My new favorite blog is Bookshelf Porn, created by Anthony Dever. It makes me feel better that I had over 40+ boxes of books when I recently moved and makes me think that daydreaming about what my next bookshelves will look like (I haven’t unpacked yet) or hoping someone will buy me a Sapien bookcase for my birthday is normal behavior. I can’t lie, I have been reading on a Kindle as of late and this website makes me want to smash it with a hammer. (Once I finish what I am reading, of course.) I particularly loved the video from the Toronto bookstore Type at bottom. Way better than a toy store coming alive. That was always creepy. Postscript: If you live in this house below with the tree in the window, I would very much like to be your friend.

All Images re-posted from Bookshelf Porn

I’m kind of obsessed with The Penguin Great Ideas series and sad to report that they have just announced the end of this collection. I’m not sure what is better: the well-edited selection or the graphic design, which is total book porn. The slim volumes of important historical essays concerning politics, philosophy, nature, sex, science, war and religion are reprinted without all of the hoopla that tends to surround such historically important writing (three introductions, appendix, etc..) and the covers are raised, tactical bliss that makes you remember how good a book feels in your hands. Penguin has a long history of innovating the publishing world, including bringing paperbacks to the masses, employing high-end graphic designers, and even in the 1930′s creating a vending machine for books called “The Penguincubator.” I just snapped up a bunch of the Great Ideas at a book store this weekend and was curious about them so I started googling it and discovered that the fifth set of twenty was released this month rounding out an even 100 for those who like myself are not mathematically inclined. (Side note: If anyone wants to get the whole set for me for Christmas, I will kiss you. Many times.) An interesting thing is that considering the books are being sold individually the sales for each book are across the board with some surprisingly selling beyond expectations. The editor of the series, Simon Winder writes on the Penguin blog about releasing John Ruskin’s edition and selling 70,000 copies when Penguin can barely keep Ruskin’s titles in print. Here are some links to David Pearson’s website, the amazing graphic designer, with images of the first sixty books: Set One, Two and Three. I put up a few of my favorites.

One of the most interesting demi-myths of contemporary politics concerns neoconservatism as an intellectual movement and its rumoured leftist heritage. Oft commented upon, the Trotskyist origins of some of its early thinkers (Irving Kristol, James Burnham), and an apparent debt displayed in its evangelical policies of aggressively exported global ideological revolution, meant that for disillusioned leftists bobbing about in the seemingly un-navigable tides of postmodern liberal democracy it recreated some of the old certainties: better to be on one side, even if it’s the wrong side, than no side at all. Indeed, though it begs the question somewhat, is this need for a coherent and familiar political narrative (radical youth jading into reactionary zeal) not entirely indicative of just such a shift, as evinced by figures like Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya, that the desire to believe in this kind of myth demonstrates? This is part of exactly what is so impressive about the neoconservative project, the shamelessness of its authoritarian extremism. Leo Strauss made no bones about the need for an elite to create lies necessary to bind the republic to their will, and just what makes this principle so insidiously effective is the disengagement it correctly presumes, that the people will lap up the lie, because they too are lost without the old grand narratives of good versus evil.

All of which leads me to one of the areas that this manoeuvre makes itself most frequently apparent: language. The ideological reorientation of words traditionally associated with the progressive and emancipatory realm of political expression is something of which we see an ever increasing amount, and to which we seem to unable to formulate a staunch response. The excellent new book from the London-based academic Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, hones in on a particular facet this broad problem, and tackles it head on, armed with voluble wit, confidence and clarity of thought. We are dealing with “a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man ([Jacques-Alain] Miller), being pro-choice ([Jessica] Valenti), being pro-life ([Sarah] Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it”.

I’m aware that by contextualising the book in this way I’m performing a typical misogynist denial of the importance and specificity of feminism by making it part of the universal narrative of emancipation. For this I apologise, with the caveat that this is exactly what Power is doing, in reverse. By relocating feminism firmly back within this narrative, as she does in the first half of the text, she mounts a trenchant defence of the term from those who would use it for their own ends, as in the case of Palin, whose feminist belief in non-violence (all three of those terms so laughably questionable I’ve only resisted the urge to ring-fence each in a squall of ugly inverted commas by an act of tremendous willpower) finds expression only in her concern towards the unborn, or the Bush administration, who regularly invoked the lack of women’s rights over there in the middle east as another perfectly good reason for bombing them a lot. With great ease she thus demonstrates exactly why the coalition of the “Mawkish and Hawkish” can make no claim to the term, thereby locking out two of the four instances of troublesome reappropriation in one.

This astute dismissal of the claims of the right to the term sets up the rest of the text, which broadly concerns itself with the two remaining contested meanings and the one underlying major one, so far unmentioned. Over a series of quickfire chapters in which she engages with sex, fashion, the hijab, pornography and monogamy, she demonstrates that contemporary feminism must neither be about behaving like men nor imitating the characters of Sex & The City, while setting up her central point, which concerns political economy. On the one hand attacking the ‘feminization’ of the labour market, in which employment opportunities increasingly resemble those initially determined for women, all temporary contracts and zero benefits, she uses the other to cohere all the above arguments into an engaging critique of contemporary capitalism.

Part of an ongoing series published by zero books, which also includes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and David Stubbs’ excellent Fear of Music (subtitled why people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen and reviewed here by Andrew Lison), One Dimensional Woman doesn’t posture. Both highly provocative and eminently sensible, Power’s 81 pager demands to be snapped up and passed about. Highly recommended.

You could hardly accuse David Stubbs of being afraid of music. Since his student days as one of the principals of the esteemed Monitor fanzine, Stubbs has engaged with an impressive breadth of artists and genres from The Cocteau Twins to Eminem in an authorial style ranging from that of the workmanlike music journo biographer to his humorous Mr Agreeable persona (who is anything but). His latest book, however, eschews many of the trappings of music journalism for an approach which is as much concerned with art history as it is with music criticism per se. Fear of Music: Why People get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen is very clearly a personal work for Stubbs, his attempt as an aficionado of avant-garde music to come to terms with its enduring unpopularity. The book’s premise, clearly stated in its subtitle, is that “modern” (i.e., 20th- and 21st-century) visual art enjoys a comparative wealth of patronage and popular engagement next to experimental music from the same period, despite the fact that both disciplines are motivated by similar (in some cases, identical) concerns. Although it never quite fully answers its foundational question, Fear of Music does provide the necessary background for interested readers to formulate their own answers while at the same time raising interesting questions about the relationship of the arts across disciplines.

In many ways, Fear of Music is best read as a companion or response to Alex Ross’s surprise bestselling overview of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise. Where Ross is disciplinary and historical, seeking to carefully elucidate the circumstances and rationale by which compositional music turned away from the heights of harmonic convergence and towards a variety of new organizational and even “non-organizational” aleatory systems over the course of the last century, Stubbs explores the relationship between the disciplines of non-representational art and experimental music, comparing their paths through the avant-garde over the past hundred years. Fear of Music thus gives us a highly selective and personal history of the avant-garde, with special attention to the moments of synchronicity between music and visual art, such as Wasilly Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg’s aborted correspondence, the Fluxus movement’s relationship to both popular and experimental music through figures like Yoko Ono and Tony Conrad, and rock group/”media terrorist” foundation the KLF’s assault on the 1990s British art scene. In doing so, Stubbs repeatedly contends that such musical figures are not taken seriously, or are somehow considered “crazy” in a way that their visual counterparts are not by a public with no interest in considering the well-founded rationale upon which their works are based.  

This problematic, while undoubtedly accurate at times, is not without, well, its own problems, as there are obviously other reasons aside from perceived insanity that might explain the general public’s aversion. Firstly, there is the issue of the qualitative difference between the media deployed in each discipline. Of primary importance, of course, is the temporality of their methods of reception: to appreciate a work of music it must be heard diachronically, that is to say in a linear fashion where one is a more-or-less captive audience for the duration of the piece. Visual art, however, can be experienced synchronically, with viewers free to spend hours in front of a piece in deep contemplation or, alternately, mere minutes or even seconds before (in a museum setting) flitting off to the next piece. Even granting the rather large distinction between quality appreciation time and a tourst-style museum blitz, the fact remains that a casual patron could easily experience the length and breadth of the Tate Modern’s offerings over the duration of a handful of symphonies. This is a problem, of course, that not only music but cinema and other diachronic media face.

Another qualitative difference between music and visual art is the physicality of their reception; in extreme circumstances, unpleasant “noise” can provoke a visceral, fight-or-flight response on a purely reflexive level. Depending on its volume, it may even be physically harmful. By contrast, while similar effects can be achieved in the visual medium they are much more difficult to produce. Indeed, where producible, they are generally only found in the relatively recent work of postmodern artists deploying strobe lights or headache-inducing neons. That is to say work which both stylistically and technologically follows the modernist avant-garde by several decades. Duchamp, Rothko and Pollock may have produced work that was puzzling to behold or disturbing to the psyche, but they were not generally capable of provoking the same physical reaction that being exposed to Kontakte (not to mention Merzbow) at the proper volume might.

This, in turn, raises another concern: for a writer with such a broad understanding of music, it is rather hard to pin down precisely what it is that constitutes “experimental music” for Stubbs. At one point early on he seems to exclude both tonal music and minimalist music from this definition, seemingly leaving us with a small cadre of artists breathing the rarefied air of post-serial composition (e.g., Boulez, Henry, Xenakis, and, yes, Stockhausen). Yet when considering Fear of Music‘s problematic under these narrow constraints, one might wonder precisely which quality it is that links Rothko and Stockhausen together in this argument. Is it their style? The effect they aim to produce on their audience? Their “difficulty”? The era in which they were both created? Some of these aspects line up, while others almost certainly do not.

Finally, there is the issue of the relationship between art forms and the era in which they are produced, and it is here that experimental compositional music can really stake a unique claim, for the curious thing about the mid-20th century compositional avant-garde is that they find themselves always already anachronistic. Theodor Adorno, writing about Schoenberg in his Philosophy of Modern Music, argued that the public feared and shunned the composer’s music not because it was strange, but because it offered uncomfortably familiar parallels with modernity: “The deepest currents present in this music proceed, however, from exactly those sociological and anthropological conditions peculiar to that public. The dissonances which horrify them testify to their own conditions.” Some fifty years later, it is precisely the opposite that obtains; we are by now not only inured to the reorganization of daily life around new, more-efficient-yet-dehumanizing systems but so far down the road of structural systematization that it seems as if we have come out the other end into a world where anything is possible, yet nothing is absolute. In a word, postmodernity. Under such circumstances it is not the “forward thinking” aspects of the serial and post-serial composers that seem foreign to us, but rather their tenuous links to the past, their deployment of orchestral instrumentation, the ways they cling to the remnants of standard musical notation even as they try to reinvent it. All of which is simply another way of saying that it is next to impossible to comprehend the historical significance of post-serial music today without reference to not only Schoenberg and Mahler, but something like acid house. Stubbs is aware of this of course, quoting Stockhausen’s hilarious response to a packet of records sent to him by The Wire in which he comes across as utterly befuddled by contemporary electronic production, but this is the bind that the composer and his contemporaries find themselves in vis-à-vis an audience: their time is perpetually out of joint.

Naturally, these concerns are all acknowledged to a greater or lesser extent in the text and the book’s commitment to both a historical and contemporary perspective on the avant-garde means that it eventually ranges far away from “difficult” composers and out into the wide world of non-academic experimental music from Sun Ra and Faust to Captain Beefheart and My Bloody Valentine. If the book’s title is somewhat misleading in that it does not really answer its initial question – and what true fan of a genre so dedicated to raising questions could really profess to offer a definitive explanation? – it makes up for it by offering instead a very human (and humorous) perspective on an often po-faced genre, backing it up with a wealth of historical context and highlighting a number of important inequities between the visual and aural art worlds. Who could deny, for example, that experimental music and sound art could benefit greatly from just a fraction of the popular attention and institutional patronage that the visual and literary arts receive instead of being left, as it so often is, entirely to the vagaries of the marketplace? In this sense, Fear of Music may be the first step in overcoming this societal anxiety, at least for readers interested enough to pursue the issues it raises.

There is a moment in The Meaning of Sarkozy when prominent French philosopher Alain Badiou brings up Sarkozy’s critique of May 1968 in France.  Sarkozy famously argued that the radical movement blurred the lines between good and evil; to Badiou, however, May 1968 is notable for clearly articulating differences between good and evil.  This book is Badiou’s attempt to draw a line in the sand once again.

The Meaning of Sarkozy opens in the run-up to the 2007 French presidential election: a gloomy moment for left-leaning French citizens, as they waited for Badiou’s “rat man,” “Sarkozy l’américain,” to trample over weak-kneed socialist candidate Ségolène Royal.  Badiou describes the presidential race as a choice between “fear” (“the twitchy accountant” Sarkozy) and “fear of fear” (the “hazy bourgeoise” Royal); fear, as we know, won the day.  But Badiou is less interested here in analyzing that fear and where it comes from than in taking on the leftist malaise that came to a head in France in 2007.  For in The Meaning of Sarkozy Badiou takes what he calls “depression” and fights it with all the force that a dedicated soixante-huitard can muster.

The text can be divided into two parts.  The first is shorter, and it deals with the question put forth in Badiou’s title: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (which translates somewhat awkwardly in English to “of what is Sarkozy the name?”).  Badiou’s answer here is relatively simple, for it takes Sarkozy at his own words when, during his election campaign, he famously attacked the legacy of May 1968 in France, advocating a “liquidation” of the movement once and for all.  This is what Sarko represents, then.  Not just global finance or capitalist order, but a world in which there is no other possibility, where emancipation is worse than impossible, worse than criminal.

Having outlined this bleak prospect, for the rest of the book Badiou sketches an emancipatory politics or, as he boldly puts it, a “communist hypothesis,” that he resolutely refuses to think of as dead.   Frankly taking it for granted that communism (which, he notes, “is what Kant called an ‘Idea’, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme”) is the right hypothesis, Badiou is brilliant at getting across what is at stake in abandoning emancipatory determination: “Sartre said in an interview, which I paraphrase: if the communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not practicable, well, that means that humanity is not a thing in itself, not very different from ants or termites.  What did he mean by that? If competition, the ‘free market’, the sum of little pleasures, and the walls that protect you from the desire of the weak, are the alpha and omega of all collective and private existence, then the human animal is not worth a cent.”  For Badiou the communist hypothesis represents the hope that humanity can overcome subordination, division of labor, and class structure; all that is left after such a hypothesis, then, is animality; in such a scenario the philosopher would have no function.

Like much of Badiou’s work, the book has been criticized as overly abstract, but this abstractness is rooted more in the fact that Badiou is explicitly writing in opposition to what he calls “repetition” than any lack of intellectual rigor or radical commitment.  Badiou’s hope is to posit something else, “a Real woven out of the impossible,” a new communist ideology that can oppose the capitalist order, rather than something like “the reconstruction of the Left” or the “reform of the Socialist Party.”  This is a notoriously hard space to navigate, and it’s probably unfair to fault Badiou for not offering any concrete model for a new emancipatory politics in this thin volume.  If Badiou offers no five-step plan for something new, moreover, it comes across as more of an advantage than not: throughout the text the closer he gets to anything prescriptive, the more he falters (see his suggestive but generally clumsy sections on “the foreigner”).  Indeed, if just for bravely and lucidly reminding his reader of the stakes of any real malaise, his attempt to fight leftist depression and disenchantment is an eminently useful endeavor.

Alain Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy is out now in hardcover, published by Verso.  Badiou gave a somewhat awkward interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk back in March that is now online at google video.