Yoga -- not an eclectic spiritual practice

I've found a yoga class where I am humbled every time. I am not only the worst student in the class, I am the chubbiest. There is very little New Age stuff about intuition and holism. The teacher urges us to be grateful that we have full use of our limbs and organs. He makes jokes about having had two milkshakes and a whole pan of lasagna before coming to class. I'm hooked. I fall down, and there is stuff I just can't do.

Here is something else that eludes me: This morning's Washington Post is alone in reporting that 1300 have been killed in sectarian fighting this week in Iraq. And then commentators wonder if civil war will break out? What more do they need as proof? An official declaration? I don't understand the news any more, and I simply do not understand its analysis either. And here is another difficulty I can't wrap my mind around: why no reporting of 1300 deaths on the front page of the New York Times ?

Gazillions of Cable Channels and Nothing to Watch

Out of sheer desperation, we are watching the Olympics -- we're paying so much for cable television that we have felt obliged to get our money's worth, even it means that our brains will be pulverized in the meantime by the hysterically pitched commentators. We can't stay up late enough to see Jon Stewart. We have watched two episodes of 'Desperate Housewives" and 45 minutes of "The OC." The problem is, we seem to be just watching the major broadcast networks and in the pre-cable world, one did not need to pay a small fortune to get reception to ABC, NBC and CBS...

Bourgeois Revolutions/Cultural Revolutions

In a recent debate with a friend, we have come across the difficulty of dealing with the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China, the intellectual ferment of the 1980s, and finally the contemporary intense nationalism of the CCP style free markets: I have argued that there needs to be a redemption of the Cultural Revolution for the Chinese, and an acceptance of responsibility for that catastrophe that it became if there is to be a reckoning, a real reckoning and not just the triumphal and tired Deng and post-Deng celebration of the present.

I find Alain Badiou (in "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?" positions: east asia cultures critique 13:3 (winter 2005), 481-514 - available on-line through Project Muse) unrepentant about a Maoism that other prominent French intellectuals have tried hard to live down.

If we are to demand redemption and reckoning for the Cultural Revolution, we should demand teh same thing of the bourgeoisie: bourgeois revolutions of the past brought us innumerable benefits that I do believe are critical. Whether or not one is a fan of private property and individualism, these conditions tore humanity out of the bondage of feudal relations.

So that's where I think the CR went wrong, TERRIBLY wrong, but to condemn it the same way the bourgeoisie was condemned by the CCP is to repeat the most totalitarian gesture all over again.

The prima donna within...

I have always admired and been terrified of the prima donna -- she who defies the logic of exchangeability -- who refuses it, who declares herself irreplaceable. -- Every one of her gestures declares "I am unique." In fact, everyone should demand what the prima donna does. But the rest of us have been so schooled in modesty and self-abnegation -- in the name not of "higher" ideals, but rather of survival, that we make of humility a moral issue rather than an ethico-tactical one. That is why the prima donna is so vulnerable. In a world where everyone and everything is made fungible, she tries through pure talent to distinguish herself above all others. She is more courageous, but also more tyrannical. She doesn't want a democratization of singularity (what would that be in any case?) -- her protest is all about doing justice to her own brilliance, her voice, her allure, her magical body.

What she reminds us of however, is the need to shine, if only briefly, like a star. Shininess is a critical quality: who would want to live with the negative charisma of the Puritans all the time? Her violation of laws against sumptuary display are reminders that it is enough to live for animal sensuality and art. Even if she consumes us in her the rapacity of her own narcissism, this danger is a tonic. The world is a mirror to her, or else it is a blank. To deny her is to affirm a shabbier, grimmer world, but to accept her rule is to accept submission to her will which replaces the universal principle.

The Diamond conspiracy

Boing Boing links to a 1982 Atlantic article on the De Beers cartel diamond marketing campaign that sought to influence generations of middle class consumers by promoting the diamond engagement ring as the bank breaking sign of love that every precariously perched couple could share. In 1947, De Beers hired an ad agency that launched an all out and very effective campaign combining lecture tours and product placement to attract the attention of the modestly affluent.

So now as I think about replacing 1200 square feet of carpeting with hardwood floors, I'm wondering if there isn't a hardwood cartel programming me for hardwood floor envy. We were going to do bamboo, but maybe there is a bamboo cartel.

I've been told Marmoleum is a natural renewable beautiful floor, but at 7 dollars a square foot, it would be just like that diamond engagement ring, -- slightly out of reach!

Experts say: Expertise in Decline!

The NY Times finds fit to report that with student presumption on the rise, and impertinent student emails raising more than a few professorial eyebrows, education professors have a few theories about it,

Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied technology in education, said these e-mail messages showed how students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors' expertise could rapidly become outdated.

"The deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge," Professor Dede said, and that notion has weakened.

An expert on the decline of professorial expertise, Dede seems to think that predicating respect in a belief on the professor's infallibility is legitimate and that there is no other way to found respect. The decline of the prestige of expertise is related to the rise of mass media, the gadget, the cynicism producing distance between official rhetoric and everyday life in institutions like a university.

The decline of the professorial aura can be related to the decline of aura in general. The instrumental and consumerist view of education that is accepted by students, administrators and often professors alike has even produced its own discourses of mass reproducible criticism -- the customer satisfaction form.

the endless conversation

that the blog format provides is the best part of it, -- and as a writer, who needs to write for more than just peer-reviewed journal, the academic audience and even the small press readership, which i find much too narrow, I thought i would cast my lot in with those writers who are not particularly tech-geeks, but who have decided in a sense to start an endless conversation. I had no illusions about reaching into the heart of America, but I thought that I should be able to communicate some of the things I've been working on to my friends who were not academics.

When I began doing this, and reading blogs, I realized I desperately needed a connection to some kind of progressive political movement that would give me the sign -- the revolution is nigh -- or else, the powers that be have been brought low -- now that I know that that this may not be tranmistted to me via the internets - (although I'm not excluding it from the realm of possibility) -- I do think that there is something to be said for being able try out certain arguments, threads of thought and reading in a very succinct way to a contingent and sometimes voluntarist rather than professional readership.

Most of the time I don't have a lot of time -- I like to think that I am able to deliver a small package of thought to those as harried as I am -- this blog is not leisurely or essayistic. There is a sense of urgency about things, but what I've also realized is that it is not an completely uncensored medium. I'm censoring myself all the time.

Private School Tuition Hits $25,000 in LA Area

In the Los Angeles Times private school mom expresses doubts: "'Sometimes I feel like they're all going to get into college no matter if I pay $25,000 or if they're in public school. I think the hope is they'll get into a really good college. I guess my hope is they will get into an Ivy League school and not go to Valley College.'"

Why do parents think that going to an Ivy League school will magically transform their children into gods and goddesses while the rest of Valley College peons travail as spiritual and material dwarves, stunted no doubt by lack of parental capital?

Answers at 5!

YouTube - Mashup of Tom Cruise as James Frey on Oprah

YouTube - Tom Cruise on Oprah : this mashup cuts between Tom Cruise's testimony to being a "relationship" man and Oprah's interrogation of James Frey.

Cruise's inauthenticity is amazing -- couldn't he have given a better performance of "being in love"?

against (air) travel

A mathematically adept friend recently calculated, much to the chagrin of his wife, that the family's share of jet exhaust on a trip from Minneapolis to New York City was greater than the pollution that their Prius would produce in an entire year.

Now, this does not mean of course that their refusal to travel would result in cleaner air over the Upper Mid-West. But the illusion of frictionless global mobility certainly has produced the careless attitudes that make us all prone to consume long distances the way readers of Elle consume dresses -- carelessly, with delusions of grandeur, little thought of the future, and fantasies of transport that have to do with credit cards.

It's not just the pollutants of air travel that are troubling, it's also the fantasy that we can and should be able to go anywhere at anytime, that we should all be like globe trotting jet setting blackberry wielding masters of the universe whose effortless transition from limousine car service to boutique hotel is well lubricated by bottles of Evian and tubes of Crème La Mer, or -- the latest $35 martini. In fact, the supposed locationless work that is most highly remunerated by late capital always entails a great deal of travel: CEO's, Halliburton consultants must all be cosmopolitan -- to a certain degree. Their ability to move around the world mimics the flow of global capital itself.

It used to be that the reactionaries, rubes, and other benighted resentful types stayed at home: now it may be the other way around.

From the front-lines of the Culture Wars,

Michael Berube is giving David Horowitz a good verbal beating on the front lines of our never culture wars.

I realize that I fight in my own way, in what I would call the culture skirmishes -- in fact, my opponent, often a glib academic who suggests things like, "It doesn't matter if a fact is true or false, as long as it is operational, or works -- which is the way financial speculation has always functioned, since the earliest days of capitalism (South Sea Bubble, Tulipmania)." gets the full brunt of my anti-pragmatist ire.

I yell silently, "You see! This is what gives American academia a bad name! Its embrace of pragmatism! This guy has just proven that democracy and capitalism are actually as Adorno and Horkheimer have suggested -- incompatible. The instrumentalization and creeping reifiication of the former always dominate the principles of the latter!"

So I am now in my own corner of the stealth culture wars declaring the founding of a new movement based on theoretical populism I shall denounce all forms of crypto-pragmatism, from sea to shining sea. And I'll do it even if no one notices!

Visual Hunting Aid

Visual Hunting Aid
by Needlenose...

Boycott Danish Modern?

I don't know if anyone remembers the anti-Japanese riots in China of a couple of years ago. The protestors were really angry that the Japanese government had allowed schools to use history books that minimized the damage done by Japanese aggression during their occupation of China. Now, no one got angry that there is nary a word about the June 4 Tiananmen massacres and there were no protests about that Chinese omission in history as well as major media outlets.

When there are no protections for the expression of political dissent in a country, people find permissible ways of expressing their anger -- in nationalism, hatred of other nations, anger over cartoons.

Here in the strange world of academia, self-censorship usually finds itself using the language of crypto-theology and overt piety in order to generate consensus when there is none. That's what is going on in these anti-Danish protests. At least they can agree on one thing.

Fashion Magazines: a Twelve Thousand Dollar Lie

ELLE magazine features in the March issue (which is not on line yet) an article by a poor writer named Jenny Feldman, about whether or not spending $12,000 on a dress is a reasonable thing to do, if the price of that dress represents one fourth of your yearly income.

Jenny pretends that young female New Yorkers would 'save" money for a dress by not taking cabs or buying capuccinos for the beautiful Sari Gueron column dress. She speaks to designers who of course have good justifications for the high cost of couture -- intensive craftsmanship from beginning to end, specially designed textiles.

But Jenny may be thinking of the dress as an investment when she decides to take the subway instead of a cab as her first act of renunciation-- in her search for an investment banker husband who makes millions, she is going to need some nice dresses. She can use it as a tax write-off.

But let's face it, Jenny, you are going to put that dress on a credit card, since credit has gotten more easy to get, and objects have become more and more attractive. And when you find the banker of your dreams, you're hoping he's going to help you pay it off.

The conclusion of the article -- because it is in a fashion magazine is that once you get over the sticker shock, the 12,000 USD dress is like SOOO worth it.

I'm not disagreeing. I don't want to shop at Marshall's all the time... under late capital, there is no pleasure like conspicuous consumption!

Nevertheless, for the working women of New York who never find their banker husbands, whose daddies aren't worth millions, whose novels never become best-sellers, that same 12,000 USD dress is going to be out of fashion next season, and the following as well, and the interest they pay on their credit card will enrich MBNA or Chase bank and impoverish them. What they will have is a meringue of a dress, a beautiful thing, not an abstraction at all, but a sign of their own seduction by a logic that no longer has anything to do with the Protestant Ethic, but everything to do with a demand for immediate satisfaction and tangible pleasures that appear more and more out of reach. Not really an investment, is it?

Baudrillard on Watergate: Simulation and Scandal

I've been reading Baudrillard's 1981 "Precession of the Simulacra" for my seminar on mimesis, and felt drawn back into the dark moment of total disillusionment with critique and revolution that this text embodies.

The simulacrum being our master, there is little to do but map its devious undermining of the "real" (what is that? we'll get to it): Watergate for Baudrillard was a simulacrum of a scandal -- and he comments more on the film All the President's Men more than on the events of the break in and subsequent cover up themselves. It seems that he wants to one up the Frankfurt School critique, a tradition to which B. owes a great deal, but in the end abandons for the idealization and simulataneous demotion of something he calls the "real." The real is at once embodied reason with a historical dimension as well as a form of unmediated inter-subjectivity that can lead to revolution or massive social upheaval. The "Kennedys" are an embodiment of the political real -- for Baudrillard. Their demise, repeated over and over again has emptied all subsequent political assassinations of any content.

The art world jumped all over these ideas.

But now with the ever expanding, but enervated sense of scandal that seems to dominate the field of the political, we may want to revisit some of Baudrillard's ideas, if only to abandon them for a new set of critical tactics -- outrage may in fact be what is enervated -- the exercise of pure force should be worrisome in a liberal republic, but it isn't and this is what Baudrillard tries to theorize when he writes "capital needs no social contract."

Live blogging the NSA hearings

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Live blogging the NSA hearings
I'm seriously behind on this issue, but Greenwald live-blogged the NSA wiretap hearings. Now while I am finding my inner nihilist speaking louder and louder every day -- it says things like, "What do you expect? Democracy is a sham!" I have to give credit to the patience of folks like Greenwald, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights for fighting the long, patient, necessary fight for Civil Liberties in these United States.

The nihilist in me is saying, "These are rear-guard actions. Free Speech and individual liberties pshaw!" The inner maoist in me says, "Only the dictatorship of the proletariat will bring about the freedom from instrumental reason that you seek!"

I've got to sit with nihilist and maoist some time and ask them what they really want out of life.

Super Crooked, Super Bowl

Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy noticed too that the Steelers won on the referees' favoritism.

Now I'm not saying that it was a conspiracy and I'm not even a Seahawks fan. Never saw them play before today, but wasn't it fairly obvious that the referees were determined to turn around their momentum on any number of occasions -- my favorite one being -- offensive pass interference -- that nullified their first touchdown.

I know that for the Seahawks themselves who make gazillions of dollars, they go home to the bling bling and their McMansions and they can afford to be good sports. But as an average female occasional fan of football, sometime conspiracy theorist I find the whole thing totally insanely unbearable. OK, the odds were for Pittsburgh, but did buying off the referees have to be that obvious???

Modern Motherhood and the Chinese "thing"

So many Chinese professionals, both male and female have mistaken me for a "real" Chinese mother and asked, "Why don't you send Leo to your parents? They can raise him for you while you're working so hard!"

Sometimes they think my parents are in Taiwan, sometimes they think my parents are in the PRC. And every time they assume that I could just send my child packing -- well, because that's what Chinese mothers do. That's what my mother did. At fourteen months, I was left with my grandmother, who raised me while my mother travelled to the US to be with my father and to work.

The idea that birth mothers should raise their own children is a novelty of modernity, given voice to by that ultimate deadbeat dad, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but along with this idea came a whole slew of other critical concepts to modernity -- such as the particularity and dignity of every individual, the importance of maternal feeling in the nuclear family, and the eminent intelligence and educability of children -- that form the foundations, problematic as they may be of progressive notions of parenthood and childrearing. Of course, frivolous Parisian aristocrats were sending their nurslings to wetnurses, and workaholic Chinese mothers are sending theirs to doting grandparents. It's different, but the formal principle of diffuse relations and feelings between mothers and children that are replaced by or displaced for other caretakers still obtain.

So you know what? I could never leave Leo with his grandparents, on either side of the family. His father and I brought him into the world and we are responsible for him. There is not so much hard labor or economic hardship in our lives that I have to resort to such extreme measures in order to make a living. (I could be on my fourth book by now!) But psychologically, I just could not give him up -- so I guess I am not Chinese after all, I am the Modern Working Mother --Western style. It freaks me out to live on this divide between East and West, but no amount of cosmpolitanism or "hybridity " actually allows for me to envision such the alternative, because I have lived the consequences of precisely this kind of maternal abandonment and it aint pretty. Call me Eurocentric. Go ahead.

Kakutani lays another one

Did you know? James Frey is not to blame for being a pathetic, egocentric liar. It was literary theory that did it. Yes, academia is to blame for all the woeful and disgusting contortions of the publishing world. "Deconstructionists were purveying a fashionably nihilistic view of the world, suggesting that all meaning is relative, all truth elusive" - says Michiko Kakutani. Yeah, the New York Times, always such a bastion of truth-telling! As for their arts coverage - great purveyors of resentment with hindsight. Serious literary journalism? Look elsewhere. - But if you want fabrications and disculpations, look to Kakutani's own employer, the (no longer so) venerable publisher of her fictions, as well as those of Jayson Blair's and Judith Miller's.

Republicans Lie and Democrats Suck!

Arianna Huffington writes about the lame ass Democratic response to Bush's pack of lies, "While Kaine was droning on, I closed my eyes and imagined Jack Murtha giving the response, someone with the authority to do much more than second guess -- to offer an alternative strategy on Iraq and the war on terror, as opposed to Kaine's 'program of service and competent management.;"

So Dems are trying to sell themselves as the TECHNOCRATS of the War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq and the bureaucratic whizkids of healthcare?

Rather than trying to even claim an oppositional vision, Kaine tried to play the MANAGEMENT card?!!!

Everyone hates Management!

That is why the Republicans have managed to get away with their Evangelical Bush on Fire. At least they have smokescreen of idealism covering up their greed and power-mongering nepotism. What do the Dems have? A guy (Kaine) whose eyebrows look as if they might fly off his face from the sheer boredom of having ot listen to him drone on.

Central Casting???? Central Casting???

We need Champions of the People, Protectors of Justice and a Righteous Man or Woman type who is eloquent, who can communicate by arguing for honesty and integrity in government, for the end of an era of greed and deception, who can dignify the ideals of public-ness as a space of dissent and civil liberty.

Democrats, you truly do suck!