Nowtopian

Penguins Do the Darndest Things!

There’s a new documentary in town, originally a French production with a farcical narrative, it’s been re-narrated in English as a more straight-ahead doc on the Emperor Penguin of Antarctica (March of the Penguins). Since I’m currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Antarctica” it was a good time to see this film and get a good look at the icescape of that little-known continent. But it was a great match with Jeremy Narby’s new book Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge.

The Emperor penguins, as seen in this film, are remarkably human. But forgoing the obvious anthropomorphism of that notion, the specific behaviors of the penguins show remarkable intelligence. And that begs the same question as Narby’s book, ‘what is intelligence’? It turns out that the harder one tries to arrive at a working definition of ‘intelligence’ the more elusive it becomes. Narby quotes a plant biologist’s definition: “adaptively variable behavior during the lifetime of the individual”. This tries to encompass a wide range of observable behaviors that are inadequately explained as mere reflex responses to chemical signals, or any of the other myriad relatively mechanical explanations that have been commonly proffered by scientists for the past 200 years. What makes Narby’s book so interesting is his rational and rigorous attempt to discover and explain (mostly in other scientists’ work) the evidence of intelligence that has been held as a given by so-called primitive peoples who live in, e.g., Amazonian jungles.

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Crashing into World Wars

This is a quickie. Saw that horrible new War of the Worlds last night. Saw the very interesting Crash a month ago. Somehow there is a weird echo in them for me, but one that most people would not see or hear in either film.

First Crash is getting a lot of attention as a blisteringly honest film about race relations. I didn’t think so. I think it’s a fairly accurate portrayal of how people rely on shallow racist stereotypes to navigate their frustrations and insecurities in daily life. But the real point of that movie, stated rather clearly in the opening epigraph voiceover by Don Cheadle, is what car culture does to us. “We never touch each other, unless in a disaster.” That’s not a verbatim quote because I’d have to see it again (can someone give me the actual line?), but it underscores the underlying theme of the movie, that revolves around a series of interlocking plots and car accidents. And sure, the fears and loathings that people maintain, mostly racist, are shown in their nauseating stupidity, but that part felt really separate and distant to me. Like racism in general, it’s artificial and based on alienation and separation. Crash shows how arbitrary and pointless the racist assumptions people use are, and how dramatically they’re tossed aside in profound moments of human connection.

But the less-than-one-dimensional Tom Cruise and the silly, disconnected, inconsistent War of the Worlds offers no insights into the human condition. Doubt that it was supposed to. But by accident it underscored something about class and America and war…

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Al-Qaida, Batman and the New Vanguardism

After a nine-day vacation in the northeast, mostly to Montreal to see my daughter, I’m back in SF in good health and spirits. Thought I might’ve posted while travelling, but it’s still not so convenient to spend time on-line when away from home. Lots to say about friends and places in the east, but this is to comment on the theme above.

While travelling, I finished RETORT’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso: 2005, RETORT is Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts), and later finished Iain Banks’ novel Complicity (Simon & Schuster: 1993) and saw the summer blockbuster Batman Begins. Curiously, they all three address Vanguardism, but who’d a thunk that ahead of time? Not me!

RETORT sets out to apply a situationist-inspired critical analysis to the historical period denoted by Sept. 11 and the Iraq War. Unlike much of the progressives and lefties around, though, they don’t fall for a simple “Blood for Oil” line of explanation, nor do they spend much time wondering about the veracity of the received story of 9-1-1 (a point that earns them the scorn of some 911 activists). Instead they do a deep and thorough job of contextualizing recent events in the long history of U.S. militarism and empire. They take up many of the arguments offered by ecologists regarding Peak Oil and conclude that this argument (irrespective of whether or not we are halfway through global oil reserves) is a basic Malthusian view, and is itself contradicted by the entire history of the oil industry (one of glut and trying to control prices).

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