in video veritas

In the process of doing my research for a presentation I gave a couple weeks ago, I came to a (very old) review of Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, written by the erstwhile Richard Dawkins, whose Selfish Gene was actually an important source in this presentation. Shockingly enough, Dawkins quotes Deleuze and Guattari: not something you will probably ever see elsewhere. (Although I did also find an article on JSTOR about this little trio, written in a style Dawkins would almost certainly deem abhorrent.) He more or less discards them out of hand as obscurantists, on the basis of one citation from Guattari and one from Deleuze, which he certainly just picked out of Sokal and Bricmont, taking them at their word. All the better for these scientific ideologues; all the worse for Dawkins’ grasp of philosophy. What follows is a brief ‘meta-review’ of Dawkins’ review, which seeks to ask some pose some basic philosophical questions about the unstated premises of scientist-demagogues like Dawkins, and the prejudices to which they give rise.
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here’s a revision of the piece I wrote a while back on Foucault and the wire, worked up for publication in UBC’s film journal Cinephile.

if you liked the old one, you’ll dig this. if you didn’t, i may have addressed your objections to it - or you might have come up with some new ones. it’s worth taking a look anyway. pre-publication release! complete with some hilarious comments from me, trying to figure out how to fix some especially unwieldy passages. (i hope this is OK. dewaard, if you read this and it isn’t, you should prolly let me know. haha) oh, and if you notice any glaring mistakes or omissions, please do let me know. (or if you can answer any of the questions in my comments!!!)
here it is: ‘dramatizing individuation: insitutions, assemblages, and the Wire.’

Prof. Steven Shaviro posted on his blog a few days ago a brief meditation on Daniel Day-Lewis’ (now Oscar-winning) performance in There Will be Blood, responding to Salon’s rather scathing review of said performance. Quite a fascinating post really, and one which linked to and generated a number of very interesting comments. Definitely worth taking a look, particularly for those of us who aren’t satisfied with just enjoying a wonderful movie like this, and insist upon analysing it theoretically (with reference, of course, to M. Deleuze).

While reading his post and the resultant comments, I was left hesitating between the implicit claims being made by Shaviro and by commenter LB: isn’t there a much more productive and Deleuzean way of thinking about Daniel Plainview’s character? One which doesn’t neatly fit into the category of ‘nonpsychological subject’ or Homo Economicus, or that of ‘disillusioned but still-sentimental misanthrope?’ And so, instead of getting started on this stack of semiology papers I’ve got to mark, I decided to write up a little dilettantish critique of Day-Lewis’ performance in response to these interesting theses.
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Ah, the humble cigarette. It’s Nature’s little way of exacting revenge on Europe for the whole smallpox-blanket thing in times of yore, a wondrous little abstract machine for killing off people with little interest in living. (And don’t get your hackles up already. I’ve had a family member die of lung cancer just like the rest of us, and I know what it’s like to watch them fade. It’s sad, but it doesn’t make them any smarter: I stand by my statement, and all the increasingly ‘offensive’ ones which are to come.) Given that our economy is still founded more or less on the productivity of living individuals, it’s become understandably fashionable in liberal countries to hate on these little tobacco-sticks. Don’t think that I buy your trumped-up moral arguments for even one second, you anti-smokers. You’re just buying into the ‘healthful’ dogma that you’ve been fed by the powers that be, who for the time being want us living and breathing (at least well enough to show up at work). And so the health nuts haven’t stopped at banning smoking from restaurants (understandable), but have moved on to bars (less so) and are beginning to set their sights on cars, open spaces, and perhaps even prohibition in general. The British have even proposed this absurdity called a ‘smoking licence,‘ while at my university a number of overzealous health nuts are trying to ban cigarette sales in the campus variety store. Maybe smokers will soon have to hide out in a secret room in their basements smoking hydroponically-grown tobacco: it won’t be all bad though, maybe it’ll give tobacco smokers the same appreciation for their hobby that pot smokers have today.

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Essentially Emily is a new blog by Emily Brill, the newly-thin ’socialite’ daughter of Steven Brill, the erstwhile founder of multiple defunct enterprises you’ve likely never heard of. Perhaps you remember his ‘media watchdog’ magazine, Brill’s Content, if you’ve got a maddening memory for the irrelevant like myself.

Excited yet?

I hope not. This should be about the least exciting thing imaginable, and in a more rational time it would be indeed. And yet I, in absence of any attempt to do so, have somehow come upon this woman’s blog. Most disconcerting is the fact that, as Nick Denton of Gawker claims, Emily has “been barraged by interview requests from, among others, the New York Observer.”

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Here’s a fun little discussion to take a look at, from the blog of Kirk Cameron’s ‘Way of the Master’ sidekick, Ray Comfort. I came across it through pure serendipity, because it’s linked back on the same CNN page from the article I wrote about last night.

Fundamentalist religion is a fascinating thing. It’s great for sparking atheist vitriol, and the necessary counterblasts of religious vitriol. Yet in the process of polemicization, atheists and advocates of religion tend to lose sight of the actual issues at stake. Putting my sanity at risk, I decided to throw a couple of pennies into the debate, and I thought I’d re-post my comments here for the edification of a rather less polemical crowd. I love reading when religionists and anti-religionists play with intensely philosophical ideas and pretend that they’re the first to come up with such notions. Religion and philosophy have long toyed with each others’ ideas, but it seems that religionists have now fully lost touch with the philosophical origins of their concepts.
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I’ve been reading and enjoying a bit of Paul Feyerabend lately, so I was interested to hear that there was a recent controversy involving this anarchic thinker and our peculiar current pope Ratzinger, or Benedict, or whatever. How could this be? Well, it’s not difficult to see where the difficulty might arise. Although Feyerabend is no creationist, he certainly makes some claims that might be attractive to those of a religious mindset. Owing to his polemical style, sometimes he’ll come up with an absurd-sounding idea, such as when he suggests that a hypothetical scientist ‘without method’ might one day “discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis” (Against Method, 21). This sort of stuff would be gold to the pious thinker or advocate of intelligent design looking to mine quotes from pseudo-noteworthy intellectual figures. Especially so-called ‘post-modernist’ ones - but when one takes quotes completely out of context one makes a fool of oneself. Let’s bury the ID issue for the moment. How did the Pope get embroiled in a controversy by way of Feyerabend? Although there is a very interesting story here, we’re going to have to sift through a couple pretty questionable stories in order to actually get at some kind of ‘truth.’ Let’s start with this confusing piece from CNN.

“Pope Benedict XVI has canceled a planned visit to a prestigious Italian university after a protest by academics and students attacked his views on Galileo, the Vatican confirmed Tuesday… academics — pointing to a speech the pope gave at the same university as a cardinal in 1990 — claimed he condones the 1633 trial and conviction of the scientist Galileo for heresy.
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The first is a fun one: normative thought and racism are fundamentally linked. More generally, we might note that all internal and external totalitarianisms (that is, totalitarianism in thought or in deed), even that fundamental totalitarianism of the ‘Good,’ that good or otherwise Platonic totalitarianism, lead to an essentially anti-humanist pattern of thought. This is a basic thesis of mine, leading me to echo Deleuze and Nietzsche in proclaiming the necessity of a certain inversion of Platonism. And it seems that empirical psychology affirms my belief. I found this article from a few-months-old issue of Discover online. Apparently, people who readily describe phenomena as decisively ‘bad’ or objectively negative are the same people who are racist. Food for thought, in any case.

The other two theses constitute about 100 pages of writing. I thought I’d post them up here for the edification of anyone who’s interested in figuring out what the hell is going on between Derrida and Deleuze, but also dogmatic philosophy in general. I’m going to - as I’ve said in a few posts previously - work up some of my ideas about dogmatism into a more ‘bloggy’ format soon. But in these two term papers (!!!) I wrote in December are the real ‘origins’ of these ideas. The first is called ‘The singular Aufhebung,’ and the second goes by the equally cumbersome ‘Difference/Repetition; Sign/Memory.’ They’re term papers which exploded to the length, if not necessarily the coherence of masters’ theses, and so they’re kind of heavy going in some ways. But damned if I didn’t have a lot of fun writing them, and didn’t feel as though I was really on to some good ideas (in spite of being, no doubt, seriously off in places). I’d be super excited to hear comments from anyone who read them, as I’m very interested in how I might chop these up into conference or publication papers. I’m working up some of these ideas for an abstract to send to the Cornell Theory Reading Group conference, ‘The substance of thought’; it’s maybe out of my league, but it’s focused on the exact ideas that I’m throwing around in these theses, so why the heck not! Please, if you read even a portion of these papers, let me know what you think in comments or email! Even if you violently hated them. Cheers!

Possibly the finest statement of overtly ‘political’ philosophy of the twentieth century is to be found in Bakunin’s God and State. I recently finished a paper on Derrida, Deleuze and onto-theology (by way of some Heidegger and Nietzsche), and at one point I went looking for a quote from the text which I had long enjoyed: “even if God did exist, mankind would have to destroy him.” I found it, spent some more time reading, and found nearly every salient element of what I had just been thinking while writing my own text already written within Bakunin’s. His inversion of Voltaire’s tongue-in-cheek maxim leads into a compelling realist argument against dogmatism, idealism, and absolute obedience of any kind. Even if we must recognize the perversely metaphysical, messianic quality of an orthodox Marxism, the sheer hubris and impatience of the ‘Social Revolutionary’ - only very slightly removed from that of the religious prophet - we ought to stand in awe of this incredible work. We might even read Bakunin’s anarchism as a specular precursor of sorts (after Marx and Nietzsche) to Deleuze’s ‘nomad thought’ and his idea of ‘crowned anarchy.’ Bakunin might have been loath to accept any suggestion of a ‘crown,’ but his text affirms nevertheless the necessity for an atheistic philosophy which cultivates a thought of immanence, and the necessarily political dimensions of such an ideology.

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so, on the last day of my holiday freedom-of-thought, i’ve been catching up on a favourite comic book of mine, Bill Willingham’s Fables. and comic books have long been a  guilty pleasure of mine: i’m not the kind of dogmatic comic-book booster who is endlessly trying to lift their preferred medium onto a pedestal alongside the classic works of ‘high’ art, since this is clearly absurd and counterproductive given the actual content of comic books as compared to, say, the ‘Ring Cycle.’ nevertheless, i’m also fervently opposed to all those latent dogmata within the ‘media-studies’ set, whereby even though various new media (film, television, internet - take your pick) may be permitted the status of ‘art,’ comic books must remain the sort of puerile fodder for children that have yet to grow up. this is absurd, given that it is founded upon a certain artistic essentialism: new media can be admitted to the ‘art’ party, so long as they play by its long-standing rules and hierarchies. thus a ‘good’ film or television show can be judged according to the same pat criteria with which foolish critics have always congratulated themselves as having understood ‘art’ as such.

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