“Give us an ‘I’
Give us an ‘S’
Give us an ‘R’
Give us an ‘A’
Give us an ‘E’
Give us an ‘L’
What’s that spell?”

Um. Don’t tell me. I know this one.

This lusty cheer was given today in Montreal by 6 high schoolers, their contribution to the city’s celebration of Israel’s independence.

The kids delivered it from the steps of a bronze statue of Edward VII. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

According to Downtown Montreal: An opinionated guide to the City’s squares, churches and underground city, the monument shows,

“four allegorical figures [:] Peace, Four Nations, Abundance, and Liberty. Peace is the woman at the front holding the olive branch, but if you look carefully there is a sword hidden in the folds of her skirt, just in case—a reminder that force is sometimes necessary if you want to keep the peace.”

I went to the celebration for the same reason, I think, that most of us were there: to meet women. But this year, with the firebombing, about 4 weeks ago, of a Jewish religious school in Montreal, the occasion took on a special urgency. Anti-semitism is on the rise in Canada, as it is, perhaps, everywhere. What a virulent beast this is. It must be refused over and over and over again.

All culture has need of recitation. As Edward Sapir put it,

While we often speak of society as though it were a static structure defined by tradition, it is, in the more intimate sense, nothing of the kind, but a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity, ranging from a pair of lovers or a family to a league of nations or that ever increasing portion of humanity which can be reached by the press through all its transnational ramifications. It is only apparently a static sum of social institutions; actually it is being reanimated or creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature which obtain among individuals participating in it.

[Sapir, Edward. 1931. Communication. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 4, pp. 78-81.]

But some things need reanimating and reaffirming more often than others, apparently: our loathing for anti-semitism in particular.

For the full essay by Sapir.

For the full treatment of the statue of Edward VII.

Two notes for today:

Yesterday, I had the privilege of watching Pip Coburn give a talk before a group of investors and brokers here in Montreal. Wow, was he good. He was talking about short and long term prospects in the stock market, and it was astonishing to see how much research and hard thinking he has on tap, and how well integrated it was into an embracing vision.

On the social science and humanities side, we are still piecing things together on an ad hoc basis without the benefit of good (or any) numbers. Depth and range are hard to find. But shouldn’t it be possible for us to begin to study the cultural and social world with something like this acuity?

Talking point # 2

I left Pip’s talk and went to have a drink with Will Straw, the head of the Art History and Communication Studies program at McGill. We were trying to figure out that moment in the life of a creative community when everyone knows that there is a new form in the works and everyone is rushing towards it, but no one can quite say what it is till they get there. How is it that people can have an “inchoate certainty” of this kind. An innovation is coming, everyone can feel it coming, everyone is indeed participating in its invention, but no one can really say what it is. This act of invention has shared properties that are operating at a preverbal but still powerful level.

This is one of the problems we will have to solve if we are ever to create a problem solving, future seeing system of the kind that Pip (and UBS) have invented.

Forgive me if I miss a couple of posts. I will be on the road.

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.

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 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.

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.”

Yesterday, I was standing in the lobby of Ogilvy Worldwide in New York City waiting to get through security. In front of me are three guys who are fresh scrubbed, new clothes, new haircuts, new shoes. They are looking around them with awe and anticipation.

I engage one of them, a tall Asian kid with spiky hair, in conversation and he tells me they are from the Miami School of Design. They are here to see what life looks like in the Big Leagues. I can see them thinking, “and some day I will stride through this lobby like I own the place…maybe.” They are very nervous. Clearly, it’s time for the old-timer to give a pep talk.

“Hey, you’ll wow them with your ideas,” I say.

One of the kids actually hangs his head, and says with heart felt sincerity, “I don’t have any ideas.”

“No, no, no,” I can hear myself thinking, ‘this is not the way you take Madison Avenue by storm.”

Peppier talk is called for.

“The ideas are already here, like electricity. It’s the strangest thing. You get into the boardroom, you start talking, and the ideas flow. The trick is to step into the moment. It’s like improv. Don’t censor. Just talk. The ideas are there in the heavens waiting for a chance to get into the room. You have to let them know that they can channel through you.”

He looks at me with surprise and relief.

“It’s a kind of group mind thing. Eventually, you are thinking out of one another’s heads.”

The kids look at me with hope and skepticism. I am old enough to know what I am talking about. On the other hand, maybe I’m too old to know what I’m talking about.

And then I say, “It’s as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.”

And they laugh at this. Obviously, I’m a nut.

They get signed in and as they move towards the elevators, I say,

“Knock em dead.”

One of them turns and laughs and waves.

A recent issue of The New Yorker contains an article by Scott Turow on capital punishment.

The piece is interesting, judicious and generally well written, but it’s hard to ignore its “howlers.” In one place, Turow describes a crime in which the murderous Brisbon “placed a shotgun against the face of a store clerk and blew him away.” In another, he refers to the “furious heat of grief and rage that these crimes inspire.” In a third, he grows cavalier: “Victims’ families talk a lot about “closure,” an end to the legal process that will allow them to come to final terms with their grief.”

Isn’t “blew him away” colloquial language? Isn’t “furious heat of grief and rage” purple prose? And doesn’t ‘talk a lot” have the effect of turning grief into carping? Isn’t this the kind of the thing that awakens the editor within? And not just the one within. That sound you hear is Harold Ross and William Shawn spinning in their graves.

Well, you say, Turow is a novelist. (For those who have never visited an airport bookstore, Turow is the author of legal pot boilers, including Reversible Errors and Personal Injuries, strangely apt titles here.) Perhaps The New Yorker was giving him his lead. But this is, lest we forget, The New Yorker. As editors, Ross and Shawn gave it a patrician voice and a watchful eye. Every word was scrutinized. Every nuance, implication and allusion was second guessed. Ross and Shawn exercised an extra-ordinary editorial vigilance. Surely, here, in Turow’s case, the red pen would have struck sure and true.

But, and it pains me to admit this, you’re probably right. This is almost certainly what The New Yorker did. David Remnick, the present editor, no doubt said something like, “Who reads Scott Turow for our prose style? Let the novelist sound like a novelist.” And this, as I finally find my way to my point, is the point. The great patrician publication is becoming a house of many mansions. In the place of a single sensibility, it now serves as a venue for several voices. In Lionel Trilling’s famous phrase, it is moving from sincerity to authenticity, from the voice of authority to the voice of the individual.

The last journal entry treated the theme of diversity, and here it is again. But what a place to find it! Yes, surely, the Tina Brown era must have brought this moment nearer. And yes, a recent and intemperate piece on Michael Jackson must have told us something was up. But this is not a celebrity piece, nor is it an excursion into popular culture. It is one of their signature “let us bore you witless while we grind smooth and fine” treatments, The New Yorker’s very stock in trade. That “other voices” should have found a place even in this the high fortress of the patrician voice tells us that things are changing, that plenitude is coming, very fast indeed.

(With thanks to Jim Gough for the dinner conversation in which this treatment occurred to me.)

Yesterday the New York Times announced that the Oscar Wilde Bookshop (OWB) in Greenwich Village will close this month. OWB is the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the country.

It is pretty clear what happened. Every Barnes and Noble has a “gay studies” section. Amazon.com treats “gay” and “lesbian” as key words and offers some 7000 titles for the first term alone. The need for a specialty bookstore is diminishing.

Book stores reflect the world. The gay community is newly visible. Will and Grace exists on prime time television. A gay presence is an increasingly ordinary presence in movies and magazines. The gay community may once have been confined to avant-garde neighborhoods like Greenwich village. But what was once, in Marvin Harris’s words, “a parallel social world” now verges on inclusion in the mainstream.

We do not have a clear sense of how this happens. But some of the mechanics are clear. The mainstream is porous. It is curious about things that happen on the margin (as defined by a gay world, youth cultures, and other experimental zones). It treats this margin as a producer of the “new.” The dance scene in the 1970s drew on the gay scene, as did the clothing styles for men in the 1980s. TV comedies in the 1990s like Frasier are said to be written in a gay voice. Witting or not, the straight community begins to learn and adopt a new style. The alien grows less alien. As the mainstream reaches out, the gay community reaches in, demanding visibility, equal rights, a place at the table. Gay men live more openly. Gay festivals and city life grows more apparent. The distant grows less distant.

This marks, from an anthropological point of view, an absolute gain in cultural space, a kind of plenitude, as it were. The mainstream culture has added categories of sex and gender. Gayness, as a style, a lifestyle, a subculture and a culture, has furnished the world with new expressive and conceptual possibilities. And the gay community replies in kind. Released from the ghetto and (some of) the threat without, it is free to take up the freedoms of self exploration. But this is not all. Alarmed by the possible loss of its identity, some members of the community react by insisting on differences, and, where necessary, creating new ones.

Diversity is created both places, both at the centre and at the margin, apparently without cost. Neither party appears at risk. No one, except the culturally conservative, thinks things will come undone, that our ability to think and act in relative concert will be compromised. Still more oddly, there does not appear to be a natural limit to this expansion. The centre appears capable of incorporating all these differences and more. The margin may feel differently. There are no doubt gays who fear the community cannot persist as a community with so much diversity within. But if there is a separatist response at work, it is not apparent. (Indeed, if there were a separatist response at work, chances are OWB would not be closing.) In sum, as the center and margin interact, they create more diversity within themselves and the other. This is an anthropological puzzle. The shade of Oscar Wilde no doubt has something acid to say about all of this. The rest of us just carry on.

I was just reading Scott Rosenberg’s account of the SuperNova conference in Palo Alto (at http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2002/12/13/supernova).

The Decentralization conference was designed to ask Howard Rheingold’s question in Smart Mobs. What happens when you get lots of people with wireless devices and constant access to their own and one another’s blogs?

There is an anthropological answer: new and extraordinary opportunities for social and cultural observation, thousands of people doing the anthropology of contemporary culture on line in real time.

To observe the world is to change it. Who is going to wear that new Gap scarf a second time? Not when it is spotted in every Starbucks in the North America, the day it hits the market.

The chatter will be interesting:

“So who else is seeing that scarf with multi colored blocks about 3 inches wide that run down a scarf that’s about 6 feet long.”

“One just walked in here.”

“Shit, there’s another.”

Scarves will go from novelty to cliche in a day.

I like this sign. It’s a ‘no logo’ logo. I’ve been admiring it on my walk through the McGill ghetto. The leaves have finally fallen away so I could get a picture.

As you can see, it’s not official Pepsi issue-it’s home made. Someone took a stencil and made their own. Why? Well, it’s a store front, isn’t it? And store fronts have signs. And probably (though this is hard to imagine) Pepsi wouldn’t give them one. So they made their own.

It is a ‘no logo’ logo in another respect. This insistence, that a commercial message is appropriate even when unpaid for, suggests that this sort of thing is so much a part of the furniture of contemporary culture that we must supply it even when it doesn’t exist.

What would the store be without it? Less identifiable, less formed. So much of our landscape is created by commerce, virtually all of it is, that it is part of our real and conceptual way finding system. What doesn’t exist, we are obliged to invent.

Naomi Klein, and you knew I was getting to her, didn’t you, would have us believe that logos are a blight, and more than that, that they are an invasion, and more than that that they are a predation. But in fact, no logo is bad anthro-a failure to see, to reckon with the fact that we are, whether we like it or not, almost nothing if not an artifact of commercial forces.

It may be that Klein is right to insist that there are costs and penalties to such a thing, and it is certainly true that we need people to ferret these out and sum them up. What we should not do, I believe, is to make our unhappiness with commerce grounds for a constant posturing against it. If only because the argument is well and truly made. Enough already. But no. The argument is returned to again and again as if it contained difficulties and complexities we hadn’t quite got to the last time round. Some version of this argument has been with us throughout the Western tradition (see Brantlinger, Carey and Docker, below). Certainly it has been robust since the Frankfurt school, and more recently as a result of the efforts of the likes of Ewen and Stuart Hall and the Birmingham school. But it keeps coming back with unexpected freshness, as if the argument were brand new, or, as I say, somehow hard to think.

Here’s something fresh and hard to think. So much of commerce is warp to culture’s woof that it is now almost impossible to distinguish them. To insist on doing so is almost single handedly responsible for the troubling ironies that so amused, but why preoccupied, the 1990s: oh, that Klein is reported to be getting rich from the sale of her book, that Michael Moore is rumored to have bought 3 condos, that Moby used clothing stores and advertisements to sell his music, that Courtney love sold Kurt’s memories for $4 million. No good things can come from commercial motives. No authenticity can come from something touched by the market place. Commerce is pandering. These are a few of our favorite things to think about the commercial culture. They prevent us from the real intellectual challenge here: not how to think about culture and commerce separately, Klein demonstrates that anybody can do this. The real challenge is thinking about how they go together. Not to celebrate that they go together. God knows we have had enough of that. But to understand what it is to live in a society where culture and commerce live out of one another’s pockets. Like it or not, this is who we are and how we live. It will decide what becomes of us.

The time has come to stop protesting the effect of commerce on culture and see how the two run together. How else are we to understand why someone would make a logo for their store front.

Brantlinger, Patrick. 1983. Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber.

Docker, John. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press.