One of my first class lectures (for a contemporary narrative course at Guelph-Humber) was about rock & roll as a kind of popular story, with its own three-part form, proceeding from Roots, through Raves, to Rehab. In this narrative, which combines Romantic character development with tragic or morality-play plotting, a band forms and pays its dues (Roots), then works or rockets to success (Raves), only to suffer the vicissitudes of fame (Rehab). In that class, we were discussing The Commitments, but the form recurs throughout contemporary pop music narrative: the bio-pic (Ray, 24-Hour Party People), the rock opera (The Wall), the documentary (Gimme Shelter), the mockumentary (A Mighty Wind, Fear of a Black Hat) … and that Lost Classic, the Canadian cartoon.
For Hallowe’en, I’ve rediscovered Nelvana’s 1978 The Devil and Daniel Mouse, a Faustian take on the rock & roll tale. Adapted from an American short story (Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1937 “The Devil and Daniel Webster”), the cartoon has been adapted in turn by British rock music: the arch-Goth band Bauhaus sampled it in “Party of the first part” (1989).
Criticisms of the perceived evils of new media are anything but new. In the 3th-century BC Phaedrus, Plato wrote against writing. In A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue (1712), Jonathan Swift condemned the practice of abbreviating words by dropping consonants, which he blamed on “illiterate Court-Fops, half-witted-Poets, and University-boys” (28):
This perpetual Disposition to shorten our Words, by retrenching the Vowels, is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended, and whose Languages labour all under the same Defect. (26)
Does Swift’s positioning of the problem between modern civilization and primitive barbarity mean that racial and class prejudices underpin present-day complaints that the Internet is rotting kids’ brains? I’ll leave that proposal a modest one. At any rate, in the age of SMS, Swift must be TOIHG.
I thought grad conference calls-for-papers in the Humanities are all about “interrogating boundaries,” “crossing borders,” or “re/thinking (punct)uation.” This one just sounds improbably kinky. I tip my hat.
The TransCanada Institute’s third and final conference in its Literature, Institutions, Citizenship series just wrapped up last weekend at Mount St Allison U in Sackville. Amidst the provocative papers and discussions, I was enthused and honoured to mobilize knowledge* in the “TransCanDance” post-banquet dance party that I’ve DJ’d now for all three events. And this time I saved the playlist (the longest yet, at 5 hours and change). So here’s what got scholars up to get down; as always, a mix of requests from the floor and the DJ’s own strategic selections. I could name names for some requests, but some knowledge is best mobilized anonymously — and collectively.
[* Thanks to Daniel Coleman for refining my idea that the dancefloor is a site of knowledge production; 'mobilization' better meets SSHRC's current research priorities.]
Ferry Corsten “Rock Your Body, Rock” [vocal intro]
INXS “Calling All Nations”
Sandeep Chowta “Dil kabutarkhana hai”
Shapeshifters “Lola’s Theme (Club Mix)”
Boogie Pimps “Somebody To Love”
The Doors “Hello I Love You (Adam Freeland Fabric mix)”
1755 “Disco Banjo”
Sylvester “Dance (Disco Heat)”
T-Rex “Bang A Gong (Get It On)”
Sly & The Family Stone “Dance to the Music”
The Jackson Five “ABC”
Elvis Presley “Jailhouse Rock” (Spankox Re:Version Highpass Radio Edit)
Credence Clearwater Revival “My back door”
The Beatles “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
The Rolling Stones “Jumping Jack Flash”
Kenny Loggins “Footloose”
David Bowie “Modern Love”
Nelly Furtado “Powerless (Josh Desi Remix)”
M.I.A. “Paper Planes (DFA Remix)”
Stevie Wonder “Superstition”
Bob Seger “Old time rock ‘n’ roll”
ABBA “Dancing Queen”
Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”
Michael Jackson “Beat It”
A. R. Rahman “Jai Ho (New York Electric Mix)”
Arcade Fire “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”
Dusty Springfield “Son of a Preacher Man”
Nine Inch Nails “Closer”
Latin Fresh “Bata Bata”
Daddy Yankee “De La Paz Y De La Guerra”
Tito El Bambino “En La Disco (DJ Mauri)”
Mr Vegas “Heads High (Kill Dem Wid It)”
Major Lazer “Hold The Line”
Madonna “Like a prayer”
New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle”
The Jackson Five “I Want You Back”
Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime”
David Bowie “Let’s Dance”
Michael Jackson “Billie Jean”
Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
The Pixies “u-mass”
The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”
Sam Roberts “Them Kids”
The Ronettes “Be My Baby”
The Ting Tings “That’s Not My Name”
Maestro Fresh Wes “Let Your Backbone Slide”
Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock “It Takes Two”
Scissor Sisters “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’”
Gnarls Barkley “Crazy”
M.I.A. “Boyz”
Young MC “Bust a move”
INXS “New Sensation”
Blondie “Heart Of Glass”
Santogold “Lights Out”
Pulp “Common people”
Go Home Productions “Velvet Sugar”
Feist “1234 (Vanshe Technologic Remix)”
Armand Van Helden feat. Spalding Rockwell “Hear My Name”
Tori Amos “Professional widow (Armand’s star trunk funkin remix)”
Wubble-U “Petal”
Cornershop “Brimful of asha (Norman Cooke remix)
Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”
Neil Diamond “Sweet Caroline”
Jimmy Cliff “Wonderful World”
Toots And The Maytals “Take Me Home Country Roads”
Arakatuba feat. Lilliana “Riva”
Waguignho “Academia de Furacao I”
Tegan and Sara “I Hear Noises”
Justice “DVNO (Justice Remix)”
Leonard Cohen “Closing Time”
John Lennon “Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)”
The viral circulation of the “Did you know” video about “living in exponential times” shows no signs of abating. It does capture something of an Information Society Zeitgeist, but it contains several premises and claims that are worth critiquing. (You can view the video below my rant about it here.)
“Exponential times”: A spectre haunts the video’s premise: that of the technological singularity — a hypothetical point of cybernetic development beyond which the machines become self-aware and rapidly accelerate the pace and scale of technological change. (See Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.) The implications of this premise will be clarified in what follows.
“There are 5x as many English words as in Shakespeare’s time”: This is specious, as historicizing goes, but it’s of a piece with the video’s unproblematized and fetishized keyword, Information. (On which more soon.) It’s specious because it serves the contemporary picture being sketched at the cost of historical knowledge. For starters, there was neither spelling as we know it nor dictionaries in Shakespeare’s time, and it’s only after such institutions arise that language becomes standardized and quantifiable. Moreover, the polysemy (multiplicity of meaning) and rich resonance of vocabulary in Elizabethan English scrambles the attempt to quantify it anyway: what does it mean to count 5 times as many words in modern English when their meanings are generally so much narrower and less ambiguous than in Shakespeare’s time? (“Ejaculation” is a great example of a formerly multiple-meaning word now confied to one very specific meaning…and one that will probably draw trolls to this blog.)
“A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century”: Similarly specious ‘historicizing’ is at work here, more clearly tied to the video’s major keyword, Information. What is Information, exactly? My favourite answer is Dr. Susan Brown’s economical definition: “Information is a fantasy.” That is, it’s a way to describe knowledge that presumes that the data exists distinctly from its interpretation, with “the problematic
implication that such raw perceptual input can actually be separated from the work of signification” (Terranova 287). In a relatively rigorous historicizing exercise, Shunya Yoshimi reads the hegemonic quantifiability of Information as a development integral to capitalism and instrumental to state militaries:
The generalization of the information concept from a specialized military term to a concept of broad social application occurred during the period when society as a whole became militarized in the 1930s and 1940s. With the development of systematic information theory and the spread of computers in society, the military associations of the information concept gradually became obscured. It thus took on the appearance of an inherently neutral and universal concept.
Yoshimi concludes that “we must be vigilant about exactly what is happening in the conceptualization process when diverse phenomena are categorized and highlighted as forms of ‘information’” (277). Given the “Did you know” video’s presumption of an Anglo-American audience and its preoccupation with the global Others of that audience — namely, India and China — Yoshimi’s is a significant caution. The “singularity” conjured in the video is none Other than the combined forces of English language learning and tech-sector development in these nations, a spectre of outsourcing and cultural appropriation, both of which the video implies are threats to the employment and identity of US citizens. The spectre of the technological singularity that underwrites this particular ‘fantasy of information,’ then, is a menacing hybrid (a “scandalous body,” to borrow Smaro Kamboureli’s term) manufactured of cybernetic and exotically racialized components. That the implied threat to Anglo-American cultural identity is actually advanced rather than countered by the video’s specious exercises in historical contrasts between early modern and “exponential times” is perhaps the text’s crowning irony.
References
Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2000.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking Penguin, 2005.
Terranova, Tiziana. “The Concept of Information.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2 (2006): 286-87.
Yoshimi, Shunya. “Information.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2 (2006): 271-78.
4 to 5:45 pm – My session on mediation went well: an interesting but connected set of papers, and a significant turnout of delegates ready with thoughtful questions. Turns out one of our panelists is at SUNY Empire State, an open U like Athabasca, or the UK’s, er, Open U.
Otherwise I still have to digest the session’s proceedings, maybe in a separate entry, especially since they announced, at the banquet, that next year’s NASSR in Vancouver will have mediation as its main theme.
7:30 pm – The final plenary talk ranged over Romantic-era philosophies of modernity and music (I was a bit annoyed music was only assigned the work of feeling, not thinking, which seemed to stay pretty specifically the turf of philosophy; but I digress). Our speaker worked in an unusual (and welcome) degree of humour:
“In the OED, ’sublate’ is defined as ‘to cancel and preserve while elevating to a higher level.’ I wonder what foreigners must think of that word if they come across it: ‘who would ever use this word?’”
Of course no talk like this is complete without coining a few of its own. “Articulacy” was floated early on, as was “supersensible substrate” (okay, that’s not a new coinage, but it’s fun to say); and the Q&A gave us “metaphysicize” as a verb.
Also overheard, whispered somewhere behind me following a late back-&-forth in the Q&A period: “Bad question, boring answer.” Okay then, where did I put those drink tickets?
The banquet was thankfully free of the line-up for drinks that had congested the Thursday reception.
Stride Day because the show hits its stride for my own selfish purposes today: my session’s later this afternoon, and the 8:30 session this morning included a fantastic talk about the discourse of technology in German philosophy. Fantastic because it pointed up parallels between German and Anglophone traditions in thinking about technology I simply hadn’t known about. (In academia, confessing one’s ignorance is regarded either as verboten taboo or as an occasion for vague waffling; it’s funny to see how differently people handle it.)
The other talks were decent too. Particularly the one about meteorology, extreme weather, and hermaphrodite polar bears. Okay, it was actually about genre, but I’m easily distracted by colourful detail. Amazing what comes up in the most unassumingly-titled presentations.
7:30 am – Didn’t I set the alarm for 7? Ah, yes, but forgot to turn it on. Well it seems somebody cashed in a second drink ticket last night. Ow.
8:30 am – Skipping out on first-thing sessions means waiting till now to hit the breakfast room.
9:30 am – The business room’s computers have USB ports my first-gen USB drive won’t fit into, a digital version of Fatass Meets Airplane Seat. Guess I’ll have to drag down the laptop or send myself an e-mail. (It’s always a mystery which is the most relatively secure digital solution when using public hardware.)
10:30 am – Where did all my free morning time go while I’ve been tweaking tomorrow’s talk?
12:30 pm – In the session on Coleridge, with a great talk on his poems by a Western grad-student colleague, I realized as the moderator hogged the Q&A that all the sessions have been padded with generous Q&A time. I’m used to hour-and-fifteen-minutes sessions from other conferences; the sessions here tack on a full 45 after the standard-issue hour allotted for the papers themselves.
Took lunch to my room, working on the paper. Honestly, I thought I had this done ages ago. Am I competing for some imaginary prize?
2
4:00 pm – Charter bus to Duke U’s east campus for a chamber music concert.
(not to be confused with the eponymous hotel)
I’ve never attended a chamber music concert before. So I furtively took some footage, and felt like less of a jerk for the camera beeps after hearing a few other pens being dropped and even some talking from somewhere up behind me. (Apologies for the rough sound quality.)
Somebody else heard it too, in fact they overheard enough to parse that the talking was an (ironic) complaint about somebodyelse’s rudeness for loud breathing. Turns out (more ironically) that the loud breather was in fact the First Violinist, inhaling the music like it was, well, you can parse my analogy.
After the concert, today’s keynote, a talk about period interpretations of the bible as literature, one of numerous talks here about modernity as secularization. (No, I did not hog the Q&A period.)
8 pm – Dined with Western colleagues and a Texan grad student here with her family; we compared notes on the dubious experiment of combining professional conference with family vacation. And amidst a collective review of the concert (why one performer wore sensible shoes, the nasally audible violinist, how different music-listening is today — you know, the points of interest for learned types who aren’t learned about music in particular), I found out about a neat-sounding book: This is your brain on music. Apparently no other human activity lights up as many patches of your brain, all at once, as music. That I might have guessed.
11:45 pm – Well that’s today then. Now to read through my talk once or twice before tucking in.
Strange how the updates tapered off once I started going to NASSR events yesterday…
The first session I went to was about “Necromanticism,” the period “cult of the dead.” A lot of the Q&A ended up about the Body Worlds exhibit and similar modern-day corpse-based “freak shows,” a big topic for one of the presenters. Who mentioned that these shows have run into legal trouble for allegations of trafficking in the bodies of executed Falun Gong political prisoners. And who referred us to a website where you too can buy human anatomic specimens of your very own. Collect the whole set!
After yesterday’s plenary talk (about which I can’t decide so the less said the better), the reception just outside the lecture hall (all of this still in the hotel, btw) featured maybe the longest and slowest line to the bar I’d ever joined. And no sooner had everybody cashed in their first of two drink tickets than the servers packed the bar up and vanished. Fail. Everybody knows these events run on alternating injections of caffeine and alcohol.
4:45 am – After some cursory (and for me sleep-encrusted) chat about where I’m off to, the cabbie makes an ironic observation about the second amendment (the one about bearing arms): how the ingrained popular support for this purported constitutional safeguard against governmental tyranny represents its own kind of slavish obedience to government. (I’m paraphrasing.)
10:20 am – Did I go anywhere? My first impressions of Raleigh-Durham are of six-lane highways and dense mixed forests. This could be southwestern Ontario (give or take a month: everything’s much greener already than the recently unfurled foliage back home).
10:40 am – Okay, is the hotel next to Duke U ever posh, complete with bellhops who unpack the trunk, open the door for you, notify the desk of your arrival. (Um, was I supposed to tip for that? And should I, every time the door’s opened for me?) The concierge directs me to the conference and the forest trail. The grounds are aflutter with dun, thrush-like birds with white wing patches. Maybe cuckoos?
10:50 – I registered months ago but I’m not in the system. Another very professional-looking hand-written name badge for me, then. Now to peruse the NASSR program and see what the rest of the day brings.
gets the feeling there's something else he should observe today. Oh right. Let us resist the authoritarian personality. http://tiny.cc/gpNf04 days ago
is wishing everybody in the Rhineland a happy kick-off to the Carnival season festivities! I'll have a Schnapps at eleven o'clock to mark it 4 days ago
