Recording Surface

As s0metim3s recently asked, “how is it that Nomsky can be so half-right so often?”

Interviewer: There has been much debate regarding the legitimacy of the Israeli state. To what extent is Israel a legitimate, or an illegitimate, state?

Chomsky: I don’t think that the notion of legitimacy of a state means very much. Is the United States a legitimate state? It’s based on genoice; it conquered half of Mexico. What makes it legitimate? The way the international system is set up, states have certain rights; that has nothing to do with their legitimacy. Every state you can think of is based on violence, repression, expulsion, and all sorts of crimes. And the state system itself has no inherent legitimacy. It’s just an institutional form that developed and that was imposed with plenty of violence. The quetion of legitimacy just doesn’t arise. There is an international order in which it is essentially agreed that states have certain rights, but that provides them with no legitimacy, Israel or anyone else.

It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or on top of the tower.–Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 214

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil envisions a world defined by bureaucracy and its oceans of paperwork, terror-inducing government forms identifiable by their jumble of numbers, letters, and backstrokes, and inefficient, inflexible administrative mechanisms. (more…)

[Somehow this post got deleted from the day I wrote it, September 20, and reappeared as a new post. Weird.]

This morning I listened to David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, from 1971, which has always been my favorite of his. I haven’t heard it in years, and I was pleasantly surprised at the topicality of some of the lyrics, particularly the minor parenting in “Kooks,” the xenophobia-rendered-as-apocalypse tale of “Oh, You Pretty Things,” and the interplay of the real/symbolic, Thanatos, and power/knowledge in “Quicksand.” (more…)

Somehow, I beat the rabble to the univerity library I have access to–but don’t accuse me or my blog of being (an) academic!–and was able to be the first to borrow Wendy Brown’s new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (chapter 1 here). I’m very excited, as I heard her give a talk on this a few years ago–well, half heard her from the hallway as I tried to convince a one and a half year old to content himself with paper clips and string and to not let out any screams that would disrupt the talk–and was impressed. At the time I thought that an exploration of tolerance was needed, as Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” is a little yellow (though still excellent, of course) and because tolerance seems a more apt subject today than Zizek’s fulminations on multiculturalism.

Anyway, I haven’t started it yet, but some of the chapter titles sound promising:

Tolerance as a Discourse of Depoliticization

Tolerance as Governmentality
Faltering Universalism, State Legitimacy, and State Violence

Subjects of Tolerance
Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians

Today is the 89th birthday of Thelonious Monk, my favortie jazz musician-composer. Jazz has never known quite what to do with Thelonious, who struggled in obscurity and poverty for two decades while others had hits with his songs and then suddenly–in the 60s, well after his creative powers had ebbed and as his debilitating mental illness took permanent root–became a huge international star: He is simultaneously venerated and institutionalized–his name is attached to professional songwriting contests and music programs at academies–and treated as a sideshow, notable but mostly for his freakishness–in Ken Burns’s Jazz, Branford Marsalis praised him but did so as a joke, like professing love for a “weird,” “quirky” cousin who gets included in the family because of the artistic cachet s/he brings.

Below is a clip of Thelonious, in a trio setting sometime in the late 50s, playing “Blue Monk.” I love all of the incarntions of Thelonious’s bands, but lately I find myself digging the trios the most, particularly the early Blue Note sessions from the late 40s that made up his first recordings. This video gives a glimpse of why.

Reading Catherine Holland’s The Body Politic (excerpted here) has prompted me to pick through, leisurely, The Federalist Papers, which I had been familiar with only secondhand. (more…)

…while I try to not throw up.