I have been posting of late, just not here. I’ve put up three posts over at Lithchat discussing the Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the song chosen by the Lithuanian people to represent them at the contest, the subversive “Eastern European Funk.”
The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown in.
The second post is a 3000-word monster that looks at the fate of songs with political messages in recent Eurovision contests, Eurovision as a whole, InCulto’s song in comparison to the Lithuanian entry in 2006 (which coincidentally beat out InCulto’s offering that year), and the song’s relationship to funk and punk. Then I shift into high gear and talk about miscegenation, economic inequality and the egalitarian fantasy of democratic equality. Then I close with some complaints on the ghetto, particularized punk of Gogol Bordello. Oh, and there’s like four embedded videos and links to who knows how many other songs on YouTube.
The third post is a quick roundup of recent press on the song, which includes news that the European Broadcasting Union, the people behind Eurovision, is investigating InCulto’s song for the possible political content of the lyrics.
Tags: democracy, economic inequality, Eurovision, exceptionalism, Georgia, Gogol Bordello, InCulto, miscegenation, nationalism, neoliberalism, Russia
A way to spend the day.
I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest.
And now, I don’t get it. I think the movie did a good job of showing how being in EOD is viewed as being a job, though a job that could either kill you every day or a job that can drive you bats. The movie handled the mundane and quotidian reasonably well (and then shat on it by having Beckham become a body bomb), much like Generation Kill did. The end, then, silliness with the son notwithstanding, showed the possibility of different kinds of mundanity, not necessarily hierarchically organized. James’s everyday life doesn’t involve choosing from hundreds of types of cereal, it involves bomb disposal.
Still, as the movie dragged along, it got more and more unbelievable, from the totally incomprehensible scene with the professor to the insanely unlikely 3-man chase after the insurgents (which is when the movie lost me). I’ve read that this is the “most real” depiction of the war in Iraq (whatever that means), and it’s not like I have my own anecdotal evidence to go on, but it seems that a “more real” depiction would be even more mundane.
Which leads me to my primary issue with the movie, which seems to be a result of narrative strategies of realism. Nancy Armstrong opens her essay on the fiction of bourgeois morality in the second volume of Moretti’s The Novel by asserting that
Literary history has indeed smiled on fiction that sets a protagonist in opposition to the prevailing field of social possibilities in a relationship that achieves synthesis when two conditions are met: (1) the protagonist acquires a position commensurate with his or her worth, and (2) the entire field of possible human identities changes to provide such a place for that individual.
The payoff Armstrong insists on is missing in the movie (to its benefit), but the setup was all too familiar. The protagonist is bigger than the space he (or she) inhabits. As soon as I saw that Guy Pearce was dead, I knew that his replacement would be a cowboy. Sure enough, James doesn’t follow the rules; he’s idiosyncratic. Sanborn reads this as a testament to James’s being a hillbilly redneck. I saw it as a sign that we’re dealing with a serious protagonist. And then, somehow, I got bored. Something about the police officer/soldier who doesn’t follow the rules but gets results is starting to bore me as a narrative device (and if we believe Armstrong, we believe that there’s no other way to make a lasting narrative about war or the police). We saw this in the fifth season of The Wire: we had loved what a loose cannon McNulty was in the first four seasons, but his antics in season five started to seriously alienate his coworkers and, if I recall correctly, many viewers.
Can you, then, think of examples of narratives of war or police where the main character does always follow protocol? Would that even be watchable? Would it, on the other hand, be/feel more real?
As a side note, how can a movie be considered pro-Army propaganda (as this one is) if the entire fuel of the plot is based on the assumption that Army protocol–in fact, the very idea of protocol–is wrong?
Tags: everyday life, Franco Moretti, individualism, Kathryn Bigelow, Nancy Armstrong, realism, The Hurt Locker, The Wire
I wrote a little something about James Verini’s fascinating Vanity Fair article about the Moscow newspaper, the eXile, edited by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, over on Lithchat. Mostly, the piece prompted an opportunity to think about how my own experiences during the ’90s, especially as they pertained to Eastern Europe, would have been different had I been about eight years older (making me just older than Matt Taibbi).
If you want to skip me as a middleman and just read Verini’s article, here it is.
Tags: James Verini, Mark Ames, matt taibbi, Moscow, regret, Russia, the eXile, Vanity Fair
Image from GRE subject test in literature, c. 2021.
Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient.
After all, if one takes that waste of time as a given, who cares what people are brawling about at MLA? Similarly, in general, it seems that it’s only professors (and their putative replacements, graduate students) who complain about the problems corrupting the current university as a whole. I imagine that, for the most part, people are content with the perceived value of a (non-humanities) degree in terms of future employment prospects.
So I wasn’t surprised when a friend (and colleague) google-shared Sharon Begley’s Newsweek article introducing the field of “cultural neuroscience” with a (to my ears) defensive tone, arguing that this field offers the best avenue of proof that “humanities-types aren’t just b.s.’ing [their] way through the academy.” Now, said friend is also, generally, into cognitive science, so I may be overreading the defensiveness, but the comment in general struck me for a number of reasons tying back to last week’s post.
Most obviously is this fear that there is some kind of “b.s.’ing” going on in the humanities. I mean, I strongly doubt that the MLA board (or whoever) gets together the day after the annual conference, opens up a keg of Heineken, and parties in a collective “we can’t fucking believe what bullshit artists we are to the degree that thousands of deluded, bright dipshit kids want to try to emulate us by applying to literature PhD programs every year!” So it’s not that we, as a field, think (secretly) amongst ourselves that we’re full of shit. Maybe (strike that…definitely) we think a colleague here or there is full of shit, but the entire organ of study?
Which means, then, that we worry that outsiders think we’re full of shit. It’s obviously true that (many|most) outsiders think that, but I’m not sure how much we should be defensive about it. My first year of grad school, John Guillory came to give a lecture that explained the best reason for being defensive: namely that humanities departments have to use the language of the business world to justify funding, hiring, and tenure decisions. Since then, I’ve also heard concerns about enrollment numbers (in undergrad courses, but this includes the various numerical ways of measuring PhD programs as well). These four areas are probably the four elements that keep the standard department alive at any university: you have to make sure you can pay people, figure out whom you want to hire to teach, decide who should stay forever, and have enough students to continue the circle of life.
And all four areas have been quantized–spreadsheetable so that accountants in Admin buildings can get a snapshot of a department (“their time-to-degree sucks, but they rake in mad majors”). Scholarship becomes a question solved by pencil-pushing, and now it becomes easier to conceive of scholars as laborers, alienated like any other.
So defensiveness toward an increasingly actuarial university administrative structure is one thing, but should the humanities feel defensive toward other divisions within the academy? Toward the public? I read my friend’s comment as saying that, yes, we should, and that by adopting more of those world’s techniques and (implicitly) values, we will justify ourselves in their eyes. Which leads us to cultural neuroscience.
Begley’s article, which has already yielded some 2k clicks via bit.ly, introduces the field by way of showing how people from different cultures use different parts of their brain when describing themselves, when doing math, and so on. Begley quickly brings up the “cultural cliché” that scientists are now “proving,” and ends up postulating that this field would probably tell us nothing that anthropology already has not (namely the overarching claim that Westerners value the “individual,” whereas Easterners value the “collective,” to the sadness of western communists the world around). That may be true, but unlike anthropology, cultural neuroscience uses fancy (and expensive, and, therefore, valuable to the university) sciency techniques, which inbue the results with a “hardness” that make the findings more marketable and press releasable, reflecting value back on the university.
So as I remarked on twitter, cutural neuroscience sounds basically like Thomas Friedman with an fMRI, as we have our cultural stereotypes and valuation of an indelible pluralism validated (somehow even Begley’s math-based example of a “surprising” result still serves to affirm a stereotype), much in the same way that racialist science kept finding new ways of proving, scientifically, differences between races (hear this 2008 episode of Radiolab to see what a cockup scientific racial difference has become).
I’m a bit interested in how this research might go about confirming the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, though I actually see its future more in a bizarro world of multicultural-positive, racially profiled human resources, as job listings emerge including qualifications like “able to spatialize numbers, Chinese native-speaker preferred.” In other words, I see a future where an fMRI session will replace the job interview.
But since this is a post about us “humanities-types,” I should return to the implications in my friend’s note. I’m generally very friendly toward rigorous quantitative analysis of literature–friendly to the degree that my current chapter makes reference to Z-scores and includes a Monte Carlo simulation. But I’m uncertain about whether I think that’s the future of literary study as a whole.
Digital humanities to me means, basically, using computational methods to do literary study, and that means doing things that are pretty much impossible to do without a computer. This approach lies in contrast to one that makes use of things that are simply easier to do with a computer. So, for example, a Monte Carlo simulation (or a quantitative analysis of titles) is appropriate as a new approach (as “doing digital humanities”), but a wordle (or a google book search on weeds) is not. What computers make possible has to be in the service of something else, otherwise it’s just “old hum but on the iPad,” as @sepoy says, not a true digital humanities.1
In this sense of openness to quant, something like fMRIs and literature strikes me as a (possibly interesting) future avenue of research, but I wonder if, in doing that, we follow ourselves down a reader-response rabbit hole, where the object of study moves from being literature to being how the reader responds to literature to being about the reader herself, thereby becoming no longer a humanistic pursuit, but, rather, a social scientific pursuit.
Avoiding this rabbit hole has forced me to limit my own whatever quantitative analysis to the text itself (which then limits the number of potential texts for study, but OK). This is in contrast to scholars like Moretti, who seems like he can’t help but move to a quantitative history of books-in-the-world (see the third and final chapter of his Atlas or the “Graphs” and “Trees” chapters of Graphs, Maps, Trees) from an analysis of the worlds-in-the-book (earlier chapters of the Atlas, “Maps” from G,M,T). To me, that move to books-in-the-world, pace dear friends in history of the book projects, becomes far too close to history for me (even Moretti qualifies it as “abstract models” for a “literary history”), which means, by the weird UofC rubric, that it becomes somehow extra-humanistic, for what it’s worth. This is, incidentally, partly why I feel bizarrely New Critical often when writing. It’s a dizzying time.
What I mean is that if some level of disciplinary distinction remains important (and I think “nodes on a rhizome” is a good model for this), it is important to figure out what exactly literary study looks like when it’s appropriating not just theories from other disciplines (like during the slutty 80s when there wasn’t a social theorist who couldn’t be quoted in a literature journal) but now also methods, as well. And since I can’t hook up Elizabeth Bennett to an fMRI, I’m skeptical about pinning the future of the humanities on fields like neuroscience, cultural or otherwise.
The point comes around to itself then. My friend’s note begs the question of the humanities bs-ing its way around town. And while there are administrative reasons why these kinds of public appearances are important, I see the future publicly clean image of humanistic research not in images of brain activity, but in the scholarship on the streets.
- Importantly, there’s the public/social/ethical/collaborational aspect of digital humanities that I’m not discussing here as well. [↩]
Tags: digital humanities, Franco Moretti, humanities, John Guillory, mla, multiculturalism, New Criticism, quantitative analysis, racism, Radiolab, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Sharon Begley, statistics, Thomas Friedman
Gaining life.
This is, I imagine, the much shorter version of a post I have had simmering in my head for a few weeks now–or, well, actually, many of the issues dovetail with another post that’s been around since new years. But somehow I haven’t sat down to figure out my point rigorously yet, and so I don’t want to commit the multiple thousand words to wax.
Our current academic crisis, defined in many increasingly encompassing ways, seems to be gaining steam in coverage on the webs. First there’s the very inside-baseball humanities “discussion” over what digital humanities add to the humanities, culminating, for now, with the MLA president’s encouraging grad students, which is to say, the people who have the most to lose by being so outrageously bold, to blow off the monograph form of a dissertation for something new and collaborative. I am very much ok with being more collaborative in my life (my take home message of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was how worthwhile it is in life to have a collaborator–note, not “spouse”), but I will not risk future hireability figuring out how on earth one does PhD-level work collaboratively. That sort of stuff must come from the top down, much as it does in the sciences, where grad students work far more closely with their advisers, at least at my school.
From the level of the humanities, the concern spins out to a tension between the humanities and the sciences, or as Mark Slouka calls it in his piece for Harper’s from 2009 that I only read recently, “mathandscience.” Slouka makes a common argument for the role of the humanities in an especially well-written way. Mathandscience have taken over the university, and, in so doing, have changed the role of the university into something that is uniquely geared toward making Americans ready to enter the workforce. Study of the humanities, on the other hand, makes them not better workers (though the writing skills they pick up are often very handy) but better citizens. This, of course, is an argument that’s similar to the one Max Weber made 100 years ago in “Science as a Vocation“: “Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer, the only question important for us: “what shall we do and how shall we live?”‘ That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable.”
I was thinking about this sort of thing in the context of ethics and public responsibilities the other night while unable to sleep, and it grows out of some of these collaborational arguments about the digital humanities. Very simply, it’s not that a prof with twitter is a good citizen, but it’s a means of getting the word out. And then once the word is out, the prof can show how her work is helping the world. In the humanities, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of many examples of this sort of thing outside of Michael Bérubé, who has been blogging about all sorts of things very publicly for years now, leading up to his pleasant book on a topic similar to this, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? (he’s written even more to the topic, but I’ve not read that work).
But what I started imagining was what a press release about my dissertation (or about the work of anyone in my department) might look like. Outside of biographies about authors–and those we never get sick of–it seems unlikely that an English Department would get much press these days for its other scholarship. I was discussing this later with some students at the center, and the argument was that, in fact, during the 80s, English Deparments were making news. Similarly, I get the sense that they made noise in the first part of the Twentieth Century when English professors were more generally public intellectuals. This position in the public, in fact, is what makes Quiz Show an even moderately interesting movie, for example.
These days, though? Not a chance. Part of the argument is that newspapers compete with humanities departments in the “covering aesthetic production” beat. That is, the science beat covers scientists in science departments, but the books beat covers not literary critics, but, rather, authors of books. This might explain the biographical interest, of course, since it’s via these sorts of “new” discoveries that old books get reloaded in the public consciousness in newspapers. And when English professors do make the news with their scholarship, it’s a small number of intensely high-profile profs who work on high-profile authors–people like Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare who are, to be polite, in the back end of their careers.1
On the other hand, given the narrow interest of science journalism–”how will the future be better?”, and “how are men and women irredeemably different?”–maybe it’s good that my work will never have to be subjected to that sort of thing. Still, it has some kind of public component, I must imagine, and that seems to be the subject of Astra Taylor’s documentary Examined Life, a 2008 documentary that tracks a handful of “philosophers” and sees them mobilize their work in a public arena. As the trailer suggests, it puts philosophy “in the streets.” Jonny Thakkar’s review in The Point argues that the movie is at its most successful when it demonstrates philosophy generated for public consumption (much like Socrates’s was), not for other academics, with a later “popularization” (read: dilution) to come. This is an interesting sort of proposition when I imagine it: the goal of graduate study is to prepare someone like me to be then unleashed into the wild, into the public, where I can do stuff.
This is, of course, a crude but tantalizing definition of any sort of educational pursuit. Spend some time away from the real world to then be able to negotiate it better. Woodshed with your sax so you blow for real onstage, etc.
So now the argument spins out from humanities vs. sciences to higher education in general, and here I turn over to the stuff I’ve been reading on my neighbor at the center’s blog about the precarity of jobs in higher education. Precariousness, of course, allegedly hits the humanities harder than the sciences, to the point where Thomas H. Benton’s Chronicle article on advising people not to grad school in the humanities was forwarded all over cyberspace faster than a lolcat. But even the sciences are hurting, as AAUP president Cary Nelson argues in his blog post about the impending furlough/pay cuts University of Illinois professors are facing. The cost of turning disciplines into vocational preparation has been a perverse reëvaluation of what kind of scientific research is valuable. You can’t get money for your research unless a company thinks that, down the line, it can make money off your research. So, sure, the sciences get piles more cash than the humanities, but it doesn’t come for free.
Nelson then argues to take the case to the streets, too, by taking advantage of the furlough days to agitate against the administration. And again, academia is back in the public.
Anyway, I’ve veered over 1200 words, and I don’t want to go much longer. I find it interesting that at all three rings of conflict, what remains the ultimate argument is figuring out what the role of higher education is in the public. Maybe that’s always been the case, and I’m suffering from a presentist bias, but there it stands.
When it goes out into the streets, I know what I’ll be singing.
- I await counter-examples. They must exist, but I can’t think of them. [↩]
Tags: AAUP, Astra Taylor, Cary Nelson, Chronicle of Higher Education, citizenship, Decasia, digital humanities, Eli Thorkelson, Emily Dickinson, ethics, Harper's, humanities, ivory tower, Jonny Thakkar, Mark Slouka, Max Weber, Michael Bérubé, Michael Chabon, mla, Science as a Vocation, Sidonie Smith, Stephen Greenblatt, The Point, Thomas H. Benton, William Faulkner
Sometime around 1987, our whole family went on a trip to the Club Med village at Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic. Each of the big trips we took (about biennially) left lasting impressions on me, and the Club Med experience completely floored me. There is so much I did there that I have never done since (all kinds of water sports, an aborted attempt at the trapeeze). But as anyone who’s been to a Club Med village knows too well, one of the staples of the experience is what’s called “Crazy Signs”–silly dances done to music I didn’t recognize when I was a tot. There were three songs that got played after the show every night, and everyone in the village was invited to join in–you just watched until you learned the dances, and then you felt like part of the club.
I heard one of the songs, Ottawan’s “Hands Up” twice this weekend while in Vilnius (at two different bars–311 and Mojito naktys).
The flashback of over 20 years made me finally decide to once and for all solve a different mystery of my childhood pertaining to Club Med. “Hands Up”’s dance I found boring and not terribly fun, but the other two songs had more involved moves. One of them, “Agadou,” then became a bit of a claim to fame for me as I taught it, as a 12 year old, to 1000-odd Lithuanian scouts at the 1988 Jamboree. I didn’t know the words, but it didn’t matter–my gibberish proved to be useful enough, and everyone loved the ass-tapping (literal) aspects of the dance. And though people have asked me about the song, I haven’t been able to say anything other than “it’s a Club Med thing. I dunno.”
Here’s a recording of the song that’s similar to the version I learned:
Now here’s a video of some annihilated people doing a reasonable impression of the Club Med version of the dance, which is what I taught the scouts:
And then, as with everything at all catchy, the song has been turned into a techno disaster, to which these two young women in bikinis dance in what looks like a travel agent’s office. “Filles folles,” indeed.
Finally, here are the lyrics to the song, with my bastardized version underneath:
A-ga-dou dou dou pouss’ l’ananas et mouds l’café x2
Tap’ la pomm’ tap’ la poir’ pouss’ l’ananas et mouds l’café x2
L’an dernier à Tahiti une jolie vahiné
Avec son ukulélé ma vraiment ukulélé
Ell’ vendait de fort beaux fruits avec son ukulélé
Quand on les avait choisis
Y’avait plus qu’a les manger
The version I taught:
A-ga-dou-dou-dou pousterai mon café x2
Tap’ le (h)eau, tap’ le bum pousterai mon café x2
A-loua-lou couré-é, A-loua-lou couré-é
A-loua-lou couré-é, A-loua-wé-é-é-é
As an amusing sidenote: part of why it took me forever to find the details about “Agadou” online (I have tried in the past) was because I let my mom convince me 23 years ago that “dou” was actually “doux,” which broke any google efforts.
Property of the state. (click to enlarge)
There’s a frustrating article by Tim Parks up on the NYRBlog now about the the dull new global novel. I’ll save the breezy history of the novel Parks provides (making an economic and democratic case for moving to the vernacular from Latin) and furnish his closing two paragraphs, which turn the whine into vermouth:
If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.
What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.
In other words, big, bad, nasty globalization is diluting the novel so that it can be pitched to the lowest common denominator, thereby finding, like Hollywood blockbusters, a huge international audience.
OK, now, what on earth is Parks thinking, when he complains earlier that “As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature”? World market, perhaps, but Europe has had an international literary market for centuries. One need only glance at the third chapter of Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel to see how everyone on the European continent was reading everyone elses’s work (England kept itself to itself). Don Quixote, a good candidate for First Novel Ever was also, in Moretti’s words, an “international bestseller.” This in the age before “globalization,” literary agents staging simultaneous releases, and the like.
Moretti provides three maps of emerging translations of Don Quixote, and he sees three Europes in it, three waves of translations, with the biggest wave coming in (wait for it) the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, when the novel was finally translated into northern and eastern European languages as well as Asian languages.
Fancy that. Now, what else, maybe, occupied much of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries regarding literature in Europe? Oh, the consolidation of local dialects / promotion of a central dialect into a national language that then needs literature in the language for it to stand as a literary language. So texts get translated, and authors are encouraged to write in their vernaculars not to make money, but, rather, because the state apparatus is finally in the vernacular language, and what was once peasant talk (shameful, dismissed, go watch Becket) becomes, for the first time, the language of power.
This is, of course, all old hat to anyone who’s read Anderson or Gellner or even, hell, DeLanda, who argues that literature, precisely, played the key role in creating languages out of dialects/creoles because of the massive vocabulary expanding opportunities it provided. But despite talking about “consolidating national languages,” the point that Parks misses is that the literature served the exact opposite role (as it got increasingly national) that he wishes it did. Puns, “subtle nuance,” and awareness of (implicitly national/linguistic) “literary culture” are in the text precisely as territorializing moves: they establish the ground rules, the borders, the space of the language, of the nation, of the national community.
In fact, these national literatures should be especially dull to Parks, since they (again, by design) actualize a public that is not, by definition, the one that Parks is a part of. This is not bad, and I’m not against efforts to try and understand different national literatures, but it does run into eventual problems of being boring. If this is the case, Parks should perhaps be championing the new, “international” novel because of its efforts to transcend national(ist) boundaries and histories in order to fulfill the fantasy of bourgeois indvidualist humanism the novel was invented to represent. Or, as I said on Google when I came across Parks’s essay: you wanted Neoliberalism, and now you’ve got it. (There may have been use of the work “circlejerk” too.)
In other words, delighting in “world literature” in pre-neoliberal times is a dilettantish effort of the elite, the people who can bother, like Gabriel Conroy, to go to the Continent every few years to “keep in touch with the languages.” The national insistence on cultural specificity (our language, our literary history, our local celebrities) means that if someone is interested in that specificity without the “our,” something weird is going on. Now that we live in kumbaya pluralism, where gluttonously gorging on multiple simultaneous cultural specificities has become the norm, something about Parks’s seeming pissyness over the fact that people can now read international authors without the effort of getting to know, you know, the author’s nation’s history and tradition and stuff seems especially condescending.
This condescension is further highlighted by the fact that Parks doesn’t bring up the question of translation at all historically, only complaining, instead, that contemporary authors keep translation in mind when writing. A quick example of how confusing this position is: in French class, we read part of Azouz Begag’s Le marteau pique-cœur, and, in it, Begag describes how the narrator’s (/his–I don’t recall if the work is literally autobiographical) mom reacted to some startling news:
Ma mère était tombée dans les courgettes pour la énième fois de sa vie.
Literally, the sentence means, “My mother had fallen among the zucchinis for the umpteenth time in her life.” However, “tomber dans les courgettes” is a play on the expression “tomber dans les pommes” (“fall among the apples”), which means to faint. But the switching of the noun also shows that the mother was most likely, as in Algerian stereotype, cooking up some couscous when she fainted, which, considering she has fallen among the zucchinis several times, is all she ever seems to be doing. By beuring up a French idiomatic expression, Begag manages to inject some cultural conflict into the sentence.
But if we consider Parks’s take on Hugo Claus, an author he says (seemingly admiringly) did not care about the “special effort” the reader and translator had with his text, who, I ask of Parks, does he expect to catch Begag’s expression? I caught it only by the dumb luck of having learned the normal idiomatic expression a few days before reading the sentence above. In class. No translation could probably catch the dynamics of what Begag is doing here–keeping the sense of being in the kitchen and fainting in the air at the same time as tweaking the idiom of the major language. So either Parks is yearning for a Conroyish past when everyone spoke a million languages and could make the efforts to gather these little twists (a past that never existed–and recall that Conroy feels ultimately isolated from his wife by not speaking Irish), or he’s assuming that this nuance used to be translated, and now writers don’t bother with such nuance and everyone is sad.
But, first, writers can’t avoid nuance, no matter how consciously they write to avoid it, unless novels become just Simple English. They can’t help but inject some of their own subjectivity (or whatever) into what they’re writing. And, second, if it is the case that novels have become victims of literary tricks and gimmicks and a general, flattering (neo-)liberal political sensibility (not “politics” per se), then it’s because Parks is reading the wrong authors, and authors these days, generally, suck.
About seven years ago (in these pages, I think), I got into a dicussion that led me to, if not assert, then at least think, that, well, basically I had gotten sick of contemporary literature–especially literature by white American dudes. This was largely part of my Great Eggers Backlash, but that’s how it was. I don’t claim to have read widely in contemporary American literature, but pretty much everything I’ve read has seriously let me down in retrospect, starting around Infinite Jest.
What it was that I lacked the terminology to describe at the time was an implicit interest in what Deleuze and Guattari call “minor literature,” which grows out of a “minor language.” They describe “minor language” in several different ways, but the basic conclusion, when it come to literature, is:
That is the strength of authors termed “minor,” who are in fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one’s own language, in other words, to attain that sobriety in the use of a major language, in order to place it in a state of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). It is in one’s own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use the minor language to send the major language racing. Minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it.
What I was failing to read were what DG would call “minor” authors–this can be understood as authors who deterritorialize the major language by writing in it. DG have here in mind their supreme example, Kafka, but they also refer to “what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language.” But in its state of deterritorialization, the minor literature is always, also, inescapably political and communal. In major literature, “the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background,” so the outside, the surface, the political all get turned into window dressing for whatever Oedipal ish the individual protagonist has to take care of.
In other words, the neo-liberal, cosmopolitan humanism that Parks sees as a sad result of globalization is, in fact, the result of authors’ he cites (and maybe he likes–or used to, before they started feeling international pressure) being major authors. And, in fact, my own disinterest in contemporary literature was related to my getting bored with individual concerns as well. Now see how DG describe the political in minor literature:
Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it. In this way, the family triangle connects to other triangles–commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical–that determine its values.
The individual takes a final blow in the third characteristic of minor literature, and this is the one that is most interesting to me, which is how in minor literature “everything takes on a collective value.” DG continue:
It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility; just as the dog of “Investigations” calls out in his solitude to another science. The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern.
It is important not to read this snippet from a too-Marxian standpoint. But that becomes especially difficult to do when comparing to the literature Parks complains about. What DG provide for us is an avenue, through their example of Kafka, of literature’s power to deterritorialize while also actualizing this “machine-to-come.” It is a feature of language and of tensions between the stratified major and the vibrating variation of minor. And there is no reason to assume that these sorts of authors are ceasing to exist. In fact, as the world gets more and more territorialized, the opportunities for minor literatures to emerge (from the teeniest molecule of a piece of graffiti) will only increase.The people need to talk, after all.
So the closing way of looking at Parks’s bizarre complaint about the future of dull, global literature, is to return to one of the assumptions he never addresses in his post, which is the assumption that any/every author wishes to be considered “great”–either on a national or international (his point is that the latter informs the former) scale. The hero who keeps tagging the HSBC in the Marais, for example, does not wish to be considered great. Begag’s tweak of French idiom is possible only since, it’s clear, he does not wish to be considered great. He destabilizes the major with his writing, and no one with an international market in translation in mind would ever write a phrase like “tomber dans les courgettes.” That writer has different goals in mind.
My advice, then, to Parks is that when these various European authors he talks about come up to him to complain about how they aren’t held in high enough prestige, he should ask them to reconsider what their goals are in writing and then go find some better (minor) authors, authors who are too busy fucking up the program to worry about winning a Nobel.
Tags: Azouz Begag, Benedict Anderson, Deleuze and Guattari, Don Quixote, Ernest Gellner, Franco Moretti, Infinite Jest, language, Manuel DeLanda, minor literature, nationalism, neo-liberalism, new york review of books, novel, NYRBlog, pluralism, Tim Parks
This photo I took in early December. I was in the Marais, found this interesting, and snapped it. It’s on the wall of a branch of HSBC, a huge bank.
Cahier des charges: notre systeme économique ne marche pas! (click to enlarge)
A “Cahier des charges” seems to be a “scope statement” or some such businessy thing I don’t understand. But the rest of the text is French 101, complete with a spelling error: “our economic system doesn’t work.”
I happened to be in the same place last week, and I was excited by the chance to snap the photo again, but this time without the pesky scooter in the way:
Notre système économique ne marche (toujours) pas! (click to enlarge)
It was only yesterday that I realized that this was, actually, not the same message as before. Now it reads, “our economic system (still) doesn’t work!” In other words, the original was effaced, and then a response returned. I am not sure if I have ever seen this before, but the anonymous writer quickly became a hero of mine. Just like with yesterday’s discussion of national identity, hiding something doesn’t make it disappear (or become not true).
Complaint about a lack of Breton instructions at the Rennes train station. (click to enlarge)
While the big discussion in Washington (other than the snow) lately seems to have been the atavistic Tea Party Convention and the various fantasies of the American that were put on display within (I won’t link to anything since, remember, I’m no longer reading about US politics), the debate about national identity in France, an official debate launched by the government in the beginning of November, died a quiet death. Finished with a few toothless suggestions. But it’s worth looking into what, exactly, happened here over the past three months to see if, perhaps, national identity is changing as a means of categorization.
First, though, the context and “les repères”: Sarkozy promised a “grand débat sur l’identité nationale” during his presidential campaign, and he tapped erstwhile socialist Éric Besson, the Minister of Immigration, to manage the project. Over the course of three months, 350 debates were organized around the country, and there was a site established for online debate. Mostly, though, the debate provided opportunities for Sarkozyists in the government to stuff their feet into their mouths, as it became quickly clear that this debate was, actually, as Laurent Joffrin explains in his editorial in today’s Libération, “Pet de lapin [a rabbit fart, a puff of air],” an injust and catastrophic indictment of Islam.
Libé put together a timeline of the good and the bad, and it reminded me of how much effort there was to get the government to drop the whole issue, but the government kept up the façade of caring until now, as PM François Fillon has “buried” (in Libé’s words) the whole debate. Besson is political poison, and the suggestions, which include, basically, “um, take teaching civics classes seriously and give kids a chance once a year to sing la Marseillaise” are a mockery.
In a recent poll, 63% of respondents claimed that the debate was unconstructive, and I can give anecdotal evidence toward that. Last weekend, I was chit chatting with some young French, and somehow I felt it ok to bring up this topic. I was immediately punched in the arm and yelled at by one of the people, who spun around and walked away. My crime had been that I said that I was “interested in the debate.” I later corrected myself to say that “what interests me about the debate is that the government thought that this would be a good idea.” The puncher relented; she agreed that it was insanity.
Similarly, only a few weeks into the debate, I was handed a flyer, penned by the PCF. The short version of the text was something like this: “with the economy collapsing all around us, the Sarkozy government thinks that every French family should be gathered around the dinner table, discussing what it means to be French.”1
But this all feels like, mostly, introduction, since there are a few thoughts beyond this context that the debate has brought up. First, the PCF argument recalls the century-old argument about using national identity to fracture a class. During a time of economic crisis (or, say, J.P. Morgan’s War), it seems like a cynical ploy in the extreme to start the wheels of xenophobic wagon. I read elsewhere that the debate was immediately blown off as a transparent ruse to gain support for the UMP in the upcoming regional elections (elections where, at least according to recent polling, the PS stands to maintain its dominance). Yet by even launching the debate, it suggests that there are non-French within France, which problematizes the idea of equality, since now some people are more French (those who don’t wear baseball caps or speak verlan, in one minister’s terrible turn of phrase) than others. So what has a fantasy about equality ends up generating precisely the opposite, as anger and resentment bubbles to the surface.
Second, though, and this returns to the puncher mentioned above, I found it interesting that people were perhaps afraid of the debate. They called on the president to halt it. They punched people who brought it up. The debate would have consequences, and so on. But this is a sort of flip of the same coin–the French are convinced that they’re (largely? loudly?) racist and xenophobic, and don’t want to broadcast that, so they wrap the xenophobia, as it were, with debates about burqas and identity. Since in France, perversely, the happy multiculturalism that is the neoliberal state’s explosive wet dream is tossed aside for a militant “laïcité,” in which demonstrating religious affiliation in public is seen as promoting the “communautaire” (the anti-republican “community” of clannish or religious ties), a debate over national identity becomes muddied by the very desires (equality) that it cannot help but undermine.
That is, on the one hand, the debate inherently wrecks equality, since it assumes that there is a proper “French” and an improper “French.” The ludicrous flaccidity of the recommendations shows how disinterested in actually figuring the scale out the government was. On the other hand, equality is used as the reason for the debate: we’re all equal here in France, so those of you acting unFrench have to get with the program if you want to be a part of France–you have to learn to respect equality. The preferred solution seems to be to put off the debate, so that the inequalities in France, both social and economic (it remains a fact in France that it’s much tougher to get called in for an interview if your CV has a foreign-looking name or lists a telling address from a bidonville), get put out of view as well.
It’s not just that the debate reveals some French as racist and xenophobic, which it does, but it also forces a subsequent debate on money. And that, I would argue, is the debate that the Sarkozy government really doesn’t want to have (or, say, the person who punched me).
Yet the begged question here remains that national identity itself is important. Questioning that seems to have not really come up, even in the anti-debate press I’ve read, but that, to me, seems to be the crucial question. It shouldn’t be “What does being French mean to you?” (“Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final…“) but, rather, “why do you care what ‘being French’ is?” I don’t think this is, immanently, a racist question, but I wonder if its current unintelligibility–and the attendant anxiety over that–is a feature of a post-Europe world, which is to say, the “l’identité nationale, je m’en fous!” world. As such, it becomes ironic that it’s the neoliberal Sarkozy government, aligned with trampling worker’s rights and globalizing, that’s panicking over the state that its policies have wrought.
So who knows. I’m new to this stuff, but I found it a pleasant coincidence that the debate happened contemporaneous with my arrival. I have no idea what it means to be French (though lately, I’ll settle for “having raclette at least once in the winter”), but after rereading U.S.A., considering how Dos Passos cares somehow very deeply about an American identity, and then rereading Probyn’s Outside Belongings, which argues for a sense of identity that is not fixed in a person’s interior, but is still important, I wonder if I haven’t been too cavalier about the “en” in the “je m’en fous” above. In a Probynesque reading, “being French” is important, then, but it’s not important to figure out how one is French. Belonging, and feeling like one is part of a network–that’s the key. And that’s something that I don’t think the French have to worry about yet.
- A similar reaction surrounds the effectively theoretical debate over whether it should be legal to wear a burqa in public (theoretical considering how few people would actually do it), as this post on the NYRB’s blog, brought to my attention by Sepoy, demonstrates. [↩]
Tags: Éric Besson, Chapati Mystery, elspeth probyn, France, identity, John Dos Passos, laïcité, Libération, nationalism, new york review of books, Nicolas Sarkozy, t.s. eliot
Repacking my bags. (click for original)
Is Up in the Air (or, as it is called in France, In the Air) a complicated movie? Or is it simply a sloppy one? Bryan called the movie too long, but then he also called it depressing. But I felt uplifted at the end, largely since I was very excited to finally see a movie that treats seriously (or, well, that at least pretended to treat seriously) an adult lifestyle not built around family-building.
Bingham has it all together, and the viewer, I would suspect, admires his savoir-faire in the opening of the movie. But the block starts getting chipped first with the business about being a dinosaur, and next about not treating Alex seriously.
Yet it bewilders me that Bingham allows Keener to bully him into thinking he has feelings for Alex. Does he, really? It’s the buildup (photos) for the wedding of his second sibling that finally puts him in a family way? Remember that, up until this point, we’ve been told to consider Alex as identical to Bingham, plus a vagina (in an interesting twist on negativity). There’s no “you complete me” here. It’s “you are me,” which is not, from what I understand, a good point on which to build a relationship.
Furthermore, the trip back in time he takes with Alex feels absolutely out of character as well. And then when he falls for her, he shows himself to be absolutely terrible at precisely what it is that he’s supposed to be good at: reading people and anticipating their responses (which is basically the case he makes for continuing the in-person terminations). The failure to read is reasserted in his failure to anticipate the suicide, but I’m not convinced that Bingham has lost his touch–we don’t actually know if it has never happened before, as Bingham explained that he “never checks up,” in what could be a complete lie for Keener’s benefit.
Then there is Bingham’s glowing endorsement for Keener. Is it because she shook him out of his shell, allowing him to make some kind of connection to someone? Or is it because, rattled by her relationship’s demise (and the suicide), she decides to “marry her job” and become just like Bingham, who is, we have no reason to doubt, an exemplary employee?
Finally, there’s the whole sickening pro-family montage at the end along with Bingham’s final monologue. Does he regret that his wingtip remains in the air, shining down as a star? Is that sad? Or is it a suggestion that Bingham has realized who he is (don’t forget that the closing credits open with Graham Nash singing “Be Yourself”), and considered the mess with Alex a temporary aberration, a parenthesis of its own that he could suppress without changing the meaning of his life?
This last version is the strong reading of the film that suggests its challenge to the usual pro-family fare that makes up mainstream narratives in the US. It’s the reading I’m most in favor of, but the movie is messy enough that I see the reading as shaky–or too much fueled by own agenda. Yet any other reading makes the movie trite. Bill Simmons interviewed Jason Reitman recently, and Reitman talked about how he thought George Clooney would never get married. He’s surrounded himself with people he loves, he explained, and that is enough. And I read Bingham in much the same way. It’s possible for him to gift the miles to his sister and still be basically not in the family picture, after all. It’s possible for him to have relationships that have underlying meaning without repeated, mandatory interaction.
I’m not sure if Bingham is ever called selfish for wanting to reach his miles total. But the way Reitman wrote and filmed the ceremony, it certainly makes the goal seem selfish. But consider that Bingham could run up credit cards buying stuff for other people in order to boost his miles total. Is that selfish? Don’t we do that all the time ourselves? Is it more selfish for me to use my AA card to buy a sibling a gift than to use my regular credit card?
Similarly, how does “reach 10,000,000 miles” as a goal differ from, say, “write a book”? (And this is where it becomes very personal for me.) Writing a “book,” that is to say, at this point, a dissertation, must be the apex of selfishness, then, since, unlike flying a bunch, I have no choice but to do it alone. Dissertations don’t have +1s. I have to spend the hours, alone, reading, thinking, and writing. Sure, the work benefits from having people read it, comment on it, and the like, but the bulk of it… the 9,800,000 miles of it… is pretty much done alone. And as to the question, “where do you find the time?,” that’s precisely the point. Finding the time requires aligning your life in such a way that the time demands seem reasonable. And that means that it’s not for everyone–yet at the same time, finding the time and desiring to make time for it is, precisely, fine for some people and, in fact, what they feel they are designed to do.
Bingham left the stage in Vegas perhaps in part to see Alex, but also, then, in part because his backpack philosophy is a niche philosophy that doesn’t have mass market appeal (not having kids, for example, is not exactly a philosophy that should be accepted globally. Though it wouldn’t be the end of the world (figuratively) if it were accepted globally (literally)). But the movie seems structured, save for the closing minute and start of the closing credits, to do the old bait-and-switch on us. We think Bingham is cool, but then we see him as totally alone, and the movie invites us to, I don’t know, feel sorry for him or something. Hug our companion in the theater tightly (“Chocolate Mousse, I’ll never forget you!”). Go home to our kids and say, “thank heavens I’m not a loser like Bingham.”
But if you’ve chosen a life like his, or you actually see his approach to life as having lots of merit, it feels like he sells out and abandons his core principles. And then the movie starts to grate with its pro-family snobbishness. Because even if I give the most positive reading possible to the movie–Bingham accepts that he is like he is, and that he will stay up in the air–the movie, through the use of empty mileage celebration, the “my family keeps me going montage,” and even Bingham’s letting go of his bag at the airport (is that a sublime release of ecstacy at all the possibilities available on the flight information board, or is it rather a pathetic release of sadness, as Bingham submits to his solitary fate?), tells the viewer that Bingham’s life should not be followed. It should not serve as a model.
If I don’t model my life on it to some extent, though, I’ll never finish my dissertation. So which is it?
The movie is rather clearly about the solitary nature of work, more than it is about family. Work in general is often solitary. In that sense, Up in the Air can be read in a similar vein as L’Emploi du temps or even Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle. In the former, Vincent is strapped to his family, and his unemployment is problematized by them. I get the sense that he’d be completely fine on his long drives alone, detached from them. In the latter, we see how a job like even playing on a team sport can be solitary and repetitive.
So I guess the final question is, do you, the viewer, feel sorry for Ryan Bingham? And if you say yes, is it because he’s “alone” at the end of the movie, or is it because he allowed himself to be “compromised”?
Tags: alienation, bill simmons, breeders, cinema, George Clooney, Jason Reitman, labor, writing, Zinedine Zidane
