Archive for July 3rd, 2009
How Derrida Won the Culture Wars (and How Sarah Palin Lost)
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Pop Culture on July 3, 2009
I’ve been meaning to link to this story from The Liberal for some time now, and today seems as good a day as any. Ostensibly a review of Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under my Bed!, the article makes the obvious but very important point that politics is actually a battle over semantics: that the left-right battle over the past few decades has been an attempt to assert a particular meaning to words such as freedom, democracy, individualism etc. I think the clearest example of this is the pro-choice/pro-life debate – the terms themselves are attempts to ‘pre-define’ choice and life as mutually exclusive ideas, when the reality is far more complicated.
It also makes the arguments that: a) despite a recent history of American anti-intellectualism, Sarah Palin’s odd, stream-of-consciousness ramblings pushed things too far, and; b) the slow march right seen across all the Western world is partly a result of the Right wresting control of the meaning of contested words from the Left.
In her attempts to outline why, however, I think Sarah Churchwell becomes unintentionally parodic, as her prose gets a little out of hand at times. Still, it’s a good read and a much smarter take than all the ‘leftist’ schadenfreude floating around today.
Nostalgic Longing, For Lost Smells and Words Made of Ink
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Rambles on July 3, 2009
Two pieces, each, in their own way, aching for something that has been lost. Particularly when technology is demonised, this romantic, sentimental nostalgia for the past can irk me. But something about the dogged resistance of these pieces felt, for a moment at least, captivating.
[Update]: Below, I said the first link to the Red Room was ‘a tribute to the Walkman’ – it’s anything but. I’m not sure what I was smoking. It actually kinda’ dismisses the Walkman, especially the ending. Instead, the piece expresses the benefits of some older technology – in this case, that the sound of a crackling tape from around the corner can beckon you to follow it.
The first is a tribute to the Walkman on its 30th birthday. Written by Farzana Versey, the woozy prose not only conjures images of listening to crackling, lo-fi music in thick North Indian air, it also reminds me of the power of well-written prose to make the mundane beautiful. I know that both the art of writing and narrative itself will diminish in significance as we enter this next age, but pieces like this remind me that being left behind might not be so bad.
The second is less beautiful, but worth a quick read. It’s on the physicality of the newspaper, something I’ve written on before. But more than that, it’s about the kind of performance of cultural savvy it enables, and the sort of physical social networking that printed texts can engender. You’ll never impress anyone walking into a coffee shop with a Sony Reader, they say, but stroll in with a copy of the Financial Times and people will know you are. They might even talk to you. In my meaner moments, I would totally dismiss this. But that first piece has me feeling more forgiving.
I have a longer piece kicking around on this nostalgia for older technologies but I probably won’t finish it for a couple of weeks yet.
