Seen in a Berkeley bookstore

At the delightful University Press Bookstore, in the humanities-social theory area, the following sign: "Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida have their own sections at the end of Cultural Studies." Unintentionally appopriate. They were, in a sense, different ends of cultural studies.
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General thoughts and update

I recently started tweeting at twitter.com/rchops, and am interested in seeing how that pans out. Hopefully I will avoid the routinized narcissism that I often find in new media (and will not sound like what Rem Koolhas et. al, in the delirious S,M, L, XL say of Bolero -- insistent and banal). I suppose some degree of focusing on the self is par for the course, but I'll try to steer clear of the pitfalls of online egocentricism

I just finished a journal article on violence and communication (exploring violence as universal communication, and violence as the failure to communicate), which should be out in a few months, and am continuing to explore these ideas in the short and medium term for a larger project. I'll be posting some reflections here as I go along. Indeed, one of the major ideological struggles of our global era appears to revolve around competing conceptions of what is legitimate violence, by state and non-state actors.

For another project just about taking shape as a seedling of an idea, I am looking at some ideas of communication and the city, drawing on ideas from a range of disciplinary areas, including urban planning, social theory, and philosophy of language. Reading Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building has been an absolute joy. The latter text can sometimes appear obtuse, given its quasi-mystical language (though both texts are written way before the current global fad for easy spirituality). Alexander is an architect, but I think anyone can benefit from his ideas.

Among the many astonishing things I am finding in these texts is the fact that they are written with a truly global consciousness well before the 'global' became a part of everyday vocabulary. Anthony Giddens in his "Runaway World" BBC lectures notes that in 1999 the term globalization was everywhere though in 1989 it was hardly used. Writing in 1979, Alexander, in A Pattern Language, calls for a global consciousness in proposing the principles of a paradigm for humans to live by, all the way from the level of the room to the globe.

Here is Alexander's profile on his website, A Pattern Language (he's a professor of architecture at Berkeley)
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More on Haiti's media coverage

The media coverage of Haiti represents a triumph of the ahistorical and unhistorical imagination. A case in point is the constant search for some essential, structural, 'cause' that explains Haiti's predicament. Here is historian Sidney Mintz in The Boston Review (H/T 3 Quarks Daily) with an excellent analysis of Haiti's history, and a critique of the media coverage: "Whitewashing Haiti's history".

Mark Danner in the New York Times also had a very good essay a few days ago, which stressed some broadly similar points: "To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not to Nature"

Whoever may or may not 'save' Haiti, one thing is certain: Anderson Cooper in his black T-shirt will not. As my friend Manan Ahmed had astutely suggested, in the context of Pakistan: Angelina Jolie in her salwar-kameez sitting on a charpai will not better the lot of Pakistani women.
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Hollywood masterpieces / or when funny guys act in serious roles

When funny guys act in serious roles, the results are often spectacular. Comedians (or comedic actors) as they are called in America often have a deeply intuitive and profound sense of the tragic, and are able to tap into some dark, melancholic reservoir to produce brilliant performances. Five very fine films that I have seen over the last few years, in a genre that I might call the understated bittersweet film, star Hollywood funny guys that one would not normally associate with such films. In no particular order, these are Will Ferell in Stranger than Fiction, Seann William Scott in The Promotion (which also stars an equally captivating performance by John C. Reilly), Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love, Owen Wilson in Marley and Me, and most recently, George Clooney (who's not only a funny guy but does enough in that vein to warrant including him in the category) in Up in the Air.

In coffee-shop level discussions of global cinema, it is routine to contrast a rapacious, unthinking Hollywood machine with the delicate sensitivities of European art-house cinema or independent films. The quality of much European cinema is not in doubt, though some independent festival/ art-house circuit cinema is astoundingly unwatchable. But with the forgettable blockbusters that Hollywood churns out, it also produces a steady stream of masterpieces that are absorbed into the cultural mainstream, as it were, without much fanfare.

The same sense of the tragic can also be seen in Dave Chappelle's brilliant comic / comedic routines in both his stand up shows and his now discontinued television show. Chappelle's comedy is not a celebration but a lament; his bitterly funny satire a ruthless, relentless indictment of the world that provides him with the raw material for his commentary. Chappelle's Killing Them Softly, an immensely significant cultural moment in American life, is perhaps the best example of his unique vision.
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Using the Haiti tragedy to further an agenda

Economist blogger Don Boudreaux uses the Haiti tragedy to (a) promote the superiority of libertarianism to other political philosophies and (b) draw attention to the superiority of California's infrastructure to that of Haiti's, with regard to the respective ability of both to withstand earthquakes.

Sheesh! I may add that elsewhere Boudreaux has criticized California for its lack of conformity to libertarian principles. A world-systems analysis, Marxist historical reading, or Marxist economic analysis might also show that in part California's prosperity depends on the poverty of nations like Haiti. Someone's security is often at the cost of the vulnerability of others.
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Malcolm Gladwell on entrepreneurs

In The New Yorker. The article requires subscription for the online version. Well worth a read, because it challenges the conventional wisdom on entrepreneurs as "risk-takers." There's an insane amount of hype around entrepreneurs at this historical moment. Much of the hype, I suspect, is a projection of people's hopes for some miraculous transformation-- a new revolution, if you will--that will solve the many problems that bedevil our times. In the article, Gladwell argues that, in fact, entrepreneurs are risk-averse "predators." They make bets after covering their bases, after weighing the costs, even agonizing about them, and, more often than not, use the money of others as a cushion. They are ruthless and not above a certain unfairness, as the article seems to suggest.

There's been a lot about Gladwell in the media recently; stories in the Guardian, New York Times, and the Nation. These stories usually focus on the secret behind his astonishing, and to some, mystifying, success. Whatever the merits and demerits of arguments advanced by fans and skeptics, Gladwell sure can write a heck of a story.
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On the media and public reaction to the Haiti tragedy

The tragic consequences of the earthquake in Haiti will elicit the best and worst of human reaction, as one remembers, all too unfortunately, from the aftermath of 9/11, 26/11, and the tsunamni of last decade. The CNN website's home page today reveals the characteristic narcissism of the network, and perhaps of, media at large. Even in an event of this sort, it is always about the greatness, heroism, and nobility of CNN's own reporters. This image from the website should speak for itself.



Pat Robertson's remark that the earthquake was the result of the Haitians' desire for independence from their colonial oppressors is repellent beyond belief. It is a matter of shame that he is not publicly repudiated by political figures---proof of the power of the religious right in a secular country. The argument that there is a double standard for different religions in the US seems borne out by the silence that has greeted Robertson's remark.

Tyler Cowen's list of reasons why Haiti is poor befuddles. Although, Cowen clarifies that he does not agree with these reasons, the silence about the violence of colonialism and its destructive legacy is puzzling.

Much of this seems like blaming the victim to me.
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A brief hiatus and happy new year

A very happy and prosperous 2010 to Antihistory readers! And as always, my appreciation to each and every one of you for kindly taking time to read and comment on posts. After a break of a couple of weeks or thereabouts, blogging resumes in early January, with a slightly different focus: centered much more on literature, philosophy, media and social theory in relation to current research interests. I keep meaning to not be diverted by the politics of the everyday, but this time, hopefully, for real!
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Anti-intellectualism in the internet age

In the culture wars in America in the 1980s, the figure of the intellectual (usually caricatured as an elitist communist academic) was pitted against the figure of the honest, everyday, God-fearing patriotic American who loved family and country, football and Apple pie, and lived by simple rules. The American right was extraordinarily successful in propagating the myth that devious intellectuals, armed with deconstruction and a handbook of minority rights, were destroying the lives of these real Americans. The simple American-- a fiction if there ever was one-- was presented and marketed as both the source and the voice of anti-intellectualism.

In the internet age, we see something radically different. Anti-intellectualism is not propagated by those who claim the status of humble folk bewildered by highfalutin' ideas. It is, rather, propagated by a species with intellectual pretensions who claim, in direct and indirect ways, that they are the real intellectuals, truly in touch with the spirit of an age, well-informed in a way that ivory-tower specialists are not, and purveyors of simple and direct truths.

This species is one that lives in the overlapping world of the internet and mass media. It consists of twitterers, bloggers and columnists, left and right (some from respectable publications). Their proof of being engaged with the world or having their finger on the pulse of the masses is, well, simply being online. Yet the 'world' here as they see it is no more than a small nexus of websites, blogs, and twitter feeds that incestuously and incessantly refer back to one another in an orgy of cross-links and retweets and trackbacks and hat-tips.

There are two prominent features of this anti-intellectualism that masquerades as intellectualism.

One, its utter ignorance of the history of ideas, social practices, theories, debates-- an ignorance of history in general. Many of the supposedly original ideas that emerge from this world-- about human rights, art and literature, aesthetics and ideology, politics and religion, secularism and the state, suffering and violence, technology and development-- can be identified easily in the work of numerous thinkers from twentieth, nineteenth, and early centuries. These ideas have been discussed, critiqued and analyzed in great depth and sophistication in the Western and other intellectual traditions but you would never know that from reading the work of the new internet intellectuals. A case in point: the astonishingly naive idea that the work of art should have nothing to do with politics or ideology (as if the two were mutually opposed). A quick look at Terry Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic should settle the spurious accusation that those who talk about ideology and art are ignorant of theories of aesthetic value.

A second feature of internet anti-intellectualism is its ignorance of specific arguments in the humanities and social sciences, even when it disparagingly refers to these. Two examples will suffice. In a recent review in the Wall Street Journal by the neocon Bret Stephens, Foucault is referred to as a cheerleader of Khomeini. Clearly Stephens is unaware of Foucault's arguments about the Iranian revolution and the debate on his position.

And in a review in Salon, Laura Miller has a mystifying remark about "the pat cautionary message about the limits of rationality that we've come to expect from the humanities." In nineteenth and twentieth century Western thought, the critique of rationality can be located in the work of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and the Frankfurt School, among other thinkers. In other contexts, Gandhi's provocative interrogation of Western instrumental and scientific rationality comes to mind. There is an enormously rich body of work that engages with the complexities of the meaning of rationality.
Nothing could be more pat than Miller's sweeping dismissal of such work, which confirms nothing other than her lack of knowledge about the very existence of such debates, let alone their substance.

It should be clear that I am not launching a neo-Luddite argument against the internet. Nor am I interested in presenting a quasi-Arnoldian defense of elitism. My point is simply that this kind of anti-intellectualism is worse than the Bill O'Reilly variety because unlike the latter, the internet warriors really do see themselves as an intellectual vanguard, at once of the masses and leading them into enlightenment. Rather than reflecting a democraticization of ideas and debate, as any number of technologically deterministic accounts of the impact of the internet will have it, this false intellectualism represents nothing more than what Brecht called plebianization. The phenomenon may be expressed in the form of a simple relationship: the volume of words generated online appears inversely proportional to the quality of the thought that animates these words.
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Name droppers and social climbers, American and Indian

Tariq and Michaele Salahi's act of gatecrashing the White House dinner for the Indian prime minister shows them for the name-dropping, social climbing parvenus that they are.

There is another, less obvious, Indian resonance to the event as well. For Indian society excels in producing Salahis of its own--- name-droppers, social climbers, arrivistes, parvenus, self-promoting hustlers.

In any Indian city, you will encounter name-dropping and boasting aplenty. The kind of person to whom a connection is claimed, however, reveals something of the psychology of each city.

In Delhi, everyone claims to know the Prime Minister (whoever he or she is) personally, and to be very close to the Gandhi family. In extreme cases, the name dropper will claim that he or she has provided critically sensitive and valuable advice to the PM or Sonia Gandhi on the Pakistan problem, Indo-US relations, or the Maoist threat.

In Bombay, everyone claims to have hung out with Shah Rukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar. If this connection is revealed after the person claiming the link has had a few drinks, a corresponding claim of having given acting tips to Khan and batting tips to Tendulkar will also be gently floated.

And in Calcutta everyone claims a very close relationship with Amartya Sen and the late Satyajit Ray or Manikda. Over tea and cigarettes in the neighborhood adda or over mishti doi and sandesh, elaborate charts will be drawn explaining the family and / or social connections, with the repeated insistence that this is actually a very immediate relationship.
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