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Sunday, September 26, 2004

Fear and laptops on the genesis project

There’s a fascinating essay in today’s New York Times Magazine about how a group of scientists are searching for the origins of blogging.  It seems that in January 2006, the Stardust spacecraft will return from its encounter with the comet Wild 2, bringing with it a payload of cosmic debris “which scientists now expect may offer significant clues about blogging’s origins here on earth.”

Until recently, many scientists believed that blogs were formed in a kind of primordial soup formed when a bunch of people got really pissed off:

Left-wing politics are thriving on blogs the way Rush Limbaugh has dominated talk radio, and in the last six months, the angrier, nastier partisan blogs have been growing the fastest. Daily Kos has tripled in traffic since June. Josh Marshall’s site has quadrupled in the last year. It’s almost as though, in a time of great national discord, you don’t want to know both sides of an issue. The once-soothing voice of the nonideological press has become, to many readers, a secondary concern, a luxury, even something suspect. It’s hard to listen to a calm and rational debate when the building is burning and your pants are smoking.

While acknowledging that some bloggers lack the evolutionary maturity necessary to appreciate the “calm and rational debate” the American media offered when it keenly analyzed Bill Clinton’s fraudulent land deals, Wen Ho Lee’s treasonous espionage, Al Gore’s criminal eye-rolling, and Saddam Hussein’s fearsome cache of weapons of mass destruction, most scientists now believe that the origins of blogging go back much further than had previously been imagined.

Indeed, the search for a “Last Universal Common Ancestor,” or LUCA, may not only answer the question of how blogs first arose from inorganic media; it may also help to explain the process of evolution itself ‚Äì or, as one researcher puts it, “the question of how the primitive, early Kaus became the highly intelligent Kos we know today.”

The jargon of blog-biology is daunting, with its talk of “archaea” such as “extremoblogs” and “acidoblogs” ("blogs that have been found to thrive on the gas given off by raw ‘drudge’ and that both excrete and multiply in concentrations of acid strong enough to dissolve metal and destroy entire city sewer systems").  And some of the science sounds more like the stuff of science fiction, like the distant-future NASA mission to Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons) in which unmanned spacecraft will drill into the moon‚Äôs miles-thick ice crust in order to search for the building blocks of blogs beneath.  “We’d have a picture of what blogs may have been like on earth before they evolved into the modern Pharyngula of today,” says Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  “Of course, it’s hard to imagine the kind of environment that‚Äôs on Europa producing blogs that look anything like the blogs we have here, either Kaus or Kos-like organisms.  And that‚Äôs what I find fascinating.”

Still, the search for the origins of blogging poses fundamental questions about the nature of life itself, even if – as the NYTMag essay suggests in its closing paragraph – we are all about to kill each other in a surge of religious-fundamentalist hatred and turn the stewardship of the planet over to a bunch of enlightened, cosmopolitan giant insects who will get rid of American popular culture and replace it with a series of strange clicking noises:

“Things are in the saddle,/And ride mankind,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in a poem warning against the soul-withering effects of civilization’s excesses. Knowing what we do now, however, about blogs’ beginnings, the word “things” takes on a whole new meaning. And should our internal extremoblogs eventually ride or override us (as human behavior sometimes suggests they are doing) into recreating the very fires from which they first emanated, there is, perhaps, some comfort to be found in blog-biology’s revelation that our own rugged ancestors will be around to inherit this earth and start the entire cycle over again.

Really thought-provoking stuff, definitely worth your time this Sunday afternoon.  Hey, I wonder if the insects will also have blog ads?

Posted by Michael on 09/26 at 07:23 AM
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Thursday, September 23, 2004

Thursday is American Street day!

That’s right, dear readers, I’ve been invited to join the mighty gang of bloggers over on The American Street, and Thursday is my day to post.  So now it is Thursday!  And that means it is my turn!  My very first effort is somewhere on the alternate side of the street-- actually, right over there by the double-parked blue Impala with the whitewall tires.

Drop by and tell ‘em I sent you!

Posted by Michael on 09/23 at 10:53 AM
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Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Thomas Frank Week Continues!

Hello again, everyone.  Sorry to have missed the crucial Day Two of Tom Frank Week just after declaring the week to be Tom Frank Week, but when I returned from Binghamton I came home to a very sick child who turns out (as we learned when Janet brought him in to the doctor today) to have pneumonia.  And in this house, sick children take precedence over post-Marxist critiques of What’s the Matter with Kansas? All right already?  So get off my case, people!!  I only missed one day, dammit!  Just sit still until I get back to the bit about corporate culture, will you??  Will you do that much?!?

Er, beg your pardon there.  We’ve been, ah, kind of tightly wound around here lately.

OK, right then.  Today’s installment is subtitled, What’s the Matter with Arguing that There’s a Contradiction Between the Right’s Opposition to Media Vulgarity and the Right’s Support for Media Consolidation?  As I noted last Friday, Frank tries to argue that Sam Brownback’s support for the Telecommunications Act (and the massive media consolidation it enabled) runs counter to the right’s moral crusade against vulgarity:  After all, as the industry critic Robert McChesney points out, the link between media ownership, the drive for profit, and the media’s insulting content should be obvious to anyone with ears to hear.  “Vulgarity is linked to corporate control and highly concentrated, only semi-competitive markets,” McChesney says.  And for many conservatives, “the radio fight was the moment of truth.  If people are seriously concerned about vulgarity, this was their chance to prove it.” (74-75)

Last week, I said there were two things very, very wrong about this line of argument.  Today, finally, I divulge them!  And here they are!

WRONG THING ONE:  the things Frank and McChesney don’t like about mass media are not at all the same things the cultural right doesn’t like about mass media.  It should be obvious-- obvious, I might say, to anyone with ears to hear-- that radio, for most cultural conservatives, is not a site of vulgarity; for them, vulgarity issues from the MTV Video Music Awards and the Super Bowl halftime show, whereas radio gives them Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, James Dobson and Oliver North.  So the idea that the right would join forces with the anticorporate left on this one, out of some common ground of opposition to vulgarity, is simply delusional. 

Let me be exceptionally clear about this, so that I don’t invite any straw-man counterarguments about how I (and all my crypto-libertarian colleagues in cultural studies) fail to acknowledge that the mass media are owned by corporations.  I know very well that the mass media are owned by corporations.  But the problem with those corporations-- say, Clear Channel, perhaps?-- is not that they promote “vulgarity,” whatever that word might mean to you.  The problem with them is that they consolidate great political power in very few hands-- and in the case of Clear Channel, those hands coordinate pro-war rallies and purge radio playlists of objectively pro-Saddam Fifth Columnists like Steve Earle and the Dixie Chicks.  That’s not about vulgarity-- that’s about right-wing control of media that advance right-wing politics, which is (once again with feeling) not at all the same thing.  In other words, trying to rally the right against Clear Channel on the grounds that corporate culture is vulgar culture is, quite honestly, a fool’s game.

One more point on this front:  the question before us here is not whether our culture is vulgar.  Undoubtedly, some aspects of it are.  For the record, I am personally opposed to any further exposure of Christina Aguilera’s butt, and I know that it takes me only a few minutes of watching Nick and Jessica or The Bachelor to lead me to wish that our species would be wiped from the face of the earth and replaced by enlightened and cosmopolitan giant insects (which is why I have never watched more than a few minutes of either-- but hey, if the giant cosmopolitan insects are reading this blog, I’m with you, guys).  The question on the table, rather, is whether you can derive the meaning of a cultural object by discovering who owns its means of production.

AND IN THAT RESPECT (see, I learned a new, Sullivanesque method of breaking up long posts, thanks to some unsolicited advice from the Kerry campaign), the Frank/McChesney thesis takes us three theoretical steps back-- back to the days when we could simply say, “the ruling class owns the means of mental production, and thereby produces the ruling ideas.” This is not a trivial point, and it should not be left to the last remaining Marxist Theory Debating Societies on the fair campuses of our fair nation.  It really has important practical consequences for how you understand the cultural right.

For the premise underlying Frank’s argument here is that somehow, the cultural right is justified in taking offense at America’s commercial culture, and wrong only to blame it on “the liberal elite” rather than on the corporations responsible for it.  (As he says in the Salon interview, “I’m just trying to play up the flagrant contradiction. If you hate this stuff, talk about capitalism! Talk about the forces that do it!") Now, if I wanted to be all snarky and dismissive about this aspect of Frank’s work-- you know, the way he’s been about cultural studies for the past decade or so-- I would say something like what my Penn State colleague Jeff Nealon said a month or two ago:  if only ordinary Kansans understood that the Madonna-Britney kiss was the work of Archer Daniels Midland, that Janet Jackson’s breast was underwritten by Monsanto, and that Eminem is but the name of one of Enron’s holding companies, movement conservatives at the grassroots would turn with fury on the real elite, the corporate elite that is poisoning our cultural groundwater!

But I wouldn’t say anything so snarky or dismissive, now, would I.

WHICH BRINGS US TO WRONG THING TWO.  If it’s a political mistake to think that the cultural right will bond with the cultural left over media vulgarity, and it’s a political and theoretical mistake to think that vulgarity is simply an epiphenomenon of corporate ownership, it’s a Whole Nother kind of mistake to go after “vulgarity” in the first place.

On this score, the problem is that Frank really does think our culture is vulgar.  Yeah, I know I took that question off the table five paragraphs ago, but now it’s relevant again.  When he writes,

for . . . aggrieved “Middle Americans,” the experience has been a bummer all around.  All they have to show for their Republican loyalty are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk—and, of course, a crap culture whose moral free fall continues without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years (136),

he really means it.  We live in a crap culture whose moral free fall continues without significant interference from anyone. 

Perhaps you think he’s just paraphrasing a position with which he himself does not sympathize?  OK, that’s charitable of you (Augustine and Aquinas would approve!), and I have to admit that for a while I thought so too.  But the argument returns again and again throughout the book-- in its closing paragraphs, of course ("Why shouldn’t our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?"), but also as part of its analysis (about which I’ll say more in another installment) of how right-wing culture wars are designed to fail:

Even when it is judged on its own terms-- as a struggle over values, patriotism, national honor, and the correct way to worship the Almighty-- the backlash has pretty much been a complete bust.  Culturally, it has achieved almost nothing in the past three decades.  TV and movies are many times coarser than they were in 1968.  Traditional gender roles continue to crumble.  Homosexuality is more visible and more accepted than ever.  Counterculture has been taken up by Madison Avenue and is today the advertising industry’s stock-in-trade, the nonstop revolution that moves cereal and cigarettes by the carload.  (121)

This is a very difficult passage, mixing things that Frank is clearly opposed to (counterculture’s incorporation by Madison Avenue, which was the subject of his first and much of his second book) with things that . . . uh . . . things that . . . well, things that we’re not quite sure what to make of.  For surely Frank can’t be serious when he says that TV and movies are many times coarser than they were in 1968?  Ah, but he is serious, and on this count it’s worth asking him whether he’d trade the corporate vulgarities of (for example) True Lies, The Lion King, or Die Hard VI:  Die Even Harder With Still More Vengeance (all of which suck, by the way) for the world in which Southern television stations would censor Star Trek for that famous interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura (which, when you think of it, is especially weird, since-- only one year after the Supreme Court decision of Loving v. Virginia, striking down state “miscegenation” laws-- it displaces the US’ first televised interracial kiss to the 24th century).  And is Frank serious about those traditional gender roles and all that acceptance of homosexuality?  He can’t really be suggesting that cultural liberalism on those fronts is to be regretted, or ascribed to coarseness and vulgarity?

I honestly don’t think he is; I’m certainly not going to accuse him of treason in the war of position against All Bad Things (racism, patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, theocracy, late late late capitalism, bagism, and dragism) when I know that he’s on the side of the angels.  I mean, I’m aware that some of the Baffler crew were unduly influenced by the work of the late Christopher Lasch, but I don’t believe that any of them are really nostalgic for the traditional gender roles and pre-Stonewall closets of 1968.  All I’ll say is that this passage is confusing and confused.

AND SO, DEAR READERS, I would urge you to take seriously our corporate culture’s fitful ventures into cultural liberalism.  Not because the Madonna-Britney kiss was subversive (it wasn’t, and pace Frank, it wasn’t “lascivious” either), but because there’s a sense in which the forces of secular modernity really are liberalizing, both for good and for ill.  Remember, when we lefties think about vulgarity, we think about the reification of human life, the reduction of every human interaction to the cash nexus; but when the cultural right thinks about vulgarity, it thinks about Six Feet Under, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Harry Potter.  (And don’t imagine for a moment that the six-temptations-of-potter can be ascribed simply to corporations trying to make money!)

And I would also urge you to join Frank and McChesney in opposing the corporate control of cultural expression and the accelerating consolidation of mass media-- but I would urge you not to do so in the hope of stamping out “vulgarity.” As an internationally-renowned American composer said to me recently, after reviewing Frank’s arguments against our crap culture, “a left campaign against vulgarity?  Fuck that shit!” I don’t think I can improve on that.

Posted by Michael on 09/22 at 03:46 PM
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Saturday, September 18, 2004

Some things the American left should think of when it thinks of “cultural studies”

With my apologies to the couple of hundred readers who read this stuff back when I first posted it, under the heading “Stuart Hall Interlude,” back on February 14 of this year.

The political context of Stuart Hall’s brilliant 1983 lecture, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” was the British Left’s failure to anticipate or understand Thatcherism’s appeal for the very people it was screwing; Hall was writing at a time when unemployment in the UK had reached three million, even after analysts had predicted mass uprisings and riots once the number of unemployed reached two million.  In the following passage, Hall offers one of his most stinging rebukes to neo-Leninist Leftists who think that the masses will flock to their cause once the “objective conditions” of their society are sufficiently draconian.  Adapt to your local circumstances as you see fit-- and pass the word along to anyone you know who still thinks that all we need is another four years of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft-Wolfowitz-Rove in order for tens of millions of Americans to see the virtues of Green/Socialist/Anti-Imperialist/Vegan/Whatever politics:

The traditional escape clause for classical marxism . . . is the recourse to “false consciousness.” The popular classes, we must suppose, have been ideologically duped by the dominant classes, using what The German Ideology calls their “monopoly over the means of mental production.” The masses, therefore, have been temporarily ensnared, against their real material interests and position in the structure of social relations, to live their relation to their real conditions of material existence through an imposed but “false” structure of illusions.  The traditional expectation on the Left, founded on this premise, would therefore be that, as real material factors begin once more to exert their effect, the cobwebs of illusion would be dispelled, “reality” would be transferred directly into working-class heads, the scales would fall from workers’ eyes, and Minerva’s Owl-- the great denouement promised by the Communist Manifesto, as the socialization of labor progressively created the conditions for mass solidarity and enlightenment-- would take wing at last (even if timed to arrive approximately 150 years too late).

This explanation has to deal with the surprising fact that mass unemployment has taken a much longer time than predicted to percolate mass consciousness; the unemployed, who might have been expected to pierce the veil of illusion first, are still by no means automatic mass converts to laborism, let alone socialism; and the lessons that can be drawn from the fact of unemployment turn out to be less monolithic and predictable, less determined by strict material factors, more variable than supposed.  The same fact can be read or made sense of in different ways, depending on the ideological perspective employed.  Mass unemployment can be interpreted as a scandalous indictment of the system; or as a sign of Britain’s underlying economic weakness about which mere governments-- Left or Right-- can do very little; or as acceptable because “there is no alternative” that is not more disastrous for the economy; or indeed-- within the sociomasochistic perspective that sometimes appears to be a peculiarly strong feature of British ideology-- as the required measure of suffering that guarantees the remedy will work eventually because it hurts so much (the Britain-is-best-when-backed-to-the-wall syndrome)! The logics of ideological inference turn out to be more multivariate, the automatic connection between material and ideal factors less determinate, than the classical theory would have us believe.

I’ll be back in a few days with more on this theme.

Posted by Michael on 09/18 at 10:19 AM
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Thursday, September 16, 2004

And by the way

It just so happens that Jamie is thirteen years old today.  Happy birthday, Jamie!

Posted by Michael on 09/16 at 05:27 AM
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From the muted post-horn mailbag

I got the coolest letter from the Kerry people yesterday!  Or at least I think I did.  It‚Äôs hard to tell these days with all these simulacra and forgeries floating around out there.

Dear Michael B?©rub?©:

Thank you for not giving us any unsolicited campaign advice.  We‚Äôre having a hard enough time as it is, trying to stay focused on jobs and health care while Iraq descends inexorably into the abyss.

But in all honesty, we have to say that your blog hasn‚Äôt really been helping lately.  We liked your RNC coverage, but since then, your deliberate post-convention confounding of ‚Äúoriginals‚Äù and ‚Äúparodies‚Äù has left many voters confused, and your strange Mobius-strip exchange with Tristero seems to have eerily anticipated the Killian memo phenomenon, in which ‚Äúthe real‚Äù is dissolved in a bubbling vat of textuality only to appear again in the form of a forgery that tells the truth.  It‚Äôs hard, amidst all this nonsense, to keep people focused on the fact that George Bush is the worst president since James Garfield fell into that coma.  (Actually many of us would prefer Garfield-in-a-coma.  But we can‚Äôt very well say that on the stump.)

Moreover, we believe that your literary/theoretical allusions are costing us critical support among undecided voters.  Not because they‚Äôre postmodern and/or poststructuralist, but because they are finally incoherent.  One day it‚Äôs Pynchon and Derrida, the next day it‚Äôs Borges and Baudrillard, the day after that it‚Äôs Nabokov and a smirking reference to Scooby-Doo Where Are You? And what‚Äôs all this business about show tunes?  Is that a reference to Trent Duffy‚Äôs explanation of Bush‚Äôs bicycle accident this summer ("suffice it to say he wasn’t whistling show tunes")?  Our internal polling suggests that this eclectic post-something blog-soup has cost us six points in Ohio and another four in Wisconsin.  Please, for the sake of the party, knock off this silliness and get back to your often-promised, never-delivered entry on Tom Frank.

Sincerely yours,

The Kerry People

Well, of course I‚Äôm very sorry to have contributed to the general confusion.  I‚Äôm writing that take on What‚Äôs the Matter with Kansas? this week, and right now it‚Äôs part of a talk I‚Äôm going to deliver at Binghamton University next Monday, so I can‚Äôt post it ‚Äòtil I get back from Binghamton‚Äì just in case I have any readers in Binghamton who‚Äôll show up to my talk and say, ‚Äúthis stuff again?  Why did we come to see you speak if you‚Äôre just going to repeat the things you say on your blog?‚Äù

More importantly, the Kerry people have a point about my incoherence.  Internal theoretical consistency has never been my strong suit!  So I think I should open this question to the floor, or whatever passes for the floor in the blogosphere.  It’s time for another Reader Poll!

The Swift Boat Vet/ Killian memo phase of the 2004 campaign is best captured by the figure of:

___ Borges
___ Kafka
___ Pynchon
___ Baudrillard
___ Nabokov
___ Scooby-Doo
___ Derrida
___ Lee Atwater (note that one of the minor titles in the Jerome Kern songbook is “Good Old Atwater”!)
___ I don’t know and I don’t care– in fact, I’m not even sure I want Kerry to inherit the debacle that will face a U.S. president in 2005, and I’m hanging on only because I cannot bear to contemplate a Supreme Court made up of Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owen, and Tomas de Torquemada.
___ Are you ever going to say anything about the NHL lockout?

Over to you, folks.

UPDATE:  In comments, Tim mentions “forged memos that are true and real memories that are false.” Which reminds me-- what about Philip K. Dick?  Some people have lately informed me that the United States now has an android television network that simulates an actual news network, with simulacra of “journalists” and “analysts” who are indistinguishable from real journalists and analysts except by means of the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test (and even then, Voigt-Kampff has an accuracy rate below 70 percent).  This sounds too much like the alternate police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so I haven’t paid much attention to these people.  But could it be true?

Posted by Michael on 09/16 at 01:50 AM
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