More on animals and horror

I've posted before a little on the connection between horror movies and animals. In the most general sense, my argument is that horror cinema is a necessary outlet or byproduct of social sanction for the outrageous violence of factory farming. After watching "Marley and Me," I have another piece of this puzzle to add.

The genre of sentimental boy-dog books and movies has been around for awhile and to an extent is self-evident. Think "Old Yeller": it's sad as hell, about "boy" stuff, and so provides a way for young males to negotiate emotions that they are going to be expected to generally disavow as "men." "Marley and me" is not directed at boys in particular, but I think it is probably intended as a family film. Really, it's about being a young to middle aged professional, but because of the PG rating it presents that arc through the discursive possibilities of a much younger audience. The end is sad because it is inevitable and (for me) refers to pets that have already died and my living dogs who will someday die. As pedagogical, it also presents adulthood and the end of childhood as part of the inevitability of generational cycling. All this humanization through the life of a dog.

The correlative process of learning emotional restraint is, as Noel Carroll argues, ingrained in horror cinema as a ritual for teenage males. (There's nothing particularly "male" about the process he describes, its just an empirical observation that teenage boys are the biggest fans of horror). Adolescent males watch horror movies to practice confronting fear and mastering it; watching movies in a group then displays this mastery and/or buttresses it through communal mockery.

There's certainly a critique to be made of the repression wrought by the Old Yeller process, but I think it is also important that the existence of such documents serves to maintain that border as fragile. The memory of tears welling up is useful to remember that despite outward appearances one retains the capacity to be moved deeply by the lives of others. A predominance of the horror mindset--seeing the mastery of horror as the mastery of affect--gives a comfort that is not so much false as dangerous. (This links up with my criticism of "Blindness" as well: its subject matter has the potential to be sad or disgusting, and it opts for the latter.)

In sum, cinema has two genres for teaching the control of public emotion (fear) and domestic emotion (love, grief) that are organized by an unspoken connection of the animal body: as object of absolute love and absolute violation.

Michael Jackson memoriam

I saw K-Punk's essay on Michael Jackson and decided I would go ahead with the one that had been forming in my head as I walked through endless supermarket corridors the last couple weeks.

I am basically too young to know Jackson's efflorescence. I wasn't alive, or at least not aware, when he was doing his best work. I do remember when the video for "Black or White" came out because it was touted as a semi-event (I was too young to be critical, much less cynical) and was in a way self-fulfilling--the mass mobilization of cultural capital is something, even if it is promoting a lost object. In the case of MJ this was all the more so. His reclusion was something like that of another masterpiece in black and white, Citizen Kane, and the fact of him stepping away from his lugubrious throne was enough to catch attention. But more than that, the video for B&W was pushed as cutting edge digital manipulation (the wikipedia page says that it was previously used only in films such as Terminator). MJ might not have been at the forefront of "music" with Dangerous, but he was still at the crest of some other wave. It was not clear then whether his video was breaking ground in sheer expenditure ("the expense of spirit in a waste of shame") or in technological innovation, and this ambiguity haunts all aspects of the Jackson legacy.

The part of this haunting interesting to me here is how his death has given him and his music new life, a social presence that I believe was being held back by the fact of his personal vitality. I mean "vitality" as the simple fact of living. Life was a negative value, a predicate that diminished him. The same could be said I suppose of any pinnacle celebrity (Elvis is the obvious example, Hitler the other), and really of any of us. But by "life" in this context I don't mean all the messy details that drag us down and sully us with their swarming demands, or the King's beer belly, garish costumes illuminated by historical hindsight, and other indignities of aging in the limelight, I mean "life" as a factical condition. In the way that life would diminish a ghost.

In the last few weeks Jackson's music has become omnipresent on the radio. A weight has been lifted: the child molestation charges, the generally off-putting weirdness of late Jackson, has been paid in blood-gold and the preferred parts of his corpus can be separated from the offal. If he challenged convention by becoming a cyborg, we can now dissassemble him, like the deathless-dead body in Pynchon's V. without disgust or sentiment at the abjection of the human body. The mourning is festal, a wake: thank god, the airways breathe, we can stop qualifying our love of MJ and his music. It's a shame he is dead, but he is so much more alive now. He hasn't been this sonically omnipresent in decades. If anything, he's younger than ever.

The turning point for this rejuvenation is clearly his death. What else could have exonerated him from his history? What Jackson had put forward was a vision of deathlessness--not just in his own facial mask, the Neverland Ranch, media-circus rumors, the myth of the frozen king, and all the other ways he seemed to ascend from corporality to a digital heaven--but of cultural capital as unexpendable. (I am using "expenditure" here in the sense of a discharge of wealth that is not recouped dialectically as it is in the investment). No matter how much money Jackson wasted on personal fantasies--and he is well known to be massively in debt--he had attained an unimpeachable place in cultural and especially musical history that could always turn its own mythic expenditure to profit. This is the point at which restricted economy touches general economy in a schematic sense; MJ gave this bloodless formula very real historical dimensions. The initial, modernist question--can a person of vast wealth forestall death indefinitely a la Howard Hughes--has passed its zenith and has reformulated itself: can such a person die? With the archival, financial, and media technologies that allowed "Michael Jackson" to exist, the answer is no.

"Blindness"

The premise in the movie "Blindness" (based on the novel by Jose Saramago, which I haven't read) is great. People start going blind without cause or cure. Julianne Moore's character doesn't. The result is a zombie movie without disembowelment--all the strengths and weaknesses of the human soul, and the societies it can sustain, are drawn to the surface. It's pretty ugly for awhile but not in the way that I enjoy. Nor is this movie well made by almost any measure I would use. The pacing is uneven and sluggish, the emotions seem forced, the crimes are hideous, the connections stereotypical or unnatural. Plus blind people boycotted it for being derogatory.

It's very similar to "Changeling," actually, another movie I didn't like, because it insists on the significance of representing the worst crimes as an ameliorative for the instincts and conditions that breed them. Yes, rape is wrong; yes, greed that kills is wrong. The problem is that in bringing our blood to a boil over such high crimes, this film--and so many like it--miss the iceberg that sinks the ship. The question is how to represent systems (or networks, if one prefers) over the established short hand of rape-patriarchy avarice-capitalism (Slumdog Millionaire is another example).

This was precisely why I had been excited by the premise of "Blindness": what I am calling for is a kind of blindness. The reason actual blind people protested the movie was that it represents blindness as totally debilitating (and to some extent morally corrupting). It's not. There is a particular irony at the beginning of the film in that one of the characters wears sunglasses all the time; I assumed she was blind and the filmmakers were showing how capable blind people can be. Not so. She was a prostitute. Sight and shame are never disarticulated in this film, and so it misses the big picture.

Hybrids right and left

Two fabulous stories in the news of late: first, that Senator Brownback (R-KS) has introduced a bill to ban "part-human, part-animal creatures, which are created in laboratories, and blur the line between species." (I linked to the Huffington Post blippet because it links to the other relevant data). Second, the recent concern about military robots running amok feasting on the flesh of the living. (Levi brought this first to my attention, but I soon heard about it on NPR's "Wait wait don't tell me" as well--which last week made reference to Sen. Brownback's 'Mermaid bill' as well).

Now, like most people my gut reactions are that robots driven to consume flesh are bad, and that bills banning human-animal hybrids are silly. But on both of these issues there points to be made contrary to one's political intuition. The EATR robot awakens Terminator scenario nightmares, but on the other hand it is "green" in its energy source. Sure, it feeds on organic matter, but where do you think petroleum comes from?

As for the latter issue, it does not seem far-fetched to me--much less far-fetched, in fact, than the apocalyptic EATR scenario--that biotech corporations would invent human-animal hybrids that exist only for profit (both monetary and knowledge-power) and that have no legal existence or protection. Donna Haraway brought some attention to this in her essay on the oncomouse (the mouse designed to grow cancer). The purpose of the oncomouse is to model human bodily conditions through the body of a nonhuman. It would be much more effective for R&D to just have a version of the human body that is nonhuman.

At the same time, there is the more theoretically serious issue that Brownback is reifying "human" and "animal" as an actual opposition and denying the dignity (and pervasiveness) of hybridity. In either case, laughing at Brownback for trying to ban centaurs and mermaids is stupid and politically ignorant. Laughing at Brownback is probably not a bad idea, generally speaking, but that does not take him out of the senate.

"Milk"

An important part of the setting of Melville's "Benito Cereno" is that it takes place in the 1790s, while Melville is writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. I point this out because, from the modern reader's perspective it is easy to overlook, and from the scholar's perspective it is critical to understanding the refractory gaze that Melville means to cast on the institution of slavery in the U.S. It is a kind of condensation of everything that Marxist literary critics, especially of the Jamesonian bent, would insist on in methodology. Always historicize. Critique of the present proceeds through the representations of the past. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme--wait, that's Twain--I mean, there is a dialectical process that conserves macrostructures and repeats superstructural cycles. "Milk" has that eerie "Benito Cereno" quality of the present existing as more fully itself in a representation of the past.

At a gut level this is simply depressing for me, most of all because I have just moved to California and must bear the albatross of Prop 8. (On the other hand, I moved from Virginia where an equally shameful if less unexpected law was also passed recently). I visited San Francisco the day before I watched "Milk." If some legal battles for gay rights have been won in the intervening years, the sense of a political struggle has faded in contrast to Harvey Milk's clear sightedness. Linking this with a broader historical narrative, it is the sense of political struggle in general that has faded--compare with the incremental erosion of abortion rights.

But what I'm more interested in than a jeremiad on the decline of political thinking is what "Benito Cereno" might mean for its methodological inheritors--not so much Jameson and the critical crowd as for artists and art objects. The premise of "Milk" as somewhat authentic must be that it has political effectivity. (Of course, it might be politically meaningless, bread and circuses--but let's just suspend and disavow that interpretation for the time being). Like "Benito Cereno" we are taken in to an uncertain political milieu (70s San Francisco) through an interlocutor whose allegiances are uncertain. Harvey Milk is the man in the three piece suit when we meet him, and when he becomes the bearded hippy all in denim he is no less knowable by his sartorial signifiers, just as Melville's Babo is knowable because he is small and Black.

But Milk becomes unknowable, even/especially to those around him, when he sees himself as above all a political actor. This is more than his behavior being unpredictable: it is, rather, completely predictable because it is principled, just as the behavior of various establishment figures around him is predictable because it follows certain other principles--essentially, the principle of non-politicization. He is unknowable in the sense that his subjectivity seems to take on its properly philosophical predicates of disconnection from objectivity, but is still in tune with the world of objects. Subjectivity is not hypothetically removed from the world but secretly available through the port of culture, it is really an inaccessible Cartesian subjectivity. This is not proposed as a vindication or reformation of Descartes but as an example of where an eerie dualism seems against all reason to work.

Melville cultivates such an ambiance of eerie dualism in "Cereno" as the narrator and reader are taken on a tour of a fantastic representation of racial power dynamics. In "Milk" the eerie dualism comes in the form of Milk dictating memoirs not long before his death, a death which is announced at the beginning of the film. As an aside that will go unexplored, this leads on to a reading of "Bartleby"'s ghostly attributes in the political terms I have laid out here. The point I really want to make, aside from a de rigueur and empty endorsement of political "thinking," is that if "subjectivity" as philsophy has developed it takes on this meaning through politics, the outward signifiers of subjectivity that scientists and linguists have sought to discover in animals is a dead end. Assume the political significance of animals and their lack of (scientific) "subjectivity" is the condition of subjectivity as we actually find it.

Capital Gains

Since moving to the Santa Cruz/ San Jose area of CA we have been looking for a starter home to buy. Our thinking was that this area took a beating in the collapse of the real estate bubble; therefore, there would be many houses available at approximately reasonable prices.

In part this is true. There are many houses available at the bottom of the market that would have been priced 20-30% more two years ago. However, they tend to fall into two categories: houses that are genuinely good deals, and houses that are crumbling and filthy. In the former case, investors buy these houses on terms I cannot compete with--of the four(ish) houses we have been seriously interested in, our efforts were stymied by people buying with cash. In the latter category, the houses need a general contractor to take them on, invest in them, and make a profit reselling for them to move. I don't begrudge the GC's for profitting in this way, but it means that the current low price tag is illusory.

This is only anecdotal evidence but it is exactly the cycle one would predict in capitalism's ability to re-entrench itself through periodic failures. People buying 200-300k houses with cash in the first week on the market are not small families, they are speculators. Moreover, while these bank-owned properties are listed in the 200-300 range, they usually sell for 50-100k more. The market is adjusting itself as liberal economics would predict. The end result is that prices will eventually return to (around) their cyclical median, except that more material capital will be in the hands of those persons who are already the wealthiest and more of the least wealthy will be reduced to selling their wage labor for diminishing returns.

I can't complain: my position is better than many, many other.

Law of Ruins

Graham Harman has posted an interesting excerpt on Roman statues. This reminds me of Albert Speer's law of ruins for Third Reich architecture. From White Noise (257-8):

he knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically--a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.

It also is evidence to extend being toward death to the architecture of (at least) a certain time and place.

the one who reads

I was going to write a somewhat lengthy review of two books I read recently on affect, but I became distracted in my own mind by a tangential topic of why I would do that. The main reason is that I often notice book reviews from Scu and Craig in the blogroll and pop over to see whether those books could be instrumental for my immediate purposes, some day swell a bibliography, or should be avoided. It is also comforting to me that someone out there is reading all these books which I am sure another someone put a lot of time and thought and emotion into composing. This is a nice fiction because it fosters the possibility that someone is also reading me and my writing. In a Kantian (or Nietzschean) way, I try to imagine that no one is reading this but I do it because this is what I would will to be doing (and in fact it is what I am doing!). But still, I am not insensitive to the fantasy of the one who reads, and I think it is evidence of this that I take the time to write in a public forum (a blog) where I might facilitate this fantasy for others.

Why the one who reads? I am positing this figure as a metamorphosis of a couple Lacanian figures, especially "the one who knows." More than having an analyst know what is wrong with me (or the world), I simply want to be seen by the analyst-figure. And while having a "reader" out there, someone who sees into the text and draws out its essence, is close to the internalized sur/sous-veillance of the father, I again think the fantasy of the one who reads shows a milder, smaller claim of desire. Rather than modern oversight that is invasive, forceful and costly in terms of labor-time, the fantasy of the one who reads is a post modern (or something) fantasy of glancing knowledge. Rather than fantasizing about the drastic relocation and examination of the Clinic, this desire is just "to be seen," to be briefly, casually admitted into the doctor's space, have him strike a few glancing sparks of illumination from my personal surface, and be returned to circulation. (To borrow further from the discourse of the pomo, we could say the modern power systems exerted force on deviant persons as if they were master narratives needing to be ripped to shreds; in contrast, once everyone must be regulated in direct relation to biopolitis, the amount of attention given to individuals must be more cursory). We don't have time to treat every philosopher, critic, theorist, artist as if they were important (meaning, brutally dissecting their arguments, wrangling with everyone ambiguity)--most of us don't even have the time to keep up with all the books we would like to read, if all the books we should be reading.

This isn't meant as a criticism of those who provide book reviews. I sincerely value the opinions of those critics (and bloggers) I read and take their evaluations to heart, and hope to contribute something back to that sphere of information. Even if no one reads it.

"Defiance"

I just watched "Defiance," the World War II pic about a group of Jewish refugees who hide and restart their lives in the forests of, I think, Poland (or Russia? I missed some context). The point being that it is a story in which Jews are agents of resistance and self-formation rather than the people of endless passive suffering. (The humor in the film, limited given its subject matter, comes from the irrepressible love of intellectual bickering that characterizes robust Jewish society).

What I found interesting is an implicit counter point to the either/or of Schmittian friend/foe politics. As the attacked, minoritarian, under-supplied, and non-state people this group exists in a tripartite politics: friend, foe, and non-combatant. Of course, part of the dramatic and philosophical tension of the film lies in the question of whether there can be non-coms; but from an extremely pragmatic point of view for a dispossessed group, the category non-combatant is expeditious for avoiding unnecessary and costly battles.

This also puts what counts as a "friend" in a different light. For Schmitt, a friend might be a non-com who permitted state violence against a third part. For the politics of the dispossessed, a friend is one who provides material support: an active rather than passive position.

If such a political paradigm belongs properly to those politically dispossessed, it can at least be a resource for condemning the either/or grandstanding of American foreign policy. We are short on friends and foes right now; the sort of varying relations that can be created with non-combatants is our biggest concern.

Mythical races

Today I was screwing around on Facebook and took a "what kind of dog are you?" quiz. I was pretty disappointed to get Welsh Corgie, but then my wife, trying to best me, got the same. Whatever breed I would have picked for her, my first pick would have been "not the same as me," because our attitudes appear to both of us to be pretty dissimilar. Apparently not.

Unrelatedly, if that is a legitimate adverb, I was thinking about Lord of the Rings while doing the dishes and what nonhuman race I would be. And then I was struck by how the idea of "race" is so powerfully represented as a real category in LotR. Different "races" share a cognitive spectrum, like all humans do, but have exaggeratedly different phenotypes and, probably because Middle Earth has pre-modern technologies, are essentially monocultures. (I don't know if elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits, etc. can interbreed--I am applying my D&D knowledge to surmise it is possible but for sociohistorical reasons infrequent).

Now, asking what breed of dog I am most like is a fairly innocent question. True, it reifies "breeds" that are historically constructed and which contain individuals of widely varying personalities and temperaments, but since there is almost certailny going to be a gap between the subject's self-image and his/her projected breed, I think the experiment tends to challenge those borders as much as it uses them.

Asking what mythic race one would be strikes me as a little less innocent. Not only do I think race is a more vicious myth than breed, I would go so far as to say that racialist discourse has done more harm to animals than breed. Middle Earth presents race as it appears in the racialist imaginary. But the question might then be a way to move around racialist thinking: to imagine oneself in formally different positions vis-a-vis anthronormativity without the sticky history of stereotypes bogging down the imagination. I don't know. If anyone reading this is nerdy enough to talk Tolkien racialism I'd love some feedback.

Animals as socializing capital

Therapy animals, usually dogs, are one of the great newly discovered resources of the affective economy. I see good and bad in this. The good news is that animals are being more frequently encountered within human social space, normalized as the kind of entity that "belongs" there and can make claims about that space. The bad, or the problematic, is how this happens. I am not even really thinking here of the imposition of class categories and hierarchies onto dogs--the "good" golden retrievers and labs, the "bad" rotts and pits--or between dogs and other species. I am thinking, right now, about how scientific studies promulgate a certain image of therapy animals that accomplishes their introduction into social space but in a way that prevents them from making claims against it.

For example, a piece by CBS on how children below level in reading catch up better by reading to dogs. On one hand we have descriptions like this:

Ross, an Irish setter owned by Barbara Murgo, sits quietly and patiently as kids read to him.

And Ross seems to look forward to it.

I do not think it is incorrect to ascribe patience, self-control, and anticipation to Ross, and I know my dogs loving hanging out with kids. But what if he didn't like it, or didn't feel like it one day? Is that an interpretive option?

The thinking is that the kids are no threatened by the dog and so will read to their ability without fear of judgment. The problem for these kids seems to be not so much a reading deficit as a power relation. They don't want to be objects of evaluation; when they feel like that, they underperform to escape attention; the adults monitoring them induce this feeling.

What the kids seem to get out of the experience is an escape from the limitations of power relations.

One youngster told Turner, "He sits and, when I show him the book, he looks at it."

That's not just adorable, that's transaction. It might be a fiction of the kid's making that they are both interested in the book, but it is at least a fiction of a shared world--and I would say, a fiction closer to the truth of the dog than that proposed by the adults.

The way the adults see this seems to hearken back to the structural issues that discouraged kids from reading in the first place. The dogs/kids are reinserted under surveillance, telos, accountability. The space in which they can interact is limited and, after each session, dis-integrated. The dog is only allowed to enter human space in its most passive mode. The positive contribution, the multiplication of narratives--and there are tons of stories to be had with dogs--are "screened" out. "They just have to be willing to lie so still for so long," concludes the writer with a sympathetic wink. I do not doubt that these dogs are largely willing to do something boring for the benefit of others, but it seems cruel--to them and the kids--and stupid to limit their social representation to that.

Criticism of capitalism in "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "The International"

I guess it has become manifest that this is largely a film criticism blog from the perspective of someone who views the world in terms of animals and anti-capitalism. It is probably equally apparent that I watch crappy mainstream movies with relish.

Recently I saw "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "The International." For those who miss commercials, the former is about a young female in NY who buys too much fashion stuff and the latter is about a cop trying to bring an international bank to justice for murdering people who interfere with its aspiration to control the production of war debt. (Baudrillard's essay on debt that I referred to in my last post is equally apropos here).

In some ways these movies are highly critical of capitalist processes. "Confessions" is about the debt cycle and over consumption at the personal level, "The International" at the political or transnational level. In both, these processes are destructive and promote harmful behavior toward others. Predictably, though, the forms of closure available to these texts as narratives are inscribed or prepared within the capitalist order. Both end, essentially, with an affirmation of the individual as that which can step away from and resist the systemic. This is the prima facie argument to be made against these films.

However, I think this kind of reading gives too much over to narrative structure--it basically agrees that beginning, middle, and end are where the (capitalist) plot says they are. If we imagine these films in an "eternal return of the same" scenario or as repeating in the sense in Difference and Repetition (which spends no small effort defining "repetition" as a technical term away from simply "doing it again") the loci called beginning, middle, and end are open to redistribution. The "middle" is where the critique comes out in these films, and the task of critical viewership is to relocate this to an end (with intentional reference to the philosophical "end" or purposively grounded state).

In "Confessions" this comes when the main character communes with animate mannequins who congratulate her on her new found discipline not to shop. Once one has broken from the capitalist imaginary, and specifically its ontological divisions, all kinds of things are able to speak and celebrate. There are more "subjects," not more divisions in kind between subjects. In "The International" this comes when an old cynical bank exec, formerly a Party hardliner with the Stasi, tells Clive Owen's character that there can be no justice within a fundamentally unjust system. Justice against persons is not politically relevant if it does not challenge the systemic nature of what elicits powerful criminals. That's what I say! If one stopped the film here, the climax would be a powerful, expansive, and completely accurate (from my standpoint) statement on what does and does not constitute politics. How could there be a better climax?



The only way out is for the film to interpolate itself in the space where the (critical) viewer should reassume his/her position in the world. The film takes on the role of action that, if arrested, it might have inspired in the viewer.

Information debt

I just bought some books on eBay and saw a disclaimed saying that this information will be stored at their facilities/servers in San Jose, CA. I drove by one of their "campuses" in San Jose a couple days ago. At the time it seemed like a sterile info-industrial park of little merit--maybe a place to turn around in if I got mixed up. Now it seems alive. It is close enough to be tangible in my mind. This sparks some momentary anxiety for me, some fear that the internet will become corporeal in more places, unexpectedly, and seize on all the information I have given to it to use against me. It's like Baudrillard's essay on global debt, but at one more level of abstraction: debt is only so much information, so many bits among other bits, and we need to keep the hell away from the lot of it. Question: is our accumulation of information also an accumulation of unfinished projects, of an informational debt that forms, like monetary debt, an insurmountable horizon of social reproduction? Can it contact us with crushing force? Is that what would transform economic crisis into revolution?

Cultural studies as comic relief

First: this is a study of cultural studies not a diatribe against it. "Comic relief" is not pejorative.

My specific claim is that "comic relief" entails two things: 1) a specific form of (comic/comedic) pleasure and 2) a break (relief) from tragic narrative. And that this describes cultural studies when it is doing a good job.

I was thinking about Murray in Delillo's White Noise and the purpose his character serves. The best explanation I can come up with is that he is comic relief. My favorite line is when Gladney is at the supermarket and he runs into Murray, who breathlessly tells him about the recent death of a colleague. After registering Gladney's stunned silence he says something like "I know. I came straight here." Murray is also the character working to emulate Gladney's Hitler Studies program with a comparable academic monument to Elvis. He compounds the absurdity of the extant academic situation with an even more absurd project. Murray personifies all that is systemically funny in White Noise with the addition that because he is a character he can also speak absurdity, whereas the situation can only be absurd (perhaps an unnecessary distinction but relevant to the written form).

Cultural studies as I see it aims to be a counter history of globalization or global capitalism. If capitalism effects deterritorializations, decentering, border-blurring--etc etc--those are also the kind of descriptions that fit with certain anti-capitalist politics. Rather than surrender those accomplishments to a purely capitalist rendering of history, cultural studies works to call attention to whatever victories or counter-capital processes are at work. Hence it is a "relief" from the master narrative of capitalism and, in a twist of meaning, takes as its political purpose to relieve the suffering of those whom capitalism abuses or neglects.

Shakespeare is arguably the inventor of comic relief, specifically in his tragedies and histories when the flow of meaning is oppressively unidirectional. As Gladney postulates in White Noise all plots--narrative, conspiratorial--tend toward death. If this is not formally necessary, it is at least a heavy inheritance for tragedy, particularly for English language lit with the place its history has given to Shakespeare. (Why are plots not geared toward birth? Damn patriarchy, damn carnophallogocentrism).

There is also a pleasure in the serious deathward plot, which I would identify with the kind of system building we find in Das Kapital or The Modern World System. But the more fully articulated the system and the pleasure of its knowing, the closer death comes to the individual. Cultural studies does not (should not?) disprove or even disapprove of such system building, but it does punctuate that kind of pleasure with one that is shorter in duration and scope. Again, I don't see this as a bad thing, but some (within cultural studies) might see this characterization as negative, just as critics from Dr. Johnson to the present have seen comic relief as stupid.


"I am having a good time."

My cell phone is just not that into me, and neither is the lab rat

For a practical example of how things are actors, one could point to the movie "He's just not that into you." Cell phones are major characters in the movie, as recalcitrant, confusing, and connecting as the human characters. I don't think there's any reciprocal contribution to theory to be drawn from this movie, at least not by me, but as a minor contribution to pedagogy I thought I would throw this out there. As far learning about human intimacy, just go to a coffee shop.

What was more interesting was a PSA in the adverts at the beginning. Side by side it shows a man smoking and a mouse in a plexiglass cage. The cage has a hole in it out of which the mouse can lean to sip from a dispenser marked "nicotine." Every time the man smokes the mouse pops out to get a fix too. The voice over says something like "cigarette companies make cigarettes addictive for a reason. Don't let them control you."

The simplicity of the image makes this a particularly ambivalent and revealing ad. At a surface level the man and the mouse are the same: the question is how other discourses surrounding them reinforce or cleave that identification. Biologically, the ad suggests they are also the same, or at least that they share biologicity. Humans and mice can become chemically addicted and the resultant behavior is the same. This raises the other half of the natureculture complex, social determination of behavior.

Both mouse and man are presented without others. I see this as a way to emphasize the biological substrate and implicitly distinguish human agency from biological imperatives. What offers a far better explanation of the mouse's "determination" is that it is trapped in a cage with only one opening, and a jug of nicotine is right there. The worker seems to be blue collar, suggesting social reasons for his habit.

I kind of like this ad because its simplicity makes its ambivalence rise to the top. The direct parallel raises the question, if one adopts any kind of critical attitude--and anti-smoking ads spur adolescent criticism like no other--of how these cases are or are not alike. As in my previous post on how horror movies display reactionary ethics, this kind of iconic manipulation of an animal shows the use of force needed to make animals less than humans. If the critique of cigarette companies is valid then 1) it is also wrong to use mice in product development and testing and 2) it is wrong to construct animals as biological machines, even if that construction can function against cigarette companies.

I looked for the video briefly on youtube but gave up. If anyone finds it I'll post it.

"Changeling," ethics and horror

Last night I watched "Changeling," the movie Angelina Jolie got an Oscar nomination for. Boy was that an unpleasant experience. The logic of the film is sadism filtered through liberal critique to make it "important." But I am not fooled: I like honest sadism, not righteous sadism. If someone wanted to defend this movie, and I doubt there is really anyone that invested in it, they might argue that it "unmasks" the patriarchal social technologies exercised by the Police. But it does so so bluntly--about fifteen minutes in John Malkovich thunders from a pulpit about the corruption and violence of the LAPD--that it can only really be considered as a horror film.

This brings me to my second point. There has been some discussion over at Critical Animal about historicism and becoming-vegetarian. One sub-argument, which I think CA correctly understands but can be misleading out of context, is this:

Me: "is there hypothetically a time or place in which humans eating animals is morally ok?"

Critical Animal: Yes, of course. I'm not too interested in figuring it out. It seems like the lifeboat situation you said you weren't too interested in, either.

The point of my question is a simple test for metaphysics: can you imagine this being otherwise? History always allows the otherwise. Metaphysics does not. It is not a test for seeking out and inhabiting those marginal moral cases or legitimizing a social order based on the exceptional example (insert Homo Sacer here). This is why, like CA, I am not particularly interested in articulating the conditions of the flesh-eating ship. I am interested in understanding the use of "the lifeboat" as a longstanding part of ethical discourse.

There are two genres that have this task: horror and Ethics (in an anglo/applied sense rather than a deconstructive 'ethics in general'). For both of these the margin or the counter-example is the paradigmatic social sphere. The lifeboat is a good example of the kind of constricted space these discourses prefer (like Sade), or any other architecture (the labyrinth/cave, the foreign place, the space ship, the cabin) that cuts the subject off from escape into social multiplicity.

Jason X, in space:


"Changeling" makes use of many such cramped conditions: police interrogation rooms, the many chambers of the asylum, a chicken coop in which boys are stored (alongside chickens) prior to slaughter (one could likewise expostulate on this). I can see two useful messages in its horror/ethics: 1) that rejecting lifeboat scenarios while apparently within them is necessary for right action, as Jolie's character does in forming alliances with other female internees, and her son does in helping another escape from the coop 2) that the existence of the lifeboat scenario is maintained as a formal possibility but as another world. That is, the reactionary character of horror is valuable precisely because it objectifies the reactionary Welt as one world among many.

Useless Datum

There is a website that supposedly uses facial recognition software to predict the child of two parents. However creepy that is--and that at the moment 122943 people have virtually mated with Miley Cyrus--I like creepy things. I especially like messing with creepy things, so I put in pictures of my two beautiful dogs.





This is what I got:



Now this is obviously a useless datum, but it reminds me of a Haraway article I read some years ago because I thought it was about vampires. I think it is called "universal donors in a vampire [culture?]." It was not especially about vampires: like so many articles it used vampires (or zombies--they are endlessly exploited) as a metaphor, disappointing me greatly. What I recall were some pictures of "Eve" a proportional composite of the racial/ethnic groups of the whole freaking world, suggesting both an origin and a telos for humanity.

What if we factored in companion species? Theoretically it is funky: if you think about it a little less abstractly it is very creepy. "Make Me Babies" doesn't really recognize the facial structures of dogs, but apparently found some cues, some data, to take into its logic and create an image. I suppose it is designed to create a basically human organism. People could get angry if their predicted progeny was Rosemary's baby. The system error seems to be that nonhumans do count as data for the program even if a human outcome is predetermined.

I tried to make a baby out of Marx and Nietzsche to wrap this up but my computer or the program refuses to do it. I don't know if this is philosophically motivated or just homophobic.

"Rachel Getting Married" plus Agamben beef

I just watched the movie "Rachel Getting Married." As far as a value-review, I will say it is worth watching. It is a kind of discontents of civilization problem: how drug addiction can spread hurt throughout a family almost without end. This is not the kind of problem we find among nonhuman animal, so it is particularly humane/humanistic to contemplate this kind of pain. It makes you a better Dasein.

There is a momentary shot during the reception of a large grill covered in meat. This kind of shocked me for two reasons: 1) the film's excellence had led me to ally myself with it with minimal irony or reservation 2) the wedding seems to be heavily Buddhist influenced, and nontraditional at the least, so I expected something other than the sacrificial lamb on the bbq. (I can only assume it is organic or grain fed or something).

Put together, there is a real question for veg/animal studies: the historicizing of vegetarianism/veganism as a political practice. The "civilization and its discontents" arc argues that this is the kind of problem specific to a certain level of complexity in society and its moral sensibility. What is a problem for us (killing and eating animals) would not even make sense in times not so long passed--or in social conditions extant but not so pleasant to think on. There is a pull for sumptuary politics to dehistoricize itself in response to this criticism and say that eating animals is never ok out of fear that Pollan and Polyface Farms will get the upper hand. (I think it is not difficult to say that 'ethical meat' belongs to the same social world in which vegetarianism is logically the best ethical choice, and by this avoid 'life boat' hypotheticals which interject an unrelated social world).

So here is my beef with Agamben, or really with those people who have hastily seized on his corpus to make over extensive arguments (Agamben is not pro-animal in any transparent sense). If we are going to extend biopolitics and the differentiation between zoe and bios from the Greeks to the present, how do we account for the painfully historical phenomenon of ethical or political vegetarianism/veganism? What many people overlook, in my eyes, is a disjunction between is and would: just because Aristotle, or Justinian law, or Hobbes says something is so doesn't mean it is. In fact, if it is a metaphysical or legal claim it is almost certainly a projection of how things should be thought rather than how they are typically thought. The experience of the majority of persons under those social conditions was probably quite distant from the conditions under which sumptuary politics can be thought coherently; only when law is already accomplished, rather than an historical destiny/task (to use Agamben's terms) can sumptuary politics emerge. When humans live in a world where the material force of law is less than its written scope, humans are closer to animals than to the juridical authorities taken by historians as Chroniclers. The distinction between bios and zoe was then, as it is now, a heuristic for the philosophical classes who are almost by definition removed from physical labor and contact with animals.

That is: removed from the class of animals where carnivorism might make sense for humans qua their animality.

This is in no way an apology for blue collar workers, or workers of any stripe, rolling out the hot dog and hamburger parade (this is the 4th of July). I am saying that if we can imagine a condition in which humans are on par with real animals, then we can imagine, as a subset of that, a social condition in which eating meat makes sense. The condition of humans among the rest of the animals is the starting point from which a non-negative ethos toward animals must emerge. Reconciling this with sumptuary politics is not impossible but it does require a proper understanding of historical method.

Chickens as movies

We're settled for now in a cottage in the hills near Santa Cruz, my new university. The owner of the property keeps three free range chickens in the yard--though their freedom is, like any citizen's, not absolute but balanced against the freedom of her and our dogs. (Her dogs have each killed one chicken apiece; ours still have no blood on their paws). The chickens usually get a couple hours to roam for bugs in the hot of the afternoon when all of the dogs are cooped up.

The chickens are fascinating for me to watch because of the way they move. Whereas mammals tend to move in a continuous flow, avians tend to move jerkily and seemingly instantly.



Photography was instrumental in parsing mammalian movement, and mammalian movement is the standard for film, or at least for "natural" looking film. Disjunctive camera movements are taken to be artifice, a technique enabled by the film's mediate status for 1) formally representing a character's subjective state or 2) provoking an excitement-response in the viewer. But avians, it seems, tend to move that way as a rule. I don't have the first hand experience to speak for reptiles, but their philogenetic kinship with birds would suggest that they share motor tendencies. Humans are, in our own eyes, telegenic but not especially photogenic--pictures of humans frozen in motion fascinate us with their absurdity and otherworldliness (Virilio talks about this in relation to sculpture at the beginning of The Vision Machine, I think). I suppose I find it odd, or too nicely coincidental/providential, that the modern hierarchy of being--and the hierarchy of sumptuary restrictions: vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, chicken eater, beef eater--fits so nicely with biological amenability to film over photography. It is almost as if the horse has escaped classification as a meat-animal by virtue of a blurred fleetness of foot.

Yellowstone: Viewing and Moving

This past week I visited Yellowstone during my relocation from the east to the west coast of the US with my wife and our two dogs. I had some concerns about going to Yellowstone because, like all National Parks, it is not especially dog friendly.

1. Pets are prohibited in the backcountry and on trails and boardwalks [for a variety of reasons].

2. Pets may accompany you in the front country areas of the park.
This includes any areas within 100 feet of roads, parking areas, and campgrounds. Pets must be kept under physical control at all times - caged, crated, or on a leash not to exceed six feet in length.

3. It is prohibited to leave a pet unattended and tied to an object.
If necessary, pets may remain in your vehicle while you are viewing attractions near roads and parking areas. However, we care about your pet's well being. Be sure to provide sufficient ventilation for its comfort and survival.

Their point is well taken: dogs (or other pets) should not run loose in Yellowstone and, for any number of reasons, they should not be "unattended and tied to an object." It is the second point that marks the real area of contention and establishes the practical meaning of dogs in Yellowstone. Dogs are allowed in certain areas: the areas where there is nothing to see. One does not go to Yellowstone to see roads, parking areas, and campgrounds. Those are ubiquitous, not spectacular.

In the parking areas there were regularly people with dogs out (ourselves included). It is by no means exceptional to take dogs into Yellowstone, so this confinement should not be read as a marginal case: it is part of the steady functioning of the park, as continual as the accumulation of pressure and spectators at Old Faithful. I did take our dogs down to a lesser geothermal site because there was no one around to see me. Again, I was able to do this because it was something deemed not worth seeing.

The irony is that the legal confinement of pets is matched by a de facto confinement of human visitors. Yellowstone has a far-reaching system of near-highway quality roads with speeds of up to 50 mph. We came in at the north entrance and made it 50-odd miles south to Old Faithful, with stops and roadwork, in a couple hours. Yellowstone is not so much a continuous flow of Nature or sublimity/beauty as a map of speed punctuated by spectacles. Vehicles race between things to see. Sometimes these things are the wildlife, and so at the fields where animals might appear there is plenty of room for cars to pull off and watch without disrupting traffic. I would say that I spent nearly as much time in the car as the dogs.

[Of course this implicates myself in the perversity of it all: I could have left my dogs elsewhere, got a pack and went on foot. More authentic. I could have been less enamored with the aura of Old Faithful and sought out unmarked geothermal sites. But I didn't, and I don't even feel bad about it.]

What I see in the history of Yellowstone, the first National Park, is a primer on how the modern subject is to relate to nature as an aesthetic object. Except for that "modern," I am talking about the subject of Romanticism. By "modern" I here mean the world of the automobile, the world of transportational acceleration (prior to total speed of a digitalized world) which dissolves the problem Wordsworth wanted to solve. Nature is out there; aesthetic mediation, poetry, brings it here; but if we have a car we can just go there. If the object an sich is readily available, we don't need mediated transcendence. We can get it uncut from the source.

The pre-post-modern job was to establish those pathways which would bring the subject into contact with the transcendent spectacles: to build the roads, clear the outlooks, erect gateways physical and legal (even if, as Kafka points out, we can't enter them). In the process, the subject was also taught how to be a looker. The relation to nature or to intra-societal spectacles was ritualized through a social architecture enabling a mass experience of what "The Wanderer" is seeing.



The Wanderer is watching a movie before film. But movie theaters are not a social experience, and so cannot take on their real purpose, without roadways feeding groups in to share the screen.

Yellowstone has a number of these Romantic nature-films and a highly efficient transportation network to move vehicles to and from them. In acculturing persons to the subject-work of viewing it also teaches them about transit between spectacles, events, images, zones determinable by the codes of optics and relevance.

Yellowstone has all the roads it is going to get. The positions of viewership have reached the appropriate density so that enough is visible but not completely interpellated with other viewer positions (you don't want to look out at nature and see someone looking back). While I was there the roads were undergoing pretty heavy duty maintenance. That seems like the postmodern job in relation to the subject of the road: keeping it up against the erosions of culture and technology.