Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We’re surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.
[The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem]
The New Yorker has a recent writeup on the financial crisis titled “Melting Into Air” with the tagline “Before the financial system went bust, it went postmodern.”
The article draws a surprising (and possibly slightly facetious) parallel between “derivatives,” a type of financial product whose value is “derived” from another transaction of an actual product, and deconstructionism, a literary theory that denies any straightforward interpretation of the written language.
An example of the simplest derivative, the article points out, is a farmer selling the right to buy his harvest later on in the year. Since what he is selling isn’t the harvest itself, but the ability to participate in a transaction for something of tangible value, this “product” he is selling has no intrinsic value, but is instead “derived” from the presumed value of the future harvest.
The farmer example seems to be pretty harmless, since whoever buys the derivative has a pretty clear idea of the risks (maybe the harvest won’t be as big as expected) and of the value (at the very least the buyer will end up owning SOME amount of crop) of the transaction. But you can imagine more complicated derivatives being set up that DON’T have obvious connections to the original good upon which their value is based. It turns out that much of the difficulty of fixing the current mess (and why there is a mess in the first place) is because of how much of the world’s investment dollars is tied up in derivatives:
The trade in derivatives took off, to the extent that the total market in derivative products around the world is counted in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Nobody knows the exact figure, but the notional amount certainly exceeds the total value of all the world’s economic output, roughly sixty-six trillion dollars, by a huge factor—perhaps tenfold.
And all because
finance, like other forms of human behavior, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts—a break with common sense, a turn toward self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English. In poetry, this moment took place with the publication of “The Waste Land.” In classical music, it was, perhaps, the première of “The Rite of Spring.” Jazz, dance, architecture, painting—all had comparable moments. The moment in finance came in 1973, with the publication of a paper in the Journal of Political Economy titled “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities,” by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes.
This is why Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism theory is strangely appropriate for describing what is happening with derivatives today:
meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an “aporia,” from a Greek term meaning “impasse.” There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.
Looks like reading all those incomprehensible papers in Junior Honors English paid off–now we can sit back in our chairs in the Ivory Tower and relish the literary beauty (literally!) of the chaos that surrounds us. What’s next? Imagist poetry embedded in Sarah Palin’s interviews?
On Sunday I went to an advance screening of Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Synecdoche, New York (trailer here), in Harvard Square. Wow! Advance screening, you say! How many hipster points is that? I don’t know. Elsa will have to claim them, because I didn’t realize that this movie existed or that it was showing here until she invited me, 10 minutes before show time.
I also didn’t know who Charlie Kaufman was. Naturally, I kept this to myself and nodded knowingly while my better-informed friends talked about his movies. Apparently Kaufman’s writing credits include Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ve only seen Eternal Sunshine, but I thought it was one of the most beautiful and romantic movies I’ve ever seen. It was about love and erasing memories.
We were waiting in line with about 500 other people, and passersby would repeatedly come up and ask what the line was for. Growing up in China where I was always lucky to get a seat anywhere, I tried to make up an answer that could plausibly attract a crowd, but not appealing enough for anyone to join in the scramble for seats. “A burlesque show with Macaque monkeys” or “Free vegan burritos” came to mind, but not before a more honest, more helpful moviegoer had already intervened. Drats.
Synecdoche did not disappoint. It was quirky, nonsensical, and full of surprises and jolting comedic flourishes. Philip Seymour Hoffman played Caden Cotard, an aging, depressed, death-obsessed playwright not just a little bit reminiscent of the hero in Fellini’s 8 1/2. He gave a soulful performance, as always, and spent half of the movie looking like he had pink eye (as always). Catherine Keener (who was, and whom I will forever identify as, Harper Lee alongside Hoffman’s Truman Capote in Capote), played Cotard’s wife of too many years, and promptly disappears after enough screen time to convince us of her disappointment in their marriage. Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, and Samantha Morton provide muses for Caden, and keep the story bursting at the seams with sexual energy, even as plot and logic are eventually left at the wayside — admittedly, to good effect.
At the center of the movie is a question: how does an artist tell the truth? Or, maybe equivalently (at least the movie thinks so), how can a person love truthfully? The sprawling screenplay sees this question through to all its direct and indirect manifestations, in romance and in family, in creation and loss. Caden Cotard as a director, Caden Cotard as a writer, Caden Cotard as a regretful father, as an ailing, ugly old man — the movie ambitiously tries to draw together a series of emotional vignettes into a cohesive whole, but doesn’t escape overextending itself once or twice. I sat through the credits feeling exhausted, but also with my heart and mind racing. How strange that a movie about death ends by making life seem more mysterious and exciting.
Part of the screening was a pleasant surprise that I felt I almost didn’t deserve to enjoy. Charlie Kaufman came up to the front of the theater and fielded some questions, not-quite-questions, and hyperbolic gush-fests from the audience. Kaufman skillfully deflected any attempts to pry an explanation of the movie out of him, and was careful not to name any sources of inspiration or influence for his work. I was waiting for him to tell the audience, “You just saw the movie. Think about it for yourself.” Which, in a way, was exactly what he was saying by refusing to give a straight answer.
I went home and got on netflix to revisit Kaufman’s older movies, and discovered both Adaptation and Being John Malkovich on my queue, ready to arrive next week. I guess I was a Charlie Kaufman fan after all. How mysterious!
1. A writeup about Starcraft and the community portal SC2GG.com in Escapist Magazine, a gaming/digital culture e-publication. The author identifies himself as an English-speaking, American-born Chinese “artist’s soul living in an engineer’s mind.” Which probably explains why his article seems to accomplish what I tried to do earlier on this blog. At one point, the author even lapses into describing my life (creepy, right?):
After cooking my dinner (usually pasta or rice), I would load one of Klazart’s, diggity’s or moletrap’s StarCraft videos. Here I was: tired after a long day, my room a mess, nursing a bowl of carbohydrates with Zerg versus Protoss on my computer screen. Weeks earlier, two Korean teenagers competed furiously in a televised match 7,000 miles away. An Indian-born Irishman and two Californians watched the raw video, ignored the Korean announcers and provided their own analysis of each game.
2. A gamer explains why Starcraft ought to be considered an Olympic sport. I say why not, especially since Starcraft requires just as much skill as chess? Oh wait…
3. My friend CJ’s post on some firsthand experiences attending pro Starcraft competitions in Korea.
Tim Wu, via Slate, on why China has been getting so much embarrassing press during the Olympics, even though they’re trying so hard to be good hosts:
China’s idea of what makes for a better Olympics for foreign consumption—tightened security and cleaning up marginal elements—is exactly what makes Western reporters crazy…you want to clean things up, but the West wants to see the dirt, not the rug it was swept under. It’s the dishonesty, as much as the substance of what’s wrong in China, that seems to get under the skin of Western reporters.
Beijing itself is an expression of the problem…It suffers from the current obsession with fazhan (“development”), which in urban-planning terms replicates the “giant soulless block” development style of Robert Moses and the American 1950s. Authenticity, which Western culture valorizes, isn’t something that Chinese people or planners go for right now. There’s a tendency to either modernize or tear down old structures, instead of trying to preserve their decay in the way Westerners like. It’s all just a little too nouveau riche to get much respect.
[Are the Media Being too Mean to China? via Slate]
As the author of the article later puts it, there’s “a sense that no matter what China does, it won’t really be accepted as an equal on the world stage, that it will always be left cleaning the toilet at the OECD country club.” Maybe that’s why there is such a wide audience for the sentiments expressed in this video: