memetic

The Wednesday quotation, part XVIII: More on TED, from a quite damning review of Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization:

I take no pleasure in declaring what has been obvious for some time: that TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas “worth spreading.” Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister.

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

[. . .]

Since any meaningful discussion of politics is off limits at TED, the solutions advocated by TED’s techno-humanitarians cannot go beyond the toolkit available to the scientist, the coder, and the engineer. This leaves Silicon Valley entrepreneurs positioned as TED’s preferred redeemers. In TED world, tech entrepreneurs are in the business of solving the world’s most pressing problems. This is what makes TED stand out from other globalist shindigs, and makes its intellectual performances increasingly irrelevant to genuine thought and serious action. (Evgeny Morozov, "The Naked and the TED ". The New Republic [August 2, 2012].)

TED

The Wednesday quotation, part XVII: Nathan Heller on TED:

TED may present itself as an ideas conference, but most people seem to watch the lectures not so much for the information as for how they make them feel. ("Listen and Learn: The TED Talk Phenomenon". New Yorker [July 9 and 16, 2012]: 73.)

I really dislike TED. For what it's worth, there's nothing I dislike more about it than the cult of the nauseous Sir Ken Robinson. But that's just a symptom, one among many. We could put it this way, rewriting TED's trademark slogan: they're not ideas, and they're not worth spreading. They're merely balm for the neoliberal soul, a cynical veneer of supposed intellectualism to leaven the effects of the market.

bafflement

The Wednesday quotation, part XVI: Stephan Collini from his excellent, if frightening, account of recent UK government policy on higher education:

The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you "want" – and you certainly can’t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from "the student experience") are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. ("From Robbins to McKinsey." London Review of Books 33.16 [25 August 2011])

bliss

The Wednesday quotation, part XV: Gilles Deleuze on immanence:

Very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face--not subjective qualities. Small children, through all their sufferings and weaknesses, are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss. (Immancence: A Life, 30)

hanging

The Wednesday quotation, part XIV: Michael Wood in the LRB on Don DeLillo's Point Omega, whose plot apparently revolves around a woman's disappearance somewhere in the Southern California desert:

We can't know whether Jessie is dead or not, whether her life has ended in some sort of Psycho-related horror: perhaps the man in the gallery killed her, inspired by the disjunction of cause and effect to murder the person he might instead have had dinner with. But we can't just leave her floating between possibilities, and her disappearance, and her father's sense of loss, are the same either way. DeLillo is not inviting us to think of inscrutable mysteries, he is asking us to weight the interpretative options, like a detective or an art historian. And weighing the options, of course, whichever side we come down on, we have already realised both of them to some degree. [. . .] We have only to hear the word "unthinkable" to start thinking--that's what the word is for--and all kinds of novelists and philosophers will remind us that Wittgenstein's excellent advice ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent") more often than not just can't be taken. ("The Paranoid Elite" London Review of Books [22 April, 2010], 40)

This resonates, I think, with my comments on What Was Lost, in which Catherine O'Flynn short-circuits the readerly process of being forced to think the unthinkable, to imagine all the various interpretative options that result from a mysterious disappearance, when she gives in to the generic conventions of crime fiction by presenting us the case neatly solved, the cause and effect packaged together at the end of her book.

I've also been thinking of Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I read many years ago but which struck me at the time because it defies the convention that suggests that the mystery (again of a missing girl, or here girls, in the desert) should be resolved by the end of the book. You reach the last page no wiser than when you began the first; although perhaps, precisely because you are left "hanging," in fact you are that little bit wiser than you would otherwise be.

finitude

The Wednesday quotation, part XIII: Jacques Derrida on ruination and love:

Ruin is not a negative thing. First, it is obviously not a thing. One could write [. . .] a short treatise on the love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason one loves it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through one's own birth and death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, one's own ruin--which it already is, therefore, or already prefigures. How can one love otherwise than in this finitude? ("Force of Law," Acts of Religion [London: Routledge, 2002], 278)

Mike Johnduff quotes the same passage and has some interesting things to say about Derrida, ruins, and love (mainly riffing off Memoirs of the Blind) at Working Notes. The image above comes from Zingology. And there are some further thoughts about ruins at borrowed city, not least "Love Among the Ruin Porn" parts one (Highland Park) and two (the Heidelberg project).

consolation

The Wednesday quotation, part XII: Anthony Lane on "Lips" (on the right in the photo), the lead singer of Canadian heavy metal band Anvil:

How can you not love a man who thinks like that, dredging the television of consolation from the swimming pool of disaster? ("Rock Solid", The New Yorker [April 20, 2009])

Buddhism

The Wednesday quotation, part XI: Slavoj Zizek on the fetishistic mode of ideology.

"Western Buddhism" [. . .] perfectly fits the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode, in which the ideological lie that structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. Fetish is effectively a kind of envers of the symptom. That is to say, symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed truth erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. [. . .] In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role of allowing us to cope with the harsh reality: fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thorough "realists," able to accept the way things are – since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to defuse the full impact of reality. (Slavoj Zizek, "The Prospects of Radical Politics Today". International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 5.1 [January, 2008])

Gibraltar

The Wednesday quotation, part X: I have just, rather belatedly, learned of George Sassoon's death.

I met George a number of times, many years ago, on the Isle of Mull. On the first occasion, it was the morning after what had evidently been a long night in which he had set out to disprove, by direct and copious scientific experimentation with himself as the guinea pig, the notion that whisky and oysters were a combination fatal to the human frame. He wrote the Island's telephone directory, which included an entry for his cow. He would talk of tram parties in Vienna with Erich Von Daniken.

Despite increasing illness from a slow-moving cancer, George Sassoon remained interested in many aspects of life. He liked to attend conferences on extra-terrestrial activity, and wrote a number of articles on the subject.

He was also a keen student of international affairs, advocating a solution to the problem of Gibraltar that involved offering Spain a reciprocal enclave in southern England - perhaps Dover or Folkestone - which would become a centre for bullfighting and other facets of Spanish life. ("George Sassoon". Daily Telegraph [March 17, 2006])

freeloading

The Wednesday quotation, part IX: A traveller is shocked to learn that they speak foreign in France.

Not only did no one not speak the language, they had also seen us as just a bunch of freeloading backpackers, which is the complete opposite of what the pilgrimage is really about. ("Language Barrier Scuppers Walker", BBC News)

This guy seems to have as much difficulty with English as with French. And how exactly was his "pilgrimage" "the complete opposite" of freeloading?

heterotopia

The Wednesday quotation, part VIII: Foucault on pirate heterotopias.

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century to the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. (Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces." Lecture given in March 1967, printed in Diacritics 16 [1986]: 22-27 [27])

This is a guest post because the quotation was suggested by my brother, Tim.

television

The Wednesday quotation, Part VII: Chávez's government by television.

Welcome to Aló Presidente!, a television chatshow like no other. Sunday's edition, No 295, was the longest yet, a marathon of politics and showmanship, and for many proof that Venezuela has become a country governed largely through television. There are cabinet meetings, national assembly debates and committee hearings in the offices of state in central Caracas, but the most emphatic exercise of power resides in the weekly show hosted by the president. This is where Mr Chávez engages with the masses, announces policies, muses on his political philosophy, and signals the next step in his self-described socialist revolution.

"Chávez governs from Aló Presidente. It is on this show that ministers find out if they have been fired or hired; it is here where mayors and governors are reprimanded for anything they have done wrong," said Arturo Serrano, a political scientist at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas. (Rory Carroll "Government by TV: Chávez sets 8-hour record". The Guardian 25 September, 2007)

anecdotaholic

The Wednesday quotation, Part VI: The fiction of Michael Ignatieff.

They saw the WMDs over the hill, staggering under the weight of their own nonexistence like some funereal assemblage of bent-backed phantoms. Ignatieff crouched in the mulberry copse, glassed his target, cursed the Chomskian dust that risked his weapons ruin, then raised The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jeffersons Dream and sent its buckshot tearing into Iraq-- tatterdemalion, sanction-wracked-- and the rocks behind were splatter-stained with a crimson decoupage like some chromatic inversion of all that is holy and lawful. I kindly reckon we just shot the shit out of Iraq, Ignatieff said. And Friedman said, Lets move in to get a better look at her. And they tried hailing a cab with an anecdotaholic driver but they couldnt find one because they were stranded in a featureless semantic apocalypse, meaning-raped and apostropheless like some joy-smudged, italicized parody of Cormac McCarthy. And on the crest of the hill they heard Kanan Makiya weeping soundlessly like the very enabler of evil itself. (David Rees, "Cormac Ignatieff's 'The Road.'". From The Huffington Post)

Read the rest of Rees's hilarious take-down of Ignatieff here. Via Printculture.

unita

The Wednesday quotation, Part V: Spinoza on the union of bodies.

When a number of bodies of the same or different size are driven so together that they remain united one with the other, or if they are moved by the same or different rapidity so that they communicate their motions one to the other in a certain ratio, those bodies are called reciprocally united bodies (corpora invicem unita), and we say that they all form one body or individual, which is distinguished from the rest by this union of bodies. (Ethics 50)

careerism

The Wednesday quotation, Part IV: lethal careerism.

In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implication s of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.(Corey Robin, "Dragon-Slayers," London Review of Books [4 January 2007]: 20)

war

The Wednesday quotation, Part III: the war on culture.

We have to redefine government based on conservative principles, we have to win the war against our culture, and we have to win the war on terror. (Tom DeLay, qtd. in Jeffrey Goldberg, "Party Unfaithful." The New Yorker [June 4, 2007]: 45; my emphasis)

multitud

The Wednesday quotation, Part II: Neruda on the multitude.

Yo no voy a morirme. Salgo ahora,
En este día lleno de volcanes
Hacia la multitud, hacia la vida.
Aquí dejo arregladas estas cosas
[. . .]

Por fin, soy libre adentro de los seres.

Entre los seres, como el aire vivo,
y de la soledad acorralada
salgo a la multitud de los combates,
libre porque en mi mano va tu mano,
conquistando alegrías indomables.
(Canto general 478)

supranational

A new feature: the Wednesday quotation. Part 1: Celebrity colonalism and the end of the nation state.

Bono has become a one-man state; more than that, he’s a one-man cross-border supranational institution. He presumes to speak for millions, not on the basis of a democratic mandate but on the basis that he – mystically, magically, and because Africans are apparently too poor and destitute to speak for themselves – really, really knows what Africans want. Thus we have the utterly bizarre spectacle of a rock star putting pressure on leaders who were elected by millions of people to do what ‘I WANT’ in Africa. British newspaper columnist Rod Liddle refers to him as "the People’s Republic of Bono," and wonders how long it will be before he is given "a seat on the United Nations security council" or makes an announcement that "he is developing nuclear weapons". (Brendan O'Neill, "Welcome to the People's Republic of Bono", from spiked)