Dot stupid

From Evgeny Morozov's 12 October 2011 TNR evisceration of Jeff Jarvis' Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (Simon & Schuster, 2011) -

For Jarvis, privacy is the preserve of the selfish; keep too much to yourself, and the “Privacy Police” may pay you a visit.

Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates — “there is money to be made in privacy” — who are paid to mislead the “netizens,” that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis’s scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi’s African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is “howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret.” Reading Jarvis, you would think that Privacy International (full-time staff: three) is a terrifying behemoth next to Google (lobbying expenses in 2010: $5.2 million).

“Privacy should not be our only concern,” Jarvis declares. “Privacy has its advocates. So must publicness.” He compiles a long and somewhat tedious list of the many benefits of “publicness”: “builds relationships,” “disarms strangers,” “enables collaboration,” “unleashes the wisdom (and generosity) of the crowd,” “defuses the myth of perfection", "neutralizes stigmas", "grants immortality ... or at least credit", "organizes us", and even "protects us". Much of this is self-evident. Do we really need to peek inside the world of Internet commerce to grasp that anyone entering into the simplest of human relationships surrenders a modicum of privacy? But Jarvis has mastered the art of transforming the most trivial observations into empty business maxims.

In one respect — his unrivaled ability to attract attention to his diva-like self — Jarvis has outdone even the fictional Dr. Kirk. Jarvis’s public parts are truly public: his recent battle with prostate cancer has become something of an online Super Bowl, with Jarvis tweeting from the operating table and blogging about the diaper problems that followed. And like the fictional Kirk, Jarvis likes his privacy when he likes it: the evangelist for publicness does not want his credit card numbers, his passwords, his e-mails, his calendar, his salary, his browsing habits, or his iTunes playlist made public. The digital disclosure of such things is off-limits for Jarvis — but not because of a scruple about privacy. He prefers to justify such immunities by appealing to other rights, fears, and concerns: he won’t share his passwords out of a fear of crime; or his calendar, because he is a busy man and doesn’t want any more commitments; or his salary, because of “cultural conventions”; or his iTunes playlist, because, well, it’s too trivial.

Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody — as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison — it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet. Stripped of all the inspirational buzzwords, it offers a two-fold, and insipid, argument. First, a democratic society cannot afford to have privacy as its main — let alone its only — value. Second, the acts of information disclosure — by individuals, corporations, or public institutions — can be beneficial, under certain conditions, to some or all of the parties involved. Jarvis believes that these points are new and original and heroically subversive of the conventional wisdom. Public Parts is meant to be a polemic, but Jarvis has a hard time finding anyone who disagrees with either of his premises. Forced to introduce at least some contention into the book, he has to venture very far from his main themes, opining on the Arab Spring, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the future of the car industry.

A few such diversions are entertaining, but Jarvis cannot joke his way through the banality of his book’s central argument. Here is Jarvis at his most typical: “Memo to doctors, lawyers, and manicurists: You’d better be online and public.” What an incredible insight, in 2011: an online presence can help your business! Or consider this breakthrough in marketing theory: “If you are known as the company that collaborates with customers to give them the products they want, you may end up with more loyal customers.” Better products boost customer loyalty! Such bland pronouncements make Public Parts sound less cutting edge than the 1996 edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Web. ...

As if to live up to the old joke about an expert being someone who knows more and more about less and less until eventually he knows everything about nothing, Jarvis casts his eye over a gazillion different industries — from cars to airlines and from retail stores to public institutions — but rarely ventures beyond the most obvious analysis anywhere he looks. There are only two pages on WikiLeaks — an oddity in a book on the virtues of publicness — and even those pages are filled with generalities (the WikiLeaks scandal “demonstrated the banality of secrecy” and showed that “government keeps too much secret”). According to Jarvis, Julian Assange is driven by a law that posits that “those who held secrets once held power. Now those who create transparency gain power.” What does that actually mean? Journalists, NGOs, even Google: all of them create transparency in one way or another. But is it true that they now hold more power? What does the WikiLeaks disclosure of all those diplomatic cables imply about the powers lost or gained by the likes of Human Rights Watch, which needs secrecy to work in difficult countries but also needs publicness to make the world aware of those countries’ dire human rights record? Jarvis doesn’t say. If, as a result of legislative changes triggered by WikiLeaks, whistle-blowers end up getting much weaker legal protection, would it mean that they, too, gain power?

There is not much consistency in Jarvis’s thought about technology. Whenever he needs to explain something positive, his instinct is always to credit the Internet: it is the one factor responsible for more publicness, more democracy, more freedom. And every time he turns to darker and more difficult subjects — like discrimination, or shame — he announces that they have nothing to do with the Internet and are simply the product of outdated social mores or ineffective politics. In Jarvis’s universe, all the good things are technologically determined and all the bad things are socially determined.

This perverse analytical framework is most pronounced when he criticizes privacy advocates for not wanting to tackle more fundamental problems — such as social stigmas — that are made less severe by invoking one’s privacy rights. Jarvis writes that “a larger fear of sharing health information is the stigma associated with illness. That stigma is most certainly society’s problem. Why should anyone be ashamed of being sick?” He applies the same logic to discrimination based on sexual orientation: “That anyone would still feel shame about being revealed as gay ... is also our failing. If we think that technology is the problem, we risk ignoring the deeper faults and more important lessons.” Yet Jarvis seems blind to ways in which the rhetoric of publicness could be mobilized to distract from finding equally “deeper faults and more important lessons” about the sprawling national security state. “Knowing that no security at all is not an option, what’s your choice: body scans, physical searches, facial recognition via surveillance cameras, more personal data attached to travel records?” he asks — and quickly informs us that he objects to none of the above. He includes this tirade in a section called “publicness protects us” — but he presents no evidence that it does protect us. And why, one might ask, is the choice so stark? Why not entertain the option of extirpating the roots of terrorism rather than investing more money in surveillance technology and embracing “publicness”? It seems that Jarvis wants to fight root causes only of problems such as shame and discrimination; for everything else, there are quick technological fixes.

Barbie's retroussé nose

From the 1709 Blog review of Infringement Nation: Copyright 2.0 and You (Oxford University Press 2011) by John Tehranian, promoted as "an engaging and accessible analysis of the history and evolution of copyright law and its profound impact on the lives of ordinary individuals in the twenty-first century" -

Books on copyright these days are very much like those doctor-and-nurse romances that used to be popular in the days when people didn't have to apologise for their poor taste in literature: they all have the same plot and the same ending. You know that, in approximate order, you are likely to encounter an explanation as to what copyright is, a nod to the fact that it was once regarded as serving a useful purpose, an account as to how it no longer addresses the day-to-day life of Joe Citizen even when he's not online or at the end of his hand-held device and how much more so when he is, a damning description of what some rogue personages - usually collective ones - do with the copyright when it's in their hands, concluding with the wise observation that something ought to be done about it. Some of these accounts are not great; others bounce along with the vigour of a John Grisham novel and also with the promise that, whatever twists the plot takes, the ending you hope for will generally be found in that place where endings are found. Given this author's experience, erudition and literary skills, this book is definitely at the upper end of this genre and will not disappoint. Indeed, it makes the reader wonder how we even put up with this tiresome inconvenience. This makes it all the more surprising to discover the existence of another book, from the stable of the same publisher, that shows just how effectively a combination of contract and, among other things, copyright law, can be wielded in order to preserve the old order which Professor Tehranian has so deftly painted.

Oxford indicates that -

organized around the trope of the individual in five different copyright-related contexts - as an infringer, transformer, pure user, creator and reformer - the book charts the changing contours of our copyright regime and assesses its vitality in the digital age. In the process, Tehranian questions some of our most basic assumptions about copyright law by highlighting the unseemly amount of infringement liability an average person rings up in a single day, the counterintuitive role of the fair use doctrine in radically expanding the copyright monopoly, the important expressive interests at play in even the unauthorized use of copyright works, the surprisingly low level of protection that American copyright law grants many creators, and the broader political import of copyright law on the exertion of social regulation and control.

Drawing upon both theory and the author's own experiences representing clients in various high-profile copyright infringement suits, Tehranian supports his arguments with a rich array of diverse examples crossing various subject matters - from the unusual origins of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, the question of numeracy among Amazonian hunter-gatherers, the history of stand-offs at papal nunciatures, and the tradition of judicial plagiarism to contemplations on Slash's criminal record, Barbie's retroussé nose, the poisonous tomato, flag burning, music as a form of torture, the smell of rotting film, William Shakespeare as a man of the people, Charles Dickens as a lobbyist, Ashley Wilkes's sexual orientation, Captain Kirk's reincarnation, and Holden Caulfield's maturation. In the end, Infringement Nation makes a sophisticated yet lucid case for reform of existing doctrine and the development of a copyright 2.0.

Humbug

From Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit (Anchor, 2011), eviscerating claims by Greg Mortenson of 'Three Cups Of Tea' fame -

Mortenson didn't really stumble into Korphe after taking a wrong turn on his way down from K2. He wasn't lovingly nursed back to health in the home of Haji Ali. He set no villagers' broken bones. On that crisp September morning, shortly before returning to America, Mortenson did not put his hands on Haji Ali's shoulders and promise to build a school. In fact, Mortenson would not even make the acquaintance of Haji Ali, or anyone else in Korphe, until more than a year later, in October 1994, under entirely different circumstances.

The first eight chapters of Three Cups of Tea are an intricately wrought work of fiction presented as fact. And by no means was this an isolated act of deceit. It turns out that Mortenson's books and public statements are permeated with falsehoods. The image of Mortenson that has been created for public consumption is an artifact born of fantasy, audacity and an apparently insatiable hunger for esteem. Mortenson has lied about noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met, the number of schools he has built. Three Cups of Tea has much in common with A Million Little Pieces, the infamous autobiography by James Frey that was exposed as a sham. But Frey, unlike Mortenson, didn't use his phony memoirs to solicit tens of millions of dollars in donations from unsuspecting readers, myself included. Moreover, Mortenson's charity, the Central Asia Institute, has issued fraudulent financial statements, and he has misused millions of dollars donated by schoolchildren and other trusting devotees. "Greg", says a former treasurer of the organisation's board of directors, "regards CAI as his personal ATM".

Associated Press reported yesterday that Mortenson's attorneys John Kauffman and Kevin Maclay have

asked a U.S. district judge in Missoula to reject certifying three plaintiffs' $5 million class-action lawsuit against Mortenson over what the plaintiffs say are false depictions of Mortenson's humanitarian work in Central Asia.

Former teacher Deborah Netter of Illinois and Montana residents Michele Reinhart and Dan Donovan claim that Mortenson duped 4 million people into buying his books by portraying events in them as true when they weren't, all for the purpose of making Mortenson a hero and to raise money.

The plaintiffs are asking Judge Donald Molloy to certify their class-action lawsuit and place all the money from Mortenson book purchases, which they estimate to be more than $5 million, into a trust to be used for humanitarian purposes.

The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit after published reports this spring by 60 Minutes and author Jon Krakauer alleged that Mortenson lied in the books about how he became involved in building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan and other events depicted as true.

The reports also questioned whether Mortenson financially benefited from his charity, Central Asia Institute, and whether CAI built the number of schools it claimed. ...

In their response filed Friday with the US District Court in Missoula, Kauffman and Maclay never explicitly say that all the events in Mortenson wrote about in the books are true

They say the lawsuit should be thrown out because the plaintiffs can't identify any false statements or misrepresentations in his books.

Also, the plaintiffs can't say that all 4 million people bought the books for the same reason, something they need to prove to turn their claim into a class-action lawsuit, Mortenson's attorneys argue. Why someone buys a book is different from person to person, and may not be the same reason why the plaintiffs bought theirs, they said.

"They cannot demonstrate that an identifiable group of people has experienced any wrongdoing, let alone the same wrongdoing," the document says.

Irrespective of whether purchasers of Mortenson's book have legal standing, Krakauer's expose is reminiscent of a succession of debunkings of humbug. I'm reminded of The Register's expose of Jeffrey Papows, who exited from IBM after the Wall Street Journal questioned statements in his CV. As I've noted elsewhere in this blog, IBM initially dismissed the questioning as nothing but "rumors strung together by commentary".

Not so, said The Register in its classic smack-down, claiming that -

So he's not an orphan, his parents are alive and well. He wasn't a Marine Corps captain, he was a lieutenant. He didn't save a buddy by throwing a live grenade out of a trench. He didn't burst an eardrum when ejecting from a Phantom F4, which didn't crash, not killing his co-pilot. He's not a tae kwon do black belt, and he doesn't have a PhD from Pepperdine University.

Sad and unnecessary.

A follow up to this post is here.

Blissed out

From Riki Sarah Dennis' review in 67(6) World Futures 449-452 of Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students' Inner Lives (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2011) -

I am writing this piece from a place of spiritual privilege. Many of the contemplative practices lauded by the authors of Cultivating the Spirit have been a part of Naropa University since its inception. A recent graduate of their Master’s program in Contemplative Education, I have been known to gush about benefits stemming from the skillful sharing of contemplative practice by school faculty. Reminiscence of the lovingly appointed spaces for related activities can literally evoke a tear. My florid descriptions aside: Can contemplative practices be of use in today’s university? Can the college experience be enhanced through fostering spiritual growth? Can I back an affirmative answer with quantitative and qualitative data, expertly collected and assembled?

Schmaltzy personal stories are fine, but can I provide more believable testimony?

From my perspective, the answer is no. Enough with the gush.

Contemplative education is described by Dennis' alma mater as -

learning infused with the experience of awareness, insight and compassion for oneself and others, honed through the practice of sitting meditation and other contemplative disciplines. The rigor of these disciplined practices prepares the mind to process information in new and perhaps unexpected ways. Contemplative practice unlocks the power of deep inward observation, enabling the learner to tap into a wellspring of knowledge about the nature of mind, self and other that has been largely overlooked by traditional, Western-oriented liberal education.

This approach to learning captures the spark of East and West working within; it’s the meeting of two of the greatest learning philosophies in the history of higher education, applied at Naropa University in the context of today’s rapidly changing world. ...

Woven into the fabric of the curriculum are practices that include sitting meditation, t’ai-chi ch’uan, aikido, yoga, Chinese brushstroke and ikebana. The depth of insight and concentration reached through students’ disciplined engagement with contemplative practices alters the very landscape of learning and teaching at Naropa.

Through such a focused self-exploration, students and faculty acquire the ability to be present in the classroom and in their lives; to engage in active listening with an open mind; to analyze a subject; and to integrate what has been learned with personal experience.

Gorilla Masks

Another rotten review, this time by Stephen Holden in the NY Times of 17 October 2007 -

John Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying cold, obsessive aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions. And in Klimt, Raoúl Ruiz's lavish biographical fantasia, his depiction of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt adds another Mephistophelean figure to his gallery of elegant monsters.

The painter, who died in 1918 at 55, joins Proust's Baron de Charlus in Mr. Ruiz's Time Regained, the silent film director F. W. Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire, Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady and Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons in the roster of sinister Malkovich eccentrics, all more or less interchangeable beneath their elaborate period get-ups.

The actor's chilly stare, attenuated speech and attitude of towering hauteur define a mannered acting style that is a technique unto itself. These imperious alter egos have little feeling for others, who are depicted as helpless objects in the laboratory of a mad scientist.

I have not seen the 130-minute director's cut of Klimt that was shown at the 2006 Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals, but I imagine it was structurally more sound than the 97-minute blur of a movie that opens today in New York. It's not that Mr. Ruiz, a Chilean-born surrealist based in Paris since 1973, is the most accessible of filmmakers to begin with. The shortened version is lovely to look at, but the stilted dialogue and crude overdubbing in scenes where English is not spoken often make it an impenetrable hodgepodge.

Klimt can be appreciated as a voluptuous wallow in high-style fin-de-siecle 'decadence', to use a word bandied about in the film as a synonym for evil. The overstuffed salons of upper-class Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire are so cluttered with expensive ornaments that moving around feels like navigating inside a giant wedding cake.

The salon guests prattle endlessly about art. What is beauty? Can a portrait be an allegory? Blah blah blah. When the subject isn't aesthetics, it is gossip and scandal. Half the men in Vienna suffer from syphilis, muses a doctor who is giving Klimt mercury treatments for that very disease.

The possibility of contagion doesn't stop Klimt from continuing his sexual rampage. His studio is crowded with beautiful nude models, many of whom he beds, and rumors fly that he has sired 30 illegitimate children. In one phantasmagoric scene, he and a friend visit a brothel in which they don gorilla masks to cavort in a cage with women wearing paste-on mustaches.

Celine translated by Larkin

From Lee Siegel's characteristically contrarian review in MoreIntelligentLife -

Go the F*** to Sleep is an expletive-laced cry of adult rage disguised as a child’s book of lullabies that is now a smash bestseller. Go, as they say, figure. The book consists of page after page of more or less conventional two lines of nursery rhyme, and flat-footed ones to boot — "The tiger reclines in the simmering jungle./The sparrow has silenced her cheep." — followed by another two lines, which are crude, angry pleas for the resistant child to immediately make himself unconscious. "F*** your stuffed bear, I’m not getting you s---./Close your eyes. Cut the crap. Sleep."

The whole thing reads like Celine translated by Philip Larkin and recited by James (Tony Soprano) Gandolfini. It has the vitality of a Bronx cheer at a stuffy formal dinner. It is supposed to be a prank, a great, vulgar cri de coeur revealing a truth hitherto hidden away: parents resent their kids for depriving them of sleep. But the F-word is a powerful imprecation that carries a wish for subjugation and even annihilation. A celebrity among words, it is — like certain tough-guy actors who have made it their trademark — full of rage. The idea of applying it to children, “in fun”, in a world where they are the first victims of adult stupidity, incomprehension and rage simply doesn’t work as an extended joke. "You know where you can go? The f*** to sleep." None of the parents I know, who like my wife and me have young children, could make it past the first few pages without tossing the book down in disgust.

The very fact of the book's commercial success, however, seems to have inspired legitimising kudos. After the book — written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortes — rose to bestseller-list heights, writers rushed to explain just what made it so important to own. In a typical effusion, one writer deployed Proust and Freud on her way to extolling the book as "odd, rageful, beautiful", praising it for exposing "a kind of existential despair that is very particularly ours". And you thought getting the kids to sleep was the least of your problems.

I, on the other hand, am a sucker for the pictures of the drowsing tigers.

Garry Wills' NY Times review of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011) by Janet Reitman and Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church (Crown 2011) by Jason Berry begins -

We do not need these books to tell us that money and religion make for a poisonous combination. But it is of some interest to see that ancient truth confirmed in both a church as relatively new as Scientology and one as ancient as Roman Catholicism. Even religious leaders develop a certain swagger when they know they are backed by bundles of cash. When a French court fined Scientology nearly a million dollars, one of its officials shrugged that off as “chump change.” And when the Vatican ran a deficit of nearly 2.4 million euros in 2007, an Italian journalist familiar with the church’s finances dismissed the debt as “chopped liver.” Chump change or chopped liver, both churches have bigger sums they can get to and use, and few outsiders are given a look at how they do it. These two books trace the cash source of theological confidence.

McLuhan

From Alan Jacobs' New Atlantis item on Marshall McLuhan -

McLuhan was simply dismissive of such puzzlement [about Hot and Cool media]. In his preface to a later edition of the book, he wrote that "the section on 'media hot and cool' confused many reviewers of Understanding Media who were unable to recognize the very large structural changes in human outlook that are occurring today". His critics, then, are just out of touch with contemporary experience. In a later interview he would add, shifting the ground of his defense, "Clear prose indicates the absence of thought". Any confusion we experience is the inevitable result of McLuhan’s profundity — a claim quite similar to the ones made by Judith Butler when responding to the news that she had “won” the 1998 edition of the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature.

I have been reading McLuhan off and on since, at age sixteen, I bought a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy. His centenary — McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 — provides an occasion for me to clarify my own oscillating responses to his work and his reputation. I have come to certain conclusions. First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions. Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable. Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics. Fourth, that McLuhan’s determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed. And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.

Jacobs goes on to comment that -

To today’s reader, McLuhan’s responses to these works resemble nothing so much as a series of blog posts. (As my friend Tim Carmody has pointed out, this is even more true of McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride [1951], which is basically an anthology of advertisements with brief commentaries, a kind of proto-tumblelog.) He quotes a passage, riffs on it for a few sentences or paragraphs, then moves on to another book: quote, riff, quote, riff. And sometimes just quote: one section consists largely of a lengthy three-paragraph selection from Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), while another gives seven brief paragraphs from Erik Barnouw’s Mass Communication (1956), in both cases with very brief introduction but no comment. As I have noted, the “mosaic” method here is an intentional homage to or imitation of the non-linear structures of the great Modernists. It may even be significant that what Yeats wanted to do, had he been granted the privilege of traveling through time to Justinian’s Byzantium, was to work in mosaic tile, to be absorbed thereby into a great collective endeavor in devotion to which he could forget his own identity. McLuhan’s refusal to produce a consecutive argument might well be an indication of his own mental quirks and limitations, but surely it was an attempt to allow “the Gutenberg Galaxy” — the vast constellation of idea, inventions, and practices that constitute “the making of typographic man” — to speak for itself.

Retro

From the NY Times coverage in 1982 of the National Science Foundation Teletext and Videotex in the United States report, under the heading 'Study Says Technology Could Transform Society' -

A report commissioned by the National Science Foundation and made public today [13 June] speculates that by the end of this century electronic information technology will have transformed American home, business, manufacturing, school, family and political life.

The report suggests that one-way and two-way home information systems, called teletext and videotex, will penetrate deeply into daily life, with an effect on society as profound as those of the automobile and commercial television earlier in this century.

It conjured a vision, at once appealing and threatening, of a style of life defined and controlled by videotex terminals throughout the house.

As a consequence, the report envisioned this kind of American home by the year 1998:

Family life is not limited to meals, weekend outings, and once-a-year vacations. Instead of being the glue that holds things together so that family members can do all those other things they're expected to do - like work, school, and community gatherings -the family is the unit that does those other things, and the home is the place where they get done. Like the term 'cottage industry,' this view might seem to reflect a previous era when family trades were passed down from generation to generation, and children apprenticed to their parents. In the 'electronic cottage,' however, one electronic 'tool kit' can support many information production trades.

It continues that -

Privacy Issues Seen Posed

The report warned that the new technology would raise difficult issues of privacy and control that will have to be addressed soon to "maximize its benefits and minimize its threats to society." ...

The study focused on the emerging videotex industry, formed by the marriage of two older technologies, communications and computing. It estimated that 40 percent of American households will have two-way videotex service by the end of the century. By comparison, it took television 16 years to penetrate 90 percent of households from the time commercial service was begun.

Opportunities for Abuse

The "key driving force" controlling the speed of videotex penetration, the report said, is the extent to which advertisers can be persuaded to use it, reducing the cost of the service to subscribers.

But for all the potential benefits the new technology may bring, the report said, there will be unpleasant "trade offs" in "control".

"Videotex systems create opportunities for individuals to exercise much greater choice over the information available to them," the researchers wrote. "Individuals may be able to use videotex systems to create their own newspapers, design their own curricula, compile their own consumer guides.

"On the other hand, because of the complexity and sophistication of these systems, they create new dangers of manipulation or social engineering, either for political or economic gain. Similarly, at the same time that these systems will bring a greatly increased flow of information and services into the home, they will also carry a stream of information out of the home about the preferences and behavior of its occupants."

Social Side Effects

The report stressed what it called "transformative effects" of the new technology, the largely unintended and unanticipated social side effects. "Television, for example, was developed to provide entertainment for mass audiences but the extent of its social and psychological side effects on children and adults was never planned for," the report said. "The mass-produced automobile has impacted on city design, allocation of recreation time, environmental policy, and the design of hospital emergency room facilities."

Such effects, it added, were likely to become apparent in home and family life, in the consumer marketplace, in the business office and in politics.

Widespread penetration of the technology, it said, would mean, among other things, these developments:

- The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.

- Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for "production on demand."

- There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.

- A new profession of information "brokers" and "managers" will emerge, serving as "gatekeepers," monitoring politicians and corporations and selectively releasing information to interested parties.

- The "extended family" might be recreated if the elderly can support themselves through electronic homework, making them more desirable to have around.

Hitting the hedgehog

From Carlin Romano's cranky review in The American Scholar of Dworkin's Justice For Hedgehogs -

Examined Lives is, then, an exercise in the Higher Wikipedia, which is not meant to sound completely snide. As a readable introduction to its worthies, it's fine. But those serious about exploring the philosophical tradition of pondering the exemplary life would be better advised to turn to the challenging work of the late French philosopher Pierre Hadot, particularly his Philosophy as a Way of Life.

If Miller’s book underwhelms by its timorous retailing of standard views, Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs annoys because of its author’s trademark smugness. Long anointed as a kind of King of Jurisprudence by the New York Review of Books, bestowing on him a powerful, protected status among academics in that field, Dworkin specializes in the illusion of argumentative rigor, wed to a clear but colorless style. Fellow philosopher of law (and federal judge) Richard Posner, wrote in his own book How Judges Think of Dworkin’s well-known position on judicial reasoning — that judges can find "right answers” in the law if they just think hard enough. He caustically observed,

Really what he has done is relabel his preferred policies 'principles' and urged judges to decide cases in accordance with those 'principles'.

One would expect a sophisticated philosopher to approach the concept of justice with humility. As the late American philosopher Robert C. Solomon observed

What we call justice would not have been recognized as such in Homeric Greece or in the Athens of Plato and Aristotle 400 years later. It is very different from the sense of justice that one would find in feudal France, in the Florentine renaissance, or in the bourgeois London society of Jane Austen. It is very different, indeed, from the sense of justice one finds in contemporary Japan or Iran.

But Dworkin, in Justice for Hedgehogs, sets out his fundamental principles and treats them as if they’re obvious and "mutually supporting". As in his reasoning about judicial decision making, Dworkin rejects any form of relativism and argues that truth in morality is objective and can be shown to be so. The book’s title is a reference to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, in 'The Hedgehog and the Fox', between the former, who knows one big thing, and the latter, who knows many little things. Dworkin identifies with the hedgehog. He’s sure about one big thing — that there is a coherent unity among all human values — and his new book is the 79-year-old thinker’s final attempt to pull his whole theory together.

"I believe", he writes in his opening "Baedeker", or introduction, "that there are objective truths about value. I believe that some institutions really are unjust and some acts really are wrong no matter how many people believe that they are not." Unfortunately, as in much of his work, Dwor­kin simply assumes that values held by well-educated, elite, liberal Westerners — for example, mak­ing one’s life a kind of work of art, respecting human dignity in one and all — are beyond question.

So, for instance, a fundamental shaping principle for Dworkin is that every life should be a "successful performance rather than a wasted opportunity" — that is, we should place extraordinary value on our own lives. Yet that's a view shared around the world, more by aggressively careerist professionals than by humbler, selfless sorts. Another supposed core principle is that we should, in a Kantian manner, treat all other people as ends rather than means, and show equal concern for them. It's a lovely sentiment, and one to which we might wish to subscribe, but a variety of cultures would object to showing equal concern for the kind and the cruel, the industrious and the lazy, just as many would reject the priority on "authenticity" that Dworkin urges.

What passes for rigorous argument in Dworkin's work is usually arbitrary, stipulative redefinition of concepts, regardless of their general use. So, for Dworkin, "ethics" and "morality" are two different things (the first is "the study of how to live well", the second is "the study of how we must treat other people"). In similar fashion, he divides "liberty" and "freedom" and with the help of that legerdemain, makes one of Isaiah Berlin's signature claims — that liberty and equality inevitably clash — disappear. Dworkin’s notion of democracy, in turn, stresses an ideal of citizens as partners rather than competitors, surely one of his less plausible twists of meaning. Law, as always in Dworkin’s past work, becomes a "branch of morality".

It’s not that one can’t prefer the way Dworkin articulates these notions — what irritates is his insinuation that any other understanding of them is wrong. He goes so far as to claim that even if no one existed to believe some of his fundamental judgments, they would still be true. He similarly contends that "we cannot defend a theory of justice without also defending, as part of the same enterprise, a theory of moral objectivity". Even Rawls, particularly in his later work, did not take such a leap, notwithstanding the way that Dworkin, like Rawls, believes all our judgments must cohere in what Rawls called "reflective equilibrium".

Alas, what Robert Solomon observed of prior justice theory might be applied to Dworkin’s massive new ahistorical effort as well:

The positions have been drawn, defined, refined, and redefined again. The qualifications have been qualified, the objections answered and answered again with more objections, and the ramifications further ramified and embellished. But the hope for a single, neutral, rational position has been thwarted every time. The attempt itself betrays incommensurable ideologies and unexamined subjective preferences ... We get no universal, strong, and complete system of justice.

Apotheosis

From James Lundberg's review in Slate of Ken Burns' The Civil War -

The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns' sentimental vision and the romance of [Shelby] Foote's anecdotes. Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved. Confederates, you might need reminding after seeing it, were fighting not for the unification of the nation, but for its dissolution. Moreover, they were fighting for their independence from the United States in the name of slavery and the racial hierarchy that underlay it. Perhaps most disingenuously, the film's cursory treatment of Reconstruction obscures the fact that the Civil War did not exactly end in April of 1865 with a few handshakes and a mutual appreciation for a war well fought. Instead, the war's most important outcome—emancipation—produced a terrible and violent reckoning with the legacy of slavery that continued well into the 20th century.

These are important realities to grasp about the Civil War, but addressing them head on would muddy Burns' neat story of heroism, fraternity, reunion, and freedom. It would also mean a dramatically reduced role for Foote, the film's de facto star. Foote's wonderful stories and synopses of the war's meaning, which manage to be at once pithy and vague, cast a spell on the viewer. When Foote tells us that "the Civil War defined us as what we are and … opened us to being what we became, good and bad things," we may not be quite sure what he means. But his accent, his beard, and his hint of sadness incline us to think there must be profound depths in his tortured language.

Too often, Foote's grand pronouncements and anecdotes become substitutes for more serious consideration of difficult historical dynamics. In the first episode, 'The Cause', Foote nearly negates Burns' careful 15-minute portrait of slavery's role in the coming of the war with a 15-second story of a "single, ragged Confederate who obviously didn't own any slaves." When asked by a group of Yankee soldiers why he was fighting, the Rebel replied, "I'm fighting because you're down here," which, according to a smirking Foote, "was a pretty satisfactory answer." In similar fashion throughout, Foote asks us to put aside the very troubled political meanings of the Confederate Lost Cause and join him in an appreciation of both its courtly leaders and its defiant rank-and-file soldiers.

Foote's powerful and affecting presence in the film would be less problematic if he shared airtime more equally with other talking heads. However, as he gets the starring role and the literal last word of the film, Foote creates an irresolvable tension at its center. As much as we want to remember the Civil War as a war for freedom, emancipation, and the full realization of American ideals, there is Foote calling us into the mythical world of the Confederacy and the Old South in spite of all they stood for.

Poverty of Theory

From Richard Webster's 1983 piece 'E.P. Thompson and the Althusserian locusts: an exercise in practical criticism' -

As the various committee meetings of socialism have wandered in their discussions from practice to theory, from the concrete questions posed by the nature and circumstances of ordinary men and women to the metaphysical discussion of abstractions, Thompson has not hesitated to rise from his seat and, holding aloft the agenda-paper which has been neglected, to seize the chair from whichever self-appointed convenor has assumed it and recall the meeting to order. In The Poverty of Theory he does so again. Because he does not hesitate to hammer upon the table, because he speaks with thunder in his voice, nearly all those present have shown at least signs of attending to him

There can be no surer indicator of the weight and significance of Thompson’s voice within English Marxism than the appearance in 1980 of a book length study of Thompson's ideas and influence written by Perry Anderson. It was Anderson who, in the early 1960s so impressed the founders of the British New Left with his seeming intellectual fertility, his energy and his decisiveness that they, having reached in Thompson's words 'a point of personal, financial and organisational exhaustion' handed over editorial control of the New Left Review to him. This was in 1963. In the next few years those who had joined forces, sometimes at great personal cost, to construct the house of the New Left, woke up from their dream to find themselves outside the home which had once been theirs looking in on a new young occupant whose pride in ownership was tempered only by his evident distaste for the unfashionable and vulgar manner in which the house had been furnished by its original occupants. It was not long before those who stood outside their old home saw the first fleet of intercontinental removal lorries roll in. Swiftly and with very little fuss the old furniture was trundled out. That battered well-used sofa with its William Morris cover went out with it, earmarked for the dust-heap. The old kitchen chairs which were hewn from oak and worked crudely so that a little humanity had stuck to their rough forms, were now considered unusable. The old pictures were taken down from the walls and most of the books were stripped from the shelves, packed into tea-chests and loaded, along with the furniture, into the waiting container lorries. No sooner was the old furniture loaded up than was the new furniture carried proudly down the ramps of the same lorries. New steel and glass tables and chairs designed on the Bauhaus principle but purchased for the most part in Paris, were efficiently installed within the house – whose walls had already been replastered and painted in that uniform white beloved of the bourgeoisie. Only when the cantilever chair of mathematical catastrophe theory had been finally placed in position opposite the sofa of Althusserian structuralism and beneath the spotlight of Lacanian theory focussed by Juliet Mitchell did the new occupants begin to feel more secure and a little more at home. Unpacking their Habitat kitchen they started to cook meals which contained little goodness and less meat but which were deemed all the better for that.

Some few of those original occupants of the house who continued now and then to peer into its windows were impressed by what they saw. Withdrawing to their own establishments in provincial and university cities they quietly ordered furniture from the same suppliers and had it delivered to their door by men wearing the white overalls of the same inter-continental removal firm. Others were dismayed and retired to a distance. One in particular, however – and this was Thompson – returned to berate the new occupants. Although the charges he laid against them were arrogantly rebutted he refused to fall into the silence of deference or complicity. He returned again until eventually, in The Poverty of Theory, he produced a polemic of such power that it threatened to break apart even the newest and most gleaming pieces of intricately machined furniture contained within the usurped house of the New Left.

Wikimyths

From John Cook's review in the current Bookforum of books on Wikileaks -

Assange's primary contribution to what he has repeatedly described as the largest leak of classified information in history consisted, essentially, of checking his e-mail. Aside from that, judging from Domscheit-Berg's account, WikiLeaks staffers spent most of their time Googling the organization's name and attending conferences.

That's not to diminish the genius of the idea Assange had in WikiLeaks, which was essentially to cut reporters and editors out of the process of disseminating sensitive information. It's simply to say that the story of how he did it is exceedingly dull, and that much of the cloak-and-dagger mythology that has developed around him since WikiLeaks began handing over hundreds of thousands of classified Defense and State Department documents to various newspapers last year is just that — mythology.

Cook goes on to describe the relationship between Assange and Domscheit-Berg, who -

joined WikiLeaks as a volunteer in 2007. He was swiftly promoted to being the group's chief spokesman, acting essentially as Assange's deputy. He begins the story as one of Assange's many wide-eyed congregants and ends it as a bitter and betrayed renegade. Their relationship was complicated and characterized primarily by Domscheit-Berg's keen hunger for affirmation from Assange and Assange's idle contempt for Domscheit-Berg. In high school terms, Assange is the cool and self-confident kid for whom everything comes easy; Domscheit-Berg is the clueless mule Assange keeps around to buy cigarettes. The intensity of Domscheit-Berg's desire for validation from his antihero borders on the pathetic. At the book's opening, he writes, "Sometimes I hate him so much that I'm afraid I'd resort to physical violence if our paths ever cross again." Yet when Domscheit-Berg became engaged to be married in March 2010, long after his relationship with Assange had deteriorated and Assange had started to behave cruelly toward him, "Julian was the first person I told ... there was nothing I wanted more than to have Julian there." After their final parting, Domscheit-Berg carried his laptop with him everywhere, including the bathroom, with the hope that Assange would bury the hatchet via a chat program.

Thumbs down for St Julian the Whitehaired Martyr -

The Assange who emerges through these chats is autocratic, vain, pedantic, self-aggrandizing, and utterly without self-awareness. "Under no circumstances was anyone permitted to criticize his Tweets", Domscheit-Berg writes — and the comic disproportion of that edict tells you all you really need to know. At various points, Assange says things like "I'm off to end a war", "Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis," and "I will destroy you." When two Swedish women filed sexual-assault charges against Assange — an accusation that landed him in a British prison; he is, at the time of this writing, appealing an order that he be extradited to Sweden to answer the complaint — Assange's reaction was to berate his staff for failing to organize rallies supporting him, raise money for his legal defense, and procure "false papers" so that he could travel without facing the charges.

Very Secret Squirrel or Inspector Gadget.

Assange certainly didn't view himself as a man who rented servers. He insisted on ludicrous security arrangements and told unconfirmed tales of assassination attempts, placing himself at the center of vast conspiracies even before he became a household name. And after he received a collection of intelligence documents from Afghanistan, incident reports from Iraq, and State Department cables from around the world—almost certainly from Private Bradley Manning, a dissident army intelligence analyst who now sits in a military brig — the spy games intensified. He began traveling with bodyguards, Domscheit-Berg writes. According to Leigh and Harding, he dressed up as an old lady in November 2010 during a drive from London to Ellingham, England, to avoid unspecified bogeymen.

Obtaining those documents seemed to change Assange — in much the same way that Gollum became a different being entirely when he happened on the ring. As all these books show, it's not that Assange was covetous — he was in fact loose with the cables, doling them out to various hangers-on and even giving the whole database to one Icelandic volunteer who then leaked it to another reporter. But the power they bestowed was not lost on him. One of the grand ironies of Assange's story is that WikiLeaks' success transformed the group into precisely the thing it was designed to render obsolete — a journalistic institution with its own agenda. ...

For decades, secrets have been trafficked through a professional class of journalists and newspapers with their own interests, liabilities, social networks, and standards of official conduct. ... Enter WikiLeaks, which performed a technological end run around the sclerotic, compromised journalist class. Assange's digital machine was nearly automatic. Anonymous leakers uploaded their wares, and if WikiLeaks volunteers could verify the material, it would be published in the order in which it was received. If successful, such a system could rob the journalistic establishment of its power as gatekeeper between the murky netherworld of secrets and rumors and the light of day.

But instead of undermining that power, Assange sought to commandeer it. Both The Guardian's WikiLeaks and the Times' Open Secrets reveal Assange's tortured relationship with the newspapers to be more about control and ego than information. Worried that the disclosures of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and State Department documents wouldn't be high-profile enough if WikiLeaks staffers simply dumped them onto the Web, Assange agreed to offer The Guardian, the Times, and Der Speigel (and later El País and Le Monde) exclusive access to the documents ahead of publication. But with each release (the consortium published the Afghanistan documents in July and the Iraq ones in October, then began releasing the cables in November), relations became more frayed. Assange began making side deals, promising access to the State Department cables to television news outlets without consulting the other partners. At the same time, he held out on handing over the cables to the eager Guardian reporters he'd promised them to; Leigh and Harding write that he "talked of how he would use his power to withhold the cables in order to 'discipline' the mainstream media."

The "the sclerotic, compromised journalist class" hasn't come to heel.

Guignol

From 'The Victorian art of murder' by Jonathan Barnes in the 13 April Times Literary Supplement -

Late one afternoon in the winter of 1836, a man boarded a London omnibus, carrying a soft, round object, approximately the size of a football, “wrapped up” under one arm. There was nothing about his appearance to excite suspicion. Indeed, he struck all those who saw him as placid and unremarkable. Taking his seat, he settled his luggage on his lap where it remained, held in place by its owner with perfect equanimity, for the rest of the journey. At Stepney, the passenger disembarked and walked the short distance to the canal where he disposed of his burden, hurling it, as discreetly as he was able, into the water. It floated for a second or two, as though struggling to remain in view of the world, before it sank at last beneath the surface, vanishing from sight.

The name of the traveller was James Greenacre and earlier that day he had committed murder. What he carried under his arm was the severed head of his victim – a washerwoman named Hannah Brown, who was his fiancée. Greenacre must have hoped that the canal would swallow the proof of his crime but the waters failed to keep their secret. On January 6, 1837, the head of Miss Brown was found by a lock-keeper when it came to obstruct the mechanism of which he was in charge. Brown’s torso was soon discovered, “in a horridly mutilated state”, dumped in a sack “tucked under a flagstone” on the Edgware Road, and in February “a pair of legs was dredged out of a bed of reeds near Coldharbour Lane, in Brixton”. Following the identification of the body by the victim’s brother, Greenacre was hunted down and arrested. Soon afterwards, he confessed and the crowd at his execution was apparently “large, vocal and perfectly good-humoured”. They purchased “Greenacre tarts” from a pie-seller while they waited to watch the killer swing.

In reviewing Judith Flanders' The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime (Harper Press, 2011) Barnes goes on to comment that -

For all that society evolved in the Victorian century, what has become most apparent by the end of Flanders’s impressively thorough book (both bibliography and index are excellent) is how little things have changed. In these pages we seem to see reflections of our own time – in the statistics (then, as now, murders seem overwhelmingly to involve male violence against women: “throughout the sixty-three years of Victoria’s reign, 26 per cent of convicted murderers were men who killed their wives, while only 1 per cent were women who killed their husbands . . . eight out of every ten female homicide victims were killed by a husband, lover, or would-be husband or lover”), and in public concern over the corruption of the young (the “vibrant illustrated posters” of the time prompted the Police News to fret that “such pictures” might have the same effect on suggestible members of the public as “the taste of blood produces upon the tiger”).

Above all, the Victorians’ thirst for murder – their fascination with the details, their poring over and feasting on it – mirrors our own culture. Today, Britain remains obsessed with murder, as the most cursory look at the television guide or the bestseller charts will show. More than that, the urge persists to invent, to extrapolate, to replay terrible events over and over, embroidering them and fleshing them out. For all the pain and horror of these transgressive deeds, dramatization seems hard to resist – certain small details, for example, in the two paragraphs which opened this review were made up in order to render the scene more ghoulishly picturesque. As to why this practice might be almost inevitable, Flanders has an explanation. “Murder”, she writes, “is like hearing blustery rain on the windowpane when sitting indoors. It reinforces a sense of safety, even of pleasure, to know that murder is possible, just not here.”

Ulysses and Deleuze

From Ron Rosenbaum's put-down of Ulysses -

on the whole Ulysses is due for more than a little irreverence. People still speak of it in hushed tones, perhaps hoping nobody will ask them about the parts they skipped over.

So you do think Ulysses is overrated?

In general, yes. Loved Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, but didn't need it blown up to Death-Star size and overinfused with deadly portentousness. Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they've wasted reading it.

I do wonder what he'd say about 'Law, Space, Bodies: The Emergence of Spatial Justice' by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos in Deleuze and Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) edited by L. de Sutter -

This is a text that brings together spatiality and legality in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, thus allowing for a renewed understanding of what is Spatial Law and Spatial Justice to enter the debate. Employing Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, I read diagrammatically a novel by Michel Tournier called Vendredi (Friday). The novel is a rewriting of Robinson meets Friday but through a spatial/legal lens. My reading enhances this perspective while extracting a few fundamental practices of law’s spatiality, namely its immanent, posthuman and material qualities. The island is part of the assemblage between the various bodies (human and otherwise) that move from logos to nomos, namely from a rational distribution to nomadic movement. While Robinson succumbs to Friday’s animalistic spatiality, the whole island bows to the emergence of what Deleuze has called "a second island." This is what I take to be the space of emergence of spatial justice, a concept immanent to the law yet only appearing at its very edge.

The author goes on to state that -

The second island is the body of Deleuzian jurisprudence. If the latter is that which “acts as the event or abstract machine of the legal assemblage”, then spatial justice is simply another name for Deleuzian jurisprudence. Deleuze’s engagement with the concept of jurisprudence was sporadic and incidental, and in many ways leaves an open space for concept construction. My aim therefore is to add to the existing subsequent literature on jurisprudence by emphasising two things that I believe emanate directly from Deleuzian thought: spatiality and immanence. Spatiality in spatial justice is as much a statement of something painfully obvious (can there ever be a justice that is not spatially emplaced? an abstract, universal justice that transcends the concrete?), as it is a political gesture that aims at moving law away from its traditional historicisation and into the open, fragmented, material space of geography, of earth and geophilosophy, of violent falls and dirty fingernails. My other aim is to emphasise the immanence of justice, namely its self-enclosed generation that is, however, necessarily based on a connection of withdrawal with the law. Spatial justice is immanent to law, flowing along the legal orientation towards justice, yet overcoded by the withdrawal of the law.

Spatial justice is jurisprudence that retains the law within, in withdrawal and perennial movement, like the empty square of the chessboard. As Deleuze writes, “there is no structure without the empty square, which makes everything function.” The second island orients everything on account of its empty space, a space of withdrawal within. And Deleuze carries on by urging us to keep moving the square: “today’s task is to make the empty square circulate”. The space of withdrawal is always there but needs to be constantly flowing, for otherwise justice becomes frozen in the regime, a pillar amidst other pillars. Just as justice cannot be disengaged from the law in its paradoxical flow of the logic and the nomic, in the same way there is no telling how much of either needs to be withdrawn for the empty square to follow the lines of escape and keep on moving. Withdrawal is a revolutionary, dangerous move that takes risks by allowing spaces to discover their immanent legality.

The second island is the product of a Deleuzian encounter, pulsating with its infinitely repeated singularity. It is the space of here into which the law throws itself, the luminosity of "erected" spaces, the singularity of "erected" times: “each day stands separate and erect, proudly affirming its own intrinsic value ... They so resemble each other as to be superimposed in my memory, so that I seem to be ceaselessly reliving anew the same day. The space of justice is the space of “second origin”, which is “more essential than the first, since it gives us the law of repetition, the law of the series” that repeats to the ‘nth’ degree the encounter every time anew. The second island, the space in which spatial justice emerges, is then the desert island par excellence. It is uncharted, unreachable except through the conjuncture of a shipwreck, closed, “a sacred island”. But to retain this sacredness, the island must remain desert yet open to shipwrecks and people arriving: "far from compromising it, humans bring the desertedness to its perfection and highest point. Humans pierce the island, make it a "holey space" that "communicates with smooth space and striated space", they set the ground on which the 'perfection and highest point of desertedness', namely of the world without law, might eventually emerge.

He didn't like her

From Joseph Epstein's snarky WSJ review of Sempre Susan (Atlas & Co, 2011) by Sigrid Nunez -

Sontag wasn't sufficiently interested in real-life details, the lifeblood of fiction, but only in ideas. She also wrote and directed films, which were not well-reviewed: I have not seen these myself, but there is time enough to do so, for I have long assumed that they are playing as a permanent double feature in the only movie theater in hell.

In case you didn't get the message that Epstein didn't like her he comments that -

In the end, Susan Sontag may have been most notable as a photographic subject and for the querulous interview, of which she gave a bookful (see "Conversations With Susan Sontag.") She was photographed by the best in the business, in poses sexy, earnest, sultry, brainy and sublimely detached. She did the siren in a thousand faces. Her last partner, Annie Leibovitz, is, appropriately, best known as a celebrity photographer. Sontag's obituary in the New York Times was accompanied by no fewer than four photographs — an instance of intellectual cheesecake.

If Susan Sontag had been a less striking woman when younger, her ideas would not have had the reach that they did. Something similar could be said about Mary McCarthy, another attractive writer, who claimed that Sontag was "the imitation me." Today, more than six years after Sontag's death, not her writing — as a prose stylist she gave no pleasure — but only the phenomenon of Susan Sontag is of interest.

And -

"Intelligence," Sontag wrote, "is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas." In her thrall to ideas she resembles the pure type of the intellectual. The difficulty, though, was in the quality of so many of her ideas, most of which cannot be too soon forgot. Her worst offenses in this line were in politics, where her specialty was extravagant utterance.

During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called "useful idiots"—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it. There she found the North Vietnamese people noble and gentle, if a touch boring and puritanical for her tastes. Doubtless that trip led to her most famous foolish remark, when she said that "the white race is the cancer of human history," later revising this judgment by noting that it was a slander on cancer. Hers was the standard leftist view on Israel, which was — natch — that it is a racist and imperialist country. All her political views were left-wing commonplace, noteworthy only because of her extreme statement of them.

Andrew Roberts in the WSJ adopts the same tone in his review of Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India (Knopf, 2011) -

"Great Soul" ... obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist — one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.

George Scialabba emotes from the other direction -

Gandhi is, to my mind, the gold standard of 20th-century political greatness. He produced tremendous effects, overwhelmingly good, and he achieved them not by luck, force, or guile but virtuously, by persuasion and example. Martin Luther King is perhaps his peer in these respects, but the scale of Gandhi's accomplishment was much greater. ...

Lelyveld's probing account of the visionary-as-politician reveals that, as one might expect, the politician often prevailed over the visionary. The Mahatma had a remarkable capacity for compromise, and even for nimble rationalization. But he was morally serious, a genuine "great soul," and thus lacked the true politician's talent for convenient self-deception. "By the end," Lelyveld writes, he was "forced to recognized that the great majority of his supposed followers hadn't followed him very far," spiritually speaking.

Oh dear

'The Liar As Hero' by historian Benny Morris in TNR (17 Mar 2011) begins by stating -

At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world's sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.

Morris' demolition of Pappe proceeds with comments such as -

Those who falsify history routinely take the path of omission. They ignore crucial facts and important pieces of evidence while cherry-picking from the documentation to prove a case.

Pappe is more brazen. He, too, often omits and ignores significant evidence, and he, too, alleges that a source tells us the opposite of what it in fact says, but he will also simply and straightforwardly falsify evidence

and

The disproportion also reflects Pappe's worth as a historian. Let me explain. To cover the history of Palestine—a geographically small backwater in the giant Ottoman domain—and the activities of its aristocracy and their interaction with the authorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one would have to spend many months in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. There one would need to locate and pore over reports and correspondence from and about the relevant vilayets (provinces), Syria/Damascus and Beirut, and the relevant sanjaks and mutasarafliks (districts), Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre, in addition to the central government’s deliberations and decision-making about Jerusalem and its environs. Pappe, who lacks Turkish, has not consulted any Ottoman archives. There is not a single reference to any Ottoman archive, or any Turkish source, in his endnotes.

and

Pappe repeatedly refers to "Harry Lock" of the British Mandate government secretariat in the 1920s —b ut the chief secretary's name was Harry Luke. Pappe obviously encountered the name in Hebrew or Arabic and transliterated it, with no prior knowledge of Luke against which to check it: if he had consulted British documents, he would have known the correct spelling. Pappe refers to "the Hope Simpson Commission" — there was no such commission, only an investigation by an official named John HopeSimpson. He refers to "twenty-two Muslim ... states" in the world in 1931, but by my count there were only about half a dozen. He refers to "the Jewish Intelligence Service" — presumably the Haganah Intelligence Service — and then adds, "whose archive has been opened to Israeli historians but not to Palestinians". To the best of my knowledge, this is an outright lie. All public archives in Israel, including the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv, which contains the papers of its intelligence service, are open to all researchers.

and

It is unclear what Pappe is quoting from. I did not find this sentence in the commission’s report. Pappe's bibliography refers, under "Primary Sources", simply to "The Shaw Commission". The report? The deliberations? Memoranda by or about? Who can tell? The footnote attached to the quote, presumably to give its source, says, simply, "Ibid". The one before it says, "Ibid., p. 103." The one before that says, "The Shaw Commission, session 46, p. 92." But the quoted passage does not appear on page 103 of the report. In the text of Palestinian Dynasty, Pappe states that "Shaw wrote [this] after leaving the country [Palestine]". But if it is not in the report, where did Shaw "write" it?

and so on.

St Martin

I have been reminded of Thomas Bernhard's rant about Heidegger in Old Masters (1985) -

Heidegger ... that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours. Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy, Heidegger and Stifter, each one for himself and in his own way, have hopelessly kitschified philosophy and literature. Heidegger, after whom the war-time and post-war generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime. I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him from the wool she has shorn from their own Heidegger sheep. I cannot visualize Heidegger other than sitting on the bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife, who all her life totally dominated him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted all his caps and baked all his bread and wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled up his sandals for him. Heidegger was a kitschy brain, Reger said, just as Stifter, but actually a lot more ridiculous than Stifter who in fact was a tragic figure unlike Heidegger, who was always merely comical, just as petit-bourgeois as Stifter, just as disastrously megalomaniac, a feeble thinker from the Alpine foothills, as I believe, and just about right for the German philosophical hot-pot. For decades they ravenously spooned up that man Heidegger, more than anybody else, and overloaded their stomachs with his stuff. Heidegger had a common face, not a spiritual one, Reger said, he was through and through an unspiritual person, devoid of all fantasy, devoid of all sensibility, a genuine German philosophical ruminant, a ceaselessly gravid German philosophical cow, Reger said, which grazed upon German philosophy and thereupon for decades let its smart little cow-pats drop on it ...

Heidegger is the petit-bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy nightcaps, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else. Heidegger has always been repulsive to me, not only the night-cap on his head and his homespun winter long-johns above the stove which he himself had lit at Todtnauberg, not only his Black Forest walking stick which he himself had whittled, in fact his entire hand-whittled Black Forest philosophy, everything about that tragicomical man has always been repulsive to me, has always profoundly repulsed me whenever I even thought of it; I only had to know a single line of Heidegger to feel repulsed, let alone when reading Heidegger, Reger said; I have always thought of Heidegger as a charlatan who merely utilized everything around him and who, during that utilization, sunned himself on his bench at Todtnauberg ... His nothing without reason is the most ludicrous thing ever, Reger said. But the Germans are impressed by posturing, Reger said, the Germans have an interest in posturing, that is one of their most striking characteristics. And as for the Austrians, they are a lot worse still in all these respects. I have seen a series of photographs which a supremely talented woman photographer made of Heidegger, who in all of them looked like a retired bloated staff officer, Reger said; in these photographs Heidegger is just climbing out of bed, or Heidegger is climbing into bed, or Heidegger is sleeping, or waking up, putting on his underpants, pulling on his socks, taking a nip of grapejuice, stepping out of his log cabin and looking towards the horizon, whittling away at his stick, putting on his cap, taking off his cap, holding his cap in his hands, opening out his legs, raising his head, lowering his head, putting his right hand in his wife’s left hand while his wife is putting her left hand into his right hand, walking in front of his house, walking at the back of his house, walking towards his house, walking away from his house, reading, eating, spooning his soup, cutting a slice of bread (baked by himself), opening a book (written by himself), closing a book (written by himself), bending down, straightening up, and so on, Reger said. Enough to make you throw up.

Global Village Idiot

From Nicholas Carr's TNR review of Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (Atlas, 2010) by Douglas Coupland -

a Canadian television show in 1968 featur[ed] a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both heroes of the '60s, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. "The planet is no longer nature", he declares, to Mailer's uncomprehending stare; "it's now the content of an art work".

Watching McLuhan, you can't quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As Douglas Coupland argues in his pithy new biography, McLuhan's mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of an apple from the base of his brain. ...

McLuhan was a scholar of literature, with a doctorate from Cambridge, and his interpretation of the intellectual and social effects of media was richly allusive and erudite. But what particularly galvanized the public was the weirdness of his prose. Perhaps because of his unusual mind, he had a knack for writing sentences that sounded at once clinical and mystical. His books read like accounts of acid trips written by a bureaucrat. That kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic style made him a darling of the counterculture — the bearded and the Birkenstocked embraced him as a guru — but it alienated him from his colleagues in academia. To them, McLuhan was a celebrity-seeking charlatan.

Perhaps he was, instead, the global idiot savant.

I'm reminded of William Melody's acerbic review in Information, Communication & Society of Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (MIT Press, 1998) by Philip Marchand -

Now that McLuhan has been dead for nearly twenty years and cannot divert us with his dazzling elliptical metaphors and bad puns, his work can be examined without raising the passions the deliberately provocative oral communicator managed to inflame in his prime. Adopting a stance of arrogant superiority, he considered clarifying his ideas an unworthy menial task for intellectual plodders, and dismissed challenging questions with comments like, 'You don't like those ideas. I got other ones', and the infamous, 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' He paid scant attention to facts and never conceded a point. His ultimate put down was a benign explanation that the question revealed the person was locked into the uni-dimensional visual bias of the age of print and could not really be expected to understand.

Didn't like it

From Jeannette Catsoulis' succinct 6 January 2011 NY Times review of Season of the Witch ("a 14th-century road movie with 21st-century cuss words") -

Tired of hacking infidels and pleasuring wenches, two deserters from the Crusades (...) agree to transport an accused witch (...) to a remote abbey to stand trial.

Accompanied by an uptight monk, a ringleted altar boy and a swindler (Stephen Graham, recently seen having much more fun as Al Capone on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire), our heroes traverse a wolf-infested forest, plague-stricken villages and a plot with more holes than a macramé plant holder. Around them, characters converse in period-appropriate dialogue ("We're gonna need more holy water"), while the cinematographer, Amir Mokri, conceals the magnificent Austrian Alps beneath a palette of sludge and fudge. The entire film seems to be happening on the other side of a dirty window — good news for the dreadful computer-generated effects, if not for our eyes.

McLuhan

From the WSJ review of Douglas Coupland's Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work (2010) -

Like his fellow devout Catholic, J.R.R. Tolkien, media theorist Marshall McLuhan exerts a powerful fascination over certain adolescent minds. His catchphrase, "the medium is the message," encapsulates an intoxicating technological determinism; his prediction, in the 1960s, that electronic communication would create a "global village" makes him seem a seer. Novelist Douglas Coupland, himself a chronicler of technology and culture, seems never to have outgrown his McLuhan phase.

Inspired by perceived similarities between their lives—both are Canadians, from stern, Protestant, frontier stock—Mr. Coupland has written a short yet infuriatingly digressive biography of McLuhan. In broad outlines, he shows how a scholar of Renaissance literature turned his critical skills toward such topics as popular culture and television. Readers may be surprised to learn that McLuhan believed the effects of modern communication technology on society to be mostly malign. Old-fashioned to the point of medievalism, he predicted the end of print but was not at all pleased about the possibility.

... Coupland's biography exhibits the same flaws as McLuhan's own books. It is lazily researched: Describing major figures that a young graduate student might have encountered at Cambridge University in the 1930s, Mr. Coupland admits that "much of this information came from Wikipedia."