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Saturday, May 31, 2008
(8:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Computers for Life
I have been tempted of late to post things about my dissertation, presumably on AUFS (if someone could explain to me why I created a blog whose name I cannot easily type or pronounce, that would be great). The point here would be to "think out loud." I have already indulged in such behavior via various electronic communications media (of the one-on-one style) with my advisor and Brad. Attentive readers will note that I did not even mention the existence of my Zizek book until I had already submitted the manuscript, and I found that one-on-one style electronic communication provided adequate feedback. Why I think that I should adopt a different model that I am likely to find frustrating for an objectively more important project is unclear to me.
There is a point to this post, however, and that is to indicate the deleterious effects of computers on the composition process generally. In a discussion with my advisor about the writing process, he said that his shift to the computer also led to a shift away from rewriting toward mere editing. As a result, he felt that one of his books had a markedly worse prose style than previous books had.
It was difficult for me to relate exactly, since I have been using a computer to compose papers ever since I had any serious papers to compose. When I was writing my Zizek book, though, I did find that in order to make progress, I had to be able to tear out and write fresh material. My strategy was to have a file (entitled "Remnants") open at all stages of the process, as a receptacle for any significant deleted blocks of prose. I told myself every time that I could reuse the chunk at a later point, but I never actually did. Nevertheless, the ruse worked -- I could delete text without the sensation that I was destroying what word-processing documents almost always feel like to me: the final product.
Perhaps that's what I'm thinking about when it comes to writing blog posts about my dissertation -- it will enable rewriting. At this stage, I would be writing and rewriting something more like a revised proposal (which I need by the fall) or an introduction. There's something about starting fresh several times, testing out what works and doesn't -- that's something that's been lost, at least for me. It's ironic, because word-processing should make everything "easier," but they seem to make everything more carved in stone. Maybe that's not the case for people raised strictly on computers, but for me, the typed version was always the final version.
In the case of the Zizek book, I was able to short-circuit that effect somewhat simply by composing in single-space rather than double-space, a convention I have adopted for subsequent writing as well and that I can't believe I'd never thought of before. Another more radical option might be the kind of no-frills text editors that Steven Poole discusses here -- or perhaps even the no-frills text editors provided by blogging services. The advantage of the former is, of course, that they lack comment functions.
(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
Friday, May 30, 2008
(5:24 PM) | Brad:
Adorno Devotional (+ The Rebirth of Friday Night Jazz!)
Adam has given up his Minima Moralia devotions, to the detriment of his eternal soul, but we all knew he was lacking in that regard anyway, his ego having arrived long before his soul and barring the way for anything resembling a rival. But that doesn't mean we have to!
(And for an ironic tweak of Adorno's nose, a throwback to a nearly forgotten Weblog tradition, Friday Night Jazz. Let's ring in its rebirth with my first love, Mingus: Freedom and Haitian Fight Song.)
Abstract utopia is all too compatible with the most insidious tendencies of society. That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality. The technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners like their guards, the murdered, murderers. The racial difference is raised to an absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing that is different survives. An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences. Politics that are still seriously considered with such a society ought not, therefore, propound the abstract equality of men even as an idea. Instead, they should point to the bad equality today, the identify of those with interests in films and in weapons, and conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear. To assure the black that he is exactly like the white man, while he obviously is not, is secretly to wrong him still further. He is benevolently humiliated by the application of a standard by which, under the pressure of the system, he must necessarily be found wanting, and to satisfy which would in any case be a doubtful achievement. The spokesmen of unitary tolerance are, accordingly, always ready to turn intolerantly on any group that remains refractory: intransigent enthusiasm for blacks does not exclude outrage at Jewish uncouthness. The melting-pot was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy. (from §66)
(Brad has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
(3:40 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Awful German Language
For a long time now, I've been using Adorno's Minima Moralia as a German reading text, with limited success. Yesterday I returned it to the library and decided to use one of the German texts that I own. I have a pretty good selection of texts by Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin, a volume of Rilke's prose (incl. Malte Laurids Brigge), and Heidegger's Gelassenheit (trans. as "Discourse on Thinking"). (I also have the German text of Phenomenology of Spirit on-hand, but I'm not even going to try that, as it took me over an hour to read the table of contents.)
Following in a long-standing tradition, I am polling the readership of this blog to determine which is the most appropriate text for me to attempt to read at this time. The poll options are limited to authors; recommendations of particular texts can be made in comments. Readers are also invited to make arguments in favor of abandoning the attempt to gain a functional reading knowledge of German.
[The poll is no longer working for some reason and is causing the page to load slowly. Thanks to all who voted, even though now I can never know the results.]
(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
(11:37 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: The Actual Afternoon
I confess that I slept in late this morning and didn't have time to pre-post the confession last night -- so all those morning sinners out there were cruelly deprived.
I confess that last night my quest to use as many different L stops as possible was significantly advanced when I fell asleep on the train and woke up at the elusive Francisco Brown Line stop, from whence I walked home. I confess that despite my many rambling walks through the neighborhood, I was not prepared for how disruptive the river was to my route home.
I confess that at the Seminary Co-op member sale, I bought Bergson's Matter and Memory, Deleuze's Bergsonism, and Lacan's Seminar XVII. I confess that at Powell's I didn't buy, but strongly considered buying, an essay collection by Gerhard Ebeling, a "very short introduction" to Mormonism, an intro book on quantum physics, and -- for reasons I can't fully understand -- an anthology of selections from John Calvin's Bible commentaries.
I confess that at some point, I need to buy a new pair of jeans to replace the ones with the crotch tear and some new shirts.
I confess that I should probably just post this so people can confess.
JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.
And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.
I am a big fan of the media critics Atrios, Brad DeLong, Eric Alterman, and above all Bob Somerby. For years (in the case of Alterman and Somerby', for at least ten years) they've been documenting the shallowness, inaccuracy, dishonesty and ultimate Republican slant of the media -- especially TV and radio, but also including such highly respected publications as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
However, they tend to be too willing to slip into the "Heathers" or "Villagers" explanation. Supposedly the media are staffed by a bunch of silly, shallow, people who only talk to each other and who, for example, did what they did to sabotage Al Gore's Presidential run because he annoyed their silly little high school sensibilities.
I've always believed that it was a management problem, and I think that Greenwald's post confirms that I've been right. This does not mean that the Heathers are not silly people, and it doesn't mean that they're not culpable. But the people whose names we see are quite literally hirelings and lackeys (albeit very well paid hirelings and lackeys). They give management what it wants.
Greenwald gives several more examples, and there is a long list of reporters whose newspaper careers ended or dead-ended because of excessively accurate reporting -- Seymour Hersh is the most eminent of them. (To Greenwald's list of recent suppressions, I'd like to add the case of Lara Logan, who tried to start an email campaign to keep her bosses at CBS from suppressing a story).
Every time that I make the claim that management is responsible, rather than individual reporters, the reflex "conspiracy theorist" accusation shoots back at me so quickly that I have to ask myself whether my statement even reached the cerebral cortex at all. All I claim is that management manages, and that reporters can be hired, fired, promoted, and demoted, but people come back at me with abstruse theories proving that management does not, and can not, manage. And that I'm the crazy one, and not them.
As for management's motives, I have no way of knowing that. My present guess is that the owners and managers of the big media favor war and low taxes (and the ending of the estate tax, which is a major factors for the few family-owned publications: see here) and are responsive to the normal kinds of favors that the federal government can hand out. They are not right wing on other issues, but the Bush administration really isn't either -- by now they've double-crossed most of their conservative ideological constituencies by now. (That is to say, nativists, cultural conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and above all little-government conservatives.)
I'm sure that organized winger pressure is a factor too, but public opinion isn't the reason: the big media have always been more hawkish and more anti-tax than public opinion. I much bigger factor is advertiser pressure, since advertising pays all the bills for TV and radio, and most of the bills for newspapers. Advertisers all have their own political agendas and have never been shy about pushing them; furthermore, a substantial proportion of high-end advertising is institutional advertising (e.g. for oil companies) intended to promote a company, and not to sell any specific product.
Of course, Chomsky and company said all this twenty years ago. Maybe we shouldn't have been tuning those guys out all that time.
(John Emerson has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
(5:41 AM) | it:
Wednesday Sex: Schopenhauer - hurrah for lesbians and contraception
Schopenhauer's notorious piece 'On Women', published in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), along with the whole chucking-woman-down-stairs thing, has cemented unhappy Arthur's reputation as something of a lady-disliker in the minds of many.
He certainly says some funny, terrible things: 'only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex'. However, a more careful reading of the essay reveals a subtle cry for female emancipation, and of an end to the historical reliance of women on men for the latter's financial and cultural capital. I am not kidding.
Subject as women equally are to the will, that icky vitalist impulse to blindly perpetuate life (oh, you know, suffering), the 'super-abundant beauty and charm' possessed by young women (compared by Schopenhauer to the wings of the female ant that fall away after mating) is nature's ruse for tricking men into the horrors of 'childbed'. If, however, there is no reproduction, indeed no longer any link between 'natural' desire and the sexual act, then the spell of nature is broken – the contraceptive pill, by virtue of its powers of chemical confusion, not only diminishes libido ('out, damn will!'), but burns the sticky umbilical bridge that necessitates a link between the wild thing and a screaming thing nine months later (we should perhaps at some point tap up Meillassoux for an argument about sexual causation).
Schopenhauer notes that in order for women to entice strong young men into tricksy tupping, they must use all their powers of dissimulation (it is to be found 'in the stupid one almost as often as in the clever one'). If the will historically can no longer smuggle itself through on a tidal wave of lust, it is perhaps only then that we can tell the truth. The true is always wrenched from the bawdy teeth of nature, as the Enlightenment never tires of teaching us.
Schopenhauer also half-invents generic humanist feminism when he claims that women are 'altogether more involved with the species than with individuals'. The bourgeois, atomised male gets his arse kicked by the Gattungswesen of femme-genericity. Oh yes.
And the lesbians? Schopenhauer resents women who rely on men for cash and class, stealing their enjoyment for years upon end (just as Schopenhauer himself had to pay compensation for twenty years to the seamstress he pushed down the stairs - Obit anus abit onus [The old woman dies, the burden is lifted]). Removed from the heteronormative need to ingratiate oneself into the male wage-packet, lesbians (plus all women with a sufficient income) need not, in principle, compete with other women, nor bother men at all, except perhaps for mutually interesting comradeship. Understood historically-materialistically, Schopenhauer's claim that 'The European lady is a creature which ought not to exist at all' (my italics), is quite right. All hail the non-reproductive species-being of a paradoxical Schopenhauerian feminism!
(it has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
(1:35 PM) | Brad:
More Playoffs
This is a few weeks old, but I had to balance out my love for Chris Paul with a Kobe clip I've been meaning to post:
Paul is great, and he might challenge the throne in the near-future, but is there anybody more feared in the NBA than Kobe? Sports Illustrated says no. If you're at all interested in basketball, it's a great piece.
Where do Weblog sports fans come down on the all-encompassing question that is Kobe?
UPDATE: I guess there is one competitor to Kobe's throne.
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