"Then I decided that this disorder and this dilemma, revealed by my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis--but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naïve it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system." - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 8.

"Is a verbal vision possible? Do not words, written or oral, interpose their opacity between readers and their visual experience of the world? Can language be effaced as such to the point where it become transparent to things, and can it from that point on display the thing itself in its truth even as it offers to the dazzled eye its simulacrum and its presence?" - Louis Marin, "Mimesis and Description," On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001): 64-84, 78-79.

How Now?

Yesterday, I set myself the task of reading Donald Kelley's "Intellectual History in a Global Age" a fine assessment of the tension between inside and out. And, more to the point, a bit of banner-waving for the linguistic turn. There were two moments that most intrigued me. To Kelley's mind, Ian Hacking, one of history of scien ce's most beloved philosophers of science, offers a lucid, cogent description of the inside-out problem in the following quote:

"External history is a matter of politics, economics, the funding of institutes, the circulation of journals, and all the social circumstances that are external to knowledge itself. Internal history is the history of individual items of knowledge, conjectures, experiments, refutations, perhaps. [...] We have no good account of the relationship between external and internal history." Hacking, "How Should we Do the History of Statistics?" The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago, 1991), 191.

Then, Kelley goes on to rescue Hacking's cliff-hanger:

"The one accessible place where internalist and externalist concerns seem to interact is language, which is internalized in individuals but which is also the object of science and which can be analyzed in terms both of both [sic] maker's knowledge and of social construction. [...] In these days of the linguistic and textualist turns one should substitute 'writing' for 'ideas,' 'sentiments' and 'thinking'; for it is in the effort of writing in particular that the subject -- philosopher, scientist, literary artist -- ventures out into the surrounding cultural space and perhaps historical notice. The author's thought is already a cultural construction, no doubt, but communication and dialogue gives it external form subject to interpretation and criticism." Kelley, "Intellectual History in a Global Age," Journal of the History of Ideas 66.2 (2005): 155-165, 164.

The questions that these snippets prompted in me might seem far too obvious. The first was, Where are pictures, even cultural practices writ large, in this schema? I think they, too, can be subject to the same sorts of analyses that Kelley applies to language. And the second was more of an observation, inspired by Kelley's upholding of language as the site of internal and external interaction. I began to think about how the dialectic that defines knowledge is the required interaction of the internal with the external, how the internal shapes the external and vice versa. Additionally, I'm wondering if it would be fair to say that ideas become knowledge once they move from one person to another. And if knowledge is social, it can't be made without individuals contributing to the circulation of ideas, generating new ideas to be swept into the tide. There will always be something necessarily cultural - or, at the very least, external to the thinker her/himself -- in the material with which each thinker works. But there is something mystifying about how each person synthesizes this social matter, and synthesizes it so differently.

I'm thinking about this on a pretty local level -- especially as I'm confronted with what strange alchemy writing is. I imagine there are multiple arguments that might be made for how peer-reviewed neuroscience papers suffer a different fate, and are much more social because they are subject to a stricter set of professional rules. Perhaps there are some practices that lean more towards the external end of the spectrum than the internal. And vice versa. My point is that I don't think we have entirely thrown out all that is internal. The reason why historians of science still have jobs is that we assess the manifold ways in which science - and knowledge, writ large - has come into being. This means we have a responsibility to both external and internal approaches. It means that we have to grapple with how thinkers secure the agency to build on each other's thoughts, and, just as important, we have to understand the institutional and cultural codes that define and refine their thinking. It's not just that new ideas change the way people think. They change social interaction. And what's more, social interaction changes the way people think, and the ideas they come up with, the ideas they distribute to one another. Whether we see this in pictures, turns of phrase, or other kinds of cultural practices (the organizing of information, etc.), the interaction of the external and internal is constantly at play. And it would be regrettable if we didn't think about this wondrous circuitry even harder. I think we have moved beyond the question of what material we might want to use in order to make this clear. Rather, the question that does linger is Hacking's: How can we best illuminate this exchange of inside-out, this mutually dependent shaping of knowledge?

For a few weeks now, I've been mulling the idea of reviving this blog. It's been a while since I put thoughts online in earnest. But I've come to the conclusion that writing a few times a week in a forum I know to be public (although frequented by few) would be a good way of keeping me honest and somewhat productive. I don't plan to do anything terribly radical with the space, as the aim isn't so different from what other bloggers do -- that is, collect things and thoughts that make enough of an impression on me that I have to tell someone else about them. My hope is that they will help me track some of my going interests, but, also, and more importantly, that they may be of some interest to people who stop by.

So, without further ado, the first in a little series of things that stir my admiration --

In early June 1962, while aboard the Queen Elizabeth, Nabakov granted an interview to a handful of journalists. He couldn't remember who asked what. But he remembered the questions and answers (and seems to have done some editing of both). I put an exclamation point next to this one:

"Still there must be things that move you--likes and dislikes.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting."

- Nabakov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill International, 1973): 3.

Images for Reviving the Weary

still from Hannah Schwarz, I Love the Body (2009)




Val Kilmer taking a photo of Ginny in front of Alice Neel's Ginny (1984)




Derek Fisher (and Kobe Bryant) at the White House on January 25th, 2010.

Barack Obama is the leader we can believe in. I cannot think of a political candidate I've ever wanted in office more; a person whose integrity stands heads and shoulders above the rest; and a man whose choice of words reflects not only a thoughtful individual but one who understands the ripple effects of his choices, both large and small.

I have always been proud of my country. But I am prouder tonight than I've been in a long while.

Undiscovered Country

One of my favorite end-of-year/beginning-of-year features anywhere is Slate's Annual Movie Club. Although writing under the auspices of a well-trafficked web magazine can always be hedged by the knowledge of (critical) readers, SAMC seems to have a freshness, a gentle banter that always helps put movie-going in perspective. (This being said, though I heartily empathize with Dana Stevens's kick-off "war movies conundrum," I found it less enticing than subsequent discussions the group has had over the past few days. Also, even though he shuffled over to New York Magazine last year, where is my beloved Edelstein?!) With Slate's round-up of critics, there's always a sense, too, that optimism is at stake. The hope of seeing a great movie is precisely that which makes us go back to the blackbox theater, or even slush through piles of VHS tapes in the one dollar bin. To find a great movie, we must bear through the rest, or at least have critics tell us which things films worth shelling out greenbacks for. Let it also be noted that there's always the occasional critic whose ideas about movie-making are the complete and total opposite of one's own that we know to love a movie when he/she has slaughtered it.

My point is that there are few great movies of yore (and present) that we encounter nowadays that we haven't had some previous exposure to, or at least some semi-consciousness about. There are so many movies on my list of must-sees -- derived from the lists of hard-core cinephiles -- that I hardly know where to begin. But my parents aren't as bedraggled by the lists of others, and are much more the cinematic risk-takers than I am: so much so that they will walk to our local public library every week to borrow three DVDs, all dependent on what's on the shelves and, they admit, the cover sleeve. Now that I'm on vacation and much of my entertainment is theirs, I was delighted when they came back recently with "Two For the Road". Though a self-proclaimed Audrey Hepburn fan, I had no idea what the movie was or what I was in for. (Then again, how could I pride myself on my personal movie watching cred? I only just saw -- and certainly enjoyed -- the first Indiana Jones this past year!)

But "Two for the Road" is the one movie I watched in 2006 with which I thoroughly fell in love. And not the kind of whimpering, self-effacing love of adolescence, but, rather, the adult version. This year was not so amorous in terms of movie-going for me: I was riveted by "The Queen" and I have yet to see "Children of Men." But traipsing -- and sometimes plundering -- down memory lane with the Wallaces was the best time I'd had since "Eternal Sunshine," not least because of its similar jogs of memory and candor about love. The framework for the film is the French country roads that Joanna (Hepburn) and Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) have traveled together--and the movie is lively and full enough that we can suspend our disbelief about their having taken the same route every time--but their scattered memories of being on the road are interwoven, quite seamlessly. First we see the couple on contemporary, embattled terms, in a plane, about to touch down on France. Then we have the pleasure of seeing them attempt to start their sad sloppy junk of a roadster; and later we see the two, fresh and naive, as they first meet, de-boarding a boat. All the while, we see moments of what was, what is, and an object lesson in how the past can never predict the future, even when the future is already here. (Indeed, such is the case for William Daniels, the man who plays efficiency consultant Howard Manchester, and then later turned out performances every week as Principle Feeny on "Boy Meets World.")

The running gag between them is also the cause of their first meeting -- when Mark loses his passport, Joanna finds it. But what makes this lost-and-found scenario symbolize bumpily married life all too well -- even better than the distraught, mute couples found so often in restaurants (and also refered toby Joel Barish in "Eternal Sunshine" as "the dining dead") -- is the trickery Joanna deploys and Mark's willing forgetfulness. On the plane or in the car Joanna will ask Mark if he has her passport, he'll search frantically when he can't find it, and, a few beats later, Joanna will fish it out of her bag or the glove compartment and hand it to him. Perhaps she does know him better than he knows himself -- such is the moral conveyed -- but it all feels like a set-up in which they both knowingly participate with each other, for each other. She waits just long enough and he is just forgetful enough to make this central metaphor for their relationship so central: she's seriously playful and he absent-mindedly bullish, but they somehow, together, form a unit. They can't live without each other. Perhaps this would be the case of Henry Mancini developed the soundtrack for all of our lives...

The tagline for "Two for the Road," as I discovered from watching the special feature trailers and IMDB, is "They make something wonderful out of being alive!" (as opposed to the imperative of the movie poster above.) It's sad to see the genuine joys of the film be so woefully, so exuberantly mischaracterized. It's not that the Wallaces don't have high highs and adorable affection for one another; it's that all these come in realistic doses wrought by their situations and not, apparently, by the script. Their wonderfulness is not a pre-determined deal, and that's what makes the film so electric -- we do wonder honestly about the couple for there are moments when it seems it just won't work out. Frederic Raphael, who also adapted "Eyes Wide Shut," seems to know something about relationships. He won't let their most precious, most silly moments be drenched in sap. And he seems to understand something that many others do not: there is a difference between living and making, and, in convincing us of love, the former outdoes the latter every time.