cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( Jan. 4th, 2020 11:45 am)
I’ve been alternating between episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s remarkable CNN show Parts Unknown, a Middle East-inflected dance record by a group called Acid Arab, which I’m writing a feature about, and the audiobook of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Alternating between these texts is leading to thought-provoking juxtapositions.

I’m nowhere near to arriving at a settled position on Bourdain’s relationship to the Orient. Having finally watched the somewhat infamous Tokyo Nights episode of Parts Unknown, I am not about to claim that he evaded the pitfalls of occidental fetishization. But I do think that the trajectory of the show demonstrates a sincere effort on his part to subject his own fetishistic impulses to critical scrutiny. The bar is set very low for Americans, when it comes to Orientalism, whether of the Near, Middle, or Far East. But Bourdain strikes me as one of the few prominent white celebrities to come anywhere near clearing it on a consistent basis.
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cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( May. 6th, 2017 12:00 am)
It is hard to be here. As I much as part of me wants to return, I clearly exhaust my will in other ways. But I can at least muster up the energy to maintain a tradition:
There is never, if you like, an interpretandum that is not already interpretans, so that it is as much a relationship of violence as of elucidation that is established in interpretation. Indeed, interpretation does not clarify a matter to be interpreted, which offers itself passively; it can only seize, and violently, an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter with the blows of a hammer.

One sees this already in Marx, who interprets not the history of the relations of production but a relation already offering itself as an interpretation, since it appears as nature. Likewise, Freud interprets not signs, but interpretations. Indeed, what does Freud discover beneath symptoms? He does not discover, as is said, "traumas"; he brings to light phantasms with their burden of anguish, that is, a kernel that is itself already in its own being an interpretation (Michel Foucault, "Marx, Nietzsche, Freud" in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 275-276).
I don't have the time to write very much at the moment. But I was thinking the other day of all the conversations I've had with my daughter during her years of teenage struggle, and realized that I'm often just trying to keep her interested in herself as an object of interpretation. Maybe that's not the right approach, clinically speaking. But I have a hunch that remaining interested and interesting for oneself is a good way to push the darkness away for a little bit longer.
cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( May. 6th, 2016 12:00 am)
Foucault on Nietzsche Freud and Marx


Je jouis dans les paves


Jean-Joseph Goux on Marx Nietzsche and Freud from Symbolic Economies
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It had been quite a while since I wrote anything to be published under my byline, both for the reasons enumerated in my last entry and because many of the "hot-button" topics circulating right now are not ones I feel comfortable making public statements about. But I did finally manage to get a piece done for Souciant and, what is more, one that is pertinent to a subject that I have typically avoided like the plague, thanks to a number of very unpleasant experiences over the years.

I'm not sure whether "People in Glass Houses" ends up doing what I'd hoped, but am pleased that readers have had a number of different takes on it, since I was striving for as much open-endedness as possible. Since I have been torn between the compulsion to write about my mom and the difficulty of tackling such a huge subject right now, I was also glad to have a way to do so indirectly. If nothing else, the finished product does have a certain symmetry, since it manages to deal obliquely with my reflections both on being her son and on Israel.

I want to share a portion of the piece here in order to frame something I just read with interest. This passage comes towards the beginning:
It wasn’t until I was five that I learned how wrong I had been about the idiom. My mother was listening to coverage of the Yom Kippur War on the radio one afternoon — she didn’t watch much television news — when she suddenly blurted out, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Since I could barely comprehend what was happening in literal terms — 1973 was a difficult year for five-year-olds, with confusing stories about the Vietnam War and peace process, the Pattie Hearst kidnapping, the OPEC oil embargo etc. — this statement turned my world upside down. Although I immediately realized that the participants in the conflict couldn’t all live in glass houses, I had no idea whom my mother meant to admonish with what I now understood to be an idiom with potentially broad application.

I distinctly remember how disorienting it felt having to revise my conception of the world on the fly. Because I was the sort of child who tended to construct entire worlds from a single discovery, I had a lot invested, by this time, in my literal interpretation of “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Indeed, it had evolved into an antipathy towards any building with too many windows. No matter how compelling such a structure might be, that didn’t justify putting its occupants at risk.

This prospect of total transparency was both thrilling and scary to me. Although I was not a stone thrower by disposition — compared to most boys, I was easy for my parents to handle — I still liked the idea of being able to take aim at the world from what military strategists deem a secure position. And the alternative, frankly, was alarming. What if someone could see the silly games my friend Mark and I played in the private reaches of our old farmstead, inside the crumbling rooms of the old red barn or out in the strange walled “garden” only accessible through its back door?

Although it seems strange to me now that I was troubled by such concerns, they were fully in keeping with the times. I was in pre-school from 1971 through 1973, when the anti-establishment paranoia of the late 1960s was matched step for step by the reactionary paranoia that fueled the backlash against counter-cultural excess. When you think back on that era, it’s a wonder that anyone was surprised by Watergate. Everybody had something to hide and everyone else was desperate to reveal it.
Forgive me for quoting at such length, but it's necessary in this case.

Anyway, I was taking a break from helping Skylar with her Spanish -- or, to be more precise, from trying to revive my Spanish enough so that I can help her -- when I picked up a recent issue of Monocle magazine, which has long both disturbed and fascinated me, for reasons I explained in a Souciant piece from a couple years ago. In one of the publication's reports, titled "Model Factories", I came across this intriguing passage:
It wouldn't do to have any secrets at Snow Peak, the Japanese outdoor brand. To describe the company's rural HQ and factory as transparent would be an understatement. Apart from the bathrooms, every room in the award-winning building is glazed for maximum visibility: the open-plan office, the meeting rooms, the shop, the factory floor and even the president's office. The conference "room" doesn't have any walls at all and has a clear view of what everyone in the company is up to. Everywhere there are views of the mountains that surround this unique set-up, which was designed by Taisei Construction. "We wanted a headquarters that really connected to nature, that related to what we do as a company," says president Tohru Yamai, whose father, a mountaineer, started the business back in 1958.

When Yamai moved the Niigata-based company from urban quarters in nearby Sanjo city to 165,000 sq m of open space in the hills two years ago, it sparked a revolution in the way the company was organised: no more individual offices, no more closed doors and no more colonising of desk space. Yamai is an admirably laid-back leader, whose one rule is that nobody sits in the same place two days running. Accountants, product designers and sales managers are all mixed in together in one workroom and the factory is just along the corridor. "This office not only looks different," says Yamai. "It has changed the way we operate too." Departments didn't always see eye-to-eye in the more conventional set-up but this way, "we're all in it together."
My first response to this description was very much like it would have been as the five-year-old I describe in my Souciant piece from yesterday, simultaneously excited and disturbed. Even if the bathrooms are exempt from the mandate to be as transparent as possible, the idea that secrets have been shunted aside by architecture still sits uneasily with me.

Part of this has to do with the anxieties perpetually in circulation about social media these days. And a large part, to get more specific, has to do with the fact that I've taught Dave Eggers' novel The Circle to my Critical Thinking About New Media course the past two semesters, pairing it with the "Panopticism" chapter from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and other academic articles about surveillance and privacy in the modern and now increasingly digital world. Routed through a revisiting of the discussions we held earlier in the semester about Immanuel Kant's essay "What Is Enlightenment?", these classes on The Circle were favorites of mine from a pedagogical standpoint, but also quite alarming.

I can't tease out everything that came to mind when reading about the Snow Peak HQ and factory's extreme transparency right now -- I need to get back to Spanish, for one thing -- but do want to flag some of the issues it brings up. Obviously, the idea that making what had been secreted away as visible possible is not a new one. It was part and parcel of the Enlightenment, conceptually, and in also seamlessly interwoven with the logic of Modernist architecture I touch on in yesterday's Souciant piece. So the initial thrill I felt reading about this place and what is was constructed to achieve feels a little misplaced, somehow, since it is only innovative relative to the backsliding that has left the project of Enlightenment unfinished. And yet, the ideal of transparency still has great power to compel us, as the opening pages of The Circle deftly attest.

Although I am willing to believe that Snow Peak president Tohru Yamai believes what he is saying in the Monocle article, I can't help but wonder how hierarchy fits into his "daring" business model. Everybody can see what everybody else is doing, yes, but not from a position of equality. The factory worker who is under constant observation from his fellow workers and his supervisors presumably has a different response to this enforced transparency than the managers who, despite having two-way glass walls to contend with, still have the authority to manage. But I should probably do some research on Snow Peak -- this is their American website -- before speculating further. For now, I just want to register how perfectly this account of the company's approach dovetails with what I was thinking about as I reflected on the idiom "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( May. 6th, 2014 12:00 am)
I find myself, once again, at the crossroads, warding off the hellhounds with a bracing dose of Herb:
The more the autonomous ego becomes superfluous, even retarding and disturbing in the functioning of the administered, technified world, the more does the development of the ego depend on its "power of negation," that is to say, on its ability to build and protect a personal, private realm with its own individual needs and faculties. Yet this ability is impaired on two grounds: the immediate, external socialization of the ego, and the control and management of free time -- the massification of privacy. Deprived of its power of negation, the ego, striving to "find identity" in the heteronomous world, either spends itself in the numerous emotional and mental diseases which come to psychological treatment, or the ego submits quickly to the required modes of thought and behavior, assimilating its self to the others. But the others, in the role of competitors or superiors, evoke instinctual hostility: identification with their ego ideal activates aggressive energy. The externalized ego ideal guides the spending of this energy: it does not drive the conscience as the moral judge of the ego, but rather directs aggression towards the external enemies of the ego ideal. The individuals are thus mentally and instinctually predisposed to accept and to make their own the political and social necessities which demand the permanent mobilization with and against atomic destruction, the organized familiarity with man-made death and disfiguration.
Now all I need is a J.G. Ballard chaser!
cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( Jan. 7th, 2014 05:58 pm)
I'm not a very superstitious person. Aside from insisting that the Cal basketball at the free-throw line is bound to miss, I don't do much to placate the gods. But sometimes I find myself brought up short by an experience that forces me to rethink my agnostic worldview. Yesterday offered an especially powerful example.

I was sitting with a colleague, discussing the difficulty of the past few months. Although my primary focus was my daughter's struggles to deal with the difficulty of being fifteen, I was also reflecting on the ways in which those struggles were brought to a head by the death of Kim's dad. I was about to talk about how I was trying to deal with my own feelings for him, writing about him here over the past week, when my phone rang.

When I looked down to see who was calling and whether I could send that person to voicemail -- I hate interrupting in-person conversations to talk on the phone -- I was surprised to see that my usual screen for incoming calls was absent. Indeed, there was no indication whatsoever that a call was coming in at all. Yet, the phone was definitely ringing.

Thinking that my phone might have locked up, which has been happening more frequently since the latest Android update, I tried everything I could to get control of the phone back so that I could hang up. But nothing worked. Strangely, though, instead of the call going to voicemail, the phone seemed to answer itself, as if it were possessed of a mind of its own.

And then I heard Carl's voice, clear as a bell, informing me of the time and channel for a game we were supposed to watch together. Even more oddly, though this call had to be a recording from before last April, when he first went into the hospital, the time and channel -- ESPN at 6pm -- matched up with the college football BCS National Championship game later that day, one he and I watched together every year during our years in Tucson except for 2007, when he was in the ICU with MRSA pneumonia.

I had been thinking all morning that I would be sad not watching the game with him and wondering whether it would be excessive to write about that feeling right after having written about the 49ers-Packers game the previous day. I couldn't help but think that he was calling, not only to say that he would be watching with me in spirit, but that I needed to acknowledge that our relationship had changed into something that can't be explained by science alone.

It was deeply unnerving, but also miraculous. Later, when I tried to tell Kim about it, she told me that it was more than she could handle. I understand that response. It was very hard for me to maintain my composure in front of my colleague during the experience. But I am very glad it happened.

I recognize, mind you, that from a Mythbusters-type perspective, this uncanny moment can be explained as a by-product of all the ways in which our lives are recorded these days without our ever having to undertake the task in a conscious manner. My phone had clearly been set up, at least for a while, to direct voicemail, which normally expires after a short time, to some sort of archive, though it no longer does so. Carl's call from the beyond was a semi-random glitch, just like when I pull my phone out of my pocket and find it open to an app I haven't selected, even though its touchscreen was supposedly locked.

And yet, despite the plausibility of this explanation, how can I not feel that some higher power, even if it was generated in my own mind, was at work in this experience. It left me feeling shaken, but not in the sense that something bad does. I liken it to what being picked up by a giant might like (or what it's like for our cats to be picked up by us!).
cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( Jan. 1st, 2014 02:51 pm)
I'm not even going to bother with my usual prefatory remarks. I haven't been able to write much of substance lately, at least in part due to the difficulties I alluded to in my last post. I have managed to crank content for Souciant several times per month, but most of it has been of the off-the-cuff, short-form kind, particularly the pieces I write for our Randomizer and Sticking Points features.

I did write a few pieces in the fall -- I'm including August, since Skylar was in school and I was teaching then -- under my own byline and was happy with them, by and large. Strangely, my most productive month in this regard was October, which would probably seem to have been the most stressful to an outside observer, since Kim's father died on the 2nd. That said, I've always been the sort of person, as my therapy is reminding me of, to box up stress and unpack it later, over time, which may explain why November and December were less productive. Not that those months were devoid of stress, mind you!

Anyway, here's the rundown on what I published as "Charlie Bertsch":
• a long review essay on my former student and friend Justin St. Germain's superb memoir Son of a Gun, which I highly recommend to all of you;

• an autobiographical review of a Deerhunter concert I attended in Phoenix, the last event I was able to attend before my father was confined "temporarily" to a wheelchair, which strikes me as odd now both because it seems so long ago that I could do that sort of thing without weeks of advance planning and because I have written so little about music lately (and indeed have listened to so little music of late);

• the tribute I wrote for my father-in-law during the week after his passing, featuring photos of the work space in his dimly lit garage that I worked very hard to get right (one of which I posted here on LJ without comment);

• a piece about the government shutdown in Washington D.C. in which I further elaborated on the "late Weimar" analogy I've been developing for a while;

• a short photo essay on Watts Towers, documenting the few hours of meaningful alone time I was able to secure for myself during the insane -- for me -- trip we took to Disneyland for Skylar's birthday, in which I ended up driving the 500 miles between Tucson and Los Angeles four times in a few days;

• a review of the Alexander Payne film Nebraska, which I was lucky enough to see before its national release, thanks to Kim's offering me a ticket;

• a review essay on the first two Hunger Games films that I am especially proud of, which concludes with the following lines: "When every possible refuge is potentially under surveillance, the only secrets worth keeping are those that can survive the light of day. Exposure can kill as easily as a knife, but you are more likely to survive if you acknowledge that you are always already exposed.";

• a short piece prompted by photos of an IKEA in Germany in which I muse, in a roundabout way, on what that nation's role in the European Community is doing to its cultural legacy;

• and, finally, the rather strange autobiographical piece Souciant published yesterday, in which I riff off a photograph of graffiti in Stuttgart to reconsider the concept of Heimat and my own feelings about it
That last piece is more peripatetic than I generally like my writing to be, but my interest in tackling the topic from several different angles made it hard to tighten up its structure. Plus, it's not like Montaigne stayed zealousy focused on his central thesis.

Anyway, that gives a decent sense of what I've been up to while not posting here. I do post regularly to Facebook, since it is so easy to do from my phone, but that doesn't count as real writing in my book. I would like to find a way to do more work that isn't cobbled together for Souciant on a tight deadline, but the priority there has to be the composition of truly long-form pieces, such as academic essays or even a book. Assuming I make headway on that sort of thing, though, I will probably share bits and pieces here to build my presence back up.
I'm probably the last person who should be writing about the link between memory and our sense of smell. As anyone who knows me well will attest, my allergies and the medications I take for them have rendered me insensitive to a vast array of odors. Someone will walk into a room and declare, "That smells terrible! How can you just sit there?" But despite having been right near the source of the offense, I will be baffled by the query.

Having said that, my sense of smell has improved a good deal in recent years. Ever since I finally consented to steroid treatments for my asthma and allergies -- treatments which, it must be noted, I do take protracted breaks from whenever possible -- I have been experiencing moments of olfactory clarity now and then. Suddenly, the keen perception of an odor will distract me from whatever I'm doing and compel me to a deeper mindfulness. Even when the smell is unpleasant, this heightened awareness is a welcome change from my how I used to experience the world,

I'm starting to wonder, though, whether my past was really as aroma-deprived as I believed. Not only am I noticing smells a lot more than before, I'm finding that memories of my pre-steroid days have a way of flooding into consciousness to accompany those smells. Recently, for example, I had an intense, smell-triggered recollection that inspired me to pursue this topic further. I was cleaning up in the front bathroom of my parents' apartment after helping my mom off the toilet and wheeling her into the dining room when I was suddenly transported back to my teenage years in the Washington D.C. area.

The strange part is that even though the combination of lingering smells in the bathroom was not particularly pleasant, it made me recall one from a place with which I have highly positive associations: the Smithsonian Institution. More specifically, as I soon realized, it reminded me of being inside the Museum of Natural History. Not the National Gallery, the Air and Space Museum or any of the other buildings on the Mall. Those smell differently. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more it become clear that many of them have a unique aroma that I identify with them or, to be more accurate, an aroma which I have used to identify them.

Because I spent my those years living in a suburban Maryland house without air conditioning, where the midnight temperature was regularly in the 90s with a relative humidity that often seemed to be approaching that figure as well, I spent as much of the summer as possible in the District. I'd get up early, despite my night owl proclivities, to accompany my father on his drive to work. I would then sit with him for a while in his office while he read the newspaper as he waited for the workday to begin, reading the articles he would periodically pass my way. Then, when public buildings started to open, I would head out on my peripatetic adventures, all of which were planned to provide extended sojourns in buildings with excellent air conditioning.

Since this was the era of the personal computer's ascendancy, I would frequently stop by the showrooms near my father's building at 16th and M Street NW. For a time, I would spend long hours laboriously entering programs into the Texas Instruments machine with a novel color graphics display at ComputerLand so that I could show off its brilliance and, I hoped, my own. Then, when Apple introduced the Macintosh to great fanfare, I shifted my allegiance to the store that would let me have extended sessions exploring its exciting features. I do remember being troubled by the way the latter were idiot-proofed and inaccessible to the sort of coding I was capable of. But the graphical user interface was too compelling to pass up.

These and other computer emporia were characterized by the same bland neutrality that characterized the consulting firms, non-profits and financial institutions in that part of Washington D.C., the "K Street Corridor" that was attracting so much attention in the Reagan Era, when lobbyists were practically celebrities. And yet for all of their deliberate blandness, these places had a smell that I can now recall quite distinctly, one defined by the conflict between hot electrical technology and air conditioning turned way down, a kind of olfactory storm front that made the air prickle, for an aspiring tech-head like possible, with the air of possibility.

When I was really in need of cool-down, though, I made my way to the Smithsonian. Something about the need to ward off decay and the high ceilings of those museums made them monuments to the potential of artificial temperature control. The Air and Space Museum was the best of all. Sometimes I would walk inside and just sit on a bench to breathe in the absence of heat and humidity. But all the buildings on the Mall were attractive to me for their air conditioning. At the National Gallery's West Wing, the marble reinforced the sense of cool. And at the Natural History Museum, the groups of school-age children and rather dated displays conspired to soften the air, making it feel warm without actually being warm.

In retrospect, I suppose the Natural History Museum, being older than the rest of the main Smithsonian exhibition areas, retained the aroma of preservation methods that left stronger, less pleasant smells than the ones deployed in recent decades. And the older ductwork no doubt contributed to this effect, which was never overpowering. My guess is that what I was smelling in the bathroom was similar enough to those traces that it conjured the memory of going there on hot days. I also suspect that the incongruity of the involuntary association, that conjoining of a present to be endured with a past fondly recalled, made the sensation particularly strong and, yes, memorable.
cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( Aug. 17th, 2011 11:18 am)
Just now I was thinking about what I should do in the thirty minutes I have before I take my mom to another doctor's appointment and wandered into my office to look at the bookshelves there. I pulled my German paperback edition of the first volume of Capital down, since I mean to at least partially reread it soon. But it was clearly too intense for such a short window of opportunity.

While I was retrieving it, I glanced over at the adjoining bookshelf that holds much of my collection in twentieth-century leftist thought. I saw books by Rudolph Rocker, Antonio Gramsci and, my personal favorite, Walter Benjamin. While I'd rather read them, especially in English, than tackle the small print and yellowed paper of my German edition of Marx's masterpiece, it felt like a betrayal and, what is more, one consistent with a disturbing tendency in post-1960s theory circles, where primary sources are neglected in favor of books kinda-sorta about them.

So I held on to the Marx and made it out into the kitchen when my thoughts drifted to Lord of the Rings, which I began rereading as part of a contest with my twelve-year-old. Given how little time I have, I told myself, it would make more sense to make a little headway in The Two Towers and return to Marx under more favorable circumstances. But then that plan also flooded me with guilt, since I would clearly be taking the easy way out.

Stumped, I decided that I should at least try to think about J.R.R. Tolkien in relation to Marxism before sitting down to read them. That got me thinking that I should try to read fantasy literature that directly influenced Tolkien, maybe something by George Macdonald, so that I could compare an approach to counter-factual worlds produced in a Victorian context to the one that Tolkien took with the Great Depression and World War II as a backdrop.

From there I started pondering the modernity of Lord of the Rings, the fact that, even though it's a deeply melancholic story that celebrates what is lost with Max Weber's Entzauberung der Welt, the prose is decidedly modern in feel, particularly when juxtaposed with The Silmarillion, where Tolkien was striving for lexical and syntactical "antiquing" akin to the sort Edmund Spenser deployed in The Faerie Queen.

And then I remembered Walter Benjamin, who was deeply preoccupied with our relation to the recent past and, in particular, the ways in which modernity can make less then a century's remove seem vaster somehow than the twenty-five hundred years that separate us from the pinnacle of classical Greek culture. In Lord of the Rings, I realized, the distant past is more present for the elves than what happened relatively recently.

Focusing on Tolkien's elves then reminded me of the insight that the genius of his fantasy world lies in the way it treats time, the fact that each species has a different lifespan and a concomitant idiosyncrasy of perception. If elves, dwarves, humans and hobbits and humans all lived more or less the same number of years, almost everything that is interesting in his work would disappear. In other words, to put this realization into language appropriate for someone of Tolkien's generation, the strength of his storytelling is a function of the relativity he introduces into the experience of time.

That brought me back to Benjamin, whose interest in the recent past went hand in hand with a mission to liberate leftist thinking from linear chronology and the unimaginative teleology to which it has unfortunately led. And then I had a flash of inspiration: both Benjamin and Tolkien were born in 1892. Surely, their interest in time and the way they thought about it had a lot to do with the period in which they grew up, when so many technological advances were radically transforming the texture of everyday life.

FInally, that realization made me think about how and why I am drawn to the work produced by intellectuals of their generation, those born sometime between the late 1880s and early 1900s. My father's parents were also born in the 1890s. And my paternal grandfather, like Tolkien and, in a different sense, Benjamin, was profoundly affected by World War I and its immediate aftermath. Could it be that my attraction to this period and the people who lived through it is bound up with an identification that, like genetic traits, skipped a generation?

Well, my time is up. Now I'm not going to read Marx, Tolkien or Benjamin until later in the day at the very earliest. But at least I got something written, which has been hard for me to do recently. It's a good exercise, reconstructing a train of thought in this manner, even if there's a danger that the mental associations that made it possible will be cauterized by the effort to capture them in words.
Alright, now that I've gotten the preamble to this "Photographic Selfhood" project out of the way, it's time to share my first photograph. This is one that longtime readers of my Live Journal might have seen back in 2006:

Looking over the Berlin Wall into the East -- February, 1987

I lived in Germany as an exchange student from July, 1986 through July, 1987. I spent most of my time far from the border between West and East Germany. But my exchange organization, Youth For Understanding, felt that understanding the divide between the two nations was important enough that they made all their students take a multi-day excursion to Berlin together with a host sibling.

This photograph was taken from one of the towers that gave a view over the wall into East Berlin. My principal goal on ascending the tower was to record a glimpse of the Communist Bloc, which was fascinating to an American teen whose political views had solidified during the Reagan years. Once I looked out into the East, though, I realized that my subject had to be the sharp contrast between the vibrant colors of the Wall and the almost unfathomable drabness of the scenery on its opposite side.

To be fair to the East, though, the scenery behind me was almost as drab. It's hard to imagine a better antidote to winter in Berlin than the decorated side of the Wall, which is probably what director Wim Wenders had in mind in Wings of Desire when he had his angelic protagonist transform into a human alongside it and then reinforced the point by shifting from black-and-white to color stock. Come to think of it, he was probably making the film around the time that I was in Berlin.

We did get to go to the East for a day. I began by going to a big department store with my host brother to see what kind of jeans were for sale and then to a music shop to see if any western rock and pop albums were available. As a German, his principal goal for the excursion was to confirm for himself how much better it was to be a consumer on our side of the Wall. Not being as enamored of such compare-and-contrast exercises and possessed, even then, of a soft spot for anti-capitalist sentiments, I was somewhat put off by this approach to tourism.

That's why, after eating a decent meal in an underground pub with him, I set off on my own. It felt exhilarating to be walking around in a surveillance state taking photographs, though I was surprised that no one seemed to care. After wearying of what I called the "EPCOT-like" fakeness of West German cities reconstructed after the war, I was especially taken with the fact that East Berlin still had plenty of rubble lying around. Amid the museums and tacky postwar monuments there was plenty of proof that the war had taken place and, therefore, an aura of authenticity lacking in places like Cologne. I remember trying to capture that sense of suspended ruination with my camera. If I can find and scan some of those shots, I'll try to post them as part of this project.

The return trip was uneventful. Indeed, the whole excursion was remarkably matter-of-fact, considering all the excitement I'd associated with the Wall prior to my year in Germany. Perhaps that was simply a reflection of the Communist Bloc's decline, given that it had less than three years to live. In a way, the divide between East and West seemed kind of fake. The fact that we boarded a subway-like train, the S-Bahn, in West Berlin and got off at an East Berlin made the journey feel a little like taking the monorail from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland.

One of the most fascinating things about photographs is that the function they play in our lives can change radically over time. When I look at this photograph today, what I see is both documentary evidence of a vanished world and a record of my desire to capture that evidence. I find myself compelled by the sense that looking over the Wall into the East is a temporal dislocation. All photographs from the past function this way, to be sure. But because the photograph shows the divide between a cutting-edge modern city and one that was trapped in a kind of suspended animation, it shows within the frame what otherwise becomes manifest only by considering the relationship between a photograph from the past and the surroundings in which it is currently viewed. When I was on top of the tower, I was actually capturing a past visible in the present.

I chose this photograph to inaugurate this project because it serves as such a good metaphor for what I'll be doing. I want to transport myself back in time in order to recall what it felt like to be taking a photograph or to be a subject in someone else's shot. And I want to think hard about the ways in which, even if I wasn't consciously aware of it at the time, I was trying to capture what would eventually be lost, a world that, like East Berlin, was doomed to disappear.

At the time, of course, most people in Germany seemed to think that the Wall would never come down. West Germany seemed fated to continue its headlong rush into the future as its special-needs twin to the east kept plodding along in increasingly weary circles. For my part, I wasn't so sure. My impressions of East Germany were centered on the perception that it inhabited a peculiarly fragile reality, one that could only be maintained by the sort of play-acting in which the guards who met our group at the border crossing displayed.

Traveling into East Berlin by bus involved taking one of the poorly maintained Autobahns built under Hitler's reign through a corridor existentially detached from the landscape around it. The feeling was akin to the one that the kids in the Harry Potter stories get when they board the Hogwarts Express, a train that leaves from a public station but can't be seen from a non-magical perspective. We looked out at the dreary landscape between the first crossing and Berlin with the sure knowledge that we couldn't set foot in it.

As we approached West Berlin, there was a second border crossing. Three East German officers boarded our bus to check passports. The procedure seemed tediously mundane, like going through the screening at an American airport. But then one of the officers raised his voice a bit. I looked back to see him with one of the younger, sweeter-looking American girls' passports in his had and a deep furrow passing over his brow. He motioned for his fellow officers to come over.

The three of them convened in the aisle as the girl turned white as a sheet. They whispered and mumbled in the way that border guards do in movies when something isn't right. The tension level in the bus mounted rapidly. And then, in an instant, everything changed. The first officer handed the passport back to the girl with a smile, speaking to her in English for the first time: "Just kidding. Have a nice stay!"

I have no way of knowing what motivated this performance, but had the strong suspicion at the time that it was a ritual the officers acted out frequently. Once they'd revealed their true intentions, I couldn't help but see them as the equivalent of the actors who wander around theme parks playing roles for the customers. Could the whole of the Communist Bloc have been "nur eine Verarschung", as the Germans say? Or was it merely that it had become a joke in its final years?

Either way, the sense that I was witnessing a theatrical performance carried over to my other encounters with the East on that trip. And it also helps to make this photograph's metaphoric potential a lot richer. What if the photographs that I've taken of other subjects over the years, from landscapes to lovers, were also attempts to fix on film or CMOS a similarly fragile reality? I wonder if I have held so tightly to my pictures over the years, valuing them above almost everything else, because of a never-fully-conscious intuition that they fulfill the same documentary purpose as a shot of Bigfoot or a UFO might.

After all, even though I had the impression that the reality of the East was fragile, I was also troubled by the sense that West German cities were suffused by inauthenticity. My perception that I was in a theme park actually carried over from the West into the East. The difference was that, whereas it was the buildings in the former that struck me as fake, it was the very mode of existence in the latter that appeared unreal. Still, this distinction was tenuous and starts to blur whenever I think about it for very long.

Perhaps the real problem wasn't the relative authenticity of the West or the East, but of my own existence. Paranoiacs struggle with the sense that nothing is really what it seems to be, that everyone is "fronting" as part of some vast conspiracy. I've never really thought of myself as paranoid, but it could be that my dysfunction inclines sufficiently in that direction to render meditating on its causes and effects a useful endeavor.
Although my decision to begin writing "Friends-only" entries has paid significant psychological dividends, I also realize that confessing my current state of mind will only take me so far. It's good to let myself feel, but I also need to think.

Because my recent trials have overlapped with a crisis in my relation to photography -- I haven't been taking many pictures and have struggled to take good ones when I've made the effort -- I'm hoping to make sense of my troubles by reflecting on the relationship between identity and photography. More specifically, I want to understand how my approach to photography has been bound up with who I am. For every decision to take a picture is also a decision about how to communicate one's vision of the world, both to others and to oneself.

Since I first conceived of this endeavor, I've thought long and hard about which photographs I should write about. Even though the focus of this project will be on what I've done with a camera, I rapidly concluded that I would need to ponder the ways I've appeared in other peoples' photographs in order to understand the ways I've chosen to present myself.

In thinking about the decisions I make with a camera, I also realized that I was powerfully influenced by pictures from which people were largely absent. Although my mother took photographs of my sister and me when we were young, she concentrated most of her artistic energy on landscapes and structures from which she did her best to exclude evidence of human presence. I need to ponder how her preferences shaped my own.

And I also concluded that it would make more sense to jump around in time, focusing on moments when my relationship to photography underwent a transformation, rather than to proceed in chronological order. Perhaps I will rearrange everything in chronological order at some later date. For now, though, the important thing is to write about what comes to mind without giving myself room for the doubt that often silences me.
cbertsch: This is me, reflected in my daughter's eye. (Default)
( Dec. 16th, 2010 08:26 am)
I gave my New Media class the final exam yesterday. It was a bittersweet experience for me, both because I'd really come to love this group of students -- saying goodbye is hard -- and because I'm probably not going to teach this course again for the foreseeable future. That would be frustrating under any circumstances, but is particularly difficult to deal with in this instance.

I came up with the idea for the course a few years back, deciding that discussing the new media of today would be far richer and more rewarding if they were considered in relation to the new media of previous eras. That's why I made Walter Benjamin's work, particularly his famous essay on the cinema, a key element in the syllabus. By reflecting on the way he wrote about the intersection of art and technology back in the 1930s, I reasoned, students could get critical purchase on the sort of long view necessary to make sense of our own era.

Because most of the students in this class were incoming freshmen, I eased them into the material. We began by reading Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash and watching a lot of YouTube clips. There was a good deal of humor, with serious subjects leavened by moments of silliness. As the semester wore on, however, and they became better adjusted to life as a college student, I began to ratchet up the intensity of our conversations.

By the end of the semester, we had developed a rapport that made it possible to move seamlessly from pondering the finer points of Walter Benjamin's work to examination of how our lives today are mediated by technology. Judging from the final exam and the last batch of papers I've grading right now, my students really understood why this application of cultural theory to everyday life matters. I'm deeply impressed with how far they came during the semester.

It's rare for me to have such clear evidence of my effectiveness as a teacher before I've turned in my grades. Typically, I hear back from former students several years after a class is over that they are finally realizing the usefulness of my approach. "I thought you were just going off on random tangents much of the time," one told me the other day, "but now I understand that what seemed to be beside the point was the point."

With this class, by contrast, I was already hearing comments like this five weeks ago. Maybe it's because they are first-semester undergraduates particularly open to being shaped by pedagogy. Or maybe I just got lucky. Whatever the reason, I have rarely felt so satisfied at the end of a course or, as a direct corollary, so sad that it has come to an end.

I don't usually write about work here. But this is one case when sharing my experiences feels appropriate. Plus, the content of the course overlapped with the experiments in social media that I've been undertaking here in the past month. As I get ready to launch the next stage in that project, a consideration of what I'm calling "photographic selfhood", giving a sense of where my head has been at when it hasn't been blogging seemed a good idea. With that goal in mind, here is the final exam for my course, which may be of interest to some of you:
Final Exam


Write responses to 8 of the following 14 questions in your bluebook (or equivalent). Your exam will be graded holistically. The longer, harder questions will get you more credit. But so will longer, more complicated responses to the shorter questions. So READ ALL THE QUESTIONS before you begin, to make sure you’re answering the ones that best suit you.

Don’t be afraid to “think out loud” for any of these. There isn’t one correct answer. What I want to see from you is your best thinking about the topics we covered in this class. And, to state the obvious, make sure you answer eight.


1) Which idea in Walter Benjamin’s work was the easiest for you to grasp? Which one was hardest? Why? Please be specific in constructing your answer.

2) The authors of our book on YouTube demonstrate the same enthusiasm for “user-generated” culture that has driven much of the technological innovation over the past decade, from amateur applications for the iPhone and Android platforms to all the ways – some more elegant than others – that consumers have been encouraged to “mash up” their media according to their own preferences. But as we discovered in class, such active consumption may not continue to play such a big role in the realm of contemporary New Media. What do you see as the most important trends in how people are using technology?

3) In discussing The Coming Insurrection, we pondered the distinction between the so-called “realm of necessity” and the sense of freedom from material reality, however temporary, made possible by the internet. We then contrasted the needs that fall into the former category, such as food and shelter, with the desires that animate the latter. Thinking hard about the different ways in which we’ve broached the topic of sex in the class – sexting, the “hug shirt” and its potential as a model for less G-rated wear, the film Catfish etc. – please reflect on the ways in which it complicates this distinction from The Coming Insurrection.

4) Think about all the movies you’ve seen this semester. Now pick one that we did not discuss in class that struck you as particularly apt for inspiring reflection on New Media. After giving a specific account of why you selected this film, try to connect it with the texts we read for this class and/or with class discussions we’ve had.

5) The great sociologist Max Weber argued that the modern era was characterized, first and foremost, by a secularizing impulse, the urge to take what had once seemed the province of divine or magical power and turn it into rationally undertaken human endeavor. This argument powerfully influenced Walter Benjamin, who gives his spin on it in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, the title essay in our book. But the fate of the aura in a world that had been, to use Weber’s term, “disenchanted” was only one of Benjamin’s concerns. He was also deeply interested in religious mysticism and made a point of including cryptic statements in many of his pieces that highlighted the continuing importance of belief in the supernatural.

Considering where things stand today, over a hundred years after Max Weber presented his thesis, how would you characterize the relationship between social media and his notion of a disenchanted world? Does the unprecedented access we have to information about other people make it easier for us to analyze their actions in a rational manner? Or does the sheer volume of data we have to sort through lead to a kind of paralysis in which we despair of understanding? Are we more likely to treat social media as tools that we control or forces that control us? Please use these questions as a guide, while offering your own thoughts on this subject.

6) Neal Stephenson’s vision of the near future in Snow Crash anticipated many of the technology-abetted changes of the past two decades. But we have a long way to go before our world matches the world of the novel. What aspect of that world that has yet to become reality seems most likely to come into being in the near future? What aspect seems most implausible today? Explain why for each response.

7) If you were given the responsibility of running a major media corporation, how would you plan for the future? Think about both the short term – what will work in the year ahead – and the long term – what will work five, ten or twenty years down the road. In constructing your response, be specific about how different media and the platforms used to distribute them would factor in your decisions.

8) Write about a time in which you made use of technological mediation – texting, e-mail, phone etc. – to facilitate a conversation that your were reluctant to have face-to-face. What factors made you wary of the physical presence of the other party (or parties) in this exchange? How did this experience affect your perception of the strengths and weaknesses of technologically mediated communication?

9) If Walter Benjamin were somehow, though the miracle of time travel, able to read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, what aspects of the novel do you think he would focus his energy on? Think about both the title essay from our book and such pieces as “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” as you formulate a response.

10) What mobile phone feature that is not currently available on any current model would you most like to see realized? Given everything we’ve discussed in this class, explain why you desire that feature and then imagine how your life would be different if you had a phone that possessed it.

11) Is it possible for a copy of something to acquire the traits we associate with originality? Why and how?

12) Dziga Vertov, the director of Man With a Movie Camera, was radically opposed to the imposition of narrative, whether borrowed from novels or the stage, on cinema. He felt that the medium’s revolutionary potential would be destroyed if its new tricks were deployed to tell old tales.

Seventy some years later, we live in an era in which traditional narrative structures are under severe assault by technological innovations that make the act of decontextualization – through excerpting, sampling, mashing up etc. – easier than ever before. More and more people watch television and even movies in pieces, frequently never bothering to make the effort required to assemble them into a coherent whole. But we are no closer to realizing the truly free society to which Vertov aspired – he was punished under Stalin’s faux-communist regime for advocating avant-garde art as political practice – than anyone was in 1930. On the contrary, the closed-mindedness that he associated with bourgeois narrative seems as widespread as ever.

This begs the question of whether a revolutionary approach to art today should still celebrate, as both he and Walter Benjamin did, the power of new media to break-up old structures and fragment experience or whether, by contrast, it would be wiser to make a case for old forms, such as traditional narrative storytelling, as a way of counterbalancing current trends. What do you think should be the principles guiding a self-consciously political attitude towards art today?

13) How have the media, old and new, been biased in favor of the senses of sight and hearing? What technological changes could diminish this bias, in your estimation? Would the negative aspects of (new-)mediated communication be offset by innovations that would extend the reach of other senses?

14) What do you think the underlying message of The Social Network is? Be specific.
As I had expected, most students avoided the longer, more abstract questions like #5 and #12. But I firmly believe that an exam should serve a pedagogic purpose and was hoping that, in reading through those questions, students would find ways of sharpening their responses to other ones. And the evidence in their bluebooks suggests that that they did just that. Not to mention that they left the exam with a taste of what higher-level study of our subject matter might entail.

I also like to give students the opportunity to connect the content of a course with reflections on their own lives. That's why questions like #8 and #10 are part of the exam. They help to lighten things up, certainly, acting as mental breathers. But they also demand the kind of self-examination that I insisted upon all semester, whether in the New Media logs students maintained or in those "fun" classes when I asked them to talk about their lives.
I did something I've never done before for the New Media course that I'm teaching this semester. I gave them the option of making their final paper a critique of one of my pieces. Because there were more conventional options on the list of possible paper topics I handed out, I don't imagine that many students will take me up on the offer. But I somehow felt that it was appropriate in this particular class.

Many of our class discussions touched upon themes I've explored over the years in my writing for alternative publications. I let them go on a tour of my Facebook during the week we devoted to pondering the site. And this particular course holds a special place in my heart, both because I really came to love the Honors Students who comprised it and because it seems unlikely that I'll get to teach it again.

In order to make it easier on any students who do opt for the critique-your-teacher topic, I compiled a partial list of those pieces of mine especially well suited to thinking about New Media. Because it has been a long time since I shared links to my non-Live Journal writing here, I thought I'd let you all see what I sent my students. Besides, given the difficult task of rediscovering my self that I've recently embarked upon -- more on that in a later entry -- I figured it wouldn't hurt to publicly acknowledge work that I'd gone out of my way not to maintain a connection with. Here, then is the message I sent my students:
My writing for ZEEK magazine can be accessed in pages organized in reverse chronological order here -- the most recent pieces -- and here. FYI, some of the latter have formatting problems that emerged after a site upgrade.

Some of the pieces I wrote for Tikkun magazine, before I moved to ZEEK, can be found here.

And, if you want to travel far back in time, the work I did for Bad Subjects: Political Education Life is still accessible here.

Here is a partial list of the pieces of mine that seem best suited to discussions of New Media:

“The Trouble With Toys: Walter Benjamin, Pixar and the Search for Redemption”, from 2010, which is divided into Part I and Part II, shows how the Toy Story movies and Wall-E are perfect foils for Benjamin’s analysis of commodity culture, particularly as it pertains to the mass-production of children’s playthings.

“Days of Future Past: Iranian Garage Rock of the 1960s”, from 2009, which meditates on the “revival”, not of music that was once commercially successful or critically acclaimed, but which barely got heard upon its release.

“Copy Right, Copy Left, Copy Central” from 2009 is an essay review on the documentaries Copyright Criminals:This Is a Sampling Sport and Rip It: A Remix Manifesto, both of which focus on musical artists who make their own “new” material from bits and pieces of other people’s work. It mentions Walter Benjamin at the end.

“Prog Is Not a Four-Letter Word” from 2009 compares the experience of seeing the classic rock act Yes on a recent nostalgia tour with a then-new triple album by the indie-label band Oneida, with reflections on how the music industry has changed since the 1970s and, more specifically, in the wake of the crisis that developed in the wake of file-sharing.

“That Noise in the Background” from 2009 is a review essay on Dinosaur Jr.’s Farm that considers the way in which music has increasingly come to function as a distraction in this era of media oversaturation.

"The iPod's Moment in History", from 2006, which originally appeared in Tikkun and was then republished in AlterNet, ponders the famous technological device’s capacity to turn public space into a private world and speculates that having one’s music collection in such portable form seemed especially attractive in the wake of 9/11.

“List of Ingredients: Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour” , from 2006, is a review essay of a “found sound” record by the cutting edge DJ and producer that raises questions about what it means to copy the natural world with a recording device.

“Listmania!: Target Marketing, the Internet and the Consumer’s ‘Me’”, from 2002, interrogates the then-rapid expansion of “participatory consumption”, focusing on Amazon.com’s use of customer-generated lists as a marketing tool.

“Incredibly Strange Culture and the End of the World As We Know It”, from 1994, anticipates the cultural fragmentation made possible by the internet in the course of considering the fate of alternative ideas at a time when they were becoming more and more accessible.
There are quite a few more pieces that are at least somewhat pertinent to New Media, but some seemed too short for the assignment in question and others required a bit too much "metaphoric" thinking for me to feel comfortable making students tackle them.
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