SOME THOUGHTS TOWARDS PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM

I apologise for the lack of updates lately. The work that I get evaluated on/paid for has to take precedence over this blog sometimes. I do have a few long things in the offing, though, that will hopefully go up within the next week or so, and I'm working on a few reviews to have up in the meantime. For now, I'll offer some food for thought about criticism, via a few passages that have me thinking about what it is I'm trying to do here and why. 

The first, from Robertson Davies' excellent novel The Rebel Angels,  is Arthur Cornish's statement of his ambitions to Maria Theotoky:

"I am going to be a patron. . . . Of course Uncle Frank put some money in the hands of living artists, and spotted some winners and encouraged them and gave them what they want most--which is sympathetic understanding--but he wasn't a patron on the grand scale. . . . [which is a] great animateur; somebody who breathes life into things. I suppose you might call it a great encourager, but also a begetter, a director who keeps artists on the tracks, and provides the power--which isn't all money, but any means--that makes them go. It's a kind of person--a very rare kind--that has to work in opera, or ballet, or the theatre; he's the central point for a group of artists of various kinds, and he has to be the autocrat. That's what calls for tact and firmness, but most of all for exceptional taste. It has to be the authoritative taste artists recognize and wants to please. . . . You're taken aback because I lay claim to exceptional taste. It's queer what people are allowed to boast about; if I told you I was an unusually good money-man and had a flair for it, you wouldn't be surprised in the least. Why shouldn't I say I have exceptional taste?"

The second comes from Giovanni Tiso's blog Bat Bean Beam (a real treat if you haven't checked it out before), the obviously applicable "An Essay on Criticism:"

So is disliking anything at all bad in itself? Again it's hard to say but there may be something of a clue in the first line of the song. "It's okay to not like things." It's not good or fine. Merely okay. We don't really endorse it, but if you must, then at least try not to be a dick about it. . . . 

Do many people really feel that the problem with the internet or society in general is people hating on the things that they like? Who does that anymore? Are there even any genuine snobs left? Are there cultural critics willing to argue that, say, reality television is bad for its public and for society, and that if you watch Police Ten 7 you just might be an arsehole? Or is it true on the contrary that even the most derivative or exploitative manifestations of mass culture have been almost universally subsumed under the rubric of taste, concerning which, as we have known for some time, there can be no dispute? . . . 

Everything must pass through the social networks, therefore everything must be liked . . . If all goes according to hype, soon there will be no publishers nor editors and so the logic of this social layer, that is to say of efficient consumption, will be alone in governing access to information and ultimately most forms of culture. It's the future we bought, the future we agreed to. It plays in chunks of sixteen seconds to the sound of an upbeat tune.

The final comes from K-Punk, perhaps most clearly articulated on his site in this post (and from which I'll quote for not having another source handy), but more fully developed in the final chapter of his book, Capitalist Realism:

Nothing could be a clearer illustration of the famous failure of the Father function, the crisis of the paternal superego in late capitalism, than a typical edition of Supernanny. . . . 

Rather like many teachers or other workers in what used to be called "public service," Supernanny has to sort out problems of socialization that the family can no longer resolve. A Marxist Supernanny would of course turn away from the troubleshooting of individual families to look at the structural causes which produce the same repeated effect. 

The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to [be] based on rejecting. In a culture in which the "paternal" concept of duty has been subsumed into the "maternal" imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their children's absolute right to enjoyment. . . . The parental disavowal of this role is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of "gatekeepers" to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want. The concrete question is: if a return to the paternal superego--the stern father in the home, Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting--is neither possible nor desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenege or educate? . . . 

Late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. . . . But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. (When will there be a Channel 4 programme called "You Are What You Read?") What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about "feeling good." To tell people how to lose weight, or how to better decorate their neo-liberal burrow, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement  is to be oppressive and elitist.

While not necessarily identical, and while not necessarily always in agreement with each other, these three examples point to an important function of criticism, one that I'm increasingly feeling that I could do a better job pursuing in my writing here. I can't make claims to exceptional taste--if I could, why would I have not only bought, but enjoyed the soundtrack to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (and I can't even lie and say it was because of Madonna's awesome "Beautiful Stranger;" I wanted to hear R.E.M.'s cover of "Dragging the Line")--but I can probably do more talk about the wider implications of the cultural objects I discuss and review. After all, as Lukacs notes in "Class Consciousness," in the undeveloped proletarian consciousness, issues of culture "occupy an almost wholly isolated position in the consciousness of the proletariat; the organic bonds connecting these issues with the immediate life-interests of the proletariat as well as with society as a whole have not even begun to penetrate its consciousness." If what I write on here is to do any good, obviously I need to start pushing beyond my own isolated position.

SOME FOLLOWUP THOUGHTS ON STUDENT EVALUATIONS

A followup on my post about student evals from the other day, inspired by some insightful points a friend emailed. Two comments that she made really struck me as suggesting the relationship between my issues with student evals and my questions/concerns about the place of the academy in society in a slightly larger sense. The first was her point--which I fully agree with--that as instructors at universities "our job should be teaching the committed." The second is her ultimate conclusion, and is related to the first: "So, the key question here and for higher-ed institutions is: What is more important, learning something or liking the class?" My only response to this is "Yes." I think the academic setting has been backed up into a corner in which learning something and liking a class are presented as distinct choices--you can have enjoyment or you can have learning--even as their pairing in this presentation inevitably suggests that liking the class is the preferred outcome (and, therefore, the appropriate measuring stick for the quality of instruction) within the context of the culture at large.

In its ideal form, teaching the committed means that learning and enjoyment/entertainment are neither inextricably linked nor forced into some kind of hierarchy. Learning can be enjoyment/entertainment, but it can also be something that exists outside of enjoyment/entertainment as another sphere of experience that is accepted as necessary on its own terms. At the very least, a course, its outcomes, and the quality of instruction to reach those outcomes can be separated out (where/when appropriate) from the enjoyment/entertainment factor when it comes to evaluation. I might not enjoy or be entertained by a class on injuries and illnesses (I'm squeamish that way), but setting my enjoyment aside, I could evaluate whether or not the instructor used methods that helped me to develop skills, apply concepts, or whatever the course outcomes suggested I should be able to do/comprehend by its completion. Now, I might enjoy certain pedagogical methods more than others--and here, student commentary can be particularly valuable when he/she articulates which methods were enjoyable, why they were enjoyable, and (this is the crucial part) how that enjoyment helped him/her to meet the course outcomes more effectively than he/she otherwise would have been able to do--and that can help to nuance my evaluation, but it shouldn't be the sole basis of that evaluation.

One of the issues, though, is that the committed--in the ideal sense outlined above--are rare. It's much more common to come across the student who remains convinced that this course/subject/four year trek through higher education generally is useless, a joke, something to be endured on the road to a career. One of the strongest moments of cognitive dissonance I've experienced as a teacher came last Fall. During a unit of my composition class in which we examined arguments on the value (or lack thereof) of higher education and the liberal arts from a variety of perspectives, my students maintained that the system would protect and care for them even as the articles we read--both for and against higher ed and the liberal arts--repeated over and over again that the system was profoundly uncaring and students should identify the most appropriate ways to prepare for this reality. In this climate, learning and a commitment to education as a valuable aspect of life outside of preparation for a career doesn't seem to offer much (though, as I'll try to explain below, the reverse is true). I don't think this is just me being an elitist, privileged white male with a graduate degree when I suggest that more access to and emphasis on learning and the tools it offers is the solution here, though, not less.

This is all still a little underdeveloped, but I want to return to a point I made in the original post about needing to clarify, for example, a question about the instructor's ability to stimulate a student's thoughts by identifying the form of that stimulation and the instructor's ability as compared to what. Here, "liking the class" again requires these kinds of qualifiers, particularly among a generation of students who are, in Mark Fisher's words, "'too wired to concentrate,'" and for whom "to be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification" (24). He goes on to link this to life under capitalism and the very specific kinds of mental processes it requires of its subjects: 

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. . . . Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

There are real consequences to this for higher education, obviously, and they manifest themselves (at least in part) in the tensions facing teachers that I tried to outline in my original post. Against the constant cries of right-wingers and "liberal communists" about higher education's disengagement with the realities of contemporary life, Fisher suggests it serves as:

the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field. Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (26)

The two poles outlined, facilitator-entertainer and disciplinarian-authoritarian, are dead on in the education climate surrounding student evaluations as currently formatted. During class time, the teacher is expected to substitute for the entertainment offered by the now inaccessible "entertainment-control circuits" at the same time that he/she is expected to handhold. One of the more striking aspects of the latter category--and one that I meant to mention in my original post and forgot--is students' inability to see evaluation of their performance on an assignment as anything other than a personal commentary, an evaluation of their very subjectivity. That is, no point about a rough patch in an argument or a well-turned phrase can be seen as anything other than an insult or a compliment on the student as a subject because the disciplinarian-authoritarian is seen as evaluating the student him/herself, rather than the work as it relates to assignment guidelines/course outcomes. Students will turn in drafts to me and say "Please don't judge me. I had to rush to finish this, and I know it needs a lot of work," as if a poor piece of writing would lead me to believe that the student is a "bad" person. I might be frustrated if a student who has turned in high quality work throughout the semester suddenly submits a piece of writing well below his/her previous level, but I'm more likely to ask the student how I can help clarify the assignment or to discuss areas for/methods of revision with him/her than I am to leap to some judgement about his/her character. That reaction doesn't fit into the above roles, though, and parses with difficulty, if at all.

To ask students, then, to evaluate a class in such a way that enjoyment and entertainment are the only available categories for the students to use when evaluating any experience would seem to be a losing prospect, not only for teachers but for higher education as a whole. Here's where it all starts to get a bit murky, but stick with me and maybe I'll have something for you. In The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek claims that:

What we have today is not so much the politics of jouissance but, more precisely, the regulation (administration) of jouissance . . . the superego aspect of today's "nonrepressive" hedonism (the constant provocation to which we are exposed, enjoining us to go right to the end, and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance. . . . [A]lthough the immediate and explicit injunction calls for the rule of a pleasure principle that would maintain homeostasis, the actual functioning of the injunction explodes these constraints into a striving toward excess enjoyment. (310)

In the wake of the past half decade of financial crises, the dominant logic of late capitalism--Consume! Enjoy!--isn't "corrected" by austerity rhetoric and current financial situations so much as redirected by it: You've enjoyed in the wrong way; learn to enjoy denying yourself as part of the greater good and you can continue to enjoy. That there is a barrenness to accepting such a life seems to me obvious, and part of the increasing levels of discontent among youths especially might be attributed to a glimpse of the barrenness that they can look forward to. As Fisher points out, "There is a sense that 'something is missing'--but no appreciation that this mysterious missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle" (22). Thus, when in Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson argues that there is a fear "of repression: that socialism will involve renunciation, that the abstinence from commodities is only a figure for a more generalized Puritanism and a systemic willed frustration of desire," a situation that "allow[s] us to grasp, but only from the outside, how difficult it may be to relinquish [the] compensatory desires and intoxications we have developed in order to make the present livable," he articulates the social context in which the political work that teachers must undertake (of which addressing student evals is one part) emerges and the challenges it faces (384). In an increasingly damaged and unsustainable world: 

rationing of some sort is inevitable. The issue is whether it will be collectively managed, or whether it will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too late. Quite what forms this collective management should take is, again, an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and experimentally. (Fisher 80)

Jameson echoes this conclusion, arguing for "a collective decision and a collective will to live in a different way" (384), and the task that  Žižek proposed to Occupy Wall Street is strikingly similar: 

Fall in love with hard and patient work . . . [W]e are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions--questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want.

Here there is an echo of the problem to which David Foster Wallace's later work--especially "This is Water" and The Pale King--attempted to find an answer: how to will different desires and modes of thought into existence and what those new desires and modes might look like. As Jameson points out, paraphrasing Marx, capitalism is desire's "stimulant and an immense machine for producing new and unforseeable desires of all kind" (384). There are opportunities for exploiting this immense machine, though, especially if those unforseeable desires, such as the missing something discussed above, cannot be met by that same machine. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear in the wake of movements toward austerity that it is only through positing alternatives (especially to austerity and its logic)--and then actively working to achieve those alternatives--that both new desires and the existing desires produced by capitalism can be identified and met.


If Fisher is correct in saying that higher education (and the education system more broadly) is "the engine room of the reproduction of social reality" and if that social reality, for students, consists of an "entertainment-control circuit" into which they are plugged in order to experience this obligatory jouissance--whose logic Žižek describes as "'You must, because you can!'"--student evals would seem to function as a way of turning the environment of higher educations into one more compatible with the texting, smartphone, social media, internet matrix. Here, student evals are a way of applying the social reality (re)produced by higher education to higher education itself: enjoyment replaces learning because learning, as a category of experience separate from enjoyment, doesn't fit into the obligatory jouissance that Žižek claims governs our current social reality. This is why, as currently formatted, those evals are a losing prospect--they undermine the ability of higher education to maintain goals that are not in direct service to capital's demands.

This is also why the task of remaking student evals and their function within higher education is a political issue. One of the reasons that this seems to me like a key area in which teachers can exercise a certain kind of power against the pressures of capital on higher education is because student evals have a definite form, one that is a reflection of the ideological assumptions that undergird the social reality that Fisher, Jameson, and  Žižek discuss above. Challenging this form and replacing it with a new, more effective form, then, requires an engagement with those ideological assumptions. Crucially, it is also an example of "the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management . . . the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without" (Fisher 79-80). At the same time, producing this new form of student evals necessarily requires a re-articulation of how learning functions in the present moment not just as a way to reproduce current social reality, but to challenge and correct that social reality. It is a way to reinscribe higher education within a larger anticapitalist project, one that teaches students how to articulate and form new desires on their own terms, rather than settling for, as Jameson terms them, "compensatory desires" to make a poor situation livable.

MAKING A CASE AGAINST STUDENT EVALS

I received my student evaluations for the Spring semester on Wednesday. I've never been a huge fan of student evals--generally, when I get them, I tend simply to feel depressed for a few days. Much like the worst internet trolls, some students seem to take the anonymity of student evals as a challenge to craft as many wounding statements as possible, attacks that are often out of all proportion to the class and their engagement with it. I've had students question my intelligence, abilities, dedication, biases, and sexual orientation on evals, often under the guise of offering helpful or constructive feedback. What's more, these students' comments are clearly meant to be deliberately and flagrantly provocative, an attempt to somehow "get even" for their performance in class/their lack of interest/engagement with the subject. Without fail, there are students who complain about having to write in a composition class, of having to read new--and at times challenging--material in a literature class, of not being entertained every single second of the semester by my teaching. In some ways, the worst comments are the ones about being graded too harshly--as someone who is keenly aware of grade inflation (and who often feels caught in an impossible position between contributing to this inflation and sticking to certain standards/principles in a way that is unfair to students given the inflated grades they might otherwise receive), I often have to bury my face in my hands when I think about all the compromises I made while grading after reading those comments.

For many, the response to all this might be "Oh well. Grow some thicker skin and get over it." However, it's precisely this attitude that contributes to the reason that I don't find student evaluations helpful. There are times when students can offer valuable and constructive feedback--I've learned that there are situations in which I haven't made my own position relative to a reading clear and have been accused (unfairly) of bias and I've dropped or used more frequently some activities because of student feedback--but for the most part, student evaluations are not set up to benefit either the student or the teacher. In fact, I would go a step further and claim that student evals are, at their most fundamental level, anti-teacher. They are a prime example of neoliberal management practices and corporatization of education masquerading as "student-centred" learning. Ultimately, student evals (at least as they are currently set up--and this is across the various educational institutions in which I've taught or been a student) are less reflections of the effectiveness of various educational practices and strategies, and more customer satisfaction surveys. The evals encourage the worst kind of self-consciousness and surveillance on the part of teachers at the same time that they set up the university as a company whose product must meet the demands (grades) of the consumer (student) at all costs. What's more, the process of student evals fails to make clear to students the purpose behind the surveys, requiring teachers both to supply the context and to perform certain ideological manoeuvres.*

While the goal of offering students the chance to speak to the quality of instruction they are receiving is laudable--this basic principle, at least, is student-centred--student evals (in their current format) do not ask students to evaluate the quality of instruction. Or rather, they do so while neither requiring that students understand what it is that they are evaluating nor monitoring the students' ability to perform this evaluation effectively (or at all).  Perhaps the biggest problem in this regard is the inability to separate the student's grade in the class from his/her evaluation of the class. That is, the evals are framed in such a way that the student's grade--both the grade he/she expects to receive in the class the grade he/she "deserves" in the class (which is almost always an A or A-, with some B+ and Bs across the class, but rarely any Cs, Ds, or Fs)--is the entry point into the survey. Having established what you "should" get in the class, what was the class like in getting you that grade? In many cases, whether an individual student received an A, B, or C is of little importance when evaluating the effectiveness of instruction. While it would be wonderful if every student in the class received an A, there is little chance of that happening (if nothing else, chance would get in the way--students get sick or distracted, they procrastinate and produce lower quality work than they are capable of producing, they develop skills at different rates, etc.). However, if an instructor does his/her best to provide students with the opportunity to succeed (read here as developing the skills that he/she is expected to gain from that class) and students are able to take advantage of those opportunities, the instruction has been effective, regardless of the outcome (in terms of grade) of the individual student.

Of course, much of this depends on student effort, as well, which student evals are unable to measure in any serious or effective way. Though there are questions that attempt to quantify the student's effort and engagement--the hours per week devoted to the class and the student's own evaluation of his/her effort in this class as compared to his/her other classes--this causes two related problems. First, these questions are rarely the catalyst for self-reflection (perhaps I found the instruction effective/ineffective because of my level of engagement with the material) and thus students who put forth minimal effort are likely to attribute this lack of engagement (rightly or wrongly) to the effectiveness of instruction (even when this is unfair to the teacher). Second, it encourages the myth that effort is the only quality on which students should be evaluated. I find the second problem particularly difficult to deal with in the classroom. While I appreciate that students can work very hard and still produce substandard material (especially in a composition course), I do not see the value in awarding grades to students for excellent effort that should reflect an evaluation of excellent quality work.** If the theory is that rewarding effort will encourage the student to continue to put forth similar effort, I would counter by saying that I think students should learn to develop intrinsic motivation out of a desire to gain the most from their education. When a majority of students tell me that when taking courses outside of their major they do not try (and have no motivation to try), I do not feel that rewarding effort in my classes (largely taken by non-majors) is a particularly productive method of reinforcing behaviour.

Taken together, these two factors (the emphasis on grades as the criterion on which evaluations should be based and the lack of accountability for students' efforts in the class/ability to evaluate instructional methods) contribute to the way that student evals (in their current format) are anti-teacher. As the job market in higher education continues to be quite competitive and as teaching portfolios (often requiring student evals) become another method of evaluating candidates, anonymous evaluations by students who are far from impartial gain importance. What's more, these evaluations are coming from a position in which entertainment--the nonstop stream of information from the iPhone/iPod/iPad/laptop matrix, the omnipresence of screens to navigate rather than text to read, the constant state of being "connected"--is given primacy not just over the system in which higher education operates, but in opposition to that system. When a student eval asks whether or not an instructor stimulated the student's thinking, it seems imperative to ask in what way is the student being asked to evaluate stimulation. In this environment, the teacher is hostage to the students' desires (desires that become validated in the form of the student eval) even when those desires work against instructional effectiveness.*** The teacher is required to be "on" at all times in a way that students are never (or rarely) required to be. One bad day in the classroom can impact scores on evals, though a semester of bad days in the classroom can still allow a student to get by with a passing grade (and then, in retribution for a poor grade, damage the student eval scores of the teacher). Thus, evals actually demote instructional effectiveness as the motivating factor for teachers and replace it with scoring well on the evals regardless of the instructional effectiveness displayed in so doing. 

You might think that the above is a response to a bad set of evals, pure spite and bitterness. In fact, my evals for this past semester are the best I've ever received. Of course, that I feel that my grading was, in many ways, far too lenient by the standards I would like to uphold and consequently my class grades were much higher than they have been in other semesters (and perhaps should have been this semester) is merely coincidental, I'm sure. What's most galling, though, is that only six students filled out evals. This is not for lack of publicity, either: every class from the moment the surveys went online to when they closed, I reminded students about them and asked that they fill them out, not just for my benefit, but for the school's benefit as well. If students aren't even going to bother filling them out, what use are they? Can one-third of one class really offer anything like useful feedback on my teaching (assuming those six students who filled out evals out are capable of separating their own individual performance [in terms of grade in the class] from the process of evaluating pedagogical strategies and decisions at work in our classroom throughout the semester to determine what was most and least effective and how the class could be improved)? Did any student benefit from the fact that, for the fifteen weeks I was their instructor, my preparations for his/her class were constrained (I might say deformed) by the question "How will this play on my student evals?" alongside more pedagogically useful questions like "What is the most effective way to present this material?" and "Given their success with [x] and struggles with [y], how can I best relate this material to what we've already covered?" 

There must be a better way. As a political act, teachers working together to reformat the idea and approach of student evals would go some way to helping combat the continued encroachment of capitalist realism and the ongoing corporatization of education.

*These manoeuvres are, essentially, legitimizing the surveillance procedures of neoliberalism and naturalizing their place in daily life through the process of distributing (or at least publicizing the availability of) the surveys in the first place. In this way, students are taught to expect similar kinds of surveillance in their own careers (as higher education becomes nothing more than a training ground for careers) and to begin to be aware of the kind of continual self-monitoring that a good neoliberal subject undertakes. Though many instructors have informal surveys that they ask students to fill out as a way of developing their own teaching, a process independent of student evals that stems from a true student-centred perspective, these are inevitably tied to and compromised by the formal student evals.  

**As I always try and explain it to students when this comes up, asking me to grade based on effort is essentially asking me to give bad grades to students who are naturally gifted writers and who do not have to put in as much effort to produce a piece of writing that meets the assignment criteria, while students who work hard but struggle to meet the assignment criteria would get higher grades. 

***In this sense, the actual university comes to seem like a certain kind of Big Other, the entity that provides the student evals with their legitimacy by using them as one of the bases by which jobs, promotions, appointments, awards, etc. are conferred. Though everyone might know that student evals are flawed, in the eyes of the Big Other, they remain valid and so retain their force.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON TEACHING PROMPTED BY READING JOURNALS

It's getting toward the end of the semester and I've just collected my students' reading journals in order to have a look at what they've been writing throughout the second half of the semester. They were supposed to make an entry into the journal every day they had a reading assignment (from a quick scan, it looks like less than half of them managed to do this), and their entry was to identify problems they were having, ideas they came up with while reading, general reactions to the text, etc. It's a fairly standard practice with some fairly standard goals: to ensure that they read, to help them think about material before coming into class so they have points to contribute to discussion, and to give them a chance to develop paper ideas/topics in an informal, low stakes way.

The most frequent comment I've seen so far in my students' reading journals--it's at the top of every entry, it seems, repeated like a mantra--is "This story was confusing." Sometimes there are slight variations--"This story makes no sense," "I'm so lost"--but mostly, the recurring theme is confusion. I was surprised that the frequency of these comments didn't drop as the semester went on; I'd structured the reading assignments to go from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (the most difficult, in my mind) to John Cheever's "The Swimmer" (the easiest), with the idea that the frustration and difficulty they encountered in reading Kafka would spur them to develop (aided by class discussion and writing) the tools to read difficult material. Thus, by the time they came to the final reading assignment of the semester, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, which we just finished, any confusion or frustration they encountered would immediately suggest to them strategies for reading and engaging with the material that would quickly move them beyond confusion as their sole reaction to the text.

Unfortunately, their reading journals don't reflect this. Even when the students were able to quite effectively produce interpretations and begin to make claims out of their confusion, they still circled back to that as their dominant (to the point of exclusivity) reaction. That the development I anticipated hasn't taken place is obviously a point on which I need to think further--what more can I do to help them get over this hump and start developing their reading skills?--but also seems like it might be related to other larger cultural factors.

A few passages from Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? seem pertinent here:

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many--and these are A-level students mind you--will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be "boring." What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate "New Flesh" that is "too wired to concentrate" and the confining, concentrated logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp--and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension--that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche. (23-24)

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations, etc). . . . Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (25-26)

While I think Fisher's take on this is perhaps slightly exaggerated at this point--although perhaps in the UK system in which he works he is in fact totally on the mark--I do feel that the process of educating students and the relationship between students, teachers, and material is trending ever more in this direction. The "indigestibility" he discusses seems related to my students' confusion. They want story without the process, the content without the form, because the act of reading, of deciphering, of making the story appear in a difficult text--which is a necessary and inseparable part of the text--runs against the grain of their mode of consuming and interpreting data. Thus, even when my students succeed in overcoming this confusion, it is the confusion they have no choice but to focus on rather than what that confusion allows/offers them.

A possibly related--though at this point wholly unsubstantiated--speculation on my part is that the breakdown in the disciplinary regime that Fisher discusses, taken together with its usurpation by Deleuze's societies of control--has something to do with my students' confusion with the material they've been reading because the stories have tended to talk about time in a way that my students no longer experience/think about time. Disciplinary society's discrete units of time, in which events are asynchronous from each other (8:00-10:00 is a block of work; 10:00-10:15 is a break that allows for socialization; 10:15-12:00 is another block of work) without any sort of overlap or simultaneity, are part of what the stories we have been reading have been playing with: the boundaries between formerly asynchronous events are breached, time becomes fluid. "The Swimmer" relies on time passing in several ways at once: the passing of an afternoon is linked to the process of aging from virility into senescence and to the cycle of seasons. Pedro Páramo cuts between events happening years apart, with effects often discussed before causes are established, and confuses chronology even further through the presence of an active population of ghosts who continue to live in the town of Comala long after their deaths.

For my students, though, time is already fluid. The seventy five minutes that delineates our class time no longer designates a time solely dedicated to learning about writing and argumentation via literature; as long as students are connected, via their cell phones (as much as I try to ban them, inevitably at some point at least one will make an appearance), they can continually escape this attempt to create a discrete block of time. The same thing applies, as Fisher notes, to the presence of food in class--students will attempt to bring whole meals into class, once again resisting the attempt to separate periods for consuming food/media/entertainment from class time. Bringing materials from other classes (ones deemed more important than a class devoted to writing and literature) to work on during our class is another form of this. The "New Flesh" Fisher mentions, constantly "wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture," does not have the sense of time as a series of discrete events against which simultaneity can be a flashpoint. Thus, attempts by these texts to use and play with time in this way is confusing to students because it is alien to their sense of the world and to how time operates within it.

Alongside this phenomenon of confusion, though, lurks the ever-present spectre of "value." What value does my class have for a student? What are they getting out of it? I would venture a guess that our thoughts on this (mine and my students') are not the same. I was pointed to why do we have to learn recently. A quick scan of the entries reveals the usual suspects--literature, philosophy, history, geography--but also a surprising number of entries dedicated to the sciences and math. There seem to be two basic arguments that students are putting forth in the tweets collated on this site:

1) Why do I have to learn about [x] when there is [computer program/hardware device that approximates one aspect of that discipline]? Example: "What's the point of learning about maps and stuff when we have GPS and Navigation systems."

2) What's the point of learning about [x] when I'm not going to be [occupation that would make use of that subject] when I grow up? Example: "Why do we learn physics? I'm not going to be an electrician when I grow up anyway o_o"

This is obviously not a new development, though it does point to a disturbing commodification of education by evaluating the process and content along the lines one would use while shopping. Here, education becomes positioned as an unnecessary frippery/luxury item: why buy this when I don't need what it does? Of course, the fact that students often misunderstand or misinterpret the "what it does" part when it comes to education makes this mindset even more damaging. I sometimes think of a shopper dismissing a bucket of water as a luxury item while his/her home is on fire when I consider this, though the premise of this attitude toward education still seems wrong.

For one thing, this attitude is a fairly obvious (though silent) way in which austerity rhetoric creeps into arguments about the structure and purpose of higher education. Fredric Jameson is right to insist that we decouple personified metaphors about balancing budgets in households from issues like national budgets and debts, as here the "we're all in this together" and "we all need to tighten our belts" kind of sentiments become the logic of the students' critique of the value of their education. As an unnecessary luxury--in their eyes--in the current economic climate, philosophy (or literature, history, etc.) is something that students must tighten their belts against, rather than something that can offer an alternative to "the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture" and its attendant logic of students being reducible to their consumer habits and occupation. Also, the "common sense" retort to this that so often seems to be promoted--encourage the students to understand the value of a degree in philosophy, literature, etc. in terms of potential career opportunities--serves only to further solidify the logic of the students' critique, as it progresses from the assumption that this critique (and the ideology that encourages students to launch this critique) is correct.

One final passage from Fisher on this topic:

It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists--get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you'd left school at sixteen. . . (26)

Combating this logic requires not a concession to its soundness, but rather a commitment to overturning the economic and social conditions that engender it. Taking the "indigestibility" of Nietzsche that Fisher mentions and using it as the counter to students' questions of "value," of "utility," as the way to engage students in a discussion of how the question they are asking/the critique they are attempting to voice is formed and whose interests that question/critique serves is important, but it's only one part of the fight. Based on the above, those who worry about the value of the humanities in the current age would do well to focus on student debt, on economic reform, on the struggles that movements like Occupy have brought to national attention, as that is the organizational battleground out of which the ideologies that must be opposed can be most effectively fought.  

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011 #1: THE WEEKND HOUSE OF BALLOONS/THURSDAY/ECHOES OF SILENCE

Albums of the Year 2011: #1

 The Weeknd - House of Balloons/Thursday/Echoes of Silence

I'm apparently in good company with this choice. This was a pretty simple decision: nothing else released in 2011 made me want to listen to it more than this trio of albums, and when I wasn't listening to them, I was thinking about them. Like another group whose stock exploded in 2011, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, The Weeknd's graphic depiction of sex that inhabits a disturbingly shady space between clearly consensual and aided by drug (ab)use generated a number of compelling think pieces by the likes of Nitsuh Abebe and Sean Fennessey--the Fennessey piece is actually paired with a take on Odd Future member Frank Ocean's Nostalgia, Ultra.--and for good reason: part of what makes The Weeknd so compelling and repellent at the same time is Abel Tesfaye who, like Tyler, the Creator, manages to genuinely turn stomachs while exerting a fierce charisma. Thankfully, The Weeknd avoids the rape and over the top violence of Odd Future (a factor that, unlike some other listeners, I am unable to "bracket" out of my listening experience--this is not some amazing moral high road I'm taking and by no means is it a criticism of Abebe, whose work I love: I am clearly capable of bracketing out my unease at tales of women being plied with drugs in order to be coerced into group sex when I listen to The Weeknd), but the elements of Tesfaye's persona here are incredibly rich. When, on "The Zone," he asks his partner "I'll be making love to her through you / so let me keep my eyes closed. / And I won't see a damn thing / I can't feel a damn thing / but I'm'a touch you right," the acknowledgement of how manipulative and exploitative his behaviour is, coupled with his admission of a kind of absolute anhedonia, transforms otherwise run of the mill seduction diary entries into a strikingly contemporary psychodrama (Abebe, in his piece on The Weeknd and David Lynch, draws a comparison to Tricky, but I'm not sure that the comparison really works on the level of content--Tricky's psychodramas seem of a different sort).

To be clear, I'm not saying these admissions make the persona in the song "good"--and here, I do want to bracket something: the question of autobiography vs. persona,* which is both incredibly complex and probably the question to discuss w/r/t The Weeknd--or that they excuse his behaviour. Rather, I think they add depth to his character in a way that illuminates certain (largely unpleasant) aspects of being a 21 year old male who is heterosexual in contemporary Canada (and the US) and the repercussions of those aspects for both heterosexual 21 year old males and the females with whom they interact.** This is really tangled; basically, the fact that anhedonia, both as a voluntary state and an inevitable byproduct of modern life, has been kind of the key theme for me from "High For This" all the way through "Echoes of Silence" seems incredibly important, not as an excuse for what the persona in this narrative does--ingest a lot of drugs and have sex with a lot of women--but as an explanation for what makes the persona such a seductive figure. What seems to make people invested in this character/able to relate to him is not his hedonism, but the nihilism and anhedonia that overtakes any attempt at hedonism while fueling continued (and inevitably doomed) attempts at hedonism (i.e., the "XO 'til we overdose" slogan adopted by Tesfaye's fans). Or, as the persona would have it in "Wicked Games," "Bring your love, baby, I can bring my shame / Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain." Tesfaye's narratives here seem to be, essentially, ones of jouissance. Now, the important critical question, I think, in discussing these narratives is to follow Jameson (following Lévi-Strauss) and ask what is the real social contradiction that Tesfaye's narratives attempt to resolve (in my view, the Balloons trilogy is an exploration [and attempted resolution] of the psychosexual demands of late consumer capitalism after the rise of Web 2.0). As Abebe points out, this is similar to the area mined by Kanye West (and Drake, a close friend of and collaborator with Tesfaye) in his recent output, perhaps one of the clearest narrative attempts to solve the increasingly apparent gap between capital's demands and human capacity for fulfillment within those demands.

Now, while all of this analysis definitely enriches my experience of the music, this would all be for naught (or, more likely, would be for a lower spot on this list) if the music didn't sound as good as it does. Tesfaye knows how to get the most out of his voice--his impression of Michael Jackson is scary good--and the backing tracks are evidence of extremely good taste and a strong compositional ability. Contrary to the apparent internet consense, I think Thursday is the best album of the trilogy, and the most fully-realized work here. House of Balloons is a brilliant introduction, the sound of talented young man with a vision getting it almost perfect, and Echoes of Silence is a fitting and fairly gripping end with a pretty amazing Michael Jackson cover, but Thursday, from those opening shudders by Abel Tesfaye on "Lonely Star," is the sound of a star at his (hopefully just first) peak.*** Each album in the trilogy reveals new flourishes, from House of Balloons' sample-delic nightscapes to Thursday's flirtations with guitars to Echoes of Silence's brilliant vocal-warping on "Initiation" (James Blake, eat your heart out!). More importantly, though, nothing about the music pulls you out of the sustained immersion in this narrative that Tesfaye clearly wants. In this sense, the comparison to Tricky (along with other people who have haunted this list, like Boards of Canada and Burial) is dead on--this is as fitting a match of form and content as Maxinquaye. In his take on music in 2011 for the AV Club, Steven Hyden claims that there were many good records but no important albums released this year. While there are several records on this list I would be willing to nominate for important album status, I feel strongly about The Weeknd's trilogy of releases. This is vital, beautiful, confusing, damaged, and disturbing music that captures something of life in 2011. I can't ask for more.

*In a nutshell, the poles between which this question operates: Tesfaye is either doing one of the best acting jobs since Bowie or he's an incredibly creepy (but also typical--and shocking in being so typical) young man. I'm inclined to believe it's probably six of one, half a dozen of the other.
**Cf. The incredibly disturbing monologue in "Lonely Star," with its proclamation from an unnamed female (who might actually be Tesfaye's voice pitched up?) that "My body is yours. Give them any other day but Thursday. . . . Every Thursday, I wait for you. I'll be beautiful for you every Thursday. I exist only on Thursday."
***Re-reading Mark Fisher's piece on Michael Jackson not long after listening to "Lonely Star" for the first time, I was struck by how well his description of the first vocals on "Billie Jean" fits Tesfaye's song, too.

FUN WITH WORDCLOUDS

(click to embiggen)

A wordcloud of the presentation I'm giving on Friday (via wordle). I rather like this. No real surprises in terms of what shows up most frequently. I've read this paper aloud enough that at this point I could probably almost give you an exact count for most of these words. I remember a friend of mine telling me that he would often end up memorizing large chunks of the stories he wrote (particularly first paragraphs) from incessantly going over them to get the wording just right. I'm not quite there yet with this, but it's awfully close.

Some statements from Zizek's appearance at Occupy Wall Street (which I mention briefly in the paper) seem to run parallel to my argument in a rather satisfying way:

[W]e are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions--questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. . . . People often desire something but don't really want it. Don't be afraid to want what you desire. (via Verso and NY Observer)

Sounds like someone's been reading his Capitalist Realism, based on that first part. I'm operating under a time limit, and this version of my paper comes right up against that limit, otherwise I might start with Zizek. Another time, I guess (or maybe in the actual full version of the paper). Perhaps it'll come up in the Q&A afterwards.

FACEBOOK AS REKAL, INC.: IT CAN REMEMBER YOUR SELF FOR YOU WHOLESALE

At its recent F8 conference, Facebook introduced some new features and announced its future plans. The presentation of one of the centrepieces of this new Facebook, Timeline, went like this. As I watched that, read a little more around the web, and listened to Chris Cox's presentation, a more appropriate introduction to the new Facebook came to me:

It's been a little over a week since I deleted my Facebook account. After the F8 conference and hearing Facebook executives candidly talk about their goals for not only users' experience of Facebook, but of the internet as a whole (see, for example, this account: "Facebook's goal is to become the social layer that supports, powers and connects every single piece of the web, no matter who or what it is or where it lives").* I decided that as I'd been increasingly unhappy with Facebook for a few years and had been toying with pulling the plug on my account for close to two years, last Thursday was the time. More than one person on the internet has compared the new Facebook to a digital panopticon, and while I can understand that comparison, I think there are slightly more interesting (and perhaps more accurate) comparisons to be drawn, ones that shed light on the active dangers that Facebook could pose (the video above is a good start). More on those comparisons in a second.

My immediate experience of getting rid of Facebook was one of relief. I'd done it: I could quit Facebook. Of course, conveniently, Facebook allows you to return to your account at any time. Just log back in. It's so seductively easy. For most of the past week and a bit, I've lived with a pretty constant, low level amount of guilt: I should be checking Facebook. Why aren't I checking Facebook? What am I doing on a computer if I'm not checking Facebook? Why did I delete Facebook? The first time I felt these questions welling up in my subconscious, I knew I'd made the right choice.

I'm not entirely cut off from social networking, though. I'm an active tweeter, and I have a Google+ profile (which, at least among the people in my circles, seemed to be slowly coming to life in the wake of Facebook's announcements, only to return to its ghost town feel by the end of the weekend). More knowledgeable men than I have pointed out that Twitter and Google aren't that much better than Facebook: really, "all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter." Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable with my remaining social networking services than I did with Facebook. While Twitter and Google may yet be planning to dictate the way that I experience the internet, they've the advantage of not being quite so open, so proud about it as Facebook (well, perhaps Google is as proud, but in something of a different way).

My displeasure with Facebook had been growing for almost the entire length of my membership. I had been a late, and involuntary, adopter of Facebook when it arrived at my undergraduate institution. The initial round of excitement had faded and Facebook was not much more active than is Google+ currently. This state did not last--a new round of users boosted the amount of content, Facebook continued to develop its platform--and I became a fairly active user. However, when games, quizzes, and other apps started to appear on Facebook, I began to find it increasingly frustrating. Site redesigns seemed to make it impossible for me to get any meaningful content from Facebook. When you became able to block individual categories of posts (say, all those that had to with Farmville, to pick a particularly odious part of the Facebook experience) I briefly became more active on Facebook, but the inundation of information about others' lives (many of whom were, at this point, complete strangers to me, regardless of the educational institution we attended together) continued unabated. I realize the latter is partly my fault--the number of people I was "friends" with on Facebook was probably larger than it needed to be (though it never approached the thousands that others have--I think at its height my list contained ~180 people, and I'd scaled back considerably in the final few months)--but it became oppressive, and there seemed no standard social protocol by which to deal with that situation. Privacy concerns that were increasingly the focus of any and all news about Facebook and its services and Facebook's own push to convince people to document their lives in an increasingly up-to-the-minute fashion (much like how some people use Twitter) just became too much for me. I had come to the end of the relationship I was willing to have with Facebook.

Some of this has already been taking place on social network like Twitter, as Laura June points out, with the result that "the people Tweeting as they experience [an event] are not experiencing in the traditional sense: they are sharing as they experience the experience, which in turn alters the experience. If you always see yourself through the eyes of a perceived crowd, your experience is altered, as is your behavior." This, it seems to me, is the digital panopticon. As at any moment we could become the focus of the crowd, our experiences and behaviours could come under scrutiny, we must consciously modify our behaviour. Farhad Manjoo's complaint that "My problem with 'frictionless sharing' is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste" because "On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing" highlights the extent of Facebook as a digital panopticon: without being able to avoid sharing our experiences, we must be increasingly self-conscious of what experiences we are having. Complete surveillance means complete self-consciousness; or, as Joe Moon puts it: "removing friction from sharing just displaces that friction. If everything I do on the web is under the public gaze, I have to reflect for a moment before I take any action . . . It simply moves the friction from sharing onto the activity, in the worst kind of self-censorial way."

However, the new Facebook--and more importantly the Facebook to come--do not stop at this digital panopticon. For Facebook, even that self-consciously mediated auto-sharing leaves too much to an individual who may be unwilling to share everything. Mark Zuckerberg has been vocal about his belief that "'You have one identity. . . . The days of your having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. . . . Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,'" and it's easy to see the new Facebook as a way implementing this belief as a kind of social/cultural law or structure of power. If an awareness of frictionless sharing leads me to mediate my online behaviour--if I make sure that I'm only sharing what projects and maintains a certain image of myself--I am, in Zuckerberg's mind, demonstrating a lack of integrity (it seems like existentialists could--and should--be going to town on this idea).** The subject of the digitial panopticon, the digital disciplinary society, still needs to be disciplined and punished for deviance. There can be a private self that attempts to escape the strictures of that disciplinary society (until that private self is, and one should read this in Delbert/Charles Grady's voice, corrected). Thus, to return to Laura June, "The changes Facebook is on the cusp of making push us over that cliff, so that you don't even need to Tweet the experience; you're just along for the ride, with other people watching as you go. The experience isn't yours, not fully."

With the new Timeline and Ticker, two services that would on the one hand catalogue and organize our lives for us according to Facebook's algorithm--one that "understands that some moments have resonance that lasts through the years. . . . that comes eerily close to emulating human memory"--and on the other hand turn our lives into a real-time record of all of our web activity, Facebook is no longer presenting itself as a representation of reality, or even a manager of reality, but rather the creator of reality--a reality fed by our ids and projections, a reality we can only accept as existing when that very existence covers over the manufactured and managed nature of its construction (were Baudrillard alive to see it, I think he might call this the perfect crime). Thus, even if I attempt to mediate my online existence, Facebook will ultimately be creating my digital identity (one that it sees as synonymous with my offline identity). My identity will be my account at Facebook, and I don't even get to choose what that identity is anymore: Facebook will do that for me. At the moment I join Facebook, I become interpellated; I am a subject of its ideology and its structures of power, and I exist only within the rules of those structures: outside of Facebook, I am nothing because Facebook cannot see that and tell me what I am.***

The new Facebook is part of a control society, not a disciplinary society, to use Deleuze's terms. In place of the organization of time and space in rigid and discrete units that characterizes a disciplinary society, the control society is made up of controls that "are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry . . . controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point" (is there a better description of apps spread across the web that link back to Facebook?). Within such a system, there are no longer individuals or masses: "Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks.' . . . The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network" (the button that invites one to share, that greets every web browser at the bottom of every web page [or so it seems]). Up-to-the-minute, frictionless sharing achieves the goal of the control society, knowing "the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant;" for Facebook, this is not just a physical position to be known, but a mental and a psychic one as well. In the face of this, Deleuze suggests we might "create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control." What that might look like in the context of Facebook's proposed omnipresent social layer is a question of vital importance, I think. Not being on Facebook will not be enough to create these vacuoles, these circuit breakers.

There are other dangers as well. This conversion of life into a machine-curated archive for which the present and future only exist to provide materials that will be constructed into a narrative geared for maximum emotional impact--one that "takes these thousands of seemingly inconsequential events, discards the irrelevant ones, finds the most emotive, the most visual, the most striking and emotionally touching moments and pulls them into sharp focus"--is a digital end of history. As Mark Fisher points out, via T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in his discussion of Children of Men: "the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. . . . A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. . . . .A culture of commemoration is a cemetery." Or, to put it another way, Facebook can remember it for us wholesale. Facebook wants to be our Rekal, but it's even better than a fake trip to Mars: Facebook will turn our lives into the exciting, arty, sexy things we've always wanted them to be here on Earth, no memory implants required (yet?). As McClane tells Quail: "'You're not accepting second-best. The actual memory, with all its vagueness, omissions and ellipses, not to say distortions--that's second-best.'" Facebook, through its instantaneous (re)construction of the event, gives us an impossible reality we cannot but accept as the real, though a reality we can only experience in retrospect. This is the seductive promise of McClane and Rekal, Inc.: "'You can't be this; you can't actually do this. . . . But you can have been and have done. We see to that. And our fee is reasonable; no hidden charges." There is of course a difference between these two things (the impression of having done something and actually doing that thing), but Facebook might be able to overcome that gap through its control over our identity; for Joe Moon, the archive model is "a conflation of the record of the event with the event itself, or even a privileging of the record over what gives the record its meaning and power. At the same time it (ingeniously) adds to the pressure to record all meaningful events on Facebook in order to make sure it becomes part of your identity."

Zizek notes that The Truman Show (along with PKD's Time Out of Joint) is an example of "The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy . . . that of an individual living in a small, idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lived in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show." There is something seductive about this fantasy, though, which elevates it beyond simply belonging to the paranoiac: it is the scenario in which one is a star whose every action is invested with significance and who thus lives in a kind of narcissistic utopia in which he or she is the most important anything in the universe. We do not all live in a small, idyllic Californian city, though, so this fantasy can only ever remain just that.  However, consider the pitch made to Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in Total Recall (the film adaptation of "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). The seductive promise offered by the new Facebook might be said to be the fulfillment of the fantasy of not being ourselves. "What's the same about every experience you've ever had?" Facebook asks. When we, just like Quaid, can't answer, it tells us: "You!" Something like Facebook's new algorithm for structuring our lives and experiences offers us that fantastic self and his/her idyllic consumerist paradise life--but only, of course, in retrospect. This scarecely matters, though, as only the Facebook version of reality will count as reality. One will have been Truman, which is enough to be Truman. In a society of control that is increasingly aligned with the needs of capital--even and above the needs of capitalism--the pressure is mounting to meet those fantasies for the denizens of this society of control. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher points out that one of the major points at which capitalist realism can be challenged is through an appeal to "the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy." The new Facebook, it seems, could quite conveniently be set to work satisfying some of those desires, removing a key form of resistance to capitalist realism and all it entails. Deleuze's call for vacuoles of noncommunication seems ever more important in this sense.

In the face of all the potential for messianism here--some kind of Morpheus figure to offer us a pill and set everything right--it seems much more likely that we'll be Rachel without a Deckard, never knowing if there is anything behind our digital selves or not. And if there isn't, what would we do?



*This, I think, sets up the science fiction scenario that capital has been waiting for the internet to deliver for some time. Facebook, as the sole social layer of the internet (should it achieve its goal), makes deals with companies to promote their apps on Facebook. Soon, as Adrian Short points out, it makes no sense to have a traditional website anymore--the real action takes place via a company's Facebook app. Given that frictionless sharing makes it impossible for a person to hide his/her online activities (provided that they allow an app/website access to their Facebook account, which seems like it will become part of the standard terms and conditions of any web-based activity before too long. In the process, frictionless sharing will become mandatory, not optional), and given that the new Facebook algorithms seem designed to know its users better than they know themselves (in terms of organizing content according to emotional resonance, significance, etc., etc.), capital will have unprecedented access to the consumer's life and experiences. If the goal of capitalism now is to sell lifestyles not products, Facebook's services essentially package its users as lifestyles-in-waiting. The spatial aspect of this is also fascinating: will Facebook (in becoming the social layer of the internet) become the sole space on the web? Will people surf? Will there be any need to leave one's Facebook page?

**Interestingly, listening to the Spice Girls is the example given of a piece of information that one does not want to share in virtually every piece about the new Facebook. Quite what the Spice Girls did to deserve this level of opprobrium I'm not sure. While their later career was perhaps not as successful as their earlier ventures, surely their reputation as part of the "girl power" movement in the 90s--however facile it may have been--should place them above the level of shame that requires one to actively hide or lie about the act of listening to them, shouldn't it?

***This calls to mind a chilling possibility. Michael K's terrifying statement "[M]y father was Huis Norenius. My father was the list of rules on the door of the dormitory" might be equally true for users of the new Facebook: their father is Facebook (and its terms of service, and its policy toward the internet and digital personas, etc.). Yet, if Facebook becomes the new "father" for its users, does its digital nature--Facebook has never been the body of the father that could be killed--always-already render it phantasmagorical, in contrast to the symbolic father of the Law-of-the-Father? As Zizek points out, such a figure projects a "phantom-like, spectral omnipotence," unlike the symbolic father, and is "perceived as uncastratable: the more [its] actual, social, public existence is cut short, the more threatening becomes [its] elusive fantasmatic ex-istence"--Facebook has, in some ways, never had an "actual, social, public existence;" is its authority of this phantom-like, omnipotent, uncastratable type?

RADIOHEAD ON COLBERT: "CAPITAL . . . THE GREAT IRONIST"

I've got a long post on Facebook that should be up by the end of the weekend, but I thought I'd take a minute to comment on Radiohead's appearance on The Colbert Report. In the lead up to the event, Colbert had said "I look forward to meeting the Radioheads and leveraging their anti-corporate indie cred to raise brand awareness for my sponsors," which is in many ways a more interesting statement than it initially appears. Stripped of the perfunctory and surface-level irony that it relies on as a gag*--famously anti-corporate rock band appears on TV show put on and supported by corporations--this statement seems to me to be a particularly good example of anti-capitalism as one of the primary guises of contemporary capitalism. In his take on WALL-E, Mark Fisher points out that:

[T]he ideology of capitalism is now "anti-capitalist." . . . Initially, it might seem subversive and ironic that a film made by a massive corporation should have such an anti-consumerist and anti-corporate message . . . Yet it is capital which is the great ironist, easily able to metabolise anti-corporate rhetoric by selling it back to an audience as entertainment. 

Colbert's statement is essentially a reformulation of this point, making explicit how capital-as-ironist functions with regard to anti-capitalism. His interview with the band goes a step further and continually puts this concept in tension with the band's statements regarding their anti-corporate stance--there is a delicious and palpable dissonance at play because, in a lot of ways, Colbert "wins" the debate: capital succeeds as an ironist (and the band appears to be as humourless as their detractors would have them be).

While some of Colbert's persona's more exaggerated characteristics are starting to wear thin--in much the same way that Jon Stewart's attempts to maintain both his "objectivity" and his status as "just a guy on a comedy show" can make his commentary infuriatingly impotent and toothless--the interviews, especially the one with just Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien, are most interesting when that persona allows him to be punishingly blunt. Until the joke about clean coal, the end of that second interview is almost unbearably pointed. If policies from the left--and political statements made by artists--are to move beyond comfy neoliberalism and the easily consumed anti-capitalism that goes with it, take downs of easy positions like those mocked by Colbert in these two interviews need to continue.


*A gag that was already boring when it featured in every review of Rage Against the Machine in the 90s and is now beyond tired.

BUTTERFLIES ON CORKBOARD: SUPERHYBRIDS, ATEMPORALITY, HAUNTOLOGY

Simon Reynolds' latest (and last) guest blog over at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond on the atemporality of the omnivorous listening generation's music (an omnivorousness that is a product of not only the increased access/availability of more music on the internet, but the consequent decrease in any sense of limitation/closed horizons to a musician's output) is a good one. One of Reynold's big points--via a piece by Justin Davidson in NY Mag--is that "with the musical past's archives splayed open, there is a constant temptation to regress;" he goes on to note that the music of a band like Battles comes across as closer in spirit (and in sound) to jazz-fusion or 70s prog rock than any kind of futuristic, forward-thinking, new millennium music, or, as he puts it: "both their aesthetics and their ethos echoed progressive rock and jazz fusion."

The problem with this echoing is the sense of atemporality that inevitably seems to accompany it. In the words of Reynolds: "The other thing worth saying about these nu-fusion or 'superhybrid' styles/scenes is that their very rhetoric and philosophical repertoire has a pronounced 'retro' air. These ideas and ideals have been around for what feels like forever." Whereas the jazz fusion or prog rock bands of the 70s were exploring and incorporating contemporary influences, "What gradually developed, with the passage of time, was the onset of atemporality: more and more elements in a new band's make-up cease to relate to the present genrescape and instead involve rummaging through the archives." So instead of prog rock picking up on folk or classical or contemporary black music, as Reynolds points out, or jazz fusion's engagement "with that moment in the 70s when soul music got looser and smoother and more electronic, and electric jazz started taming the wildness of improvisation with the slickness and structure of the pop song," as Jess Harvell mentions in re: Thundercat's new album, we have bands in 2011 engaging with moments in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, etc. and producing music that is not, in an distinguishable way, beyond that earlier era (Reynolds has written about this extensively [and I gather Retromania, his new book, explores this idea in some depth], and Mark Fisher has also discussed this on his blog).* This seems different than hauntological music, obviously, because whereas that features, according to Fisher, "cultural objects that return to a wounded or distorted version of the past in flight from a waning sense of the present," and whose purpose is to "preserv[e] . . . demands [for the radically new] in conditions where--for the moment at least--they cannot be met,"** this atemporal, omnivorous music is purely archival or curatorial: it highlights a dead style without advancing it, or by simply adding it alongside other dead styles, without the production of any kind of real cultural affect--it's the musical equivalent of the Ark of the Arts in Children of Men. In contrast with the superhybrid, the hauntological foregrounds the unanswered questions, the unexplored possibilities; it captures what is still alive in the "dead" genre but has been repressed, the ghost of the past-future and its potentially utopic energies.

The inevitable product of these "superhybrids," though, can only ever be pastiche, in Jameson's sense:

the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs. . .

Those blind eyeballs are unable to see unresolved questions or contradictions in the genres that are hybridized. What's more, they don't want to see them, don't want to have speak with a live tongue, because of the work and effort that goes into actually having and sustaining the necessary "ulterior motives," convictions, or beliefs. Nigel's answer to Theo's questioning of the purpose of the Ark of the Arts in a dying world--"I just don't think about it"--is the answer of the pastiche maker: there is nothing behind the mask of the art, no belief it can reference, so no viewers are even necessary. In this environment, the cleverest recombinations or resurrections of past genres wins. And those that are deemed cleverest are those whose chosen genres have been archived, or curated, for the present audience by the most prestigious curators/archivers (cf. Soul Jazz's Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound compilation, or the Ethiopiques series, or the granddaddy of the them all in some senses, Nuggets--and this is not to denigrate the music found on those compilations: most of the songs on Tropicalia are fantastic, and I own and enjoy several volumes from Ethiopiques).*** Who revives these genres becomes more important than why the particular genre is revived, or its resonance with the current cultural moment. Consequently, the wrong advocate, the wrong curator, can sink a genre's chance for successful revivification (in the sense of restoring to activity, but not to life or vigour--this is rarely revitalization).

For Reynolds, this "looks a lot like the way fashion operates. Or indeed how high finance operates. Where no value is immune from being abruptly and utterly devalued." The consequences, he notes, are rather dire:

the principles and practices of 'flux and mutability' have long ago shed their former subversive and utopian charge. Worse than that: they have become inverted, to the point where if anything they suggest the static and dystopian. Because in some fundamental and profoundly perturbing way, 'flux' and 'mutability' are actually isomorphic with the economy, characterized as it is by precariousness and the imposition of 'flexible' work patterns. 

This music works as an ideal soundtrack for the ascendance of non-places and non-time in the modern working world, or what Fisher calls "Itime, a distributed or unpunctuated temporality," which has been characterized by a "reflexive impotence in the face of a neoliberal ideological program which sought to subordinate all of culture to the imperatives of business." The reissue and compilation cycle work in tandem with the atemporal, omniverous musician: he or she creates a "superhybrid," and in explaining its roots in [insert various genres/locales/time periods here], sets in motion (if the musician is successful) the machine that gives us back those genres, locales, and time periods, like so many butterflies on a corkboard. New superhybrids arrive, along with their new butterflies to display, etc., etc. Isn't this just the music of the Last Man who lives at the mythical End of History? The man for whom everything is a museum piece?

It seems to me that, in some ways, the worst offender in this whole phenomenon has been krautrock and its champions. While Can, Neu!, Faust, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Popul Vuh, Amon Duul, Ash Ra Tempel et al. could be incredibly forward-thinking (they could also be stultifying in being totally of their moment), the idea in certain circles seems to have become that German music of the 1970s is the endpoint for experimental leanings and tendencies. How do we know that a band is getting more "serious" and making more "challenging" music? They play a rigid 4/4 beat and say the word "motorik" a lot in interviews. What are recycled analog synth washes and occasional bits of string or flute in the hands of such bands? Attempts at channeling the same "kosmische" music that poured out of Germany three and four decades ago. The annoyance I felt at the sort of reflexive praise automatically heaped on any band with even a whiff of krautrock coming off their music (and again, I'm not blind to my hypocrisy here: there's a footnote praising Stereolab in this very post!) came to a head for me following Portishead's album Third. I should note that I'm a huge fan of Third: it's a great record, and it might be the record I've listened to most over the past three years. Indeed, going by the metric Nick Southall suggested recently for determining a favourite album--"how often you've listened to a record through choice"--you'd have to call Third one of my favourite albums (interestingly, if I sat down to write a list, I'm fairly certain Third would struggle to make the top ten, and maybe even the top twenty).

Perhaps, then, it's just a matter of overexposure, but when Portishead debuted "Chase the Tear," with an accompanying video that could've been made at any time since the 1970s it looked like, I'd had enough. This was good music by most reasonable standards--it sounds good, it's got a catchy melody, it's well-played and produced, you can even dance to it if you want--but it's not "new" in any sense other than the song was written in 2009. It's not likely to lead to "new" music, either. "Chase the Tear" is pointed firmly backwards, but it exists now--it is the mask, the dead language, that characterizes pastiche. Nevertheless, a lot of the language in reviews of the track suggested that this is music that is going forward. And I just couldn't be excited by it. I still can't. This is the same band who largely abandoned the samples that made up its first album (or sampled instrumentals played by the members) by the time they got to album number two for fear of repeating themselves. Now, it's not hard to say that a lot of Portishead's aesthetic was always looking backward, but it was never felt to me as much of an open plagiarism of the past, a copy and paste job of dead genres and styles, as it does on "Chase the Tear" (even when they were literally copying and pasting bits of the past to make new music!).

The problem, in a nutshell:

What is different about music now is that open-minded, curious musicians are responding to and fusing with influences from all across music history and across the globe. This ought to provide them with a palette of infinite possibilities. And for those who are very creatively strong, who have a filter, having such a superfluity of launching pads and diving boards works out well.
But most artists aren't strong enough to withstand such an influx.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with musicians having a set of influences from the past (it would be hard to say that the Thundercat album I just gave a fairly positive review of doesn't have a few influences from the 1970s and 1980s, say), but there is something "wrong"--and I think Reynolds does a great job identifying just what that is--with the automatic assumption that omnivorous listening habits and infinitely extendable spheres of influence automatically lead to new music. The facts seem to be pointing to the conclusion that they don't, or at least that they don't often enough. What we're left with the rest of the time is pastiche, a poorly reproduced simulacrum of the past that won't leave us alone, and which denies even the possibility of nostalgia for that past or an investigation of the promised-futures trapped within it, the desires that capitalism (and neoliberalism in particular) "captur[ed] . . . [but] which it could not satisfy." To close with Fisher's words--a few sentences that underscore, I think, the continued importance in considering the hauntological, even if its internet vogue might be long gone--"A genuinely new Left must be shaped by those desires, and not lulled, once again, by the logics of failed revolts." If there's to be any kind of post-capitalist society, it seems to me, its art won't sound (and look) like it's ensconced in the accompanying lulling cultural logic, either.


*I should say that technology also seems to be an interesting factor here: not that technology has stopped expanding and developing w/r/t music and production, but wrestling with technology and its possibilities doesn't seem as public and exciting as it has in the past, probably because outside of autotune--which very people are actually "experimenting" with in any meaningful way, to say nothing of its age: it's hardly contemporary technology, given the speed of technological advancement these days--there is little public grappling with technology when it comes to music. The technology that dominated in the 1970s and 1980s, synthesizers (particularly analog ones), are not quaint retro touches, the domain of middle aged men able to drop ridiculous amounts of money on Moogs and ARPs and Oberheims, etc., etc. It is, as Adrian Utley from Portishead agreed in an interview a few years back, a hobby like owning a caravan (or a set of golf clubs). Circuit-bending and software that allows user-written programs might be the closest thing to this, but they hardly seem like public interactions of music and technology (was Radiohead's "Go to Sleep," featuring Greenwood's guitar solo passed through Cycling74's Max/MSP the most public example of this? That was back in 2003. . .).  But then again, is it really that different than his guitar solo on "Paranoid Android?" And that was running through even older technology. . .
**That post I've linked to on Fisher's blog, thanks to the series of abstracts it contains, is one of the easiest and best summaries of hauntology and capitalist realism available on the web. A great resource, there.
***I'm also not necessarily denigrating bands who do this: Stereolab are one of my favourite bands ever, and they essentially functioned as highly selective and successful curators for a large part of their career. Ditto Portishead (but I'll talk about them more in the body of this). And of course there is a difference between genealogical exploration of a genrescape (I love that term!) and an investigation of its constituent parts and simple curatorial presentation; two very different kinds of critical apparatus are involved in these acts.