From Matt’s FAQ:

Q. How did you get those kids in Rwanda to dance with you?

A. I just started dancing. There was no prior discussion or explanation. They thought it looked like a fun thing to be doing and joined in. They also really dug seeing themselves on the camera’s playback screen.

Kieran calls it “absurdly sweet in a nerd-brings-the-world-together sort of a way” and I can get behind that sentiment. It is intended to be that, and it is. The comment thread on Matt’s site and here are exuberant and joyful. But. Am I allowed be bothered by the fact that in every “white” country Matt visits he is surrounded by adults, whereas in the “non-white” countries he visits, he is surrounded by children? This isn’t a hard and fast rule, exactly, but watch the video and see if you don’t see what I mean.

For example, Matt is seen dancing ONLY with non-white children in the following places:
Madagascar, Zambia, Fiji, The Solomon Islands, Yemen, the Phillipines, Mali, Bhutan, Jordan, Morocco, South Africa, East Jerusalem

Whereas he is seen dancing with a majority of white adults in the following:
Brisbane, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Turkey, London, Sweden, Brazil, Tel Aviv, France, Quebec, California, Poland, Texas, Belgium, Florida, Germany, Illinois, NY, New Zealand, Amsterdam, Japan, Australia, Portugal

There is, in other words, a high level of correlation between “Matt pictured with children” and “that country having been on the receiving end of racist colonialism in its near history.” If you wanted, you could find ways to trouble this division into two categories; what does one make of Kyrgystan, for example, where he dances with teenagers? Can one responsibly make anything of that at all? One can also note that in Japan and India, he is surrounded by cliches of male sexual fantasy. That Brazil or Turkey are not clearly “white” countries (though almost everyone in those shots are very light skinned) is certainly true. But that’s exactly the point, that such categories structure our perception in strange, disturbing, and fictional ways. “Development” therefore correlates with being represented by adults in this video, while underdevelopment trends in exactly the other way.

This is hardly an attack; I’m not trying to cry “racist” here, exactly. And, after all, if I wanted to find people to dance on camera with me in Tanzania, say, I would look for children too; adults tend to be much more reserved about dancing with a stranger, and much more wary of weirdos with cameras. But my point is just that–in the same way that “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men” illustrates how gender and race are inextricable–the ways we conceptualize geographic location have a lot to do with the ways we conceptualize maturity (and vice versa), such that it is easier for the “touristic gaze” to imagine black children and white adults than it is to reverse those categories. There are reasons why this video isn’t filled with Matt dancing with dark skinned adults and white children, and I’m not silly enough to claim that those reasons are simply the man’s virulent violent racism, but it is significant, and worth pausing over, that a video not defined by such categories is so much more unlikely. Correlation is not causation, of course, but it does exist.

So I’ll make you this bargain: the next time there’s a story on Africa in the NY Times, I’ll bet you a dollar that the story will include more pictures of a starving child, a wailing mother, or a scary looking man with a rifle than anything else. Often one of each. And while I won’t win that bet every time, I will make more money from you than if I were counting cards in a casino.

(My title, btw, references this book)

Johnny To’s Exiled is such a goddamn Western. The opening sequence is amazing for many reasons, but one of the things I find most affecting about it is the constant wind blowing in through the windows, the invasion of air from the outside into the domestic space. De Mille’s The Plainsman (which, like Stagecoach, was one of the late thirties attempts to retool the western) has a great moment where tumbleweeds keep blowing into the house that the “good” female lead is trying to build, just before Gary Cooper arrives to take her husband off to war. In Exiled, the wind is the same kind of quasi-expressionist sturm-and-drang figure for the gangsters who have come to take the husband away from his family, and the omnipresence of that wind manages very nicely to illustrate the insufficiency of her domestic cocoon, the way the frame in which the wife and child are ensconsed (thereby gendering the terms) is impossibly doomed*. As a succession of gangsters pound on her door, she can force them to wait outside, but to do so is only to delay the inevitable.

In that figure, you have the movie in a nutshell: exiled, Wo and his family have “come home” to a place that is on the verge of ceasing to be, a home that is ceasing to be home. Macau is being handed over to China, and Boss Fay from Hong Kong-who will kill Wo-is taking over the place. What might have once been a refuge is no longer; “home” is a tenuous and fast disappearing shelter from the storm.

Practically a definition of the genre, in other words. But what really makes the film work, on the other hand, is what happens after the second big shootout in the clinic, the escape into the desert and into a kind of philosophical quest framed by the flipping coin. The film has to do something radically different than what it’s already done, because the merely glossy archetypicality of the Western tropes (faceoffs, winds, domestic spaces being invaded, brotherhood) can’t sustain the movie without actually becoming cliches. So the desert interlude - “How much is a ton of love?” - is lovely, and works, I think, to nicely cleanse the pallate after the baroque excesses of the underground clinic shoot-out. The fluttering curtains and Wo’s dirty tarp shroud are visually as stunning as the clip I’ve youtubed above, but one can only aestheticize violence so far before it becomes unsustainable. So To Kai-Fung very nicely backs away from that style of visual narrative into a minimalist sequence of dusty parched wilderness, hanging somewhere between the philosophizing of Kurasawa at his most existential and the worldless philosophy of American Westerns. Having just seen Three Godfathers, it strikes me as very similar to that film, but only if the baby had died leaving the outlaws on the run from the law and from themselves. Wilderness has now gone from home-wrecker to purgatory.

Of course, it’s also implausible: the four hitmen must have had to drive a long time to find a backdrop in Macau that would be appropriate for a desert sequence - so they eventually film it in a quarry of some sort - but this indicates to me how important it was to give the “Buddha Mountain” sequence that sort of ambiance. Along with the slide guitar on the soundtrack (and, eventually, a harmonica played within the scene), the desert backdrop harkens back even more explicitly to the Western idiom the film is articulating, the idea of the desert that underwrites so much of the ideological work that the Western does as a genre. This film is doing subtly different work, I suspect, but it’s using a well-established vocabulary to do it; although the home that is being lost or gained is defined not by the frontier but by handover, we are familiar with the manner in which its inside/outside narratives of home and loss are articulated through gender (the cigar smoking gangsters that pound on her door, that interrupt the doctor’s having sex, that shoot Simon Lam in the balls, and that ultimately fail to recreate a domestic space through homosocial bonding) and with the manner in which gender is tracked by violence (the gun violence that makes a home will also, inevitably tear it apart).

For Teddy Roosevelt, the great theorist of the West, the difference between the cowboy and the farmer was fundamental, and while the former cleared the wilderness with violence, he could never be a true husband to the land. This was the tragedy of the closing frontier for him, as Turner would give it in his own particular articulation: an American spirit that was defined by the violence of clearing away the wilderness had to give way to the more gentle farmers that would follow. For Roosevelt, it was a decline and fall narrative, one which he imagined forestalling by extending the frontier out to imperial spaces abroad, sending cowboys charging up San Juan hill (and, by the way, “reading” the darker peoples of the world through the genocidal paradigms set up by indian warfare). But this conflict between the violence that makes a home and the violence that destroys it - the violence that makes the cowboy also makes him incapable of - is at the heart of so many of the great Westerns. I’m thinking of High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in particular, both of which I’ll actually blog about in more detail at some point. But in brief, I think both of those movies try to explode the problem that Exiled seems more interested in inhabiting: that a domestic space carved out by violence will inevitably die by that sword.

High Noon, for example, turns the Quaker wife into a purveyor of violence, thus undoing the only thing that made her a character and (presumably) the basis of his love for her, while Cooper’s own use of extralegal violence (shooting a bandit in the back) manages to save the town only by shaming them and making himself into an exile. You couldn’t ask for a more damning and devastating employment of the “violence kills love” trope, nor could you ask that it be more thoroughly Rooseveltian in its articulation: the man of violence carves civilization out of desert savagery, but by that very process becomes superfluous, even dangerous to it. The complete insufficiency of the “happy” ending (whereby the bad guys are dead and the husband and wife are together again) only better shows how impossible it is to mediate the contradiction: wife has become a monster to herself, and husband has become the very criminal he thought he was fighting.

One could make a similar argument with respect to Liberty Valance, but I don’t want to use up my Ford quota for this month, so I’ll let High Noon stand as the example. What’s so weird about those endings is the ways High Noon and Liberty Valance so powerfully illustrate the incommensurability of female domesticity and manly violence that their endings, which magically bridge the gap, are powerfully unsatisfying. Who the fuck did shoot Liberty? Stoddard’s wife still loves John Wayne, and the newspapers won’t print the truth. The plot resolves into a happy ending, as it had to, but that resolution is as empty as Gary Cooper’s motivations for staying and fighting in High Noon: no one in town wants him to stay and fight, but he is completely unable to articulate why he has to, other than that he has to. The plot simply demands it, in a way that disables human choice.

You could, in that vein, make the argument that the Western genre (overdetermined, as it always is, by the closing of the frontier) is ultimately about the foreclosures of fate, the ways our identities manifest our destinies and the ways that social context always closes in around us, fensing us in. It’s rare, after all, to find a twentieth century Western that takes seriously the possibility that one could “light out for the territories,” and when you find one, chances are good that it sucks. The Western begins, I think, the moment that ship sails.

In Exiled, on the other hand, the ship never quite sails. In a very literal sense, the hitmen have choices and this gives substance to their performance of Western cliché after cliché, rendering those gunfights with a depth and meaning that an automaton like Gary Cooper (who suffers but does not choose to suffer) or allegories like Wayne/Stewart lack. In their wilderness purgatory, the hitmen redeem themselves-illustrating, along the way, the incommensurability of violence gold and love-but they do so by choosing to go back, a choice that renders the meanings of possibility, rather than the tragedy of impossibility. Exiled doesn’t contradict itself with the impossible happy ending-a gesture of no faith in the party line that is not without significance-but translates the impossibility of turning violence into a home into a choice: do you play with the boys around a campfire or do you sacrifice everything for the family unit? And this choice is not an archetype, not an allegory. To’s actors are, for all their stylized sartoriality, able to invest their characters with a depth that American Westerns cannot, not because they’re better, but because they’re doing something different.

So my thesis is this: because American Westerns are obsessed and impressed with the omnipresent inevitability of the State’s hegemony, the ultimate impossibility of the freedom every cowboy is in search of, their resolutions tend towards reinforcing the impossiblity of the very escapist fantasies they enact. Yet the whole point of the To Western is that something new is being born as history takes a step forward; while the ideology of the American Western is always an avoidance of the future, Wo comes home not out of nostalgia but because he has a concrete plan, with a very real sense of what he will lose and gain, and he chooses to make that trade-off. The American Western understands home as an already always doomed and lost nostalgia, while Home, for Wo, is that which is being born.

“As governmental practices have addressed themselves in an increasingly immediate way to ‘life,’ in the form of the individual detail of individual sexual conducts, individuals have begun to formulate the needs and imperatives of that same life as the basis for political counter-demands. Biopolitics thus provides a prime instance of what Foucault calls here the ‘strategic reversibility’ of power relations, or the ways in which the terms of governmental practice can beturned around into focuses of resistance…as he put is in his 1978 lectures, the way the history of government as the ’conduct of conduct’ is interwoven with the history of dissenting “counter-conducts’”

Colin Gordon, “Government Rationality: An Introduction” in The Foucault Effect, p5

(In case you were wondering, the album’s title literally refers to the fact that the Nigerian government tried to catch Fela for smoking dope by testing his excrement, or something, thus making his shit very expensive. It is, however, more interesting in various figurative ways)

The cafe I’m in has been playing Abbey Road since I’ve been in here; we’re reaching the crescendo, and I’m finding it difficult to concentrate. This is the most powerful piece of music I can think of for me, the most compelling and difficult to ignore. But could I explain why? I could not. I am constitutionally inclined to blather on about almost anything, as this blog attests, but if I tried to write about what makes music like this so powerful to me, I’d only prove Frank Zappa right: “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

I’m less inclined than him to take “dancing about architecture” as a point of absolute impossibility–the depths of my academic perversion is that I find it to be a really interesting idea (how would one dance High Modernism?)–but I also take his point, which is that there are deep problems preventing that sort of intellectual work from getting done. Music, in short, does not textualize easily, or without great loss. Which is, to put another way, to say that music is a kind of theoretical space that cannot easily be explored by the technologies of knowledge that we, in our post-enlightenment landing craft, are equipped with. And this, too, is something I find interesting, as I’ve written here and here. What does this obscurity signify? What does the fact of a thing that our method filters out of our purview indicate about both the method and the thing? Apparently this book aims to find out, and I’m equally excited at the potential as I am concerned that they’ll do it really badly.

More broadly, I’m absolutely fascinated these days by the idea that “ignorance” is a useful way to approach how knowledge becomes an architecture of power, to approach how limits and blind spots in governmental surveillance are exactly the outlets that those systems actually need to function. To acknowledge that empire reproduces itself through the neo-liberal gesture of selectively granting freedom and autonomy, how regimes of knowledge/power that proceed by the “conduct of conduct” actually presume that their subjects will have the freedom of movement (one cannot, after all, conduct someone’s conduct unless it is in their hands in some meaningful way), seems to me to be a critical move with still very untapped possibilities. I lobe Bayart for this reason, and all the other neo-Foucaultians that proceed along these lines, the Foucault Effect and so forth.

Bayart’s big globalization book quotes James Scott as writing about the “non state spaces” formed by the mountainous regions of South-East Asia, places where the state cannot easily go:

“The mountains of Southeast Asia are ‘anti-state’, at least as much as ‘non-state’ or ‘not-yet-state’. They are peopled, over long historical periods, by deserters, people evading tax and forced labor, refugees from slavery, those who have lost factional struggles and pariahs of every sort, not to mention religious dissidents, hermits, members of religious heterodox sects who, we might say, represent the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the margin, adding a symbolic dimension to the practical rejection of central power incarnated by these communities. The mountainous periphery of southeast Asia is the negative of the society at the centre, in terms of ecology, religious practice, social structure, government and demography. And in particular thanks to its population of fugitives and dissidents.”

Bayart’s point (which is an implicit critique of many of the presumptions that structure Scott’s stuff) is that “these areas of flight and dissidence have always had a synergetic relationship with the state and the economic world in which it is situated,” as part of a larger argument that a state is as constituted by its anti-state spaces as by the spaces it actually surveys. Bayart’s point in that chapter is that the ways that globalization creates limitations to nation-states are not, in any fundamental sense, a cause of state failure in general; instead, he argues that two centuries of globalization are actually the precondition for the modern state existence.

This is, too, James Ferguson’s point in his most recent book, in which “Africa” is part of the world system precisely because it resists being incorporated, an “anti-world state” function which gets instrumentalized in ways that reinforce, even make possible, that very system. My guess is that Africanists are particularly attuned to this kind of argument, or at least a lot of the people who have done some of the most interesting work with it (people like Bayart and Ferguson) are Africanists; a continent defined by its resistance to global penetration, a “dark” continent, is a particularly fertile field for doing this kind of investigation.

But I find that the more I’ve become interested in film and photography (having come into possession of a digital camera and having become obsessed with John To and Johnny Ford), the clearer it’s become to me that “reading” images requires sustained attention to the offscreen (in ways that actually speak to how texts produce narrative as well). “Reading” the texts at Sociological Images, for example, necessitates thinking about how these images are produce through what is not shown, how narrative is made by its absences and occlusions, what they include by not showing as much as what they actually show. Creating narrative through images proceeds not merely by the positive act of encompassing and seeing but by the negative act of cutting and excluding, of limiting its lines of sight

The image I’ve taken as my avatar, for example, is a picture I took by looking between my legs over a particular scenic overview in Japan. There are signs that tell you to do this, and there is indeed something remarkable about the panarama produced: you feel like the earth is hanging above you and you see the landbridge from a perspective that is, well, indescribable. It’s hard to make this into a picture though, as wide perspectives don’t film easily (something you realize very quickly if you try to do landscape photography, since normal lenses simply cannot encompass the kinds of perspectives that the human eye finds most directly appealing). So what I did was get a picture taken of me looking between my legs; the umbrella gives it a good composition, but the narrative I was thinking about had something to do with the funny way I was producing a visual narrative about my own production of vision. And, as my “About Me” page indicates, pondering what you look like when you are pointing you ass at the sky, in the rain, is not really a bad way to describe blogging.

In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan book, the way Tarzan is “King of the Apes” is clearly a trope for white colonialism over a black continent. It’s also an argument for America’s supplanting of European colonialism, which he essentially cribs from his hero Teddy Roosevelt: as the son of British parents who grows up in the wilderness and marries into a Maryland plantation family, Tarzan’s frontier manliness pretty explicitly contrasts with the over-civilized and emasculated Europeans he will eventually supplant. So, on a symbolic level, the fact that Tarzan rises to dominion over the African great apes is an argument, conducted in quasi-Darwinian terms, for the white man’s dominion over Africa. Yet (and here’s the tricky part) his domination of Africans is also a symbol for his dominion over, um, Africans.

Burroughs was a very successful novelist, but he wasn’t a very good one, if I can make that kind of distinction. So I don’t think he worried too much about the fact that he had symbolic representation of Africans in a novel that also had, you know, actual Africans in it too. This is sort of like the way The Wire has two characters based on Jay Landsman (one being named “Jay Landsman”) and a third character played by the actual real-life Jay Landsman, but not named Jay Landsman. But a funny little quirk in the hermeneutic texture of The Wire (more an in-joke than anything else) is a much more interesting dissonance in Tarzan of the Apes, and something that might actually be worth exploring. For example, while there are good apes and bad apes, Tarzan himself has a kind of uniform, instinctual revulsion for the Africans he meets (and usually kills). While an Ape is not intrinsically threatening to him (and can even be an object of emotional attachment), an African is, as such, something he finds instinctively vile, not merely a kind of bare life which can be killed without consequence, but a kind of life that needs to be killed.

On the most basic level, I think it’s the claim to human status that an African might mobilize that makes them threatening to him: while an Ape represents exactly what, for Burroughs, an African is supposed to be, an African who occupies the same narrative frame as an Ape will almost necessarily stand in implicit contrast to it, looking all the more human (and all the less Ape-ish) for the fact of not being an Ape. So an almost hysterical imperative structures Burroughs’ narrative: the African must be killed so that the Apes can occupy Africa (and be, in turn, occupied by Tarzan).

I was reminded of this when listening yesterday to a Fresh Air interview with Brent Stirton, a photojournalist whose pictures form the spine of a story in the latest National Geographic about some Gorillas that were killed in Eastern Congo. As the reporter quickly asserted, there’s something incredibly surreal about a handful of dead gorillas eliciting a cover story when what has been called the “African World War” remains firmly off the West’s radar screen. This is a conflict in which (conservatively) five million people died between 1998 and 2003, and though there are a series of cease-fires and negotiated settlements that keep things quieter, this also means that instead of being a crisis, violence has become a way of life there. By any reasonable standard, that area is still a war zone, and as such, these pictures were taken at the center of an ongoing ten year human disaster of a significantly larger scale than that in Darfur, but a disaster that remains firmly off camera. Stirton himself emphasized that he was there to cover the deaths of actual people, something he recognized as more important, but it was only when the story he wrote about the deaths of some Gorillas was picked up that he was able to do so to the extent that he was.

Why does this happen? After all, the MSM more often recognizes the selectivity of its own gaze than it transcends it. Putting the best spin on the issue that he could, Stirton suggested that the huge numbers of humans killed somehow inhibits the West’s willingness to be engaged (a number too large to conceptualize), while the more personal story of the Gorillas could seem less hopelessly unmanageable. I don’t buy that at all, but I was also interested in his suggestion that the deaths of these animals could serve as a symbol for what’s wrong with the region, and that, as such, it could draw some sort of positive attention to it. He notes, for example, that the local warlord who is based in the conservation park (and who probably killed the gorillas) is aligned with the government in Rwanda and that the United States has good trade relations with Kigali; the numbers of Africans he’s killed is prodigious, but he hoped that killing an endangered species, the Mountain gorilla, might cause someone to take notice. I’m not sure how optimistic he is about that, but I’m not, for exactly the reason I pointed to Tarzan of the Apes to illustrate: it wasn’t an accident that the story about the Gorillas gets picked up while the Eastern Congo disaster remains way, way off the radar screen.

The National Geographic story has several unspoken (but easily heard) subtexts, no matter what the reporter himself wrote or didn’t write: scary shit happening in Africa and intrepid white man going off to discover it. People have been reading variations on that story in the National Geographic for well over a century. But the specifics of this story, the fact that the Gorillas being killed is a tragedy (and a failure of conservation) in the very site of a stunningly invisible human tragedy, represent something parallel to Tarzan’s Ape/African problem. Like Burroughs, I think, the MSM is much more comfortable with “apes” as a symbol for what’s going on out there in that heart of darkness, and much less interested in allowing Africans themselves to occupy that conceptual space. As with Burroughs (and especially with Teddy Roosevelt), the metaphors of conservation are a far more attractive way to conceptualize problems of governance: not only does such a story foreground the “failures” of Africans to bring order to the continent (a story the West loves), but “conservation” also provides a way to justify the anti-democratic and paternalistic assumptions about Western liberal interventionism in the Third World that the West is always on the lookout for ways to rationalize, an excuse for anti-democratic surveillance and policing of de-humanized subjects (yet with their best interests in mind). Whereas treating Africans like human beings would make the question of intervention impossibly complicated, because Africans tend to insist on having a complicated society with complicated social divisions and conflicts of interest, a conservationist doesn’t have to worry about any of that. A conservationist doesn’t have to ask his subjects what they want or need - he can simply tell them - and can freely intervene (is impelled to do so!) without such complications. Democracy (and the non-existence of a single “best interest” for a people) is not how conservation is understood.

None of this has anything to do with any claim I might make for what should be done, and I’m not going to, though it does seem to me that to even ask a question like “How can the West intervene” you’d need to think about the many ways the West is already fundamentally involved in what’s been going on (something the MSM as an entity seems constitutionally unable to do). But as Timothy Burke pointed out yesterday with reference to Zimbabwe, rigidly adhering to either the principle of humanitarian internationalism or national sovereignty tends to be more a way of not engaging with all the complexities of these situations, of filtering out the many complications that make simple answers impossible. But in cases like this, “conservation” as a metaphor for a continent achieves exactly the same purpose, transforming a practically unsolvable problem of governance, with no clear lines dividing the good guys from the bad guys, into a narrative about those who selflessly bring order to the jungle and those who despoil it. And even if an easy avenue for intervention is not therefore suggested, that’s a much more palatable story for Western readers.

I find something totally fascinating about this mix of self-realization male-bonding rhetoric and the oddly juxtoposed image of be-hatted and be-mustachioed manly men enjoying each other’s company. Says a lot–I believe–about how we view masculinity through a lens of American never-was nostalgia, or at least how my own education in how to desire has allowed insight into those larger culturally-taught skills.

Take, for example, the guy whose arm is draped so lovingly in his pal’s lap and try to imagine that not signifying coupling up if you saw two men doing it in an American public space. I have the same sort of feeling watching a lot of the Johnny To movies, where male bonding manages to be sexual without being sexualized, if I can make that distinction; since I probably can’t, what I mean is this: when the other gangsters in Exiled tear Lam Suet’s pants off to show that he has gotten excited by their talk of brothels, it both is and isn’t homoerotic as the term would be most basically defined the American cultural lowest common denominator. Of course it is about sex and it’s about sex in a way that bonds men together in the absence of women, but it isn’t about sex in the way the American sexual idiom teaches us to read it as–as a prelude to actual sexual congress, and therefore a catalyst and a warning–were it to happen in an American movie, for example. In other words, while it’s roughly translatable, like reading Brazilian Portuguese when you know Spanish, it also registers as a significantly foreign idiom. You can make sense of it, but you can’t ignore that there’s more going on than you can fully decode, nor can what you fully incorporate the things you understand you don’t understand.

This poster gives me the same feeling. While the language of self-help is utterly familiar–from the presumption that without help you will continue “spoiling relationships” to the unexplained valorization of “change” and “living more fully in the present moment”–the picture itself feels oddly dissonant, like a badly subtitled movie. They stare at that camera the way my grandfather’s generation did, that mix of guarded solemnity and veiled posing, produced by a very different relationship to the camera. While the poster’s text implies an unmediated collectivity of men, the relationship around the central older man suggests to me a family portrait, and if the absence of women does not necessarily signify anything per se (as it does in the poster’s text), it is at least consonant with the rugged frontierish vibe they’re giving off, from the rough wooden post to the neck-kerchief to the hats worn indoors; these are manly men, but what kind of manliness is it? Are these men that cherish male-bonding, or is it the rugged masculinity of the frontier cowboy, who creates domestic spaces but can never fully be at ease within them? The outdoor clothes worn indoors would seem to indicate the latter, if I can speculate.

But even more telling, I think, is the manner in which placing an intentionally anachronistic image of masculinity in the context of an implied present crisis of masculinity speaks to how masculinity is enunciated through reference to history. After all, as the EotAW reminds us in their list of American verities, American masculinity is always in crisis, always under threat by some incarnation of the advancing frontier of domesticity that is enabled by and then consumes the gloriously violent homo-social space of the Western frontier, bringing in its wake the emasculating forces of the market, the factory, or cosmopolitan urbanism. But the corollary to that verity is that masculinity is always just having emerged from its golden age, always nostalgically looking back to the time when men were real men and when women knew their place (as in this case, outside the frame). Yet the feeling of anachronism doesn’t go away, exactly; it remains in the frame, speaking worldessly, and perhaps giving shape–as unincorporated surplus–to masculine desires that the desires we’ve been educated into can’t speak to.

From an article on 1950’s era Hollywood’s belated efforts to cash in on their primary audience becoming younger and younger, this is the sort of paragraph I couldn’t possibly be expected to resist:

“Many responded to the sudden prominence of the American teenager with fear and trembling. Throughout the 1950’s, cultural guardians likened this “new American caste” to savage hordes descending on a city under siege. But even as editorial writers, law engforcement officials, and parents were shoring up the barricades against them, the business community were welcoming their arrival at the gates. With good reason: there was a fortune to be made selling trinkets to the barbarians.” (from “Teenagers and Teenpics, 1955-1957: A Study of Exploitation Filmmaking,” Thomas Doherty)

It’s the kind of upside down and backwards image that might appear if you projected my dissertation through a series of particular screens and filters, bounced it across several dozen mirrors, and then displayed it on an uneven surface. Almost unrecognizable, unless you know it really well, but all the key terms are there, practically, from the extraneous use of the word “caste” to the uneasy conversation between capitalism and cultural antipathy, all served up with a healthy dose of what I would creatively misparaphrase Marc Bousquet creatively misparaphrasing Stuart Hall to call “Youth as a category through which race is lived.” Reality is so often even better than the films, in such cases. For example, the guy who was responsible for pioneering the industry’s direction into its teen audience after 1956? A guy first known for making jungle movies who therefore became known as “Jungle Jim.”

In any case, I think the speed by which “youth” gets recast as “race” suggests how inseperable “race” (or rather, “developing world” status) is from notions about the the proper place and role that youth must occupy vis-a-vis their elders, which is why I cringe every time I hear the phrase “young democracies.” But it also makes histories of things like rock and roll, which are about both youth and race, legible in an interesting way. Which leads me to the last little nugget this article revealed: after movies like Rock around the Clock, which established teen-rock films as great moneymakers, our man “Jungle Jim” was casting around for the next big thing and settled on: Calypso. After Harry Belafonte’s version of “Banana boat song” was all the rage, Jungle Jim and others decided, comically, that calypso was going to be as big as rock music (which was clearly on its way out) and they started registering every possible movie title with the word “calypso” in it, to get ready. Obviously, calypso wasn’t quite the next big thing that they thought it would be, but I’m interested in more than just the studios’ amusing cluelessness about what the kids are into, since there’s something suggestive about what they didn’t get: the fact that “rock and roll,” a black music become white and American, would be so much more powerful and long lasting than a music that wears its foreign status on its sleeve (after all, “banana boat song?”), even if studio executives couldn’t themselves tell the difference, or care. There’s race, after all, and then there’s furren, but in this case it wasn’t the evil mainstream media that was the cause of that difference being observed.

One of the things that makes The Wire what it is, I think, is that it combines an incredible level of detail in portraying the local with a radical disinclination to address the larger context in which the “local” is located. This, of course, would hardly be a criticism if the show’s accomplishment in one kind of realism didn’t draw attention to its failings in another; after all, can you name a television show that does a better job in displaying the functioning of international capitalism than The Wire? In any case, “better” and “worse” are precisely not the right way to adjudicate this question. Instead, I would suggest that The Wire can’t see anything outside of Baltimore for the very simple reason that it carefully (and strategically) avoids looking.

Think of season two, for example, where the global criminal underworld stretching out from Baltimore’s port is not so much portrayed as obscured, where we don’t so much see the connections as we become aware that our sight of them has become closed off. The season begins with the Barksdale crew’s main supplier, who we never see, cutting them off, for reasons not fully explained, due to events that have happened off screen. The crime that pushes the season’s plotline happens on a ship crewed by foreign nationals who obstinately and successfully pretend not to speak English, thereby flummoxing the helpless Freeman and Bunk, who, confronted with a Swahili speaking crewmember lose their composure (”English Motherfucker!” and “Negro, you cannot travel halfway around the world and not speak a word of English!”). After all, what could be more existentially troubling to West-side Baltimore po-lice than a black man who so exists outside that frame of reference as to be completely illegible? Yet the show also shares this perspective, failing to subtitle his words and allowing the boat to sail right out of the narrative. The other main embodiment of global criminal capitalism (and the most important one) turns out to be a man whose name, “The Greek,” is more a sign of what he isn’t than of what he is. While the name intentionally harks back to what we think we know about the criminal underworld–the ways that familial gangs are structured by ethnicity in movies like The Godfather,The Departed, Eastern Promises, and The Wire itself (Italian, Irish, Russian, and African-American gangs, respectively)–it turns out that “the Greek” is a false clue deployed only to mislead Baltimore’s locally bound police. “After all,” he smirks “I’m not even Greek” He can therefore disappear into nowhere in the final episode precisely because the local knowledges that would suffice to track a locally-based hoodlum like Omar and Avon (who have local roots and histories) is useless against a crime boss whose locality is a trail of bread crumbs leading in the wrong direction.

As Joseph Kugelmass noted, one of the conceits of The Wire is that it melds the show’s own hermeneutics with the technologies of detection being used by its protagonists; we often see the action, especially in the first season, through camera angles that mimic the very public surveillance apparatus that the show’s detectives are using to track their counterparts. But in this case, the show does exactly the inverse: it weaves our heroes’ dis-inclination to look outside of Baltimore into the fabric of the show’s narrative, carefully framing the drama so that everything outside of Baltimore appears off-screen.

The fact that the show is about locality, however, doesn’t take from the fact that it is also, itself, bound by this local perspective. After all, while we are privy to anything that happens in any corner of Baltimore, from the darkest street corner or boarded-up row house to the inner sanctum of the Mayor’s office, the experience of anything outside Baltimore is inevitably one of disorientation and confusion for both characters and for their audience. Brody’s dismay at discovering that other cities have their own radio stations, Stringer Bell’s ignorance of go-go music, the comic scene in which west-side players are dumped in the woods and we pan across the looks of shock on their faces, McNulty’s alienation within the Washington DC party he stakes out, even the show’s own inability to explain why Herc has a Bronx accent, all speak to the ways the outside world is constituted as a blind spot within the show’s Baltimore narrative, and the show’s viewers share in that blind spot as inevitably as we share in it’s insights. When Wallace retreats to PG county, after all, he drops off of everyone’s radar, gangsters and police alike, and even off of ours: we see him only in the moments when he’s calling the Towers from a pay phone and the question of whether or not he’s turned remains in suspense. We never find out who the New York crew are that move into Baltimore in season four, or why they’ve come; they can be negatively identified through their lack of local knowledge, but they are never placed in a positive sense, nor does the show try to do so. And Brother Mouzone–Omar’s analogue and opposite–remains a cipher or an empty cliché set next to the kind of visceral history-in-place that Omar represents, in details like the scar on his face that signifies the past he carries with him.

In terms of the political landscape, Baltimore and Washington are close enough to each other to share Baltimore Washington International airport, but the absence of Washington DC in the show is a particular source of distress to me, a former resident. Yet this, too, is programmatic: even in episodes dealing with politics, when the federal government shows up, it never does so legibly. The FBI, for example, is often present but their obsession with international terrorism almost always renders them irrelevant, except insofar as McNulty’s personal relationship with an agent can transcend the agency’s built in apathy to local issues (as in the fictional “Ahmed Bell”). The feds show up out of nowhere to quash the Hamsterdam project, and the specter of “No Child” haunts season four like a disembodied spectre–always present but located nowhere in particular–but the show works to characterize the relationship between outside and local as mutual ignorance and blindness: if Baltimore can’t see out, then at least Washington can’t see in. To this effect, the entire narrative purpose of McNulty’s dalliance with D’Agostino seems to be to spotlight the fact that although the two are connected by multiple plotlines, they absolutely fail to see into each others’ worlds, even when they want to: he cannot comprehend politics on the national level, yet he jealously (and successfully) guards his knowledge of the local scene from her when she briefly puts her withering contempt for beat-cop level reality aside.

What does all this mean? I have some speculations–in particular, about the ways The Wire’s narrative strategies respond both to the neo-liberal governance it takes as its subject and to the post-modern fantasies of infinite transparency that it takes as its medium–but I’m inching my way towards some kind of a hypothesis about how the show’s modes of looking at its subject tend to shape and condition what it becomes possible for it to see and show. After all, what seemed to come across in my last post on The Wire as criticism or finger-wagging was intended (if I can be pardoned for saying so) in a non-evaluative sense. I wrote that:

“The Wire is strikingly bad at understanding or even imagining any other form of social organization. And this myopia–the inability to see the fallacy of comparing the Baltimore Sun with marriage–is a blindness that produces a particular kind of insight. Simon and company are incapable of seeing any possible good coming out of structural forms because they’ve already closed their eyes to the possibility.”

This style of analysis is, of course, vintage De Man, for it tries to make “blindness” into a prerequisite for seeing rather than a sign of failure to see. But I came to it by thinking about the ways that filmmakers create visual narrative not merely by what they show but by what they block out of the camera frame. A propos of the Bordwell thread a few weeks back, D.W. Griffith is a “great” director in a historical sense less because The Birth of a Nation still holds up as a great film (I find it hard to sustain that argument) than because he was perhaps the first director to understand and exploit the potential of framing and perspective in the ways that now characterize almost all narrative filmmaking. Before Griffith, the standard practice was a “full shot” in which nothing of significance was off screen, and his innovations in perspective were produced as much by strategically blocking our view of important elements in the scene as by highlighting whatever is that was being highlighted. Studio executives used to demand the “full shot” because, they reasoned, the public would not pay full price to see half of an actor, but Griffith was primarily responsible for the idea that selective framing could, in fact, produce more with less. And this innovation went beyond the technical details of shot composition: the famous homecoming scene in The Birth of a Nation, for example, where the mother’s arm reaches out of a doorway to embrace her son as he returns from the civil war, produces a kind of pathos by the same principle, but it uses physical props to obscure the mother’s face instead of the line dividing off-camera from on-camera.

In The Wire, I would suggest, the show’s macro-structure — the manner in which its plotlines select what is and what isn’t knowable by its characters and by its viewers — fulfills a similar function to the way a single shot’s micro-structural composition produces its mise-en-scene. But instead of creating a single scene, The Wire’s careful and strategic narrative myopias create a particular sense of place and location on a grand scale, a Baltimore whose visceral micro-texture can come into focus only at the cost of placing global macro-structures firmly off screen. It does the local so well, in other words, precisely because it doesn’t do the global at all. And this, maybe, is a way of addressing the show’s dedicated and omnipresent cynicism: if an incredible emphasis on producing the local means that one can only imagine local action, then how could one ever imagine dealing with a global structural crisis? One rarely cures a disease by exclusively treating its symptoms, but the obsessively local framing of The Wire doesn’t merely block out the larger world, it produces its insights about local reform by this very process.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about how badly the insights of social theory so often fare when you try to make them do the job of historical writing. One example is Weber, but I’m going to go to a better example: Foucault, whose Madness and Civilization is similarly both brilliant and, apparently, quite off base in how it gets to some of its claims. I base that statement on no personal knowledge–this being the internet–but simply on the fact a new translation was published fairly recently and, shortly afterwards, Andrew Scull used the occasion to broadside Mr. Foucault from both the broad sides and the narrow sides, on such charges as having not done his recherches to the much more serious offense of consorting with bearded radicals in the sixties. This may or may not have been warranted, and while it isn’t clear to me whether or not Foucault’s footnotes actually hold up, I’m hardly at all interested in that question.

That’s partially because I’m not a real historian, but it’s mostly because what I’m interested in here is the ways social theory and history as separate disciplines talk to each other, or don’t. This may be largely a function of the eccentric ways I might be here defining social theory and history work, but I mean something like the difference between understanding in an abstract and structural sort of way how things work, and understanding in a very empirical and specific sort of way how the worked at a somewhat specific point in time and/or space. The difference, for example, between governmentality and the House of Representatives, between criminology and the Baltimore Police department, and so forth.

The kerfuffle which ensued–which I’ve been reading up on here and here–revolved partly around the question of whether or not Foucault’s responsible use of archival data matters, and I want to hold onto that question, as a question, rather than try to answer it. In his post, Scott Kaufman grabbed onto some stuff that Foucault later wrote in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” illustrating that he did, as it happened, hold himself to the high methodological standard of not just making stuff up. But farther down in the comment pool, someone pseudo-named Swifty offered this nugget from an interview, apparently, in Foucault Live:

“I am not merely a historian, nor a novelist. What I do is a kind of historical fiction. I know, in a sense, that what I say is not true. Take madness: I know very well that what I have done from a historical point of view is single-minded, exaggerated. But the book had an effect on the perception of madness. So the book and my thesis have a truth in the nowadays of reality…What I want is to provoke an interference between our reality and the knowledge of our past history. If I succeed, this will have real effects in our present history. My hope is my books will become true after they have been written–not before.”

Now back to that question, which is hovering in the air above us, unanswered but patiently waiting its turn. Why would Foucault’s use or misuse of archival sources matter? If his goal is, as in the second quote, to “provoke an interference between our reality and the knowledge of our past history,” I’m not sure it really does. If what he wants to do is question whether what we think we know about madness, where it comes from, and how we should treat it, then whether or not there was a “great confinement” in the seventeenth century isn’t really the point. As Jpool put it earlier in that thread, Scull’s main point seems simply to be that

“There was no great confinement in the 17th century,” and that ”it happened in the 19th and 20th centuries.” Scull may even be right about this, and what little expertise I have on the subject would lead me to place my money on the nineteenth century (The seventeenth century? Pshaw. It wishes it could have a great confinement). On the other hand, it may also actually have happened earlier; as Jpool continues: “Colleagues of mine who study Early Modern Europe tend to make the corollary argument that the growth of disciplinary institutions actually happened a lot earlier that Foucault thinks it did in D&P.”

This is a familiar dilemma for people who try to understand where the hell things went off the rails between the enlightenment and the second Bush presidency. The trouble is, every time you decide on a particular landmark, the point when whatever you’re studying got started or changed or shifted or whatever, you discover that it didn’t really happen then, it sort of happened earlier than that. But then, it also sort of happened latter than that. The vertigo inducing escalator sequence in The Country and the City, which I will go on about at the drop of a hat, is a great example: pick a year between 1600 and 2008, and chances are good that you can find someone talking about how the city is ruining the countryside, and the real old way of life of one generation ago is gone forever. But how, as Raymond Williams puts it, can the georgic past be in a state of constantly having just disappeared, decade after decade, century after century? That’s one persistent present perfect.

The Industrial Revolution is another classic example; in the second book of Wallerstein’s big World Systems Theory opus, he chases that thing from the nineteenth century back to the sixteenth, concluding that the elusive moment where everything shifted and changed (where pre-industrial became industrial) is impossible to locate by any reasonable standard. Things might be getting more industrialized at every point, and it actually does mean something to say so (just like Williams would never deny that the city does encroach on and transform the country), but you can’t find that magical moment when it happens. Instead, it’s always happening, as a single process in multiple variations, and the clearly marked before and after landmarks we’d like to impose on the archive actually tell us more about the narratives we’re trying to construct out of it than about any objective sense of history. Wallerstein says all sorts of smart stuff about this, but I’ll let you read him if you care too.

Foucault walks right into this problem, writing (in Madness and Civilization) that:

“It is common knowledge that the seventeenth century created enormous houses of confinement.”

My first though is this: How can a century confine people? Of course that’s precisely not his point–which is that the ways confinement operated were much weirder (and more invasive) than we realize–but I want to grab onto the fact that the structure of this particularly mistranslated (and extremely influential) sentence manages to imply that the motive force here wasn’t people or structures but time. Hegelian Historicism (as opposed to small-h historicism) always finds a way to sneak in the back door if you leave it open, and this is no exception: by so closely addressing the critical question of what happened, the questions of why it happened vanish from view and it becomes simply a development out of itself, capable only of being articulated only in temporal terms. People unsympathetic to Foucault’s project, like Mr. Scull, can use a claim like this to smash down what Foucault is trying to do. “He’s wrong!” they can point out, “The Great Confinement actually happened in the 19^th C! Foucault didn‘t do his research!” And having tugged at that one thread, they can go on to try to unravel the entire housecoat from it.

Have fun guys. As others have already observed, this is a mountains and molehills situation precisely because the real accomplishment of M&C was in making it necessary for even people who disagree about when it happened largely agree that it happened, and to agree to a certain extent what it is. That’s the accomplishment that matters, and quibbling about when it happened (when it was something that happened over and over again in different but similar ways for centuries) doesn’t take away from that. Which is why, to go back to where I started, a book like M&C is an excellent piece of social theory even if it isn’t good history writing. He isn’t, in the final analysis, talking about the seventeenth century nearly as much as he’s talking about the twentieth, and beyond. While one cannot simply invent one’s archival sources (nor does Foucault think you can), the real work being done in a book like that is the model making and breaking that allows him to conceptualize what is going on in those archival sources in new (and suggestive) ways. And in doing that, it’s less important to be right about where exactly the lepers squatted as the haunted the outskirts of the towns and villages than to have an interesting and useful way of understanding what that squatting meant, and how it worked.

In that sense, I wonder if a book like Madness and Civilization could be so influential precisely because its theory gets so detached from the concrete historical specifics of how it was practiced. If Foucault were more careful in making an argument about a specific historic moment, maybe the theory produced by the encounter wouldn’t be so portable to other historical moments? After all, the underlying paradigms that Madness and Civilization puts into play, after all, are not limited to the French seventeenth century, so the fact that he plays fast and loose with that century doesn’t really cause problems unless its that century you’re specifically interested in.

I wonder how often this is the case. Marx, too, would be a good example. If you want to understand what we’ll call, for the gestalt of it, the “Late Capitalism” we currently know and love, it doesn’t really seem to me that the historical data that would have been available in 1867 would be a promising place out of which to start formulating your archive. Is the British East India company really useful for understanding Enron? Or, God help us, the mortgage meltdown? Or this frightening chart? Again, if you dislike Marxism as an approach, this is your opportunity to deplane: it’s exactly the kind of confirmation you’ve been looking for that Marx didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. But if you’re still with me, I would suggest that this is, in a counterintuitive way, exactly why parts of Marxism are still so helpful in de-mystifying liberalism, neo- and otherwise. Precisely because Marx and Foucault were tilting not with data but with political ideas, the data they used to support their counterintuitive notions were somewhat beside the point, and could be allowed to fall away like flower-petals with the passing years. The counter-intuitivity was the thing to catch the conscience of a, well, of a relatively small number of eggheads who were predisposed to be convinced by the argument. And that’s something, right? Um, right?

I’ve been reading Matt Yglesias‘ stuff quite a bit lately; I recently switched from manual surfing to Google Reader assisted blogreading, and the man’s seven post a day output has given him a disproportionate amount of my time, strictly as a result of the way the posts now come to me (taking up seven times as much space on the screen as a blogger who writes one post a day). And one of the more thought provoking pieces I came across at his joint was this Atlantic article (he’s shilling for the company, I suppose, but it really was a good piece), “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” an article about whether or not the way we use the internet is making us increasingly incapable of reading and appreciating longer and more nuanced arguments. It’s a valid question; I’m still very much on the fence about whether or not doing so much of my stuff on the internet is a positive tactic, whether letting the blog medium become a kind of process of writing helps or hurts. A bit of pro, a bit of con, I suppose, and in any case it seems like a worthwhile experiment so far. But the time I spend reading blogs definitely does take away from the brain-time I have available for reading actual books, and I worry about this. Switching over to google-reader has helped, so far; I’ve been more able to focus and control what I read, reducing the time I spend scrolling through my bookmarks. But the larger question does remain (and I’m not alone in this, as posts like this and the Nicholas Carr “stupid-google” article indicate). What changes as the internet increasingly becomes the medium through which we work, read, and think?

For example, I was struck today by a claim that Yglesias made today, to wit:

“American politics isn’t especially ideological and hasn’t historically ever been especially ideological. Tradition and institutional structure have given us a robust two-party system. Geography and immigration have given us an enormous, extremely diverse country. Typical democracies have many fewer people and substantially more political parties. Consequently, practical politics in the United States revolves around a competition between two political coalitions that are, of necessity, pretty slapdash and unwieldy.”

The first thing that struck me was how wrong it feels, based on the book reading I’ve been doing lately. Michael Hunt’s Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, for example, is a remarkable piece of scholarship that still gets read and cited, precisely because it outlines in great detail the shared ideological consensuses that the US foreign policy establishment has tended to share (and he convinced me that there’s more continuity in the long duree of American history than I would have expected there to be), but one of the things you notice, as you read, is the consistant way that this ideology gets challenged and shaped by local resistance to it (or the ways that politics takes ideological forms). Not only is ideology a central fact of American political history, and political conflicts revolved around ideological positions at odds with each other, but there are real consequences to your ideological stance toward, say, the question local self-determination versus federal state sovereignty. The United States constitution leaves that kind of question really unclear (as compared to European governments, who tend to be clearly centralized, a distinction I picked up from Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State…), which means its been an ongoing issue from the beginning to right now. And this means that while the civil war was not really about the issue of state’s rights, it took that form because that kind of ideological conflict was available to be used, and reused (which speaks to why anti-big government conservatives are so quick to look to state’s rights as an ideology: gutting social policies is easier if you have an ideological position, rather than naked class interest).

More than that, though, the statement that “Geography and immigration have given us an enormous, extremely diverse country” is obviously true and, less obviously, a misuse of that truth: whatever geography “gave” us (the Tocquevillian explanation of American exceptionalism), industrialization and integration into the global economy have dramatically reshaped American society, in every possible way. Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order is a powerful narrative of the period in which this can most clearly be seen to be occurring (though Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution tells a similar story during the Jacksonian era), and not only do both of these books tell the story of ideological struggle after ideological struggle (of shifting coalitions based on shifting regional interests necessitating shifting ideology), but its a story of national conversation after national conversation on these ideological questions. In other words, while American “diversity” is part of that conversation, it is far more a conversation about diversity than the equilibrium produced when diverse voices blend into harmonious heterogeneity. People have made that argument, in great depth (in fact, the idea that this would occur is at the root of some of the Federalist papers’ most innovative arguments for why democracy could work) but it’s not really a tenable claim, I think, to say it has occurred. Americans have not, in practice, been as different from each other as they have often claimed; it’s been the claiming of whether or not we’re different (an ideological position) that has been important.

To continue, I’m also struck by the statement that “Typical democracies have many fewer people and substantially more political parties,” to which I would point out that the United States has never been one democracy among many, but the exemplar of a kind of historical revolution (as people like Tocqueville saw it) that was sweeping the world. It seems strange to say that the United States is an atypical democracy when so many theorists of “democracy” in the nineteenth century saw that United States as the ideal type, and worried about whether or not European or Latin American republics could follow suit.

To sum up, my basic problem with Yglesias’s claim is that what I know about the nineteenth or early twenty century, stuff I know from reading books, doesn’t seem to match his description of “America.” And this is not to say that he’s somehow factually irresponsible, or that he’s lying about history: these are very much open questions, with reputable scholars on both sides of the question (sides which are, by the way, quite ideologically defined) having written big books about the issue. But he answered a question about American politics and ideology using, I think, the experience of the post-WWII consensus, a very limited (and unusual) period in American history when you could find ideological agreement on most issues across party lines, a historically brief and anomalous time when it was true to say that American politicians were “relatively comfortable acknowledging the essentially grubby and transactional nature of real-world democratic politics rather than one dominated by a lot of aspirations to purism and total victory.” There’s not a moment in the nineteenth century when it would be true to say that, I think, nor much of the twentieth century as well. Distressed wails about partisan politics come from people that have no sense of how it used to be, how dirty a game politics used to be, or how self righteously it was played. But blogging can’t privilege the long duree, can it? It’s vital immediacy comes at a real cost.

Perhaps more importantly, look how long it took me to even explain why I have a problem with what he said, how many books I had to cite (and you’d have to actually look at those books if you wanted to know the substance of what I’m using them to do), and how little of an argument I’ve put forward in response to his clear, concise, and easily paraphrasable statement. Look what it is possible and not possible to do on the internet, or rather, what it is easy and difficult to say. This medium practically requires a kind of snappy set-up and punchline structure (structurally akin to the dreaded five paragraph SAT essay) and this is something that the unbelievably complex texture of the historical record resists becoming without significant losses, especially if you try to do it with any kind of regularity (which the blog medium requires). My guess is that this is why the Edge of the West folks have adopted a “this day in history” format, and why that works so well for blogging: it gives the writing an Archimedean point on which to stand, so it doesn’t lose its focus in historical abstraction. Yglesias, on the other hand, is here making claims about “American politics,” “diversity,” “typical democracies,” and “ideology” that are not only deeply open questions that he doesn’t have anything like the time or space or occasion to explore or explain, but the very medium of the blog-post disinclines a writer from admitting that such questions exist. And so I, an academically oriented writer interested in this particular class of historical problem, find myself calling a foul.

I’m not sure, that said, that any of this is any different than traditional journalism, and, anyway, the standard to which I’m implicitly holding Yglesias to is quite high: I’m demanding that he have, at his fingertips, the particular texts I happened to have read in the last few months, and have taken from the particular lessons and examples that I did, for reasons which were particular to my own project. And one of the positive advantages that the internet has with respect to traditional journalism - its ability to use hyperlinks and comment fields to make a monologue into a dialogue - is not something to be dismissed lightly. But this seems to be the tradeoff: the kind of grand synthetic work that a Wiebe or Sellers does is the kind of thing the internet is least good at. And I go back to the kinds of reading practice that google-reader has introduced into my own reading, the way I’ve been reading bloggers like Yglesias more (precisely because they write short and pithy posts, usually in response to de-contextualized quotes, and usually quite ideological) and I find it’s at the cost, to at least some extent, of reading stuff on jstor, longer post bloggers, or actual books. And as I’ve become more and more regular a blogger, I find that I’ve been writing shorter and shorter pieces, working harder to finish a thing more quickly and in doing so being less ambitious about what I’m trying to do (and more oriented to conversations elsewhere). Whereas the writing I used to do on my computer or in my notebooks (and show to no one) would stretch out towards infinity, teasing at problems without the need to wrap them up and finish, now that I’m writing for actual people, dear reader, I find myself trying top tie a neat bow at the end of each post. It’s good practice, and I’ve become a better writer as a result of doing it. But if there are trade-offs, there’s a fine line between forgetting their existence and tossing the baby out with the bathwater because of the hyperbole of “google is making us stupid.” An Atlantic article, like a blog post, has to have a snappy and almost reducto ad absurdum telos, but we, luckily, do not.