Comments on: “those without agency have sentimentality and vice versa”

By: Round Up of the Best of Anthro 2008 « Neuroanthropology

Round Up of the Best of Anthro 2008 « Neuroanthropology — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:30:19 +0000

[...] commitments to the real world that are verboten in most mainstream philosophy departments.” Best: “those without agency have sentimentality and vice versa” Cellphones, the destruction of the public, and definitions of [...]

By: The Relevance of Anthropology – Part 1 on the Best of Anthro Blogging 2008 « Neuroanthropology

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:24:56 +0000

[...] Anthropology) The story behind an HTS picture (Culture Matters) Studying Sin (Neuroanthropology) “those without agency have sentimentality and vice versa” (Savage Minds) When Do Immigrants Learn English? Likely, not when you think (Greg Laden’s [...]

By: ckelty

ckelty — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:48:32 +0000

I think I agree, though my sense is that Franzen is in fact arguing that cell phones are harmful— in the sense that even if they don’t destroy the public sphere, the sentimentilization of it is a bad thing because it displaces the kind of agency we associate with politics proper. So yes, there are new forms of talk and new forms of being in the public being formed by the imperative to connect, but what’s a issue is whether those forms are good or bad for collective political construction of the world. I think cell phones can be used for good or for evil in this sense, but i think i agree with Franzen that they mostly are not, by most of the people who use them in these newly configured places.

By: Crystal

Crystal — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:19:05 +0000

Hmm. I don’t really think Franzen is saying the cell phone can only lead to a destruction of the public at all. i think he is making an argument that 9/11 reframed the collective template for connection, with the cell phone becoming a potent symbol of affection and connection (he points to the stories about people using their cell phones at the 11th hour to make emotional phone calls to loved ones or relatives). Maybe he is just arguing that the cell phone, in recent times, is one marker by which we can measure or see the ’sentimentalization’ of the public. His piece prompted me to think about the way the cell phone or other technologies might be a tool that ‘disciplines’ people. In fact, cell phone use and overuse very much creates ‘publics’ through the repeated circulation of overheard ‘i love yous’ that become scripted performances within certain contexts (like airports). Airports, then, are one site where such utterances can become normative and compulsory almost by virtue of the presence of an assumed audience with shared values and orientations to such ‘i love yous,’ or to filial connection, e.g. I think he would say there is something to be learned about public life, about our shared moral imaginary, about affect and connection… in closing conversations with ‘i love you’ (something he argues was less common ten years ago).

He most takes issue with the cell phone’s imagery (post 9-11) as a “conduit of intimacy for the desperate” within a country he describes as in the midst of an ‘orgy of connectedness’ (I agree with this observation, or, I did when i was last there one year ago). I think his piece encourages us to look beneath the surface of all this humanist discourse(?), and to be unafraid of challenging what (along with things like human rights) might be one of the most innocuous-seeming, lovely discourses out there: sentimentality (?) i think he urges us to ask what kinds of utterances are possible or not possible in what might be termed a newly contoured public sphere. I think maybe he would also say that cell phones and Blackberries and whatever else allowed for a massive response to 9-11 and an unprecedented flurry of communication between individuals, but he would also like to consider how having so many connecting devices at our disposal coerces us to connect, and to connect normatively (if that makes sense). Furthermore, what does all this talk of connection and connection through talk DO? he writes:
“On the plus side, Americans in 2001 were a lot better at saying “I love you” to their children than their fathers or grandfathers had been. But competing economically? Pulling together as a nation? Defeating our enemies? Forming strong international alliances? Perhaps a bit of a minus side there.”

I read it quickly, but my thoughts.

By: ckelty

ckelty — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:59:38 +0000

I don’t really know how to think about collective trauma these days. Ten years ago we would have had (in academia) a rich Freudian and Lacanian vocabulary… but that seems unlikely to explain anything about 9.11 or McCain and his torture. I think Franzen is trying to suggest that with the 9.11 thing, the fact that people who were not there watched it happen over and over again means simply that they have had something close to the experience of being there. Whereas he and others who listened to the radio or read news reports of it did not connect affectively in quite the same immediate way. The connection to the public/private thing is still mysterious to me, but I like the comparison with Mel Gibson. There is clearly a nationalist version of christianity (or a christian version of nationalism, whatever it is we have in the US) played out in the repeated political use of 9.11 as if it happened to “all of us” instead of 3000 people in New York.

By: MTBradley

MTBradley — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:11:16 +0000

There’s some real substance in the article, though in my opinion Franzen’s agent could do his client a favor by finding him a good editor.

—by locating part of the transition in 9/11 and the ways in which televised images create a form of collective trauma that is somehow (i didn’t quite get this) related to the cell phone and the nature of public declarations of love.—

Does he mean to say that the trauma is collective or is he implying something about how digital technology has fed the tendency to individuate and emotionalize (I can’t think of better terms for what I’m trying to say, unfortunately) even the most public of experiences? This seems somehow related to Mel Gibson’s cinematic treatment of Jesus’s crucifiction—an inherently public act, engineered for the public to warn about the cost of threatening public order, is portrayed in such a way that the majority of the audience is silently (and perhaps unconsciously) emoting, “It’s me suffering up there on that screen!”

I don’t quite know how but this all somehow seems to relate to McCain’s speech last night. There was something uncomfortable for me in seeing and hearing him talk about being tortured as a POW. It also struck me that there are some sorts of traumas that can be unproblematically exploited as political capital while there are other traumas that one uses at the risk of being considered unseemly or whiny.