experience

In the film, anyway (I haven't read the book), the turning point for a paralyzed, locked in Jean-Dominique Bauby was the realization that he had two infinite assets: memory and imagination. Julien Schnabel represents this epiphany and its aftermath with the delicacy of a watercolorist; so different a director than a painter. I have to see Before Night Falls again to see if I feel the same way about his work there.

I have long rejected arguments that treat 'experience' as if it were an epistemological category on the same order as reason.

In the era of identity politics (during which I cut my own teeth) this was a serious problem, at least among my own set. From dispatches I receive periodically from that world, I understand that it is still.

I don't despise experience altogether. I just don't think it carries an argument or sustains inquiry, except for neuroscientists. That is not to say that it is not profound and complex and just as fundamental to human existence as the exercise of reason. Such does Bauby's recognition of imagination and memory as the essential devices of a self, suggest. The nearest evidence for this in my own life is moment of (usually futile, always fleeting) decision to return to my dreams. It may be seconds; rarely, it lasts days. But I can rise to the surface and know I am waking--know, that is, that I am sleeping-- and yet be fully committed to returning to the conversation, or activity, or relationship with which I am engaged below the surface. The experience of my dream life can be as compelling, or as tedious, as anything taking place during waking hours. And no more and no less does it sustain my attention, or lose it. Qualitatively, there is no difference between my waking experience and dreaming experience. That fact has implications for all sorts of things-- reality, desire, struggle, for example. Experience is not a bedrock or foundation for action, but incoherent and creative decisionmaking.

worth

There are two films in the current swell of enthusiasm I wanted to see: There Will Be Blood and Scaphandre et le papillon or Diving Bell & Butterfly.

What with having all the time in the world and all right now, I have achieved this modest ambition.

Can I improve on David Denby's (declined) canonization of TWBB? I do wonder at his disappointment with the final scene, which thrums convincingly in my mind and imagination. It's a scene that reveals and seals the coterminous fate of god and mammon, and satisfies even my own highly calibrated sentiment detector.

I'd heard that Schnabel's film was unexpectedly uplifting. I am relieved to report that it is no such thing. As he is portrayed, Beauby was enough of an ass to persist in this tendency with as little as a blink to convey his arrogance.

Quel cool.

Think of England

Personally I think the metaphor with which she opens her Huffington Post rant is unnecessarily sensationalist (though I'm not above extending it) but I love Barbara Ehrenreich's outrage at the discourse around the hows and whys of stimulating the economy.

"The economic rationale for more a progressive stimulus package, which we hear now several times a day, is that the poor and the freshly unemployed will spend whatever money they get. Give them more money in the form of food stamps or unemployment benefits and they'll drop more at the mall. Money, it has been observed, sticks to the rich but just slides off the poor, which makes them the lynchpin of stimulus. After decades of hearing the poor stereotyped as lazy, stupid, addicted, and crime-prone, they have been discovered to have this singular virtue: They are veritable spending machines.

All this is true, but it is also a form of economy fetishism, or should I say worship? If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being. We've seen the economy grow without wage gains; we've seen productivity grow without wage gains. We've even seen unemployment fall without wage gains. In fact, when economists want to talk about life "on the ground," where jobs and wages and the price of Special K are paramount, they've taken to talking about "the real economy." If there's a "real economy," then what in the hell is "the economy"?

Once it was real-er, this economy that we have. But that was before we got polarized into the rich, the poor, and the sinking middle class. Gross social inequality is what has "de-coupled" growth and productivity from wage gains for the average household. As far as I can tell, "the economy," as opposed to the "real economy," is the realm of investment, and is occupied by people who live on interest and dividends instead of salaries and wages, aka the rich.

So I'm proposing a radical shift in rhetoric: Any stimulus package should focus on the poor and the unemployed, not because they spend more, but because they are in most in need of help. Yes, when a parent can afford to buy Enfamil, it helps the Enfamil company and no doubt "the economy" too. But let's not throw out the baby with the sensual bubble bath of "stimulus." In any ordinary moral calculus, the baby comes first."

Blasphemers & Farmers

A casual observer of the media's celebration of benefactions by the Buffetts, Kochs and Hiltons of the world--each seemingly bigger and more ambitious than the last-- might well conclude that we've entered some sort of golden age of philanthropy, where those who have benefited the most from the flows of global capital are answering the call to irrigate the fields of those whose resources they have hitherto depleted. Of course, what makes this interpretation possible is the magnitude of exploitation that founds and facilitates the donors' largesse. I have posted before about the dirty secret of the charitable giving industry: that it functions primarily to recirculate wealth among and ensure the reproduction of the upper and middle classes. Because I work in higher education, I am especially agitated by the efficiency with which our colleges and universities perform this function. Harvard and Yale have recently recalculated their financial aid formulae to provide greater benefits for families earning up to $200,000 per year. At Yale,

Families earning less than $60,000 annually will not make any contribution toward the cost of a child’s education, and families earning $60,000 to $120,000 will typically contribute from 1% to 10% of total family income. The contribution of aided families earning above $120,000 will average 10% of income.

Yale also is increasing the number of families who qualify for aid, eliminating the need for students to take loans, enhancing its grants to families with more than one child attending college, exempting the first $200,000 of family assets from the assessment of need....

In reality, the population of Yale students from families earning less than $60,000 per year is almost hypothetical. The new financial aid policy is a benefit package for middle class students--those from families earning up to $200,000 per year. Now, given that Yale's undergraduate term bill for 2007-2008 is $43,050, families earning $200,000 might well need a break in order to afford a Yale student. But no one should be deceived about the purpose and beneficiaries of Yale's apparent generosity.

This op-ed piece in today's NYT gets it precisely right.

haiku for MAS

mississippi carp:
just when you least expect, it
smacks you in the head.








congratulations.

Free Lunch

I've heard interviews with David Cay Johnston on Bill Moyers, Fresh Air, Democracy Now--all my usual and more or less trusted news programs. The basic argument of his book, if you haven't also heard it already, is that US government subsidies ostensibly designed to benefit the poor (by stimulating business in low income communities etc) are mainly benefiting the wealthiest individuals and corporations which are in a position to understand and take advantage of the 'incentives' they offer. He names and nails Warren Buffett (I was sorry to find this out), Donald Trump & George Bush (no surprises there, except in the degree and specificity of their iniquity).

I'm linking a few of the interviews here, including one from the libertarian Reason. I tried to find a link to the book but the closest I could find was Amazon's site. Not even a publisher's squib.

I'm being overly and unearnedly squeamish but decline to link to Amazon out of exaggerated respect for Johnston, the book and the point. Do take a look or listen at one or another of the interviews if you have somehow managed to avoid the wall to wall coverage until now.

He seems to be tracing the money trail in some very useful ways, but I was disappointed that he failed to draw the most obvious and well documented conclusion of his research: that late/global capitalism depends on such collusion between the government & private sectors.

Worse still:

"But I have no objection to people getting wealthy. Just get wealthy off hard work and enterprise, not getting government to pass rules no one knows about that reach into my pocket and take money out of it."

Fouad Alfarhan, update

Ghost in the Machine

A year or so ago, I started a skype account when I was planning a trip abroad. It was helpful for making international calls, but I didn't use it for anything else and soon forgot about it. Very recently, I started using it again, not for transactions, but for what I guess counts as social networking, a neologism that is perhaps not so neo but that-- doubtless anachronistically if not misanthropically-- I find very distasteful. I don't like the gerundive, and I am appalled by the docility with which seemingly everyone is willing to abandon the work of more complex and authentic seeming (I say authentic seeming to signal my awareness that authenticity is thoroughly ideological, but nevertheless has real effects)social relations such as friendship, in favor of the promise of such relations that 'social networking' offers. As Horkheimer & Adorno wrote:

The culture industry [read: social networking technology] perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises...; the promise, which is all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with he menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape

.

I am no Frankfurt School Marxist (I could just as easily, and in fact more comfortably, have used Baudrillard to comment on how 'social networking' offers the illusion of private relationships 'to hide a profound recognition and acceptance of the public verdict. At bottom individuals know themselves (if they do not feel themselves) to be judged by their objects, to be judged according to their objects, and each at bottom submits to this judgment, though it be by disavowal'.

Here it is a question of more than the imperative of conformity issuing from a limited group, or that of upward mobility issuing from global society: it is a question of an order in which each group or individual can come to locate itself in the very movement which makes it exist socially

.

Of course, social networking technologies exist to distract us from our real and unspeakable atomization and alienation. If you have a list of hundreds of 'friends', how can you be friendless? If you are always on and everyone is always available to you, how can you be lonely? If you have a complete profile, how can you feel empty?

I would reject the greater pieties of the exponents of the Frankfurt School (I say 'would' because I share more of them than I like to admit, although I resist them strenuously) by noting that the technologies in themselves (the 'signifiers') have no moral content (no 'signifieds') outside the particular instance of their utilization (which is not to discount their cultural significance, or deny their ideological force).

Theoretically, in other words, there is no reason why as 'pure' technologies, skype (or a blog, for that matter) couldn't function as mechanisms to facilitate real social relations.

So I am giving it a try, and enjoying it so far. (But of course, no one's arguing that the productions of the culture industry including social networking technologies aren't enjoyable; that's precisely how they work).

Yesterday I had the uncanny experience of speaking to a friend 6,000 miles and 7 hours away; my voice in his room; whereas he could not speak to me. Skype supports a chat feature, so I spoke and he wrote. There is a quality of distortion to such a communication, as if talking with the spirit world through a ouija board. He described himself as mute; I was a ghost in a machine.

Dora

I went to MoMA today, for the Martin Puryear exhibition which comes down in a few days, and the Lucien Freud etchings which have just gone up. I thought I was a fan of Puryear and now trying to remember what I had seen before. Some of the pieces were absolutely delightful; the limb of a tree stretching heavenward from found wagon wheels, 5 exhibition floors high, testifying as obviously and improbably as a spiritual. But the naivete that could be breathtaking in an individual piece (to wit, the perspectival Ladder for Booker T Washington) edged toward embarrassment by the end of an exhibition that was comprehensive and expansive enough to exhaust the artist's few concepts in a handful of gestures that one might well applaud at first glance, but soon subside into yawns.

There was a bit in the wall text where he said he is taken with the referentiality of art. I think that may be a big part of the problem.

The Freud had the opposite effect on me, and in that it achieved what is generally the purpose of this sort of exhibition, to suggest, undergird, complicate, displace (as you will) the received understanding, or maybe the real point is to create the experience of having done so by flattering viewers preconceptions. Works for me.

It was the mad stares of the early studies that brought me closer to his sustained later fascination with Leigh Bowery, for example, and made the interaction, and Freud's determination not to exist outside it, so obvious and grand. Formidable the talent that can so dominate such a biography, such a history. The brows and planes and gazes that start so boldly but more naively engaging the viewer (who is always the portraitist's double; weird trick, Ive never felt that so clearly with any other artist) shift and force the viewer into a more confrontational, self-conscious posture (and I'm not just talking about subjects staring back at us over their indifferent genitals, although this is the most typical gesture). I'm not an art critic and if I were trust I would not endorse the biological or genealogical fallacy that I assume is a discredited cliche of Freud criticism, but I can't help noting my own overwhelming experience of the transference.

Otherwise I have to say again how much I HATE the whole MoMA experience, esp. the meat grinder escalators clogged with three and four abreast phlegmatic tourists who WILL NOT step aside for those of us who actually have somewhere to go at the museum.

bon mot

Like water, like speech. Some squander our abundance, withdrawn from the mouths of others.

I have been following the posts on Global Voices On Line (see links) about the arrest on 10 December of Fouad Alfarhan, a (US-educated) Saudi blogger whose predictions that his open advocacy of the rights of Saudi political prisoners would put him in jeopardy were unfortunately if predictably prescient.

The NYT has just posted the story on the front page (on line).