Rudolf Stingel. Untitled (After Sam). 2006.

Oil on canvas (335 x 457 cm).

Current solo show at Secession, Vienna, Austria, till April 15, 2012.

More here, here, and here.

M. Francis Wolff reviews Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, in The New Inquiry:

Adam Johnson’s latest novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, is one of those rare works of high ambition that follow through on all of its promises. Set in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it examines both the Orwellian horrors of life in the DPRK and the voyeurism of Western media. North Korea is a two-way mirror, a country in lockdown; we can see in, but they can’t see out. North Koreans’ isolation and reliance on shameless state propaganda for any understanding of the outside world, or even of their own country, create a culture of such outlandish misinformation that the Western media and its audience often respond with laughter. Incredulous, horrified, uncontrollable laughter, more indicative of disturbance and fear than amusement. As outsiders, spectators, we have no way to connect: There is either the black humor of a country where Kim Il-Sung created the world and Kim Jong-il controls the weather, or the tragedy of unrelenting state-perpetrated murders, where almost 1 percent of the population are sent to die in concentration camps. We see a case study in mass manipulation, or a crowd of faceless victims. Neither is conducive to true understanding.

All the more credit to Adam Johnson, then, for even attempting to set a novel in the DPRK. The Orphan Master’s Son is Johnson’s third work — he has published a book of short stories, Emporium, and a novel, Parasites Like Us — and he appears to be in his natural element of black dystopian humor. Johnson’s great strength lies in the bait-and-switch: He lures his readers in with comedy and then overwhelms us with the tragedy that underscores every joke. He makes unexamined caricatures human again. His novel is essential reading for its cynical, media-swamped audience; it is one of those rare vindications of fiction’s potential, its power to humanize the Other and light the way of empathy and understanding.

It is important to note that this is not A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich; Johnson does not confine himself to grim realism, but instead races through North Korea at a breakneck speed, like a crazed tourist guide who won’t let you out of the car. His North Korean everyman, Jun Do (consideration of the similarities to the appellation “John Doe” is encouraged but not required) is propelled through a dizzying array of settings and identities, from North Korea to Texas, from an orphan to a state-manufactured national treasure. Our hero’s childhood is dispensed of in 10 pages. His entry into the army and training as a tunnel fighter occupies one paragraph, after which point he emerges, blinking in the light of day, to fulfill his duties as our unwitting guide to North Korea. Nor does The Orphan Master’s Son attempt to describe a representative sample of North Korean daily life; there is something else going on here.

Perry Anderson responds to critics of his The New Old World in New Left Review:

Most of the literature on the EU, as noted in [The New Old World's] foreword, is highly technical, enjoying little currency among non-specialists; in addition much of it is so ideologically uniform as to stifle, rather than arouse, any interest in the variety of political conflicts and cultures across Europe. The result, reinforced by a widespread conformism of media opinion, remains a surprising intellectual parochialism—a lack of any genuinely European public sphere. This will only be remedied when political curiosity can cross national borders in a natural to-and-fro of the kind that marked the continent’s republic of letters in the time of Montesquieu or Hume, even that of Curtius or Benda, not to speak of its revolutionary versions in Trotsky or Gramsci. The aim of writing about the core countries of the Union, and its Eastern Question, on the plane where politics retains vastly greater popular meaning than in the rarefied machinery of Brussels, was to offer some reminder, however diminished, of this tradition.

To national introversion has corresponded, over the same period, continental self-satisfaction. This was the second target of The New Old World. If in the case of the first, the critical intention was performative, in that of the second it could hardly be more demonstrative. The book is a systematic attack on the European narcissism that reached a crescendo in these years: the claim that the Union offers a ‘paragon’—in the formula of the late Tony Judt, echoed by so many other pillars of European wisdom—of social and political development to humanity at large. Since 2010, the lacerations of the Eurozone have left their own cruel commentary on these vanities. But have they, for all that, disappeared? That it would be premature to think so can be seen from an august example. Jürgen Habermas has just published another book about the eu, now following Ach, Europa (2008) with Zur Verfassung Europas (2011). [2] Its centrepiece, an essay entitled ‘The Crisis of the European Union in the Light of a Constitutionalization of International Law’, is a remarkable illustration of the patterns of thought indicated. Some sixty pages in length, it contains around a hundred references. Three quarters of them are to German authors. Nearly half of these, in turn, are to three associates whom he thanks for assistance, or to himself. The residue is exclusively Anglo-American, dominated—a third of the entries—by a single British admirer, David Held of recent Gaddafi fame. No other European culture figures in this ingenuous exhibition of provincialism.

More arresting still is the theme of the essay. In 2008 Habermas had attacked the Lisbon Treaty for failing to make good the democratic deficit of the eu, or offer any moral-political horizon for it. The Treaty’s passage, he wrote, could only ‘cement the existing chasm between political elites and citizens’, without supplying any positive direction to Europe. Needed instead was a Europe-wide referendum to endow the Union with the social and fiscal harmonization, military capacity and—above all—directly elected Presidency that alone could save the continent from a future ‘settled along orthodox neo-liberal lines’. Noting how far from his traditional outlook was this enthusiasm for a democratic expression of popular will that he had never shown any sign of countenancing in his own country, [3] I commented that, once the Treaty was pushed through, Habermas would no doubt quietly pocket it after all.

Klaus-Michael Bogdal in Eurozine:

Is Europe anything more than the remnants of a grand political delusion? Is there a cultural bond that unites the nations and peoples of this fragmented continent? From Max Weber to Norbert Elias, the greats of European intellectual history have described and re-described Europe as the birthplace of modernity; not, like the other continents, as the “heart of darkness”, but as the energetic centre of civilizing progress. Their attention has focused on the “grand narratives”: industrialization and economic productivity, state and nation building, science and art. Yet might not an examination from the other side – through an investigation of the marginal – provide essential insights into Europe's development over the longue dureé? Might not the history of the Roma, a group marginalized like none other, reveal a less auspicious aspect of Europe's grand narrative of modernity?

The tendency of existing research to treat the Roma as having first entered European political history with the Nazi genocide disregards a unique six-hundred-year history. It is indeed the case that the Roma, who over long periods of time lived nomadically and possessed no written culture of their own, have left almost no historical accounts of themselves. The heritage and documents therefore do not permit a history of the Roma comparable to that, for example, of the persecuted and expelled French Huguenots. What is available to us, however, is evidence – in the form of literature and art – of the way in which the settled, feudally organized European population experienced a way of life that it perceived as threatening. Despite consisting solely of stories and images that are defensive “distortions”, this evidence provides a far from unfavourable basis for an examination of the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, insofar as it is a history of cultural appropriation characterized by segregation. We encounter the traces of the reality experienced by the Roma almost exclusively through depictions by outsiders, and must use these to imagine those parts considered impossible to represent. The extraneous cultural depictions of the Roma – variously referred to as gypsies, zigeuner, tatern, cigány, çingeneler, and so on – have created heterogeneous units of “erased” identity and cultural attributes. The “invention” of the Gypsy is the underside of the European cultural subject's invention of itself as the agent of civilising progress in the world.

The Roma occupied a unique position from the outset. They belonged to those who were not there from the beginning, who were not expected and who therefore had to disappear again. They were seen as sinister because they “lurked everywhere” and “came and went” according to inscrutable rules. This gave rise to a uniform moment of perception and encounter: the ambivalence of contempt and fascination. A repository of stereotypes, images, motifs, behavioural patterns and legends developed early on, at the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern period. Repeatedly, exterminatory fantasies turned into exterminatory practices.

Jonathan Littell in the LRB (image from wikimedia commons):

A large banner proclaimed the demonstrators’ allegiance to the Syrian National Council: ‘No! To imaginary opposition, fabrications of Assad’s gangs. The SNC unites us, factions divide us.’ All around, mountains of rubbish cluttered the streets; ever the since the revolt started, refuse has no longer been collected from opposition neighbourhoods. Songs and dances, which take the form of zikr, the mystic dances of the Sufis, roused the crowd, while the leaders chanted slogans: ‘Idlib, we are with you! Teblisi, we are with you! Rastan, we are with you until death!’ This yearning for a union of communities, faced with the regime, was explicit: ‘We are not rebelling against Alaouites or Christians! The people are one!’ ‘Wahad, wahad, al-shaab al-suri wahad!’ shouts the crowd, ‘The Syrian people are one!’ Standing on a man’s shoulders, a red-headed boy of about 12 called Mahmoud led the crowd, chanting the cult poem by the murdered Ibrahim Qashoush, ‘Get out, Bashar!’

What is striking in these exuberant demonstrations is the power they produce. They serve not only as an outlet, a collective release for accumulated tension; they also give energy back to the participants, fill them with a little more vigour to endure. The group generates energy and then each individual reabsorbs it; that is also the point of the music and dancing. They’re not just provocations or slogans, they are also, like the Sufi zikr, ways to generate and receive strength. The Syrian revolution – a rare thing – survives not just because of the weapons of the FSA, or even the courage of the rebels; it keeps going because of joy, dance and song.

Michel Bauwens in Al Jazeera:

Does Facebook exploit its users? And where is the $100bn in the company's estimated value coming from?

This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term “Free Labour” to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labour – firstly referring to the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now to the new generation of social media participants on sites such as Facebook. The argument can be summarised very succinctly by the catch phrase: “If it's free, then you are the product being sold.”

This term was recently relaunched in an article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, entitled “They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free“. In this mini-essay, they make a very strong claim that “we can certainly position the users of Facebook as labourers. If labour is understood as 'value producing activity', then updating your status, liking a website, or 'friending' someone, creates Facebook's basic commodity.”

This line of argument is misleading, however, because it conflates two types of value creation that were already recognised as distinct by 18th century political economists. The distinction is between use value and exchange value. For thousands of years, under conditions of non-capitalist production, the majority of the working population directly produced “use value” – either for themselves as subsistence farmers, or as tributes to the managerial class of the day. It is only under capitalism that a majority of the working population produces “exchange value” by selling their labour to firms. The difference between what we are paid and what the market pays for the products we are making is the “surplus value”.

But Facebook users are not workers producing commodities for a wage, and Facebook is not selling these commodities on a market to create surplus value.

More here.

Vijay Prashad in Jadaliyya:

“The overall anti-imperialist sentiment remains strong among the Syrian population and the attempts by parts of the Left to smear the entire uprising as a stand-in for imperialism belies a Manichean worldview that badly misunderstands the country’s history. I don’t see any contradiction in opposing intervention and simultaneously being against the Assad regime—which, we need to remember, has embraced neoliberalism and consistently used a rhetoric of ‘anti-imperialism’ to obfuscate a practice of accommodation with both the US and Israel.” Adam Hanieh, author, Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States, 2011.

One of Hamid Dabashi’s most acidic critiques of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is that she indulged in the “systematic denigration of an entire culture of revolutionary resistance.” A simple index for the Left is to protect itself from this kind of amnesia. The Syrian people threw off the violent regime of imperial France in their Great Revolt from 1925 to 1927. The revolt inaugurated a trek into Arab nationalism, whose most eloquent energies were absorbed and distorted by the Ba’athist party that has ruled Syria since 1963. Nonetheless the Syrian people incubate a thirst for freedom from their suffocation by the Ba’ath regime. The problem has been that the power of the Syrian state and the enchained geopolitics of the region have denied them, for now.

More here.

From lensculture:

The international jury of the 55th annual World Press Photo Contest has selected a picture by Samuel Aranda from Spain as the World Press Photo of the Year 2011. The picture shows a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on 15 October 2011. Samuel Aranda was working in Yemen on assignment for The New York Times.
Lens Culture is pleased to present the winning photos here. Our high-resolution slideshow of the winning images shows the most detail.

Comments about the winning photo by members of the jury: Koyo Kouoh
“It is a photo that speaks for the entire region. It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring. But it shows a private, intimate side of what went on. And it shows the role that women played, not only as care-givers, but as active people in the movement.”

More here.

From New York Magazine:

Of all the gatherings, it’s TED, which might as well be the official event of digitization, that has acquired an outsize cultural footprint. Giving a talk at TED, the technology journalist Steven Levy has written, is �a rite of passage for an Internet-age intellectual.� The conference makes the Stuff White People Like list. In last year’s The Muppets movie, the character Scooter is updated to be a Google employee and TED attendee. And just as Davos is darkly symbolic to those who believe the world is controlled by 300 people, TED is uniquely able to stir up the Internet’s latent intellectual-class resentments. To attendees, or �TEDsters,� as they refer to themselves, tweeting from behind the velvet rope is a chance to camouflage pride as wonderment. From the 2011 conference, Ashton Kutcher shared that he was �jazzed to be here� and �Wow.� To speakers, filing a dispatch from TED is the jackpot of false modesty. �As I was stepping onstage,� Eboo Patel blogged in 2008 in a classic of the genre, �I thought to myself, �Literally everyone in the audience is smarter than me.’ �

André Balazs could come up with an even more lucrative nightclub by studying TED’s marketing model: Create a Boom Boom Room that not only won’t let you in but also videocasts what’s happening inside so you’ll know exactly what you’re missing. Imagine, further, that everyone in the club is miked, so you hear them going on about how �amazing� it is and how �combined our contacts reach pretty much everyone who’s interesting in the country if not the planet,� as TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, told one TED crowd. TED Talks, curated clips of the eighteen-minute lectures that are gathered on ted.com, have become today’s Cliffs Notes to sounding smart. They are, despite their length and seriousness, some of the most popular material on the Internet. TED is now on something of a populist kick. Three years ago, it spun off a franchise version of itself, called TEDX, of which there have been thousands so far. Last month, it announced a global American Idol�style search for speakers for next year’s main conference.

More here.

Late

Late have I called &
late my
beloved
was blessing me

I was covering
my breasts with my arms

…………. “Those doves”
…………. you said

In the sun ………… I took my arms away

by Jean Valentine
from Barrow Street
Winter 2011-2012

Joshua Marks over at the SSRC's Possible Futures project:

It’s difficult to make sense of the reactions of many Western governments and international actors to the disastrous elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on November 28, 2011. Initial responses from the United States and the European Union were muted, and Belgium later congratulated President Joseph Kabila on his reelection. As the extent of fraud and lost votes have became clearer, some governments have come out with stronger criticisms of the elections. US Secretary Clinton was “deeply disappointed,” while EU High Representative Catherine Ashton echoed Clinton’s assessment and said that the EU would “re-evaluate” its cooperation.

Yet today, both Western responses to the elections and their policies are unclear and tending dangerously toward the status quo of the last five years. The US Government, according to some, is very divided on Congo, and its public representatives have recently provided cautious statements on the elections and their aftermath. Consumed by their own economic troubles, no member of the EU has the interest to take the lead on reconsidering Europe’s Congo policy, while the UN stabilization mission in the Congo (MONUSCO) wants to move on from the elections and renew its focus on civilian protection.

However, these signs of policy inertia could prove disastrous, since Western policies have so far done little to strengthen Congo’s governance, a key goal of many bilateral programs. While the Congo’s GDP growth for 2011 was just under seven percent, Congo dropped to last place in the UNDP’s latest Human Development Report, and its business environment, dominated by the corruption-laden mining industry, is considered one of the worst in the world. (It is telling of the personal nature of business in Congo, for instance, that the death of key Kabila-adviser Katumba Mwanke in a plane crash on 12 February has left foreign investors worried.) Above all, the 2011 presidential and legislative elections, which were an important indicator for the state of democratic governance in the country, were so compromised that the final results are called into question.

Tyler Hicks in the NYT:

It was damp and cold as Anthony Shadid and I crossed in darkness over the barbed-wire fence that separated Turkey from Syria last month. We were also crossing from peace into war, into the bloodiest conflict of the Arab Spring, exploding just up the rocky and sparsely wooded mountain we had to climb once inside.

The smugglers waiting for us had horses, though we learned they were not for us. They were to carry ammunition and supplies to the Free Syrian Army. That is the armed opposition group, made up largely of defectors from President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal army, we had come to interview, photograph and try to understand.

The ammunition seemed evidence of the risk we were taking — a risk we did not shoulder lightly. Anthony, who passionately documented the eruptions in the Arab world from Iraq to Libya for The New York Times, felt it was essential that journalists get into Syria, where about 7,000 people have been killed, largely out of the world’s view. We had spent months planning to stay safe.

It turned out the real danger was not the weapons but possibly the horses. Anthony was allergic. He did not know how badly.

He had a terrible allergic attack that first night after we crossed over the barbed wire. He had another attack a week later, as horses led us out of Syria, just 45 minutes from safety. He died during that attack, at only 43, his wife and nearly 2-year-old son waiting for him in Turkey.

He did not write his articles from our eventful week of reporting and shooting pictures in Syria; his notes, taken obsessively, are barely decipherable. But he would have wanted a record of this final trip, some hint of the questions we sought to answer: Who were these fighters, and did they have any chance of beating the Syrian government? How were they armed and organized? Was the conflict, as in Iraq, worsening sectarian tensions? Just who supported whom?

Vladislav Inozemtsev in Eurozine:

The debate on modernisation taking place in contemporary Russia at times puzzles western researchers, accustomed to a strict understanding of the term. Indeed, they may also consider Russia to be a country in which problems related to traditional industrialisation were resolved decades ago. Yet the issue of modernisation is very real and, in this short article, I will attempt to analyse it and ask whether it can be resolved in the immediately foreseeable future.

What does modernisation mean for contemporary Russia?

In my view, modernisation can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it is understood as a purely economic and technological process, with the aim of achieving competitiveness at the global level. On the other hand, modernisation can refer to a development of social and political institutions that brings a given society closer to the ideal model represented by developed western democracies. The suggestiveness of the term can lead to inconsistencies in its use and it can be tempting to speak of modernisation, in the primary sense of the word, as industrialisation and, in a secondary sense, as liberalisation. It seems to me that this approach is mistaken: first, because in today's world economic modernisation cannot be reduced to industrialisation alone and, second, because a consolidation of institutions is not always a foundation for liberalism. For example, the contemporary Russian economy is far more “liberal” than the quasi-socialist economies of Europe. In this way we risk getting bogged down in the usual arguments about terminology that fail to lead to any real increase in knowledge.

I prefer to talk about modernisation as, essentially, an economic process that leads to a modern, self-regulating economy capable of stable self-development. At the same time, the building up of an economy requires a serious, consolidated effort from both society and the state, directed at dismantling previous economic structures, opening up the country to the outside world and re-orientating social consciousness from traditional values and ideals drawn from the past, towards the future. In this particular context, I would say that the criterion for the success of modernisation is the absence of any need for new modernisations.

The jacket of Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” describes it as “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It is also a hall of mirrors in which the author watches himself watching (and remembers himself remembering) a movie that, according to his impressively detailed description, ends with a character looking at us, looking at her. At once audacious post-postmodernist memoir and après-DVD monograph, “Zona” considers Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979), the last movie the great Russian director would make in his native land. Dyer, a novelist, critical polymath and regular contributor to the Book Review whose oeuvre includes book-length essays on jazz, photography and D. H. Lawrence, isn’t the first literary author to write a book about a single movie. Some years ago, Salman Rushdie initiated the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series with a slim volume on “The Wizard of Oz”; more recently, Jonathan Lethem wrote a book-length essay on John Carpenter’s sci-fi thriller “They Live.” But “The Wizard of Oz” is more culture myth than movie, and “They Live” is a disreputable genre flick that pokes fun at the Reagan era. “Stalker,” by contrast, is a doggedly ambitious masterpiece by a major filmmaker.

more from J. Hoberman at the NY Times here.

From Open Letters Monthly:

From a certain perspective, Virginia Woolf did not write criticism at all. Her literary essays and journalism are truer specimens of belles lettres than of the kind of writing that surrounds Woolf’s Common Reader series on my university library’s shelves, books with titles like Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, or Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, or Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, or Hellenism and Loss in the Works of Virginia Woolf. These are books written by and for specialists; their stock-in-trade is the relentless analysis of particulars, the meticulous interrelation of text and context–all self-consciously framed with theoretical abstractions. Associative leaps, bold assertions, insights born of intuition and experience rather than justified by detailed exegesis and authoritative citation: for today’s professional critics, these are as inadmissible as stolen evidence in a courtroom.

Against their painstakingly researched conclusions, Woolf’s commentaries seem—indeed, are—impressionistic, idiosyncratic, unsubstantiated. On what basis, with what justification, can she claim that Donne “excels most poets” in his “power of suddenly surprising and subjugating the reader”? What exactly does it mean to “subjugate the reader” anyway? Where are the quotations—where is the specific analysis of prosody and form, metaphor and imagery—to support that claim, or the claim that in “Extasie” “lines of pure poetry suddenly flow as if liquefied by a great heat”?

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Yahoo! News:

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries.

He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills.

More here.

Marina Kamenev in The Atlantic:

In 1997 Kevin Sorbo, known for his starring role in the television series Hercules, felt a searing pain in his left shoulder during a workout. Thinking it was a strain, he went to see his chiropractor, who manipulated his neck for treatment. Several days later the actor suffered a stroke and a recent article in Neurology Now links the aneurysm with the actions of his chiropractor. The article is currently used as reference material by a prominent group of Australian doctors, medical researchers, and scientists who are trying to curb what they refer to as pseudosciences, like branches of chiropractic practice, right at their root: the universities where they are taught.

Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM) already has 450 members. They include Ian Frazer, the inventor of the cervical cancer vaccine, and Sir Gustav Nossal, a renowned immunologist. Among their group, 50 are international and they too hope to snuff out what they refer to as modern-day quackery. The group has written a letter to all of Australia's university vice-chancellors asking them to: “Reverse the trend which sees government-funded tertiary institutions offering courses in the health care sciences that are not underpinned by convincing scientific evidence.”

The questionable courses include homeopathy, iridology, reflexology, Chinese herbal medicine, chiropractic, naturopathy, and aromatherapy, some of which are taught at 18 of 39 Australian universities. “A university is supposed to be a bastion of good science, but their reputation is let down by teaching something like homeopathy,” said John Dwyer, a founding member of FSM and emeritus professor of medicine at the University of New South Wales.

More here.