Monday, October 31, 2005

Sometimes I agree with the Conservatives (sort of)

CBC online has a story today about a proposal from the Agricultural Institute of Canada that the GST be assessed on food, and the money given to farmers as a subsidy. This is stupid. The article quotes MP David Anderson (C-Sask), "do we need to increase taxes further? If this government was serious about supporting agriculture, it seems to have a fairly healthy surplus." I agree with him in part. Though I am not opposed to income taxes, I generally frown on sales taxes, especially when they are applied to essential items like food. Adding a 7% tax to food would only hurt the poor people of Canada, and there are much better ways of subsidising the farm industry, if that is what we want to do. To my surprise, Anderson, in pointing to the government's surplus, seems to be suggesting my favourite, just give them money directly from government coffers. It need not be tied to any particular source of (government) income. We could then, for example, divert money received from taxing the wealthiest Canadians to paying farmers to produce food at a cost above market price. This of course raises the other pertinent question, should we subsidise them at all? I don't know. One might view the food supply as in part an issue of national security. We might not want to become too dependent on other countries for our food. Even if we disagree with that, we might think that, at the very least, the current generation of farmers needs some sort of safety net.

Anyways, back to work.

Academic Joy

I'm reading what has so far proved to be a great book, Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear. The author, Leon Harold Craig, is of a decidedly different generation. He eschews contemporary critical approaches (historicist, postmodern) in favour of a good old reading of the text. His thesis is that Shakespeare was an emminently intelligent philosopher, and that much of his wisdom is contained in his plays. I should note that when Craig uses the word "philosophy" (or "philosophical") he is much less concerned with a particular set of ideas than he is with a particular approach to life, and to the way we think about life. The philosopher for him is someone who likes to think about things, always hoping to understand them better, and who delights in inspiring this sort of approach in others. The other inspiration for this post was that I've realized I have a great deal of work to do a some point, some point after Reed. There is a lot of post-modern thought (I intentionally do not employ the term postmodernism) with which I agree, at least in part. There is also a lot of stuff anathema to post-modern thinking with which I also agree. It is perhaps possible that I've selectively agreed with things in such a way that I am not myself in contradiction. But I have my doubts. At some point, I am going to have to sort this all out. It is an endeavour that excites me greatly, but it make take a while. I have an inkling that there is something of an answer in the buddhist distinction between absolute and relative reality. "Relative" here does not have all the same implications that it would in a post-modernist text. (Again, I employ 'post-modernist' intentionally, this time as a sort of little intellectual jab.) Simply because relative reality is not absolute does not mean it is not to be respected. Indeed, you ignore its constraints at your peril (physically, socially, emotionally,...).

Anyways, back to Lear.

Things we thought all along

The NY Times, that bastion of liberalism, has an article today detailing the still classified research of historian Robert J. Hayok, in which he concludes that the crucial Tonkin Gulf episode was a sham. For those who've forgotten grade 12 history, the Tonkin Gulf episode consisted of an alleged attack by a (North) Vietnamese destroyer (gunboat?, paddlewheel?) on an American ship on August 4th 1964, two days after a previous clash. This was believed to be a clear sign of 'escalation' on the part of the Vietnamese, and President Johnson cited the attack as justification for his request to Congress for authorization of "broad military action in Vietnam." In a recent interview, the then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, says, according to the Times, "that the intelligence reports [...] played a decisive role in the war's expansion. Historians have long suspected that the incident didn't really happen, but none before Mr Hayok has had access to the N.S.A (National Security Agency, aka the really creepy spooks) archives. The Times reports that he reached his conclusion based on the differences between official N.S.A. reports and intercepts from N.S.A. listening posts in South Vietnam and the Philippines. It appears that mid-level N.S.A. operatives mistranslated the intercepts, and though they soon noticed their errors, they then systematically mistranslated the intercepts to cover up their initial mistakes. Hayok further concludes that it is doubful that any high-level folks at the N.S.A, or in other parts of government (the White House) new about the mistake and subsequent coverup. Johnson is reported to have had doubts about the episode from the get go, but alas. Hayok's research, entitled "Spartans in Darkness", was 'published' in an internal NSA 'journal' about five years ago. The Times reports that the agency was planning to release the report until it became evident that some of the intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq had been falsified. No one, except us pussy-footed, pansie-assed liberal blow-hards, wants to have that sort of déja-vu. We need unity in the face of adversity; ignorance in the face of propaganda.

According to the times, the N.S.A is planning to release the report, and to also declassify the pertinent primary evidence, in the near future. This will be interesting to see. One has to wonder about the bias of a historian employed by the N.S.A, but I know nothing about Hayok's other work. Further, I imagine that the US Armed Forces and some of the associated intelligence services are probably quite interested in internal criticism, at least within certain constraints. It can only make them stronger. As much as us liberal softies like to joke about the boys and their toys, the US officer corps is actually a very smart bunch on the whole.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

evenin' ramblings

So I'm sort of exhausted (yes, again), and though I may be able to embark on grand adventures of literary meaning in such states, it is the not the most conducive to analytical, scientific thinking. Yes, this does say something dissapointing about the interpretation of literature. But it is also beautiful. As is my habit, I opened up a number of articles from The Economist to occupy my mind while it loosens up and returns to sobriety. Unexpectedly, I was attracted by a headline for one of the monthly summaries of what's in the business journals. A reborn version of the European Business Forum is hoping to challengen the Harvard Business Review's preeminent position at the top of the pack. The Economist is however roundly dismissive of their aspirations:

On the evidence of this issue, [the European Business Forum] has some way to go. Teased though it sometimes is for its use of “management-speak”, the mostly eloquent HBR would never start an article thus: “One of the more interesting things about life is, precisely, things. Things bring people together.”

Now this is really neither here nor there. It was not what inspired me to write this post. It was the next summary, of an article from the Havard Business Review, that piqued my interest. The article itself is but a summary, or an excerpt, of the findings of a book published by the HBR. Let's start with the title of the book: "Results: Keep What’s Good, Fix What’s Wrong and Unlock Great Performance". Now, granted this is just the title, but is this not a bit question begging? Anyways, the article looks at one of seven types of corporate organisation (why not six? why not eight?), which the authors have named 'passive-aggresive'. The Economist summarizes:

The “passive-aggressive” type they describe in the HBR article is one that is easy to recognise. Generally free of conflict and quick to achieve consensus, firms with such an organisational structure are extremely reluctant to implement changes. One key symptom of a passive-aggressive organisation is a poorly-designed incentive scheme that fails to differentiate between good and merely adequate performers. With no way of telling who gets rewarded for what, “rituals and routines, even modes of dress, become fetishized, as though they contain the secret to the firm’s past successes.”

Having described the passive-aggressive organisation, the authors admit that rehabilitating one is “uniquely difficult”, if only becomes [sic] everything appears to be functioning smoothly. Bringing in an outsider to lead can help; unfortunately, an outsider who moves too quickly to change things might provoke more of the passive-aggressive resistance he is there to undermine.

The next summary is of an article on the correlation, or lack therof, between spending on R&D and success:

A new study by a group of consultants at Booz Allen Hamilton’s New York office has come up with the disturbing finding that “there is no relationship between R&D spending and the primary measures of economic or corporate success”. It’s not how much you spend that matters, say the authors in what they claim is “the most comprehensive effort to date to assess the influence of R&D on corporate performance,” it’s the way that you spend it.

[...]

So is it time to cut the R&D budget? For some, maybe. But not by too much. The authors found that the bottom 10% of their sample performed worse than the rest. Their advice? “Avoid being either a top or a bottom spender” on R&D, unless there is a clear and compelling reason for it.


Now, let's look at what we've learned from these two articles. Oh, wait, the next one, "Strategy and the Fat Smoker" is even better (I swear, I'm not making this stuff up).

David Maister, a former Harvard Business School professor and a leading expert on the management of professional-service firms, has an article forthcoming on his website (a related video presentation is already available) in which he compares strategy formulation to dieting—“the lesson of strategy is simple. You are either seriously in the programme, really living what you have chosen, or you are wasting your time.” As it is for Weight Watchers, “the essential question [of strategy] is which of our habits are we really prepared to change, permanently and forever?”

Mr Maister’s argument is that the secret of successful strategy lies not in theoretical analysis, nor in technique; it lies in resolve, in determination, in adopting “a managerial style of insistent patience”. Introducing strategic change is like recovering from alcoholism—“first make a lifetime commitment, then take it one day at a time.” First have the vision, the ideology; then have the patience.

Mr Maister, a self-confessed one-pack a day smoker for 37 years, gave up this year and lost 30 pounds in weight. “If I can become a fit, non-smoking exerciser,” he writes, “there’s truly no limit.”

As I can't resist, we're going to have to wade through the banalities of two more summaries. This first summary is nicely titled, "Balance is Better".

“Spreading Yourself Too Thin: the Atkins Diet and Other Fads”
The bankruptcy in July of the company founded by the late Robert Atkins, promoter of the low-carb diet and bad breath, has prompted Wharton School professors Marshall Fisher and Barbara Kahn to ponder on the nature of fadswonder products, such as Pet Rocks and bell-bottom jeans, whose meteoric rise is exceeded only by their meteoric fall. But does it have to be so? No, says Ms Kahn, some fads “have legs of their own, get accepted and become widespread”.

But most geet routed by the competition that sooner or later enters their market space. Atkins Nutritionals had to fight off “a stampede of major food manufacturers who produced thousands of low-carb products”. If they did not succeed, they could abandon them and revert to their old range of products with little loss. That option was not available to Atkins, which remained a “one-trick-pony” throughout its life.


And the last one: "Worth Remembering" from the MIT Sloan Management Review, “Managing Organisational Forgetting”. The Economist writes:

If any publication can stand comparison with the Harvard Business Review (HBR) it is the MIT Sloan Management Review. As the HBR awards a prize to the best article that a panel of outside judges decides it has published in the past year (the McKinsey prize), so the MIT Sloan Management Review awards the Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize to the authors of its best article. Named after a professor of organisational development at the school, the prize has just been awarded to an article published in the Winter 2004 issue. Written by three academics, from Canada, Spain and the UK, it argued that companies need to take “a selective, discriminating and active approach to acquiring and utilising knowledge”—ie, they must forget some things at the same time as they learn and remember others. The authors say that companies hang on to knowledge that can often be producing “dysfunctional outcomes”. Their advice? Forget it.


Now, what have we learned:

1) Pop-culture psychology has nothing interesting to tell us about how to run a company. In somewhat the same way as pop-psychology, any attempt to make its conclusions generally applicable has the result of making them either wrong or uninterestingly obvious.

2) Spend you money wisely.

3) Discipline, in terms of clarity of focus and persistence in application, lies at the heart of any attempt to effect lasting change.

4) Diversify. Have a core-business that is not subject to the whims of human frailty. Exercise some common sense.

5) Not everything you know is useful. One might wonder if the authors of that article didn't feel the slightest sense of irony as they penned their prize winning opus.

I realise now that if I was willing to whore myself out to the production of business "knowledge" (if ever there was time to put a word in quotation marks, this is it), I could have a rather lucrative career. Most of their grand insights are simply platitudes disguised in metaphors or analogies. The few that aren't so easily dismissed tend to "prove" the obvious. In real science, proving the obvious is often rather difficult, and is an admirable and important part of human progress. However Economics is not science. Business "analysis" is rarely Economics, it is in fact about as close to science as pop-psychology is to physics.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Evening thoughts while sobering up

“THE ideas of economists and political philosophers...are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” —John Maynard Keynes
(cited by The Economist in their obituary of Arthur Sheldon; October 20th, 2005)

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Thesis and Booze

Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Coleridge...many poets and writers, perhaps Proust as well, have thought drunkeness, or other states of insobriety, a catalyst of creative endeavour. As I think literary criticism is little more than an attempt to tell a good story, I am hopeful that my current mild inebriation will produce thesis musings of great depth and grandeur. Though I'd settle for coherent and pointed. In fact, I aspire to coherent and pointed. The best literary criticism often tells the tale of the obvious. Reading it, we feel astounded to have missed what now seems so apparent. This is of course the sign of a good yarn, of a particular facility for weaving the threads together. Out of this comes a clear picture, no longer mere interwoven strands, but a set of relationships that jump forth into our imagination with a visual clarity that makes them self-evident. How we could have missed it we are no longer sure. The logic, the motivation and the ramifications are all now clear. The critic's tale has bowled us over like a monster truck over trycicles.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Almost there [Vancouver in less thatn 48hrs !!!]

I'm writing an annotated bibliography for my King Lear paper. Once again, I am dismayed by all the crap I have to wade through. If I thought it would make the articles more interesting, I'd bang my head on the brick wall to my left. These are the sort of irrational suppositions and correlations that the dead weight of academia unleashes.

Ev

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

drivel

"drivel" in French is "radotage" (n.m.)

I'm quite pleased.

Monday, October 10, 2005

I Love School

While reading the introduction to Julius Caesar (Arden), I came across a word entirely foreign to me, "hendiadys".

From the OED:A figure of speech in which a single complex idea is expressed by two words connected by a conjunction; e.g. by two substantives with and instead of an adjective and substantive.

1586 A. DAY Eng. Secretary II. (1625) 83 Hendiadis, when one thing of it selfe intire, is diversly laid open, as to say, On iron and bit he champt, for on the iron bit he champt. 1589 PUTTENHAM Eng. Poesie III. xvi. (Arb.) 188 Another manner of speach when ye will seeme to make two of one..which therefore we call the figure of Twynnes, the Greekes Endiadis.

I love learning new things.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

The biggest problem with "Globalisation"

A global market for labour.

In a recent article ("Be My Guest"; Oct. 6th 2005), The Economist writes:

Labour is globalisation's missing link. The flow of workers across borders is heavily impeded, leaving the global market for labour far more distorted than those for capital and commodities. The world price of capital may be set in America, and that of oil set in Saudi Arabia. But there is no such thing as a world price of labour. Wages can differ by a factor of ten or more depending only on the passport of the wage-earner, according to Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard.


Can we really imagine what a global market for labour would look like? I think I can, and it is stupid. I'm not ready to do away with nation states and their semi-closed borders. I do think that immigration policies should be loosened, but I'm not about to argue that anyone should be able to work and live anywhere, and get up and move somewhere else as they please. (Not yet at least.) I should say, this is not what The Economist is suggesting. The article goes on to discuss the issues surrounding temporary migration, but the central inequity of globalization remains: companies may be able pick labourers as they see fit, and investors deploy their capital as they choose, but labourers are mostly stuck with whatever options are available at home. Now, I'm being entirely too simplistic. Labour is necessarily localized, and though workers may move, their scope for doing so is understandably more limited than that of capital. Companies, on the other hand, lie somewhere in between. The tendency of late has been for them to become more international, with accordingly fewer ties to any locality or nationality. Though I think this has often been good, it is worth thinking about.

Good Morning

It's no wonder we believe in our own existence. We can hold someone's hand, talk to them, listen and respond. And yet I'm not sure I can point to anything beyond the physical extention and duration of a corporeal object. To be entirely clear: I'm not really concerned with rather or not we exist in a physical sense, but with to what extent, and in what way we exist as the person we experience ourselves to be. When emotions manifest with an undeniable physicality, it seems quite clear that that subjective sense of I exists. Sometimes, it just seems that "these feelings won't go away", and we feel utterly convinced that we exist, painful as our existence may be. I sometimes wonder about why it is that I feel more certain of my existence, more conscious of it, when I am sad than when I am happy.

What sort of extention and duration does our consciousness have? For the moment, let's conceive of consciousness as simply the capacity to be aware of oneself and the surrounding world. Our awareness off the physical world must of course be restricted by the extent to which we have sense-datum of it . If one prefers not to divide perception into the perceptual act and the mental objects created, that's just fine. I'm happy to simply say that our awareness of the physical world is restricted by our capacity to sense it. This is an obvious constraint, but I want to be clear that I'm not interested in entertaining any notions of psychic revelation.

So we have a physical body with clear duration and extension and we have awareness. I don't really care whether we believe our awareness to have extension or not. I don't hope to solve the mind-body problem, and as far as my interest extends at present, it doesn't matter whether awareness is a physical "organ" of our mind, or some sort of psychic capacity without a clear physicality (emergent or not—though I have hard time conceiving how it could be anything but emergent if it's not inherently physical). I am being a little disingenuous here: part of my concern does in fact directly pertain to the mind-body problem. I am creating a distinction between consciousness and awareness to examine to different facets of human experience that I think are often erroneously lumped together. The first, that I am calling awareness is simply our capacity to be conscious of observing the world and ourselves. (I can tell that this terminolgy is already horribly ill-conceived, but for now I'm going to go with it and editing will come later.) I don't much care whether or not awareness has extension. Its duration on the other hand is very important.

umm yeah. I need to do some work, so this it to be continued.

Oh, and Sufjan Stevens rocks my world (sad as it it).

Saturday, October 08, 2005

comfort

I've surrounded myself with an intellectual comfort. I have a wall of books—over fifty for my thesis alone—that fill the lower shelf of my cubicle, an imposing presence across the entire field of my vision as I sit, eyes moving back and forth from book to screen, attempting to write about painting and Proust.

Death comes quickly

This wasn't what I had intended to write about, but as my fingers began typing, it was what came out. We all have granparents, aunts and uncles, and other elderly friends of the family. I recently found out that someone close to my family has died. I'd been planning on writing her a letter, in response to one that she had sent me, for the last month. Planning, meaning to...I never did get to it...

So yeah, don't let this happen to you.

Coming back to what I meant to write about. As I mentioned in a recent post, acamedics often embark on seemingly pointless quests in search of answers to the most meaningless of questions. A case in point: many critics have spent a great deal of time attempting to decide which, if any, of the yellow patches in Vermeer's View of Delft is the fabled "petit pan de mur jaune" ("little section of yellow wall") that is mentioned three times in A La recherche du temps perdu. If you follow the second link, you'll see a rendition of the painting (I say "rendition" because I have no idea what sort of saturation, contrast, etc., the painting actually has) where to my eyes, it is eminently clear which patch of yellow is the "petit pan de mur jaune" (the one labeled "A" in the first link). And yet, I don't care.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Further thoughts on music

I'm working at the Paradox, meticulously cleaning the espresso machine and listening to the melancholy music that has been my mood of late. A couple minutes ago, while listening to Led Zepplin's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", I had some more thoughts on my previous musings on music and lyrics. I've been listening to this song a fair bit lately as it has often been in accord with the way I've been feeling. However, as I was listening to it this evening, and paying attention to the lyrics in a way I normally would not, I realised something. The semantic content of the lyrics in no way express what I feel. And yet there is a similarity between the feeling that is expressed and what I feel. Anyways, I need to get back to work.

Ev

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

I just almost passed out from an emotional attack. Well, that's sort of what it felt like. I don't want to go into details, what really interests me is the intense physical manifestation of my emotions. Certainly, I usually feel some sort of physical sense of what I'm feeling, as is probably true of all of us. That that is true is obvious in the way we talk about emotions—we feel them. But usually, I find that, even if my feelings are strong, I am still able to maintain some rational control. It's not that I can give up my sadness on a whim (nor do I think I would want to), but that, even when I feel very sad (or angry, etc.) there is most always a sort of conscious observer in my head. If any of you have ever seen Franciso Goya's etching El sueno de la razon produce monstruous (The sleep/dream of reason produces monsters) [small ; big], the lynx (in the bottom right hand corner of the picture) reminds me very much of this sense of a conscious observer, somewhat separated from the principal flow of events. Today, I had a brief experience of losing that. I was still somewhat aware of myself as thinking subject, so I won't say I lost it entirely, but what little sense of the perspective of the observer that remained had no bearing on how I saw the world. Or more accurately, how the world manifested for me at that moment. It was an experience of rapture, but it ended as soon as I realised that the outside world (real) was not in fact how I had briefly believed it to be.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Prout's favourite colour?

Academics are capable of such drivel. I doubt many disciplines are spared this blight, but sometimes, okay often, I feel that the study of literature and of culture (commonly called anthropology–or, How I learned to scientivise my racism and stop worrying about colonialism) are the standout, cancerous growths. Their constant self-reflection, their collapsing of the centre—because it has no "structure"—their pedantic, meandering descriptions of the minutiae of some topic for which the world has no concern, and which, even if they tried, they would not succeed in establishing any meaningful resonances with real situations, all these, and more, annoy me. (I'm not dismissing all such academic investigations out of hand. I am not, as of yet, a marxist literary critic. I do think it is alright, and indeed often very helpful to spend time looking at grand themes, or internal structures, with little or no immediate regard for how they relate to the "outside world". Though I agree that art is usually a product, a good to be consumed, I also continue to believe in its transcendental qualities.)

So it was not without some humour today that I stumbled across a paper on Proust's favourite colour. As I skimmed the introduction, I felt a vague sense of increasing horror. I had visions of the intertextualities between childhood games of "what's your favourite colour" and Proust's own instantiations of his favourite colour coming to the fore, of the recovery of the underlying uncertainty in the text, and of the praxis of transformation as subtle shifts in the visual undercurrents rose to become an active hermeneutic that was itself constitutive of subjectivity. It was not that bad. But it was not much better. Most of the article was simply a description of the places one finds this particular colour in the Recherche.

I don't mean to say that I think all academics are awash in indulgent intellectual flings of premature ejaculation, without regard for the groundwork of foreplay, or the immense satisfaction and depth of sustained endeavour. There are many who make me smile, many who I feel have augmented human knowledge for the better, many who, in reading, bring a joy of both complexity and simplicity. Among many others, I highly recommend Stanley Cavell, Northrop Frye, Judith Butler, Paul de Man, William Empson, Edward Said and Raymond Williams.

(Um, yeah. I should, like, go back to work or somethin'. That stuff I said about anthropology, only half true, I think...I don't really know that much about anthropology)

Choking aspiration

So I have to write a paper for my Shakespeare class. The course title, "Shakespeare and Politics", must in some way guide my choice of topic. I spent all weekend working, trying to devise some sort of coherent, interesting and manageable course of attack. Early on, I decided on King Lear as my play of choice. This was perhaps my first mistake. Shakespeare's tragedies are beastly behemoths of signification, and they don't come any more complex than Hamlet and Lear. So why you ask, didn't I just write on the politics of As You Like It, or the interplay between theatricality and truth as Prince Hal develops from delinquent youth to stately young king (Henry IV I)? Well, I like to make things difficult. Difficulty is rarely far behind when the question at stake is interesting, and, to be honest, I like the challenge.

And now for the topic: What sort of ideology is at play in the conception of nature and of what is natural in King Lear. These two are not always the same, and when they diverge it is always political. How is “nature” contravened, how is it edified, and what are the resonances with contemporary concerns of Jacobean England?

This isn't quite as clear and pointed as I'd like it, but I've no more time to work on it until tomorrow.