Rupert Cox

Another new feature. When I meet cool or interesting people, or hear a talk that I find particularly engaging in one way or another, I will make mention of them here with a link to their work. I may or may not be loquacious.

So, first up is Rupert Cox, social anthropologist, who’s been doing interesting work on listening, sound, aircraft and the memory of war in Japan. He’s working on a book for Bloomsbury, but in the meantime, here’s a link to a short snippet of his work (you will need university library access for this one, sorry).

One of the things we talked about was the experience of sound outside the sound sounding in a physical way — remembered or imagined sounds, for instance. This seems especially important in writing about war and trauma, but has also become increasingly important for other areas: not only does this point come up a couple times in Remapping Sound Studies, but it’s important for thinking about sound, impairment and disability, as in Mack Hagood’s discussion of tinnitus.

…and we’re back…

So that whole social media “platform” this was an interesting ride, wasn’t it? Turns out, nothing is ever free, the new captains of industry are as selfish and narrow minded as the old ones, and we are just the product. Oh wait, we knew that already:

I submit that the materialist answer to the question — What is the commodity form of mass-produced, advertiser-supported communications under monopoly capitalism? — is audiences and readerships (hereafter referred to for simplicity as audiences). The material reality under monopoly capitalism is that all non-sleeping time of most of the population is work time.

Sure, it’s more complicated than what Dallas Smythe laid out in 1977, but is it also still as he laid it out in 1977. The irony is the social media companies, and media industries in general as more cynical about “content”–code for everything that fills up media, from the most meaningful personal thoughts and experiences, to text generated to draw in searches for medical information–than any Marxist professor ever could be.

There’s value in controlling the rights to one’s own writing–and more importantly, one’s own thoughts–and putting it out there on a website that doesn’t control who sees it and who doesn’t. For now I’m still on the big 3 social media companies, but I’m sick of writing thoughtful stuff and it disappearing on Facebook (“read more” is designed so you don’t), and I’m sick of trying to be clever on Twitter. Yay long form.

I missed blogs and blogging, so I am doing something about it.

Probably this will be more or less the same random collection of musings as before, except I’ll talk more about music and music tech because, why not? Also I’m in two bands and Carrie plays drums now. And I owe the world a NAMM 2019 report. Don’t know what NAMM is? All the better.

I still have cancer (coming up on 10 years), my voice still ebbs and flows, and I still love cats.

Other changes: I’ve moved from a shitty for-profit hosting company (ipowerweb, oh how I hated them) to an awesome local not-for-profit company. With their help, the back catalog is cleaned up*, so you can read about Pierre the Nationalist Dishwasher Salesman (and my very early days of learning about Quebec politics) without weird diacritical marks everywhere.

The words “I must respond to” have been banned from my thinking about my public writing. The internet is so full of that. If I want to talk about wave shapers or crip science while the world races to melt the polar ice caps, kill off legions of species, and flood coastal cities; while political leaders say and do awful things; and celebrities (regular and academic) continue to die and/or do stupid shit, I will do just that. Life is short. This is just writing.

*This blog is so old that WordPress changed the character set they use for their database. Also, I started on B2, because I didn’t know about WordPress.

PS–on academia.edu: I told you so. Academics should use websites they control themselves, or use their universities’ repositories. But more on that another time.

An Open Letter in Support of Divest McGill

As I’ve mentioned before, McGill students have been organizing a campaign to get McGill to divest from fossil fuels.  This seems eminently sensible to me. This past week, the Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility released a report to the Board of Governors recommending AGAINST divestment because (among other things) oil companies have not cause “grave social harm” through fossil fuel extraction. The claim is outrageous.  And the “experts” they consulted are anonymous.  Which means nobody is willing to sign their name to this ridiculous position. While I would accept disagreements about strategy for fighting climate change, the report is based on some very suspicious ideas about causes.

In response to the CAMSR and the Board of Governors, Divest McGill has organized a series of actions on campus, and they’ve set up a website where you can get caught up on what’s happening and why it matters:http://divestmcgill.com/ .

I just sent the following letter to Principal Suzanne Fortier (suzanne.fortier@mcgill.ca), Chairman Kip Cobbett (stuart.cobbett@mail.mcgill.ca), and Secretary-General Stephen Strople (stephen.strople@mcgill.ca), copied to mfl4divestment@gmail.com.

I urge you to join me in writing in support of Our Future, Our Choice.

—

Dear Colleagues,

I was very disappointed to read Principal Fortier’s letter to the McGill community regarding the decision not to support Divest McGill’s proposals regarding McGill’s investments.  While I am pleased to see both a respectful tone toward student activists (lacking in the Principal’s communications regarding the BDS movement) and an acknowledgement of the consensus among climate scientists, the conclusions of the CAMSR’s report utterly bizarre from a social theoretical point of view.

I will return to those in a moment, but I am equally concerned that the CAMSR and McGill administration consulted “experts” anonymously.  If they are claiming their consultants are experts, should we not be able to evaluate their expertise?  Are there experts on climate science at McGill who would sign their name to the CAMSR’s claim that

Climate change is an injurious impact primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels by end-users rather than activities of fossil fuel companies.

In general, if the CAMSR consulted experts on either climate change or the social impact of business practices, don’t we deserve to know who is willing to stand behind claims like this? If no McGill faculty members are willing to stand behind these kinds of claims, do they deserve to be in the CAMSR’s report?

Here’s where the social theory comes in.  Fossil fuel consumption does not simply exist because of consumer demand or research into possible uses of petroleum.  It also is a function of active work on the behalf of oil companies to limit research into and diffusion of alternative technologies: this is well documented in histories of public transit and electric cars.  It is also a policy matter, since oil companies (and other companies whose work depends on destroying the environment) routinely lobby governments against policies like Extended Product Responsibility, which would turn the environmental impact of disposing non-recyclable consumer goods, like mobile phones, from an externality into an economic factor in the manufacture, sale, and consumption of those goods.In my research on computer disposal, I found that companies intentionally designed disposal of environmentally hazardous materials into their business models. Of course, they don’t think in those terms.  They think in terms of product life-cycles and planned obsolescence, aka “upgrading.”  The environment is very much a part of modern business strategy, even when it isn’t spoken about in those terms.

Let us compare this to other areas of policy regarding things generally regarded to cause “grave social injury”: we know that smoking is bad for people, but the governments of Canada and the US (and other countries) have found that the companies were also responsible for the social injuries caused by smoking. We know that nuclear power is potentially quite dangerous, and in the case of nuclear accidents, it is the companies that are responsible, not just the end users of nuclear power. We know that trans fats are bad for us, which is why they must be labelled in processed foods sold to consumers, and why companies can’t claim foods high in “trans fat” are good for you.

My colleague Derek Nystrom, in his remarks to the Board of Governors, compared climate change to a ticking time bomb under the table.  It has not yet caused “grave” harm to millions of people by some definitions of “grave” — but it is highly likely to do so by any reasonable definition of the term.  In my letter from last October, I quoted anthropologist Stefan Helmreich’s claim that “the problem of the the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the water line.”

The just-reported climate predictions regarding the Antarctic Ice Shelf are a good example.  http://www.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/science/global-warming-antarctica-ice-sheet-sea-level-rise.html . Whether or not this particular climate model will turn out to be correct is not the issue. The issue is that if it is correct, the damage it predicts cannot be undone.  Even as the Times engages in a little fantasy work to “save” New York City, the impact on the oceans worldwide would displace millions of people at best, and at worse, have a much higher human cost.  It is not something that could be undone, but it is something we could help prevent by committing to alternative energies.

Yes, the CAMSR is right that many petroleum-based consumer products have brought about social good.  But in almost every case today, petroleum could be replaced. In fact, if we look at the diffusion of petroleum-based consumer products over the course of the last 100 years, we see that in many cases petroleum replaced other, less environmentally-damaging materials. Consider one example — the shift from shellac to vinyl records (as documented in Jacob Smith’s new book Eco-Sonic Media).  Vinyl was cheaper and more efficient, but it wouldn’t have been considered to be so if its environmental cost had been included in that calculation. Shellac’s virtues aside, researchers (and artists) all over the world have experimented with making records out of other materials, and many could work.

For these reasons, and many others, I echo Divest McGill’s three demands:

  • That the University hold public hearings on the discredited report of the Committee to Advise on Matter of Social Responsibility (CAMSR).
  • That CAMSR publicly discloses all expert testimony gathered in the course of its consideration of the petition.
  • That Principal Fortier makes a statement acknowledging what the CAMSR Report did not: the activities of fossil fuel corporations cause grave social harm, through the exacerbation of climate change and the devastating impacts on frontline communities.

In short, they are asking for informed public discussion (of the sort that should have preceded the Board’s decision), they are asking for transparency, and they are asking for reason.

Sincerely,

–Jonathan Sterne

Geoffrey Bennington’s review of the new translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology: read as a commentary on the humanities.

Read the review here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/embarrassing-ourselves

This was a great read over breakfast. I want to leave aside the intra-Derridean sniping and draw some bigger lessons from this review:

1. It’s dangerous for scholars to cut corners: look at the text, not your notes on the text. Advice for students and super stars alike. (or rather, we are all always students)

2. Publishers are cutting corners more and more. This is equally dangerous. We need proper fact-checking, reference-checking and “continuity editing” to make sure references are consistent. As budgets for copyediting are slashed, this work is being outsourced to scholars, who are neither qualified to do it, nor able to manage it on top of all the other things that are now outsourced to them.

3. Deep expertise is still necessary to engage in high stakes humanities argument, whether it is linguistic, historical, philosophical, or “other.” The old-fashioned language learning evidenced in this fight, which is the part of the humanities probably most suffering from cuts to the humanities in general, is a great example of this. If you want to argue across traditions and national contexts, there is no substitute for language learning. 

4. Any kind of erudition takes time to do well. The calls to speed up humanities PhDs will insure our future work will be less intelligent and less sophisticated. Expect more misreadings, more mistranslations, and more corners cut for professional rather than intellectual reasons.

5. Whether you write accessible prose for broad audiences, or intricate prose aimed at specialists (or try to do both and other things too), you should be able to read, discuss and work through difficult texts. That’s part of the job description.

6. Ok, a little intra-Derridean sniping. I don’t have the French chops to take a position on the translation, but I’m still not sold on the reading of Derrida that takes his expansion of terms like “text” too literally, including Bennington’s.

2015 in Review

Like most years, 2015 was mixed with both good and bad. It was a tough year for a lot of my friends, and lots of terrible stuff happened in the world, but I’m not one of the “good riddance to 2015” people.

On a personal level, I have a lot of good memories. My travel experiences have been SO good and so whirlwind that I haven’t said too much about them here. Delhi, Paris and Berlin were intellectual highlights. Maui was, well, Maui. Teaching was great as usual, and I am back to my own writing priorities, more or less, after digging out from having said yes to too many “small” projects that took me away from my own work. I probably read more finished books in 2015 (as opposed to student writing and work in progress) than in a long time, which was also immensely satisfying. As usual, I gave too many talks and did way more service than I probably should have. I didn’t swim enough — only some of which can be blamed on injuries. Carrie finished 4 years’ heavy admin and I finished 1 year’s heavy admin. Good riddance to admin.

Cancer-wise it ended well, with me being demoted to every-six-month scans (from every 3 months).  I’ll take it.

Probably the most important change in my life was musical. My 2015 New Year’s resolution was to spend 15 minutes a day (when home) with a stringed musical instrument, which was a way to get my head back into playing. I have done a lot of electronic stuff in recent years, which is fun but lacks the instant gratification factor of playing bass or guitar. It is without question the best resolution I ever made and the only one I’ve kept. A year later, I have six months of guitar lessons under my belt, which have in turn improved my bass playing in entirely unpredicted ways. I am in two bands that practice regularly and will gig (and MAYBE even record) in 2016. and in a related development Carrie is finally learning drums after a couple decades’ worth of my not-so-subtle suggestion and playing in one of them. I am absolutely certain that there is nothing else I could have done that would have been better for my general happiness and well-being.

My friend Loretta posted on Facebook that what you do on New Year’s Day says something about the year to come. Mine was spent watching the outdoor NHL hockey game, playing bass and guitar, doing a little gear maintenance, reading the paper, hanging out with Carrie and the cats, and eating leftovers and catching up on TV series we neglected while in Europe.

Given that I’m teaching two new courses and doing a ton of service this winter, I’m not sure that it’s an accurate picture of what’s about to come, but I’ll take it.