So yes, we went to Vienna yesterday for a day trip. I am sure there are many interesting and wonderful things to say about Vienna, and it was pretty impressive, but in some ways it seemed like just another European capital city. Certainly, it was different from any that I had visited before, but I am, in a way, beginning to get the idea. Oh, sure, great public transit, a vibrant commercial center, more great art than you can shake a stick at, cheap and delicious kebaps around every corner, and a general sense of actually being in a civilized part of the world (vs., say, Palo Alto). What else have you got for me?

One thing that stuck out was the auction that was going on when we got off the train from Brno to Vienna. Items from the lost and found were being auctioned off to the general public: calculators, phones, and any number of other item. Somehow that seemed strange to me.

Today, we go to Prague, were we’ll be staying until July 4, then off to London. Whee.

Haven’t posted much of anything here the last couple days. After leaving Iceland, we stopped over in London, then hopped over to the Czech Republic where we’ve been the last few days. You can read about my original trip to Hradec Kralove in last year’s blog entries. Not much new or different has happened since then. Generally, we’ve been meeting up with Ema’s and her brother’s friends. Yesterday, we went to a castle in a neighboring town which had a group of peacocks and -hens. We spend most of the time watching the peacocks spread their tails and the -hens strategically ignore them. Got to love such blatent sexual selection. There was one peacock with a tiny tail who always seemed to be trying to elbow in on the -hens who were hanging around the -cocks with bigger tails. I suppose he may be employing a, eh, different mate-slection strategy. Anyway, there isn’t much more to report here, but I’ll jot down some more about my trip and my plans later.

We’re leaving Iceland in a few hours, and my only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see the Icelandic Phallological Museum (not to be confused with the philological museum). At this fabled site the proprietor has gathered together samples of you-know-what from every phallus-bearing species that has walked Iceland’s shores, with the exception of a human you-know-what, although it is reported that an Icelandic farmer has volunteered to donate his upon his demise; we can only hope he hurries up. The only problem is that, apparently, the whole museum has picked up shop and moved five hours to the north. Why the owner got it in his head to, ah, remove Iceland’s most monumental attraction defies all logic. There is definitely something lacking in a Reykjavik without a museum dedicated to all matters phallological.

A note to my loyal readers–all two of you–I am not going to be posting much in this space this summer because I’ll be doing all my blogging on kitteneater. I’m saving this space for deep and heavy ruminations on the nature of post-irony and for more academic matters. And have no doubt, I’ve had all manner of deep and heavy thoughts on the matter.

Now that my orals are successfully over, and summer shenanigans are on my local horizon, I can begin properly to post stuff on this site.

So first a word on my orals. They went, somehow, far better than I had anticipated they would go. This wasn’t because I thought I would screw up or anything, but because I didn’t realize how high-level most of the questions would be. Most of the questions that I got were of the form “Talk about Idea X in relation to Book Y.” Questions like that I can handle with both arms tied behind my back and my legs frozen in concrete. My mind is nothing if not a hotbed of crazy, associative logic. This may be some correlary to the fact that I don’t have much of a dreamlife to speak of; I do all my craziest thinking while wide awake. My talk was on representations and literary reformulations of what I called “the countercultural idea,” obviously an off-shoot in some serious ways from the Heath and Potter reading that I was doing. I read William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Nova Express; Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow; Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo; and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as all engaging with a form of this idea, and as finding ways to explore its logical implications. The most interesting, and in some ways the hardest, question I got from one of my examiners had to do with whether I thought my talk constituted an interpretation of these works.

I guess it depends on what we mean when we say “interpretation,” but my answer was no, my talk was not an interpretation. I think of interpretation as reading into some manfest text a latent content not there on the surface. So the model for books this way becomes “Book A says A* but actually A* is a coded transformation of content B* from Domain of Knowledge B.” This may sound complicated, but this definition of interpretation makes sense when you think about it in terms of things like Freudian dream-reading and the like. A cigar is not always a cigar, but something else. A cigar (manfest content) expresses some repressed sexual dimension of the Id (latent content). The Doman of Knowledge changes to any particular thing we’re interested in–psychoanalysis, economics, history, whatever–but ultimately this kind of interpretation has the pernicious (and lazy) effect of always “discovering” confirmations that the theory we happen to be fans of is everwhere.

This is, I think, a mistaken way to go about studying literature. Obviously, I don’t want to think that this is what I was doing in may talk. After mulling it over for a few days, I think I was right to say that I wasn’t interpreting these books. There is a perfectly reasonable alternative to interpretation which involves looking at particular ideas, people, events and how these are written about, transformed, and expressed in literary works. So saying that a model of the countercultural idea gets described, and metaphorically extended, in a literary work makes no claims about the “meaning” of that particular work. In fact, I don’t see that deep study is ever required to come to understand the meaning of a work. It seems like a waste to even try. Instead, all that’s really needed is a committment to do some difficult thinking, and work hard to put forward some very basic ideas, even if the procedure is nothing magical or inpenetrable, but very ordinary, and involves doing a lot of research, thinking, and careful writing. If this sounds all very simple and obvious, it’s not. The professional study of literature has become an often obscure and uncomfortably solipsistic discipline. Avoiding these traps while recognizing the complexity of literary study is a challenge I’m going to have to face now that the actual process of dissertation-writing is beginning; the safetynet’s down. I want to avoid sloppy thinking if I can, although, given my associative tendencies, it’s more easily said than done.

My orals are tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3:30 pacific time. Oboy, oboy. I haven’t been able to bring myself to feel nervous about it yet, but I feel the change coming on. Ugh.

I’ve been wondering what exactly I meant when I wrote that the current stock of post-ironic art wants to think beyond the “negative critical methods of the counterculture.” I know what I meant to write, but after a conversation I had today with a friend of mine, I’m not quite sure anymore. Specifically, I wonder if I was wrong to use the word “counterculture” to describe the movement and sensibility against which post-ironic artists define themselves.

In their new book, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andew Potter define “counterculture” as a mode of cultural criticism that tries to reveal chinks in the armor of the (always oppressive) dominant/hegemonic ideology of mainstream culture. “Culture jamming” is one example of this sort of resistance which they make a big deal of in the book (too big a deal in my view). I think the book’s very interesting, and deeply flawed, but in reading the book I kind of uncritically accepted their definition of counterculture, reasoning that irony is definitely one of the key forms of resistance of the anti-hegemony counterculture as definied in the book. So when I used the word “counterculture” in my previous post, I was wondering how post-ironic authors and artists try to go beyond ironic “culture jamming”-type modes of criticism (the idea that one can resist the oppressive dominant culture by making fun of its hypocracy) towards a new sense of the real.

But the problem with this use of the term counterculture is that it erases certain aspects of history. In particular, it conflates the 60’s (which were arguably hugely optimistic, idealistic, and Utopian in outlook) with the 70s and 80s (which had a much darker turn to them), and drops the successes of the feminist/civil rights/antiwar/environmental movements out of the picture. Heath and Potter consciously combine the two epochs, explaining that the basic philosophical position of, say, punk doesn’t differ much from that of the hippies; the only difference is punk’s criticism that the hippies “sold out,” got co-opted by the hegemonic Establishment, in various ways, before punk itself sold out, only to be followed up by grunge, hip-hop, etc., in an endless cycle of resistance and selling out. The point of their criticism is that countercultural people of this bent have a wrong-headed idea about what will cause social change, and incorrect ideas about co-optation, and so far (I’m only 100 pages into the book) they seem to be proposing a kind of return to collective action and economic institutional reform (which I’m all in favor of, but I wonder if they’re just misrepresenting the aims of these earlier activists, turning the historical counterculture into a straw man far too easily easily knocked down).

Now there is a dominant conservative critique of the 1960s which very much wants to erase the postive acheivements of the counterculture with an emphasis on decadence, postmodernism, and cultural deterioration–the 60s becomes all Sex/Drugs/Rock’n’Roll and very little feminist liberation/black rights/antiwar activism (in some instances feminism, environmentalism, etc. end up causing all our current woes). But more of concern to me is the question of whether left-leaning critics, like Heath and Potter, are basically willing to make the same move. But then, maybe it is the straw man that is interesting–straw men, like ghosts and extra-terrestrial abductors, can shape lives in deep ways. Do these distortions of contemporary countercultural historiography really matter for my project? After all, aren’t contemporary writers and artists responding more to the image of the recent past, confusions and all, than they respond to what really happened? Or am I, by focusing on the image, just tacitly buying into efforts to erase the many successes of the 60’s?: feminism, civil rights, early environmentalism, etc.

Will the real counterculture please stand up?

It’s a tricky question; I’d love some feedback on what people think when they use the term “counterculture,” and what they thought I meant. I am not really sure anymore; I probably should have used the (deeply odious) word “postmodernism” in my original post. It seems more accurate, on reflection.

Me, of course.

But also, more specifically, the work that I’ll be doing over the next two-three years on my dissertation. I think it’ll be a productive exercise to work through my thinking-process on this blog, to put my ideas out on a provisional basis, and to build a community of readers who might even re-shape the direction my work goes in.

So what’s the topic of my dissertation? I haven’t had my colloquium yet (that’s going to be in the fall), but I am narrowing in on “post-irony” as a concept that might be particularly fruitful to explore. Since the early 1990s, and at an accelerated pace since 9/11, there have been a range of artistic efforts–from the Freedom Tower going up on Ground Zero to Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan to Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to Wes Anderson’s various movies to the many many brilliant episodes of This American Life–to reformulate the moral logic of earnestness in an ironic world. The artists engaged in this effort appreciate what irony (as a tool of cultural criticism and as a means of resisting the dominant culture) has let us do since the heyday of the counterculture, but they also desperately want to push beyond irony, and the negative critical methods of the counterculture, towards something else. Towards something postive, affirmative, or (at the very least) real. Put differently, all these artists are struggling to find a way, through art, to express deeply felt, often unbearable, emotions without seeming trite, cliched, or mainstream; yet they all seem somehow forced to use highly ironized and self-conscious means of doing so. The results are often odd but (almost) always interesting.

That’s my idea in a nutshell. I’ll post more on the contours this project soon. Eventually, I’ll post my colloquium paper here.

I implore you, all of you, to visit this site and do what you can to save this furry little guy. By God, what has this world come to?