Monthly Archives: April 2004

Creativity and a tennis ball

I had another chance yesterday to think about creativity.  (See previous entry on how creativity works at advertising agencies).  All these observations made at 7,500 feet.  (You may wish to factor in the possibility of oxygen debt.)

Mark Miller, Omar Wasow and I were out for a stroll.  It was lunch time at a future-gazing conference put on by the Sterling Rice Group and held at the haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (see last two entries).

We were making our way down the long lawn of the hotel.  Our plan was to walk into town, some part of which was visible well ahead of us.  Omar had gone for a run in the  morning, so he claimed to know the way. 

Half way down the lawn we came upon an ancient tennis ball (a Penn 3) and immediately a game of "kick it back and forth"” ensued.  None of us was very good at the game and it was necessary sometimes to stop walking and in one or two places, actually to stop talking.  But we kept kicking the ball.  And eventually, in a forced march, it accompanied us down the lawn, across the highway, beside the lake. 

We talked about blogging mostly, whether, how and with what logic this universe would distribute, and several other things.  I thought I glimpsed a rhetorical form here, and I began to think that this was our unofficial process for creativity.

One person would take up the conversation lead.  He would begin building an argument, looking for the assertions that would singly and collectively make a case.  And always you could tell the conversation was as much between the speaker and himself as it was between the speaker and the rest of us.  Did this work?  Can I say this?  Is this the best way to have said it?  What could I say next?  What is the best next step?  How is the larger argument taking shape?  Do the one and the other conform to the things I think I know about the topic and the world?  Even if these things are not clear or, possibly wrong, am I still in the view corridor, the vector, that I believe to be fundamentally the correct one.  And occasionally, we would see someone stumble upon an illumination that was not at all what he meant to say, but we could see that he was now truly "on to something"” and follow up as he began to work the theme, bringing some things with him, leaving other things behind. 

The other two parties to the conversation had an interesting role.  Sometimes we were muse to the speaker, sometimes we would stand in to do (mixed metaphor alert!) a small solo in support, sometimes we would be filing an objection and notice to return to this objection when the conversational turn returned to us.  We were alternatively, supportive, collaborative, competitive, skeptical and one or twice combative. 

Progress was measured (and who got to get and to hold the conversational lead) by a single calculation.  Are we "on to something?"”  Are we getting closer to a plausible picture of the future or not?  As long as we could answer this question in the affirmative, we would persevere.  The moment we could not, we would bail and start again.  In this way, little propositional portraits of the future kept taking shape.

There is a singleness of purpose and the conversation is almost entirely selfless.  If someone steps in to complete a phrase you are struggling with, that’s fine.  No, it’s perfect.  If you get have way out on an argument gambit and you realize that it is, in the matter of the Icarian jazz solo, coming apart, there is no shame in just laughing. 

This, and your sudden cessation of talk, signals that you have "flamed out"” and that you are turning over the lead to anyone else who wants it.  Often it is picked up by someone who has been "playing along beside you" in their head.  They know exactly where you were going and they can get there.  And they do.  Now it is not clear who "owns” the argument, the founder or its savoir.  And it is this "shared mind,"” "group idea,"” "single, noisy thought"” logic that works so profoundly to make these conversations productive and completely "open source.”"

What makes this a difficult form of discourse is that it works on a world (blogging, the net, new patterns of sociality, celebrity, authority, diffusion, networks, networking, etc.)  that is known incompletely and that is very much in process.  We are obliged to work in the "half light"” of a dynamic world, to try things out "in quotation marks”" (because we might be utterly wrong), and to leap perilously from assumption to assumption, proposition to proposition, as if they were so many slippery stones in a stream.  Stay too long and you are sure to loose purchase and end up in the drink. 

Some of these things can be thought about only in a group, with the conversational lead passing suddenly back and forth between the talkers that the group can make its way to fully formed idea.  If you tried to do it alone, you would surely end up in the drink.  It’s not that you need more people to get the job done.  You need them for speed and sometimes for ballast, to make the intellectual enterprise aerodynamic and in the extreme case self righting.

Back to the tennis ball.  I don’t know which one of us found it and first kicked it.  But the moment it emerged from the rough grass of the hotel lawn, it was "in play.”  The world had changed in a very little but very distinct way.  And the other two players accepted the new presupposition of our interaction and "fell into” the game.  No one much cared when they did well or badly.  The official idea was to move the ball forward at something like at a pedestrian pace.  The unofficial idea was ‘to see what happened’” and to be party to this little act of chaos.  I remember being struck that there was no hesitation to engage in the game or to continue playing it, despite the fact that we did it badly..  And I think this must be one of the characteristics of creativity, especially group creativity, and most especially of group creativity dedicated to thinking about dynamic phenomena.  It is dynamism about dynamism.  It is, in a phrase, spontaneous, selfless, tentative, reflexive, propositional, experimental, constantly forming, and utterly open source.

Biographical notes: Omar Wascow is the founder of blackplanet.com.  The New York Times called him "Silicon Alley’’s Philosopher Prince.” " I think this is about right.  Mark Miller is a chef and restaurateur.  Life Magazine called him "one of the most influential chefs of the decade."”

that ghost in the corridor

Ok, so I am still at the Stanley Hotel (see previous entry) and this afternoon I found 3 people wandering the corridor, looking in all the nooks and crannies.

“Looking for ghosts?” I ask cheerily.

Yes, they say, only a little sheepishly. “Have you seen any?”

“No,” I say, “but apparently no one guest survives the night in 415. They check out by dawn.”

“Really!”

“That’s what they say.”

“So have you seen anything?”

“No,” I say, “what’s the camera for.”

“Well,” they say, only a little sheepishly, “it can pick up ghosts.”

I nod sagely.

“But we don’t need a camera. We picked something up in this hall way.”

I can’t resist, “I’m pretty lifelike, aren’t I?”

What a look those phantom seekers gave me! The older woman actually hopped back a step. And the younger one took my picture.

This is an entry about the new credulity. And the things anthropologist will do for data.

Food and culture

I am being held in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. This is the place in which they shot the Shining and I am told that my room has haunted, tortured, tormented and otherwise preoccupied.

Just had a very interesting conversation with Mark Miller. Here’s the question I asked him: what’s the book that best describes the movement of American, North American culture from one that treated cuisine has a closed code the finest moment of which was for some people ice berg lettuce with Kraft dressing to a place with something closer to an open code in which millions of people have an educated palate and an extraordinary set of choices in food, spices, treatments, restaurants. This change has taken place in the last 40 years.

Mark had lots of suggestions but nothing that seemed definitive. As I listened to him talk about the possibilities, I found myself thinking, “he’s too modest to say so, but this guy is one of the reasons North American culture made the transition.”

I will investigate this possibility and report back.

open/closed code distinction is from Bernstein:
Bernstein, Basil. 1975. Class, Codes and Control. New York: Schocken Books.

the sudden loss of celebrity pressure

The anthropology of the contemporary world has many questions to take up. One of the things we particularly need to understand is the precise character and operation of our dynamism. As a culture, we are changeable, dynamic, and discontinuous in ways that few cultures have ever been.

Yesterday, I found myself thinking about a special case of this dynamism. I was thinking about what we might it the “cataclysmic loss of credibility” that sometimes occurs on the public stage.

Chevy Chase, the comedian who began his career on Saturday Night Live and did a series of successful films (Caddyshack, Fletch, National Lampoon’s Vacation) did a talk show for Fox in 1993. For more info on Chase, see the Yahoo bio here. Here was a guy with lots of credibility as a comedian. The world was long practiced in “finding him funny.” Suddenly, it was over. He wasn’t funny any more. At all. His talk show was excruciatingly precisely because it presupposed a humor that Chase could not produce.

Are there politicians to whom this has happened? One moment they are more or less credible representatives of the people, the next they are just “over.” Musicians or actors? Examples, please.

The fact that a cataclysmic loss of credibility can take place tells us something about famous people. I think it says that we must “stake” them some part of their credibility. To be sure, some they earn by dint of effort and talent. This they can claim to own. But some of their credibility exists in them because it comes from us. We “spot” them this credibility and it is, it turns out, ours to take back.

The website and books series called “Jump the Shark” specializes in spotting these moments of cataclysmic loss of credibility. The point of the exercise is not just for people to see that they no longer like “The Apprentice,” it is to identify the precise moment we withdrew our consent, the moment it ceased to engage. The Jump the Shark players are REPO men (and women). They hunt the neighborhoods of popular culture and exercising the right to repossess anything that no longer “belongs” to its possessor.

There are two particular issues that must vex and mystify us:

First, that there is, apparently, a kind of political contract at work here. I had always assumed that we admired our celebrities because, well, in most cases how could you not? They are talented, accomplished, charismatic, beautiful, durable, winning, influential and so on. But the “cataclysmic” model looks a lot more like something out of the world of political science. It says that celebrity is a much more cooperative enterprise, that the fan, at least in the mass, actually possesses the rights of authorship. Celebrities do not extract our deference, we give this to them. Celebrities do not fashion their credibility, but persuade us to surrender the stake and more besides.

Second, that, when there is a loss of credibility, it can happen all at once, “before our eyes.” My guess would have been that credibility was something that wore away. But no. Sometimes it goes “right then and there.” This is vexing. How is it possible that a very large group of people can change their ideas this dramatically and this simultaneously. They are not following one another in a diffusion array. They are all undergoing the same change of heart and mind virtually simultaneously. We are accustomed these days to think of ourselves as a culture with lots of differences and lots of inconsistencies. We sometimes wonder how any consensus, cultural or political, can be made to happen. And here it is, something that looks for all the world like a consensus that is somehow both simultaneous and naturally occurring.

There are many religious and political enterprises that have hoped for this extraordinary moment when the “scales” fall from our eyes that we may see where once we were blind. It has been a long and frustrating wait for the Marxists particularly. But here it is, the kind of thing they hoped for and worked so hard to set in train. Here it is happening apparently by itself in our midst all the time!

No doubt, there is a substantial literature on this problem somewhere. Or it may be that I have framed it badly, creating a problem where none exists. Dear reader, do advise.

Goffman’s corner

This will be a series of blogs devoted to the “cultural rules” of everyday life.

It is named for Erving Goffman. Goffman was born in Alberta in 1922. He got his graduate training from the University of Chicago. He taught for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. He died in Philadelphia on November 19, 1982. Those interested in his work will find “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959) a good place to start. Goffman was an inspired observer of “cultural rules.”

We are a postmodern culture, to be sure. But a surprising amount of social life is still constrained and scripted by cultural rules.

“Turn taking” is a good example. There is a rule in our culture that says that each person in a conversation may speak for only so long. He/she must then turn over the conversational lead to someone else.

You can test this rule in your next conversation. Hold your lead. Keep talking. Don’t let anyone in. It won’t be long before your friends begin to twitch their bodies and flash their impatience. Eventually, they will wrestle the turn away from you.

Watch for little (or large) expression of affrontery. Your conversational partners will be offended that you presumed to hold the conversational lead at their expense. You will have subtly challenged them. They will likely give you a couple of those “across the face” glances (where the looker looks not straight ahead, but across the face. This normally betokens resentment and or challenge and or scrutiny.) All you did was talk for a little too long. Ah, the very large implications that come from tiny little departures. Goffman understood this sort of thing right down to the ground.

Cultural rules have the interesting property of being active but, usually, invisible. We all obey the turn taking rule. But if you asked someone to describe a conversation, they would probably not ever make reference to the rule. If you asked them to describe why they were, in the case of your withholding the conversational turn, unhappy with you, almost certainly, they won’t be able to report that “you talked too long.” These rules remain invisible even when broken.

Moments of social change will sometimes encourage us to make these rules explicit. The feminism of the 1970s was a time in which we began to notice that there was one set of turn taking rules for men and another for women. But once the rules are reworked, they tend to slip once more below the surface of consciousness.

So why treat cultural rules here?

Two reasons.

First, this is one of the things that anthropologists can bring to the party. Despite Goffman’s magnificent efforts, we don’t all know about the operation of these rules.

Second, cultural rules are a place to spot underlying shifts in what and who we are as a culture. This is a good observation platform.

As Virginia Postrel was saying today in her post, there is so much noise in social life, it is sometimes hard to tell what indicates a trend and what does not. But the contemplation of cultural rules can sometimes feel like a submarine world. It is, sometimes, stiller, quieter, and easier to read.

new rules on death

Many cultural rules are changing, but one that has proven particularly robust is the one that says we “mustn’t speak ill of the dead.”

And then along comes a piece in the Daily Telegraph by Stephen Pollard. Telegraph | Opinion | I can only speak ill of Sir Peter

Pollard lets fly:

“[Ustinov’s] politics were so vile, and his judgment so warped, that it beggars belief that his death should have been met with praise such as “great humanitarian”, “selfless” and “visionary”.

The cultural logic of the old rule is pretty clear. The dead are protected from criticism because, after all, they aren’t in a position to defend themselves. So attacks are cruel and mean. There is also a notion that says dying is actually the ultimate act of concession. For some reason, we find death mollifying. “Well, if you put it that way…” seems to be the spirit with which critics put down their weapons. I think there might be a third consideration. With death, a bell has sounded, we suspend all hostilities–as if death were the end of a rugby match. All is forgiven.

The cultural logic of the new rule comes from our general preference for full disclosure. We suppose that, generally speaking, the individual’s right to privacy is less important than the collectivity’s right to know. Private lives are part of the proposition, we seem to argue. We can’t really think about Foucault’s ideas, unless we know the appalling details of his private life.

Clearly, the argument is not always so grand as this. The gutter press reveals private details for the purposes of titilation. Grander institutions have a higher motive (we hope).

Pollard’s innovation (if it is an innovation), is, I think, a useful corrective against the addled “let us sing their praises” approach with which the dead are more usually remembered. After all, the obituary is a crucial moment of idea formation. (If it isn’t, we are we bothering?) How we remember someone is an important part of how we think about ourselves. I believe its true that the dead won’t mind, and the rest of us will think a little more clearly.

Here’s to Peter Ustinov, that bastard.

great quotes of our time

“But I really do not expect people to agree with me. People haven’t agreed with me as a soft Marxist, as a social engineering transport economist, as a quantitative economic historian, as a Chicago School economist, as a neoinstitutionalist, as a libertarian, as a global monetarist, as a free market feminist. No wonder they don’t agree with me as a rhetorician of science.

Of course, like most people, I do assume that those people are wrong and I am right. (And in sober truth–can I confide in you as a friend?–I am right.)”

McCloskey, Deirdre N. 1998. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, p. 188.

John Avlon, Dennis Miller and Independent Nation

John Avlon, author of Independent Nation, was on Dennis Miller last night and his argument raises some interesting problems. These are both anthropological and political.

Avlon says that a very large group of citizens (as much as 60%) are liberal on social issues and conservative on economic ones.

Let’s suppose this is true. This implies that American voters once “signed on” with a party, and accepted the “party line” on all, or most, other issues. One choice made all the other choices. (Or maybe it ran in the other direction: you made all your individual choices and then looked to see which party matched these most closely). It also suggests that this “aggregating model” is now in trouble.

There are of course several million issues here. I want to raise just a couple.

1. Avlon’s “independent nation” is strictly speaking a prolongation of the old system. Citizens are still grouping. They are in this case actually massing. They may even be making a single decision that makes them appear to run both left and right. (It would take some ethnography to find out if this is so).

This is to say that “independent nation” is not very independent. These people are merely “resplicing” the DNA of the political system. They have found a new logic that lets them choose “a” from one menu and “b” from another. In the process, they have constructed a new “solid body” political choice, and amassed, if Avlon is right, a new and very large political constituency.

2. The next question is this: Is this it? Is this as independent as the American voter ever going to get? Or is there a bigger development here waiting to happen? It might be that if individuals have courage and imagination enough to refuse the old “one choice” model, they may have courage and imagination enough to just keep going.

In this event, citizens would treat all political issues as a matrix and they would make choices from this matrix without regard to party lines, community groups, or the aggregating effects of any larger loyalty. They would, in other words, make every political choice discretely. Where they stood on military spending would tell us absolutely nothing about what they thought about school spending. Where they stood on the death penalty would have no predictive power about where they stood on the United Nations.

This matrix model is the real “independent nation.” Naturally, it strikes us as implausible that the political world could ever and utterly disaggregate in this way. Surely, we suppose, some of these decisions will continue to pool, to school, to run in packs… insert your metaphor for aggregation here. But it is technically possible that a real independent nation could establish itself.

You would have to know more about political science than I ever will to comment on whether this is a foreseeable future or not, but you don’t have to be a political philosopher to see what it means for representative democracy. It makes a hash of it. Representation can only make sense if my choice of Democratic or Republican (or in the Canadian case, NDP, Liberal and Conservative) sets in train a series of choices by my surrogate in the house with which I am likely to agree. In a matrix world, the correspondence between my representative’s choice and my choice will be only a little better than random.

Well, the obvious point to make here is that the old system of representative politics presumed a world that has now passed. We have the technology to poll and eventually poll we shall, issue by issue.

3) And this raises a third point, where these issues come back together. Howard Rheingold gives us a vision of “smart mobs” (and recent events have made this something more than a vision) in which the wishes and the will of the individual has everything to do with the group. He/she will be carried forward by a momentum that marshals suddenly and in many cases fleetingly. Sudden aggregations of opinion come and go, creating sudden group effects that exert tremendous gravitation effects before they disappear without a trace.

Now to play the science fiction card, this might open up the possibility of a political universe in which aggregations as substantial and thoroughgoing as “democrat” and “republican” could form in the dynamic field of political choice, but only for a very brief moment and the aggregations that followed might be altogether discontinuous, drawing on different issues, new cultural logics, an entirely different lens for parsing the cause for action and assembly. In this scenario, the group effect is back in, but it is so sudden and passing that it might as well be individual. It is, if you see what I mean, that discrete. Or to put this another way, the group effect no longer works, as it does now, as a gravitation field that organizes political discourse and gives it consistency and scale. Now the group effect is cause for dynamism and variety.

4) There are many things to think and rethink here, but I thought Dennis Miller might make a useful case in point for closing. First, he has moved apparently from liberal politics to a more conservative position. And this is a little striking. Comics, esp. stand up comics, used to be a domain that belonged to the liberal left (think Mort Saul). The rise of P.J. O’Rourke was at first hard to think. “Wait, you can’t be funny and conservative. Conservatives are supposed to be humorless blow-hards.” That Miller can be a conservative is evidence of a new ideological looseness, a cultural uncoupling, in our culture.

Miller appears to have taken up the liberal-conservative position that Avlon has in mind. So here too he gives us evidence of someone breaking with the old “forms” of politics and exercising a more independent cast of mind than the “lock step” one. Miller is, perhaps, supra-categorical. He encourages the idea that the existing categories cannot hold the new diversity, and perhaps even the larger, much more stunning possibility, that no set of categories can.

But, finally, Miller insists on taking a “My President, right or wrong” position that does not seem to leave him much room for the exercise of independence. This may be his “war footing” and it will be interesting to see what happens here when things are a little less perilous.

In sum, Avlon’s book suggests a reworking of the old system even as it gives some small indication of the possibility of its demise. But even if the group effect is now in decline, we might well see its quite spectacular return in the form of the “smart mob.”

neo-con footwear, just in time for spring

A ripple of excitement ran through Neo-Conservative world today as news of the Black Spot Sneaker spread.

“These are slammin,” said David Frum.

“It’s what to wear on the half pipe,” said Norman Podhoretz.

“Nothing gives me better traction in the corridors of power.” said Douglas Feith.

The shoe in question was created by Kalle Lasn and the Adbusters organization. It looks a little like a Converse All-Star. And it goes well with everything.

Well, not everything. The Neo-Conservative Design Council (NCDC) feels strongly that, worn with a bow tie, Black Spot Sneakers give the wearer a ‘Professor PBS’ or “children’s educational television” look. “This is not something we recommend,” a NCDC spokesperson said yesterday, “But they really work with gray flannel trousers.”

Neo-con insiders say the footwear trend is driven by something more than aesthetics.

“I guess what really caught our attention was the black spot,” the NCDC said.

In this month’s Adbusters, Lasn published “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish.” He provided a list of the “50 most influential neo-cons in the U.S.” He put black spots beside the name of anyone on the list he thought was Jewish. Twenty-six people got black spots.

“I mean, the coincidence is striking, don’t you think? Black spot sneakers for black spot neo-cons. We feel the symbolism is irresistible.”

And indeed the Neo-Con camp is reportedly rushing to the website.

“Look, I know there are only 26 of us, but we’re high profile. The trickle-down effect will be tremendous.”

Not everyone agrees.

“This can’t be good for business. I mean Norman Podhoretz is not a fashion forward early adopter. I think these guys might be jamming the culture jammers. And that’s just mean,” said one Adbusters critic.

Lasn’s reaction is unknown. Industry insiders are waiting to see if he will ask corporations to require Jewish Neo-Conservatives to wear the Black Spot sneaker, especially on days when they might be party to conversations concerning Israel.

Adbusters: Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?

(All quotes invented, all attributions spurious.)

Courtney Love and the Mennonite drug lords

There was Courtney Love on David Letterman a couple of weeks ago—an accident no longer waiting to happen. First, she flashed the stage hands, then Paul and the band, and finally Letterman himself. In a calm, genial manner, Dave said, ‘thank you very much.”

Old Colony Mennonites live in Canada and Mexico. They are hard working, devout, world renouncing, low church Protestants who wish to be left alone. Recently some of them set up a drug ring. By the late 1990s, they controlled 20% of the marijuana market in Canada. They now traffic in cocaine and methamphetamine, sometimes working with biker gangs to do so.

We think we know what is going on with Courtney Love. Once credible, or at least interesting, Ms. Love can feel herself falling from the celebrity heavens and she must now engage sensationalism to maintain altitude. We know she knows this will not help, that the slide is inexorable, that this accident will happen in slow motion, and that the kindest thing that can happen to her is that she will be reduced to a Sally Kellerman character who waits on the edges of the red carpet of Oscar Night, hoping, sometimes pleading, for an interview. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous.

What is happening in the second case is harder to say and we might resort to something biblical. The devil is ingenious. He found a way in. There are more sociological explanations: a drought, a devalued peso, and new trade rules hit the Mexican community. The Mennonites became drug lords to remain simple farming folk. (Where is my Advil.)

But we cannot see the larger pattern here if we focus only on conspicuous players. Let us take the case of Neko Case, the singer who began her musical career in a punk band, and now sings Country and Western? Or a friend of mine who started out a sports writer and is now a museum curator. Or another friend who began as a radio personality and now runs a start-up. Or the case of Donald Trump who started out a short fingered vulgarian and eventually became…well, not everyone changes.

There is no evidence that our culture has come to terms with this new modality. I think most of us believe that we can have the right of self authorship without stepping onto a dance floor strewn with ball bearings. This is to say we want the modernist right of self authorship without the postmodernist outcome of a slippery world. Most of us shake our heads at Courtney Love. I don’t know anyone who nodded and said, “Yes, that’s what transformation looks like.”

in fact, the argument that explains the Mennonite drug lords should explain Courtney Love as well. After all, the Mennonites, in their 125 years in North America, did divorce themselves from the real world, and this makes their disaster a kind of “systems” problem. Once they began to engage with the real world, there were almost no checks, no antibodies, no instincts, no precedents, no lessons in place to protect them. Their culture was missing an important piece of code. The long slide into drug trafficking was not inevitable, but once it started it was exceedingly difficult to stop.

We act as if Courtney’s difference was her opportunity, and that her failure is therefore her fault. Unlike those poor, clueless Mennonites, Courtney was a product of a culture that knows all about the corruptions of fame. More than that, she, and it, know about the perils of self transformation. How many entertainers preceded her down the path of self destruction? (Michael Jackson, Jim Morrison, um, Kurt Cobain, the list is long.)

But in fact Love’s culture is not much better prepared than the Mennonite one. When it comes to personal transformation, it’s not clear than we have more checks, antibodies, instincts, precedents in place, lessons to protect us from the rough air of personal transformation.

In a more robust culture (more or less postmodernist, it’s not clear which), there would be a well established body of understandings of what transformation is and how it must be managed. We would understand it as well as we do city planning or smoking cessation. (Five days and counting.)

What we would not do is shake our heads reproachfully in the face of another Icarian descent. We would react to Courtney as we do to the news of the Mennonite disaster: with astonishment, sympathy and a deep curiosity about this could have happened. Because, honestly, we not know in either case.

For the next installment of the Courtney Love episode, see her appearance on the Jay Leno show scheduled for April 15.

Details on the Old Colony Mennonite community from:

Mitrovica, Andrew and Susan Bourette. 2004. The Wages of Sin: How God-fearing Old Colony Mennonites –’the plain people”—have become some of Canada’s biggest and most dangerous drug smugglers.” Saturday Night. Vol. 119. (3): 29-36. (sorry, not posted on the web.)

Brooks become a waterfall

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks describes his visit to the global hub of Federal Express in Memphis.

The first thing you notice during the overnight sort is the endless parade of planes stacked up in the night sky. Then there are the swarms of workers who descend upon the planes once they land and strip them of their cargo. Then begins the scramble of the caterpillars — little motorized tugs towing strings of cargo containers pell-mell around the complex and honking out warnings at every intersection.

They’re bringing about 1.3 million envelopes and packages a night to vast sorting arenas with names like the Primary Matrix Area. Inside these stadium-sized rooms there are rows and rows of speeding conveyor belts and rushing envelope trays. Little devices push or tip individual packages into one of the thousands of chutes and slides and ramps. If you stand on a catwalk over the conveyers and look down at the pulsing motion below, you feel that same disorienting, perilous sensation you get on a bridge staring down into a waterfall.

It was the last image that caught my attention: the waterfall. After all, Kant had something to say about waterfalls:

…the high waterfall of some night river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more [end of 110] attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature.

Waterfalls were for Kant, and not only Kant, one of the things in nature that demand we reckon with a scale larger than the paltry human one. The sublime was one of the moments in which we find our powers of comprehension tested. The sublime presented a vastness that exploded one’s sense of scale.

There is a little of this in the Brooks quote. The FED EX operation, with its planes stacked over head, all that technology on the ground, 1.3 million packages in transit! To see this from above, Brooks says, is to experience a “disorienting, perilous sensation.” This is a world too large, too dynamic, at once so orderly and disorderly that it threatens our sense of scale. It is in Tambiah’s famous phrase, not just “hard to think.” It sits on the edge of what is thinkable.

As Jack Greene tell us, European intellectuals and visitors were inclined to regard America and the new world in general as the locus of much that was sublime. As Greene says, “awareness of the seeming boundlessness of America penetrated more deeply into European consciousness.”

And of course that’s now utterly over. Nature in America isn’t sublime, any longer. It’s not even “wild.” It is now thoroughly “cowed,” but which I mean, of course, domesticated.

If the sublime operates still in the new world, it is at the FED EX plant in Memphis. And of course FED EX is merely a toy compared to the internet which has 5 – 10 gigabytes coursing through it at any given moment. (1.3 million packages, hah!)

Science will not be outdone. We soothe our sense of outraged scale with reassurances that “6 degrees” bring order to this new world. But a little voice carries on. We stand on the catwalk of contemporary culture and think, “oh!” a cartoon character suffering a blow to the solar plexus.

One little question we can answer. Did Brooks mean to evoke Kant? I think he probably did. He was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago where reading Kant is part of the punishment of everyday life. When I was a graduate student there, there was a joke circulating: “how can you tell an undergraduate from a graduate student? The undergraduate is the one talking to himself.” Thank goodness Brook now talks to the rest of us.

Op-Ed Columnist: Scanning for Success

Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgement. translator James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 110-111.

Greene, Jack P. 1993. The Intellectual Construction of America: exceptionalism and identity from 1492-1800. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, p. 25.

Lasn outs Lasn

Lasn “did not expect” the intense criticism and cancelled subscriptions with which the world replied to his Adbuster’s essay “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”

“This has made me feel like I am the victim,” he told the National Post. Cancelled subscriptions made Mr. Lasn feel like a victim? Mr. Lasn has published a list that evoked memories of 1930s Germany. And now he claims he has been made “the victim.”

I know there are people in the world as stupid and insensitive as this. I just didn’t realize they had their own magazines.

Stinson, Scott. 2004. B.C. Magazine Sparks Outcry by “Outing” Jewish neo-cons. National Post. April 2, 2004, p. A5. (sorry, no link possible, NP online is subscriber only)

Lasn outs Jewish neo-cons

Controversy surrounds Kalle Lasn. The current issue of his AdBusters has an article entitled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish.” This is accompanied by a list that details the “50 most influential neo-cons in the U.S.” Twenty-six of the names have black dots beside them.

This confirms that a self appointed critic of the media is an idiot. Mind you, there wasn’t much doubt here. If his argument weren’t so very fashionable, poor Lasn would not ever have been given his own soapbox.

But the article suggests Lasn is something much worse than an idiot. Let’s file this in the “look what just crawled out from under a rock” category.

A list with black dots identifying Jews? Really? Shouldn’t a “media critic” have guessed that the world might take exception to this? Don’t you think a man with even trace elements of historical or cultural sensitivity might have thought this through?

Mr. Lasn, put my name on that list. Add a black dot, if you please.

Adbusters: Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?

Where do new ideas come from? Today’s blog smoke free!

This ancient question takes on new urgency as the competitive advantage of the “knowledge economy” depends more and more on 50 million “cultural creatives.” It takes on still more urgency when we notice how few new ideas are now issuing from the humanities and social sciences.

This question took on personal urgency when I chose today to quit smoking. (I started smoking when I came to Montreal because this city is, as someone recently put it, Canada’s “smoking section.”)

For smoking had become where my new ideas came from.

Who knows why? I think ideas like the commotion that smoking creates, the commotion of activity, sensation, physiology. This commotion somehow interferes with the screen between the conscious and unconcious mind and, like Canadians from the North or Mexicans from the South, ideas steal across the border and just keep going. They begin to earn their keep, and make a place for themselves. Before you know it, they are a blog entry, an article or a book. (This idea brought to you by Imperial tobacco! I still have a lot of nicotine in my blood stream.)

But there is a second effect going on here. I was surprised to discover, when hitching hiking across Canada in my youth, that ideas like the sound of the big tires on giant rigs. The same effect happens when I am on an airplace at 30,000 feet. Something about that roaring sound from the engines. Ideas come rushing in. The same thing happens when I am in a seminar room or a board room.

I think smoking, trucks, planes, seminars and board rooms work like vega-matics. They divide the world into many little sounds or ideas. Now we have something to work with, lots of elements all in a jumble. The jumble incites our inclination for pattern recogntion. We start to assemble: Oh, that goes with that, goes with that, goes with that. Hey presto, an idea. (It was this effect that I was trying to talk about in the entry below called “Taking Madison Avenue by storm.”)

Where do new ideas come from? They come, in part at least, from any activity, place or event that gives us controlled commotion. Create lots of disorder, mix in a few rules for order, and we have an aid to invention. Networks form. New constellations light up. Things figure and reconfigure. Now we have something.

This is of course classically what we say cities do. They bring together the lots of differences and the differences begin to interact and patterns form. It is also, if cities do not stand in for this, what we say markets do. They do not merely assemble differences, but insist on their convertibility and responsiveness. It is, indeed, the effect of all cultural dynamism, as Virginia Postrel has noted. See The Future and Its Enemies at www.dynamist.com.

Cities, markets, seminars, and of course smoking somehow break down the borders and supply the play things of our creativity. But not the academy. How many times have we sat in class rooms and seminars only to hear the class resort to the recitation of all the things that must be true. How grim this. In particular, the field of anthropology and many of Foucault’s children have created a great act of consensus in which, irony or ironies, differences do not figure, in which profusion cannot happen, in which creativity has ceased.

Surely, this cannot last. Surely, this intellectual regime will be crushed beneath the weight of its own tedium. Given the choice between the safety of orthodoxy and the liberatory joys of difference, surely one of these days the academy will do the right thing. In the meantime, I’m not smoking and neither are they.

Amazon.com: Books: The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

Amazon.com: Books: The Cultural Creatives : How 50 Million People Are Changing the World