Month: January 2011

Charming introduction to Theodore Zeldin’s books of French history:

Zeldin’s approach can be understood as a kind of historical ethnography, while Todd’s approach emphasizes processes and structures of nation formation.

What’s striking is how out-of-place Zeldin’s work must be in contemporary academic history — but equally, how it’s the kind of history people really want to write, and to read. I’m becoming increasingly sympathetic to the idea of some kind of revival of 19th century humanities, with the diligence and the emotional involvement. I’m not sure if you can manage that without the racism and shallowness — though is it really better to have your prejudices concealed behind dull prose and academic walls?

Adam Curtis has a blog

Curtis is IMO the most interesting documentary-maker currently active, by a healthy margin. He spends months or years closeted in the BBC archives, intermittently emerging with documentaries like The Trap or The Power of Nightmares.

Most of his documentaries fit into a coherent project, an intellectual history of the 20th century. What continually fascinates him is the interaction between emotions and politics, how ideas about human nature shape how we see ourselves, and so form the background assumptions which justify political movements. As he told Charlie Brooker:

“What I’m hoping they’ll do is pull back like in a helicopter and look at themselves and think about how they’re a product of history, and of power, and politics, as much as a product of their own little inner desires. We’re all part of a big historical age. That’s just what we are. And, sometimes, we forget.”

The blog extends these themes, often accompanied by decades-old clips which might otherwise never have found their way online.

Here is a typically fascinating post. Curtis takes Behavioural Economics — popularised in ‘Nudge’ and by Dan Ariely, now being politically weaponized by Cameron’s Behavioural Insight Unit — and ties it to Behaviourism. Behaviourism is the psychological apporoach* of treating the mind as a black box, not trying to understand it internally but just tracking how it responds to certain stimuli. Curtis:

Drawing on… behaviourist ideas [

Nudge

author] Thaler wrote a paper in 1981 with a great title – An Economic Theory of Self-Control.

This is what lies behind the Downing Street unit’s plans to find mechanisms to manipulate people so they will do “good” things – like save more for retirement or eat less bad food.

Skinner himself [the leading figure in Behaviourism] was acutely aware that modifying human behaviour in these ways raises serious political questions. Not just about individual freedom, but about who decides what is “good” behaviour, and what happens when others decide it is bad.

These are questions that the Nudge enthusiasts seem to be blithely unaware of.

The whole blog is fascinating, and is at the very least full of arguements to interestingly disagree with. I’m a fan.

* ‘approach’ because it hovers uneasily between being a methodological practice of conducting experiments and a theory of how the mind works. It’s comparable to the ‘homo economicus’ model of rational self-interest in economics. Both are trivially true, but only if you sideline some of the most important causes of behaviour. Both function very well in narrow circumstances which make for good journal articles, tempting researchers to focus on those circumstances and ignore the rest. Both thus had a similar academic trajectory — innumerable grad students applying the theories in ways that were clever, internally consistent, and applied to the real world only if you ignored the footnotes. Both were accordingly attacked by outsiders determined to blame the theory for the shortcomings of its application.

The

Sekhmet Hypothesis

is the idea that pop-culture upheavals follow sunspot patterns. Every 11 years the sunspots hit a peak, and so there’s a culture shift. If you squint really hard you can kind of see it. Warren Ellis:

1955 — the dawn of rock’n’roll. 1966 00 is when the Sixties happened. 1977 — punk epxlodes. 1988 — aciiiid. 1999 — fucking nothing.

So, we’re now in a cultural rut which even bizarre sunspot theories can’t extricate us from. Ellis again:

here in the Zero Years of the 21, even those most reliable engines of creation of the last half of C20, Britain and Japan (both islands, both post-imperialist, both post-major and incredibly damaged economic shell games, both finding their stations as makers of art) are coming up empty. Coldplay and Fruits Basket? Give me strength.

It’s a chilling thought, but maybe worth considering, even only as a Threat Condition to be armed against: maybe we’re stuck here.

[compare: the post-temporality Bruce Sterling has been turning into a theme, e.g. in his transmediale keynote last year]

Benjamin Disraeli’s father, Isaac D’Israeli, was apparently a bookworm of monomaniac dedication. According to his son:

He was himself a complete literary character, a man who really passed his life in his library. Even marriage produced no change in these habits; he rose to enter the chamber where he lived alone with his books, and at night his lamp was ever lit within the same walls. Nothing, indeed, was more remarkable than the isolation of this prolonged existence;

One of his projects was Curiosities of Literature, an immense notebook full of whatever had struck him over a lifetime of reading.

He seems to have had a particular fondness for anecdotes of people more book-obsessed than himself. For example Anthony Magliabechi, the extreme case of the reader-hoarder. This is the kind of person who in other circumstances would open a secondhand bookshop, sell almost nothing, but sit all day surrounded by piles of books.

the passage below stairs was full of books, and the staircase from the top to the bottom was lined with them. When you reached the second story, you saw with astonishment three rooms, similar to those below, equally full, so crowded, that two good beds in these chambers were also crammed with books.

This apparent confusion did not, however, hinder Magliabechi from immediately finding the books he wanted. He knew them all so well, that even to the least of them it was suffiicient to see its outside, to say what it was; and indeed he read them day and night, and never lost sight of any. He ate on his books, he slept on his books, and quitted them as rarely as possible… Nothing could be more simple than his mode of life; a few eggs, a little bread, and some water, were his ordinary food.

[Via Bruce Sterling’s latest State of the World discussion thread.]

Marina Abroamovic:

The underlying question in all of this is, of course: why? Why put yourself though such suffering in the name of art? Abramovic has no easy answers to that question. “I am obsessive always, even as a child,” she says, suddenly serious, and, for the first time, pausing for thought. “On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.” She hoots with laughter again and reaches for the English tea.

…

“The brother of my grandfather was the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and revered as a saint. So everything in my childhood is about total sacrifice, whether to religion or to communism. This is what is engraved on me. This is why I have this insane willpower. My body is now beginning to be falling apart, but I will do it to the end. I don’t care. With me it is about whatever it takes.”

compare: the Hunger Artist, Ashley Z’s ‘private performance’, pornography

Adam Curtis has a blog

Curtis is IMO the most interesting documentary-maker currently active, by a healthy margin. He spends months or years closeted in the BBC archives, intermittently emerging with documentaries like The Trap or The Power of Nightmares.

Most of his documentaries fit into a coherent project, an intellectual history of the 20th century. What continually fascinates him is the interaction between emotions and politics, how ideas about human nature shape how we see ourselves, and so form the background assumptions which justify political movements. As he told Charlie Brooker:

“What I’m hoping they’ll do is pull back like in a helicopter and look at themselves and think about how they’re a product of history, and of power, and politics, as much as a product of their own little inner desires. We’re all part of a big historical age. That’s just what we are. And, sometimes, we forget.”

The blog extends these themes, often accompanied by decades-old clips which might otherwise never have found there way online.

Here is a typically fascinating post. Curtis takes Behavioural Economics — popularised in ‘Nudge’ and by Dan Ariely, now being politically weaponized by Cameron’s Behavioural Insight Unit — and ties it to Behavoiurism. This is the psychological apporoach* of treating the mind as a black box, not trying to understand it internally but just tracking how it responds to certain stimuli. Curtis:

Drawing on… behaviourist ideas [

Nudge

author] Thaler wrote a paper in 1981 with a great title – An Economic Theory of Self-Control.

This is what lies behind the Downing Street unit’s plans to find mechanisms to manipulate people so they will do “good” things – like save more for retirement or eat less bad food.

Skinner himself was acutely aware that modifying human behaviour in these ways raises serious political questions. Not just about individual freedom, but about who decides what is “good” behaviour, and what happens when others decide it is bad.

These are questions that the Nudge enthusiasts seem to be blithely unaware of.

The whole blog is fascinating, and is at the very least full of arguements to interestingly disagree with. I’m a fan.

* ‘approach’ because it hovers uneasily between being a methodological practice of conducting experiments and a theory of how the mind works. It’s comparable to the ‘homo economicus’ model of rational self-interest in economics. Both are trivially true, but only if you sideline some of the most important causes of behaviour. Both function very well in narrow circumstances which make for good journal articles, tempting researchers to focus on those circumstances and ignore the rest. Both thus had a similar academic trajectory — innumerable grad students applying the theories in ways that were clever, internally consistent, and applied to the real world only if you ignored the footnotes — attacked continually by outsiders determined to blame the theory for the shortcomings of its application.

Sterling:

The monkeys in our heads are rattled, they’re bouncing and swinging

out of control. Streams of thought block awareness of the moment. We’re

somnambulists in a world of persistent dreams that are not necessarily

our own. The voices in our heads are not inherently our own, and not

inherently friendly. And there are so many of them.