INTELLECTUAL ATROPHY

You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:17:48 -0400

You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it.

You’re just a kid, you don’t have the faintest idea...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:03:07 -0400

You’re just a kid, you don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.

Familiarity

Sat, 12 May 2012 21:28:50 -0400

My dreams are becoming increasingly conventional and seem, on the whole, to be lacking in true abstraction. I am concerned that this is an indication of my own unoriginality.

"False consciousness"

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:11:58 -0400

Kony 2012 was never about oil. It was about white men and women saving poor, starving, but promising black children from savagely violent black men.

We seriously need to stop talking about oil so much. It’s there, and it means something, but it doesn’t mean much. Oil is nothing in this fraught field of racial-sexual-economic violence. Every article written, every movie made, every photo splashed across the cover of Time, is worth more than all the oil we could ever hope to plunder.

Hermeneutics

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:59:00 -0400

“The problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another. From this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs, but that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.”

Currently reading:

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:52:11 -0400

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.

Currently using as bookmarks: 2x pieces of scrap paper; 1x Shaeffer pen; 1x Google Nexus S; 1x tube of Allen Edmonds premium shoe polish (walnut); 1x CD case (RHCP, Blood Sugar Sex Magik); 1x different book.

Feeling disingenuous

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:47:50 -0400

In light of an impending deadline, and for the sake of making a thorough, coherent, and most importantly original point, I’m about to advance an argument that isn’t entirely charitable or fair to its intended target. Over the next several days, I will so forcefully and repetitively make my case that, by the time I’m done, I will in fact believe what I started out knowing to be untrue. I know it’s not right, and yet I’m ~~unable~~ unwilling to do otherwise.

Gender-neutral

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:22:05 -0400

I occasionally have to read male theologians who insist that gendered language does no harm to women. When I do, I’m reminded of prison studies of convicted male rapists who adamantly maintain that the women they raped “enjoyed it.”

Authenticity

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:44:00 -0400

jeffreylo:

The common denominator is, of course, authenticity and nostalgia for a time when things were “real.”

The Current Rage in Branding: Fake Authenticity is now A-Okay

Fashion?

Culture?

Music?

Theology?

Hasn’t this been going on in Euro-American societies since the Renaissance? The operative assumption here seems to be that there can be something prior to “manufacture” or “production” or “construction,” that there’s either a “real ‘real’” (which these brands aspire to but fail to acquire) or else some other kind of authenticity (e.g. the authentic, if boring/undesirable, moment of the present-day consumer). I don’t buy the assumption (which may be why I continue to buy the branding).

I think there’s also something to be said for the aesthetic dimension of nostalgia as somehow productive in its own way. No one looks at an Asian guy in a plaid shirt and assumes he’s a lumberjack or aspiring to be one. There’s an aesthetic dimension to the shirt that isn’t exhausted by its reference to something else.

The productivity of knowledge

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:32:18 -0400

I don’t really want to become part of the industry of academia.

Racism

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:27:14 -0500

Contemporary racism (like sexism, and classism, and ableism) is not and has never been about personal prejudice. From its murky and long-since forgotten beginnings, racism has been an ideological (scientific, theological, ethical) and material (economic, political, bodily) project that works on the scale of entire societies and nations. Individual, discernible acts of racism, then, aren’t just reducible to a person’s skewed view of the world: they’re the products of a massive and deeply entrenched framework of ideas and material relations. By the same token, racist acts don’t need to be individual or discernible/obvious in order to be racist. The basic problem isn’t personal; it’s systemic.

Deleuze

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:12:55 -0500

What comes first — desire or inhibition?

Observer

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:36:35 -0500

Over the past few months, I’ve been cataloguing old issues of the United Church Observer (early to mid 70s) for the library, and have been reading some of its articles in the process. These have included coverage of the planned union with the Anglican church, denunciations of apartheid in South Africa, persistent critiques of American and Israeli imperialism, and even a candid interview with then-prime minister Trudeau. It’s really interesting to see how the church’s commitment to love and justice has manifested itself differently at different times.

Dream cars

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:28:12 -0500

As inspired by a recent conversation:

R32 Nissan Skyline
Porsche 964 turbo
VW Golf Mk5
Suzuki Cappuccino
Nissan Gazelle (JDM)

Tradition

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:58:05 -0500

“Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; [rather] these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place.’ … We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off — when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy may be wasted at that point in the frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them onto the branches: but the sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe. We are always in danger, in clinging to an old tradition, or attempting to re-establish one, of confusing the vital and the unessential, the real and the sentimental. Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time.”

- T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (1934)

No way Kikkoman

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:55:08 -0500

THEME TWINS.

Help Japan?

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:57:00 -0500

I don’t really get why this became the media/branding/arts sensation that it did. Every “major” natural disaster that preceded the earthquake in Japan, up to and including Haiti [1], seemed to evoke a similar response: news coverage, followed up with pledges of governmental aid, calls for sympathy from celebrities, and occasional heart-rending ad spots on television. The earthquake in Japan, by contrast, produced posters, t-shirts, music, and album covers, to which were affixed ready-made and easily-digested slogans: “Help Japan”; “Pray for Japan.” The whole thing seemed more like a kind of cultural-commercial meme than a disaster relief effort. Why?

I guess the slogans tell half the story: “help” Japan, not “save” Japan. All the talk about aid for Haiti was really about saving, not helping, and the assumption was that Haiti was fucked if it was left to its own devices. Maybe, then, there’s a bit of a sense of First World, liberal-democratic, G8 camaraderie underpinning the “Help Japan” movement — with none of the patronising condescension or resentment that come with knowing (read: believing) that the receiver is totally dependent on the giver. We’re always more willing to buy a drink for a friend than to drop some change in a panhandler’s hat, after all. We’re also more willing to help those who we think deserve it.

There were other problematic discourses at play in the “Help Japan” movement. Even before it really took off, there were Orientalist narratives emerging in major news outlets about the stoic, Zen-like character of the Japanese people, a theme which was subsequently picked up by many artists. I think it was also strange how commercialised and commodified the whole thing became: even though many individuals and corporations were redirecting 100% of profits from their “Help Japan” products to disaster relief efforts, the mere fact that the production and consumption of goods was (perceived to be) necessary to garner support — that consumption became an ethical act, and ethics, in turn, was ideally expressed through consumption — was problematic. I’m all for people finding ways to connect what they do with what they believe in (e.g. artists producing art as social-political statement), but I think more care needs to be taken when individual or local interests evolve into broader trends, movements, and institutions.

Notes:

[1] There were a good many natural events in which human lives and property were destroyed that didn’t receive adequate coverage in North America. These tended to occur in the general vicinity of regions where the United States has recently waged war.

When I'm done

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:03:00 -0500

I have an ever-expanding list of things I want to do when my last paper is finished. In no particular order:

~~play some guitar — I have a new amp that I’ve hardly touched~~;
~~have some beers with people I’ve been ignoring~~;
watch a documentary on Judith Butler;
~~research fountain pens~~;
start thinking about/planning aspects of the ceremony and vows;
~~play some TF2~~;
read A Feminist Ethic of Risk, by Sharon Welch;
read The Grace of Difference, by Marilyn Legge;
read Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge;
learn a bit of Latin;
~~take my dog to the park~~;
pick courses for next term;
start preparing for scholarship applications;
start thinking about AAR.

There are probably other things that aren’t coming to mind right now. To be honest, now that I’ve actually committed this list to writing, I’m kind of glad that they aren’t.

Sometimes it can be jarring to see someone speak after having...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:26:04 -0500

Sometimes it can be jarring to see someone speak after having read their writing, because written and spoken voices can be so dramatically different. Here, it was pretty much exactly what I was anticipating.

A version with English subtitles here (though with a slightly skewed aspect ratio): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6TghIrYEc

I seem to be missing something

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:47:00 -0500

Is there a connection of some kind between Apple products and North American evangelical Protestantism? And I’m not referring to evangelical Christians who happen to have and use said products, but rather to the people who literally define themselves in terms of their ownership of any and/or all things Apple. I’ve seen “Jesus lover” and “Mac user” strung together in the description blurb of personal sites and blogs more times than I care to count. And I still remember when, a few years ago, a guest preacher [1] actually prefaced his presentation with something to the effect of “For sermons, Macs are the only way to go.”

Notes:

[1] This was also the only sermon that I’ve ever had to pay to listen to. Incidentally, according to the Didache, an itinerant preacher who asks for money is a false prophet. Just saying.