It is Completely Out of its Mind!

If one ever wonder at just how completely fuct Montreal is as a city and as a people, read this excerpt on the naming of streets in Montreal from Wikipedia:

"According to the rules of the Commission de toponymie du Québec, the French-language form of street names is the only official one, and is to be used in all languages: e.g. chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges; rue Sainte-Catherine; côte du Beaver Hall. Most English speakers, however, use English generic equivalents such as "street" or "road", as do English-language media such as the Montreal Gazette. Officially bilingual boroughs have the right to use such names in official contexts, such as on street signs. In the past, a number of streets had both English and French names, such as "avenue du Parc" or "Park Avenue", "rue de la Montange" or "Mountain Street", "rue Saint-Jacques" or "Saint James Street". Some of these names are still in common colloquial use in English, and perpetuated by the tourism industry. Many streets incorporate an English specific name into French, such as "chemin Queen Mary", "rue University", "avenue McGill College". There are also a few cases where two names are official, such as "chemin du Bord-du-Lac/Lakeshore Road". Ironically many francophones have resisted the change to some French street designations; in the Verdun area, "rue de l'Église" street is referred to as "rue Church".

In English, the pre-Francization names are still commonly used, thus, although only the French is 'official', in English one often hears names such as Park Avenue, Mountain Street, Saint Lawrence Boulevard, Pine Avenue, Saint John's Boulevard etc. Canada Post accepts the French specific with English generic, as in "de la Montagne Street" or "du Parc Avenue", although many such forms are never used in speaking. Another anomaly is René Lévesque Boulevard. Once called "Dorchester", it was renamed for Quebec nationalist René Lévesque. However many Anglophones still refer to it as "Dorchester."

I especially like that last line about René Lévesque Boulevard and Dorchester. Yes, politics is everywhere here, it perverts all aspects of daily living. It follows you to work and watches you while you eat from the café across the street. It lives in your closet and peers at you while you sleep. It knows whether you’ve been bad or good, and knows if you’re awake… And it is completely out of its mind!

Looting in New Orleans

The people of the US and the folks in Iraq really aren’t so different. I get annoyed when cheeky american politicians who seem to think they occupy some kind of moral high ground dismiss their contempararies.

Well it’s already been two years since the looting of Baghdad but I can’t help but be reminded of it by the recent looting of New Orleans. I can remember at the time George Bush smirking and dismissing the looting of Iraq’s national museums and landmarks as unfortunate but a sign of just how long gone the people were after years of amoral rule under Saddam: a view shared by many on ‘the right’ including this guy. Well how bitterly ironic it is today when we witness the looting of Louisiana, a state that supported Bush in the last presidential elections. What kind of crazies would do such a thing, and when the community is most vulnerable! Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

Alright, alright, alright. As one blogger puts it, the good people of ‘Katrina ground zero’ may be “merely searching out basic supplies after being stranded for 36+ hours.” I’m sure we can’t expect them all to starve while they wait for aid from governments that didn’t bother to evacuate them in the first place. Maybe we should be less jugdmental when they decide to grab a TV or stereo on the way out. Fair enough, they aren’t exactly looting the museums (that we know of), but arguably, they are taking many a ‘sacred’ of american materialist consumer society. When people start taking things without paying for them in America, “chaos and anarchy” ensue – as many a nerwsheadline will tell you.

Alas, I suppose my point is that the people of the US and the folks in Iraq really aren’t so different. In a capitalist society, one in which property is necessarily protected by the law, if you knock out the man, whether it be by miliatry brute or natural forces, you can’t help but expect folks to start taking what they feel they need (Often what they feel they need, and what they actually need are two very different things.). Many of the iraqi people had been a lot longer than 36+ hours without rescources; I’m sure when they stoll ancient manuscripts that they had some pecuniary use for them in mind. I get annoyed when cheeky american politicians who seem to think they occupy some kind of moral high ground dismiss their contempararies.

A Blurp on Context

I apologize, my spell check isn’t working properly and it’s very frustrating.

Contemporary society is a disjunction juxtaposing the absurdity it is and the rational way it should be.

Following from my last post, we touched on the issues of the postmodern actor feeling unable to affect his situation. Is it their inability to place context – or find that place “where all these images converge” – to the simulacrum that surrounds that renders them apathetic. What is context? How do we find context? Arguably a great deal of the past fifty years of social theory – post-structuralism, decunstrcution – has been along these lines. I read somewhere that when Derrida says “there is nothing outside the text, (this may or may not be the exact quote – I can’t for the life of me remember – but it grasps the general idea.”) he is actually trying to imply that there is nothing outside of context; the text for Derrida is very broad and includes all cultural symbols (means of communication [poorly worded]); we come to understand them and thus ourselves by understanding their contexts. He calls this process deconstruction (overly simplified). Thus this ongoing ‘deconstruction’ of this and that is more a search for and a greater undertsanding of contexts rather than an attempt at overturning establishments. Ironically it seems that the more intouch we become with certain texts and their contexts, we realize just how absurd they actually are. For example the context within which a WASP sociobiologist of the turn of the last century might argue that blacks are an inferior race. Or in a more specifically related example to Derrida and his ‘suplements’: what is in the text and what isn’t in the text? Thus pushing the boundaries of where the text even begins. Where does the American Declaration of Independence begin and end?

So we began by saying that what is wrong with society today is we lack the ability to put context to our day to day lives. Apparently, trying to understand context isn’t the right way of producing it, since it would seem the more we come to understand it the more alienated we become. This places us in a strange perdicament: either we need to go back to the board and really question just what our version of context really is, or we must conclude that the problem with contemporary society has more to do with a disjunction juxtaposing the absurdity it is and the rational way it should be, that the more we come to understand it the more we feel alieanted because it just plane doesn’t make any sense. I suppose that if we asume the later this might imply that we adopt the normative view that we should work at making it more rational.

Digressing from this point onward…

This does not mean that I am pro-fascist or for any other extreme macro rationalizing mechanisms. I think the earlier post commenting on the modern man did a good job of pointing out the absurdity in such approaches. I would be more inclined to question the context within which we view ‘rationality’ – perhaps the current interpretation is actually is absurd. See for example an earlier post of mine: Jumping Off Bridges and Playing Chicken and the Global Free Market.

Assimilating Ideas on the Postmodern 'Actor'

Well it has certainly been awhile. This post is vague and unclear and meant to be more of a 'getting back into the flow of things' piece. I think I set out in it to accomplish too much.

“The postmodern man is an observer, not a participant: a film enthusiast, not a life enthusiast.” - Michelle

"Heidegger’s essay on the Age of the World Picture remarks on the distinction between a time when man was a spectacle for the gods, the object of a perception which was itself beyond conception, and a modernity wherein man is fundamentally the perceiver of a world that offers itself to him as or is posited as a picture. Benjamin, in his Artwork essay, also alludes to man’s former status as an object or show for the gods. Fascism, he famously remarks turns humanity into a spectacle for itself. At the same time, the gigantism of this spectacle – the rallies, the giant screens, the massive advertisements careering towards the random city dweller from the sides of buildings, magnifies man to God-like proportions. The modern citizen is miniaturised before the Olympian powers of industrial society but also watches them, agog, and lives vicariously though them." (rest here at Long Sunday)

The Long Sunday article then goes on to depict the world through the eyes of John Berger as he flips through a magazine:

"The ‘plane’ on which these images co-exist is inhuman, there is no human point of view where all these images converge."

Heidegger is talking about a modern world, while I think Berger and Michelle are talking about a postmodern one. Somewhere between Mussolini and Wal-Mart (which by the way is in my Microsoft spell check, even if Heidegger isn’t) there is a ‘gap’. During modernity man did see himself as observer, however he also saw himself as taking-part by becoming as an essential cog in the larger socio-political order. I think this has a lot to do with the general tendency of the period of subscribing to larger reified ideologies. With the breakdown of the ‘grand narratives’, the post modern ‘actor’, though still viewing them self as an observer, now think they are lying outside the larger order unable to affect it.

Benjamin describes the modern man:

"Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics, which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

But he is not insane. He believed in the ideologies that guided him, and it is only from a historical perspective that we become aware of his alienation. The postmodern actor on the other hand is insane. He is handicapped by the inability to form a “human point of view where all these images converge”. They have been enlightened to their impending destruction, but being void of perspective are unable to remedy this, and yet still derive aesthetic pleasure from it!

A Couple of Things

Thing 1

Infinite Th0ught brings up a very good point in her post today, “death side by side with suicide .” How ironic is it that we are so disgusted with how someone can be so fanatical that they would blow themselves up, and yet we ourselves are on the verge of suicide. Whom among us is unaware of the unsustainability /suicidalness of current conspicuous consumtption habits, and yet whom among us is prepared to give any of this up? Though this is a tad over simplified, what is more egregious, some damage done by “a bunch of teenagers with bombs made of nail-polish,” or the end of living organisms?

Thing 2
I think this is the hippie-generation-in-a-nut-shell-summary I’ve been searching for. I found it here. It's a great essay, so click the link and read it.

“Fascism comes to a nation when a group of fanatical outsiders forge alliances, based on political and economic expediency, with a corrupt ruling elite -- as all the while, a fearful, distracted, denial-ridden public surrenders their liberty (then, inevitably, their souls) for the illusion of security and a few material goods. I first began to take note of the acceptance of proto-fascistic tendencies, in the cultural banalities evinced in the 1970s, even in those of us who were too young to have cast a vote for Nixon. I noticed my fellow peak-years-of-the-Baby-Boom teenagers were not the progeny of The Woodstock Nation, as the beleaguered authoritarian types of the era had feared. Instead we were the floating spirit-incarnate of a pop culture Weimar Republic. As a rule, we used drugs neither to expand our awareness nor as an act of social or political rebellion -- rather they were utilized as apolitical agents of anesthetization. Like the sound and fury of our pinball machine distractions, and our Muscle Car imperialism, and the pseudo-edginess of the so-called FM radio revolution (that was, in reality, the advent of corporate rock) -- our seeming rebelliousness was, below the lank-haired, faded denim-clad, reefer-reeking surface, a pervasive anomie ... the metastasizing of an insidious indifference -- to a large measure a radical renunciation of anything more challenging than those things available within the immediate confines of our comfort zones. It was a revelry in adolescent, pop culture narcissism, punctuated by incessant self-medication, that was mistaken for the excesses of freedom ... In short, just the sort of numbed-out, muck-headed Sturm und Drang one should expect from young minds -- bereft of life experience, brainwashed by an existence inundated by commercial manipulation, and incompetently educated by the state -- that were larded with Quaaludes and the like, for Christ's sake!”

Sounding Smart and Things to Do

So after a great deal of research (scanning a bunch of blogs, making mental notes on bibliographies, and general word of mouth) I’ve concluded that the key to sounding smart within critical social theory is having an extensive knowledge, or at least knowing how to talk endlessly, about Foucault, Badiou, and Habermas. So, not so much in order to sound smart for smarts sake, but because I think I’m smart and I’d like to sound smart, I plan on studying the aforementioned over the following months beginning with Foucault. I may not get as far as Badiou, but I would definitely like to know a thing or two about Habermas and the entire Frankfurt School in general. I am beginning with Foucault because from what I can tell he seems to be among the easier reads of twentieth century philosophers, I am already most familiar with him, and I already tend to agree with him on a number of issues. I had hoped to begin with his work on gender, but I can’t get an English copy of his Histoire de la Sexualite, and so I will be beginning here.

I am adding these studies to my list of, teaching myself high school math, further inquiries into the philosophy of identity (another necessity to sounding smart), reading a novel a week (give or take a week), teaching myself Quebecois French (would probably be easier if I actually knew French French), maintaining a full course load with a 3.5 GPA, not loosing my youthful good looks (remain active), the continued upkeep of this blog, and all the while trying to maintain a reasonable standard of the “good life” (I need a girlfriend or I need to get laid.).

Wow, this is a lot of stuff to do in a year. Gosh Michelle, I’m starting to sound a lot like you… so that stomach pain didn’t end up being an ulcer? I’m quite pleased with my “new life,” only a few months ago, trying to achieve even one of these would have seemed highly unlikely. (I still think the novel a week is little unlikely… shhhhhh…)

It’s a little intimidating committing all this to text. Now it seems a little more binding.

Edit: I missed Nietzsche... He’s important too but in more general terms.

Assimilation and Radicalism

The appointment of Michaëlle Jean has also got me thinking about another matter all together. Recently we saw the very public debate over the appointment of a new judge to the Supreme Court in America. I doubt there will be any public outcry in Canada over Madame Jean’s leftish leanings. What strikes me is the way Canada’s “mosaic” reacts to major political appointments as opposed to the American “melting pot”. We would think that an assimilated population would get along better than an eclectic one. Why isn’t this the case? I’m feeling lazy this evening so I won’t go any further, but I’m thinking somewhere along the lines of assimilative practices and the radical polarization of populations being closely related. It would seem that the more eclectic you make a debate, the more difficult it is for nut-jobs to legitimate their ideologies. Is this a good thing? I think so.

Yeay, Michaëlle Jean!!

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m a quite pleased with the recent announcement that Michaëlle Jean will be our next governor general. She’s young, she’s black, she’s French, she’s an immigrant, she’s got it all. But I think what I like most about her is that she’s a journalist with an amazingly accurate and philanthropic world vision. In an interview on the CBC, one of her coworkers – at the CBC – said that she struck him as the kind of person that would speak out on issues that mattered to her. I think that’s fabulous. I’m all for sober second thought when its warranted, and especially if the thought is actually sober. I am especially excited about her pledges concerning child poverty but I hope she will also raise her voice on issues of immigration and third world poverty.