Un coup de dès jamais n'abolira le hasard

About a week ago I wrote a post adding to my ongoing series on puerility, observing how the cultural phenomenon of the FiveThirtyEight blog and the conflicts surrounding it exemplified a discourse in which discrete, mutually exclusive outcomes are the only imaginable ones. Then, while I drove to Maryland for a workshop, stopping in Philadelphia on the way back, about eighty people commented on my post to let me know that they were persuaded (in error) that I was somehow defaming Nate Silver personally and statistics as a field, and that it was up to them to defend both.

This seems to me to suggest two things.

First, that the same logic that gives us "Obama or Romney?" as the paramount question one can ask about an election also gives us "for or against?" as the paramount question one could ask about the FiveThirtyEight blog. This is in no way an interesting question to me, but for many people it was the only question, and therefore my post could only be read as answering it. This reduction to discrete, mutually exclusive, and usually binary outcomes legible in the terms of a game is of course what I was identifying as a form of puerility in the first place. Obama or Romney? Statistics or "gut"? Nate Silver or Politico? Quants or scouts? These questions clearly generate a great deal of pleasure, as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which they are debated, but there are other questions, involving words like "why" and "how," that are worth discussing.

Second, that childhood is so overwhelmingly treated as a debased category that to invoke it is considered an insult.* In addition to its literal meaning of "boyish" (Latin puer), "puerile," in common usage, carries a pejorative connotation, of course, but that's its least descriptive and least useful aspect, which is why I set it aside. Puerility, in the sense of the performance of child masculinity, is one of the most powerful political forces in the present moment; that's why there is a "Nate Silver phenomenon" in the first place. It should go without saying that anyone can engage in this performance, but it is also worth noting (so I noted it) that Silver's public persona (white, male, youthful, virtuosic) makes him a particularly good candidate, out of the many people and organizations aggregating polls, to emerge as the celebrity of popular political statistics.

On election night it was interesting (though not surprising) to observe how, once the presidential race was called, Silver began to be celebrated on Twitter (elsewhere too, I'm sure, but Twitter is time-stamped) as if he were the magical wizard that, prior to the election, Silver himself so patiently tried to explain that he was not. A lot of the tweets were really funny (funniest), but many of them oddly called the Obama victory "a win for statistics" or even "a win for reality," as if to suggest that the validity of either were contingent on who won the election.** Some even explicitly trod into "Nate Silver IS a wizard!" territory:

Drunk Nate Silver held a seance for Nostradamus just so he could mock his abilities. #DrunkNateSilver (@fivethirtyeight)

— If It's A Choice... (@IfItsAChoice) November 8, 2012

Such celebrations seemed to concede (erroneously) that Scarborough et al. had a point in the first place— that a Romney win would have falsified Silver's model, and that Silver's model were based on occult wizardry rather than weighted averages of widely available polling data. As Siva Vaidhyanathan put it:

You realize, of course, that if Romney had won Nate Silver's prediction would still have been right.

— Siva Vaidhyanathan (@sivavaid) November 9, 2012

And surely many of the people declaring Silver the real winner of the election knew this, and had even, prior to the election, said it. This put no damper on the explosion of Silver jokes, however; the pleasure of play trumped the basic premises of the very thing being celebrated. The cultural meaning of statistics was precisely puerile at this moment, openly signifying "winning team" more than it signified the actual principles of statistics.

Another form of data analysis was also declared a winner after the election, it is worth noting—the data-mining that enabled the Obama camp's microtargeted get-out-the-vote effort. This was swept into the same category as Silver's poll averages and made a cause for celebration. But as Zeynep Tufekçi, who had earlier argued that work like Silver's had the potential to limit the puerile logic of the horse race, observed, data-mining is ethically neutral at best, and is as eagerly pursued by Target as by the Democratic Party:

Winning by big data driven ground game & micro-messaging is appealing (not saying all that it was) but it's policy neutral. Who next time?

— Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) November 7, 2012

Or as Alexis Madrigal put it, "Data Doesn't Belong to the Democrats". "The left's celebrating the analytical method right now as if it belonged to them," Madrigal writes. "But it doesn't. [...T]his election was not a triumph of data over no data, of rigor over hunch. The 2012 election was a triumph of Democratic data over Republican data." What Madrigal predicts next is a data analysis war, as Republicans struggle to catch up with and exceed the facility already achieved by Democrats.

This is indeed probably what will happen in 2016, and it is about winning. In such a discursive environment, we can easily have another election in which drone strikes are not up for debate at all. But who wins—the question that FiveThirtyEight and the political parties' data-mining efforts each, in their different ways, attempt to answer***—only ultimately matters in the context of policy questions. Are we able to ask them?

-----

*This is complicated, to say the least.

**This is in contrast with the predictions in individual states, which, taken together, are rather more meaningful for evaluating the model.

***I.e., Silver tries to answer by prediction based on polling data, while the data-miners try to answer by trying to secure a particular outcome.

The Passion of Nate Silver (Sort Of)

Needless to say, I am fascinated by the recent Silver Wars, which erupted, oddly, in the midst of a gigantic hurricane bearing down on the east coast. (No major damage up in my neck of the woods, although an uprooted tree on the green did reveal a skeleton. h/t Miriam.)

The "Nate Silver phenomenon" is a perfect example of Second Gilded Age puerility, a form of political commentary that is concerned not with meaning or ethics but rather with phenomenality, especially as translated into abstract forms, chief among them numbers. When I use "puerility" in this way, I don't mean it pejoratively but literally: this is a form of boyishness, as boyishness has been constructed in U.S. history. It's concerned first and foremost with abstract play—even a certain virtuosity with play—and it is entirely bound up its own game. And it is a game that may be a little ruthless, a game that implicitly must be played by a white, boyish figure, a Tom Sawyer who insists on playing even when a slave's freedom is at stake.* Silver's Wunderkind image creates kind of persona from whom we are prepared to receive statistical models; it is entirely appropriate that his statistical forecasting began not in politics but in sports.

Nate Silver's models can tell us how likely it is that Obama will "win" (the game). They can't, and absolutely do not aim to, explain, say, the role of race in the election. And they cannot give definitive predictions either, only probabilities: that's the point. Statistics always pulls back from the claims it makes; if it did not do so, it would not be statistics. Statistics is an inherently puerile discipline, not because it is dominated by men but because its principles concord so strongly with the way we have constructed boyhood—an unrelenting commitment to the play of abstract forms above all else: above wishes, above belief, above ethics, its only ethics being a commitment to the rules of the game. It presumes being unable to really know "the answer," except as defined and bounded by the game.

The Silver backlash has a huge problem with this. In the Politico piece that seems to crystallize the backlash, Dylan Byers quotes the NYT columnist David Brooks:

"I should treat polls as a fuzzy snapshot of a moment in time. I should not read them, and think I understand the future," he wrote. "If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior."**

The key here is the word "understand." Brooks thinks that Silver thinks he "understands" the future. But understanding has nothing to do with it; there are simulations, and they indicate the probability of potential outcomes. It's not understanding; it's pointing.

The backlash to the Silver backlash is even more interesting. Silver's most ardent defenders are wholly immersed in the logic of puerility: new-media, moderate-left, youthful, exclusively male***—most notably Silver's fellow statistical Wunderkind, Ezra Klein. Their chosen tactics, moreover, have at times taken forms that we might associate with the other sense of "puerile." An article in Deadspin, Gawker Media's sports site, for instance, delights in the flamboyant immaturity of name-calling: "Nate Silver’s Braying Idiot Detractors Show That Being Ignorant About Politics Is Like Being Ignorant About Sports."

The Defenders accuse the Backlashers of two things—ignorance of statistics and a reflexive personal hatred of Silver founded on defensiveness—and suggest that the two are, in essence, identical. The latter, it is interesting to note, is a highly psychologized accounting. In TechCrunch, Gregory Ferenstein writes,

Why does Silver, who is really just an apartisan puzzle-solver, inspire so much loathing? Because his results reveal a psychologically disturbing fact: we live in an uncontrollable, unpredictable world.

As far as Ferenstein is concerned, the reason Silver is being criticized is that he reveals a truth that some people can't handle. That truth is, essentially, that statistics is a valid method of producing knowledge about reality; in other words, decrying Nate Silver reveals an ignorance that is the same as a psychological weakness. Klein's take is less cosmic but equally psychological:

Lots of pundits don't like Nate Silver because he makes them feel innumerate. Then they criticize him and prove it.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 29, 2012

Klein packs a slight dig at the Backlashers' masculinity in that phrase, "makes them feel innumerate." "Innumerate" is code for "inadequate," but a particular kind of inadequate; it's a castration complex built on an ignorance of statistics. Silver, as a methodologist and as a person, is "threatening" to traditional journalists (Ferenstein). The Defenders impute wrong feelings to the Backlashers, wrong feelings that are indistinguishable from wrong knowledge.

What is so interesting to me about the Defense—which is, if anything, more impassioned than the Backlash—is that it finds in the Backlashers a profound moral failing. Ferenstein's TechCrunch piece literally includes a picture of Galileo, calling up a larger-than-life myth of the forces of dogma unfairly pursuing a scientific crusader whose, as the Indigo Girls would have it, "crime was looking up the truth." Yup; Nate Silver, Galileo; I totally see it.

But the real failure of the Backlashers is a little more complex: not a moral failure, but rather a failure to be okay with the moral absence at the heart of statistical methods. The Silver backlash wants an answer, a position; it wants Silver to stop playing around. In other words, it reads statistics itself as waffling and double-tonguery. It's not wrong in that sense. It just fails to appreciate that that is more or less the entire point of statistics: to measure what is irreducibly uncertain.

There's certainly a basic failure to grok statistics that underwrites the comments by Joe Scarborough, David Brooks, et al. (the Backlash). And undoubtedly they are craven, miserable, petty people, as Ferenstein, Klein, and others suggest, although I have my doubts about proving the latter by way of the former.

But it's also important to break out of the puerility sandbox for a minute. We do not have to suppose, as Robert Schlesinger does in U.S. News, that the only alternative to "quants" is "gut feeling traditionalists" and "conventional wisdom"—that is, non-knowledge. There are good reasons to be wary of the statistical mode, if not reasons dreamed of by David Brooks, and they do not necessarily involve siding with the Ancients in a battle against the Moderns. Klein writes that

If you had to distill the work of a political pundit down to a single question, you’d have to pick the perennial “who will win the election?” [...] Now Silver—and Silver’s imitators and political scientists—are taking that question away from us. It would be shocking if the profession didn’t try and defend itself.

Perhaps so. But what if that weren't, after all, the question?

A Nieman Lab defense of Silver by Jonathan Stray celebrates that "FiveThirtyEight has set a new standard for horse race coverage" of elections. That this can be represented as an unqualified good speaks to the power of puerility in the present epistemological culture. But we oughtn't consider better horse race coverage the ultimate aim of knowledge; somehow we have inadvertently landed ourselves back in the world of sports. An election is not, in the end, a game. Coverage should not be reducible to who will win? Here are some other questions: How will the next administration govern? How will the election affect my reproductive health? When will women see equal representation in Congress? How will the U.S. extricate itself from permanent war, or will it even try? These are questions with real ethical resonance. FiveThirtyEight knows better than to try to answer with statistics.**** But we should still ask them, and try to answer them too.*****

Nate Silver's Log, 2016. I've been on the run for four years now, spreading polling averages to them that needs 'em most...

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2012

Coda

The first woman I have seen to comment on the Silver Wars is Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times's public editor, and it was to reprimand Silver for playing around—literally. Silver offered to make a bet with Backlasher Joe Scarborough about the outcome of the election. Aunt Polly Sullivan writes that "[i]n a phone conversation, Mr. Silver described the wager offer as 'half playful and half serious.'" Which is, of course, the essence of the appeal of FiveThirtyEight.

-----

*I am of course alluding to the ending of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
**It's bad enough to have to link a Politico piece, but I'm not linking Brooks.
***I have not yet seen a Silver defense by a woman, although I suppose they must exist. I have seen many, prominently placed, by men, however.
****Silver's NYT colleagues, Dubner and Levitt, do not know better, unfortunately.
*****I am all too aware that a perfectly plausible gloss of this post would be: "don't hate the player; hate the game."

A surplus of toys

A last (?) note on Moonrise Kingdom's puerility.

Stephen Crane is a master of the particular version of puerility; I think in particular of the Whilomville story "Lynx-Hunting," in which a group of Whilomville boys, led by Jimmie Trescott, stolidly defend the town against a grazing cow.

Crane, too, is continually said to work in miniatures; thus Michael Fried reads the final scene in The Monster as a scene of "reading painfully what has already been written, with the stove representing a domesticated (in effect miniaturized) version of the catastrophic fire" (142). Indeed, Fried argues, "two opposing tendencies, one toward miniaturization and the other toward a certain monstrosity, coinhabit Crane's prose" (141). The same could be, and has been, said of Wes Anderson's filmmaking.

This brings us back to Noye's Fludde, the systematized, aestheticized miniature of the real flood happening outside, which in the film takes on the cosmic significance of the Noah's Flood, the narrator going into some detail about its historic devastation. At a certain point the real flood takes precedence over everything else, disrupting Noye's Fludde and revealing every system as miniature, as diminutive.

Such moments appear in Crane as well. In The Material Unconscious, Bill Brown addresses Crane's poetry only once, in order to reveal the dimension of childish play latent in "The Open Boat":

The ocean speaks the lines of the poem, asking that the weeping woman on shore be told that her lover is dead: "Her lover I have laid/ In cool green hall." The second and final stanza supplements the message:

"Tell her this
"And more,—
"That the king of the seas
"Weeps too, old, helpless man.
"The bustling fates
"Heap his hands with corpses
"until he stands like a child
"With Surplus of toys." (W, 10:22)

The lines intimate an understanding of life and death that would make the entirety of "The Open Boat" intelligible as "play".... (Brown 123-4)

The great fear is that there is no end to this regress, that there are, indeed, no grown-ups in the room. Not only are all the adults invested in miniature systems; the Cosmic Adults are so many babies as well, pulling the heads off dolls.

Thus in Crane's story "Death and the Child," the unaware toddler playing on a mountaintop, accidentally abandoned by the evacuating villagers, is possessed of a godlike perspective on the battle below. To him the action looks like a doodle, "fantastic smoky shapes" and "white circles and whirligigs" and "[l]ines of flame" (Crane 962). When young Peza, foolishly overeager for battle, reaches the mountaintop and finds himself face to face with this baby, it is the baby who is in a position to inquire, "Are you a man?"

Of course, we don't quite have the same fear that gods are babies in Anderson's films. The weather exerts its whims, but there is always ultimately a grown-up chaperoning things—Anderson himself. The craftedness of his miniatures remind us that somebody has things under control.

That that register of control—the aesthetic—is the same register as that of the miniature, e.g. the church production of Noye's Fludde, however, may give us a moment's pause. In the end this film is deeply sympathetic to the ridiculous seriousness with which children and especially adults invest their play. For in the film, aesthetic satisfaction appears to be the only available site of even fictive shelter. One can but work on that production of Noye's Fludde, or pull a crisis back into the realm of Khaki Scouting by inspecting the camp and issuing a Commendable.

As Crane writes in Black Riders:

If there is a witness to my little life,
To my tiny throes and struggles,
He sees a fool;
And it is not fine for gods to menace fools. (Crane 1303)

Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane & the Economies of Play. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996. Print.

Crane, Stephen. Prose and Poetry: Maggie: A Girl of the Street; The Red Badge of Courage; Stories, Sketches and Journalism; Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. New York, N.Y: Library of America, 1984. Print. The Library of America 18.

Fried, Michael. Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Paperback ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Print.

"I'm a raven."

I forgot to mention in my previous post one of my favorite things about Moonrise Kingdom, which was the liberal use of Benjamin Britten's works in the soundtrack. Movie nerds will recognize the theme from his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra as the Rondeau from Henry Purcell's Abdelazar, which was adapted (quite effectively, for solo violin) for a key scene in The Lesser Adaptation of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"I'm a raven."

The amateur production of Britten's Noye's Fludde, staged in a local church and replete with children dressed as animals, is, like the Khaki Scouts, its own kind of child-adult collusion in overenthusiasm. Suzy is a failed raven just as Sam is a failed Khaki Scout, failed on social grounds rather than out of incompetence. It is a "play" that is taken utterly seriously, especially by the grown-ups (like the one who demotes Suzy from her raven role). Play taken too seriously, or serious enterprises (like child care) rendered all too game-like (as when the best scout of all, Scoutmaster Ward, manages to lose first Sam, then the rest of the troop), continually threaten happiness. The only possible resistance is yet another system, an alternative game, a union between Sam's wilderness skills and Suzy's fantasy world, the game of their private Moonrise Kingdom.

Thus when all the other social systems of discipline converge, they do so at the church, in the midst of Noye's Fludde, in order to escape the actual flooding outside.

Britten is a serious, even difficult composer who has, when you think about it, written a great deal for children—both child audiences and child performers. He's especially known as a composer of liturgical music in a tradition famous for its boy choristers. I couldn't help noticing a movement from his Simple Symphony when it appeared in the film—a movement tellingly titled "Playful Pizzicato"—I'd played it as a child, after all. Using childish sounds—"playful" pizzicato (plucked strings), glockenspiels, high-pitched child voices, and at times almost comical bombast (including in the didactic Young Person's Guide)—Britten proffers Middle English texts and challenging harmonies. Thus, within the world of the film, his music marks the oscillations between "too easy" and "too hard" that marks every educational pursuit, every system for cultivating the self.

Anderson's own oeuvre, so often described in the terms of miniatures and toys (and including an animated adaptation of a children's book, Roald Dahl's 1970 Fantastic Mister Fox) aspires to similar comminglings. In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson focalizes childhood as a site of real difficulty, one whose difficulties are not discontinuous with those of adulthood, and indeed, one whose difficulties are most adult when they reside in the domain of play.

Suzy lugs a suitcase of stolen library books through the wilderness, imaginative resources for building a private universe. Her fictions are bulwarks against the flood.

Commendable

[Spoilers for Moonrise Kingdom.]

**

There is hardly a clearer example of Foucauldian power than the Boy Scouts—a most codified set of techniques of the self, each self a set of badges pinned to the uniform.

I saw Moonrise Kingdom last night; the centrality of its "Khaki Scouts" highlights the way in which overinvestment in such systems conduces to tragicomedy, especially in Wes Anderson's films (The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Rushmore function similarly).

Particularly notable to me are the juxtapositions of adults and children; there is often intergenerational buy-in. There is something truly hilarious about a group of boys taking their scouting very seriously. Funnier still is the truest true believer, the adult Scoutmaster Ward, who avers that being a scout master is his real job: "I teach math on the side." But the boys' and men's beliefs exist in the same plane; Sam's adorable self-importance as he gives Suzy camping tips (of very widely varying utility) is later validated by his scout master's manner of offering sympathy: "I wish we'd had time for an inspection back there. I would have given you a Commendable."

As ridiculous as the Khaki Scouts are, they are soon revealed to be no more ridiculous than the other disciplinary institutions that they mimic—the law, as figured by Suzy's lawyer parents; the state, as figured by Social Services (Tilda Swinton, in some of the film's most visually striking moments—of course); and perhaps the most absurd of them all, the police, as figured by Commander Sharp. In a climactic scene, all four avatars of systematized discipline bark into walkie-talkies attempting to sort out the proper placement of the two children, four criss-crossing domains of authority emblematized by five bewildered—but still entirely invested—adults. At the end, when Sharp agrees to foster the orphaned Sam, Sam switches out the Khaki Scouts uniform in which we have always seen him for a miniature police uniform. He has merely switched systems.

In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf mocks men's love of fancy dress by pointing to the pomp and circumstance of the military. Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade (1933) contains a military dance sequence ("Shanghai Lil") that indeed quite undermines any distinction between the military and the Tiller Girls when it comes to examples of the mass ornament. What I am getting at is that there is a pettiness in these systems—and it is precisely the pettiness that interests Anderson—that we may identify as a form of puerility. It is "boyish" behavior, both highly elaborated and ridiculous, even if adults are frequently the originators of that puerility. (What is The Life Aquatic if not a story about a man playing with the people and things around him as if they were so many toys?) These are systems of play entered into for their own sake, and prioritized regardless of the consequences. (A pet dog is killed in one encounter; when confronted with this fact, Sam's nemesis shrugs and says something to the effect that it can't be helped; the dog is a casualty of war.)

Puerility and its powerful appeal—its necessity, even—is one of Anderson's continual themes. Why do people invest themselves in ridiculous systems? When is such investment reprehensible? From what standpoint is one capable of distinguishing between puerility and grandeur of vision—or does any such distinction exist?


Kracauer, Siegfried. "The Mass Ornament." The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966. Print.

Puerility is also one of Stephen Crane's great themes.

Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on it to become more human. (3-4)
—Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (trans. Bennington and Bowlby)

Saying hey

Via Ben Friedlander on Twitter, I was recently treated to Anne Boyer's "Damnatio Memoriae." Please read it--it's short and brilliant.

As Miriam Posner points out, it's oddly moving, not in spite of its repetition of the hilariously banal phrase "saying hey," but because of it. It serves as a subversively anti-dramatic counterpoint to the question, "Can the subaltern speak?" After all, here they are, saying hey. Only they're saying hey across the centuries, across the continents, "across deep time." These mysteries of the low register are the genius of flarf and the reason it's poetry, even if it's irritating poetry. Why does lameness sometimes flare out in the form of awesomeness?

[Better than Storify? Worse? I sometimes think Twitter conversations amount to more than the sum of their parts, but it can be difficult to render them usefully on a blog.]

The Case of @MayorEmanuel; or, The Puerility of Profanity

A wise friend of mine once explained the rule to me: adults can swear, and children can swear, but they can't swear in front of each other. It violates a boundary.

I suspect that this is, in part, because it is nowhere more necessary for adults to appear to be adults than around children. When the altogether hilarious lyric video for Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You" came out, I argued that the song was a virtuoso performance of puerility (that is, a particular kind of child-masculinity), and that the refrain "Fuck you!" was funny because it was so immature. I didn't, however, argue that liberal profanity was itself inherently puerile. But I now think it is, and the reason is @MayorEmanuel.

@MayorEmanuel is of course the brilliant fake Rahm Emanuel Twitter account authored by Dan Sinker and maintained over the course of the real Emanuel's mayoral campaign. Fake Rahm, accompanied by a Honda-driving David Axelrod (and his strangely agential moustache), innocent geeky wunderkind Carl the Intern (he fetches coffee, builds an igloo, calculates Rahm's correct position in an alternate dimension), stray puppy Hambone, and a politically savvy duck named Quaxelrod, curses his way through a mayoral campaign, Chicago winter weather, the Superbowl, and a number of hilarious visions involving the most recent Mayor Daley and, at one point, the disembodied (yet dapper!) head of Marshall Field. (I believe Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic did the definitive rundown.)

Really, the source of this insight isn't directly @MayorEmanuel but one of Kevin Dettmar's recent posts on the relationship between tiny bursts of writing (Twitter), medium chunks (blogging), and longer formats (articles, books). I left a comment that reminded me of one of Kevin's earlier posts, which in turn reminded me of my own series of posts on puerility, which by the way reminded me that, intentionally or otherwise, I end up posting serially, if intermittently, on the same topics, and one of those is puerility, and quite honestly I'll be surprised if it doesn't develop into a monograph eventually,* which perhaps speaks to Kevin's actual point.

But forget Kevin's actual point: back to the puerility of f-bombs.

The basic joke of the @MayorEmanuel account is that Rahm Emanuel is extremely foul-mouthed. So, stupid joke? Well, maybe at first. Sinker himself notes he got bored with just tweeting f-bombs. But of course the style had to persist as he began to add story arcs, and what it brings out is the puerile emotional intensity that must accompany a constant stream of profanity. Profanity constitutes a libidinal outburst; it's an intensifier with a particular affective charge. Constant, repeated outbursts of aggression, applied equally to things loved and things hated, can only be sustained by a puerile character.

Hated:

4 October 2010

Loved:

7 February 2011

Note the matching f-bombs.

Despite the fact that the real Rahm Emanuel is married, @MayorEmanuel's universe is a sort of boy-paradise, a Huck's raft variously located in Axelrod's old beater of a Civic, the crawlspace of Rahm's Chicago house, an igloo, and, at one point (as if in homage to Twain), an ice floe in the middle of the Chicago River. Female characters occasionally join in the play--Axelrod loses a pool cannonball competition to a seven-year-old girl named Alyssa, and Penny Pritzker and Helen Mirren, among others, make appearances--but the core quintet is all male. Yes, even the duck.

And while "fuck" is undoubtedly the most-used word in the whole feed, the five don't at all appear to be in a genital phase; all the actual libidinal impulses expressed involve food, coffee, and games (football, snow angels on a frozen Lake Michigan). And, of course (tellingly) shitting, one of fake Rahm's favorite pranks (Hambone, the puppy, is good at it too). Rahm even occasionally longs for a nap, requiring parenting:

22 February 2011

15 February 2011

He sometimes doesn't understand why various advisors won't "let" him do various puerile things. The most common of these is filling his campaign slogans and speeches with f-bombs, of course, but sometimes his prohibited desires are even more obviously childish:

Both 18 February 2011

The fact that the animal companions, Hambone and Quaxelrod (so named because of the moustachelike dark spot on his beak), are given human attributes while retaining some animal characteristics places @MayorEmanuel squarely in the tradition of children's fiction. Indeed, it's never clear how much of fake Rahm's world is his fantasy, and to what degree the puppy and the duck are anthropomorphized by Rahm's childish projection.

14 February 2011

22 February 2011

Indeed, @MayorEmanuel's primary influence may be Calvin and Hobbes, with Rahm playing Calvin and his friends variously playing parents and the toy/animal Hobbes. Fake Rahm's aggression is indistinguishable from puerile desire and enthusiasm--indeed, from play. And that's why fake Rahm's main character trait, his propensity to infuse every utterance with cursing, opens up vistas of delight and childish wonder:

17 February 2011

17 February 2011

18 February 2011

Fake Rahm's enthusiasm is, let's face it, cute.

Here's what Kevin Dettmar wrote about "Fuck You" back in August. It reveals a basic assumption that reappears in his comment regarding @MayorEmanuel, namely that f-bombs are a cheap form of humor, a kind of automatic or unearned transgression (in the way that sentimental fiction is supposed to deliver unearned feeling, for instance).

Friday’s Twitter stream was all abuzz with big love for the new Cee-Lo single, “Fuck You” (or, as YouTube’s dainty orthography/typography would have it, “F**k You”). One of my Tweeps and Producer Extraordinaire, Andy Zax (@andyzax), said it was “destined to be the anthem of late summer, 2010.” Normally I’m healthily skeptical of such claims: but Andy’s nobody’s fool. Not long after, my FB friend Carter Delloro updated his status, and it was clear he is equally smitten.

Something about this all annoyed me deeply. Maybe it’s my inner Church Lady: After all, what kind of a title is that for a song? How you gonna sell it at Wal-Mart? (Probably the way R.E.M. sold Automatic for the People, changing a certain song’s title to “Star Me Kitten.” “Star You”?) Also, I hate being scooped. I may not know much about music, but I know a bangin’ pop song when I hear one. I’ll be the judge, Andy and Carter: even better, I’ll be the critic, and weigh in, explaining how you’re wrong.

So I decided--sound unheard--that I’d write a smackdown of “Fuck You.” I mean clearly, Andy and Carter had been swayed by the naughty factor: I’m willing to drop the F-bomb when it gets some genuine communicative work done, but I was sure Cee-Lo was just being a Bad Boy.

"Just being a Bad Boy"--why, yes. I'm only using Kevin's post as an example, of course, and partly by way of citation, since it's what got me thinking about the puerility of profanity in the first place. But it's a fairly common characterization of the use of f-bombs in humor, and is instructively dismissive to boot.

So is profanity inherently funny, or "just" (to borrow Kevin's word) immature? Well, the examples of Cee Lo's "Fuck You" and Sinker's @MayorEmanuel suggest that it's funny because it's immature; it's a form of self-infantilization, and thus a form of self-deprecation.

The dissonance that produces humor, in @MayorEmanuel, is the disconnect between Rahm's childishness and the (supposedly) grown-up business of a mayoral campaign (children, after all, cannot vote). Profanity is actually the hilarious hinge between these two: as my wise friend explained, it violates a boundary--because typically profanity is a boundary between adult and child realms. In @MayorEmanuel, profanity is a metonym for all the libidinal puerility that really is present in "grown-up" political campaigns, and in particular, in Rahm Emanuel's famously hard-nosed political style. Ha ha, Rahm Emanuel curses a lot. It's only superficially funny, until it reveals the puerility within a certain masculinist (and "realistic") political style--and then it's profoundly fucking hilarious.

*Not just by gluing some blog posts together, for God's sake. It's called revision.

This post's title is with apologies to Jacqueline Rose.

My favorite character is definitely Quaxelrod.

A Supposedly Fun Thing: Text-Mining and the Amusement/Knowledge System; or, the Epistemological Sentimentalists

If we could text-mine the internets of the last few days for the correlation between the words "n-gram" and "fun," I'm sure we'd get a nontrivial number. One of the most striking things about the reception of the Google Books Ngrams, largely in the form of the web tool, is the giddy delight with which people have announced how much fun it is. Exhibit A is the bit I quoted yesterday from Patricia Cohen at the New York Times:

The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.

But that's just one example--the fun of the Google Books Ngrams tool is almost universally noted. See, for instance, "Fun With Google's Ngram Viewer" (Mother Jones), "Fun with Google NGram Viewer" (WSJ), and "BRB, Can't Stop NGraming" (The Awl). And Dorothea Salo tweets,

What I like about the GBooks n-grams is seeing all kinds of people playing with it. Just playing. THAT, friends, is how one learns.

The prevalence of this language of play raises two questions.

1. What rhetorical work is this move (calling Google Books Ngrams a fun toy) doing?

2. What experiential dimension of Google Books Ngrams does this rhetorical move describe, and what does it tell us about the tool's epistemic significance?

Answering the first question feeds into answering the second. To call the Google Books Ngrams web tool (henceforth "GBN") a fun toy is to hedge one's bets, to express approval without necessarily venturing into the higher-stakes terrain of approving it as a research method. Any assessment of the tool's epistemic value is channeled through an expression of pleasure (or, as Patricia Cohen and The Awl's Choire Sicha rather interestingly suggest, compulsion). Play can of course be a form of learning, and very important--that's what Dorothea Salo's tweet indicates. But play is a good learning environment precisely because the stakes are low and mistakes can be made safely, as a comment by Bill Flesch suggests: "I played around with it for about half an hour. Now I'm bored." New toy, please! With respect to knowledge, the language of play is deeply ambivalent.

As I read it, the universal declaration of fun that has surrounded the release of GBN is as much about guilt as about pleasure. Those who are compulsively "ngraming," as Sicha so amusingly puts it, are often all too aware of GBN's limitations, which have been blogged extensively, all the way down to what Natalie Binder points out, in her much-retweeted post, has to underlie the whole operation: inevitably imperfect OCR.*

Why does the GBN web tool even exist? Not to advance knowledge, I don't think, or at least not directly, but rather because it's fun. Because it directs interest toward the more substantive element of the project, the downloadable data set that relatively few people are actually going to download.

There are huge problems with using GBN (and throughout I'm alluding to the web tool/toy that everybody is saying is so much fun) as any sort of meaningful index of culture, and everyone knows it. And yet.

I would argue that the universal declaration of fun is a form of confession: I am deriving epistemological satisfaction from this unsound tool, with its built-in Words for Snowism. It's a guilty pleasure, epistemic candy: the sensation of knowledge, lacking in any nutritional value.

But the guilt goes rather deeper than the simple tension between GBN's unreliability for actual research and the "gee whiz!" quality of the graphs: GBN is fun because it is so limited.

That great scholar of nineteenth-century culture, Walter Benjamin, described a mode of writing that he called "information."

Villemessant, the founder of Le Figaro, characterized the nature of information in a famous formulation. 'To my readers,' he used to say, 'an attic fire in the Latin Quarter [Paris] is more important than a revolution in Madrid.' This makes strikingly clear that what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest. Intelligence that came from afar--whether over spatial distance (from foreign countries) or temporal (from tradition)--possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear 'understandable in itself.' (147, emphasis added)

What GBN delivers is information in this sense. It is near at hand, easy to use, and puts out a nice visualization that appears "understandable in itself." It's easy to deliver, in that way, not unlike a pizza. It's no good to point out, as Mark Davies does, that the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) allows one to look at specific syntactic forms, or include related words, or track usages by the genre of the source. Such capacities only raise anxieties. (For example, what gets tagged as "nonfiction"? Where, for instance, do autobiographies go? I once, to my astonishment, saw The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the nonfiction section of a book store--along with Three Lives! But I digress.)

As soon as we raise such questions, the graph stops being "understandable in itself," stops being information. Conversely, when you aren't given the choice to sort by genre, how genres are defined necessarily stops being a question. It's the very fact that the toy is a black box and a blunt instrument that makes it feel immediate and incontrovertible and, in that very satisfying way, obvious. We get the epistemic satisfaction of information, and the thing that gives it to us is precisely that information's lack of nuance.

Yesterday I used the word "cheap" to describe the kind of historical narratives GBN suggests. There is indeed a kind of economic dimension to the satisfaction that GBN delivers. Of Oscar Wilde's many quotable lines, I am reminded of this one:

The fact is that you were, and are I suppose still, a typical sentimentalist. For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. (768)

Feeling, Wilde suggests, has to be earned.** Bracketing the question of whether this is a good description of sentimentalism, it's a good analogue for the epistemic candy of GBN. One receives the apparent solidity of research--the nice graph that summarizes and visualizes what might otherwise be years of labor in the making--without having to have actually done any research. This is only a cheap thrill, "fun," when it is actually cheap--that is, when we don't inquire into how the corpus was prepared, or what effects GBN's case-sensitivity is having on our results.

The analogy to sentimentalism is useful not only because it gives us a model for understanding the economy of feeling here, but also because it allows us to recognize that there is an element of feeling in the way that we encounter information. We are likely to find it ethically reprehensible when our emotions or what we believe we know are manipulated. And yet there are times when we want the cheap thrill. Most people I know will freely cop to liking a good emotionally manipulative movie or novel, whether a thriller or a romance or one of those movies where the dog dies. As the fun of ngrams demonstrates, we like a little intellectual manipulation too.

(I know, I know, it doesn't tell you anything conclusively, but...try Foucault versus Habermas!)

What does it mean, this liking it?

I mentioned Bill Brown's term, the "amusement/knowledge system," in my title above because it's another, perhaps more explicit way of describing the close interweaving of knowledge and fun at the end of the nineteenth century that so fascinated Benjamin (208). In my own work I have tried to make a case for taking seriously both the knowledge and the amusement in that system, notably in naturalist fiction, because it's often in such liminal places that the terms of what counts as knowledge are most at stake. Part of the reason experimental literature seems to be here to stay is that the amusement/knowledge system is, too.

The point is not to condemn fun as something that has no place in knowledge--far from it. Fun is central to how we vet knowledge--just think of how important it is that research be "interesting"! It is our highest (and also most common) praise.*** Indeed, play lies at the heart of our most cherished models of intellectual inquiry--a nonutilitarian curiosity to "see what happens." As I quoted Dorothea Salo at the beginning of this post: "THAT, friends, is how one learns."

So condemning fun is not at all on my agenda. Rather, I want to draw attention to the emotional content of the way we talk about knowledge, and to the ambivalence that intellectual "fun" signifies. Ours is an age of "news junkies" (again with the pleasure bordering on unpleasurable compulsion, à la the "addictive" ngrams) and "armchair policy wonks" and people who read voraciously, but only in the proverbial dubiously defined "nonfiction" category. Nate Silver and the Freakonomics dudes are minor celebrities. Lies, damned lies, and statistics are our idea of fun, as powerfully as a Victorian melodrama was ever considered fun. Which means we need to think much more about how fun operates, and why, and what that means for knowledge. And just as crucially: what knowledge means for pleasure.


*In fairness, Ben Schmidt argues that GBN's OCR is pretty accurate, given the state of the field, and also that "No one is in a position to be holier-than-thou about metadata. We all live in a sub-development of glass houses." But there's a big difference between "this is really good, for OCR" and "this degree of accuracy is good enough for supplying evidence for X kinds of claims."

**Taken out of context, Wilde appears here to be describing sentimentalism through an economic metaphor. In fact, it's rather the reverse, or at the very least something more confused than that: most of the surrounding text is taken up with Wilde chastising Douglas for his financial mooching.

***As Sianne Ngai points out, the "interesting," like the language of play, has a hedging quality, bridging epistemological and aesthetic domains.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2002. Print.

Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. "Merely Interesting." Critical Inquiry 34.4 (Summer 2008): 777-817. Print.

Wilde, Oscar. "To Alfred Douglas." Jan.-Mar. 1897. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-David. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Print.

Previously on text-mining:
Google Books Ngrams and the number of words for "snow"
Dec. 16, 2010
Dec. 14, 2010
Google's automatic writing and the gendering of birds

Puerility and corporate authorship; or, Being a real boy

Oh boy. (So to speak.) Fall semester is in full swing, and and I'm having to put Gertrude Stein and Susy Clemens on hold for a while in order to move some other writing projects to the head of the queue. It's busy, busy, busy, and I would grouse about it, but the truth is it's my favorite way to be.

Anyway, that's why I've been meaning, but failing, for weeks to post on Jerome Christensen's wonderful talk at the English Institute, "Pinocchio Logic, Pixar Theory, and the Assertion of 'Cultural' Authorship." I thought it was amazing, but I also had a huge beef with it, which of course means blogging, since I distinctly don't have time to write up some kind of formal response.

Corporate authorship

At this late date I can't summarize the whole talk, which included some really brilliant readings, but I'll try to represent it as best I can.

Christensen wanted to know what it would mean, exactly, to construe a corporation's "culture" serve as its conscience.

Juridically, guilt depends on mens rea, or a guilty mind, for which corporations lack the subjective capacity. It can break the law, but a corporation itself can't know right from wrong, and the difference matters legally. An undesirable consequence of this distinction is that corporations escape accountability for their actions.

On the other hand, in the recent Citizens United decision, the court ruled that corporations do have the right to protected speech, where speech is construed as indistinguishable from money, since speech need not originate in a physical body, even for you or for I. A key example in the Citizens United decision is that of the Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which the opinion construes as an instance of corporate authorship on the part of Columbia Pictures--over and against, Christensen pointed out, the auteur theory suggested by what is technically the film's full title, Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Indeed, the decision conspicuously omits any mention of Capra or his negotiated billing. The film, the court opined, was an example of protected free speech on the part of Columbia Pictures; the ability to make money is reinterpreted as the ability to speak politically and construed as a right that all corporations hold.

The idea of corporate film authorship, something Christensen has written on before, thus underwrites the Citizens United decision. (One wonders whether the same principle is really extensible to corporations that don't make films but rather, say, chocolate pudding, since corporate pudding authorship seems less analogous to speech, or to corporate-funded political ad campaigns. But I digress.)

Christensen then turned to two corporations and their corporate-authored, animated allegories of animation itself, Disney's Pinocchio and Pixar's Toy Story trilogy. It's important to this story that both Disney and Pixar have distinctive corporate cultures, and that when Pixar was acquired by Disney, a clause in the contract stipulated that Pixar's "culture" -- quotation marks in the original -- remain intact.

Despite charges by Winfried Fluck, Jack Zipes, and others, Disney's corporate culture reveals itself as entirely contemptuous of mass production, Christensen argues. Pinocchio is never represented as a commodity in the film; not only does Geppetto never sell Pinocchio, the idea of selling Pinocchio is pointedly raised precisely as a repugnant notion to be rejected. Geppetto is never really a toy-seller but an animator, a bringer-to-life; likewise, Pinocchio is always a boy manqué, who will always need to have a cricket substitute for his conscience but who is deserving of animation nonetheless.

To Pixar, however, a toy is not a near-child longing for subjectivity (or a conscience); it's always a toy. It therefore never wants to be a child; it is manufactured to be played with by a child, and therefore that is what it wants. Mass production is the condition of their existence, as we see when the toys in the films confront identical copies of themselves who both are and are not them.

The Roberts court, like the Blue Fairy, rescues an artificial person, the corporation, that has proven constitutively incapable of maintaining a conscience. But a corporate culture can substitute for subjectivity, serving as the source of a conscience that need never be internalized. Pixar doesn't maintain any fantasies of becoming a real boy, but it preserves in its place the Pixar "culture," which will do just as well. As Christensen put it, "If it makes no difference who is speaking, it may as well be a cricket who can tell right from wrong." Under the terms of the Disney-Pixar merger, Pixar preserves its autonomous culture; thus its authorship and speech remain accountable to the Pixar culture. Thus the Citizens United decision, by making corporate authorship into legal precedent, backhandedly confers an external but still functional conscience on corporations, providing, perhaps, the grounds for mens rea and responsibility.

Real boys will be real boys

Now here's where I wanted to hear more from Christensen: What about gender--specifically, gendered childhood? At the risk of being The Feminist (look, someone has to be The Feminist), I posed this question after the talk and was very disappointed not to receive much of an answer. Here's why it matters: American corporate culture is famously masculinist, as is Pixar's oeuvre. If Pinocchio and Toy Story can be read as allegories of corporate culture, and I'm persuaded that they can, then their constructions of boyhood have implications for how we construe corporate authorship, hence corporate liability. In fact, it's worth noting that Toy Story's plot comes almost wholesale from a really terrible 1986 made-for-TV muppet production called The Christmas Toy (yeah, you read that date right, so don't judge; I was FIVE). The Christmas Toy is less a missing link between the Disney masterpiece and the Pixar masterpiece than an inconvenient cousin, and not only because live-action muppets are an odd form to triangulate with animated puppets (Pinocchio) and hyper-round animated dolls (Toy Story). It's inconvenient because it contains -- wait for it -- girls.

In The Christmas Toy, the loved child is not a boy (Andy) but a girl (Jamie). More importantly, the central conflict between the old favorite toy and the new, flashy superhero toy is not a battle of competing masculinities but an allegory of the glass ceiling: instead of comically super-butch Buzz Lightyear, The Christmas Toy's threatening but ultimately lovable interloper is a classic 1980s castrating bitch, the metal-be-boobed Meteora ("queen of the asteroids"). (Oh, the eighties!)

It could be argued that the dynamics brought into play by Buzz Lightyear's gently mocked hypermasculinity are as complicated as those engendered by Meteora's masculine performance. Pushed far enough, gender always reveals itself as drag. But Pixar's version has consequences for corporate authorship because it not only embraces the existential quandary of mass production (for the toys, that is) but also reimagines toy consciousness as an allegory of rightly performed masculinity--the masculinity of good workers (toys) and of good managers (real boys). In Pixar's toy universe, you can have old-fashioned masculinity (the cowboy--as Christensen pointed out, at one point Woody's skill at being played with is remarked upon: "Are you classically trained?") and a futuristic masculinity (the space invader); there are good boys (Andy, who takes care of his toys) and bad boys (Sid, who likes to blow them up). Nearly as unacceptable as being owned by the bad boy is the possibility of being owned by a girl, which Christensen did not mention because there is, of course, no possible analogue in the corporate history of Pixar. The result of being owned by a girl would be a situation antithetical to the playful aims of any self-respecting toy: boring, unimaginative girl play, most likely someplace pink. The girl is benign, but out of bounds.As Christensen remarked, success in Toy Story doesn't lie in achieving subjectivity but in getting oneself managed by a good, rather than a bad, boy (or, say, getting acquired by the right parent company, which will let you keep your "culture"). That's why gender is so crucial in this understanding of corporate authorship and its consequences. With Pixar, there's no longing to be a "real boy," but there's an insistence on maintaining a corporate culture in which boyhood--and emphatically not girlhood--is the name of the game. And boyhood--the kind of playing that boys are imagined to do, the kind of creativity and propensity for technical production that boys are supposed to have--is central to the way the corporate author is imagined.

But it's not just Pixar but Pinocchio that's instructive here, since Pinocchio supplies the metaphor that makes Pixar's culture into a potential source of conscience. Perhaps we're comfortable with a boy whose conscience is a cricket. Perhaps that's cute, perhaps that's even the condition of puerile creativity. Perhaps boyish ruthlessness is what lets Pixar be as technically skillful and imaginative as it is. But how would we feel if girlhood were the model for corporate authorship? Could we countenance a girl with a cricket for a conscience?*

Christensen proposes a legal model that he represents as ungendered. I'm persuaded that he is right to see corporations, now granted protected free "speech," as substitutes for real boys. He is wrong to suppose that "boy" means the same thing as "person" or "subject." The insight that Christensen makes and then misses is that corporations are precisely "boys' clubs." As of the year of our Flying Spaghetti Monster 2009, three percent of Fortune 500 companies were headed by women (source). The model of personhood that Christensen extrapolates from the court's decision is in fact a model of boyhood. It depends entirely on a specific, historical construction of boyhood that underwrites what we see as possible and permissible in corporations, especially insofar as they are understood as "creative," and therefore capable of authorship in the narrower sense. And it is this narrower creative corporate authorship that, as Christensen shows, enables the broader understanding of corporate speech on which Citizens United relies. Since this model of boyhood is specifically one of ruthless creative play and total amorality (his conscience is a bug), can we expect corporate culture to serve any differently from the ultimately ineffectual Jiminy Cricket?

Boys--male children--have been constructed as creatures that are morally culpable for very few things. Nor are they legally liable for much. Boys will be boys.

What, then, is the real upshot of puerile corporate authorship?

-----
The obvious point of comparison is Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Her daemon, Pantalaimon, is an externalized manifestation of her soul. Note (1) Pantalaimon is explicitly male, part of Pullman's complicated and generally misguided attempt to rectify C.S. Lewis's objectionable gender politics; and (2) the film, in which Pantalaimon was of course animated, was a flop.

"WHHHHY?": still cute, now with different video

I feel like my earlier reading of Cee Lo's "Fuck You" is very much backed up by the developmental narrative (from childhood through adolescence to the present) of the new video:



It gets extra cuteness points for the mother slapping the boy when he lip-synchs the "fuck you" refrain, the video's only coy acknowledgment of the incongruity that's runs throughout the song--the childishness on one hand, the adult profanity on the other. The deferral of the bridge-tantrum to near the end of the song gives the lie to the progress narrative suggested by the succession of years and the announcement, via title, that Cee Lo is now a "ladykiller" (a word whose aggression is, in context, infantile).

There's a lot more to say about the new video.

It's chilling to see a small girl alluded to as a "gold-digger," for instance.

The video is also very pointed about the lip-synching, since Cee Lo always sings the lead and various actors mouth it. This also conduces to the gender-bending that Kevin mentions, particularly with the (very funny) trio of female backup vocalists mouthing what are audibly male backup vocals.

No time for a dissection tonight, but I assume the internets will be picking this one up and running with it.

Puerile desire and the cuteness of "WHHHHY?"

[Welcome, readers from 33 1/3!]

There are a lot of f-bombs in this post. Just saying.

Puerility is a powerful mode for a number of the authors I study, so you can imagine my delight when the internets deposited the following gem before me:



We learn that there is going to be no claim to dignity from the very first line, even before the endlessly catchy refrain:

I see you driving 'round town with the girl I love, and I'm like, "Fuck you!"

"I'm like" lets us know before we even arrive that this will be no haughty drama; no grand passion; no cold, dignified rage. It acknowledges at once the immaturity of responding to heartbreak with "Fuck you!" The song subtly clues us into the conjectural status of the "gold-digger" theory of rejection as well: "I guess the change in my pocket wasn't enough." Translation: you must have rejected me because you're a venal, flat stereotype of a woman. Cee Lo indulges in the most simplistic of interpretations, the one that makes a rejection into something other than a real rejection. There's a vicious pleasure and satisfaction in facile interpretations (viz. cable news), and Cee Lo both embraces that pleasure and acknowledges it for what it is: puerility.

As Kevin points out, the song's "fuck you" is universal ("fuck you and fuck her too"--which is to say, fuck everybody). The song's first sentence lets us think the addressee is a competitor for a woman's affections, but it quickly slips back and forth between addressing the competitor and addressing the woman herself. Eventually the universe of the song expands to include an appeal to "Mamma," whereupon the singer is once again denied and handed off to "Dad," in a deft Freudian disciplinary gesture.



The song invokes a queer triangulation of desire (of the woman, of the competitor), but despite the proliferation of f-bombs, in the end it is not an adult song at all but a childish immersion in polymorphous desire. This is why it makes perfect sense that a key metaphor revolves around more or less awesome video game consoles ("Xbox" versus "Atari"), why it "ain't fair" seems like a valid complaint, and why the bridge devolves into explicit (and hilarious) whining, an actual tantrum. By the end of this bridge all pretense that the gold-digger theory could have actually been valid has been abandoned in favor of the open, raw howl of "WHHHHY?" He doesn't know why. It's all a free-flowing libidinal soup now.



The clever lyric video supports the polymorphous libido of the song by refusing distinctions between reasonable and unreasonable, important and unimportant, figure and ground. Every last word of the song is printed before our eyes, in time, including backup vocals and non-words like "OOO, OOO, OOOO" and "UH." (Follow the bouncing ball?)



This is perhaps the best use of puerility I've seen in a while, and like some of Mark Twain's funniest rants, it's characterized by an unusual energy, a full-fledgedness that's hilarious, in part, because it's so very cute--an impotent, multidirectional, adorable rage. This is how the song manages to be intense and light at the same time, angry and hilarious--like some of Twain's less sporting pot-shots at the literary lights of a previous generation. It's indulgent, childishly so, and that's what makes it appealing.

As with Twain, there's a dark dimension to this humor as well. First, it depends on our willingness to take childish anguish lightly, and to laugh at what is intensely, if incoherently, felt. And second, puerility (that is, the tantrum of the male child) here becomes the humorous grounds for perpetuating a deeply misogynistic narrative. She isn't really a gold-digger, no, but Cee Lo gets to say she is, over and over, and we'll laugh at it, because puerility excuses it. Female desire is reduced to a cipher for our amusement. There's no resolving this, I don't think. Humor always has its undertow.

[Update as of 9/1/2010.]

I know this is absolutely pathological, but I'm a little bothered that the apostrophe in front of "round" is pointed in the wrong direction. Someone didn't override smart quotes?

Also, it strikes me as ingenious that the video emulates film stock, but I'm not sure why.

On cuteness:
Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2004): 811-47. Print.

Boom. Proven with statistics.

I couldn't help noticing this image, tiny as it is. It's a graph showing changes in the number of U.S. jobs over time. Even though the graph depicts job losses almost exclusively, it's a graph that makes President Obama look fairly good, compared to his predecessor.

What does it mean to make a graph into a Twitter icon?

There's something terribly Harper's Indexy about it: look at the [visual representation of the] numbers; the numbers don't lie. Boom. Proven with statistics.

The Harper's Index is interesting because it is aware of its own comical aspect. Its writers think nothing of contorting a sentence or an idea in order to fit the formula of label: number. This is in part the source of the comedy. There's a certain playful pettiness involved in the Harper's Index. It's a pettiness that meshes perfectly with the Index's particular kind of authority. An index only claims to indicate.

Here, in the Twitter icon, is the same gesture. It's an appeal to statistics as an authority -- here, an authority that stands in for the President of the United States, a discursive authority that serves now as the visual marker for an authority's discourse, the President's Twitter account (managed, of course, by a staffer).

As a Twitter icon, the graph is too small to read; it only makes sense if you already know what it represents (which you may, since it's been used widely in news media). Here, too, the thought has been crammed into a small and rigid space, the conventional formula of the Twitter icon.

It's the very cramming that makes it possible to say: Boom. Proven with statistics.

Puerility and Pedantry

From Burke and Kant, we're used to seeing the sublime opposed to the beautiful. But Longinus writes (in this 1698 translation of On the Sublime):

A Boyish, or Pedantick Style is contrary to it. For there is nothing so low as this latter, so mean, so oppos'd to true gallantry of Discourse. What is Pedantry then? 'Tis nothing else but the thought of a great Scholar, which is made cold, and non-sense, by endeavouring to be too refin'd and affected. And this is a fault into which those fall, who aim at saying something uncommon, and surprizing; who endeavour to make a Thought extreamly taking and charming: for they, by dressing their language in too many Figures, fall into a ridiculous Affectation.

What undoes the sublime, for Longinus, is too eager an attempt to describe it adequately, or to approximate it by being "uncommon, and surprizing."

It's interesting to me that Longinus collapses pedantry with puerility: teacher and pupil alike may partake of this intellectual fruitlessness. It seems to me that there's a difference between the two, on which more later perhaps.

I've been thinking a lot about puerility lately. For Longinus it's clearly a pejorative, but I think that a certain pedantry has its appeal for many modernists. The cognitive act of slogging through irrelevancies can amount to, I think, an ascetic quest for the real.

Michael North's recent book Machine-Age Comedy takes up what I think of as a puerile streak in modernism--the amusement in rigidity and mechanicity that, North argues, is peculiarly modern. Though North is more interested in Chaplin and, much later, David Foster Wallace, it's impossible not to see the same impulse in 'pataphysical and Oulipian writing. Puerility enables a certain kind of play that is regenerative for the modernists. In a Foreword to Machine-Age Comedy, the series editors, Mark Wollaeger and Kevin Dettmar, astutely wonder whether "whether comedy in the machine age was a boys-only playground" (vi). I rather think that it is -- not that only the XY-chromosomed were interested in it, but that puerility is a masculine formation--a way of performing boyhood, in fact. The simultaneous triviality and momentousness of childhood play is a source of vitality in modern literature, and problematic in the way that primitivism is problematic.

In I Capture the Castle, which I've just been teaching, Dodie Smith imagines Mortmain's modernist breakthrough as a return to origins, as he mimics "a child learning to read and write" (335). His teenaged daughter Cassandra, the narrator, has just undergone a series of experiences that have made her definitively and somewhat painfully leave childhood behind, and she finds his reappropriation of childhood as a figure trivial and confusing at once--as, perhaps, "dressing [his] language in too many Figures." "I feel so resentful!" she says to the novel's exemplary literary critic, Simon. "Why should father make things so difficult?"

The problem with Mortmain's childish, riddling poetics is that its cleverness runs roughshod over actual childhood, and in particular the experiences of his own children, whom he's neglected and failed to provide for for years. Cassandra, the realist, wants to "capture the castle"; in attempting to do so she writes a coming-of-age novel about herself. Mortmain's modernist novel, in contrast, regresses to the scene of learning to read. One can imagine why his daughter might resent his puerilities. She might say to her father, as William Carlos Williams imagines his critics saying to him at the beginning of Spring and All, "I do not like your poems; you have no faith whatever. You seem neither to have suffered nor, in fact, to have felt anything very deeply" (88).

Indeed, Williams positions himself as immature, as one who has not yet suffered. "[T]hey mean that when I have suffered," Williams writes, "I too shall run for cover; that I too shall seek refuge in fantasy. And mind you, I do not say that I will not. To decorate my age. But today it is different." A childish callousness is required for Williams to engage in the literary violence of his poetics. The fantasies of destruction that ensue are straight out of Winnicott. I think that Smith, in imagining the most exciting modernist gesture as one of (male) regression, is onto something, something that Michael North calls machine-age comedy and that Longinus* calls puerility, a delight in and a commitment to the trivial, gimmicky game and ritual repetition, the embrace of travesty so long as the travesty is fun.

This sounds judgmental, but I mean it as descriptive. If puerility is a counter to the sublime, perhaps it is also a needed corrective. It is generative as well as problematic, transgressive as well as regressive. It has much to do with what constitutes modern boyhood. American literature in particular has always loved the "bad boy," but modernist puerility is something more than a rebellion against "petticoat government." What that something is, I intend to find out.


*Longinus very likely didn't write On the Sublime. You know how it goes.

My thoughts on puerility are, of course, related to the meditations of my previous post on gendering Twitter.

Longinus (attrib.). An Essay upon Sublime. Oxford: Leon. Litchfield, 1698. Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI, 1999- (Early English books, 1641-1700 ; 1705:22).

North, Michael. Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. 1948. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998. Print.

Williams, William Carlos. Spring and All. 1923. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1971. Print.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. 1971. New York: Routledge, 1992.