Bedtime Stories
Might be worth seeing just for the sake of an easy psychoanalytically-informed ideology-critique.
Happy War on Christmas
To celebrate this year’s continued secularization of Christ-mas at the hands of gay fascists and half-breed Muslins, here’s some Christmas history:
During the Reformation, some Puritans condemned Christmas celebration as “trappings of popery” and the “rags of the Beast.” The Roman Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in a more religiously oriented form. Following the Parliamentarian victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War, England’s Puritan rulers banned Christmas, in 1647. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities, and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the ban, but many clergymen still disapproved of Christmas celebration.
That’s right, you Monarchists. (Via 3QD.)
Goo-goos
Paul Krugman on why “conservatives” cannot, by definition, govern well:
Needless to say, the Bush administration offers a spectacular example of non-goo-gooism. But the Bushies didn’t have to worry about governing well and honestly. Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can’t do anything right.
It’s the borrowed kettle.
The Enigma of Bruno S.
Pretty great story, especially if you’re a Herzog fan.
“Greek Syndrome”
The Independent (UK):
Europe exists, it appears. If Greek students sneeze, or catch a whiff of tear-gas, young people take to the streets in France and now Sweden. Yesterday, masked youths threw two firebombs at the French Institute in Athens. Windows were smashed but the building was not seriously damaged. Then youths spray-painted two slogans on the building. One said, “Spark in Athens. Fire in Paris. Insurrection is coming”. The other read, “France, Greece, uprising everywhere”.
Check out more about the Greek riots here. (Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
UPDATE: Adam Shatz in the LRB:
On 16 December, ten days into the unrest in Greece sparked by the killing of a 15-year-old boy by the police, a group of Greek students occupied the National Broadcasting Network. Interrupting a report on a parliamentary address by the prime minister, they raised a banner that read: ‘Stop Watching – Everyone on the Streets!’ Those who joined them would have missed the footage broadcast the same night on Al Tsantiri News, in which hooded men were seen smashing shop windows in Athens with iron clubs, then a short time later chatting amiably with the police. Al Tsantiri (a play on Al-Jazeera) is known for sending up the news in the style of the Daily Show, but this wasn’t a joke. The footage confirmed what many Greeks already suspected: that the government was using agents provocateurs to increase the violence and discredit the protests.
(Update via 3QD.)
On the Right to Food
A good thing to keep in mind this Christmas as the U.N. takes a vote. Here are the results:
In favor: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Against: United States.
(Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
Christmas Fiends!
Posted at 10:21 PMIt’s that magical time of year when you cuddle up with Dan the Elf and fear the Christmas Dragon. Make this year special again, with Christmas Fiends! the sequel to the massive international seller Christmas Peel. Entertain your friends & celebrate these grand days of stocking stuffery.
Tracklist:
- Little Red St. Nick (feat. Jenny “Santagold” Armstrong)
- Good King Wensenslaw
- Shapoloid
- Christmas Island
- Loving You
Preview a track:
Act now and receive the original Christmas Peel, absolutely free, while supplies last (download).
In a spooky mood? Like your holidays Tim Burtonized? Try Halloween Peel (download).
Ann Arbor: Public and Private Space
Posted at 7:19 PM
My apologies for the slow blog week. I have been tirelessly working on the first two chapters of my thesis, of which I’ve completed about two-thirds of. Anyhow, now that classes have ended I can relax a bit and begin to post on the Howler with greater frequency (at least for the time being). Tomorrow I’m leaving for Atlanta, GA, and so I’ve been walking back and forth across campus in order to get my stuff packed and ready to go.
One annoying thing that I’ve noticed is that, perhaps as a result of certain purely “virtual” changes in the city’s political economy, all sorts of spaces are being transformed. More chains are moving in to “public” university space, such as a Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in the student union. For a while, there hadn’t been any major fast-food chains in the city, especially on campus, and so it’s weird to see these things appearing en masse. Moreover, multi-million dollar apartment complexes keep appearing out of nowhere, especially as the university tears down old buildings. This summer, the city government lifted a tax that was placed on Hollywood studios, which made it more expensive for them to shoot films in Ann Arbor. Not so anymore—and the virtual changes have entered into “concrete space” with the appearance of dozens of movies being shot on campus.
But the most hideously extravagant and indulgent piece of architecture is—by far—the new business school, which I am sure will contribute its fair share towards furthering ethical-universal maxims in the world-community. And it wasn’t as if the business school was, exactly, struggling for cash, unlike a variety of other departments on campus who are being slowly strangled to death due to a lack of interest on behalf of a certain class of financiers and technocratic university managers.
But even more so, the construction of these new, elaborate, and extremely decadent private spaces are beginning to cripple the public space of the city. On my walk over, for instance, the main sidewalk that is used to enter from student housing to the main sidewalk that cuts across campus is almost inoperable thanks to a long series of metal construction gates. The encroachment of neoliberal zones onto once-public space is even more daunting given the huge amount of snow we’ve received over the past few days, which is piled up alongside the street, where those who are excluded are forced to walk in the mud and even on the road to get anywhere.
On the one hand, these concerns seem very self-indulgent to me. It’s hardly the case that, because I’m being forced to walk in mud-snow that I’ve somehow been reduced to the status homo sacer at the cruel, murderous hands of neoliberal capitalism. On the other hand, though, there is something strange about detecting the way in which virtual economic changes take on such a concrete, visible form, especially as they begin to erode public space in favor of neoliberal “green-zones” across the city. It’s a tragic sign of the times, even as we seem to be entering into a new era of liberal Keynesianism, which will surely do all that it can to cure capitalism of its nefarious ills.
Shaviro on Biopolitics
From The Pinocchio Theory blog:
Can I dare to suggest (without being denounced as a “self-hating Jew”) that such a focus on the Holocaust, on the Adornian lament about the difficulty (or impossibility) of poetry (or anything else) “after Auschwitz,” is at this point, 63 years after the end of World War II, an obscurantist evasion rather than a moral imperative? Not only is Esposito’s focus upon Nazi thanatopolitics blindly Eurocentric, but it also fails to take account of the many forms racism, nationalist chauvinism, etc. have taken around the world in the last half century and more. The politicization of “life” and the management of “life” have become all the more pervasive and ubiquitous in the last half century, precisely because of (rather than in spite of) the discrediting (for the most part) of Nazi racist/nationalist themes. For instance, bigotry and genocide today tend to be expressed in “cultural” and religious terms, rather than in the terms the Nazis used; but these new terms are themselves related to how we have come to reconceptualize “life”…. And questions about agriculture and food production, about access to water and other vital resources, about the patenting of genetic material, about the use of biometric data to track both individuals and populations, and so on almost ad infinitum — all these are excluded from Esposito’s purview, largely because his reductively Eurocentric and Holocaust-centric view of the biologization of politics and the politicization of biology has no room for them.
Capitalism as Religion
Benjamin from No Useless Leniency:
1. ‘capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed’. Capital is a system of religious beliefs and practices with ‘no specific body of dogma, no theology’. We could link this to the arguments of Zizek, Pfaller, and Santner that capitalism qua cult is a materialised set of ideological rituals. As the pure mechanism of accumulation it can have no theology or dogma per se (although it may have temporary forms of such theologies), because these would potentially disrupt a purely cultic veneration of objects - as objects of production / consumption. Capitalism is concrete (captured in Don DeLillo’s anecdote, in White Noise, concerning the sense of feeling blessed when one’s estimation of the balance of our bank account is revealed as accurate by the ATM.
I’d like to point out too that the bailout money used to buy up bad credit has lost somewhere around $9 bn., and who knows how much of it is being used to line the pockets of Goldman Sachs executives. If that isn’t a cultic sacrifice at the altar of the God of Capital, I don’t know what is.
In Defense of Irony
Posted at 6:56 PM
From the comments section at infinite thøught:
Zizek is a raving theory-fiend who spends his spare time building models of concentration camps out of matchsticks, and populating them with figurines of characters from Hitchcock movies. His publications have a sinister, mesmerising power which enables them to turn otherwise decent people into fanatical communists, slavering with blood-lust and restlessly prowling the halls of academia in the vain hoping of finding some kulaks they can liquidate. Also, he talks very quickly in a faintly humorous Eastern European accent, and our informants in the former Yugoslav Republic tell us that he was personally responsible for everything unpleasant that has ever happened in that otherwise moderate and convivial region. His beard should be burned and his books shaved, and his legions of sycophants should be given Cognitive Behavioural Therapy until they realise it’s time to grow up and get proper jobs.
This is a 100% reliable summary, and you now do not need to read anything by Zizek, ever.
I had intended on writing a long response to Jodi Dean’s post on Zizek and the New Republic hit piece, which seems like it came out forever-ago. Because of that, I won’t now, but all the same I think it’s worth pointing out how reading Zizek as an ironist does not constitute some sort of perverse attempt at turning him into a philosopher-clown who makes jokes and therefore can’t be taken seriously—as if irony and activism were mutually exclusive (and as Dean would have us believe). I forget where exactly, but Zizek makes a point in one of his books that irony is different than cynicism, the latter being used to serve the interests of the ruling ideology. Rather, irony as a rhetorical device is an incredibly subversive tool for undermining one’s opponent.
And of course, Zizek’s other goal—besides the political one—is to popularize his German Idealist-tinted reading of Lacan, which in my opinion has a lot of textual support. But to anyone who has read Zizek, that should be fairly obvious. On the other hand, it’s also clear that Zizek draws a lot on the spirit of Lacan, whose texts and life are thoroughly laced with irony. One historical anecdote that comes to mind is that, at the same time as Lacan was making overtures to the head of the French Communist Party, he was in correspondence with his brother (a priest) claiming that his revision of Freudianism would be a great step forward for Christianity. Which isn’t to say that it’s just irony for irony’s sake, but something of a speculative claim that requires one, after the initial moment of bafflement, to think a little harder about things.
So, in conclusion, I think Dean makes a serious blunder (a political one, I might add) in excluding the entire domain of irony from political activism, which points more to the deficiencies in her otherwise “traditional” political views as opposed to any serious allegations regarding a misreading of Zizek’s work.
Imperfect Freedom
The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoe at President Bush was recently beaten and tortured by the police, which the Times Online UK heralds as a great achievement for democracy. To quote Lenin from Lenin’s Tomb:
It claims that the protest “demonstrated how far Iraq has come”, and that Iraqis “have learnt to enjoy freedom of expression.” It would be redundant to go through all the ways in which this disgusting reverie constitutes both a moral and intellectual insult. But one has to wonder: if a Times journalist was bleeding internally, with broken ribs and a smashed arm after suffering a severe beating by police, would its leader column be waxing wistful and ironical about ‘imperfect’ freedom?
I wonder how long it will take before our own government begins referring to Guantanamo Bay as a case of “imperfect” freedom?
Pride and Hysteria
Posted at 2:32 AM
I just finished watching the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet In episode 4, there’s a great scene where Eliza, after running into Mr. Darcy, leaves in a hurry by carriage back to her family’s house. The scene is weirdly intense and the camera angles begin to shift rapidly closer and closer to the clacking of the horses hooves and the bouncing carriage wheels, and at the same time a fantasmatic picture of Mr. Darcy appears before Eliza’s eyes, followed quickly by a cut to another scene as the pacing of the film (at least temporarily) begins to slow down.
I think it’s best to read this scene in the crudest way possible: as the climax of an orgasm. Interestingly, Victorian physicians used to prescribe bumpy carriage rides to women suffering from so-called “female hysteria.” Just saying.
Downtime
Posted at 12:50 AM
In the midst of studying for finals and what not, we forgot to pay our hosting bill. Whoops.
The Auto Bailout
So the auto bailout is now dead, again, for the seemingly hundredth time. According to TPM:
Dems were willing to agree to Republican demands that Big 3 employees move to wage parity with Japanese automakers operating in the US. But they wouldn’t agree to reach parity by 2009, as Republicans demanded.
Has the Republican Party become so politically marginalized that they’re now willing to openly acknowledge the fact that their policies are simply spiteful for spite’s sake and antagonistic to the interests of the working-class, especially unionized labor? I mean, it was always obvious that that was their intent, but they tend to veil it behind some phony grievance rooted in ressentiment.
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