Archive for September, 2010
For Bodies That Beckon
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory on September 26, 2010
For a couple of months now, I’ve seen this ad on the subway. In what I think is the situation for a lot of straight male feminists, my reaction to this was both “wow, seriously?” and, um, “hm, that’s actually a little bit hot”.
Still, on an intellectual level, I didn’t like the ad. The cartoon woman is bent over cakes while shopping at the grocery store. It seems to reaffirm every notion of the always-present potential for objectification – that while picking up something at a grocery store, one suddenly becomes a sexualized body, whether or not one intends to.
Still, as I’ve discussed on this blog before, there is always the difficult question of claiming or attempting to control the undercurrent of desire that circulates both around and through the sexualized female body. And my pal Emma took up this line of reasoning in this post at Shameless Mag, where she defends the ad:
It’s important to note that the woman in this ad is not necessarily misrepresenting women. Many choose to wear heels, makeup, and provocative clothing, and are very happy about it. Some women enjoy bending over and giving a little show at the grocery store. (Personally, I enjoy being ogled from time to time. As I walked the streets of Victoria, B.C. in a fairly short dress this summer, a girl told me: “I like your legs. They’re very womanly.” I beamed.)
I like this ad I because I see it as a playful and sexy throwback that successfully reaches its target market: women who shave their legs because they consider it attractive. While many women rock hairy legs like Mo’Nique, others prefer to keep their gams smooth. To shave or not to shave is a decision made with very personal reasons.
In a sense then, this is an argument over what many call “erotic capital“. The power to invoke desire in other is (I imagine) pretty powerful. To be able to change others’ behaviour based on the strange overlapped desire where, for lack of a better description, people can’t decide if they want to fuck you or be you can’t help but afford one some kind of social power. This, after all, is what the ad is selling: use this product and you too shall be able to beckon.
Of course, at the same time, it’s hard not to see the ad as promoting the reduction of a female subject to an object. What’s more, that objectification can’t help but reinforce sexist notions of capability versus ‘privilege’; to use erotic capital as an advantage inevitably raises those privileged-soaked discussions between the achievement that was ‘earned’ (“I worked hard for this, man”) and the one that is seen as illegitimately gained (“She just got that job because she’s pretty.”)
We still live firmly in a historical dynamic in which women’s sexuality has been used to suppress women (the Eve temptation, the ever-present threat of seduction etc.) while also being suppressed itself. So contemporary feminism finds itself in a bind where it must both embrace an empowering kind of sexuality and the reclamation of bodies, while still dealing with a society that often frowns upon open expressions of both sexuality and the body itself.
So I’m not sure if this particular ad is the best starting point for this discussion, but erotic capital… your thoughts?
Wax Interlude: “Vinkonur”, Ólöf Arnalds
Posted by Nav in Music, Wax Interlude on September 22, 2010
Ólöf Arnalds is an Icelandic singer, whose voice you may recognise from electronic outfit Múm. Her solo work, however, is far more eclectic, such as on her new album, Innidunr Skinni, which is all Icelandic folk music.
I’m not sure why, but this song – Vinkonur – utterly charmed me.
The Coin, When Spinning, Still Glints in the Light
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Theorizing the Web on September 22, 2010
We exist in a weird moment in history:
- On the one hand, the aggregative power of the web to collect and centralize knowledge and intelligence is laying bare the power of ‘public knowledge’, softening the hard line between expert and layperson.
- On the other, we live in a time where the electoral and political process – the rise of the Tea Party down south and the dominance of Rob Ford in Toronto’s mayoral campaign – are doing much to prove that the democratic political process is reaching a breaking point. At some point, we have to deal with the discomforting and discomfiting reality that the reliance of democracy upon an idea of ‘the people knowing best’ is fundamentally flawed.
Ok, that’s a silly, sweeping generalization. But it’s a sentiment at least worth thinking about.
On the surface, these two simultaneous phenomena look like a contradiction in which we say both that “democracy works” and “democracy is failing” at the same time. But that’s misleading. Crowdsourcing works not because of the aggregated knowledge of the general public, but because it can collect the ‘amateur expertise’ of thousands, which when aggregated, can sometimes prove to be superior to an individual expert. It’s not as if a random sampling of a 100,000 North Americans will necessarily reveal brilliance; it’s that people who self-select to offer up their knowledge can do pretty amazing things when that knowledge is gathered together. The web allows a kind and scale of gathering that simply wasn’t practical before. What is also suggests is that democracy is and never was about ‘the knowledge of the people’ as much as it was skilled guidance of their interests.
But the recent thrust of political movements in North America suggests something quite different. In the Tea Party and Rob Ford we have widespread support for candidates whose actual capacity to govern the massive operating budgets of states and large cities, or navigate the intricate diplomatic complexities of day-to-day politics, are overshadowed by the dissemination of a particular rhetoric in the public sphere. That rhetoric is often superficially appealing – cutting taxes is inherently good – but doesn’t always necessarily line up with considered appraisals of what a given socio-economic system needs.
The web both helps and hinders here. It makes it easier to spread facts; but more importantly, it also makes it easier to spread their backgrounds and justifications. At the same time, as an active rather than passive medium, it also makes it easy to construct a specific world view untouched by contradictory approaches. The web has certainly aided the dissemination of things like ‘Obama is a Muslim’ or the viability of Rob Ford’s subway plan.
But I think it’s a mistake to make that about blame. To simply say that someone who votes for Christine O’Donnell or Rob Ford “is stupid” is to miss the massive socio-cultural networks that allow for their ascent, from the education system, to the length of the late-capitalist work-week to the media’s inability (both economic and cultural) to spread complex information. What’s more, it also fails to take into account the incredible pace at which this new information network has found its place within public discourse. I mean, most schools are yet to teach students about the basics of using Windows or OS X.
If Rob Ford is so popular because he promises to slash $250 million from an $11.6 billion budget, how are people to know that this is: a) a drop in the bucket; b) will likely leave people worse off than not? More complex: If Tea Partiers are committed to the notion that less government is better, when presented with the fact that it is social democracies that consistently have the highest standard of living in the world, will they change their minds?
Democracy is supposed to function through the aggregated intention of a population. The problem is, the overlapping systems of economics, ideology and the networks of public discourse all work to foreclose debate about novel or large-scale solutions, instead encouraging a political situation in which stability is maintained through a tug-of-war between right and left.
So what role, if any, can the web play in breaking the stalemate in which the core need of democracy – an informed, engaged public – is pre-empted by the material necessities of the democratic-capitalist process itself? Can it only work to further fracture the possibility of aggregated political action? Is the web of Facebook and Buzzfeed a kind of Baudrilliardian nightmare come true? Or is there some sliver of hope in the spaces between these two sides of democracy?
The Soul/Made Cyborg
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on September 21, 2010
Note: This is one of 50 posts about cyborgs, a month-long series put together by Quiet Babylon‘s Tim Maly commemorating the 50th anniversary of the term ‘cyborg‘.You can read the rest of the posts by checking out the Tumblr, or searching for the #50cyborgs hashtag on Twitter and elsewhere. It might go without saying, but I highly recommend you do; the whole series has been truly excellent. You can also listen to Tim talk about the series here on CBC’s Spark.
It is often said of actor Peter Sellers that he was so skilled at his craft because he had no identity of his own – only that of the characters he played.
Peter Sellers would have loved the internet.
* * *
The shy and the introverted take refuge in the internet. So often characterized as an outlet for their failings – well, our failings – the web is seen as a corrupted and impure space for a kind of corrupted and impure interaction. Unable to deal with what is characterized as ‘the real world’, the web becomes the introvert’s substitute for the immediacy and give-and-take of face-to-face interaction.
Or so that line of thinking goes.
But what if the web as social prosthetic – as the cyborg component of consciousness we send out in search of connection – weren’t an end to something but a means? And rather than a tool to achieve a specific external goal, it were somehow different: a conduit that reconfigured the self from the outside in? A tool for the quiet and internal to grapple with the strange paradox that is the uncomfortable and threatening imminence of the immanent.
* * *
In 2009 film Coraline, the titular character is beckoned into another world by a doll version of herself. The film begins with the image of an unknown entity sewing a mini-Coraline together. Coraline is sutured into another world by her stitched-together avatar.
The other world is glorious and strange: hyperbolic and hyper-real. Like Alice down the rabbit-hole, Coraline is delighted by a world that seems to exceed the limitations of her rain-soaked, leaky real life. But leaks sprout in the other world, too; soon, Coraline finds the other world – and her Other Mother – is not what she had wanted. To become Other carries far too high a price: the replacement of her natural, human eyes with buttons. She must look through new eyes to look the part.
The only thing that isn’t a replicated, iterated, perverse version of an original is Coraline herself. After spending her time facing challenges and collecting glowing red orbs, she returns to the real world reconfigured, brave and mature. She passes into, out of – and through – the re-created world in order to move forward and grow.
Clearly something is going on here.
* * *
After the invention of writing, subjectivity has always been inherently linked to self-presentation. In fact, the need to represent oneself to oneself is built into language itself. When Descartes tries to establish the solidity of the relationship between his subjectivity and the world, he makes two contradictory moves: he erases the external world, banishing everything except for the internal; and then he paints a scenario in which to test himself. Even after banishing the outside, our friend Rene cannot help but conjure images in his mind in a space that is inevitably ‘outside’. It is the externality of the interior imagination. This is the old contradiction of the self: locked into its interiority, it is only composed of those things that were put into it from the outside. A permeable cell-membrane surrounds the subject, and it only allows things in – but does not let that interiority out.
What writing does is allow the self to become a thing to be considered at a distance, out there. The web takes this one step further; rather than allowing for self-presentation in either the imagination or in the referential structure and syntactic gestures of the sentence, it allows the subject to become an object-made-public: a visual and textual metaphor of the self that disseminates and scatters.
Fortunately, for the shy, that is not all it does.
* * *
Art has a funny way of getting at things. If you believe Frederic Jameson’s take on Hamlet, the Danish Prince’s indecision is not only a meditation on ‘how should one act?’ – Kafka’s parable from The Trial pre-written four-hundred years earlier – but a literary representation of the impossibility of seeing over a historical horizon as feudalism gave way to mercantilism and capitalism.
Maybe something is also happening in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani.
Jas – a meek, shy teenage boy – occupies a new ‘desi‘ subject position. All gruff posturing, masculine aggression, capitalist excess and hard-won maturity, Jas grows. He self actualises – in that strange teleology of the bildungsroman – by temporarily becoming someone else. Like Bart Simpson rowing in an imaginary paradise with his soul for a partner, Jas becomes an avatar of himself in order to become ‘full’ and ‘complete’.
Unlike Coraline, Jas does not move through a tunnel between worlds. But he may as well.
The logic of the avatar is creeping its way into art.
* * *
The web is the mechanism by which we send out pieces of our self out into the world.
But the notion of the online self as social cyborg – of a series of fractured images that signify and refract endlessly across the rhizomatic network – is only half of the equation. Like writing before it, the web is also the exteriorization of that which is radically interior: subjectivity. What you might, if you were picky, call the temporal simultaneity of the subjective and prosthetic selves – the here-and-there-ness of it in the same moment – means the web is also a prosthetic for subjectivity. An external extension of the interior self, a stitched-together composite of the avatar and the soul. A cyborg whose subjective pathways are composed of neural networks and masses of fiber optics, indistinguishably intertwined.
* * *
If Peter Sellers had the web, he might have become the cyborg par excellence. A shell looking for an outlet, he might have engaged the strange, paradoxical inscriptive power of the web: as he wrote out his multiple selves and sat, with this new form on the screen just ahead of him, the dull blue glow that pulsed from his monitor would have reinscribed itself, morphed and revised, onto his body.
The body as canvas, as page, for a writing made of light.
Between the eyes and the screen is air – a nothing. But if sight is the impinging of light on rods and cones; and screens are made to project light out; perhaps, just hovering there, it is the space-in-between the self that looks out and the screen that burns in – that leaves an invisible trace – that is the home of cyborg soul.
The Aspirational Index
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on September 5, 2010
When it comes to measuring the state and potential of cities, most of our metrics are, well, rather dry. Almost axiomatically, they are socio-economic in nature: GDP, income breakdown, employment, the potential for upward mobility, etc.
But the experience of living in a city – or, more confusingly and paradoxically, the aggregated subjective experience of a place – is only measured in part by these socio-economic indicators. Obviously, there is no way to measure what a city feels like in general, mainly because there are millions of different views on the subject.
Yet, this quality of ‘feeling’ engendered by how urban spaces are not only organized but experienced is a crucial component of living, despite the fact that it is so ineffable – or indeed, perhaps because of it.
More than anything, of concern to me in these less concrete aspects of place is to what degree a city is able to inspire hope in its citizens. Not only of the transcendent sort – of looking up at the Willis Tower and wondering what it might be like to be a CEO some day – but also of being able to project oneself into a future in which one is not only secure, but happy in one’s place in the city. To what extent does a city allow you to envision a place for yourself in which you might feel at home?
Regular readers will know that my interest in this stems from becoming somewhat obsessed by my own city, perhaps especially because of its strange quality that makes it both amazing and disheartening both at once. As I have expressed elsewhere, Toronto is the city that is always almost on the verge of becoming something great. And in typical Toronto style, it feels both closer to and further away from that mythical point than ever before.
Still, kicking around the streets of my adopted city, flitting back and forth between its sprawling suburban areas and tight, dense core, it occurs to me, in one those endless mental comparisons with New York, that Toronto may lack in what you might call its ‘aspirational index’.
You might define an aspirational index as a ‘ranking’ of sorts that takes into account the capacity of a city to inspire both hope in its residents and the feeling that it is not only possible to build a life and be upwardly mobile, but that it is desirable to so there. A city with a high aspirational index – and here it is difficult not to think of New York or London – is one not only ‘great’ in traditional senses, but in the degree to which its inhabitants feel that things are possible for them if they stay.
I say this because an aspirational index – which, as metaphor at least, is meant to express what cities feel like – is one way of encompassing the aggregate effect of radically disparate elements – here, say, of the restoration of Regent Park, the existence of Kensington Market and the steadily growing skyline, all at once. Though those things would register quite differently in, say, a demographic analysis, an aspirational index would take into account the ‘subjective’ effect of the aggregated public display of successful urban spaces.
Now, to be clear, I don’t mean to ‘establish’ an aspirational index at all – partly because I’m not a complete fucking idiot (as much as this blog works to reaffirm that I really am). The term, beyond being oxymoronic in its juxtaposition of quality and quantity, is also utterly unfeasible.
Still – to think about the city and hope seems like a worthwhile endeavour, particularly for Toronto, as it perhaps articulates what underpins so many contemporary debates here and elsewhere. Think, for example, of the surge in discourse around cycling here, in Montreal, New York, or a host of other places: a certain group of people wish to see change enacted so that they can believe the city may become closer what they want it to be.
Cities with a high so-called aspirational index are good at performing and publicising moments of positive change, which has the circular effect of encouraging more of them. Toronto, which stumbles at even the slightest change – such as a pilot project to put bike lanes on University Avenue – can lack this capacity. Thus, people stay simply because the money’s here, while at the same time, the truly talented – the Clive Thompsons or Rachel Sklars – leave for America because there, the scope for hope is greater.
And yet, small markers like the arrival of Bixi each peform their unintended significance not only as markers of material change, but as testaments to the possiblity that it may still be worth hoping.
To have urban hope is to be able project oneself into an imaginary future that feels plausible. For me, it might be something like ending up at a Toronto-based, Canadian version of Wired (which, many moons ago, was once called Shift), or writing a web column somewhere in between running my gourmet sandwich shop that only served local microbrews. Funnily, the latter seems relatively plausible; the former is, for a whole slew of reasons – from a lack of a large startup community to a deeply entrenched conservatism among publishing folk – almost totally pie in the sky.
But everyone has dreams like that. The aspirational city is the one that makes as many as possible seem… well, possible. This is why places like London or New York are so unique, and still so distinct from places like Shanghai or New Delhi: that despite unavoidable problems, they offer the widest range of hope (though it must be said, that in sheer socio-economic terms, it is probably Scandanavia that offers the greatest chance at a decent life for the most number of people).
* * *
Why aspiration? Because it allows us to talk about to more than either just the vibe of a city or its economic output. It instead is a way of finding an experiential link between the view of the skyline from East Humber Bay Park and the number of university spaces for international students. It is a way of cementing the lived link between the quiet pleasures of Dundas West and the ethnic ghettoization in Northern Etobicoke. It is a way of articulating the aesthetic dimensions of hope without forgetting that painters must also pay for oil and canvas.
It is a way of remembering that cities are not just masses of buildings and people, but are an imaginary gathering – a diaphanous image, painted upon a screen that isn’t quite there, hovering almost invisibly, just in front of the eyes of millions.
A Study in Contrasts and Other Lame Blog Post Titles
It’s true that The Books’ new album is pretty fascinating . Like in “Cold Freezing Night”, my favourite track off the disc, The Books have become experts at weaving strange, catchy soundscapes of ‘found poetry’ and music.
And the new Lali Puna album isn’t bad either. I guess it’s pretty standard as indietronica goes, but it’s pleasant, and the kind of thing well-suited to late-night listening now that the weather will soon get colder.
But what does it mean, as white hairs sprout sporadically in my beard, that this is the sort of song I find myself listening to most?
(Hint: It’s “Dark Clouds” by Sarah Harmer, off the unabashedly poppy Oh Little Fire).
(Hint #2: The Books’ label, Temporary Residence, houses all kinds of great acts, including the now defunct Sonna, who are one of my favourite bands ever.)
