Farmville

If you use Facebook you have probably seen ads for Farmville or dabbled in it yourself. If you don't use the F-book you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Farmville is a game you can play for free through facebook. You get a gridded piece of virtual land. You can plant an increasing array of virtual crops as you progress in experience, as well as acquire livestock and ornaments and plant trees. Crops, animals, and trees give you money. They are simple, risk free investments. It is absurdly addictive.

The game progresses as a kind of well-graphicked algebra problem in which you, the player, try to figure out which plants--factoring in their time til harvest, their cost, and their payoff--you want to put in the ground. It is the way capitalism would work if it were a single variable problem. Farmville is only about supply. There is an infinite and continuous demand, so if you grow all soy beans all the time you get the same return every time. Isn't that wonderful? By the same token, there can be no exploitation of crop failures, of speculators, of market manipulation. You can't game the system.

My personal feeling toward Farmville is that it is a harmless addiction that restores logic and order to my largely disordered and anxious existence. (Weightlifting works in a similar way but, as with all empirical processes, is given to moments of independent fluctuation). I am not sure what to make of it as a critical or reactionary program. As I have shown, it both idealizes capitalism as the best possible world, and it slaps down the actual working of capitalism as anathema to that ideal. In the same way, one can continually harvest products from virtual trees and animals without destroying them (milking the cows, getting eggs from chickens, finding truffles with the pigs). This is both deeply idealistic and ideological. To borrow from the Beach Boys, yeah, that would be nice--but does imagining it make us closer or farther? And does the addictive pull to return to the screen, to plan one's virtual acriculture around a relationship to the computer, similarly entail a coming together between a carbon- and a silicon-based operating system? Or does it underscore how an organic veneer is necessary to allow the one to "pass" in the world of the other? Whatever the answer to these questions, many, many people are living that experience right now.

In Praise of Particle Board

Particle board is the material of choice for cheap furniture. Venture into a dorm or bachelor pad and you will likely find particle board products. It is the lowest form of wood, lower even than plywood (which at least has substantial ruggedness to recommend its otherwise unattractive appearance). Particle board has only its cheapness, and that it wears a veneer well.

Like many people I was inclined to look down on PB. It displaces real, beautiful wood, and the kind of crap easily made with PB displaces real carpenters. Beholding a wooden stool made with good craftsmanship and good materials is a glory.

I was raised in this cult of quality. Now I am reconsidering whether I judged the its foe too harshly. PB is made mostly out of waste product. That's why it is so cheap. Isn't there a quiet dignity in reclaiming what the quest for greatness discards? And isn't there something truthful about a material that really wears its economization on its laminate sleeve? There is no aura to the thing made of PB; it is undisguised simulacra. It might imitate a granite counter top or a cherry cabinet (with the help of a more attractive sheath) but once you commit to PB rather than the real thing you have given up the social capital game. The question becomes not: what do others think of this and of me as a result? but: what do I think about the appearance of this thing. Because if you scratch the surface, it's right there. There is no fetish value there, it's just there there. No symbolic filler, just literal filler. I feel deeply related to this subpar material, recuperated from the ashbin of authenticity, that is worthless inside but effective on the surface.

Freud, Animals, and Smell

Where does repression come from? Part of its origin, says Freud, is physiological. As hominids became erect our noses moved away from our genitals and anuses. At the same time, we began to rely more on sight and less on smell; our sense of smell withered in proportion to our strengthening eyes. Our once easy familiarity with our sexual zone became uneasy. What happens first as evolutionary biology repeats as evolutionary psychology: humans are distinguished from animals not just by our erect posture, strong eyes and weak noses, but by a mental economy of not knowing what we know. Out of a certain defensiveness about (ostensibly) not knowing sex morality is born.

So says Freud, if you can forgive my rough paraphrase. I think we are, today, generally skeptical of any story of this kind that roots the discoveries of a certain age (ie repression, Oedipus, etc) in a pre-historical proto-humanity. What I see of use in this story is a wedge for a particular critique of Freud. When he talks about the strong sense of smell of primitive or pre-humanity he is talking about animality, a general concept grounding the concept of humanity; but he is also talking about lots of species coeval with homo sapiens. Dogs are the obvious example, especially as they are distinctly "within" the polis, and in Freud's case within his office during sessions. But when we look on dogs and their amazing ability to track by scent, to approach the world through a different lens than humans--and the ineffability of butt-sniffing to the weak-nosed human--we don't see the Id incarnate. The history/prehistory divide set up in Freud's story introduces an unnecessary binarism that would divide ego from id and uncritically attach values based on a division that is at best heuristic (This tendency persists today in researchers showing that language-oriented dogs are "smarter" than scent-oriented dogs). The "uncanny," the general darkness of the libidinal region, are results of the very vertico-centricity that Freud is criticizing. It seems more the case that the ego as the human form of consciousness does not have one other (sex) but many, and the empirical evidence of this many lies quite simply in the lives of animals. Thus the Id is not frightening, as any dyadic Other must at first appear, but different in a non-competitive way (non-competitive because framed in a wide and generally flat field, rather than the top-bottom orientation of any two term set). From here it is not a long distance to an Anti-Oedipal reading of multiplicity in the unconscious, with the advantage that actual animals are irreducibly included, as actual and not symbolic, in the dialectic of human selfhood

UC Graduate Student Walkout

As everyone knows, the UC system is in a lot of trouble. Less widely discussed is why and whose vision of higher education this crisis benefits. Perhaps even less mentioned is what can and is being done to avoid total capitulation by faculty and students to the Regents. Please read the letter below being circulated by UC grad students and visit the sites:

Faculty Walkout

Graduate Student Walkout

Dear Professor XXX,

I write to express my solidarity with the striking UPTE workers and UC Faculty pushing for a system-wide walkout on the first day of class on 9/24. In advance of this date, I want to let you know of my intention not to cross any picket line. The emergency powers recently seized by the University of California Office of the President—not to mention the Administration's heavy handed budget decisions made under cover of summer vacation and holiday weekends—are unacceptable from any perspective within the UC system. This new thrust of long-standing trends toward privatization makes a farce of the University's stated mission of providing an accessible and quality public education for the youth of California. As educators, students and workers, we all have a stake in fighting for this dream against the prevailing corporate cynicism of the Chancellors and Office of the President.

Along with my fellow graduate students I have witnessed steep cutbacks in TAships, departmental funding decreases, fee hikes and dwindling job prospects. These new cutbacks threaten graduate students, who already have staggeringly high levels of debt, with the prospect of real financial ruin along the path to completing their degree programs. Assisting our professors instruct undergraduates grows more difficult with each over-crowded classroom and every bloated discussion section that the administrators force upon us. We are asked to take the hit for the financial crisis while those charged with managing the budget reject significant cuts in their own large salaries and, remarkably, refuse public disclosure the budget itself. For these reasons and many more, I support the actions and demands of the UC Faculty Walkout which must ensure that the University of California will not be "business as usual" on 9/24. On behalf of a growing contingent of graduate students (http://www.gradstudentstoppage.com/ ), I strongly encourage you to make the decision to walk out and sign the open letter if you have not already done so. That open letter and signatory page is here: http://ucfacultywalkout.com/

I strongly believe that this faculty walkout represents an important exercise in pedagogy: disruption is an essential component of all critical thought and all advances in human knowledge. Towards this end, I welcome the opportunity to discuss ways of including our undergraduates in this day of action. It is of utmost importance that we don’t punish undergraduates who choose to walk out in support of faculty on the first day, so we may want to discuss postponing attendance, permission codes and enrollment until the next scheduled day of class. In the days to come, building solidarity and creatively collaborating on pedagogical resistance will be essential to defending—more than just our individual positions—the very principle of a free and public education against the vicious and failed ideologies of corporatization and privatization. I hope this letter is only the beginning of an ongoing dialogue between us about these issues.

In solidarity,

XX

Feel free to re-post or publicize this effort any way possible.

Have you seen "Brazil"!

I just stumbled across Brazil, a kind of playful reworking of the Orwellian nightmare. Somewhere between Blue Velvet and Willy Wonka, it tickles the absurdity drive and anxiety drive equally. What I enjoyed about Brazil--other than its simulations of the visual rhetoric of a control society, the euphemisms of the age of universal terrorism, its self-cinematizing lack of emotional manipulation--was that it did not allow itself to fantasize about an actual "outside" of the system. The total bureacracy that the protagonist finds himself within is not a Megatronic evil entity one can front, fight, or flee from. It is society itself.

Furthermore, the bureaucracy is not apart from the protagonist. He is not the messianic possessor of truth and light in a world benighted by paper work. Rather, the absolute bureaucracy is a fantasy of the will to artistic resistance. We see him as the figure of light, quite literally, in his fantasy world. By splitting between the protagonist's objective experience with his bosses, mother, desk, and papers, and his subjective myth-fantasy of flight, dueling, salvation, self-knowledge, the film shows that the revolutionary interpretation of narratives about this kind of world is precisely the means by which one fails to cognize that world as itself.

Weber gives a theorist's account of this beautiful monstrosity (if we use Kant's terms the perfect bureaucracy is both beautiful and sublime). Kafka is sainted for it, then Orwell. Brazil gives a generic reading of this fantasy: the image of the perfect bureaucracy arises from the desire for aesthetic resistance. Only as opposed to bureaucracy can the modern artist conceive of himself in Icarian terms (Lowry's fantasy begins as Icarus, flying toward the light above the clouds). Once at a show in Gainesville a pamphlet was distributed that appeared to be an insurance form. The text, however, explained that by typing within that format the author was able to escape detection at work and spend his or her time writing the manifesto that followed. The formalism of bureaucracy, the contentless gray race it engages, is what allows content--dreams, revolutions, individuals, objects--to appear by contrast.

Brazil's plot is above all about a state of terrorism. "Have you ever seen an actual terrorist?" Lowry is asked. He has not, and the only "terrorist" we have seen is a rogue repairman (played by Robert Deniro, even though he appears for maybe 10 minutes out of 140). But we have seen terrorism: explosions in restaurants and shopping malls that affect mostly the upper class, and the (counter-)terrorist raids that leave the tenements of the poor in ever worse repair (not to mention dragging them away for "information retrieval," ie, torture). Terrorism, like the liberation Lowry inchoately longs for, is a milieu, the in-between; it vanishes in the graspable. The mit, not the Sein. Lowry's demise seems to reinforce the nihilistic reading. Deniro's anarchistic repairman, however, is another version of rebellion. He has a specific goal: making stuff work. He operates anarchistically because it is more functional. "Why don't you work for central services?" Lowry asks. "I became a heating engineer for the action, not the paperwork," he replies. Deniro's repairmen, however, does not get a macronarrative. There is no end in sight of a time when everything is fixed. That sounds about right.

Virginia Woolf

Today I got The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf in the mail. I'd bought it because I thought it contained "Flush," a novella about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel. Any story centered on an animal is of interest to me. (You can actually find a nice copy of the full text free online, I just like physical books). "Flush," however, is not included, though in one of the appendices there are some nice fragments about a dog and monkeys (separate fragments). I also enjoyed a story about a woman named "V." as it was oddly similar to Pynchon's novel/character of the same name in thematizing cyborgs, dispersed agents, and undeath as a unit. The later, more typical stories were less to my liking because they seemed to have a back door, almost Heideggerian reinstatement of the human. Woolf is fantastic at disaggregating the flitting about of the subject in the phenomenological field and capturing each moment as both with and without relation to those adjacent. On one hand, then, this dismantles "the subject"--and while "dismantle" is something of a metaphor here, on the path of modernism/Woolf to postmodernism/Pynchon it is quite literal: Pynchon's V. is made mostly of mechanical parts and her death scene is a literal dismantling. This centerless or defiltered flow is also more likely to admit those object-agents traditionally disqualified as even supporting characters to play furniture or mise-en-scene. However, as Woolf makes clear in her early story "Phyllis and Rosamond," the intent is anthropological: "Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day's work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the door keeper at the Globe [passed his day]....And as such portraits as we have are invariably of the male sex...it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade" (17). The focal point of the phenomenological constellation is a new and better human.

This is not to say that Woolf is only an anthropologist, or even that her contribution to the reformation of literary anthropology is negative, but that her driving continuity is torn between these visions. She is very much at the forefront of modernism. Heidegger's hands, too, know not what the other is doing. Ulysses marks its uncertainty about animals in its mythic-lawmaking structure with sudden reflections on cannibalism. Faulkner's novella "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses is about how a hybrid hunting dog is the only way for humanity to encounter the sublimity of Nature's ferocity. If "modernity" is a term too easily place in certain narratives of the suppression and enclosure of animals, maybe the shorter periodizations of literature can highlight how modernity folds in on itself; how each progressive revolution undercuts itself with regard to its animals and its self as animal. That would be a big project. It can at least be begun with due specificity in texts like "Flush."