Seven Red

After the last two fiasco-capped seasons, I’ve been hesitant to start up again with the baseball posts, though I did reactivate the baseball links. One can only stand so much late-season collapsery before even glancing at mid-season ball becomes a little painful. I did not re-up my MLB.TV subscription this year, in any case, even though that’s partly becaiuse I’m too busy. But I have been watching and listening (baseball will always be a radio game to me), at least when I can. But I have to chime in here, even though the Mets just stomped the Cards in Queens, and pulled back to within a game and a half of the Phils. But thatr’s what I want to talk about. The Phillies should, by all rights, be up five or six games right now, if not more. This isn’t a Philly bashing session typical of Mets fans. It’s a Philly What-the-Fucking session. So, Phils, what the fuck? After the Pirates inscrutable sweep of the Mets in Pittsburgh – which came just after they seemed to have gotten over a sweep by the Dodgers, Philly should have run away with the division before the break. They have the talent (though with injuries), and every other team was playing like shit, the Metropolitans included. The last week and a half is really the capper, with the Phils dropping now seven of their last eight, most of those at home, leaving them with what really should be considered the most scandalous home record in baseball: they’ve won only one more game at home than the hapless Washington Nationals. But the disease seems to be of eastern origin. Just as a painful fact as of this writing, San Francisco – currently eight games out in the NL West (admittedly, the Dodgers are having a sick season) – would be in first place by half a game were the Giants to have stayed in the Polo Grounds (yes, that would be hard…). The Rockies, currently third in the NL West at 10 games out, would be nipping at the Phils heels. As for the prat falls and other nonsense going on the in NL East (Castillo’s dropped pop up that gave the Yankees one in the Bronx deserved to be amplified even more than the chortling New York media could), well, it’s getting hard to watch.

I spent the last weekend out in Davis, CA and environs, doing the Computers & Writing (C&W) conference thing. My colleague JP and I have been going to this conference every year for the last several, and we usually have a good time. Same this year. The new thing at the conference this year was a Twitter feed that displayed various participants tweets (is there a more obnoxious term?), many of them directly from some presentation room or other. So, you’d go into the break/registration room, and you’d supposedly get a sense of what was going on in the panels that you were not then attending. You could also go back to the feed to see what people had to tweet (ugh) about your panel. All of this, of course, ends up being presented as some kind of openness, and presumably we’re supposed to learn something from all that tweeting (yuck!). The question here, I guess, is whether we actually do.

As anyone breathing is now fully aware of, Twitter is now somehow implicated in the events going on in Iran—so much so that otherwise careful commentators have fallen into the whole “Twitter Revolution” rhetoric as if it’s some kind of obvious fact. The supposedly political use of Twitter washing over the infosphere was thus a frequent topic of discussion at the conference, with most people that I saw entering into rather unqualified celebration of whole thing. I should remind you all at this point that the conference was not made up of Iran experts, but—and I hesitate to say this—Twitter experts, or experts in the use of new writing technologies and rhetoric. But this may be the correct group to stand in as an instance of the general phenomenon, since all the twitter about the tweets from Tehran seems to be much more about Twitter than Tehran. In any case, I’d eat my hat in the public square (supposing such a place still exists) if even a small fraction of the people currently celebrating the Twitter revolution know fuck-all about Iranian politics, culture, and history.  But this returns us to the other point.

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So for about six weeks Ellie has been into finding money that we’ve left around the house and hoarding it in a little wooden box. Well, we said, we’re going to get you a piggy bank. Of course, because doing that is out of our usual routine, weeks and weeks go by with only the promise of a piggy bank, kinda like the promise of a moderately useful banking system in the US. Then I go on this trip to Davis, CA for the inimitable Computers & Writing conference, and suddenly find myself in the Sacramento airport not having bought the kids a promised present. The last time this happened I had to go get a present at Target and pretend I had gotten it during my trip. That wasn’t going to happen again. So I go into the airport gift shop, ready to be robbed blind for some tourist trinket, and what do I see staring me in the face but a tiny little piggy bank painted with various scenes of Sacramento. Score, I thought. Double score. I wrap the damn piggy bank up and stuff it between various layers of clothes in my carry-on, hoping it doesn’t break en route. Needless to say, my plane is delayed and then delayed again, and we sit on the runway in Sacramento for two hours. During this time I call home and tell Ellie that I got her a present, which raises her excitement level. I miss my connection in Minneapolis, and have to sit there for another two plus hours, and once again I call and talk up the present, not having totally forgotten this time. So this morning, I get up and Ellie is right in my face asking about her present. It’s time for the big reveal, so I pull out the wrapped up piggy bank and take the tape off so Ellie can extract it from the newswrap. She peels through a layer. Then another. Then another. My present! My present! Finally, she can see the piggy bank. She grabs it, looks it over, screws up her eyes, and tosses it across the room. Smash, and it cracks right in half.

But the addendum: It cracked so perfectly in half that she was able to crazy glue it back together, and Ellie now claims to like it. I know, however, that she probably doesn’t. A broken bank for this time of broken banks.

Whew. That was a week of reading like comps. When I was reading for comps, I tended to measure my progress – at least apart from the giant stacks of notes – on raw pages; if I plowed through 1000-1500 pages in a week, that was good, while 600 was at the low end (i.e., Derrida). Of course, you have to go back and conceptualize all that, but there is only so much time, and there’s so much to get through, so setting yourself page goals always seemed to reduce the despair before the massiveness of it all. So, this week, I plowed through about 1000 pages of Agamben, which I found now remarkably painless, and I did it while teaching the two classes (OK, granted, it was the last week, so the preps were cursory) and going to meetings, and grading and all that. I can see why faculty seems unimpressed when graduate students gripe about their workload, in any case. But this would have been a pretty good week during comps, especially if you throw a few articles into the mix:

Now, I had read some Agamben before, both collections, and a couple of books: Homo Sacer and The Open (both of which I reread this week). In fact, a funny story about The Open. I read it for a reading group in graduate school, and then some months later lent it to the department chair for some reason. Probably more than a year went by, and then it was time for me to leave SC for Chicago. Before I left, the department chair saw me in the hallway and said “Oh, let me return your book.” Huh, I thought. What book? I followed him into his office and he handed me The Open, to which I replied “I think you have me mixed up with somebody else.” I had no memory of ever seeing this book before in my life. Very diplomatically, he pretended to be unsure, but encouraged me to look through it. I opened up the book to see detailed margin notes in my handwriting throughout. “Huh,” I said, “I guess it is mine.” Well, maybe that’s what you get when you’re plowing through a thousand pages a week.

When you don’t completely forget that you’ve read something, the comps style gets you – if it’s not your main area – some fakeable sense of the concepts (sovereign exception, naked or bare life, the remnant, potentiality, space of indistinction between law and life, language and life, human and inhuman, etc.) and a vague sense of the conversations (with Aristotle on potential, with Schmitt on law/politics, with Benjamin on messianic time, with Heidegger on the ontological difference, with Arendt and Foucault – especially with Foucault – on biopower). And that’s about what I got when I read a little of Agamben’s stuff last time. I remember being annoyed at the time by the intro to Homo Sacer in its portrayal of Foucault’s work, which I still think is off the mark, but certainly worth consideration rather than annoyance. I say you, in any case, when I should say me. Maybe some people can integrate the conceptual system across the board when they’re plowing through stuff, but I can’t. I usually just got some slogans, which is sufficient to the task, and probably not completely worthless, either. But this second reading during the last week gave me a more systematic look at the way these concepts play off each other and connect, maybe call it slogan-plus, so I want to take some of that up in the coming weeks. In a sense, this is the continuation of my long-neglected series here on the so-called “Italian ideology,” and I think that Agamben – by not quite being included (the included exclusion? the excluded inclusion?) in the Autonomist tradition – does shed some light on what’s going on with some of the other stuff I’ve discussed (Negri, Virno, Esposito), especially, as I said, when it comes to biopower, and really, the analysis of power more generally. I still have Profanations, the St. Paul book (how Agamben cashes out his early work on kairos from Infancy and History is the real target here), Potentialities, and the latest, What is an Apparatus?, to get through, but I’ll probably be responding here as I go, in the new series … Blogamben (it’s true…we’re so lame).

What? My peoples if you wit me where the fuck you at? – Method Man, Triumph

Every year, the Brooklyn Famiglia gears up for one of the big events: Hooligan Day. It’s the day when everybody wears their hooligan kit, watches the FA Cup, then gather at The Gate on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope for the big doo. And every year since 2002 I’ve missed it, since I’ve been away.  And even though it’s just a little afternoon beer drinking kind of thing, it’s the time that I most miss New York. I think we had such a tight community when we were there that it just stings more now that we’re not there, but especially on those real occasions of off-the-wall solidarity. And this year especially, since we’re missing not just the community, but my two nieces who I haven’t seen yet, and the whole transformation of the event into a far more family friendly sort of affair, which it pretty much had to become, all these years later.

And so you’re in graduate school in my field and you have to sign on to this idea that you can’t be very specific about where you end up. But it’s easier to sign on to that than to live it. And it all seems so temporary, until you’re looking down the pike at tenure and buying a place and thinking – is this it for us now? Are we now from here? Certainly, we’re very lucky to end up in a kind of place that’s like the kind of places that we like. But a place isn’t a people. On a night like this in Brooklyn I would call my brother and just head up to the bar to catch a game. No plans. No planes. And there’d be people, and we’d know them, even from just around. You know that guy? Yeah. How you know him? From around. All the Facebook friends in the world don’t match that, I’m coming to understand, technological evangelism and general distaste for the usual technophobia notwithstanding. So you sign on to this thing, but you only sign on to the concrete social dislocation in a very abstract way. Yes, I know this is griping. Or pitiful. Maybe both. A friend said to me last year: “We have a name for people who get jobs where they grew up: the working class.” Well, yes and no, I guess. 

So I just saw these flicks on Facebook, and I wanted to say that I miss my place, and my peoples.