at the fun fair

Bathed in the smell of overpriced deep-fried food the country the fair goer marvels at the prize heifer and hopes to cheat destiny, at least for a day. The state and county fair is a primal form of culture industry at work for the entertainment of agricultural workers: long ago, it was at such events that the yearly isolation of the rancher, the dairy farmer, the sharecropper was briefly interrupted. The spectacle of hardened carnies barking out the attractions of hairy ladies and the cheap thrill of mechanically questionable roller coaster rides and garishly painted carousels were supposed to make up for the drabness and privations of farm life.

Today, on our way to gawking at Angus beef cattle and lean pigs, we pass booth after booth hung with cheap giant stuffed animals, all made in China's new manufacturing sector: hairy blue gorillas, overgrown pink teddy bears have never seemed more desirable. These are the prizes you can win for trying your hand at games of putative skill: when we are looking for fun, the greatest thrill is the promise of winning something for 'nothing': of course we forget that we pay for this chance to thwart our fate as workers when we pony up five dollars for a chance to shoot a duck, pop a balloon, stand the bottle in the circle with a fishing rod to win either four wheel drive truck or stuffed python.

The whole principle of the fair is to make us briefly forget the infernal rhythms of work: we pay to forget how we earn our daily bread and our bi-weekly paycheck  when we try to pin the tail on the donkey. The fair is the overturning of the puritan work ethic, which is turned on its head - for a price. When the game hawker stuffs the plastic toy in our hands after we've popped our three balloons, it feels as if we have defied the fates - for a price, the price of admissions, which we forget because it seems as if we've gotten something for our putative skills as a dart thrower.

Just as the roller coaster ride evokes false dangers and risks, the fair 'game' evokes the logic of chance and the denial of persistence.

For the carnies, it's all in a day's work.

less and more than a conspiracy

I wish I had been invited to Rob Stein's presentation on what Lewis Lapham has called "the organizational structure of the Republican Message machine. As Lapham writes in September's Harper's which is not (yet?) on line, "Having devoted several months to his research through the available documents, he was content to let the facts speak for themselves--fifty funding agencies of different dimensions and varying degrees of ideological fervor nominally philanthropic but zealous in their common hatred of the liberal enemy disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years for the fabrication of 'irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.'"
Irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas - a brilliant formulation, attributed I'm assuming to Stein. Now if we take Stein's research seriously, the right wing has bought an entire class and generation of intellectuals and academics, funding the 'research' of eager to please scholars such as Milton Friedman and Dinesh D'Souza. The first defends the miraculous power of markets while the second condemns cultural and moral relativism.The loosely organized system of funders, ideologues and foundations have more recently started to fund the campus (see gadflyer. So if the Young Conservatives are suddenly looking good on your local campus, you'll know that they're energized by large infusions of good old cash.
Lapham ends his editorial on a dark note: the concerted effort to dumb down public discourse has worked as both presidential candidates campaign on values and virtue rather than ideas. But at least one of them appears to believe in reason. The bottom line in America is -- it is better to be "good" than to be capable of "critical thinking." Wendy Kaminer has described this as piety triumphing over dissent. But the Academic Left has certainly contributed to the pathetic state of public discourse. Jeff Wallen's criticism of how contemporary academic debate gave more importance on "where the speaker comes from" than  what the speaker says is most succinct; this leads to the most radically individualist ethos -- each individual defends the interests of his or her identity rather than the validity of his/her argument. I think things are changing because I think finally we are realizing that it is democracy and NOT identity that needs to be defended.  At a meeting I attended this past year, a speaker tried to say, "Well as a ...., this makes me feel..." and no one was buying it. It didn't silence discussion. We moved on.

broke

I'm doing some translation work for money and getting ready to move to Asia for the year so I am not blogging very much these days, but I had this thought for you all about my Minneapolis years. I'm sorting through my stay in the heartland and I remembered how oppressed I was by the ostentatious frugality of the good people of that state. The more money they had, the more they flaunted their penny-pinching ways. Each one of them was a wannabe Benjamin Franklin. They were keeping their Franklin close and their benjamins closer.

In Minneapolis I overheard some one giving a detailed inventory of how little money she had spent on vacation while on the checkout line of the yuppie grocery store. "And then we found this incredible hotel overlooking the Mediterranean for $15.00 a night. I told the owner that she had to include breakfast and she agreed! I spent two hundred dollars in two weeks!" Skinflint.

Here in New York, we are way more into the ghetto gold. Those anxious women at suburban train stations are clutching their LV spring collection bags as if their lives depended on it. They vacation at "Sandals" in Jamaica. The faces here bear the anxious mark of the shtetl, the overcrowded steamer leaving Naples harbor seventy years ago, the fetid Lower East Side, teeming Flushing, Queens, the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. They look nothing like the good people of Minnesota.

shameless commerce/right to privacy

The highly contradictory notion of bourgeois privacy makes its transformation into an internal limit (to be transgressed by police, media, and perverts) a political and libidinal inevitability. The unthought-through debt that the right to privacy owes to the right to property is repaid when privacy is transformed into property. The cold hard cash that even B-grade celebrity can earn seems to be the newest, shiniest brass ring to which ordinary people can aspire when reality television asks us to trade in the privacy of our bedroom or toilet for a few weeks of televisual fame. There is an inexhaustible reservoir of middle-class hotties - trapped by credit-card debt, but proud of their flat abdomens - who submit to screen tests in order to expose every moment of their lives to the television camera. In this segment of the overdeveloped world, individuals feel that privacy is the last thing they have left to exchange for a golden parachute out of the increasingly abject middle class.

The culture industry's enthusiastic mobilization of surveillance technologies proves that Adorno and Horkheimer got it right when they suggested that mass-produced entertainment teaches us to submit and adapt to logics and technologies of domination -- in this case 24 hour surveilance and the destruction of the boundaries around our private parts.


Revised excerpt from my article "A Brief Genealogy of Privacy" in Grey Room. -

Always ready to up the ante on disciplinary entertainment, Fox is set to start up a cable channel devoted entirely to Reality Television -- 24/7.

Authoritarian? Anyone?

You've seen dependent personality disorders, narcissistic personality disorders, borderline personality disorders. You think these people have made your life hard!

Wait until you encounter authoritarian personality disorder whose first demand is unquestioning obedience and trust in his declarations/delusions "Mission Accomplished" "Rich people need money too" and "I'm for Democracy." "I've never made any mistakes." "Stay the course." "Eat your dinner."

Deaf to criticism, blind to reality, authoritarian personality disorder believes in the use of force and the force of repetition to get his point through our thick numbskulls. He believes, truly that he is infallible. See especially transcript of W.'s April 13, 2004 press conference.

But W. is not alone: his techniques work because well, we've been prepared for the authoritarian personality disorder. Many people suffering from authoritarian personality disorder are highly successful and live to obscure the truth of their worthiness.I think intelligent people on the right identify with Karl Rove Bush's Brain As servant to the body of authoritarianism, you can really get AHEAD.

Danger! Charisma at Work!

Why do we fall so hard for the charismatic personality? Because he or she appears to offer us a way out of the daily grind. As Max Weber has written, "In contrast to any kind of bureaucratic organization of offices, the charismatic structure knows nothing of a form or of an ordered procedure of appointment or dismissal. It knows no regulated 'career,' 'advancement,' 'salary.' It knows no agency of control or appeal, no local bailiwicks or exclusive functional jurisdictions; nor does it embrace permanent institutions like our bureaucratic 'departments,' which are independent of persons and of purely personal charisma." While charisma may lie beyond the realm of criticism, its charms are deadly, and only appeal to those made so desperate by the depersonalization of the administered life that a regression towards semi-feudal relations of fealty for a big "personality" seems the only appealing alternative to the "peer review."

But now, the "free" market wants to corner the monopoly on charisma -- Free marketeers promote the idea that ONLY the market is dynamic and innovative, only the market can "act" in a sovereign manner. The market is actually imagined as the sole force that can disregard economic rationalization in order to project a more exciting relationship with money - the most important thing about the ethics of generalized entrepreneurialism is that in this fantasy, money is transformed from the dull and predictable creativity-killing weekly paycheck into BOOTY! Pirate's booty!

Everybody an expert! Revolt against Modernity!

It seems to be a good thing that we are advised by many New Agers to privilege intuition over science: if science is to be mistrusted, getting in touch with our instinctual, experiential life is crucial if we are to find wisdom from within. This is known as "self-empowerment." Intuition is considered the gift of the generations - handed down to us through this mysterious force called tradition.
Tradition is idealized as some purveyor of hidden wisdom to be opposed to the ham-fisted exploitative principles of "Western Science," or a suspect knowledge, guarded by "experts." Everybody can be an expert (of oneself), if only one can listen to the voices within!
But it is only when the cycle of inter-generational transmission is effectively broken that advice industry enters upon the scene, brimming over with admonitions about how to balance a checkbook, cook a roast, how to breastfeed one's children, how to succeed in business. The advice industry banks on one thing - the obsolescence of our parents' experiences. When the advice industry advises us to connect with tradition, to simplify our lives, to reorganize our closets, it is showing us how completely alienated we are from "tradition" itself. It is telling us that we are helpless before modernity, against which it advises us to rebel.

Benjamin blogs

The construction of life online is at present determined far more by links to fun facts than by thoughtful observation - indeed by such serendipitous factoids as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. Under these circumstances, rigorous thinking cannot aspire to take place within the extant intellectual framework; this is, rather, the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant intelligence can come into being only in a strict alternation between websurfing and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in online communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book - in websites, blogs, emails, and newsgroups. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment. Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

(after W. Benjamin's "Filling Station," the opening of One-Way Street)

The fun fact, then, is the tchotchke of thinking - kitschy, useless, loudly demanding of attention... as quickly obsolete as the ephemeral link. Opinionated writing, from solitary blogging to flame-wars, is both the last reserve of consumer retorts and the oil in the works of the net. Books can be as provisional and as experimental as anything else, but are packaged as complete, written in stone rather than etched in sand, or sketched on virtual graphite. Blogs, sites, newsgroups command attention, but bloggers (not just faux bloggers) are reaching for book contracts because they command respect, even if they are not the contemporary habitat of writing at the speed of thought.

Tchotchke City

It's hard to live a tchotchke free life, but I tried to take the anti-tchotchke vow and join tchotchke-lovers anonymous when I moved to a city that boasted a number of franchised upscale tchotchke stores called "Bibelot." But first, no one knew what tchotchke meant because Minneapolis is Yiddish challenged and second, there are no support groups for those of us recovering from tchotchke love.

So despite my best resolve, tchotchkes kept slipping into my life. I thought my apartment was a tchotchke free zone, but how could I throw away that silver plated pill box that X gave me for my birthday? Or what about the crystal candy dish shaped like a lilypad? I was the owner of lonely tchotchkes because I was holding back on tchotchke acquisitiveness, and had placed a cordon sanitaire around my apartment. Bibelot is French and means basically the same thing as tchotchke, that is -- useless decorative item placed nonchalantly around the bourgeois home. Bibelot aspires to something more sophisticated: the eponymous store certainly carried many ambitious tchotchkes, straining to be tasteful, that is untchotchke-like in their restrained and self-conscious handsomeness. The miniature Zen rock garden with the tiny rake or tabletop bubbling spring is a good example of this new, preening tchotchke.

And you had to have those adorable little bud vases for those special moments when you decided to pretend that you lived in a B&B and served yourself a breakfast of freshly baked scones on a tray adorned with cloth napkin and -- bud vases, each holding a perfect bud.

A tchotchke can be any function-free thing collected over the years, accumulating dust on your bookshelf. They are the stuff of our grandmothers' generation, the grotesquely humble and beloved objects of aspiring lower middle class families across the world. One of my favorites dates from the days of Old Communism in China, and could be found in the homes of up and coming comrades. We called them cats under glass, but they were basically little cats made of bits of rabbit fur, glued to plates covered by a glass bubble so that you could never hope to eat off this item. Yiddish in origin, this word has travelled far and wide to express the tragicomic outcome of pinning all our hopes for a better and more authentic life on a Lladro figurine of a dreamy shepherdess, on the iron trivet in the shape of a turtle, on the pastoral scene carved on a walnut, on the tiny copper milk jug filled with dried flowers.