A recent article in Newsday by Wallace Matthews is typical of how the press is treating Barry Bonds. "Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, forever linked by a single word. Cheater."
This despite the fact that they are accused of using steroids were steroids were not banned by baseball. Ergo, though they may be liars, they were not cheaters. Why has there been such a rush to condemn?
Had he said "Bonehead," I might have agreed with him, since neither man has a reputation for being congenial.
I want to try for some perspective here. First, I take it as a fact of history that both men, and most of the great athletes of their times, used steroids. I also think it is pretty clear that if neither man had ever used them, they would have still been among the greatest players in the game, since they were both established greats at the time that they are accused of using steroids. What we have are athletes facing the downward tail of their peak years, trying to extend their peak productivity.
Is not that what a professional athlete is supposed to do? But never mind that, that's not really what I'm trying to get at. Let me circle around and come back...
When Tommy John, the pitcher for whom a certain kind of reconstructive surgery is now named, was facing the end of his career, he used to joke, "My arm is only three (five, seven) years old." My point is that he had access to developments in modern medicine, and took full use of them to extend his career. It is not seen as the same thing, because he faced coming back from an injury; but most accounts have it that Bonds (and Andy Petite) both used performance enhancers as a way of getting back after an injury. Where then the meaningful difference?
But I'm still not getting where I want to go. I need to dig back further. Much further.
The history of Baseball is the history of American Modernism. Some accounts have it beginning during the civil war (the war that introduced gas warfare and war dead photos), but it achieves its popularity in the 1880's. Despite the pastoral imagery that is always associated with it ("ducks on a pond" "elysian fields," etc.) it is eminently an urban game--witness the homes of the original franchises (Boston, Chicago, Cincinatti, New York, etc). My point is that from the start, it is about both urban growth and the pastoral, the way parks in general are. Let me push this a little further: baseball is game about ambivalence towards the future and manufactured dreams of the past.
What do I mean? This: When Babe Ruth revolutionized the game, he was widely chided. A Newspaper editorialized that by swinging for home runs, he would sacrifice his batting average. Ty Cobb, who well into the Ruth era was considered the best player in baseball, for two days in a row made a conscious effort to his for home runs--successfully--then went back to his high avwerage style, to prove that he could hit for power, but chose not to.
Ring Lardner, who wrote what some consider the best baseball novel every, "You know me, Al," thought that Ruth had ruined baseball, and that he, Lardner, had wasted his talents writing about it.
Of course, we don't remember the Ruth era today through the eyes of Lardner or Cobb. We remember one of the great men of baseball, who defined an era. The old archetypes that were defining to these men have lost meaning to us. Who wouldn't prefer a game with more give and take between offence and pitching?
To make a similar point: We hold onto the mythology of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier at the risk of forgetting that the color barrier he broke was only about 40 years old when he broke it. It was a creation of the twentieth century. Modernity didn't break down the barrier; it erected it.
Now we're finally getting close to my point. When Keith Hernandez, Willie Wilson, and a dozen others were punished for using cocaine back some 20 years ago, sports writers preached the high moral road. "I hope Hernandez can live with himself the next time some kid goes flying out the window on speed," Dick Young of the NY Daily News wrote.
Why? Did Dick Young think Keith Heranandez sold drugs to teenagers? Or that teenagers did not do drugs before Keith Hernandez?
Here then is my point: Baseball has always constructed for itself a humanism, BASED ON LIES, DISTORTIONS, AND FABRICATIONS, which it then PRETENDS to accept as the "truth." Even though, for the most part, everyone knows it is a fabrication.
Roger Maris supposedly had an asterisk next to his single season record because he played in something like four more games than Ruth when he set his record. Now fans (read: fatuous sports writers) supposedly want an asterisk next to Bonds' single season and all time record.
To imply that BUT for the introduction of steroids the game would have stayed the same from 61 to 2001? That training regimens, ball parks, strategy, culture changed nothing meaningful?
If you inject steroids into someone and supplement that with correct training, you will make him (usally him) stronger than his would otherwise be. That has huge advantages to a baseball player, and some disadvantages which can become huge if it leads to a career threatening injury (as it often has). So what. So does training a ball player to hit for power (instead of average), and to work the count (instead of swinging away), the big changes in baseball culture that Bonds took full advantage of before he ever took steroids.
Humanism is a trope which defines itself through exclusion; and exclusion specifically of the post human (power, color, drugs, in sequence, in baseball).
Showing posts with label post-human. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-human. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Monday, August 6, 2007
Only slightly about Sookie Stackhouse...
I’ve read five of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery series, so there must be a lot in them I find compelling and likeable and there is. If I mainly wanted to comment on them in this post, I would point out that Shreveport and the surrounding area is 40%+ African-American, but that none of the major recurring characters in the series are. Off the top of my head, the most important African American character I can think of is the black man whose death in the second book, Dead in Dallas, gets going one of the two major plot lines (having to do with a private sex club). I would acknowledge that this represents the segregated reality of the rural south, in which neighborhood bars, such as Merlottes, tend to cater primarily to either a white or a black clientelle, but that the segregation is not all that complete. I would also acknowledge that white writers often have to tread carefully, because of the abysmal history American letters have in imagining the Africanistic resident, but that I think her novels would be richer if she would give it an earnest try.
I have no intention of stopping there, however. Give me a moment to get my cyberpodium out of my flash drive.
In the best and worst tradition of literary criticism, I’m going to throw out discussion of everything I like about the Sookie Stackhouse books–Sookie herself, her struggle with the hypermasculine subcultures that thrive in the rural south, the character Sam, and the dry, wry wit that infuses these novels–to focus a sec to look at a marginal consideration in her novels: race.
Right off the bat, I feel two immediate responses forming:
1. One is the sort of roll my eyes "there you go again" response. Geez, not everything is about race. It’s easy to complain about what a writer doesn’t do. No writer can do everything, especially while working in a genre related field. Why not look at what she does do?
2. But she does deal with figures of race, but she denaturalizes them. There are vampires, fairies, werecritters, and less common other supernaturals, who form coalitions and subcultures very much analogous to race.
From a critical perspective, the second is more compelling, since an argument that says "for once, would you just focus on the positive?" is unproductive. That is not to say it’s more or less correct. It is important to note, though, that the two arguments are mutually exclusive. If I want to argue that she deals inventively with race, why should I as a reader want to excuse the lack of a fully realized Africanistic presence in the day to day world? Why can’t the novels do both?
I think this points to a problem with current discussions on race. Let me draw this out for a moment, and then explain how it relates to the post-human.
Race and Humanism: A Digression
Race, as such, is in part a creation of the humanistic enterprise. To understand this, look at Thomas Jefferson, a founder of American humanism (he edited a version of the New Testament to cut all the miracles out of it, making less a religious than a humanist document). What does EVERYONE know about Jefferson these days?
1. He wrote the declaration of Indepence, which gave voice to the spirit of liberty that would find a home in the abolitionist movement: "All men are created equal..."
2. He kept slaves, believed in Negro inferiority, and tried to prove it in his Notes on the State of Virginia.
How can both things be true? Because the same spirit that wanted to improve humanity also saw it as important to recognize gradations of difference in quality between human communities. Humanism is in part a project of social hygiene.
To put this another way, the basis for racism and the opposition to it share a cultural ancestry. Now lets flashforward to the future. Two responses to the historical and continuing discourse on race in America.
1. Race is a myth, with no biological reality. We would all do well to ignore it.
2. Race is a social reality, silently embedded, throughout most of American history, in the concept of "American." We need to discuss race, because avoiding discussions of race devalues the experience of black Americans. (W.E.B. Dubois said it well a century ago, talking about growing up in a majority white culture: "One always feels this twoness, two warring souls, black and American, in one dark body...")
Deny the first, you open the door to fascism. Deny the second, you get policies whose effect (sometimes by design) is to limit economic and educational mobility to black people (I’m thinking of the June 2007 Supreme Court cases which seem to disallow considerations of race in the college admission process.)
Class: A Digression Digresses
In practical, political terms, one response (one I hope most colleges will be using) is to focus less on race than on class. If the goal is economic mobility, than we consider factors such as high performance in a low performing school, and relative performance compared against families of similar income levels. Offer help to enough poor people, and a disproportionate percent of the people helped are going to be African American. As a strategic response, I completely support this.
But what does this move signify? We are at the end of a 400 year period which sought to "naturalize" race lines. At the same time, class alignment has always been downplayed. In these terms, a coming together of diverse groups along shared class interests is a "cyborgian" construction.
Pointing out the shared affinity of folks along class lines is always interesting in American culture, in part because class is less visible in America than, for instance, race or gender. But I am unwilling to replace one kind of essentialism with another. But to "naturalize" it would to an extent to "essentialize" it.
(By the way, even assuming that colleges follow this route, I'll await some evidence that the students who are so recruited recognized in each other a sense of shared class interest. )
Enter the Cyborg.
I’ve covered this before on this blog. but Donna Haraway’s pre-eminent example of the social cyborg was the definition "Women of Color," one which cut across class and race lines to identify a common interest in reforming American institutions to be more inclusive.
Enter the Posthuman.
The human being is defined in humanistic discourse by his organic unity, his reflective nature, his progressive maturity. I could support this by citing Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, but believe me, that would get tedious. –Maybe another day.
The posthuman is artificial, inorganic; he or she or it interupts the organic unity of the social body or social text.
Sookie Stackhouse is Posthuman
in her "freakish" abilities to violate the unity of other individuals; she is not a self-contained, unified entity; parts of those around her "leak" into her.
Vampires are Posthuman
at leasst in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and most contemporary vampire novels, for mostly the same reasons as Sookie is. (Dracula is not post-human; he’s just an aristocratic monster.)
Here’s the point (and I do have one)....
The Posthuman (as I’m using it) is not utopian or essentialist. It is improvisatory, and provisional. It respects the idea of science and progress, but is as likely to lead to error, because it has no stranglehold on the truth. It allows for the recognition of class, sex, and race distinctions, devalues rigid alignment along these lines. This is a perspective we need to discuss race intelligently these days.
Therefore...
The Sookie Stackhouse series is not leading the way towards the posthuman, but it is participating in the evolution of same. Assuming a posthuman perspective (which believe me, does NOT come naturally to me) gives me a way of seeing what I like, and why, though I like Harris’ figures of race (vampirism, lycanthropy, etc.), I want more.
I have no intention of stopping there, however. Give me a moment to get my cyberpodium out of my flash drive.
In the best and worst tradition of literary criticism, I’m going to throw out discussion of everything I like about the Sookie Stackhouse books–Sookie herself, her struggle with the hypermasculine subcultures that thrive in the rural south, the character Sam, and the dry, wry wit that infuses these novels–to focus a sec to look at a marginal consideration in her novels: race.
Right off the bat, I feel two immediate responses forming:
1. One is the sort of roll my eyes "there you go again" response. Geez, not everything is about race. It’s easy to complain about what a writer doesn’t do. No writer can do everything, especially while working in a genre related field. Why not look at what she does do?
2. But she does deal with figures of race, but she denaturalizes them. There are vampires, fairies, werecritters, and less common other supernaturals, who form coalitions and subcultures very much analogous to race.
From a critical perspective, the second is more compelling, since an argument that says "for once, would you just focus on the positive?" is unproductive. That is not to say it’s more or less correct. It is important to note, though, that the two arguments are mutually exclusive. If I want to argue that she deals inventively with race, why should I as a reader want to excuse the lack of a fully realized Africanistic presence in the day to day world? Why can’t the novels do both?
I think this points to a problem with current discussions on race. Let me draw this out for a moment, and then explain how it relates to the post-human.
Race and Humanism: A Digression
Race, as such, is in part a creation of the humanistic enterprise. To understand this, look at Thomas Jefferson, a founder of American humanism (he edited a version of the New Testament to cut all the miracles out of it, making less a religious than a humanist document). What does EVERYONE know about Jefferson these days?
1. He wrote the declaration of Indepence, which gave voice to the spirit of liberty that would find a home in the abolitionist movement: "All men are created equal..."
2. He kept slaves, believed in Negro inferiority, and tried to prove it in his Notes on the State of Virginia.
How can both things be true? Because the same spirit that wanted to improve humanity also saw it as important to recognize gradations of difference in quality between human communities. Humanism is in part a project of social hygiene.
To put this another way, the basis for racism and the opposition to it share a cultural ancestry. Now lets flashforward to the future. Two responses to the historical and continuing discourse on race in America.
1. Race is a myth, with no biological reality. We would all do well to ignore it.
2. Race is a social reality, silently embedded, throughout most of American history, in the concept of "American." We need to discuss race, because avoiding discussions of race devalues the experience of black Americans. (W.E.B. Dubois said it well a century ago, talking about growing up in a majority white culture: "One always feels this twoness, two warring souls, black and American, in one dark body...")
Deny the first, you open the door to fascism. Deny the second, you get policies whose effect (sometimes by design) is to limit economic and educational mobility to black people (I’m thinking of the June 2007 Supreme Court cases which seem to disallow considerations of race in the college admission process.)
Class: A Digression Digresses
In practical, political terms, one response (one I hope most colleges will be using) is to focus less on race than on class. If the goal is economic mobility, than we consider factors such as high performance in a low performing school, and relative performance compared against families of similar income levels. Offer help to enough poor people, and a disproportionate percent of the people helped are going to be African American. As a strategic response, I completely support this.
But what does this move signify? We are at the end of a 400 year period which sought to "naturalize" race lines. At the same time, class alignment has always been downplayed. In these terms, a coming together of diverse groups along shared class interests is a "cyborgian" construction.
Pointing out the shared affinity of folks along class lines is always interesting in American culture, in part because class is less visible in America than, for instance, race or gender. But I am unwilling to replace one kind of essentialism with another. But to "naturalize" it would to an extent to "essentialize" it.
(By the way, even assuming that colleges follow this route, I'll await some evidence that the students who are so recruited recognized in each other a sense of shared class interest. )
Enter the Cyborg.
I’ve covered this before on this blog. but Donna Haraway’s pre-eminent example of the social cyborg was the definition "Women of Color," one which cut across class and race lines to identify a common interest in reforming American institutions to be more inclusive.
Enter the Posthuman.
The human being is defined in humanistic discourse by his organic unity, his reflective nature, his progressive maturity. I could support this by citing Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, but believe me, that would get tedious. –Maybe another day.
The posthuman is artificial, inorganic; he or she or it interupts the organic unity of the social body or social text.
Sookie Stackhouse is Posthuman
in her "freakish" abilities to violate the unity of other individuals; she is not a self-contained, unified entity; parts of those around her "leak" into her.
Vampires are Posthuman
at leasst in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and most contemporary vampire novels, for mostly the same reasons as Sookie is. (Dracula is not post-human; he’s just an aristocratic monster.)
Here’s the point (and I do have one)....
The Posthuman (as I’m using it) is not utopian or essentialist. It is improvisatory, and provisional. It respects the idea of science and progress, but is as likely to lead to error, because it has no stranglehold on the truth. It allows for the recognition of class, sex, and race distinctions, devalues rigid alignment along these lines. This is a perspective we need to discuss race intelligently these days.
Therefore...
The Sookie Stackhouse series is not leading the way towards the posthuman, but it is participating in the evolution of same. Assuming a posthuman perspective (which believe me, does NOT come naturally to me) gives me a way of seeing what I like, and why, though I like Harris’ figures of race (vampirism, lycanthropy, etc.), I want more.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Things to like (or not) about Masters of SF.
Two things to like about Masters of Science Fiction, which premiered last night:
1) It reminds millions of TV viewers that SF is a written genre. It is not just about blowing up CGI robots onscreen; it can also be about blowing up cities on the page.
2) It returns the anthology format to the small screen.
One thing to like about the first episode, "A Clean Escape," which debuted last night: Judy Davis looks great at 50something. Perhaps a trifle too great to be a dying of cancer, but I’m almost willing to give them a pass on that. They DID try to show her as over-stressed and frayed, which is perhaps a television producer's understanding of "dying of late stage terminal cancer."
It’s been years since I read the story by John Kessel that it was based on. I remember it as being more elemental, focusing on the drama between doctor and patient, without the filler they threw in to stretch it out, and I’m almost certain there was no breakdown moment in which the amnesiac character played by Sam Waterston has a breakthrough moment, which he subsequently forgets.
(If this is a part of the original story, I repressed it, because it makes no sense. People who have suffered a brain trauma leading to loss of short term memory don’t suddenly retrieve lost memories only to forget them again.)
Normally, I think it’s not only unfair but downright silly to denigrate a work for not following its source material. TV, short stories, and movies are different genres. (Robert B. Parker once complained of the producers of Spencer for Hire turning down one of his scripts because it wasn’t about "their" Spencer, but they were right to do so.) By calling themselves Masters of Science Fiction, the producers created a problem for themselves, putting front and center that this is material adapted from "masters." Still, let’s pretend that this an episode called "A Doctor and a Patient In Search of Rod Serling or something Like Him," and judge it on its own merits.
I still don’t like the patient’s "breakthrough," in which he suddenly remembers who he is. Worse, I don’t like why they did it. This moment of regret, and the speech they gave Waterston, was in line with a few other changes they made to highlight the "relevance" of this story to the Bush pre-emptive war strategy and insensitivity to climate change.
Why did they make these changes? Because they think we’re all blithering idiots who wouldn’t "get it" if they didn’t spell it out in small words.
Seems to me that if that’s their attitude they should have played out the final therapy scene as a chase scene around the compound. Maybe they could have staged on it on Segway scooters! Judy Davis on her scooter, Waterston on his, while she fires shots. "How do you feel about your wife?" she shouts, then Blam! Then, when he hits his head, which everyone knows is how you cure amnesia on TV, she would stand over him and laugh maniacally. "I have you now! You thought you escaped. Ha, ha, ha." Then, Blam!, she shoots herself.
Only a slight improvement, but it might have helped.
I will tune in next week, just like I used to watch Space: 1999, because it wasn’t REALLY as bad as it could have been. A "D" is still passing.
Let me make a short attempt to relate this to the topic of this blog, post-humanism. One of humanism’s great themes is restoration of a lost self. That’s the return-to-Eden theme which is at the heart of psychoanalysis. This episode, "A Clean Escape," is about a loss that is irreparable. Unable to face that, it gives us a moment of restoration, to satisfy its humanist soul. Let me put this another way: this show is basically a drama about the complete loss of humanity, an irrevocable transition to new state of being. Our good doctor, Judy Davis, is absolutely unwilling to accept this loss. The president’s breakdown is summoned not by the logic of the therapy, which would disallow it, but by the logic of her own need for it (and the Hollywood desire for such a moment by George Bush). It also becomes the moment of her death: having enforced a return to a humanistic framework for one moment, she is unable and unwilling to accept its loss; ergo, her suicide, which in this case can be seen as an assertion of self over the circumstances of the world. Basically, this is an unwitting drama about humanism as nostalgic, resentful wish fulfillment.
1) It reminds millions of TV viewers that SF is a written genre. It is not just about blowing up CGI robots onscreen; it can also be about blowing up cities on the page.
2) It returns the anthology format to the small screen.
One thing to like about the first episode, "A Clean Escape," which debuted last night: Judy Davis looks great at 50something. Perhaps a trifle too great to be a dying of cancer, but I’m almost willing to give them a pass on that. They DID try to show her as over-stressed and frayed, which is perhaps a television producer's understanding of "dying of late stage terminal cancer."
It’s been years since I read the story by John Kessel that it was based on. I remember it as being more elemental, focusing on the drama between doctor and patient, without the filler they threw in to stretch it out, and I’m almost certain there was no breakdown moment in which the amnesiac character played by Sam Waterston has a breakthrough moment, which he subsequently forgets.
(If this is a part of the original story, I repressed it, because it makes no sense. People who have suffered a brain trauma leading to loss of short term memory don’t suddenly retrieve lost memories only to forget them again.)
Normally, I think it’s not only unfair but downright silly to denigrate a work for not following its source material. TV, short stories, and movies are different genres. (Robert B. Parker once complained of the producers of Spencer for Hire turning down one of his scripts because it wasn’t about "their" Spencer, but they were right to do so.) By calling themselves Masters of Science Fiction, the producers created a problem for themselves, putting front and center that this is material adapted from "masters." Still, let’s pretend that this an episode called "A Doctor and a Patient In Search of Rod Serling or something Like Him," and judge it on its own merits.
I still don’t like the patient’s "breakthrough," in which he suddenly remembers who he is. Worse, I don’t like why they did it. This moment of regret, and the speech they gave Waterston, was in line with a few other changes they made to highlight the "relevance" of this story to the Bush pre-emptive war strategy and insensitivity to climate change.
Why did they make these changes? Because they think we’re all blithering idiots who wouldn’t "get it" if they didn’t spell it out in small words.
Seems to me that if that’s their attitude they should have played out the final therapy scene as a chase scene around the compound. Maybe they could have staged on it on Segway scooters! Judy Davis on her scooter, Waterston on his, while she fires shots. "How do you feel about your wife?" she shouts, then Blam! Then, when he hits his head, which everyone knows is how you cure amnesia on TV, she would stand over him and laugh maniacally. "I have you now! You thought you escaped. Ha, ha, ha." Then, Blam!, she shoots herself.
Only a slight improvement, but it might have helped.
I will tune in next week, just like I used to watch Space: 1999, because it wasn’t REALLY as bad as it could have been. A "D" is still passing.
Let me make a short attempt to relate this to the topic of this blog, post-humanism. One of humanism’s great themes is restoration of a lost self. That’s the return-to-Eden theme which is at the heart of psychoanalysis. This episode, "A Clean Escape," is about a loss that is irreparable. Unable to face that, it gives us a moment of restoration, to satisfy its humanist soul. Let me put this another way: this show is basically a drama about the complete loss of humanity, an irrevocable transition to new state of being. Our good doctor, Judy Davis, is absolutely unwilling to accept this loss. The president’s breakdown is summoned not by the logic of the therapy, which would disallow it, but by the logic of her own need for it (and the Hollywood desire for such a moment by George Bush). It also becomes the moment of her death: having enforced a return to a humanistic framework for one moment, she is unable and unwilling to accept its loss; ergo, her suicide, which in this case can be seen as an assertion of self over the circumstances of the world. Basically, this is an unwitting drama about humanism as nostalgic, resentful wish fulfillment.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Cyber selves
Woke up this morning to a terrific story from NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12263532
Online gaming is not a pleasure I've allowed myself, but I LOVE this story about people and their avatars. It illustrates for me the power of the post-human, here and now:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12263532
Online gaming is not a pleasure I've allowed myself, but I LOVE this story about people and their avatars. It illustrates for me the power of the post-human, here and now:
Jason Rowe (left) and his avatar, Rurouni Kenshin, who rides
Imperial speeder bikes in Star Wars Galaxies. Copyright Robbie Cooper/Chris Boot
Cooper's portrait of Jason Rowe, for instance, stops you dead. He stares straight at you out of startled blue eyes. But what takes you aback is his frail body, his clenched hands, and the ominous ventilator strapped to his face. "My condition is called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy," Rowe told Spaight. "It pretty much affects all the muscles in the body. They don't function." Rowe does have a little movement in his thumbs, which enables him to play the MMO Star Wars Galaxies an average of 80 hours a week. His avatar is a steely, robot-like character who rides Imperial speeder bikes and fights monsters, his head helmeted, his face unseen. "My character in the game is a lot different from what you see here in real life," Rowe says.
"[It] pretty much gave me a window to the world." In the four years since he created his avatar, this frail 32-year-old has had an unprecedented life experience: Online, he is treated as an equal among his peers. "Not disabled," he says. "Not in a wheelchair. In virtual worlds, everyone is on common ground."Of course, the most remarkable thing about this story is that a man with Duchenne's living into his 30's!
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