June 25, 2008
Contemporary culture has lost one of its most ardent defenders. George Carlin’s humor opened doors, windows, and eyes on the road to opening up free speech for us all, much to the chagrin of conservatives across the nation. He will be missed; that is all.
[ A cautionary word to those with sensitive palates: this clip contains abrasive language. This cautionary word was to cover my own ass; don't like the language, don't watch the clip is what I'm saying]
Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television:
May 22, 2008
Language is, perhaps, more dangerous than conventional weaponry or methods of punishment; technologically induced wounds will fade after a period of time, but words can sit in the heart and on the mind for an eternity, becoming a part of the very fabric which constructs us. In this respect, the way we address and consequently come to understand one another becomes a crucial facet of our existence. For not only does language construct that metaphysical facets of our being, it also builds the framework—the infrastructure—of the landscape we exist in. Which is to say, how we allow ourselves to be spoken of creates the parameters in which we are allowed to work, to socialize, to live.
Ideally, we want to be recognized as individuals who are free to make choices within that framework, but once we are outlined and separated from the herd we are burdened by the overwhelming desire to return to the warmth and safety of conformity; it is difficult to take a false step that could induce retribution when surrounded on all sides. What is troubling to us is the bifurcated expectations with which we are inundated at an early age: we are explicitly instructed not to follow the pack—peer pressure is bad, don’t be a lemming—yet we are also discouraged from differentiating ourselves too drastically in order to maintain a continuous thread that shares common properties which can be policed with generalized sets of rules. This puts us in quite a predicament: we want to be unique in order to be recognized and valued, but we must be careful not to cross the thinly veiled boundary into the “weird.”
At the dawn of the nineteenth-century, the marriage of the medical and the judicial legally defined this contradiction and afforded the major players generalized groupings in order to streamline the punishment process. If “life is simply the will to power,” as Nietzsche claims in his essay Beyond Good and Evil, then the medico-juridical construction of the individual as an abnormality that must be identified and then contained and re-assimilated into a prefabricated “norm” is an attempt by those in possession of a “master morality” to retain their power. By creating a language that is concomitantly based on fear and morality as well as an attempt to comfort, a notion of monstrosity emerges—one which is encompassed by complex technical definitions but what essentially reduces to a discomfort with a legal being that defies codification. Although this discourse is omnipresent, in many respects, there are two ways to circumvent the disparaging effects of a system that seeks to select and define merely to facilitate punishment: either aspire to greatness, or take refuge in the banality of the existence that is given.
The commingling of medical and judicial theory and practice in an attempt to personalize the penal system resulted in the contamination of both fields, and ignited a process that would eventually come to define what it means to be normal. By sussing out individuated justifications for criminality—such as peculiar behavioral traits—the law, now in the presence of a psychiatric expertise, seeks to soften “the sordid business of punishing…into the fine profession of curing.”[1] Here we see an attempt to showcase various “misdeeds” in order to demonstrate how “the individual resembles his crime and at the same time revealing…a parapathological series that is close to being an illness, but an illness that is not an illness since it is a moral fault.”[2] This friendlier language—one focused on curing—helps to pacify the modern subject at the very moment his legal corporeality is fragmented and he is objectified; as the subject becomes a flailing prisoner to his innermost desires and behavioral motivations, he becomes difficult to hold responsible—at once responsible for everything and nothing—and he becomes “the object of technology and knowledge of rectification, readaption [sic], reinsertion, and correction”[3]
Framing legal specificities in soothing language—one that imitates the medical profession, which operates within the comforting boundaries of the Hippocratic oath—speaks to another facet of legal individualization: the attachment of morality to notions of perversity and the emergence of a “parental-puerile discourse.”[4]Which is to say, medico-legal individualization loves us, the modern subject, so much it has to give us boundaries and snoops through our journals so it can best assess exactly what boundaries we need in order to mature into happy, functioning adults. By identifying criminal tendencies and thus re-imagining the modern subject according to intent as a type of petulant child, a “technique of normalization” emerges that facilitates a borderline obsessive desire to codify that which does not acquiesce to prevailing societal norms.
What is perhaps most interesting about the process of signifying normalization is how it seeks not to reject individuals or groups, but to include them. “It is not a question of driving out individuals but rather of establishing and fixing them, of giving them their own place…and of defining presences,” and it initiates “a series of fine and constantly observed differences between individuals who are ill and those who are not. It is a question of individualization; the division…of power extending to the fine grain of individuality.”[5] Once again we see an attempt to cloak a rather disturbing process—that of a persistent surveillance—in comforting language: the modern subject is not being codified, he is merely being awarded a unique presence within societal undulations.
What this dynamic aspires to is a comprehensive, comprehendible organization of individuals that are presented before the law; when it encounters an undefinable—an undesirable—it casts that individual in the role of the antagonist, and thus we have the emergence of the monster. Since “the norm brings with it a principle of both qualification and correction,” the essence of monstrosity is, at its core, a legal notion.[6] The realm of the monstrous, however, is decidedly rooted in the realm of the flesh—seen in its ability to “combine the impossible and the forbidden” as a veritable chimera which mixes various combinations of species, individuals, sexes, forms, and even stages of life and death.[7] This process of identifying monstrosity in physical reality soon mutated into a process of identifying it within intent—within nature itself—and it soon becomes evident that “there is only monstrosity when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law.”[8] The friendly language that was created in order to “cure” the maladjusted, the sick, has turned ugly; suddenly “the abnormal individual is essentially an everyday monster, a monster that has become commonplace.”[9]
At times, when legal language such as this—for it is at its root a matter of language—becomes overwhelming, it is comforting to take refuge in philosophy—to allow philosophers to carry the burden of understanding the consequences of the discourses in which we are involved; if this is the intent, Nietzsche is not the remedy. What Nietzsche offers the modern subject attempting to come to terms with his legal predicament is a deeper understanding of hierarchical motivations for individualization, as well as a few suggestions on how to avoid the trappings of this medico-legal discourse. Essentially, the construction of any language is a process of assessing and prescribing value—there is a logic to it—and “behind all logic…there are…physiological demands for the preservation of a particular way of life.”[10] The upper echelons of any given institution “would like to make all existence in accordance with [their] own image alone,” and from this desire a norm is produced.[11] However, by focusing excessively on the nature of individuals they have interpreted them falsely and, as such, have “misused cause and effect.”[12] Which is to say, the law, in its fervor to quantify its populations by distinguishing between those in need of a cure and those in need of punishment, has created monsters where they did not exist. This is partially attributed to the undue emphasis placed upon intent, which “is but a sign or a symptom…with so many meanings that as a consequence it has almost none in and of itself.”[13] When the foundations of a theory are unwell, the conclusions it arrives at are similarly ill.
Nietzsche’s prescription for this medico-legal virus is “to rid ourselves of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many others.”[14] In other words, the modern subject must counteract objectification within the norm by aspiring to greatness. In his opinion:
Being noble, wanting to be for oneself, managing to be
different, standing alone and needing to live independently
are integral to the concept of ‘greatness’…[and] the greatest
person should be the one who can be most lonely, most hidden,
most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his
virtues, abundantly rich in will. This is what greatness should
mean: the ability to be both multifarious and whole, both wide
and full.[15]
Which is to say, by retreating from the public realm—by refusing to be incorporated into the legal language of modernity—“the noble soul reveres itself” and only itself, which affords an individual a modicum of catharsis.[16]
This, however, is not the only avenue the modern subject can take to counteract the dangers of legal individuation; one could also take pleasure in “living in such a way that nobody has the slightest recollection you exist”—living under the radar, as they say.[17] Part of this existence is choosing to “dwell always in the most discrete of discretions, where you could exercise your dear, beautiful virtue to your utmost satisfaction, with a modesty that is moving, enchanting, and utterly beyond praise.”[18] This option concomitantly retains an equivalent dose of nobility while refraining from the medico-legal discourse, just as the option to pursue greatness does.
[1] Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (New York: Picador, 2003), 23.
[2] Foucault, 19-20.
[3] Ibid., 21.
[4] Ibid., 35.
[5] Ibid., 46.
[6] Ibid., 50-56.
[7] Ibid., 56-63.
[8] Ibid., 63.
[9] Ibid., 57.
[10] Nietzsche, 314.
[11] Ibid., 315.
[12] Ibid., 322.
[13] Ibid., 328.
[14] Nietzsche, 340.
[15] Ibid., 347.
[16] Ibid., 359.
[17] Kwinter, “An Address to a Button” in Selected Prose, 28.
[18] Ibid., 28.
May 3, 2008
Because we are all a part of the same loop and constructed by the same regimented institutions that revolve around repetition in a sepia infused world; positive and negative space are key, learned traits are a must. And it may be the absurdity of it all that keeps us functioning and well lubricated, docile enough to experience another day and feed ourselves into another pattern. At least, that’s what I extracted from The Brothers Quay film Institute Benjamenta, based off the book Jakob von Gutten by Walser. To put the clip in context as best as I can (the film and the book are hard to extrapolate from without an in depth analysis) Jakob von Guten has enrolled himself in an unorthodox school for servants, and this is the classroom scene.
April 29, 2008
Cultural phenomena often defy definitive placement. Hunter S. Thompson wore white lo-top converse throughout most of his adult life; my father wore them throughout his high school basketball career; I wore them while meandering around Europe on my version of what has become the American college student’s cultural right of passage. What do we have here: counter-culture, conservative-culture, present-culture(?); my father hated Hunter S. Thompson (not the individual, per se, but what the individual represented); I worshiped Hunter for some years; Hunter, most likely, would have derisively yet lovingly reviled us both (that is, if he could have been bothered by those of us who, for the most part, walk the straight and narrow).
Claude Monet said, “I don’t paint what is. I paint what seems.” What I am interested in here is not a plain canvas shoe with a rubber sole, mass produced and available at a plethora of retail stores that know no national boundaries; no, I am not interested in the shoes themselves. What I am interested in is what the shoe signifies. In France, to don a pair of chucks is a glaring status symbol that does not go unnoticed by the massive flux of hip young Parisians boarding the metro on the way to their busy lives (chucks are extremely expensive because they’re an American import). Yet, in the US chucks are most often seen on the lower strata of the population, the strata more responsive to cultural undulations–those who are standing at the epicenter of the underground and at the foreground of burgeoning cultural movements; the more ragged, the more personalized they are, the higher their value soars. Just as in France, a statement is being made. What I am trying to say is, we are examining not the shoe itself, but the content of the shoe, the soul behind the foot on the sole.
April 11, 2008
I’ve run across a plethora of youtube posts with a variation on the title of “Fun in Iraq.” Most are trivial pranks, such as tipping a porta-potty over while one of their comrades is indisposed. This one, however, shows prisoners of war as part of an ironic music video montage. Welcome to Contemporary Culture.
April 10, 2008
We—you, me, and everyone else—are bifurcated subjects: the subject that speaks and the subject that is spoken of, which creates a largely unknowable breach in the Self that we are all constantly attempting to define, whether we are conscious of that search or not; this breach is the unconscious, the gray fuzzy center of what we are at our core. I believe that musicians, and artists in general, attempt to rectify, to understand this gap through their chosen medium of expression: their art form. This is an extremely personal journey and people are drawn to the type of music that embodies the journey that is most like their own. This attraction is based on many factors that, I believe, stem from a certain element of alienation that is endemic of and intrinsic to contemporary culture in particular and can partially be traced to the steaming pile of horse shit that we call the media. As like people gravitate towards like journeys, they begin to congregate, to coalesce and this is the point at which a “scene” begins to develop. To put this in the terminology preferred by Catherine Belsey, music interpellates people as they attempt to construct themselves into cohesive units, which is a variegated system of communication (both within and outside of the barriers of language) that can be diagramed as follows:
TRADITION – - – ARTIST- – - – MUSIC – - – - AUDIENCE.
Which is to say, an artist draws upon his/her experiences and the fundamental historicized legacies that comprise them, distills them into a song as a form of catharsis, then shares that cathartic creation with his/her audience who in turn reap the benefits of their own catharsis by identifying with that journey and being surrounded by people who are reaping the same benefits.
At a point, the authenticity of this relationship between the artist(s) and the audience is called into question. Once a band is hyped, signed to a major label, and commodified, something is lost; people begin to follow the artist(s) based not upon a genuine connection with their journey, but rather for the “coolness” factor of the associated scene. This is, consequently, the death of any meaningful extraction: it has been co-opted by popular culture and its original intention has been bastardized. Video killed the radio star. The precise location of this bastardization is difficult to pin point and, therefore, is entirely subjective. Personally, once Middle America (the red states) has picked up on an indie rock artist I tend to lose faith in its authenticity, but that’s because I’m an indie music snob.
