Category Archives: theory

Eurotrash philosophy

In a controversial article titled An Oasis in the Desert of Eurotrash Philosophy published in the The Chronicle of Higher Education of January 23, American literary critic Carlin Romano praises Pierre Hadot and lambasts European philosophers for their views on 9/11:

“In the infancy of the 21st century, Eurotrash philosophers give European philosophy a bad name. Like Eurotrashers at trendy clubs, the philosophical species lives for the moment, spouts from the top of its careerist head, and makes little sense.
…We think of Jean Baudrillard, the Eurotrash patron saint, a man whose mastery of argument falls somewhere between that of Kim Jong Il and the Raelians, and his ugly, exploitative little 9/11 “book,” The Spirit of Terrorism (Verso Books, 2002).
…We think of the laughable French “urbanologist” Paul Virilio, whose works read as if a nasty wind blew his notes in the air, then haphazardly bound them into a book. (Ground Zero, Verso Books, 2002).
…Of course, you don’t have to be French to be a Eurotrash philosopher. Consider Slovene Slavoj Zizek, the Roberto Benigni of corrupt intellectual discourse, a tiresome court jester always happy to walk across the chairs of any American university willing to meet his salary demands. To this often English-challenged jet-setter, in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Verso Books, 2002), the collapse of the WTC towers was “the climactic conclusion of 20th-century art’s ‘passion for the Real,'” and “the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest.” —Carlin Romano, An Oasis in the Desert of Eurotrash Philosophy, The Chronicle, January 2003

The breeding of money

Donald Kuspit on contemporary art in Artnet:

By way of introduction, I want to quote some lines from the tenth and final Duino Elegy of Rainer Maria Rilke. Describing the “booths” in a fair — let’s call it an art fair — “that can please the most curious tastes,” he asserts that there’s one “especially worth seeing (for adults only): the breeding of Money! Anatomy made amusing! Money’s organs on view! Nothing concealed! Instructive, and guaranteed to increase fertility!”

I will suggest that the irrational exuberance of the contemporary art market is about the breeding of money, not the fertility of art, and that commercially precious works of art have become the organ grinder’s monkeys of money. They exist to increase the generative value and staying power of money — the power of money to breed money, to fertilize itself — not the value and staying power of art. —Donald Kuspit

Such is the state of feminism that it forces one to defend lame movies

… post in progress …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjPFO-1t5c]

I watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend with my kids and liked it. Probably too lame to be called a sleeper, which is a term that Danny Peary uses to define a future cult film, in his Cult Movie Stars. Although lame, you may enjoy the allegorical representation of early 20th century Western sexual mores. Part of the fun was watching it with my daughters after my eldest (12) had picked it up at our local video rental store. Its interesting connections are movie ratings around the world and issues of contemporary feminism. Be warned though, some of you may find this an incredibly stupid film. To start the discussion, here is an article by Udolpho.com.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend… When I read Slate “reviewer” Dana Stevens’ deranged put-down [this tale of male sexual panic, you breathe a sigh of relief: Thank God we don’t really live there. Or do we?] of My Super Ex-Girlfriend as “grim misogyny“, I knew I would have to see the comedy that inspired her grim diatribe. And yet I also knew that the movie probably wasn’t going to be any good. Such is the state of feminism that it forces one to defend lame movies. —Udolpho.com

Regarding the film certification on its adultness: In the United States the film was rated PG-13 (children under 13 can attend but need special guidance by parent or guardian) but in Germany and the Netherlands is deemed suitable for children aged 6 and above. American mainstream film critic Michael Medved noted that the “PG-13 rating” was inappropriate (due to several sex references and depictions) and that the movie should have had an “R rating” instead.

On its potential cult status (a financial disaster at the box office is a criterium of a future cult hit):

The film has been viewed as a financial disaster according to Box Office Mojo, as the film took in a mere $8.6 million on its opening weekend and has made $22,530,295 domestically, and $54,882,045 worldwide as of November 19, 2006.

As an allegory of early 21st century sexual mores:

  • portrait of Jenny as a needy, desperate, bitchy and clingy woman
  • depictions of zero-tolerance policies of sexual correctness at work

P. S. You may have noticed that I finally learned how to insert YouTube films into my pages. Some of you may have had problems with inserting the films (I know I’ve had). Here is the code:

“open square brackets youtube=paste youtube link here close square brackets”.


					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				On micro-blogging and macro-blogging
			

								


				

			
Micro-blogging is a relatively new term that has been used in connection to new social networking applications such as Twitter (What are you doing?).  Today, it’s also being used in connection to Flickr and YouTube. A good post on the subject here and here.


I’ve only been ‘properly’ blogging since August 2006. With properly I mean using blogging software, I used to imitate the style of a blog in simple .txt files here.  First I tried blogspot, which I disliked so much that I thought I’d return to my old ways, but then I tried WordPress and have stuck with it.


But when I compare the ease of editing at WordPress with those found at Flickr, Flickr is clearly the winner. Many times when I started with a post I’d compose it first at Flickr and than copy it and continue with it here (WordPress).


Now the main –how do you say it in English (overall tendency or purpose)? — is:


    

  • to praise Flickr’s writing environment.
    • 

  • to praise WordPress and especially its SNAP extension
    • 

  • to raise the question whether there is a Flickr-like application for MP3s
    • 

  • to question whether there is content management system in the making which is as elegant as Flickr, and which also includes content from Wikipedia and YouTube, sort of the meta-approach to internet publishing and where I could re-publish the content now hosted at Jahsonic.com
    • 

  • to introduce the term macro-blogging referring to the process listed in the bullet point above
    • 



In order to spice up what is perhaps an uneventful blog entry I give you Chesty Morgan in Fellini’s Casanova:


[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeUzWi2O0KU]


Breast fetishists may want to scrub to two minutes and 23 seconds.


Credit where credit is due: I think it is Nils Geylen who first led me to the concept of micro-blogging.

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Jean Baudrillard died today
			

								


				

			
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, cultural theorist, media theorist, situationist, post-structuralist and one of France’s leading postmodern thinkers, died today in Paris at the age of 77, his relatives said. He was the last survivor of the fab four of French PoMo (the others being Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and  Jacques Derrida), and a wonderful prose poet. The only living French philosopher I can think of who continues to write in the tradition of Baudrillard is Paul Virilio.


 	    		




Baudrillard satirized.


Text: “Yes, hyper-scepticism. Intellectuals must stop legitimizing the notion that there is some “ultimate truth” behind appearances. Then, maybe, the masses will turn their backs on the media and public opinion management will collapse.” –Baudrillard


The cartoon is from “Postmodernism for beginners” by Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, an Icon Books book.


Update, March 11 2007:


British gulf war.jpg


The Gulf War Did not Take Place


 


9/11 attack on America 


New York, Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacs on th WTC.




My interest in Baudrillard is very much related to his statements on hyperreal mediatizations of the 1990/1991 Gulf war and on the 2001 terrorist attacks on the WTC.



Update March 12, 2007:


					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Flaubert’s hatred for the bourgeois was at times almost maniacal
			

								


				

			
Yesterday I acquired Bohemian Versus Bourgeois at Demian bookstore, Antwerpen. It appears to be one of the earliest books on alienation in modern art, taking a sociological approach. Colin Wilson has done the same with a psychological approach in 1956 with   The Outsider.


   


   Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French society and the French man of letters in the nineteenth century (1964) – César Graña [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]  


It’s in this book that one finds references to the group of French artists les bousingots, which is rendered bousignots in the index. Web references to this groups include: “Hugnet, Georges, 1906-1974. Bousignots, excentriques et isolés du romanisme, typed manuscript with handwritten corrections together with signed typed letter 1954 Oct. from L. Mollion of Radiodiffusion Français”. The book itself references Théophile Lavallée’s Histoire de Paris depuis le temps des Gaulois jusqu’en 1850 published by J. Hetzel, Paris, 1852. [Feb 2007] 


César Graña bio


César Graña (1919 – 1986) was a Peruvian anthropologist who received his Ph.D. of sociology from the University of California. In 1942, he came to the United States. 


César Graña’s best known work was based on the sociology of art. He wrote Bohemia vs. Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century, which was published in 1964, this work is also known as Modernity and its Discontents. In 1989, he released Meaning and Authenticity. On Bohemia: The Code of the Self Exiled was published in 1990. In 1994, Fact and Symbol was published and it was nominated for a National Book Award. Graña died on August 24, 1986 in a car crash. —[1]


  


An excerpt from cultural relativist Roger Sandall’s The Culture Cult:


In his 1964 study Bohemian Versus Bourgeois César Graña shows how [the bohemians] claimed a more natural sympathy with other cultures than the bourgeoisie could possibly possess. They regarded the lives of the French commercial and professional classes as utterly degrading. Graña describes Stendhal’s horror of the lowness and meanness of the middle-class, and how “anyone who acquired a routine social obligation or worked at a profession received from Flaubert either casual scorn or mocking sorrow”. This same contempt for the routine world of paid employment was pushed to an extreme by Baudelaire, whose attitude—“to be a useful person has always appeared to me to be something particularly horrible”—expressed pure aristocratic disdain. 


Flaubert’s hatred for the bourgeois was at times almost maniacal. After completing his second novel Salammbo in 1862 he wrote that “It will: 1) annoy the bourgeois; 2) unnerve and shock sensitive people; 3) anger the archaeologists; 4) be unintelligible to the ladies; 5) earn me a reputation as a pederast and a cannibal. Let us hope so.” While research into sexual behavior is a normal part of anthropological inquiry, it was a personal interest in erotic experience—romantically justified as self-fulfilment—which drove literary bohemia on its escapades. — Roger Sandall via http://www.culturecult.com/culturecult/bohemia.htm [Jun 2006]  


See also: Flaubert – Stendhal – Baudelaire –  bohemia –  bourgeois –  genre theory 

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				The possibility of a literary canon
			

								


				

			
On the Possibility of Conservative Literary Criticism


      via          Acephalous     by Scott Eric Kaufman on Feb 27, 2007


Actually, Scott’s post is more about the possibility of a literary canon tout court. He says: “few believe that Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Melville shouldn’t be taught—that’d they’re somehow inadequately “literary” in some regard—only that they should be taught alongside Behn [amatory fiction, women’s lit], (George) Eliot [women’s lit] and Stowe [Uncle Tom].” He recognizes place and time constraints: “Practical issues obviously abound. I’m talking about the hypothetical canon here, not what can be covered in a ten or eighteen-week survey.”


Shakespeare is universal because he embraced cultures and traditions outside his own—although his argument suffers here from being too quick on the triumphalism. …But then there’s the problem of what else should be included in the canon. We all agree that Shakespeare should, but what about all those books written by brown people who live on islands we’ve never even heard of. Can they possibly produce great literature. …


there’s absolutely no reason [Erna] Brodber‘s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home couldn’t be a work of “universal” genius. Were someone to argue that “our” cultural tradition isn’t represented, the claim to universality could be wielded as a multicultural cudgel: It doesn’t matter, we could say, swinging, because it tells a universal story, as applicable to us and our lives as any native Jamaican.


….


none of the usual critics of academia have attempted to define the literary in such a way that Shakespeare and Dickens are in, but Brodber and the rest are out. Or, they could have the courage of their convictions and say that if Shakespeare and Dickens are in, so are Brodber and the rest …


In this respect, I think the multiculturalist have cornered the cultural traditionalists, forcing them into a position either visibly incoherent (the false universalism of Shakespeare) or spectacularly racist (Dead and White, That’s What’s Right! Dead and White, That’s What’s Right!). ….


To conclude Scott asks: Where do they go from here?


Essentially,  Acephalous is in search of a postmodern canon. A canon that gives a place to the other; the queer, the postcolonial. He’s not denying the justifiability of the Western canon, but wonders how big a place should be reserved for the ‘other’ within that canon, without deviating too far from the what-is-ness of things. I look forward to reading more.

					

		
		
	


	

	

				

			
						

				The end of the sexual revolution
			

								


				

			
    


  In the Cut (Unrated and Uncut Director’s Edition) (2003) – Jane Campion [Amazon.com]  [FR] [DE] [UK]   


 In the Cut, of course, continues Campion’s career-long examination   of female masochism.    


   


  In the Cut (1995) – Susanna Moore

[Amazon.com]  [FR] [DE] [UK]  


I’m halfway through Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel In the Cut, the story of a thirty-something literature teacher in New York City with an interest in street slang who falls in love with a cop of whom she suspects he may also be a serial killer/psychopath. There are lots of similarities here with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which I read last year. Can both be categorized as chick lit? If yes, this kind of chick lit takes it upon itself to study men’s (sexual) behavior in an almost anthropological way. Moore describes how a post-coital man, Erica Jong described one of her lover’s post-toilet behavior. 


So far I liked Jane Campion’s film adaption of In the Cut better, Moore’s prose is kind of trite and Moore lacks the philosophical breadth I liked in Fear of Flying.  


What In the Cut and Fear of Flying also share is the concept of women’s sexuality after the sexual revolution, a topic I’ve first mentioned in my profile of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).


Speaking of the end of the sexual revolution which oficially arrived in 1984 (cfr. TIME cover) and which coincides with the arrival of AIDS (see Benetton AIDS ad) and of postmodernism: many writers of the pre- and sexual revolution era such as  Gershon Legman, Wayland Young (Eros Denied), Gordon Rattray Taylor and Amos Vogel (Film as a Subversive Art) foreshadowed utopia as soon as we would get rid of our sexual inhibitions.


I quote from Jim Haynes’s website[1]:


 


“Murder is a crime; describing murder is not.          Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is. Why?” –Gershon Legman.


“If we were sexually liberated there’d be no president, no police          force, no night sticks, no governments.” –Germaine Greer.


The utopia did not happen because of the aforementioned AIDS epidemic and what I suspect a whole range of reasons. Personally I like the concept of inhibitions, the concept of taboos, the concept of shame and guilt; not only are these inhibitions what makes sex exciting in the first place but I suspect that they are necessary to regulate a society. If these inhibitions would not be there life would be an eternal recurrence of the orgy in Perfume.  Maybe I should read this?


The only writer that comes to mind who has dealt with this subject is Camille Paglia.


 Well, um, what I’m saying is that I’m part of the sexual revolution, um, and I feel that the…in one of my most controversial sentences is “Everybody who preached free love in the 60’s is responsible for AIDS.” I mean by that the Mama’s and the Papa’s and all of us, so, the price of that revolution has been paid by gay men, primarily. I think that what we’re understanding is the enormous power of nature. Even Larry Kramer is starting to talk like this now: that nature apparently did not want us to be promiscuous and that it puts a thousand obstacles in our paths such as these diseases. OK. I feel that procreation is nature’s law, and that’s why I defy nature, I resist it, I oppose it. OK. I think that women certainly are in the..um, you know we were the first generation to have the birth control pill, OK, which frustrates nature. […] –Camille Paglia interviewed by Jack Nichols, 1997


But of course there must be other literature out there, and if you know of any, I’m looking forward to your recommendations.






					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				To jump-start your thinking
			

								


				

			
I’ve been thinking about something meaningful to say about the negative stir caused by Camille Paglia’s return to on-line writing at Salon.com. Scott McLemee at Quick Study introduced her comeback with the lines “Is Anybody Out There Eagerly Waiting for Volume Two of “Sexual Personae”? No, I Didn’t Think So….” When I read the actual piece, I found more than 400 comments, more than 90% negative. Today, as I check the backward links to her, I see more than hundred blog entries mentioning her comeback. I haven’t checked the positive/negative in those yet.I was enormously intrigued when I read my first interview with Paglia in Belgian magazine HUMO; I was increasingly intrigued when I read her in techno-utopian Wired magazine; I was rewarded when I finally read   	 Sexual Personae (1990); she introduced me to the Lovecraftian Chthonic, to the Nietzschean Dionysian and Apollonian, she said strange things on date rape, her quotes were funny, she compared Meryl Streep (who I disliked at the time, I’ve since seen Adaptation and changed my mind, which reminds me that I have to re-watch Sophie’s Choice.)  to I believe a horse and mentioned her nasal tone. I liked it. I had been raised on a Freudo-Marxist diet and her biased politics were refreshing. In short, I loved her, and I still do; my page on her is even referenced at the Camille Paglia checklist:


“Camille Paglia 	, another dictionary entry in a network of illustrated cultural 		references, with quotes illustrating various points 		Paglia is known to occasionally make.”


Over the last few years, I’ve come to understand what her limits are, that she is indeed often only a provocateur (but what a flattering ToA), this sentiment was best described by  Lee Siegel who wrote two years ago:


 To invoke two other writers from the past, Paglia used to come on like Byron; now she is like some cynical version of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, trampling on her very own standards, stooping as low as she can go in order to get a second helping of attention from the public that has forgotten her. But bullies always end up being reduced to their inner weakling. It’s called poetic justice. –Lee Siegel in Look at Me [June 13, 2005 ]


So there I was, trying to defend someone and not knowing how. Until today when Scott Mclemee, in a fascinating post paralleling Zizek and McLuhan, provides the vocabulary I was looking for: “to jump start your thinking”. According to the American Heritage Dictionary to jump-start means to “start or reinvigorate (an activity, system, or process).”


Jump-start my thinking is exactly what Paglia did. Philosophers who are quotable.  Philosophers who read like poets. Philosophers who write prose poetry. Philosophy as eternal recurrence repackaged in beautiful words.


And now for the Marshall McLuhan / Slavoj Žižek  parallel:


By coincidence, I see that Jonathan Goodwin has noticed an interesting parallel that certainly squares with my own impression:




Žižek reminds me much of McLuhan. Facts don’t matter for either. In the space of a few pages, Žižek has claimed that Martin Luther King made a radical anti-capitalist turn in the last few weeks before his death and that the Japanese Army relied on a Zen mantra similar to “the sword that kills is the sword that saves” to justify their actions in Korea and Manchuria. These are not even the kinds of claims that can be checked. As with McLuhan, Žižek just wants to make as many connective gestures as possible. That’s what make both, generally speaking, fun to read but dangerous to the untutored.




This is exactly right. McLuhan liked to refer to some of his writing as “probes” — a very space race-era locution (let’s not even get into the Legmanian implications) meaning, in effect, “I am totally making this up as I go along.” —Scott Mc Lemee via Legman and McLuhan With Zizek Along the Way.


Speaking of Adaptation and eternal return, I caught Eternal Sunshine … on TV, and I was slightly amused but not impressed. In the category experiment in cinematic time it did not strike a chord as much La Jetée or Back to the Future. As Charlie Kaufman script I was more impressed with Adaptation and Being John Malkovitch.


One last word on film, I got to see Destricted, and was only slightly taken by Matthew Barney’s opening vignette, and found the rest of the film quite literally masturbatingly boring. I was especially bored with Noé’s ‘strobed’ entry. Larry Clark had put up an ad for young men to apply to perform with an adult actress. After Clark and his team had chosen the male candidate, the male candidate interviewed the actresses and made his pick. He then proceeded to ‘get it on’. Very sad, just as sad as the Lasse Braun documentary I watched a while back. Final verdict for Destricted: to be avoided, try catching the Matthew Barney ‘s Hoist (and here) at Youtube and you’ve had the best.