Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Thanks, all, for the geek-squadding. I'll practice my barrel rolls. By
the very end of Week 2, I'll just be getting the hang of this thing.
  

    
>>#143 of 151: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 18 May 2012 (10:52 AM)

>>studies
showing that believers, confronted with facts opposing their beliefs,
tend to become even more entrenched, not less so. 

Of course, Enlightened Beings like ourselves, ruled by the better
angels of our reason, are immune to such passions.

<g>

The science pages keep telling us we're prisoners of our evolutionary
psychology, which supposedly makes us constitutionally disinclined to
change our minds, once they're made up. Or something like that. 

>>However, he
suggested, you can change someone's head with a good story, as opposed
to straight facts.

That would explain Gladwell's fondness for bite-sized anecdotes that
concentrate the MBA mind. One of BAD THOUGHTS' essays, about self-help
lit, considers the overlap between the Bible tract and
motivational-psychology books for salesmen. The Judaeo-Christian
fondness for the instructive parable and inspirational homily dies
hard.
  

    
Mark, try using 'Spellcheck" before you post...it allows a bigger
field than the tiny text box and is easier to read.
  

    

Mark writes:

'I'm not sure I understand the distinction between "riffing" and
 writing, but I gather it's something like Capote's distinction, in his
 feline swipe at Kerouac, between typing and writing.'

No, I wouldn't embrace Capote's talk-show comment as underscoring a
distinction of substantive importance. Kerouac certainly does count as
"jazz" in a way that Capote never does, but jazz, of course, takes
discipline too, and it takes no less discipline than Capote (at his best)
deployed.

With regard to ON BULLSHIT, my sense is that a very great proportion of
current and past writing regarding culture qualifies as "bullshit" in the
Frankfurtian sense -- I think this has been true for more or less the entire
history of what we now think of as "cyberculture" and the commentary about
it. Frankfurt's major point with regard to bullshit is that its purpose is
not to convey truth or falsehood, but to impress. Its sheer orthoganality to
truth or falsehood makes bullshit, in Frankfurt's phrase, "a greater enemy
of the truth than lies are."

In this respect, I think Frankfurt qualifies as a culture critic, even if
that is not necessarily his primary mission. I'm sure you've come across in
your reading, Mark, many instances in which writers who cast themselves as
critics write mainly to seem impressive (e.g., with the scope of the
cultural referents) without much care as to truth or falsehood or creating
any lasting social value. For me, the measure of such critics is whether I
find myself with more cultural insight after reading them than I had before.
Frankfurt's essay ON BULLSHIT passes this essential test, in my view.
  

    <scribbled by wickett Fri 18 May 12 17:37>
  

    

 I will put _On Bullshit_ on my reading list.

 I had difficulty with many essays in your book, Mark, as pop culture is
 largely alien to me. However, I was amused, but not enlightened, by your
 essay on Santa Claus and less amused by the essay on the Capuchin crypt.
 I could not discern a point. The crypt is startling, indeed, and
 potentially as spiritually useful as a sand mandala and the painstaking
 labor and artistic skill put into it before all its grains are brushed to
 the four winds.

 Gothic or grotesque? Neither. Your essay made clear the mindset you
 brought into the church and the mindset with which you left. To my mind,
 an effective cultural critic drills the depths and expands the minds of at
 least some of the audience, who then quest further on their own. Death is
 a tempting topic for reflection, but you, alas, evaded that opportunity
 and did not give any indication that your own mind was enlarged by the
 experience. Was it?
  

    
Wickett: Pop culture is "largely alien" to you? How extraordinary. You
sound positively anchoritic. If it isn't presumptuous of me, how did
you come to lead such a cloistered life? 

In any event, I'm not surprised you had difficulty with my book if pop
culture is Martian anthropology to you, since my brand of
brow-furrowing deals largely (though not entirely, as the essays on the
Crypt of the Capuchins and La Specola make clear) with pop culture. A
pity you weren't enlightened, but we can't all be. Here's to the laugh
lines. (Were you one of the Inkwell members who received a free copy of
the book from my publisher, in order to prime the pump of discussion?
If so, perhaps you'll re-gift it to some deserving friend. Or, better
yet, enemy.)

Regarding the specific essay you mention, you seem to want me to
defend myself against a farrago of charges, among them your contention
that my little prose poem had no point; that my "mindset" ought to have
been altered by my visit to the Crypt, and since it wasn't---at least,
by your lights---I clearly missed an opportunity for enlightenment,
thereby cheating my readers of one as well; that I should have had a
Hamlet Moment, contemplating my mortality, the Meaning of Life, et. al.

Alas, as you might say, the prosecutorial style brings out the Imp of
the Perverse in me; I make it a point never to justify my work,
especially when the line of questioning feels more inquisitional than
inquisitive. I suppose what I'm saying is: you seem to have answered
your questions.
  

    
Mike: Pardon my Captain Earnest, but I feel the need for an
encounter-group moment. In deference to your obvious intelligence, and
the apparent sincerity of your question, I took an hour or so out of my
lunatic schedule to watch several video interviews with Frankfurt, and
to read thoughtful reviews of, and excerpts from, his book in _The
Guardian_ and _Philosophy Now_, among others. I did this in order to be
able to serve up something other than steaming bullshit in response to
your question. 

But---and this may be wall-eyed paranoia, occasioned by the number of
you-lookin'-at-me? Travis Bickles who've come crashing through the
skylight of our little book club, without warning---I can't quite
banish the suspicion that you're implying *my work* is the merest
bullshit. In all immodesty, I'd much rather discuss my work than
Frankfurter's. I'll take a whack at the book, with the big, fat caveat
that I haven't read it, and thus may go tap-dancing right into a
minefield of bullshit, but I'd like to know, before I spend the time
and tendons on a careful reply, if you've read any of my work, and if
so, is the imputation here that it is bullshit? It's hard not to hear
your blithe observation that a "very great proportion of current and
past writing regarding culture qualifies as 'bullshit'" as a shot
across my bow. Is it? You add, "I think this has been true for more or
less the entire history of what we now think of as 'cyberculture' and
the commentary about it." Since I *wrote a book about cyberculture*,
very much informed by cultural studies, I can only assume this is a
flaming brick heaved in the general direction of my book, and my work
more generally.

If you're asking your questions in a spirit of intellectual curiosity
mingled with skeptical inquiry, I'm happy to take up my pen. But as
with Wickett, I'm not going to waste any ink "defending" cultural
criticism in general or my work in specific from charges leveled by
someone who's convinced it's nothing more than gilded bullshit, any
more than you'd waste your breath justifying the law, and lawyers, in
the eyes of some unlettered yahoo who thinks the world would be a
better place if we hung all the lawyers.
  

    
Rather thin-skinned, aren't you?
  

    

Assumptions, assumptions. I plan to use your book for critical thinking
exercises with my students.
  

    

Mark, I think your questioning of me is entirely reasonable, so I'm going to
try to respond thoughtfully in a way that enables you more clearly to
express your own thinking, while sidestepping, if I can, anything that
positions me as an opponent to you.

First, yes, of course, I've read some of your work, including FLAME WARS,
which I owned for many years before I donated it, along with much of my
library, to other, more capable owners. I'm reading this topic because it
interests me to see what you have to say these days, because I've been
familiar with your work for a long time now.

With regard to ON BULLSHIT, I brought up Frankfurt's book because I believe
it is a useful touchstone with regard to anyone's efforts at cultural
criticism, including my own. As a moderately trained, generally mediocre
student of philosophy, I have tried to develop the habit of subjecting both
my own writing and that of others to a persistently critical, even
adversarial perspective. In this regard, I blame my habits more on Plato
than on law school -- although I'm no Platonist, I do believe that the
dialogic, critical mode tests my thinking much more than finding people who
agree with my thoughts about this or that.

That's my method, such as it is.

If you take me to be intellectually curious, I think you've understood me
correctly -- what I want to hear you tell me is why I might want to read
your latest book. You and I both have many friends and colleagues who
publish a lot -- we each have to make choices about where next to allocate
our reading and thinking time.

I don't need a sales pitch, and I wouldn't demean either of us by asking for
one -- and I don't expect you rely on sales, as such, any more than I ever
have -- but I do appreciate apologias (I think you know the sense in which I
use that word). If I position myself as an opponent to you (which, really,
I'm not), then I think it's easy to dismiss me, maybe along the same lines
in which you dismissed <wickett>, as a mere critic, unwilling to play,
undeserving of your energies. So I don't want to do that. I think what I
most want is to hear what you believe you're up to, both generally and with
regard to your latest book. And, if you can, I'd like to hear you explicate
the social value of your project.

I hope you appreciate that I'm taking pains here not to be oppositional or
reductive, but instead to give you opportunities to engage with us here to
say more about what you're working on, and about its strategic and/or social
relevance.
  

    
Forthright and to the point, Mike. I appreciate your laying your cards
on the table. I'll respond at thoughtful length later today, early in
the evening.
  

    

Sidenote:  I skimmed the first 5 pages of On Bullshit and I wish I 
hadn't.  It affected me in a bad way.  Started trying to tell the truth
instead of trying to impress, with negative consequences.  Started
worrying about bullshitting others, and getting offended by others bullshitting
me.  And I've heard a lot of bullshit this week in my offline life,
face to face with total pros. 
I'm recovered now, and grateful that for just a day or two the veil slipped.


 
  

    
The post/non/inhuman is coalescing into "Object Oriented Philosophy"
and "Speculative Realism", one-man schools of blog-friendly petty
academic rivalries based on a Marie Antoinettish worldview that don't
realise or care that it's paving the way for post-peak-oil feudalism.

I'd be very interested to read what you write about the nonhuman
turn...
  

    
#164 (robmyers): Can you provide specific examples of object-oriented
ontology's/speculative realism's "Marie Antoinettish worldview"? I'm
not questioning the legitimacy of your critique, just asking for
further and better particulars that bear it out. Obviously, the notion
of a critique of anthropocentricity that takes that critique to the
reductio ad absurdum limit by arguing against the privileging of the
human over *any* other entity seems lunatic on its face, but to those
of us who have a soft spot for the lunatic, and who view this sort of
thing---very possibly at our political peril---as deadpan Surrealism
(philosophy not with a hammer, but with a lobster telephone), it has a
certain zany appeal, if only on the level of zaniness. For instance,
I've come across overheated speculations about "the secret lives of
objects," which, taken as *poetic* theory, appeal to the Joseph Cornell
fan in me. But I take your point about the social and political cost
of these academic fever dreams, especially in an America where
corporations have attained a kind of personhood, in the eyes of the
law. Anyway, fascinating comment; thanks for beckoning us down that
fruitful path. 
  

    
Assertions about phenomenology remind us how constrained we are in our
perception and interpretation of experience, as we try to grasp the
reality beyond our limitations. I'm always fascinated by those kinds of
conversations, but I'm not sure I would call them fruitful. This is
where the intuitive level of perception and interpretation probably
deserves our trust; intellect is so much slower and error-prone.
  

    
#166 (jonl): In my world, fascination is its own fruit. As for
intuition versus intellect, must we choose? Smells like a false binary
to me.
  

    
It's not inherently either-or, but many choose one over the other.
  

    
Then they're nuts.
  

    
Well, maybe, depending on your perspective. I think it's common to
embrace intellect over intuition, and for some vice versa. In the
Gurdjieff work, they talk about imbalances of the intellectual,
emotional, and instinctive centers, which is probably a more accurate
way to see and articulate the problem.

But we should get back to the project at hand, whether the must think
bad thoughts, or not.

As I read "The Prophet Margin" about Jack Chick and his "tracts"  -
fundamentalist memes embedded in comic book imagery - I wondered how
those relate to the current spew of right-wing astroturf into the
inboxes of middle-American Tea Party malcontents? I never believed
Chick was getting traction, but I also never believed that the John
Birch Society could have meaningful influence.
  

    
(jonl) slipped in. Jon, I'm going to (mentally) bookmark your Chick
question because, as promised yesterday, I owe (mnemonic) a *long*
response to his jabs and feints about _On Bullshit_. Apologies for
back-burnering yours.
  

    
#161 of 167: Mike Godwin (mnemonic):

Mike: 

I appreciate your candor and clarity and, most of all, your careful
avoidance of threat-posturing, coup-counting, and tedious
tendentiousness of the why-does-your-book-suck-and-blow? variety. I’ll
make every effort to respond in kind. If any of my seat-of-the-pants
theorizing feels less like pointed argument and too much like a fixed
bayonet, my apologies in advance. I’m going to assume the best
intentions on your part, and hope you’ll do likewise.

Now, then: my thoughts---in no particular order---on *your* thoughts
on cultural criticism (in general) and *On Bullshit* (in particular). 

In a pre-emptive strike (in my dreams...) against the inevitable
charge that, by offering my free-associated responses to a book I
haven’t read I am, in effect, shoveling bullshit, I’ll note that I’m
responding to your critique of cultural criticism, in you cited the
Frankfurt book as a corrective to what you perceive to be the
weaknesses of cultural criticism. 

As noted in an earlier post, I *have* crammed for my exam by trudging
through a few reviews of the book, as well as a brief excerpt from it,
and have listened to an hours’ worth of interviews with the author,
about his book. Thus, I can pretend to a Cliff’s Notes acquaintance, at
least, with _On Bullshit_, though hardly to its fine points. To my
mind, this is hardly an Achilles’ Heel, since I’m responding less to
Frankfurt’s book than to your *representation* of it, and to your
reading of cultural criticism *through* it (in the critical-theory
sense of “reading through,” as in, say, Proust read through queer
theory).
  

    
(mnemonic):

First thoughts:

Respectfully, there seem to be some logical inconsistencies---internal
contradictions?---in #161. 

You say you want me to tell you “why [you] might want to read [my]
latest book,” especially in light of information overload and time
famine. “So many books, so little time,” you seem to be saying; “tell
me why your book is worth my time.” 

Then, perhaps realizing that asking an author to justify his demands
on a reader’s time sounds importunate, you add that you’re not asking
for “a sales pitch,” which if you *were* asking for it would, as you
concede, be somewhat demeaning.

In fact, you *do* seem to be asking for a sales pitch, a request at
odds with your later, worthier suggestion that I seize the opportunity
to “explicate the social value of your project...to say more
about...its strategic and/or social relevance. Even the admittedly less
Amway-friendly term “apologia”---well-familiar to me from grudge
matches with god-botherers, in which this battle-scarred atheist played
the part of devil’s advocate---connotes a sense of justification or
defense, implying that my book requires one or the other or both,
especially in light of data smog and time starvation but more
immediately in light of your skepticism about cultural criticism per
se. 

I’m going to choose Door Number Two. Meaning: I’m happy to join battle
over the question of the “social value” or “strategic relevance” of
cultural criticism. While I’m not unaware that we live in a consumer
culture, where as Marx predicted nearly every social exchange is
reduced to the cash nexus and most social media are little more than an
opportunity for product placement (hello, inkwell.vue 441: Mark Dery -
I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts!) and burnishing Brand Me, I can’t
muster much more than yawning indifference to the prospect of selling
anyone on my bright, shiny product. The thing speaks for itself. More
to the point, it speaks *to* those who are drawn to the subjects it
ponders---popular culture, the social effects and cultural politics of
media old and new, fringe thought, subcultures subversive or just plain
perverse, the gothic, the grotesque, the abject, the uncanny---but
specifically to those who prefer a style of mind that is as
idiosyncratic and edgy as the subjects it treats *and* a prose style
that enacts that sensibility on a poetic level.  

Oh. My. God. As my 16-year-old would say. I’ve just given you a sales
pitch after all, haven’t I?
  

    
(mnemonic):

If I understand it correctly, your critique of cultural criticism, as
expounded in #88 and #154 and refracted through the Frankfurt book,
goes as follows: 

1. Most cultural criticism is bullshit: “A very great proportion of
current and past writing regarding culture qualifies as ‘bullshit’ in
the
Frankfurtian sense.” Moreover, too many cultural critics “write mainly
to seem impressive (e.g., with the scope of the
cultural referents) without much care as to truth or falsehood or
creating
any lasting social value.” (This is essentially a somewhat more
nuanced restatement of point #1.)

2. This is true in spades for cybercrit: “I think this has been true
for more or less the entire
history of what we now think of as "cyberculture" and the commentary
about
it.”

3. Frankfurt is an exemplar of bullshit-free cultural criticism. His
book _On Bullshit_ is a useful bullshit meter, enabling us to separate
critics---most notably, Frankfurt---who leave us more enlightened about
the world around us than when we were when we got our tickets punched,
as opposed to academo-babbling smoke-shovelers.  

(About which, more later, in a separate post.)

Point #1:

Irony of ironies, I’m condemned to channel our mutual friend Rocket in
pointing out---with all due respect---that your sweeping denunciation
of cultural criticism invites the suspicion that you’re not entirely
familiar with the genre. Hell, man, do you even know who Cee-Lo is? 

But seriously: I suspect you’ve tasted just enough of the stuff to
determine it’s spinach and to hell with it. 

Your choice of Plato (!) as a start point for cultural
criticism---whose roots are more typically traced through the
Birmingham school of cultural studies back to the founding fathers of
critical theory (the Frankfurt Marxists)---would confirm that suspicion
in academic eyes. At the very least, your historical narrative is
idiosyncratic. 

Then, too, Foucault is typically understood as a poststructuralist
theorist or, if you prefer, poststructuralist historian; calling him a
cultural critic isn’t exactly a country mile wide of the bull’s-eye,
but it’s not the first pigeonhole most theory-literate readers would
choose.

Benjamin, a card-carrying Frankfurt Marxist, was unquestionably a
cultural critic. So, one out of three, which as I say invites the
suspicion that you haven’t ventured very far into the briar patch of
the very thing you’re weed-whacking. 

Likewise, I’m not sure what you mean when you say cybercrit, but it’s
a vasty deep, from me to Bruce Sterling to William Gibson to Jaron
Lanier to Neil Denari to Andrew Ross to Friedrich Kittler to Virilio to
Baudrillard to Constance Penley to Donna Haraway to Arthur Kroker (no
endorsement implied, by the way) to Sandy Stone to Erik Davis to Julian
Dibbell to Geert Lovink to Lev Manov to the technofeminists (with
Sadie Plant carrying the battle standard) to the Afro-futurists (a term
I coined, as you may know) to Douglas Rushkoff to Steven Johnson to
Scott Bukatman to Gary Chapman to Langdon Winner to the Father of Us
All, Marshall McLuhan. 

Are you saying *none* of us---cultural critics in particular,
cybercritics in specific---has a glimmer of insight? That we’re *all*
preening popinjays, “writing to seem impressive,” muddying our waters
with jargon to make them look deep, blithely unconcerned with Truth
(your usage, and Frankfurt’s, seems to demand the upper-case “T”) or
social change in any lasting sense?

As a thought experiment, ask yourself: couldn’t this charge be leveled
at *any* discourse by an outsider innocent of its breadth and depth,
familiar only with its most strenuous self-promoters, and unfamiliar
with its intellectual history and, be it said, specialized jargon?
Doesn’t it sound just a little like reactionary fulminations, from the
right, about “trial lawyers”? 

But here’s the thing: what really troubles me in this line of argument
is its grinding utilitarianism, the imputation that we should be able
to drop a coin in the slot and have a gumball’s worth of greatest good
for the greatest number pop out. The imputation, as I hear it, is that
ideas must produce quantifiable results or crawl off to die in some
academic ossuary---the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa
Cruz, say. I smell something in this argument that stinks of a
suffocating pragmatism---one of the defining characteristics of the
American mind since the days of the Puritans; something that sneers at
intellectuals and their close kin artists, insisting on applied
sciences and Truly Useful knowledge that can be “monetized,” to use the
ghastly corporate-ese that has spread, like kudzu, across our public
discourse. 

There’s an inherent conservatism to this hoary argument, a knee-jerk
recoil from the Love Of Ideas For Idea’s Sake that reaches its
mind-numbing nadir in income-inequality apologist and hyperrich
plutocrat Edward Conard’s sneering dismissal of anyone not pursuing an
MBA or a degree in computer science as “art-history majors.”  

Which is precisely why I’m surprised to hear you making this point.
Any man who loves Proust knows, in his bones, that the True and the
Beautiful, much less the True and the Useful, are not always
synonymous. Frankfurt (about whom more in a minute, in my next post)
may be correct in some of his assertions, but he is least interesting
when he is most correct, and less than original all the time, dull as
the day is long. 

I’d rather walk around in a fascinating mind than a correct one any
day, though it’s admittedly nice to explore a mind that is both. Of
course, it bears noting that one can be Truthful but dull, or useful
but dull, or oozing bullshit from both ears but fascinating, or
sublimely useless but fascinating---permutations I somehow suspect
wouldn’t occur to the Frankfurts of the world. 

Yes, cultural criticism dreams of social change. Yes, most cultural
critics see themselves as intellectual activists, critiquing culture
and social relations from a radical political perspective. But are they
abject failures if they shed a sea of ink without troubling Lloyd
Blankfein’s sleep or dragging Donald Rumsfeld before a war-crimes
tribunal? 
  

    

Pardon me for peeking in from my anchorage or cloister, or wherever it was 
you consigned me.

But do you? That was my first question. Your response was off-the-mark,
perhaps because I wasn't clear. Do you, in fact, trouble any of the people
you say you want to trouble?