Thursday, September 17, 2020
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
06/20
Trans diary (6/20):
Gonna start in media res. I feel I can barely keep up with all the new links forming in my brain as a result of realizing I'm trans. It's not just the usual "oh, that makes sense" retrospective reassessment of my life story. It's other things too. Like this: transgender people are beautiful, and they deserve love and protection, right? Then the same must logically be true for me. I'm being given permission to stop hating myself. I can see now how much that self-hating neurosis was forced on me by internalizing the way other people saw my younger self. I interpreted their irritation, avoidance, or condescension toward me as an objective confirmation of my own weirdness and worthlessness. But this is totally relative. The children and adults who didn't treat me well as a child were acting on their own subconscious beliefs, and transphobia must surely have factored into how I was treated.
In fact it's hard now not to think of how often, for no apparent reason, people didn't seem to like me. And it's not like I was some kind of angelic child either. I was def bratty, stubborn, arrogant, and annoying plenty of times. But they knew something I didn't. They could see things that I, as a gender-confused autistic child very much locked within my own perspective, could not see about myself. They knew what I was instinctively, and many must have harmed me because of that. Not even intentionally -- or, at least, not always. Just pure, socially-constructed bias that manifests in human interactions, leaving the recipient always confused why they seem to be treated so badly everywhere they go.
This ruins lives, I hope you understand. I don't know if I would want to speculate about it without having some claim to oppression myself, but now that I do, the conclusion seems undeniable. What if more often than not, every time you talked to someone new, they already disliked something about you through no fault of your own? What's the more likely explanation, especially for a young person with no understanding of social norms? That many people in the world are misjudging your character independent of one another? Or -- seemingly much more plausible -- that you're just inherently weird, bad, broken, etc. etc.?
My heart breaks for all the children who receive this message. Now that I know what it's like not to believe it after a lifetime of telling myself they were all correct, I can see how heavily that lie shadowed my life. It's like seeing in 3D what you could only perceive as 2D before. Other people are wrong, often! Social hierarchies are unjust and based on exploitation! The way you're treated does not affect your worth! You know your worth best, but there are people out there who will treat you like you deserve to be treated! Even if there aren't any in your life right now, it doesn't mean that there won't be, and it doesn't make you any less valid!
The exclamation points above are just some transliteration attempt at communicating how ground-breaking and pleasurable my new realizations are. They're all coming rapidly after one another, augmenting the one that came before, setting the conditions for the next to come along. I feel that all my specialized knowledge is being united into a framework that provides irrefutable proof that I'm trans and that I'm lovable. The work of several decades is being beamed at high intensity deep inside me right now. I'm just laying in my bed letting thoughts of self-love, pride, and healing wash over me. I don't know if I've ever felt this good before in my life. It feels like the glorious reemergence of my true self, the painstakingly-maintained false self falling away into useless bits and pieces.
Gonna start in media res. I feel I can barely keep up with all the new links forming in my brain as a result of realizing I'm trans. It's not just the usual "oh, that makes sense" retrospective reassessment of my life story. It's other things too. Like this: transgender people are beautiful, and they deserve love and protection, right? Then the same must logically be true for me. I'm being given permission to stop hating myself. I can see now how much that self-hating neurosis was forced on me by internalizing the way other people saw my younger self. I interpreted their irritation, avoidance, or condescension toward me as an objective confirmation of my own weirdness and worthlessness. But this is totally relative. The children and adults who didn't treat me well as a child were acting on their own subconscious beliefs, and transphobia must surely have factored into how I was treated.
In fact it's hard now not to think of how often, for no apparent reason, people didn't seem to like me. And it's not like I was some kind of angelic child either. I was def bratty, stubborn, arrogant, and annoying plenty of times. But they knew something I didn't. They could see things that I, as a gender-confused autistic child very much locked within my own perspective, could not see about myself. They knew what I was instinctively, and many must have harmed me because of that. Not even intentionally -- or, at least, not always. Just pure, socially-constructed bias that manifests in human interactions, leaving the recipient always confused why they seem to be treated so badly everywhere they go.
This ruins lives, I hope you understand. I don't know if I would want to speculate about it without having some claim to oppression myself, but now that I do, the conclusion seems undeniable. What if more often than not, every time you talked to someone new, they already disliked something about you through no fault of your own? What's the more likely explanation, especially for a young person with no understanding of social norms? That many people in the world are misjudging your character independent of one another? Or -- seemingly much more plausible -- that you're just inherently weird, bad, broken, etc. etc.?
My heart breaks for all the children who receive this message. Now that I know what it's like not to believe it after a lifetime of telling myself they were all correct, I can see how heavily that lie shadowed my life. It's like seeing in 3D what you could only perceive as 2D before. Other people are wrong, often! Social hierarchies are unjust and based on exploitation! The way you're treated does not affect your worth! You know your worth best, but there are people out there who will treat you like you deserve to be treated! Even if there aren't any in your life right now, it doesn't mean that there won't be, and it doesn't make you any less valid!
The exclamation points above are just some transliteration attempt at communicating how ground-breaking and pleasurable my new realizations are. They're all coming rapidly after one another, augmenting the one that came before, setting the conditions for the next to come along. I feel that all my specialized knowledge is being united into a framework that provides irrefutable proof that I'm trans and that I'm lovable. The work of several decades is being beamed at high intensity deep inside me right now. I'm just laying in my bed letting thoughts of self-love, pride, and healing wash over me. I don't know if I've ever felt this good before in my life. It feels like the glorious reemergence of my true self, the painstakingly-maintained false self falling away into useless bits and pieces.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
05/20
100th post!! Including drafts, that is. Let's make this one count.
To start: I have to admit I only skimmed this n+1 corona dispatch, but there's a reason I put it here, and a reason I didn't drop it entirely after not feeling totally engaged. The author seems to suffer from an unclear "false self" affliction, and they feel as if their life is being lived in response to other people's expectations of them. The reprieve from 'society' caused by COVID-19 has also given the author a chance to reflect on how uncomfortable they feel in normative society, that they don't really want to go back at all. They also feel, however, that even spending time with familiar people in strange circumstances seems to automatically create new norms, despite all of this being totally unprecedented and exceptional. I don't like that, and I feel an uncanny correspondence with everything being described. I don't often hear people talk about life the way I experience it. But it's kind of late and I just don't know if I'm in the mood to really consider this as a whole. So this is a bookmark for now, until I feel up to a closer read.
COVID through the eyes of Jia Zhang-ke. Motivated me to finally watch VISIT, a short film that was oddly fun in a way I don't think most COVID art will be in the future. Even better is Apichatpong's letter, which starts out by proposing that cinema is the art of stopping to stare -- I wouldn't endorse that 100% now, but it definitely was the case for my first, transformative viewing of SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY -- before taking on a speculative turn about cinema slowing to halt, inaugurating an ultra-minimal aesthetic preference built on quarantine-induced sensory deprivation. He's so creative. I really love him.
Nathan Tankus blows up my inbox with his Substack, and I can't pretend to understand much of what he writes, even if I think it's worth trying as a form of mental exercise. But then there are relatively clear posts like this that justify the whole endeavor: how universities might collectively build solidarity to avoid state budget cuts in times of crisis, such as post-'08 and the current COVID one. They are uniquely vulnerable, as Tankus lays out, but they also have some unlikely options available...
I'm also really interested in the implications to his Means Crisis subhead in this post. Tankus makes a good argument for why central planning would have helped allocate resources during the corona crisis, preventing those infamous images of milk being poured down drains and farmers disposing of their food. On the face of it, the logic is simple: having a public plan ahead of time is more responsible than hoping the private sector will respond adaptively. But Tankus argues something more. This is not just a partisan difference of opinions, but a fundamental example of how frail private businesses are in moments of severe crisis. The uncertainty of something like COVID is just completely overwhelming to businesses that count on the conservative assumption of everything running smoothly. They try to bide time until things settle down so that they can resume operations as normal, rather than trying to navigate new circumstances with big, ambitious spending projects (after all, that's what governments are for!). I also suspect this is part of why Trump and the business community are clamoring for us all to get "back to work" and "back to normal." It's because they know this is a cascading series of crises, and the disruptions will profoundly affect an economy in which they've invested so much (literally and figuratively). No more normal means no more illusions of control and certainty. No more private predation on underfunded public services. No more insisting that capitalism is the best economic system for human flourishing when it visibly, manifestly is not.
To start: I have to admit I only skimmed this n+1 corona dispatch, but there's a reason I put it here, and a reason I didn't drop it entirely after not feeling totally engaged. The author seems to suffer from an unclear "false self" affliction, and they feel as if their life is being lived in response to other people's expectations of them. The reprieve from 'society' caused by COVID-19 has also given the author a chance to reflect on how uncomfortable they feel in normative society, that they don't really want to go back at all. They also feel, however, that even spending time with familiar people in strange circumstances seems to automatically create new norms, despite all of this being totally unprecedented and exceptional. I don't like that, and I feel an uncanny correspondence with everything being described. I don't often hear people talk about life the way I experience it. But it's kind of late and I just don't know if I'm in the mood to really consider this as a whole. So this is a bookmark for now, until I feel up to a closer read.
COVID through the eyes of Jia Zhang-ke. Motivated me to finally watch VISIT, a short film that was oddly fun in a way I don't think most COVID art will be in the future. Even better is Apichatpong's letter, which starts out by proposing that cinema is the art of stopping to stare -- I wouldn't endorse that 100% now, but it definitely was the case for my first, transformative viewing of SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY -- before taking on a speculative turn about cinema slowing to halt, inaugurating an ultra-minimal aesthetic preference built on quarantine-induced sensory deprivation. He's so creative. I really love him.
Nathan Tankus blows up my inbox with his Substack, and I can't pretend to understand much of what he writes, even if I think it's worth trying as a form of mental exercise. But then there are relatively clear posts like this that justify the whole endeavor: how universities might collectively build solidarity to avoid state budget cuts in times of crisis, such as post-'08 and the current COVID one. They are uniquely vulnerable, as Tankus lays out, but they also have some unlikely options available...
I'm also really interested in the implications to his Means Crisis subhead in this post. Tankus makes a good argument for why central planning would have helped allocate resources during the corona crisis, preventing those infamous images of milk being poured down drains and farmers disposing of their food. On the face of it, the logic is simple: having a public plan ahead of time is more responsible than hoping the private sector will respond adaptively. But Tankus argues something more. This is not just a partisan difference of opinions, but a fundamental example of how frail private businesses are in moments of severe crisis. The uncertainty of something like COVID is just completely overwhelming to businesses that count on the conservative assumption of everything running smoothly. They try to bide time until things settle down so that they can resume operations as normal, rather than trying to navigate new circumstances with big, ambitious spending projects (after all, that's what governments are for!). I also suspect this is part of why Trump and the business community are clamoring for us all to get "back to work" and "back to normal." It's because they know this is a cascading series of crises, and the disruptions will profoundly affect an economy in which they've invested so much (literally and figuratively). No more normal means no more illusions of control and certainty. No more private predation on underfunded public services. No more insisting that capitalism is the best economic system for human flourishing when it visibly, manifestly is not.
Monday, April 6, 2020
04/20
There could be new COVID outbreaks until 2022-24 if social distancing is inadequately implemented. The study cited in that SCMP article also warns against too much social distancing, which could lead to nobody developing immunity at all...but isn't it a risky gamble to just let people go out and contract it? For one thing, I've started seeing people say there could be lasting effects to contraction, like weakened immune systems and compromised respiration. Then there's the issue I still feel is under-addressed: community transmission from asymptomatic carriers to vulnerable populations. It's all well and good for 'healthy' people to go back out into the world, but those people don't exist as discrete units. They have children, parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors, community members, etc. who could be put at risk from contact with someone who -- unbeknownst to either party -- is carrying the novel coronavirus. Quite apart from creating new hot spots, it would be cruel forcing people to live under such prolonged stress. Not that I expect sensitivity or pragmatism from the United States...I just really and truly don't see an end to any of this though. And I don't think I'm being overly cynical in thinking so, or having my judgment skewed negatively by depression.
(Anyway, isn't depressive realism supposed to help you see more clearly?)
***
As I've written before, if asked to name my favorite book I would choose The Portrait of a Lady for convenience and relative high profile, not because it truly stands head and shoulders above other books I cherish. But even so, it's fair to say that Henry James occupies a special place in my life, one of those artists I feel compelled to learn more about whenever the opportunity arises, the kind of name that will make me pause during a Twitter scroll session to see what's currently being said about him. So I did enjoy reading about James' relation to solitude, and I even think it's possible to take his forsaking of marriage for "the common good" in a direction opposite to the one indicated in a play he wrote. Instead of religious devotion, why not material commitment to the needs of humankind? Such a choice wouldn't even preclude a life given over to art, if art is taken to be a crucial component of human existence (and I firmly believe it is).
Michael Koresky on SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM. Very accomplished work, and makes me want to revisit TAKE ONE somewhere down the line after not really appreciating it fully the first time.
The world as seen by Abel Ferrara, on lockdown in Rome. Nice asides about Cassavetes. It hadn't really occurred to me to worry about any film directors during this pandemic, but Ferrara's gotten much older...
This essay is a useful way of thinking through the electoral assumption that charismatic leaders both create and direct mass movements. Regrettably, it uses only the Anglophone examples of Bernie and Corbyn, yet even these two examples provide support for a thesis I've been trying to formulate myself without a significant breakthrough. It is the clash of agendas between a mass movement and an electoral process, the power to destroy versus the imperative to maintain order, which forces concessions from the state. Elected leaders (or candidates, MPs, what have you) can't count on personal charisma and election year enthusiasm to "turn out the vote" if there aren't fierce, competing demands for a vision of the future.
I really like Gavin Mueller's attempt to push past the 'liberal public sphere' concept often used in describing the Internet. So many people are fixated on the Internet as some kind of digital democracy, where information and debate lead to rational action by informed participants. Doesn't that sound ridiculous in and of itself? Anyone who's used the Internet enough knows the derangement it produces in people. If we take *that* as a starting point, maybe we can move toward an analogy favored by Mueller and the authors he cites: war. War waged by the state against the people, with weapons supplied by capital (war profiteering, in this metaphor), and an array of actions that blur the distinction between civil protest and 'criminal' insurgency. I wouldn't ordinarily resort to militaristic metaphors right away, but to me, this seems a much sharper way of interrogating the Internet's place in our lives.
Mueller's essay provides an unexpected bridge to one by Rob Horning on the collectibility (and thus, interchangeability) of 'authentic experiences.' It's actually Mueller's citation of Jodi Dean's "communicative capitalism" that came to mind while I was reading this new essay. Since capitalism has the ability to extract data from communication and thus profit from our social interactions, why do we continue communicating online despite knowing the conditions under which it happens? Obviously the urge to connect with other people tends to outweigh whatever ethical or structural concerns we can raise through critiques of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I don't think that's a new observation on my part, even if I also don't believe the implications of it are fully understood. But in reading Horning's essay, I found myself considering one way this natural desire is stoked, then distorted, then turned into profit both directly (through engagement with influencers and celebrities) and indirectly (through fan communities, as well as purchases made under the influence, so to speak).
Influencer exhortations shape fan behavior, which is why even well-meaning suggestions to stay safe during COVID-19 come off as branding opportunities. As human brands, influencers make their audiences feel special for the relational experiences 'shared' between marketer and fan. The ideal fan need not interact with other fans -- though of course they often do, and fervently, which is one of many contradictions in this phenomenon that resists easy and reductive rage against the machine. All that's required of a fan is their ongoing commitment to acquisition. What they acquire can range from products to those emotional experiences seen as a unique component in a given "fandom." Particulars don't matter as long as the baseline need for attention is diverted into psychic investment. This is how I understand the attention economy to work. It's more than just the momentary appeal of outrageous headlines or feeling attached to the construct another person projects. It's the gradual re-conditioning of human interiority into an apparatus that responds to advertising's stimulation.
From this angle, algorithms are like clumsy attempts at provoking the same reaction a human brand can induce "authentically." Amazon ads, Spotify playlists, and YouTube video recommendations create an uncanny intimacy by intuiting what you like, then presenting it to you without your asking. Weirdly, this exchange resembles the emotional labor behind gift-giving -- our personal knowledge of another person that tells us what things they like -- without the warmth of kindness that comes with it. I think that's why algorithms don't (always) seem robotic or emotionless; if they're worth their programming, the recipient will enjoy what's being offered. But neither are they fully human. Occupying a strange in-between space, they purport to know us better than we even know ourselves based on meta-analysis of all possible people, categorizing us with sometimes frightening accuracy. None of this could happen without siphoning the energies and emotional investments of countless 'consumers.'
In fact, the more I think of it, the more I see a digital world built on quasi-human interaction. YouTube influencers and their legions of fans; Spotify's customization, filtered through metrics of popularity; Facebook's and Instagram's battle royale for attention; Twitter, with its Likes, Follows, and RTs; Amazon, eternally at the ready with your shopping list that it memorized, gazing back at you on any ad-run site. To various degrees, there are parasocial relationships occurring in all the above interactions. Some, like Tinder, Twitter, and Facebook, feel more concrete because you can reach out and touch the people involved through text or communicative symbols. Others, like Spotify and Amazon, are like stores built just for you, based on what people like you shop for, with salespeople who know what kind of things you bought here before.
With some distance, an all-encompassing vision comes into focus: capital, monstrous in its hunger, preying upon the wants and needs of lonely, atomized consumers. I'm not suggesting we can -- or even should -- withdraw en masse from these websites and their place in our lives. For people who are lonely, misunderstood, or oppressed in real life, the internet can be a haven where likeminded people support you through your offline troubles. In those cases, the ambiguously social spaces of the internet are an improvement over lives without the freedoms of self-determination. Yet at the same time as the internet assuages its disaffected, it also ropes better-adjusted people into a network of new fears, doubts, resentments. Perhaps this is one way we actually can call the internet "the great equalizer." Whoever we were before we came here, it's our shared burden now.
***
It's not just YouTube. Amazon is programming right-wing foot soldiers too. In researching digital currents of fascism -- Thielism is yet another -- I feel like I'm constantly playing catch up not only to new developments in reactionary thought, but also the linkages between the 20th century's far-right and its 21st century successors. One remedial example: this month I watched Walter Heynowski's AKTION J, a documentary film chronicling the career of Hans Josef Maria Globke as he transitioned from high-ranking Nazi to high-ranking post-war government official. I found the film buried in rarefilmm.com's archives, and there's a link in my Letterboxd post there if you're curious.
Following up on my viewing of the film, I decided to familiarize myself a bit with the upper ranks of Nazi Germany. I read up on Eichmann and Müller, and I was about to switch over to Himmler when I noticed a link to the Red Army tucked away in Müller's page...at which point I asked myself, shouldn't I also be reading up on WWII-era Communism, not just Nazism? So I switched over to the Soviet Union's endeavors, which brought me to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which brought me to the Soviet Union's annexations of the 1940s, which at long last generated in me a question: why aren't these seeming acts of imperialism discussed more? Why is the big tankie split centered on Hungary when the Soviet Union had already annexed parts of Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland? I would sincerely be interested in the tankie justification for these actions.
Pondering the tankie issue more, I switched over the Hungarian Revolution page, trying to see if I could find information that might take me somewhere new. I wasn't expecting what I found. Among the names of refugees who'd fled the Hungarian Communist Party replacing its Soviet predecessor, one stood out with great prominence: Georg Lukács!! Whoa! Not only had Lukács been present in Hungary at the time, he had actually served as part of Imre Nagy's interim government!! A world-famous Marxist writer and philosopher, and a primary source for this hugely controversial event in history? Surely there was some account from Lukács on what he felt had transpired?
Well, I might have to keep digging around for that. Apparently a Budapest Diary does exist that relates to the event (though a quick search hasn't produced any results). But the reason I'm detailing this long Wikipedia digression is because of the unlikely things I found on this unlikely page. You know that feeling of encountering a Wikipedia page that's been surprisingly well-tended, even magisterial in its upkeep? Lukács has such a page. Reading it, I came closer to understanding the slippery concept of dialectical materialism than I've yet managed on my own. Not only does Lukács, in quotes below, describe it very clearly:
"For this reason the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process."
He even goes further, downplaying the role of the "individual" in this churning of time and power that would seem to overwhelm any one person's ability to make a change. And guess what: basically, that is what happens. Lukács again -- not in quotes this time to avoid confusion; and sorry for the lengthy block of text, but it really is all necessary:
According to him, "The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men's consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.' ...Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." (§5). In line with Marx's thought, he criticises the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology, he asserts the primacy of social relations. Existence – and thus the world – is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness is accepted. Lukács does not restrain human liberty for sociological determinism: to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis.
(Me now:) History makes us, having itself been made by people, but we as individuals struggle to make history because we are not as powerful as we've been led to believe. I'm going to drop one more big Lukács claim, comment on it, then do a little fake page break, so that this doesn't get too unwieldy...even though there's so much more to be said (this one is without quotes again):
For Lukács, "ideology" is a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining consciousness of its revolutionary position. Ideology determines the "form of objectivity", thus the very structure of knowledge. According to Lukács, real science must attain the "concrete totality" through which only it is possible to think the current form of objectivity as a historical period. Thus, the so-called eternal "laws" of economics are dismissed as the ideological illusion projected by the current form of objectivity ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §3). He also writes: "It is only when the core of being has showed itself as social becoming, that the being itself can appear as a product, so far unconscious, of human activity, and this activity, in turn, as the decisive element of the transformation of being." ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §5)
Am I wrong, or is this all like 100% correct? I'd have to do the reading myself, yet I feel like this is something I've intuitively known for years, without ever seeing it expressed so plainly. I gather that studying dialectical materialism might have given me this view of history as a process, but as for viewing the "individual" as a product of their environment, of economic forces beyond their control? It sounds simple to say, but this is a truth that challenges so much of Western thinking on subjectivity. I think I've actually been coming at it almost from the opposite angle, from within the field of psychology and critical theory, and especially via Lacan, whose work eludes me as much as it tantalizes me, but from which I've carried this crucial insight for quite a while now: at the core of our 'being' is not our "self," but in fact, the language through which other people have taught us to engage the world.
***
Still on Lukács: if this were all the Wikipedia page had given me, I'd have more than enough to investigate further. But not only did Lukács contribute these ideas to Marxism, he also applied them to literature, developing a theory of aesthetics whose outline I think can be applied to some questions I've been wondering about art. Big big quote here, a paragraph and a half:
The Historical Novel is probably Lukács's most influential work of literary history. In it he traces the development of the genre of historical fiction. While prior to 1789, he argues, people's consciousness of history was relatively underdeveloped, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars that followed brought about a realisation of the constantly changing, evolving character of human existence. This new historical consciousness was reflected in the work of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels use 'representative' or 'typical' characters to dramatise major social conflicts and historical transformations, for example the dissolution of feudal society in the Scottish Highlands and the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism. Lukács argues that Scott's new brand of historical realism was taken up by Balzac and Tolstoy, and enabled novelists to depict contemporary social life not as a static drama of fixed, universal types, but rather as a moment of history, constantly changing, open to the potential of revolutionary transformation. For this reason he sees these authors as progressive and their work as potentially radical, despite their own personal conservative politics.
For Lukács, this historical realist tradition began to give way after the 1848 revolutions, when the bourgeoisie ceased to be a progressive force and their role as agents of history was usurped by the proletariat. After this time, historical realism begins to sicken and lose its concern with social life as inescapably historical.
I guess I'm the latecomer to this way of thinking, because the Wikipedia page calls it "hugely influential," but I'm totally fascinated at first contact, and I think it has plenty of applications outside literature. For instance, I could complain that a lot of current films lack this situated tendency, existing in some shapeless and eternal Now that -- while I suppose accurate to the erasure of past and future under neoliberalism -- is ultimately false, and we know this because of what Lukács himself said!! If we can mock Francis Fukuyama while agreeing amongst ourselves that history hasn't ended, then the next step should be theorizing ourselves as products of history. Back to Lukács!
"Realism in the Balance"[45] is a 1938 essay by Georg Lukács (written while he lived in Soviet Russia and first published in a German literary journal) in which he defends the "traditional" realism of authors like Thomas Mann in the face of rising Modernist movements, such as Expressionism, Surrealism, and Naturalism. Practitioners of these movements, such as James Joyce, placed an emphasis on displaying the discord and disenchantment of modern life through techniques that highlight individualism and individual consciousness, such as stream of consciousness. In his essay, Lukács presents a complex, nuanced view of these movements and their relation to what he regards as "true" realism: On the one hand, Lukács argues that such movements are a historical necessity, but he also strongly expresses the sentiment that these new artistic movements lack what he views as revolutionary power.
Another two block quotes:
He explains that the pervasiveness of capitalism, the unity in its economic and ideological theory, and its profound influence on social relations comprise a "closed integration" or "totality," an objective whole that functions independent of human consciousness. Lukács cites Marx to bolster this historical materialist worldview: "The relations of production in every society form a whole." He further relies on Marx to argue that the bourgeoisie's unabated development of the world's markets are so far-reaching as to create a unified totality, and explains that because the increasing autonomy of elements of the capitalist system (such as the autonomy of currency) is perceived by society as "crisis," there must be an underlying unity that binds these seemingly autonomous elements of the capitalist system together, and makes their separation appear as crisis.
Returning to modernist forms, Lukács stipulates that such theories disregard the relationship of literature to objective reality, in favour of the portrayal of subjective experience and immediacy that do little to evince the underlying capitalist totality of existence. It is clear that Lukács regards the representation of reality as art's chief purpose—in this he is perhaps not in disagreement with the modernists—but he maintains that "If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role." "True realists" demonstrate the importance of the social context, and since the unmasking of this objective totality is a crucial element in Lukács's Marxist ideology, he privileges their authorial approach.
Naturally, I shy away from the word "objective" as a way of viewing the world, but there seems to be room in Lukács' theory for individual subjectivity, which he grants can be a necessary abstraction that's useful for explaining how the "totality" affects people. And now one more quote, because this has gone on long enough:
Lukács then sets up a dialectical opposition between two elements he believes inherent to human experience. He maintains that this dialectical relation exists between the "appearance" of events as subjective, unfettered experiences and their "essence" as provoked by the objective totality of capitalism. Lukács explains that good realists, such as Thomas Mann, create a contrast between the consciousnesses of their characters (appearance) and a reality independent of them (essence). According to Lukács, Mann succeeds because he creates this contrast. Conversely, modernist writers fail because they portray reality only as it appears to themselves and their characters—subjectively—and "fail to pierce the surface" of these immediate, subjective experiences "to discover the underlying essence, i.e. the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them." The pitfalls of relying on immediacy are manifold, according to Lukács. Because the prejudices inculcated by the capitalist system are so insidious, they cannot be escaped without the abandonment of subjective experience and immediacy in the literary sphere. They can only be superseded by realist authors who "abandon and transcend the limits of immediacy, by scrutinising all subjective experiences and measuring them against social reality;" this is no easy task. Lukács relies on Hegelian dialectics to explain how the relationship between this immediacy and abstraction effects a subtle indoctrination on the part of capitalist totality. The circulation of money, he explains, as well as other elements of capitalism, is entirely abstracted away from its place in the broader capitalist system, and therefore appears as a subjective immediacy, which elides its position as a crucial element of objective totality.
Okay, that's it, but really the entire section is worth reading. I just can't help wonder who put in the time to make this all flow so lucidly. And keeping in mind, once again, that I'm only gleaning Lukács' theoretical work from these (comparatively) brief summaries, I nevertheless think there's value in 'playing around' with Wikipedia like this. Would I have come across Lukács' work otherwise? Maybe, maybe not. Hard to say. There are so many other things I want to read too. Am I more interested in reading him for real than I was before browsing Wikipedia? Absolutely, now that I know his deep involvement in questions and situations that are often on my mind. There are several things I'm wondering now, and I'd like to air them out just a little before I close up, hopefully to be reprised later:
- Continuing with the concept of 'play': this connection might seem silly from the outside, but it seems pretty vital to me from inside my head. The process of seeing the past, the present, and one's place in them are a form of play that people can only figure out for themselves. Everyone's conclusions will be different, which is one area I might diverge from Lukács (assuming he doesn't address this himself). The "totality" of capitalism, or something close to it, has only grown more complex under neoliberalism, and it would take a lot of creative thinking to puzzle out a realism that could be considered equal to the task. Then there's the matter of tools, what's available to us for research, guidance, and personal experience once it's time to start. The need to learn, the need to experiment, the knowledge to of how to apply acquired skills in service of art. How do we optimize conditions so that creativity will flourish?
- Who depicts this totality? What do they choose to emphasize? Again, I think there's a lot of room for interpretation here. Not everyone would respond to a given realist novel the same way. Even Lukács had to play favorites. I'm not just arguing in defense of individual subjectivity, of which I hope I've been clear in expressing my distrust. I mean that it's harder to rally behind a realist novel than, say, the Communist Manifesto. That concise, electrifying document may well have illustrated the "totality" better than any work of literature. But even a manifesto is a work of art, first and foremost in its use of rhetoric. Where does that leave us?
- I guess tying the two above points together are questions of access and freedom to create. That's a political challenge, and I want to bring in Isiah Medina's INVENTING THE FUTURE to undergird my inquiries in this section. As I've written in my review of that film, a Universal Basic Income coupled with a reduced workweek would be huge boons for marginalized people whose creativity has been stifled by capitalism.
- The use of the term "realism" irks me on a bunch of levels, but having not read Lukács' work myself and trusting he has his reasons, I won't complain. What I will say is that I've very much been thinking about the basics of creation lately. The simple act of putting words together, and the joining together of two images. These sequential decisions alone are feats of tremendous creativity, though not everyone appreciates their enormity. But to me this is style, and it's inseparable from substance for the very reason that substance couldn't exist without it. I'm definitely with Lukács so far, but I don't see how you can subtract the encoding and decoding processes from artistic practice and interpretation. Of course it's possible to stray too far from exploring history and the "totality" it made, but that appears to be Lukács' complaint with the Modernists anyhow.
- What about (post-)cinema then? Here's what really interests me. I've been trying to assimilate Eisensteinian montage into my own point-of-view, and while it's been a challenge, I don't see how cinema can continue to evolve without incorporating increasing levels of "abstraction." Referring back to Medina, I imagine this happening through digital imagery, critical theory, and a renewed emphasis on montage. Perhaps I'm still not getting the point, but these all seem like non-negotiable pieces of creating an artwork that tackles the "totality," which not many films outside INVENTING THE FUTURE seem to be attempting. Experimentation with style is itself a way of generating new substance. I'd like to read Lukács and see where we agree and where we differ on that point.
And I guess just a piece of trivia: I think one reason this was all so thrilling to me is because it helps me understand my affection for The Portrait of a Lady, professed several weeks ago at the top of this post. The feeling James gives of watching a world change in front of you is indescribable. Not only does it illuminate that world, it also gives a deeper sense of the people in it too. It's such a full fictional experience, unmatched by most other books I've read. If that's what Lukács wanted more of, then I do too.
***
While the recent Comrade Britney meme has been silly fun to watch from afar, unjust conservatorship is a real disability rights issue, Britney included, and Sara Luterman was able to persuade The Nation to let her write about this very serious problem after previously failing to generate interest in it. I'm sure she and The Nation would rather not rely on memes to underwrite journalism, but hey, I clicked too.
(Anyway, isn't depressive realism supposed to help you see more clearly?)
***
As I've written before, if asked to name my favorite book I would choose The Portrait of a Lady for convenience and relative high profile, not because it truly stands head and shoulders above other books I cherish. But even so, it's fair to say that Henry James occupies a special place in my life, one of those artists I feel compelled to learn more about whenever the opportunity arises, the kind of name that will make me pause during a Twitter scroll session to see what's currently being said about him. So I did enjoy reading about James' relation to solitude, and I even think it's possible to take his forsaking of marriage for "the common good" in a direction opposite to the one indicated in a play he wrote. Instead of religious devotion, why not material commitment to the needs of humankind? Such a choice wouldn't even preclude a life given over to art, if art is taken to be a crucial component of human existence (and I firmly believe it is).
Michael Koresky on SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM. Very accomplished work, and makes me want to revisit TAKE ONE somewhere down the line after not really appreciating it fully the first time.
The world as seen by Abel Ferrara, on lockdown in Rome. Nice asides about Cassavetes. It hadn't really occurred to me to worry about any film directors during this pandemic, but Ferrara's gotten much older...
This essay is a useful way of thinking through the electoral assumption that charismatic leaders both create and direct mass movements. Regrettably, it uses only the Anglophone examples of Bernie and Corbyn, yet even these two examples provide support for a thesis I've been trying to formulate myself without a significant breakthrough. It is the clash of agendas between a mass movement and an electoral process, the power to destroy versus the imperative to maintain order, which forces concessions from the state. Elected leaders (or candidates, MPs, what have you) can't count on personal charisma and election year enthusiasm to "turn out the vote" if there aren't fierce, competing demands for a vision of the future.
I really like Gavin Mueller's attempt to push past the 'liberal public sphere' concept often used in describing the Internet. So many people are fixated on the Internet as some kind of digital democracy, where information and debate lead to rational action by informed participants. Doesn't that sound ridiculous in and of itself? Anyone who's used the Internet enough knows the derangement it produces in people. If we take *that* as a starting point, maybe we can move toward an analogy favored by Mueller and the authors he cites: war. War waged by the state against the people, with weapons supplied by capital (war profiteering, in this metaphor), and an array of actions that blur the distinction between civil protest and 'criminal' insurgency. I wouldn't ordinarily resort to militaristic metaphors right away, but to me, this seems a much sharper way of interrogating the Internet's place in our lives.
Mueller's essay provides an unexpected bridge to one by Rob Horning on the collectibility (and thus, interchangeability) of 'authentic experiences.' It's actually Mueller's citation of Jodi Dean's "communicative capitalism" that came to mind while I was reading this new essay. Since capitalism has the ability to extract data from communication and thus profit from our social interactions, why do we continue communicating online despite knowing the conditions under which it happens? Obviously the urge to connect with other people tends to outweigh whatever ethical or structural concerns we can raise through critiques of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I don't think that's a new observation on my part, even if I also don't believe the implications of it are fully understood. But in reading Horning's essay, I found myself considering one way this natural desire is stoked, then distorted, then turned into profit both directly (through engagement with influencers and celebrities) and indirectly (through fan communities, as well as purchases made under the influence, so to speak).
Influencer exhortations shape fan behavior, which is why even well-meaning suggestions to stay safe during COVID-19 come off as branding opportunities. As human brands, influencers make their audiences feel special for the relational experiences 'shared' between marketer and fan. The ideal fan need not interact with other fans -- though of course they often do, and fervently, which is one of many contradictions in this phenomenon that resists easy and reductive rage against the machine. All that's required of a fan is their ongoing commitment to acquisition. What they acquire can range from products to those emotional experiences seen as a unique component in a given "fandom." Particulars don't matter as long as the baseline need for attention is diverted into psychic investment. This is how I understand the attention economy to work. It's more than just the momentary appeal of outrageous headlines or feeling attached to the construct another person projects. It's the gradual re-conditioning of human interiority into an apparatus that responds to advertising's stimulation.
From this angle, algorithms are like clumsy attempts at provoking the same reaction a human brand can induce "authentically." Amazon ads, Spotify playlists, and YouTube video recommendations create an uncanny intimacy by intuiting what you like, then presenting it to you without your asking. Weirdly, this exchange resembles the emotional labor behind gift-giving -- our personal knowledge of another person that tells us what things they like -- without the warmth of kindness that comes with it. I think that's why algorithms don't (always) seem robotic or emotionless; if they're worth their programming, the recipient will enjoy what's being offered. But neither are they fully human. Occupying a strange in-between space, they purport to know us better than we even know ourselves based on meta-analysis of all possible people, categorizing us with sometimes frightening accuracy. None of this could happen without siphoning the energies and emotional investments of countless 'consumers.'
In fact, the more I think of it, the more I see a digital world built on quasi-human interaction. YouTube influencers and their legions of fans; Spotify's customization, filtered through metrics of popularity; Facebook's and Instagram's battle royale for attention; Twitter, with its Likes, Follows, and RTs; Amazon, eternally at the ready with your shopping list that it memorized, gazing back at you on any ad-run site. To various degrees, there are parasocial relationships occurring in all the above interactions. Some, like Tinder, Twitter, and Facebook, feel more concrete because you can reach out and touch the people involved through text or communicative symbols. Others, like Spotify and Amazon, are like stores built just for you, based on what people like you shop for, with salespeople who know what kind of things you bought here before.
With some distance, an all-encompassing vision comes into focus: capital, monstrous in its hunger, preying upon the wants and needs of lonely, atomized consumers. I'm not suggesting we can -- or even should -- withdraw en masse from these websites and their place in our lives. For people who are lonely, misunderstood, or oppressed in real life, the internet can be a haven where likeminded people support you through your offline troubles. In those cases, the ambiguously social spaces of the internet are an improvement over lives without the freedoms of self-determination. Yet at the same time as the internet assuages its disaffected, it also ropes better-adjusted people into a network of new fears, doubts, resentments. Perhaps this is one way we actually can call the internet "the great equalizer." Whoever we were before we came here, it's our shared burden now.
***
It's not just YouTube. Amazon is programming right-wing foot soldiers too. In researching digital currents of fascism -- Thielism is yet another -- I feel like I'm constantly playing catch up not only to new developments in reactionary thought, but also the linkages between the 20th century's far-right and its 21st century successors. One remedial example: this month I watched Walter Heynowski's AKTION J, a documentary film chronicling the career of Hans Josef Maria Globke as he transitioned from high-ranking Nazi to high-ranking post-war government official. I found the film buried in rarefilmm.com's archives, and there's a link in my Letterboxd post there if you're curious.
Following up on my viewing of the film, I decided to familiarize myself a bit with the upper ranks of Nazi Germany. I read up on Eichmann and Müller, and I was about to switch over to Himmler when I noticed a link to the Red Army tucked away in Müller's page...at which point I asked myself, shouldn't I also be reading up on WWII-era Communism, not just Nazism? So I switched over to the Soviet Union's endeavors, which brought me to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which brought me to the Soviet Union's annexations of the 1940s, which at long last generated in me a question: why aren't these seeming acts of imperialism discussed more? Why is the big tankie split centered on Hungary when the Soviet Union had already annexed parts of Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland? I would sincerely be interested in the tankie justification for these actions.
Pondering the tankie issue more, I switched over the Hungarian Revolution page, trying to see if I could find information that might take me somewhere new. I wasn't expecting what I found. Among the names of refugees who'd fled the Hungarian Communist Party replacing its Soviet predecessor, one stood out with great prominence: Georg Lukács!! Whoa! Not only had Lukács been present in Hungary at the time, he had actually served as part of Imre Nagy's interim government!! A world-famous Marxist writer and philosopher, and a primary source for this hugely controversial event in history? Surely there was some account from Lukács on what he felt had transpired?
Well, I might have to keep digging around for that. Apparently a Budapest Diary does exist that relates to the event (though a quick search hasn't produced any results). But the reason I'm detailing this long Wikipedia digression is because of the unlikely things I found on this unlikely page. You know that feeling of encountering a Wikipedia page that's been surprisingly well-tended, even magisterial in its upkeep? Lukács has such a page. Reading it, I came closer to understanding the slippery concept of dialectical materialism than I've yet managed on my own. Not only does Lukács, in quotes below, describe it very clearly:
"For this reason the task of orthodox Marxism, its victory over Revisionism and utopianism can never mean the defeat, once and for all, of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat. Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process."
He even goes further, downplaying the role of the "individual" in this churning of time and power that would seem to overwhelm any one person's ability to make a change. And guess what: basically, that is what happens. Lukács again -- not in quotes this time to avoid confusion; and sorry for the lengthy block of text, but it really is all necessary:
According to him, "The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men's consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.' ...Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." (§5). In line with Marx's thought, he criticises the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology, he asserts the primacy of social relations. Existence – and thus the world – is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness is accepted. Lukács does not restrain human liberty for sociological determinism: to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis.
(Me now:) History makes us, having itself been made by people, but we as individuals struggle to make history because we are not as powerful as we've been led to believe. I'm going to drop one more big Lukács claim, comment on it, then do a little fake page break, so that this doesn't get too unwieldy...even though there's so much more to be said (this one is without quotes again):
For Lukács, "ideology" is a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining consciousness of its revolutionary position. Ideology determines the "form of objectivity", thus the very structure of knowledge. According to Lukács, real science must attain the "concrete totality" through which only it is possible to think the current form of objectivity as a historical period. Thus, the so-called eternal "laws" of economics are dismissed as the ideological illusion projected by the current form of objectivity ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §3). He also writes: "It is only when the core of being has showed itself as social becoming, that the being itself can appear as a product, so far unconscious, of human activity, and this activity, in turn, as the decisive element of the transformation of being." ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §5)
Am I wrong, or is this all like 100% correct? I'd have to do the reading myself, yet I feel like this is something I've intuitively known for years, without ever seeing it expressed so plainly. I gather that studying dialectical materialism might have given me this view of history as a process, but as for viewing the "individual" as a product of their environment, of economic forces beyond their control? It sounds simple to say, but this is a truth that challenges so much of Western thinking on subjectivity. I think I've actually been coming at it almost from the opposite angle, from within the field of psychology and critical theory, and especially via Lacan, whose work eludes me as much as it tantalizes me, but from which I've carried this crucial insight for quite a while now: at the core of our 'being' is not our "self," but in fact, the language through which other people have taught us to engage the world.
***
Still on Lukács: if this were all the Wikipedia page had given me, I'd have more than enough to investigate further. But not only did Lukács contribute these ideas to Marxism, he also applied them to literature, developing a theory of aesthetics whose outline I think can be applied to some questions I've been wondering about art. Big big quote here, a paragraph and a half:
The Historical Novel is probably Lukács's most influential work of literary history. In it he traces the development of the genre of historical fiction. While prior to 1789, he argues, people's consciousness of history was relatively underdeveloped, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars that followed brought about a realisation of the constantly changing, evolving character of human existence. This new historical consciousness was reflected in the work of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels use 'representative' or 'typical' characters to dramatise major social conflicts and historical transformations, for example the dissolution of feudal society in the Scottish Highlands and the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism. Lukács argues that Scott's new brand of historical realism was taken up by Balzac and Tolstoy, and enabled novelists to depict contemporary social life not as a static drama of fixed, universal types, but rather as a moment of history, constantly changing, open to the potential of revolutionary transformation. For this reason he sees these authors as progressive and their work as potentially radical, despite their own personal conservative politics.
For Lukács, this historical realist tradition began to give way after the 1848 revolutions, when the bourgeoisie ceased to be a progressive force and their role as agents of history was usurped by the proletariat. After this time, historical realism begins to sicken and lose its concern with social life as inescapably historical.
I guess I'm the latecomer to this way of thinking, because the Wikipedia page calls it "hugely influential," but I'm totally fascinated at first contact, and I think it has plenty of applications outside literature. For instance, I could complain that a lot of current films lack this situated tendency, existing in some shapeless and eternal Now that -- while I suppose accurate to the erasure of past and future under neoliberalism -- is ultimately false, and we know this because of what Lukács himself said!! If we can mock Francis Fukuyama while agreeing amongst ourselves that history hasn't ended, then the next step should be theorizing ourselves as products of history. Back to Lukács!
"Realism in the Balance"[45] is a 1938 essay by Georg Lukács (written while he lived in Soviet Russia and first published in a German literary journal) in which he defends the "traditional" realism of authors like Thomas Mann in the face of rising Modernist movements, such as Expressionism, Surrealism, and Naturalism. Practitioners of these movements, such as James Joyce, placed an emphasis on displaying the discord and disenchantment of modern life through techniques that highlight individualism and individual consciousness, such as stream of consciousness. In his essay, Lukács presents a complex, nuanced view of these movements and their relation to what he regards as "true" realism: On the one hand, Lukács argues that such movements are a historical necessity, but he also strongly expresses the sentiment that these new artistic movements lack what he views as revolutionary power.
Another two block quotes:
He explains that the pervasiveness of capitalism, the unity in its economic and ideological theory, and its profound influence on social relations comprise a "closed integration" or "totality," an objective whole that functions independent of human consciousness. Lukács cites Marx to bolster this historical materialist worldview: "The relations of production in every society form a whole." He further relies on Marx to argue that the bourgeoisie's unabated development of the world's markets are so far-reaching as to create a unified totality, and explains that because the increasing autonomy of elements of the capitalist system (such as the autonomy of currency) is perceived by society as "crisis," there must be an underlying unity that binds these seemingly autonomous elements of the capitalist system together, and makes their separation appear as crisis.
Returning to modernist forms, Lukács stipulates that such theories disregard the relationship of literature to objective reality, in favour of the portrayal of subjective experience and immediacy that do little to evince the underlying capitalist totality of existence. It is clear that Lukács regards the representation of reality as art's chief purpose—in this he is perhaps not in disagreement with the modernists—but he maintains that "If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role." "True realists" demonstrate the importance of the social context, and since the unmasking of this objective totality is a crucial element in Lukács's Marxist ideology, he privileges their authorial approach.
Naturally, I shy away from the word "objective" as a way of viewing the world, but there seems to be room in Lukács' theory for individual subjectivity, which he grants can be a necessary abstraction that's useful for explaining how the "totality" affects people. And now one more quote, because this has gone on long enough:
Lukács then sets up a dialectical opposition between two elements he believes inherent to human experience. He maintains that this dialectical relation exists between the "appearance" of events as subjective, unfettered experiences and their "essence" as provoked by the objective totality of capitalism. Lukács explains that good realists, such as Thomas Mann, create a contrast between the consciousnesses of their characters (appearance) and a reality independent of them (essence). According to Lukács, Mann succeeds because he creates this contrast. Conversely, modernist writers fail because they portray reality only as it appears to themselves and their characters—subjectively—and "fail to pierce the surface" of these immediate, subjective experiences "to discover the underlying essence, i.e. the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them." The pitfalls of relying on immediacy are manifold, according to Lukács. Because the prejudices inculcated by the capitalist system are so insidious, they cannot be escaped without the abandonment of subjective experience and immediacy in the literary sphere. They can only be superseded by realist authors who "abandon and transcend the limits of immediacy, by scrutinising all subjective experiences and measuring them against social reality;" this is no easy task. Lukács relies on Hegelian dialectics to explain how the relationship between this immediacy and abstraction effects a subtle indoctrination on the part of capitalist totality. The circulation of money, he explains, as well as other elements of capitalism, is entirely abstracted away from its place in the broader capitalist system, and therefore appears as a subjective immediacy, which elides its position as a crucial element of objective totality.
Okay, that's it, but really the entire section is worth reading. I just can't help wonder who put in the time to make this all flow so lucidly. And keeping in mind, once again, that I'm only gleaning Lukács' theoretical work from these (comparatively) brief summaries, I nevertheless think there's value in 'playing around' with Wikipedia like this. Would I have come across Lukács' work otherwise? Maybe, maybe not. Hard to say. There are so many other things I want to read too. Am I more interested in reading him for real than I was before browsing Wikipedia? Absolutely, now that I know his deep involvement in questions and situations that are often on my mind. There are several things I'm wondering now, and I'd like to air them out just a little before I close up, hopefully to be reprised later:
- Continuing with the concept of 'play': this connection might seem silly from the outside, but it seems pretty vital to me from inside my head. The process of seeing the past, the present, and one's place in them are a form of play that people can only figure out for themselves. Everyone's conclusions will be different, which is one area I might diverge from Lukács (assuming he doesn't address this himself). The "totality" of capitalism, or something close to it, has only grown more complex under neoliberalism, and it would take a lot of creative thinking to puzzle out a realism that could be considered equal to the task. Then there's the matter of tools, what's available to us for research, guidance, and personal experience once it's time to start. The need to learn, the need to experiment, the knowledge to of how to apply acquired skills in service of art. How do we optimize conditions so that creativity will flourish?
- Who depicts this totality? What do they choose to emphasize? Again, I think there's a lot of room for interpretation here. Not everyone would respond to a given realist novel the same way. Even Lukács had to play favorites. I'm not just arguing in defense of individual subjectivity, of which I hope I've been clear in expressing my distrust. I mean that it's harder to rally behind a realist novel than, say, the Communist Manifesto. That concise, electrifying document may well have illustrated the "totality" better than any work of literature. But even a manifesto is a work of art, first and foremost in its use of rhetoric. Where does that leave us?
- I guess tying the two above points together are questions of access and freedom to create. That's a political challenge, and I want to bring in Isiah Medina's INVENTING THE FUTURE to undergird my inquiries in this section. As I've written in my review of that film, a Universal Basic Income coupled with a reduced workweek would be huge boons for marginalized people whose creativity has been stifled by capitalism.
- The use of the term "realism" irks me on a bunch of levels, but having not read Lukács' work myself and trusting he has his reasons, I won't complain. What I will say is that I've very much been thinking about the basics of creation lately. The simple act of putting words together, and the joining together of two images. These sequential decisions alone are feats of tremendous creativity, though not everyone appreciates their enormity. But to me this is style, and it's inseparable from substance for the very reason that substance couldn't exist without it. I'm definitely with Lukács so far, but I don't see how you can subtract the encoding and decoding processes from artistic practice and interpretation. Of course it's possible to stray too far from exploring history and the "totality" it made, but that appears to be Lukács' complaint with the Modernists anyhow.
- What about (post-)cinema then? Here's what really interests me. I've been trying to assimilate Eisensteinian montage into my own point-of-view, and while it's been a challenge, I don't see how cinema can continue to evolve without incorporating increasing levels of "abstraction." Referring back to Medina, I imagine this happening through digital imagery, critical theory, and a renewed emphasis on montage. Perhaps I'm still not getting the point, but these all seem like non-negotiable pieces of creating an artwork that tackles the "totality," which not many films outside INVENTING THE FUTURE seem to be attempting. Experimentation with style is itself a way of generating new substance. I'd like to read Lukács and see where we agree and where we differ on that point.
And I guess just a piece of trivia: I think one reason this was all so thrilling to me is because it helps me understand my affection for The Portrait of a Lady, professed several weeks ago at the top of this post. The feeling James gives of watching a world change in front of you is indescribable. Not only does it illuminate that world, it also gives a deeper sense of the people in it too. It's such a full fictional experience, unmatched by most other books I've read. If that's what Lukács wanted more of, then I do too.
***
While the recent Comrade Britney meme has been silly fun to watch from afar, unjust conservatorship is a real disability rights issue, Britney included, and Sara Luterman was able to persuade The Nation to let her write about this very serious problem after previously failing to generate interest in it. I'm sure she and The Nation would rather not rely on memes to underwrite journalism, but hey, I clicked too.
Sunday, March 1, 2020
03/20
Well, it's March 16 as I lay here on my couch writing this post. It's exactly four months until my birthday; I'm 28 and 2/3 years old. More pertinent though, I guess, is the worldwide pandemic and impending economic cataclysm.
Myself, I'm rather miraculously on two weeks paid leave. That's something I wouldn't have expected. My work is very low-paid, despite working for an enormous entity with vast reserves of wealth. However, the day after it was announced we'd be taking the hiatus, I talked with a co-worker who knew someone high up in the organization. He said that high-level employee was one of the most genuine people he knew, someone who'd gone to bat for countless co-workers before this whole thing, and that that person would almost certainly be advocating for us lower-paid employees to receive pay on our leave. It wasn't solely their decision, but having one voice in the room at least bettered the odds. I think he may have been right. A few hours later, we received confirmation of our continuing pay.
I keep forgetting to mention this -- and it seems fairly trivial now in the grand scheme of things -- but I've been playing a small part in getting my workplace unionized. The effort is small but mighty, and we have a powerful ally on our side that's won many David and Goliath labor struggles before ours. We were hoping to hold a vote in the next few months; obviously, things are up in the air now. But I'm mentioning this to give context to my surprise that I'm being paid at all, given how hostile my employer has historically been toward labor rights. We were advised that they'd fight "tooth and nail" against any attempts at unionization (a parallel effort in a different branch seems to have stalled or at least gone under the radar), so we'd have to push back just as hard. I don't know that that's a battle I can really fight. I feel really awkward at work, and that ambient threat of retaliation is intimidating. But I got two people to sign on -- or at least, I got one person, who then passed along a form to her sister when I mentioned that her sister had expressed interest before. It's a small thing, but I'm really proud! I wanted to talk to the previously mentioned co-worker as well, but I've heard he's a little more reluctant despite general pro-union beliefs and left-leaning sympathies. It's just risky no matter your politics. And I totally understand that, 100%.
So we'll see where all that goes. Two weeks of paid leave is very reassuring right now. However, I don't know what will happen if things continue as they have been...or if they get worse, which is very possible. The work I do is especially sensitive to health and hygiene concerns, and I personally can't see any way I could resume work after two weeks when *more* people are going to be infected. The mere possibility of *risking* infection was what shut us down in the first place. What happens when there's a near-certainty of it? Just today (now 03/17), I read a Baltimore Sun article suggesting that my particular employment situation could require several months to stabilize. I have no idea what that will mean for me, as much depends on my employer, the Maryland state government, and the US federal government, none of whom I trust very much. The impact is too far on the horizon for me to clearly discern now.
This is also the case for everything going on right now. I find myself frantically keeping up to date on so many different variables in this crisis through Twitter, and though I've been successful at moderating my Twitter usage for over a year, I don't feel guilty or unhappy about re-engaging with it now. I believe I would feel far worse without trying to construct a detailed understanding of this strange, emergent world now taking shape. Reading, bookmarking, and writing are helping me process the tsunami of information with which we're all being flooded. In that spirit, I want to divide this blogpost into three parts, as it's likely to grow huge and unwieldy very soon. With the first segment, I want some space to interpret my own thoughts and feelings about my immediate circumstances. The second segment will deal with the virus' ripple effects. The third will be miscellaneous items that I still want to engage despite their seeming superfluity. We may be undergoing an unprecedented global crisis, but one ironic feature of it (for me, at least) has been the abundance of time now disconnected from the frantic rhythms of a disappearing status quo. How best to use it is a question I will need to figure out slowly, bit by bit.
*
I am okay. I am writing on March 24th, a Tuesday, and we are now a week and a half into the new times. I am shocked at how automatically I adjusted to this rupture. Part of it has to do with the shape of my life: I am at home, armed with my phone and my laptop, able to watch movies on our TV, able to read books on my Nook. Without imposed deadlines weighing in -- namely a scheduled return to work -- this feels like some kind of semi-permanent weekend. I can't deny there's pleasure in such an arrangement, but that's not all there is to it. Beneath the relative freedom and security, I am disconcerted. For the first few days I felt a truly vertiginous sensation of not knowing what to do. The world had changed overnight, and I'd been cut adrift from the life I only thought I knew. In some ways I was forced to confront the deeper conditions of my existence, to re-situate myself in a broader context than the one that had tranquilized me through habituation.
I don't consider myself a complacent person. I even like to think I'm willing, in general, to re-examine parameters I hadn't thought to question before. But there's a contradiction that I always find hard to resolve, and that is my opposing tendency toward habit, routine, and repetition. I have trouble admitting this to myself sometimes because it feels like giving in to autism, which I've fought against so hard throughout my life in vain pursuit of normalcy.
I am not normal. I am not bragging when I say so. Saying so doesn't make me proud. I have always been ashamed not to be normal, and I have spent gargantuan reserves of energy trying to remake myself into a normal person. I can't even rightly claim a victory in abandoning that goal. More than anything, I think a deep collapse into depression stole my willpower and ability to pass as normal. I drifted away from normalcy without meaning to, and no amount of panic could push me back in its direction. I had to come to terms with the forces that had structured my life and, therefore, my subjectivity. Race, gender, class, and things of that nature. None of that was easy, and I am always struggling for better understanding, better orientation toward a world that has harmed me in the name of 'helping' me, which I could not understand for so long despite carrying the damage deep inside.
Something feels different about my struggles with autism. I keep trying to conceptualize it, but I can't seem to put my finger on it. Perhaps it's the low profile of neurodiversity in broader struggles around privilege and difference. Maybe it's my fault for not seeking out resources and movements that engage it more directly. But in my dealings with art, politics, and history, I just don't see much reckoning with neurodiversity, let alone autism. Awareness has certainly increased over the past decades, yet this aspect of myself feels invisible and inarticulable to the world around me. Nobody seems to be experiencing what I am. There are neurotypical people who don't get it, and there are neurodiverse people whose concerns are as idiosyncratic as my own. I guess that's part of neurodiversity, recognizing that interior sameness shouldn't be assumed. But that's what frustrates me so much. Where are the people who know how I feel? How do I find them? Why haven't I come across them in the many years I've devoted to radical solidarity?
It's lonely work trying to figure all this out. I try to be as open and introspective as I can be in all the areas of my life, expecting insight to arrive from connections forged through honesty. With painstaking slowness, I have redefined my approach to interconnection, strengthening my online friendships and real life relationships. I am very happy with the progress I've made. It still doesn't feel like enough. I feel weary and discouraged. I wish I knew what to do.
None of the above was what I came here to write. I wanted to explore the way I've adjusted to an extraordinary situation as if it were just another threshold between life stages. Now I'm just feeling dispirited about my own learned helplessness, how a lifetime of feeling powerless has dovetailed with a neurological predilection for safety and familiarity. I'm worn out by it all. I'll be okay, but I don't know if I know what "okay" even means. It just seems to mean resilience at this point, a zombie urge to persevere without vitality or spontaneity. Better than nothing, but not by much.
**
The recession is already here. Our lost decade between 2008 and now has seen exorbitant CEO pay, trillion dollar tax cuts, and delirious amounts of stock buybacks, but very little real benefit to workers. As discussed here and in the above Jacobin essay, there was an under-publicized catastrophe in the US repo market late in 2019 that the financial system survived, albeit in poor health. With horrific timing, the coronavirus has arrived as a black swan, not disrupting a thriving economy so much as exposing every one of its structural flaws simultaneously. What do we do about it?
Denmark is among the more ambitious countries confronting their economic danger, though as Bue Rubner writes, this subsidizing of the social democratic tradition will eventually need to adapt to a post-recession global economy. It's a start, but it doesn't go far enough. A US stimulus package would need to be very large and well-targeted, though Congressional efforts so far have been pitiful. China has already attempted to stimulate its recovering economy, but its government is pessimistic about the chances for a multilateral response, and I can see why. The ridiculous trade war that Trump has doggedly pursued against China has grown into a bigger and bigger obstacle, with this now the unavoidable result. Plus, China's economic woes may foretell the rest of the world's, and they look to be steep so far. The supply-chain there has already been disrupted, as a freelance reporter predicted almost two decades ago. This is the result of a neoliberal obsession with monopoly and (misjudged) efficiency, and the cost will be measured in human lives prematurely ended. Between China's trouble re-integrating into the global market and the waves of economic turmoil now spreading across the globe, there is much cause for alarm and little room for hope.
Outside the world's two biggest economies is an intricate latticework of fault-lines; Serbia's outright rejection of European unity, quoted in the first SCMP article above, is one striking indicator of this geopolitical challenge. National economies will have to be fundamentally reshaped, most likely one by one. Quantitative easing will not return things to normal, as the US Federal Reserve seems to be hoping. The issue is that people themselves are unable to work, which was not the case in 2008's crisis (reminder again: it could be months before I return to work, and I'm not even sick!). A public health emergency is not the same as a breakdown in speculative finance. A labor shortage will affect goods and services, and unemployed workers won't have money to re-insert into the economy. While I disagree the current system is worth preserving, I do think Branko Milanovic is right to say that social collapse is a genuine possibility. This is as real as it gets. Nothing will ever be the same again.
I'm heading off this series of sub-sections with Mike Davis' essay from 03/13.* Though it focuses largely on the US healthcare system, one point glaringly protrudes: few have written about developing nations of the Global South, whose efforts to impede the virus could be severely constrained by a lack of resources. East Asia has had its turn; the West and Southeast Asia are, as of 03/17, the main areas of focus; but will attention be paid to Africa, Latin America, the wider Middle East and Central Asia when their time comes? The world has really only begun to deal with this unfolding disaster. The next days, weeks, and months will be crucial in tracking international progress, or the lack thereof.
(*Here, however, you can find a crucial rebuttal from inside China to Davis' praise of the Chinese state's COVID response.)
The best analysis of global pandemic threats you're likely to find will come from reading Mike Davis' book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. Short of that, you can listen to an excellent interview with Davis here, which is what persuaded me to buy the book. Mike Davis has been on my radar ever since Gavin Mueller called him the best living political writer in the US -- no small praise!! I'd been circling books like City of Quartz and Planet of Slums for a while, but between availability issues and other items on my reading list, they slipped down a few rungs on the ladder. Luckily, the current situation galvanized me in his direction, and my reward has been some of the most lucid writing on neoliberal globalization that I've ever encountered. I tore through The Monster at Our Door in a matter of days and am quickly vaulting into Planet of Slums, a natural follow-up given the conditions described by Davis as creating pandemic-level diseases.
(By the way, I'm not a doctor or anything close to one, but it looks like we should beware aspirin and ibuprofen, which can aggravate symptoms; Tylenol, a.k.a. paracetamol, is the best bet.)
Africa has a head start on managing the coronavirus, and the best lessons are coming from Asia. Right now South Africa appears to be hit hardest. I dearly hope the lockdown slows its spread.
Ethiopia is testing and quarantining its confirmed cases, with 117 potential contacts as of 03/17.
(I'm also seeing rumors of an unusually early arrival in Burkina Faso, i.e. back in January when things were first heating up, possibly due to Japanese nationals who'd arrived in the country around that time.)
Singapore considers a stimulus combination of surplus and "past reserves" for the first time since the financial crisis.
Big trouble in Malaysia. A large-scale religious event has infected a sizable percentage of its 16,000 attendees, but only 7,000 have come forward for testing. Meanwhile, participants have travelled to Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, where cases are now proliferating.
There are parallels with the situation in South Korea. Religious gatherings seem especially prone to infectious spread (this has been the case in Iran too; see below), and it only takes literally one person to cause a massive spike in transmission. I'm sure no one thinks they'd be Patient 31, but then neither did Patient 31 before she went in for testing. Now 80% of new cases can be traced back to her....which must be a horrible weight on a person's conscience. At least South Korea has been proactive in combatting the virus through nationwide, government-subsidized testing. (Here's one US American's quite smooth experience with it.) Other countries could face similar crises with worse results.
Iran releases 85,000 prisoners, though it appears to be temporary. About 60% of the population are now in self-isolation. Sanctions have been devastating the country's coronavirus efforts, and the US stands firm in its refusal to loosen its obscene strangehold. Although China has helped some, I wouldn't be surprised to see death tolls higher in Iran than much of the outside world by the time this is all over. A terrible tragedy that could easily be avoided, were it not for US imperialism.
The Red Nation issues a call to end all US sanctions on Iran (as well as Venezuela and the DPRK), in addition to other demands that will protect the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, the elderly, and Indigenous people living in rural, isolated areas, among others. A group of First Nations in the territory known as Manitoba have considered partnering with Cuba for treatment and training, though nothing formal is yet in place.
As for the US itself, what is there to say at this point? "Failed state" seems like too generous a description for a nation whose lack of preparedness has been in plain sight since 2018. Even the minimal attempts at crisis response expose its status as an illegitimate enterprise. Rick Santelli, a prominent conservative who helped kickstart the Tea Party, would like to apply the same social Darwinism to the vulnerable in 2020 that he encouraged the government to adopt in 2009. He may not need to lift a finger. Thanks to a privatized healthcare system whose drug providers are operating on public money, the US may not see a vaccine for some time, and who knows what the cost will be then? Price gouging was deemed permissible under a bipartisan effort led by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in the mid-90s (note: then-House member Bernie Sanders successfully created an amendment to reverse this. Then-Senator Joe Biden successfully killed that amendment). Tests for the coronavirus also appear unlikely to arrive anytime soon.
Until then, Charles Mudede is one among many arguing that rent/mortgage freezes are necessary to protect personal finances. Unemployment has spiked at record-high levels, leading to backlogs in processing benefits (I will probably need to sign up on Monday, March 30th, after I'm furloughed). In Milwaukee, a hypersegregated city, middle-aged black men comprise the majority of coronavirus victims. I understand there's also a racial disparity in Detroit. New York has just days to prevent an outbreak as awful as Italy's (let's not "augment police" though please). But provisions for frontline nurses are dangerously inadequate. And just to add insult to injury, the EPA is now suspending enforcement of regulations.
Still fragile from the US' unforgivable neglect, Puerto Rico will face challenges in containing the coronavirus.
Ireland is offering unemployment benefits for six weeks, which also applies to self-employed people and people who are still employed but can't be paid by their employer.
Italy prepares to let people over 80 and people in poor health die, should need outweigh resources.
Spain has been a virus hotspot rivaling Italy, but its government has responded forcefully to the rapid increase in cases. (Lots of miscellaneous info on international measures in that link too.)
One global issue (that's covered locally here) will be an increase in abuse and domestic violence. There will be a lot of trauma burdening people once they can leave their homes again. Coupled with widespread deaths of family and friends, I anticipate a lot of fragile emotional states in the coronavirus aftermath.
What about when things stabilize -- if, in fact, they ever do? We'll need more than nudges to rebuild in the aftermath. This excellent interview with evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace clarifies some root causes of modern pathogen transmission. They are about what you'd expect: Western land theft in the Global South, agribusiness, and deforestation all play a part. Also crucial to note is that the Wuhan food market is not fundamentally responsible for the outbreak. Rather, any point in a supply chain that deals with potentially infected animals and brings them into contact with humans could produce a similar effect. One last time: Mike Davis synthesizes Wallace's book, his own reseach, and the emergent coronavirus information to produce a picture of 2020 clearer than anything else I've encountered so far. Nothing will improve unless -- and until -- the world itself changes course.
Natasha Lennard writes of the ways we choose our boundaries, but also the ways they are chosen for us. The Care Collective provides a framework for systematizing care locally, nationally, and globally -- I only shrink away from their use of the word "overcrowding" to describe the movement of people towards the end, which hints in the direction of eugenics despite the general validity of their point. Rob Horning on trying not to "pose with the flag" and cities without people. Beautiful words from Anne Boyer on the evil of those with power, and the love of those without. (Have some more for good measure.) Subscribe to Momtaza Mehri's TinyLetter if you want to keep up with another of the most vital poets currently at work.
I've been liking Anton Jäger's writing and perspective lately...but there are some weird undertones in this that I don't like, despite agreeing with a lot of it. The 'class first' rebuke to identity politics ignores how vivid experiences of identity-based oppression often lead people to a broader anti-capitalism. His distaste for a "post-paternal" move toward an "infantile," "maternal" state of complacency feels gendered in an ugly and masculinist way. A linked essay by Benjamin Fife and Taylor Hines only doubles down on this sneering dismissal, despite introducing the useful concept of "claustrum." I find it very strange that anti-capitalists see no utility in building mutual understanding between oppressed people, as if that is some luxury distracting from a class struggle which always-already involves people of infinitely varied backgrounds and conditions. "Exclusion" isn't just a petty grievance over not being coddled enough by revolutionary movements. It's a legitimate risk and has been across time, with the experiences of black women in the otherwise very admirable Black Panther Party just one example among many. Should we just expect the excluded to put up and shut up? Or are these strategic flaws that a greater devotion to outreach can help ameliorate? I wouldn't share this if I didn't think it had some analytical value -- I think Jäger is right that history will probably need some time to begin again in earnest -- but there are some red flags here I'll need to think over.
Peering out from within this amorphous blob of time, the real-deal capital-F Future seems impossibly distant -- but it will arrive, one way or another, whether we want it to or not. There are still big plans being made, and they come from the same people who made them before COVID-19. Malcolm Harris brings a stunning piece of undercover journalism that, in fact, wasn't so undercover after all: Shell paid him to participate in a conference about how Shell can adapt to a greener economy while remaining profitable short- and long-term. No strings attached. They have no concerns about their business practices showing up in print, and they seem just as sanguine about the emerging progressive generation who would, in theory, count them as enemies. Co-optation has blunted many social movements before, so I consider this a very real threat to climate justice. Let's not allow their scheme to succeed.
Maybe the longest view yet taken has been Will Davies'. I feel he's right that the most pertinent comparison is neither 2008 nor the 1970s' financial crises, but something like 1945, or even his example of Lisbon. While COVID-19 is certainly an economic cataclysm beyond imagining, I expect we will also look back on this moment as an existential reckoning that altered the course of our lives forever. Davies' citation of Kant is profound and moving: faced with a world in collapse, we must allow ourselves to be reshaped by it, rather than clinging to what we once thought unbreakable. The future belongs to those who find new possibilities within themselves.
***
SubStack post from Kelley Dong about the complacency engendered by the film ecosystem. Genuinely hope I can live up to this gauntlet that they are very right to lay down. (While reading, I recognized that those structural pressures were a big reservation I had about the idea of formally entering that world, which makes me value my independence as a fairly anonymous Letterboxd presence.)
Nick Pinkerton (who has also started a Substack, btw) on the subtle complexities of RICHARD JEWELL. In a similar vein, Sheila O'Malley sizes up Nick Nolte's career of implosive masculinity. Though I've only seen a few of these selections -- WARRIOR, a perfectly fine sports film on the whole, is deepened by Nolte's committed work -- I like the description of him as someone who finds inner ugliness only to hide it from his self-destructive characters. That's a tricky balance, actorly skill and the unthinking flaws we make visible to everyone but ourselves. Film Comment did a podcast a while ago on Robert Mitchum, maybe the quintessential "man who was never young," his reticent presence an invitation to know the sorrows and failures that seem always to be lurking in his past. THE LUSTY MEN is a big favorite of mine for this very reason. Mitchum encapsulates Ray's air of heavy melancholy with a line reading I'll never forget, one that compresses life's smallness and futility into a distant, occluded moment of reflection: "I was born in that room." Haunting like little else I've experienced in art.
A series of novels about young professional women and their unsatisfying lives. There's something in the air, and this seems like part of it.
From Cinema Scope's top-of-the-decade list: Blake Williams on ADIEU AU LANGAGE ("Abstraction is the closest we can get to reality" -- yes).
Few things I look forward to more than the next installment of Rosenbaum's Global DVD Column. Here's 82, and I'm going to add a link to the Ronnie Scheib essay on Ida Lupino, though I haven't read it myself yet. I caught a screening of NOT WANTED a little while back and very much enjoyed it, but I haven't yet followed up on Lupino's other films, which I understand are a bit more troubled (outside consensus favorite THE HITCH-HIKER...I'll go ahead and add that to my Netflix Queue so I don't let things slide again).
A book I'd like to read.
Who better than Adam Nayman to survey a decade's worth of Canadian cinema? His Cinema Scope essay is worth savoring just as a remarkable piece of writing. But as criticism, it reminded me how wide a gap exists between Canadian films I know and Canadian films I've seen. Cronenberg, Dolan, and Villeneuve were easy enough to follow; TAKE THIS WALTZ I caught early on (and even passed along to a friend, forever ago); and then there are the stray works I've been lucky enough to catch, like 88:88, THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN, and OUR PEOPLE WILL BE HEALED. Outside those stray encounters? I recognize many names and many movements from reading Cinema Scope religiously over the past decade, perhaps the film magazine I know best after Reverse Shot. I couldn't even count up the debts I surely owe to their critical guidance. Yet as much as I've sought to keep up with Canadian film in return, two near-misses feel indicative of how little it takes for these films to fall through my fingers. Ashley McKenzie's WEREWOLF came to the Maryland Film Festival a few years back, but for one reason or another it didn't make my viewing schedule -- even though I managed to catch a talk between McKenzie, Nick Pinkerton, Stephen Cone, and other film folks later on. I regret missing it then because I can't find it now, and I already lament the absence of ANNE AT 13,000 FT., Kazik Radwanski's breakout film that managed to secure distribution south of the border....only to find itself in limbo, I presume, after COVID-19's decimation of the film ecosystem. While that can't be helped, nor could it have been foreseen, such a sudden disappearance after years of incremental gain proves the art world is far more fragile than most had assumed. Now I can only bide my time while I await the chance to finally see one of Radwanski's films (having already waited the better part of a decade to do so).
Lovely discussion between Devika Girish and Soraya Nadia McDonald of LOSING GROUND, a film I liked a lot and would be happy to revisit with their observations in mind.
One last gift, this one from a tweet by Pinkerton: an ongoing list of African films and where to find them. Large majority seem to be on YouTube, couple on Rarefilm.com as well, very cool to see a project like this underway!
Myself, I'm rather miraculously on two weeks paid leave. That's something I wouldn't have expected. My work is very low-paid, despite working for an enormous entity with vast reserves of wealth. However, the day after it was announced we'd be taking the hiatus, I talked with a co-worker who knew someone high up in the organization. He said that high-level employee was one of the most genuine people he knew, someone who'd gone to bat for countless co-workers before this whole thing, and that that person would almost certainly be advocating for us lower-paid employees to receive pay on our leave. It wasn't solely their decision, but having one voice in the room at least bettered the odds. I think he may have been right. A few hours later, we received confirmation of our continuing pay.
I keep forgetting to mention this -- and it seems fairly trivial now in the grand scheme of things -- but I've been playing a small part in getting my workplace unionized. The effort is small but mighty, and we have a powerful ally on our side that's won many David and Goliath labor struggles before ours. We were hoping to hold a vote in the next few months; obviously, things are up in the air now. But I'm mentioning this to give context to my surprise that I'm being paid at all, given how hostile my employer has historically been toward labor rights. We were advised that they'd fight "tooth and nail" against any attempts at unionization (a parallel effort in a different branch seems to have stalled or at least gone under the radar), so we'd have to push back just as hard. I don't know that that's a battle I can really fight. I feel really awkward at work, and that ambient threat of retaliation is intimidating. But I got two people to sign on -- or at least, I got one person, who then passed along a form to her sister when I mentioned that her sister had expressed interest before. It's a small thing, but I'm really proud! I wanted to talk to the previously mentioned co-worker as well, but I've heard he's a little more reluctant despite general pro-union beliefs and left-leaning sympathies. It's just risky no matter your politics. And I totally understand that, 100%.
So we'll see where all that goes. Two weeks of paid leave is very reassuring right now. However, I don't know what will happen if things continue as they have been...or if they get worse, which is very possible. The work I do is especially sensitive to health and hygiene concerns, and I personally can't see any way I could resume work after two weeks when *more* people are going to be infected. The mere possibility of *risking* infection was what shut us down in the first place. What happens when there's a near-certainty of it? Just today (now 03/17), I read a Baltimore Sun article suggesting that my particular employment situation could require several months to stabilize. I have no idea what that will mean for me, as much depends on my employer, the Maryland state government, and the US federal government, none of whom I trust very much. The impact is too far on the horizon for me to clearly discern now.
This is also the case for everything going on right now. I find myself frantically keeping up to date on so many different variables in this crisis through Twitter, and though I've been successful at moderating my Twitter usage for over a year, I don't feel guilty or unhappy about re-engaging with it now. I believe I would feel far worse without trying to construct a detailed understanding of this strange, emergent world now taking shape. Reading, bookmarking, and writing are helping me process the tsunami of information with which we're all being flooded. In that spirit, I want to divide this blogpost into three parts, as it's likely to grow huge and unwieldy very soon. With the first segment, I want some space to interpret my own thoughts and feelings about my immediate circumstances. The second segment will deal with the virus' ripple effects. The third will be miscellaneous items that I still want to engage despite their seeming superfluity. We may be undergoing an unprecedented global crisis, but one ironic feature of it (for me, at least) has been the abundance of time now disconnected from the frantic rhythms of a disappearing status quo. How best to use it is a question I will need to figure out slowly, bit by bit.
*
I am okay. I am writing on March 24th, a Tuesday, and we are now a week and a half into the new times. I am shocked at how automatically I adjusted to this rupture. Part of it has to do with the shape of my life: I am at home, armed with my phone and my laptop, able to watch movies on our TV, able to read books on my Nook. Without imposed deadlines weighing in -- namely a scheduled return to work -- this feels like some kind of semi-permanent weekend. I can't deny there's pleasure in such an arrangement, but that's not all there is to it. Beneath the relative freedom and security, I am disconcerted. For the first few days I felt a truly vertiginous sensation of not knowing what to do. The world had changed overnight, and I'd been cut adrift from the life I only thought I knew. In some ways I was forced to confront the deeper conditions of my existence, to re-situate myself in a broader context than the one that had tranquilized me through habituation.
I don't consider myself a complacent person. I even like to think I'm willing, in general, to re-examine parameters I hadn't thought to question before. But there's a contradiction that I always find hard to resolve, and that is my opposing tendency toward habit, routine, and repetition. I have trouble admitting this to myself sometimes because it feels like giving in to autism, which I've fought against so hard throughout my life in vain pursuit of normalcy.
I am not normal. I am not bragging when I say so. Saying so doesn't make me proud. I have always been ashamed not to be normal, and I have spent gargantuan reserves of energy trying to remake myself into a normal person. I can't even rightly claim a victory in abandoning that goal. More than anything, I think a deep collapse into depression stole my willpower and ability to pass as normal. I drifted away from normalcy without meaning to, and no amount of panic could push me back in its direction. I had to come to terms with the forces that had structured my life and, therefore, my subjectivity. Race, gender, class, and things of that nature. None of that was easy, and I am always struggling for better understanding, better orientation toward a world that has harmed me in the name of 'helping' me, which I could not understand for so long despite carrying the damage deep inside.
Something feels different about my struggles with autism. I keep trying to conceptualize it, but I can't seem to put my finger on it. Perhaps it's the low profile of neurodiversity in broader struggles around privilege and difference. Maybe it's my fault for not seeking out resources and movements that engage it more directly. But in my dealings with art, politics, and history, I just don't see much reckoning with neurodiversity, let alone autism. Awareness has certainly increased over the past decades, yet this aspect of myself feels invisible and inarticulable to the world around me. Nobody seems to be experiencing what I am. There are neurotypical people who don't get it, and there are neurodiverse people whose concerns are as idiosyncratic as my own. I guess that's part of neurodiversity, recognizing that interior sameness shouldn't be assumed. But that's what frustrates me so much. Where are the people who know how I feel? How do I find them? Why haven't I come across them in the many years I've devoted to radical solidarity?
It's lonely work trying to figure all this out. I try to be as open and introspective as I can be in all the areas of my life, expecting insight to arrive from connections forged through honesty. With painstaking slowness, I have redefined my approach to interconnection, strengthening my online friendships and real life relationships. I am very happy with the progress I've made. It still doesn't feel like enough. I feel weary and discouraged. I wish I knew what to do.
None of the above was what I came here to write. I wanted to explore the way I've adjusted to an extraordinary situation as if it were just another threshold between life stages. Now I'm just feeling dispirited about my own learned helplessness, how a lifetime of feeling powerless has dovetailed with a neurological predilection for safety and familiarity. I'm worn out by it all. I'll be okay, but I don't know if I know what "okay" even means. It just seems to mean resilience at this point, a zombie urge to persevere without vitality or spontaneity. Better than nothing, but not by much.
**
The recession is already here. Our lost decade between 2008 and now has seen exorbitant CEO pay, trillion dollar tax cuts, and delirious amounts of stock buybacks, but very little real benefit to workers. As discussed here and in the above Jacobin essay, there was an under-publicized catastrophe in the US repo market late in 2019 that the financial system survived, albeit in poor health. With horrific timing, the coronavirus has arrived as a black swan, not disrupting a thriving economy so much as exposing every one of its structural flaws simultaneously. What do we do about it?
Denmark is among the more ambitious countries confronting their economic danger, though as Bue Rubner writes, this subsidizing of the social democratic tradition will eventually need to adapt to a post-recession global economy. It's a start, but it doesn't go far enough. A US stimulus package would need to be very large and well-targeted, though Congressional efforts so far have been pitiful. China has already attempted to stimulate its recovering economy, but its government is pessimistic about the chances for a multilateral response, and I can see why. The ridiculous trade war that Trump has doggedly pursued against China has grown into a bigger and bigger obstacle, with this now the unavoidable result. Plus, China's economic woes may foretell the rest of the world's, and they look to be steep so far. The supply-chain there has already been disrupted, as a freelance reporter predicted almost two decades ago. This is the result of a neoliberal obsession with monopoly and (misjudged) efficiency, and the cost will be measured in human lives prematurely ended. Between China's trouble re-integrating into the global market and the waves of economic turmoil now spreading across the globe, there is much cause for alarm and little room for hope.
Outside the world's two biggest economies is an intricate latticework of fault-lines; Serbia's outright rejection of European unity, quoted in the first SCMP article above, is one striking indicator of this geopolitical challenge. National economies will have to be fundamentally reshaped, most likely one by one. Quantitative easing will not return things to normal, as the US Federal Reserve seems to be hoping. The issue is that people themselves are unable to work, which was not the case in 2008's crisis (reminder again: it could be months before I return to work, and I'm not even sick!). A public health emergency is not the same as a breakdown in speculative finance. A labor shortage will affect goods and services, and unemployed workers won't have money to re-insert into the economy. While I disagree the current system is worth preserving, I do think Branko Milanovic is right to say that social collapse is a genuine possibility. This is as real as it gets. Nothing will ever be the same again.
I'm heading off this series of sub-sections with Mike Davis' essay from 03/13.* Though it focuses largely on the US healthcare system, one point glaringly protrudes: few have written about developing nations of the Global South, whose efforts to impede the virus could be severely constrained by a lack of resources. East Asia has had its turn; the West and Southeast Asia are, as of 03/17, the main areas of focus; but will attention be paid to Africa, Latin America, the wider Middle East and Central Asia when their time comes? The world has really only begun to deal with this unfolding disaster. The next days, weeks, and months will be crucial in tracking international progress, or the lack thereof.
(*Here, however, you can find a crucial rebuttal from inside China to Davis' praise of the Chinese state's COVID response.)
The best analysis of global pandemic threats you're likely to find will come from reading Mike Davis' book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. Short of that, you can listen to an excellent interview with Davis here, which is what persuaded me to buy the book. Mike Davis has been on my radar ever since Gavin Mueller called him the best living political writer in the US -- no small praise!! I'd been circling books like City of Quartz and Planet of Slums for a while, but between availability issues and other items on my reading list, they slipped down a few rungs on the ladder. Luckily, the current situation galvanized me in his direction, and my reward has been some of the most lucid writing on neoliberal globalization that I've ever encountered. I tore through The Monster at Our Door in a matter of days and am quickly vaulting into Planet of Slums, a natural follow-up given the conditions described by Davis as creating pandemic-level diseases.
(By the way, I'm not a doctor or anything close to one, but it looks like we should beware aspirin and ibuprofen, which can aggravate symptoms; Tylenol, a.k.a. paracetamol, is the best bet.)
Africa has a head start on managing the coronavirus, and the best lessons are coming from Asia. Right now South Africa appears to be hit hardest. I dearly hope the lockdown slows its spread.
Ethiopia is testing and quarantining its confirmed cases, with 117 potential contacts as of 03/17.
(I'm also seeing rumors of an unusually early arrival in Burkina Faso, i.e. back in January when things were first heating up, possibly due to Japanese nationals who'd arrived in the country around that time.)
Singapore considers a stimulus combination of surplus and "past reserves" for the first time since the financial crisis.
Big trouble in Malaysia. A large-scale religious event has infected a sizable percentage of its 16,000 attendees, but only 7,000 have come forward for testing. Meanwhile, participants have travelled to Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, where cases are now proliferating.
There are parallels with the situation in South Korea. Religious gatherings seem especially prone to infectious spread (this has been the case in Iran too; see below), and it only takes literally one person to cause a massive spike in transmission. I'm sure no one thinks they'd be Patient 31, but then neither did Patient 31 before she went in for testing. Now 80% of new cases can be traced back to her....which must be a horrible weight on a person's conscience. At least South Korea has been proactive in combatting the virus through nationwide, government-subsidized testing. (Here's one US American's quite smooth experience with it.) Other countries could face similar crises with worse results.
Iran releases 85,000 prisoners, though it appears to be temporary. About 60% of the population are now in self-isolation. Sanctions have been devastating the country's coronavirus efforts, and the US stands firm in its refusal to loosen its obscene strangehold. Although China has helped some, I wouldn't be surprised to see death tolls higher in Iran than much of the outside world by the time this is all over. A terrible tragedy that could easily be avoided, were it not for US imperialism.
The Red Nation issues a call to end all US sanctions on Iran (as well as Venezuela and the DPRK), in addition to other demands that will protect the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, the elderly, and Indigenous people living in rural, isolated areas, among others. A group of First Nations in the territory known as Manitoba have considered partnering with Cuba for treatment and training, though nothing formal is yet in place.
As for the US itself, what is there to say at this point? "Failed state" seems like too generous a description for a nation whose lack of preparedness has been in plain sight since 2018. Even the minimal attempts at crisis response expose its status as an illegitimate enterprise. Rick Santelli, a prominent conservative who helped kickstart the Tea Party, would like to apply the same social Darwinism to the vulnerable in 2020 that he encouraged the government to adopt in 2009. He may not need to lift a finger. Thanks to a privatized healthcare system whose drug providers are operating on public money, the US may not see a vaccine for some time, and who knows what the cost will be then? Price gouging was deemed permissible under a bipartisan effort led by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in the mid-90s (note: then-House member Bernie Sanders successfully created an amendment to reverse this. Then-Senator Joe Biden successfully killed that amendment). Tests for the coronavirus also appear unlikely to arrive anytime soon.
Until then, Charles Mudede is one among many arguing that rent/mortgage freezes are necessary to protect personal finances. Unemployment has spiked at record-high levels, leading to backlogs in processing benefits (I will probably need to sign up on Monday, March 30th, after I'm furloughed). In Milwaukee, a hypersegregated city, middle-aged black men comprise the majority of coronavirus victims. I understand there's also a racial disparity in Detroit. New York has just days to prevent an outbreak as awful as Italy's (let's not "augment police" though please). But provisions for frontline nurses are dangerously inadequate. And just to add insult to injury, the EPA is now suspending enforcement of regulations.
Still fragile from the US' unforgivable neglect, Puerto Rico will face challenges in containing the coronavirus.
Ireland is offering unemployment benefits for six weeks, which also applies to self-employed people and people who are still employed but can't be paid by their employer.
Italy prepares to let people over 80 and people in poor health die, should need outweigh resources.
Spain has been a virus hotspot rivaling Italy, but its government has responded forcefully to the rapid increase in cases. (Lots of miscellaneous info on international measures in that link too.)
One global issue (that's covered locally here) will be an increase in abuse and domestic violence. There will be a lot of trauma burdening people once they can leave their homes again. Coupled with widespread deaths of family and friends, I anticipate a lot of fragile emotional states in the coronavirus aftermath.
What about when things stabilize -- if, in fact, they ever do? We'll need more than nudges to rebuild in the aftermath. This excellent interview with evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace clarifies some root causes of modern pathogen transmission. They are about what you'd expect: Western land theft in the Global South, agribusiness, and deforestation all play a part. Also crucial to note is that the Wuhan food market is not fundamentally responsible for the outbreak. Rather, any point in a supply chain that deals with potentially infected animals and brings them into contact with humans could produce a similar effect. One last time: Mike Davis synthesizes Wallace's book, his own reseach, and the emergent coronavirus information to produce a picture of 2020 clearer than anything else I've encountered so far. Nothing will improve unless -- and until -- the world itself changes course.
Natasha Lennard writes of the ways we choose our boundaries, but also the ways they are chosen for us. The Care Collective provides a framework for systematizing care locally, nationally, and globally -- I only shrink away from their use of the word "overcrowding" to describe the movement of people towards the end, which hints in the direction of eugenics despite the general validity of their point. Rob Horning on trying not to "pose with the flag" and cities without people. Beautiful words from Anne Boyer on the evil of those with power, and the love of those without. (Have some more for good measure.) Subscribe to Momtaza Mehri's TinyLetter if you want to keep up with another of the most vital poets currently at work.
I've been liking Anton Jäger's writing and perspective lately...but there are some weird undertones in this that I don't like, despite agreeing with a lot of it. The 'class first' rebuke to identity politics ignores how vivid experiences of identity-based oppression often lead people to a broader anti-capitalism. His distaste for a "post-paternal" move toward an "infantile," "maternal" state of complacency feels gendered in an ugly and masculinist way. A linked essay by Benjamin Fife and Taylor Hines only doubles down on this sneering dismissal, despite introducing the useful concept of "claustrum." I find it very strange that anti-capitalists see no utility in building mutual understanding between oppressed people, as if that is some luxury distracting from a class struggle which always-already involves people of infinitely varied backgrounds and conditions. "Exclusion" isn't just a petty grievance over not being coddled enough by revolutionary movements. It's a legitimate risk and has been across time, with the experiences of black women in the otherwise very admirable Black Panther Party just one example among many. Should we just expect the excluded to put up and shut up? Or are these strategic flaws that a greater devotion to outreach can help ameliorate? I wouldn't share this if I didn't think it had some analytical value -- I think Jäger is right that history will probably need some time to begin again in earnest -- but there are some red flags here I'll need to think over.
Peering out from within this amorphous blob of time, the real-deal capital-F Future seems impossibly distant -- but it will arrive, one way or another, whether we want it to or not. There are still big plans being made, and they come from the same people who made them before COVID-19. Malcolm Harris brings a stunning piece of undercover journalism that, in fact, wasn't so undercover after all: Shell paid him to participate in a conference about how Shell can adapt to a greener economy while remaining profitable short- and long-term. No strings attached. They have no concerns about their business practices showing up in print, and they seem just as sanguine about the emerging progressive generation who would, in theory, count them as enemies. Co-optation has blunted many social movements before, so I consider this a very real threat to climate justice. Let's not allow their scheme to succeed.
Maybe the longest view yet taken has been Will Davies'. I feel he's right that the most pertinent comparison is neither 2008 nor the 1970s' financial crises, but something like 1945, or even his example of Lisbon. While COVID-19 is certainly an economic cataclysm beyond imagining, I expect we will also look back on this moment as an existential reckoning that altered the course of our lives forever. Davies' citation of Kant is profound and moving: faced with a world in collapse, we must allow ourselves to be reshaped by it, rather than clinging to what we once thought unbreakable. The future belongs to those who find new possibilities within themselves.
***
SubStack post from Kelley Dong about the complacency engendered by the film ecosystem. Genuinely hope I can live up to this gauntlet that they are very right to lay down. (While reading, I recognized that those structural pressures were a big reservation I had about the idea of formally entering that world, which makes me value my independence as a fairly anonymous Letterboxd presence.)
Nick Pinkerton (who has also started a Substack, btw) on the subtle complexities of RICHARD JEWELL. In a similar vein, Sheila O'Malley sizes up Nick Nolte's career of implosive masculinity. Though I've only seen a few of these selections -- WARRIOR, a perfectly fine sports film on the whole, is deepened by Nolte's committed work -- I like the description of him as someone who finds inner ugliness only to hide it from his self-destructive characters. That's a tricky balance, actorly skill and the unthinking flaws we make visible to everyone but ourselves. Film Comment did a podcast a while ago on Robert Mitchum, maybe the quintessential "man who was never young," his reticent presence an invitation to know the sorrows and failures that seem always to be lurking in his past. THE LUSTY MEN is a big favorite of mine for this very reason. Mitchum encapsulates Ray's air of heavy melancholy with a line reading I'll never forget, one that compresses life's smallness and futility into a distant, occluded moment of reflection: "I was born in that room." Haunting like little else I've experienced in art.
A series of novels about young professional women and their unsatisfying lives. There's something in the air, and this seems like part of it.
From Cinema Scope's top-of-the-decade list: Blake Williams on ADIEU AU LANGAGE ("Abstraction is the closest we can get to reality" -- yes).
Few things I look forward to more than the next installment of Rosenbaum's Global DVD Column. Here's 82, and I'm going to add a link to the Ronnie Scheib essay on Ida Lupino, though I haven't read it myself yet. I caught a screening of NOT WANTED a little while back and very much enjoyed it, but I haven't yet followed up on Lupino's other films, which I understand are a bit more troubled (outside consensus favorite THE HITCH-HIKER...I'll go ahead and add that to my Netflix Queue so I don't let things slide again).
A book I'd like to read.
Who better than Adam Nayman to survey a decade's worth of Canadian cinema? His Cinema Scope essay is worth savoring just as a remarkable piece of writing. But as criticism, it reminded me how wide a gap exists between Canadian films I know and Canadian films I've seen. Cronenberg, Dolan, and Villeneuve were easy enough to follow; TAKE THIS WALTZ I caught early on (and even passed along to a friend, forever ago); and then there are the stray works I've been lucky enough to catch, like 88:88, THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN, and OUR PEOPLE WILL BE HEALED. Outside those stray encounters? I recognize many names and many movements from reading Cinema Scope religiously over the past decade, perhaps the film magazine I know best after Reverse Shot. I couldn't even count up the debts I surely owe to their critical guidance. Yet as much as I've sought to keep up with Canadian film in return, two near-misses feel indicative of how little it takes for these films to fall through my fingers. Ashley McKenzie's WEREWOLF came to the Maryland Film Festival a few years back, but for one reason or another it didn't make my viewing schedule -- even though I managed to catch a talk between McKenzie, Nick Pinkerton, Stephen Cone, and other film folks later on. I regret missing it then because I can't find it now, and I already lament the absence of ANNE AT 13,000 FT., Kazik Radwanski's breakout film that managed to secure distribution south of the border....only to find itself in limbo, I presume, after COVID-19's decimation of the film ecosystem. While that can't be helped, nor could it have been foreseen, such a sudden disappearance after years of incremental gain proves the art world is far more fragile than most had assumed. Now I can only bide my time while I await the chance to finally see one of Radwanski's films (having already waited the better part of a decade to do so).
Lovely discussion between Devika Girish and Soraya Nadia McDonald of LOSING GROUND, a film I liked a lot and would be happy to revisit with their observations in mind.
One last gift, this one from a tweet by Pinkerton: an ongoing list of African films and where to find them. Large majority seem to be on YouTube, couple on Rarefilm.com as well, very cool to see a project like this underway!
Friday, February 14, 2020
02/20
Persuasive account of how communism succeeded, then failed, in Central and Eastern Europe. To be a bit reductive, it seems that rising standards of living produced generally happy populations until the 70s-80s, when a noticeable gulf between the elite and non-elite strata made itself obvious.
I've begun to make a point of reading A.S. Hamrah whenever something of his becomes available (his Baffler write-up on this year's Oscar movies is just about the only thing worth reading on the subject), and while his Bookforum review of a dismal-sounding New Hollywood lament doesn't have much material with which to work, I did perk up at this accident of crossing currents, featuring Michael Eisner and Don Simpson:
Simpson I've written about before. Eisner I haven't paid as much attention, but considering the shape Disney has since taken, this statement of intent on his part seems like a prophecy that grows more powerful by the day. I'll have to take a closer look at his place in US film history soon.
I don't hate-read things anymore. But sometimes something I read will induce hatred in me, and unsurprisingly, The Baffler tends to do this pretty well. I got a lot of enjoyment out of the spleen vented toward IP that prioritizes "a well-written story" over style, politics, and morality. Also known as "content," as empty and interchangeable as that corporatized non-word implies.
Lately it just seems like there are just so many stories out there that so many people want you to read, and the thing is, I don't want to read (or watch) any of them!! I'm still reading even if I don't follow the @Longreads account on Twitter, I promise! Keep the true-crime documentaries, books, and podcasts far away from me, thanks. The essay also gave me the pleasure of throttling a question I recently asked of myself: whether or not it might be worth pursuing an MFA. Looks like the Iowan, CIA-funded, endlessly workshopped "quality fiction" model still predominates, so again, no thank you!
If anything, I'm surprised that niche film success is the jackpot to which most online magazines and content curators are aspiring. That's the world I know best, and film critics routinely describe it in just about the same language of terminal crisis as is used in this essay.
(Also kind of a relief to learn I can skip the Killers of the Blood Moon book, one I'd considered reading, and just watch the film instead, which will surely be a massive improvement on its source material)
Nice interview of Julia Reichert via Eric Hynes...though unfortunately I ended up disliking AMERICAN FACTORY very much. Between the Obama endorsement and the sinophobia, it gave off the air of state propaganda, which was the opposite of what I'd expected from a documentary filmmaker who'd come up through the labor and women's movements -- as this interview does a fine job of laying out. I have UNION MAIDS bookmarked for another time, because I like to think AMERICAN FACTORY was just one wrong turn after a lifetime of acclaimed work.
Haven't been following Reverse Shot much lately but there's some great stuff on last decade's best films: Violet Lucca on the incongruities and elisions of THE MASTER, Farihah Zaman on the interrogative sweep of CAMERAPERSON, Shonni Enelow on Joanna Hogg's grappling with privilege in THE SOUVENIR, Clara Miranda Scherfig on BOYHOOD (a film that I think has become rather uncool to like, but which I still love), Kelley Dong's sensitive examination of Lee Chang-dong's POETRY, Chris Wisniewski on the beautiful CAROL, and Julien Allen on Kiarostami's wonderful LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE.
(Eric Hynes also makes a good case for the bracingly defeatist INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, a film I enjoyed forever ago, before my aesthetic sensibilities grew repelled by the Coen style. I think this one could still work for me, thanks in no small part to Delbonnel's textured cinematography.)
The problem with bringing back blogs...this is all, sadly, very true. Even blogging here feels like a quixotic attempt at preserving some lost ideal combining introspection and a publicly accessible database -- which is also why I haven't done that e-mail Newsletter/Substack thing other people are doing, because it seems too much like throwing my writing down a bottomless hole in vain hopes of someone seeing it on the way down. I don't begrudge other people for going that route, and in fact I subscribe to three Substacks from three writers I like a lot, but something in me just feels too attached to the blog form, imperfect as it is...
(I will say, though, that Letterboxd seems to me like a promising hybrid, in that it allows for sociality and the guilty serotonin pleasures of more established social media while also giving room for lengthier, more considered writing than Facebook posts or Tweets)
More magisterial work by Kate Wagner, this time on aesthetic pleasure and its relationship to "ruin porn," viewed historically, architecturally, and culturally.
Short profile of Jason Blum, whose thrift has triumphantly cut through the bloat of contemporary Hollywood and found a winning 'formula' for popular genre films. I scare-quote the word formula partly because it feels unseemly when applied to art, but the fact remains: unless you have a strategy for navigating a studio system polarized between micro-budget and mega-budget, it's hard to finance any kind of original work that stands a chance in theatrical release. Years ago I suspected Blum had the right idea, and time has borne that out spectacularly, although I wouldn't say I like all -- or even most of -- the films he's produced. Yet with A24 pumping out Yorgos-inflected pseudo-horror, I much prefer Blum's straightforward approach to genre. The easy money subsidizes occasional risk-taking, and it seems he wants to tilt further in the direction of artistic freedom, despite his skill lying more in the assemblage of talent than any personal auteurist vision (as he himself appears to acknowledge). Also, like with Soderbergh, I enjoy watching the ripple effects of a surprise financial success, something that only real experimentation can produce, and which has grown rarer and rarer as brand-based intellectual property devours US cinema.
Wikipedia, last and best outpost of a non-corporatized internet. Of course it's not totally utopian, as the article admits. Social hierarchies still reproduce themselves there, and if the page-top banners are any indication, they seem permanently in need of donations. Yet it's somehow gained critical mass where imitators have failed, and the engine has begun running itself, to the general benefit of humankind. Hard not to feel moved!
Corey Robin and the fast-growing danger of white minority rule. It's interesting that the Electoral College was apparently a non-issue for most of US history, only revealing its undemocratic roots recently. This also pairs nicely with Jamelle Bouie's look back at the Democratic South's authoritarian enforcement of Jim Crow, elements of which could resurface depending on the levers of power that Republicans decide to utilize in the 2020s.
I hate Piketty, but he's not going anywhere for now, and if I have to deal with that, I'd rather have Will Davies sizing up the new work than break it open myself.
The ambivalent nostalgia of Mike Leigh's CAREER GIRLS, which more and more seems just as impressive an achievement as its more-acclaimed predecessor.
Read everything Robin James writes. This Real Life essay flips the romanticized notion of artistic independence on its head, arguing that so-called independence represents the privatization of risk and thereby making artists the optimal neoliberal subjects. That alone would be a piercing insight, but James also suggests that the ideal of "interdependence" floated by some artists as an alternative is still too intersectionally exploitative, due to its incomplete emancipation from the private property relation. Wow. This is the type of work Terre Thaemlitz regularly produces, which is just about the highest compliment I can give.
Almost finished making my way through this massive look at Japan's pop cultural decline. What's written here ties in quite well with Hiroki Azuma's book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, although this five-part essay is more like the base to Azuma's superstructure. Otaku may be dominating Japanese pop culture, but it's only because the rest of Japan has been suffering three decades of economic malaise, the effects of which have devastated its young generation (I worry more and more about my step-siblings, who'll soon have to confront this crisis). Less disposable income means less cultural production -- except for consumerist sub-cultures, which the essay somewhat oddly fingers as being maladjusted individuals spending their way to group identity. I wouldn't say I disagree with that generalization...but it seems too blunt to see it spelled out like that, so maybe I need to interrogate it a bit more myself. Anyhow, the rise of sub-cultural influence has led to groups like AKB48, powered by fandom and obsessive purchases into mainstream success. I hadn't thought to view AKB48 that way, probably because I never bothered to look beneath the surface of their popularity. But this is a point well worth considering, because I think the same process is underway in the US (Japan, as McKenzie Wark* has said, always seems to be several steps ahead of global trends). Stateside otaku are replacing popular culture with their own obsessive interests: Star Wars, Batman, Marvel, Disney animation and live-action.
I guess now would be a natural segue into the legacy of Bob Iger, ex-CEO of Disney. For that I have an overview from Scott Mendelson, a writer with whom I have a strained relationship. There was a period of time in the mid-10s I read his columns nearly every day because I was interested in keeping up with Hollywood's evolution. Mendelson would zero in on case studies and suggest emerging trends and curtailed possibilities; this I found useful, and it kept me from actually having to see most of the movies. But after a while I found his authorial voice very annoying, heavy as it was on franchise lore and spurious meta-narratives of his own making (often based on some milk-and-water ideas on representation and social justice in mainstream cinema). Reading his work at such a high frequency became an enervating chore, so I jumped ship and have mostly kept away since. But I'll check back in occasionally when other box office articles aren't available, and if someone points me toward something like this, I'll give it a shot, because I know he can crunch numbers and throw together some crude media history if needed. So, circling back to the point at hand, Mendelson's thesis here is that Disney's current empire came about through acquisition, not any kind of pioneering successes Iger can call his own. It's an incredibly conservative legacy, which at first seems to contradict a winning streak one would guess is based on peerless expertise. But these qualities can in fact coexist. Craven calculation and shrewd marketing go hand-in-hand at Disney, and now other studios -- not to mention US film culture as a whole -- survive at the margins of this titanic branding exercise, so impressive in so many ways but always fundamentally dull and depressing at its core.
*Great little interview with her here, btw.
I enjoyed these two articles and think they play well together. There’s another one too that builds on these ideas from another angle, saying that socialism in the West has always been expressed racially, which is why top-heavy governments like Hitler’s Germany actually *are socialist* (even though conservatives misinterpret this point on purpose to discredit socialism/communism). Lotta good stuff!! I really like Mudede.
I've had some occasion recently to reflect on Frederick Douglass, surely one of the most fascinating figures in US historical, intellectual, and political history. As this Jacobin article suggests, there's no easy way to reduce his politics to a handful of agit-prop quotes, but even with the limited excerpts on inequality we have from him, how anyone fail to recognize the moral force of arguments made by a once-enslaved African-American? At the very least they deserve profound respect and consideration; really though, the beginner-level exposure to Douglass provided by the US education system should be deepened over years of intensive study, a lodestar around which all subjects of this infernal slave empire should orient themselves.
I've begun to make a point of reading A.S. Hamrah whenever something of his becomes available (his Baffler write-up on this year's Oscar movies is just about the only thing worth reading on the subject), and while his Bookforum review of a dismal-sounding New Hollywood lament doesn't have much material with which to work, I did perk up at this accident of crossing currents, featuring Michael Eisner and Don Simpson:
Simpson I've written about before. Eisner I haven't paid as much attention, but considering the shape Disney has since taken, this statement of intent on his part seems like a prophecy that grows more powerful by the day. I'll have to take a closer look at his place in US film history soon.
I don't hate-read things anymore. But sometimes something I read will induce hatred in me, and unsurprisingly, The Baffler tends to do this pretty well. I got a lot of enjoyment out of the spleen vented toward IP that prioritizes "a well-written story" over style, politics, and morality. Also known as "content," as empty and interchangeable as that corporatized non-word implies.
Lately it just seems like there are just so many stories out there that so many people want you to read, and the thing is, I don't want to read (or watch) any of them!! I'm still reading even if I don't follow the @Longreads account on Twitter, I promise! Keep the true-crime documentaries, books, and podcasts far away from me, thanks. The essay also gave me the pleasure of throttling a question I recently asked of myself: whether or not it might be worth pursuing an MFA. Looks like the Iowan, CIA-funded, endlessly workshopped "quality fiction" model still predominates, so again, no thank you!
If anything, I'm surprised that niche film success is the jackpot to which most online magazines and content curators are aspiring. That's the world I know best, and film critics routinely describe it in just about the same language of terminal crisis as is used in this essay.
(Also kind of a relief to learn I can skip the Killers of the Blood Moon book, one I'd considered reading, and just watch the film instead, which will surely be a massive improvement on its source material)
Nice interview of Julia Reichert via Eric Hynes...though unfortunately I ended up disliking AMERICAN FACTORY very much. Between the Obama endorsement and the sinophobia, it gave off the air of state propaganda, which was the opposite of what I'd expected from a documentary filmmaker who'd come up through the labor and women's movements -- as this interview does a fine job of laying out. I have UNION MAIDS bookmarked for another time, because I like to think AMERICAN FACTORY was just one wrong turn after a lifetime of acclaimed work.
Haven't been following Reverse Shot much lately but there's some great stuff on last decade's best films: Violet Lucca on the incongruities and elisions of THE MASTER, Farihah Zaman on the interrogative sweep of CAMERAPERSON, Shonni Enelow on Joanna Hogg's grappling with privilege in THE SOUVENIR, Clara Miranda Scherfig on BOYHOOD (a film that I think has become rather uncool to like, but which I still love), Kelley Dong's sensitive examination of Lee Chang-dong's POETRY, Chris Wisniewski on the beautiful CAROL, and Julien Allen on Kiarostami's wonderful LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE.
(Eric Hynes also makes a good case for the bracingly defeatist INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, a film I enjoyed forever ago, before my aesthetic sensibilities grew repelled by the Coen style. I think this one could still work for me, thanks in no small part to Delbonnel's textured cinematography.)
The problem with bringing back blogs...this is all, sadly, very true. Even blogging here feels like a quixotic attempt at preserving some lost ideal combining introspection and a publicly accessible database -- which is also why I haven't done that e-mail Newsletter/Substack thing other people are doing, because it seems too much like throwing my writing down a bottomless hole in vain hopes of someone seeing it on the way down. I don't begrudge other people for going that route, and in fact I subscribe to three Substacks from three writers I like a lot, but something in me just feels too attached to the blog form, imperfect as it is...
(I will say, though, that Letterboxd seems to me like a promising hybrid, in that it allows for sociality and the guilty serotonin pleasures of more established social media while also giving room for lengthier, more considered writing than Facebook posts or Tweets)
More magisterial work by Kate Wagner, this time on aesthetic pleasure and its relationship to "ruin porn," viewed historically, architecturally, and culturally.
Short profile of Jason Blum, whose thrift has triumphantly cut through the bloat of contemporary Hollywood and found a winning 'formula' for popular genre films. I scare-quote the word formula partly because it feels unseemly when applied to art, but the fact remains: unless you have a strategy for navigating a studio system polarized between micro-budget and mega-budget, it's hard to finance any kind of original work that stands a chance in theatrical release. Years ago I suspected Blum had the right idea, and time has borne that out spectacularly, although I wouldn't say I like all -- or even most of -- the films he's produced. Yet with A24 pumping out Yorgos-inflected pseudo-horror, I much prefer Blum's straightforward approach to genre. The easy money subsidizes occasional risk-taking, and it seems he wants to tilt further in the direction of artistic freedom, despite his skill lying more in the assemblage of talent than any personal auteurist vision (as he himself appears to acknowledge). Also, like with Soderbergh, I enjoy watching the ripple effects of a surprise financial success, something that only real experimentation can produce, and which has grown rarer and rarer as brand-based intellectual property devours US cinema.
Wikipedia, last and best outpost of a non-corporatized internet. Of course it's not totally utopian, as the article admits. Social hierarchies still reproduce themselves there, and if the page-top banners are any indication, they seem permanently in need of donations. Yet it's somehow gained critical mass where imitators have failed, and the engine has begun running itself, to the general benefit of humankind. Hard not to feel moved!
Corey Robin and the fast-growing danger of white minority rule. It's interesting that the Electoral College was apparently a non-issue for most of US history, only revealing its undemocratic roots recently. This also pairs nicely with Jamelle Bouie's look back at the Democratic South's authoritarian enforcement of Jim Crow, elements of which could resurface depending on the levers of power that Republicans decide to utilize in the 2020s.
I hate Piketty, but he's not going anywhere for now, and if I have to deal with that, I'd rather have Will Davies sizing up the new work than break it open myself.
The ambivalent nostalgia of Mike Leigh's CAREER GIRLS, which more and more seems just as impressive an achievement as its more-acclaimed predecessor.
Read everything Robin James writes. This Real Life essay flips the romanticized notion of artistic independence on its head, arguing that so-called independence represents the privatization of risk and thereby making artists the optimal neoliberal subjects. That alone would be a piercing insight, but James also suggests that the ideal of "interdependence" floated by some artists as an alternative is still too intersectionally exploitative, due to its incomplete emancipation from the private property relation. Wow. This is the type of work Terre Thaemlitz regularly produces, which is just about the highest compliment I can give.
Almost finished making my way through this massive look at Japan's pop cultural decline. What's written here ties in quite well with Hiroki Azuma's book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, although this five-part essay is more like the base to Azuma's superstructure. Otaku may be dominating Japanese pop culture, but it's only because the rest of Japan has been suffering three decades of economic malaise, the effects of which have devastated its young generation (I worry more and more about my step-siblings, who'll soon have to confront this crisis). Less disposable income means less cultural production -- except for consumerist sub-cultures, which the essay somewhat oddly fingers as being maladjusted individuals spending their way to group identity. I wouldn't say I disagree with that generalization...but it seems too blunt to see it spelled out like that, so maybe I need to interrogate it a bit more myself. Anyhow, the rise of sub-cultural influence has led to groups like AKB48, powered by fandom and obsessive purchases into mainstream success. I hadn't thought to view AKB48 that way, probably because I never bothered to look beneath the surface of their popularity. But this is a point well worth considering, because I think the same process is underway in the US (Japan, as McKenzie Wark* has said, always seems to be several steps ahead of global trends). Stateside otaku are replacing popular culture with their own obsessive interests: Star Wars, Batman, Marvel, Disney animation and live-action.
I guess now would be a natural segue into the legacy of Bob Iger, ex-CEO of Disney. For that I have an overview from Scott Mendelson, a writer with whom I have a strained relationship. There was a period of time in the mid-10s I read his columns nearly every day because I was interested in keeping up with Hollywood's evolution. Mendelson would zero in on case studies and suggest emerging trends and curtailed possibilities; this I found useful, and it kept me from actually having to see most of the movies. But after a while I found his authorial voice very annoying, heavy as it was on franchise lore and spurious meta-narratives of his own making (often based on some milk-and-water ideas on representation and social justice in mainstream cinema). Reading his work at such a high frequency became an enervating chore, so I jumped ship and have mostly kept away since. But I'll check back in occasionally when other box office articles aren't available, and if someone points me toward something like this, I'll give it a shot, because I know he can crunch numbers and throw together some crude media history if needed. So, circling back to the point at hand, Mendelson's thesis here is that Disney's current empire came about through acquisition, not any kind of pioneering successes Iger can call his own. It's an incredibly conservative legacy, which at first seems to contradict a winning streak one would guess is based on peerless expertise. But these qualities can in fact coexist. Craven calculation and shrewd marketing go hand-in-hand at Disney, and now other studios -- not to mention US film culture as a whole -- survive at the margins of this titanic branding exercise, so impressive in so many ways but always fundamentally dull and depressing at its core.
*Great little interview with her here, btw.
I enjoyed these two articles and think they play well together. There’s another one too that builds on these ideas from another angle, saying that socialism in the West has always been expressed racially, which is why top-heavy governments like Hitler’s Germany actually *are socialist* (even though conservatives misinterpret this point on purpose to discredit socialism/communism). Lotta good stuff!! I really like Mudede.
I've had some occasion recently to reflect on Frederick Douglass, surely one of the most fascinating figures in US historical, intellectual, and political history. As this Jacobin article suggests, there's no easy way to reduce his politics to a handful of agit-prop quotes, but even with the limited excerpts on inequality we have from him, how anyone fail to recognize the moral force of arguments made by a once-enslaved African-American? At the very least they deserve profound respect and consideration; really though, the beginner-level exposure to Douglass provided by the US education system should be deepened over years of intensive study, a lodestar around which all subjects of this infernal slave empire should orient themselves.
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