espresso bongo

Nationalism and Poetry: Thoughts on Pascale Casanova and Adam Zagajewski's "Poems on Poland"

I noticed during the State of the Union the other  week, how frequently the theme of economic nationalism was invoked (bringing jobs back home, rewarding companies who base their manufacturing here, etc.).

And judging from the polls afterwards, it worked -- across the political spectrum.  This got me thinking about nationalism in general.  If ideas about "the Nation" strike such a chord, how might they affect aesthetics?

In an essay in the latest New Left Review, literary historian Pascale Casanova argues that feelings about "national identity" are actually a central, if sometimes unconscious, element of literary production.

Even writers who eschew such identification, embracing a sort of cosmopolitanism, are only able to do so because of the confidence their national culture affords them.  In other words, if you're a writer from an older literary cuture, one already respected on the world stage, you don't need to worry about your right to write.

But for nations just emerging, the driving aesthetic often has to do with discovering, refining and battling  for a national identity.  And making the case that one's own culture can stand, aesthetically at least, toe to toe with the giants.

One might imagine, by extension, that an important step in such aesthetic nationalism would involve fighting off the images cast upon your culture by the more powerful.

These ideas came to life for me as I was rereading a poem by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.  Poland, as a national culture, is certainly in a state of (re)emergence, since it only recently has escaped (yet again) the domination of its aggressive neighbors.

Zagajewski's poem records the aesthetic after-shocks of such a history:

POEMS ON POLAND

I read poems on Poland written
by foreign poets.  Germans and Russians
have not only guns, but also
ink, pens, some heart, and a lot
of imagination.  Poland in their poems
reminds me of an audacious unicorn
which feeds on the wool of tapestries, it is
beautiful, weak and imprudent.  I don't know
what the mechanism of illusion is based on,
but even I, a sober reader,
am enraptured by that fairy-tale defenseless land
on which feed balck eagles, hungry
emperors, the Third Reich, and the Third Rome.

The picture painted of Poland by more powerful nations here reminds me of Donald Lopez's classic book on the cultural history of Tibet, Prisoners of Shangri-La.  In it, Lopez examines how that country has been portrayed in books (and skewed translations of Tibetan texts) by Western scholars, New Agers and explorers.

This "mystical kingdom" has been seen as everything from a utopia ("Shangri-La") to a sort of medieval slave state; its people portrayed sometimes as superstitious and even barbaric -- at others, deeply wise (if idealized) magicians.  But like Poland, however Tibet is pictured, it generally ends up seeming like a place lost in the past and its own passivity.  It's rarely an actor on the modern stage.

The Poetics of U.S. Nation Building

But the nationalist muse doesn't only inspire smaller, less powerful countries.  As U.S. literature came into its own, as Casanova points out, it too competed on the stage of international cultural politics.

Throughout the 19th century, U.S. writers, in their own quest for cultural independence, saw themselves in competition with Britain.  This nationalist impulse reached a high point in Whitman (who has been hailed as "America's  Shakespeare").  As Casanova puts it:

"Walt Whitman's writings contain magnificent pages on the power, novelty and immensity of American verse, while the United States themselves constituted 'the greatest poem' of all." 

It's amazing how such poetic nationalism persisted -- especially in view of how dominant the U.S. became by the mid 20th century.  As late as the early 60s, for example, poet George Oppen criticized U.S.  poets for looking away from their home soil -- and toward "the exotic arms of Zen" -- for inspiration.  Oppen remarked that for his generation, developing a more homegrown poetics (Williams being the ground breaker here) was considered the radical position to take.

Why?  "We grew up on English writing..." he wrote, and "the more open society [of the U.S.] made possible the literary career of the obviously non aristocratic spokesman who, once he tired of Invocation to Someone Else's Muse, had to make his own poetry."

Nevertheless, I'm not sure how appealing such ideas are for U.S. poetry anymore.  A few years back, I remember attending literary events attempting to answer the question of "What's American about American Poetry" (as if few knew anymore).

But I wonder, if the national economic ideology shifts away from the globalism of the last 25 years or so, how might this affect poetry, or our aesthetics in general.  Thoughts?

 

From Diesel (Jeans) Island to Zuccotti Park: Thoughts About OWS and Some Recent TV Ads and Videos

I've been away from this blog for a few weeks to get other writing projects done.  Now that I'm back, I thought it would be interesting to look at a few TV ads and videos that are  related -- directly or indirectly -- to Occupy Wall Street and/or our current political culture.

First, one from the Right (specifically focused on a Democratic candidate) that slams OWS and everyone associated with it.

Negative Political Attack Ad on Elizabeth Warren

 

This Karl Rove production associates Warren with the anachronistic sign of Communism ("radical redistribution of wealth"), with a little 60s era "hippie druggie" stuff thrown in for good measure.

But what interests me more here is one of the other reasons the ad offers as to why this rising Democratic star is "dangerous" -- she's an intellectual theorist.  This sort of "accusation" is partly a recycling of Cold War-era anti-intellectualism.  But it also points to another cliche about intellectuals: they're supposedly ineffectual, i.e., "all theory and no practice."

This can also be related to a common criticism of Occupy Wall Street.  Some commentators have complained that the movement is indefinite as to its demands.  At the heart of their irritation is the implication that OWS is all ideals, no "getting down to brass tacks" -- a variation on the theme of all talk/protest, no (effectual) action.

The next ad, produced for OWS (funded through an online crowdsourcing site), does a lot to answer both the criticisms of radicalism and impracticality.

Occupy Wall Street TV Ad

 

This ad seems designed to answer the question of "what do they want?" head on.  Every person who makes a cameo here begins their statement with "I want..." Some demands/desires are more general -- but others are quite specific.

Additionally, the mosaic of faces presented in the ad is from a wide enough swath of U.S. society (and the people look "normal" enough) to prove that OWS, rather than a radical "them" is a home grown "us".  You  might call the spot a representation of representativeness -- signifying not "dangerous foreign collectivism" but U.S. democracy with a capital D.

"Diesel Island Is Going Down!" (Video Ad)

In the context of the argument about the need for change that you see in the first two ads, the new video ad below for Diesel Jeans (though not directly about OWS) is  all the more fascinating.

A few months back, this blog covered a Diesel campaign in which the brand created a wacky kingdom called Diesel Island, "the least fucked up country of all".  It was an imaginary nation, made up of a kooky community of young idealists who all, of course, wore Diesel Jeans.

In this new video, we find out that this utopian experiment in (heavily-branded) democracy, alas, has succumbed to corruption and scandal:



Looking at this clip now, it's hard not to think, by coincidence at least,  of that other locale where utopian impulses are springing up: Zuccotti Park.  And though neither of the first two spots touches on it directly, the utopian element of OWS is what actually excites some commentators  Here is Matt Taibbi, reporting for Rolling Stone:

"...Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance.  It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything.  This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become.  If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it."

Is not the original message of Diesel Island (and other imagined brand communties such as the Republic of Corona) exactly the sort of thing that Taibbi sees OWS as rejecting? That is, the offering, say, of brand images and experiences as simulated stand-ins for more actual sorts of freedom.

Some scholars claim the ideological function of consumer culture is precisely to provide such  consolation prizes as substitutes for our own insurgent impulses.  William Davies put it this way, in a recent article in New Left Review:

"Advertising, like management theory, is fuelled by a critique of the dominant normative-economic regime within which it sits, facilitating safe acts of micro-rebellion against the macro-social order."

In this light, the dissolving of Diesel Island seems almost honorable.  It's as if consumer culture's unconscious is saying (in video dream-speak): "hey, when you've got real utopian experiment in the news, who needs a simulated one?"  (Though what Diesel's ad folks really intend is probably to  just to promote the brand as cool,  by way of joking around with the  political zeitgeist.)

In any case, this all makes you wonder: if experiments like OWS persist, what will it mean for consumer culture as we've known it?  Thoughts?

 

"Imported from Detroit" and Made in America: Dr. Dre and John Varvatos in Chrysler Commercials

Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" campaign (the brainchild of French-born marketing guru Olivier Francois) covered on this blog a few months back, tuned out to be a hit.  brandchannel recently reported on its success:

"Chrysler was clearly onto something when it launched its breakthrough 'Imported from Detroit' campaign.  Sales spiked, leading the company to launch phase 2.  Explaining the positioning, Chrysler CMO Olivier Francois told brandchannel 'American coolness is essential to our strategy, because that's exactly what imports do not have, and some other American [luxury] brands don't have as well."

Here are two of the latest spots from the campaign that build on its position.  One featues Detroit-born high-fashion designer John Varvatos, the the other Dr. Dre:

 

 

The Chrysler 300 in these ads is considered a luxury car.  And one of the reasons the spots work, it seems to me (and perhaps one the secrets of the "American" positioning),  is that they're able to make luxury seem cool, rather than just boujie.  But how do they do that?

For one thing, they suggest that in America there's little shame in luxury.  Because this sort of luxe is accessible across class and race lines, if you work hard enough.

And the bold, blue-collar celebrity endorsers in these spots (like Eminem in the kickoff spot) have a nice rub-off on the car itself. Their presence and authenticity assure not only fine workmanship, but originality and most of all hipness.

A Bit Utopian...But So What?

You could say then, that these commercials work on reinventing the American Dream, not to mention the industrial might that made it credible.  Whether such a meaning rhymes with the current state of the economy may not really matter.  Ads are about wishes (often utopian) as much as they are about products.

But not only that.  Due to the increasing class stratification in the U.S., where "the top 1% alone control nearly 40% of the wealth,"  it turns out that the top 10% of households now "account for almost half of consumer spending."  In other words, the message of these spots simply doesn't have to be believable to everyone to make them effective.

And recent data reveals that "American Made" is an appealing pitch to the affluent.  brandchannel points outs that "traditionally, it has been the lower end brands that have leveraged the appeal of American-made, but now luxury brands have picked up the theme...

"An American Express Publishing/Harrison Group survey conducted this year showed that more than 75% of wealthy consumers like brands made in America, and 65% of them buy American-made products whenever possible."

The piece I'm quoting from speculates that the appeal of such branding could be the result of anything from ideas that buying American is good for business, patriotic -- or that such products are simply made better.  It also mentions a website (MadeInUSAForever), whose following is growing quickly, dedicated to this sort of "nationalist" shopping,  that offers more reasons why people should consume this way.

 Certainly, the idea that your consumption habits have political consequences has been richly elaborated throughout U.S. history.  The very identity of "the consumer", in fact, was invented in part by the New Deal administration as a counterweight against corporate power.

For that matter, the success of the Chrysler campaign itself will have an effect on current politics. Because the the U.S. car industry's rebirth was jumpstarted by government investment, it will be a key theme for the Dems in the upcoming presidential race.  The Obama campaign is even replacing McCain's "Joe the Plummer" with "James the Jeep Worker."

As far as the Chrysler campaign goes, though, I think the appeal is best explained by a bit of literary, rather than political, history.  It turns out that nationalism is tied to distinct meanings in terms of aesthetics, too.

The great literary historian, Pascale Casanova, tells us that in the evolution of world literature, France, via of course Paris, once assumed total dominance.  So much so, that the styles of Parisian art and writing were considered a universal measure of the best there was.  French aesthetics were judged the most sophisticated and "cosmopolitan" (or, as we'd put it today, they were the signature style of "globalism"). 

But, as German national consciousness rose, to compete with the French, another measure of good literature came about.  According to the German philosopher Herder, the arts, rather than copy the global standard (or aim for universality), should strive for authenticity.  And this would be achieved, he theorized, if they sought to express the "soul" of the Nation and its people.

Chrysler's CMO is following Herder's strategy for his brand communications.  What's more associated with the "American soul" than cool?

But, ironically, it's taken a sophisticated, French-born, cosmopolitan executive to grasp this. Thoughts?

 

Existential Pop: Dr Pepper Meets the Incredible Shrinking Man

Lately, I 've found myself amused at a Dr Pepper commercial (originally created, I think, in 2009) set in a self-help group.  It seems the animated characters in the spot meet for support in dealing with a particular social handicap: the world refuses to acknowledge their existence:

 

What caught my eye about this commercial was its comic light touch -- even when alluding to something everyone from therapists, to philosophers, to the great modern writers seem to agree is a serious one: the establishment of a personal sense of "being" -- or, as it's more commonly referred to today, an "identity."

This concern even got translated into a specific form of cultural politics (usually called "identity politics" or "the politics of recognition").  In the 80s and 90s, "identity" movements arose on the liberal side of the spectrum (concerning rights around the issues of gender, ethnicity and sexuality).  Later, this style of politics was mimicked on the Right, often around religious beliefs and traditionalist lifestyles.

Cultural Studies scholar Nancy Fraser analyzes the philosophical roots of this tendency:

"The usual approach to the politics of recognition -- what I call the 'identity model' -- starts from the Hegelian idea that identity is constructed dialogically, through a process of mutual recognition. According to Hegel, recognition designates an ideal reciprocal relation between subjects, in which each sees the other both as its equal and also as separate from it.  This relation is constitutive for subjectivity: one becomes an individual subject only by virtue of recognizing, and being recognized by, another subject.  Recognition from others is thus essential to the development of a sense of self."

As Fraser indicates, a sense of identity is created socially as much as it is internally.  One essential for its establishment is that others take you seriously.

What's comic about the spot is that you see this logic  applied to establishing a brand identity.  The problem the Dr Pepper guy has is signaled by Santa Claus: people think what he stands for (a diet soda with great flavor) is a laughable myth.

Intentionally or not, what this setting also brings to mind is the brand identity issue a soda with a hard-to-categorize taste like Dr Pepper already carries with it.  As the Wiki about Dr Pepper puts it:

"W.W. Clements, a former CEO and president of the Dr Pepper/7-Up Company, described the taste of Dr Pepper as one-of-a-kind, saying "I've always maintained  you cannot tell anyone what Dr Pepper tastes like because it's so different. It's not an apple, it's not an orange, it's not a strawberry, it's not a root beer, it's not even a cola."

For that matter, even where the name "Dr Pepper" comes from is somewhat of a mystery.

In any case, such a lighthearted take on angst about the "question of existence" brought to my mind, by way of contrast, another version of pop-culture existentialism -- this one from a much earlier era...

"The Incredible Shrinking Man" Ponders His Existence

If you're obsessed with classic Science Fiction films like I am, you may be familiar with the story of "The Incredible Shrinking Man."  In the 1957 movie, the hero of this flick runs into a radioactive cloud, while he's out boating.  Soon after, as a side effect, he begins to shrink.

As he gets smaller and smaller, common household creatures -- cats and spiders -- turn into horrific monsters.  But as the movie progresses, he becomes too small for even them to see (or torment). Then his problems grow more philosophical.  As he faces the prospect of becoming as tiny as a molecule, or even an atom, he wonders whether, since living things can no longer recognize him, he even still exists.

Here's the way he resolves his quandary in the closing monologue (which ends "I still exist!"):

 

Whatever Happened to the Age of Anxiety?

In this clip, it's the gaze of God that assures the hero of his continuing identity/existence.  But today, it seems to me, many people look elsewhere for the recognition they need to build their sense of self.

Is not one of the appeals of social media, with all the "friending" it encourages, that it offers a quick, technologic way to make a person feel like somebody?  And, establishing an identity this way is certainly achieved with a lighter touch than in previous eras: a modicum of recognition is just a few clicks away.  No wonder even "identity politics" seems to be fading from the scene.

But I wonder, does this mean the "search for authenticity" will soon be passe?  Any thoughts on this -- or these clips?

 

The Poetry of Political Tragedy: George Oppen's "Armies of the Plain"

As I was in the process of writing a post about a George Oppen poem I admire, the story about the shootings in Arizona continued to unfold.  I was struck by the sad resonance this event had with the poem I was writing about.

"Armies of the Plain" offers Oppen's reflections on the story of the Kennedy assassination, by way of a study of its two gunmen: Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.

It's a provocative poem -- speculating not only on a possible motivation behind political violence, but on the connection it might have to poetry and aesthetic pursuits in general.

Armies of the Plain

1.

'A zero, a nothing':
Assassin.

Not nothing.  At nineteen
Crossing frontiers,

Rifleman of the suffering --
Irremediable suffering -- of the not great,

Hero and anti-hero
Of our time

Despite all he has cost us
And he may have cost us very much

2.

Ruby's day,
Bloomsday.

Ruby

Proud to have learned survival
On the harsh plains --  --

Bloomsday.

A man
'Of the Jewish faith . . .'

'and it is so stupid . .
And I never use the term . .'

Whose people wrote
Greatly

Desperate the not great,
Like Oswald the not great

Locked
In combat. 

The Art of the Warren Report

When I looked for some background on this poem, I found, in an extremely helpful essay by Stephen Cope (read it here) that it was informed by Oppen's reading of the Warren Report.  The phrases in quotes throughout the poem are taken from Jack Ruby's comments about Oswald and himself as recorded by the Report.

Oppen not only found this document convincing -- he thought of it as a masterpiece in its own right. In fact, he looked at the section in which Jack Ruby explained his motivation for shooting Oswald as a kind of American Bloomsday -- with Ruby as a more tragic, because more banal, version of Leopold Bloom from Joyce's Ulysses.

Playing off the actions of these two "nobodies" (who became (in)famous) against a work like Ulysses (and an immortal creation like Leopold Bloom), it seems, helped Oppen speculate on the motivation behind Oswald and Ruby's violent actions.

Oppen related the "desperate" desire for greatness, on the part of Oswald and Ruby, to his own motivation for writing poems.  Like him, they were compelled to look for meaning.

But Oppen felt that the social order didn't offer a lot of roles in which one could find such fulfillment.  As a result, most were forced to "lead...lives without meaning and without drama and without honor."

The Importance of Being Nobody

Another of the quotes Cope includes in his piece suggests to me that Oppen, in adopting the role of "poet" in answer to a yearning for meaning (or even greatness), realized that one of its advantages was that the literary world itself at times makes a virtue out of what drives many crazy: a lack of recognition.  As Oppen puts it:

"It so happens that I   well,
happen to occupy a position at the precise apex of the pyramid, there is no one who outranks me.  First, because I am a poet, which is what gives me a position somewhere in the upper layers of the cultural pyramid, and finally because I am an unknown poet, which places me in the highest position of our society.  I outrank the President of the United States.   It is understood that if the President had the temerity to invite me for dinner, I would contemptuously refuse.  If I did not refuse, I would no longer be an unknown poet, of course, and would no longer outrank the President."

Oppen isn't just being satiric (or snobby) here.  As the late, great sociologist of culture, Pierre Bourdieu pointed out, in esoteric realms like avant-garde poetry, there's a loser-wins scenario.

That is, as if to make a virtue out of the relative obscurity of one's endeavors, writing to achieve "greatness for the ages" (rather than mere fame for today) is often taken as a sign of artistic integrity (i.e.,  a refusal to sell-out).  Thus, lack of commercial/official/public popularity can help increase one's prestige, at least among other poets "in the know."

Of course, Oswald and Ruby (like most) didn't have access to such rarefied aesthetic worlds.  But without some such sublimation, the poem suggests, their desires for greatness end up being acted out in the literal world -- with explosive results.  As Cope puts it:

"Oswald's act amounts for Oppen to a caveat bearing on the hazards of confusing the literary with the literal, the poetic with the political, and of wanting to achieve historical greatness at a time, and from a place, when and where it is historically impossible to do so."

Granted, few would apply such an aesthetic/existentialist take on the assassins of today.  Their actions are usually explained as a result of paranoid psychology meeting gun-toting (or religious) propaganda.  But Oppen's poem suggests at least that an additional speculation might be proposed about the causes of our current insanity ...

That, in an age of celebrity, maybe a lack of fame is another thing that drives people nuts.

NOTE:
For an intriguing comparison between today's assassination culture and the 60s', see the posts at Lally's Alley, starting here. 

 

 

What's So Funny About Hermann Goering? Or, Why I'm Afraid of (Political) Clowns

Reading Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas, a satirical encyclopedia of the lives of fictional poets and prose writers, I came across one faux biography I found especially amusing.

Under an entry labeled "Franz Zwickau, Caracas, 1946 - Caracas, 1971", we get the tale of a "son of German immigrants", once called "Venezuela's best schoolboy poet".  Here is part of Bolano's "review" of a "badly written" volume titled The War Criminals' Son:

"A number of poems are noteworthy:
--'A Dialogue with Hermann Goering in Hell,' in which the poet, astride the black motorcycle of his early sonnets, arrives at an abandoned airfield, in a place known as Hell, near Maracaibo on the Venezuelan coast, and meets the shade of the Reichsmarschall, with whom he discusses various subjects: aviation, vertigo, destiny, uninhabited houses, courage, justice and death." (p. 90)

Why, I wondered, was this passage, in a book full of fascist camp, particularly funny to me?  Of course, such a description is part of a long line of literary and media images of goofy Nazis, stretching from Chaplin's The Great Dictator, all the way to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.  If, as Susan Sontag first wrote, there's something kinky about fascists, there's something laughable about them too.

This is because as losers, their inflated claims about superiority seem, in retrospect, silly and pompous.  And who looks more boorish than the pudgy Goering?  In his day, he must have been a terror -- but to us, he seems a clown.

You could even say  that satiric portrayals of such figures have created a modern archetype: the puffed-up, anti-intellectual authoritarian who invites our derision as soon as he (or now she) appears in the news.  By now, in fact, this sort of portrayal is so common that figures who embody it have become almost endearing (because of their very familiarity, if nothing else).

But I wonder sometimes if we fail to fully grasp the dangers of modern authoritarianism, precisely because it seems difficult to take our own political buffoons completely seriously...

The Postmodern Political Clown

Back in 2009, the philosopher Zizek began commenting on the parade of puffed-up leaders who now inhabited the world stage.  Blustery figures such as Berlusconi of Italy, Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Putin of Russia, he noted, shared certain personality traits.

All were rather clownish, tending to make flubs, off-color remarks and generally outrageous verbal mistakes in public.  They were also given to emotional outbursts, sometimes containing threats.  

And though he never compares them to Nazis, I couldn't help seeing one rhetorical connection: what makes these figures seem silly is similar to what makes our media images of fascists funny: their almost self-conscious, ironic courting of pomposity, braggadocio and a sort of knowing ignorance- -- as if each were acting the fool for our entertainment.

Further, as Zizek pointed out, it's not only humor that makes these figures popular:

"The wager behind Berlusconi's vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian ... Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man's dream greatness.  Yet we shouldn't be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency.  Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game."

Those Lovable Mavericks and Populists

Recent U.S. politics has been nearly overpopulated with these sorts of figures -- from the Perots of the 90s to contemporary innovations such as the Palladinos and Mama Grizzlies.  They too invite laughter mixed with identification through the screwed up, but "earnest" ways they talk (not to mention their "authentic" emotional outbursts and tweets).

But you have to wonder, in light of all this, if the many parodies these figures inspire might not be helping to normalize their politics -- by integrating them into a "lively and diverse American Scene." Such joking around might even imply that it would be fun (and harmless) to live under their entertaining rhetoric full-time.  They appear on Saturday Night Live after all!

And there's another factor that makes them appealing.  The political theorist Gramsci described (back in the 1930s, under Mussolini) something he called Caesarism.  Gramsci theorized that when large segments of the public perceived conventional politics to be "gridlocked", people longed for an authoritarian figure from outside the system to intervene.

No doubt this is part of the appeal of our own "mavericks."  The more they signal through word, deed and emotional display that they are not part of "regular" politics (despite their corporate backing), the more they they are not only loved -- but seen as a possible solution. 

   

 

Return of the Communist Menace! Recent Political Rhetoric and Steven Johnson's New Book

There's a specter haunting political discourse.  And yes, it's the specter of communism.  Again.  But not plain old materialist communism -- but communism of a virtual kind.  Exaggeration?  Check this out:

 

Actually, even in all its xenophobic glory, that TV spot is rather subtle.  If you listen to Glen Beck and crew, you'll find out that the hated liberals aren't only selling out to the Red Hordes -- they are the commies themselves.

Of course, by now, this sort of propaganda is so familiar it's hard not to be numb to it.  But what surprises me is that even in indie movies nowadays you see a blurring of the concepts of socialist, communist and liberal.  The other night, I was watching Southland Tales (2006), a film by one of my favorite directors, Richard Kelly (who made Donnie Darko and The Box, two films I love).

The film's premise is that because of nuclear terrorist attacks (this time in L.A.) the U.S.  lurches further to the Right -- with increasingly draconian enforcement of the Patriot Act.  There are, we are told, however, pockets of liberal resistance.  The main one is called the Neo-Marxists.

Not since the Cold War, it seems, have incompatible terms like liberal and Marxist experienced this sort of force fitting.  And on the face of it, it is ridiculous.

But, at the same time, over the last few years I've become a believer in the maxim that "the unconscious is on the outside"; i.e., that the secret fears and desires of people and cultures are often presented so blatantly, it's hard to see them.  (They're "hiding in the daylight", so to speak.)

So I began to wonder if this "Return of the Reds" (as in "commies" not red states!) into that public dream we call popular culture might not be expressing something deeper than just propaganda and confusion.

One candidate for the source of these anxieties is played out loudly and clearly by the commercial.  As our economy lags and China's apparently races ahead, there are no doubt fears that our style of capitalism ain't what it used to be.  

Add the double trauma of the Crash and continuing unemployment to the mix, and you start to wonder if this fear of communism is not masking a nostalgia for the Cold War era itself, when things were more prosperous (thanks in part to the very Keynesian economics the TV spot criticizes). 

But recently I came across a set of ideas that led me to wilder speculations about this latest version of commie phobia.

If You Have a Good Idea, Does It Mean You're a Communist?

A buzz-worthy read on the popular non-fiction scene right now is Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From.  In a piece last week in the NY Times in which Johnson wrote about his ideas, he starts by relating how a member of the audience, during his book tour, asked jokingly if he were a communist.  Johnson's article is about why the joke would arise in the first place.

He feels this is because his book makes the case that, since 1800, the majority of new scientific and cultural discoveries arose in non-market environments (i.e. from Universities to individual artists, hobbyists and inventors -- people making things for the sake of making things, without thinking if these these things would make them a buck).  And many of these innovations were the result of collaboration, rather than individual genius.

Of course, he assures us, there are numerous examples of market-driven discoveries.  Interestingly though, of these the majority are also of the collaborative, "networked" type.  So, on balance, he's speaking a heresy.  Though the market drives innovation -- other forces and sources drive it more.  And even in for-profit situations, a collective rather than individual effort most often comes up with the best stuff. 

A case in point: Johnson's own method for studying all this derives in part from the brilliant literary scholar, Franco Moretti (who's been discussed in this blog here) -- whose own ground-breaking theories arose out of his (collaborative) academic research and were published early on in New Left Review. 

Add to this the fact that the internet economy Johnson writes about, that place where huge collectives "liberate" formerly pricey products and share them for free, does tend to act like a big, subversive, electronic commune.

 The problem with all these new collectivities is that, as Johnson points out, there's really no name as yet for them or the symbiotic economies to which they sometimes seem to be on the verge of giving birth.  Maybe this is why old names for collaboration, like communism, keep coming up.

So perhaps, as far as communism itself goes, it may be most accurate to say it's still dead on earth, but alive and well in the heaven of our virtual life -- on the web, at the movies, in televisual space. Not to mention our imaginations -- paranoid or utopian. 

And Now a Word From Your Friendly Neighborhood SWAT Team: Bud Light's "Rescue" Commercial

The gleam of torture tools.  Flashlights in an ominous corridor.  A SWAT team breaking down the door on unsuspecting party people.  Is this the beginning of a horror-porn film?  A war drama?  A drug-bust flick?  Check this out:

 

When I first saw this spot for Bud Light a few weeks back, the discord between its images, which I would usually read as scary, and its message of "let's all have a good time" surprised me.  If the mild shock they produced was designed to get my attention, it worked.

Of course, the "fear factor" awakened by such images is softened by the fact that they all refer to types of pop culture entertainment.  There are probably lots of video games that enable you to join a SWAT team for fun.  Then there's the allusion to James Bond flicks -- and, more distantly, torture films like Hostel and Saw.

Yet, nevertheless, I couldn't help but associate the apartment break-in and torture threats with some of the very darkest imagery that's come out of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  This had me interpreting the inherent cultural symbolism in the spot in all sorts of ways. 

Bud Brings the War Home?

My first reaction was to read this commercial as allegory.  Because of our on-going economic maladies, the war seems to have faded into the background of the media landscape.  Here, I thought, like the return of the repressed, it bursts symbolically onto the scene again --  just when people are trying to relax.

I also wondered why its creators (DDB Chicago) felt at home enough with such images to use them, without the worry of turning off viewers with negative associations. 

One answer might be that we've all become so familiar with such imagery by now that it seems nearly normal.  This may be an indication of a general acceptance of a war that began back in 2001.

As Slavoj Zizek has remarked, it is at the moment when "certain features, attitudes and norms of life" transform from debatable to "neutral" -- even part of our "common sense", that you know a particular ideology has really taken root. (p. 20-21)

But still, there are limits.  Near the time when the Bud Light commercial first started to air, another depiction of SWAT team activity appeared in a popular medium.

The British/Sri Lankan hip hop star, M.I.A. released a 9 minute video titled "Born Free", which showed (scored to a machine-gun beat) a group of soldiers not that much different from the ones in the Bud commercial, breaking into people's houses and carting them away in vans (see it here).

The video was banned from YouTube for its violence and nudity.  I've read that an image viewers found particularly disturbing was the one at right, in which a very young person is about to be executed.  (The image itself is an allusion to an earlier one -- the iconic execution of a Vietcong, whose shock value helped speed the end of the Vietnam War.)  As might be expected, the video caused a mini-scandal.

Of course, the Bud Light commercial never steps over the line that separates "real" from "play" violence.  It also avoids "bad vibes" by implying (no doubt unintentionally) that you don't need to worry about what its own warlike images suggest.

Distraction as a Patriotic Duty

One of the things that seems implicit to me in the Bud commercial is the idea that it's OK to get distracted.  Think of the story it tells...

The soldiers are on an important mission to save the Bond-like character from torture.  But an apparently even more pressing duty is that they allow themselves to chill out -- and enjoy a Bud Light, a few pizza puffs and a cool party.

So perhaps the cure for the crisis the TV spot sets up is, in one sense, consumption.  Doesn't the soldier asking the bad guy for ice inadvertently put an end to James Bond's suffering?

And, as we've all learned, not only is distracting ourselves with consumption an effective way to take one's mind's off things, but it's also good for the country.  After all, who doesn't remember being asked to shop after 9/11 to fight terror -- by restoring faith in an ailing economy?

All of which leads me to yet another reading of this spot.  Perhaps as in a dream, the surface ("manifest") content is there partly to hide what the dreamer is actually concerned with.  The commercial is about trouble, all right, but not James Bond's -- or even, symbolically, our own in Afghanistan.

It may be the economy after all that's causing the dis-ease I sense here.  And the cure?  Drink up! 



 

Are All Utopians Prudes? Thoughts on the Film "The Last Station"

"The revolution is puritan" Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is said to have told hedonistic 60s rebels.  I don't know if he was right, but that's certainly one of the more common ways the movies have portrayed revolutionaries.

I thought of this the other night after watching The Last Station.  Based on the novel by Jay Parini, the film tells a tale of Leo Tolstoy's latter days, the commune he started, and the clash between his spouse and the Tolstoyan movement.  

Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), the leader of the Tolstoyans -- a sort of anarcho-pacifist society -- is the most chaste character in the flick.  You get the impression that he's one of the few followers of Tolstoy who actually lives the ascetic side (celibacy, vegetarianism) of Tolstoyan doctrine to the letter.

Giamatti's Chertkov is rigid, humorless, doctrinaire -- and one of the only characters in the film who doesn't get a little (or a lot) on the side.  In this, he's more Tolstoyan than Tolstoy (who doesn't himself obey the no-sex rule).

But Chertkov is guilty of one sin: he's against private property -- at least in the form of copyrights.  He convinces Tolstoy to sign his work into public domain -- so that, as he puts it, it belongs to the peasants.

This enrages Sofya (Helen Mirren), Tolstoy's spouse, who worries about her family's estate.  By contrast to Chertkov, Mirren's character is lusty, earthy and cosmopolitan.  Needless to say, she has no truck with the more otherworldly beliefs of her husband or his acolytes.

So the film draws a line in the sand.  On one side, the ascetic revolutionary.  On the other, the sensualist, in favor or private property -- and Capitalism.  The stiff and serious versus the spontaneous and pleasure-loving.  Where have we seen this before?

The Ascetic vs. the Aesthetic

Check out this clip from Silk Stockings, the 50s Cold War Musical film, where the same contrast is played to romantic comdedic effect.  In it, Fred Astaire serenades the Russian Communist Cyd Charisse:

Also interesting here is the debate about aesthetics.  The "decadent bourgeois" Astaire recommends doing something "just for the hell of it" (art about nothing) -- while the Bolshevik Charisse insists on purpose, utility -- meaning!  In retrospect, it's not hard to see why "the West" won this particular battle of images.

And (alas), it appears such demarcations were not only the work of propaganda.  This is how Slavoj Zizek describes the "absolute classic of literary Stalinism", the Socialist Realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered, by Nikolai Ostrovsky:

"Pavka, a Bolshevik fully engaged first in the Civil War and then, during the 1920s, in the construction of steel mills, ends his life in dirty rags and totally crippled, immobilized, deprived of limbs, thus reduced to an almost nonbodily existence.  In such a state, he finally marries a young girl named Taya, making it clear that there will be no sex between them, just companionship, with her function being to take care of him.  Here, in a way, we encounter the 'truth' of the Stalinist mythology of the Happy New Man: a dirty, desexualized cripple, sacrificing everything for the construction of Socialism." (p.119)

Cybernetic Asceticism

Aside from the Cold War heritage, the battle over copyrights in The Last Station made me think of more contemporary revolutions.  The so-called "Internet Revolution" has, of course, ignited an ongoing struggle between the "information wants to be free" and the "information wants to be expensive" folks.

This fight is probably still too young to have generated its own stereotypes.  Yet there are some accounts of web utopias that also seem as suspicious of bodily things as the examples above.

One of the more extreme of such fantasies, according to Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, involves the possibility of (post?) human immortality.  Some "cybernetic totalists" as Lanier dubs them, envision the possibility of uploading memories, and whole minds, into virtual reality, where they could live forever. This, unfortunately, would involve people "dying in the flesh" -- and becoming bodiless in deference to a super machine. (pp. 24-6)

What this heaven shares with the old one, of course, is the fact that few worldly types would want to actually live there. 

      

    

     

If You Create a New Species, Is It OK to Have Sex With It? Thoughts About the Movie "Splice"

(Spoiler Alert: Contains details about the movie plot.)

I recently saw Splice, the latest film inspired by the ethical questions raised by genetic research.  In it, a married pair of scientists, played by the always cool Sarah Polley and Oscar winner Adrian Brody, through gene splicing experiments, create a new life form.

As in earlier films, like The Island of Dr. Moreau, the being is an amalgam of creatures.  It's got some of Polley's genes, so it looks partly human.  But it has legs like a bald kangaroo's, and a tail with a stinger (like a scorpion or stingray).  It chirps like a menacing bird -- and it unfurls majestic wings when excited, taking on the look of something above-human: an angel.

The being can look sexy, too.  Played by Delphine Chaneac, the creature sometimes resembles a runway model. The following scene captures a bit of the sexy/scary quality of this "new species":

What I like about this clip is that it suggests the mix of fascination/horror public discourse about new science and technology often carries with it.  We love this stuff, yet we're afraid it will kill us if we get too close.

In fact, what's new about the film is that it pushes that "love" all the way into Eros.  There's even a sex scene between Brody's character and Dren (the name given the creature), where her angel wings flutter in ecstasy.

But, as the stinger at Polley's throat reminds us, Dren is "not of our kind."  (That stinger will pierce the heart of one of the characters later, administering a death blow not unlike what killed Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter.)

One of the things that keeps the film from resolving into cliche is that it maintains this ambivalence through to the very end.  Of course, Polley and Brody are punished in various ways for their Promethean hubris.  Like Adam and Eve, they've accessed knowledge it seems they should have left alone.

But in the last scene, this idea is thrown into doubt.  We find out Polley's character is pregnant. The baby could be the progeny of her (now dead) husband or of the creature itself -- who at one point transformed itself into a man and raped her.  In a rather futuristic take on the Pro-Choice position, she decides to keep the baby.

And her boss at the genetics firm has gone from condemnation of her creation to approval.  It turns out her research produced profitable new patents for the company.  Polley's character is lauded for her courage.

Tradition and the Posthuman Individual

As I was wondering about the film's vacillations, I came across some interesting observations by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the public rhetoric surrounding genetic research.

 Zizek, thinking about the way the news of genetics breakthroughs has been received in Europe, notes a tendency which "on the one hand, tacitly tolerates scientific and technical progress, while on the other...tries to control its effects on our socio-symbolic order, that is, to prevent the existing theological-ethical world picture from changing." (p. 62)

I think Zizek's comments explain the caution around such discoveries when it comes to public policy rhetoric.  In the U.S. at least, such "official statements" are influenced by a politics that speaks the language of (if not rules according to) Judeo-Christian ethics.  And the film certainly reflects this influence. But what of its simultaneous delight and endorsement with such dabbling? 

There's one U.S. institution stronger than Church and State combined: Business.  And this force is governed more by cost/value equations than ethics.  As such, it tends to be morally agnostic.

The movie can be read as a parable about the difficulty of splicing all these forces together -- into anything resembling an integrated social whole.  And though this integration never happens, along the way the film offers up some fascinating and hilarious conundrums.  Here's my favorite:

After walking in on Brody and Dren, Polley's character mutters a standard movie expression, along the lines of: "There are some things you just don't do."  This draws a big laugh from the audience.

Maybe that's partly because it's hard to define Brody's transgression: has he committed adultery?  Incest? Or something new -- human/alien sex -- that we don't have a sin for yet?  In which case, you find yourself asking: is it really bad?