Mar 4, 2010 0
There are many reasons why my academic career didn’t pan out, but among them is undoubtedly the fact that I didn’t publish very much. For example, I never turned my dissertation on the Baader-Meinhof Gang into a book (though part of my research did end up in an obscure, Canadian journal called, Border/Lines).
When I did publish, it was essays like this one on the politics of gangsta rap.
Now, of course, I “publish” pretty much every day!
Life is so strange.
Dec 28, 2009 2
In Ithaca, my friend Art once told me that he hated it when people spoke of “levels” as in, “We’re seeing a whole other level of play on the court today.” (I had just told him that, having finished my dissertation, I felt that I had “moved to another level.”)
Years later, I’m in New Zealand hanging with this other friend, Russel, and I say, “I’ve always got to remind myself that there are other levels. Like, I imagine I’m at the highest level, but then I realize there’s another level.”
“There’s always another level,” Russel said.
I believe that there is always another level if for no other reason than that such a belief can spur us on and inspire us to be better, do more – grow, change, thrive.
Nevertheless, I also hold fast to the faith that there is a level where there are no levels at all.
Incredible Image Courtesy of kern.justin.
Sep 21, 2009 0
As some of you may recall, and many of you will not, Frances Fukuyama published a book in 1992 entitled, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama’s thesis therein was that, with the ascendancy of societies combining a free market economy with democratic political institutions, history, understood quasi-dialectically as a series of increasingly dominant and effective social forms, had, as the title suggests, ended.
Fukuyama’s thesis was and is plausible because, like the scientific rationality which forms the third angle of modernity’s powerful triumvirate, the free market and democracy share a distinct formalism. Just as “science” offers not a set of beliefs about the world so much as a method for exploring and solving its many mysteries, “democracy” merely offers a way of formulating laws and maintaining a system of government, without stipulating their specific content, while the “free market” provides general guidelines for the organization of commerce and trade, indifferent to the existence of a particular enterprise or commodity.
This formal abstraction lends to science, the free market, and democracy, a kind of universal timelessness and along with it an aura of finality. At the same time, this formal emptiness, while appealing to the reformer, appalls the revolutionary; the reformer sees in this open-endedness the possibility of continuous improvement; the revolutionary sees it as a failure to instantiate the absolute.
