Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.
William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.
Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.
Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.
The Seattle Research Institute is trying to bridge the gap between academic and journalistic discourse, and to open a new space for a new generation, and a new sort, of “public intellectual.” Over the past few years, they’ve been a vital presence here in Seattle, sponsoring lectures, readings, and performances, as well as publishing two volumes of essays, with more to come. I finally got around to reading their first book, Politics Without the State, by Nic Veroli and others, and edited by Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede. (It was originally published in 2002, and has just been reprinted).
Politics Without the State is a brilliant polemic, one of the few I’ve read recently that is actually worth arguing with, rather than just dismissing. Veroli et al. argue for a politics of joy and imaginative expansion, in contrast to the politics of terror and restriction purveyed by the IMF and the US government, no less than by Al Qaeda.They focus on how the current world order works affectively, rather than just economically and ideologically or cognitively. Against “the communication of terror by a private corporate media oligopoly that functions in tandem with a state apparatus”, they advocate “a universal communication” of invention, of joy, and of bodies. The goal that they envision is “gaining collective, participatory control over the imaginary processes through which our identities and desires are instituted.” This means inventing new forms of sociality, imagining alternatives to global capitalism precisely at the moment when we are endlessly being told that no alternative is conceivable.
The theoretical inspiration for all this comes from Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri and Hardt, and to a certain extent Zizek; and before them, from such nomadic thinkers (as Deleuze calls them) as Spinoza (for his theory of affect) and Gabriel Tarde (for his theory of sociality). (They also cite C. L. R. James, as well as some German thinkers I am alas only vaguely familiar with, like Negt and Kluge, and Enzsenzberger).
But there is also a pragmatic inspiration, or one deriving from practice, which has a lot to do with why and how Politics Without the State is more than just an academic exercise. Veroli et al are inspired by the successful Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999 and by the Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as by the ongoing (and not quite as successful) efforts in the alternative media to develop a counter-narrative to the official “manufacturing of consent” to imperial adventurism in the wake of 9/11.
So what is it that I want to argue with in Veroli et al’s account? I suppose I could put it down to my own neurotic doom and gloom that I find them (as I do Hardt and Negri) way too optimistic. However attractive it is to call for a revolutionary politics of gratified desire, in opposition to the old-fashioned (Leninist) ethos of sacrifice and discipline, I am not really convinced by such a vision. It’s the old problem that Wilhelm Reich ran into: if the masses (or, to use the more up-to-date Negrian term, the multitude) are orgasmically sated and satisfied, they aren’t going to rebel for anything more than their orgasms. While I’m all for “irruptions of idleness, perverse delights, useless pursuits” (Veroli and George), I don’t believe that such “practices of desertion” are radical acts, or threats to the consumerist world order. And although I’m as much in credit card hell as anyone, I also don’t believe that “our mounting debts, even as they topple us, will bring the system in upon itself, effectively sucking the money away from globalization’s larger agenda,” as Robert Corbett playfully (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) proposes. (For one thing, because the problem for world capitalism is not overconsumption, but precisely the reverse: overproduction).
In addition, I wish that anarcho-collectivists, like Veroli et al, would get over their negative fetishization of “the State” as the source of all evil. I know this may make me sound like an old-line marxist fundamentalist, but I’m sorry: the State is not the problem, multi- and transnational capital is. Bush’s police state tactics are in the service of Halliburton, and not the reverse. Deleuze and Guattari write somewhere of the “minimal State,” pioneered by Pinochet and Thatcher, and reaching fruition today under Bush. This is when the State abdicates all forms of authority except for its policing and military functions (and even those are being privatized to a good extent), in order to give capital a freer hand at ever-more horrific forms of exploitation. That, rather than State power, is the main danger, the real source of terror, today. Bush is truly a “crowned anarchist,” destroying the State far more radically than any left anarchists have dreamed.
Similarly, it’s the IMF and the World Bank and free-trade agreements like NAFTA that are the greatest antagonists of the State today, since they are precisely negating any form of independence or local sovereignty, in order to allow for the unimpeded expansion of flows of capital, and in order to further privatize all forms of social life.
So when Veroli dismisses the importance of public services like those of the New Deal, on the grounds that such services were only extracted from the State by the threat of “large mass movements” (which is not untrue in itself), he’s speaking from a position of luxury that fails to acknowledge what a big difference such services have made in many people’s lives however inadequate such services are. And when he says that “it is unlikely that today’s mass movements will be satisfied by a New Deal, even a global one,” I can only throw up my hands in exasperation: it’s like saying that starving people will not be satisfied with access to middle-class American meals, because anything less than the banquets of ancient Rome is oppressive and unfair.
In short, I take the rather unfashionable position that a progressive and democratic politics today must strive to reinvent the State, not bypass it or destroy it. “Politics without the State” is a chimera.
The Seattle Research Institute is trying to bridge the gap between academic and journalistic discourse, and to open a new space for a new generation, and a new sort, of “public intellectual.” Over the past few years, they’ve been a vital presence here in Seattle, sponsoring lectures, readings, and performances, as well as publishing two volumes of essays, with more to come. I finally got around to reading their first book, Politics Without the State, by Nic Veroli and others, and edited by Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede. (It was originally published in 2002, and has just been reprinted).
Politics Without the State is a brilliant polemic, one of the few I’ve read recently that is actually worth arguing with, rather than just dismissing. Veroli et al. argue for a politics of joy and imaginative expansion, in contrast to the politics of terror and restriction purveyed by the IMF and the US government, no less than by Al Qaeda.They focus on how the current world order works affectively, rather than just economically and ideologically or cognitively. Against “the communication of terror by a private corporate media oligopoly that functions in tandem with a state apparatus”, they advocate “a universal communication” of invention, of joy, and of bodies. The goal that they envision is “gaining collective, participatory control over the imaginary processes through which our identities and desires are instituted.” This means inventing new forms of sociality, imagining alternatives to global capitalism precisely at the moment when we are endlessly being told that no alternative is conceivable.
The theoretical inspiration for all this comes from Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri and Hardt, and to a certain extent Zizek; and before them, from such nomadic thinkers (as Deleuze calls them) as Spinoza (for his theory of affect) and Gabriel Tarde (for his theory of sociality). (They also cite C. L. R. James, as well as some German thinkers I am alas only vaguely familiar with, like Negt and Kluge, and Enzsenzberger).
But there is also a pragmatic inspiration, or one deriving from practice, which has a lot to do with why and how Politics Without the State is more than just an academic exercise. Veroli et al are inspired by the successful Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999 and by the Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as by the ongoing (and not quite as successful) efforts in the alternative media to develop a counter-narrative to the official “manufacturing of consent” to imperial adventurism in the wake of 9/11.
So what is it that I want to argue with in Veroli et al’s account? I suppose I could put it down to my own neurotic doom and gloom that I find them (as I do Hardt and Negri) way too optimistic. However attractive it is to call for a revolutionary politics of gratified desire, in opposition to the old-fashioned (Leninist) ethos of sacrifice and discipline, I am not really convinced by such a vision. It’s the old problem that Wilhelm Reich ran into: if the masses (or, to use the more up-to-date Negrian term, the multitude) are orgasmically sated and satisfied, they aren’t going to rebel for anything more than their orgasms. While I’m all for “irruptions of idleness, perverse delights, useless pursuits” (Veroli and George), I don’t believe that such “practices of desertion” are radical acts, or threats to the consumerist world order. And although I’m as much in credit card hell as anyone, I also don’t believe that “our mounting debts, even as they topple us, will bring the system in upon itself, effectively sucking the money away from globalization’s larger agenda,” as Robert Corbett playfully (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) proposes. (For one thing, because the problem for world capitalism is not overconsumption, but precisely the reverse: overproduction).
In addition, I wish that anarcho-collectivists, like Veroli et al, would get over their negative fetishization of “the State” as the source of all evil. I know this may make me sound like an old-line marxist fundamentalist, but I’m sorry: the State is not the problem, multi- and transnational capital is. Bush’s police state tactics are in the service of Halliburton, and not the reverse. Deleuze and Guattari write somewhere of the “minimal State,” pioneered by Pinochet and Thatcher, and reaching fruition today under Bush. This is when the State abdicates all forms of authority except for its policing and military functions (and even those are being privatized to a good extent), in order to give capital a freer hand at ever-more horrific forms of exploitation. That, rather than State power, is the main danger, the real source of terror, today. Bush is truly a “crowned anarchist,” destroying the State far more radically than any left anarchists have dreamed.
Similarly, it’s the IMF and the World Bank and free-trade agreements like NAFTA that are the greatest antagonists of the State today, since they are precisely negating any form of independence or local sovereignty, in order to allow for the unimpeded expansion of flows of capital, and in order to further privatize all forms of social life.
So when Veroli dismisses the importance of public services like those of the New Deal, on the grounds that such services were only extracted from the State by the threat of “large mass movements” (which is not untrue in itself), he’s speaking from a position of luxury that fails to acknowledge what a big difference such services have made in many people’s lives however inadequate such services are. And when he says that “it is unlikely that today’s mass movements will be satisfied by a New Deal, even a global one,” I can only throw up my hands in exasperation: it’s like saying that starving people will not be satisfied with access to middle-class American meals, because anything less than the banquets of ancient Rome is oppressive and unfair.
In short, I take the rather unfashionable position that a progressive and democratic politics today must strive to reinvent the State, not bypass it or destroy it. “Politics without the State” is a chimera.
John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.
John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.
Norman Kelley‘s A Phat Death, or, The Last Days of Noir Soul is the third in his series of Nina Halligan detective novels (following Black Heat and The Big Mango). Like the others, A Phat Death offers a convoluted mystery plot, with ample doses of murder, mayhem, and steamy sex. This time Kelley focuses on the music business, with an ample assortment of murdered hip hop artists, thuggish black record company owners, and slimy, corrupt white politicians and media moguls. Nina Halligan, the detective protagonist and first-person narrator, is a strong black woman – but an emotional and impulsive one, deeply angry as any thoughtful black person in America will inevitably be, able to kick ass when the need arises, and NOT one of those “Mammy” figures who “endures,” and who is filled with comfort and wisdom. (Also, while Nina herself is straight, her close women friends are straight, gay, bi, and hermaphroditic).
But what’s most noteworthy about A Phat Death, and its predecessors in the series, is Kelley’s hard-hitting analysis of the crisis of Black America, and his exceedingly, wonderfully sharp and nasty satire. All the characters in the three novels have invented names, but the books are virtually romans a clef. It’s not hard to recognize the venomous portraits of African American businessmen, intellectuals, political and religious leaders, and musicians and entertainers (with a few powerful white figures thrown in for good measure). Kelley’s vision is a bracing and disturbing one: he portrays a devastated black America, in total social, cultural, and economic collapse, being torn apart and peddled to whites for profit by entrepreneurs, charlatans, and self-appointed saviors, all wanting only to “get paid.”
Norman Kelley‘s A Phat Death, or, The Last Days of Noir Soul is the third in his series of Nina Halligan detective novels (following Black Heat and The Big Mango). Like the others, A Phat Death offers a convoluted mystery plot, with ample doses of murder, mayhem, and steamy sex. This time Kelley focuses on the music business, with an ample assortment of murdered hip hop artists, thuggish black record company owners, and slimy, corrupt white politicians and media moguls. Nina Halligan, the detective protagonist and first-person narrator, is a strong black woman – but an emotional and impulsive one, deeply angry as any thoughtful black person in America will inevitably be, able to kick ass when the need arises, and NOT one of those “Mammy” figures who “endures,” and who is filled with comfort and wisdom. (Also, while Nina herself is straight, her close women friends are straight, gay, bi, and hermaphroditic).
But what’s most noteworthy about A Phat Death, and its predecessors in the series, is Kelley’s hard-hitting analysis of the crisis of Black America, and his exceedingly, wonderfully sharp and nasty satire. All the characters in the three novels have invented names, but the books are virtually romans a clef. It’s not hard to recognize the venomous portraits of African American businessmen, intellectuals, political and religious leaders, and musicians and entertainers (with a few powerful white figures thrown in for good measure). Kelley’s vision is a bracing and disturbing one: he portrays a devastated black America, in total social, cultural, and economic collapse, being torn apart and peddled to whites for profit by entrepreneurs, charlatans, and self-appointed saviors, all wanting only to “get paid.”
From a review of a forthcoming book, Killing Freud: 20th-century culture and the death of psychoanalysis by Todd Dufresne:
“Dufresne suggests that the upshot of Freud’s moribund triumph has been, intellectually, little short of catastrophic. Psychoanalysis subverts the essence of western rationality, substituting a bastard discourse for the fact-honouring conventions of dialogue that, intermittently, have served civilization well since Socrates. Rightly, Dufresne identifies the excesses of post-structuralism and postmodernism as Freud’s progeny, without wholly condemning all such movements. Yet his basic point rings true: wherever the bearded shadow of Freud falls, something unwholesome festers.”
This is precisely why, for all my suspicion and distrust of psychoanalysis (on grounds that have been worked through by Foucault, Deleuze, and others) I still consider it to be necessary, indeed indispensable.
From a review of a forthcoming book, Killing Freud: 20th-century culture and the death of psychoanalysis by Todd Dufresne:
“Dufresne suggests that the upshot of Freud’s moribund triumph has been, intellectually, little short of catastrophic. Psychoanalysis subverts the essence of western rationality, substituting a bastard discourse for the fact-honouring conventions of dialogue that, intermittently, have served civilization well since Socrates. Rightly, Dufresne identifies the excesses of post-structuralism and postmodernism as Freud’s progeny, without wholly condemning all such movements. Yet his basic point rings true: wherever the bearded shadow of Freud falls, something unwholesome festers.”
This is precisely why, for all my suspicion and distrust of psychoanalysis (on grounds that have been worked through by Foucault, Deleuze, and others) I still consider it to be necessary, indeed indispensable.