At Home in the City

September 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Finding a place to live is a complicated, essential, bittersweet, sometimes unexpectedly profound part of living in a big city. Having spent the past two weeks touring Brooklyn in an apartment search, I feel newly connected and newly aware of the patchwork fabric of diversity and interconnectedness that is our shared urban world.

apartment (noun): a suite of rooms forming one residence; a flat. ORIGIN: from Fr. appartement, from Ital. appartamento, from appartare ‘to separate’.

To separate. Our shared need for distance allows us to remain together. In cities we pack closely together, our buildings made of boxes inside boxes. Apartments inside buildings, rooms inside apartments. This one is mine, that one is yours. This is the bedroom, that is the kitchen. So we keep things organized. I’ve also lived in more communal spaces, in squats and lofts and cabins. But it’s true, what they say: The older I get, the more glad I am to have my personal life boxed and protected in the confines of an apart-ment. This isn’t because I want to isolate myself from the world. On the contrary, it’s because I want my engagements in the world to extend beyond the level of neighbor and neighborhood. As a teacher, artist, and academic, I spend most of my time and energy cultivating a public existence through those larger institutional channels. At the same time, I also need a private life, an intimate life, the kind of life that can unfold within an apartment. This leaves precious little time or energy for neighbors and the neighborhood.

I’ve always romanticized cities, even though I’ve almost always lived in one. My childhood dreams and fantasies were brimming with golden and silver cityscapes inspired by films and books like The Fifth Element and Imajica. As I grew up I became more interested in actual cities, which are sometimes golden and sometimes silver but always also real and mundane and frustrating and specific and impossible to capture or describe or comprehend. During this apartment search I don’t think about the cities of my childhood imagination. I’m fixated on the realities of rent stabilization, demographics, transportation, and square footage. But afterwards, looking back, it’s clear that I have been walking through one of those cities about which I used to dream. The force of New York City no longer hits me with a single impact like the fantastic cities of literature and film. I’ve never been up into a helicopter to see it from that distance as a single glimmering artifact. But this city has something else going for it that my dream-cities never had: It’s real.

Next to the east side of Prospect Park my partner and I visit a large, high-ceilinged apartment in a vast old mansion of a building. Apparently this building is the best if you have dogs. Everyone there has dogs, and there is the botanical garden across the street where you can walk your dogs. But we don’t have a dog, and the apartment feels cold to me. It makes me think of a nineteenth century novel full of strange illnesses and ongoing, unspoken suffering in the drawing room. Even the neighborhood feels cold to me: no shops, no cafes, no restaurants. Each person alone in their apartment with their dogs. But it’s also raining that day, which makes a difference.

Close to the heart of downtown Brooklyn we discover a gem of an apartment with a small stained-glass window and old, decorative, perfectly maintained wooden doorframes. Someone has put a lot of love into this apartment and it shows. It’s priced below market rate because the bedroom is in between the living room and the kitchen and bathroom. This means that if one person is up and about, the other can have no guarantee of peace or privacy. Even so, we can’t afford it. The market has changed since we looked two years ago, and not in our favor. Now, if we want to have cafes and fresh produce nearby, we’ll have to find them the edge of the gentrification wave.

In Crown Heights, we find ourselves walking along that thin edge. In a way it seems inevitable that we will end up living along a border area like this, where class, race, and cultural history collide before our eyes. Here we can have our cafes and groceries, if we don’t mind living on a somewhat desolate street where half the block is taken up by an enormous parking garage. The apartment itself is beautiful, but is it worth pushing our budget when the subways nearby are not quite the ones that we want? As New Yorkers we are reconciled to the fact that we will spend a good portion of every day on the subway, in those moving boxes that bring us all together and carry us on our separate ways. Transportation by subway is another complex calculus to be applied to the apartment hunt: Which subways exactly, and just how far away?

We even look at one of those ridiculous new luxury buildings that claim to offer “a high-quality living experience” with gym, lounge, and optional valet parking. The cheapest studio, its price brought down to within our range by the economic travails of the past few years, is luxurious but tiny. Far worse is the feeling that living here would be equivalent to selling one’s soul, aligning oneself with all that is wrong in the world. Culturally we are as out of place here as we are in the housing projects that are hidden in plain sight, two blocks away, next to the highway. There we feel like invaders, threatening and threatened, simultaneously guilty of privilege and anxious to protect it. Here we feel something different but equally painful: This is not what buildings and apartments should look like. This is not what we — I mean all of us — should be doing with our money. This is not what we should be doing with New York City.

Differences in culture and differences in privilege map onto each other in complex and not always obvious ways. In south Williamsburg we find ourselves in a Latino neighborhood where music and advertising and signage in Spanish mark a distinct community. Two years ago we looked at an apartment in the Hasidic neighborhood next door. In both places we still feel out of place. Differences in language, clothing, and food are both personal and political. For us as a couple they are simply preferences that have emerged organically from our lives and backgrounds and interests. But we cannot pretend that in living here we would not also be part of a much larger wave of change in this area. And if it’s really a question of (white) “hipsters” vs. Latinos then we are inescapably in the category of the former. That’s how privilege works: You have to own it even if you don’t identify with it. White, male, “hipster” — I am none of these and yet I am all of them. It depends what each term means. It depends who you ask. It depends if we are talking about privilege or identification.

A few blocks away, but across the highway and a few blocks closer to Bedford Ave — the fount of this gentrification wave — we find the first apartment on which we are moved to put down a deposit. It’s smaller than the other but we have our cafes and our restaurants and our groceries. Once again we have landed right on the edge on this wave, this pattern that is beyond our control. One block away is a coffee shop dominated by famously entrepreneurial laptops. Half a block in the opposite direction, kids play basketball in the street under a string of Puerto Rican flags. So the city puts us in our place. This is the kind of neighborhood we want. And we can afford to live here, as long as we don’t mind that the kitchen floor is peeling up and there is no sink in the bathroom. From this apartment we can stage our own projects and journeys and battles with and through the city. Perhaps this is why it already feels like our home, and why my sweetheart starts kissing me when the realty agent isn’t looking. This hasn’t happened in any other apartment so far: The kissing test.

I am glad to be a new Writing Fellow at Baruch College, itself a towering vision of the contemporary city, hundreds more boxes within boxes organized to bring us together and keep us part according to the organizational system we call higher education. The architecture of the vertical campus reminds me of the towering luxury condominium in Fort Greene, but the student body is the most ethnically diverse in the nation. My first impression of the Bernard Schwartz Communication Institute is that it is much less diverse than the rest of Baruch, a subject I hope to explore in a future blog post. Nor do I feel at home in a world focused on “business” as distinct from culture, ecology, and social justice. But I do see the potential here for a new generation of thinking about communication, education, and how we choose to build our collective future. I see that this school, and CUNY in general, is the future of this city, dirty and golden and real.

IMAGE CREDITS: City from The Fifth Element (see also City and The City). “Gentrification… Just say NO” from southside rants. Gentrification diagram from Geosimulation. Avalon Fort Greene from Rent.com (see also “Suddenly, a Brooklyn Skyline”, New York Times). Cafe photograph from Atlas Cafe. “Puerto Rican flags strung across a street in South Williamsburg” from City Limits. Baruch College Vertical Campus from Architectural Record.

Filed Under: Art, Audience, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Media, New York, Politics

The Qydz are alright

May 20, 2011 By 1 Comment

I suppose after Linell’s, John’s, and David’s timely and thoughtful responses to Grant McCracken’s Symposium keynote talk, it might be overkill or overdue to pitch in my inflation-adjusted 

But seeing as some of my BLSCI colleagues might be awaiting something from one who could talk some smack but still state facts, get down to brass tacks, not exactly attack but risk a lack of tact, and maybe attract fellow hacks to take a crack at McCracken. Wise-cracks and shellackings, maybe followed by retractions and being sent home packing.

Or maybe a pact. But not exactly to shack up intellectually with this jack of all trades and his tract on value-extraction.

Alack, what to make of McCracken?

I started calling myself an anthropologist not too long ago, and since Dr. McCracken does as well, I suppose we have something in common. I suppose our differences are an invitation for me to police the boundaries of our discipline. The stakes seem to be broader than just defining what a proper understanding of anthropology or ‘culture’ can or should be. In any case, for all their propensity to deploy opaque jargon, anthropologists don’t maintain a monopoly on the concepts and methodologies of their field. Ethnography is increasingly popular in business, law, design, as well as other academic disciplines. The right to talk about culture belongs to everyone. I don’t think many anthropologists would object to that sentiment.

That said, McCracken’s take-away message was that successful companies need to be hip to culture and its vagaries, especially of a certain category of people he referred to repeatedly as the ‘Qydz.’

The Qydz are, as I understood McCracken, a rather large and underexamined tribe. They actually live among us, rather than in some faraway rainforest or mountainous highland. (At least, we aren’t so interested in the Qydz residing in such remote lands.)

These Qydz are the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism. Any business worth its salt should devote its energies toward studying the values and aesthetic tastes of this people. For the Qydz are nothing else if not consumers. And oh, the stuff they consume! Baggy jeans! Flip-out keyboard texting gizmos! Snapple!

Apparently, the Qydz are not born or raised. They have no provenance, no parentage, no institutions that foster their development. They simply appear in their present form (or ‘respawn’ as they might say in their own video-game parlance), as autonomous beings arranged into ‘generations’ we can only designate as ‘X’ or ‘Y’ (no word yet on any Generation Z sightings). Qydz culture prizes individualism, but their collective will is mighty and a thing to be feared only if business does not have the products to appease them.

Three female Qydz foraging for sustenance (not such a rare sighting, actually)

McCracken is right to suggest that capitalism has been increasingly dependent on the desires of consumers as a resource to mine and extract value. (Actually, he never said this outright, but it seems central to his research agenda.) Is this a fair assessment of capitalism, Linell seems to ask in the previous post? I would add, is this a fair assessment of desire?

For McCracken, the wants of the Qydz are limited only to their own imaginations, which, he contends, are limitless. Business can only hope to track the Qydz desires by means of increasingly sophisticated trend-tracking technology and–gasp!–ethnographic methods. Yes, really getting to ‘hang’ with some Qydz is a thrilling and potentially dangerous experience.

Academics spend oodles of time with Qydz, but McCracken may lament the time professors waste speaking to them, teaching them of our ways of life, rather than listening to and observing them. Pity.

It is increasingly clear that the Qydz are a natural resource we must safeguard carefully, lest they begin to imagine and wish for things business cannot manufacture and sell to them.

Great former tribesman Qydz referred to as Qurt Qobayn (center). He is still revered on t-shirts and other sacred memorabilia as an unsatisfied customer.

Filed Under: Baruch College, BLSCI, Conferences, Culture, edupunk, Fun, Politics, Resources, Symposium, To Ponder, Tools, What if . . .

Capitalism, critique and catastrophe

May 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Shoting star and other dollar origami by Corey Comenitz http://www.corigami.com/Gallery_3.html

I’m following John and David’s posts, both of which I think responded insightfully and eloquently to aspects of Grant McCraken’s presentation that I was too flustered by to take on myself. My immediate thought, following McCraken’s argument that anthropology should be a tool for companies, analyzing culture in order to help companies capture potential consumers, was that the motives of academics and business people are different. The task of academics is to question social structures—like the relationship between culture and the marketplace—in terms of how they affect human flourishing. And, the task of business people is to grow business. Either their job is not to care how their business affects human flourishing (writ large, not just the shareholders and consumers), or to assume that the growth of business is an inherent and general good.

But, is this a fair assumption or a prejudice? As soon as I had articulated this thought to myself, as a possible response to McCraken, I realized it sounded like a prejudice. This led me to think about the tropes that commonly circulate among academics, and to think of the generalizations made on both sides of the business/academic divide.

RSA videos have been circulating recently among my friends (and fellow academics). The first one that circulated among my (academic) friends was Slavoj Zizek’s “First tragedy, then farce.” The next was the David Harvey’s “Crises of Capitalism,” also posted on cac.ophony. One thing that struck me about them both is the catastrophic view of capitalism. Harvey ends his argument by saying that capitalism will only continue to become more extreme, that it is a phenomenon that far exceeds the range of our current political discourse, even our current political framework. Zizek suggests (with tiny caveats, it’s just a suggestion!) that charity merely mitigates the “zero point” of the increase in human suffering inherent to capitalism.

This is an old idea, made glamorous by a celebrity and by technology. Yet Zizek acts, though he cites Oscar Wilde, as if this were an original insight. I do think Marx’s ideas are still very relevant and useful today, but I’m frustrated that Marx still seems like a daring and challenging reference, and an endpoint. When his ideas are re-voiced outside of academic context, they seem to me to be more invoked and applied than built upon.

What I’d like to see turned into an RSA is perhaps Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, in which he studies the oppressions of several different political and economic forms, in different historical periods, and measures them against revolutions and the forms of governance and economics that replaced the old. No clear winners. I’d like to see some of George Yúdice’s ideas in an RSA. For example, he argues in The Expediency of Culture, that capitalism in its current phase is capturing more of human life, turning more and more of culture into a commodity. At the same time, he says, commodification has been cultured. The marketplace is more and more in the hands of more and more people. This takes us to last year’s keynote speaker, Clay Shirkey, who described Amazon as a kind of partial democratization of the marketplace. Or is it the commodification of democracy? Yúdice sees the capacity for the distribution of political agency, for more inclusive and effective solidarities, in this phase of the relationship between capital and culture.

In order to actually be able to turn speeches like McCraken’s into opportunities for mutually constructive criticism and dialogue, I think we might need to agree that we come to the table with a different set of prejudices about terms like the marketplace, capitalism, business, and academia. And would it be possible to have a conversation about who and how business and academia see themselves as serving to advance human flourishing?

Filed Under: BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Liberal Arts, Politics, Symposium

Burying the earth

April 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which, in the catastrophe subgenre pantheon, was a rather strange one. The explosion of reaction #4 and resulting fallout provided few media-ready images that persist today.Not that the Soviet television would have broadcast it. As a child in the US I remember only news graphics of a vague ‘toxic cloud’ spreading across Eastern Europe. It was something to fear, but it was over there. Nuclear radiation is, of course, invisible, and its effects are not immediately evident. There will be no Hollywood version. So what we have instead are enduring legacies and hauntings.

It’s baffling why nuclear power continues to be touted as a safe energy alternative in the face of its history of accidents. Along with environmental and health risks, the technology is a political failure: it is difficult to establish democratic rule over an industry that so few understand and even less know how to manage. I do not know of any historical account that makes this argument, but it seems plausible that Chernobyl was a nail in the coffin, so to speak, to a USSR already disintegrating. Experts and authorities could claim to contain the radiation, but not the claims around this ongoing calamity.

Paul Fusco, "Chernobyl Legacies"

Ordinary people are left to put together claims from the evidence that emerges, or that is allowed to emerge. Photographer Paul Fusco put together this harrowing account of Belarussian children with an array of birth defects and mental disease, calling them, with grim irony, “a different race of people.” It’s just about the saddest thing you will ever see, yes. And it is still debated whether these kinds of cases are attributable directly to Chernobyl. It is depressing to consider that the same debate will emerge around Japan in the coming years.

The effects on future generations go beyond deformed bodies, however. In a startling book of interviews with survivors and “liquidator” volunteers, Svetlana Alexievich reports of firemen digging up the poisoned topsoil around Chernobyl in order to bury it deep in the earth: plants, animals (which were indiscriminately killed), everything had to be buried, sometimes in lead containers or rolled up in plastic sheets.  ”We buried the forest… One of the poets says that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them, buried them” (p. 89).

Greenpeace, in its role as our better conscience, mentions 76 cities and villages were abandoned.

What has happened in the void? Tourism and hunting. Vice Magazine, in its gonzo reporting way, took cameras into Chernobyl in search of big game: as humans evacuated the region around the reactor, animals thrived. Nature has begun to reclaim this ruined land over the last 25 years, but it’s not the same as before. So hunters now enter the zone, looking to shoot mutant bear and dear.

 

It may be difficult to commemorate something like Chernobyl, it seems Chernobyl has its ways of reminding us.

 

Filed Under: Politics, Technology, To Ponder

Gagarin and Limahl walk into a bar…and talk about school curriculum

April 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

April 12th was the 50th anniversary of Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin’s first flight into space in the Vostoc 1 space ship, when he Orbited the earth.

No doubt, the man deserved the Hero of the Soviet Union medal awarded to him, and the glory and fame that came with it.

I learned about Gagarin during a class called “ Knowledge About Society”. The curriculum was build around several themes such as Polish patriotism, building a close relationship with the Soviet brothers, and self defense in case of impending attack form imperialists (yes, that means you!).

From http://www.aerospaceguide.net/spacehistory/yurigagarin.html

It is there that we learned he was Brave, Patriotic and Handsome. A true Soviet Man.

This reminiscing took me down memory lane. What else did I learn in the 1980’s Poland?

The “Knowlegde About Society” class was a catch-all for propaganda and weird pieces of information that did not fit neatly into other subjects. We did not take it very seriously but some of the class trips were rather fun.

We learned how to shoot during a single trip to a shooting range, where we also practiced cleaning and assembling a Kalashnikov. When I arrived in America I was the only teenager in my class with this special skill set.
There were many class exercises when we were told to wear old, decommissioned gas masks and run around the soccer field with them on because it was supposed to help us react in case of a gas attack. The theme of some sort of a danger coming from the USA was common, not surprising given that we were in the middle of the Cold War.

This poster reads: “Be Cautious of the Enemy of the Nation”

From http://c.wrzuta.pl/wi13542/99fc9a1d001fcdc84745f002/Plakaty%20PRL%27u?type=i&key=maM14bouGD&ft=f

 

For a common image of the America-the land- of -social- inequalities, check this poster titled: “The American Advertisement for Shoes.”

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/41.jpg

 

This is a uniform worn by all school children in the 1980s: easily improvised to more or less resemble the basic design, it was customized by different collars, and for the rebels among us, making a statement meant opening up the buttons on the front to reveal some more individualized clothing item, likely made by your grandmother, but still, cooler then the synthetic, clingy, navy blue tent.

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/szkola/2.jpg

 

The school was decorated with few old posters, praising the Communist Party and the Friendship with the Soviet Union, much like this:

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/3.jpg

The letters on this poster: “ ZSSR” is Polish for “the USSR”, and the signs means: “Defender of peace and a friend of children.”

Another theme was the pride in the accomplishments of the nation and socialism.

In this image, the dude walking away from the construction site, hands in his pockets, is described as “a bum”: “ The bum, a deserter from the front of the fight for peace and strong Poland.”

From http://niepoprawni.pl/grafika/bumelant-plakat-propagandowy-prl

 

The economic situation of Poland was often explained to be partly due to the effects of rampant capitalism elsewhere: we in the Soviet block had to manage and help each other in the face of the rest of the world.

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te2/w03sl%5B1%5D.jpeg

The stores really did look like this.

And the real economy was taking place on the black market, which the state never attempted to regulate or banish, because it really was central to any survival in the economic system of constant shortages of necessities and all consumer goods.

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te1.htm

 

Yummy meat. And here is sugar:

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te1.htm

If, walking to school, you happen to see that a delivery truck has arrived at a store, bringing a product, whatever it may be, you would skip class, stand in a long line, and hopefully triumphantly secure some much desired product, like… toilet paper.

From http://m.onet.pl/_m/f81b3974c3f210496819cd5891fcffd2,14,1.jpg

 

Industrializing the country was a point of pride for the Polish Communist Party and a popular topic of propaganda:

“The buildings of socialism are our pride.”
Or:
“1971- 1980: From those years of toil and creativity comes the strength and well being of the fatherland.”

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/16.jpg

 

What else do I remember, ehem, fondly?

From http://europe-band-guides.blogspot.com/2011/04/final-countdown.html

From http://upperplayground.com/wordpress/?p=15361

 

From http://www.wallpaperbase.com/music-depechemode.shtml

 

Filed Under: Art, Asides, Politics

Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

Godzilla, the last sequel

March 22, 2011 By 1 Comment

Reflecting on John’s recent post on Japan, as well as my last contribution to this forum, I think it is time we do indeed start thinking and talking about our implicatedness in the transformations in and of the earth itself. In the wake of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear crisis in Japan, the New York Times gently reminded readers:

Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production — coal, oil and nuclear power — have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation at a time when the world has no workable alternatives able to operate at sufficient scale.

In all three scenarios, we heard from leaders and experts assume the mantle of authority to dissuade the panic-stricken from questioning our energy economy, or–gasp!–suggesting we make meaningful moves towards alternatives. These ‘accidents,’ as the NYT itself terms them, continue to be framed as matters of risk management, regulation, and oversight.

Let me suggest a different take the environmental and health risks of nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, and mine explosions are not technical failures but political ones. The expertise and ownership infrastructures necessitated and supported by these industries are what have produced “irrational fears about risk.” Why do we live in a world where people don’t know what processes power their lightbulbs, washing machines, and computers? We need a renewed global conversation about energy, technology, and democracy now.

As a colleague of mine reminded me recently, this conversation has precedents: see Ivan Illich’s 1973 essay “Energy and Equity”. A pithy excerpt:

Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and “cold turkey”—between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps—but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.

I want to draw attention to the ideological blindspots hidden in the notion that ‘natural disasters’ bring people together under the banner of humanitarianism. This is the imperative sense of our moral responsibility (‘response-ability,’ as John framed it), and there is nothing wrong with it: we need ever more of this kind of altruism and less cynicism. But the thing about natural disasters is how they naturalize many aspects of our world that are not natural. In fact, we see this view as a smokescreen for all kinds of new projects of class power, as documented in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. As geographer Neil Smith noted about Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe that effectively functioned as a mass eviction of poor people in New Orleans, “far from flattening the social differences, disaster reconstruction invariably cuts deeper the ruts and grooves of social oppression and exploitation.”

This brings up the question I posed before: what kind of horror-movie is contemporary capitalist society? Comedian Patton Oswalt offered three possibilities: zombies, spaceships, wastelands. In the midst of the current Japanese calamity, it seems appropriate to call for the return of the monster movie.

"Om nom nom nom"

Many American audiences enjoyed and dismissed Godzilla as a campy sci-fi flick and thus missed its scathing critique of the nuclear age. The monster, a symbol of science gone berserk, appeared in cinemas in 1954, the same year as the thermonuclear detonation on Bikini Island. “Audiences who flocked to “Gojira” were clearly watching more than just a monster movie. The film’s opening scenes evoked the nuclear explosion in the Pacific and the damaged Japanese bodies so poignant to domestic viewers. Godzilla — relentless, vengeful, sinister — looms as an overt symbol of science run amok. The creature’s every footstep and tail-swipe lay bare the shaky foundations on which Japan’s postwar prosperity stood,” notes Peter Wynn Kirby. (Interestingly, a new monster film by Guillermo Del Toro, ‘Pacific Rim,’ has come under pressure to ensure ‘insensitive’ references to Japan being attacked are excised from the screenplay.) I wonder what idiom the political mobilization against the excesses of the science/energy industrial complex might have to develop to capture people’s attention the way Godzilla did in the 1950s.

So, I am concerned and skeptical about the attempts to silence political debate under the rubric of “we must all band together in a crisis.” Human beings as a global society are transforming the earth to the extent that our collective activities are increasingly entangled with so-called natural processes. Some have harkened in this era as the ‘Anthropocene.’ Perhaps there is no way back, but there must be a different way forward.

Filed Under: Art, Media, Politics, Technology, What if . . .

Horror-Movie Capitalism?

March 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As Tina’s post earlier this week attests, the ideas of Karl Marx live on, in ever clever guises. Her anonymous student vociferously wished to avoid intellectual contact with the thinker/giant bronze head (eww, commodity fetishism!), but once he got to know Uncle Karl a bit better, he could, at least for present purposes, better satisfy the stern critical eye of his anthropology professor. But wait, there’s more, so listen up:

Kids of the world, you have nothing to lose but your student debt, dire job prospects, and terribly overpriced cell phone plans!

Karl Marx would be a huge Twilight fan, at least if we consider the following quip:

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Greenspan hunnngrrry for morrrtgages rrrrawwwrrr

Yes, I believe that is as close as we get to actually claiming that Marx said, effectively, “Capitalism sucks.” But what draws my attention is the personification move. Marx was always making this rhetorical maneuver, giving Capital its own agency so that he could identify how it behaves and thinks. Many times, actual human capitalists are rendered “capital embodied.” It walks among us… Beware!

I won’t deny that I am pointing to a hint of paranoia, even behind the (attempt at) humor here. I think that is one of the main modes of popular resistance to Marxism today. McCarthyism and red-baiting as an American Tradition™ may have not completely faded as effective ideological tools, but in classroom and colloquial settings there is a common reliance on articles of faith still associated with our dominant economic system: “Capital is no vampire; just look at how He fosters creativity, drives innovation, defines property and individual identity, acts as a fair arbiter of the value of goods and labor,” one might argue. Well, if you put it that way, Capital sounds like a whole different kind of bloke.

Let’s concede that Marx was paranoid. As Marx also said: “If things appeared exactly as they are, there would be no need for science.” Marx considered himself a scientist, interested in getting past the surface appearances of the world toward an underlying reality. That is the mentality of a paranoiac, to be sure, but it is the foundation of any critical enterprise to doubt things are as they seem. Freud did the same with human behavior, for example, by positing that we must be at least partially governed by something we can’t see or touch, an unconscious. That idea is now commonsense and lies at the heart of, say, all advertising and politics in consumer societies, if you follow the argument in this documentary, “The Century of the Self” (below is just Part 3: “There is Policeman Inside all our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed”):

One recent attempt, by actual comedian and voice of animated rodent gourmet Remy, to define the world through dominant social figures is Patton Oswalt. But he doesn’t see vampires. The eponymous chapter of his new book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland seems an attempt at popular sociology. It’s kind of beautiful in its daring but laid-back tone. The essay is part bong-hit musing, part exercise in bringing clarifying order to a confusing human universe. In Oswalt’s formulation, if we can call it that, everyone from adolescence on conforms to one of three social types: you’re either a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland. Let’s let Patton summarize these figures:

“Zombies simplify… Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact… Zombies can’t believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.” (pp. 96-98)

“Spaceships leave. No surviving infrastructure for them. No Earth, period… Spaceships figure it’s easier for them to build a world and know its history or, better yet, choose the limited customs and rituals that fit the story.” (p. 98)

“Wastelands destroy. They’re confused but fascinated by the world. The wasteland is inhabited by people or, for variety, mutants… Variations of the human species grown amok–isn’t that how some teenage outcasts already feel? Mutants bring comfort.” (p. 100)

Behind the archetypes, however, is a more interesting insight. The world of zombies, spaceships, and wastelands is something created, somehow. He locates these categories’ origins “as aspects of a shared teen experience,” but, in a typical academic move, I want to make a bigger, lamer deal out of something that was meant mainly as a joke and a memoir of a science-fiction nerdom upbringing.

For Oswalt, until misfit teens grow into adults, “anything we create has to involve simplifying, leaving, or destroying the world we’re living in.”

The more I look at these musings, the more they sound like Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling. What I enjoy about Oswalt’s way of writing here is that these social types are not altogether models fabricated in any conscious kind of way. They are skins people inhabit but can’t quite get out of. They are not only found in movie tropes and protagonists (“Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship,” p. 99) but are also spaces and ways of being. They are inside and outside of us, in living practices and landscapes.

All I would do here is to expand Oswalt’s concepts with the question, “what kind of world produces Zombies, Spaceships, and Wastelands, makes those imaginable, workable worlds?” What is it that makes practices of simplifying, leaving, or destroying viable and even creative? In Oswalt’s examples you can discern all kinds of things and people: suburbia, punk rock, hipsters, Star Wars, excess, fast food, college. It’s as if he’s trying to think, on the widest possible level, how all these things come together. All three are alienated types, to be sure, and this is what may connect them to Marx.

What Uncle Karl would have to say about zombies, spaceships, and wastelands might be a way of defining what most of contemporary critical theory is grappling with today. The villains, the scenes have changed, and we don’t yet have a language to understand it–critically, at least. These days it might not be only about sucking dry the blood of the laborer, but also about after-lives of the dead, utopian launches, and broken ruins?

Oswalt, to close: “Weirdly, Wastelands are the most hopeful and sentimental of the bunch. Because even though they’ve destroyed the world as we know it, they conceive of stories in which the core of humanity–either in actual numbers of survivors or in the conscience of a lone hero–survives and endures. Wastelands, in college, love Beckett.” (p. 101)

Patton is apparently guarded about his writing

Filed Under: Asides, edupunk, Language, literature, Politics, To Ponder

I Hate Karl Marx

March 7, 2011 By 2 Comments

Last week I spent an hour working with a student on a response paper. The assignment required an analysis of a cultural anthropology text: a quick summary of the author’s position, an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of its argument, and an identification of its methodology or theory. Routine stuff.

The student, other than being a multilingual learner with a few ESL issues, had a great sense of how to move forward, even if he lacked some confidence in his ability to do so. The article was an investigation of the socioeconomic ramifications of the drug economy on a small South American nation; the student, a native of that country, had a clear and nuanced opinion about where the author’s argument and data held up and where it didn’t. He even correctly identified the research and writing as based in, or closely related to, cultural materialism: the problem was more deeply understanding that relationship, and how to make that tie explicit in his paper.

We set about breaking down what, exactly, cultural materialism is – and in our discussion, I brought up Marxism as the underpinning theory. The student visibly bristled. “I don’t want to talk about Marx in my paper!”

“Okay, ” I said, but just so you’re aware, this whole idea that we’re talking about, and that you agree with – that the structure of this economy in which a few people own the coca farms and the paste processing places – the means of production – that this structure determines how everyone else in society lives – this idea comes directly out of Marx.” A few seriously reductive points later – and a pointing out that cultural materialism grew out of the incorporation of other theories into Marxism, he visibly relaxed. He then said that no one had ever explained what Marx meant in such simple and understandable terms.

Of course, one could write reams about the assimilation of some students to an overarching resistance/knee-jerk reaction to what mainstream American culture has deemed a four-letter word. But it’s troubling that an otherwise seemingly intellectually curious and pretty assiduous student would simply shut down at the mention of Marx, and try really hard to separate it from the later cultural theory that it’s ok to learn and know about, since that theory is required directly on the syllabus. Obviously, the simple solution is a quick and simple demystification of Marx, as occurred here. But I can’t help but wonder if, on a classroom scale, in the wake of reactionary discourse on “academic freedom,” professors not teaching the history of Western philosophy might not just want to gloss over the whole thing entirely.

This weekend I participated in a panel at the art fair Volta NY entitled “Communism’s Afterlives,” and had the opportunity to rewatch the following video by artist Rainer Ganahl when a colleague showed it as part of her presentation. For those who like their Marx-hate steeped in satire, with a deeply nuanced understanding of the shared ideological histories of West and East, and an acknowledgment of the vague Western fear of China taken to an extreme: enjoy.

Filed Under: Politics, teaching Tagged With:

Red Dawn, 1984 (Remember when American Movies fantasized about Russian Invasions?)

March 1, 2011 By 3 Comments

Word on the street is that there is a possible release of the remake of Red Dawn in late summer of this year. If you grew up Cold War America then there is a high chance you were screaming “Wolverines!” as Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell drank moose blood in the mountains of Montana.

Image from http://wwww.threeimaginarygirls.com/files/uploaded-images/wolverines.jpg

Image from http://www.bigchicosmovieblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/red-dawn.jpg

Quite possibly the best mix of Patrick Swayze Jennifer Grey mix pre-Dirty Dancing, Red Dawn was actually the stuff of my nightmares! Imagine getting to Brooklyn all the way from Kabul and seeing this movie — it opens with paratroopers landing by the high school just as the teacher finishes up a lecture on the invading Mongol hordes!

This 1984 teen film was released right around the time that the Soviet-Afghan war was at its thickest and Afghans were winning popular American support. You can see the connection in these two photos I’ve juxtaposed — the first, the Wolverines (brave rebels fighting Nicuaraguans, Cubans and Russians who were invading the U.S.) and then the Mujahideen (brave warriors fighting the Soviets and given their own Afghanistan Day by Reagan in 1987)

Image from http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/6100000/Red-Dawn-1984-80s-films-6130207-1024-768.jpg

It’s like the cast of The Outsiders and St. Elmo’s Fire merged and were given military weapons.

Photo by Jonas Dovydenas

See the similarities… okay so the Afghan Mujahideen are not wearing letterman jackets and posing on bleachers, but you get it! In this photo, the Mujahideen are photographed in the Kunar Province, 1985.

Image from http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/reddawn.jpg

This one is in the mountains — come on way too similar to 80s photos of the Mujahideen!

Image from http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/reza_p57%5B1%5D.jpg

One of the most famous Mujahideen glory era photos of Ahmad Shah Masood by the famous international photographer, Reza.

Image from http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4asx7ilAA1qzzh6g.jpg

Not sure if die-hard Red Dawn fans will buy this connection. I’ve already had one facebook comment war with a friend from high school who was vehement that Red Dawn had nothing to do with the Mujahideen. But… you and I know better.

Image from http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2009/02/10/reddawn120704.jpg

It’s all fun and games till the commies conquer the McDonalds! What could happen next? Silver Spoons in Russian?!!

Red Dawn (1984)

Now onto the remake, which has its own issues of being Sinophobic. Honestly, I thought the easiest step would be to make invading Turbanismo Warriors. But apparently, they decided to have the Chinese invading America. Some have said that it’s anti-Asian sentiment may have even canceled it. Hmmm… maybe it would have been better to invest in a remake of Robocop?

Filed Under: Media, Politics
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