I just had the greatest Star Wars dream ever. It's all narrated by Leia, talking to Han. While the allianace is working to take down the death star, she uncovers documents about a fanatic religious organization that is taking steps at the same time to get rid of the Empire. The cult has a plan to assassinate crucial heads of state (planetary governers and key military figures, including Darth Vader) in order to bring about a New World Order with messianic implications. Although toppling the Empire is nice and all, the sinister aims of the shadowy cult are too grave to risk, and the rebels are the only ones who know its secret. In order to save the galaxy, they have to put a stop to assassination plots, but put pieces of the puzzle together too late: key political figures have already started turning up dead.

And then I woke up.

Gigantic plug

I want to take just a second to plug a movie I saw that I liked. Lately I've noticed that I don't really like very many movies, and a large part of this is because of the rather silly and plain ways they nearly uniformly treat romance. With few exceptions, a movie's narrative is driven by a man and a woman discovering their love for one another, and also nearly always this requires both of them to mold their behavior better to suit our collective prescriptions for how a couple ought to behave (which is why these stories inevitably end with the beginning: once domesticated, the dissonance between the couple and society at large is resolved). "Gigantic" is something of an exception.

But only something. I will avoid spoilers as best I can, since it's unlikely any of you've seen it. What seems to've captivated me is that although the story is told from the male lead's perspective, he is not the protagonist. It is Zooey Deschanelle's (sp) character who must overcome her hurdle, and while almost no narrative time is spent on her concerns (you only meet four of her acquaintances, as opposed to nine for the man) (I forget the male actor's name, and it's omitted only for this reason)--while almost no narrative time is spent on her, all the dramatic tension, all the dissonance, ultimately is hers to resolve. The rather sneaky way the movie works her into the viewer's focus is quite surprising, when it finally comes to bear, and emotionally quite successful.

One thing that irks me a little--though maybe this too is positive from some perspectives--is how boring the two are as a couple. One gets the impression that the only thing they see in each other is a mutual awkward- and hotness. Maybe this is on purpose, to make them easier to relate to and to allow them more easily to be representative, but the simultaneous effect is irritation. One almost wants them to fail, since seeing them together offers no charm. It nearly says that physical attraction is the only arbiter in mate selection.

But it's a cute little indie film--and I do not generally like independent films any more than dependent films--and worth your two hours. The homeless guy is a fun twist.

Miss representation.

Found a useful article on Reddit: http://www.badscience.net/2009/07/asking-for-it/

It's an anecdotal account of journalists willfully or ignorantl--but obviously, either way--misrepresenting academic research. In this case, the beginnings of a dissertation project on the behavior of intoxicated heterosexual men was reported under the title, "Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists." This was printed in spite of the facts that the study had no statistically significant data to support this quesiton, the lead researcher had made no such claim, and (in someways most significant for me) the research in question was the preliminary phase of an unpublished (read: not yet peer reviewed) dissertation project.

FTA:

But there is a second, less obvious problem. Repeatedly, unpublished work – often of a highly speculative and eye-catching nature – is shepherded into newspapers by the press officers of the British Psychological Society, and other organisations. A rash of news coverage and popular speculation ensues, in a situation where nobody can read the academic work. I could only get to the reality of what was measured, and how, by personally tracking down and speaking to an MSc student about her dissertation on the phone. In any situation this would be ridiculous, but in a sensitive area such as rape it is blind, irresponsible, coverage-hungry foolishness.

Kantian humility

I'm listening to a podcast I found of Dr. Susan Stuart giving undergad lectures on Kant. In her first lecture, she mentions something called "Kantian humility," which is apparently not Kant's term. Some background, as I understand it:

We might poorly summarize Kant by saying there are three kinds of stuff. There is reason, which is a purely internal process of intellectual activity; there is the sensible world (sensible in that we sense it); and there is the noumenal world. Reason, the domain of a priory judgments and such, cannot happen without interaction in with the sensible world. First one senses, then one understands, then one can reason (the middle term here does not correspond to the above triple). A priory reason is possible, but is also always rooted in some encounter with the sensible. The nouminal world is off limits.

Now apparently Kant's work (or at least the Critique of Pure Reason), serves two polemical purposes: it refutes rationalists and empiricists. The former, typified by George Berkeley (though the more popular Descartes is amongst their number) skeptically discount all sensible encounters, supposing that the eye can deceive you, and you shouldn't trust it. Kant argues counter to this that we cannot begin to reason purely without sensible event (how can I count if I've never seen discrete objects?). The latter set, the empiricists, include Locke and Hume. Pure empiricists argue that while we can see what looks like causality, experience does not logically lead to axioms or principles. Hume says that though we may see the sun rise every morning, we cannot logically infer from that that the sun will again rise tomorrow.

Stuart summarizes by saying that Rationalists believe that the world is fundamentally disjunct from the mind, while empiricists believe that the world shapes the mind through experience. So on the one hand the mind and experience are disjunct (the latter may not even truly exist), and on the other hand the mind is wholly contingent upon experience.

The Kantian revolution is this: it is not so much that the world orders and shapes the mind, but that the mind orders and shapes the world.

Oh yes, but what about humility? By Kantian humility Stuart means the refusal to claim knowledge over the noumenal. Locke, apparently, errs in this respect, and rather brashly claims to know objective but non-experiential attributes. Kant says we cannot do this; the noumenal is marked off.

This resonates with my approach to agnosticism, but not in a way that makes me wholly pleased. On the one hand, I agree in principle that it is irresponsible and dishonest to make claims, totalizing, moralizing or otherwise, about that which is permanently extra-experiential. On the other hand, I am disquieted by the fundamentally theistic origins of this prohibition.

By saying that we must be humble, or meek, and not make claims for the noumenal (or the real, or the Ideal, or what have you), we presuppose that there *is* a noumenal world; agnosticism based on this prohibition is perhaps not really agnosticism after all, but rather a sort of overly reverential theism (though perhaps a pleasantly antisocial one).

Now I can't offer here any solid reason to distrust theism (presuming humility). Also I need to sleep so for now I won't go on any further I think. Suffice it to say that a certain poststructural critique of the situation would, I expect, undermine the assumption of the noumenal itself. Provisionally, I'd say that saying there is a noumenal world always already prohibits the sort of humility that Kant is supposed (by Stuart) to be advocating (though this may be a result of the epistemological limits of his time).

Žižek

This is somewhat long, but an interesting listen. Žižek is a widely-read (and in most circles well-respected) Marxist intellectual, talking here about what Marxism should be busy about. He seems to have stage fright.

If you get to the joke about the Mongolian and are put off, stick around until the last few minutes; he offers a useful explanation. I don't think I'll go in for a large-scale commentary, in part because I'm not really equipped to, and in part because he's all over the place. The two main points I take away from this are the need for solidarity on the left (not uniformity, but an acknowledgment that most of the problems confronting leftism in its various forms--Marxism, feminism, etc.--are systemic); and the need for suspicion in the face of stop-gap measures and partial solutions (capitalism w/ a human face, he says). These are both closely tied, and are talking points not only amongst Marxists, but feminists as well. The point of view, which I believe stems form Adorno (and probably others, but Žižek starts there too), is that the problems--violence, e.g.--are systemic in their current manifestations to capitalism (or patriarchy), but too that capital and patriarchy don't offer a facilely homogeneous superstructure which can be either easily conceived of or easily toppled.

At any rate, I like the energy, and the pessimistic optimism.

.:)

Today I'm wearing my The Watchmen T, which has as yellow smiley face with a blood splatter to the left of the eyes.

The barista at my favorite too-christian café commented on how I must having a kind of nice day (but not quite because of the blood); he did not seem to recognize the logo. I thought about explaining, but did not:

It's from a movie, and does not necessarily advocate violence against Walmart. Personally, I believe non-violent action is sufficient to take on the W, but it must take the form of both abstinence and activism. I do my part in the former: I do not shop there (easy for me, since it's 30 miles away). Activism?

My activism has been voting for Obama, which my turn out not to be enough. We will see. I voted for Obama in part because he advocates for nation-wide public health care. Offering a publicly funded health insurance option might be the most popular thing the government could do to combat large business like Walmart. Low-income consumers would have larger budget constraints, and small businesses would be more competitive in the marketplace, since they wouldn't have to bear as much of the cost when it comes to benefits. These two factors, in my naive mind, combine to allow Walmart shoppers the option of shopping elsewhere. Maybe. It's a nice shirt, though it's a little small for me.

Nos, II

Robert Morris's "Notes on Sculpture" parts I and II are a pair of analytical essays from 1966 concerned with producing an art of wholeness. Part II engages intimacy, size, and detail; Morris asserts that sculpture ought to be public rather than intimate, and that small scale and detail disrupt publicness (and foster intimacy).

Here are the consecutive sentences that I want to work through:

"One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions, and under various conditions of light and spacial context."
then
"Every internal relationship, whether it be set up by a structural division, a rich surface, or what have you, reduces the public, external quality of the object and tends to eliminate the viewer to the degree that these details pull him into an intimate relation with the work and out of the space in which the object exists."

I'm bothered by what seems to be a bit of a contradiction here. In the first excerpt, Morris argues for a new sculpture that encourages active viewer participation: the viewer circulate through the object's space, establishing (bodily) relationships between the space, the viewer, and the object. This seems to me a pretty intimate scenario. In the second excerpt, the structural, internal relationships of the object itself pose an artistic problem because they create intimacy with the viewer and (as is clarified earlier) pull the sculpture apart.

The provisional resolution would seem that Morris understands intimacy much differently than I do. For Morris, intimacy-producing objects are seductive and lead to the disruption and disillusion of the art object into its component parts. Intimacy is scary. Intimacy is castrating. I think I'll stop there and get back to reading.

EDIT: Morris clarifies his conscious (that's a dangerous word) intentions (that one is too!) toward the end:

"While the work must be autonomous in the sense of being a self-contained unit for the formation of the gestalt, the indivisible and undissolvable whole, the major aesthetic terms are not in but dependent upon this autonomous object and exist as unfixed variable that find their specific definition in the particular space and light and physical viewpoint of the spectator. Only one aspect of the work is immediate: the apprehension of the gestalt. The experience of the work necessarily exists in time. The intention is diametrically opposed to Cubism with its concern for simultaneous views in one plane." (234)

Why is intimacy bad? Why is wholeness good? Why is it now important for the viewer to take time to view the piece from multiple angles? Because now we're making Real American Art! Abstract expressionism, David Smith, Anthony Caro... they're all just cubists in new clothes. NOS I and II are Morris's argument for his art being the real first American art. Cocky?