Try not to be THAT guy

While I am not this guy, I have been that guy.  As another aside, the urban term for this type of act, more specifically this type of drunk walking is called “noodling.”  Appropriate.

 

Cagematch: Zombieland vs Surrogates

I was going to revive the cagematch series with Surrogates (Jonathan Mostow: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) but then I made a mistake on the bus yesterday and read Howard Hampton’s essay “Metal-liad” and am now thoroughly embarrassed to have even tried the genre.  In that essay Hampton reads 1991 music as Nirvana’s Nevermind against Guns N Roses’ Use Your Illusion I & II. It is a cagematch par excellence and I would recomment everyone check it out.  Nick Hornby has nothing on this guy.  Neither do I.  Instead I offer a review of Surrogates.

The summary portion of the review is best handled by Jenna Busch over at JoBlo.com:

Fourteen years from now, the technology that allows people to move inanimate prosthetics with their minds has advanced by leaps and bounds. In this brave new world, people sit in “stim chairs” for most of the day, while living through an idealized, robotic version of themselves. The son of the man who created this fantastically creepy technology and his one night stand (a fat guy in a girl-bot) has been zapped to death by a mysterious man. And the users themselves have had their brains liquefied in their chairs. FBI agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Radha Mitchell) are sent to investigate, uncovering a plot that threatens the very idea of surrogacy.

This movie is not good.  I think it has potential but the way they executed it was not enjoyable.  A few problems with the backstory.  First, everyone in the world has a surrogate.  Everyone?  Even the poor?  Capitalism changes and allows universal access?   This is just glossed over, posited as if true, AND it is not even necessary to the story.  Why not just say a lot of people have them a la television or computers?  Because then the movie would become too polemical.  Although I suspect that would have raised the production standards and its hidden jeramiad would have needed tightening up.  Not even a resource crunch based on all the added energy needed to power the near doubling of the world’s overpopulation?

The second issue is that all crime disappears.  Supposedly crime is a personal afront and since people are now sheltered away there is no point to breaking the law.  Anyone who thinks that is plausible was probably confused at “StoopidNoodle”.  And if there is no/little crime why then is there even an FBI for Greer to work at?

Third, each major city has a section called a reservation where Luddites have retreated to escape technology.  Again I have to wonder what other monumental change occurred, because surely our government would need more than a surrogate development to allow this to happen.  Sci Fi is nice when they posit one difference and then see how the world would be different, a type of counterfactual.  This backstory, however, is replete with unfounded changes based upon the movie’s fiat.  Needless to say, the initial backstory montage had my hackles up.

Spoiler, well sort of, the trailer shows all the surrogates deactivating and collapsing so it’s not much of a spoiler (and there are scenes in the movie where an operative disconnects from the surrogate and the surrogate remains standing, but in the the movie’s resolution all of them fall down): Greer unplugs them so people are forced to act as ‘humans’ again.  That’s a silly ending.  The technology is obviously deemed desireable.  Today’s world is so competitive with electronics that undesired technology is quickly discarded.  All Greer does is momentarily suspend the tech.  He also probably kills people as some people are dependent on the tech for sustenance and, most all, people have grown physically dependent upon the surrogates.  Good job.

Greer was faced with a choice and he instead chose ‘humane’ one.  Instead of dropping all the operator/surrogate links he could have allowed a virus to kill all surrogates and operators; his other choice was to stop any change and allow the status quo to continue.  I contend that either of the other options would have been preferable.  I have already laid out how disconnecting them was already a violent act, abruptly denying people something they are used to and have every reason to believe will continue to be available.

The other option of killing the operators would have also been more humane.  It all comes down to the anxiety informing the movie.  Some see the movie as anti-technological.  But there is no reason to think the criticism is about ALL technology.  Rather it is about technologies of representation.  The movie is informed by a crisis of authenticity.  There are a couple of things in the movie pointing to this read: 1. the initiating event is a double murder, and one of the murdered is not an attractive young woman but instead an old guy (a la the chat room predator fear)  2. Greer at one points says, “I don’t even know who you are!”  But it is said as though it makes a difference.  3.  The constant romantic tensions between Greer and his wife is about her continued use of a surrogate and whether or not “they” are still married.  There are many other moments where this reading is clear.  So, the movie is about authenticity, which is supposedly why Greer makes the choice he does.

Won’t everyone be sad to realize that being face to face with someone does not restore authenticity?  Authenticity is not about identity, which is the conflation made in the film.  This movie is a perfect demonstration of Badiou’s criticism of authenticity:

Any attempt to achieve the real as identified authenticity, to bypass the inevitably tendential mediation of representation… will result in infinite violence…  Since any such attempt ‘a formal criterion is lacking to distinguish the real from semblance,’ there is no way for militants to confirm authenticity of commitment – neither that of colleagues and leaders nor their own.  All that can ensue is constant suspicion and purge.  Stalin’s regime is emblematic. (Jenkins 2008)

Greer has not saved anyone from violence.  He has merely delayed it and cast their lives in the interim into an uncomfortable and potentially horrifying place.  The technology still exists and can be rebuilt, so there will always be doubt about whom a person is.  The more humane – humane as “more than human”, a humanity-surpassing move (H+) – move might have been to wipe it all clean and let the anti-Surrogates rebuild.

Hampton, Howard.  (1992) in Howard Hampton, ed.  (2007).  Born in flames (75-80).  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Jenkins, Joseph.  (2008, April).  Symposium law and event: Violence in Badiou’s recent work.  Cardozo Law Review, 29, online.

 

The Beatles

Ringo Starr via last.fm

For something a little more light-hearted:

“Making a Beatles record…requires more than the presence of individual Beatles voices; it requires the potential for at least three-part harmony; it requires Paul’s bass and piano style; it requires George’s lead-guitar style, it requires unusual guitar harmony between George, John and Paul and the peculiar drumming style of Ringo; it requires John tempered by Paul, and Paul darkened by John; all of them spiritualized by George; all of them lightened up by Ringo; all of the excited by Paul; all of them made wary by John.”  Michael Boyce, letter to the editor.  The Believer Magazine, October 09.

But not too light-hearted.  Here we have a new (new?  new to me) method to study music.  In any case, it is well written and beyond my abilities to either confirm or deny.

 

Cloud Computing

I had previously experimented with storing and using data from the cloud, even thought a bit about purchasing a netbook as my laptop of use when biking around the city (when the weather was bike-able).  There were a few hiccups with the transition and I decided not to invest the time to learn how to make it really worthwhile.  Well, to-day is my trial by fire.

The Swede has to wake early in the mornings and in the wee small hours of the morning our computers look alike, so I grabbed the wrong one.  In any case, so far so good.  I guess my cloud integration was more advanced than I had suspected.  The book is not updated but I can always add pieces to it and then integrate later.  Thanks to Dropbox I have access to some important files.  RSS feeds will keep me up to date on my reading.  It seems as though my current MacBook is, in reality, a netbook.  An expensive netbook, but one nonetheless.  I am not sure how I feel about that.

I even fretted about music for a bit but…(1) I am at Spyhouse where the best of Bill Withers is playing so that’s righteous enough background noise and (2) Last.fm.  If I were good about updating, which Dropbox does automatically had I been smart, then the transition would be seamless.

On another, yet similar, note Verizon will soon be launching an Android based 3G smartphone.  I have been with Verizon for years now and unwilling to change because the travel schedule makes Verizon a superior carrier in some locations.  Plus, the few people I am in constant contact with also use Verizon which means those communications are covered in the basic plan.  If anything could lull me away it would be a 3G smartphone and I qualify for a new phone in December, birthday!, which is well after the planned release of the Droid.  Now I am a mere few months away from always being on the cloud.  I am excited about this even though most of my daily frustrations are about me spending too much time on the computer and not enough in analog land.  I am walking proof of loving gadgets for gadgetry’s sake.

 

Moore 2009

Image via Wikipedia

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I am doing on here.  I find myself thinking about it more and more as I approach the re-placement of my body and labors into the academic realm.  Consequently I find (possible) missions statements in everything I read.  Here is the latest:

‘Bio-power’ is Foucault’s arresting term for the processes by which a modern society achieves the ’subjection of bodies and the control of populations’, as we good citizens submit to all manner of corporate disciplines and rtional-seeming imperatives.  We submit more often than not without recognising that our actions are in fact submissive: Foucault is playing the traditional, demystifying role of the intellectual in alerting us to the full measure of our daily implication in the ‘rapports de force‘, or of power relations, whose pervasiveness he intends to expose. (Sturrock 1998, 63)

Rather, this is a mission statement I decided long ago to reject.  Ursa considers me an optimist (he would never say naive to my face) when I say that I doubt most people need to be informed of the complex power relationships trapping them.  Maybe the specifics or the origins of that power are not known, but ‘consciousness raising’ strikes me as a cop-out.  It is a way for people to feel better about not taking risks.  What does need to be taught are strategies of resistance.  En-couraging measures.  One of the reasons I enjoy working with the high schoolers is because I can show them how to stand up to things.  I can teach them that they have the ability and that adolescent insecurity is founded upon a paradox that chills action.  I am constantly amazed at how savvy the kids can be when it comes to really understanding the forces they feel acting upon them.

Most demystifying intellectuals tend to focus on the wrong things.  This is also my problem when people talk of micro-politics.  Usually they mean ‘talking about shit’.  That’s not micro-politics.  Politics is about resource distribution and micro simply means further distributions but on a scale usually not seen.  Liberating the empty house for squatters is micro-politics.  Seizing a shut down factory until Bank of America restores the credit line is micro-politics.  What then is Michael Moore’s latest film Capitalism: A Love Story?

I feel no compunction to continue the project of categorization for categorization’s sake, but this is an important question.  Moore is really good about putting a human face on micro-politics. The small ruptures in our national myth are everywhere and yet oddly invisible.  Nobody does as good a job showing it as Moore does.  His movies are affecting.  But he even acknowledges his own limitations.  The end of the movie has a black screen with Moore asking people to get involved.  Even he knows his movie actually does no thing to improve conditions, but rather serves as a conduit to encourage others.  From a place of empathy.

And that is the kind of academic I strive to be.  I want to teach about strategies.  Contingencies are important, but people know their locations.  What they do not know is (1) how to do something about it and (2) that they will not be alone when the police start cracking skulls.

Sturrock, John.  (1998).  The word from Paris. London: Verso Books.

 

Moby Dick

Image via Wikipedia

This is the stuff that gets me out of bed in the mornings.  Orion books has recently launched a series where the classics are pared down because most people do not have the time to read the originals.  Moby Dick in one such classic.  I have never read the actual thing because it was too cumbersome, but everytime I have read – *ahem* been required to read – portions I have really enjoyed it.  Now half the book is gone, and it was excised with a sensitivty to preserving its characters, storyline and the historical setting of the storyline.

The journal Review of Contemporary Fiction has published what was taken out in a special issue (Summer 2009).  That book is cheekily called ; or the Whale.  That’s brilliant.  I was curious so I looked through it and managed to waste nearly a complete day.  I feel good about it too!

Chapter 62 of ; or the Whale is a word: “hapless”.  One word?  They cut out a single word from a whole chapter?  The remainder of the book is also really interesting.  It reads like a victim of a Burrough’s cutting.  Now I cannot help but look around my booksheleves and wonder what other gems are awaiting discovery.  The obvious text is the Bible, although I worry I might discard the whole thing, but what then to call the new text?  This is all too Glas-y.  Glas?  What might that text render?  Obviously one would have keep portions of the letter and portions of Husserl.

All in all I have found myself a new distraction.  Now if only someone could help me find a mapping website that will tell me exactly how far away from Russia’s closest point a place in Washington state is.  Or Hawaii.  Don’t ask.

 

Jones 2008

Working principle(s) # 5: creative!’experimental, fallible, collective  Thrift supports his view of NRT as ‘a machine for multi- plying questions’ by insisting that ‘the world should be added to not subtracted from’ (Thrift, 2005, p. 474). Creativ- ity, experimentation, fallible (modest theory) and collectivity should all be enfolded into the conduct of ArT practice. This creativity can be found in James’s assertion that; Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, simplifying; saving labour; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally (James, 1981, p. 30). This resonates with the messengers of Serres which bring ‘rapprochement and rapport between categories’ (Bingham and Thrift, 2000, p. 285) and of the ‘movement thoughts’ of Deleuze and Guattari. In NRT there is a call for modest method and theory in so much as limits, and trial and error experiments are recognised. This is embedded in pragmatism, particularly its fallibihsm which was pioneered by Peirce. Doubt is placed at the heart of knowledge, yet it does not disable it, rather, it energises it – ‘where the modernist intellectuals saw doubt as debilitating, Peirce saw it as liberating’ (Dig- gins, 1995, p. 190). Bernstein (1991) terms pragmatism as a tradition of ‘engaged fallibilistic pluralism’ (which means), ‘taking our own fallibility seriously – resolving that however much we are committed to our own styles of thinking, we are willing to listen to others without denying or suppressing the otherness of the other’ (p. 336). Pluralism within prag- matist thought means not only assuming that existence is plural in nature but also that theoretical engagement with it should come in plural forms which are ‘interpretive, ten- tative, always subject to correction’ (ibid, p. 327). This entails replacing established adversarial styles of academic argument with ‘a model of dialogical encounter’ in which one ‘begins with the assumption that the other has some- thing to say to us and to contribute to our understanding. [ ] This requires imagination, sensitivity and perfecting of hermeneutical skills’ (ibid). It is not assumed that this pro- cess will resolve disagreement, but rather that it will pro- duce a mutual reciprocal understanding, which includes understanding of disagreements. This fallibilistic element of pragmatism anticipates Thrift’s notion of NRT as ‘mod- est’, ‘affirmative and therefore collective expression’ which does not seek to play the ‘macho’ stance ‘boy’s game’ of building and defending theoretical ground at the expense of others (Thrift, 2004a, p. 83). Linked to fallibihsm is Peirce’s metaphor of knowledge as a cable, in which the ‘mul- titude and variety’ of ideas and theories are woven intimately together, thus making it collective and ongoing. (Jones 2008)

I am going to take exception to Jones’ conclusion about the stance of the artist.  Rather, I am going to accuse Jones of conflating the artist and the problem-solver.  The artist is part of a project that is concerned with bearing witness and moving from experience to experience.  The problem solver, however, is concerned with being an advocate.  Being a quality advocate involves – or at the least should involve – a dialectic where questions are asked.  The goal however, is never to question but to answer.  The questions are merely a method of obtaining a more accurate (academics) or lasting (judiciary) answer.  In either case though the concern is to obtain the ‘last’ answer.  Problem solvers are not concerned with an endless process of discovery.

I will return to this as lately I have been consumed by the notion of ‘last’ and what it means to my life, my labor path and others.  This new preoccupation is after rereading Chaloupka 1992 where he disclosed a twist to the ‘last’ problem: the search for knowledge is an individual’s attempt to have dying words worth remembering.  Supposedly, we search for knowledge so we can utter some great axiom thus creating our immortality.  An example of this is Shit My Dad Says.  That site is easily the funniest thing on the interwbs these days, and what is really amazing is how much of it rings true.  Shrinking the world into sound bites is therefore not only useful but ultimately a search for our own immortality.  This mechanistic view of dialectics and even debate is turning into a focus of mine.

I am not yet sure if I buy such a cynical reading of the quest for knowledge.  However, like Nietzsche, such a cynical read has infected my other readings and endeavors.

Chaloupka, William.  (1992).  Knowing nukes. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press.

Jones, Owain.  (2008).  Stepping from the wreckage: Geography, pragmatism and anti-representational theory.  Geoforum, 39, 1600-1612.

 

Le Clezio 2008

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

With the recent Nobel announcements I decided to check out last year’s lecture from the winner of the literature prize.  Here are some notes as I proceed and I might later compile them into something larger and more formal.

The opening of the essay is about why writers write.  Obviously there is reduction as Le Clezio attributes the same impulses to writers.  Writers see injustice in the world and decide to take a different approach to resistance, a form that is “another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.”  It almost sounds like cowardice Le Clezio is describing, but I will hold off on that since Le Clezio will surely attempt to rehabilitate the role of the writer.  I will spare us from the usual refutation that has been put to rest since Of Grammatology, however one thing needs to be noted.  I have never before seen the spoken resisatcne that is neither meditated nor mediated.  Le Clezio’s initial premsise seems overly Socratic.

Le Clezio then takes us to the next reason writers are not resistant: their works are consumed almost exclusively by the wealthy.  The hungry woman does not purchase books when instead she is worried about feeding her children.  Again I am not sure this is true.  So much so that it smells like a set up.  Le Clezio is constructing the straw man so he can later pummel it.  I am cynical of his motivations (the straw man construction makes me suspect he wants to appear radical is more improtant than being radical) even if I may agree with his ultimate conclusion.  This is Le Clezio’s founding paradox: the writer is a radical dressed in chic clothing.

The remainder of the lecture is a series of rembrances, which are interesting, that do nothing for what I guessed to be his argument.  In the end Le Clezio’s argument is less ambitious than it should be.  He argues that hunger and illiteracy are the same problem and need to combated together.  The once hungry is not much improved if she remains illiterate and the once illiterate is still a captive if hungry.  I am not sure this is at all controversial.  This conclusion is so brief and unexplored that it seems pithy.  I wonder if this speech was extemporaneous even though he had had months to prepare.

The blandness of the conclusion also makes me think Le Clezio’s writer is a bourgeoisie dressed in radical clothing.  Expanding literacy as a goal to combat hunger is insufficient in our politics.  If the goal is to sell more books then it is a great message.  Feeding people does little to combat hunger as the problem is more about distribution mechanisms than it is about the desire to resist.

 

Cage Match: Zombieland v. ?

Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr

It has been a long time since the last cage match.  So much so that I am unsure how to resuscitate the theme.  The main reason is the complete dearth of fiction in my life lately.  Few movies.  Few books.  Not for a lack of trying though.  Work, friends and my body are all conspiring against me to not actually complete anything.  I wish I knew what the problem was, but my attention span is almost nonexistent these days.  Failing to complete a project then makes it harder to complete another one.  I have tried to kick up my readings about neuro-science, but again the lack of attention.

Anywho.  I saw Zombieland (direced by Ruben Fleischer) last week when I should have been working on some arguments for my teams.  This cage match is more of an introduction.  Out of the tunnel comes Zombieland.  The next Cage Match will then resume against ?.

Overall, I enjoyed it.  It was a fun take on the genre.  There were moments where I laughed out loud (Bill Murray’s cameo) and there were genuine moments of fright like the best of the horror films.  What I enjoyed most about the movie was that it was not pure entertainment.  Fleischer understands the genre inside and out and took many opportunities to play off the genre and explain it to us.  The best contribution of this film, however, was the presentation of a psychoanalytic analysis of the zombie genre.  The characters reveal the anxieties for which the zombie is a metaphor.  It was a well done reading of a zombie film presented as a telling.

The movie began to drag at the end, as every critical impersonation inevitably does.  Two of the main characters turn stupid.  And it just so happens that the two are women.  If ever there was a trope to be broken that would seem to be it.  I was always impressed with how westerns dealt with the genre post-Unforgiven (dir. Clint Eastwood), but it seems that horror has failed to adequately deal with their genre post-Scream (dir. Wes Craven).  Zombieland might be a horror film that reflects this sensitivity, but I suspect instead that it serves best as a comedy standing outside of the genre.  It is not scary enough to satisfy people looking for a fright.

I paid a matinee price for it and was pleased for the return on my money.  I might not feel the same way if I had paid the full fare and had to deal with a full crowd of obnoxious teenagers.  That hesitation to share the movie probably means the movie is not a horror (more about my theory of audience interaction and horror later.)

Go see it.

Oh yeah.  They’re remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Why?  That seems to be the biggest horror in this story.

 

RSS Feeds

Surprising to me I have had several people ask me recently how to put the blog into their RSS readers.  Thanks for the support.  I use Google Reader and for me I just had to drop the URL into the subscribe field.  If your reader does not recognize that then try stoopidnoodle.wordpress.com/feed.