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"I sort of can't believe it exists"

Tom Breihan's review of Snoop Dogg's new cd, Ego Trippin', appeared yesterday at Pitchfork. In his opening paragraph, Tom writes that Snoop has "somehow managed to evolve into a model of gangsta consistency, a sort of rap version of Tom Petty or Alan Jackson. He cranks out lazy, effortless hits at a scary clip, slightly tweaking his formula as the musical climate changes without ever leaving his comfort zone." I find this comparison both entertaining and spot on, but it's not the reason I'm linking to the review. It's this:

And then there's the utterly inexplicable country-fried "My Medicine" [which Tom later calls "batshit awesome" and I have to admit really makes me want to hear], which Snoop dedicates to "my main man Johnny Cash, a real American gangster" before intoning "Grand Ole Opry, here we come" and sing-rapping about weed over Everlast's respectable Tennessee Three pastiche. It's the closest thing we've ever had to a straight-up country song from one of the world's most recognizable rappers, and it's also a celebration of drugs dedicated to a beloved figure whose pill habit almost killed him more than once; I sort of can't believe it exists.

"I sort of can't believe it exists." Tom has used this phrase at least once before. In January, at his blog Status Ain't Hood, Tom posted about a couple of metal bands. That post ends with this, about the Swedish band Disfear:

And so Live the Storm brings just about everything I could possibly want from a metal album: pick-slides, dense and rumbling riffs, Ted Nugent caveman-solos, youth-crew call-and-response chants, epic pseudo-tribal drumming, vein-popping screams, incomprehensible lyrics that seem to be about staying true to yourself, song-lengths that generally stay in the three-minute range. Hooks. This thing absolutely slays, and I sort of can't believe it exists.

I like the phrase. I think we get so caught up in evaluation and assessment and moving on to the next big thing (or the next small thing) that we too rarely stop to consider how amazing artistic creation is. I commented to Tom's post that "the line between something awesome being created and not is that vanishingly thin." This is probably true to the point of banality, but at times I ponder it, in something like astonishment. When listening to a song, one that seems just so, and yet comprised, perhaps, of what might have otherwise seemed like incongruous elements, I sometimes become forcefully aware of how easily it could have been otherwise.

The same is true of writing, and the audacity of creation in general. Isn't there something astonishing about the mere existence of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu? Can you believe that someone undertook such a massive project? Along with the great pleasure I'm experiencing reading that novel, this brute fact of its existence still manages to boggle my mind. . .

Chris Hedges in Salon

There was an interesting interview in Salon yesterday with Chris Hedges, in support of his new book I Don't Believe in Atheists. A sample:

The Enlightenment was both a curse and a blessing, because it was really a reaction to the kind of superstition, intolerance, bigotry, anti-intellectualism of the clerics, of the church. But it also ended up with the Jacobins, [who said] well, if we can't make certain segments of the society "civilized," as we define civilization, then they must be eradicated, in the same way that you eradicate a virus.

I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.

And a couple of digs at our man Christopher Hitchens:

Do you think the new atheists are similarly uninterested in their impact? It seems that what the New Atheists write and say is somewhat a performance.

Well, not Harris. Harris is just intellectually shallow. Harris doesn't know anything about religion or the Middle East. For Hitchens, it's about a performance, and that was true when he was on the left. He hasn't changed. It's all about him. It's all about being a contrarian. He reminds me of Ann Coulter, he's that kind of a figure. He's witty, and he's funny and insulting. You know I debated him, and in the middle of the debate he starts shouting, "Shame on you for defending suicide bombers!" Of course, unlike him, I've actually stood at the edge of a suicide bombing attack. That kind of stuff is just ... it's the epistemology of television. They make a lot of money off it, but it's gross and disgusting and anti-intellectual and not at all about real discussion.

Do you think Hitchens really believes what he writes?

I think he's completely amoral. I think he doesn't have a moral core. I think he doesn't believe anything. What's good for Christopher Hitchens is about as moral as he gets.

I like Chris Hedges. His book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is a worthy read, though I think he's wrong on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (about which, incidentally, see this excellent recent post at Lenin's Tomb on humanitarian intervention). The interview is worth looking at, though I found the interviewer a little painful. Of course, I agree with much of what Hedges says (his use of the "fundamentalism" trope is more persuasive than I usually see). His point about the Enlightenment is a good one, and he's certainly right to observe that the so-called "New Atheists" argue and behave as if the Enlightenment were an unequivocally positive development. . .

Pre-empting Reflections

Yesterday I bought a copy of Reflections, the Walter Benjamin collection. I'm happy to have the book, but now I sort of wish I'd held off and perhaps tried to find an older, used edition. See, I bought a copy of the new edition, issued in 2007. The cover is uglier than the old one was, for one thing. Far worse, it's saddled with a new, worthless, three-page preface from one Leon Wieseltier. Has a preface or introduction ever made you want to unload a book you're otherwise happy with having? Is it wrong that I want to take a blade to these pages? Wieseltier isn't around for long and doesn't say much, but characteristically, he does have time to irritate. After a relatively innocuous opening page, we get this:

In his temperament and in his method, Benjamin was an esotericist. He was modernity's kabbalist. In his turgidly enchanted world there were only mysteries, locked and unlocked. His infatuation with Marxism, the most embarrassing episode of his mental wanderings, the only time that he acquiesced in the regimentation of his own mind, may be understood as merely the most desperate of his exercises in arcane reading. . .

[. . .]

. . . Benjamin's work was scarred by a high ideological nastiness, as when he mocked "the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom" (as if Europe in his day was suffering from a surfeit of this), and speculated acidly about the belief in "the sacredness of life" (or from a surfeit of this), and responded with perfect diffidence to the censorship and persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, which he coldly described as "the transfer of the mental means of production into public ownership." The pioneering explorer of memory worshipped history too much. He also wrote too much: he advised writers to "never stop writing because you have run out of ideas," and often he acted on his own advice. I confess that there are many pages of Benjamin that I do not understand, in which the discourse seems to be dictating itself, and no direction is clear. Like many esotericists, he abuses the privilege of obscurity.

What is the purpose of such a preface? The book still has the original, 35-page introduction by Peter Demetz (who, to be sure, does criticize Benjamin in certain ways, including aspects of his relationship with Marxism, but who isn't dismissive or obnoxious about it), which should do a well enough job by itself introducing the new reader to Benjamin (especially when combined with Hannah Arendt's introduction to Illuminations). Why is Wieseltier here? What purpose can he serve, other than as an attempt to pre-empt the novice reader's own readings? This Benjamin character is an interesting read, when it comes to literature, sure, but be sure to not take him all that seriously otherwise! (But, you know, thanks for buying our book!)

Rehabilitate the notion of truth

The thrust of my recent posts has reminded me of an essay by Christina Nehring from last November, at Truthdig. In it, she discusses the state of the essay, decrying the entrenched personal essay, with its fixation on the autobiographical, the small. She argues that we need a return to the truth-seeking essay, as exemplified by Seneca, Montaigne, Emerson:

Today's essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be.

I agree with her, though one could be forgiven for thinking that my unclear earlier post might imply that I do not. With respect to the focus on the personal, she writes:

. . . here lies the problem with essayists today: not that they speak of themselves, but that they do so with no effort to make their experience relevant or useful to anyone else, with no effort to extract from it any generalizeable insight into the human condition. It is as though they were unthinking stenographers—"recording secretaries," as indeed the most self-conscious 20th-century essayist, E.B. White, called them—pedantically taking down their own experience simply because it is their own.
The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it's our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. "Where I have least knowledge," said the blithe Montaigne, "there do I use my judgment most readily." And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne's by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

I think she's quite right to observe that we have a problem with big claims. It is only through making big claims that we can get anywhere, but any such attempt is openly attacked as in itself suspect, as too ambitious (the same is true in literature and music). We want to know the writer's credentials for making any claim. Is he or she a trained expert in the field? If not, why should we listen? Certainly there is valuable training that can be brought to bear, and there are cranks eager to expound on any subject. But surely the writer's credentials should be found in the writing? Perhaps, collectively, we've lost the ability to discern. At the same time, we feel strongly that we are each entitled to our own opinion, no matter how ridiculous. What has gone into forming this opinion, mind you, is of no consequence; one's considered, informed opinion is equivalent to another's ignorant, spittle-flecked reaction.

As an aside to finish up: I quoted from Jodi Dean in my last post, and here I wanted to make reference to some of her earlier posts about this idea, that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, that all opinions are made equal, but I couldn't find the posts I had in mind. . . there was this post from last month, which engages with Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. There she refers to "a decreasing ability to distinguish between truth and lies, a decline in a politics wherein truth matters" and later, where Debord says "the spectator is supposed to know nothing", she says that now "the opposite is the case: everyone has a right to her own opinion." (Jodi is always blogging about writers and thinkers with whom I have little to no contact--mostly no--but in ways that make the ideas seem accessible and relevant. And yet I am still all too often overwhelmed into silence, given my ignorance of the actual texts in question.) There was also this post from December about the stupidity of student papers, though it seems to me that her remarks are broadly applicable. Her students refuse to discern differences:

Their mindset is something like this: what is important is what any individual truly feels is important; that's all that matters, the intensity and authenticity of a certain affective attachment. This intensity means that individuals can define words, issues, concepts, etc, any way they want, as long as they "truly believe it." But, and here is the catch, the students tend to combine this intense subjectivism (or subjectivism of intensity) with an underlying universalism: if everyone truly believes in something that they affectively feel and know, then there is peace, harmony, and social justice. It's like they are committed to an underlying ontology of unity that renders all affective difference and discord into rapturous accord.

Neither of these posts are quite the ones I had in mind, but they're well worth checking out anyway. . .

(A final aside: I note that my second references above to Nehring and Debord are to their last names, yet I refer to Jodi Dean as "Jodi". In an earlier draft of the previous post, I noted that I wrote "Hitchens" and "Jodi" and I worried about seeming to "respect" the former more than the latter, especially in that case, with the gender difference. But I do not respect Christopher Hitchens at all, and I do respect Jodi Dean. This post tells me that the difference is that Jodi Dean writes a blog, and I know her primarily through that blog. For example, it's always weird for me to see myself referred to as "Crary" rather than "Richard" when others link to me. The blog implies some sort of personal relationship, perhaps, an informality of expression, certainly. So even if I had read one of Jodi Dean's books prior to having encountered the excellent I Cite, the blog nevertheless invites me to call her "Jodi", though I've never met her.)

Something like the Truth

Last week, I expressed some concern about what I called the "depressingly utilitarian" nature of much of the writing I see, using Christopher Hitchens and his favored forms, the short column or polemic (and his reputation as "polemicist") as my jumping off point. By coincidence, the very next day at I Cite, Jodi Dean took issue with what Foucault says in this short extract from an interview conducted in 1984 ("Polemics, Politics and Problematisation"). The following, from Foucault, sounds like the kind of thing I was attempting to say in my post:

The polemicist . . . proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be, not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

This sounds a lot like what I might have been saying about Hitchens. He certainly does proceed as if he is setting out to destroy an adversary, an adversary he would often not recognize as even worthy of the name. But Jodi Dean points out that Foucault's formulation is itself highly polemical. And she reminds me that polemics are merely "disputations, arguments against another position defended by apologists". She goes on to say:

Together, the positions engaged in an argumentative practice designed to get to something like truth. The polemicist pushes a side, but against another side, in an agonistic practice that is itself dialogic. As a practice of speech, it is not the same as war and annihilation.

In this way, polemics, as argumentation, can be essays into a topic, explorations in words, in writing, though in opposition to another set of ideas or positions. I think that the word "polemic" has, for me, been so tied up with someone like Hitchens--whose particular mode, I still claim, is not argumentation, but in fact attempted destruction--that I rolled that word into my question about the "utilitarian". So I'm happy to unroll them, so to speak. However, the question itself still nags at me.

With my Hitchens example, of course, the problem could simply be, not that polemics are a problem, but that he has long since abandoned any kind of rigor he once held, in favor of bullshit; that the things he says, the big points he makes, are all too often simply and demonstrably wrong, relying as they do on truth-claims about factual matters, truth-claims that can be researched and shown to be factually incorrect (as he would say of his religious enemies). My general point was not about Hitchens but about what I perceive as, again, a depressingly utilitarian approach to writing and public discourse (I'm sticking with those words until better words occur to me and until I do a better job of explaining what I mean). And I can see that I'm merely back where I began, only with the word "polemic" removed from the equation.

While I'm here, I'm going to make a related observation, one that, I hope, will allow me to refrain from mentioning Christopher Hitchens again in connection with this line of argument. One complaint that has been commonly thrown at people like Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that they are "fundamentalist atheists". I find this formulation unhelpful (and a little irritating), not least because it allows them easy space for further dismissal and ridicule, but also because it doesn't do much to gain access to what's amiss in their arguments (politics aside). Another complaint is that they have not read enough theology. This complaint is more interesting, though unfortunately it seems to be made with the expectation that immersion in theology will somehow make the non-believer realize what he or she is missing in their lives (the odds are against it.) What these writers, I think, are caught up in is the idea that there is a "right" and a "wrong" to everything, and that they can necessarily identify it and that they can tell us about it. I think this idea lies behind the tendency to see fundamentalists as representatives of "true" religion. Possibly, theology could help disabuse them of this notion (I don't actually know). In his book, Hitchens has all the answers. He feints in the direction of acknowledging that science does not have all the answers, but he has an answer for that too (science just hasn't discovered the answers yet, or they're not worth knowing). He has written god is not Great not in order to enter a discussion, because for him there is no discussion. There is nothing in the book that evinces the slightest doubt about anything. This in itself might not be a huge problem, were it not for the subject and the audience (and those pesky facts that might get in the way). He accuses religious people of having certainty, when it seems to me, in my limited engagement as an outsider, that religious people are full of doubts about their faith, about their relationship to God, about the Bible as this massive compendium of contradictory stories and lessons and all kinds of weird stuff. For those of us who are not only atheists but have never felt any twinge of religious faith, I think we are attracted to the idea that the Bible must make sense, so we are in turn attracted to (and repelled by) those religious people, generally fundamentalists, who treat, or claim to treat, the Bible as the literal truth, as the literal Word of God. These people, on some level, we understand, though we strenuously disagree. But we fail to understand the experience of religion and faith for others, for the vast majority, and this failure is almost total, and potentially dangerous.

The disappearance and reappearance of the moment

From Carl Wilson's great meditation on the glorious Deerhoof and their use of silence in their music:

My guess is that the power of silence also has to do with the character of consciousness and experience. Consciousness is not a continuous process, but a chain of discrete moments forever vanishing before we can get hold of them - in a sense, of experiences slipping away before they are truly experienced. It's always now, and now and now and now, and as the bulk of Eastern thought and religion informs us, one of the basic dilemmas of life is that we seldom feel "in" that now: its elusiveness is its essence. It doesn't disappear by dwindling away, by cresting and falling, but always all of a sudden: This instant, this second, this hour, this day is "now" but in the time it takes to note that fact, the instant is now "then." As a survival mechanism, our minds create a continuity out of it, the way our optical processes narrate the discrete frames of cinema, stillness becoming an illusion of movement, but this is a constant, perhaps exhausting subconscious effort. Experience is as much made of total breaks, of gaps and aporias, as it is of content. Music, like (almost) all art, takes the chaos of experience and makes something more coherent of it because it has form - even the most abstract art has greater structure than the experience of consciousness. (Although it also might have more freedom than social experience, with its daily routines, etc. - a combination that helps account for its pleasure.) So perhaps this meta-genre of "stop-start" art feels especially elevating because it returns the fragmented experience of life to us, magnified and exaggerated, so that what feels day to day as a frustrating limitation of the mind can be transformed into a hosannah of glorious affirmation: "Praise be to the gap, to the disappearance and reappearance of the moment! What a miracle that time annihilates itself, because, behold, it also spontaneously regenerates in the very moment of its demise! What a happy universe in which a black hole becomes a big bang every instant! Let us observe it in slow-motion replay, and dance!"