Scalia's gestural language

is eloquent. But he says it doesn't mean anything. OK, I didn't grow up in suburban New York for nothing. Accompanying the gesture, Tony is said to have let loose, "To my critics, I say 'Vafancull-" umm yes indeed, that is a Supreme Court justice speaking to the Press. It's TONY SCALIA, not TONY SOPRANO.

Now, I happen to know a lot of senstive, anti-racist "type" who believe that "stereotyping" of people is the worst thing a citizen of the world can do. We are all types -- to understand or identify the type is to be able to see the hardened, objective, authoritarian remnants of inculcation both in others and ourselves -- we struggle with it, we may even occasionally rise above it. But we can not destroy typology as destiny.

We must refuse the humanist pablum of "We are all different." Different from what? For Adorno, most of us have remained "types" and have not attained anything even like individualism, or at least, in the case of everyone, our particularism is shot through by typology -- the libidinally blocked nerd, the angry young man, Jewish American Princess, the Southern beauty queen, the Asian good girl -- so even as Hollywood narratives glorify everything on the level of the individual, many of us are not individuated enough to take a critical view of the sedimentation of the type within, which are like veins in marble, or swirls in your chocolate swirl in your creamy cheesecake.

Scalia is a type -- vulgar, Sicilian, crypto-Fascist, Mafioso-like, strong man, Supreme Court justice who believes himself above the law -- oh, am I being anti-Italian? Only if you think "tolerance" obviates critique! Fall into your own stereotype and you will find that that is the place where you were prepared for regression, repressive desublimation, absolute submission to authority and the use of violence (against or for yourself!)

Cutting Class

The LA Times reports that LA High School students cut class in great numbers in order to protest proposed immigration reforms.

Under-reported in the US media was the walkout of over a million civil servants in London this week.

Global discontent may not produce a revolution, but it may in fact produce new learning opportunities. And they will not be taking place at airports, so it's another reason to travel less.

Digital Chosunilbo on France and a few memories of Paris last summer

Digital Chosunilbo decries the recent French protests as symptomatic of a culture unable to face the present or the future. By demanding life-long job security, the French, according to this Korean daily are trying to turn the clock back to a period of post-war prosperity, Cold War politics and middle class growth. From the Asian point of view, it is hard to understand why the French would be trying to turn back the clock. The prosperity of South Korea and Taiwan are based in large part on a stoical Confucian work ethic: but there simply does seem to be a lot more room for educated young people to get jobs that have no security, but offer a promise of some kind of better future (with gadgets).

I just have to say that last July, I had conversations with friends in Paris that went like this -- "Things can't go on like this much longer. How are people surviving while staples and luxuries displayed so defiantly in shopwindows are entirely out of their reach? Added to this is a sense that there is simply no hope for the average person because the price of a daily cup of espresso is the kind of indulgence she can no longer afford."

Disciplined by Gadgets

I've been on a few domestic flights recently and I have realized that airports/airplanes are the NEW carceral spaces. Forced to watch bad movies, and page through the Sky Mall offerings because airlines have become cheaper and cheaper in their services and have no more reading materials with at least a wider array of advertorials, travellers are the new hostages...unable to refuse to take off your shoes or watch the latest romantic comedy, you think that you can protect yourself from the sensory assault -- by talking to your loved ones on your cell phone. Travel today is just so much time and space in which to be exposed to products and their various placements. Autonomy from the vacuity of the kiosks offering (anything resembling journalism was decidedly absent from such spaces), one has recourse to gadgets, which give travellers a wonderful sense of sovereignty! I'm listening to the my Ipod, tuning out CNN, and then I'm talking to my family, tuning out the airport ambience, which is all permitted, I'm writing emails to get a leg up on the next day of work -- everything in terms of connectivity is permitted except critical thinking.

Lord of "das Ding"

I used to be embarassed about harboring my secret allegorical reading of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings , but I have recently overcome my shame and would like to ask that you remember that YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST.

I'm not referring to Tolkien's novels because I've never been able to get through any of it...but here it is -- the ring represents "the instrumentalization of psychoanalytic theory IN academia." And here is why -- Once you begin to "use" psychoanalytic theory in academia, it thoroughly consumes you, turning you into a ring wraith or Gollum, consumed by its all-explaining powers. But it is so powerful, that it must actually be kept out of the wrong places...

The "ring" is simply too powerful to use.

Got it? I'm not saying psychoanalytic theory should be banned or something akin to what a colleague of mine at Minnesota once suggested, I'm saying that if one uses it as a "tool" or "instrument" it will eventually, like an insatiable demon, eat your intellectual soul and spit it out like a peach pit.

Psychoanalytic theory in the clinic has nothing to do with the above allegory. In fact, there is no clinic in the Lord of "das Ding" as there is no clinic in academia. And here, finally is what Lord of the Rings has in common with psychoanalysis in academia as an epistemological space -- there is much talk of fellowship and sublimated libido, but no sexual "rapport." As some one else wrote, Liv Tyler seems trapped in a perfume commercial. The Ring is pure sublimation as will to power gone mad. There are other aspects of this allegory that shall be revealed, but only to the worthy....

Welcome to The BC

Check out The BC, a spoof of television series The OC by students at Boston College: it's become so popular it was just written up in the NYTimes.

Bush over breakfast

is what I got oday as our great leader's news conference was broadcast on NPR. There are four things that strike me in retrospect:

1. He stumbled over "moderate" and "modern" governments in Middle East that would find succor in the victory of democracy. Not terribly significant, except that there may be a critical difference. In many ways, Saddam's government was fully modern -- secular and drawing in its rhetoric and ideology from right wing and left wing movements of the early twentieth century in Europe. One can be modern without being moderate. This is a big political conundrum of our times.

2. He stumbled over the word emergency and emergence with regard to democracy. Emergency democracy or emergent democracy? Can the first even exist, or is it an oxymoron: hasn't he thrown our own country into state after state of emergency precisely to foil democratic processes?

3. His use of the term "the enemy" evokes a powerful narrative -- every time he says "the enemy this" or "the enemy that" he stimulates some involuntary/unconscious part of the human psyche. To counter this, we must talk about the enemy as much as possible as well -- in order to steal his thunder. People who like to say "that they don't hate us" in the Middle East are trying to extirpate any notion of oppositionality and serves the same gods of propaganda as Bush and his cronies.

4. Other commentators will tell you that the account on the ground in Iraq absolutely contradicts Bush's version of things, but I heard on NPR that because there is no visible street demonstration, Bush has "gained traction" in defense of the war in Iraq. I'm afraid that this is simply untrue. I myself didn't show up to rallies because I honestly do not think that a pull out is something that I can rally for. In Vietnam, the withdrawal of US troops seemed an obvious thing to demand. The anti-war movement has not crystallized into a pro-democracy movement. I'm waiting for that to happen.

Revisiting my cv

today, I am forced to remember two aspects of my past -- and my youthful, ridiculous idea of my own abilities and importance

1. On all the committees I ever sat at the University of Minnesota, I thought I was supposed to DO something, whereas now, looking back, I realized that my most important function was to occupy space. I had no patience either for slow change. I couldn't understand institutional inertia and believed that I was supposed to try to make things more "rational."

2. Seeing all my art reviews made me flush with pleasure in my early twenties. Today, I read Artforum with horror. There is much more so-called "diversity" in the pages -- if by that one means international jet-setters and advertisements for Art Fairs from Greenland to rural China, alongside advertisements for bad boy artist pushing the envelope with shows of staged violence against women (models) and other forms of jejeune transgression. In the midst of this, reviews. It's like a trade magazine gone mad.

Slavoj Zizek on Islamic mistrust and the Far Eastern

apotheosis of Mother-Goddess: Slavoj Zizek takes a look into the archives of Islam and glances at the Far East to bring us this nugget of insight: "This brings us back to the topic with which we began: woman and the Orient. The true choice is not the one between the Near-East masculine Islam and the Far-East more feminine spirituality, but between the Far-Eastern elevation of a woman into the Mother-Goddess, the generative-and-destructive substance of the World, and the Muslim distrust of woman which, paradoxically, in a negative way renders much more directly the traumatic-subversive-creative-explosive power of feminine subjectivity."

Is he taking the New Age's Goddess worship as "Far Eastern?" It certainly sets up a nice little opposition between Islam and "Far East." For Zizek, Islam's "mistrust" of women is a more authentic position with regard to the feminine than Goddess worship. But what Goddess worshipping Far East is he talking about? The one he finds in his local Wicca bookstore?

Isn't he talking about paganism? Matriarchy? Mythology? I am confused...but as Lacan says, at least according to Zizek, the truth deceives, or I am sure it was something along those lines.

Far East! Far Out!

Couch commitment problems

couches have been on our minds for the past week, after a period of serious conference organization and intensive negotiations at work; we have finally confronted our seriously underfurnished home... it's been torture. Chinese knockoffs of the Mies Barcelona daybed can cost 10% of the Knoll "original." But when we went to a showroom to try it out, the whole thing seemed to sag in the middle. We have yet to venture to Design Beyond, I mean, Within Reach's showroom in Santa Monica to sit on the real thing. The DWR version costs over nine grand! And looking around at used furniture in the OC made my stomach turn - seems around here they like it the bigger the better: everyone's couches look as if they're on steroids. Sitting on one obscenely obese item makes me feel like Lily Tomlin in the giant rocker on old SNL's. Why so big?

dragon fight

Leo set up this dragon fight on the couch and took pictures of it. Here is one. Bad things are happening in the world every day and I can't do anything about it, but in the dragon fight, perhaps there is some honor.

O'Connor on the dangers of dictatorship -- in the US

Retired Supreme Court Justice warns of dictatorship: "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings," says Sandra Day O'Connor in an underreported speech at Georgetown University in an attack on Republicans who attack the courts for not falling in line behind their march to corporate oligarchy.

A thousand little cuts can kill democracy slowly -- or at least anesthetize the spirit of critical thinking within the citizens of a democracy to such a degree that little is needed to inspire in them the desired and necessary capitulations.

Thanks to Jost for bringing this to our attention. We're back after conference and camping trip.

Pimping your invented past.

She is JT LeRoy. Boy am I out of it. I didn't realize that James Frey stole page ouf of JT LeRoy's "book." This stuff gives punk a bad name. But it sells.

The Real OC

Los Angeles Times reports on the Real OC. I feel sorry for everyone at home and abroad (in Germany especially) who think that the television show is entertaining, or has anything to do with the toxic mix of moneyed privilege and police culture that leads to this kind of crime, committed in the beautiful beach town of Corona del Mar.

Pacific Modernities: Museum Culture and Civic Engagement

We're organizing a conference this weekend, called Pacific Modernities: Museum Culture and Civic Engagement, which UCI Visual Studies is co-hosting with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. So - apologies for light or no blogging for the next few days, and do check out the conference program!

Inventions of Tradition: Karate

Frog in a Well has a great post on the "invention" of karate. CP Snow and Eric Hobsbawm have dealt with the fact that most British "traditions" date from the second half of the 19th century -- and as John Quiggin notes on Crooked Timber , a hundred fifty years is a long time for Australians and Americans. Be that as it may, it is precisely the shallowness of traditions that reminds us of the dynamism and inventive force of history.

"Crash" Sucked

for many reasons, but one of the most obvious ones is this -- falling down the stairs in one's Brentwood home and discovering that one's only friend is one's cleaning lady is in no way equivalent to discovering that one's problem child brother has been shot at point blank range and dumped roadside. The Magnolia imitation sound track and skillful use of montage does JUXTAPOSE these tragedies as if they coudl be weighed on the same scale -- "life is Los Angeles." The fact that Don Cheadle got behind this project is discouraging.

As I read on the Frankfurt School discussion list, Paul Haggis learned everything he knows about race relations from watching television. There is something irredeemable about the culture industry and the spectacle of its own redemption that it sells back to us.

Everyone in L.A., we are told by the film, is angry and alienated. It is a film full of false equivalences, false analogies and false equality. The cast gave a gripping performance, demonstrating once again that acting can be taken hostage at any time.

Women in Gaming

The Entertainment Software Association reports that women make up 44 percent of online gamers, and that 57 percent of their total play time is spent on casual games. -Wired claims "Casual games have definitely made massive inroads into women's free time. Lisa Sikora, of Microsoft's Casual Games division, says women make up 70 percent of their players - up from 20 percent in 1996." [ESA report, Women in Games, Fragdolls]
And Linden Lab Senior Vice President Robin Harper notes that although women comprise only 27 percent of Second Life's population, they log 43 percent of the in-game hours.

Celebrating Ang Lee by censorship

The BBC reports that the PRC major press is quick to claim Ang Lee as a great "Chinese" director - even as it censors his comments on homosexuality. The government also excludes Brokeback Mountain from its list of approved films.

This allows me to dilate a moment on the famed concept of "Eastern Tradition" and its special knowledge of the body: unfortunately, you'll find in most Eastern traditions a brutal attitude toward homosexuality and women. And Buddhism as a form of spirituality seems designed to cultivate resignation with regard to the status quo.

So if the only way to imagine overcoming what is given is identification with the tale of doomed (gay) love, then I think the Chinese government has responded "correctly" according to its old puritanical Communist Party imperatives.

But to make of Ang Lee a Chinese national treasure while repudiating the film he made is sad, very, very sad.

Liveblogging from Leo's soccer practice

(not really -- it's from yesterday)...but I retranscribe frantically scribbled notes:

I don't know if I can keep my mouth shut around the anxious Asian mom in a track suit and one of those duckbilled white visors that I find particularly unfetching -- if that is a word. She literally re-arranged her son's limbs while they were doing stretches at the beginning of class. I noticed him going limp like an Udon noodle. Why bother using the central nervous system when mom is doing all the work?

I have to walk up to her and say something. I think she is coaching him about his kicks during their drills and just in case he should get away from her while he is standing on line waiting for his turn at the ball, she keeps one palm firmly planted on top of his Beatles moptop. If she's Chinese, I'm going to go up to her and say something in Chinese like, "Are you torturing him or do you want him to enjoy learning how to play soccer?" Or "It's not the World Cup you know." Or simply, "Can you relax? They're five years old."

My heart was pounding as I got up and started towards her as she is muttering to her son about his latest kick and suddenly I hear that she is speaking Korean. Thank the Lord! I don't have to make an intervention today. My burden is lifted. She wouldn't listen to me if I spoke to her in English.

Gatorade break: I get a cup for Leo. Anxious Korean mom starts to lay cups out for all the children. She is just nervous. She is obviously not comfortable with anything that is going on here. She loves her kid. I suddenly feel less outraged by her behavior. Leo turns around to the Korean boy and flashes him a smile for no reason whatsoever. Yes, I remember how that was -- when my parents thought that every godd@@# thing that I did in public in front of people was an occasion for me either to shine and allow my parents to feel as if their toehold on middle class American existence was little more secure, or I could blow it and bring shame and deepest humiliation upon my entire family.

Nothing succeeds like failure

which will soon gain the right to have "studies" added to it. American Foucauldians who haven't read Nietzsche have decided that the only way to "talk back to power" is to make it an interdiscipinary field of academic specialization. Is there thought or research or basic analysis going on here? No! There is a great deal of display of subcultural privilege, mockery of the reproduction obsessed heteronormative types (like yours truly I suppose) and playing for laughs all in the insider's manner of perpetual subversiveness.

Failure studies, it turns out is a stunning success: accessing the failure as the new frontier of subversion, the logic of 80s cultural studies is extended in a realm where politics is will to power actualized as pure ambition, and critical thinking is realized as the display of one's subcultural credentials. As anyone who can use google will find out, the speaker whose talk I listened to recently is fully booked with speaking engagements all over the world.

Queer studies has identified the most hideous form of domination is -- normativity, with heteronormativity as the main culprit and reproductive heteronormativity as the New Lucifer. The queer and about to be failure studies scholar I listened to did deign to mention the term "capitalism" (my thought was, why bother when we know that heteronormativity is the true enemy?). It turned out that for failure studies, there are in fact hierarchies of failure, with -- you guessed it, the white heteronormative brand being the wrong kind. After reading passages from Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting about Scottish junkie self-loathing, the speaker indicated that Welsh's losers were -- well failures at failing. Compared unfavorably with Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of my Mother unfavorably for its anti-colonial rhetoric, Welsh is consigned to the category of failed failures, and Kincaid, elevated to what? Exemplary expression of anti-colonial self-critique? But where is her "failure"? I am, by the way, an admirer of both books -- but to compare them in this way is absurd.

Even though I, like the "studies" people and almost everyone else in America, feel marginal and under-represented -- harried writer/blogger Ph.D. mothers unite! being a married woman and a mother, I realized, I couldn't even fail properly according to her standards of "normativity." I had succeeded all too well and said speaker had her revenge on my heterosexual ass.

Added to this was the typical demand for recognition of the marginal while celebrating the marginal's marginality at the same time. It turned out that this speaker hailed as the highest form of failure under capitalism the butch dyke -- because get this -- she can't sell anything and she can't get her own television show.

Proof of this "failure" was offered in the fact that Martina Navratilova only got two endorsements in her career!

I beg to differ dear scholar of failure. If one measures success by the sell, then fat does not sell, old age sells even worse, and the poor, they don't sell at all. So if you're poor. old and fat and a butch dyke, then you really don't sell, but at this point what are we even asking for? Equal opportunity marketing?

click and drag

I'm wondering about what is happening to our sense of the haptic (that sensuous capacity for at touching that is also an act of grasping and seizing) under the regime of the click and drag interface.

It has made me want to write the response to the recent Hollywood upper-middle class panic attack atrocity Firewall and my own script would be named CURSOR . You know the plot, happy white upper middle class family with subzero stainless appliances is beset by terrorist blackmailer identity thieves who infect happy white upper middle class family's digital home with a viral Tourette's syndrome. The HDTV and the computerized appliances all display F##$ YOU as a morning greeting and the IPOD driven stereo sends out wave after wave of songs laced with obscenities. Family falls apart, children are kicked out of private school for cursing, wife pulls a muscle in Pilates class cursing her instructor out, husband's work computer confiscated for obscenity.

What does it mean that our ideas of grasping and touching has become metaphorized as click and drag? Internet porn may be once again at the forefront of making this particular kind of "interface" with the surface of the other.

our moment of zen

In an off-handed manner, Freud described the highest form of pleasure as lack of tension and stimulation. Spiritual virtuousity, according to him, was not available to the majority of human beings: he is concerned the average person, who is unable to immolate the senses, who is susceptible to short cuts, who is attached to the material world and feels all too sharply the ravages of cupidity, aggression, desire for vengeance, envy either of penises or of other things, the darkness of disappointments.

Freedom and detachment were not goals that could be attained through any Master's guidance: every analysis follows a completely idiosyncratic path. And the end of analysis is precisely not the annihilation of the ego preached by every five and dime guru, nor the inflation of it by every self-help meister.

There is a powerful populism of and in psychoanalysis that has yet to be affirmed.