Category: Personal

The Price of Connection

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.”

— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 68.

This quotation ought to have been an additional epigraph to my book Connected; but I forgot about it until now. “Forgot about it” means, of course, that I used it and incorporated it without being consciously aware of doing so. Connected is a book about how being connected (as “we” — the affluent portion of humankind — are increasingly being connected on the Internet, and as all human beings today are increasingly being connected by the globalized economic transactions of the “network society”) involves being in thrall to the powers of transnational Capital. I wrote about how this oppression, or enslavement, extends into our very bodies — “eyes and ears and nerves” — literally and physiologically, as well as metaphorically. And among the horrific examples of this enslavement I included vignettes on the privatization of free speech (taken from actual news stories) and even on the privatization of the atmosphere, so that we would have to pay in order to breathe (taken from the musings of a free-market economist, who recommended it as a cost-effective way to cut down on air pollution).

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.”

— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 68.

This quotation ought to have been an additional epigraph to my book Connected; but I forgot about it until now. “Forgot about it” means, of course, that I used it and incorporated it without being consciously aware of doing so. Connected is a book about how being connected (as “we” — the affluent portion of humankind — are increasingly being connected on the Internet, and as all human beings today are increasingly being connected by the globalized economic transactions of the “network society”) involves being in thrall to the powers of transnational Capital. I wrote about how this oppression, or enslavement, extends into our very bodies — “eyes and ears and nerves” — literally and physiologically, as well as metaphorically. And among the horrific examples of this enslavement I included vignettes on the privatization of free speech (taken from actual news stories) and even on the privatization of the atmosphere, so that we would have to pay in order to breathe (taken from the musings of a free-market economist, who recommended it as a cost-effective way to cut down on air pollution).

Cognitive Dissonance

I spent most of the past week in New York City, attending to family matters. (The basic purpose of the trip was so that my parents could spend some time with their grandchildren).

Whenever we were in our hotel room, and the kids were awake, we had the TV on, turned to CNN or MSNBC, watching images of the current catastrophe. I was struck, even more forcefully than usual, by the cognitive dissonance between what was seen, and what was said. Images of horror, covered by the most anodyne commentary conceivable. I remember, during the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO protests, when visuals of cops running amok were accompanied by one local anchorperson whining that her Christmas shopping had been disrupted by all the fuss and hubbub downtown. But this week’s coverage was far worse. Even as the reporters and commentators mentioned, for once, the usually taboo subjects of race and class, their overall tone and demeanor was working to muffle and diminish the impact of what we were seeing, to suggest that human benevolence was going to triumph over merely temporary difficulties. Soledad O’Brien, ‘on the scene’ yet standing firmly on dry land, didn’t break into a sweat, nor lose an ounce of her perkiness, as she reported that help was on the way. Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper reported the flooding, the starvation, the lack of medical care, in the same tone that they would use to describe chatting pleasantly with Donald Rumsfeld at a cocktail party. It wasn’t so much what they said, as how they said it.

Leftist philosophers, theorists, and cultural critics have usually been worried about the seductive power of images: the way that they disarm criticism by making What Is seem self-evident, by reifying particular moments and isolating them from their contexts, by preventing any analysis that would seek to go beneath surface appearances. And indeed, it’s true that images shorn of context have often been used for the most hideous propagandistic purposes. But here, in televisual feed coming from New Orleans this past week, we seem to have the reverse situation: images that ‘speak’ starkly of the ugly facts of race and class in America today, that show how the Powers That Be of government and business have relegated large numbers of human beings to the status of non-persons, that demonstrate eloquently that, however ‘natural’ the disaster, the differential experience of the victims is entirely man-made; while a flood (if I can use that metaphor) of speech and discourse strives to decontextualize and normalize these people’s suffering, and to ‘explain’ how, even in the face of sadness and tragedy, life goes on and the USA continues to be the greatest nation on earth.

I spent most of the past week in New York City, attending to family matters. (The basic purpose of the trip was so that my parents could spend some time with their grandchildren).

Whenever we were in our hotel room, and the kids were awake, we had the TV on, turned to CNN or MSNBC, watching images of the current catastrophe. I was struck, even more forcefully than usual, by the cognitive dissonance between what was seen, and what was said. Images of horror, covered by the most anodyne commentary conceivable. I remember, during the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO protests, when visuals of cops running amok were accompanied by one local anchorperson whining that her Christmas shopping had been disrupted by all the fuss and hubbub downtown. But this week’s coverage was far worse. Even as the reporters and commentators mentioned, for once, the usually taboo subjects of race and class, their overall tone and demeanor was working to muffle and diminish the impact of what we were seeing, to suggest that human benevolence was going to triumph over merely temporary difficulties. Soledad O’Brien, ‘on the scene’ yet standing firmly on dry land, didn’t break into a sweat, nor lose an ounce of her perkiness, as she reported that help was on the way. Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper reported the flooding, the starvation, the lack of medical care, in the same tone that they would use to describe chatting pleasantly with Donald Rumsfeld at a cocktail party. It wasn’t so much what they said, as how they said it.

Leftist philosophers, theorists, and cultural critics have usually been worried about the seductive power of images: the way that they disarm criticism by making What Is seem self-evident, by reifying particular moments and isolating them from their contexts, by preventing any analysis that would seek to go beneath surface appearances. And indeed, it’s true that images shorn of context have often been used for the most hideous propagandistic purposes. But here, in televisual feed coming from New Orleans this past week, we seem to have the reverse situation: images that ‘speak’ starkly of the ugly facts of race and class in America today, that show how the Powers That Be of government and business have relegated large numbers of human beings to the status of non-persons, that demonstrate eloquently that, however ‘natural’ the disaster, the differential experience of the victims is entirely man-made; while a flood (if I can use that metaphor) of speech and discourse strives to decontextualize and normalize these people’s suffering, and to ‘explain’ how, even in the face of sadness and tragedy, life goes on and the USA continues to be the greatest nation on earth.

More London

So, since people have been asking — now I have met a bunch of Londoners, and they have been great: I’ve been having a good time here. Sean (left of me in the photo as you look at it, or to my right from my point of view) invited me out to his birthday dinner — midnight tapas in Soho.


So, since people have been asking — now I have met a bunch of Londoners, and they have been great: I’ve been having a good time here. Sean (left of me in the photo as you look at it, or to my right from my point of view) invited me out to his birthday dinner — midnight tapas in Soho.

London

I arrived in London this morning. Great to be in a place so crowded, with so many people. I don’t really know any Londoners (the two people I do know are an American and an Australian), so I can’t yet comment about them, but the density of crowds and the life of the streets is exhilarating.


I arrived in London this morning. Great to be in a place so crowded, with so many people. I don’t really know any Londoners (the two people I do know are an American and an Australian), so I can’t yet comment about them, but the density of crowds and the life of the streets is exhilarating.

Commodity Fetishism

It’s been three weeks since I turned in my final grades; I don’t have to teach again until September. Which means I have been able to start writing again. I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled The Age of Aesthetics. (This, like almost everything about it, is subject to change). Now, I can’t see doing the book on the blog: writing, for me, is far too much of a slow process involving multiple revisions for that to be at all practical. (In fact, it’s more the reverse: things I right initially on the blog often turn out, after much excruciating revision, to be raw material for the book). But, since writing something long like this inevitably means blogging less, I thought I could at least put up some fragments, excerpts, and outtakes from the book as occasional blog entries. I hope it won’t end up sounding too much more pedantic than the stuff I usually post here.

So here goes.

Marx defines the fetishism of commodities as a “definite social relation between men which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” In the marketplace, as in “the misty realm of religion. . . the
products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.” Traditionally, this is interpreted as a theory of alienation and illusion. According to the conventional reading, commodities are really just inert ob jects, things; but we pro ject our own human relationships onto these objects, so that they seem to us, fantastically and falsely, to be alive. Zizek, however, argues for a subtle inversion of this logic. It’s not that we literally believe in the magical properties of things, so much as that, while we remain “rational utilitarians, guided only by [our] selfish interests. . . the things (commodities) themselves believe in [our] place. . . [We] no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for [us].”

However, isn’t this a case where Zizek (for once) doesn’t go far enough? Zizek seeks to overturn the common assumption “that a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior (in the sense that it can be verified
through an external procedure).” He argues, instead, that “it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.” And this becomes the basis for his materialist theory of ideology. So
far, so good. But why does Zizek, in this turn to material practice, still characterize what he finds there in terms of “belief,” which is to say cognition? Following Zizek’s own logic, we should say that commodity fetishism is not a matter of belief or ideology. It doesn’t belong to the category of mystification, or intellectual (mis)apprehension, at all. Rather, fetishism or animism is a set of ritual practices, stances, and attunements to the world, constituting the way we participate in capitalist existence. Commodities actually are alive: more alive, perhaps, than we ourselves are. They “appear,” or stand forth, or “shine” (the word Marx uses is scheinen) as autonomous beings. Commodities don’t just “believe” for us; much more, they usurp our day-to-day lives, and act pragmatically in our place. The “naive” consumer, who sees commodities as animate beings, endowed with magical properties, is therefore not mystified or deluded. He or she is accurately perceiving the way that capitalism works, how it endows material things with an inner life. Under the reign of commodities, we live – as William Burroughs said we did
– in a “magical universe.”

And so, our encounter with commodities and brands is an affective experience, before it is a cognitive one. It’s not belief that is at stake here, but attraction and revulsion, euphoria and disgust, a warm sense of belonging, nostalgia, panic, and loss….

It’s been three weeks since I turned in my final grades; I don’t have to teach again until September. Which means I have been able to start writing again. I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled The Age of Aesthetics. (This, like almost everything about it, is subject to change). Now, I can’t see doing the book on the blog: writing, for me, is far too much of a slow process involving multiple revisions for that to be at all practical. (In fact, it’s more the reverse: things I right initially on the blog often turn out, after much excruciating revision, to be raw material for the book). But, since writing something long like this inevitably means blogging less, I thought I could at least put up some fragments, excerpts, and outtakes from the book as occasional blog entries. I hope it won’t end up sounding too much more pedantic than the stuff I usually post here.

So here goes.

Marx defines the fetishism of commodities as a “definite social relation between men which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” In the marketplace, as in”the misty realm of religion. . . the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.” Traditionally, this is interpreted as a theory of alienation and illusion. According to the conventional reading, commodities are really just inert objects, things; but we project our own human relationships onto these objects, so that they seem to us, fantastically and falsely, to be alive. Zizek, however, argues for a subtle inversion of this logic. It’s not that we literally believe in the magical properties of things, so much as that, while we remain “rational utilitarians, guided only by [our] selfish interests. . .the things (commodities) themselves believe in [our] place. . . [We] no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for [us].”

However, isn’t this a case where Zizek (for once) doesn’t go far enough? Zizek seeks to overturn the common assumption “that a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior (in the sense that it can be verified through an external procedure).” He argues, instead, that “it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.” And this becomes the basis for his materialist theory of ideology. So far, so good. But why does Zizek, in this turn to material practice, still characterize what he finds there in terms of “belief,” which is to say cognition? Following Zizek’s own logic, we should say that commodity fetishism is not a matter of belief or ideology. It doesn’t belong to the category of mystification, or intellectual (mis)apprehension, at all. Rather, fetishism or animism is a set of ritual practices, stances, and attunements to the world, constituting the way we participate in capitalist existence. Commodities actually are alive: more alive, perhaps, than we ourselves are. They “appear,” or stand forth, or “shine” (the word Marx uses is scheinen) as autonomous beings. Commodities don’t just “believe” for us; much more, they usurp our day-to-day lives, and act pragmatically in our place. The “naive” consumer, who sees commodities as animate beings, endowed with magical properties, is therefore not mystified or deluded. He or she is accurately perceiving the way that capitalism works, how it endows material things with an inner life. Under the reign of commodities, we live — as William Burroughs said we did — in a “magical universe.”

And so, our encounter with commodities and brands is an affective experience, before it is a cognitive one. It’s not belief that is at stake here, but attraction and revulsion, euphoria and disgust, a warm sense of belonging, nostalgia, panic, and loss….

Insides

It’s very strange to imagine — let alone to actually see — the insides of one’s own body. Today I went to the hospital and had a flexible sigmoidoscopy: the bottom third of my colon was examined for polyps, or other signs of incipient cancer. (Nothing was found; I got a clean bill of health, at least as far as the lower third of my colon is concerned).

The procedure is done without sedation, and it didn’t hurt — it was barely noticeable. After I had cleansed myself with the requisite laxatives and enemas, the doctor inserted a small tube, with a light and a miniature video camera, up my rectum. I was lying on my side, and I could see the camera’s output on a video screen. The camera went up my insides for a distance of 60 centimeters. I saw the opening of the rectum, some minor hemerrhoids just inside, then a sort of glide through the twists and turns of my colon: it was a fleshly tunnel, mostly smooth, with networks or meshes of blood vessels visible just beneath the surface of the skin. At one point, a bit of excrement — which appeared somewhat greenish in this light — floated in the tunnel, but the doctor (I mean the device he was controlling) pushed it aside and continued inward. Finally things became a bit congested, at which point the instrument reversed and came back out. The whole thing was over in ten minutes.

Now maybe this is the sort of thing you (my readers) might rather not hear about. But it wasn’t grotesque, or even particularly scatoalogical or sexual in how it felt. It was more just the odd sense of displacement, seeing an unfamiliar, indeed alien, landscape that yet exists just inside me. When we speak of “interiority”, we usually are referring to the mind, to the recesses of thought that other people can’t know, that even I myself can’t really know, but only vaguely feel and sense. And yet what I saw on that video monitor, although in a certain sense it isn’t me at all, but merely part of a hole that runs right through me — correction: not although, but precisely because it is a hole connected on both ends to the outside — was a deeper “interiority” than any to be found in depths of my thought (or in the convolutions of my brain). We are living organisms, which means that we exist by separating the inside from from the outside; but the Inside really is nothing other but the Outside, folded back upon itself to constitute the interiority that is “me.” (This is what Deleuze says, more or less). To see inside myself (with all the sexual, as well as mental and physiological, connotations of “inside”) is to sense both my precariousness, and the miraculous strangeness that I should exist at all. It’s to be displaced from myself, to realize that intimacy — including self-intimacy — is always with someone who remains a stranger.

It’s very strange to imagine — let alone to actually see — the insides of one’s own body. Today I went to the hospital and had a flexible sigmoidoscopy: the bottom third of my colon was examined for polyps, or other signs of incipient cancer. (Nothing was found; I got a clean bill of health, at least as far as the lower third of my colon is concerned).

The procedure is done without sedation, and it didn’t hurt — it was barely noticeable. After I had cleansed myself with the requisite laxatives and enemas, the doctor inserted a small tube, with a light and a miniature video camera, up my rectum. I was lying on my side, and I could see the camera’s output on a video screen. The camera went up my insides for a distance of 60 centimeters. I saw the opening of the rectum, some minor hemerrhoids just inside, then a sort of glide through the twists and turns of my colon: it was a fleshly tunnel, mostly smooth, with networks or meshes of blood vessels visible just beneath the surface of the skin. At one point, a bit of excrement — which appeared somewhat greenish in this light — floated in the tunnel, but the doctor (I mean the device he was controlling) pushed it aside and continued inward. Finally things became a bit congested, at which point the instrument reversed and came back out. The whole thing was over in ten minutes.

Now maybe this is the sort of thing you (my readers) might rather not hear about. But it wasn’t grotesque, or even particularly scatoalogical or sexual in how it felt. It was more just the odd sense of displacement, seeing an unfamiliar, indeed alien, landscape that yet exists just inside me. When we speak of “interiority”, we usually are referring to the mind, to the recesses of thought that other people can’t know, that even I myself can’t really know, but only vaguely feel and sense. And yet what I saw on that video monitor, although in a certain sense it isn’t me at all, but merely part of a hole that runs right through me — correction: not although, but precisely because it is a hole connected on both ends to the outside — was a deeper “interiority” than any to be found in depths of my thought (or in the convolutions of my brain). We are living organisms, which means that we exist by separating the inside from from the outside; but the Inside really is nothing other but the Outside, folded back upon itself to constitute the interiority that is “me.” (This is what Deleuze says, more or less). To see inside myself (with all the sexual, as well as mental and physiological, connotations of “inside”) is to sense both my precariousness, and the miraculous strangeness that I should exist at all. It’s to be displaced from myself, to realize that intimacy — including self-intimacy — is always with someone who remains a stranger.

Changes

The look of this blog has completely changed; I’ve decided to switch over from Movable Type to WordPress, which is much easier to use.
It was easy to import all the entries from the old blog, but the internal links (from one entry to another) are completely messed up, and some of the images are missing. Still, it should work for the most part.
Also, the RSS feed url is different, I hope this doesn’t screw up too many people.

Trackback update

I’ve turned trackbacks back on, after applying various patches & plugins that allowed me to excise the over-300 references to online poker I received in the last week, and that will supposedly make it more difficult for similar spam to appear in the future. I guess I will see in the days to come how well they really work.

I’ve turned trackbacks back on, after applying various patches & plugins that allowed me to excise the over-300 references to online poker I received in the last week, and that will supposedly make it more difficult for similar spam to appear in the future. I guess I will see in the days to come how well they really work.