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....

Turnstile

Aw shucks, make it the largest wine cellar in Europe, I say (just think how jealous the cinephiles of underground Paris would become).  Everybody knows there is an inverse relation between the number of nukes sitting under various egomaniacs' thumbs on any given day and such fancies as a "genuine fear of nuclear war."  Come to think of it, maybe there are other examples where this is the case?  The more people blog about (middle-brow) "literature," for example, or abuse their borrowed talking points as aggressive intellectual all-purpose currency with others, the less likely literature, or the flexing of the intellect becomes?

Fresh Light

...to supplement a post at The Weblog (and encourage readers toward David's, on Badiou's Hölderlin below it)

None of the parties involved in the struggle against terrorism can afford to refrain from talking about it, but the more they do so the more they help the terrorist cause, by giving it status, visibility, and a sense of purpose...victims of a traumatic experience need to endlessly play the trauma back for themselves in order to feel reassured that they have withstood it.  This self-destructive tendency becomes a destructive weapon in the hands of the media and the political leadership.  Imagine, said Derrida, if we told the American public and the world that what has happened is no doubt an unspeakable crime, but it's over.  Everyone would then begin their own period of mourning, the preliminary step to turning the page.  All responsible parties need to facilitate this turning of the page and stop hindering it.  This is an urgent responsibility, the evasion of which transforms the enemies of terrorism into its allies.  (Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 153-154; image via remue.net)

I may not share the proclivity (or mixed fascination) for sterilized images of the zeitgeist's self-appointed spokesmen, but I do appreciate the impetus of Alain's post.   And I suspect he would agree that discussions of Fukuyama and B-Henri, while revealing things by falling rather decisively short, don't really do the subject at hand much of any justice. Which is the way I prefer to read his concluding remarks, in any case.  That subject being, broadly, the social and political role of philosophers, and even more broadly their relation to the question of Europe.

As to the former, Alain cites those two repellents attempting to  distinguish strictly between "government" and "private life", and "realistic" and "idealistic" intellectual labor, respectively.  But as Alain himself, and one savvy commenter do not fail to note, neither of these sets of bins are very helpful, or even all that relevant.

Rather, and in a manner that overlaps a great deal with John Emerson's recent forays into questions of global citizenship and intellectual responsibility in "analytic" vs. "continental" frameworks, one might more usefully distinguish, following Giovanna Borradori, between models of social and political commitment aligned with either a "liberal" or "Hegelian" lineage.

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The web we're on

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use...
President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.
But Tice [former NSA insider] disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.  "That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

Today via The Volokh's, who also raise a few questions about the wisdom of that whole e-annoyance law thing from 50-odd posts ago:

This potentially criminalizes any anonymous speech on a Web site that's intended to annoy at least some readers, even if it's also intended to inform other readers.  This is true whether the poster is berating a government official, a religious figure, a company that he thinks provides bad service, an academic who he thinks is doing or saying something misguided, a sports figure who he thinks is misbehaving, or what have you; so long as he's trying to annoy any recipient (whether the target, if the poster thinks the target is reading the blog, or the target's partisans or fans).

How is this different from traditional telephone harassment law? The trouble is that the change extends traditional telephone harassment law from a basically one-to-one medium (phone calls) to include a one-to-many medium (Web sites).

This is a big change. One-to-one speech that's intended to annoy the one recipient is rarely of very much First Amendment value; people are just rarely persuaded or enlightened by speech that's intended to annoy them. It has some value (see item 3 below), but to the extent that it's in some measure deterred, the loss to public debate isn't that great — speakers are still free to speak to others besides the person they're trying to annoy.

But one-to-many speech that is intended to annoy one or a few readers, but intended and likely to enlighten or persuade many other readers, is potentially much more valuable.

Update:  Then again, maybe not such a  big deal you gullible little bloggers, you.  More blog-able items of this sort beneath the fold:

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