Birthers

As I was looking at Salon's guide to refuting the Birther movement, I thought again about something that has been lurking in the back of my mind for a while.  Perhaps this isn't a fair assessment, but I get the impression over the last several years that the media has given more attention to what I will call fringe voices - by which I mean individuals or collections of people espousing a claim or point of view supposedly of public importance and that clearly does not work within the confines of rational thought.  Regardless of whether or not this is a somewhat recent turn, what surprises me most about this phenomenon is the media's approach to stories surrounding these fringe voices, particularly the desire to engage these voices, to respond to them and refute them.  It seems reasonable to report on the fact that the Birther movement exists, but why engage it on any serious level?  

I suppose one could argue that there any number of people out there who just aren't sure what to think, and we need to provide them with good reasons not to side with the Birthers, but I dont' get the impression that this is the goal of most media outlets.  For example, when I see Orly Taitz appearing on MSNBC, the interview is clearly more about spectacle than rational debate.  It's no great insight that news channels might prioritize entertainment over news, but it seems disingenuous for news channels to take advantage of a situation that easily allows them to take the moral and logical high road.  In other words, not only do they put the incomprehensible Orly Taitz on display, but they do so not in order to cover the story in its entirety but rather to put their own incredulity and thus superiority on display as well.

But there's something else going on here that has some interesting implications for those of us in the world of rhetorical pedagogy.  I notice it in places like the Salon piece and its hypothetical "Uncle Floyd," that relative who keeps forwarding you emails about the "fact" that Obama was born in Kenya.  Salon purportedly offers its guide to debunking the Birthers so that "you can just e-mail this list to Uncle Floyd and get on with your life."  But do we have any reason to believe that Uncle Floyd will be persuaded by this list?  The Birther movement's appeal obviously lies outside of the logical, so why do we suspect that a healthy dose of evidence will persuade its members?  And do we really feel comfortable just getting on with our lives?  Are we willing to dismiss those who won't listen to reason and cut them out of the conversation?  

To return to part of my original point, it seems safe to say that our current state of public discourse (in terms of what the media most frequently presents to us) is far removed from its Enlightenment ideal.  Such discourse has become about more than rational exchange; ethical claims to a speaker's credibility rarely depend (at least entirely, and perhaps even primarily) on actual credentials; pathetic appeals and style often seem to be the most important elements of "persuasive" discourse (since we have largely jettisoned the notion of the logical, "identification" might be a better term here).  In the academic world, the most common response focuses on the importance of education, the need to teach people the fundamentals of argumentation as a means of helping our students successfully navigate the world of civic discourse.  But if we teach our students how to analyze the arguments made by Birthers, to see their fallacies, and to offer counter-arguments, have we taught them anything about actually communicating with the Birthers?  In other words, are we only teaching students how to participate in the Salons of the world, or are we helping them in their email exchanges with Uncle Floyd?  While I'm not sure what all the Uncle Floyd pedagogy would include, I feel fairly confident suggesting that a failure to address these shifts in civic discourse will further contribute to the "us vs. them" mentality informing so much of that discourse, particularly w/r/t fringe voices.  I also feel fairly sure that our response cannot simply be one of highlighting the importance of rational discourse - we have to figure out how to have productive irrational discourse.  Otherwise, we are contenting ourselves to the easy high road and giving up on those emails to Uncle Floyd.

Sublime Infrastructure

My friend Jim recently posted some thoughts on Infinite Jest.  My entry here is largely a response to that post.  I decided that this might be too long for a comment and that the Black Lodge could benefit from a new post of its own.

In his post, Jim points to a few examples of "postmodern" authors paying particular attention to infrastructure in their novels, noting that "these works are dealing carefully with environments in which space and infrastructure are undergoing radical change. These works seem to want to dig deeper into those changes while also acknowledging that you're never going to get to the bottom."  I wanted to suggest the possibility that we approach this attention to infrastructure through a notion of the sublime.

In Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson suggests that the “postmodern sublime” must be understood with reference to “the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself…that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (38).  For Jameson, the postmodern fascination with technology - particularly the sort of computer and digital technologies that involve a nearly incomprehensible (for most of us) infrastructure - ultimately points toward the global network of late capitalism itself, a network both aw(e)ful and terrifying.  Jameson's sublime has a particular Marxist bent in its focus on "economic and social institutions" that have achieved a new level of complexity and ubiquity in postmodernism.  Regardless of whether you follow Jameson in locating the sublime in a material network (as opposed to, for example, seeing the sublime as a function of language), he opens the possibility of linking the sublime to postmodern technology, which itself involves a certain attention to infrastructure.

To return to Jim's claim about infrastructure in certain "postmodern" novels, we could say that the "desire to dig deeper" balanced against the sense "that you're never going to get to the bottom" suggests a sort of sublime.  Infrastructure here suggests, on the one hand, possibility, freedom, and pleasure (the "desire to dig deeper" corresponds to the freedom to explore as well as to escape and to hide, the sense of space implied by a complicated network).  But this freedom can be terrifying; if there's no bottom, there's nothing on which to anchor yourself except provisionally.  Also, while you may never get to the bottom, there's often a corresponding paranoia that someone sees the system whole, that someone or something stands outside of the infrastructure, in whose service it functions.

Along these lines, to point to some of Jim's examples, in Didion's Play It As It Lays, the rush that Maria gets from driving California highways gets balanced against the terror she feels whenever she thinks about pipes after having an abortion.  The sort of freedom from subjectivity that Tyrone Slothrop experiences in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow by adopting a number of personas as he explores the underground networks of WWII Europe gets balanced against his disappearance as a subject in the novel.  In The Crying of Lot 49, the Trystero could either be the promise of a vast network of the dispossessed linked by the desire to reach out and touch someone or an elaborate hoax pointing to nothing more than the bizarre mental network of Oedipa's former lover.

One limitation of this understanding - suggesting infrastructure as a sort of sublime trope - is that it often leads to a sort of critical impasse:  the ambivalent tendencies embodied in the sublime allow us to contemplate simultaneously the tremendous possibilities of these different incarnations of infrastructure and their terrifying implications, but this leaves no clear path for moving beyond aesthetic contemplation into some form of praxis.  While I wouldn't suggest that these novelists have a political agenda, I do find it interesting to try to chart exactly what these instances of infrastructure perform in these texts.  In other words, while I think that examples of infrastructure in part lend themselves to sublime readings, different texts seem to be shaping our attitudes toward these sublime possibilities in various ways.  In this sense, I tend to think not that the goal of these novelists is to invoke the sublime for aesthetic reasons but rather to represent it as a particular aspect of postmodern experience.

Interview Project

Interview Project (directed by Austin Lynch and Jason S.) began airing this week.  The extent of David Lynch's involvement in this project seems unclear - the site appears under his name and he introduces the interviews and the project generally, but he was not involved in the filming.  Nonetheless, this project overlaps with his films in many ways, primarily in its exploration of the weird, violent, and absurd (and yet sweet, human, and nostalgic) aspects of small-town (dare we say "real"?) America.  In a strange sort of way, Interview Project seems to implicitly make the case that Lynch's other projects have been much more realistic than might have been suspected.  Take the second episode (released today):  as Tommie Holliday describes how he is waiting for his girlfriend to get out of jail in sixteen months after serving time for murdering her ex-boyfriend with a machine gun after he stalked her across the Arizona countryside and finally, when meeting her face to face, came at her with an axe, it is easy to think of Big Ed Hurley shooting out Nadine's eye on their honeymoon or Sailor and Lula's adventures through the South.  

As with Lynch's movies (and perhaps more profoundly in this context given its real-world situation), one of the main achievements here seems to be the laying bare of "real" America for what it is - not that there is a dark underside to the traditional veneer, but that our national identities have always been much more complicated and implicated in violence, perversity, and absurdity.  David Foster Wallace made this point in his definition of Lynchian as a term that "refers to a particular type of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter."  The point isn't to demonstrate the macabre hidden under the mundane but rather to expose their interpenetration and interaction.

At this point, it seems reasonable to ask why David Lynch would go this route and what ultimately we should make of it.  What does Interview Project achieve that the films do not (and vice versa)?  In many ways, Inland Empire suggests a sort of limit of what Lynch could achieve in film.  I don't mean to suggest that he's not capable of doing more with film, but it is hard to imagine him carrying his recent themes - specifically the splintering of identity through various levels and sorts of fantasy - further than in his most recent film.  In Inland Empire, it seems much less plausible to recreate the sort of narratives that can nearly be found in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive; which version of Laura Dern really exists?  How many versions are there?  Is she not merely someone else's fantasy?  If Lynch has indeed reached an extreme here - if it would be difficult to show any more poignantly the utter chaos and terror that comes out of our attempts to make sense of desire - what does it say that the next step in the progression is a turn to reality?

Perhaps it is not fair to suggest a sort of progression here.  In some ways, the people we see populating Interview Project seem as if they would be more at home in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks than in Lynch's more recent works.  And yet there is a sort of narcissism pervading the more recent efforts; Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire focus so intently on the fantasy worlds of single characters that their stories suggest a sort of gradual looking inward, seemingly to the point of insanity or death.  In earlier Lynch films, the exploration of a character's desire tended to lead them outward to a community that mirrored this desire or participated in it.  

If we accept this description of Lynch's earlier and later films, where would we locate Interview Project?  We see the interviewees in isolation, but we get a sense for the sort of communities in which they participate.  We get this sense first through their stories, through their thoughts on the people that have shaped and continue to shape their lives.  There is another sort of community at play here as well, an American community consisting not necessarily of a set of shared values but rather shaped by similar forces, American forces.  Perhaps this is not a fair claim (I certainly don't have the expertise to make it), but there does seem to be (Lynch implicitly seems to suggest as much) a particularly American form of the grotesque (which Flannery O'Connor sees as combining elements of violence and comedy) that links the interviewees.  It is simply difficult to imagine that a road trip through any other country would yield these results.  But this is a different question than I want to pursue here.

At this point, it still seems interesting to me to decide what sort of step Interview Project represents in Lynch's work.  I'll suggest a few possibilities, some of which might already have been hinted at.  1) We can think of Interview Project as an attempt to justify and/or validate Lynch's films and some of his most memorable characters.  In other words, Interview Project proves that Lynch isn't simply making this stuff up out of nowhere - these people exist.  2) We can think of Interview Project as an extension of his more recent films.  Having reached the limit of what he could do to represent the fracturing possibilities of desire in film, Lynch now offers a sort of fractured view of American desire writ large, the multiple personalities played by people across the continent.  3) We can think of Interview Project as a return to Lynch's earlier works where the focus was not on characters descending into narcissistic madness but rather looking outward and finding strange sorts of community bound by desire.  Surely other possibilities will present themselves as the series continues.  

On a personal level (and this sentiment seems to be shared by other viewers), it is difficult not to watch these interviews and feel a certain sweetness.  It's possible that this sweetness is purchased all too easily, in the form of some nostalgia that Lynch often hints at but rarely indulges, the nostalgia invoked by telling the stories of small-town Americans, no matter what their stories may be.  And yet there seems to be something good about telling the story of "real" America and having it sound so beautiful and strange.

Outliers

It has been a while since I've posted here, and it is an interesting coincidence that brought me here tonight.  My friend Jim was discussing Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's book explaining how individual success is a product of many factors that have little to do with the individual.  Later in the evening, I found David Brook's column discussing Outliers and another interest of Jim's:  attention.  Jim has been thinking about attention with reference to the impact of speed on rhetoric.  We live in a fast culture; rhetoric historically has privileged deliberation.  As rhetoricians (which Jim and I are), how do we respond?  In the classes we teach, we often encourage students to try to slow down, to notice, to reflect.  But can this approach be applied to our culture generally?  Is there a way to slow down the world around us?  Or do we need to find a way to speed up our own rhetoric?

In his column this evening, Brooks responds to Gladwell by (ree)valu(at)ing individual accomplishment and ability:

Most successful people begin with two beliefs:  the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.  They were often showered by good fortune, but relied in crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.

Brooks has been examining the limits of the individual for some time now.  At times he has used his column as an opportunity to reflect upon research and theories from recent years that suggest the importance of our material and social environments in shaping our ways of thinking, our beliefs, our identities/identifications.  When I opened his column this evening, I expected him to celebrate Gladwell's book as another example in this line of thought.  On second thought, Brooks's celebration of the individual fits comfortably alongside his conservatism.  The main aspect of this celebration focused on attention:

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention...Control of attention is the ultimate individual power.  People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.  They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons.  This individual power leads to others.  It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses.

I take note of this for two reasons:  it has interesting implications for Jim's thoughts on attention, speed and rhetoric; also, it helps me think through my own reasons for starting this blog.  One of my main challenges as a grad student has been maintaining focus and attention.  I struggle to "choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons."  Blogging seemed like a way to do this, a way to focus on a series of thoughts and develop them over time.  Unfortunately, I have found so far that this condition of non-attentiveness has informed my blogging habits rather than fading away in the face of such habits.

Regarding the implications of Brooks's argument for the rhetoric of attention, a few possibilities suggest themselves.  If the most successful among us have the ability to slow down and sift through the bombardment of information we experience daily, then rhetorical power (in the deliberative and reflective sense of the term) offers a particular sort of cultural currency.  It seems possible that Brooks has not accounted for the extent of Gladwell's argument.  Although I cannot vouch for this from my own reading experience, part of Gladwell's point seems to be that environmental factors play a large role in who will be able to control their own economy of attention.  Attention is not simply what the individual brings to the table to negotiate with a number of environmental determiners; attention itself can be influenced by such context.  This line of thought suggests that the question of attention helps define the limits of the individual, the line between necessity and choice.  This suggests an ethics of attention as well.  David Foster Wallace has described the pedagogical implications of attention, and perhaps for now the last word should be his.

Holiday Surprise

I made it to New York this weekend for the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise tour. This was something of a watershed moment (as I'm sure it was for many in the audience). I lived in Athens for a year around 2001-02 and have found it easy to continue idealizing this place as the home of the greatest music community on earth. This bit of history was resurrected alongside my first few years of graduate school, brought back to memory by my good friend Anthony (who was both at the show and at grad school with me in Austin). I once had a vision of Anthony's head exploding while he was giving a presentation in our pedagogy class. The vision wasn't so much violent as peaceful (or perhaps some combination of the two - think Joe Christmas in Light In August).  Somehow Anthony's exploding head crystalized a vision of community that I was in need of at the time.

When I was in Athens, the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel were already on indefinite hiatus, of Montreal hadn't started recording on laptops yet, and the Elves were still plugging away under most radars. So it was something of a quiet time in terms of mainstream excitement about the Elephant 6. Jeff Mangum wasn't releasing new music, but you could see him on the streets or catch him playing drums at a Circulatory System show. Andrew Reiger was at about every show and house party in town, and Michael Stipe kept showing up about five minutes after I left any place downtown.

It strikes me as strange that Anthony's exploding head and the Elephant 6 stand in my mind as images of community.  Both of these associations signal solitary experiences for me, images of community seen from a distance.  My mother is a fish, if you know what I mean.  Nonetheless, these were the things structuring my experience this past Saturday.  

Perhaps what has struck me most over the years listening to these bands from Athens is the depth of talent.  Everyone plays with everyone else, and everyone writes their own stuff.  But the bands you aren't as likely to hear are often just as good as the ones you are.  I knew Elf Power and the Olivia Tremor Control would rock in New York, but I was amazed at how well the other projects stood alongside them.  There was no weak link in the Holiday Surprise.  When you throw in a seven-foot tall metronome, a singing TV, and a singing saw, you are pretty much guaranteed of the sublime.

There is no particular making sense of this evening.  It can only be another in a long line of exploding heads.  The whole point of the collective seems to be a continual disruption of time and space - the pop aesthetic always gets balanced against the collage, the noise.  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea takes us as far as we can go in the direction of cohesion and then shows it crumbling before us.  Don't hate them when they get up to leave.  So this is how the show has left me:  ruptured, floating in time (many directions at once).  To listen is to constantly be falling apart, and to witness this in person is to ride the ferris wheel on fire.  This is what videos will not remember and why the question of a NMH reunion was beside the point.

Songs played: Major Organ - His Mister's Pet Whistles, Life Forms; Elf Power - An Old Familiar Scene, Spiral Stairs, The Arrow Flies Close, The Spider and the Fly; 63 Crayons - one song; Nana Grizol - 3 songs; Gerbils - about 4 songs; Pipes You See, Pipes You Don't - Karaoke Free, new song; Circulatory System - Yesterday's World; Olivia Tremor Control - Opera House, I Have Been Floated, Sunshine Fix, Love Athena, No Growing, NYC-25 (last two w/ Bill Doss and Julian on the saw); Music Tapes - The Television Tells Us, Schedrevka, Majesty, Manifest Destiny; Neutral Milk Hotel - the Fool

Closer all the time...

What I've Been Listening To...

Parenthetical Girls

It's Not You It's Me

Pattern Is Movement

No Age

The Music Tapes