Long Sunday

A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true [updated]

Having just watched the later, 60's film version of Hemingway's The Killers (after the Tarkovsky and Burt Lancaster) featuring one Ronald Reagan, I cannot help but feel I understand these comments about "time and space" in a whole new way.  Ronald was an odd duck wasn't he (the word, "stilted" seems invented just for him, back when art of faux-working class swagger and unflinching confidence was quite enough).  A common thought:  why was America always so much behind the times?  Anyway this guy Rx is saying something very much in the manner of cognitive dissonance with this mashup; perhaps usefully provoking: Download freedom101Rx.mov

Those familiar with the story and even those not may find this engaging article by Ron Berman useful reading:

swiped from crooked timber, but probably even more appropriate over here...

Try this out.

I'm wondering why my posts seem particularly apt to incite the masses. One of them has a sign that says "Continue Reading Adbusters," for instance.

I love the little guy with the beret who carries the "Perec" sign too... And the Baudrillardians seem to be truly pissed.

Finally, one guy is firmly with the Lacoue-ians, but. apparently, against the Labarthites.

first person (plural) shooter

I'm sure soldiers, ever since there have been soldiers, have hooted adolescently in the throes of combat. What would we expect, that they'd go about their work gravely, constantly reminding themselves of the seriousness - the mortal seriousness - of the things that they do, the weapons that they discharge? That is undoubtedly too much to expect. The stupid talk and yells undoubtedly represent a release from the psychosis inspiring and inspired actions that they are committing.

It is not new, it is not groundbreaking, to think: "They sound like the subset of students that you see hooting and unawarely spewing stuff they heard in a movie somewhere. They always talk like this, yell like this. They likely feel most themselves when they most completely give themselves over to the canned material they have been served, night after night, for their entire lives."

What we hear is not the organic, the militaristically gnomic, the earthy - it is the sitcomedic. MTV trashtalk, some Full Metal Jacketisms (Kubrick would have loved this, at least in a way) thrown in.

And, because you too have seen the same movies, at least a lot of them, you are able to try to reconstruct any possible reason, any scenario at all, in which the cars that speed in, crash, disgorge their occupants, who then are blown away by the Americans. The sniper was in a car? The insurgents, after a lengthy pause, get into their little cars and attempt, as an act of insane bravery perhaps, to speed past the marines' position? Why?

Unlike the talk, no, the actions of the "insurgents" don't fit into any plausible script, especially not the one posted at the end of the video.

reality

Nominalist, I and a few others have been rehearsing arguments about the mind's ability to understand or construct reality in the post that started with Heidegger below. The discussion had dwindled down, but this morning I saw this review of The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe by Michael Frayne. Colin McGinn is the reviewer. Introducing the book, he writes:

[Frayn's] question, central to philosophy, is to what degree, and in what ways, is the world dependent on the mind? Do we construct the world, or is it thrust upon us? He contends that reality has neither substance nor form without the constructive activities of the knowing subject, that space, time, causality and matter are all mental products, the results of our "traffic" with the world, not antecedent realities. He admits that the universe must exist independently of us in some way, but only as a kind of "undifferentiated mass." This is, he thinks, the basic paradox of philosophy: that we both create and are created by the world.

Deserving jibes at Sartre, included

This space has been on an absolute roll lately. Go see. Courtesy of, and since we're watching film, the following may be of interest, particularly in light of recent conversations:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

dialectics at a standstill: bruce sterling as exemplary public intellectual, circa now

The current configuration of the fields of journalism, academia, and publishing - plus the advent of the blogsphere - have produced in turn a new configuration of public intellectualism. There's something of a long tail effect at work - there are probably more PIs listened to by fewer than any time in history. All manner of blogpundits, evangelists, and visionaries abound.

One of these (actually, he's officially the Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in California) is Bruce Sterling, who has recently produced his very own youtubed guide to Belgrade:

Let me clip in what I think is the key passage here:

OK. so bear around the corner of the street, and this Tito-era workers housing building with its crumbling substandard concrete, we have what's basically an ideological declaration here: business, technology, communication. You notice it doesn't seem to be actually selling much of anything, it's more like a placard for the 21st century way of life. Just a layer, a thin layer, on top of an older building. But it is this layer, this thin layer, that actually allows me to live within this particular city and earn a living here... via internet. Oh but what kind of person am I? Well, you know, look at my clothing. Look at my possessions. Business, technology, communication. What are these objects, actually attached to my body. This one in particular, wireless communication, completely changes people's physical relationship to the city grid. In order to assemble my crew here on this street corner, we had to make about 30 different wireless phone calls just this morning and this afternoon. And yet, thanks to wireless communication, this is it. Thanks to the internet, that's what allows me to be here.

Dear Christ. So, let's consult the scorecard. The public housing of the old regime sucked, sure, but now there's, what, a weird placard and Sterling with a fucking cellphone. For a proper celebration to ensue, you'd think we'd catch sight of all the fabulous new housing for the underclasses since the arrival of the free market chez Belgrade. After all, one guesses that there still are, like, people living in the crumbling workers housing building. Just as the failure of the American welfare state doesn't mean that no one has to live in towering projects, it's just that the idea of building new residences for the working class has been abandoned.

I suppose it does change "people's relationship to the city grid" to have a well-paid speculative fiction writer cum freelance consultant strolling the streets of your city, making 30 calls a day on his phone, escorted by a movie crew. The rise of communism. The death of Tito. The fall of the Wall. The arrival of Bruce Sterling in your city. It all makes sense now, no?

More seriously: the illogic of the paragraph I've typed in speaks to the strange situation of the nearly-depoliticized public intellectual in 2007. The past, its utopian politics, are recognized and then derided. Guffaw, guffaw. But when the part of the paragraph arrives when you're meant to explain why you're smiling and carrying on, the part about the world actually being a better place now that the nasty specter of communism has slinked back into the grave, you simply stare into the face of your cellphone, or flip it out for all to admire. You register the amazingness of the fact that you're actually here, wherever you are: a post-communist city that still bears the scares of US bombing, or a Pizza Hut in Bangalore, or the Department of Defense media center in the green zone, wherever. Your voice rises, you get excited, but there's nothing to show but a civic-boosterist information economy poster splayed across the face of a Worker's Residence, gutted into condos.

In short, the past and its potentialities are everywhere confronted, but only to be at once disowned with a shrug....

eightieth anniversary of being and time

Can it really be that long ago? Eighty years! What do we think now about that whole project? Was it useful or even necessary at the time but now not so much? Reading it now, does it seem like something that is important from the history of philosophy and that's all, or is it still 'actual'?

Help me make a list

of phenomena that, though not directly observable, make themselves known by the distortions they cause in some mediating element.

Truthiness and Foucault

For those of you unfamiliar with it, The Colbert Report is a fake news cable show hosted by the over the top, pseudo right wing commentator Stephen Colbert.  While it may be simply described as a parody of cable political talk shows (like The O'Reilly Factor) it offers an ironic look at contemporary political discourse.   What strikes me is that Colbert seems to be able to sum up the cultural and political divide with one word - Truthiness:

The A.V. Club: What's your take on the "truthiness" imbroglio that's tearing our country apart?

Stephen Colbert: Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

What would Hannah Say?

When it comes to Hannah Arendt, it seems you either love her work or hate it.  It has been noted that her corpus has attained an academic cult status over the last 15 to 20 years, but many people do not understand why.  Many dislike Arendt's condescending, almost imperial, tone, her idiosyncratic definitions of ordinary terms, and even what some perceive as a shallowness of thought.  As Isiah Berlin once remarked:

She produces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical thought. It is all a stream of metaphysical free association. She moves from one sentence to another, without logical connection, without either rational or imaginative links between them.

I should be clear that I do not accept this view.  In fact I am firmly in the "love her work" camp.  But I understand this sort of reaction because much of her writing, taken in isolation from her larger project, does leave the impression of randomness, or even a certain lack of rigor.

Attempting to untangle some of the latest efforts of "Hannah Worship,"  Jeremy Waldron addresses the question of "What would Hannah Say?"  In a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, Waldron discusses several recent attempts to hypothesize how Arendt would react to our current situation:  The so called "War on Terror," the suspension of Habeas Corpus, Guantanamo Bay, the "Palestinian Question."  He ultimately believes this is a misguided task, not because Arendt's work is not rich with insight, but because it attempts to make her thinking iconic.  Instead of worshiping in the museum of all that is Hannah, we should follow her example: