Despite the lack of rigor, this fantastically interesting article can be forgiven both because it is meant for a broad audience and because it takes up so many issues that I implicitly raise in my commentary on the kinetic beauty of sports. Also, I am using this writing as a way to reenergize my cognition.
Stanford’s Hans Gumbrecht has clearly been reading my blog and stealing ideas to create his new work, In Praise of Athletic Beauty. Using Kantian aesthetic theory, which I have little knowledge of, Gumbrecht argues that beautiful sports plays “give a distinct ‘impression of purposivensess’.” However, the article’s author argues, I think rightly, that a great deal of “aesthetic clout” comes from the context of an athletic feat; the buzzer beating shot, the overtime goal and such are, of course, much more ‘pleasurable’ than any shot, any goal, and heightened all the more when done in the playoffs, Olympics or World Cup tournament.
More interestingly, and in conversation with Kristine’s post on experiencing the self, the article engages David Foster Wallace’s attempt to reconcile “the incredible banality with which athletes typically talk about [their] extraordinary abilities and accomplishments.” Wallace concludes that neither a lack of intelligence or articulation explains this phenomena, but is instead a necessary condition of an athlete’s ability. That is, precisely because they move and perform in a space outside (beside?) the intellect they are able to accomplish the extraordinary. However, this space cannot then be communicated or explained in the intellect and must needs be relegated to banal commentary, i.e. “I feel great,” “I saw the shot and took it.” Wallace’s argument can best be understood in his own succinct language; “that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it––and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence."
This is precisely the paradox of an immersive experience, or experience generally, because an athlete’s success in those tense moments is built on the ability to shut down or void the thinking, reflective, critiquing self; athletes occupy another space which is voided the moment one tries to communicate it. However, there seems to be an interesting correlation between athletic or kinetic immersion and intellectual immersion, which at its highest level, produces the moment of insight. The clarity achieved in these moments is both immersive and perfectly self-articulate, but all within an interior space-time that mutates (if not annulled) in its contact with the external. In contradistinction to intellectual immersion, kinetic or bodily ‘wholeness’ achieves perfect articulation in the external through the perfect movement/ action but must remain internally aloof. Thus, rewriting Kristine’s observations into a question of athleticism, is it possible to be both kinetically and intellectually immersed? Is it possible to experience internal self-articulate insight while experiencing a, or perhaps through, kinetic immersion that achieves external articulation in its perfect performance.
Scary:
Genuinely feeling like you’re going to die; hospitals; naturalizing life experiences and implicitly rejecting an outside….Sincerely having the thought, “sure she’s cute but what’s her family like”…yikes…
Beautiful: Engaged 1020 students who almost forget that you’re there because they are too busy disagreeing and debating each other.
One student opened our class discussion with a vehement dismissal of Chris Rock’s humor as misogynistic, treating women as sex objects who have no being outside of pleasuring men. That opening carried our class into an investigation of Rap (which I clearly differentiate from Hip Hop) and the politics of listening to “just the beat,” i.e. ignoring the lyrical content. Many said that club rap, namely artists like Lil’ Jon, aren’t at all interested in lyrical content the same way Mos Def, The Roots and the like are. However, I complicated the picture by asking if we can similarly dismiss Comedy’s political content because it too uses an equally disarming structure of address, a move they were less willing to make because of Rock’s charged delivery.
Returning to the misogyny question, a student commented that indeed men do see women simply as sex objects because some women present themselves that way. Catching the stereotype in play, we reversed the power dynamic in play by asking if such a characterization of men, by Rock, is as problematic as his alleged misogyny. A moment the class pointed to as evidence of his misogyny, his claim that he would have had sex with his wife’s friend, turned into evidence of a deeply prejudiced view of men as slaves to their penis.
This conversation alone would make for a good class, but one clever student turned the critical screw once more to say that Rock ultimately denigrates women through his simplistic view of men. That is, the sexual objectification of women reinforces their understanding of men as libidinal machines and their relation to men as one predicated solely on sexual desire, a cycle that damages both women’s experience of the world and themselves.
Good stuff!
p.s. This is my first broadcast from my shiny new laptop; Say hi everyone!
Also, my writing is clearly suffering from post-episodic neuronal misfiring; God save the queen!!…wait…that doesn’t go there….
The discussion of Zizek’s article “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape” went fairly smoothly in both classes. I was pleased to see my students pick up on Zizek’s insightful, but rather counterintuitive, case for the racism of post Katrina New Orleans reportage; “Even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.”
More interesting, however, was the conversation following my declaration of the course’s thesis statement, also found in Zizek’s article. “Of course, we never openly admit these motives. But from time to time, they nonetheless pop up in our public space in a censored form, in the guise of denegation: Once evoked as an option, they are then immediately discarded.” I claimed that comedians, specifically those artists we are concerned with, foreground the perverse logic of prejudice and push it to an absurd max. Enacting what I called the politics of absurdity, comedy pushes us into the “blank zone that offers itself as a screen for the projection of our fears, anxieties and secret desires.” However, through its structure of address (humorous, hyperbolic, cartoon animation etc), comedy simultaneously calls attention to the fantastic logic of its representations and the stereotypes grounding them. These formal features intersect content precisely through the wide range of subject positions that are caricatured (i.e. no one is safe). By offending us through a hyperbolic representation of our lives, cultures, heritage etc., we realize that all such representations are hyperbolic and efface the infinite particularity of a given person’s experience.
However, my students rightly offered the following critiques, which I left for them to answer:
Do people in fact take shows such as South Park, Family Guy et al., as a critique of our prejudices?
Do such shows instead propagate those very prejudices?
Does comedy offer a mode of empathy? (The moment we’re offended, we realize what it is to be offended and/or offensive)
Does it offer a release valve on societal pressures, or does it exacerbate that pressure? What are the political ramifications of either option?
Many thanks to my students for stimulating these thoughts and a special thanks to the ever-helpful KFD.
Got me a shiny new computer! How? ‘Cause I’m rich biaatch…
No, actually I’m just a smarty-pants who is smart enough to have friends that are far smarter. When I was first shopping for a laptop (that infamous gadget) Aarthi told me that Costco has a 6 month no-questions-asked-full-refund return policy on computers, and just as time was running out on my current machine, my brother informed me that Apple introduced this beautiful piece of hardware called the MacBook.
Released: 5-16-06 at approximately 12am
Ordered: 5-16-06 at exactly 1: 33pm EST
Net cost of upgrade from 3 year old technology packed in a (beautiful) 1.5 year old body to 6 month old technology enshrined in crisp minimalist white: $100
Anticipation and euphoria: Priceless
My overall plan for my courses is to juxtapose very serious readings with comedic texts (shows, specials etc) to examine the intersections and chasms between them. I’ve begun the semester with two short articles, one on Affirmative action and the other on the socio-political state of black men, and clashed them with a Family Guy episode in which Peter learns that he has a black ancestor. Moreover, he learns that his wife’s extremely wealthy family owned his ancestor, prompting him to ask for reparations.
For anyone familiar with the show, or others like it (South Park, Simpsons etc.) you need not be told that the show handles this material with little tact. Rather, we are beaten with blunt comedy.
Understandably, some of my students had visceral reactions to the show finding it crass, simplistic, and a serious issue’s reduction into dirty (non) humor rubble. My question to them specifically and the class generally was simply, why make a show like this? Once we flushed out the basic supply/ demand economic incentive the broader question became what makes such shows possible, viable as entertainment, and even demanded as such? (FG was actually cancelled after they aired a show called “Wish upon a Weinstein” but because of its cult hit status was brought on again to produce new episodes)
I dare not offer any answers to these questions lest my student’s take on my reading as their own and parrot it to me in their papers. However, I do want to clarify and emphasize why it is that I want to push these issues in my classroom.
My interest is two fold. First, I genuinely (if naively) believe that the classroom is one of the few places left where such issues can still be discussed, argued, and flushed out without recourse to verbal or emotional violence. Secondly, comedy (broadly defined) has been a crucial medium for the exploration of social contradictions, foregrounding their absurdity while simultaneously calling attention to its own structure of address.
My dear offended students, don’t shy away from the subject or its mode of delivery but put that energy into your writing, focus it to negate each text’s ideas through rigorous examination and logical dismantling. After all, being offended or even bothered by anything presented is, to me, a firm affirmation that some political neurons are firing.
Walking north on Cass around midnight, I see a drunken homeless man deliberately on a trajectory to intersect me. I prepare myself for any potential hostility and pull off my headphones because I can see that he is trying to say something to me. I don’t break stride:
Man: Yo, Saddam
Me: I’m sorry, what? (I really didn’t hear what he said)
Man: You Saddam right? Saddam Bin Laden right?
Me: [laugh]
Man: You look just like him; Saddam Bin Laden right?
Me: word
Man: Yo man, how you keep them planes in the air?
Me: I don’t know man
Man: Oil right? Why you holdin out?
Me: word
Hey, I started a pact to stop swearing…
Fuck that…
What do you mean English boy? What the hell??
Does hell count?
No, It’s a location.
Having just written a paper on the mob/ criminal collectives and amidst a paper on Tamburlaine, a Machiavellian Godfather of sorts, everything filters through this lens, including my nephew; I give you Don Summy.
You come to me, sit across my table, and offer me no blocks? No juice?
Briefly, because Tamburlaine awaits…
1) I just watched an episode of the Daily Show only to find a 24 year old conservative author who has written a book about his party’s faults, or faulty members. I have a year and three months to get my name, Shashi Soren Jaques Thandra, on a book cover.
2) My blog is being a playa-hata; it has refused to save two posts so far, both of which were as intellectually productive as this one. I think my blog has become more pretentious than me…oh God…the horror….
3) Don’t ever write a post with the title 3 blondes, Hefner & other thoughts unless you want Cialis spamming you all day. Jeez…you ask for one sample and they come in, scarring you stiff…
End abuse of language…
