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.

REVIEW: BELBURY POLY - THE BELBURY TALES

Belbury Poly - The Belbury Tales
Ghost Box, 2012

Between the new Burial EP, the new Caretaker album, and the new Belbury Poly album--to say nothing of the rumours of a new Boards of Canada album, cruelly squashed though they were--this has been something of a banner year for hauntology. Perhaps even more than Burial at this point, whose Kindred EP was so fascinating precisely because it seemed the first glimpse of where his sound might go beyond hauntology, the releases on the Ghost Box label (and possibly those of the Caretaker) are the last vestiges of hauntology as that style was being defined in the middle part of the last decade, a kind of "pure" hauntology. The Belbury Tales is an able realization of that style, perhaps even a peak that's come long after hauntology is no longer fashionable. Drawing their power in part from the fascination that is generated by the uncanny as a mode of cultural and political critique, Ghost Box releases develop little worlds that are in contact with ours but that nevertheless remain alien, strange, and a little frightening. Existing just beyond the boundaries of time and maps, these worlds are powerful triggers for memories, longings, and desires (often ones that have been forgotten, suppressed, or dismissed). The label offers this overview of its releases:

Ghost Box is a record label for a group of artists who find inspiration in folklore, vintage electronics, library music and haunted television soundtracks.

Indeed, much of the aesthetic ground explored by The Hauntological Society is at the very least implied by the Ghost Box family, if not outright referenced: the Penguin Classics, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, library music, sound effects from radio serials, children's television, mid-century science fiction, and British folklore, all can be found on Ghost Box releases.

For me, the hauntological dimension of the Ghost Box project (and Belbury Poly's latest release in particular) develops out of its very heimlich rather than unheimlich associations (as, properly befitting the uncanny, it should--Freud is very clear that etymologically [and, I think, psychologically] the progression must be from the homely to the unhomely, the familiar to the made-strange, the secret to the revealed). Specifically, The Belbury Tales (and Ghost Box releases more generally) have a particular sound that I associate with home and with childhood. Unlike the British listeners whose exposure to the BBC offers a certain kind of shared media framework for these songs, though, mine comes via the CBC and its show openings and interstitial music on the radio.

My mother turns on the radio (permanently set on CBC) first thing in the morning and only turns it off when it is time for bed (or, more commonly now, when she switches over to the television to watch the news). As It Happens--a news and interview show with occasional flights of whimsy and the bizarre (such as its love of puns)--comes on during dinnertime, and its theme music ("Curried Soul" by Moe Koffman) evokes memories of my home and childhood stronger than just about anything else. Even as a child, "Curried Soul" seemed slightly magical and out of time, a remnant of something that had been day-glo, but was now slightly dusty and faded. Until Google and YouTube became prominent features in my life, I didn't even know it was a piece of music separate from As It Happens. When I was young, I'd imagined a longer piece of music that I had no access to, a part of a world in which music like that existed popularly and was able to be heard and listened to (obviously this was already the case, but it wasn't in my house). In short, I wanted the song to give up its secrets and to make my world weird and psychedelic (though I was then unaware of that term or its freight).

I don't claim to be an expert on anything when it comes to children--not their biology, not their thoughts, not their media--but isn't this somehow a typically uncanny act that children perform constantly? Demanding the secret to be revealed, demanding the hidden to be brought to light, demanding the strange and the new as a supplement (and at times a replacement) to the familiar? Isn't a certain romanticism--the power of childlike innocence and wonder, the new, clear sight of the child--an attempt at a kind of positive working out of the uncanny? Thus, the absolute horror of the scene in Children of Men in which Miriam tells Theo while they stand in an abandoned school that "As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices," when the uncanny can no longer be worked out. A few years ago, I was visiting my brother, his wife, and their daughter. As the grown-ups talked, my brother turned on the television to allow his daughter to watch her favourite show. It is, I'm told, quite a popular children's show these days. I found it at once terrifying and exhilarating, though. For me, it resembled nothing so much as a bad trip, an unconscious let wild and free, running roughshod over mundane reality. It was the same kind of energy that I searched for as a child. It was why I loved dinosaurs and science fiction so much and checked out the same books at the library over and over again. It's why I forced myself to try and watch In Search Of... even though (more likely because) it gave me nightmares. It's why the opening credits of The X-Files were at once so repellent and fascinating. All of these things were scary, but they hinted at other worlds within this one, secret worlds that you could have access to even in the daylight.

This is growing unwieldy and slipping outside the bounds of a record review at this point, but it helps explain why I find Belbury Poly's The Belbury Tales the most satisfying Ghost Box release of the ones I've heard. It integrates itself seamlessly into the world defined by In Search Of... and "Curried Soul" and strange science fiction paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s and library books on ghosts, monsters, and unexplained occurrences to assemble a kind of alternative culture and place. I anticipate finding advertisements for comics and novels set in this world in the pages at the back of the used science fiction books I read (or old copies of Semiotext(e) I occasionally find). I expect to come across these songs on YouTube when clicking through episodes of In Search Of... or watching The Stone Tape or Threads (the latter two of which I've learned about because of Ghost Box and hauntology), one more example of strange cultural offshoots that no longer seem quite of this world.

Consider, for example, the description of Belbury Poly's project from the Ghost Box website, which is not only to insert Belbury Poly's music within these media, but also within the world described by these media, a world that never existed outside the page, the screen, and the speaker:

The music of Belbury Poly is, by turns joyous and naive and at other times shot through with terror or supernatural wonder. Parallel world TV soundtracks and nostalgia for an imaginary past.

Of course this is a project fraught with nostalgia, but an ironic nostalgia for that which never had a chance to exist but which might yet be brought into existence.* As Adam Harper points out, the crucial feature of hauntological art is its dual nature, that ironic nostalgia that critiques the present by positing it as the future of the imaginary past, a position in which the present is seen to inevitably fail in comparison to the future promised by that past. In this way, hauntological art is able to elucidate both the limits of our current thought--What can't we think beyond when it comes to the future? How has our future drawn in ever closer and, in turn, become ever more narrow? What changes do we no longer recognize as possible? Why do we hold them to be impossible?--and to recapture the utopian thrust of a different time, one that was before those limits and therefore freely posits a future (our could-have-been-present) without those limits. While this project has been criticized as being regressive, an exercise in simple nostalgia (or ostalgia) dressed up in PoMo clothes, its emphasis on reclamation and re-imagination serves a practical function. As Fredric Jameson notes in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, "the more surely a given Utopia asserts its radical difference from what currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely unrealizable but, what is worse, unimaginable" (xv) When such Utopias become unimaginable they fail at what Jameson calls "the most reliable political test" of a Utopian text, "its capacity to generate new [works], Utopian visions that include those of the past and modify or correct them" (xv). What does the theme song for As It Happens or The Belbury Tales say to me politically, in and of itself? Not a whole lot. As part of a constellation of cultural artifacts, though, they both serve as a foundation for utopian imaginings.

This is far too much context for a review and it will inevitably overshadow what I have to say about the music. Nevertheless, I turn to that now, starting with the record's highpoints: "Now Then" with its lysergically charged flute and analog squelches and "The Geography," which hovers just beyond the decipherable. These two tracks, to my mind, establish the basic types of songs on the album. There is the rough instrumental vs. vocal breakdown that they imply, but there is also a sense of the twin poles of Belbury Poly's project in this division. The former brings to mind the sounds of my childhood, while the latter suggests just how the strange the world behind that sound truly is. "The Geography" and the other vocal tracks--"Cantalus," "Green Grass Grows," "My Hands," "Unforgotten Town," and "Earth Lights" (though the latter is vocodored beyond all recognition)--supply the haunting, out of time residents of this world, their missives often brief and of Delphic inscrutability ("You are printed on the palms of my hands," "It's just what I didn't want!") but suggestive of something not quite right. On "Green Grass Grows" the child's voice is eerily bright, the sound of play in some unseen garden that has a hint of unease in its lyrics of compulsion, a sense of slight menace (possibly sexual) from the forces that can command the child to act this way. Certainly this balance between menace and ecstasy is key to the appeal of "My Hands," part drug trip, part cult ritual, part new age transcendence, and all the more affecting for never allowing one of those elements to overwhelm the others. As I keep saying, the world of Belbury Poly is strange, but its strangeness is neither rationalized nor forced into the realm of the supernatural. It's kept activated as a force through its indeterminacy, its deferral of explanation. To be sure, in the Belbury mythos, things are haunted, but what does that actually mean? The record keeps that tantalizingly unclear.

The real stars of the album, though, are the instrumental tracks. I've singled out "Now Then" for special praise (it is the track that inspired my "Curried Soul" remembrances), but there is plenty here to chew on. "A Pilgrim's Path" rides gently insistent piano to some beautifully technicolour synth work, while both "Chapel Perilous" (a Monty Python reference?) and "Goat Foot" take the funkiness of "Cantalus" and amp it up to hard-charging levels. "Goat Foot" in particular, with its vague whiffs of exoticism alongside some heavily flanged metallic textures, is a joy on headphones. "Unheimlich," ironically, is perhaps the only real miss here, a too obvious evocation of "uneasy" sounds, it reminds me of video game menu music (not necessarily a bad thing) and, in light of how masterfully the whole album works together to evoke the uncanny, doesn't seem to earn its name. The true third highlight of the album, though, after "Now Then" and "The Geography", is "Summer Round" which feels at once wholly recognizable and stubbornly tip-of-the-tongueish beyond recognition. I imagine pagan ceremonies during the dying light of the solstice when I listen to it, but it could just as easily soundtrack the opening of a news program in 1970 or a weekly show based around time travel. As an example of Jim Jupp's compositional prowess and his ear for period synth tones, it is pretty much peerless.

Those period synth tones are an interesting aspect of Jupp's work as Belbury Poly and of the Ghost Box label as a whole. In his review of the album for Tiny Mix Tapes, James Parker made an intriguing observation:

I think it's also worth pointing out that a record like The Belbury Tales works whether or not you were born between 1965 and 1975. . . . I came to the Radiophonic workshop and library music actually through Ghost Box, rather than the other way around. And I grew up in a Britain that was always already suburbanized and gridlocked with traffic.

The real genius of this record, and of Ghost Box's output more generally, is that it works even if you don't "get" the references in anything like a conscious sense, even if they don't make you feel "nostalgic" per se. Because the reference points Ghost Box is playing with are hardwired deeper than that, part of a more complex network of cultural memorization. And I can't help but think, therefore, that one of the reasons I love Ghost Box so much is precisely the fact that I don't really "get it," that I never could, that I never can quite tell the difference between the old and the new, but that these strange, hallucinatory feelings arise unbidden anyway, the result of some mysterious collective nerve being touched.

I agree with Parker. As someone who was born in Canada in 1986 (to parents who left England in 1976), Ghost Box is not mining a culture I grew up with. Oh, my father introduced me to Dr. Who when black and white reruns came on from time to time, and since then I've watched Nigel Kneale shows and episodes of Out of the Unknown on YouTube, but this has always been in retrospect; it has never been my culture that Ghost Box is mining. My pathway to Ghost Box is through bands like Stereolab and the cultural signifiers mentioned above, not from first hand knowledge of the label's typical sources.

What's more, the powerfully rural aspect of Ghost Box and Belbury Poly is something that I--as a pretty much lifelong resident of the suburbs--don't quite understand. The horror of the countryside, yes--in my one experience staying in a house in the Welsh countryside as a young child, I thought I saw a ghost and wet my pants in terror; not one of my finest moments--but not what the life that is being remembered and mourned in this music was like. In this sense, while I don't doubt that a grounding in the music and culture that makes up Rob Young's notion of Electric Eden and an attachment to the idea of Albion might strengthen appreciation for what Ghost Box releases do, it's the inability to know the new and the old, as Parker points out, that makes Ghost Box so enticing for those of without access to (or at least ignorant of) that culture. I don't imagine a future--except a dystopian one--that involves some return to the land in agrarian communes or that involves life in quaint little villages in the countryside (which seems a little too much like The Village); the future for me is urban (when it's not in cyberspace). As fuel for hopefully utopian dreams, though, The Belbury Tales pinpoints moments that connect and resonate with (and even haunt) me. The album's forty five minutes are weird and strange in the best possible way. It's not an everyday listen, to be sure, but when you need to escape to that parallel world, there's little else as beguiling as what's on offer here.



*Strange typo that initially ended that first clause: "never had a chance to resist." But it does resist. Isn't that the point? Hauntology suggests the possibility of and depicts the places that can exist in a society with what Mark Fisher calls a "Marxist Supernanny," a government that recognizes that:

the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk. The Marxist Supernanny would not only by the one who laid down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it. (76)

FRAGMENTS ON MEMORY

"We live in a world riddled with ghosts. Every exchange stripped of tactility is an instance of a spectral encounter. 
Ghosts are neither here nor there. And neither are we."

-Lisa Gye, Half Lives

---

"The challenge for the next generation: to be more interesting to talk to than a phone is to browse."

"The end logic of our relationship to computers: asking google, 'what shall I do with my life?'"

-Alain de Botton

---

"'There is no air in me,' the ship said. 'Nothing for you to eat. No one to talk to, since everyone else is under.'

Kemmings said, 'I can talk to you. We can play chess.'

'Not for ten years. Listen to me . . . I will feed you your own buried memories, emphasizing the pleasant ones. You possess two hundred and six years of memories and most of them have sunk down into your unconscious. This is a splendid source of sensory data for you to receive. . . . Relax and trust me. I will see that you are provided with a world.'"

-Philip K. Dick, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon"

"The only thing worse than bad memories

is no memories at all"

-The Dismemberment Plan, "Spider in the Snow"

---

"We attach ourselves to pop iconography as a way of saying, 'This is who I am.' . . . I can't help thinking that technology has shifted things, intensifying the process by allowing us to re-purpose richer media. Not to mention making the whole process so much easier. . . . You can actually become a broadcaster of the media, rather than just commenting on it, and you can do it all with just a couple of clicks of a mouse. The person posting can say, 'This is me' with a click or two, and the media itself becomes part of the person's identity, not just the association with it."

-Mark Richardson, "Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures: Dirty Beaches, David Lynch, Lana Del Rey and the Tumblr-ization of Indie"

"We never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read."

-Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

---

In some ways, the above quotes frame a certain existential question that I've been grappling with lately but can't quite put into words. Part of it has to do with digital selves, archives, social networking, and the seemingly foolish (but actually quite profound, I think) question that keeps popping up on sites like Yahoo! Answers every so often about Facebook/MySpace profiles and death. Giovanni Tiso's elegant post on the way blogs end gets at some of what concerns me here. I've tried to write on this before, too, though I'm not sure that says even half of what I'm thinking about now. The other part has to do with a kind of general anxiety about the future, about (human) memory, about how we know ourselves.

Over the past few days, I've heard and read a few things that have given me pause. I can't resolve any of this right now, so here are some scraps of what I've been thinking about before bed, on the bus going to and from school, etc.

#1

Graduate students are not part of the institutional memory. You leave and go other places and are forgotten about.

I'd like to say that I disagree with this statement, but I honestly don't know if I can. I'm not convinced that institutional memories are any less fragile than human ones. How many times has an advanced PhD student walked into the office and everyone waits for him or her to leave before asking "Who was that?!" Finishing course work seems a lot like becoming a ghost: you haunt the same hallways, but you're only visible at certain times, a partially reconstituted memory, a window into the past. The people who knew you and might invoke your name rapidly move out of course work themselves. Eventually, you stop haunting those hallways. You leave and go somewhere else. No one speaks of you--or if they do, they speak of you (and your connection to this place) only in the past tense. What happens when a ghost stops frequenting its haunt, stops haunting? Is anything left? Who remembers a ghost when it's gone? How does a ghost exist without a haunt?

Graduate students carry part of the very institutional memory that they are not a part of--I remember who sat in my cubicle last year and who is there no longer, for example--but it's never complete, and it's party to all the distortions, omissions, and erasures that plague any other memory. I never thought I'd forget the names and faces of the students in the first class I ever taught. I tried to remember them the other day, though, and I couldn't be sure that what I remember about them is true, or if it's just what I've told myself I remember about them.

#2

There is this loss in you that just is what it is. You leave, or you stay, and you watch everyone else leave. You can make a good life for yourself somewhere else, but maybe you never shake the feeling that you lost your home.

This next one is from the absolutely heartbreaking comic that Kate Beaton posted to her website about a death in her hometown. She took the comic down because there were some concerns that people might think she was making fun of the situation (though if you read it, you would never think that). I hope it goes back up soon. Here's all that she's left up:

Kate Beaton: http://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/17228188734/a-recent-death-for-my-home-town-it-made-an 

A little while ago, I was planning on writing a post about albums that grow with you--ones that you pick up early on and that shape your conception of life and how it works. The albums that you revisit year after year because they help you to reorient yourself, to try and make sense of life. I was going to talk about The Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I, an album that, like a lot of things I love, is dominated by this idea of memory: memory machines that save our hearts from labour, old friends whose names you can't remember, the people we consider our personal heroes and heroines even if we never see them again. "The City," my favourite song on the album, gets at the same sort of thing that Beaton does in the passage I quoted:

So I'm not unsympathetic;

I see why you left:

there's no one to know

and nothing to do.

The city's been dead

since you've been gone

A little later, Travis Morrison delivers the kicker: "All I ever say now is goodbye."

Is this what life requires of us now? Is Eva Hoffman right: are we all nomads now? With global capital making life outside of its demands virtually impossible, "home" seems to be a luxury that few can afford. For years I've told people who ask me about my plans--"Where do you want to live/end up/settle down/etc?"--that I'll go wherever I can find work. Something about that seems less than satisfactory these days, and those lines from Beaton's comic seem to capture my feelings.

I've crossed the border a fair number of times over the past six or seven years. Whenever I do, I wonder if some bond is being damaged somehow, stretched and pulled taut, then allowed to snap back, only to be restretched a few weeks later. While I was at my parents' house over Christmas, I woke up one morning and couldn't figure out where I was. It's been my home since I was eleven. It has, to borrow from Bachelard, sheltered me as a dreamer and my dreams. I didn't recognize it in that first moment when I woke up.

When I left, my mother mentioned that it might have been the last Christmas they are living in that house--it's getting too big for them as they get older. Where would home be then?

#3

[There is] [s]omething very interesting about this to me, the point where human memory becomes replaced by media. As of last week, she was the last person on earth who could tell you a story about serving in WWI based on her own experience. And now there are none. We have books and photos and websites but the imperfect human memory is no more.

From Mark Richardson, on the death of the last WWI veteran, Florence Green, at the age of 110.

I wonder how many people already assume, in their day to day lives, that media has replaced human memory. This isn't a new phenomenon, obviously. Commonplace books, journals, diaries, memoirs, recordings, home movies, all of these have proved supplements (or replacements) for memory. What's different now, of course, is that a machine selects those unforgettable moments for us--just like a machine tells me which emails in my inbox are important--collates them for us, and presents them for us. We've made a memory machine, just like the Dismemberment Plan said we would.

A few years ago, one of the more interesting Facebook applications (at least in my opinion) was a summary of the user's past year via a collection of the status updates he or she had posted over the previous twelve months. This was the kind of even-better-than-memory aspect that Facebook took to new levels with the new Timeline layout: a digital collection of you that presents itself as being literally unforgettable.

What's unforgettable in my life right now? What do I assume to be unforgettable (like that first class of students)? I don't have a single photograph of my home, my apartment, or my office. I don't have any photographs of the last apartment I lived in, or any of the apartments before that. I don't have a photograph of Oregon, even though I lived there for two years, but I do have some photos of California, where I went on holiday for three days with some friends (though none of the sites of my two most vivid memories from that trip). I don't have any photographs of my office in Oregon, nor the building it was in, nor any of the classes I taught in. Can I even say that I remember these places these days?

FREDRIC JAMESON AND FUTURAMA: A NOTE ON SOME XMAS PRESENTS

Happy 2012 to all readers! I hope the new year finds you well.

The Weeknd have been remixed by Slim K, their albums offered now in chopped & screwed form. Do I really need complete remixes of three albums I already love? Yes, yes I do. I'll probably write something up about these remixes at some point over the next few days, so if you're interested in (even more of) my thoughts on the Weeknd, stay tuned.

The most exciting thing to happen so far in 2012: my Xmas present to myself--a reward for a semester of hard work--arrived today.

I can't wait to start reading this. I picked it up in a bookstore a few years ago and read the chapter on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (a totally underrated series of novels, especially the first book, Red Mars, which is an absolute classic--maybe they're not actually underrated, but I've never come across anyone talking about them). I didn't have the cash at the time (and buying a book like this in the bookstores around where I'm from is a rapid road to penury), so I'm glad to have finally tracked down a copy for a reasonable price. Jameson's writing on science fiction, which I encountered when I first started grad school and was exposed to theory as something other than a useless mass of pretentiousness to be avoided at all costs (not to say that none of it is that), was a pleasant surprise. That someone with a big name was writing about science fiction was particularly important to me because I'd been given the impression in undergrad that to do English Studies and to be at all serious (and taken seriously) one must avoid things like science fiction. Given that science fiction was a) just about the only thing I read from the age of about 7/8-18 and b) what got me interested in reading and talking about books, this was quite a blow. Since those dark times, though, I've come to (re)embrace my love of the things I wasn't supposed to talk and write about (like science fiction, music, cartoons, etc.). Huzzah!

This actually pairs quite well with a present from my parents:

I'd seen most of this season, but there were a couple of episodes I'd missed. Having a chance to sit down and watch them all in order, I think they made a slightly more favourable impression on me than they did on television. The season as a whole doesn't match the heights of the four movies between Season 4 and Season 5, but it also manages to avoid the lows of those movies. Overall, I'd say the quality is somewhere around the second half of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. Considering that the second half of Season 2 is what I would consider the beginning of the Golden Era of the show, that's not too bad, and the animation has never looked so good. There were a few moments of absolute brilliance--"Lethal Inspection" provided an all too rare poignant moment for both Bender and Hermes, the middle act of "A Clockwork Origin" redeems an otherwise irritatingly didactic episode, and "The Prisoner of Benda" is nearly as much fun as "The Farnsworth Parabox" and its Professor-Zoidberg/Fry-Leela subplot provided one of the season's genuine belly laughs. 

I missed a lot of the sixth season and need to catch up with the DVDs at some point, but I do think that the show is moving in a positive direction, even if it will never quite recapture the dizzying heights of Season 3 and Season 4, when nothing seemed out of reach of the show--the Fry and Leela dynamic has obviously shifted, and they can't quite recapture the sweetness that it added to episodes like "Time Keeps on Slipping," "The Why of Fry," and "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings." Some of the most distinctive writing voices are missing and their absence is felt, but when the show gets out of the way of itself and lets the characters provide the humour and pathos without the zaniness and gags, it can still shine. Speaking of shining, the packaging for the DVD is absolutely gorgeous.

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.

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.

HARRY POTTER MANIA IN TORONTO

Last night was the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and the CBC reported that fans had been lining up outside the theatre since 5:30 AM. Interviews conducted with various fans of the series were played throughout the day yesterday, and a number of people called in to share their tales of fandom.

I'm not a fan of the series myself--I've never read any of the books, and I fell asleep watching one of the movies--but I do think it's an interesting cultural phenomenon. For example, I find it fascinating that fans dressing up as their favourite characters, or their own characters they've created (!!), is regarded as a normal expression of their love of the series, whereas fans of other series like Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings are stigmatized for the same activity. Ultimately, I wonder if this has something to do with the function that the Harry Potter narrative serves in the symbolic life of our society. Is there something more acceptable about overt (some might say excessive) Potter-love because of a certain desire the series caters to? When I think about Harry Potter I'm drawn back to Jameson's concept of the function of narrative and its larger social purpose:

ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions. (PU 79)

What is the ideology being expressed by Harry Potter? What real contradiction is resolved in its narrative? Perhaps more importantly, what ideology is being expressed by the series' fans' appropriation of the narrative? What real contradiction are they using the narrative to resolve? To what extent are they rewriting the narrative to cover new contradictions?

I am also intrigued by the obsession with celebrity and the actors who play the main characters in the Harry Potter movies (see also the frenzy surrounding the recent royal visit to Canada). If the novels serve to resolve certain real social contradictions, the movies must do likewise (though not necessarily the same contradictions as the novels, I would imagine), as must the actors themselves. What contradiction(s) do the actors resolve for the fans, especially for the ones camping out in the pre-dawn hours to catch a glimpse of the actors at the premiere? What desires do they fulfill? The obsession certainly seems to have something of Freud's family romance in it:

Small events in the child's life may induce in him a mood of dissatisfaction and so provide him with an occasion to start criticizing his parents and to support this critical attitude with the recently acquired knowledge that other parents are in some respects to be preferred to them. . . . At about this time, then, the child's imagination is occupied with the task of ridding himself of his parents, of whom he now has a low opinion, and replacing by others, usually of superior social standing. In this connection he makes use of the chance concurrence of these aims with actual experiences, such as an acquaintanceship with the lord of the manor or some landowner in the country, or with some aristocrat in the city. Such fortuitous experiences arouse the child's envy, which then finds expression in a fantasy that replaces both parents by others who are grander. The technique used in developing such fantasies, which at this period are of course conscious, depends on the child's ingenuity and the material he has at his disposal. It is also a question of how much or how little effort has gone into making the fantasies seems probable. . . . For if one takes a close look at the commonest of these romances--the replacement of both parents or just the father by grander personages--one discovers that these new, distinguished parents are provided with features that derive from the child's actual memories of his real, more humble parents: the child does not really eliminate his father, but exalts him. Indeed, the whole effort to replace the real father by another who is more distinguished is merely an expression of the child's longing for the happy times gone by, when his father seemed to him the strongest and most distinguished of men, and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He turns away from the man he now knows as his father to the one he believed in as a child. The fantasy is actually only an expression of regret for the happy times that have vanished. ("Family Romances" 37, 38-39, 40; my emphasis)

Coupled with this, does Harry Potter serve as some kind of distorted mirror stage for its readers: the recognition of an ego separate from the reader's actual self in society, the acknowledgement (and encouragement) of an inner life in which the reader is heroic, special, unique, magical? Is the popularity of Harry Potter a response to life in late capitalism? A symptom related to the quarter-life crisis? An attempt to live in a society in which each person is encouraged to believe that he or she is special and unique, with talents that deserve recognition and praise, and consequently no one is special and unique? That is, can the reader of Harry Potter assert--via the fantasies that the text allows him/her to have--"no, I am special. The qualities that make me special are just hidden. If only I could go to a world more like Hogwarts rather than [x], then I could show everyone my hidden, inner self"?

In asking these questions I don't mean to suggest that Harry Potter is bad or that it's not literature. I couldn't honestly make any such judgement, given that I haven't read the series myself. If Harry Potter has made readers out of non-readers, as the most commonly offered claim for its greatness goes, then I say "great." I wonder, though, if the series has made readers or readers-of-Harry-Potter. That is, how many people who are enamoured of the series go on to read other books regularly? I know plenty of people who love Harry Potter who can't name another book they've read. I know dozens of people who were already quite avid readers who love Harry Potter. I personally don't know anyone who would say that they didn't read for pleasure before Harry Potter but do so now that they've finished the series. I think the truth, as is so often the case, is a little more convoluted than Potter devotees would like to admit. Also, I have no answers to these questions, but I would be interested to hear what others think about this. Perhaps everyone who talks about Harry Potter got over these questions years ago and I'm behind the times. Based on the interviews on CBC yesterday, though, I rather suspect I'm not.

QUILTING POINTS, IDEOLOGEMES, AND CRITICAL HISTORIES

I will preface this post, like last time, by saying that I've done no research on this topic, so what follows might very well be cliched and passé (or just flat out wrong). I will further preface this post by saying that if you don't like boring questions about theory, feel free to skip on over this.

I've been thinking about Fredric Jameson (I'm not going to lie, I think about him a lot. His ideas fascinate me and I envy him his writing style, even as writing or talking about him terrifies me) and his concept of the “ideologeme” (introduced in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act) in relation to Lacan's idea of the “point de capiton” (quilting point). I should say at the outset that I'm no expert on Lacan (I'm not even a novice on Lacan) and I'm drawing what I know about the quilting point from Žižek. If I've read my Žižek correctly, he seems to suggest that the quilting point (or maybe here “anchoring point,” the other translation of Lacan's term, is more appropriate) fixes the subject in a symbolic field against which the subject can be delimited, given shape, known (at least in some way). His example, at least in Violence, is anti-Semitic discourse and the image of the “Jew.” For anti-Semites, the “Jew” is a symbol, an image projected onto the “real” Jew. This symbol contains all the irrational fears, hatreds, and associations that make up the anti-Semite's conception of “Jew” as a subject. In order to create, maintain, and justify the anti-Semitism (or perhaps the anti-Semite's worldview, or the anti-Semite's conception of the “Jew” as subject or “Jew” as Other), the Jew must be affixed to this symbolic field (that matrix of hatred, fear, and associations) via the quilting point of the “Jew.”

Now, it seems to me that we can read this quilting point (the symbolic “Jew” is Žižek's example) as a kind of narrative. A small narrative, but one that fulfils a particular (and extremely important) function ideologically: it is by way of this quilting point, this narrative of the “Jew,” that the anti-Semite reconciles the fact that the flesh-and-blood Jew he or she experiences is in fact not the “Jew” that he or she hates and fears, by affixing the Other in the symbolic field that creates and sustains the hatred by dictating how he or she experiences the Jew. Or, as Žižek puts it in Violence:

What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking, what they react to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but the image/figure of the “Jew” which circulates and has been constructed in their tradition. The catch, of course, is that one single individual cannot distinguish in any simple way between real Jews and their anti-Semitic image: this image overdetermines the way I experience real Jews themselves, and furthermore it affects the way Jews experience themselves. What makes a real Jew that an anti-Semite encounters on the street “intolerable,” what the anti-Semite tries to destroy when he attacks the Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension. (66-67)

This narrative function (if I'm correct that we can see the quilting point—via the example above—as a kind of narrative) is remarkably similar to the function Jameson assigns to an ideologeme. For Jameson, an ideologeme:

is an amphibious formation, whose essential structural characteristic may be described as its possibility to manifest itself as either a pseudoidea—a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or prejudice—or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the 'collective characters' which are the class in opposition. (87)

He goes on to say that the ideologeme serves to explain or narrate away social and historical (which he terms objective) contradictions that emerge from ideological conceptions; the ideologeme is a “symbolic resolution” and an “imaginary resolution” to these contradictions (much as the “Jew” is for the anti-Semite the resolution to the conflict raised by the flesh-and-blood Jew). The ideologeme provides ideological closure that would otherwise be denied by the objective contradictions raised; it fills in a gap that the contradictions have exposed. The similarity to the quilting points function in relation to a symbolic field appears obvious (of course, this similarity rests on my having correctly understood the concept of a quilting point. I might not would not wager money on this being correct).

Now why does any of this matter? (Short answer: it doesn't). I think I might be a structuralist at heart more than I'm anything else (theoretically, at least). Hayden White makes a lot of sense to me, and his concept of metahistory (and I do love all things meta. Is it because I was born in a period that would not allow me to be anything other than a child of postmodernism?) seems particularly useful and valuable when considering the critical history of literary texts. Ditto with Jameson and his dictum to “Always historicize!,” or his ideas that:

we apprehend [texts] through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. (9)*

and that:

our object of study is less the text itself than the interpretations through which we attempt to confront and to appropriate it. Interpretation is here construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code. (9-10)**

Without this kind of metahistory or metacommentary (Jameson's term for the method of literary analysis outlined above), it seems to me like critical histories can become factories of ideologemes, producers of quilting points, forever fixing texts as narratives that shore up gaps in ideological conceptions or visible entryways into symbolic fields. That is, my critical reading of a text makes it perform a particular ideological role or function because I know that that ideology already exists and the text must therefore (through a kind of Althusserian interpellation, it seems like) always-already be a part of that ideology.

For example, if I'm a post-structuralist critic, I must read a text as embodying elements of post-structuralism (not only because I'm likely to choose texts that embody those elements given that those are texts I would enjoy reading) because post-structuralism is how I understand the world, and the text, as part of that world, must therefore enact post-structuralism. The text must become a narrative that smooths over/explains away/fills in any contradictions/gaps that emerge from the interaction between the content of the text and my worldview. The text must be the quilting point that serves as the visible aspect of the symbolic field. In short, the text itself is overdetermined (always-already read, as Jameson says). In such an environment, moving the critical discussion further and introducing new ideas seems difficult (at the risk of understatement). Jameson's method of ideological analysis and critique—the process that starts with the identifying and naming of ideologemes—in order to uncover the political unconscious of a text seems especially relevant in this context. By performing this critique on the critical histories of texts, the criticism of the text can move beyond ideology (even if it is only to a different ideology). At the very least, perhaps new, fresh ideas in a critical discussion can thereby emerge.

* Hello, Stanley Fish and “interpretive communities!”

** Again, hello Mr. Fish, I didn't see you come in.