Sunday, February 05, 2012
A Dirty Dozen Sneaking up on the Apocalypse
I just watched The Dirty Dozen, a 1967 war film with an ensemble cast headlined by Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, and Telly Savalas. The premise is simple, if a bit implausible: Marvin is hard-as-nails Major with guts and an attitude who’s tasked with leading a team on a Very Important Mission, one that’s also risky and likely to kill most of the team. His team consists of men convicted of capital offenses and sentenced either to long prison terms or to die. The mission is to destroy a chateau that serves as a rest and conference center for high-level German officers.
Most of this two-and-a-half hour film is devoted to training and a dry run at some war games. The actual mission only takes the last 45 minutes of the film. Of course the mission is a success, and most of the men die. There’s a fairly well-known scene in which Jim Brown, recently retired from a spectacular football career, does some broken field running while stuffing hand grenades down ventilation shafts for a large underground bunker, which was filled with German officers and their women, mostly prostitutes and mistresses I’d guess. As Marvin and his team had already poured gasoline down those shafts we assume that the officers and women were incinerated, though we don’t see and fire in the bunker.
That implied immolation scene was mentioned in one of the DVD extras, perhaps the voice-over commentary, perhaps Ernest Borgnine’s intro, I forget which, as possibly costing the director, Robert Aldrich, an Oscar; otherwise the film was nominated in four categories (supporting actor, editing, sound, and sound effects) and it won for sound effects. It was the top money-maker of 1967. All things considered, it was a BIG DEAL.
Now, between what I saw in the film itself, and what I heard in the voice-over commentary, this was a very mid-60s film, though it was set at the end of World War II. What made it a 60s film was that it had an almost anti-authoritarian streak, something that nodded in the direction of the unrest that was brewing in the 60s. Though a major, Marvin had a record as being unorthodox and something of a discipline problem. His superiors could have been those guys in the trailer in Apocalypse Now who tasked Martin Sheen with assassinating Marvin Brando; the high command was, in general, treated like those four star clowns Sheen talked about in his voice-overs. If you take the Marvin character and tweak him one way you get Robert Duval as Kilgore; tweak him another way and you get Sheen as Willard; tweak him yet another way and crank it up to eleven and you get Brando as Kurtz.
That is to say, with the deceptive clarity of hindsight, one can see the seeds of Apocalypse Now in The Dirty Dozen (and no doubt in other films as well). It doesn’t have either the moral or aesthetic weight of Apocalypse Now, but there is nonetheless some kinship. We’re a long way from a film where the central plot-driving objective is for one of the ostensible Guys on Our Side, Willard, is tasked with assassinating another of the Guys on Our Side. But, the major action IS on Our Side, the process through which a bunch of convicted criminals is transformed into a team.
Where this is leading is to an analysis of the themes and motifs of war movies, which is certainly beyond a blog post, but it’s also well beyond my knowledge of the genre.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
ADD: Drugs Don’t Work Long Term
L. Alan Sroufe has an oped in today’s NYTimes on the use of drugs to treat ADD (attention Deficient Disorder) in children: Ritalin Gone Wrong.
Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.
Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs.
He suggests that experience may be the cause:
Policy makers are so convinced that children with attention deficits have an organic disease that they have all but called off the search for a comprehensive understanding of the condition. The National Institute of Mental Health finances research aimed largely at physiological and brain components of A.D.D. While there is some research on other treatment approaches, very little is studied regarding the role of experience. Scientists, aware of this orientation, tend to submit only grants aimed at elucidating the biochemistry.
Thus, only one question is asked: are there aspects of brain functioning associated with childhood attention problems? The answer is always yes. Overlooked is the very real possibility that both the brain anomalies and the A.D.D. result from experience.
Here’s some informal notes I did some years ago on the experience angle: Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD: A Theoretical Perspective:
Russell A. Barkley has argued that ADHD is fundamentally a disorientation in time. These notes explore the possibility that music, which requires and supports finely tuned temporal cognition, might play a role in ameliorating ADHD. The discussion ranges across cultural issues (grasshopper vs. ant, lower rate of diagnosis of ADHD among African-Americans), play, distribution of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, neural development, and genes in culture (studies of the distribution of alleles for dopamine receptors). Unfortunately, the literature on ADHD does not allow us to draw strong conclusions. We do not understand what causes ADHD nor do we understand how best to treat the condition. However, in view of the fact that ADHD does involve problems with temporal cognition, and that music does train one’s sense of timing, the use of music therapy as a way of ameliorating ADHD should be investigated. I also advocate conducting epidemiological studies about the relationship between dancing and music in childhood, especially in early childhood, and the incidence of ADHD.
Friday, January 27, 2012
More Fishy Business
Mark Liberman has a run at Stanley Fish‘s recent fusillade against digital humanties, which turns on a pair of plosives in a paragraph in Milton’s Aeropagetica. Fish makes a big deal of Milton’s p’s and b’s while Liberman does a statistical analysis of their occurence in the text and concludes that Fish’s argument is much ado about nothing.
Which translates rather easily into much ado about Stanley Fish, opportunist extraordinaire. In the spirit of my own brief post from a couples days ago, I made the following comment to Liberman’s piece:
It’s difficult to know just how seriously to take this little performance, but it’s worth setting it in the larger context of Fish’s career as a theorist of methodology. Back in the dark and benighted times of the 1970s he wrote some take-downs of linguistic and statistical methods in stylistics which were included in his very influential 1980 collection, Is There A Text in This Class? Elsewhere in that collection he argued his version of the notion that the meanings critics find in texts are the meanings that they themselves put there (as authorised by their local ‘interpretive community’). It was his ability to argue that point that put him on the map as a BIG THEORIST.
That, of course, is rather different from the position he’s now claiming in this piece, namely that the meaning is put there by the author and that it’s the critic’s job to find it through arguments that can be right, a good thing, or wrong, not so good. THAT was the mainstream position at mid-20th century; that was the position Fish and others were then deposing.
So perhaps he’s changed his mind. Though I note that only a few years ago he was arguing that what critics, such as himself, do is pretty much play around with texts in a way that is unfettered by utility in any way, shape, or form. And that’s the glory of it all.
And that DOES seem to be what Fish was doing in his plosives palaver in this piece, playing around.
I note that in one of his excursions in the current piece, Fish argues against one Stephen Ramsay, who “doesn’t want to narrow interpretive possibilities, he wants to multiply them.” That is, Ramsey seems to view digital explorations of texts as a means of playing around even more, a comfortable demodernist postconstructive recouperation of post-industrial capitalist technology. So, if Fish is going to position himself against THAT, well, what better position to assume than arguing for truth, justice, and the old intentionalst way?
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Fish Argues Against Interpretation Via Digital Humanities
He’s at it again. Fish has another post contra-digital humanities, this time centering on interpretation. Not surprisingly, he’s opposed, which is consistent with remarks he made about stylistics, including computational stylistics, in one or two of the essays in Is There A Text in This Class? What IS surprising, given the arguments in that—arguably ancient—book, is his final paragraph:
But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.
When did he revert to the beliefs he so strenuously argued against in that text, the beliefs that made him a Major Theorist?
But, of course, he’s allowed to change his beliefs. We all are. For that matter, some of the positions he’s arguing against aren’t terribly attractive to me, at least as he presents them. But that’s neither here nor there.
My major problem is that he’s implicitly asserting that digital humanities stands or falls on its service to interpretation. It doesn’t. And, heretical though though the idea may seem, interpretation need not be the central activity of literary criticism. We’ve been too long too greedy after meaning. Understanding how texts work is not at all co-extensive with figuring out, case by case, what this or that text means.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
The Conversation Continues: What is Graffiti?
My meeting with the Semiotics Workshop at the University of Chicago went very well, very well indeed. As you may recall, I was asked to present a paper: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: What is Graffiti? It was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in an academic setting. The workshop coordinators, Britta Ingebretson and Chris Bloechl, had distributed my paper to participants ahead of time so: 1) everyone had read it and had a chance to think about it, and 2) I didn’t have to make a formal presentation. Instead, 3) we could devote our time to discussion. To get things started Joseph Weiss made some brief remarks about my paper and then the floor was opened for discussion.
That discussion, as I said, went very well. It continued through dinner afterward. And I’ve continued thinking about issues raised.
What’s a Site?
Britta Ingebretson wanted to know how I determined the boundary of a site, but, as things unfolded, I never got a chance to answer. The question is important because I’ve argued that the site is an important locus for analytical and explanatory attention. The site isn’t simply where the graffiti happens to be, but it somehow plays a contributory role in graffiti culture.
At one level the question is relatively simple, relatively, but not completely. I’ve organized my online photos by site, and I’ve even marked up a Google Earth map with outlines of those sites:
The pushpins indicate buildings (green = my apartment, blue = a high school, red = entrance to/exit from the Holland Tunnel) while the yellow rectangles bound sites. While there are tags on street signs and dumpsters all over, the pieces tend to be within the yellow boundaries. They are not, however, uniformly distributed within the boundaries. The exact distribution varies from site to site. The large rectangular site, HC (Holland Corridor, right of center), however, is a bit different. It is not densely packed with pieces, but pieces are here and there within the boundaries, though many are now gone as the buildings themselves have been demolished.
The long diagonal left of center, BA-EC (Bergen Arches-Erie Cut), has densely packed graffiti in about a half dozen regions, but not continuously. It is close to BR, CT, and YD, which are close to one another as well. However, local geography is such that BA-EC is invisible from the other three; thus I’d been photographing the other three for perhaps a year before I even knew that BA-EC existed. I treated the other three as separate sites because local conditions of access and usage—though all three are on posted land—dictated differences. Thus, CT (The Cut) tracks an active freight line that goes into a tunnel; there’s also a low cliff to one side atop which are vaults in which one finds graffiti. The Yard (YD) has extensive graffiti on support columns for viaducts, but also served as a staging area for construction equipment for about two years or so. That usage both attracted writers to the construction equipment and seemed to discourage them from going over the graffiti on the viaducts.
And so forth and so on, for each of the sites. Each has its own story, a story dictated by local geography on a scale of meters, 10s of meters, and 100s of meters. While these sites vary in size—think of size in terms of square meters of markable surface—by a factor of, say, 100 (I’m guessing) even the smallest has a half dozen or more pieces while the more extensive sites (e.g. BR, BA-EC) have 20-30 or more pieces, plus various tags and throwies.
Now, let’s look at a single wall in that CT site, a wall that I’ve called the shrine of the Triceratops. This is what I saw the first time I saw that wall:
Here’s a somewhat different shot of the same wall, deliberately staged to create a sense of continuity between the train and the Triceratops:
This is the wall that got me thinking about the notion that graffiti somehow represents the spirit, the kami, of a place. The Triceratops is green, picking up the greenery at the site, while its massiveness participates in old tropes about trains as large animals, iron horses and fire-breathing dragons.
Now, that’s a fairly specific reading of that particular site. That Triceratops was by no means the only graffiti in that general area; and it’s no longer there. The weather degraded over several years it and then it was gone over, by two smaller pieces (L, Kemos; R, Jnub):
More recently, this pirate showed up just around the corner:
Could one think of these are representing the same spirit, the same kami, as the Triceratops? I don’t know. Nor, in the end, do I much care. What we’re looking at, of course, is how things change at a site.
As I said, it took several years for the triceratops to degrade. You can follow that happening in this set of photos, which includes some close-ups, such as this:
What that close-up reveals, of course, is that there was something painted on the wall before the triceratops. What? And for how many layers?
Some of the walls I’ve photographed have remained unchanged, except through weathering, for several years. While others, only yards away, have changed several times in a year? Why? Off hand I can think of several relevant factors: 1) quality of work, 2) accumulated credibility of the writer, 3) location factors such as visibility, accessibility, and use. Some walls were, in effect, protected because they are on property that was used as a staging area for construction work. Writers would tag the construction equipment, but they weren’t about to spend several hours doing a piece on a wall in the middle of that equipment. Tagging is hit and run; piecing is not.
And so, for each of the ‘macro sites’ I’ve outlined in that initial map I could look at each individual wall and develop an index of changeability. The index would have to be a crude one, as I didn’t photograph these sites at regular intervals, but it might make sense to divide individual wall sections into, say, three classes: 1) 0 to 3 changes in five years, 2) 4 to 10 changes in five years, three 3), more than 10 changes in five years. Now I don’t actually know whether or not those are reasonable cut-off points. The thing to do would be to score each and every wall segment and see what the numbers look like.
That would be a tricky thing to do for various reason. First, I didn’t photograph the sites on a regular basis and I tended to photograph only major changes. Second, matching photographs to specific walls and wall sections would be tricky too. Given two different pieces of graffiti, photographed at different times (all photos are automatically date-stamped), it’s not, in general, obvious whether or not they are on the same or different wall segments. I made no attempt to work to standards that, for example, I rather imagine would be typical of archaeological fieldwork. I thought of doing that, but the peskiness of in-the-field note-taking worked against just going out and getting the photos at all. Yes, I made field notes once I’d returned from a photographing trip; but making notes while actually in the field would have distracted from actually observing the graffiti and taking the photos.
Now, if I’d been funded and could have afforded to pay an assistant to accompany me into the field . . . . Practically speaking, that’s what it would take to get a handle on how graffiti lives on particular sites. I may well have the most systematic record of particular sites that anyone has attempted. But what I’ve done is, in fact, crude and incomplete. Getting better observations would require funding.
Some Other Questions Raised
At the very end of the session, when we’d (happily) gone over the allotted time, someone named Eric raised a number of issues that deserve consideration, but not now. As I remember them:
1) Perhaps the illegality of graffiti has changed its ‘valence’ (my word) so that now it’s merely a ‘cost of doing business’ (my phrase) and is otherwise no big deal.
2) What about street art? Do the people doing what’s called street art come from a different demographic and different educational background?
3) Some other specific thing which I forget at the moment, but which may occur to me sometime later.
Finally, Joseph Weiss ended his prepared remarks by wondering whether or not I was, in fact, pursuing a general theory of graffiti? As the conversation fell out, I never got to respond directly to his remarks in general, nor specifically to this one. However, when he offered that suggestion my immediate, and silent, response was: No, no theory of graffiti. But then I realized that, of course, in some sense, that’s what I was pursuing.
But why? Why my initial denial? And why does graffiti (seem to) require a theory?
Monday, January 16, 2012
Listening is All
One of the motifs that returns again and again in these “Inside the Actor’s Studio” interviews is listening. Most recently, the interviews with Michael Caine, Meryl Streep, and Juliette Binoch. Listening is all, listening is everything.
The first time I heard that it surprised me. And then became utterly obvious. I am, after all, a musician. To perform music, you must listen to your fellow performers. And it makes no difference whether the performance is more or less fully notated on a score or there is no score at all. In either case you MUST listen to your fellow performers.
For that matter, you must listen to yourself as well. The point of practice and preparation, in a sense, is that that, in performance, you play your instrument, sing, speak, by intending to HEAR something. The muscular stuff is subordinated to what you hear.
Now, I suppose I don’t have anything very specific in mind when I’m wishing that literary critics listen to actors talking about their craft. The thing is, if you take that actor talk seriously you have to accept that there is a deep and subtle process involved in simply speaking the words “as they are written.” And coming to grips with that process, whatever it is, is what we must do as critics.
And it is precisely what WE EVADE when we look for meaning. Whatever actors may think about if and when they think about meaning, they cannot be thinking about THAT when they’re listening to another actor, or actors, and summoning their lines in response to what they’re hearing.
That is, this actor talk is a way to get some sense of a process involved in simply and only speaking the words as they’re written. No hidden meanings required. The only other way to get that sense is to go more deeply into the cognitive sciences than, as far as I can tell, any of the literary cognitivists have been able or willing to go. You have to think, explicitly, formally or almost so, about computational process.
Ideally, both avenues. That is, if I could dictate the ideal undergraduate training for someone who wants to study literature at the graduate level, that training would include both a performance component, e.g. take acting classes and participate in performances (or music), and a deep cognitive science component, where you learn about computational cognition, and perhaps even do a bit of programming. Those two things are, obviously, very different. But someone who has done both has at least a ghost of a chance of understanding that ‘the text’ is something real, and something that we must learn to describe.
The idea is to foster useful intuitions. As things stand now, there are now useful intuitions. Just some version of signs pointing to signs pointing to signs in a godalmightlybuttfuckdaisychain of arbitrary signification. Those intuitions have failed.
Getting back to acting . . . 1) What does it mean to speak preset words immediately and spontaneously in response to someone who is speaking present words to you? 2) Recall that Shakespeare is at the canonical heart of the English-language literary tradition. He didn’t write novels to be read in the comfort of an armchair. He wrote scripts to be performed on the stage by actors he knew, and knew well. 3) What about novels, that aren’t written to be performed? What’s the process there?
Sunday, January 15, 2012
As Actors Prepare, so Should Critics Learn
Every once in awhile I like to listen to a bunch of James Lipton’s interviews with theatre and film people, mostly actors. They’re all over YouTube; just google “Inside the Actors Studio.” I’ve been doing so this weekend.
What I enjoy is the nitty-gritty sense of craft, of what actors do to prepare a role. For example, in this interview, starting at roughly 17:30 or so, Jeremy Irons talks about playing twin brothers in Dead Ringers about playing twin brothers in Dead Ringers (a film I’ve not seen):
He says that, in order to differentiate the two, he thought in terms of “energy point” (his term), acting one brother from the forehead and the other from the throat—but, note, that Irons didn’t use those terms. Rather, he pointed to the points on his body. I don’t know whether or not he was using “energy point” as a synonym for “chakra,” but I’d guess the idea is the same. In any event, his remark was immediately and intuitive to me, perhaps because I’m a musician and, as such, understand something of what’s involved in performing.
Whatever you think, however you think, it all MUST come out in how you use your body. Performance is physical. It’s easy enough to talk about embodiment—such talk has been fashionable in a number of disciplines for over a decade—but you can’t merely talk a performance. You must execute it.
More and more I think listening to such interviews could be more important for academic literary critics than learning philosophy or psychology or even literary theory. That’s all abstract, learning it always moves you away from the work, from the text, off into greedy meaning and abstraction. That’s easy and, at this point, it’s in the way of making intellectual progress.
Critics need a much stronger sense of literature as craft, of texts as things constructed, to precise and rigorous, if flexible, standards. Listening to good actors talk about their craft, and figuring out how to take such talk seriously, deeply, that might begin pushing our minds in the right direction.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral: What is Graffiti?
I’ll be at the University of Chicago next Thursday talking about graffiti in their Semiotics Workshop (details here). The presentation will be informal and is based on a number of slightly revised blog posts. I’ve written the following introductory remarks to the posts.
Graffiti: Some Parameters
What is graffiti? That’s the question. Well, actually, it’s two questions. One is relatively easy to answer, though the answer is, inevitably, a fuzzy one. The other is difficult to answer, perhaps even, at this time, impossible. Impossible because we may not have the terms in which to state an answer. But perhaps impossible as well because graffiti is still in a state of becoming and, as such, has not yet settled into being some one thing or several delimited things. It’s the second question that interests me, but I can’t get to it until I’ve provided an answer to the first.
Names: Tags, Throwies, Pieces
On the first question, by graffiti I mean an expressive tradition that seems to have started in North Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which spread out from there. It’s now all over the world, with visible stylistic links back to the 1970s graffiti in the Northeastern USofA.
Graffiti’s about the name, the name a person takes when they decide to write graffiti: Taki183, Snake, Dondi, Blade, Seen, to name a few names. The word “graffiti” has been externally imposed, though it’s long been accepted within graffiti culture. Since the form is about the name, the people who do it think of it as writing, and of themselves as writers. They write graffiti. A writer may write under two or more different names, nor is it uncommon for a writer to get up (that is do graffiti on a wall) under the name of another writer in his crew.
The tag is the most basic form of graffiti, but it can, in some hands, take on the grace of a master calligrapher. Tags can be done quickly. Throw-ups or throwies are more elaborate, generally taking the form of block of balloon letters with outline and fill in contrasting colors. They cover more space that tags and take more time to do. Tags can be done in, say, a minute or less; throwies take several minutes. [When you’re avoiding the police, time to execute is important.]
Pieces, aka masterpieces, are the most elaborate of the basic graffiti forms. A piece is likely five or six feet high, maybe eight or ten, and can be 15 to 20 feet wide. The design of a piece may be worked out beforehand in a black book. Pieces may be multi-colored and may feature various kinds of representational art. If executed in so-called wild style the name may be so distorted and elaborated as to be unreadable.
But What IS it?
When Norman Mailer wrote his 1974 essay, “The Faith of Graffiti,” he declared it to be art, perhaps the first to do so. But many New Yorkers – most? – thought it was vandalism. After all, it was illegally done. So, is it art or vandalism?
They aren’t exclusive categories. Remember, however, that those original graffiti writers did not come up in the world of art schools, galleries, and museums. They operated outside of it. And getting away with vandalism was important to them. It still is. That is, the illegal nature of the work is not an incidental fact of its production. Even those among the very small number of writers who make a living working with design firms will still keep up their street cred by doing illegals.
A taq sprayed on a moveable board is just a tag. But it earns the writer no street cred. A tag on the back of a stop sign, or on the side of a water tower, that tag is illegal and earns points. It doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as it’s identifiably the tag of a named writer: Ceaze, Tdee, KH1, Sol, Werds, to a name a few that have gotten up in my neck of the woods. Aesthetics counts, but just where and why and how much, that’s tricky.
Then we have a remark by Susan Farrell, who started perhaps the oldest graffiti site on the web, Art Crimes. She said, in an email a few years ago, that graffiti is a cross between art and extreme sport. One earns credit by getting up in places that are both highly visible and difficult to reach, on the upper parts of buildings and towers. Some writers have been known to use climbing gear to a gain access.
And then we have the standard advice on how to photograph graffiti (which you can find here and there on the web). Photograph it straight on, with no fancy angles. You can include some context if you wish, but the emphasis is always on the graffiti itself. Sounds sensible enough, no?
Well, not quite. A lot of graffiti is quite large and you may come onto it at odd angles. If you can get close to it, you probably will, at which point you can no longer see the whole thing. You may even all but put your nose on the wall examining a particular detail. In any event, you get close enough to see the grain in the concrete, or brick, or wood, whatever the surface may be. The way you look at it at different scales, that’s important. That’s how you take it in.
The standard advice ignores that. The standard advice, in effect, instructs you to pretend that graffiti is just like easel-painted art, except outdoors. And so that’s how you photograph it.
Through several years of photographing the same walls month after month, in different kinds of light, and at different seasons of the year, I’ve come to think of the site as itself and important locus of graffiti activity, perhaps THE most important locus. Thus I see it as a kind of ‘back door’ environmental art that changes constantly. The standard photographic advice simply makes that invisible, as do the usual accounts.
All of this taken together suggest to me that it is at least unwise, if not an outright mistake, to think of graffiti is some species of art that just happens to be on walls. It doesn’t just happen to be on those walls, and that the fact of it’s so being makes it illegal has far-reaching consequences, some of which I bring up in the notes that follow this introduction.
Finally, I note that photography has become integral to graffiti culture. Because much of the work is illegal, and almost all of it is outdoors, it is also ephemeral. It is either ‘buffed’ by the authorities, gone over by other writers, or simply degrades in the weather. So, photographs are important in documenting graffiti. Writers will photograph their own work, but there are also many photographers with a specific interest in graffiti (like me). And these photographs find their way onto the web in various photo-sharing sites, some general and some specific to graffiti.
The Rest of this Paper
consists of lightly revised posts from my blog. As such it is informal in tone and lacking in scholarly apparatus. It is also exploratory in nature. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, not reporting closely argued conclusions. I note that while writing these posts, which are recent, I’ve been under the influence of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennet (Vibrant Matter) and so have been seeing how it feels to think of the graffiti site as an agent, or actant (Latour’s term), in graffiti culture. I did a series of blog posts on Latour’s Reassembling the Social where I used graffiti as a touchstone example.
These are the posts I’ll be working from:
Graffiti Hit the Reset Button on Culture
Graffiti and the Site: What’s to be explained, anyhow?
The Spirit of the Site: Linked Poetry and Mu’en
Tossing Paint Binds the World, or, Green Chapel in Jersey City
The Paradox of Graffiti and Photos
Friday, December 23, 2011
The Peregrinations of Agency vis-à-vis the Text
Back in the ancient days of the 1950s the intentional fallacy was invoked to separate the text from the author, indeed, it was invoked to separate any work of art from its creator. Agency was thus invested solely in the text itself, the autonomous text. It was the critic’s job to interrogate the text and thus discern its meaning.
As a practical matter, it turned out that texts spoke differently to different critics. For some this was evidence of the richness of texts, that they should support so many meanings. For others it was a problem.
The problem tried out various solutions. One line of thinking restored authorial intention, subordinating textual meaning to that intention, thus locating agency in the author. Another line of thinking killed the author and located meaning in codes variously linked to social structure or to the unconscious. Agency was thus denied to author, reader, and text and invested in those codes and the nebulous structures placing them on offer. Yet another line of thinking located agency in the reader.
So: text, author, codes, reader. What else could there be?
Now the speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists are investing the text with agency—see, for example, this Twitter lecture by Eileen Joy and this commentary by Levi Bryant. Is this but a return to an old position albeit encased in new terminology? Or will something new emerge?
Who knows? I note that Bryant ends by suggesting that we “allow the work of art to transform how we sense”—a old idea, tried and true: make it new.
I further note that Joy begins by asking: “First, what happens when we consider that literary characters are not human beings, but more like mathematical compressions of the human?” Indeed, literary characters ARE NOT human beings. Could we perhaps arrive at some understanding of just how they are “mathematical compressions” and of how we understand such compressions?
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
OOO is Very Abstract, but so is KR
Over the past several months I’ve been reading around in object-oriented ontology (OOO)—I’m currently reading an interview with Levi Bryant—and I note that it’s a very abstract way of dealing with the world. Here, for example, is a passage from that Bryant interview:
Is use the term “withdrawal” in a somewhat different sense than Harman. For Harman, withdrawal means that objects are independent of all their relations such that they never touch or relate to one another. For me, by contrast, objects are capable of relating, but are also external to the relations in the sense that they can break with current relations and enter into new relations. With Harman I thus hold that objects are independent in the sense that they are not constituted by their relations, while contrary to Harman I hold that objects can enter into relations with other objects. For me, withdrawal thus means two things. On the one hand, withdrawal refers to the virtual dimension of objects. The virtual dimension of objects or their powers is forever withdrawn from other objects. Not only do objects have all sorts of powers that may or may not ever lead to manifestations or actualizations (a person might never get a tan because they live their entire life locked in a dungeon), but also powers as such are never themselves manifested. That is, the qualities an object manifests never resemble the powers that it possesses.
It’s all about JUST objects and relations, and powers, and qualities too. Very abstract.
There’s nothing surprising about that. That’s how philosophy tends to be. And I knew that going in.
What strikes me, however, is that this level of abstraction feels akin to knowledge representation (KR), the discipline in cognitive science and artificial intelligence about representing human knowledge in computational form. KR has many specific formalisms, but one can think of them as being about objects and relations, powers and qualities. If you’re building an expert system for medical diagnosis, well, what objects, relations, powers, and qualities do you need to have in your system in order to represent some body of medical diagnostics? If you want to be able to recognize stories about going into food establishments and ordering a meal, what objects, relations, powers, and qualities do you need to have in your system in order to do that? So, the study of KR is the study of how to deploy objects, relations, powers, and qualities in representing bodies of knowledge.
There are differences, obviously. KR will, at some point, involve formalized expressions of some kind—often based in set theory and predicate calculus—and may also involve diagrams. OOO seems not to involve those things at all, though there are the beginnings of such in Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object, with its Greimasian diagrams and ontographical notation.
I mean, I’m almost tempted to develop a graphical language to represent some of Harman’s notions. For example (pp. 115-116):
First, the location of sensual objects cannot be inside the mind, since both the mind and its sensual objects are located on the interior of a more encompassing object. If I perceive a tree, this sensual object and I do not meet up inside my mind, and for a simple reason: my mind and its object are two equal partners in the intention, and the unifying term must contain both. The mind cannot serve as both part and whole simultaneously. Instead, both the mind and its object are encompassed by something larger: namely, both exist inside the object formed through the relation between me and the real tree, which may be rather different from the trees found in everyday life.
The exercise would be to come up with a graphical notion that depicts four things, the real tree, the sensual tree, the mind, and the ‘something larger,’ AND their appropriate relations. That’s not going to be a very complicated diagram. The trick, of course, is to come up with diagrammatic conventions that will perspicuously handle a lot of situations.
And THAT’s what KR is about, coming up with such schemes.
Another thing, OOO is about the world in the deepest sense. It’s metaphysics. KR is, well, just what it is IS a bit tricky. For some investigators it’s about how the mind packages knowledge, and that is very different from being about the world as it makes no claim about ultimate reality. But lots of KR is done by folks who just want to set up a working computer system. There’s no explicit claim about how the world deeply is, nor even about how the mind represents it to be; there’s just the claim that this computer system will handle some circumscribed class of knowledge-based tasks, like medical diagnosis, ordering a meal, or, more recently, competing at Jeopardy.
Metaphysics and Jeopardy are very different games. But underneath, or is it above? each is a kind of chess. You’ve got a limited number of pieces, each with highly circumscribed moves, and you’ve got to cover the waterfront only with them.
Russell Hoban: Disappearances
Was the late Russell Hoban an object-oriented ontologist? How’s this sound?
More and more I find life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.
H/t Michael Sporn.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Alenka Pinterič
Nina Paley’s started background research for her Exodus project (aka Seder-Masochism). One aspect of her research has been to immerse herself in recordings of the theme song from Exodus, a hit movie from 1960 about a shipload of Holocaust survivors after World War II. The theme song became a hit in an instrumental version by duo-pianists Ferrante and Teicher and was covered in many other instrumental versions. Pop star Pat Boone wrote lyrics and vocal versions multiplied like rabbits, many of which are available on YouTube.
Paley singled out one version for special mention on her Facebook page, a version by one Alenka Pinterič, which she introduced with this sentence: “But I just came across this one, which is...special. Like, Trolololo special. It has viral potential.” That reads like Paley had her tongue in her cheek. And when you hear it, well . . . . The thing is, a day later she reposted that same version, remarking that it “is the only version of “Exodus” that gets BETTER every time you play it.” No tongue in cheek. In comments she says: “What makes it great is her palpable joy and confidence.” She’s right. I’m not sure that “great” is the word, but “palpable joy and confidence,” yes. Here it is:
And this is just one of hundreds of karaoke performances Ms. Pinterič has placed online. I’ve listened to, say, 10 to 20 of them, and don’t know quite to make of them, or of her.
Some are better than others, which is true for all artists. Her version of “Help” (the Beatles tune) was pretty bad, but she did much better on “Georgia on My Mind” (Ray Charles arrangement) than I’d have expected. When she sings “Boom Boom,” well, her accent’s off; but she does get into it. There’s something that’s quite convincing about these performances, way more convincing that, for example, Pat Boone’s covers of Little Richard songs. If Pat Boone had an inner Little Richard, he certainly didn’t let on. But Pinterič does seem to have an inner Ray Charles and an inner John Lee Hooker, and she’s giving them access to her voice.
She’s got sincerity to burn, a sentimental streak, and questionable judgment about what material works for her. She’s obviously been at it for awhile and she’s got some chops. But she’s obviously enjoying whatever she’s singing and she’s got resources of emotional expressiveness that many, most? singers do not have or, at any rate, do not use.
She’s got an IMDb entry that says she was born in 1948 in Maribor, Slovenia, and she’s got a Facebook page that indicates that she currently lives in Maribor. A little googling turned up this duet she does with one Helena Blagne, whom I presume is Slovenian as well:
Taken together with her IMDb entry, sketchy though it is, this suggest that Pinteričs is an entertainer of some significance in Slovenia.
How many Alenka Pinteričs are there in the world, and on YouTube?
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Community Bands in America
In 19th century America, the community band was at the center of community life. Here’s a documentary about them:
Meet The Band, a Hindsight Media production, is a one-hour documentary tracing the history of community bands n the United States. We profile four very different bands from around the country and takes us through the American Revolution, the Civil War and the 20th century.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
New coinage: “Assholocracy”
Over at Language Log Geoffrey Pullum is arguing for “assholocracy” as a new addition to the English language. Donald Trump is his favored instance of the assholocrat, but examples are legion:
The whole Arab Spring has been a process of bringing down assholocracies. Italy suffered under one until recently. Russia and Syria are now protesting against their own crooked assholocracies, and the only reason North Korea and Zimbabwe don’t do the same is that they daren’t, they could be killed. We in the West are going to need a term for being ruled by assholocrats, because they continue to threaten to exercise power over huge parts of the earth’s population even if not (yet) over us.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Tank Tankoro, by Gajo Sakamoto
Gaja Sakamoto. Tank Tankuro: Prewar Works, 1934-45. Presspop, Inc. 2011.
I was browsing in Jim Hanley’s Universe* a few weeks ago and saw a handsomely slipcased volume by someone I’d never heard of, Gajo Sakamoto, about a character I’d never heard of, Tank Tankoro. That I’d never heard of either means nothing, of course. The fine print on the label pasted to the cellophane wrapper indicated that this Tankoro character was “the preeminent robot superhero manga from pre-WWII Japan” and that it had somehow gotten lost even in Japan and wasn’t rediscovered there until the 1970s, at which point it was republished to much joy and acclaim.
A very convincing sales pitch and, as I said, the slipcasing was very handsome. But I didn’t buy that first time. But two weeks later . . . then I bought. I ripped off the cellophane wrapper, took the book out of its case and started leafing though. Good paper, high quality printing, I thought, and funny.
I leafed through to page 73 and noticed a bunch of guys and a canon, but no ammunition. I turned the page and saw a nice two-page spread (74-75), in four color printing (the earlier pages had been only black and red). On the right-hand page some guy had a basket stacked high with octopi while on the left-hand the guys with the canon were wondering “What’ll we do with them?”
Of course, I new exactly what they were going to do with them, and started chuckling at the notion of using octopi as canon balls (while also thinking that that wasn’t too kind to the octopi). And, yep! that’s what happened on pages 76 and 77. And then 78 and 79 formed another two page spread, which you can see on the web, here (page 78) and here (page 79). The octopi formed a chain stretching from Tankuro up there in the air down to the guys on the ground, who were trying to reel him in: “It’s like beach net fishing.”
What an utterly absurd and wonderful conception. Of course, it didn’t work. Tankuro freed himself, because he’s the hero. I was hooked.
The series was originally published in 1934 and seems mostly about war between unnamed combatants, though at the time Japan was fighting in Manchuria. Tank Tankuro and his monkey sidekick, Key-Ko, are on one side and Kuro-Kabuto and his troops are on the other side. But that doesn’t happen until after the octopi incident. Before that Tank just went up against this or that villain.
The drawing is vigorous, forceful, and simple in a way that leads you think, oh, I could do that. You couldn’t, of course. But kids reading it could and probably did think that and were not likely bothered by the difference between their imitations and Sakamoto’s original.
The story is episodic and more than a little surreal, as the octopi incident indicates. It’s worth noting that the octopus is a well-established motif in Japanese art, as well as in Japanese cuisine. So, in introducing octopi into his manga in this way Sakamoto was using a motif that had well-established meanings for his audience. But not, I suspect, as live feed canon fodder.
Then there’s Tank himself. As Sakamoto tells the story (in an essay appended to the volume) he’d been working on a strip that doesn’t seem to have been getting much response (p. ii):
The serial was a samurai story, but one day, there came a time when I had to strike out in a new direction. After much consideration, I came up with my very own superhero character. I decided to put a human inside an iron ball and make him act in amazing and unheard of ways.
Which Tankuro does. In an introductory historical essay Shunsuke Nakazawa points out (p. xiv):
Almost all other protagonists in pre-war manga were personified animals or pure human beings. These characters had a basically good nature, and could be a role model for their child readers. Tankuro was not as simple. I goes unexplained whether he was a robot, a super strong human being, or anything besides that. No one could fully explain his identity. He was not as safe and friendly as other peaceful and tamed characters of the time.
So, we have a character that’s drawn as a samurai in an iron ball and who functions as a trickster-like demi-urge, a being at once natural and mechanical who’s at home on land, in the air, on and even under water.
That’s what makes Tank Tankuro an important character in manga history, his indeterminacy. In that respect he’s more like Tezuka’s Michy, in Metropolis, than like the Mighty Atom (aka Astroboy). The Mighty Atom was quite clearly an electromechanical construction, but Michy was fashioned of synthetic cells and so straddled the distinction between organic and mechanical, as does Tankuro. It’s out of this indeterminacy that all those fantastical mange and anime creatures will grow in the post-war years.
* * * * *
*A major comics store in Manhattan.