(2:58 PM) | Brad:

Where All Secrets Are Revealed

(1) Adam Kotsko is an internet rock star. He has, at my last count, fucked all of the contributors -- yes, myself included -- typically without ever calling again -- as well as at least 80% of the commenters, and a good 50% of all who populate the Valve -- thus the rumors of his infamous penis scar that made the rounds at the most recent MLA & AAR. The bloggers at Long Sunday, apparently, have thus far rebuffed his advances. This is what I'm told anyway. Such is, of course, just more proof that they are not worth reading. As Adam says, when he unblocks me on IM chat, "To me, Brad, fucking & blogging are the same thing -- the two cannot be separated. If I don't want you in my bed, I don't want you in my Bloglines. That's the only metablogging theory that's really necessary." Gawd, Adam Kotsko rawks, doesn't he?

(2) Everyone else who blogs here at the Weblog effectively function like opening acts. The shittier we are, the better Adam Kotsko looks. Sure, as at concerts, occasionally an opening act outshines the headliner, but you can be sure they won't be invited back for the second-leg of the tour. The same goes here at the Weblog. All those old contributors you once loved, the ones you never see or hear about anymore -- Adam has destroyed their blogging careers. I'm still sorry about how you were treated, Young Hegelian. Not even fleeing to Long Sunday saved you. Anthony & I, two of the longest-running contributors, are kept around clearly because we are the village idiots, truly unclever poseur-bloggers, whose only useful function is to highlight, via our marked contrast, Adam's casual brilliance.

(3) Old Doug Johnson is homo sacer. Or, barring that, he is the coming of death itself. It really all depends on his mood.

(4) Claire, plain & simple, is not to be fucked with. Seriously. I'm so afraid of her I don't dare say anything else.

(5) F. Winston Codpiece blogs from his cell at Gitmo, using a ThinkPad he cleverly disguised as a Qu'ran. I'm sorry if I've outed you, Codpiece, but it is for the sake of the blog. If this is not the case, and this is what Adam told one evening after he had his way with me & I was cleaning up the unused honey & marshmallow puff, Codpiece is actually Bret Easton Ellis in disguise.

(6) Amish Lovelock is a ninja. He, too, is not to be fucked with. In addition to any number of political assassinations -- he is, at last check, not employed by Adam Kotsko, and in fact the Weblog variable that truly frightens him -- he has ghost written at least four of Zizek's books -- five if you count On Belief, which he sent to Routledge as an indecipherable text message. This, of course, explains a lot, and is not something he is proud of.

(7) Dave Belcher is in hiding from Adam Kotsko. He is not to be trusted, but you can probably go ahead and fuck with him.

(8)Thomas J. J. Altizer is Adam Kotsko's personal bodyguard, and is currently in search of Dave Belcher. When he isn't blogging here, he is plotting your demise, or at least that of your god.

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(2:03 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Hauerwas Quote

I know that I've seen Hauerwas quoted as saying that attending to the sexual preferences of homosexuals cannot be a priority for the church. Does anyone know of the exact wording and/or the source for this quote?

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(10:35 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Prolegomena to Any Future Meta-Blogging That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science

The academic blogosphere has been rocked by a wave of unprecedented meta-blogging. Certainly Scott Eric Kaufman has been responsible for well over 60% of the material in this deluge -- and in fact has gone far beyond the bounds of meta-blogging and founded a new genre: meta-dissertation-writing. His achievements in this field are unmatched and we will never be able to calculate the debt that blogging as an enterprise owes to his heroic labors. Yet it is Carrie Shanafelt, a lowly "guest author" at The Valve, who has moved the conversation forward decisively. She notes the proliferation of meta-blogging as well, but has reservations:

But with all this metablogular talk, I haven’t seen much in the way of a real, useful rhetorical analysis of academic blogging that could be accessed and understood by those who have experience with blogs and by those who need to be convinced that “the internet” is the present of academic discourse, not just the future.

Also the future, certainly -- that was never in question -- but not just the future. This is where academic blogging asserts itself and begins to exercise hegemony over the other subaltern academic classes.

It is no accident that the same world-historical individual who proclaims the present sway of academic blogging is also the one who calls for a more rigorous theory of blogging. "[A]ll this metablogular talk" has been just that: "talk," undisciplined, free-wheeling, everyone reinventing the wheel every time (even if few have had the courage and fortitude of an RIPope, who found himself able to say in 2006, "It seems, several years into the blog phenomenon, few have pondered much about the medium itself"). It's almost as though these so-called meta-bloggers have just been ranting on a blog, the whole time!

What we need is a true meta-blogging, a methodologically sound meta-blogging, something that can account for such diverse phenomena as open threads at Atrios, posts of Holbonic length, the Troll of Sorrow, blogspats, the singular persistence of Robert "KC" Johnson, the color scheme at Scott McLemee's blog, Matt Yglesias's insistence on doing basketball posts, the precise function of links to former comment threads at Unfogged, Bitch PhD's marriage, and those times when you try to publish in Blogger and it just sits at 0% for like an hour. (Even this catalog is much too bloggishly impressionistic.) We need a meta-blogging that will introduce some discipline into this haphazardly assembled collection of tubes, that will allow blogging to be truly professional, truly CV-able.

It is not enough to have an academic panel at the MLA about blogging, nor even to write a peer-reviewed article on the phenomenon -- no, since we are both the present and the future of academic blogging, we bloggers must be recognized qua bloggers, recognized as professional academics precisely insofar as we blog. Our product is indeed superior in every way to the doomed academic practices of the past. Our chatty style makes us accessible to the unwashed masses. Our dutiful comment and trackback trolling guarantees that our latest thoughts on academic blogging will be read by far more people than would ever even learn of the existence of whatever tedious, jargon-ridden monstrosity that the latest self-hating assistant professor produced while on the verge of suicide.

The monograph: dead. The peer-reviewed journal: dead. The classroom: dead. Only blogging can guarantee the future of academic discourse, and indeed it is the only thing keeping it alive in the present! Open up your eyes, people! Look around you! Everywhere you look: blogs, beautiful blogs! Our blogs will give us tenure. Our blogs will give us cultural relevance. Our blogs will help us get the attention of that girl from college who was really cool but only seemed to want to date assholes. And if we manage to get into a flamewar along the way, all to the good.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Saturday, January 27, 2007

(4:16 PM) | Dave Belcher:

Pop

[I posted a version of this on my site, but just realized today that it would probably be better suited here].

All of the following selections are taken from Theodor W. Adorno's "Popular Music" (Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1988), 21-38).

"To this day, pop music has scarcely participated in the evolution of material that has been going on in serious music for more than fifty years. Pop music does not balk at novelties, of course, but it deprives them of function and free unfoldment by using them--down to the seemingly haphazard dissonances of some jazz trends--as mere splotches of color, ornaments added to a strictly traditional tongue. They have no power over that tongue; they are not even properly integrated in it [....] What is incessantly boosted as exceptional grows dull, and the festivities to which light music permanently summons its adherents, under the name of feasts for the ears, are dismal everyday fare" (24-5).

Can pop music (which it seems, for Adorno, must today include nearly every style of music on the radio--except for the misnamed "classical" music) ever reach beyond this banality? What can we make of such "popular" bands as U2 (in their Pop period), or Radiohead, or Modest Mouse, or Coldplay? Or, what about OutKast, Cee-Lo Green, or Kanye West? Are they reduced to their market share?

"Standardization extends from the overall plan down to details. The basic rule in the American practice that governs production everywhere is that the refrain consists of 32 bars with a 'bridge,' a part initiating the repetition, in the middle [....] Nothing really new is allowed to intrude, nothing but calculated effects that add some spice to the ever-sameness without imperiling it. And these effects in turn take their bearing from schemata [....] The higher music's relation to its historical form is dialectical. It catches fire on those forms, melts them down, makes them vanish and return in vanishing. Popular music, on the other hand, uses the types as empty cans into which the material is pressed without interacting with the forms. Unrelated to the forms, the substance withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer serve for compositional organization.
"The effect of song hits--more precisely put, perhaps: their social role--might be circumscribed as that of patterns of identification. It is comparable to the effect of movie stars, of magazine cover girls, and of the beauties in hosiery and toothpaste ads. The hists not only appeal to a 'lonely crowd' of the atomized; they reckon with the immature, with those who cannot express their emotions and experiences, who either never had the power of expression or were crippled by cultural taboos [....] In an imaginary but psychologically emotion-lade domain, the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the community of 'fans.' In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of socialization, althogh beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged" (25-7).

No doubt there are many places where "standard" forms of music are challenged from within (even in the overly poppy music of someone like Gavin DeGraw where the chorus does not appear within the first minute...as in most radio pop), but would this constitute something new, for Adorno? Really, it seems we must look to the listener more than the production...to the "event of subjectivization," as Badiou might say.

"It is the banality of present-day popular music--a banality relentlessly controlled in order to make it salable--which brands that music with its crucial trait. That trait is vulgarity. We might almost suspect that this is the most avid concern of the audience, that the maxim of their musical mentality is indeed Brecht's line: 'But I dont want to be human!' Any musical reminder of themselves, of the doubtfulness and possible uplifting of their own existence, will embarass them. That they are really cut off from their potential is the very reason why it infuriates them to be reminded by art" (28).

We are reminded here of Adorno's negative dialectic, instilling a principle of non-identity into the "situation" (to borrow from Badiou again). The issue, it seems, with most pop music is that it is not (is not even possible to be?) subjectivized as an objective non-identity within the identity of the situation...it fails to take root as a motivation, of sorts, for the reconciliation of the non-identity in society at large.

"On the other hand [....] there is still some good bad music left today, along with all the bad good music. Under the pressures of the marketplace much genuine talent is absorbed by popular music and cannot be entirely crushed even there. Even in the thoroughly commercialized late phase primary ideas, beautifully arched melodies, pregnant rhythmic and harmonic turns will be encountered, particularly in America. But the spheres can only be defined from the extremes, not from the transitions, and besideds, even the most gifted escapades within popular music are marred by considerations paid to the appointed guardians of salability. Boneheadedness is shrewdly calculated and revved up by highly qualified musicians, and there are many more of those throughout the realm of pop music than the serious one's sense of superiority likes to admit" (32).

Not all are lost, it would at first appear...but the market is exceptionally good at co-opting even these and turning them to its own ends:

"Each single song hit is its own advertisement and a boost for its title [....] The whole entertainment music would scarcely have the scope and effect it has without the element Americans call 'plugging.' A song chosen for bestsellerdom will be drummed into the listeners' ears until they cannot help recognizing it and hence--as the psychologists of compositional advertising correctly figure--will love it" (34).

With this we remember U2's recent ad for iTunes...perhaps all are lost after all (and the ironies of the capital campaign of LiveAid, the "Red" campaign in cooperation with the Gap, etc. abound).

But, with that in mind, we have to ask about so-called "serious music" today as well. There is no doubt that people are not rushing to the stores to buy Philip Glass' recent choral recording, for instance (nor are "producers" merely catering to "salability," though of course this is not foreign to that "market"). Nevertheless, wouldn't a sociology of serious music be just as necessary...to discover the presence or absence of subjectivization? I haven't done that, so I have no real knowledge, but it seems like even serious music fails to be serious for us any longer...and does that mean that we have killed music--once our god, now replaced by "Empire"?

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(Dave Belcher has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(10:55 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Conferences

This weekend, I am apparently going to write some ridiculous thing on John Wesley and Jean-Luc Nancy. The reason I am doing it this weekend in specific is that the papers for the Wesleyan Theological Society are apparently due February 1, so that they can be posted on the website and people can -- apparently -- read them beforehand.

I am skeptical of this whole concept. While my charming and witty delivery style is well worth the trip to the conference, I think it's a safe bet to say that this will not be the case for all presenters. Certainly there's the off chance that (1) people will actually read the papers ahead of time and (2) this will lead to better use of the paltry five minutes of Q&A at the actual event -- but we can all think of a variety of more likely outcomes.

This does raise the obvious question of whether one could run a completely virtual "conference," perhaps via a blog on which only registered participants could comment. We all know that every paper at every conference is totally worthless and stupid and no one in their right mind would ever want to hear them, so this would save everyone a lot of misery -- we could get the line on our CVs without having to go through the bother of interacting with each other in person. The next step, of course, would be to eliminate the papers themselves, since no one reads more than the abstracts anyway, eventually leading to a point where an online conference would be a simple list of names and institutional affiliations, perhaps with some residual paper and session titles, which would attain to ever more baroque levels of decadence. "Sodomy as Ereignis: Dasein's Ownmost Possibility of Fisting." "Meatwad Sacer: An Agambenian Reading of Aqua Teen Hunger Force." "'That Dangerous Supplement...': Thoughts on Explaining Away Semen Stains on Student Papers."

This would inaugurate an academia that would go beyond its own exhaustion, suspending its own suspension of meaning in a desoeuvrement that fulfills academia by holding it in reserve as pure potentiality -- a messianic academia that would be purely gestural, communicating nothing but communication itself.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Friday, January 26, 2007

(12:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Other, more desperate games

I confess that I'm much better at making depressing mixes. I confess that I've used over half of the blank CDs Mike bought last time he wanted to make a mix. I confess that I miss Radiohead, to the point where I'm listening to the Thom Yorke solo album every few days. I confess that listening to music I used to like in college is a vivid reminder of how incredibly depressed I was at that time -- or, if it was summer vacation, either angry (Nine Inch Nails) or resurgently adolescent (Pink Floyd).

I confess that doing laundry yesterday didn't feel as good as it normally does. I confess that I may have problems that can't be solved with clean socks. I confess that even though I object to my family's policy that males as well as females must sit down to pee, I can see what they're getting at.

I confess that I have no idea who Kreszentia Cheeseman is, and I think it's better that way.

I confess that I'm having some serious difficulty getting myself to read The Nature and Destiny of Man other than on the CTA.

I confess that I'm having some serious difficulty getting to sleep without a fan, but it's too cold to have a fan on. I confess that perhaps the "but" should be replaced with a "because" -- the fan puts me in a coma-like state from which I am finding it harder and harder to emerge each morning.

I confess that last night I had trouble getting to sleep because I was worried that my bank account would be overdrawn, something that has somehow miraculously never happened to me. I confess that I have had dreams about the following: asking my roommate if he would consider scraping and rinsing his dishes more often; moving over closer to Damen to make it more practical to take the Wilson Express downtown once the catastrophic Red/Brown/Purple line delays start this spring; doing laundry somewhere that does not require quarters. There have been times when I was interested in someone and I had constant dreams that we were just hanging out and talking. I can only shudder at the horrific urges that underlie those dreams.

I confess that I still use my mom's favorite interjections -- namely, "rut roh" and "Oh my lands." I confess that I'm not totally sure that she still uses them.

I confess that I keep posting these things earlier and earlier. (Blogger needs a post-dating function. Automation is the key to successful blogging.)

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Thursday, January 25, 2007

(4:54 PM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

Nine Russian Films

I'm not saying you should do this, as it may be illegal, but I thought some of you may be interested to know that you can download nine classic Russian films from the Soviet era.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(12:25 PM) | Claire:

Selected Ontological Questions

Due to my holding a soul-crushingly boring job, I am able to formulate tons of ontological and otherwise-classified questions. I have determined that in order to continue to build a beloved community on the Weblog, it is necessary for me to externalize my philosophical inquiries. With this post, I hope to ignite a dialogue of greater than or equal to fifty comments. Can you help me achieve this?

1. What if drowned polar bears started washing up on the shores of Lake Michigan?

2. If the above event took place, would people in Chicago take global warming more seriously?

3. Why does my hairdresser ask me if I'm dating anyone and then proceed to give me progressively dyke-ier hair styles at each appointment?

4. Why did no one on Unfogged respond to my clever comment about a blow-up party sheep?

5. Why do so many men think that having a wife or girlfriend will solve all of their problems?

6. Why do I work at an HMO, but believe in universal healthcare?

7. Why, on multiple occasions, has Victor the maintenance man tried to fix my melting freezer by removing a container of oatmeal?

8. Why do so many callers fail to understand the mechanism of voicemail and accuse me of "transferring" them to voicemail, when, in fact, the intended call recipient failed to answer the phone?

9. Why does every caller have a child with ADHD?

10. Why do I feel a profound disdain for and impatience with each caller?

11. Why does my HMO consider it an achievement authorize a maximum of 5 inpatient days of treatment, regardless of the severity of the patient's mental illness?

12. Why does the sweaty, pie-faced, human-swine hybrid of a co-worker always look over me instead of at me?

13. Why did a homeless man on the corner insist on calling me 'captain'?

14. Why am I tempted to huff the spray dusting compound on my desk?

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(Claire has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

(5:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted

Jodi Dean is instructing K-punk in apocalyptic.

I note this mainly because I wanted to use the title. But I have a hard time believing that war in Iran -- if it is indeed being hatched -- is being hatched because of apocalyptic passions. Certainly all this kind of stuff can be used to drum up support of the lunatics (too great in number!) among our fellow citizens on the Christian Right, but this time around, it seems that Mr. Bush can hardly be bothered to drum up any support outside the Christian Right. And in any case, it seems improbable that war with Iran will lead to the literal end of the world. (Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but no one will be around to gloat about it if so.) So once again, the Christian Right is getting fleeced! No apocalypse, not now! The poor souls.

My question here, since we're talking about deep theological issues: what the hell ever happened to Bush's messianism? Remember how he was on a messianic quest to reshape the Middle East? Now all of a sudden we've shifted gears to apocalypticism. The two genres are clearly related in some way -- the seamless shift, if nothing else, should show us this. Is it the difference between, on the one hand, believing, however delusively, that one can actually achieve some goal and on the other, basically saying, "Fuck it, I'm all in" when you know you're going to lose? Does Mr. Bush know that he's going to lose? Can the concept of "losing" find a home in the vast and airy corridors of what we will, for the sake of social convention only, call his "mind?" That is, in short: yes, we know that Mr. Bush did not attend seminary. We know that he has not had much in the way of formal theological education. But can he tell messianism and apocalypticism apart?

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(8:45 AM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:

Calendar Shopping

As many of you know, each year I wait until the end of January to buy my calendars, hoping to beat the proverbial "rush," but also to experience a "rush" of quite a different order -- viz., that associated with getting a good deal.

This year, pickings were slim. Aside from boxes full of New Yorker cartoon wall calendars dated from 1993 to 2007 and a handful of "Odie" calendars (apparently meant as a consolation prize for those customers, like myself, who would be heartbroken to have missed out on a year of Garfieldian insight and edification), basically all they had was The Intimate Reinhold Niebuhr: 2007 Wall Calendar.

I was previously unfamiliar with this "very attractive figure among 20th century American theologians," but I have to admit: I like the cut of his jib. Take, for example, the image for January:



The sheer existential weight of this image makes it well qualified to represent April, the cruellest month:



And of course, for June, the month of his birth, they show a younger, sexier Reinhold:



If you hurry to the calendar kiosk at the mall, you may be able to secure a copy -- and I think I might have seen a couple H. Richard calendars as well.

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(F. Winston Codpiece III has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

(12:00 AM) | Claire:

Passing the Torch of Hatred

This past month has been emotionally trying; I've put my relationship on the line for the sole purpose of entertaining you, the readers. Some of you were intrigued by the saga, others were incensed by the "puppetry" and "shadowboxing". Whatever your opinion, you bore witness to pivotal events in Weblog history. To the majority of you, I want to say thank you for your positive comments; your enthusiasm; your support. I leave you with some of my most profound and heartfelt hatred to date.

I hate that some of you have been questioning my existence.

I hate that I am questioning my existence.

I hate that I'm actually excited to be shredding papers.

I hate that I'm so out of touch with sports that I asked someone wearing beads if it was Mardi Gras.

I hate that I have Justin Timberlake's "My Love" on repeat in my head.

I hate that in the Hippie's absence, Boring Married Guy served me my coffee.

I hate that Marta's Finnish friend took me seriously when I said that I wanted to move to Finland to be a mushroom harvester.

I hate that a Finnish mushroom harvester earns a better salary than I do.

I hate that even when fantasizing about picking mushrooms in an idyllic Finnish forest, I soon have visions of being accosted by woodland claims trolls who dump papers on a nearby stump and say, "These are for whenever."

I hate that I am sought after by alcoholic men of all stripes.

I hate that our newest employee is overly enthusiastic and has a pear-shaped head.

I hate that Ben Wolfson has outed our relationship as functional and I can no longer post dramatic pleas for his affection.

[Editor's note: Claire was initially given a one-month appointment as Hater, but unbeknownst to her, I have decided to promote her to full-time indefinite Hatred duties. Whether this is a reward or a punishment is unclear, but one thing isn't: Claire exists, and she is going to continue to fill our lives with hate every Tuesday right here at The Weblog. -- AK]

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(Claire has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Monday, January 22, 2007

(9:37 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Best Pseudonym Ever

This morning, a spam message slipped through the filter. I feel this was providential, because the sender's name was amazing: Kreszentia Cheeseman. Someone needs to claim this as a pseudonym, immediately.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Sunday, January 21, 2007

(10:56 PM) | Amish Lovelock:

Finding a Voice

There is this point at the end of one year and the beginning of another where I suddenly and abruptly re-discover literature. I immediately have a craving for novels, poems, and try to listen and read as many interviews with authors as I can. Part of the thrill is what appears to me as a complete economy with words many of these people have. In what can take three to four academic papers, writers accomplish in a sentence, and get the recognition for it. Reading them becomes like a swift, sharp strike to the head, or like an ice-cold bucket of water has been thrown in my face. They say what I wanted to say.

The question that seems to be presenting itself to me is the following: when does the academic become an artist? While the general reception of writers and artists is a mixed bag of confused reverance led by professional sales culture and tired journalistic idioms, and of academics, a useless intellectual elite simply there to put down naturally intellegent people and stop them from telling the truth, I sometimes really wish that academic writing could capture the economy of literature in this sense. There is a little quote that I read online the other day from a seminar on feminist memoir that tries to tell me why it can't.

"After all, I believe, I don't even think academic is such a dirty word. I mean, I did say once, when I was sitting in the subaltern studies party in Hyderabad, I was sitting and there was a lot of noise going on. I was speaking Bengali again; I hope someone can imagine what kind of word I used for "motherfucker," but anyway [. . .] Everybody else was milling around being very academic in the bad sense - a boys' club, mostly. I said to a woman friend, I entered this profession because I like to read, write and teach; and as a result, I'm thrown in with a bunch of motherfuckers. This is what I said. (laughter) So I know the problems, but nonetheless, I think, one should question oneself, that one sticks at the job, takes in young people in the name of teaching, makes a salary, makes a life, fights for tenure. And then, at the end of the day, says, I don't want to be in the academy, I want to write something, you can give it a nice psychoanalytic name. I don't even know what kind of name I would give it. It just seems too obvious to me. So, I'm not against education. We shouldn't burn the universities. But nonetheless, my desire in this thing has been to write in such a way that they would find the questions something that . . . I want to be haunted. Some people will know what I'm talking about. I want to be haunted by them. So it's a hauntological autobiography."

But then again I wonder if when an academic is regarded as an artist it is because he writes a book on Aristotle, Kant, Montaigne and Heidegger and calls it The Politics of Friendship, rather than calling it: "Friendship and Fraternity in the Western Canon from Aristotle to Heidegger." Why do people in philosophy departments get hooked to one, two or maybe even three individuals and write paper after paper with their names in the titles? For all the reasons cited above no doubt. People outside philosophy, sociologists (not the policy-driven kind) for example, look to philosophy for inspiration in tackling a specific issue or subject, but usually lack the time for proper engagement - social theory and philosophy/thought have never really come to terms with one another. I see people moving towards literary expression on the one side and maths on the other.

How the hell are people who believe it's important to do a huge amount of time-consuming research, read a lot of books, reflect on difficult philosophical, empirical and theoretical issues to produce intellegent knowledge expected to produce anything today? Something tells me that the question of finding a voice in today's academia is completely inseperable from the issue of academia's future.

...and I wish it was not.

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(Amish Lovelock has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(2:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Psychologizing

In my experience, online discussions include far more "psychologizing" of people's opinions than face-to-face discussions. This is of course ironic, given that online discussions offer the least possible data for drawing conclusions as to a particular writer's mental state -- tone, facial expressions, nervous tics, etc., are all excluded, leaving only the bare words.

Perhaps it is precisely this lack that incites people to impute sinister motives to their interlocutors, as though there were something inherently sinister about disembodied words.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Saturday, January 20, 2007

(9:45 PM) | Amish Lovelock:

The difference between "or" and "and"

In a few months no doubt the avid viewers of British television channel Channel 4 will be treated by Endemol to a special 2 hour docu-soap involving Jade Goody travelling to India on a good-will tour and Shilpa Shetty visiting Bermondsey (maybe they won't do the second). Throughout the whole thing there will be neatly edited clips of speeches made by Gandhi in Manchester, former Indian army troop testiments on how we all fought fascism together, the Kumar's may pitch in, they'll be stuff from Mandella no doubt, tears all round, and nobody will be "a racist," despite the fact that nobody was "a racist" in the first place and all were capable of practicing racism.

The posts on this at K-Punk and Foucault is Dead are nearly spot-on. That "under the cover of defending a housemate from racism, the media and the public have indulged in a slew of class hatred" is true. That the "British middle class resent their enjoyment of this jouissance and therefore develop a classist jouissance of their own" is true also. I can see that the need to "play-down" the moralizing division between "racists" and their "tolerant" counterparts made into some of the most bizare political capital I've seen recently by Gordon Brown and Ken Livingstone is necessary to catch this classist element. That moralizing division blurs the important similarities that exist between the two positions too. Tolerance is not about making those invested with the fantasy of governmental power less so, but inviting them not to exercise their power. Jade acts so we don't have to, we must be charitable and protect her victims, poor "sexy Indian babe" etc...

While Goody's is a conatus characterized by "miserable self-denigration and low self-confidence" "concealed behind borish bravado and conspicuous hedonism" molded and rewarded by Endemol, I don't see the need to take the "playing down" of the moralizing accusation to the following level:

While Goody and her compatriots have certainly bullied Shetty, I agree with Foucault is Dead that the treatment of the actress has not been straightforwardly racist. There have been racist remarks, but the central dynamic appears to be resentment and jealousy rather than racial hatred. There are certain structural similarities with racism in that the housemates who have attacked Shetty have done so on the basis of fantasies about the enjoyment of the other: Shetty, for instance, is held to have been given privileged treatment by Big Brother.
It is pleasing that the debate around the programme has concerned whether or not racism has happened rather than whether racism is acceptable or not. But it is worth thinking about why postmodern media abominates racism (at the level of discourse; it has, of course, done little to tackle racism and a structural problem) but is worryingly silent about class.

"Straightforwardly racist"? Does the label "racism" require "straightforward racism" or "racial hatred"? Is that what the last chapter of Tarrying with the Negative says? The postmodern media abominates racism because of the money involved in racism litigation, probably because of something to do with the legitimizing ideology of the postwar British regime, and to keep the relationship between the classist and racist joussance that everyone is talking about intact. In this sense, not "straightforwardly racist" sounds a lot like Goody's "I'm not a racist but..."

Lets not say "classist joussance" or "racist joussance" but and. Wouldn't it be great if someone actually understood Goody's words to mean "I'm not a racist, but I was being racist"? You know, I think even she might agree with that.

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(Amish Lovelock has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(11:56 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Partisan Rancor

Does it seem to you that our political elites routinely overestimate the degree to which most people value bipartisanship and national unity? Having had a car for the last few weeks, I've been listening to a lot more NPR, and I've got to say that I'm sick to death of everyone -- reporters, pundits, politicians, everyone -- making continual reference to the need to move forward in some kind of unified way, almost as though a serious disagreement between the two political parties on a serious issue like Iraq would be more damaging than, you know, the actual effects of the Iraq War. As I recall, the political elites were pretty "unified" about how gravely necessary the Iraq War was, and all their wonderful "unity" didn't end up producing very desirable results.

And another thing -- in exactly what way is Iraq vital to our national security? I'm sincerely confused about this. What "dire" consequences would result for the US "if" we lost in Iraq? I'm pretty sure that the oil companies can handle things for themselves -- hire some South African mercenaries to guard the oil wells and let the rest of the country go to hell. Would Muqtada al Sadr be appointed president of the US if we pulled out? Would we be facing a major Sunni insurgency on American soil? Or is it just a matter of saving face -- if we admitted to losing a war, people would know that it's possible for us to lose a war?

I'm pretty sure people already fucking know that it's possible for the US to lose a fucking war. We've lost in Iraq! Get over it! Pull out now! Immediately, precipitously, "irresponsibly" -- just get the motherfuck OUT! That is the only "way forward," to get the fuck out. Just fucking stop. That's my "plan," which I am apparently morally required to produce if I am to criticize the sheer idiocy of arbitrarily sending in more troops. Iraq is probably unfixable, and in any case it's unfixable by us. There are plenty of failed states in the world where things will probably never get better, and we're not indefinitely occupying any of them.

Oh, also impeach Bush and Cheney, because they're war criminals who have also repeatedly and flagrantly violated the US Constitution and claimed the right to violate it further. It would probably divide the nation and appear to be partisan (i.e., because Bush and Cheney belong to a particular political party and therefore would obviously be impeached solely for that reason), but it'd totally be worth it.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(10:38 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

50 most loathsome people

The 50 most loathsome people is always a highlight of my year. 2006 is easily the best since I've been reading it. (Via Unfogged.)

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Friday, January 19, 2007

(7:28 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Trend That Will Not Die

Looking through the AAR's 2007 call for papers, I found that they're looking for people to talk about "Paul and Philosophy."

Maybe I can work something up.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(8:16 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: "I saw the world-spirit, posting on a blog"

I confess that the illustrious Claire has started a special new blog. I confess that I find the continued bafflement about the Claire-Wolfson affair to be delightful.

I confess to the deeply held belief that marriage, like graduate school, should only be entered into if there is no way of avoiding it.

I confess that being in class again has given me more stuff to write about at An und für sich, including some remarks on Derrida and Agamben. I confess that no matter how good a class is, I am always at least a little impatient for it to be over. I further confess that I have a nervous tic of coughing throughout every class I am in -- I'm not consciously nervous to be in class, so I don't know exactly what the problem is.

I confess that "administrative" stuff is a good way to feel like I'm "doing something" while at the same time putting forth minimal effort.

I confess that while I'm tired of receiving e-mails from Amazon, I can't muster the energy to take myself off their mailing list. I confess that when I look at my wish list and see Calvin's Institutes at the very top, I become very sad -- but I will actually need to pick up a copy at some point for the course I am TAing next semester. I confess that the two-volume set costs nearly $80.00 at the Co-op.

I confess that the other day I went to Europa Books and saw that they were selling Sein und Zeit for over $50. Telling Ted about this, I mentioned, "I think it's cheaper at the Co-op," then realized that that may well have been the first time I -- and perhaps anyone in history -- had ever used the phrase "cheaper at the Co-op."

I confess that literally every time I read the meta-blogging of an "academic blogger," I feel like my analysis of academic blogging is being vindicated, either substantively or performatively. In other words, I was and remain deeply and truly right in all that I said in that post, and people are only now starting to face up to it. That's why this place is called The Weblog: only we -- no, only I have fully comprehended blogging.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(12:17 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

Animal Adaptation

This is either going to endear you or freak you out. I'm endeared, but I'm guessing Patrick will be a bit disgusted. Perhaps Adam will be somewhat endeared, while Jodi will be slightly freaked out.



Courtesy of The Girl.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Thursday, January 18, 2007

(7:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

"Which"

Normally, "which" is a relative pronoun. In everyday speech, however, I have noticed that in recent years it has taken up a new role. Like the traditional "which," this new use of "which" serves to introduce explanatory information, but it is normally followed by what is semantically an independent clause.

Furthermore, the tendency is for it to introduce information that is negative in some way. An example: "So he got here like three hours early, which, he never even called me to let me know he was coming." It functions somewhat similarly to "however," but seems to have more strongly negative connotations.

Is anyone else familiar with this new usage of "which"? I personally have heard it so often that I find myself occasionally using it, which, maybe that's not such a bad thing. More importantly, does anyone have any idea how it could've arisen?

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(9:29 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

Bank Woes

We were fined £38 for over drafting by £10. This is after we were told that our account couldn't overdraft, as it's a savings account and would just 'decline' payment. Add to this the fact that the damn bank didn't even pay out the £10 (plus £12 that we had in the accont) to the fucking water company and I feel pretty ripped off. £38 is a lot of money for us and it's not our damn fault that the system for magically turning dollars into pounds is incredibly slow and complicated.

So, who wants to buy me the last two volumes of Collapse (volumes I and II together, with postage, for £12)? Cause that and a few pints is what I was going to spend the £38 on.

I fucking hate banks.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

(2:23 PM) | Thomas J. J. Altizer:

On Sacrifice

Friends,

Last night Jim Lehrer of PBS interviewed President Bush for almost thirty minutes. The topic being, of course, the renewal of the war in Iraq. Bush employed the usual pabulum, but with an overwhelming emphasis upon how ultimately important this war is and how devastating the consequences will be if we do not succeed and fully succeed. Towards the end of the interview, Lehrer noted what an enormous importance the president gave this war and recalled how presidents in time of war called upon the people to sacrifice, and asked why the President had never called for sacrifice and only spoke of the sacrifice of the military and their families. Bush became unusually flustered, apparently not having been prompted on this, and then immediately said that he would not raise taxes as a way of sacrifice because that would set back the economy and it was ultimately important that the economy flourish so that the people can be happy. But Lehrer continued to probe him, a probing that obviously became a challenge to Bush, and all that he could reply was that people suffer in seeing the war on TV, and that this is the sacrifice of the people in this war.

LEHRER: Let me ask you a bottom-line question, Mr. President. If it is as important as you've just said -- and you've said it many times -- as all of this is, particularly the struggle in Iraq, if it's that important to all of us and to the future of our country, if not the world, why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans and more American interests to sacrifice something?....

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.

Apparently the media ignored this interview, but I found it to be most revealing, as did the commentators who followed the interview. Sacrifice is clearly a category foreign to Bush, who can only associate the consequences of the war for Americans with happiness, and can only associate evil or destructiveness with our enemies, and enemies of whom we are truly ignorant, as Bush demonstrated in all he said of them. It was like encountering a contemporary Manichean. No, that is not true, for I don't think that he really believes anything, except for the ultimate importance of himself, his clan, and his allies. But I am intrigued that with all of the counseling sources available to him, none prepared him for the topic of sacrifice, despite the enormous sacrifices which his administration demands, including the sacrifice of the destiny of America itself. It is also revealing that despite his born again conversion and constant professions of the Christian faith he is simply incapable of thinking about sacrifice, but does he thereby speak for a new America, or a new American faith?

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(Thomas J. J. Altizer has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(11:49 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

"Enjoy using your card"

In 2004, I was confused. I thought one of my credit cards was offering to upgrade my existing account to "Platinum," and being a huge fan of precious metals, I jumped at the chance. Turns out that it was actually a whole new account, the card for which I either never received or mistook for a credit card solicitation, and accordingly I never used it.

Fast-forward to late 2006: This card that I never used expired, and they sent me the new one. I called to cancel, and they said that for security reasons they first had to close the old account and issue me a new number, which I could then cancel. Today I finally got the new card and called to cancel it, a process which on their end involved three discrete individuals.

Just as when I cancelled my Chase credit card because they were trying to destroy the Zapatistas, once it became clear that they were approaching the crucial moment of losing my business entirely, they became desperate. (In this case, it was rather bizarre since I already have another card with them.) Would I take a balance transfer at 2.9% for 9 months? 4.9% in perpetuity? My credit rating must be going down for some reason, because it seems like only six months ago I would've been offered 0% -- maybe if I had pushed them, I could've gotten it.

But expiring 0% offers are a rip-off for two reasons. First, the transaction fee, normally charged as a cash advance, amounts to paying the interest up front -- in some cases, fairly substantial interest. For instance, I once got an offer of 0% for three months. The trick was that they were charging a fee of 4%, meaning that I would effectively be paying a 16% annualized rate, not counting the interest from the transaction fee (which, because it has the higher cash-advance rate, is "buried" below the nominally 0% balance transfer -- meaning that you will be charged interest every month). Second, they're obviously hoping that you're going to forget when it ends, exposing yourself to at least one month of monstrous interest while you try desperately to find some way to roll it over.

That's why I'm a "low rate in perpetuity" man now. But in any case, I got to thinking: what kind of demands could I make? 0% in perpetuity with no fee? Unlimited balance transfer with partial forgiveness? Full forgiveness? I doubt I'll be in a position to cancel another card in the near future, so I've missed my chance to gauge the reaction to such demands.

In any case, I successfully cancelled this account that I never thought I had in the first place, and they transfered that card's credit line to my old one. At long last, the upgrade I had desired! But the card remains a lowly plastic one, not platinum. The customer service representative, defeated by my stonewall tactics, wished me a good day and exhorted me to "enjoy using [my] card in the future."

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(10:19 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Messiness of the elites

Scott McLemee's column today discusses that book about how messiness can be "good" and "helpful." In general, I'm in favor of everyone finding their own method for their intellectual pursuits, and if this book persuades one teacher to give up on teaching a cookie-cutter "writing process" and requiring all students to go out and buy Trapper Keepers, its existence will have been justified

At the same time, it strikes me that messiness is now becoming a commodity for the privileged. Professors, executives, etc. -- they can be messy. Meanwhile, jobs in the service sector become more and more characterized by rigid formalism. It's just like so many other things that in some previous historical era were simply a given for almost everyone -- living "simply," getting physical exercise, eating food grown using natural methods -- but have now been repackaged as expensive luxuries.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

(11:46 AM) | Claire:

Bakery Dreams

It's my second to last hatred and I'm already feeling nostalgic for the time when I was a naive young hater, not yet embittered by a public feud with a distant lover, who, in the end, chose academia. With these hatreds, I'll attempt to bulldoze the emotional wreckage of the past few weeks and clear a path for pure, untainted hate.

I hate that mullet head has assigned me new detail work that I can supposedly do when I'm not answering 300 phone calls.

I hate that there's a half an hour until I can go to the bakery and purchase my generic coffee.

I hate that after going on the "Golden Revolution" pub crawl, I got doored by a car and fell off my bike in front of an audience of Wicker Park hipsters.

I hate that there is a flashing Christmas tree made of safety pins and plastic beads on my desk.

I hate that, in a vain attempt to mentally escape work, I have manufactured a crush on a young hippie/independent studier of agriculture who lives in a commune and works at the bakery.

I hate that instead of attending a lunch lecture on Freud, I stayed home and wrote a functional resume.

I hate that now that I've lost my Chicago Card Plus, I obsess about people taking it for joyrides all over the CTA.

I hate that my coworker's response to any question is a blank look, a shrug and nervous
laughter.

I that I rationalize my reception job by telling myself that I am perfecting my velvet voice for radio.

I hate that at some point in the process of making my chronological resume functional, it instead became dysfunctional.

I hate that so many of you have been hurt by my feud with Ben Wolfson.

Until next week...

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(Claire has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(8:51 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

The Infinite Deferral of the Decline of the West

Apparently some British television producers saw Kids and thought, "We should make this into a television series!" I know everyone hates apocalypticism after it was so big last year and just maybe hedonistic teenage nihilism is back! And of course no one will be able to turn away, like watching a train wreck or kiddie porn beauty contests, we'll swallow the vomit and this will be all the rage with kids leaving comments on Myspace saying "Finally a show about my life! This is what my mates and I do every weekend."

Heidegger was wrong - only a god can destroy us now.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Monday, January 15, 2007

(3:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Annoying to-do list

This is what you signed up for when you started reading a blog that is partly my personal MySpace.

The semester at CTS starts early in February. I've already started two classes, and once CTS starts up, my schedule will look like t