Mon Coeur Mis à Nu

From: GONEPOMO
To: Tim Ingalls
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 2:31 AM
Subject: Re: dream come true

i literally just spent 2 hours shopping online after i talked to you because i was so depressed about being home and not knowing what the fuck to do with my life
----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Ingalls
To: GONEPOMO
Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 11:59 PM
Subject: Re: dream come true

yo, don't steal my style, DAWG
BTW should I get the new rescue or the other ones?
TIm
On Dec 15, 2007 5:40 PM, GONEPOMO < ****> wrote:
if you want to buy those APC's - "Tobi" is running 25% off everything. PERFECTGIFT is the coupon code. im thinking of getting a pair for myself.

"The Waning of Affect"?

Well, "it's been a while, since I" posted on this blog. The other day, as I competed with the anorexo-bunnies at the gym, pwning all of them by staying on the elliptical for 50 minutes and burning over 600 calories, listening to Justice remixes and watching "True Life: I'm having an arranged marriage" on MTV, I thought: wouldn't it be delicious if I could somehow capture this moment, somehow evoke it on my blog, make it pop? A woman (whose parents had emigrated from Pakistan), quite upper-middle class, with big Chanel sunglasses, was speaking about how according to her religion, she could not hold hands with her fiancee, whom her parents and picked out for her, until they were married. She spoke of her excitement, the fact that though she had "always thought," like any American girl, that she would meet the man of her dreams and fall in love all on her own, that had somehow never quite happened, and now she wanted to follow the dictates of tradition, to be a part of that ancient cultural tradition with which she had perhaps lost touch.

Can't hold hands, yet her, and her parents, and her fiancee, were more than willing to have camera crews follow her, watch her spray perfume at the last moment in her Chevy Tahoe before she meets her fiancee for the first time. I'm watching this, with the deadening, misspelled and unpuntuated subtitles blurting endlessly along the bottom of the screen, big fat electro'd beats "ironically" blaring in my ears, I'm feeling good, I'm syncing my movements with the beat, I'm burning those calories, getting real toned, she's real nervous about meeting this guy but excited, he seems nice, she wants to hold hands, her ass looks great in those Seven jeans, she's so happy to be part of this ancient tradition which despite her family's immigration, despite all the changes wrought by their life in the big new world, despite their fabulous financial success, is still alive in her and her fiancee's union - through them the tradition lives on, and the best part is that MTV is capturing it and spreading the information to all these white people, indeed all these Americans whether they're white or not, so that they can have an appreciation of her tradition and realize that Islam is not some "Other" but is really just another cultural tradition, which America, the melting pot (or perhaps we should dispense with that metaphor, let's just call it a global village), can accommodate and celebrate.

Jameson suggests that postmodernity is characterized by the "waning of affect". Perhaps our MTV lovebirds are affectless; more substantially, one can imagine bored, cynical teenagers sitting on their woven-polyester couch in some suburban, aesthetically dead bungalow, flipping aimlessly through channels, pausing on "True Life," chuckling a little, or perhaps showing some "genuine" (however qualified we want that term to be) interest in it, "believing," half cynically and without any actual intellectual committment in the story being told, but certainly moving on to MTV2 within a few minutes.

What about this, though?


"Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope - of ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making." (Massumi)

Culture Industry: DA REMIX!

Someone tipped me off to this paper by Xiaochang Li, a Comparative Media Studies master's student at MIT on Soulja Boy in the context of "viral video." Let me say that it is more than worth your time to read this, in the same way that it is more than worth your time to watch the YouTube video that Soulja Boy released and on which this paper comments.


Aiyo, Lil Chang, lemme break dis one down for you. Aite, one, you've clearly read some Noam Chomsky or something. I'm sure your school makes you read all the pomo-generator shit that MIT Press puts out. Lemme hit you with some fresh azz isht: dis Culture Industry jaint, by my dog T.Ado (Theodor Adorno).

Lil Chang seems to unquestioningly accept the "Soulja Boy phenomenon" as a story of someone "making it big" without the assistance of - even in defiance of - mainstream labels and the corporate culture-industry-esque record industry. Soulja uses methods "theoretically available to every member of his generation" to promote himself; though his goals may be self-promotion and financial gain, he supposedly has found a way to achieve these goals in such a way that the power is in his hands and not that of the corporation - he makes them come to him (as evidenced by the fact that he IMs the record executive, instructing him to "Meet me at my crib"). Though the culture industry is intact, it is seemingly just a shell of its former self, eviscerated of any economic power, and only providing the means through which the individual can realize himself. (Isn't this already sounding suspiciously like the free-market wet-dream?)

Lil Chang really hits his or her stride, however, when they break down the utopian political possibilities engendered by Soulja Boy's viral video self-promotion:

"What's more, there are a number of disparate groups represented across gender, age, and location, all of them reinterpreting the dance through their own communities, and linked through their ability to watch the videos across various devices, emphasizing at once a sense of connectivity, but also an urge to represent local communities and groups. In short, Soulja Boy as a phenomenon presents itself as more of a mode than a community, a practice that allows existing communities based on characteristics that are generally thought to be "disappeared" in the digital space (gender, age, race etc.) to foreground themselves."

(By the way, hasn't your thesis advisor at MIT told you that identity politics is DEFINITELY not hip anymore?)

Let's grant Lil' Chang that this phenomenon really does represent the possibility of individuals having access to the tools to "make it" in a radically democratic way that was never before possible. Though I think this is a bit utopian - isn't this the type of claim that's been made for every new form of mass media in democratic states? - we can let it stand. In fact, I think Lil Chang's argument reveal itself to be even more pwned if we grant that this is the case. Because if Soldier Boy has used radically democratic means to achieve his dream, we must next ask: what is his dream? What has he achieved?

He has precisely pwned himself, and this time it's not something to be proud of. As Adorno trenchantly perceived over 60 years ago, the culture industry (i.e., capital's colonization of the cultural sphere) has most insidiously and effectively achieved its ends precisely when it seems to have gentrified itself, when the desires of the masses are seamlessly congruent with the interests of capital. What the culture industry is 'selling' is mass culture as such, or better capitalism as such - a subjectivity perfectly adapted to the imperative of culture that is purchaseable, disposable, and constantly unfulfulling (thus creating the need for ever more consumption). One line T.Ado drops is particularly on point here: "The culture industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people." Thus it is not just that we are 'sold' the idea that we want a certain type of culture, or that we want ever more of it, but that this type of culture is essentially a conduit for the reproduction of subjectivities that are subjected to capital. Having "made it," having "achieved his dream," what will Soulja Boy do now? Well, he's signed to a major label, so most of the (substantial) profits from CD sales, tours, merchandise (tee-shirts, customizable Soulja Boy shades - did they come up with the idea to sell those after he wore them or was it the other way around?) will go to the label owner. But he will become rich too; then he'll buy lots of shit, such as the shit that he talks about in the song (BAPES, etc) that he probably couldn't afford when he was first rapping about it.

This much touted "radical democratic" "convergent" media which brought Soulja Boy to fame has achieving nothing more than reproducing the economic structure which it supposedly evaded and laying the ground for its further acceptance in the millions who watch, listen to, and buy Soulja Boy. Soulja Boy may feel himself to have "achieved", to have become successful, and - as have similar artists whose careers progressed the "normal" way, i.e. through being promoted by a label - he is successful, and he probably is happy. Without going into the question of false consciousness, the point is that the objective effect of his use of "viral video" and "radical-democratic" media is the same as if his rise to fame were due to overpromotion through marketing, except that now, the labels don't have to waste their money, Soulja Boy did all the work for them, and the profits - but more importantly the reproduction of mass culture - will be generated just the same. Soulja Boy may be evidence of a "new" trajectory for mass cultural phenomena, but to look naively at this as an instance of increasing individual creative freedom and self-actualization ignores the end result of such "new media," which is anything but liberatory.

Britney as Vanitas

Does anyone else see a relationship between this Holbein painting ("The Ambassadors," 1533) and Britney Spears? Holbein's use of the vanitas/memento mori is striking it a way that I cannot get over. While one is tempted to dismiss the "anamorphic" rendering as sort of silly, a "vain" technical flourish, it makes the skull completely unintegrable with the aesthetic and narrative space of the painting itself. The vanitas is somehow excessive, scandalous even; or rather it makes the painting itself scandalous, uncomfortable to look at, embarrassing. The work of art is of course always 'calling out' to us, interpellating us as a subject that sees it; yet here there is another layer: it sees us seeing ourselves as called out by it, and it mocks us for it. I think, then, that this is a sort of formal achievement of the representative function of the vanitas in painting. It's not just a question of either the futility of earthly existence or the carpe diem imperative, but a reminder of our position in creating the terms by which such questions arise in the first place (i.e., how our subjectivity is not given, not transcendent, not 'eternal').

Take another look at the Britney video below. Obviously this video is very uncomfortable. There is something about how she sort of stands around with this spectacle whirring along effortlessly around her. When she used to make all of the moves, when her body was 'toned,' more machinelike (a sex robot, both there just for me and totally indifferent to my existence), when her face was more successfully frozen into an expressionless come-hither/I-don't-even-need-you-to-get-off look, she was integrated into this spectacle, it worked with her and around her. Now she is a "stain," as Lacan calls it, in this spectacle: that which destroys the interpellative coherence of the representation. When she moves around awkwardly, it's too human; her body is too voluptuous; her wig reminds us that she has real hair; her off-cue lip-syching makes it too obvious that she actually speaks. Yet we can't help but feel that she is now somehow less real, less human, less "Britney" than she was before. The stain is that unassimilable mark that is both more human (the skull, the fact of death) and less human (it feels less alive, less "full," than the ambassadors standing next to it) And this "stain" calls out to me; in noticing it I have let myself be tricked into acknowledging the fact that it is there for me, that, to the extent that it is a signifying event, it is there in me, and that it is signifying nothing other than 'me'.

So, Holbein. The vanitas reminds us of our frailty, of the essential constructness and humanness (i.e., in the sense that these are the same thing) of aesthetic pleasure, of life as experienced by the subject; with Holbein (as opposed to the traditional use of the vanitas, where it is simply a 'normal' skull placed along with other objects in the picture), it does so in a thoroughgoing way, not just as one more 'motif' in the work; we must experience this constructedness and our own place as the chief (if you'll pardon my reference to Ayn Rand) 'architect' of it. The new Britney, this 'failed' Britney, this 'more real' Britney, is fascinating, horrifying, and most of all uncanny for this same reason: we cannot get over, we cannot 'forget,' her 'actual' presence in this spectacle, which is actually nothing other than a sign for our own presence which her 'absence' would/should otherwise smooth over.

Inhaling your own shit is hip

Hippest new trend of November 2007: Jenkem.

"Originally Posted by pickwick
Well today I finally did it. I became probably the first person in America to huff his own shit gas."

It's Britney, Bitch!

OMG Guys.

Um, this reminds me of Adorno's dictum that "the greatness of a work of art consists solely in it's ability to give voice to that which ideology hides."

While I'd love to amuse myself by relating this to Foucault's "truth games" (see the 'perfomative' S&M at the end), the sublimity of technology (maybe I could throw, like, Baudrillard in there?), the radical contingency of the subject implied by the double-remove of a lip-sync'd "It's Britney, bitch," or by spouting out some faux Perez Hilton-esque sassy commentary about some small detail that you can only notice by pausing the video, somehow I can't help but feel that posting a video such as this, which every ironic little college student does, is not only nothing other than 'sound and fury, signifying nothing,' but some sort of bullshit, ultimately conservative resistence-as-acquiescence. I would like to take refuge in the notion that one could reactivate the type of critique found in Adorno's Minima Moralia and that this could then mean something, be an outraged but not sanctimonious protest, an ethical working through, a bringing-to-the-fore of 'inherent contradictions.' I'm not sure, really, that that's anything other than self-indulgence.

That said, here are some funny things I noticed about this.

-Hey Britney, have you put on some weight there??!!!11!?? I mean, you still look great but maybe that baby took a toll on you or something!

-Those moves are cool but next time try to get them sync'd up a bit better!

-'Gimme more'? GREAT! LOVES the refrain. Perfect for clubs, can't wait for the Oakenfold remix, also it speaks so eloquently to the current state of our consumption-oriented culture!

-This will be GREAT for the emerging tween market. I envision a whole line of Britney-branded stripper poles. Perhaps a brand of low-fat, low-carb(on) diet cereal.

Blow my DILZ, Wes Anderson

I want to like Wes Anderson. In fact, I feel an almost pathological need to justify his work. His films hinge on a total aestheticization of their content; indeed the content becomes merely a staging ground for a refined, highly contextualized, highly specific, and explicitly referential aesthetic practice. As I have definitively proved, according to a strict, logical theorem derived from a synthesis of the work of analytic philosophers A.J. Ayer and John Rawls, aestheticization of narrative and emotional content -- a rewriting of the form/content dialectic where form not only subsumes content but destroys any independent existence of the latter and in which the former becomes not a transcendental category but itself a contingent, material expression of contemporary life -- is one of the only viable and 'genuine' ways of producing art today. Thus Anderson, bird-lipped, pale, and kitted out in slim bespoke 2-button suits, with his anal-retentive framing technique, his hipster color palette, his exquisite eye for the perfect juxtaposition of "quirky" though always self-consciously stylized subcultural details with the obvious constraints and influence of wealth, power, and the culture industry, would seem a perfect hero, a Baudelairian "painter of modern life."

No, Wes, no. I'm sorry. Your art is bullshit. First clue: wearing LL Bean duck-hunting boots and shorts, in Austin, Texas, bespeaks a failure to understand that, ironic or not, self-aestheticization must be firmly rooted in, indeed must grow out of, a deep contextual understanding, that is to say, it must contain an element of reflexivity. This outfit suggests rather a simple affirmation of the "preppy tradition" in defiance of circumstance, as if Anderson is intent on proving the transcendental ethical virtues of WASPiness. Second clue -- and this follows from the first --: the pleasure in each of his films, but especially this recent celebration of hipster colonialism entitled Darjeeling Limited, derives not from a self-reflexive awareness of the contingency of the aesthetic and emotional content; rather, this pleasure derives from a regressive defiance of this contingency, a forceful, childish insistence that these things are pretty, sad, 'cool,' regardless of - almost in ignorance of - their circumstance.
In "Hotel Chevalier," a short which precedes Darjeeling Limited, we get a little tableau that encapsulates all his work. Indeed, having seen this, there's hardly need to see anything else of his. There is a quite beautiful scene which consists of a slow-mo of Natalie Portman, posing exquisitely, awkwardly, nude, Jason Schwartzman covering her up with a bathrobe, and the two of them walking to the balcony of their fancy-but-not-cheesy, aristocratic-but-quirky, hotel room. Why is this scene pleasurable? Because Natalie Portman looks hot. She looks anorexic, but powerful - short hair, self-conscious self-eroticization. Because Schwarztman looks cool - long hair, ironic mustache, but rich. Clearly rich. Because the hotel is dope, and Paris is beautiful, and the idea of a life of young, attractive, ironic, anorexic leisure is decadent and appealing. And it is appealing, and one does not need to deny that. We should, however, try to problematize it; without this, Wes Anderson might as well be doing socialist realism (late capitalist realism?).

How, then, does this differ from the most conservative/affirmative of cultural production? Only in that Anderson is playing to a different (richer, younger, more 'aware') demographic. The ideology, the impulse behind it, is the same. Everything here, all the impossibilities of this scene, are staged not as a sort of beautiful nostalgic failure (as in, I would argue, Miami Vice) but as something real, a "really" beautiful "lifestyle." Anderson's cultivation of a very specific aesthetic is a question of instituting his own self-production as a model for others; he is saying, look at how beautiful this lifestyle I've thought up is. Wouldn't you like it? Or, at the very least, wouldn't you like something equivalent of your own? The problem is, it is completely un-self-aware, and the embededness of his aesthetic with the usual suspects - capital, social class (here obviously fictional, yet still operative as an ideological category), and race (i.e., how blacks and Indians are always props in his films) - is not thematized at all, only valorized and itself aestheticized.

Though Carbon Neutrality is Hip, It is Not Easy

As we've learned from celebrity icons such as Britney Spears, who shaved her head so as to reduce the need for air-conditioning in her L.A. mansion, being hip is not easy. It requires hard work, dedication, and often a fair amount of anxiety. Like this morning, after I took a piss, I hesitated for a good thirty seconds about whether to flush the toilet: would the energy and water that I saved from not flushing more than offset the damage that would be caused when I later would have to scrub down the yellow-stained bowl with cleaning products?

These and other questions, while they may appear to be the preserve of inexperienced hipsters like myself, are actually questions that even the most powerful hipsters are facing every day. As this Times article suggests, celebrities, writers, and other hip yuppies confront difficult eco-choices every day.

Not So Dino-Riffic High Bid

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Going Dumb, Pre-Adolescence

As Lacan writes, we are in effect going dumb before we come out of the womb. I urge you all to peep this:





It looks like our little friend on the right here will be well prepared for a life of supermanning that "ohhh!" - perhaps he will begin with that nice little ballerina in the middle, who seems to be game?

Barney - The Dino-Riffic Collection

Not so Dino-Riffic omission,
March 27, 2007
By M. Douglas "barney seeker" (Grand Blanc, MI USA) -

My daughter is a Barney freak. We're always on the lookout for Barney DVD's she doesn't have. That's why we bought The Dino-Riffic collection. Unfortunately, there was no information on the website listing to tell me that this collection was 3 common DVD's she already had. She was very dissappointed.

H2 and Porsche Cayenne S Drivers are Pussies

Recently, I was in da club (or rather out da club, waiting to gain entrance da club). As I shivered (those jeans may be expensive, but that doesn't mean they're warm!) and tried to look cool, I saw this dude roll up in an H2. He parked it in the middle of the street, got out, and start walking towards da club. He was about to bypass me (clearly he was headed for the VIP), but I stopped him and asked: "Hey man - how come you didn't get the H1?" He shrugged and moved along, feigning aristocratic indifference, but I knew that my comment must have ruined his evening. After all, what kind of pussy buys an H2? Is he not wealthy enough - was his line of credit not generous enough - for him to have afforded the H1? Surely he wasn't concerned about gas mileage, ostentatiousness, convenience, or the welfare of other drivers, so what prevented him from going all the way?

The same thing applies to Porsche Cayenne S drivers. These pathetic, blue-collar individuals could not afford the quad-exhaust, 520hp, contrast leather interior, and overall classiness of the Cayenne Turbo, let alone the Cayenne Turbo S. They are effectively unable to actualize on their own dreams; they are like those would-be Olympic athletes who, having trained their whole lives, make it to the tryouts but simply fail to man up and make the team.

Pussy

High School Varsity B-Ball

Oh yeah baby.

Carbon Neutrality is Hip

Ok guys,



In my last post I talked about how I learned that global warming is a hoax. This made me realize that it was okay to drink water. But then I remembered something. I've heard that a lot of Hollywood stars and other accomplished people are going carbon neutral. This may sound like bologna, but it's actually pretty cool. Here's the deal: you can buy "carbon credits." If you buy enough of them, you can become carbon neutral. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are both carbon neutral. Also, most products can now be bought in carbon neutral forms: jeans, cereal, dishwashers, and even houses. Most stars buy only carbon neutral products.



The coolest thing, though, is that this isn't just a mainstream trend. It's really urban and hip. Urban subcultures, such as squatters, are often really carbon neutral. Fixies are very carbon neutral. Lofts, organic restaurants, trannies, Girl Talk, and other things that happen in Williamsburg are all, to varying degrees, carbon neutral.

Maybe it's not worth it to forgo that glass of water; I, for one, was glad I had it. But it's probably worth it to buy a carbon offset for it.


If you're interested in going carbon neutral, check this out.

Global Warming is a Hoax

Whew! Well, I have to say that we all went pretty dumb last night! When I woke up at 1PM today with a throbbing headache, stumbling towards the fridge to get some nice, cold water I was struck with a scary thought. What is going to happen when all of the polar ice caps melt and there is no more fresh, cold water? I had heard a lot about global warming recently and it sounds pretty scary. One of the things that is supposed to happen is that the polar ice caps are going to melt. These are the sources for all of our water. While this may not matter much to people in developing countries like India or Africa, where their supply of water is already low, those of us in America like our water nice and cold and plentiful!

My head pounding, I wondered if perhaps I should not drink the water. I decided to do a little research, and I found out that global warming is actually a hoax. According to Richard Lindzen, who is a scientist, the Scientific Community is unsure of whether global warming is even happening at all. Thus, I decided to drink the water.

Reading List

Dear Female Public Sphere,

Due to a not-insignificant level of interest from my readership of the female persuasion, I thought it would befit my generous and aristocratic spirit if I were to provide some guidelines for those seeking to make my acquaintance. Namely, I have provided below a reading list that constitutes the minimum level of education that I expect from female suitors. If you have not read the following, or are not willing to do so before a F2F meeting, I would be willing to consider chatting online or perhaps even a webcam 'encounter,' as long as you agree to play the Youtube recordings of Zizek lectures at the European Graduate School at the highest possible volume, and within sight of the webcam, during our 'encounter'.

• Deleuze & Guattari, Mille Plateaux
  
• Marx, Das Kapital (All four volumes, preferably in the original German or in French translation)


• Ellis, American Psycho


• Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex


• Stine, Goosebumps (All installments. Note that French or German translations are acceptable. Alternatively, familiarity with the entire Fear Street series will be accepted on the condition that all volumes were read in German translation - French translation NOT acceptable)


• Hegel Phenomonology of Spirit (must be in original German)


• Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (translation OK)


• Joyce, Ulysses


• Nietzsche's œuvre complète (must be in original German, and must have been read while on long walks in the Schwarzwald, while wintering in St. Moritz, or while under the influence of peyote)

Good luck, and may the best -Φ win!

[Note: thanks to kushakov for alerting me to my lack of an "eeks" at the end of Mille Platea[x]. Quelle horreur que ca soit si je l'ai laissé comme avant!]

P.Diddy Fails to Ball Once Again

P.Diddy is always on the verge of balling: he's got the yacht(s), he runs marathons, wears Tom Wolfe suits, etc, yet he's always a little bit on the wrong side of laughable. I don't think he ever gotten over his role as pathetic sidekick to Biggie Smalls (e.g. his lines in Hypnotize). Here is an example of an almost successful attempt at balling: the ad verges on aesthetic coherence and a nice post-9/11 soft-porno feel, yet by the time he's pulling off her underwear and staring into the camera while biting her stomach we can't help but laugh.

It's all the more embarassing when someone as ostensibly non-baller as David Lynch can pull it off with such aristocratic ease:

Lifestyle Irony

Why Can't Anyone Tell I'm Wearing This Business Suit Ironically?

This piece in the Onion, about ironizing one's life to the point where one has actually assumed the traits which one is ironizing, is quite amusing:

"But what good is all this hilarity if there's no one else hip enough to appreciate it? On the 8:12 a.m. commuter train, everybody just assumes I'm one of them. So does my secretary, my assistant, and every single one of my colleagues at the law firm, where I'm now a partner. I even married this clueless girl from Connecticut—loves shopping and everything—and we have two ironic kids. I swear, they look like something out of a creepy 1950s Dick And Jane reader—I even have these hilarious silver-framed pictures of them in my cheesy corner office. But still, the humor is lost on everybody but me. I'm probably the most fashionable guy on the planet at this point, but no one understands. God! Do you have any idea how difficult it is being so far ahead of your time? Some days, it's enough to make me want to embrace conformity like all the other sheep."

The serious question which I believe this article implies is: to what extent does ironic performance depend on 'an audience'? The article hinges on the "writer's" assumption that the effectiveness of irony lies in other people "getting it"; that is, it implies that the subversive effect is to be gained through making others realize that, e.g., corporate existence is hollow and worthy of parody.

Yet - and I say this in all honesty - if we were to be a bit less ridiculous than the ostensible writer of this column, I think that this type of "lifestyle irony" could be a legitimate form of subversion. The key is not conceiving of it as a sort of external performance, a question of instructing others or revealing to them their own conformity - in the end obviously a self-aggrandizing hipness, which is obviously where this article gains its humorous effect - but rather as a practice. If we look at Foucault's notion of ascesis (in Vol. 3 of the History of Sexuality), the"work of the self on the self," I think we can come to conceptualize lifestyle irony as a legitimate way of navigating one's social existence. If one feels - how could one not? - that this social existence is in some fundamental sense patently absurd, and that the options for a self-sufficient, self-realizing subjectivity are extremely circumscribed, I think a limited self-ironizing which is directed at assuming one's position in the social order while attempting to preserve a critical perspective on it at the same time, and artfully "enhancing" that existence with a sense of the existential hilarity of the whole situation, is a potentially ethical position to take. Though it is easy to criticize such a practice as pure aestheticism and ultimately conservative - and this is a critique often leveled at Foucault, e.g., by Habermas - I think it provides a potential foundation for a critical existence that, while it may not presume the progressivist ability for constant, real, and practically unemcumbered social change - is a more solid foundation for anything that could come to be useful as social praxis. I subscribe wholeheardtedly to the Marxist notion that some sort of critical subjectivity is necessary for praxis; thus I think we need to start by examining the positions of possibility for such a position. I don't believe that these positions are easy or well-defined; the unpredictable and "irrational" commitment to "lifestyle irony" mirrors these difficulties, and is I believe a site, perhaps, for their realization.

Bro-Economics

Dear Global Public Sphere,

As a result of the massive volume of traffic on this blog in the past few days, I have received a number of comments via email, most of them positive. Yet some disgruntled readers have chided me for what they see as my blatant sexism. Phrases such as "sexed-out $lutz," "hotties," and "bangin' 80s aerobics-instructor bitchez" seemed to have struck a nerve with some of these sensitive souls. Rather than simply laughing at these pussies, or feeling sorry for them (since they clearly aren't getting any), I would like to point out that the discipline of economics teaches us that women are in fact destined to play a different role in society than men.



The key concept here is that of comparative advantage. A person has a comparative advantage in an activity if that person can perform the activity at a lower opportunity cost than anyone else. Differences in opportunity costs arise from differences in individual abilities and from differences in the characteristics of other resources. Thus one should specialize in one's comparative advantage; in this way the maximum amount of goods gets produced in a society (a goal which, as we all know, is the inherent telos of human existence). Since women have vaginas and wombs, their comparative advantage is coitus and childbearing. Since men have penises, their comparative advantage (to borrow from Lacan) is signification.



It is important to remember here that there does not have to be an absolute comparative advantage, but only a dynamic comparative advantage. This means that individuals, economies, or genders don't necessarily have to be inherently more productive, but, through learning-by-doing, can come to specialize in a certain area and gain a comparative advantage. Thus other aspects of gender differences - intelligence, bravery, etc. - may not be the direct result of biological difference but a result of historical specialization based on social organization. For example, women now have a dynamic comparative advantage in crying, hand-holding, sewing, and reading, while men have a dynamic comparative advantage in making money, lifting, playing Halo 3, and other forms of bro-ing out.



Thus, in most cases it would be a Pareto improvement for women to give it up more frequently, and for men to concentrate on bro-ing out when the marginal benefit of getting play exceeds the associated marginal costs (hand-holding, talking, brushing teeth).



I hope this answers the various objections that have so far been made; however, as this blog serves to engage the public sphere, where a perfect meta-language reigns and discourse is always conducted on a fully inter-subjective and rational level, the discussion will continue, and I welcome further comments or suggestions.

Miami Vice as Gesamkunstwerk/Mass Ornament

Baudelaire wrote that director Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, The Insider) is "looking for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity'...he makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever elemental it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory." Modernity, as Baudelaire defines it, is "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent."

For those of us looking for the modern-day Ulysses, such as Pitchfork Music, postmodern (i.e., for our purposes, sufficiently contemporary and socially critical) art has to have some sort of sad irony about it, some supposedly fractured Wasteland-esque evocation of the poverty and inanity of mass culture. Even films such as Tarantino's, I think, essentially imply this type of critique: by trying to create "real"-seeming, vibrant characters whose behavior is an agglomeration of cliches from other films, he suggests that reality is now simply mimed, a simulacrum, andthat we cannot have even moving films but only ironic inanity.

Michael Mann - Baudelaire's "Painter of Modern Life" - is someone that these ostensibly cultured and critical hipsters might look down upon. The plot in Miami Vice is not only cliche, it doesn't know it's cliche; it's not only violent, it expects the violence to be frightening and moving. Yet who's to say that Tarantino actually knows how cliche he's being? The presumption of a position from which one can perform the ironic critique with pure remove is the same bird-lipped modernist elitism that people like Tarantino are trying to get away from.

Does anyone really not find modern life - let's call it "late capitalism" for fun - to be almost sublime? If you're not a Luddite - actually, even if you are - can you deny that there is something intoxicating about mass culture, about huge, technologized cities populated with complacent receptacles of ideology, about millions of people on treadmills across the world, listening to techno on their iPods and dreaming their little dreams?

In Miami Vice, we get an evocation of all that is terrifying and beautiful about late capitalism: shiny white cars lost in the crowd on the freeway; slick, mindless dudes talking on their cell phones; sexed out $lutz in glittery bodysuits writhing at "velvet-rope" clubs, "go-fast" boats zipping along an overdeveloped coastline. Globalization (international drug trade, Chinese-Cuban businesswoman as the post-feminist embodiment of the 'Protestant Work Ethic', the faux-internationalism of Miami) figures large; mass culture is treated simply as it is and evoked straightforwardly. The film lets it speak for itself, and it is unbearably moving. The tendency to dismiss films like these as cheesy is, I think, an indication of the fact that people are uncomfortable with the position it puts them in. Take a look at this trailer:

or this admirable home-made thing:.

I don't want to hear that the Linkin Park/Jay-Z mash-up is "bad." When Jay-Z drops the line "Boeing jets" while the teaser cuts to a drug-running plane, then cuts back to the club scene, then to Colin Ferril pulling a 360 in the Ferrari, then to Colin Ferril and Gong Li making out in a limo - which looks like a sort of sublime, frenetic business transaction - this is the beauty of late capitalism. The suffocating literalness of the trailer - matching Jay-Z's raps with 'related' scenes ("blow you to smithereens" gets played over a car getting blown up) and the beat to intercut shots of Colin Ferril and Jamie Foxx cocking various guns - brings us even closer to the text. As in Wagner's use of leitmotifs in der Ring des Nibelungen, the film aestheticizes itself through a synthesis of the aural and visual (creating a "kinetic" feel) and thus the viewer is forced to experience it more intimately and fully. It's not just a song playing over images from the movie, which happens to enhance the mood of the film, but rather the two fuse and come to work "directly on the emotions" - and yet, of course, it's anything but direct; it's wholly mediated through the trappings of late capitalist-gemeinschaft/gesellschaft. This "mediated authenticity" is the exactly the sublime element of late capitalism; what's so fun about hitting the club with your bros is that when you're dancing to Soulja boy with some hottie, it feels real, yet it also feels rediculous and false (like those fake titties! HIGH FIVE BRO!!!!!!!). This is the pleasure of Krakauer's "mass ornament," the aesthetics of the mechanization of human life, here taken to its logical late-capitalist conclusion with the mechanization of culture as such. Miami Vice "works on us"; it leaves little space for the comfortably ironic transcendental liberal subject. Therein lies its beauty and, indeed, its political possibility

Thus, I think it is reasonable to say that Miami Vice exists in the space of the contemporary gesamkunstwerk.

Hipster Fascism

We all love Simian Mobile Disco, or at least we did last year before they got all recuperated and stuff, and of course we still welcome any new pearls of culture they might have for us post-electroclash Brown students who still like to sweat out those $15 drinks at Bungalow 8 courtesy of our trust funds.

This new video for "Hustler," which, as even the most aged, Wheetabix-and-prune-eating gramps knows is the dopest track on their album, thus initially seems like good old hipster fun: some bitchez dancing around in American Apparel bikinis, and before we get uncomfortable and start feeling like bros at a strip club, they luckily start 'ironically' smearing food on their chests, spraying Redi-whip in their mouths, and puking up neon colors. Just like Vice: we get to see some hot anorexo-bunnies in various sexually compromising situations, but the gross-out factor makes it a. hip (i.e. different from, say, Maxim) and b. politically correct, for those in the know, since it's not actually debasing women or satisfying voyeuristic male desire - it's teasing us for our desire to see them debased, dancing around for our pleasure, and then allowing us the convenient self-critical perspective within the text itself. While we get grossed out by the spectacle of these hotties throwing up peanut-butter and smearing it all over their face, it becomes funny because we're slightly embarassed that we were just plain old aroused - no irony (gasp!) - before it got gross. Their fetishistic pleasure - satisfied with hot dogs, Twix, and Redi-Whip - becomes our passive affirmation of a feminist "fuck you."

Yet is it really a "fuck you"? As our favorite over-the-hill theory dork Stanley Fish says, "Think Again!" Like Godard's ironic cinema, in which we, the spectators, are "given" what we "want" from capitalism - fine honey$, dudes with dope suits smoking unfiltered Gaulloises - and then castigated for it with a formal, Brechtian distantiation - Simian Mobile Disco, or whatever RISD grad directed this video, are offering us a too-easy way out. We still want these things from our films and our music videos. Bridgette Bardot in Contempt is maddiningly beautiful and unsatisfactory. We always want MORE of her, the same way we want MORE of Britney Spears (well, no longer). This is precisely what is unfulfilling about these so-called false desires that are supposedly being critiqued by, e.g., Godard and our RISD grad. To critique them as such does nothing; it makes us feel guilty for what is essentially not our fault, and it denies us the modicum of satisfaction offered by the staging of these false desires.

Rather, what they should do is "go all the way"; give us what we want. This, in fact, is what capitalism, or whatever ideology we're trying to transcend here, is afraid of and always denies, because it reveals precisely the failure of capitalism to contain within itself "all that we want." Instead of this safe distance of already-given self-critique and ironic awareness, a truly progressive hipster (we all want to be progressive, right? Even when we're being un-PC "asshole" hipsters it's as an ironic 'performance' of the failure of progressive politics.) would make a video like that for Eric Prydz's "Call on Me".

I'm not joking. This yuppie-wet dream, with an appropriately 'happy ending', is a perfect evocation of the sexual fantasies of upper-middle-class quasi-urban, quasi-'metro' bro or sorority girl. What it offers is not only a modicum of satisfaction - and I'm sure many a pimply teeny-hipsters has wasted a few tissues over this one - but also a sense of the dissatisfaction of this type of completely eviscerated culture. We don't get this "easily," through the text, as we do with Godard, but rather through a confrontation with our own reaction to it. Why is it satisfying? Why is it unsatisfying? Why is it funny when it really should be depressing? Why don't bangin' 80s aerobics-instructor hoez be all up on my dilz? There are no easy answers to these questions, as there are to those posed by Godard's cinema and Simian Mobile Disco, and it is this difficulty that art can and should be staging.

-Slavoj Zizek