Of Stench and Living with Memory

Courtesy of the good Dr. Lohren Green, poet-sophist-atmospherist, I have been reading the exquisite, hilarious, and, if you'll excuse the misplaced pun, illuminating, "In Praise of Shadows" by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. Tanizaki considers the Western taste for the sheen against the Oriental predilection for the worn, or what he calls the "glow of grime"—the way touch wears something and bends its relationship to light and, alas, to time.

For instance, in the West, we use shiny tableware, glimmering forks and knives; not so in the East where the muted tin and wood prevail. Tanizaki spends considerable time discussing bathrooms and the horror of the Western camode with its white tiles that amplify the filth of the space.

Reading this, I found myself continuing his line of thought. The Western obsession with the glean speaks to a perpetual eradication of history, of memory. We shine our antiques and in so doing erase the very thing that gives them their charm: the mark of use, the patina of time. In ceaselessly polishing, we erase our past, not just the doings of our so-called forefathers but the doings of ourselves.

I, for one, enjoy a certain whiff of myself—through eyes and nose. I like leaving residue of my goings on—a beer bottle on the coffee table, a torn scrap of paper used for god knows what, and, yes, a tinge of my own urine permeating the bathroom. Of course, culturally, we consider this "dirty."

But this dirt is more than mere marker of events; it is the event. It is, miraculously, the cohabitation of the present and the past. To live amongst one's stench is to live with and amongst one's past, to be present with one's memory—rather than sloughing it like so much dead skin.

And yet no sooner can I mark my temporality than a sponge descends on the scene, wiping my very remnants from this world and leaving me desperately alienated from myself, a (more or less) pure contemporary forced to face the now without the reeking trail of my own becoming. I must start anew, my memory wrung down the kitchen sink.

And so I relish those moments before antiseptic sweeps in, when the room is dense with the memory of me, when I can seep in my past, breathe my memory, and enjoy a certain peace that comes with the stench of time.

On this whole inauguration thing

So, may I rant for a moment? Of course you can, jewbag, it's your blog!

Ok, so, I know people are all, like, excited for this inauguration thing. And I'm not one to shit on anyone's holiday—only I am the one, precisely, to shit on everyone's holiday. So here I go.

What the fuck? This Obama cat may be an excellent guy. He and his family unit sure seem super cool, no doubt about it. But, first, the inauguration was filled, inevitably, with sanctamonious bullshit proffered by a series of fucking idiots. Is this history redeemed? I may not know a lot about African-American politics but it seems to me that the election of this guy does not do a whole lot for the black men I see on the streets just trying to get by.

C'mon, folks, this is the president we're talking about. How much power does this guy really have? And even if he did have all the power in the world, are we sure we want it in this guy's hands? What's all this nonsense about jesus I heard here and there on various televisions about town during this inaguruation? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? Isn't this why the world hates us—because we think we know who God is? Because we push jesus on everyone? Goddamn, I'm jewish—and jesus was a jew—and it made me feel left out.

It's the president, people. It's not your dad or your boss or your hubby or your friend. You still have to wake up to the stench of your life, regardless of who pays rent at the white house.

Listen, I hope this guy miraculously brings the change we all seek. I hope he stops bombing folks I've never met. I hope he puts money into our schools because, fuckin' a, we don't know how to educate our youth and it's quite literally killing us. I hope he puts a damper on corporate greed and actually restricts what hedge funds can do, what financial companies can risk.

I know y'all are desperate for change. But, c'mon, there are forces at work here that are big and determined and this guy, however cool, is only the president and is, in fact, not hell bent on fundamental change. He's a politician and not a terribly radical one at that. Yes, he seems competent and cool but government is government and life exceeds the law.

The change we need is drastic. We need a 32 hour work week, not 40, 50, 60, 80 hours. We need basic support of education and libido and love. Can a president do all that? Fuck, I hope so. Will this cat do it? No, because capitalism is greater than any president. The key to change therefore exists elsewhere. Where? In you—and, no doubt, in me.

My fear is that we're all being fooled—no, placated, cajoled into thinking this changes everything. But it's the president! It's not that important! Nothing is more dangerous than the mass accepting of change that is anything but.

I am with you in hoping that there's hope. But I fear I am utterly alone in my hesitation and suspicion.

On University Teaching: Stanley Fish's False Dichotomy

In his review of a new book, "The Last Professors," Stanley Fish proffers a dichotomy: we teach to prepare people for work or we teach humanist knowledge for its own sake. On the one hand, we have students gathering around professors speaking of Shakespeare and tropes and Kant. On the other, we have students being prepared for the work world:

"The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment."

Of course, in many ways what he says is right and it is, alas, utterly depressing. Nothing—well, almost nothing—makes me weep more than students asking me what they're "going to do" with a degree in rhetoric, as if all pedagogy must end in profit.

My answer to that question initially is: you'll use this education to think and enjoy life, to live better. And this is practical. But it does seem to reify the dichotomy between inspiration and work.

But the fact is that today's economy is a network economy and this demands a certain kind of pedagogy that is at once inspirational and "practical." This does not just mean that local economies are enmeshed. Nor does it mean solely that we live in the network of the Internet. No, what it means is that jobs themselves are a network—a network of skills.

The assembly line demanded expertise in one area—put the screw in the hole (but don't touch the engine), fix the guy's fingers (but not his anxiety), design the ad (but don't think about revenue streams). But the assembly line is, basically, dead. Today's jobs don't let you stay in your silo. Today's designers can't just draw pictures—they have to know technology and business, the competitive landscape and the behaviors of people.

This, today, is a network life, a network economy, and it demands network thinking. And this is redundant because to think is to forge connections between and amongst different things, to forge networks.

Now, the liberal tradition of the university is built on scholarship and knowledge, on philology and, once again, expertise. It is NOT premised on thinking. What the university rewards is mastering some pedantic, esoteric field no one else has mastered and this is your ticket to tenure—which will eventually allow you not to teach anymore. Thinking, per se, is rarely taught and more often than not is frowned upon.

But there is a mode of teaching that is not premised on mastery, not premised on knowledge, one that is premised on teaching a practical skill—and yet not a skill that is immediately transferable to an industry. This skill is called thinking, or perhaps, critical thinking. It involves the ability to think across disciplines, to assemble disparate trajectories, to make new kinds of sense. And this is precisely what the network economy demands.

First, we must escape the trappings of industrial thinking, assembly-line thinking, which still reigns in both industry and the academy. When both embrace the network and what it demands, then we can have a university in which thinking is, finally, rewarded.

The Melodrama of the Image in Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely"

All of the characters in Mister Lonely—almost—are impersonators. This immediately shifts the very architecture of cinema and the dynamics of experiencing a film. Rather than actors trying to present real people, we see actors playing actors who are always acting—and yet it is not as though they go back to their real selves when off screen.

The characters in this film, then, are always playing a character. This shifts the affective distribution of the filmic experience. We are never asked to identify or understand these people. We are asked, rather, to see these people as they are always already images, always already playing life, putting on the world (I steal that from McLuhan and I just love that phrase—putting on the world). By displacing the very premise of acting, the film displaces the very possibility of identification.

And so the narrative force that would come from characters interacting with each other is suspended. There is no narrative force, not really, just a series of exquisite images.

This film is a spectacle. It privileges looking at images rather than interpreting images. Mister Lonely rigorously denies access to the real as it shifts the space of cinema from the relationship between world and image to the image itself, to the screen. The images in this film do no refer to a real. Diego Luna doesn't just play some guy playing Michael Jackson. His identity is as an impersonator of Michael Jackson. This guise will not give way to a real person (despite the ending which I will not address now).

The film is not a parable. On the contrary, it's a film.

But what makes it so great—and it is almost or perhaps great—is that it is a melodrama. The effect is supremely odd. These are not people, not really. They're impersonators but impersonators all the way down. So from whence the drama? It seems to come from the narratives of characters they play—from Michael Jackson, from Marilyn Monroe—but this is not to say that it doesn't come from the characters, as well. Only who are they?

What Korine brings to light is the melodrama of the image. It is not that the image presents melodrama, that the image is a vehicle of melodrama. There is no representation. All there are are images and these images are rich in pathos.

It's not a pathos that we experience one-to-one with the drama—we are not necessarily sad when they are sad, happy when they are happy. As I've said, there is no identification because how could you possibly identity with these characters? It's literally impossible. No, the affect of the characters are constituent and constitutive of the affect of the image.

It is the image, of which the characters are a part, that produces—no, that is—the melodrama.

Another thought about professional sports

Why, exactly, do the networks insist on showing us the owners of the teams during the game? I, for one, find it kind of disturbing as it reminds me of the creepy class and race structure of professional sports.

Ah, perhaps that is why the networks do it: to incite, even if in a roundabout way, a revolutionary consciousness.

And a random thought about professional athletes

Do you think professional athletes—at least in football, baseball, and basketball—are at least a tiny bit relieved when they're eliminated from the playoffs? This is their job, after all, and who wants to keep working? I mean, jeez, their bodies ache in ways we will never, ever, understand and we think they want to play more? Why? For glory? Perhaps. But still....

A brief thought: slow motion reveals....slow motion

It is odd, I think, that we believe a slow motion replay of an event to reveal the reality of the event. It seems to me that slow motion reveals....what things look like in slow motion. How could it be otherwise? Indeed, how could severely distorting the perception of something reveal its truth? Hmn.