I thought this week’s episode of Mad Men was one of the weakest the show has ever done – this season has often been a bit obvious, but this episode went beyond that to be genuinely clunky: the heavy handedness of the episode’s insistence that prostitution is bad (a simplicity which undermines the show’s previous, much more interesting, awareness of the way in which, for women in the 60s, all choices were bad choices); the strange insistence on presenting Don as a “good” person; the blindingly obvious parallels between Joan’s storyline, the ad campaign they are working on, and the subplot involving Megan. So I’m annoyed by this post, which praises the episode for all the things that make it clumsy, in the service of a moralizing critique of capitalism which, because it ties that moralism to women’s bodies, also manages to be sexist. The key line, regarding the supposed ethical superiority of Don and Peggy:
They are free to act ethically because they are not trying to find a way to belong, and they understand themselves as having nothing to lose…. Thus, they are not simply good capitalist subjects in the fashion that, say, Pete Campbell is. They are ambitious in wanting to work the system but also understand the impossibility of obtaining the object that would provide complete inclusion.
That is, they make an ethical choice to resist being “included” in the capitalist system. Read more↴
Let us accept that all identity is a differential identity. In that case two consequences follow: (1) that, as in a Saussurean system, each identity is what is is only through its differences from all the others; (2) that the context has to be a closed one – if all identities depend on the differential system, unless the latter defines its own limits, no identity would be finally constituted. But nothing is more difficult – from a logical point of view – than defining those limits. If we had a foundational perspective we could appeal to an ultimate ground which would be the source of all differences; but if we are dealing with a true pluralism of differences, if the differences are constitutive, we cannot go, in the search for the systematic limits that define a context, beyond the differences themselves. Now, the only way of defining a context is, as we have said, through its limits, and the only way of defining those limits is to point out what is beyond them. But what is beyond the limits can only be other differences, and in that case – given the constitutive character of all differences – it is impossible to establish whether these new differences are internal or external to the context. The very possibility of a limit and, ergo, a context, is thus jeopardized. (Laclau, Emancipation(s), 52)
This far, Laclau’s argument seems pretty reasonable, and the consequence presumably would be that, indeed, “no identity would be finally constituted,” that is, the differences that establish any identity would be indeterminate, there would be no point at which we could say we could say we “had” the full determination of the identity, and so any discussion of a particular identity would always be open to further questioning and the need for further investigation into the specificities of that identity. Oddly, though, that’s not the conclusion Laclau draws. Having “jeopardized” the possibility of a total context, Laclau nonetheless goes on to assert that a total context is possible, with the limit being provided not by a difference, but by an antagonism, which “poses a threat to (that is, negates) all the differences within that context.” Read more↴
I really enjoyed Adam Kotsko’s Why We Love Sociopaths, in part because of the additional perspective it gives on his previous book, Awkwardness. The “fantasy sociopath” the book studies is introduced as the opposite of awkwardness: where awkwardness is an anxiety in relation to social norms, sociopaths, at least in TV fantasy, never experience social norms as something that makes them anxious, only as tools they can use to manipulate others. But what unites awkwardness and sociopathy is that these anti-social experiences reveal something fundamental which underlies the possibility of sociality. That is to say, Adam’s project is a kind of dialectical redemption of the anti-social, in which anti-sociality, by revealing the conditions of our sociality denaturalize it and provide ways of thinking about an alternative sociality which we might choose. Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths thus I think have something in common with what Judith Halberstam calls “anti-social” queer theory; the connection is perhaps clearest in the anti-familial theme that surfaces periodically through Why We Love Sociopaths (which Adam has also discussed at An und für Sich). Read more↴
It took me a while to remember what it was that the visual style of The Hunger Games reminded me of. It was a second-hand paperback of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come published some time in the 70s which, as these books usually do, featured a cover illustration which drew a little on the book itself and a lot on the trends in SF illustration of the time. That’s an appropriate style for the film, I think, a re-creation of 70s interpretations of WWII-era futurism, or, a taking-up of the science-fictional imaginations from two previous eras of austerity. And the film does look marvelous, with lots of little touches (some of which, such as the train we see near the beginning of the film, might be lost on an audience that doesn’t remember the existence of British Rail) that position it critically within the aesthetics of austerity nostalgia. Read more↴
The new issue of Street Spirit, a paper put together by a group of Quakers and sold by homeless people throughout the Bay Area, is mostly made up of articles on non-violence. In an astonishing (in a bad way) interview, George Lakey, “longtime nonviolent activist and trainer” manages to outdo Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s infamous claim that protesters linking arms is “not non-violent”:
Lakey: Running does not heighten the contrast between the activists and the purveyors of violence. The running, to a T.V. or a news photographer or a bystander just looks like a riot and it gets reported in the news, that black people rioted on the streets of Birmingham or whatever. So sometimes you need to heighten the contrasts in order to make your point, and if that means getting people on their knees so they won’t run, great. Read more↴
There are few things that annoy me more in a reading of a text than the claim that the author “doesn’t mean” what the text “literally says.” Such a claim sounds like a sophisticated reading strategy, one which wouldn’t be fooled by a cunning author, but it is based on a naive belief that authors have intentions and texts have literal meanings. Worse, because this kind of reading depends on basically unknowable authorial intentions, the reader has a great deal of license to decide where the intention and the literal meaning diverge, and the tendency is for this to coincide with whatever the reader feels is least plausible in the text. So, this supposedly sophisticated method of reading ends up domesticating texts, turning a text which might challenge the reader into one which just reinforces their own beliefs (the king of this kind of reading is Leo Strauss, who managed to read his philosophy into the entire western canon).
I was thinking of this because I’ve been reading various interpretations of Capital that seek to find where Marx is being “ironic,” and so where his true belief is the opposite of the position he puts forward. Read more↴
