Second Balcony

Non-immanent critiques Amerikkkkka: A Novel 

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I think one of the biggest gaps in our understanding of human affairs is that we have no theory of what it really means for ideas, or views, or attitudes, or feelings, about distinct objects to be in tension or in harmony with one another. We need some kind of a theory of this in order to make sense of ‘elective affinities’ talk in historical explanation, and in order to make sense of the idea of some view being logically consistent but ‘dialectically’ inconsistent, and in order to make sense of the kind of ‘structural dependence of social norm x on social norm y’ talk one finds in Theory, which though often questionable is often pretty interesting. (It might even be necessary for making sense of *some aspects* of the ‘reflective equilibrium’ talk that’s fundamental in a lot of analytic philosophy.)

One reason why I think that really making sense of this requires overcoming a big gap is that IMO it will require some synthesis of a ‘memetic’ perspective and a ‘logical’ perspective on ideas (or whatever). In all these cases we really are talking about a kind of soft consistency or soft inconsistency, not just about any kind of causal pathway whereby one idea (or whatever) helps or hinders the propagation of another — it’s not like the relationship between an interest in hats and insanity via mercury poisoning — but on the other hand I don’t think what we’re talking about can be separated from the actual population dynamics of ideas in a brain or in a society or in historical processes. After all it’s not a logical relationships between bodies of propositions, it’s a… something relationship between… forces (?!) related to bodies of propositions.

When I think about it intuitively, I imagine something like ideas (or whatever) having ‘natural’ trajectories towards generalization, towards making everything in their image so to speak, and ‘soft consistency’/’soft inconsistency’ having something to do with the difference between a set of ideas (or whatever) that are held in check from generalizing to the point of clashing with each other only by the grace of executive function fiat (or some social-process analogue of that), and a set of ideas (or whatever) that each… internally represent their relation to one another within a totality? And I imagine that this difference is closely tied to the memetic stability/instability of the set.

Obviously there are resources on this, and sometimes profound ones, to be found in Hegel, Derrida, Deleuze, but working any of this stuff into the scientific image, or even just the plain-English image, seems astonishingly hard.

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I talked to Brian Ng about my Theory of Vibe, the role that mathematical analogies can play in literary theory, and bringing the idea of knowledge back into poetics

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It’s time to read-again my bad but correct essay about Vampire Weekend’s lyrics from 2010:   ‘Just give it to us straight, Ezra Koenig. Are you saying rich girls deserve their money, or are you saying rich girls are dumb whores? Do you taunt the 57% of America that can’t take real summer vacations, or do you mock the 43% that go on holidays? Was “Mansard Roof” an endorsement of roofs or an anti-roof satire? The Vampire Weekend wars are about class, maybe, but they are also about classification: the lyrics in Contra keep trying to do things we don’t allow pop lyrics to do. We can all adore Jean Renoir (prepschool kid, Popular Front activist, had a rags-to-riches dad) for making films that treat the rich with worship, scorn, anger, affection and grief, but apparently we’re not gonna let a pop album get fancy on us like that. Books and films are supposed to confound us with layers of ideas and conflicting emotions; pop lyrics need to fess up or shut up. So Koenig pleading that his lyrics “aren’t ‘about’ anything but have levels of meaning” can come off like someone yelling “Checkmate!” in the middle of a poker game – obnoxious or confused or both at once.  There’s Ezra Pound and then there’s Ezra Koenig and the whole way that we talk about pop lyrics is about not getting these mixed up. But if I have to choose between Vampire Weekend and the logic of our pop-talk I choose the Vampires. Partly because Vampire Weekend can be kind of great, and mostly cause really I hate the logic of our pop-talk: outside pop-talk, in the actual reality of writing, listening to, and reading language set to popular music, artsy lyrics are as much a part of pop as the distortion pedal.

Since at least the ‘60’s (early Kinks, late Beatles, “The Velvet Underground And Nico’) pop songs have been awesomely and miserably Warhol-damaged, Joyce-Damaged, Brecht-damaged and Dada-damaged. If you love these damages you call them avant-garde and if you hate these damages you call them Art School, which is fair enough— people do become artsy in Art School. But the point is that the last 150 years of trying out new ways to make meanings in art made a big impression on a lot of kids, and a lot of these kids started bands. And other, younger kids who couldn’t care who Gertrude Stein was get the virus listening to Patti Smith and Bowie and the Pixies, and sometimes one of those kids turns out to be Kurt Cobain and then weird abstract lyrics infect the entire pop bloodstream. And the Wu-Tang Clan weren’t nothing to fuck with either. But the way that we talk about pop lyrics never caught up. Because pop-talk is lazy about lyrics, and discussing lifestyles takes a lot less effort than discussing writing styles. It’s easy to profile the Godard-affectations of liberal arts youths, and it’s harder to ask what a “Week End” fixation might say about a band’s approach to sense and nonsense and ideas and images. And if you hate Godard films in the first place, then the easy way is better—but I love Godard films so I’d love to find a little bit of “Week End” in my pop.

Most of what Contra is up to owes more to traditional novels (Waugh, Fitzgerald) than to weird films or experimental poetry, but the whole thing lives or dies on the natural liberties of avant-damaged lyrics: abstraction, collage, contradiction, self-reference. Koenig doesn’t string his crisp, descriptive sentences into narratives but stacks them in layers. Which is beautiful and resonant and complex, and also means that Contra can’t do anything to stop you if you want to believe it’s a country-club anthem. So music critics Googled for the price of Wolford Tights and compiled lists of vacation destinations, but never asked themselves why does this pool-party-album keep compulsively referring to The Clash. Or why do songs that start with “every dollar counts, and every morning hurts” end with a trust fund, and songs about holidays flash to Iraq. Or why it’s called “Contra.”

“Contra” talks about conflicts a lot—small and comfortable ones at first, like wanting to be rich so you can buy the modern art that you don’t want rich people owning (‘White Sky”), or loving your self-made-man father but hating the cultural myth that this kind of success represents (“Dad was a risk taker/ his was a shoemaker”). We also get all sorts of breakups between Koenig and rich girlfriends, and arguments with girls and music-critics about class, and a couple of political and sexual identity-crises. But what really puts the “contra” in Contra is the things that Koenig does with words: On “Horchata” it’s the way that Koenig rhymes “drinking horchata” (road trips, multicultural culture, left-liberal college kids) to “foot on Masada” (Birthright Israel trips where they tell Jewish kids to marry Jewish). On the break-uppy “I Think Ur a Contra,” it’s accusing the ex “you’re a contra” (you’re a hater), and then accusing the ex “you’re not a contra” (you’re not a revolutionary), and then defending —from the ex? from critics?—with “don’t call me a contra” (don’t call me anti-revolutionary). All throughout Contra words fight it out with each other or divide against themselves. Even the punk song “Cousins” is a hissy fit that self-destructs with wordplay: everything Koenig is yelping works both as a rant against posh music critics with self-righteous attitudes and as a hysterical caricature of the Vampires themselves. Koenig sings “You, greatest hits 2006, little listmaker” and you can’t tell if it’s an insult for a critic that made the list (wrote the list) or for a Vampire that made-the-list (got listed).

Which is kind of the point that the repeating chorus of “Me and my cousins and you and your   cousins…” is trying to make—that personal animosity requires a whole lot of common context. Vampire Weekend can get pretty bitchy when it comes to critics who demand to hear them tell rich people to go fuck themselves, but Contra is obsessed with punk and politics in its own terms. You don’t call an album “Contra” and then pack it up with references to The Clash unless you’re aching for a face-off with Joe Strummer’s angry ghost. And every time the shadow of The Clash shows up to haunt the lyrics (“Taxi Cab,” “Diplomat’s Son,” “I Think Ur a Contra’) Koenig gets dead serious and apologetic, and melancholically tries to explain why he can’t do heroic political anger. Koenig is in love with being in the middle— all “You’re not a victim, but neither am I” and “Never pick sides, never choose between two, but I just wanted you”—and honestly he’s doing a good job there. If you’re going to occupy a middle ground in life, then it’s a great idea to use it for creating nuanced, fragile songs about how politics and love and money interact while also constantly reminding us about The Clash.’

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Cognition is a basic libidinal drive, which is why culture criticism that engages literature or philosophy in a Freudo-Marxist way but has no time for the experience of [logical/sensory/semiotic] form  — so, New Historicism and most every lit mag critic raised there  — is a scam.

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This dissertation presents a mathematically informed, cultural-materialist interpretation of a classically romantic literary-theoretic thesis: that a work of literature can aesthetically communicate an ineffably complex holistic understanding of the

I should have book news soon, but in the meanwhile:

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The thing is, I experience social reality not as a thrownness but not as a game either, but a leap of faith.

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Camp is the real relationship of an individual to the imaginary conditions of their existence.

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‘A Theory of Vibe’

My treatise ‘Theory of Vibe,’ seven years in the making, is online on Glass Bead Journal. 

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If they did one of those Edge-dot-org questions of 'what is a scientific concept you think everyone should learn' but for aesthetics I would say 'romantic irony.' Only there's never been a really good direct description of the concept: it is more or less the cognitive-affective state of being simultaneously inside and outside of a worldview, or inhabiting a worldview while at the same time sensing its contingency and specificity within the space of worldviews, but it's hard to get more clear than that without constructing a specific theory of romantic irony. The other part that's tricky is that while most everyone intensely literary has had rich experiences of romantic irony in art, the case that any one specific literary work creates romantic irony rather than (purely) negative or mocking irony is more or less impossible to make on other than 'I know it when I see it' grounds. I think 'romantic irony' names one of the most subtle and profound capacities that set apart a human subject from most animals and AIs categorically, so I would love to have a solidly reliable, widely accessible reference point for demonstration  — like ''romantic irony' is the faculty that reading Eugene Onegin calls on,' but more popularly accessible.  

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A Letter About Art

‘So this is going to be way too specific to be something that I can directly reuse, but whatever. I think the issue underlying lots of what came up in our conversation is something like this: 

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My fave post 

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(Précis of May ‘17 HUJI Einstein Institute of Mathematics talk)

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Two Affect Notes 1. There’s almost nothing false that you can say about the tone of ‘Twin Peaks’: sentimental, cruel, naïve, ironic, placid, nervous, earnest, knowing, icy, sensual, libertine, moralizing, urgent, playful, skeptical, excited, desperate… It runs the full gamut of human feelings-about-feelings. 2. Kate Bush’s aesthetic is entirely dependent on romantic irony as a cognitive structure, but somehow without any of the affective tensions that normally go with it. In other words, her work is always, in some abstract sense, half-parody, but usually not even half-funny in even an abstract sense. Instead it’s the sublation or whatever of the rom-irony contradiction.

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I'll never forgive post-structuralism for creating a brand of self-doubt kitsch.

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Two Notes On BoJack Horseman

1. This show would be so bad if there were no anthropomorphic animals in there, but there are so it’s raw and beautiful. It’s all in that great Kafka trick of twisting the world with dream-logic only to reveal you didn’t. First, the fact that the protagonists are sapient, anthropomorphic animals gives their incessant existential crises something like a secret ontological validity. When BoJack whines that there is something wrong with him, or Princess Caroline professes that she doesn't know what she is living for, we're less inclined than usual to think 'get over it' because part of us recognizes that their sapience and human lives are a distortion of the natural order of things, no matter how hard the fictional world refuses to acknowledge this. Second, we compare the animal characters to the human characters and to ourselves, and recognize that sapient, anthropomorphic apes are just as wrong as sapient, anthropomorphic cats and horses, and that our own existential crises and those of people around us also have a kind of ontological validity. 2. It’s not exactly trying to sync up to the cultural cycle of the internet, which can’t possibly work, but it sort of invests in cultural-capital startups. Half of the plot of season one was a homage to the relationship between Jesse and Walter back in Breaking Bad, which wasn’t even off the air yet when they started. I don’t think that they were trying to be topical or purposefully ephemeral, though --  instead, it was a kind of bet that Breaking Bad is a new classic. Now the latest season has a ‘coming out as asexual’ arc, which is as close as a TV show can get to purchasing Tumblr stock. 

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Every so often I need to remind myself what the point of my research is. I'm not exactly feeling it right now, but I guess it's like this: I think most of the meaning of a literary work lies in a 'vibe' or 'style' we sense when we consider all the myriad objects and phenomena that make up the imaginative landscape of the work as a kind of curated set of objects and phenomena. All of the machine-learning inspired theories and stuff in the dissertation are basically meant to tell a scientifically realistic story about how this might work.

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The reason superheroes as a genre goes so good with comics as medium is that they're both based on the mind's capacity to integrate basically any arbitrary bunch of posits into a functioning world.  

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