I’ve done boring jobs. I’ve worked in abattoirs stunning pigs and musicians and by the end of the day your back aches
October 19, 2012 § Leave a comment
One historical irony of this transition from the intensive, state-coordinated investment in these grand projects (with their significant blue-sky R&D components) to our current model (with its emphasis on “results,” i.e., profitable applications) is the extent to which the current crop of profitable technologies came out of that previous era of state development.
Rather than a mystical substance exuded through the pores of entrepreneurial ubermenschen, like Steve Jobs, most of the actual innovations that have driven capitalist profitability over the last several decades—including computerization and the internet—were first developed through research intensive, collective state projects, like NASA or DARPA.
Entrepreneurial “innovation” in our neoliberal period could be likened to a process of enclosure, whereby, in John Gulick’s words, corporate capitalists and a reconfigured neoliberal capitalist state commodify and reapportion already existing technical infrastructure and cultural wealth, “rather than creating anything new.” Leigh Philips details these more recent uses of space technology in “Put Whitey Back On The Moon,” in the process of advocating a return to manned space exploration as part of a comprehensively social democratic program that includes “guaranteed incomes, well-funded pensions, a transformation to a low-carbon (or even carbon-negative) economy, and investment in space exploration.”
In other words, rather than ceding the utopian legacy of space travel to the likes of Newt Gingrich, while offering a standard neoliberal “austerian” justification for such a rejection, leftists should wholeheartedly embrace the old dream of modernity. The specter of communism, in interstellar form, haunts this call.
Communism put human beings in space. The Moon landing was the Soviets’ greatest accomplishment: a quip that transcends its most immediate nationalist point of reference, as evinced—Newt Gingrich aside—in the American right-wing’s longstanding antipathy toward the space program, or “big government” in space (unless it’s say Ronald Reagan touting a Star Wars-style space weapons program run by conservatives’ command economy of choice). read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Diane Arbus
“Now,” someone said, and I truly couldn’t say if it was me
October 18, 2012 § Leave a comment
Recently I’ve been watching YouTube clips of Max Wall performing in his role as Professor Wallofski. The weirdness of antiquity hangs over this kind of comedy but unlike other entertainers of the Music Hall era, Wall’s influence (on John Cleese and Les Dawson, for example) is clear and his abject yet distasteful persona, tattered creature of the night who has fallen into the wrong world, is compulsively creepy. Part of his professorial status is earned through a piano whose presence requires not only music but a configuration of the body. Wall’s arachnid body malfunctions under the pressure of this demand (not uncommon among virtuosi); his wrists go floppy or one arm becomes shorter than the other, must be extended and then compared in a routine that addresses the piano as a near-silent phantom of cultural rectitude, patient and implacable in its search for the perfect human specimen.
All musical instruments come with baggage. In fact they are baggage – objects of surrealist furniture that speak. Smash them, burn them, build them in funny shapes or digital simulacra and yet they grin back: “still here”. Seeing Rhodri Davies set himself up to play amplified harp at Café Oto last night reminded me of Max Wall, not because Rhodri gurns, suffers limb rubberisation or wears black tights but because the instrument is the ventriloquist doll that has the last word. Whatever you do to me tonight, I am the harp of your childhood and all childhoods, it says. Now do your worst. read more
ART: Ando Hiroshige
I really do think that the crowning glory of the Sex Pistols is that we’ve always managed to disappoint on big occasions. When the chips were down we never came through
October 17, 2012 § 1 Comment
Our instictive aversion to freeloaders was an evolutionary response to pre-industrial times. But it is a maladaption in our present environment, an atavistic anachronism. There is now – and there is likely to remain – a shortage of jobs. In this world, the fact that some (few?) people don’t want to work should be welcomed, as it increases the chances of getting work for those who want it. This is a good thing because involuntary unemployment is a big source of unhappiness.
What’s more, many of the few low-wage jobs that are available are of private benefit but little or even negative social value. Incentivizing people to work in call centres cold-calling people to sell them PPI compensation is not an obviously Pareto-efficient policy.
In this context, we can think of the tax and benefit system as being like an auction in which people bid for the scarce right to work; taxes are the price we pay to buy that right. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Larry Sultan
either the starch goes or I do for you
October 16, 2012 § Leave a comment
By 1998, Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood overflowed with thousands and thousands of high-school girls adhering to kogyaru-inspired trends, who shopped at Shibuya 109, read the magazine egg, worked increasingly with marketers from large companies, and dominated the sexual fantasies of men’s magazines. The female subculture spent most of the 1990s tarred by the enjo kōsai schoolgirl prostitution panic, but with so much kogyaru-driven media in the marketplace in the late 1990s, the group was finally moving closer towards mainstream acceptance.
Full social integration of the style, however, was not to be. At the end of the decade, the gyaru subculture made one of the most radical shifts of any Japanese fashion subculture ever, embracing an eccentric and shocking personal style that frightened and disgusted wider society and turned away regular high-school students who had once looked to the gyaru for their fashion cues. The kogyaru had entered into the era of ganguro — and there was no turning back. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Wing-Chi Poon
Wenches emerge from scullery dimnesses to seat themselves at the tables of disputants, and in brogues thick as oatmeal recite their own lists of British sins
October 15, 2012 § Leave a comment
In my recent halting quest to delve more deeply into classical music, it occurs to me that I’ve been pretty trusting of people’s advice. For instance, everyone who has an opinion seems to think that Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is uniquely worthy of attention among his works, and so I got a recording of a performance from Netflix and watched it yesterday afternoon — turns out it’s pretty impressive. Similarly, I’ve eagerly acted on recommendations of books and recordings.
Why am I so trusting? Because basically no one is going to bother even claiming to have an opinion about classical music unless they know what they’re talking about to some degree. It’s totally “voluntary” to know about it — the culture has moved on, so there’s no payoff for pretension. Someone might tell you that The Wire is great just because they feel like they “should” think that; no one’s going to pull a similar move on Missa Solemnis.
In a way, this is a basic Adorno-esque point: previously elite artforms that have lost their accustomed role have a unique potential for “disinterested” uses. I wonder, though, how many other things are like this? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Miroslav
What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask
October 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
Unsophisticated critics often identify economic neoclassicism with models in which all agents are perfectly informed. Or fully instrumentally rational. Or excruciatingly selfish. Defining neoclassicism in this manner would perhaps be apt in the 1950s but, nowadays, it leaves almost all of modern neoclassical theory out of the definition, therefore strengthening the mainstream’s rejoinders. Indeed, the last thirty years of neoclassical economics have been marked by an explosion of models in which economic actors are imperfectly informed, some times other-regarding, frequently irrational (or boundedly rational, as the current jargon would have it) etc. In short, Homo Economicus has evolved to resemble us more.
None of these brilliant theoretical advances have, however, dislodged the neoclassical vessel from its methodological anchorage. Neoclassical theory retains its roots firmly within liberal individualist social science. The method is still unbendingly of the analytic-synthetic type: the socio-economic phenomenon under scrutiny is to be analysed by focusing on the individuals whose actions brought it about; understanding fully their ‘workings’ at the individual level; and, finally, synthesising the knowledge derived at the individual level in order to understand the complex social phenomenon at hand. In short, neoclassical theory follows the watchmaker’s method who, faced with a strange watch, studies its function by focusing on understanding, initially, the function of each of its cogs and wheels. To the neoclassical economist, the latter are the individual agents who are to be studied, like the watchmaker’ cogs and wheels, independently of the social whole their actions help bring about.
So, the first feature of the ‘body of theory’ we think of as neoclassical is its methodological individualism: the idea that socio-economic explanation must be sought at the level of the individual agent. Note two things: First, this was not the method of classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Or, indeed, of Keynes. Or Hayek. Secondly, this proclivity is fully in tune with the mid-19th Century angloceltic liberal individualism (though the opposite does not hold) as it imposes axiomatically a strict separation of structure from agency, insisting that socio-economic explanation, at any point in time, must move from agency to structure, with the latter being understood as the crystallisation of agents’ past acts. We shall argue later that this strict separation is central in not only defining but also undermining the most recent claims of neoclassicism. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Peter Abrahams. ART [detail]: Sarah Cawkwell
Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?
October 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
We usually just stop the simulations at the present, because we’re still trying to understand how we got here, but there’s no particular reason to stop them. You can continue to run them forward and some people have done that in the past. What they’ve found is that if you run the universe far enough into the future it expands into a pretty bleak place.
All the matter runs away from each other, because space is being created at an ever-accelerating rate. In fact, people often joke that this is the right time to do cosmology because trillions of years from now we won’t be able to see anything: Everything will have receded out of sight. So yes, we can run these simulations into the future, but it’s not that interesting. The universe is much more interesting now than it’s going to be in the future, provided that this accelerating expansion phase of the universe continues as we expect it to. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Fiona’s Japanese Cooking
The law must be irrational, since if there were reasons for obeying it it would lose its absolute authority
October 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
One of my cousins spent four weeks in a hinanjo (避難所, evacuation shelter) after the Tohoku disaster, and during that time she experienced the moteki (モテキ, a time when one is gloriously attractive to the opposite sex) of her life.
Now in her 40s and divorced for some time, this cousin had always been pretty and hadezuki (派手好き, having a penchant for all things glittery, or just plain flamboyant) — to use one of my grandmother’s phrases.
When her marriage fell apart, my cousin took it in all her stride and moved out of her damp, gloomy house into a light-filled apartment just outside Sendai city. She got a job at a big discount store to shiwake (仕分け, dividing and categorizing) the stock, a skill which she later deployed to full use within 30 hours of the Great East Japan Earthquake when supplies from well-wishers started coming in from all over the country.
Even working among the danbōru-bako (ダンボール箱, cardboard boxes) by day, and sleeping in the local chūgakko (中学校, junior high school) gymnasium by night, my cousin was always made-up, her hair carefully dyed and sporting her favorite necklaces. Men at the hinanjo trampled over each other to ask her out, preferably to the nearest operative bar 10 km away. (The toilet didn’t work but hey, sake was ¥100 per tumbler!) One night, someone tried to sneak into her futon, which for the record wasn’t conducive to romance or even a night’s rest. Another man approached her and offered her the use of his house, as soon as he could get the mud and seaweed out of the premises. And then he proposed. My cousin summed up her situation in one sentence: “Nanpatte iiwanē!” (「ナンパっていいわねえ!」”It’s so nice to be courted!”).
The catch? None of the gentlemen were a day under 50 years old. But I circulated my cousin’s story to a bunch of Tokyo women and their collective reaction pretty much amounted to: “How could such a thing happen — and why isn’t it happening to me?” read more
STILL: Andre Almuró
People always ask, Why did you stop drinking? They never ask, Why did you start drinking?
October 9, 2012 § Leave a comment
Our cultural belief is that harmony is good and dissonance, bad. Those forms of music that have abandoned connection to what most people regard as “harmony” can be very difficult to listen to: for many people the onslaught of dissonance in much twentieth-century “serious” music amounts to torture, and they retreat to Mozart for relief. Yet music that has no dissonance is equally difficult to listen to, not because it is painful but because it is dull – particularly if it lacks rhythmic definition as well. Twentieth-century minimalist music is not as challenging to Western ears as twentieth-century serialism, but it is just as difficult to listen to attentively. After 5 minutes of unrelenting ostinato, the average listener is asleep…
Permanent dissonance is perhaps not quite as dangerous as permanent harmony. The soporific effect of unrelieved harmony can be disastrous, as anyone who has fallen asleep at a car wheel could testify. Listening to challenging music can be an effective way of warding off fatal sleepiness. Listening to undemanding musak can make sleepiness worse. When things are going well we are lulled into a false sense of security, which means that the crisis when it comes is all the worse because it is unexpected. In the recent financial crisis many people asked why it wasn’t predicted. The truth is that it WAS predicted, by many economists, but politicians and people alike didn’t want to listen to the Cassandras and wheeled out their own “experts” to “prove” that there would be no crisis, despite the mounting evidence that there was an unsustainable boom in house prices and credit expansion. They were asleep at the wheel, and the result was a crash. read more
ART: RB Kitaj
and I am a child again, begging on the threshold of eternity
October 8, 2012 § Leave a comment
Gentle murmurings in a foreign language, crinkling packaging, meticulous descriptions of folding towels or the feigned administration of eye exams bypass the defense of interpretation to become sacramental. To call this relaxation is to underplay its uncanny intensity. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Glen Bowman
my nerves are bad to-night 
