The Weblog

Reading

2008-05-10T10:54:00.002-05:00

Once I'm ABD, I'm thinking of taking a couple weeks to catch up on my reading. In particular, I'm thinking of reading some novel that I never managed to get to back in my English major days (or in a couple cases, that didn't yet exist in those days). As a service to you, my faithful Webloggians, I have distilled my decision-making process down to blogpoll form, and you can determine my fate. (Please don't laugh at the books I haven't read yet.)

The Death of "Toughness"

2008-05-10T10:23:00.003-05:00

As is well-known, Democrats frequently go along with Republicans on foreign policy issues out of a desire to look "tough." As is also well-known, Democrats other than Lieberman never get any credit for such positions.

Hillary Clinton's campaign is the culmination of the quest for "toughness." Not only does she embrace right-wing foreign policy positions for the sake of "toughness," but she also began to base the entire rationale for her candidacy on how "tough" she was in her struggle against Barack Obama. Indeed, many liberal candidates expressed a grudging respect for her and wondered if perhaps her "toughness" would actually make her the better candidate.

Yet crucially, "toughness" didn't work! Barring some miracle, she has lost the nomination -- in fact, she effectively lost it two months ago. The whole charade of "toughness" took place as a desperate gambit after the battle had already been lost.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Hijacked Version

2008-05-09T08:34:00.002-05:00

I confess that I am posting this with no authority. I claim authorship as my moral right, but it was not given me to post today's confessional. I sincerely hope that whatever plans have long been in place for this spot will succeed my post, even abolish it if deemed appropriate. I'll live.

I mean, fo' reals, I got shit I'm not going to confess here. Real, meaningful shit that is blowing me up with shit. I confess I'm a wretch. That'll have to do for the probing honesty you're going to get from me. Because I'm too sad to tell you.

Really, though, what I wanted to say is that I saw this at Ryan Call's new blog:

I think I might derive too much from this.

ABABD

2008-05-07T16:22:00.001-05:00

I just finished my last exam. In addition, yesterday I sent my advisor the draft of my dissertation proposal that will be the basis for my oral exam next Thursday. Assuming I passed all the exams, I can think of no other way to describe my present status than ABABD.

Even with the extra AB, it feels pretty damn good.

Wednesday Sex: Alpha and Omega

2008-05-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

Is there a parallax effect in sexual attitudes, caused by a fundamental inequality between two distinct classes of person?

Consider the fables of sexual happiness set up by Houellebecq, in which a lifelong sexual loser finds love with a desirable, vivacious, obscurely unhappy sex maniac who will do absolutely anything to please him. A law of nature is posited in order to be broken: someone whose previous sexual experience is entirely composed of rejection, humiliation and sordid failed attempts at gratification with other unhappy persons is suddenly ennobled, granted the keys to the garden of earthly delights. It is like passing from one side to another of the screen separating the viewer from the pornographic movie: the world's great "no" to the loser is transformed into a ceaselessly renewed "yes, at once!".

The transformation is a "local truth", confined to the immediate vicinity of the beloved: the wider world remains hostile, contemptuous, structured through and through by the invisible line that separates the desirable from the undesirable. Happiness for Houellebecq is an "island", a zone of exception where the normal rules of social hierarchy are suspended and one's desires can be fulfilled without having to demonstrate one's status, or display one's credentials. His lovers visit sex clubs together, or frolic in the sand dunes, expanding the freedom they have found with each other to include others. There is something saintly about them.

Houllebecq's vision of happiness requires of women specifically that they cease to discriminate between desirable and undesirable sexual partners, whilst continuing to make every effort to be desirable, and not undesirable, to men. It is not as if there are not plenty of disgusted, contemptuous descriptions of old, saggy, emotionally mean or mentally inferior females in Houllebecq's tales: women who fail, or refuse, to give pleasure to men, to stimulate or accommodate them. Houllebecq dwells with morose delectation on every particular of the sexist schema within which his characters are imprisoned; but his imaginary solution to the impasse at the heart of that schema is for one party simply to roll over and let the other have whatever it wants.

What is this sexist schema, and where does the impasse arise? Houllebecq's novels assume, and propound, the premise that nature prescribes sexual competition between males for the attention of females. Male social hierarchy is organised around sexual access to females: the "alpha" male both monopolises resources (food, money, markers of status) and maximises his reproductive opportunity. Females co-operate with this system by awarding reproductive opportunities to those males who look like a good bet in terms of nourishing and defending future offspring. What makes females desirable to males however is not status but fecundity: the female sexual attributes that Houellebecq's male characters continually salivate over are all markers of reproductive health. (Nubility in this system is nothing other than fuckability, the state of being of "prime" child-bearing age). A male is undesirable if he is not materially successful, or if his place in the male social hierarchy is low; a female is undesirable if she is old, unhealthy or sexually unaccommodating.

It's clear that this system hasn't much to offer to non-alpha males, or non-conformist females; but the trouble is that the non-alpha males persist in finding well-formed females desirable, and ill-formed females persist in fantasizing about alpha males; indeed, they have to in order for the system to work. In reality? Who knows: this is ideology we're talking about here. And as ideology always does, it says two incompatible things: i) there is a natural order which matches sexual partners one to another according to a system of rank ("there's someone for everyone"), and ii) the system of rank operates by making everybody desire precisely those who are out of their league ("you shall go to the ball!" - and Houellebecq does indeed rewrite Cinderella with a male protagonist). Attempts to game this system, in the manner of Neil Strauss, only affirm its ludicrous premises.

To return to my initial question: do the kinds of inequality that Houellebecq first naturalises and then miraculously suspends (in a manner that actually completely validates the underlying logic of the system) actually exist in the real world in such a way that they result in a parallax view of sex? I've often felt that people talking about how constrained they feel by monogamy, for example, must belong to some entirely other sexual universe than the one I live in: a universe in which you're actually missing out on something by only having sex with one person. (One whole person!) For me, the familiar claim that no one person can completely satisfy one's diverse sexual needs just screams MASSIVE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT. But this is wholly unfair of me: I like having more than one friend (while I'm not gregarious, I do like to hang out every once in a while...), and would probably feel a bit hard-done-by if even my best friend in the whole world were the only friend I had; and some people feel that way about fucking, too, and it's an entirely contingent and uninteresting fact about me that I mostly don't. Someone who found it difficult to form and sustain lasting friendships would probably find my alleged need for a wide and varied circle of friends similarly vexing, and suspiciously self-centred.

But still, there's that whole-other-world effect. I was once very briefly in a situation when I might if I chose have split up with one woman and taken up with another - or, if I'd been really crafty about it, managed to keep them both on the go at once (can't think of anything worse, actually, but some people would I suppose have relished the challenge). I think that was the only time in my life when I was ever in the position of having that sort of decision to make (in the event I vacillated, which is never good). It's incredibly difficult for me to imagine what it might be like to be continually faced with such dilemmas, but I've known people who were, and whose working assumptions about sex and relationships were simply incomprehensible to me. The thing is: they weren't necessarily the most attractive, or rich, or socially impressive people I knew. Some of the most mind-rendingly complex psycho-sexual configurations I've ever heard described were - apparently - swarming around the persons of some of the plainest and most unprepossessing people I've ever met. So it's not - pace Houellebecq - alpha-maledom or super-breeder status that makes for this kind of differend. In that case...what the heck is it?

I WILL SMASH YOU

2008-05-06T16:43:00.002-05:00

Michael Kimball, the novelist, and Luca Dipierro, the artist, are collaborating on a documentary that features dozens of people smashing things that mean a lot to them. I participated. I smashed my favorite hymn. It came out about how I expected.

They used my part as the trailer.

Calling All Computer People!

2008-05-06T13:35:00.003-05:00

I found a macro that converts sentence capitalization to title capitalization -- a crucial step toward maintaining my sanity as I assemble the bibliography for my dissertation proposal, as the Regenstein library lists all titles in sentence capitalization. It even skips over words not usually capitalized and does the first letter of the selected phrase regardless.

For optimal convenience, though, it should do two things: detect a subtitle (i.e., capitalize the word following a colon regardless) and strip the space that the Regenstein puts before all colons. How do I make it do that?

Tuesday Hatred: Then There Was One

2008-05-06T00:00:00.003-05:00

I hate that I still have one more exam to look forward to. I hate being afraid to start my dissertation because I'm afraid to be finished. I hate that I've been letting go of language maintenance for the sake of exams and how frustrating it's going to be initially when I start back up.

I hate Unfogged commenter James B. Shearer, and I hate the misguided liberal tolerance that allows him to keep posting there.

I hate not hearing back at the promised time about a potential job.

I hate that I'm unlikely to find work for the summer and don't really want a job anyway, so I should take out another student loan. I hate that if I do take out a student loan, there will be no real reason for me not to take some kind of language class to learn how to actually speak something other than language -- I have enough trouble socially interacting in English.

I hate my general boredom and anhedonia. I hate not knowing what I want from people, and I also hate not knowing what they want but assuming I must be letting them down in some way. I hate running into people I didn't realize I never wanted to see again, and I hate situations that trigger negative associations -- especially when the negative association itself leads to a vicious circle of self-beratement.

I hate lapsing back into the despairing attitude that went out of style on The Weblog some time in 2005. I hate feeling that my best days of blogging are far behind me -- to be precise, I hate that I care that I don't care about that. That last clause is a testament to what it's like to have about 14 levels of self-reflexivity floating around at all times.

UPDATE: All you need is Tuesday Love.

OMG OMG OMG!!!

2008-05-05T16:07:00.002-05:00

Blogger now lets you schedule posts! Just change the timestamp to the future, push publish, and it lists it as "scheduled" and explicitly promises to post it automatically!

Since I learned this by accidentally hitting "post" for the Tuesday Hatred, I should say: I hate being excited about a feature they should've implemented years ago.

A Nearly Empty To-Do List

2008-05-04T17:42:00.002-05:00

I have reached the point where I can no longer bear to do further preparation for the third of my four exams tomorrow. Naturally I am now daydreaming about what I will do with myself when this process is completed, and it seems to me that, barring any rash commitments in the next few days, my academic to-do list will contain only three items:

A brief review of an introductory text on philosophy of religion
A conference paper on Jean-Luc Nancy
My dissertation

Only three things to do! No big deal.

A Thought

2008-05-03T11:44:00.001-05:00

What would be better at a high school basketball game than the pep band breaking out into "Head Like a Hole"?

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Little Boxes on the Hillside

2008-05-02T00:00:00.003-05:00

In a recent confessional someone accused me of eating "children's cereal" and I took umbrage. I confess that one morning this week I opened up my box of Frosted Mini-Wheats to find a glowing Indiana Jones-themed spoon.

I confess that taking a qualifying exam while crippled by allergies is sub-optimal.

I confess that the conclusion of the second season of Weeds -- which I confess I watched in one sitting, as a "reward" for the aforementioned day of taking an exam while crippled by allergies -- dispelled my doubts. I confess that I went straight to my room and began downloading season 3, upon seeing the massive cliffhanger with which season 2 ends.

I confess that I had nothing to do with the advent of Wednesday Sex, but I approve.

Still Nothing to Lose But Our Chains, After All These Years

2008-05-01T10:25:00.002-05:00

Happy May Day, Webloggians. Don't forget to play the Internationale in French [audio] or in the language of your choice.

Wednesday Sex

2008-04-29T23:13:00.002-05:00

'Murderous mothers and incestuous fathers, who are infinitely more widespread than paedophile killers, are an unsettling intrusion into the idyllic portrait of the family, which depicts the delightful relationship between our citizen parents and their angelic offspring' - Badiou, 'Sex in Crisis' The Century.

Current revelations with regards to the way in which 'citizen parents' can sometimes treat their children remind us, as if we needed reminding, both that Thomas Bernhard is always right about Austria, and that families, when they go wrong, go really really wrong.

Badiou in The Century attempts to reawaken the original impulse of Freud's thought by reminding us that 'he explained human thought on the basis of child sexuality' and that 'there is nothing either natural or obvious about the fact that the object of desire for a subject is borne by the opposite sex'. Both the 'naturalness' of heterosexuality and the sexual innocence of the child are simultaneously put into question by psychoanalysis in its nascent state, and it is Badiou's conviction that Freud's attempt to address the 'real of sex, rather than its meaning' has sadly become lost in the ubiquitous call for mandatory, yet hyper-moralised, enjoyment.

Badiou seems somewhat depressed about sex, in fact, and certainly not pleased with pornography ('Bénazéraf has not kept any of his promises'), despite the fact that it supposedly touches on the 'very essence of cinema insofar as it is confronted with the full visibility of the sexual' ('Philosophy and Cinema'). Nowhere do we find a communist hypothesis with regard to the future uses of a sexuality that responds to the insights of psychoanalysis in a non-hysterical manner.

For that we must turn to the deplorably overlooked, somewhat mad but absolutely brilliant Shulamith Firestone and her 1970 tract, The Dialectic of Sex (written in a white heat in her mid-20s, shame on us all). In the final chapter, 'The Ultimate Revolution', Firestone takes seriously the implications of what she calls cybernetic communism, the total emancipation of women (and men) from the shackles of biology via advances in contraceptive, reproductive technology and alternative models of work and social organisation (choice line: 'Natural childbirth is only one more part of the reactionary hippie-Rousseauean Return-to-Nature'). Not surprisingly, she ends up touching on the same 'real' of sex as Freud, that of child sexuality, only instead of merely noting it (shocking enough in the first place, admittedly), she attempts to incorporate it into her plans for a future utopia of collectives, work-replacing machines and no more pregnancy.

Following the 'complete integration' of 'sexegrated' women and children into society, Firestone argues that we will uncover 'for the first time', natural sexual freedom (her perverse technologism is the precondition for humanist practice). The sexual freedom of all women and children is summarised baldly in the following way: 'now they can do whatever they wish to do sexually': Cybernetics simply destroys the incest taboo. Relations with children would include, apparently, 'as much genital sex as the child was capable of ... but because genital sex would no longer be the central focus of the relationship, lack of orgasm would not present a serious problem.' This idea of the literal limits of child sexuality is pretty extreme, though not without its historical echoes in the intellectual climate of the time ('Certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me,' said Daniel Cohn-Bendit. 'I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances ... But when they insisted on it, I then caressed them.') The immediate cry of 'paedophile!' is enough to put a very rapid end to this kind of sexual utopianising both in theory and in practice, but 'the problem of children', as Foucault puts it, remains very much with us...a creepy secret in the basement of an otherwise perfectly normal-looking family house...

The Fearsome John McCain

2008-04-29T16:45:00.003-05:00

In an article about his health plan, I learn that John McCain thinks that a good idea would be "eliminating tax breaks for employers who provide health insurance for workers," replacing those tax breaks with tax credits toward buying individual insurance. I also learn that apparently Sen. McCain was unaware of the nature of individual insurance, including the fact that he himself would be unable to find insurance under his own plan, due to having had melanoma.

Does a scary black preacher outweigh a health plan that purports to help the crisis of the uninsured by actively discouraging employer-based health insurance? Stay tuned!

The Party Line

2008-04-29T11:18:00.002-05:00

In the comments to my post about hand-wringing, Amish Lovelock supplies the party line to which we all must adhere if we are to be victorious:

The Democrats are Strong! Invincible!

Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman, waging the Democratic revolution in America depends on Barack Obama!

Loyalty to Obama! Loyalty to Barack Obama Thought! Loyalty to the Obama Revolution!

The Democrats Serve the People!

Dare to Think my Democratic Brethren! Dare to Act! Smash the Republicans!

Long Live the Democratic Party! Long Live Obama!

In an e-mail, Scott McLemee adds:

Dare to struggle, dare to win!

Tuesday Hatred: Down with the Blogs!

2008-04-29T00:00:00.004-05:00

I hate that there is so little actual left-wing media criticism in the mainstream blogosphere. Jonathan Schwarz is the only real example I know, and he's virtually never linked by anyone even remotely "big name." So I guess we're stuck with either the insane right-wing "critique" or the liberal critique that asks for the media to be "reality-based" and appears to be founded on the notion that the news media's function really is to produce an informed populace and that it is failing to live up to that for some basically contingent reason -- such as laziness, overidentification with the powerful, whatever.

I hate that the supposedly unfettered new public sphere of blogs has done little more than give amateurs a chance to publish their own little reflections on the extremely constrained range of acceptable opinions in America. I hate that I'm not sure whether liberals or conservatives hate the left more.

I hate having to wake up way earlier than usual for exams. I hate the thought that some people schedule all four of their exams for four consecutive days -- if I had to sit in that room by myself with a non-internet-connected laptop for even two days in a row, I think I would die.

I hate that I seem to have to go grocery shopping more and more often lately. I hate that I hate the shitty job that the baggers usually do and that I don't feel like I can criticize them for doing a shitty-paying job shittily.

I hate not being able to fall asleep. I hate evenings where I'm just killing time until I can go to sleep. I hate that the new episode of House Monday night was underwhelming.

I hate that I'm so lax about linking to Tuesday Love.

The Roots!

2008-04-28T21:32:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow is the official release of The Roots new CD, Rising Down. Some of you don't care, but I have a feeling others of you may very already downloaded it. (I, for one, have.) It's not as good from end to end as their last one, but there are definitely enough high points to make it one of the better large-label releases of 2008. A couple of videos to whet your appetite:

One that a white dude can dance to:

One that a white dude can run from:

The Phenomenal Žižek

2008-04-28T06:04:00.002-05:00

"There is something perilous as well as attractive about such an ethics; but in this book, it is a view that allows Žižek to defend the idea of revolution while rejecting revolutionary terror. For the point about Robespierre and Stalin, so he argues, is not that they were too extreme, but that they were not revolutionary enough – and that had they been so, political terror would not have been necessary. The Jacobin terror, for example, is seen somewhat implausibly as bearing witness to the group’s inability to carry out an economic as well as a political transformation. Something similar is asserted of Mao’s Cultural Revolution."

- Tel on Slav

Both Kinds of Music

2008-04-27T12:19:00.002-05:00

Last night I reluctantly went to a country-western bar with some friends. There was a live band taking requests, and I leaned over to one of my friends and asked him -- sincerely -- if "These Boots Are Made for Walking" was a country song.

I had always suspected it, but this incident confirmed it: I can never be elected president.

Torture and Collateral Damage

2008-04-27T10:15:00.002-05:00

In an apparent effort to lock in the title of "most brazenly lawless administration ever," the Bush administration has provided Congress with the legal reasoning behind its violation of the Geneva conventions:

The Justice letters allow that certain acts by interrogators -- sexual mutilation, for example -- would be unlawful under any circumstance. But when judging whether a specific interrogation practice would violate the conventions' ban on degrading treatment, the government can weigh "the identity and information possessed by a detainee," Benczkowski wrote.

He suggested that a suspect with information about a future attack could be subjected to harsher treatment, noting that a violation would occur only if the interrogator's conduct "shocks the conscience" because it is out of proportion to "the government interest involved."

This reasoning seems to turn the "outrage of human dignity" into a kind of collateral damage. Yes, it happens, but the intent of the torture is to gain information to stop a terrorist attack -- if the point of the torture was just to torture, then that would outrage the conscience. In the same way, killing civilians in the course of a legitimate war is lamentable but blameless, while the terrorist act that directly targets civilians outrages the conscience.

Thus, even though the consequences of American action in the "war on terror" have been far more destructive than anything a terrorist could dream of doing, it's okay because we've instrumentalized the destruction, because we needed to do it in order to achieve some other goal -- in other words, it's justified because it was expedient.

The Audacity of Worry

2008-04-26T16:03:00.002-05:00

Many Democrats are worrying about whether the ongoing primary is hurting the Democrats' chances in the general election. My worry: that this public hand-wringing itself will hurt the Democrats in the general election. Having most of your side's leading public figures on the verge of despair over the party's weakness could very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The American people seem like, all things considered, they'd really prefer to elect a Democrat -- and so, naturally, the Democrats are trying their best to talk them out of it. Doesn't this sound like a nice, upbeat, and basically realistic response to the primary situation: "Yes, we have such a surplus of great candidates that we still haven't decided which will be our nominee, though we do know that either one will be a historic first"? But no -- it is the sworn duty of every Democrat to provide free advertising for John McCain's fearsome political skills and broad appeal.

(On another note, this post is yet another example of the fact that the culture of Democrats is absolutely saturated with the "consultant" mindset -- all we bloggers do all day long is talk about strategy, positioning, framing, rhetoric. Even calls to talk more about concrete policy are framed in terms of the perceived political effectiveness of talking about policy!)

Weeds

2008-04-26T11:25:00.002-05:00

In keeping with my longstanding tradition of blogging about premium cable shows, I must say that I loved the first season of Weeds and am indeed, like apparently every man she encounters, in love with Mary-Louise Parker -- but I am more skeptical about the second season. Things just seem to be getting overly complicated. In addition, I felt that all along, the music was just a little too "precious," and having various people (particularly Deathcab for Cutie) cover the theme song only compounds the problem.

Nonetheless, the second disc of season 2 could easily redeem the minor flaws, earning the season the coveted "five Netflix stars from Kotsko."

Friday Afternoon Confessional: The End of the End

2008-04-25T00:00:00.002-05:00

I confess that as of Thursday, I have completed all duties related to being the convener of the PhD Students Association, including finding a replacement. I confess that I had anticipated that my exaggerated sense of duty and difficulty saying no would lead me to sign on for another year after no one volunteered. Losing the stress of planning a chapel service in the fall will add years to my life.

I confess that the first of my qualifying exams is on Monday and it's the one that I feel most confident on. I confess that I may also have a lead for some adjunct teaching work next year at a respectable institution, nicely rounding out the old CV. I confess that I've been neglecting my language work in recent weeks due to my impending exams and that I need to get to work on a new excuse for when exams are over.

I confess that I've recently started to pay more attention to how many L stops I've used. The occasion was when circumstances conspired to put me at the Montrose Brown Line stop, which I had never used before, and I realized that I was only three stops away from getting full coverage on the Brown Line. I confess that I've developed my own internal rules about what counts as "sincere" usage (as opposed to using the stop just to fill out my list), and I'm still not sure whether using a stop only for a transfer counts. If commenters could decide this for me, I would know whether I can rightly claim the Howard stop. I confess that getting the remaining three on the Brown Line could be challenging, particularly the Francisco stop.

I confess that the L stop thing is much less intrusive than a previous neurosis I developed about walking -- trying to find as many possible routes between two points that involved crossing only once per intersection. That is, my rules disallowed moving to a corner diagonal from the one where I was standing. I confess that T-intersections were a major help whenever I could find them, because I could get to the equivalent of the diagonal corner without technically "crossing the street." I confess that my system fell apart when I realized that there were no routes satisfying my rules between the Regenstein library and my then-girlfriend's house. Well, actually there would've been, but the main rule was that I couldn't go out of my way -- it had to fulfill the street-crossing rules while being equal in distance to the shortest possible route.

I confess that that last part feels more like a true "confession" than most of what I've written here over the years.

Change is Good

2008-04-24T18:56:00.002-05:00

I just realized that I'm "wasting" a lot of good links by sharing them through Google Reader rather than blogging them, and so I have updated the template to give you all the best of both worlds. I'm worried that the combination of the Amazon stuff and the links is a little tacky, and -- of course, since I am starting exams in a few days -- I'm now thinking about a more thorough overhaul of the site.

Any suggestions?