Earlier today, we showed you what goes into making a Steinway grand piano. Now we’re heading clear across the country, from New York to California, to the factory where the Tesla Model S is made. The process couldn’t be more different. Steinway is all about wood and craftsmen; Tesla about metal and mind-blowing robotics. A piano takes a year to build; a Tesla, 3–5 days. But what do they ultimately have in common? A price tag that can rise well north of $60,000.
Earlier this month we posted an excerpt from an interview in which linguist Noam Chomsky slams the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, along with the late French theorists Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, for cloaking trivial ideas in obscure and inflated language to make them seem profound.
“There’s no ‘theory’ in any of this stuff,” Chomsky says to an interviewer who had asked him about the three continental thinkers, “not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it.”
Chomsky’s remarks sparked a heated debate on Open Culture and elsewhere. Many readers applauded Chomsky; others said he just didn’t get it. On Friday, Žižek addressed some of Chomsky’s criticisms during a panel discussion with a group of colleagues at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London:
Žižek’s remarks about Chomsky don’t appear until about the one-hour, 30-minute mark, but Sam Burgum, a PhD student at the University of York, has transcribed the pertinent statements and posted them on his site, EsJayBe. Here are the key passages:
What is that about, again, the academy and Chomsky and so on? Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that “No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know.” But I totally reject this line of reasoning.
For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” an organization — not communist party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask “Who is my leader?” your head was chopped off immediately and so on.
Okay, next point about Chomsky, you know the consequence of this attitude of his empirical and so on — and that’s my basic difference with him — and precisely Corey Robinson and some other people talking with him recently confirmed this to me. His idea is today that cynicism of those in power is so open that we don’t need any critique of ideology, you reach symptomatically between the lines, everything is cynically openly admitted. We just have to bring out the facts of people. Like “This company is profiting in Iraq” and so on and so on. Here I violently disagree.
First, more than ever today, our daily life is ideology. how can you doubt ideology when recntly I think Paul Krugman published a relatively good text where he demonstrated how this idea of austerity, this is not even good bourgeois economic theory! It’s a kind of a primordial, common-sense magical thinking when you confront a crisis, “Oh, we must have done something wrong, we spent too much so let’s economize and so on and so on.”
My second point, cynicists are those who are most prone to fall into illusions. Cynicists are not people who see things the way they really are and so on. Think about 2008 and the ongoing financial crisis. It was not cooked up in some crazy welfare state; social democrats who are spending too much. The crisis exploded because of activity of those other cynicists who precisely thought “screw human rights, screw dignity, all that maters is,” and so on and so on.
So as this “problem” of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever “no” today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in the humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: it’s brutal. Who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations and so on? We are totally marginalized here. I mean look at my position: “Oh yeah, you are a mega-star in United States.” Well, I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him “You almost got it, but then somebody says “Oh, if Žižek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him.”
So I claim that all these “how popular we are” is really a mask of… remember the large majority of academia are these gray either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see them but they are the power. They are the power. On the other hand, why are they in power worried? Because you know… don’t exaggerate this leftist paranoia idea that “we can all be recuperated” and so on and so on. No! I still quite naively believe in the efficiency of theoretical thinking. It’s not as simple as to recuperate everything in. But you know there are different strategies of how to contain us. I must say that I maybe am not innocent in this, because people like to say about me, “Oh, go and listen to him, he is an amusing clown blah blah blah.” This is another way to say “Don’t take it seriously.”
via Partially Examined Life
Related content:
Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing’
Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated ‘Polysyllabic Truisms’
John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy
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“I didn’t think much of Infinite Jest in the beginning,” writes Jacqueline Munoz, librarian at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. But as she read further into Wallace’s seemingly “wordy and unfocused” landmark novel, the author’s mind, and how it dealt with “how unforgiving it is to be human” and how different generations “struggle internally with the same issues,” won her over: “I thought, this man is a genius; I want to know him better.” Many of us Wallace fans harbor the same desire, and now that the Ransom Center has acquired and made available a considerable chunk of the writer’s heavily annotated library, a few more of us can. The books in Wallace’s library, as Munoz puts it, reveal “a philosopher, mathophile, physics buff, grammarian, pop-fiction reader, lit professor, creative writer, and spiritual seeker,” and Maria Bustillos, writing in The Awl back in 2011, traced Wallace’s seemingly strange but ultimately meaningful presence of titles like The Spirituality of Imperfection and The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Bustillos’ exploration of Wallace’s proclivity for self-help brings in a volume written by Sally Foster Wallace, David’s mother: a grammar textbook called Practically Painless English, “the only book of English grammar I know of that can hold a candle to the works of the Fowler brothers.” Her book has a place in the Ransom Center’s collection, and anyone who’s read Wallace’s Harper’s article “Tense Present” may smile at its presence, remembering stories of the songs about solecisms and other linguistic misuses his family would sing on car trips. Ostensibly a review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a copy of which also made it into the collection, the piece reveals Wallace’s thoroughgoing interest in the mechanics, well-functioning or otherwise, of English. You can follow the thread through several other titles in his possession, including Albert Baugh’s A History of the English Language, John D. Ramage’s Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, all the way to Peter Ladefoged’s Elements of Acoustic Phoenetics. And when you’re done, you will want to keep following the thread a little further by checking out our previous post: David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in the English Language.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Henry Engelhard Steinway, a German immigrant, founded Steinway & Sons in 1853, in a loft located at 85 Varick Street in New York City. Within a decade, Steinway pianos were winning major awards and finding themselves in high demand. By 1900, factories in New York and Hamburg, Germany were producing 3,500 hand-crafted pianos per year, roughly the same number being made today. Then, as now, each Steinway grand piano took a year to build, and it involved the work of many skilled craftspeople.
Several decades ago, John H. Steinway (the great-grandson of Henry E. Steinway) narrated an audio tour of the New York factory, where he described the generations-old process of making a Steinway grand piano.
In 2011 Ben Niles, the producer behind the documentary film Note by Note, synced the audio tour with present-day footage of the Steinway factory, giving us a glimpse of what goes into making the piano played by Arthur Rubinstein in the vintage footage below. Here Rubinstein plays an excerpt from “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
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Russian punk performance art collective Pussy Riot will not be deterred. Despite two of their members still languishing in prison labor camps for a musical protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the band continues to rail against its country’s corruption and abuses. This time, in their first music video in almost a year, they take on the Russian oil industry and other targets in the song above called “Like in a Red Prison.” The Wall Street Journal writes:
The confusing and caustic lyrics to the hard-to-listen-to song decry sexism, “homophobic vermin,” actor Gerard Depardieu (a recent recipient of Russian citizenship courtesy of Mr. Putin), and likens Russia’s president to the Ayatollah of Iran.
I don’t find the song hard to listen to at all—quite the contrary—and the video’s pretty exhilarating too, with the band members, in trademark multi-colored balaclavas, clambering atop an oil derrick and defacing a portrait of oil executive Igor Sechin and a head of the Investigative Committee (Russia’s FBI). Definitely a lot going on here, but the central focus is the critique of Russian big oil. The band explains on their site that “Russia’s revenues from the oil industry amounted to 7 trillion rubles ($216 billion), but only Russian President Vladimir Putin and ‘several of his friend see this’” [sic]. The new song’s lyrics were partly written by one of the still-imprisoned members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
You’ve started reading Ulysses, James Joyce’s modernist classic, and never quite made it the whole way through. Sound familiar? You’re in good company.
So here’s another approach. Start reading Ulysses Seen, the graphic novel adaptation of Joyce’s tome. The artist behind Ulysses Seen is Rob Berry, and he’s devoted to using “the visual aid of the graphic novel” to “foster understanding of public domain literary masterworks.” He’s clear to point out that Ulysses Seen isn’t meant to replace Ulysses. Rather it’s meant to be a visual companion to the original work. It uses the comic narrative to “cut through jungles of unfamiliar references” and to help readers “appreciate the subtlety and artistry” of Joyce’s text. So far Berry has completed about 138 pages of Ulysses Seen, and more pages will be coming online at the Joyce Center web site in the near future. According to Publisher’s Weekly, the artist estimates that it will take roughly a decade to complete the full adaptation. (The original novel spans more than 700 pages after all.) In the meantime, here are some more resources to help you get through Joyce’s great work:
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book
Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast
James Joyce Manuscripts Online, Free Courtesy of The National Library of Ireland
Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses
Here’s a strange home video of Nirvana when they were unknown, playing inside a Radio Shack in the band’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. The video was recorded on the evening of January 24, 1988, after the store had closed. In those days the group went by the name of Ted Ed Fred.
Only the day before, the band had recorded its first demo tape at a studio in Seattle. Guitarist and singer Kurt Cobain asked his new friend Eric Harter, who managed the Radio Shack, to videotape the band playing “Paper Cuts,” one of 10 songs from the demo. Along with Cobain, the video features Nirvana co-founder Krist Novoselic on bass and Dale Crover of the Melvins on drums.
The YouTube version below has been synched to the recording of “paper Cuts” made the day before, and was taken from a segment of the tabloid TV show American Journal that aired shortly after Cobain’s suicide in April, 1994. The unaltered clip from the program (above) includes footage of Harter talking about the Radio Shack video and giving a copy of the tape to Cobain’s grieving widow Courtney Love, who is shown with her friend Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland. At one point, Harter mentions a “Ted Ed Fred” concert at the Community World Theater in Tacoma. To see a full video of that show, which was staged the night before the Radio Shack taping (and only hours after the demo session), click here.
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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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To those who haven’t delved deeply into his considerable body of work, twentieth-century architect, inventor, and futurist Buckminster Fuller seems to have left behind a single lasting contribution to the built environment: the geodesic dome. This I remember whenever I pass by the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, a famous movie theater built according to Fuller’s sphere-intensive architectural principles. But the fact that you don’t see many other geodesic domes these days — you never did see many, I suppose — belies the abundant fruits of Fuller’s imagination and know-how. Vigilantly mindful of humanity’s potential for a better tomorrow, he also designed a suite of seemingly Utopian, surprisingly innovative, and ultimately unpopular tools for better living. He branded them with a portmanteau of dynamic, maximum, and tension: “Dymaxion” came to stand, or at least Fuller seemed to want it to stand, for unceasing dedication to improving our patterns of life.
To that end, he conceived of the Dymaxion House, or “Dymaxion Dwelling Machine,” a cheaply mass-producible, naturally heated and cooled, nearly maintenance-free, easily modifiable, and, of course, round housing solution. The satisfied resident of Fuller’s future would drive to and from his Dymaxion House, along with ten passengers, in his aerodynamic Dymaxion Car, capable of reaching 90 miles per hour at 30 miles to the gallon. And no matter where he drove, he could find his way with the Dymaxion Map (also known as the “Fuller Projection map”), the only flat whole-earth map with no visual distortions in its representation of what Fuller called Spaceship Earth. You can see the Dymaxion Car in action, and hear Fuller talk about its development, in the video just above. A 1946 newsreel tour of the Dymaxion House appears at the top of the post. If you now find yourself eager to live according to Buckminster Fuller’s ideals, try keeping his ultra-detailed form of a diary, the Dymaxion Chronofile, or taking his periodic 30 minute Dymaxion naps. I know I’d like to get a Dymaxion bathroom installed.
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Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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