I’m going to post something to expand on the themes in this article shortly, but to whet your appetites:

Capitalism would seem to require an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness amongst its participants, if it is to be sustainable. The need for dissatisfaction is implicitly recognized by Keynesian economics, which sees the capitalist system as threatened by the possibility of individual or collective satisfaction, manifest as a demand shortfall. Capitalism’s gravest problem is then how to maintain governments or consumers in a state of dissatisfied hunger, and how to find ever more credit through which to feed that hunger. The defining difference between the Keynesian era and the neo-liberal era was simply that the former depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ state, whereas the latter depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ consumer. The question of who or what is to inject such an appetite in future has no apparent answer as yet.

Max Weber, and more recently Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, addressed a parallel problem, but via moral and cultural sociology. To what extent and on what basis must capitalism serve our human needs and desires, if we are to remain committed to it? Immaterial needs and desires play a key role, as these are less easily exhaustible than material ones. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue:

Whereas capitalism, by its very nature, is an insatiable process, people are satiable, so that they require justifications for getting involved in an insatiable process. It follows that capitalism cannot make do with offering nothing more specific than its inherent insatiability.

The culture of capitalism must keep individuals sufficiently dissatisfied that they continue to seek satisfaction from it, but not so dissatisfied that they reject or resist it outright. Boltanski and Chiapello’s central argument is that capitalism has drawn on varieties of anti-capitalist critique in generating the ‘spirit’ which induces a sufficient mass of the population to remain at this finely tuned level of engagement. At key moments of crisis, capitalist accumulation has alternately drawn on those criticizing its unfairness (the ‘social critique’) and those criticizing its dullness (the ‘artistic critique’) in order to find ‘routes to its own survival’. [12] In promising to answer these critics, it pledges to treat the moral and human injuries that it itself has enacted, thereby renewing its legitimacy.

New Left Review – William Davies: The Political Economy of Unhappiness.

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Hamsterdam’s Homepage: The War on Drugs gets its own Wikileaks

Drugs are actually pretty boring, though my attitude has always been that though I may not agree with using chemical means to sit through Enter the Void I will die for your right to- well, not die die, just be mildly inconvinienced if it really is necessary. And if I don’t have better things to do.
I’m prepping for something big and smart about Bitcoin, and couldn’t help but be distracted by the discovery of The Silk Road (don’t bother with the link unless you’re using TOR). Silk Road is Hamsterdam from The Wire gone digital, a DMZ in the war on drugs where users can buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods (provided that they can’t be used to kill or injure others) in digital anonymity. Transfers are made using Bitcoins, a (practically) anonymous digital currency with some murky connections to Anonymous and Wikileaks and an exchange rate of $8 to one bitcoin.

Read more about Silk Road and Bitcoin on Wired.

Right now my drug of choice is Brazil Santos, a light, flavorful slow-dried coffee with a low acidity grown on one of Brazils hundreds of small (below 10 acre) family run coffee plantations.

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Maria Fischer’s ‘Traumgedanken’

Unbelievably cool:

The book “Traumgedanken” (“Thoughts on dreams”) contains a collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts which provide an insight into different dream theories.

To ease the access to the elusive topic, the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.

On five pages there are illustrations made out of thread. Their shape and colour relies on the key words on the opposite page. This way an abstract image of the dream about dreaming is generated.

In addition there are five pages where a significant excerpt from a text of the opposite page is stitched into the paper. It is not legible because the type’s actual surface is inside the folded page. This expresses the mysteriousness of dreams and the aspect of dream interpretation.

More at Maria Fishcer’s website.

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Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere

I really wish that I could say that I haven’t posted anything in the last few weeks because I’ve been in Egypt fucking shit up with my revolutionary brothers and sisters and Atari Teenage Riot on infinite repeat, but the truth is that I’ve been trying to negotiate myself out of ‘emerging adulthood‘ and into wage slavery (or, failing that, actual slavery via internships).
Smart people have been saying smart things about the unrest that has spread through the Middle East since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on January 4th. Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Žižek were on Al Jazeera as a double act, Johann Hari asked how the West can help and Foreign Policy has declared the whole thing a failure.
However, I’m a sucker for big picture thinking and a snappy title, so the article that has come out of the last six weeks that I would particularly like to highlight is Newsnight Economics editor Paul Mason’s ‘Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere’, a sane version of Glenn Beck’s Apocalyptic visions of an advancing Islamo-Communist Caliphate with a touch of the Beck-approved pamphlet ‘The Coming Insurrection‘ in its emphasis on solidarity-groups (‘communes’ in TCI) as units for revolutionary action and a good deal of Clay Shirky’s techno-progressive utopianism.
Each of the twenty points is worth a mini-essay (now there’s something to drive pageviews now that I don’t have Highschool of the Dead’s endless jiggle-parade to fall back on), but you can get the pre-digested version here, on the BBC website.

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Was Jared Lee Loughner politically motivated, insane or just plain stupid?

Pop quiz: there’s a guy who’s been getting a lot of attention lately who had a long history of mental illness which ended in tragedy, an obsessive focus on grammar, a distrust of the American government, who toyed with the idea that the world we experience is not real- who am I talking about?
Jared Lee Loughner, who shot and killed six people in Tucson Arizona whilst trying to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, right? Or David Foster Wallace, about whom all of the above statements are true. Two very different people, both left legacies that the United States, and the world, is struggling to come to grips with. Despite the similarities listed above, nobody would argue that Wallace and Loughner belong in the same rough category- hell, I might lobby to have them recognised as belonging to different species- Homo Sapiens Superior and Homo Sapiens Vulgaris respectively.
The gulf that separates the two is immense, but a vast proportion of it is taken up by one single factor: intellect.
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What could have been: works that would have entered the public domain this year

See anything you like in the picture above? The chances are that even a basically literate person will know and perhaps love one of the books and films in the picture above- there’s my favorite Hitchcock film and favorite stage play right next to each other. Well good news, because all of the above works (and 2/3 of the Lord of the Rings books, On the Waterfront, and the songs ‘I’ve got a woman’ and ‘Shake, rattle and roll’) are now yours! Yes, you can now distribute, remix, adapt, mash-up and reinterpret anything from the year 1954, and all for free! Think of the possibilities for spreading the great cultural achievements of the 20th century and creating new works for the 21st, think of-

-And we’re back in the room, take a deep breath. The above is what could have been had the US not passed the 1976 Copyright act (which became effective in 1978) on the world’s behalf and extended the time in which it takes for a work to be considered to be in the public domain from 56 years to 95. I’m afraid that you’ll have to wait until 2050 before releasing any of the above works in the popular ‘and zombies’ genre, which really puts a damper on my forthcoming Milwaukee Braves/New York Giants/Zombies mash-up, Sports and Zombies Illustrated.

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Making Sense of Modernism

Despite his gain in knowledge and power, Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus strikes an increasingly saturnine pose. His freedom from Christian authority, bought at such great cost from Mephistopheles, comes to be experienced as loss: not just loss of grace, but loss of meaning and of purpose, too. At the last, as we hear him here, he strives once more for the re-enchantment of the world. He can even see that symbol of the sacramental universe, ‘Christ’s blood’, ‘stream[ing] in the firmament’. But it’s too late; God has departed. In his wake, modern Faustian man is free, but rootless, liberated but cut adrift from the resources that had once furnished his life with meaning.

Such is the similarly plaintive refrain that runs through Professor Gabriel Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism?. Not that you would know this, given the silly-season furore that greeted the author’s much-publicised criticism of the greats of contemporary Anglo-American literature. Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, even Philip Roth – all are, admittedly, the recipients of Josopivici’s critical sting. ‘Reading Barnes’, Jospovici writes – and the Guardian gleefully quoted – ‘like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner’. If these ‘precise’, ‘cynical’, and unrelentingly ‘ironical’ writers, having snuck out from under ‘Philip Larkin’s overcoat’, clearly annoy Josopivici, then at least he finds Philip Roth, a man frequently and perhaps unthinkingly hailed as ‘our greatest living writer’, funny and thought-provoking. ‘[B]ut only as good journalism can be funny and thought-provoking’, Jospivici adds, just in case his personal enjoyment be mistaken for objective literary praise.

More at Sp!ked

Also, Carles at Hipsterrunoff is now podcasting, and you can listen to episode 1 here. The content is virtually identical to HRO in its written form (there are no MP3s of relevant buzzbands, for example) but does allow the listener to realize that Carles has a very, very sexy voice.

UPDATE

You can now call Carles from Hipster Runoff at any time, day or night (mostly night) to discuss your problems, chillwave and Zooey Daschenel or just to hear Carles’s sexy voice (mostly the latter).

Also again: it’s 2011. Here’s a picture of Michael Jackson dressed as Hitler.

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Introduction to Electronic Literature: A Freeware Guide

Over on his Free Space Comix blog poet Brian Kim Stefans has compiled an incredible introduction to electronic literature- one hundred documents that will soon form part of a virtual seminar course on the subject.

The website that I am creating for this anthology will contain the essays in .pdf form (reset, since many of these pages are nearly illegible), a .pdf of the edited book with my editorial commentary, a page of videos I often use when teaching, a “ten week course” that is a series of essays, links and assignments based on my course, and other materials such as a bibliography, via Amazon’s “listmania” feature, of electronic literature books.

This is not a complete overview of the state of the field, or an attempt to create a “canon.” If the image here is skewed or flawed, it’s only because it’s meant to be a launching pad for an independent investigation of the genre, either as a scholar or artist.

More at Free Space Comix

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The Philosophical Underpinnings of David Foster Wallace’s Fiction

When the future novelist David Foster Wallace was about 14 years old, he asked his father, the University of Illinois philosophy professor James D. Wallace, to explain to him what philosophy is, so that when people would ask him exactly what it was that his father did, he could give them an answer. James had the two of them read Plato’s Phaedo dialogue together, an experience that turned out to be pivotal in his understanding of his son. “I had never had an undergraduate student who caught on so quickly or who responded with such maturity and sophistication,” James recalls. “This was this first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

The experience seems to have made an impression on David as well. Not long after he arrived at Amherst College in the early 1980s, he developed a reputation among his professors as a rare philosophical talent, an exceptional student who combined raw analytical horsepower with an indefatigable work ethic. He was thought, by himself and by others, to be headed toward a career as a professor of philosophy. Even after he began writing fiction, a pursuit he undertook midway through college, philosophy remained the source of his academic identity. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, a professor now at Smith College who worked with Wallace at the time, remembers. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”

More at Slate.

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Why isn’t AMC’s The Walking Dead as good as it should be?

I have kind of a thing for Zombie movies and Zombies as a trope in general. I won’t attempt to intellectualise it- I didn’t particularly care about the political messages in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead when I watched both films (though I was pretty young at the time), I just enjoyed watching a group of characters overcome (or fail to overcome) a unique challenge. For me Zombie films, books, comics, video games and so on are a subset of the ‘disaster’ genre, no different from volcanoes, killer bees or mega-sharks and giant octopi.
In particular, perhaps above all other depictions of the living dead in any medium, I love Robert Kirkman’s comic book The Walking Dead. When AMC announced that they would be filming it on a Hollywood budget with Frank Darabont directing I was understandably excited. Every issue printed since 2003 should have had a banner headline on the front that read ‘Soon to be a major series from whichever network can see an opportunity to make the greatest TV show ever’. I knew that, unlike the comic, it would be in color but otherwise assumed that the dark, difficult narrative was basically unfuckwithable. Frank Darabont may have helmed two of the more saccharine Stephen King adaptations, but they had visual flair and solid performances, and hey, the guy obviously knows supernatural horror and prisons (a large part of The Walking Dead is set in one, though the characters are more about staying inside than crawling through shit to get out, Pacific ocean or no.) With such strong source material there was no way it could be done badly.
But you see that idea was predicated on the belief that when somebody, say the Oscar-winning director of The Shawshank Redemption, wants to adapt something, like the Eisner-award winner for best ongoing series, he does so because he likes it. Sure, in the adaptation process scenes will be stretched or truncated and maybe the dialogue could be tightened up here or there but ultimately if you’ve got something as clearly cinematical as the Walking Dead already laid out in a serial format then, if you like it, there’s no reason to change a thing. If you go and add new characters and new situations then I guess that means that you don’t like the original, or that you liked the rough description given by your P.A’s assistant’s aide during your morning meeting and decided to shoot that instead of spending a whole afternoon reading comics.

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