Note on Abstraction

The Latin means to draw away or to draw off; to separate or remove. When we say that Plato's forms are abstract, we mean that they are not here. And also that where the forms are, the things that they stand in for are not there either. So to be abstract means to be a thing apart, but also a stand-in, an epitomization, in this absence.

This is the sense of the earliest instance recorded by the OED, from the 14th century, by the chronicler John de Trevisa: "The names of the auctores been rehersede here, of whom thys presente cronicle is abstracte." And in fact, "abstract" has almost always been a document given in lieu of some other document, just as it is still for a house or a journal article. Thomas Hobbes reserves the name "abstract" for names "severed (not from Matter, but) from the account of Matter."

One of Ezra Pound's undergraduate classes in Latin poetry at Penn is described as "Introduction to the methods of textual and exegetical criticism... Practice in using the philological periodicals, and the books of reference that are most important to the teacher of Latin, as well as the dissertations and works that especially deal with epigrammatic literature." Pound, who wanted to study the great Latin poets themselves, never forgave his teachers, and afterwards each of his critical texts (and many of his poems) were long on selections of actual poetry, short on apparatus.

My own belief is that the rejection of literary "abstraction" in the modernist period is a function of the disintegration of this mode of handling information. The 19th-century is the age of the chancery and the scrivener, the hand-copied ledger and the index. The telegraph, typewriter, and carbon copies both made the meticulous summarization and reduplication irrelevant and, through the sheer proliferation of paper, made the traditional modes of transmission, circulation, and storage untenable. A turn-of-the-century advertisement for a vertical file cabinet reads like a modernist manifesto. Liberate yourself from the tyrannical weight of the past with these glorious new machines!

In the nineteenth century, to be lost in abstraction isn't to be contemplating algebra equations, but to be thinking about something other than what is immediately present. It's really only with the twentieth century that you begin to see "abstract" as a synonym for "nonrepresentational." There is virtually no contradiction between the modernist embrace of formal "abstraction" in the visual arts and the excoriation of verbal and critical "abstraction" in the literary arts. The two words simply do not refer to the same thing. At one point, one meaning was drawn off from the other, until the two collapsed, foundering under a common signifier.

Can't A Union Man Edit That Copy?

From Foreign Policy/FP Passport, "More Journalism Outsourced to India Than You Think":

A few weeks back, one of our editors blogged about a California newspaper outsourcing basic newspaper work like copy-editing and layout to India. The paper had enlisted Mindworks Global Media, an India-based company that helps Newspaper publishers cut costs and increase efficiency.

Lest you think the Orange County Register is the only American newspaper now being partly designed, edited, and produced in India, think again. The firm already boasts eight overseas clients, including the Miami Herald, and expects more business as Western print media publishers and editors continue to cut costs, Businessweek reports.

The firm "claims it helps publications cut costs 35% to 40%," which is certainly a temptation in today's rough media market, where ad revenues and readership for print media are declining rapidly. Mindworks' CEO Tony Joseph even lives in New York to be closer to his clients, even as their work is being shipped halfway across the world to his home country of India. That's globalization at work, my friends.

IMovie for Conversations

Watching this Bloggingheads between Matt Yglesias and James Kirchick reminds me of what I dislike about Bloggingheads, namely that it seems impossible to actually have a conversation in this form. It's like watching Mary Matalin and Bob Schrum go back and forth on Meet the Press, except with the pretense of deference between people who are actually terrible on TV. A form like this can work between two nimble, camera-savvy people who like each other but disagree on some things; let's say Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens would be the best case, while Ross Douthat and Yglesias would be less good. But even then, it's not the best form, and for nasal, curmudgeonly, and belligerent twenty-somethings, it's just disastrous.

Marc Ambinder's The Table is significantly better, but that's because it takes everything down a notch, coming a bit closer to the Charlie Rose / Terry Gross form of the relatively disinterested (but well-prepared) interviewer. I mean, with Sullivan, the Ambinder reaction shots (where he nods or does nothing) don't really add anything, except to establish that the two conversees actually are in the same room.

Part of the problem is the performance of the people who are having these conversations -- but (and this is a big but) I would like to believe that ordinary, non-telegenic people can have smart, compelling conversations that can be presented in an intimate and reasonably naturalistic way. And if we're going to do that, then I think we need some new technical tools to do that. Since I'm not really a technical person, I'm not sure exactly what that is -- but some kind of iMovie for conversations, a cheap, easy way to shoot and edit two or three people talking to one another, that can pull it together, in the same way that anyone can now pull together a pretty decent home movie with inexpensive tools, would benefit internet discourse tremendously, and maybe even contribute something both new and good.

A Little Quality Control, Please?

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein on the trouble with Google Books:

Google Books is digitizing books badly. The scans can be blurry, distorted, or chopped in half--and scanning problems affect the search function. There are books missing their first page. There are books missing their last page. There are books missing random chunks of pages. There are books with pages in the wrong order. There are inconsistencies (are triple-deckers scanned as one volume? As three?). And, of course, there is the sheer and utter uselessness of snippet view. (I just suffered through yet another snippet view that landed me in the margin. You know, the blank space on the page.) From an academic POV, this lack of interest in anything resembling quality control is not a minor glitch or superficial inconvenience.

As I've said on more than one occasion, I'm completely enamored with the idea of Google Books, and I have found all sorts of potentially wonderful material by using it. But far too much of that potentially wonderful material remains just that--potentially wonderful.

Memo to Scholars: Jesus Is Not Original

There's a new 1st-century BCE tablet that's making the scholarly rounds with a lot of missing and indecipherable text but which seems to talk about a Jewish messiah getting killed by the Romans and rising again in three days. The view presented in the NYT is that this should be scary for Christians, since it shows that their Jesus story is just another one of the messiah stories making the rounds around the low point in Roman-Jewish relations. “Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism.” But take it from an apostate: Christianity's validity doesn't rest on the idea of Jesus's story and its theology being brand-new. It rests on an interpretation of Jesus's life, teachings, and death in a history of Jewish prophecy and theology. So when you dig up texts before Jesus was born that talk about things that sound like Jesus's life, Christians for the most part don't say "Oh my god, Paul's a plagiarist," they say "hey, maybe there's another prophet foretelling Jesus's life." The Catholics spent centuries arguing that the Greek and Roman philosophers anticipated Jesus's theology. They can eat, digest, and excrete one more old tablet.

The New Exploitation: Nonexploitation

N'Gai Croai, "The Internet is the New Sweatshop":

When an executive wants to sound humane during a public address to the staff, he or she will trot out the well-worn phrase, "Our most valuable assets leave the building at the end of the day." Clichés are generally true, but this one may not be, thanks to the growth of user-generated content on the Internet. Whether they're creating content for sites like YouTube and Wikipedia, viewer-submitted news services like CNN's iReport or videogames like Spore and LittleBigPlanet, today's most valuable employees will most likely never set foot inside the building—or collect a paycheck. They may be teenagers posting videos of themselves dancing like Soulja Boy, programmers messing around with Twitter's tools to create cool new applications or aspiring game developers who want to create the next big thing. But what they all have in common is a somewhat surprising willingness to work for little more than peer recognition and a long shot at 15 seconds of fame. [Emphasis mine]

This last statement is highly doubtful. I mean, there are web enterprises that are totally geared to exploit the exchange value of all of your user data in exchange for a tiny, tiny amount of entertainment (coughFacebookAppscough). But Wikipedia and YouTube are actually good stand-ins that show what other users get out of their labor.

Wikipedia is the central node for the digital humanists, the people who diligently work to gather up information, digital and non-digital, and preserve it for public access. Digital humanists work for free, but generally only for projects that don't commercialize or monetize their information, or put it behind a firewall. This is the ethos of the open-source community, the music and movie bootleggers, and the helpful wing of the IT forum crowd (i.e. those guys who help you diagnose your HijackThis logfiles).

YouTube and to a greater extent Flickr overlaps with the digital humanists (especially those people who upload movie and TV clips, or who videotape themselves disassembling their laptops) but also includes the Web 2.0 crowd, usually casual users who really want to share their media with friends, family, or another smaller community. If your Soulja Boy video goes viral, great; but you made it to get your cousin and your suitemates to crack up. Call this the Livejournal ethos. These people are willing to accept that someone else profits from their data, but they really see it as a data service. More to the point, these sites actually work as a data service: they let their users do something that they wouldn't be able to on their own, i.e., they give their users real value.

The last crowd consists of the entrepreneurs, the people who post ads on Craigslist and Etsy and Ebay, who blog or make movies for profit or the hope of profit, the bands who dutifully upload MP3s and show listings to their MySpace pages, etc. Very, very few of these people think of themselves as being exploited; even more so than the Web 2.0 users, they see it as a fee for service (or in Craigslist's case, no fee at all).

So there are a lot of reasons why people "work" on these sites: to make money, to network, to share a social bond, to add to their knowledge, or to show off. But the active users, for the most part, don't get exploited because they get out as much or more value than they add. The money isn't in the active data anyways. It's in the passive data: your demographic information, your geographic location, your likes and dislikes, what sites you visit, and above all what you buy. "The internet" gives production tools away because they help to create and identify consumers. It makes no sense to wring our hands about what motivates the people to make their YouTube videos or Facebook profiles unless you're willing to examine the motivations of those who watch them, consume them -- or process them to facilitate future consumption.

Pro Patria (Hot Dogs and Fields of Grain)

Stars and Stripes Forever, Muppet-style:

Via LPS, who in addition to her brilliant title "the only acceptable expression of american nationalism", also notes "i think my favorite part is when sam eagle states one of the core american values to be keeping the world safe from weirdos!"

I'll add that this is made doubly awesome when he's interrupted by Animal and a terrific background shot of hot dogs getting covered by mustard.

Happy Anniversary to all American Weirdos (and Weirdo-Americans) everywhere.

The Trouble With Philosophy

Matthew Yglesias on the advantages and disadvantages of a philosophical education for political punditry. Pro:

I think studying philosophy as an undergraduate is excellent preparation for being a political pundit -- it's a lot of arguing, a lot of playing with words, and a lot of learning about how to make a contribution to a discussion without a lot of factual background on the subject at hand.

Con:

At the same time, these shared attributes of the disciplines can lead to some dangerous wrongheaded conclusions about specific things...To some extent I think Iraq, which generated a lot of discussion over a prolonged period of time, suffered less from this in the punditsphere (the trouble was more that a lot of people were operating with made up facts rather than with no facts per se) than have a lot of other issues. But I think discussion of Darfur, and then the brief moment of hype around invading Burma, and then again Zimbabwe from time to time tends to partake of rather a lot of this. Robert Mugabe and his regime have no real ethical claims on anyone, so, hey, why not invade?

And of course since it's all non-specialists out having the argument it's difficult to say with authority in detail what would likely go wrong with an invasion of Burma. What's needed is to recover the time-honored sense of a very strong predisposition against attacking other countries.

I say this a lot, but the three disciplines I have degrees in (mathematics, philosophy, and literature) have one thing in common: an aversion for the empirical. But -- in all of these fields I've specialized in history, politics, everyday objects, and other injections of the empirical. So what I seem to like is mastering beautiful, pure, abstract fields and messing them up with the contingent and particular.

I also like being a contentious omnivorous know-it-all, which is the best possible education for a blogger, no matter what kind.

Smash Song Hits

File under Awesomely Unknown Trivia: the first musical record to come with an album cover was Rodgers and Hart's Musical Comedy Hits in 1938. The designer was Alex Steinweiss, for Columbia Records, who went on to do a ton of graphically inventive jazz and musical album covers. (The original cast recording of South Pacific, for one.

One of the sides is "Falling in Love with Love," from that year's The Boys from Syracuse:

Falling in love with love is falling for make believe. Falling in love with love is playing the fool; Caring too much in such a juvenile fancy. Learning to trust is just for children in school.

Via Kottke.

Problems With Names Like Frida and Carrie

Sandra Loh breaks it down:

Is the mass media to blame (again!) for pushing women out of the workplace? Not so much. On our zeitgeist-setting TV shows, it's only the housewives who are desperate. Work is fun! The Manhattan working gals of Sex and the City, whose days revolve chiefly around dishing over cocktails, are essentially '50s suburban housewives, trophy wives of (in this case) glamorous if emotionally distant New York jobs -- skyscraper-housed entities with good addresses and doormen that handsomely fund their lifestyles while requiring that they show up to service them only infrequently, in bustiers and heels. I want a vague job like the one Charlotte has, in the art gallery she never goes to; or the lawyer job Miranda has (charcoal suits and plenty o' time for lunch with the gals); or Samantha's PR gig, throwing SoHo loft parties and giving blow jobs to freakishly endowed men (actually, that's the one job I don't want); I want to spend my days like "writer" Carrie, lolling in bed in her underwear, smoking and occasionally updating her quasi-bohemian equivalent of a MySpace page.

In real life, female journalists (particularly sex columnists) have frightening stalkers, dour editors who begin phone conversations with "This is not your best," and paychecks so thin they trigger not just an amusing episode in which some Jimmy Choos must be returned but years of fluorescent-lit subway rides to a part-time job teaching ESL at some community college on Long Island. In an ugly if typical turn, one's column is suddenly moved from the Manhattan section to the North Jersey "auto buy" section because of the arrival of a younger, hotter writer. In real life, workmen would unceremoniously peel Carrie's ad off the side of the bus and replace it with an ad touting the peppy new relationship blog of Miley Cyrus.

And:

Why aren't the women who are outnumbering men in undergraduate institutions leading the information economy? "Because they're dabbling," [Linda Hershman] snaps. Here's yet another Problem That Has a Name: Frida Kahlo.

Everybody loves Frida Kahlo. Half Jewish, half Mexican, tragically injured when young, sexually linked to men and women, abused by a famous genius husband. Oh, and a brilliantly talented painter. If I was a feminazi, the first thing I'd ban would be books about Frida Kahlo. Because Frida Kahlo's life is not a model for women's lives. And if you're not Frida Kahlo and you major in art, you're going to wind up answering the phones at some gallery in Chelsea, hoping a rich male collector comes to rescue you.