In one of the better articles on the end of the decade, Rebecca Mead reflects on the difficulty we seemingly have with naming the ten years that have passed from the top to the bottom of the hourglass; from what was the future to what is now our past. Mead reminds us that at the start of the decade we were already well aware of the problem. The nineties had passed and now we are in the… In the what? “The ohs? The double-ohs? The zeros? The zips? The nadas? The naughties?” Not one of these possible names seem to satisfy. However, there is one name that seems to have stuck: ‘the aughts’. Mead: “To call the decade ‘the aughts’ is a compromise that pleases no one, and that has more than a whiff of resigned settling about it. But perhaps that’s appropriate, since this turned out to be the decade in which there were no good answers.”[1] The article goes on to discuss some of the most memorable moments, events, and tragedies that have come to pass in the last decade. There are plenty of them, of course. And yet, none of them seem to capture what can truly be called the spirit of the decade—or, otherwise, none of the events that transpired are what we want the first decade of the twenty-first century to be remembered for.

While this matter is fascinating and—there is no doubt in my mind—important, another question seems to precede or, rather, supersede the issue concerning the proper name of the decade: why do we seek to seek to name it at all?

No doubt you are aware of the end-of-year overviews and lists that are produced—and eagerly consumed—every year. It seems that we are somehow obsessed with looking over our shoulder; with reflecting on the time that has passed. These lists commonly seek to single out the one thing that is most memorable. In other words, it is a quest for a signifier for the period behind us. Of course, it is important to note that this signifier is often not singular. That is, there are many domains in which the search for significance takes place—think about all the ‘best-[insert something here]-of-[insert time period here]’ lists. But when the question concerning the master signifier is posed, it becomes a matter of reducing experienced time to a singular thing, event, or phenomenon. In most of the western world 2001 will be remembered as the year of 9/11. 1945 will be remembered as the end of World War II.[2] And while there certainly are contenders to the dominant master signifiers, it should be recognized that it is infinitely easier to name a year than it is to name a decade. In the time frame of ten years so many events and phenomena unfold and come to pass it becomes a daunting task for anyone who is brave enough to even glance at the long shadow cast by the present; a shadow that forever traces our steps.

But wait, there seems to be a problematic conflation in this process of naming the decade. On the one hand there is the nominal question—that is, it is concerned with the translation of the digits of the decade into an acceptable name. On the other hand there is the hermeneutic question—or, the question that concerns the significance and meaning of the decade. Clearly, the question of meaning is what informs most reflexive inquiries. Whether or not we can agree to call the first decade of the twenty-first century ‘the aughts’ is, ultimately, of little concern, for any thought on this particular issue will always ask what such a name signifies; how the name of time relates to its content. This is further demonstrated by Rebecca Mead’s article for the New Yorker.

And yet, the division between name and content is an uneasy one. We like to speak of the eighties and the nineties as if those names are self-evident; we all know what the eighties were like, right? Here the confusion or conflation of όνομα and νόησις—the name and what we immediately understand it to mean—is again apparent. The problem, or so it seems to me, stems from the discordance between our numerical segmentation of time and what can be called an era or age.

The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau

In what can be understood as a critique of the western conceptualization of time French philosopher and historian Michel de Certeau once wrote that in our decadent civilization “only the end of an age makes it possible to say what made it live, as if it had to die in order to become a book”.[3] What, then, is problematic is that it is impossible to tell when an age has come to its end; that is, how can we know when it is the proper time (καιρός) to reflect on what has passed (Χρόνος)? So, in a strange confluence of the Enlightenment fable of infinite Progress and its belief in the truth of numbers and mathematics, we cling to our system of chronological time, failing to see that this system—although it appears to us as objective time—is human-made and is consequently arbitrary in nature.[4] The semblance of reality that the figure of the decade forces upon us is a product of our culture and obscures the fact that the eras and ages—history, in other words—that we dreamt up do not conform themselves to our design.

Walter Benjamin

In the spring of 1940 philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote: “the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.”[5] The dream of the Enlightenment—the subjugation of and mastery over all of nature by Man—entails the fundamental conviction that time itself is an empty slate that is destined to be inscribed with the endeavors, conquests, and boundless Progress of Man. In the face of his own machinations, Man has sentenced himself to an endless march forward through this desert of linear time.

When we ask ourselves what the most memorable ‘something’ of the year was or what to call the decade, really what we are hoping to distil are coherence and meaning—logic and rationale—which are necessary elements to the Enlightenment fiction. The mistake, of course, is that we assume the end of an era at the end of a decade. This end of the decade is a meaningless event that simulates significance by means of its numerical logic and elegance. Contemplating ‘the aughts’, like Rebecca Mead does wonderfully, demonstrates that many incongruent events and phenomena have manifested themselves over the course of ten years—some of those have their roots in different time periods while others have yet to fully play out. Instead of writing this particular history in the annals of linear time, we should seek to experience live history and acknowledge that every point in time is disjunctive and incoherent. History is nothing if not simultaneously the end, the unfolding, and the beginning. Our heritage of the Enlightenment compels us to rhyme name and meaning and yet we are unable to definitively name any epoch that has gone by. Man, perhaps, never was the master of time.

References

[1]http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/01/04/100104taco_talk_mead
[2] And yet, or so it seems to me, the significance or meaning of that event seems to elude increasingly more people. A tragedy of forgetting that seems to inform and has taken hold of public opinion and policymaking in our age of information.
[3] De Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, p. 198.
[4] Of course, the system that we have devised to express time correlates with our observations of the cosmos. The fact, however, that we now live in the year 2010 is wholly the result of the history of cultures, not that of nature. Furthermore, the reality of a decennium is a cultural practice and is derived wholly from the logic of the numerical system that is employed and, as such, has no bearing on nature.
[5] Benjamin, W. (2007). Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Benjamin, W. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, p. 261.

It took me a long time to figure out the answer and it is actually in the struggle to find a satisfactory answer itself that the solution and the reason for its elusiveness can be found. Having watched quite a few episodes of HARDtalk, I was often impressed with its apparent depth and thought it a quality program amidst an ocean of triviality. However, I must admit that all the items I watched were always concerned with issues I knew little or nothing about. Then, on March 24th, an episode of HARDtalk aired in which Stephen Sackur interviewed famous French philosopher Alain Badiou. Being familiar with his thought, I was excited about this episode. It was a chance for a wider audience to catch a glimpse of Mr. Badiou’s deep and compelling contributions to our understanding of the world. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Instead of letting Badiou elaborate, Sackur jumps from one topic to another, frequently interrupting his guest by feeding him apparent contradictions in his own thought—contradictions that, upon closer examination, can only exist as such when taking snippets of Badiou’s writing out of context. Badiou is not the most gifted speaker of the English language and obviously could not—or would not—keep up with Sackur’s pace. Consequently, Badiou appeared to be just some poor soul lost in the world of the Parisian salons; a philosopher disconnected from the world of things. Somewhat upset I shrugged and blamed the language barrier for this off-putting interview.

Slavoj Žižek

So what went wrong? Why were two of today’s boldest thinkers not capable of conveying their ideas in the face of Stephen Sackur? Did the editorial board of HARDtalk outsmart these two philosophers? Yes, in a way they did. But my thesis would be that this kind of ‘smart’ is qualitatively different in nature than the kind that best describes the vanquished men of theory. That is to say, HARDtalk operates through a strategy that is directly opposed to philosophy—a strategy that has speech as its fundamental element.

In his critique of Western metaphysics, the late philosopher Jacques Derrida, wholly in line with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, proceeds to argue how all Western thought ultimately conceptualizes Being as being-present.[3] While part of a very nuanced and complicated argument, what is important, here, is the notion of distance. Being can perhaps be conceptualized as the locus of thought and as such coincides with this notion of being-present. To think is to Be, or so the fable of the Enlightenment goes.[4] Derrida’s critique then focuses on how Western metaphysics prefers speech over writing. As Barbara Johnson explains in her excellent introduction to Derrida’s ‘Dissemination’ (1981): “The spoken word is given a higher value because the speaker and listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously. There is no temporal or spatial distance between speaker, speech, and listener, since the speaker hears himself speak at the same time the listener does. This immediacy seems to guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said.”[5] Writing, then, is of secondary importance; it is an operation that is derivative of speech. It is the representation of speech, which is why we read out loud or read to ourselves with our mind’s voice. Writing can only be an act of distancing. It is the author—the subject that is the locus of thought—that distances himself from his thought. It is an operation through which thought is externalized and disconnected from its originator. In this sense, by transforming thought into writing it is allowed to gain an existence onto itself and—separated from its author—it is not to be trusted.

Now, or so it seems to me, HARDtalk is finally settling the score. It has decided that thought itself is long past its expiration date and its day of reckoning has come. In the final analysis writing fulfills its purpose by betraying that which it supposedly represents. Writing exposes the possibility of a distancing between an author and his thought, and in this very movement it casts doubt on speech’s faithfulness to thought. Is speech not also structured through the logic of distance? Is there not a fundamental difference between that which is spoken, and that which is meant? Is not the Saussurian difference between the signifier and that which is signified a function of the distance between thought and its expression?[6] Thought becomes dangerous because through its necessary expression—its externalization—it is transformed into something that is no longer controllable.

Both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek are thinkers associated with the socialist left. Leaving these two to their own devices is certainly a mistake since their objectified thought—that is to say, their thought in its externalized form—has the potential to undermine the ideological structures that are in place. To be sure, the problem is not so much the thought of these specific philosophers, but is concerned with something much more abstract. The problem lies in the potential of thought in general to take on a form that is opposed to whatever elite is in power. From the moment thought is expressed—externalized—it becomes increasingly harder to control. It is no wonder that information control is an essential part of warfare.

HARDtalk, then, symbolizes a struggle between the consumerist ideology that underlies broadcast media and the thought that opposes it and the ultimate weapon seems to be speech itself. It is speech that can be made to turn on its creator; that is, it is the movement of speech that can be employed as a strategy that radically opposes thought itself. This much becomes apparent when close attention is paid to Stephen Sackur’s role in the interviews. By continuously interrupting his guests by asking questions and confronting them with quotes from their own work that are seemingly contradictory or otherwise offensive, Sackur succeeds in derailing the train of thought of the philosophers. No, it is not a derailing of thought but more like a preemptive strike that prevents thought to come to fruition altogether. By cutting thought short it can never be fully externalized and, as such, can never form any threat to anything whatsoever. HARDtalk operates through the motion of curving the space of discourse. Through the insisting and persisting tone of Stephen Sackur’s voice—in other words a particular form of speech—HARDtalk masks the fact that there is no longer any substantial thought beneath its questions. Speech, in this sense, refers to nothing but itself. It substitutes the signs of depth and intelligence for actual substance. Paying close attention to the questions asked by the host of the show, it becomes apparent that there is nothing there except for a strategy that obscures its own emptiness through simulation. The seriousness and mimetic substance of the show is entirely derived from the premise that it asks the tough questions. A premise that itself is founded upon the belief that rapidly asking questions without situating them in a proper context is the contemporary equivalent of criticism.

Jacques Derrida demonstrated how Western thought privileges speech over writing, but at least the reciprocal or symmetrical relationship between thought and its expression was left intact. Now, speech has been made to turn on its maker. To stifle thought itself in order to finally dispense with thought altogether.

References

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/about_hardtalk/default.stm
[2] Mirzoeff, N. (2005). Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. New York: Routledge.
[3] Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
[4] It is important to understand that this sketch of Western metaphysics that conceptualizes Being as being-present is part of Jacques Derrida’s attempt to criticize this particular metaphysics. As such it should be understood that Derrida is not in favor of conceptualizing Being in this particular way. In fact, his is an attempt at undermining this particular belief.
[5] Johnson, B. (1981). Translator’s Introduction. In Derrida, J., Dissemination. New York: Continuum.
[6] Ibid.

The Little Mermaid

The fine folks over at Sociological Images recently posted a fascinating picture that attempts to ‘deconstruct’ some of Disney’s most famous princesses. Unfortunately, much to my disappointment, this particular deconstruction is not of the Derridean kind and simply proceeds to strip the stories of the princesses to their bare constituent parts. At their core, these animation classics are very similar stories about women who have nothing more—or is it nothing less?—to offer than their beauty in exchange for their rescue, their salvation, by a man. Of course, this strategy of exposing the essence of these stories is important and worthwhile in itself but should not be confused with Derrida’s deconstruction.

Seeing this picture reminded me of how intimately familiar I am with these stories. I do not think it a stretch to claim that Disney’s depiction of these fairy tales are at the heart of what informs our contemporary culture while at the same time they themselves find their constitution in some of our culture’s most persistent tropes. Still, one of these tales, or rather one of the princesses, stands out the most to me; Ariel, the little mermaid.

Is Ariel, the little mermaid, not precisely the embodiment of what Derrida calls the undecidable?[1] The mermaid is, at least in Disney’s interpretation of the fairy tale, both woman and fish, human and animal. And yet she is a tragic figure for she is also neither human nor animal—at least not wholly so. Is this not precisely the reason why she sings of wanting “to be where the people are”? It is the desire to be wholly something; to properly be. Of course, Ariel has lived under the sea her whole life and, even though there are other mermaids and mermen, she spends most of her time surrounded by fish, lobsters and other such proper sea creatures. Only being half fish it is as if she does not belong; she is out of place. The problem, nevertheless, is that there is no proper place for half-beings like this little mermaid. She does not belong with the fish and yet she knows no proper home among humans.

Understood from the perspective of Derrida’s principle of undecidability, then, the story can be interpreted as ultimately one of trying to solve Ariel’s intrinsic predicament. According to Derrida the Western mode of thought is constituted, in part, by dichotomies or dualisms; darkness/light, black/white, death/life; animal/human et cetera. What matters is the place of the undecidable; it is the occurrence of something being both poles at the same time. The zombie is one such figure—neither living not dead. The mermaid fits the same mold: she is undecided. However, since our (Western) system of thought reduces everything to one of two poles, an undecidable is problematic and needs to be resolved.

The need for a resolution? Okay. But why does Ariel dream to be “up where the people are; up where they run; up where they stay all day in the sun”? Why does she wish for her half-being to be resolved this way instead of that way? Why human instead of animal? There are two answers that I can think of off-the-cuff. First, if I understand Derrida, it is because Western thought always prefers one side of the dichotomy over the other. We prefer life over death, good over evil, human over animal—after all, at least since the enlightenment, Man is understood as the superior being.[2] Second—and this requires me to scratch the surface of mermaid mythology—is it not so that mermaids are the seducers of sea men? Of course, in the earliest of mythologies, creatures with this particular make-up were gods.[3] But the version with which we are most intimately familiar, the incarnation that seems to be the primary source of inspiration for the design of the little mermaid, is the mermaid that through her seductive beauty entices men. The problem of this mermaid is the fact that she ends with a tail.[4] Beautiful beyond compare but a beauty that can never be consummated. Here, the undecidable comes into play again. A mermaid must seduce but can only do so as a phantasm; a promise. The ultimate fulfillment of seduction can never be achieved. An object of sexual lust, yet forever virgin.

Between these two motivations, Ariel pursues her wish to become human. As is the case with the zombie, the resolution of the undecidable is sought in magic. Zombies cannot be killed for they are already dead (but living); the zombie must be resolved through ritual.[5] A similar motif is encountered in Ariel’s confrontation with the sea witch Ursula. Ursula’s magic, however, seems strangely in line with the pagan principle of magic that something can not come from nothing—magic, in this sense, concerns manipulation not creation. In the story of the little mermaid this much becomes apparent when Ursula can only simulate Ariel’s human body; a simulation that is will only last for a limited time before showing its true nature.

It is during this time that Ariel must properly seduce prince Eric in order to fully become human and abolish her undecidability. Here, as also shown in the image uploaded by Sociological Images, Disney’s imagining of this fairy tale reveals—I believe—one of the fundamental inheritances of the Judeo-Christian tradition that continue to inform our Western culture: woman as a function of man. It is only in the embrace by Eric that Ariel can receive her full womanhood and be human, finally.

As the story goes on, Ursula simulates Ariel’s legs but only in exchange for her voice. Following Heidegger, Derrida argues that Western metaphysics ultimately conceptualizes being as presence; that is to say, being means to be present or to have presence. Derrida goes on to argue that Western culture prefers speech over writing which is, to a certain extent, the result of the conceptualization of speech as being closest to thought and as such closest to presence.[6] Understood from this perspective, Ariel’s loss of voice as a trade-off for having the appearance of a full human being signifies her non-being. For without voice she lacks presence and, if presence is the essence of being, she cannot be understood as fully a human being. As a mermaid she is undecidable; she is at the most a half-being. As the semblance of a woman she is deprived of being by lacking a voice.

Ultimately, or so the story can be interpreted, it is man that gives woman voice. Man, through his embrace of woman, constitutes her being. A persistent trope indeed.

References

The citation in the title of this article is originally from comedian Nipsey Russell.

[1] Derrida, J. (1993). La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil.

[2] Cf. Derrida, J. (2009). The Beast & the Sovereign. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

[3] See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2766413 (retrieved on October 26, 2009).

[4] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_problem

[5] Collins, J. & Mayblin, B. (2006). Introducing Derrida. Cambridge: Icon Books.

[6] Derrida, J. (1997). De la Grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

The Little Mermaid is property of the Walt Disney Corporation. No copyright infringement intended.

Now let me tell you something about what I’m doing. So since the beginning of September, I’ve been working on a thesis on YouTube. YouTube’s quick rise to prominence—on the internet as well as in the world of mass media in general—and its sustained popularity have fascinated me for the past two years. Thinking about it, many questions arise: why did it become so popular? To what kind of cultural register does it appeal? How does it relate to other—perhaps more traditional—media? But the more fundamental question I keep coming back to is: what is it? Admittedly it is a website with a video sharing functionality. But its popularity appears to have made it evolve into something bigger, something different. The sheer size of its traffic makes for many social implications and makes YouTube transcend its functional purpose.

Basically, what I’m doing is participating on YouTube by just using the site to watch videos, read and leave comments and I’ll be uploading some vlogs in the near future; in a way, I’ve adapted anthropology’s mainstay approach—the so-called participant-observation—to this digital environment. Through my constant exposure to this website and by using the site constantly, I’m trying to explore YouTube as a particular kind of cultural object and phenomenon. What this means is that my participating in the world of YouTube informs me on what kind of theoretical questions I should explore and think through.

After two months of continuous and intensive use of the site, which, by the way, is truly exhausting, what strikes me as a pertinent question that needs to be answered is “what kind of space is YouTube?” While, of course, it is a particular website, once you enter it, it becomes this structure within which different kinds of interaction are possible. This interaction involves, of course, people but it also is about the ‘user’ interacting with a machine. And what about public space? YouTube is, by its very nature, publically accessible but is often accessed from the most private space we know; the home or perhaps even the bedroom. What about this relationship between public and private space? Does YouTube alter this relation? One of the other major questions I’m concerned with is the question of the Subject. What kind of subjectivity does YouTube generate? People show themselves by uploading vlogs (video blogs) and all kinds of home videos. What do they show and what do we see? Fundamentally, here, there rises the issue of the subject-object distinction. YouTube seems to test our assumptions—in so far as we have them—on these concepts. While it seems clear that what we see on the screen is Object, but at the same time it concerns Subjects showing themselves. What about these Subjects that are both interior and exterior to the machine?

So yeah, my project is one of engaging this phenomenon called YouTube with broad theoretical issues. In order to facilitate this process, I’ve decided to open this blog to allow my supervisors and myself to keep track of my thoughts but also to share my thoughts with anyone interested (assuming people will even find their way here). In a way this blog will be a kind of mix between field notes and field diary; I will post my musings on whatever concerns me at the moment and I will post some thoughts and segments of chapters that will need further development.

This entry became way to long for an introduction but it is what it is. Expect more.