Sorry America, People in Iran Still Fucking Hate You

I like to think of myself as a person who, if not unbiased, is at least aware of his biases. This doesn’t mean that I’m working to overcome them, but at least I know where they are. Part of this system of prejudices is that I generally hate Republicans more than I hate Democrats. This isn’t because I  think that Democrats are necessarily smarter than Republicans – they quite often aren’t, although I suspect averages favor the left wing – but because Democrats are more likely to want the same things I want, and thus less liable to get in my way. I recall being around campus for the presidential “Get out the Vote!” thing this past fall, and couldn’t ever quite decide if the people doing it were disingenuous or terribly naive. I mean, isn’t driving on a national freeway system evidence enough that most people probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote? Dogs chained up in the back of pickups; people eating with one hand and applying makeup with the other; some redneck motherfucker beating his kids and changing the radio at the same time. These people can vote! Why, why, why would you ever want to remind them of that? Maybe it’s the college atmosphere that confuses people – you have to at least be able to write your name and wipe your own ass to go to college (unless you’ve got a jumpshot), so maybe they’ve forgotten that these aren’t the only people voting. Go to a cheap public location some time and listen to the things people are saying. Listen. You wouldn’t let them watch your kid, wash your dog, or remove your tonsils – why the fuck would you let them choose who leads the most powerful country on earth? It’s like all of a sudden, every 4 years, all those people who aren’t expected to know shit about the economy, about healthcare, about international relations get their day. Like “Bring your kids to work!“, except when that day happens, the kids don’t actually get to do anything – they have to fucking sit their quietly and watch. Why? Because they aren’t qualified – they’re children, they have the relative functional intelligence of a monkey. This same analogy applies to democratic voting, except work involves control over enough explosives to turn the planet inside out.

This might be part of why I wasn’t terribly initially excited about this whole Iranian revolution. Now, I like to see civic-sponsored violence as much as the next guy, and I’m not really wild about muslims, so I suppose there’s a certain animalistic pleasure in watching the news coverage. However, a couple things initially turned me off, both on their side and ours, and I’m relatively certain the whole thing isn’t anything like what most Americans think.

First of all – John McCain has all of a sudden got a real fucking boner for getting on Obama’s case about not coming out and supporting “the Iranian people”, whatever that means. This is the same motherfucker who sang “Bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” when asked what his foreign policy towards them was. And now he thinks we should intervene? Which is it, Johnny? Blow them up or save them? A similar attitude seems to be endemic to most Republican commentators, who can’t seem to remember that 2 weeks ago they thought we should invade.

Second, I’m not sure that Americans really understand the Iranian “people” (I use the term under erasure, but this is how pundits and dumb people think, so it’s necessary) as well as they think they do. Most of the latte-sippers who are now all about the revolution here don’t realize that the opposition candidate is only slightly less a controlling fascist than the current one. Iranians aren’t having a revolution for women’s rights, freedom of religion, or capitalism – they already had a revolution, 30 years ago, and they put fucking Khomeini in place – the guy who went into exile and incited riots when the Shah let women vote. They willingly pushed into power the fucking clerics – they made THEIR OWN STATE an Islamic Republic, which as far as I can tell is Arab for no fun at all. Does anyone here really understand the sort of views that Moussavi supports? He approved the taking of hostages, he was responsible for the execution of political prisoners in 1988, and (at least in my book) worst of all, supported the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. You think the sort of dude who orderered a (brilliant) writer executed and put a price on his head is really about to be a paragon of democracy? Me neither. To even be approved as a candidate for this election, the guy had to be enough of an asshole that Khomeini would let him run in the first place – it’s not an actual democracy, although it would be well served to note that the US did the same thing in Vietnam and the Israelis do the same thing in Palestine.

So yes, they’re rioting in Tehran. Yes, the people have spoken out – and said they want the same damn thing in a different color (namely, green.) Who knows – maybe the system they put into place shooting back at them will remind them that they did a really shitty job the first time and ought to let someone else sort it out the second time.

Love in the time of Cholera, pt. 2: Where it gets all mushy

This part will, with any luck, be the section that the previous one was meant to be. I’ll confess, I chickened out – Dani said that I never write anything personal in my “journal,” and loathe as I am to admit it, she may be right. This entry will be, then, my attempt to come to terms with that and with any luck overcome it – although I’m certain that a good dose of clinical diction will dilute any hint of romance.

I mentioned in the prior entry that my relationships tend to burn out rather quickly, and speculated that this was perhaps not because they were lacking something that I was looking for, but instead because the enjoyment, for me, ensued from the looking for in and of itself; once things become predictable, I tend to (despite my best intentions) check out. Whether this is an entirely unique phenomenon is unclear – while I’m certain there are people who claim to desire stability in a relationship, there are also those who claim that neither money nor looks are important; perhaps what we want and what we think we want don’t always overlap. This happens with somewhat frightening regularity to me; fairly early on in relationships, I tend to experience a particular moment in which I recognize the “fatal flaw”, and some sort of biological switch is flipped which signals what will ultimately result in the parting of ways.

Now, for the mushy. The young, weak at heart, or bitter should probably close their browsers. I’m somewhat taken by a particular young woman right now, who for reasons still somewhat unknown to me has yet to reveal her tragic flaw. I like to think that I do a little better in finding a match every time (I suppose one can’t really use the phrase ‘trading up’ without risking a significant amount of wrath), but even I’m a little bit surprised at this. Best guess: I tend to be a little bit of a personality leech, meaning that I seek out people in life who are better than me at skills I want to have. Normally, this results in the aforementioned overtaking – however, the people who tend to persist in my life are those who generate new information or abilities at a rate equal to or faster than I can catch up to them. These people I like to keep around, because they’re easy to learn from – and quite frankly, because I tend to find most other people become quite boring.

Maybe that’s why I like Dani – she produces new content more quickly than I can dig through the old stuff. I admit that there’s an extremely narcissistic element to the sort of ’searching’ that I do – it’s not the search for a particular quality that I find enjoying, but the ability to search at all. In short, the quality desired exists not in the other person, but in myself. However, this is precisely what makes Dani attractive to me (and perhaps non-tragic, because I suspect that the tragic element is generally one that leads to predictability): I’m never quite certain where she’s going to go next, at least in the metaphorical sense (the real life one is almost always towards candy.) This makes her challenging, and quite possibly a peer. In addition, a tiny part of me, which rarely gets to see the light of day, appreciates the possibility that the sort of challenges she presents me with allow me to wrangle with my own demons a little bit, and for the briefest moments clutch somewhere deep down inside at the possiblity, however minute, that there might be some sort of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness out there to aspire to.

So there. I’m in love with Dani because sometimes she’s better than me at things and I can’t ever figure out what the fuck she’s going to do next, or what she’s thinking. Also, great lay.

Love in the time of Cholera, pt. 1

My response to hearing people use the phrase “in real life” is generally akin to hearing nails screeching on a chalk board. For those of you who don’t have ears, this feeling is bad. I’ve been meaning for quite some time to write about this sort of bucolic, folksy ideal of “common sense” that’s quite often not at all sensible; I find that “in real life” generally conveys a subset of the same sort of blithely self-assured ignorance. Maybe it’s what I perceive to be the ironic condescension of it – “Oh, I’m sure you’ve having fun studying literature/history/philosophy, but what are you going to do with that in real life?” repeated ad nauseum, as if their primary occupation as Rite-Aid checker and professional arm-chair basketball coach had somehow made them uniquely qualified to comment on my future life prospects. This strikes me as particularly amusing because these people tend to be the sort who would be the last to contextualize their personalities within their own jobs; I hardly expect to find any glistening personal insights in the careers of cubicle  monkies, UPS deliverymen, or real estate sales people, nor do I expect them to have a particularly ready quip when asked “So what are you going to do with all of those episodes of Sex and the City in real life?” Perhaps I can take small comfort in the fact that I can read the newspaper without a dictionary handy and understsand mot of the references in Pixar movies.

With all that said, I’ve never had a romantic relationship in “real life.” Now, I know what you jackals are thinking, and I’m sure at some point it will come back to haunt me when this is quoted out of context. I don’t mean that I have a BangBus subscription, nor that troll Eharmony. Quite the opposite – my personal relationships tend to consume large amounts of my “real life” time, and as such, tend to be short lived and mostly revolve around relatively obligation free points of my life – summers, winter breaks, college in general. As to whether I’ve fallen into a trap of assuming correlation = causation, I’m skeptical – perhaps not entirely convinced that the two are related, but the evidence seems to suggest so.

Figuring out why this occurs is slightly more complicated – and carries the added (obvious) risk of reaching those sort of comforting self-analyses that really just reify the things we pretend not to like about ourselves, the things you mention in an interview when someone asks you what your greatest faults are. “Probably that I’m too hard on myself,” you say, with the downward glance of faux-contrition, “I tend to let projects consume me.” But this is precisely the problem I think that I have with relationships – I have a difficult time finding the medium heat setting; things tend to end up boiling over or curdling on the back burner. This is, of course, not the actual problem; my stalwart readers would certainly remind me that this is merely a symptom, not a cause, and that I simply can’t leave them to draw their own conclusions. No, no, that would never do. The author-function persists, and we must be spoon-fed.

So. Why? Why are my relationships so much Fox News (loud, fast, frightening) and so little French cinema (long, slow, boring)? I suppose the obvious answer is that they’re a reflection of my own personality – lots of flash, little substance – although I think that hardly does me justice. The answer, instead, is perhaps the opposite: I tend to consume substance, or at least sift through it, at an all-too-rapid pace, and end up, like some sort of existentialist Bugs Bunny, frantically digging holes through my romantic partners, looking for some sort of metaphysical treasure before I emerge on the other side (Notebook screenings, divorce court, Valentine’s Day – wherever it is that relationships go to die.) This rarely works, because most people tend to have content which I either don’t find particularly valuable or rapidly exhaust, and I find myself reliving the same conversations and awaiting the ensuing breakdown, in which the wheels generally fall off completely and I embarrass myself in front of everyone who works at Applebee’s (again).

Of course, this would be so much easier if I knew what, precisely, I was looking for. I’ve commented on this behavior in a similar manner a few times in the past, mostly pointing out that my intellectual endeavors tend to be streaky and tenuous. Whether or not this is because I abhor the idea that one can’t simply be talented at all things, that it sometimes takes practice to become  good at something is uncertain, although I suspect that my own arrogance plays no small role – “Well, if I can’t figure this out, it’s stupid and not worth my time.” Perhaps (and this is undoubtedly an over-eager application of post-modernism) the difficulty remains in my consistent framing of my personal life within a grand-narrative, in the belief that there really is some sort of unifying thread tying these things together, that I really do (or at least should) have a telos, a center or common goal that lies at the heart of all these thosuands of hours I’m wasting on Iranian revolutions and anti-Tibet movements and intelligent design debates on the internet. Maybe the important part is the questioning part itself – removing the emphasis from the particular content and placing it instead on the search. Of course, this is nothing more than a relocation of the telos onto the method, a move not entirely unlike creating a system out of deconstructionism, but it happens to be one for which society is willing to pay you and let you write books and drink all the coffee your little heart can handle, as a university professor. So yes, that’s what I’m going to do with that in real life; I’m going to ask questions that you never think about and it’s going to be financed by your tax dollars.

It’s Just A Human Life

As far as I can recall, the only significant fight that Dani and I have ever had occurred as we were stumbling (drunk, because normally I’m extremely graceful) down Franklin Street to buy more beer on the evening of some NCAA championship game. Because we’re both fairly intelligent and not total assholes, we were having a conversation about something vaguely intellectual and the subject rolled around to abortion. I’ve learned throughout the years, although perhaps most specifically as a result of PUA stuff, that there are some things you simply don’t talk to women about – particularly ones you’re trying to sleep with. However, as mentioned, I was a little bit drunk and she’s a little bit weird so I thought “Hey, perfect time to let the anti-humanist flag fly.” Big Mistake. She started asking a lot of questions beginning with “What would you do if…”, always a sign of  trouble, and I answered, somewhat provocatively (did I mention I was drunk yet?) that at some point, these sorts of caluclations have to consider that “it’s just a human life.” This produced the (predictable) shit-storm, which I guess is somewhat understandable given that we try and make a baby – or at least replicate the act, if not the goal –   whenever we’re alone (and sometimes when we aren’t – sorry Matt!)

 

The argument sounds cold, but I think it’s one that’s internalized at some level in most of us.  The US Highway Department estimates the marginal cost of saving one human life at around 6-7 million dollars. That’s the amount of money you lose by reducing the speed limit, building more guard rails, straightening out curvy roads, etc – but these things have a cost. If you can only drive 50, it takes trucks longer to move across those life-veins of capitalism, the arterial highway system, to put goods in stores and money in banks and most importantly to put feet in malls. This is unaccceptable – thus, we’re willing to take the risk. This is what strikes me as a little bit silly about the whole pro-choice/pro-life thing: none of them really believe in what they’re saying. Pro-life people drive to rallies in SUVs; the entire wealthy white right wing is avidly pro-life and equally vehemently pro-capitalist. They have millions, often billions of dollars – yet they’re pissed off that a poor person doesn’t want to be saddled with 18 years of accidental hardship? Outrageous – something like 40 million people (real, live, kicking breathing thinking feeling people) die every year of starvation, and what’s more – it’s entirely fixable. According to the UN, it would take $30 billion a year to end world hunger. 30 billion! People spend that on summer houses! On yachts! On fucking artwork! Don’t ever say that abortion doctors are murderers when you drive a Cadillac – when you drive a fucking car at all. Absolutely nauseating. If God has some ace, first class fucking plan for every life that necessitates shooting an educated man in the back, which part of his fucking plan involves the entire population of France starving to death every year? Oh, but wait – those aren’t Christian babies, so it doesn’t count. Fucking hypocrites. If you go to a megachurch whose pastor has a 6 figure salary and you think abortion is a crime, you need to re-evaluate your fucking priorities. 

 

Digressions aside, the point of this post. My last couple entries have been detailing this growing divide I’m feeling, a sort of metaphysical distance from the people around me.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this – I’m honestly certain that it’s a sign that I’m either destined for genius or psychiatric illness. Maybe both. Maybe one and then the other, although that usually doesn’t work as well. This latest experience occurred this evening, as I was sitting in the hot tub at our gym, trying very hard to avoid the swarms of (hopefully) just-barely-potty-trained toddlers storming the spa like it was the west coast of France. Once the little monsters had settled down, I was watching them play and talk amongst one another, and had this very surreal experience of watching some sort of animal – like I was recognizing features of what was certainly a living organism, but not one that I shared any particular traits or commonalities with. The experience was unsettling, to say the least, and while I tried to shake it off, I found myself entirely unable to generate any sort of empathy for anyone in the pool – even adults. It was like being on a human safari. The question occurred to me then, which, try as I might, I was entirely unable to either answer comfortably nor purge from my mind: Given the choice between saving the life of a random child and ten thousand dollars, which would I pick?

Well? Which would you pick? This is the basis for my anti-humanism. That child is one in six billion – contrary to the anti-abortionists’ argument, the chances that he’ll cure cancer, or even do anything nominally “positive” for mankind as a whole are extremely slim. He won’t write the next great American novel, he won’t stop a nuclear detonation. In all likelihood, he will grow up and lead an entirely non-descript life. He will probably lie, he will probably steal, he will probably break hearts and pick on his classmates. He’ll probably believe in God and the American way and that people at the bottom deserve it. He might drink too much, sell drugs; he might even kill someone. All these things are infinitely more likely than a positive impact on the world. It’s just a human life. But, before this turns into a debate of human rights versus statistics, we’ve got to resolve my own moral quandary. What would I do with ten thousand dollars? Nothing special, I assure you – I don’t think that I can save the world, bring peace to the middle east, any of that shit. It’s $10,000. People spend that on dinner. But it would make my life significantly better, at least for a time – which is more than I can say for saving a kid. Christ knows there are enough people on this planet already – it’s not like we’re begging for more polluters and crop consumers. 

That’s not to say this is a universal situation – if it were my kid, or my brother’s kid, or even a close friend of mine’s kid, then it’s an entirely different story. $10,000 isn’t worth family, and what’s more, I have a pretty high estimation of the gene pools around me – the likelihood of killing or suffering as a result of this act decreases significantly.

This thought was (is) depressing to me – I can’t be certain if I’ve alienated myself from the people I know, or if I’m peering through the veil. It’s like I was adopted into the wrong species, and I just found out. Unclear. This is particularly hard for me to reconcile because it’s such a dramatic swing from the sort of transcendental consciousness feelings I used to experience – the kind where you can look around a room and feel an affinity with every face. I’m not sure that it’s entirely indicative of a lack of empathy; I’m still deeply troubled by the thought of suffering on the part of any creature, but I can’t seem to regard humans with the sort of sacro-sanctity that our society requires. This has been a slippery slope for me; I’ve been demolishing most of my meta-religions for almost a year now, and I’m slightly afraid to find out where this will lead.

I wonder if this is the beginning of genius or a breakdown.

Lethal Text

Jeden Tag stirbt ein Teil von dir

jeden Tag schwindet deine Zeit,

jeden Tag einen Tag den du verlierst,

nichts bleibt für die Ewigkeit

I’m feeling alienated now. Not lonely, although that may be a part. Lonely doesn’t particularly bother me, because it’s easy enough to fix. The world is filled with warm bodies, and unless you’re particularly ugly/communicable/obnoxious, chances are you can find another person to hang out with you. But alienation – that’s another thing entirely. I sometimes wonder if pursuing my interests is going to lead me to a point of no return. I don’t think my parents really like talking to me anymore. Of course, I can’t say with any degree of certainty that they ever really liked talking to me before, but it didn’t have that undertone of indifference that makes it particularly difficult. The fact of the matter is that I’m a little too far out there for what people would consider amusing, if also irrelevant, conversation. This is the realm of the analytical philosopher – people will sort of absent-mindedly over dinner ponder whether or not it’s ethical to test shampoo on animals, then shrug and order the lobster. Convincing them that they’ve mostly made up the idea of meaning is going to take at least until dessert. Most people don’t believe in the things I believe in anymore. I wonder if I’ve gone too far. I wonder if I’ve not gone far enough. I hope the damage is reversible. There’s an idea called a ‘lethal text’, which, upon being read, lays bare in the mind of the reader the paradoxes of language and of meaning and makes you go crazy – a little bit like glimpsing the Real.  I wonder if somewhere along the lines I encountered a fatal text. I wish I knew who it was, so I could write the publisher a letter and say “Stop! This book will destroy everything you believe in!” Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good title for a book in and of itself – maybe I’ll use that.

I deleted one of the posts I made on here recently, because it was mostly redundant and mostly unimportant, and most siginficantly, it was expressing, at its core, a sentiment that I wasn’t (and probably still am not) entirely up to dealing with – not quite regret, although I certainly have a deep-seated fear of regrets, but rather one of powerlessness. I suppose that’s not quite the right term – being afraid of being powerless makes me sound like either a third world dictator or a prime candidate for domestic abuse, and that’s not quite what I’m looking for. Adrift, maybe. That’s what I’m afraid of – being a passenger in my own life, although not explicitly a passenger: better, a driver without brakes. The role of agency is important here – the decisions I’m making, the interests I pursue and values I espouse, the friends I keep and the ones I let slip by, all these things are to be certain within my control, but seem to be tracing out a certain inexorable path. 

 

I sometimes re-read this blog and wonder if I’m arrogant. The question is never really one of arrogance (although this probably depends on one’s working definition of arrogance; if it entails a high assessment of skills, perhaps, but if it’s a matter of overestimating capacities,  it also strikes me as slightly silly to think that one could assess one’s own competency in various areas; that in itself smacks of a much greater degree of hubris), but instead one of conflicting aims. My last post was about the fascist within, whatever it is that lends priority to various values and emerges as a consistent self. I may have erred here, because such a statement implies a consistent reign; such is not the case, various libidinal ‘rulers’ emerge at different times, each with their own agendas, goals, estimations of value. Some days I want to be a professor. Some days I want to be famous. Some days I want to be needed. These desires are all well and good, and I’m certain they would make a compelling picture book, but they fail to hit upon the real crux of the matter: I want to have choices. Not opportunities, because it’s not a matter of seizing the right thing at the right time, but the ability to never go down a path that I can’t come back up. This is a bit of a paradox, as I think further about it. When I demand a plurality of choices, I’m not actually asking for a choice at all – I’m asking for an element of non-choice, a parallel existence where being an astronaut doesn’t preclude me from being a porn star nor a physician. I wish that I had lived in the age of the polymath, where you could know everything about everything. I wish that I spoke seven languages. I wish I understood physics. All of these things require a certain investment, a passage of time that simply isn’t reclaimable. This may be my greatest reluctance to getting a job – I’m 20 years old, I cant be employed doing anything that I like.  This is lack. Working is lack – we give up choices to engage further in a now limited number of choices, most of which reside in brain-real estate that’s bought and sold on television commercials and interestate billboards. There seems to be something intrinsically wrong with that sort of a system. People go to work to make money to do what they want in the meager amount of free time they’re allotted. But it’s not really free time anyway, because if not the place you work for, the place someone else works for has a vested interest in convincing you that whatever choices you have remaining are already determined – you just don’t know it.

 

This post is shit. I’m drunk. I was hoping that I would get really fucked up and write something brilliant, but it’s just coming out garbage. Sometimes I re-read my older posts to assess the rate at which my intelligence is decreasing. I think I used to be smarter than I am now. I wonder if alcohol had something to do with it. I wonder if that’s a good trade off.

I notice that I used to believe in things. I don’t, particularly, anymore. Maybe I’m suppressing it. Maybe gleichgueltig is the new black. Maybe this is all a phase. I sure hope so. Someone asked me on the internet today if I thought that being immortal would be worse than dying. I sure hope not, but I think he’s right. I wonder if I have any passions. I hope that I find out about them before it’s too late. I wonder if I’m in love. I think so. I wonder if James Joyce wrote like that on purpose or if it just came out that way. If it just came out that way, why didn’t he decide not to change it? I hope I recognize genius if I ever produce it. I hope I don’t die before I’m ready,  but I hope I don’t live longer than I need to.

I hope I’m happy.

The Fascist Within

There’s a certain amount of investment that goes into writing these blog posts – I’m always convinced there’s something better I could be doing at the time, and can only reluctantly sit down and write these. This is, however, not without its rewards – I get to sit down later and chuckle at my own witticisms, and sleep soundly knowing that history will have a testament to my genius.  Maybe not that, so much, but at least in part a record of what I was thinking at some particular time. I think there’s a very syncretic aspect of memory – it’s hard to remember outside of your epistemology – and I often have a difficult time remembering when (or perhaps more importantly, why) I used to think Israel was good and drugs were bad, or that love wasn’t real, and then that it was, and then that it wasn’t again. If anything, these blog entries are a bulwark against time, against reason. A testament to rationality, perhaps. Or maybe against it – because really, how much sense does it make to leave these testaments behind? If you can tie a common thread through them, great, your author function is preserved. But if not? Whoops – what if you didn’t use to think the way you did now? What if the brain that makes a “you” now isn’t the same brain that made a “you” earlier? 

I’ve been fretting a little bit about what I want to actually study once I land this professor schtick – apparently you aren’t allowed to just sit in a leather chair and offer pithy remarks – you have to actually produce something. I read a couple works about libidinal economies for a couple of my papers and ended up really falling in love with the concept, more generally, of Eros  and by extension the dissolution of consciousness. One of the most poignant sentences of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (which I’ve been meaning to finish, but am simply intimidated by) was the one where, after describing the process through which binaries are created through some sort of  slowing of the libidinal flow, says “Don’t ask why – to ask why is to return to the realm of the Zero, to look for meaning.” This has been a bit stymieing for me, because while ultimately proving the source of my Nihilism, there’s an implication that the intellectual endeavours themselves are a bit of a false consciousness – a “We should know better, but we’re doing it anyway.” This is the primary difficulty I have with arriving comfortably at some sort of hedonism as a paradigm – I can’t justify it, which throws me right back into the spin cycle of “Why try and justify it?” which is in itself a sort of attempt to find justification. I’ve yet to find an exit that I’m satisfied with, although beer seems to help. And sex – I find that sex is good for resolving a lot of these ontological difficulties, although I suppose in a roundabout way it’s reproducing them. *Snort*

Dani told me recently that my blog wouldn’t cut it as a real publication because if I wanted to make something out of it, I would have to take out those sort of narcissistic asides: the bad jokes and even worse puns that I find amusing (and secretly suspect you do too) if not a little bit lacking in journalistic integrity. Also ensuing from our discussion was the way in which this blog offers insight into my personality. I’m somewhat split on this account – of course it does, because anyone who reads this is aware that I am over-educated and under-exposed to the dirty materialism of real life, somewhat pretentious, incredibly self-absorbed, and (obvi) devastatingly charming.

 

There is, however, the “belauschen” aspect of a blog, what Dani termed the false earnestness of it. I’ve long suspected that people who keep journals (particularly confessional ones) do so with the purpose or at least the awareness (however repressed) that they may be read some day. I’ll go one step further, and declare that the sort of tertiary subjectivity of writing something and reading it when you write it, in the vein of impulse thought review, has a built in theatricality. There is, of course, the Derridian aspect here linking the voice and the sign, but what I’m really getting at is the attempt to generate meaning itself through signification; there is a creation of consciousness necessary to express an I in a text, and a certain degree of Herrschaft that eventually determines which words and ideas will pop out the other end. What I’m trying to get at is that embedded within free speech (and, implicitly, most expression) is a bit of fascism – the decision to express in one medium and even in some sort of order and most significantly at any amount of length is by all means a repressive act, and one which unquestioningly subscribes to some sort of belief in meaning or transcendentalism or at very minimum something, or else why am I writing all this shit and not watching television or jerking off or any number of things more pleasant than pecking away at a dimly lit LCD?

 

This is getting muddled – I tend to forget that these are blog posts and not essays and end up mentally masturbating my way into a corner. Let me summarize: I am intrigued by the creation of a subject implied in expression; we intuitively sort, order, and repress certain feelings and thoughts to form the appearance (at least on the exterior) of a whole – a consciousness that is an “I” and not an “Us”, when the fact of the matter is that there’s a battle for every syllable – and even before that, when the decision to write is made. Interestingly, German people don’t make decisions – they meet them, as if some sort of LHC in their brains shoots around consciousness electrons and they eventually hit upon an idea.  Lacan says the unconscious is structured like a language. Sometimes I try and think without words – never works very well, except for these sorts of primal emotions. Maybe there’s something to take from that – words aren’t the source but the symptom of repression, which we arrive at in the constitution of Self.

 

I hate it when Lacan is right.

Deutsch? Na klar!

I had a somewhat startling realization the other day -I was in the middle of listening to my gazillionth German podcast, which I’ve alternately interpersed with arguing about German grammar on the internet, and it struck me. I speak a foreign language. Well, sort of. I understand a foreign language – speaking it is going to be the difficult part. It’s an odd sort of benchmark to reach – I’ve been undergoing all sorts of psychic distress about how I didn’t learn a foreign language young enough, and my Boca’s region never split in half, and I’ll never understand like a native speaker, and… You get the idea. Precisely the sorts of thoughts that led early man to discover alcohol.  And then I realized I’m actually doing it, and it didn’t really take that long. Granted, I’ve been spending 4-5 hours a day doing this since the summer started, but that’s really only been 2 weeks or so. Amazing – and simultaneously depressing, because with every accomplishment, I’m forced to reckon with its inverse; If I could do such and such in such and such a time, then what the fuck have I been doing until now? Why have I been wasting all this time? This argument holds for traveling, reading, writing, foreign languages, fucking, working – everything! It’s a distressing epistemology, and I’m not sure what induces it, nor how to rid myself of it. Maybe this is why people get religious – because you don’t have to worry about running out of time anymore. Or maybe not. I can’t help but feel that this anxiety isn’t intrinsic; it’s induced, exogenous, or at least surmountable. I suppose their may be biological difficulties to overcome: organisms that feel happy or content probably don’t get their genes into the next round as often as ones that don’t. But hey, I tell myself, that’s what SSRIs were invented for, and wind up right back at Lexistentialism. 

 

I’m somewhat amazed by psycho-pharmacology in this regard, for two reasons. One: Humanity has advanced to such a point that it can medicate itself well enough that it’s no longer subject to the burden of progress. I would not be entirely unamused if civilization just stopped at the invention of the SSRI – perhaps even more humorous would be if the unmedicated third world caught up to and surpassed the now indolent West. It’s a funny thought, really. Perhaps a bit pedestrian, but if people became content with what they have, the whole system would break down. Of course, the system would also break down if people became too upset about what they have (or rather, don’t) and decided to even up accounts with the rich a little bit. Maybe the balancing act is a little bit more complicated than I thought: on the one hand, hunter-gatherer; on the other, French Revolution. 

I can’t help but wonder what sort of a role advertising has played in this. I was having some sort of bizarre discussion with my mother recently about whether or not kids get fat because they eat too much, or because they don’t exercise. My mother is very good (bad) at being myopic and self-selecting in perceiving faults – the issue at hand this time being whether or not my little sister needs to be forced to begin to do something with herself a little bit more demanding than changing from Disney to Nickelodeon. My father is of the opinion that she needs to start playing a sport, where as my mother’s self-righteousness gene (and confirmation bias) kicks in and determines that it’s my father taking her to Dairy Queen that will ultimately be the deciding difference. Now, barring engagement with the actual argument (although I think my father is right; plenty of American kids eat junk food and remain skinny, because they do things), I want to focus on something my mother said afterward. She was engaging in some sort of nostalgic remniscence of her childhood, and said that her family didn’t stop for “junk food” the way ours did now. I pointed out that this simply wasn’t possible then, because she’s a dinosaur and McDonald’s never offered McSaurusburgers, but also that it’s simply an unavoidable part of our world. More now than ever before, you’re bombarded with advertisements telling you about McDonalds and Starbucks and organic cereals; real men drink Coors Light (unless they drink Heineken – being a ‘real man’ is suddenly so much easier and so much harder.)  She responded that this was in fact not the case; while there weren’t fast food outlets, there were snacks and things sold – chocolate, popcorn, icecream, etc. 

I pointed out (and remain of the opinion) that the situation then was entirely different – a Starbucks drink now is an accessory, just like any other. Things aren’t marketed now -they’re branded. And what’s more, we’ve been taught that these brands are how you create your identity. It’s an odd sort of simulacrum: beyond even “you are what you buy,” we’ve arrived at a point of “you are because you buy.” The market place is loaded with brands and the information that they convey – purchasing decisions become identity decisions. It’s unavoidable, too – there is information conveyed in shopping at a thriftstore, or second hand, or sewing your own clothes, and it’s unavoidable – everyone knows it, and as a result is beholden to it.  In short, self-expression requires conscious choice about brands, and our next generation of consumers must be aware of this. And consequently, I think my little sister has to play a sport – if only so she can buy Nike shoes, to show that she’s goal-oriented and upwardly mobile, and drink Jamba Juice, to show that she’s relaxed, can kick back, and not overly body-conscious.

If You Hate The Internet I Probably Hate You

This post could have been a number of things – if nothing else, I never have a shortage of material that draws my ire. I had briefly considered keeping a running count of “Things I like and Things I hate” on this blog, but abandoned the whole project when it became clear that it would be terribly one-sided. Also, I haven’t got the time nor the dedication to write on the only other even remotely ‘real’ topic I’m mulling over, so what you’ll see here is my forte: A contrived situation out of my real (or imagined) life, hopelessly expanded and abstracted until I can morph it into a bit of amateur philosophizing. If this were a book, that would be a killer introduction. 

In perhaps the most pretentious move ever, I’ve begun keeping a mental list of things that need genealogies and words that need to be deconstructed. Any competent psychologist would quickly recognize this as evidence that I am insane, and any prudent peer would suggest that this sort of narcissism is provoked by either having entirely too much or entirely too little sex. However, my laptop computer, as a non-sentient (*crosses fingers, fears Singularity*) being, can do nothing to stop me elaborating on this shit at length. So: I’ve had it up to here with this ‘nature’ bullshit. One of my roommates had a big issue with technology; in particular, the internet. He hated it, and hated the way it had changed things,I’m told far more frequently than I ever desire to be that ‘the world moves too fast these days’ or that ‘the internet removes the personal element of life.’ This is ridiculous. It’s one thing to admit that you aren’t very ‘good’ with computers – this is admitting ignorance, which is OK with me because I’ve long suspected you of it. However, it’s another thing entirely to dislike technology. This is not only shortsighted, it’s absurd. At the risk of being terribly bourgeois and condescending, things in the United States are, by all quantifiable measures, better than they have ever been before and better than nearly anywhere else in the world. People have more material happiness here than perhaps 95% of the world – excepting the white upperclass existence in Western Europe that has us beat, if only by a tick. This sort of relative luxury is our domain purely because of our ability to dominate others in the realm of information. Western nations have, for quite some time, been able to control global flows of information (oftentimes directly generating them) and as a result, offer the average American the ability to have computer knowledge limited only to Facebook and msn.com, while still maintaining an eminently superior quality of life. 

Now, big questions: Why? Well, if Jared Diamond is to be believed, it all started with dumb luck – western Europeans got the right grains and the right animals, and as a result, our 12 year olds get obese on Jamba Juice and Their 12 year olds sew shirts. All day. And not for themselves, either. And you know what? I bet people that aren’t trying to escape their “stressful job enviroment”, where they’re chained to a Blackberry all day (”you have nothing to lose but your chains”) would be pretty fucking excited to be able to use a computer and speed up the pace of life.

Yes, I’m aware that there’s a risk of projecting my desires onto others, or assuming that they want the things we have, but isn’t this risk balanced by it’s counterpart, an Otherization which assumes that sweatshop workers or rural peasants have some sort of idealized, bucolic lifestyle that’s free of our Western hustle-and-bustle? Of course it’s free of hustle and bustle; we have implemented a system that makes them an underclass and means they’ll never be able to afford it. This is what really irks me about this democracy all over the world bullshit: you can pump democracy all you want, but becoming a democracy does not mean becoming materially wealthy. What’s more, we see the evident conflict of interest at work here – there can only be so many democracies, because once people get rights, they don’t like being fucking slaves. The US had to support Pinochet, had to support Aristide, had to support all the bizarre south east asian leaders we’ve installed that rule with iron fucking fists. Why is that? Because when you give people access to information, they find out that they’re getting fucked. 

 I’ve been having these very surreal experiences here with my family, who are quintessential petit-bourgeois, where we walk into a grocery store and it just makes my head spin.  There’s one unbelievably pretentious grocery store (excuse me, “Gourmet Market”) in Chapel Hill (also a theme park for the bourgeoisie)  that has an entire row of the store filled with different variations of truffle oil. Across from it, they sell truffle products. What, precisely does this mean? Truffle popcorn ! At $10/2 oz.  bag. If the rest of the world ever figured out that these things exist, they would hang us. Every one of us. And they should, too. Can you imagine the arrogance of a country that spends less than .5% of its GDP on foreign aid, drives Mercedes, and complains about leading a high-stress lifestyle? Unbelievable.

For one of my classes, we read an interesting deconstruction of the German term “Heimat” – a word which, roughly translated, means “native land”, complete with all the bullshit baggage about belonging, ancestry, autochthony (the greek term for born of the land; central to Plato’s Noble Lie) and so forth.  What the article reveals is that contrary to being some sort of eternal longing, “Heimat” was a term invented during the rise of modernism, as a way to combat psychic distress from urbanization and industrialization. People didn’t believe in this shit 300 years ago, they didn’t want to go “back to nature” until exactly the moment at which they no longer had to live in nature – our luxuries only seem like burdens precisely because they are luxuries – this idea of being connected to the land had to be invented, precisely because they no longer were. It’s very Oedipal – that what is forbidden to you must be what you desire, because it’s forbidden. It’s an absurd delusion, a bizarre paradox – you can’t actually leave the computers and the technology and the information behind, because it’s what ensures your dominance and ensures your agency: you can leave computers precisely because you have computers. We are the masters and we are the slaves.

 

Edit: Last line isn’t quite right, because it marginalizes the plight of people who actually are slaves. We enslaved ourselves with the illusion of choice.

On World Series and the Homo-Social

So, I’m back home for the summer, which means no more frantic paper writing, no coffee binges, no white rum binges, and perhaps most significantly, lots of spare time. Because I am a curious (self-absorbed, narcissistic) person, this gives me a lot of time to reflect on the trajectory of my life up to now. Where do I do all this soul-searching? Why, on the couch watching ESPN, of course, because as a general rule, that’s all my father likes to do with his spare time. 

This has led me to a profound realization: It’s probably good that I’ve decided to go into academia, because I simply can’t stand most ordinary people. Being out of the university has left me stuck in a world of inane conversations that generally consist of batting averages, the weather, and favorite foods. I would never confess it to Matt, but I miss his company. One of my favorite Matt moments was when I invited him to a party and he asked if anyone would try to talk to him about sports. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the only thing most straight men consider safe to talk about with one another is Sportscenter, precisely because it allows you to flesh out a value-system without ever engaging in any of those awkwardly homo-social moments of personal expression. People who like the Red Sox are probably fan boys and obnoxious, people who like the Yankees are either Italian or pretentious, and people who claim to just enjoy the sport without a favorite team are either liars or liberals (this may be splitting hairs.)  

This is an interesting social theory I’m stumbling upon here; one of my favorite Foucault pieces is one where he writes that men are gay because they desire relations with other men – that is, homosociality. It’s somewhat amusing that these sorts of things are forbidden in our society; I think it’s foolish to deny the presence of misogyny or at least sexism, yet male-male bonds are generally frowned upon as well. If men are so much better than women, how come we can’t just hang out with one another? Perhaps more interesting than this as a general rule are the exceptions to it- certain microcosms,  little homosocial Utopias  - binge drinking, sporting events, the military. All of these areas are of course rife with homophobia, and a disavowal / telos assigned that makes them emphatically not about male bonding (i.e. competition with sports, athetic prowess to get women; drinking/bars to get laid; military as defense organization), but the truth of the matter is that these institutions are fundamentally about the generation and preservation of inclusive male experience. Maybe that’s why my dad watches sports so much – he’s either not sure how to relate, or sublimating it into contextualized fields in which the expression is permissible. Now I feel like a shitty kid for not watching the World Series with my dad.

 

To this, however, I would suggest one more realm – academia. Again, one fights by proxy, because direct expressions aren’t allowed, but through an intellectual avatar constructed of favorite authors, texts, films, etc. men are able to develop profound, lasting relationships with one another. Maybe this is why Langston hates me – he and I as real people get along alright, perhaps even well, but our avatars  (mine of post-structuralism, his as… some sort of ambiguous german Marxist-Idealism) , our real representatives of self, outside of bounded, structured communication norms, are diametrically opposed. I suppose this is part of why I want to be a professor: I hate the trivial shit that most people talk about. I suspect this is because people are 1.) afraid of conflict and 2.) reluctant to lose face by potentially backing the wrong horse. This is what makes proxy-war so great: Instead of you and I arguing, Heidegger argues with Kant. Instead of you and I fighting, the Tigers battle the Mariners. I’ve made it clear already that I think men are more interesting than women (not, of course, as an absolute rule – see girlfriend, but certainly as a general guideline), and I can’t help but suspect that to be a motivating force in my desire to enter an intellectual arena. I don’t particularly like dumb people either, so sports and the military are out, and the weaker avatar of political discussion means that people are generally afraid of discussing absolutism, which makes being a nihilist less fun. Thus, theory, where one develops interpersonal relationships with smart people that pull no punches.

Signs of the Impending Apocalypse

I live in simulacrum.

I found out today from my dear friend Ginia that Slavoj Zizek has a twitter account. What’s more, he converses with a character calling himself sfreud.

http://twitter.com/zizekspeaks

http://twitter.com/sfreud

Zizek is pretty awesome as the Lacanian version of M. Night Shamalayan – you thought you were having sex with a real person, but instead it’s just a masturbation fantasy! You thought you were free, but this is truly your greater unfreedom! You thought you knew the unknowns, but what about the unknown knowns!

Anyway, Reality is too real for me right now. I’m off to project onto Nature (no, really – quote from his Twitter. Reality is a double Virtual. Self reflection of the One = 2)