On liking bad things

When I was a kid, I collected comic books. This was back in the 80s, before the Tim Burton Batman movie turned "comics" into something else, into movies, I suppose.

I was obsessed with comics, and my best friend at the time was my best friend in large part because he was the other kid who was really into comic books (there were other common interests but for the sake of anonymity I'll leave those out).  

I stopped collecting comics in the early 90s for a very straightforward reason- I got a girlfriend. It was that simple.  I went from spending all my money on comics to never buying one for years.  I was done with them and I never really looked back.  

Well, that's not really true, or else I wouldn't be writing about them now.  More like, every few years I would go to a comic book store, sometimes one I'd frequented in the past, where the owner would remember me with a mixture of nostalgia and resentment, and I'd pick up an issue of what had been my favourite comic book, the Fantastic Four.  I'd read the issue I bought, mostly confused because I'd lost all the plot threads.  And was never so taken by whatever I read I sought out older issues to better understand what was going on.  This was probably a sign.

I still have my comic books, or, my parents do. They sit in a pile of white boxes in a storage room in their basement, and we talk a lot about them sending these eight boxes to me, the final repatriation of stuff that has been sitting at my parents' house in the quarter century since I left Calgary.

After the birth of my first son, I started to indulge again in some of my youthful interests more than I did in that liminal space between childhood and parenthood. As an example, over the years, I've bought some of the omnibus editions of the Fantastic Four, big thick volumes that collect 30 issues in a hardbound dust jacketed "prestige" edition.  I've usually bought them on sale at BMV, a local second hand bookstore here in Toronto, while also somewhat inebriated, alcohol being the royal road to nostalgia.

I've had them for years, but it was only a few weeks ago that I started to read the first one, which collects the first 30 issues of the Fantastic Four, "The World's Greatest Comic Book Magazine".  I'm reading them mainly because I'm sleep deprived as a result of the birth of my second son, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to read, say, Wieland's Des Esels Schatten at night, or anything else that's a) in a language other than English or b) more involved or complicated than a magazine article.

As I've been making my way through the omnibus, an issue or two per night, a thought kept creeping in, one that was there the last time I read some of these treasured stories about a decade ago - they aren't very good.  The stories, the art, they aren't very good.

Maybe it was pride, or nostalgia (it was nostalgia) that kept the thought at bay, but yesterday I happened to read an essay by Sam Kriss about the death of nerds.  As someone who used to try to talk about hipsters on this very blog, to try to figure them out, I'd never really thought about the fact that nerds really did take over. 

And the idea, which I'm taking from Kriss' essay, that hipsters were just snobs except in the wrong direction, seems correct, in part because I talked about this myself 14 years ago!  So I think he's right about how the hipster and the nerd have functioned in our culture, and how we do seem to be moving past them.

For my own part, I never considered myself a nerd (I'm sure everyone else did!) but in my defense, I'd always been a pretty bad nerd - for one, although I was obsessed with comic books, and collected them with a verve bordering on what we'd probably call OCD now, I really did enjoy them.  I really liked the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, and all the other superheroes - I liked their adventures, and had a lot of fun reading them and talking about the latest issues with my friends.  

But then I grew up.

To be sure, when I was in junior high, my friends and I would discuss the literary merits of comic books, their aesthetic value of course on a par with the great works of Shakespeare and Beckett, but given none of us had read any literature at that stage, it seems like in hindsight, what we were doing was learning to perform the Anglo-American-Canadian culture two step, where we affirm that whatever mass media product we're slurping down at the time is just as good as anything that has a higher aesthetic value - snobs are really just nerds with ascots!  

But back to me. I don't think it's a coincidence that I stopped reading comic books around the same time I got into classical music - the girlfriend was definitely the last straw, but the signs were there.  The last year I bought comics as a teenager, it was more out of a sense of duty- I wasn't reading them, I was collecting them, but the love wasn't really there anymore.

What did I love instead?  Bach.  And Monteverdi.  And so on.  

***

All this being said, I don't want to pretend I spend all my time listening to Xenakis on a $10,000 soundsystem while reclining in a late 60s Finnish recliner. For one, I like Star Wars, and I dutifully watch all the shows and movies, and I've even bought some of the novels and  comic books.  Most of them aren't very good, and it feels a lot like Kriss' description of nerdery, where I'm really consuming it because it's not great, but Star Wars has always held a particular place in my head, and even though I sometimes resent it, it doesn't really matter. 

It's more like a sickness, in the way that Goethe and Heine described Romanticism as a sickness. It's something I have, and deal with, but it's not going away, and you have to treat it.  But pretending like it isn't a sickness is as good an explanation as any as to why so much mass culture sucks so badly, where you have so many smart, creative people turning out bland slop to audiences who don't even know if they care about this stuff anymore.

Have I just spent a morning writing a blog post on how I'm not really a nerd?  Yes, I think so.  But I'd also like to start talking about taste again, maybe in a slightly more philosophical way, and this seemed like a good place to start.  

Soon I'll start talking about Heinrich Heine's thoughts on taste, but not today.  

But soon.

Post Beer

According to my Blogger account, I had intended to write a post about the unstoppable rise of overhopped beer almost a decade ago, in September of 2013.  

For some reason, I never got to it, but now's good time to talk about this trend just as it seems to be dying out.  The winds have changed, and what would have been a prescient 2013 post will now just be me trying to keep some kind of momentum going on this blog!

***

Way back in 2010, I went to Germany for the first time in a long time.  It was a pretty difficult time in my life, but I had a great time in Göttingen, and was very fortunate that I was able to return to Germany for months on end during the subsequent summers.

It was here that I discovered that I really liked German beer.  That is, I really liked lagers - I also liked wheat beers, but there is something wonderful about German lagers, and how I could drink so very very much of it and feel fine the next day, in a way that I'd never experienced in Canada.

I'll never forget the day I returned to Toronto, and went out to a local (unfortunately long gone) pub near my apartment with my parents and then young son.  I ordered a Steamwhistle, which advertised itself as a pilsner and which up to that very moment, was a beer I quite liked.

As I took that first sip, I was taken aback by its sweetness and, for lack of a better way of saying this, how difficult it was to just knock it back. It's not a terrible beer, but it's no pilsner!

As I recently pointed out implicitly on this very blog, Canadians can be uh, parochial.  Even in a big city like Toronto, there's a long-standing tolerance for mediocrity that I've always found really strange, especially when we have access to so many great cuisines and people with the cultural knowledge to prepare things well.  People here have always seemed to equate paying a lot of money in a cool place to eat or drink something with eating or drinking something good.

Although my taste buds readjusted to the sweeter Canadian beers, what didn't change was my emerging hostility to hoppy ales.  Which is why this article by Rick Ball in Guernica magazine spoke to me, although not enough to write about it at the time! 

I'd encourage you to read it, but the short version is that the reason we were (and are still) awash in overhopped IPA is because they're easier to make, and what started as a kind of reaction to bland corporate beer, became the many headed hydra of going out and watching people pretend that something that tasted like floor cleaner was actually delightfully refreshing.

Even at the time, articles like Hoppy Beer is Awful were sounding the alarm bells, even if it was with the-then necessary cultural proviso that she also liked these terrible beers, they were just getting too hoppy.

Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend for me was the opening of Bellwoods Brewery in my old neighbourhood. It checked all the boxes - it had this "authentic" vibe while simultaneously being very expensive, and advertising how local and "authentic" it was, while clearly the result of a large amount of capital.  

Nevertheless, everyone was raving about them so I thought I'd give them a try, and their beer was awful.  I don't say this lightly - at the time I didn't really like IPAs but I could stomach them, but they had this one IPA with blood orange that was literally stomach turning.  

Now to be fair to them, they've pivoted away from the hoppy beers to the sour ones.  But at the time, I was genuinely perplexed to see the volume of people walking past my apartment carrying their smartly branded bottles.  Did they really enjoy these beers?  Or were they just chasing trends?

Why did I care about this so much?  Probably because I drank a lot and so beer was on my mind!  Now, I feel so distant from beer culture that I don't even really know what's popular anymore.  What I do know is that a lot of breweries, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the easy-to-make IPA crowd, started trying to make nice German lagers again, and one can indeed find some good local beers that I don't want to use as a stain remover.

That being said, most bars and brewpubs here in Toronto at least are still extremely over saturated with IPAs, but at least now there's a small chance that there will be something I would like to drink, if I were to drink at all!

Even Bellwoods seems to have moved on - their most popular beer now is a sour, which again, coming from Germany, is something that both amuses me a depresses me!  But the story of trying to get a glass of Berliner Weisse with syrup in Toronto is a story for another day!

Reverend Billy

This morning, on the way home from walking my dog, I kicked a plastic Starbucks coffee/frappuccino/iced latte/whatever cup that someone had decided was better to leave on the ground instead of putting it into the nearby garbage container...who am I to judge?

Anyway, kicking it had a Proustian effect on me, because I immediately thought about Reverend Billy, someone I haven't thought about in nearly 20 years.  Specifically, I recalled the photo that accompanied this 2004 profile of him in the New York Times (unfortunately archived article lacks the photo!), which depicted Reverend Billy being held back by some random Starbucks patron.  

In my mind, the patron has the dead expression of a dad holding an unruly toddler, keeping Reverend Billy in place until the authorities could arrive and the patron could get his 2000 calorie Moccaccino with extra whipped topping or whatever it was he was protecting from the Reverend's anti-consumerist predations.  

I can't find the image anywhere online, so you'll just have to trust me, but it's evocative of a time when culture jamming was still a thing and the "average" person thought that it was more important to protect Starbucks than to let the performance artist play out his show. 

Times have changed, and come to think of it, I think if Reverend Billy went into a Starbucks now, he'd be greeted with applause instead of concern.  In other words, he'd probably get co-opted in that special way that capitalism manages to do to everything and everyone.

So it good to know that Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping have moved on somewhat from their anti-consumerist bent (haven't we all?) and onto other pressing matters, like recently writing about global warming and protesting robobees.  In other words, he's still fighting the good fight.

Although I haven't thought of him in decades, I'm glad he's still around.  Who knew kicking a trash on a Toronto street this brisk late summer morning would lead to reacquainting myself (and you, my dear reader) with something good?

Punching down

I wouldn't really be back to blogging if I didn't complain about something that I saw on the Internet a while ago.  

Even better, I'll be complaining about someone's take on classical music!

Today's blog post responds to a tweet thread about a subscriber-only New York Times piece by John McWhorter that's a review of a book by Philip Ewell about racism in musicology.

Here is the tweet in question - at least most of them! 

I mean the real answer is “fine” art was conceived as part of a racial and colonial and gendered project to figure out how society could contain free self-governing subjects who miraculously all arrived at the same universal laws independently

— Robin James (@doctaj) May 18, 2023

The tweet is from a musicologist named Robin James - she has a blog too!  

When I read these, my initial reaction was to be angry.  Because that's what one does when they're on Twitter.  

But the more I've thought about it (and I give these kinds of things far too much thought) the more it just makes me depressed and sad.  Sad about the state of arts and humanities academia, but also sad about the ways in which most people, even smart people, talk about something that's very important and vital to me - classical music.

***

Now if you're actually reading this, or you've read me before, you'll know that these tweets are the kind of thing that's preoccupied me for a long time, because they're about the "discourse" of classical music.

I think there's a lot going on in this tweet, which is part of a longer thread - beyond the "classical music is white supremacist" stuff, she thinks that Socrates had it coming, which I'll admit I found pretty funny even if I think that's an idiosyncratic take on his death!  

At the heart of them is an age old battle, one that's been going on for maybe 100 years.  You know the one, right?  Or is it just me?  It's probably just me.

I've explained this before, so I'll try to be brief - the popular music industry has long used "classical" music as a foil to sell records.  If that's the materialist base, the cultural byproduct of this dialectical relationship between popular and "art" music is that a lot of people (and I've known a lot of people like this!) who like popular music simultaneously see classical music as some kind of threat. 

This takes all kinds of forms - you have the stuffiness of the concert hall as opposed to the authentic freedom of a rock concert.  There's the obvious conservatism of the classical musician compared to the progressive vision of the punk or new wave artist.  Or maybe it's just a generic defensiveness that I've encountered all too often when I tell people I like listening to Josquin or Wagner, as though I'm judging people for their musical tastes simply by expressing my own tastes.

This is a very common rhetorical move in popular discourse around classical music, and the move is persistent mainly because it's very effective!  

It's what the CBC did back in the aughts to gut classical music on the radio, and fire a bunch of orchestral musicians (which I discussed back in the day) - they argued that in was unfair that classical music got so much airtime as opposed to popular music on CBC.  

And of course, they were right!  Classical music did get a lot of airtime on CBC radio, but literally nowhere else on the radio!  If you wanted to listen to all kinds of independent "popular" artists or huge acts, you had a lot of places to listen to them, but if you wanted to hear Calgary Opera's production of some new Canadian opera, CBC Radio Two was it.

So fast forward to 2023, and the newest version of this phenomenon is something like this:

 

I'll admit, this video kind of broke my brain when I first encountered it. I thought about doing a post on it, but it's too demoralizing and this video is too old at this stage, and frankly too popular, to bother.

That being said, the idea that the music theory that one is taught if they go to university to study western classical music has some kind of empirical claim to universality is absurd to me.

I studied music at university, and took years of theory, counterpoint and orchestration. I still have my theory textbooks, so after watching this video I went and checked them out, and right there at the start, they all say they're going to teach you about the harmonic and contrapuntal practices of European music from around the late 17th Century to the present.

They never say that this is the only way to conceive of music theory, or that this is the best way of doing music theory, or whatever.  The textbook does what it says on the tin - it shows you the kinds of musical organization that one saw in the music of Bach and those who followed in his footsteps.

Do North American universities privilege "classical" music education over popular music?  Yes, at least this was the case back in the day.  Is this the result of long-standing legacies of colonialism and racism in North America?  Yes, it seems likely, given the settlement patterns of the continent!  Does this mean that classical music, as in, a particular genre of music whose genealogy predates colonialism, is essentially white supremacist?  Uh...

If I'm being charitable, Jame's tweet above is pretty narrow in scope.  She's suggesting that the idea of "fine" art is a kind of political project that cashes out in favour of western ideas as being universal.  But there are a lot of problems with this - when does this "project" actually start?  

For example, was Beethoven, when he was adopting Schiller's text about all men being brothers, in fact suggesting that the idea of universal brotherhood relied on western subjectivity, and not say, wishing for the possibility of human solidarity across race and culture?  One of these readings seems charitable and plausible, and the other one seems like the reading that will get you a SSHRC here in Canada (zing!).

This tweet strikes me as part of this defensiveness I've been describing taken to a whole new level - did someone say classical music is better than pop music?  Well, classical music isn't just stuffy or irrelevant or out of touch, it's actually harming people, and also, please buy my rock album and read my scholarship.

That seems like a very bold and nonsensical move to make, especially for someone like James.  She's a philosopher, but there's a pretty clear hole in this argument - the suggestion that the people who made the art somehow impacts the aesthetic value of the art is just the good old intentional fallacy.

If this all seems mean, it kind of is, and I don't doubt that her response comes from a place of justified anger about McWhorter's piece - I'm going to go ahead and admit that I haven't read it because I don't have a NY Times subscription, but his tweets on it are not great - conflating musicology and music theory doesn't really cover him in glory. 

That being said, if I'm being charitable, I can see that the point he's getting at is just that making these kinds of essentialist claims about an academic discipline leads us to dark places - I should know - I'm a Germanist!

But it's a pretty easy move, in a dying academic profession, to take something like classical music, which gets scholarly attention for historical reasons and declare it to be so bad, so evil, that it should be wiped off the face of the earth, so that popular music scholars can get tenure instead.

I don't want to psychologize Robin James too much, but she definitely reads, in her tweets and in her blog, like someone who really does think that rock music is the music of protest, while Marxists like Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze were, I don't know, white supremacists,  because of the kind of music they produced.  As in, it wasn't their political affiliations that mattered, but what she considers the problematic genealogy of their music that renders their art as reactionary or racist. I think this is deeply, deeply wrong.  

Unfortunately, it's typical of online discourse to see people punch down while acting as though they're punching up.  Does Robin James really believe that classical music has any cultural power at this stage?  Would anyone who isn't trying to raise funds for an orchestra or an opera company say that it does?

I don't know Robin James. She might be a very nice person, and an excellent scholar, and I suspect that if we had a beer together, we'd probably be a lot closer politically than apart. But as someone who is himself recently out of the academy, I have encountered a lot of people who put on this kind of performance, who talk in this way, and I just don't understand how they fail to see that all they're doing is tearing apart their own academic disciplines in an attempt to "rescue" them.

It's not a solution to the "problem" of the arts or the humanities in the academy - it's just doing the work of the neoliberal ghouls who've destroyed pretty much all of culture, including higher education.  But make no mistake - once they get rid of all those overpriced classical music programs, they're coming for everyone else.

I think it would be better if people did work of all kinds in well-funded public universities that accommodate the histories and theories of many musical genres .  I think robust public radio and television and internet that supports the huge diversity of musical styles and histories would work well for everyone.  

I think almost anything would work better than watching people tear each other down in the service of capital on a dying social media platform would be better, but often it seems like this is all we have left.

Knowing Carbonara

Like many people who only write on their blog every few years, I probably spend too much time consuming more modern forms of online content.  

Despite the algorithmic focus of today's internet, YouTube in particular occasionally suggests stuff to me that satisfies a "need" I didn't know I had. In this case, it's been suggesting various "science" YouTubers to me, and I found myself enjoying this video in particular about physics crackpots:

 

 

The gist of the video is that physicists get a lot of e-mails from people who've claimed to have "solved" some problem in physics, or that physics as it's currently understood is wrong.  She mentions that a lot of these cranks are retired engineers, and having written correspondence for senior public officials over the years, I can attest to the fact that engineers have a strange propensity for attempting to "solve" some problem in a way they'd build a bridge, but without say, knowing anything about bridge building.  It's funny because it's true!

What does this have to do with spaghetti carbonara? Well, about halfway into the video, the host uses an analogy about crackpots where she compares receiving these e-mails to someone coming into a professional kitchen and telling the chef that they're doing food incorrectly, and the crank proceeds to shows them their own correctly prepared meal, which is in fact made of play dough.  

It's a great analogy and she does a better job of explaining it than I do here, but it reminded me of an incident where I did something crank-like at a restaurant that complicates the narrative a bit.

I should note that I completely agree with everything she says, and that this isn't meant to be a refutation of her video, more of a deeply weird story that's stuck with me for a long time that's both connected to her analogy and also the epistemological concerns her video raises.

So, the story - I was in Calgary visiting my family a few years after having moved to Toronto, circa 2000, and we went out to dinner to a local Italian restaurant.  This restaurant was a small and highly popular local chain, and was known for authentic and affordable Italian food (This detail is important!).

At the time I was really into spaghetti carbonara.  I would make it at home, and I would order it regularly whenever I was at an Italian restaurant.  I'd even had it in Italy, and uh, Austria, so I feel confident in saying that I was pretty well-versed in the preparation and eating of spaghetti carbonara.

All this is to say that I ordered it at this well-known local restaurant. And when the dish came out, it wasn't spaghetti carbonara.  It was scrambled eggs with bacon on pasta.  

Now, to my many Italian-food-making readers, if you've made carbonara, you'll know exactly what's happened.  Part of making carbonara is that you use an egg at the end to make a creamy sauce.  Jamie Oliver demonstrates this here:

If you watch the video, he goes to some lengths to show that you can't put the egg in while the pasta and bacon are still too hot, because you'll wind up with scrambled eggs, which is what I got.

This is clearly what had happened, and in my naivete, I figured that they'd known this and just sent it out anyway.  Because this is Canada.   In the same way a bartender will pour a pint of beer that's mostly foam and serve it, daring you to send it back, I assumed they thought they could simply give it to me, and I'd eat it, because people do this all the time.  

Unfortunately, I was at the height of my pretentious gourmand phase, where I had aspirations of becoming a food critic, and so I sent it back and asked them to make it correctly.  As a Canadian, I was nice about it, and not the least bit passive aggressive.

So the waitress went back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later, the manager of the restaurant came to me to ask me what the problem was.  I was a bit surprised, but explained to him that what I was given wasn't carbonara - I mean, it was the same ingredients but it had been prepared incorrectly.

He had no idea what I meant.  So I explained to him what I thought had happened, and he nodded and looked at me appreciatively in the way that service sector people do when you're doing something as condescending as explaining to the manager of an Italian restaurant how to make a very popular and not at all obscure pasta dish. And he apologized for the mistake, but then he suggested that I order something else.

That's when it dawned on me - no one had ever pointed out to the restaurant that this isn't what spaghetti carbonara was supposed to look like. This was a busy and popular Italian restaurant, and they'd been making carbonara for years like this, and no one had ever said anything.

Why else would he tell me to order something else?  If this were a one off, they'd just make it correctly, but they couldn't because no one knew what I was talking about.  

I don't mean this as a dig to the cooks either - like most chains, these were probably not trained chefs but people hired to work cheaply in a busy kitchen, and who were following recipes. From their perspective, I was probably some Toronto snob who was telling them what to do - I wasn't even Italian!  How would I know?  

From their perspective, I was the crackpot!

But I did know, and in this day and age, one would probably just whip out their phone and show the manager 25 videos on YouTube demonstrating exactly how their kitchen was doing this incorrectly. But at the time, all I had was my word.

Things got stranger - for the rest of the evening, whenever a waiter or waitress would walk by, they would apologize to me for the mix-up.  There was this whole production that was clearly rehearsed to make me feel better, but I would have felt better knowing that they were going to  make the dish correctly - I even offered to show them!  And again, I understand that this would have made me look like an arrogant jerk, but I certainly would have felt better.

But then one wonders - let's say that the manager goes home, wondering if what I was saying was true, and goes to an Italian cookbook and discovers that I was telling the truth.  What then?  Maybe it was a popular item, and people might complain that it was different when they started preparing it correctly!  Or maybe they'd rechristen it as their "house-style" carbonara, made just the way Nonna used to make at home!

But it raises an important question: what happens when the places that sell themselves as authentic and as experts, reveal themselves to be nothing of the sort?

I left the restaurant with a sinking feeling, a kind of amused horror, and it's a feeling that I've been getting again recently, when I think about the rise of AI.  

So much of what I've seen of ChatGPT in its deployment so far reminds me of that (now-gone) local authentic Italian restaurant chain, and how so many Calgarians thought it was great and authentic, all while being served scrambled egg pasta.  I see all these people on YouTube talking about using ChatGPT to teach them stuff, but it's pretty clear that ChatGPT is not always reliable.

How we think of knowledge is shifting and how we deal with that shift is going to have some very serious implications, not just for AI replaceable people like me, but for questions of knowledge and what constitutes knowledge as opposed to belief.

Next up - where I complain about something I saw online! 

Ian Hacking (1937-2023)

I found out yesterday that the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking has passed away.  The University of Toronto philosophy department has a notice here, and Brian Leiter's philosophy blog has some great reminiscences here.  What follows are my own reflections on his passing.

 It is difficult for me to overstate how important Ian Hacking was to me as a thinker.  

Throughout my life, I have had a tendency to form what we now commonly refer to as "parasocial relationships". I'd find someone to admire and I'd read everything about them and then eventually I'd move on.  

So it was in the early 2000s that I embarked on a (in hindsight ill-conceived) plan to get an MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto.  The reason for this was pretty straightforward - at the time I was being passed over for jobs in the Ontario Government (where I worked) for people who had MAs in...just about anything.  It was that simple!  

At that point getting a graduate degree in music was out of the question (Why? Good question!) but in any case, like most clever young men, I thought I would really like to pursue a philosophy degree.  

However, there was a catch - as someone with a music degree, I needed at least 10 half courses in philosophy to apply for the the MA program.  I should add, and this will be important for later, U of T had very restricted enrollment for the MA due to the fact that the department, like most departments, saw its graduate program as a training program, and no one gets a job with an MA in philosophy - no one, except I hoped, for myself!

Anyway, I started accumulating credits, and at some point (the specific moment is lost to time) I found out about Ian Hacking.  It might have been at a philosophy social, where I met him and had a nice brief conversation with him about his Wittgenstein course (which I couldn't take due to a scheduling conflict - I was taking these courses while holding down a full time job). 

At some point, I started reading his work and was blown away by it. Although the analytic/continental philosophy wars seem to have died off, at the time (2002-2006?) they were very much alive.  Ian Hacking somehow managed to straddle this distinction - he had come out of the analytical side, discovered Foucault, and then did philosophical genealogies à la Foucault, but which were in fact, much better than anything Foucault had produced.  

Beyond this, he was perhaps the clearest philosophical writer I had ever read - he could take virtually any concept, from either side of the-then philosophical divide, and make it easy to understand for those of us who perhaps didn't have the time to invest in just reading the texts.

I read everything he wrote - books, papers, essays, even his reviews in the NY Review of Books.  I wasn't ever able to take a course with him, again mostly due to scheduling conflicts, but so much of my philosophical underpinnings come from that reading - far more than any of the coursework I did.

In fact, calling my relationship to him "parasocial" doesn't really do justice to his influence on my thinking - it's more akin to ancient understanding of philosophical schools (Pierre Hadot's What is Ancient Philosophy? is a great introduction to this topic), where the practice of reading and discussing a philosopher's work  transforms one's own perceptions of the world.  

That's the kind of effect he had on me.  I never got into the MA program (and wound up doing something very different indeed!) but I regularly think about Ian Hacking, his sense of wonder, and how he did philosophy, and it makes me want to look at the world anew after so many years of closing myself off to it.  

I wish there were more people out there like him, and even if he never founded a philosophical school on the Athenian model, I'd like to think that his legacy might prod some of us (me, just me), to, in a clumsy paraphrase of one of his books,  try to do a little less representing, and a little more intervening. 

On Remembrance Day

 

After last week's Whole Foods poppy debacle, I found myself unable to participate in yet another installment of the Canadian culture war Kabuki theatre that is Remembrance Day.

We all know the drill – someone does something, anything connected to poppies, and Conservative politicians briefly remind everyone that virtue signalling and cancel culture are not the sole domain of the “Tumblr left”. 

Following this comes the ritual denunciations of Remembrance Day from the left, where we are all reminded that Canada is a colonial settler culture, and that Remembrance Day has been effectively co-opted by the right to gin up patriotic fervour for whatever imperial adventures we’ve decided the tag along with.

The thing is, the specific history of Remembrance Day concerns an unpayable debt that we owe to our ancestors – 106 years ago, this country began to send its young over to die for what was, in hindsight, perhaps the most absurd and pointless war in human history – nearly 60,000 Canadians died so that the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha could remain the most powerful royal house in Europe.  Thanks to this war, the Italians invented fascism, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered and many of the political formations that we find ourselves dealing with today find their genesis in the shadow of this insane expression of nihilism.

So this debt remains, and it seems to me that so much of why we undergo this culture war every year has to do with the fact that, as time has passed, Remembrance Day shifted away from reminding ourselves of this unpayable debt, and towards celebrating those who live, those for whom the debt can, in some ways, be repaid.

It is difficult to argue with this, as the bombers fly over our house today, that despite its seeming solemnity, Remembrance Day has become more of a celebration of military power and glory than an acknowledgement of the emptiness of the vast majority of armed conflicts in which Canadians have engaged.  I think we can now safely include Afghanistan in this calculus - the 200 odd people who died there really died for nothing, and no elegant flight formations, or poppy wearing, can change that.

Like many people on the left, I was outraged and horrified by the jingoistic celebration of “our troops” who we sent off on an errand of revenge after September 11, and that the invasion of Afghanistan was somehow a noble and just war (history has shown us that it wasn’t). 

That being said, there is something to be said for affirming this debt on Remembrance Day, this throwing away of life for nothing, in part because many of those who insist that one must wear a poppy are those who also believe that there’s no need to shut the country down right and pay everyone to stay home. 

That is, the current conditions we live under are akin to a time of war, and instead of the left being in denial of this reality, it is the right who seems to ever increasingly demand that we forget all those who have died for nothing over the past 6 months.  Perhaps if there is value in Remembrance Day, in this Remembrance Day, it’s that if one believes there is value to life, then today is a time to acknowledge that, to acknowledge that we do indeed live in a society, and perhaps expand the scope of Remembrance Day to include all those who have died for nothing, as a result of the neglect of our governments, and our society, and a reminder that we can do better than this.

Back to Blogging

I went off of Facebook for about six years.  There was a lot going on in my life, and after receiving some particularly depressing news, that desire to present some kind of avatar of myself felt impossible. 

Three years ago, I returned to Facebook.  My motivation for doing so was to in part to make it easier to be included on things with my wife, who had rejoined Facebook.  It also became clear to me that the reasons I went off Facebook were no longer really relevant, and my status as "that guy who doesn't use Facebook" no longer had the cachet it did in 2010. 

So I have been back for about 3 years, and frankly it kinda sucks.  I wound up using it as a quasi-blog, where I'd post links and complain about things, but the reality was that most of the posts that wound up with any feedback were posts where I shared a picture of our dog, or our son, or our son with a dog.

This isn't to say that those things are bad, it's just that Facebook as a social space is pretty unhealthy in some really strange ways, ways that I only ever understand when I go off Facebook, which I did again about a month ago.

My reasons this time were really different - I'm finishing my dissertation and given everything that is going on, Facebook just felt like an unhealthy distraction.

This is all to say that I'm going to try to blog more, in part because I like writing about things, and feel more inclined to do so.  But I tend to say this every few years, and nothing happens, so who knows? 

Plain Language is Bad

I found this old essay by chance today.  It's not bad, and reminds me that I was probably smarter a decade ago than I am now!  The Medicare fraud letter remains chilling, and I still believe that the plain language movement is part of a far larger cultural trend that has immiserated us to no end.  In any case, to the three of you who still read my blog, enjoy!

Government Communications and Entertainment:  a Brief Analysis of the Plain Language Movement

The shamelessness of the rhetorical question “What do people want?” lies in the fact that it appeals to the very people as thinking subjects whose subjectivity it specifically seeks to annul.

Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry” Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 116.

There is a certain irony to the fact that George Orwell is both the author of Nineteen Eighty Four and the essay Politics and the English Language.  Nineteen Eighty Four has become a kind of cautionary tale about governments and their relationship to the truth, alerting people to the dangers of “newspeak” and the manufacture of truth by governments.  However, Politics and the English Language, where Orwell extols the virtues of clear and simple language, has itself become the foundational text for the Plain Language Movement.  His six rules for clear writing, such as avoid the passive voice, form the grammatical canon for the movement, which seeks to eradicate “gobbledygook” from legal and government communication, to ensure greater “readability” and “clarity”.  And what began as a movement opposed to government and legal standards of writing has now been fully embraced by those institutions.

Despite the broad aims of the movement, and the depth of its transformative power in shaping how governments communicate with their citizens, it is perhaps surprising how little sociological research has been done to examine the ramifications of the Plain Language Movement on public discourse.   Rather it has been assumed that plain language is good and necessary thing.  My own experience as a bureaucrat can testify to the near universal acceptance of plain language as a good thing.   This brief essay will attempt to suggest some avenues for more closely examining how plain language, far from engaging citizens, annuls that engagement by removing citizens from the democratic process, by focusing on ends to the detriment of means.

What is plain language?  The United State government's Plain Language (www.plainlanguage.gov) website has several definitions[1]:

A word about "plain English." The phrase certainly shouldn't connote drab and dreary language. Actually, plain English is typically quite interesting to read. It's robust and direct—the opposite of gaudy, pretentious language. You achieve plain English when you use the simplest, most straightforward way of expressing an idea. You can still choose interesting words. But you'll avoid fancy ones that have everyday replacements meaning precisely the same thing.[2]

Bryan Garner, from Legal Writing in Plain English, 2001, pp xiv

The next definition is from Professor Robert Eagleson, an Australian scholar of plain language:

Plain English is clear, straightforward expression, using only as many words as are necessary. It is language that avoids obscurity, inflated vocabulary and convoluted sentence construction. It is not baby talk, nor is it a simplified version of the English language. Writers of plain English let their audience concentrate on the message instead of being distracted by complicated language. They make sure that their audience understands the message easily.[3]

These examples illustrate the broad aims of the movement:  To eliminate ornament from language, and to make documents “readable”.  A writer is to find the “simplest” way of expressing an idea, and one is to avoid “fancy” words when “ordinary” words will do.   If one does this, the “audience” will understand their text (or specifically their message, a very important word indeed) “easily”.  It is important to note that complicated language “distracts”, presumably because it forces one to think for a moment about what one is hearing. The focus of both definitions is on economy as the hallmark of clarity.  However, what does clarity mean in practice for the Plain Language Movement?

The dramatic effect Plain Language has on government communications is best shown through an example.  One of the more chilling examples is the following, from US government's plain language website.  It is important to keep in mind that this transformation is being sold as an exemplar of clear, plain language:

Medicare Fraud Letter

The Medicare Beneficiary Services receives a lot of Medicare fraud correspondence every year. To reach their customers more effectively, they took an already short letter and made it even shorter and to the point.

Before

Investigators at the contractor will review the facts in your case and decide the most appropriate course of action. The first step taken with most Medicare health care providers is to reeducate them about Medicare regulations and policies. If the practice continues, the contractor may conduct special audits of the providers medical records. Often, the contractor recovers overpayments to health care providers this way. If there is sufficient evidence to show that the provider is consistently violating Medicare policies, the contractor will document the violations and ask the Office of the Inspector General to prosecute the case. This can lead to expulsion from the Medicare program, civil monetary penalties, and imprisonment.

After

We will take two steps to look at this matter: We will find out if it was an error or fraud.

We will let you know the result.[4]

It is important to note that this is a letter regarding an allegation of fraud.  The first letter goes to some length to explain the process to the correspondent, and the possible outcomes.  The second omits this information, and instead informs the correspondent that they will be told the outcome only when the government has completed its investigation.  An opportunity to describe a government's process becomes a statement of government action.  However, which letter is really “clearer”?

Instead of providing the reader an opportunity to form their own thoughts, the second letter, and indeed, many things written in “plain language” are designed to narrow the interpretive space of communication down to nothing.  Similar to Walter Benjamin’s views on newspaper writing, the government strains to interpret “what the people want”, so no other interpretation but the government’s interpretation is possible.  The second letter in the example explains, while the first letter describes.

This is where the idea of the government “message” is of supreme importance.  A politician, or a government, must remain “on message”, in other words, they must stick to the script which allows as little latitude as possible for interpretation.  However, through plain language, the idea of the message is sold as populist clarity.  The second letter, ominous as it sounds, also leaves a clear message – the government is acting.   The key message of the second letter is the sense that the government is “doing something”, not that the citizen has a role in that activity. 

Thinking of citizens as busy, simple people, who want facts and to see action, is reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s views on myth and its relationship to Enlightenment.  As they write, “Enlightenment’s mythic terror springs from a horror of myth.  It detects myth not only in semantically unclarified concepts and words…but in any human utterance which has no place in the functional context of self-preservation.”[5]  Plain language adherents see complex sentence constructions and technical vocabularies not as the outcome of complex government institutions, but as needless and wasteful, as a myth of government which plain language can eradicate, at least when communicating to citizens.   Instead, it forecloses the very possibility that governments are complex, restricting that complexity to those who work in government, who are themselves presumably not average.

Plain language in a government setting presumes people are unwilling to want to engage with their government in any more than a rudimentary, “practical” way.  It assumes not only that citizens want their information to be handed to them, without the sense that they, as citizens in a democracy, have a part to play in shaping that information.   It assumes, in effect, that they want to be entertained by their government.

It is telling that despite nearly 30 years of the plain language movement, as well as strong support from the very governments it had targeted, voter turnout is lower than ever and citizen disengagement in Canada has reached an all-time high.  The quote found at the head of this essay seems more apt than ever:  Citizens are less engaged perhaps because they understand that they are not really necessary, except on occasion for reasons of legitimacy.   Through plain language, the activity of democratic government has been replaced by politics as light entertainment, although I appreciate that this brief paper has only offered a glimpse of that.  

However, and perhaps this is the most perplexing question, who would have thought that this alienation would have been cultivated using the very grammatical rules Orwell developed as a caution against it?

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[1] I am using the US government’s website for clarity.  Similar examples exist in Canada as well.

[2]    http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/definitions/garner.cfm

[3]    http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/definitions/eagleson.cfm

[4]    http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before_after/medicarefraudltr.cfm

[5] Dialectic of Enlightenment, p.22