Waffle

Waffle — No Comments
10
Jun 11

The Rumsfeld doctrine

I have recently distributed all the twitter accounts I follow across four lists. I follow eighty something twitter accounts and from time to time, getting through the timeline is a bit of a bother. So I decided to weigh, sort and categorize everyone.

Of course, such a thing is not to be done lightly. I pondered and schemed and finally decided to follow the Rumsfeld doctrine. Or a variation of it at least.

I have a couple of public lists containing tech and digital humanities stuff, but then I have three additional lists based on a famous statement about the search for weapons of mass destruction 1 in Iraq given by former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There are Known unknowns, Unknown knowns and unknown unknowns.

As Zizek rightly pointed out, Rumsfeld never referred to the category of unknown knowns 2. He did however talk of Known knowns. What Zizek found amusing was the fact that Rumsfeld tried to evoke the terror of the unknown threats that we can’t even imagine – the unknown unknowns – without even considering taking a look at the disavowed ideological background for his statements.

I am not completely faithful to the Rumsfeld doctrine as he imagined it. The known unknowns within my Twitter universe are not the ever elusive dangers I know about but am unable to confront and terminate. They are not the objet petit a. Nor are they people I know who are not famous. The list contains people that I know – friends and acquaintances – but it acknowledges that they will remain forever ‘other’, you can never fully know the people you know.

The unknown knowns are the almost famous people that I do know, but not quite. More specifically they are the people that I do not know personally, which is exactly why I know them. I know them in their spectacular presence, their imaginary existence as whole consistent entities, I know them as being one with their name and character.

Unknown unknowns lists the information that I didn’t know that I didn’t know, i.e. news. Different news services inform me on a daily basis of things I had no idea would happen or the existence of which I had never guessed. The terror of Rumsfeld is transformed into the pleasant pursuit of learning.

Just as Rumsfeld left out one of the four possible combinations of the two terms known and unknown, I have left out the known knowns. Because who on earth would follow a stream of data you are already familiar with?

I am very happy with my modified Rumsfeld doctrine. I hereby present it to public use.

  1. when writing this, I actually wrote weapons of mass distraction. Talk about a Freudian free fall ↩
  2. Cf. e.g. http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm ↩
Polemos / Waffle — No Comments
27
May 11

Von Trier’s breast

Much has been said about Lars von Trier’s failed remarks at his Cannes press conference. Too much. One of the few sain interventions came from Hannah Pilarczyk at Spiegel. She states:

By deciding to declare von Trier persona non grata for the current competition, the festival loses much of its credibility. Treating von Trier’s remarks as a political position to be taken seriously and drawing extensive consequences from it misjudges the situation in which von Trier made the remarks, as well as his work as aesthetic context.

I completely agree. Yes, Trier said foolish things, he has apologized, now let’s get on with it. Anyone taking his remarks at face value and thus considering him a true Nazi is a blithering idiot. So there.

But now, according to Danish newspaper Politiken, French/German television channel Arte threatens to pull further sponsorship for von Trier’s movies. They have financially supported several of his films but, apparently, they now feel that the remarks, although acknowledged as a failed joke, enter into conflict with their overall identity and purpose.

From Politiken:

“We know it was said for fun. But it was simply not funny. We found Trier’s statements crude and very shocking. We need to reconsider whether we can continue to support his films,” says Arte Film Director Michel Reilhac.
[…]
Arte was originally created by the then French President François Mitterand and Germany’s Helmuth Kohl as a way of signalling an end to historical enmity and in order to show through culture that European countries share the same ideals about humanity and generosity.

“Lars von Trier’s statements do not fit in to that perspective,” Reilhac says.

Arte hereby loses all credibility as a producer of quality cultural content. This reaction reminds me of the time Janet Jackson showed a not quite naked breast during a Super Bowl performance. To be shocked by Trier would require the same nervous frailty as the woman who claimed substantial psychic damage three years after being inflicted by Jackson’s breast. It is a feigned shock, designed to show… I have no idea! Does it demonstrate moral superiority to say “We know he didn’t mean it but, nonetheless, we were profoundly hurt”? This is the reaction you would expect form the tabloids, from the small town idiots who gossip about their new next door neighbour, not from what is supposed to be a powerhouse of cultural television.

Waffle — No Comments
26
May 11

iPad Killer

Even though Steve Ballmer famously suggested that there is “no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share” every new smart phone is measured against the almost messianic term “iPhone killer”. Will this one be able to compete with the unstoppable force that is Steve Jobs’ almost blasphemously divine creation? This, of course, holds even more true for every new tablet on the market, which is consistently described as trying to catch up with the undisputed market leader, the iPad.

Which device will be able to taint their glory and thus earn the killer status remains to be seen. I do feel, however, that the double divinity have somewhat of a killing capacity themselves. Two weeks ago, I inherited my mother’s iPad 1. She had bought it as an interesting toy but, as sometimes happens with interesting toys, she never really transformed the initial fantasy of owning the thing into an actual practice.

So, for two weeks I have been the lucky and happy owner of an iPad and it is killing me. The permissiveness of the ipad’s lavish array of possibilities functions as superego enjoining me to enjoy. A hedonistic microcosm has installed itself in the incessant feedback loop between me and my precious tablet. Of course there are prohibitions. I am a serious man and not about to play Angry Birds or engage in any such foolishness. No, I am enjoined to desire the optimisation of my own work routines and the salvation of human kind. This is serious business, it does anything you could possibly want, it gives you access to anything anywhere at any time, all that is lacking for the ultimate completion of every thinkable potential is to incorporate this thing appropriately in noble pursuits. Desire can finally be fulfilled.

This optimisation of work as a process is a stressful occupation. I have installed Instapaper to profit from the superior experience of reading web content. I have installed Reeder to have optimal conditions for the perusal of my rss subscriptions. I have bought Goodreader allowing me to read and annotate my extensive collection of PDF articles as found in my Dropbox. I have downloaded the Kindle app in order to explore the reading efficiencies of ebooks. Of course I also have the Twitter app to keep me up to date on different news and research areas. That is a lot of reading!

And then comes the organisation of time and knowledge. Of course I have the standard calendar but I also got Omnifocus to remind me what I should actually do with my time. And of course the Omnifocus user experience is so nice that I light up the iPad to change the due date of a task even though I have the Mac edition right in front of me. I have Evernote to store God knows what. I am still not sure whether Evernote on the iPad beats Evernote on the MacBook as a note taking tool during conferences, but the iPad superego enjoins me to enjoy, to fulfil its potential and my own along with it.

I am a bit tired. The last thing I do before falling asleep is read on the iPad. I wake up to the sound of TuneIn Radio Pro playing France Culture. I have the iPad alight next to my computer while I work so that I may use it as an extra screen, use it to display the text I am translating instead of printing it, use it to display my to-dos in Omnifocus so that I will never forget what is to be done.

When I am not sure what to do I look for new ways to use the iPad. And when I can’t think of any new ways and I feel all worn out, I use it to write a blog post about my iPad and how it is killing me.

Branding / Waffle — No Comments
4
Jan 10

Polite vomit

Polite Vomit

Norwegian airline Widerøe accept the potential oral effluent of their customers with polite and polished ease. One side of the complementary vomit bag carries the inscription “uff da… (ooops…)” while the other one conveys the best wishes of the airline: “god bedring! (get well soon!)”. Isn’t that nice?!

Polemos / Waffle — No Comments
14
Dec 09

To speak and say nothing

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“I am here, and there is nothing to say.” “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” These two quotes are, respectively, the first and one of the first sentences of John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing 1. Usually, to speak and say nothing is not appreciated by the listener, the speech will be categorized as waffle, a waste of time. And rightfully so! There is, however, such an abundance of empty utterances that actually aim at – but horribly miss – meaningful communication that, from time to time, you long for the willful undermining of language, the brave probings of nonsense.

These are the days of the COP15 summit and more or less everyone is busy stating their views of a better world. There are a lot of professional opinion makers in the fray. Prominent among them, Naomi Klein yesterday contributed with the following commentary in her Memo to Danes: Even You Cannot Control This Summit: “In the morning demonstrators are going to march to the Bella Center to demand real solutions to the climate crisis, not the fuzzy math and carbon trading on offer inside.”

Carbon trading might be a legitimate means for handling the current problems, it might be the contrary, but to simply oppose “real solutions” to “fuzzy math and carbon trading” is downright silly. Why is math an unreal tool to the task? One should think that mathematics would be a necessary and very real element in fighting climate change. What she means, of course, is that the official negotiators have trouble agreeing on the math and that carbon trading is an unacceptable solution. But sadly, the math seems equally fuzzy at Klimaforum09, and carbon trading is, supposedly, a manifestly more real solution than “real solutions.”
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  1. A 2007 performance of Lecture on Nothing can be found at Ubuweb and heard here:
    ↩
All things theory / Waffle — No Comments
11
Dec 09

Badiou’s acid wit

A quick post to share a joke. Well not really a joke, more of an acid wit. French philosopher Alain Badiou has been called many things during his long and lustrous life, a lot of them bad. Some people seem to insist, for example, that the man is anti-Semite. Zizek lovingly repeats that he and Badiou are both Stalinists (Badiou, of course, is Maoist). I seem to remember that, not too long ago, a Danish journalist recounting French contemporary political thinking called him dangerous and mad. Ah, well… “A beloved child has many names” as we say in Denmark. But to call Badiou names is, I think, a most marvelous thing. Not that he deserves it, but because he tends to answer these preposterous accusations with such humorous force as to make any stand up comedian blush with envy.

I just now stumbled upon the following gem of an aggressive defense:

“J’aime les grandes mĂ©taphores venues de la religion : Miracle, Grâce, Salut, Corps Glorieux, Conversion… On a Ă©videmment conclu de ce goĂ»t que ma philosophie Ă©tait un christianisme dĂ©guisĂ©. Le livre sur saint Paul que j’ai publiĂ© en 1997 aux PUF n’a pas arrangĂ© les choses. Ă€ tout prendre, j’aime mieux ĂŞtre un athĂ©e rĂ©volutionnaire cachĂ© sous une langue religieuse qu’un “dĂ©mocrate” occidental persĂ©cuteur de musulman(e)s dĂ©guisĂ© en fĂ©ministe laĂŻque.” (Baidou: Second manifeste pour la philosophie note 4)

In case your French is a bit rusty, here is a rusty translation:

“I love the great religious metaphors: Miracle, Grace, Salvation, Glorious Body, Conversion… Obviously, someone concluded from this preference that my philosophy was disguised christianity. The book on Saint Paul, which I published in 1997 at PUF, didn’t help the matter. All considered, I would rather be a revolutionary atheist hidden behind a religious vernacular than an occidental “democrat” persecuting muslims disguised as a secular feminist.”

You almost want to high-five your buddy and chest bump your pal shouting “Snap! Them mo-fo’s got pwned!,” don’t you?

All things theory / Polemos / Waffle — No Comments
9
Dec 09

We the People

“We the people” is a weird constellation. Is the plural subsumed under the singular or is it the other way around? Who is “We” and what is a people? Well in the case of “We the people,” “We” are the “people” of the United States, but again what does this entail? This question has no doubt been scrutinized endlessly by jurists and philosophers and our goal here is not to attempt what better men and women have already achieved. It is simply to draw attention to an unsettling frequency of similar statements in current political discourse and the problematic consequences thereof.

Let us begin at home. At their main annual convention this summer, leader of Danish People’s Party Pia Kjærsgaard said something like the following: “So while the potential maximum penalty for a crime has maybe doubled, the actually passed sentences have only augmented slightly. We will not stand for this. The judges are not the rulers of this country!” As well as crying out for mandatory minimums, this angry minx is decreeing the power of “We” over the power of the judges. “We the people” may be sovereign in American law but even the Americans try to uphold the seperation of powers as described by Montesquieu. Kjærsgaard is actually calling for direct popular control of the judiciary branch. “We the people shall not accept delicate judicial treatment of those who dare defy our laws.”
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Waffle — No Comments
3
Dec 09

Correspondences…

In spite of what the title might evoke in the geeky mind, this is not an entry about Baudelaire. No, it is about popular culture and the references, or correspondences, that are planted in popular culture. All viewers of FOX’s tv show House will have noticed that he used to live in no 221B, which, of course, is a reference to Sherlock Holmes who lived in 221B Baker Street. Naturally, there are plenty more correspondences between the good doctor House and the wise and wicked Sherlock Holmes, because they are the same character! Wilson is Watson, especially in that he is more ‘what?’ than ‘will’, House and Holmes both have a drug addiction, and they both tend to be arrogant in a slightly funny manner, etc. We don’t need to go further down that road and I once wrote an entry about the comedic positions of the different characters (I wrote it in Danish, but here you go).

The one thing I wanted to point out today is the tiny reference made to Monty Python in the recent episode 9 of the 6th season:
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Polemos / Waffle — No Comments
21
Mar 09

Anything but a fatal blow (usually) requires a ready defense

As a last installment (promised!) in our whole “commentary on the spectacular horrors of commentary”-debacle (now a trilogy with parts one and two already out) we should take a quick look at the ground values, not of bloggery as such, but of this our own particular verbal version of loose-stooled effluent. And as the greek word in the header (to the right of the backslash, not the hebrew one to the left) cries out in an embarrassingly high brow fashion, there is only one ground value: War!

So, the idea of this fecal accumulation was to have a place through which to channel the pile of bile that rises within us all when encountering that which is too high, too low, too in the middle, as well as that which just generally rubs us the wrong way.

An example: When some semi-celeb on the front page of a wholly disgraceful newspaper states “I am good in bed”, you must be made of sturdier stuff than me to avoid shaking your fists at the world, shouting insults and death threats at all who would even think of finding such a journalistic abomination worthy of print. Another one: The former princess Alexandra (Denmark), once visited a very hot country, somewhere with elephants, I forget… A photo of this young lady in a sweat stained t-shirt appeared on the front page of one of the weekly attacks on the minds of the already challenged with the following title “The Princess’ Hot Flashes”. I mean, really!
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Waffle — 1 Comment
13
Mar 09

Rhetorical masturbation makes you blind

On the subject of this blog’s last defilement of a perfectly nice blank screen, The importance of being Elvis, a friend remarked that the title bore a bit of the Elvis odour itself. She claimed that this particular critique of intellectual commentary was in and by itself just another bit of pseudo-intellectual commentary. And of course she is right!

As has already been stated on this page – it’s remarkable how long a webpage really is – bloggery is fit for the more or less cultivated or casual considerations of the works of mice and men over digital drinks and dinner, but not for laborious elaborations on the subtle workings of all things theory. Blogs are the very sanctuaries of commentary, it is where commentary goes when it is no longer wanted in respectable company, which is why blogs are usually just havens for washed up intellectual waste and futile observations of abundant banality.

So why more or less consciously commit the sin you are condemning? Why throw all personal pride and integrity overboard and just plow right through the known courteous seas? Because it feels so good! Bloggery as well as commentary are generally examples of what we might call rhetorical masturbation and rhetorical masturbation, as we have all learnt in our early years, makes you blind. Well, maybe you don’t really loose your eyesight but you do tend to lean back a bit and close your eyes with the sheer pleasure of it.
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