Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Why I'm Back on Facebook

I announced recently with much self-certain finality that I was leaving Facebook. I succeeded in doing so for almost a month, after which I reopened my account with the status update: "Alright, I'm back. I can't leave you guys. Forgive me for trying." This update got 57 likes. I was delighted.

But how could I so blatantly fail to live up to my intention? The short answer is that I literally had to go back; I had too much information stored in various parts of my account --in my message box, in my photos, and even in my timeline-- to which I needed access. It was impractical for me to have to revive the account each time, particularly since after a certain number of deactivations, Facebook starts imposing a 24-hour delay on each new reactivation. As a very serious philosopher wrote in response to my homecoming update: "Zuckerberg has us by the short and curlies."

Many of my friends said, or implied, that I ought to be ashamed of myself for caving, but moreso for having announced such a bold intention in the first place. Some compared me to a lapsed AA enthusiast who has rediscovered his old familiar barstool. But I will say right out in the open: I am, in every aspect of my life, and not just the digital one, prone to wild swings between excess and renunciation. Some people don't know what this is like: some are naturally ascetic, some perfectly comfortable with a life of constant excess, and some are simply so constituted as to always consume only the right amount of everything. The last sort are a foreign species to me; I have no idea what it would be like to be one of them, and I am contemptuous of their facile recommendation to just do whatever one is inclined to do in moderation. As if we, the overeaters, overdrinkers, overworkers, hadn't thought of that already!

I understand in my soul the slogan of the recovering alcoholics, according to which one drink is too much, because ten drinks are not enough. In this respect, perhaps, I am more 'American' than 'European', the latter of whom insist that it is a distinctly New World problem to not be able to enjoy vices maturely, to live our lives as though vices are something to renounce rather than master. Those who know me know that I have peculiar eating habits; there is a whole gamut of foods I simply will not eat, and I hate being told that I should just learn to enjoy them in moderation. I could do so, I suppose, if I were differently constituted, but I've lived with myself long enough to know fairly precisely where the boundaries of my capacity to change lie. 

I have to confess, though I move in Europhile circles where it is just taken for granted that mature Epicurean indulgence is the only way to live, I am 100% American in this regard. I hate balance, and if I can't be consistently at either the extreme of asceticism or of debauche, I still prefer wild pendularity over smug self-mastery.

So this explains, I hope, why I made that bold declaration, and then failed to live up to it. But I hope, moreover, that in that declaration my strong ambivalence was clear. I certainly did not say that I think Facebook is entirely sinister. What I in fact said was that Internet-mediated social networks are a more important development in human history than the printing press, and they can no more be said to be good or bad than books can be.

A few years ago I liked to say that part of Facebook's power is that it is a true equalizer of personal identity, in that it forces me to present myself in the same way to everyone in my list of friends: former mentors, students, parents, high-school friends, editors, literally everyone. I was often told in response that this was not in fact so, that I had the freedom to block certain people, to control the flow of information so that not everyone heard the same thing. I insisted that this went against my principles.

But I have now adopted the habit of blocking and list-making that I used to argue against. I have permanently removed from view the updates of everyone who carries on overmuch about their children, everyone who is in the habit of sharing frivolous memes; I've eliminated all the whooping and hollering about sports;  I no longer see the updates of academics I barely know who have nothing to talk about but how much they resent grading papers, or how busy they are, or the quality of the airport they're at, or how they are 'addicted' to espresso. Come to think of it, most of my recent wall-grooming has really been a filtering out of my academic peers.

I expect others will do the same to me; perhaps they'll unfriend me altogether. So be it. This is a new era, and I no longer have the old principled commitment to unfettered sharing that I used to have. Now, instead, the digital social world is starting to look a good deal more like that other social world always has, where we select our smaller social groups based on elective affinities, and where we exclude people with whom we really don't have such affinities. Anyhow when I look at my wall these days, it is considerably less depressing than it had become.

In the month or so I spent away, I finished a book proposal, made significant progress on an article on medieval Indian logic, got through 200 more pages of Proust's masterpiece, and read a lot, but I mean a very lot, of Wikipedia. I finally got straight on the difference between Ranters, Levellers, Diggers, Fuggers, and Junckers; if the article in French on the Mediterranean winds (Sirocco, etc.) seemed inadequate, I would consult the ones in Italian, Corsican, Sicilian, Occitan. On February 17, my browser history indicates that within the space of an hour I read the entries on Goodluck Jonathan, Günther Kaufmann, the Neolithic Cultures of China, and Little House on the Prairie.

I don't know what exactly it is I'm doing when I'm doing this, but I definitely began to do more of it when I didn't have my Facebook wall to scan. The one was clearly functioning as a replacement drug for the other. Like Facebook to the Republic of Letters, Wikipedia makes Diderot's Encyclopédie look like a pathetic joke. And in both cases, this new thing that has overrun the old thing seems as corrosive as it is edifying. I absorb the world through it in a way that I could not have done before, but it's as if I'm absorbing it up my nose, or into my veins. This is potent shit, and it's clear that every one of us is going to have to learn to place it under some regime of control. This is a particular challenge for those of us who are not naturally inclined to moderation, and who know the difference between having a second espresso and having an addiction.

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Product Packaging and Nationhood

I enjoy spending time in those countries that are not big enough or important enough to have their own product packaging, and instead must share surface space with information in the sundry native tongues of neighboring countries. I remember standing in front of a microwave in Sarajevo, waiting for some ramen noodles to warm up, and thinking: Wow! I can study 20 languages at once, just skimming the ingredients of this so humble repast.

These noodles, in fact, were meant to be cast far and wide across a great swath of Eurasia, the entire part of it, in fact, that cannot be said to be truly either Europe or Asia, roughly from Albania in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. The languages one finds in between, marked out on the package by a little oval containing the official one- or two-letter country abbreviation ('H', 'RO', 'BH', 'KZ', etc.)  are mostly Slavic and Turkic, with some representatives of Eastern Romance (Romanian, Moldovan), Caucasian (Georgian), Ural-Altaic (Hungarian), and a few true isolates such as Albanian --the native word for which is 'shqip' and which evidently evolved as the only surviving descendant of ancient Illyrian--, thrown into the mix. And, except in those few cases where the alphabet is unknown to me, I can learn how to say 'sodium carbonate' in all of these! ('Sodyum karbonat', 'natrij-karbonat', 'carbonat de sodiu', 'nátrium-karbonát', etc.)

These noodles are not fit for consumption in Europe proper, where packaging, other than in the so-called 'ethnic' stores, is meant to mirror national identity, which since 1789 has been wrapped up in the modern collective imagination with language: no nation, in fact, without linguistic uniformity. Western Europe cannot let itself descend into Balkanic lawlessness! Why, the unpoliced linguistic macédoine of the products they allow to circulate there: is this not a testimony of past violence and a portent of more to come?

Of course, there are some complications. For one thing, there is at least one multinational state in Europe (Belgium), and it shares languages with three of its neighbors (most significantly, France and the Netherlands, but also Germany). This means that if you are eating corn flakes in Lille or Nancy, it is not entirely unusual to be told (at least in writing, which is for me a sort of telling) that these are not flocons de maïs at all, but rather maisvlokken. Now in Belgium one learns to live with this, if bitterly: I once had a Walloon girlfriend who proclaimed that she was 'assaulted' every time her eyes landed on the Flemish side of the cereal box. ('Walloon', by the way, like 'Welsh' and 'Vlach' and a number of other European demonyms, comes from an Old Brythonic word that meant, simply, 'foreign'; and foreign she was.) But when these bilingual boxes spill over from that queer kingdom into the glorious republic to the south, the reaction could very well be not indignation, but simply confusion. The French revolutionaries had to wage a brutal campaign against regional otherness to rid the new republic of Occitan and Provençal and Breton, and here we are more than two centuries later confronted with these obscene Germanic consonant clusters on our cereal boxes! This is not the sort of fraternité we had in mind!

The idea of a binational state, as product packaging reveals to us, is inherently strange. In fact, I feel like saying that product packaging in binational states itself serves as a testament to the fragility of the arrangement. If we may move from the Old World context to one with which I am slightly more familiar, I would like to hold forth a bit on the utter bizarreness of Canadian conventions in the labelling and marketing of commercial goods.

Anyone who comes to Canada and who cares about the richness of either English or French will quickly notice that both of these cultural-linguistic treasuries are, in the public display of them, anyway, greatly reduced. In order to be sure of saying exactly the same thing in both languages, Canadian product packaging invariably ends up saying nothing, or next to nothing, or something that really would have been better left unsaid. Thus for example we are told, and expected to passively agree, that 'Fancy Spinach' is 'Épinards de Fantaisie'. Of course, 'fancy' is etymologically a contraction of 'fantasy', which did come into English through French. But 'fancy' and 'fantasy' mean two different things today, and it is absurd to think that anyone has any 'fantasies' at all about frozen spinach. The high percentage of shared lexical items means that Anglo-French bilingualism is fundamentally different from, say, the Anglo-Chinese bilingualism of Hong Kong, or even the Franco-Netherlandic bilingualism of the earlier example, as it enables product packagers to squeeze two languages' worth of labelling into a seemingly continuous phrase, with the two languages' adjectives flanking a shared noun in the middle. This is supposed to save space, as well as the reader's mental energy, but it makes me furious. When I am told that I am eating 'Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates', I feel like like saying: Well of course I am! You already told me that!

It has been said of the Francophone and Anglophone communities in Canada that they are 'two solitudes', and some have pessimistically averred that this is the most we can hope for wherever two or more ethnies are crammed together into a single state (the worst, of course, is Sarajevo, where we started out). The two-solitude détente is perhaps most evident in what is often called 'generic' packaging (a strange designation, when we think about this term's origin in the taxonomical notion of genus). I do not want to dwell for too long on the strangeness of this species of packaging (for it is not a genus). That would bring us too far afield from our principal concern, which is, if I may put it this way, product packaging and nationhood. But I will just say that generics perform a striking counter-movement against the prevailing purpose of packaging in the capitalist world: while ordinarily packaging strives to the extent possible to conceal what is really contained within it, and to present it as not just the sum of its ingredients, but as something with what Walter Benjamin might have called an 'aura', generic packaging by contrast has as its sole aim the blunt declaration of the true nature of the thing or things it contains.

And it is here that bilingualism seems, momentarily, to do what it is officially supposed to be doing: communicating to us exactly the same thing in two different, non-overlapping word-worlds: peas & carrots / pois & carottes. It all seems so simple.

But even here, even when the aim is pure generic explicitness, the idiosyncrasy of what the Spanish rightly call 'idioms' (for to the extent that we are separated off in our own linguistic worlds, we are indeed idiots) shows itself soon enough. Next to the cans of peas and carrots, we find some mixed vegetables, which, curiously enough, are in French not légumes mixtes, but rather they are a macédoine de légumes. A veritable Macedonia of vegetables! They are the culinary equivalent of that demographic powder keg in Southeastern Europe, with pea next to chopped carrot next to diced potato, just as you might find an Albanian village next to a Serbian enclave that abuts an Aromanian district. The French and the English cannot be made to say exactly the same thing, not even in the blunt, literal language of generics. And this unharmonizability, one fears, is but the exact linguistic reflection of the irreducible discreteness of the can's various contents (this is not a mash, but a mix), which in turn is but the alimentary mirror of unending human conflict.

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Previously published in Kiosk Magazine.

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Keeping Up with the Republican Primaries

I got all teary-eyed around November, 2008, just like every other non-australopithecine American. But unlike most of my co-evolved concitoyens I was not a sucker. I was delighted that we would now have a rational and evidently morally decent person, rather than a cretinous one, volunteering to take on a role that is for structural reasons morally compromising. But I did not think for a second that this was the dawning of some sort of new era. That would be to misunderstand what a president is.

We have what in places like Turkey is lucidly described as a 'deep state' (though in Turkey it's principally the army that is had in mind, while for us it's a more composite beast). The deep state  limits drastically what elected officals can do. It is the permanent structure that endures behind the constant electoral spectacle, and it ought to be the only thing of interest to political analysts. Do I blame Obama for the continuation of the Iraq War, the non-closure of Guantánamo, etc.? Just a little bit more than I blame his tailor. For Obama is, as they say, a suit, and many, many people conspire to maintain him as the presentable image of American power. I am incapable of conjuring any commiseration with the conventional liberals who believe disappointment in Obama the person is an appropriate reaction to his record as president.

However little Obama interests me, the current clamoring of the Republican candidates is of an altogether different order of uninterestingness. The constant din they are permitted to sustain for so many months ought, as someone put it, to be of no more concern to us than the gossip on Jersey Shore. And doesn't the decision to tune in or not to any one of the endless 'debates' feel exactly like the rest of your television viewing habits: passive, recreational, irrelevant, kind of fun?

But I was never a big TV fan, and I feel a bit betrayed by the Internet in recent years for having sneakily transformed into something so TV-like. It could have been a rejection of everything TV tells us to care about. Instead the blogs and the pundits work in perfect tandem, encouraging us for example to take an interest in the details of Mitt Romney's tax returns. Mitt Romney is a classic plutocrat; of course he's getting away with as much as he can. The problem is not this or that indiscretion in any given year's filing. The problem is that one has to be a plutocrat in order to stand any chance of being elected.

Nor do I care about the dog on the roof of Romney's car, or the miscarried child the Santorums brought home and fondled for a few days. Hell, if it helped them get through it, why not? Stranger rituals have been documented in the rich variety of human experience.

Still less do I care about Newt Gingrich's infidelities. I have heard the argument that it is not Gingrich's personal life itself that interests progressives, but only his hypocrisy: the fact that he dogged Bill Clinton in the 1990s for his extramarital affairs, and now turns out to be no better. But we can still be better: we can hold ourselves to a higher standard, and agree that an aspiring politician's sex life is wholly irrelevant to our assessment of his capacity to govern.

As a good rule of thumb, I don't care about anything, really, that Maureen Dowd cares about. She cares a great deal about Newt Gingrich's sexual prowess, for example, and about Callista Gingrich's fashion sensibilities, whereas I don't. Dowd is a fawning courtisane who satisfies an evidently widespread middle-brow craving for page-six gossip by wrapping it up in faux-feminist indignation and moderately witty word play.

Oh, and Jon Stewart is a sanctimonious boob.

And still less do I care about the simple existence of Ron Paul. I myself have splashed around in the swamps out of which creatures like Paul congeal. They are my extended family. They are the cranks on the call-in AM radio shows that were always on when I was a child (KFBK AM 1530, to be precise). They are the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who nevertheless, for some reason, still don't add up to WASPs. They feel cast off, left out, and the world-view they conjure up as a defense reaction is so muddled that for brief moments it can look as though it's motivated by genuine concern about the betterment of the world. But it never is. 

I will not vote for any of them, not Obama, not the others. This is, I insist, itself a legitimate use of my right to vote: it is a refusal to get sucked into the spectacle.

Alright, next post: back to Rilke, and to things that are beautiful and that matter.

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Living in the Material World

[From the online edition of the New York Times. To read the entire piece, click here.]

The region that brought forth the great medieval Bukharan polymath ibn Sina (Avicenna) has been thought to be philosophically fallow for centuries, though on a visit to the Academy of Sciences in Almaty some years ago I was presented with a souvenir meant to assure me that Central Asia was indeed still producing philosophy worthy of note. It was a collectively authored book entitled “The Development of Materialist Dialectics in Kazakhstan,” and I still display it proudly on my shelf. Its rough binding and paper bespeak economic hardship. It is packed with the traces of ideas, yet everything about the book announces its materiality.

I had arrived in the Kazakh capital 1994, just in time to encounter the last of a dying breed: the philosopher as party functionary (they are all by now retired, dead or defenestrated, or have simply given up on what they learned in school). The book, written by committee, was a collection of official talking points, and what passed for conversation there was something much closer to recitation.

Central to this performance was the concept of  “materialism.” The entire history of philosophy, in fact, was portrayed in Soviet historiography as a series of matches between the materialist home-team and its “idealist” opponents, beginning roughly with Democritus (good) and Plato (bad), and culminating in the opposition between official party philosophy and logical positivism, the latter of which was portrayed as a shrouded variety of idealism. Thus from the “Short Philosophical Dictionary,” published in Moscow in 1951, we learn that the school of logical empiricism represented by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and others, “is a form of subjective idealism, characteristic of degenerating bourgeois philosophy in the epoch of the decline of capitalism.” ...

Notes on The Thin Red Line

When Terrence Malick returned to film-making in 1999 after a twenty-year hiatus, I certainly didn't notice. I was holed up in some empty East Village broom-closet theater watching Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's marathon Unser Hitler, or perhaps Aleksandr Sokurov's impossible Mother and Son. I thought 'American' and 'avant-garde' were mutually exclusive, and I was dogmatically attached to the latter. Nothing that got a mention at the Academy awards could possibly have been of any interest to me.

These days I pretty much just watch whatever I come across on Netflix that seems half-way palatable. I enjoyed the latest installment in the Harold and Kumar franchise, for example.

Anyhow when I saw Malick's The New World, and more recently his Tree of Life, my complaint was certainly not that they were too challenging or 'cerebral' (a favorite Netflix adjective). Had I not sat through Stalker from start to finish? Malick's work strikes me, in fact, as pure Hollywood. He's that classic American man with a vision, who says: I want to make a big picture, really big. We're going to pull out all the stops. Now one might place that sort of vision in a line with, say, Wagner (surely a cinéaste avant la lettre if anyone in his century was); but it's first and foremost the big studio men of the Hollywood golden age who breathed life into this stereotype.

But still, there is a coherent and compelling philosophy that comes out in at least the three films I've mentioned that perhaps justifies the Netflix descriptor. At its core this philosophy is a meditation on the interpermeability of the realms of the living and the dead. As Rilke puts it in the first of the Duino Elegies:

-- But all of the living make
this mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.
The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether
they were moving among the living or the dead.

Perhaps a corollary of this embeddedness of life in death is that of the historical in the mythical (Guadalcanal moves from 1942 to the eternal present of myth); another is that of the social in the natural (with the Melanesians, along with the bats and parrots and lizards with which they cohabit, representing the original unity of the two).

The Thin Red Line is also a Christian film. It contrasts the morality of the Iliad --which is announced by Lt. Col. Tall's invocation of the eos rhododaktylos on the dawn of the first day of battle-- with the morality of the Gospels. The good news is brought by two characters rather than one. The first is Captain Staros, who speaks a line of his native Greek to tell the soldiers under him that they are 'like his sons'. It seems implicit that here the modern Greek is meant to contrast with the Homeric Greek as if it were New Testament Greek, that is, the good news of love and redemption, contrasted with the perpetual sublime battle that had been the existential condition of the ancients. Staros's true paternal love is contrasted with the numerous false invocations of a family-like relationship by careerist officers, including Tall.

The other Christian figure is Private Witt, who is coupled and contrasted with Sergeant Edward Welsh in the same way Staros is with Tall. Witt has no paternal love to offer, but only saintly, agapic love that does not distinguish between family and stranger. He gives succor to wounded Japanese and to frightened American recruits alike. His love is contrasted not with pre-Christian, Homeric morality, but with Welsh's world-weary cynicism: a world-view that is understood to run parallel with, rather than to precede, the redemptive love that is known and offered by Witt.

Two-thirds of the way through Staros is relieved of his duty by Tall, and in the end Witt is killed by the Japanese. The relationship between Witt and Welsh is the only complex and interesting one that emerges over the course of three hours (I certainly could have done without the flashbacks to pretty girls in Texas). When Witt dies, Welsh is left with his cynical belief confirmed that 'there is only one world', and it does not care about us. It is understood however that Welsh's deepened conviction is not the 'lesson' of the film, since Witt's own conviction was never something that could be disconfirmed by death.

The most striking scenes in the film, to me, were those following the capture of the Japanese bunker, in which the two shell-shocked parties were mingling and waiting, variously, to die, to be sent off to a POW camp, or to be relieved by other troops. The Japanese appear from the American perspective, which of course does not make subtle distinctions. But even so they are shown to be entirely unique as individuals: some are angry, some have gone insane, some are sobbing, some are praying. Some of the Americans, in turn, are abusive, some are flippant, some are professional, and one, Witt, is full of love.

I respond well to Malick's vision of the world. But I wish he could get it across without the voiceovers, without the Rockwellian kitsch, and without the glossiness and unctuousness of the big-name, big-budget spectacle.