Seven Red

In which Jim Cramer accuses Chris Cox, the head of Bush’s Securities and Exchange Commission, of being a communist. It’s hard to get laughs like this for free.

For Bastille Day, I guess, topspun’s birth document. Vive la France.

Faux French patriotism only redeemed here by tres mysterious Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage style redactions….

On the twenty seventh of September, nineteen hundred seventy three, is born at 22 Rue de Meudon: [topspun, redacted], a baby boy (“of the masculine sex,” if you can believe it), to Francesco [topspun's Dad, redacted], born in Milan (Italy), November 2, 1941, and Mary Ellen [topspun's Mom, redacted], born in New York (United States of America), December 30, 1942, his wife.

I translate this only because she just loves the last part: “his wife.” They apparently wanted to make that good and clear.

Booga Face’s larger project in his analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness has to do with single parenting, and the peculiar location of single parenting in cultural production. BF explains in a comment below:

Or, if one wanted to continue to rip on Habermas, this is the scene of the private sphere and autonomous, pastoral family time which is perhaps the most public moment in the movie. What seems important here in this social economy is the necessity of privation (or deprivation) in order to be a good networker — the logic of the college frat — which is why the single parent is the perfect image of the new “network-from-home” economic order.

And he further notes on his own page that he’s really trying to get at “the ways identity gets linked to performances of independency and stigmatizations of dependency.” The Pursuit of Happyness thus links these themes: labor as a public act; the family as a private act; performance of autonomy (from the social), together with a corresponding (constituent?) devaluation of social ties. The single parent is a particularly good site for these themes because there’s already an assumed loss of autonomy that would have been provided by the dual parent household (i.e., the caretaking that “frees up” action of the other parent). Barring this classical structure of autonomy (the oikos always holds up the action in the polis), the single parent must combine spheres of activity (political, social, economic, familial) more intensely. And, of course, reach out to social support networks in order to simulate the autonomy created in the dual-parent household. From the perspective of autonomy, these two aspects—intensity of multiple activities (creative autonomy) and dependence on social support networks (simulated or outsourced autonomy)—determine the scene of single parenting, so it would seem strange that cultural productions of the single parent tend to celebrate the first while devaluing the second.

It’s a good place to pick up on the discussion of our Italian Ideologists, and particularly their multiple readings of Hannah Arendt, who was, of course, keyed in precisely on the relationship between the household (reproduction), the social and economic (production), and politics (action). Without rehearsing the details or numerous qualifications, Arendt saw authentic politics (freedom and action) exemplified in the Greek polis, and particularly in its supposedly strict division from the scene of production and reproduction (the household, or oikos). The household/economy is the realm of necessity, the needs of the body, biological life. The agora is the realm of freedom from precisely biological necessity. If the household is structured around the preservation of life as it encounters privation, in other words, the agora is constituted through putting oneself at public risk to create a dynamic and differentiated common. The first is concerned with mortality, while the second is concerned with immortality. But “immortality,” for Arendt, cannot mean simply “fame,” in the way the kiddies say that they want to be famous so that their “name will live on long after they’re gone.” Rather, fame, as a supposed species of immortality, is quite rightly subtitled “I wanna live forever,” which is to say, it is actually a species of the concern for mortality. For Arendt, the immortaliy that becomes the object in the authentic polis is not the immortality of the person (through the name or otherwise), but rather of common structures and affects that can be abstracted from the individual, like, say, democracy or Law. It is in only through their departure from the biological needs of individuals that they become “common” in a political sense. And it is through the reintegration of biology and political action that an authentic common space disintegrates.

(Manifesto Note: Needless to say, Seven Red disagrees with all of this, which is why we don’t have one blog for “academic” writing, another for “politics,” and another for babygirl pictures: it’s all of a piece, playa. We dislike the blogosphere’s silly celebration of the amateur, and the professionals‘ equally silly defense of professionalism. We want “Mommy blogs” that also do vicious takedowns of the culture of childhood! We want foreign policy analysis next to descriptions of last night’s Dora the Explorer episode! We spit at internet marketing advice that insists your blog have a “theme” in order to get more hits and links! Fuck hits. We don’t want a public. We want tempos that twist privatization!)

With the emergence of a particular form of individualism through Christian dogma, this division begins to degrade: the preservation of life (and its attendant efficiencies) spread into the political. The Middle Ages see entire societies governed as if they were households: the pater familias model of the monarchical “state.” In the modern era, the function of the pater familias is distributed in vast administrative bureaucracies; as Foucault would say, the exercise of (bio)power gets lighter, more efficient. But the distance from authentic politics is still there, since the function of the administrative apparatus is increasingly the “care” of the population. While this process is most clearly drawn out in The Human Condition, it runs through all of her works, the stakes of which, of course, are the analysis of totalitarianism.

So, to take the most well-known example, Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is bound up in the distinction between “pure” politics as distinct from life and a political apparatus that administers life (biopolitics could just as easily administer death, flip over into what Esposito and Negri call thanatopolitics, is the point). That Eichmann struck Arendt as a sad little accountant rather than as a sovereign monster—the” banality of evil” thesis—isn’t a biographical point about Eichmann (one suspects that more hair and less horn-rimmed glasses would have pushed up Eichmann’s exceptional evil ratio); rather, it is simply evidence for the degradation of political action once the preservation of life—at one time the domain of oikos alone—infests and infects and invests the political sphere. Indeed, it would seem that exceptionality could not be evil, strictly speaking, in the same way Nietzsche says you cannot reproach the bird of prey for being a bird of prey. Evil is a quality of the bleating lambs; it emerges only when life infects action.

What Booga Face calls the “most public moment” in The Pursuit of Happyness, the networking at the football game, would not be public at all for Arendt, since it is economic activity, idion, idiocy. For Arendt, there is no “political economy,” or rather, it is a contradiction in terms. Similarly, there is no biopolitics; bios cannot qualify (authentic) politics, and vice versa. Our Italian friends find value, problems, and opportunities for strange reversals in this account, but we’ll have to pick that up next time, cuz this body’s shutting down for the night…

Attention problem this weekend with

• Hockey playoffs kicking off
• Yankees-Red Sox, Mets-Brewers
• The Masters (yes, I watch golf and I effin’ love it…sue me)
• Parents in town, requesting all manner of activities
• Grading to do
• Writing to do

Oy…

Hanging in Nawlins. Haven’t been here since 2002, but it all seems very familiar. I make a point of never leaving the tourist areas, under the belief that most tourist cities have a primary tourist area, and then a secondary tourist area designed to provide tourists with an authenticity experience by which they can claim to have left the tourist area. Of course, we have friends who lived here in Nawlins, and would show us the real non-tourist stuff, but then we would simply be playing out the authenticity bit in another way. Ah well.

What I should really do if this Seven Red was honest is tell you what I think about these sorts of conferences. But as careful readers will have noticed, Seven Red is terminally dishonest, despite the usual draw of telling it straight under a cloak of anonymity. Well, some of Seven Red. One third of Seven Red may not even believe in honesty, full stop. babygirl is such a liar. Why then am I wasting time writing this post when I could be drinking a hand grenade and otherwise playing out the obnoxious role assigned to me in the Nawlins drama? Because we do not believe in honesty, but we do believe in killing time between sessions. And, more importantly, to announce a special: Graffiti Fridays, Nawlins. That’s coming tomorrow. There’s actually lots of good stuff here, and it must be shared.

1) babygirl talks a lot. “My phone.” “I need help.” “On the playground.” Other such stuff. It’s pretty amazing.

2) We Own the Night is a painfully bad film. Plotwise, it’s absurd. For some reason, though set in New York in the late-80′s, the director has decided to run a late-70′s soundtrack, which is just weird. But she and I both noticed the same thing: the dialogue is terrible. The exposition dialogue is ridiculous. At a cop’s funeral, one cop tells another that “They’re setting up a new drug deal,” or something to that effect. It’s silly. I mean right when they hand the shovel over. Amusingly, Ed Koch makes a few appearances, despite the fact that the whole premise of the film was that his administration of the City in the late-80′s was a catastrophe. Good to have a sense of humor, I guess.

But the really awful dialogue is interesting, since the film has otherwise good qualities. The acting is pretty strong, the production values are good, they clearly spent money on it. In fact, it could almost be a good film if it weren’t for the terrible writing. Which made us wonder: why did nobody stop this thing? Why didn’t anybody say, “Hey, we’re making a gritty thriller here, let’s get the lines right!” Then we saw that the guy who wrote it also directed it, and both Joachim Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg (the two leads) produced it. In other words, there was no quality control on the writing at any step in the process, and probably others were too intimidated by thye director and producers to say, “Hey, that sucks.”

That said, the film had a distinctly New York outer boroughs feel, so it was somewhat satisfying. At one point, a couple in the film is staying at the Kew Motor Inn, a famous “by-the-hour” joint on Union Turnpike in Queens, near where I went to high school. Friends of mine used to brag about having gotten the “Jungle Room” at the Screw Motor Inn, and other laughable high school sex stories. A character in the film correctly mentions that everybody calls it the “Screw Motor Inn.” Strangely, though, the film cuts to the sign, and it reads “Cue Motor Inn,” which means that they bothered to construct a fake sign, but they spelled the name wrong. It’s a metaphor for the whole film, really: a lot of effort expended for a relatively shitty product.

3) I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 today. It’s nice. I’ll play with it tonight.

So there’s an extended conversation going on through Facebook email about that favorite topic of all New Yawkahs over 28: What happened to authentic New York? The predictable positions, of course, all come out. Yuppie interlopers ruined New York, the junkies on Delancy, the fancy cheese shop on Smith Street, we like one, not the other, etc. I’ve never known quite what to make of these arguments, but I like Andreas Huyssen’s take in a concise little essay called “Fear of Mice: The Times Square Redevelopment,” which appears in his Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. I saw Huyssen – a kind of Frankfurt School cultural critic – speak now many years ago on Maus as a memory text, and I guess it’s interesting how many of the successful graphic novels perform similar public memory functions (Persepolis being the obvious example, but isn’t Ghost World also a sort of memory text?).

In “Fear of Mice,” Huyssen addresses the Disneyfication of Times Square, the most manifest marker of the New New York, and an obvious locus for the debate. Whether you stand with the heroin addicts and peep shops or with the fucking Olive Garden (there’s a fucking Olive Garden in Manhattan, and people actually fucking go to it!!!) says a lot about where you might stand. Of course, it’s more complicated than that: whether you want junkies and stick-up kids and corrupt cops and crack rocks on Smith Street or the Brooklyn version of Mario Batali’s Po with its grilled guinea hen, pumpkin and scallion fregula is probably more where the argument is these days. In any case, Huyssen argues that both the clean-up mongers and the peep show nostalgists are running the same program: the desperate fear of social change. I especially like that the Sleaze Lovers get labeled the “romantics of marginality” – I am, of course, guilty of quite a bit of this myself, the whole “exit” business from Bey to Negri is vulnerable to just this charge.

No real conclusion here. Maybe it’s a question for others. I think I may be a little too close to the heat of this one to come up with anything interesting to say about it. But it did put me in the mind of one of NYC’s great pre-Great-Clean-Up verses, so here’s a little Gang Starr for your Friday morning. And really, how could you hate on a guy who came up with one of the most bizarre lyrics in the history of American music:

Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
I get more props and stunts than Bruce Willis

The huh? This was our New York, right on the cusp, Spring 1994, right before Giuliani’s broken windows policing really started kicking in that summer. It was summer 1994: The Rangers won the Stanley Cup, and Giuliani killed working class culture in New York City. Maybe for the better. Like I said, too close to it. But I dare you to listen to “Mass Appeal” without nodding to the sick beat and sample.

Well, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union made it on to Salon’s Top Five Fiction Picks of 2007. Yay me. Now I have to read the other four. I do really want to read Tree of Smoke, which I’ve heard great things about everywhere, and the description for Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games sounds really interesting as well – more noir in “strange places.” Does the noir genre have some kind of special purchase on contemplating fanaticism?

I’ve been reading a lot about eye-tracking studies in preparation for next quarter’s graduate course.

For a fairly in-depth discussion of the subject, there’s no better site than Eyetrack III.

The studies are both weirdly ahistorical and strangely seductive, although, to be fair, most of the research is well aware of its limitations.  (The fascinating work in psychology on phenomena like the attentional blink universalizes without qualification, by way of contrast.) Ahistorical, then, by design: these studies aren’t really making claims that reading has always worked a certain way, or even that it works a particular way across cultures, which would be absurd even on its face, given different reading directions.

They avoid – as does most of the work on “attention mapping” – the well-researched work on the history of attention, like Jonathan Crary’s very interesting Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, or even Lanham’s The Economics of Attention. It’s certainly fair, at this point, to ask what these histories can teach us, other than the inherent variability of phenomena like attention, and how that can help us design snazzy ad-driven web sites. Like most of the work on document design, these studies tell us how people read, not how they might read, or how that mode of reading produces particular sets of consequences. That’s fine, I guess.

As this site – with its interminable paragraphs – itself amply demonstrates, even getting to the way we read now is a mighty jump for some. But there’s still the faint feeling of self-justification involved: you should organize your site/document this way, because this is the way we read, because sites are organized this way, because this is the way we read. But it’s worse than even that, because the repetition of the design structures actually produces the kind of reading that it is ostensibly responding to; this is truly like Nietzsche’s little story of hiding a ball under a bushel and then being amazed to find it there.

Obviously, there are limitations to attention, and perhaps constants in the way we read (we call these strata); you can’t just do anything. Those studies in Gestalt psychology (however dubious) are likely seeking such stratified formations. The other studies on attentional blink do likewise, and they are useful (see, for example, an interesting collection The Limits of Attention: Temporal Constraints in Human Information Processing). But I’d much rather see people producing new attention structures and their attendant subjectivities than merely replaying, again, the attention structures we currently enact. Of course, that’s an avant-garde desire, and it might be that such experiments should be left to some kind of avant-garde, while the rest of us just get the current design structures right. And maybe it’s even admirable that so few can pay attention to those avant-garde designs.

Top Ten Awful Writing Habits Revealed to Me by My Own Posts

1. I use the phrases “In any case” and “Needless to say” more than any human being should.
2. I am a foul-mouthed motherfucker.
3. Could I have any more parenthetical asides?
4. The aside enclosed by dashes is even more annoying and disruptive than the parenthetical.
5. My penchant for the personal anecdote is oppressive and possibly dangerous.
6. I am a pedantic jerk when it comes to citing some study I’ve read. Like, wow.
7. I am oblivious to genre conventions; I violate all blog writing advice about consistency in theme, short paragraphs, and linking to fellow bloggers, which only displays that I either cannot negotiate the difference between very particular sorts of print conventions and blog conventions (supposing that any of this would not also be bad writing in any print genre), or that don’t have enough respect for my readers – supposing any exist – to follow them.
8. Four line compound-complex sentences are the norm.
9. My use of Capitalized Phrases to Indicate Sarcastic Proper Nouns is so Donald Barthelme and now utterly lame.
10. It is the case that I violate every rule I’ve ever taught students about using it clefts or some form of “to be” as my main verb.