Ideological Critique

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the word "nigger" over 200 times. The Merchant of Venice depicts the humiliation and ruin of a Jewish villain at the hands of a Christian majority; Othello, a negro who strangles his perfectly innocent wife. The famous first line of Pride and Prejudice can be read as a blatant formula for prostitution, if one so chooses. The women of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight inspire and manipulate their men, but don't engage in any decapitating contests themselves.

It's relatively easy to point one's finger at a work of art, especially challenging art, and denounce it as ideologically unsavory in some way. Anyone can (re)apply this or that political formula (e.g. the "Woman in the Refrigerator," or any of the dozens of other ways to reduce a story to who's-doing-what-to-whom) and bandy about the -isms of the day in a denunciatory fashion. There are people with tenure right now who have made entire careers out of little else. It's a lot harder, however, to make a sincere effort to participate in an artist's world view, to try to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, to make an honest and uncompromising critique that nonetheless adds value to the world rather than merely taking it away.

I'm talking about imaginative generosity, not apologia. And I'm not always great at taking my own advice--I talk more lazy, cheap, snide, cynical shit than a lot of people I know. I'm just saying I'd rather watch Othello than Gothika.

(Image from mincer.en.alibaba.com.)

Hipsters Hatin' on Hipsters

I just finished reading Adbusters' July 2008 article, "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization", and I think Douglas Haddow got it mostly wrong--the counterculture hasn't lost its values at all. The beatniks, the hippies, the punks, the hip-hoppers, the ravers, the anti-consumer movement, etc. all concern(ed) themselves with an elaborate system of in-group fashion semiotics and justifications for having a good time (i.e. looking good and having fun) couched in contemporary political terms. Today's kids may just want to party without feeling as obliged to justify it as "subversive" or "revolutionary," but if they still want to be different from (i.e. cooler than) the kids across the street, then the aforementioned "countercultural" values are intact, minus some of the political pretension. I say good for them. Posers will always be posers, but posers who think they're activists are worse.

I can sympathize with Mr. Haddow's disappointment that the hipsters of 2008 aren't into the same militant anti-consumer pseudo-activism that the hipsters of 2000 were. Before too long, there might not be anyone left to buy Adbusters.

(Image from kidsnpets.files.wordpress.com. Read Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's book for a better discussion of this subject.)

The Paranoia of Political Correctness

Most people (e.g. me) whose parents weren't active in the KKK grew up thinking, rather naively, that racism is the belief that one's own race is superior and other races are inferior. By contemporary standards, this is not exactly true--the inner logic of political correctness is more convoluted than that. For example, a positive opinion of another group expressed for the wrong reasons is still racist (e.g. "orientalism," "white guilt"), while a sweepingly negative statement denigrating all members of a particular group is not necessarily racist: if the target group has more members and/or a higher average socioeconomic status than that of the person uttering the statement, it's "reverse racist." It can also be tricky to tell "ironic" racism from the real thing, especially in our present cultural climate, wherein edginess is valued over intelligence, and low quality satire often reinforces the very ideas it's intended to critique.

I imagine that people who are members of minority groups (most of whom actually belong to majority groups, in an extra-American context) feel just as frustrated, if not more so. They could probably describe the same sensation of walking on eggshells, the same feeling slightly guilty awkwardness whenever the issue of "race" comes up, and the additional fear that just maybe a group of 5 resentful crackers are going to be waiting in the alley with sticks in their hands and pillowcases over their heads.

Maybe the way we're all looking at the issue of "race" right now seldom makes anyone feel happy or secure. Maybe identity politics isn't a zero sum power game, and "race" (whatever that actually means--minor statistical variation in a single actively communicating global gene pool, maybe?) is less of a big deal than people seem to think. Perhaps racism isn't necessarily a hideous social cancer or a deeply entrenched, self-perpetuating "regime of power and knowledge" but rather a lazy and complacent in-group superstition that most people would happily give up upon learning that it's intelligent and profitable to do so. I suspect our current efforts to combat racism usually only make it worse, and the sooner we figure that out, the better off we'll all be.

(Image from www.reggie.net.)

Black Box Pluralism

"Despite its claims, 'pluralism' is in itself, paradoxically, a unifying perspective, but a rather procrustean one. What it does is reduce all cultural differences to a sort of grid of cultural black boxes laid out over an infinite plane, boxes whose external form is safely measurable but whose contents are incommensurable and thus unknowable, and which are, as it were, the fundamental monads or quanta of reality. Geometrically it resembles the characteristic grid-design of the American city, or the relationship between departments in the American multiversity. Though pluralism forbids any attempt to perceive one cultural box as containing another, and thus revealing a comparable and measurable internal structure, it is itself a kind of gigantic box containing all other boxes as its subordinate material. Thus, like relativism, it contains a subtle hegemonic ambition of its own.

"One way of describing what is the problem with pluralism is to say that if the universe is curved, even a simple sphere, no grid of equal rectilinear blocks can cover (or 'tile') it without overlap. Specialization, and the definition of smaller and smaller cultural units, might be seen as the desperate resource of an intellectual culture trying to solve exactly this problem. If the world's squares are small enough, perhaps the distortions of the world's curvature will somehow go away" (Frederick Turner 1991, Tempest, Flute and Oz: Essays on the Future pp. 30-1).

(Image from blog.jovoto.com)

The Cremaster Cycle: Treading Water in a Sea of Retarded Sexuality and Bad Poetry

Matthew Barney's film series, the Cremaster Cycle, is a cognitively retarded and symbolically barren exercise in tedium and bad taste. Barney's take on biology is more of a superficial pose than a serious exploratioin, and the sexual logic underlying his artistic vision is not evolutionary (i.e. human) but rather postmodern and Freudian. He throws around terms like "system" and "entropy," but makes no effort to link his use of these concepts to the notion of complex dynamical systems as they are now understood to occur in nature and culture (see James Gleick's Chaos and A Blessed Rage for Order by Alexander Argyros, both of which predate the Cremaster Cycle, for an introduction to this topic). Sport, likewise, appears in his work as a pseudo-theme, but since there are no distinct players or rules (not even the dynamic, evolving ones described by game theory), the treatment, again, is superficial.

What I can't understand is why Barney gets such rave reviews--his work appears on the covers of art history textbooks, and people seem to be throwing money at him to slop vaseline all over the Guggenheim (only an American artist could be so self-consciously Eurotrash). I guess the sophistos and trendoids of the moneyed academic art world have mistaken his vagueness and obscurity for depth, so no one wants to be the poor benighted rube who asks why the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

The film series' only (dubious) value, it seems to me, is as a study of how an ill-conceived "closed aesthetic system" quickly succumbs to entropy, resulting in artless and sterile mutations like a grotesque half-sheep/half bagpipe or a rubber tire from which a pair of testicles dangles uselessly. It may be argued that this is the point, and that Barney's work succeeds as a depiction of aesthetic schizophrenia and metaphysical failure, but it's surely foolish to praise bad art for its ability to express bad ideas. Serious art, whatever its form and content, gives expression to enduring human themes like hope, promise and gravity--ideas which are absent from Barney's inane films.

Here's a link to a documentary-length interview with Barney that shows some of his work, and here's another to a Cremaster trailer. See if you can figure out what he means by terms like "mythology," "narrative," and "character"--I don't think he even knows.

Rather than releasing his films in a low cost, mass-market format like everyone else, Barney has pressed a limited run of 20 DVD's and auctioned them off in gussied up packaging for over $100,000 each. The unwashed philistines and non-cognoscenti will have to settle for a 30 minute excerpt from Cremaster 3, or maybe they will be able to find Neville Wakefield's overpriced book in a public library. Walter Benjamin, (the Marxist author of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" whose ideas about art and mass production have influenced 3 generations of "anti-establishment" elitists) would be impressed, no doubt, but I suspect Barney's marketing strategy has more to do with the fact that on some level he realizes that the common consumer, who is unburdened by a Yale education in postmodern pretension, would quickly see the Cremaster films for the malarky that they are.

THE BOTTOM LINE: If civilization fails when art and culture stop being sexy, then the Cremaster Cycle is a crime against humanity. I, for one, would rather watch a clown die of cancer than sit through all 7.5 hours of Barney's incoherent, self-indulgent, desperately ugly horseshit.

(image from www.soundopinions.org)

Clean Air for Kids Campaign

Today is International Pipe Smoking Day, and I'd like to take a moment to discuss the Clean Air for Kids campaign. This is an initiative by the Lung Association of Canada, the aim of which is to make it illegal for people to smoke in cars when there are children present. This Canada-wide campaign is advertised on television all the time here in New Brunswick, and, I assume, elsewhere in Canada as well. The basic idea is that smoking in a car when children are present would become an offense punishable by a ticket and a fine.

I think this is a terrible idea. This is not to say that parents should be "free to choose" whether they want to expose their children to such hazards. On the contrary, they should be prevented from doing so by the filial bond , which is the strongest, oldest, and most culturally universal of all constraints on human behaviour. As far as the state is concerned, however, people not in public employ should be allowed to chain smoke all day in a car full of kids, puppies and emphysema victims if they want to. Protecting children from lung diseases caused by tobacco smoke is primarily a job for parents or other adults into whose care they have entrusted their children, and secondarily for education and the moral pressure of public opinion--never, in any case, for armed police, who should have better things to do with their time.

I'm proud to be a Canadian, and I support my country's decision to provide universal basic health care for its citizens, but this does not make my children wards of the state. If civil society can't be left to its own devices in relatively minor matters of conscience (after all, it's not like smokers are butting their cigarettes out in kids' eyes), then how can it be trusted with the task of democratic self-government?

Charter 77 and Moral Responsibility

In January 1977, a document titled Charter 77 (Charta 77 in Czech and Slovak) was published as a manifesto in a West German newspaper after being circulated within communist Czechoslovakia. It was signed by 243 Czechoslovak citizens, including well-known signatories Vaclav Havel and Jan Patocka. The document criticized the Czechoslovak communist government's "systematic violation of human rights and freedoms" and its failure to uphold the human rights laws it had agreed to follow in the Czechoslovak constitution, the Helsinki Accords of 1975, and in various United Nations covenants. The authors of the document took great pains to emphasize the informality of their association and the fact that it in no way formed a basis for political opposition to the communist regime.

The Czechoslovak government dealt severely with the signatories, who were publicly denounced as traitors and imperialist agents by the communist party and its state media apparatus. Many of them were fired from their jobs, their children were denied access to higher education, privileges such as their drivers' licenses and passports were suspended, and some dissidents were even exiled or imprisoned. Their lives were essentially ruined because they signed a document which, in so many words, asked the Czechoslovak government to follow its own laws. Although many more of the Czech people sympathized with the signatories, they did not sign the Charter, and thus they bear part of the responsibility for the suffering of those who did.

Likewise, critical or inflammatory blog comments posted anonymously, unsigned emails, letters, and other such messages are the recourse of the coward. If one cannot take responsibility for one's opinion, then one does not deserve to have one. Even in the face of severe reprisals, people who author these kinds of statements anonymously must realize that in choosing not to sign their name they are undermining the possibility of living in truth that forms the bedrock of civil society, and thus they become morally complicit in the wrongdoing they seek to criticize. This is not to say that people should always throw their lives away needlessly, but rather that it is not possible to be both brave and cowardly at the same time. Sometimes a coward is the sensible thing to be, not only for one's own sake but for the sake of one's children: this is why the various totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were among the worst indignities ever inflicted upon the human race.

C'est une Pipe!

February 20th is International Pipe Smoking Day (here's a link to a fancy brochure). I'm not sure why my fellow pipe smokers would choose to celebrate pipe smoking (an outdoor activity if there ever was one) in the dead of winter, but I'll play ball. I encourage anyone and everyone of legal age to grab a briar on February 20th and light up in celebration of civil liberty and the responsible use of a noble and oft-maligned plant.

The pipe, in one form or another, has been a trusty human companion for a very long time. I think it's a potent symbol, both of our miraculous self-domestication and of the gods' generosity.

(image from www.psychogarage.freeserve.co.uk)

"Slovania" by Laibach, The Good Old Days

Here's another video from Laibach's Volk album. The first time I watched it, I didn't really get the irony, or the whole nuclear war subtext. Then again, their irony is lost on a lot of people, and they're often mistaken for either neo-nazis or communist sympathizers. I think that's why I like Laibach, even though I'm not crazy about everything they've put out. I find them more subtle and creative than many North American industrial acts. They have a real rock opera-ish quality about them, and the fact that they spent the 1980's in communist Yugoslavia gives them a little more political credibility, I think, than many self-styled "activist" groups here in North America.

I can remember a time about ten years ago when I thought "revolutionary" (postmodern) politics were the coolest thing since sliced bread. My friend Ondrej and I would drink Labatt Maximum Ice and talk about anarchism, communism (he's a Czech, and at that point it had been less than 10 years since the velvet revolution) and all kinds of stuff that kids think is interesting before they go to college. There was a time in my life when I thought Marx was just misunderstood and misapplied, and that the "pure" socialist economy (i.e. one that replaces the act of exchange with a top-down notion of "social justice") was a great idea hampered only by a nasty and inconvenient human nature. Spending a year and a half in the Czech Republic was enough to convince me that there had been something fundamentally ugly and inhuman at the heart of Marxist socialism, and four years of "the university experience" led me to the conclusion that most political posturing is naive, narcissistic, self-serving horseshit.

I still like Laibach, though, although my enjoyment is more than a little nostalgic.