Ghost in the Wire

One of my all time favorite female singer-songwriters, Kate Fenner, has a relatively recent website redesign that uses a mesmerizing array of flash images on a white background. The images, which look like color sketch work, are striking and somewhat hypnotic. There are also four tracks to listen to, including a tribute to the now defunct Rheostatics. Anyway, check it out, and if you do not have her first album, go grab a copy.

Oh, and for those who think the name sounds familiar but just can't place it, Kate Fenner was formerly with the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir and even more recently a duo act with her musical partner Chris Brown. The two penned and performed the widely acclaimed "resist war" track, one of the better contemporary protest songs.

Now if only we could get one or both of them to visit Seattle. Hmm.

Looking for a way to bring out the flavor in Crimini mushrooms? Mushrooms often pose difficulties for the kitchen, and the tendency is to toss them in with some other dish, be it salad or stir-fry, which works and whatnot, but it sacrifices the earthy loving of the mushroom and sublimates it to something else. So here's a quick way to make a mouth-popping dish that avoids that problem. You will need:

6-8 oz. of Crimini mushrooms, organic and local if you can.
1 Leek.
4 tablespoons of teriyaki sauce.
1 tablespoon of brown rice syrup (or honey).
1 generous teaspoon of sesame oil.
1/2 a lemon, or a whole one if on the small side.

Get a baking dish out and preheat the broiler. Put in the teriyaki sauce, the rice syrup, and the sesame oil. Then squeeze the juice out of the lemon (seed it first if you need to). Whisk the mixture together. Now wash the Crimini mushrooms and pat dry with a towel. Add them to the bowl and stir until coated. Now lay the leek out horizontally and cut it into 1 inch sections and then cut each of those length-wise twice, rotating the section 90 degrees between cuts (in effect, just cubing each 1 inch section). Add to the bowl, and stir until coated. By now, the broiler is ready, so pop them in the oven and cook for four minutes. Pull them out, given them a good stir, and then broil for another minute or two. The mushrooms will have busted out into a nutty brown and the leeks gone soft and lost some of their fibrous quality when it's all done. Serve as is with a side of brown rice. Fast, healthy, and scrumptious.

Call it Dell's One-Dimensional Computer.

What follows is the transcript of an online chat with a Dell representative. Disappointing, to say the least.

08:37:53 PM System System Initial Question/Comment: Is it really the case that there's only one laptop line available with ubuntu pre-installed?

08:38:34 PM System System BE_Rep_Heritha has joined this session!

08:38:34 PM System System Connected with BE_Rep_Heritha

08:38:47 PM Customer Ken Rufo Hello :)

08:39:19 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Welcome to Dell Sales Chat. My name is Ritha. I'll be your personal sales agent today. Give me a moment to review your concern. Please don’t go away. Is Ritha.

08:39:34 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha You can also email us at us_dhs_reply@dell.com.We are available 8am-10pm We are available from 8am-11pm CST. Monday-Sunday. Rest assured that we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

08:39:39 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Hi ken.

08:41:07 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Yes that is only the 1420 system.

08:41:08 PM Customer Ken Rufo I'm looking to replace my laptop in the next month or so, and as someone who has converted to ubuntu for a year and a half now, I have no desire to go back to windows, but I want a laptop with discrete graphics memory - i was told you had a line like that, but now I only see one model for the open source laptops.

08:41:13 PM Customer Ken Rufo Why?

08:41:51 PM Customer Ken Rufo I mean I have never bought a dell before, and you're my first place to look given that I wouldn't have to deal with the EULA/refund hassle for Vista, but your options are so slight... it doesn't make sense.

08:42:21 PM Customer Ken Rufo Without more options, you lose the competitive advantage you have over HP (which is the manufacture of laptop I'm using now) - I'm totally confused.

08:42:38 PM Customer Ken Rufo Or whoever else, I suppose.

08:42:39 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha I'm sorry for that ken.

08:42:44 PM Customer Ken Rufo Is there a reason for it?

08:43:08 PM Customer Ken Rufo You have like 9 vista models, which I'm still considering, it's just a shame I then have to call and ask for a refund...

08:44:20 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha I assure you that you will have a great system with dell Ken.

08:45:05 PM Customer Ken Rufo Umm, ok. Is there a rule against answering the "why so few options" question? Like does it violate some weird licensing agreement, or publicize some weird licensing agreement to answer?

08:45:39 PM Customer Ken Rufo How about this - can I get one of the other lines with NO OS?

08:46:46 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha The operating system comes pre-installed in the system already, we don't have system that is not pre-installed with OS.

08:47:22 PM Customer Ken Rufo And again no attempted answer to the why question. Seriously, is there something weird about that question?

08:48:58 PM Customer Ken Rufo You did use to have a second linux notebook model, right?

08:49:13 PM Customer Ken Rufo A 15 incher?

08:49:26 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha No ken..What we have online is what we can offer.WEe have full line of systems,and since we would like to cater to everyone's need,we still have choices for you from the open source.

08:49:42 PM Customer Ken Rufo What are my choices?

08:49:49 PM Customer Ken Rufo The 1420n and ___?

08:50:38 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Sorry but Ubuntu is limited to one system only.We have free dos as well.for 1420n.

08:50:41 PM Customer Ken Rufo I'm not trying to be a smart ass, I'm really trying to understand my options.

08:51:06 PM Customer Ken Rufo So by choices, you mean choices of OS, not choices of notebook hardware for that particular OS.

08:51:55 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Yes ken.

08:51:55 PM Customer Ken Rufo Are there any plans to change that in the near to medium future? And is the 15 incher you used to sell still available?

08:52:18 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha We do have 15 inch systems.

08:52:36 PM Customer Ken Rufo Just not with Ubuntu, right?

08:53:05 PM Customer Ken Rufo And you won't let me customize it in a way that actually puts ubuntu on it, correct?

08:53:24 PM Customer Ken Rufo Even though you sell ubuntu on other models... Ok, so seriously, what is the reason for that?

08:53:44 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Sorry but you can only have 1420 for Ubuntu.

08:53:55 PM Customer Ken Rufo Right, I get it. Is there a reason for that?

08:54:25 PM Customer Ken Rufo Look, you can understand my position - I'm considering getting a dell notebook with ubuntu, even if it's not exactly the hardware specs I'm looking for, but I want to know if Dell is being serious about it.

08:55:08 PM Customer Ken Rufo At a support level, I mean.

08:55:16 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Yes we surely are..I assure you that:)

08:55:45 PM Customer Ken Rufo Ok, then please explain the reason for the limited options. I've asked nicely several times, and the answer does matter to my purchasing decision.

08:58:17 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha I do apologize for the inconvenience,but for now,that is the only system we can configure with Ubuntu.

08:59:43 PM Customer Ken Rufo I understand the facts of it now, I really do. But you used to offer another model, and now you don't. So you have halved your options and effectively turned it into "option," and all I'm asking is to have some idea why Dell did this, so I can know whether or not I should give Dell some sort of competitive benefit when making my purchasing decision, a benefit they would accrue if I got the sense they were really serious about supporting ubuntu.

09:00:06 PM Customer Ken Rufo The problem is when you tell me you're very serious, that seems confounded by the lack of options, so I'm asking for a bit of explanation, that's all.

09:05:08 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha Dell is in full transition with Vista now,that's why we don't offer that much though we still cater to the open-source but that is limited to one system only here in Home and Home office Site.;

09:05:28 PM Agent BE_Rep_Heritha My humblest apology in behalf of Dell.

09:06:46 PM Customer Ken Rufo Ok, I guess I can understand you have obligations to MS and Vista, it just seems a shame that the reason I was most interested in Dell doesn't bear up under scrutiny. I may still buy a Dell system, so no fault there, but now I'll have to comparison shop with all the other Vista-based models from other manufacturers.

Session ID: 13603013
Question40

The agent still never really explains why transitioning to Vista precludes more attention to Ubuntu, nor is any explanation available as to why the transition once included a second notebook model that is now no longer available. That and the massive amount of time that passes each time I ask for a "why is that" answer (2 and a half minutes one time, over 5 minutes another) makes me wonder. I'm sure the 1420n is a nice machine, but I'm just not sure I should be giving Dell the benefit of the doubt on this... Thoughts?

Ok, so it never really went anywhere, but it hasn't seemed as important of late. Not so with today's story: "Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die." The best bit:

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, it seems that Iraqis do indeed experience at least minor feelings of grief when a best friend or a grandparent is ripped apart by a car bomb or shot execution style and later unearthed in a shallow mass grave," Prytzal said. "Last December's suicide-bomb killing of 71 Shiites in Baghdad, for example, produced unexpected reactions ranging from crumpled, sobbing despair to silent, dazed shock."

Iraqis have often been observed weeping and wailing in apparent anguish, but the study offers evidence indicating this may not be exclusively an outward expression of anger or a desire for revenge. It also provocatively suggests that this grief can possess an American-like personal quality, and is not simply a tribal lamentation ritual.

Said Pryztal: "When trying to understand the psychology of the Iraqi citizenry after four years of war, think of a small American town roiled by the death of a well-known high school football player."

According to Pryztal, the intensity of the grief does not diminish if the mourner experiences multiple bereavements over time. "If a woman has already lost one child, the subsequent killings of other children will evoke similar responses," he said. "In the majority of cases we studied, it appeared as though those who lost multiple kids never actually got used to it."

Though Pryztal expects the results of the study may be of some interest to students of Arab psychology, he did concede that the data may not be entirely accurate because it was gathered directly from Iraqis themselves.

If a solution exists to the current crisis of conscience in foreign policy, it is in understanding the shared vulnerability that gives substance to the very concept of humanity. The comic frame seems as much a means of doing this as any. Nice job, Onion.

I'm back.

I don't know if someone has already claimed this one, but if not, I'm calling nomenclature rights. As such, I define Rufo's Law as follows:

When it comes to theoretical work of any type, the more widely "assumed" a certain argument, concept, or thinker is, the less that argument, concept, or thinker is actually understood.

Less Josh think I'm talking about his recent discussion of phonocentrism, I'm not really, or at least that wasn't the inspiration for this post. Sure, I do think that far too much of Derrida is now "assumed" and, concomitantly, rather horribly misunderstood. Derrida will remain one of the more complicated philosophers, rich in reward, for some time, and I suspect he will be read and re-interpreted long after others of his day have passed from the collective consciousness. I do not think we have even begun to read Derrida - but that is an issue for a different post.

Nothing Derrida-related prompted the declaration of Rufo's Law. No, the actual inspiration came from a series of comments about Baudrillard, scattered across the intertubes and a random aside in article I recently read. Baudrillard is one of those people who routinely suffer from what I call "drive-by parentheticals," wherein an article wants to assert some commonly "assumed" fact that Baudrillard might commonly be "assumed" to provide, and so randomly inserts Baudrillard into a footnote or parenthetical citation. In effect, we see comments like, "given the proliferation of simulacra (Baudrillard 1994), yada yada." That's the drive-by - academic style.

As someone who has read a lot of Baudrillard and who has sustained a keen interest in his work despite moments in which I withdraw, look elsewhere, or even recoil, I am still amazed at how little even self-proclaimed fans of his work actually understand him. For the vast majority of commentators, the Baudrillard they know is that of Simulations, or Simulacra and Simulations, or Seduction, or Silent Majorities. Sure, they saw a Cool Memories volume once or twice in a university bookstore, and some of them even stumbled upon The Transparency of Evil, almost by accident (the irony). And of course, they read the Internet version of Baudrillard's 9-11 essay. And most are aware that he and Foucault fought about something or other. But even these other encounters simply orbit the mainstays of what is assumed to be Baudrillard's standardized corpus, which, strangely enough, are the middle, transitional texts in his work. Ignored and unattended are the beautiful and essential earlier works on political economy and symbolic exchange, and "assumed" are the later works on evil, the end, and virtual reality. You can hear their inner voices as they flip quickly through the pages of a random JB text in Borders, or see the cover flash by on their "Amazon recommends" pages: "Been there, done that, it's all simulacra, baby. We've heard it all before. Now how about this shiny Badiou book instead?"

Unfortunately, Rufo's Law is here in full effect. And the assumed Baudrillard is, not surprisingly, the most often misunderstood and misappropriated Baudrillard. The irony, of course, is that this sort of academic game is precisely the sort of simulational theoretical enterprise that Baudrillard decried, and the one that prompted him to change his writing style after Symbolic Exchange and Death to one more allusional rather than referential, and more poetic than academic.

Baudrillard needs to be re-read and re-engaged, I think. He is too often folded into Deleuzian readings or "corrected" by Zizekian analysis, as if Baudrillard hadn't already laid out thorough, nuanced, and rather impressive criticisms of the internal heuristic limits of both the desiring machine and psychoanalysis. He is said to ignore class conditions and the necessity of Marxist critique, as well as the reality of suffering, even as he spends entire books detailing his objections to Marxism and essay after essay explaining the role of the reality-principle in the portrayal of suffering. He is declared a (bad) nihilist and a misogynist, as if he never accounted for and addressed criticism of his work after the 80s, and as if he never further extended and enriched his analysis. That this sort of short-thrift, simulation-via-assumption engagement has become so commonplace, and that it confirms much of his take-down of critical theory, should hardly be surprising. If anything, it seems banal, perhaps even oafish, to take note of it. Nevertheless...

I am a psychic. And as such, I predict this study will be cited incessantly by people who mock social science research, especially in economics.

And for good reason.

Fast forward from the material governing the previous post, to May of 1999, to what amounts, in other words, to a thirty year jump. We are near the end of Baudrillard's career now rather than its beginning, and Baudrillard is doing a series of Wellek lectures at the University of California, Irvine. In the third lecture, entitled the "Murder of the Real," Baudrillard rehearses a theme that has been more or less a constant to his work since The Perfect Crime, namely that reality has died, been ex-terminated, and has not and never will be resurrected. Indeed, it's corpse may never even be found. He notes:

For reality is but a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies an origin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real without these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse. And its disappearing is the dislocation of this whole constellation.

This argument is bound up, for Baudrillard, with virtualization and virtual reality, and a critique of new information technology. I have never been particularly convinced by his critiques of these technologies, but I do find the cultural inference he draws from them to be accurate; in other words, whether virtual reality itself does anything to dissolve the real, the discursive field that enables something like the term "virtual reality" is evidence already that the dissolution has taken place, that it has become susceptible to qualification, subdivision, and hyper-realization.

This collapse of reality is an argument for which Baudrillard is particularly well known, but it will come as no surprise that the Heidegger of Being and Time is also dedicated to a dissolution of the metaphysical reality principle, though his reasons for thinking this dissolution are far more subjectal in orientation (again, at least that's the case back in 1927).

Continue reading "Baudrillard and Heidegger, 2" »

A friend requested a bit on Baudrillard's relationship to Heidegger, so:

I think that one of the fundamental points of confusion in Heidegger's Being and Time comes when, in analyzing why it is that human beings so often ignore their being or Dasein, choosing the crowd over resolute and authentic existence, thereby voiding the Eigen in Eigentlichkeit. Heidegger characterizes it this way: Dasein is "dispersed into the 'they' and must find itself." This dispersal is, for Heidegger, part of the existential structure of Dasein, and as a consequence Heidegger offers no substantive discussion of the means or methods of this dispersal, at least not back in 1927 (arguably the "turn" towards historicity and the forgetting of Being may offer an explanation for it, but that comes some years later).

I think that one productive way to address this question is to consider the overall project of Being and Time, which is really an analytic of the subjectivity of Dasein, even if it distances itself from subjectivity as understood in Western metaphysics. What I mean is that the investigation of Dasein starts by investigating Dasein itself as the subject of the analysis, and so there remains a bit of an emphasis on the subjectal determination of the world, which I think you can see in the discussion of "thrownness" and the "call of conscience." Again this changes later, as Heidegger explicitly admits this as a limitation of his early work, altering his analytical emphasis away from Dasein in his On Time and Being, and elsewhere segues from the "call of conscience" to the "call of being." Still, without necessarily following Heidegger's turn, we can look at this "error" as a productive one.

To do so, we can begin to think a brief bit about Walter Benjamin, whose work had a considerable emphasis on Baudrillard's thought.

Continue reading "Baudrillard and Heidegger, 1" »

He was 77. That particular generation of thinkers gets thinner every month, it seems. French announcement can be found here , with a write-up or two beneath the picture of JB, though it will probably be a day or two before proper obits start appearing.

Of course, that won't stop the sea of idiotic and malicious sentiment reminding us just how stupid Baudrillard was; that sentiment ends up being rather quick in its delivery, at least judging from the recent reaction to Derrida's death.

One of the things that I have found particularly intellectually stimulating in my "conversion" to Buddhism is that the history and debates that govern Buddhism are not that dissimilar to those governing Western philosophy, though many of the Buddhist debates are wrapped up in questions of religion and spirituality in a way that Western philosophy is not. I do not mean to imply that Western philosophy has not been bound up with various spiritual notions, only that the character of those notions differ from what we find in Buddhism.

Anyway, in just a bare bones sketch, I want to trace one of the more interesting debates or moments of transition in Buddhism, the one that mirrors, to my mind, the so-called postmodern turn in Western philosophy. The story begins with Shakyamuni Buddha, the name given to the enlightened form of Siddhartha Gautama. who upon reaching enlightenment begins teaching what he has discovered. Now Shakyamuni is teaching in the context of a rather established Hindu and Vedic tradition, and many of his teachings run counter to it, but many of his teachings are also adapted to it, which is to say, that like any rhetorician, he spoke in the vernacular of his audience. His four noble truths, for example, borrow and reconfigure several terms that were common in Hinduism. The truths are, as follows:

Continue reading "Mahayana Buddhism and the Pre-Pomo Turn" »