I Said 3,000 Words Minus Quotes!

I found Walkowitz’s piece most interesting in regards to its style, or should I say frustrating. Either way, works like this are helpful to me because they make me conscious of some of the things I’ve been (rightly)criticized for in my writing.PARAGRAPH The first thing that popped out at me reading this was the abuse of quotes. What I’ve been taught is that 1) quotes must be introduced for context to the original work, 2)quotes must be explicated for context in the work at hand, and 3)that quotes must not be made to do the work of the writing assignment for me. So right away Walkowitz gives up the ghost of Henry James in phrases supposedly in his own voice. Are they from an interview (in which case this would be a more acceptable use, but even then lacking the context of the interview itself could still be misleading)? Are they from his fiction? This kind of close, first-person introspection is common enough there, but if that’s the case then this is wholly inappropriate. It’s not to say that James didn’t fit into this perfectly embodied image of the privileged bourgeois male flaneur- Yeah, I speak some French- but, even provided that is the case, this only detracts from the argument. James’ anthology of fiction is certainly long enough to show this disposition instead of pulling his phrases out of the air as if he were writing the essay himself. Besides, it’s irksome. It feels like talking to one of those people who snarkily throw up little air-quotes with their fingers when they’re talking to you.PARAGRAPH The other style issue I found with Walkowitz’s essay was the superfluous emphasis on gender relevance in an essay that never really gets to any salient point regarding gender. I’m not saying that the privileged gaze wasn’t emblematic of a sexist paradigm that underestimated and stereotyped women. In fact, I just said it- in one sentence. Unless she wants to go the extra mile like Wilson does and actually show this idea in action, however, it’s all “just a lot of words.” Now it’s my turn with the quotes. Christopher Isherwood said that in reference to the language of the afterlife on the tongues of the living, and now he’s talking about feminism in the 19th-century. See how easy that is. Point is: Walkowitz is writing about specific men that helped to map out the imaginative social and geographic city spaces of the time. Tell me why it matters that they were men. That’s interesting. That they were men, we already know.PARAGRAPH OK, there was one more thing. It’s something professor Garett’s cautioned us about, and something I’m really trying to work out of my own writing: the abuse of jargon. I noticed as I started to sense that some of Walkowitz’s gender points were falling through why this is so dangerous, and it’s something I’ve been guilty of. Jargon, unless it economizes the argument (says the thing more directly and specifically), can become a crutch for points that aren’t there. Strange analogy coming, but: I was once talking to a racist about crime in communities, and as soon as his flawed ideas ran into my common sense he all-of-the-sudden became a sociologist, a geneticist, an evolutionary biologist- He gave himself quite the promotion.PARAGRAPH Of course, I’m not calling this author a racist, or a sexist. I’m just looking at things like quote abuse, strained themes, and jargon for how they tend to operate mechanically.

The Lunatic in the Basement

That’s fine, I’ll take it. Better that than the perverse visual possessor in the arcade. Actually, I really appreciated Wilson’s take-down of some of the conventional feminist mythology behind the flaneur, not to mention her take on the origin of the blase’. Is it just a defensive apathy against such an overwhelming tide of stimulation, or is it the cynicism of the sell-out, the rebel who depends on the object of his angst for survival? Ouch. Take that, hipsters. Wilson touches down on another point I’d felt while reading some of the voyeuristic literature therein described, but which I never quite got the words for... She said what I was thinking (Is that what I think I’m trying to say?). It’s the dramatic irony behind the watcher, that he thinks he’s in control, ‘possessing with his gaze’, but really we know he’s a marginal character, a powerless outsider looking in. He’s a man with nothing but ‘nostalgia for a life he’s never known’. It’s interesting to think about that point alone. This version of the flaneur is controlled by the same type of oppressive ideological landscape that Wilson criticizes some of her fellow feminists for creating. There is a lot of talk about the way we use these ideologies, but it’s nice to see discussed the way ideologies use us. There is a moment in Wilson’s argument where she talks about the use of stone imagery in Baudelaire’s poetry. It’s when she’s talking about the impotence of the flaneur in the face of the new set of transgressive desires offered by the metropolis. The man can either become an object of that desire or turn to stone. It’s easy to forget that men were/are subject to moral frameworks as restrictive as women’s. And it wasn’t like there was a new value system waiting to take up the purpose and function of the original: “The heroism-for both sexes-is in surviving this disorienting space”, she says. Cheers, I say. Particularly depressing is her use Benjamin’s image of the idler in the marketplace, but with no Socrates to come by and offer guidance. I suppose if Socrates were to pass by the commodified spaces of today, he’d just throw some change down. The life never-known also shows itself in the flaneur’s present, as dystopia and utopia co-existing in the same mindscape- which brings us right back to last week’s reading of “City Imaginaries”. Conceptual images, just like ideologies, have real effects on experience. And the trouble really sets in in situations like Wilson’s, because, unlike in physical space, antithetical imaginative constructs can exist both simultaneously and simulspacially (anybody have this word for me?) in the mind, materializing, as she says, as a “narcotic dream”. This is that defining lack of definition that the metropolis challenges us with, the “fluid universe of shifting meanings”. All of us watchers, but who can blame us? The scene keeps changing. We’re all like dogs with our faces out the window, new forms of life flying by like milemarkers on the interstate.

Formatting tips?

Anybody know how to format these posts (Mac, running "Bean" freeware)? I can't seem to put the paragraph breaks in- hence the breathless 600-word eruptions.

Panopticism and The A-Bomb

Foucault leaves us with an opening for speculation as to how the Panoptic observation model will divorce itself from its physical institutions (like scientific investigation was freed from the Inquisition and applied, in principal, as a universal methodology). “Who will be the Great Observer?” Oh, if only it could be me! Unfortunately, some 19th-century Danish novelist already found a way, and more than two hundred thousand people died because of it. Okay, that may not be fair. Here’s the story. Forgive my incomplete allusions as I work through what I’ve read so far of Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” This book is an odd sort of composition in that it attempts, simultaneously, to outline the theoretical evolution of mid-19th century physics and biographically sketch the physicists that made it happen. Niels Bohr was one of the pantheon of those odd and brilliant men behind the A-bomb. One thing that becomes clear in Rhodes’ book is that a new type of intellect comes out of this field and this era, which is evident all around us today when we look at the nature of new scientific inventions. The days of Edison, who could conceptualize something as revolutionary as the phonograph in a single sketch and build a physical model a diletant mechanic could appreciate, are over. Learning has evolved just as Foucault anticipated. Individual education has been optimized for its maximum social utility, the labor of the genius being divided into infinitely complex tasks accomplished by armies of men instead single prodigies. Look at Apple. Steve Jobs is not a genius, he’s a figure-head; like a symphony conductor, only instead of musicians he organizes masses of programmers. But if we look at genius this way, we are only measuring men by their output, their capital product, which is not only a sterile and obnoxiously marxist way to talk about them, but an incomplete one as well. Inventions are only the productive yield of the panoptic educational apparatus, but, when we look at the scientist instead, we see that these products are not those of a panoptically optimized conventional intellect. They are products of a new type intellect. This brings me back to a moment in Rhodes’ description of Niels Bohr that has been echoing in the quiet backdrop of my apartment since I first began reading Foucault’s study of panopticism. Bohr (forgive my very brute understanding of physics) was responsible for many breakthroughs in physics and chemistry, but one of them was the “complimentarity” theory, the idea that a single theoretical model isn’t enough to describe certain things- Excuse me, now professor Garrett’s voice has entered the backdrop- to describe light. Anyway, sometimes two models are required, each limiting the other. Neither is complete. The models are instead in conversation with one another. But if we contrast this with the way Newton, for example, conceived of light, we start to understand that this is more than a new, unified theory. This is not one man’s model supplanting his predecessor’s. This is a new kind of mind. This is one man’s mental labor, segmented, conversing with itself, observing itself. Now for the novelist. Niel’s Bohr, like man of his fellow atomic physicists, was heavily influenced by literature, and his favorite novel was by a Danish existentialist (whose name is hiding in my notes somewhere- apologies) entitled “The Adventures of a Danish Student.” From this book: “I divide myself into an infinite retrogressive series of I’s... who consider each other.” Bohr, apparently, was haunted by this phenomenon. Rhodes’, drawing on interviews of the physicist, tells us that this was Bohr’s way of stalling. It was a defense against the anxiety of publication, a psychologically internalized way of keeping concepts in dialog until they were perfect. The point is that Bohr had already done what Foucault anticipated. He had internalized the panoptic disciplinary model, replacing all physical supervision by actually fragmenting his own psyche into operational parts. He became the thing that watches itself, and, in doing so, catapulted science into the ashy future as realized in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Depressing. But really, Bentham- Did you really think anything sunny could come out of something called a Panopticon?

Mr. Bucket

As if the house weren’t bleak enough, now the cops are here. I found myself giving extra attention to Mr. Bucket in light of Mr. Garrett’s observation that the discomfort we feel at the detective’s methods and manner is a more modern reaction. It’s hard to imagine that this figure was meant to inspire admiration for his skills, when those skills involve so much deception- not to mention the fact that he works directly for the nefarious Tulkinghorn. But it is in the text, clearest when we get to Esther’s ride-along and see him so steadfastly engaged in the young lady’s interests. But I still can’t quite accept this character as a positive force (Maybe the last hundred pages will redeem him?). I’m sure Dickens mentioned whether or no Bucket has a beard, and there is likely a word or two on his stature, but his image is fixed in my mind as Vinnie Jones (Bulletproof Tony from the Guy Ritchie film, Snatch), and this is not just a convenient British stereotype. Mr. Bucket, though representative of law, is as much gangster as he is detective. We get our first taste in his interview with Snagsby: “‘Yes! and lookee here’, Mr. Snagsby, resumes Bucket, taking him aside by the arm , tapping him familiarly on the breast, and speaking in a confidential tone, ‘You’re a man of the world, and a man of business, and a man of sense. That’s what you are’” (356). Yes, Bucket is a skilled interrogator- no doubt at all, he always gets what he goes in for. But Dicken’s control of tone never lets Bucket rise to the nobility of the other ‘good’ characters in the novel. Bucket’s tone is authoritative, but in more of a jailhouse false-confidant way. Bucket is no Sherlock Holmes, standing aloof by the fireplace mantle, ‘rounding his sentences with the turn of his wrist’ (love this expression). Bucket closes intimate spaces directly, with no regard to class station, and he speaks in that intimidating combination of affected intimacy and assuming imperatives. The phrase “You’re a man of business” is flattery, but it is also threat. Bucket has a knack of complimenting all of those things his subject stands to lose by not doing exactly what Bucket suggests. Bucket is, “in the friendliest condition towards his species, and will drink with most of them. He is free with his money, affable in his manners, innocent in his conversation- but, through the placid stream of his life, there glides an under-current of forefinger” (803). Yes, yes- there is always that forefinger. Referred to several times as demonic, it’s hard not to envision it writing, in red lipstick, “REDRUM” on Lady Dedlock’s vanity when finally left alone in her room. This “demonic” quality of Bucket is the deciding factor, I believe. Bucket is, of course, awesome with his disguises and shocking ability to simply appear in closed rooms, but he is, for the purposes of the story, an agent, and as such he is for hire. He is paid for his services, by both Tulkinghorn and Leicester, and his services play no small role in the death of poor Jo, not to mention the premature incarceration of George. Dickens seems to be aware of the complicated nature of Bucket’s wow-factor. Bucket (at least his finger) is called the “familiar demon,” a “terrible avenger” (803). He is cop, gangster, and dark angel rolled into one.

When did Marxism Become Such a Bourgeois Argument?

The first thing that struck me about Benjamin’s “The Arcades Project” was the flat tone delivering such bold phrases- “revolutionary terrorism,” “instrument of domination,” etc. He certainly has the prospect view, both over time and urban spaces, sort of disinterestedly alighting on selected moments in the history of architecture, art, and revolutions. I actually thought of Baudelaire, so when he came to his section on the poet it all made sense: This is why Baudelaire didn’t write essays. The stronger parts of Benjamin’s argument seem to lie in the places where he is less poet and more historian. When he talks about iron, for example, and how this very first of artificial building materials began the dialectic between practical engineers and aesthetically motivated architects- the first in his series of pragmatic/expressionistic dichotomies: Photography and paint; passions mecanistes and cabalistes; fashion and utility; etc. His poetic angst, clearly informed by his strong Marxist dispositions has some artful moments, but it sometimes obscures his argument, for example: Topic sentence: “In the flaneur, the intelligentsia sets foot in the marketplace.” Conclusion: “Baudelaire’s poetry draws its strength from the rebellious pathos of this class. He sides with the asocial. He realizes his only sexual communion with a whore” (10). He drops the big W as if “asocial” were code for prostitution. The asocial element of the city is made clear, but is there some sort of sexual gratification happening in the arcades? “Whore” is a pretty loaded word-choice. He backs off in the next paragraph, but his connections are still not very clear: “Such an image is afforded b the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute- seller and sold in one” (10). Here comes the poet again. In one way, it actually reminds me of Dickens’ ironic adjective catalogs. Sir Leicester, for example, is “honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man,” connecting incongruous descriptions in the context of a list. (22). Similarly, Benjamin’s anaphora drops these rhythmic condemnations of the flaneur to create an association between concepts we otherwise might not make, between those of commodity, arcade, and prostitution. Is shopping postitution? If so, of what? What is Benjamin suggesting as being sold in the commercial exchange of the arcade? The crux of this seems lost in the poetry, forwarding only his bitter distaste for all things flaneur. Ironically, or hypocritically, he comes down pretty hard on the intelligentsia and the boheme, when his only hope of being clearly understood would be with someone who’d just read Les Fleurs du mal. There are, however, moments where Benjamin’s poetic flare for dramatic imagery is both subtle and effective. One is his presentation of Daguerre and the birth of the Daguerotype. Here, a more complete history would appear tangential and distracting, but the poetic truth of the event fits perfectly into Benjamin’s argument that the practical and expressionistic commodities were not only conversing but competing with one another as well. The rise of the photograph is a complicated history, but here positioning is more important than some comprehensive listing of events might be, for example: the parallel positioning of the burning down of Daguerre’s panorama and his invention of the Daguerrotype, each in the same year (6). It is the language of myth, of the phoenix, of the old giving way to the new in violent exchanges.

The Opiate of the Masses, also Opium

Mary Barton is just swimming in Christian allusions, quotations, and right-out dogma, an overall message of faith that seems hardly believable in ones who suffer so, who are at every end desperate and forced into such material, physical, and moral strife that is hard to believe any kind of practical end could come from it, if we are to believe men like Engels. The message placates the rage of revolution Engels sought to incite, puts manna in the place of bread, in mouths starving for the latter, and ultimately dethrones Mary’s father from his position of steadfast and upright proletarian martyr-soldier. So, is religion here the “opiate of the masses”? How much of this unyielding martyr’s piety is authentic to a man or woman of this time, place, and station, once forced into such a perpetually hard and desperate lifestyle of labor, the only pay for which is clemming? This question comes as the result of another that this novel inspires: That of justice. In Mary Barton, just as in Silas Marner, we are introduced to the grass roots version of social government. Law enforcement is at best inept, and it is always incomprehensible to the uneducated poor. Critical decisions are made by the drawing of lots, and courts of public opinion, such as the tavern in Eliot’s novel and Jem’s factory in Gaskell’s, make decisions of real social significance that, in Mary Barton’s case especially, supersede the opinions of courts. But, like religion, the institution of justice in Mary Barton is something reconstructed by peasants in ways that make it just as accessible and practical to them as Gaskell’s novel argues, as it is intellectually restrictive and counter-productive to Engels’ conjured image of the people of post-industrial England, contented by their Bibles but “intellectually dead” and somehow complacent and unprepared in the sweeping changes that were altering their world. What Gaskell’s and Engels’ works share, however, is that their visions of solutions were hypothetical, invisible hands like Smith’s marketplace Providence: Gaskell, lost in the whimsical dream of laborers, “bound to their employers by ties of respect and affection,” with, “the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law” (374); Engels, in his own fantasy of some unified class-consciousness, “‘One and Indivisible’ Mankind” (10), leading up to actions as glorious and decisive as the Americans’ or as bloody and perpetual as France’s. And then, of course, there’s the opium, or the tobacco, or the alcohol. Oh yes, and let’s not forget the starvation. These things, like religion, do placate, but, to use Steinbeck’s terms in a context at once both anachronistic and likely upsetting to the later-day socialist, they “are the effect, not the cause.” There is a complicated irony in Marx’s phrase, “opiate of the masses,” as a reference to religion. Yes, religion placates an otherwise revolutionary, i.e.: violent, citizen, but, as we see in Mary Barton, religion is equally as effective at building the kind of moral reserve it requires to face adversity. Christ may be good, but opium was a lot more accessible, and it is but for that “golden thread” that only one character, John Barton, gives in to it, and then only after his faith is broken. While it is clear that Gaskell is motivated by the combination of a desire for class diplomacy and a somewhat naive Christian imagination, a strong, practical case for religion is made in her novel, but less by her dialog or asides than by the place where her characters don’t go: Church. The closest thing we get to a church scene is tea-time, but for these people, cut off from the pastoral institutions that Engels so bitterly scoffs at, this humble convention takes up all of the functions of a formal religious institution, and, like justice, its urban-industrial incarnation is the customized product of a particular need: It isn’t top-down from some ideologue puppet-master. It’s bottom-up, from the people who carry the Word into their homes. We spoke in class of the absence of access to healthy foods in working-class neighborhoods, but, for this brief defense of religion, I will offer another example of something common to such working-class towns: An omnipresence of both liquor stores and evangelical churches.

Foreign Agitators in the New City?

One of the ideas that fascinate me most about such ideologically loaded texts is the question of the author's own political or social perspective. Gaskell's social perspective is obvious. Her repeated returns to the Bible for clarification of her character's motives or justification of their actions makes it clear that her observations and her fiction are both informed by by her religion. But where is Engels coming from? Engels is unique to the other authors we've read so far, because he comes with his a third ideology. Glaskell and Elliot, for example, discuss an old way of life and its replacement, that of- to use Mumford's term- the paleotechnic man. Engels's text, though certainly treating those subjects as well, is also haunted by the shadow of this other way of life, one that requires the repudiation of both the industrial monstrosity and the pastoral idyllic. For him, "the middle classes intend in reality nothing else but to enrich themselves by your labour while they can sell its produce, and to abandon you to starvation as soon as they cannot make a profit by this direct trade in human flesh" (10). Gaskell, Elliot, and Mumford each portray Engels's proletarian subjects as victims of a system, but Engels takes it one step further, personifying the entire world outside of the slums as this entity intent on human destruction. His language consistently positions the proletarian men and women as objects of some unified action against them. And who is the enemy? Well, England: "With the greatest pleasure I observed you to be free from that blasting curse, national prejudice and national pride, which after all means nothing but wholesale selfishness" (10). So is Engels then trying to restore the relative personal freedom and moral chastity of pastoral times? Is he trying to broker some sort of tenable peace between a time that is gone and the reality on the ground? Is the answer within you, young proletarian? Not really: "[medieval Englishmen] could rarely read and far more rarely write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired, never thought..." (17). This statement comes immediately after a description of an Eden-like medieval English town, with free time to garden and pious little children marrying if not before, then immediately after intercourse (17). But the parallel construction of this sentence orders pastoral religion and humility with ignorance, and Engels is not too shy to come out with it explicitly: "But intellectually they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind" (17). There's that shadow, "the mighty movement." This is the third ideology, ironically the brain-child of a fortunate son of Germany. Texts like these are very powerful hstorical examples of the real threats, the ones you don't see. People were suffering and desperate, and this made them vulnerable to more than their immediate physical hungers.

The Savage Blase

Reading Wordsworth's preface and Simmel's essay side-by-side provided a nice historical perspective on a rivalry that follows us to this day, that of the urban versus the rural intellect. Each side draws on it's own cliche's of how they perceive the other to operate intellectually. Simmel uses the image of a rural, passion-driven human animal, one who's intellectual landscape is intuitively driven by "feelings and emotional relationships" alone (12). Such a person does not reason, because the required faculties are located in "the upper strata of the mind," a faraway place available only to the urbanite's world of "unbroken customs" (12). Simmel is not attempting to be insulting, however. His essay swiftly evolves into a sharp criticism of the pitfalls and toxic ideologies that come with the industrial market economy and emotional alienation that thrive in large urban centers. But his urban man is not a hero, an example of some elevated state that the rural immigrant ought to gain from his transport to the city. This figure is more of a martyr, sacrificing those close personal ties of home for the omniscent logic of the urban intellectual. Of course, Wordsworth unfairly caricatures his adversary as well. For Wordsworth, the city's influences, its swift and unceasing fountain of impersonal interactions, don't give clarity to the mind, they "blunt" its "discriminating powers" (3). Where Simmel saw the rural mind as little more than an unreasoning intuition, Wordsworth saw the urban mind as a hundred-car pile up of "gross and violent stimulants" (3). Wordsworth, too, noticed the element of the blase, as Simmel later called it, but for Wordsworth this was not a noble defense against personal interaction. For Wordsworth the feeling was "savage" (3). But these broad and unbecoming portraits are helpful in looking at the emergence of the modern city. With Wordsworth we get a violent, poetic reaction to a foreign and seeming unnatural entity. With Simmel we get a reaction from the other side, an insider appreciation and nuanced understanding of the forces at work within it. Together they prompt sharp questions about how and why the modern industrial city was (and continues to, for that matter) influence they way we think and the way we interact with one another.