Nonfiction
Yu Hua, China in Ten Words: The book conveys something of the dislocations and upside-downness of growing up during the Cultural Revolution, then seeing China lurch towards capitalism (full of corruption and inequality, different than the randomness and destructiveness of Maoist times). One striking story involves books-during the Cultural Revolution, most were destroyed, and the few remaining in his village were passed around through so many hands that they tended to lose front and back pages. Desperate to know the endings, he resorted to inventing them, his first steps to becoming a writer: “I owe a debt to those truncated novels for sparking creative tendencies in me.” Discussing redevelopment, which means the destruction of poor people’s houses, he recounts a joke in which the CIA traces Osama bin Laden to an urban location. “A spy plane enters the airspace overhead, only to discover a scene of utter devastation. ‘I don’t know who ordered the bombing,’ the American pilot reports back to headquarters, ‘but there’s no way bin Laden could have survived this.’” Later, he eloquently and sympathetically identifies the “gifts” required to transact business with a corrupt broker as a form of communication: “gifts not only are the most vital prerequisite for interaction but actually constitute an alternative language, one predicated on a certain degree of personal loss but also able to communicate such sentiments as favor, homage, and esteem. … When they presented to him their cabbages, tomatoes, or eggs, they would be paying him a compliment and addressing him with deference, whereas if they arrived empty-handed, this would be to forfeit language and lose the power of speech.” He likens the Cultural Revolution to today’s economic development in how disruptive they were, how there was and is no stability in expectations.
Yu devotes a whole chapter to the “copycat” and China’s copy culture, which among other things means that this book-officially banned in China-can only circulate (and does) in pirate copies. He believes that copycatting is a result of “lopsided” development. “[A]ll kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art.” Copying isn’t just piracy: he discusses a prostitution business that explicitly modeled itself after the structure of the Communist Party, with a hierarchy, self-criticism, and similar attributes. Copycatting includes making up interviews with people-something that slides into another topic, bamboozling, a term whose cozy connotations are used for everything from flattery to melamine-in-milk fraud. I was left with the strong sense that anyone who purports to tell you what will happen in this huge, diverse nation in five years is bamboozling you.
Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, & Susan Carnicero with Don Tennant, Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How To Detect Deception: Slight but entertaining book about how to catch people out by asking nonjudgmental, focused questions, and identifying specific verbal/nonverbal behaviors as indicating a need for further investigation (e.g., a lot of weasel words, distraction claims about the person’s general character in response to a question about a specific matter, jiggling feet, etc.). They aren’t fans of microexpressions or of giving much weight to lack of eye contact, and several times emphasize the importance of understanding the interviewee’s culture, because some behaviors are simply different across cultures.
Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work: Stahl argues that recording artists are both embodiments of the current contradictions of capitalism and partial holdouts against the standard view of the worker as a disposable part not entitled to any of the surplus created by his/her work. A recording artist’s work is understood, by both herself and her audience, as self-expressive, yet she generally works under contract to a major company, and also works with other creative people (producers, session musicians, etc.) to whom she denies control/authorship rights. (Stahl doesn’t quite explain the ridiculously complex law behind this, but the point is that both legally and culturally featured artists claim rights by virtue of being the only relevant “authors” of a multiperson-created experience.) Neoliberalism claims to enhance and honor individual freedom while in practice leaving individuals exposed to subordination by employers, and American Idol and other images of popular music play out the valorization of freedom and individual success while helping undermine the political and economic basis of independence. American Idol also instructs people how to be good workers: committed to the production of self in the service of commerce, owed no duty of loyalty by an employer but always having to be producing something new and valuable; all insecurity and vulnerability are borne by the individual, while the benefits of flexibility accrue to the corporation. (As Stahl points out, one of the ironies here is that historically entertainment/media workers have high unionization rates, but that isn’t visible.) The book makes an interesting contrast with Karen Ho’s book on Wall Street workers. Both address how the workers they examine are held out as a model for other types of workers, identifying a core sectoral assumption that risk and failure should be common, and the consequences borne by individuals, while noting that the model doesn’t actually work very well for other workers, e.g., teachers.
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Yu devotes a whole chapter to the “copycat” and China’s copy culture, which among other things means that this book-officially banned in China-can only circulate (and does) in pirate copies. He believes that copycatting is a result of “lopsided” development. “[A]ll kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art.” Copying isn’t just piracy: he discusses a prostitution business that explicitly modeled itself after the structure of the Communist Party, with a hierarchy, self-criticism, and similar attributes. Copycatting includes making up interviews with people-something that slides into another topic, bamboozling, a term whose cozy connotations are used for everything from flattery to melamine-in-milk fraud. I was left with the strong sense that anyone who purports to tell you what will happen in this huge, diverse nation in five years is bamboozling you.
Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, & Susan Carnicero with Don Tennant, Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How To Detect Deception: Slight but entertaining book about how to catch people out by asking nonjudgmental, focused questions, and identifying specific verbal/nonverbal behaviors as indicating a need for further investigation (e.g., a lot of weasel words, distraction claims about the person’s general character in response to a question about a specific matter, jiggling feet, etc.). They aren’t fans of microexpressions or of giving much weight to lack of eye contact, and several times emphasize the importance of understanding the interviewee’s culture, because some behaviors are simply different across cultures.
Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work: Stahl argues that recording artists are both embodiments of the current contradictions of capitalism and partial holdouts against the standard view of the worker as a disposable part not entitled to any of the surplus created by his/her work. A recording artist’s work is understood, by both herself and her audience, as self-expressive, yet she generally works under contract to a major company, and also works with other creative people (producers, session musicians, etc.) to whom she denies control/authorship rights. (Stahl doesn’t quite explain the ridiculously complex law behind this, but the point is that both legally and culturally featured artists claim rights by virtue of being the only relevant “authors” of a multiperson-created experience.) Neoliberalism claims to enhance and honor individual freedom while in practice leaving individuals exposed to subordination by employers, and American Idol and other images of popular music play out the valorization of freedom and individual success while helping undermine the political and economic basis of independence. American Idol also instructs people how to be good workers: committed to the production of self in the service of commerce, owed no duty of loyalty by an employer but always having to be producing something new and valuable; all insecurity and vulnerability are borne by the individual, while the benefits of flexibility accrue to the corporation. (As Stahl points out, one of the ironies here is that historically entertainment/media workers have high unionization rates, but that isn’t visible.) The book makes an interesting contrast with Karen Ho’s book on Wall Street workers. Both address how the workers they examine are held out as a model for other types of workers, identifying a core sectoral assumption that risk and failure should be common, and the consequences borne by individuals, while noting that the model doesn’t actually work very well for other workers, e.g., teachers.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.