He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common – at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather than Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.

— George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871–72

To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know. Thinking can and must be employed in the attempt to know, but in the exercise of this function it is never itself; it is but the handmaiden of an altogether different enterprise.

— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, published posthumously in 1978

From Daido Moriyama’s Shinjuku series (1970s, maybe?)

There is no longer any need to be sensitive to the music of religions to understand that the [current] global catastrophe should of necessity become the goddess of the century. Adorned with the aura of monstrosity, she presents more than one trait we associate with transcendental powers: she remains veiled, but she is already here; she reveals herself to individuals in the form of brutal visions and at the same time exceeds what human intelligence can conceive of; she appeals to individual personalities and makes prophets out of them; in her name, her delegates address themselves to the rest of the world, only to be constantly pushed back…. And since the global catastrophe has begun to unveil itself, a new form of the absolute imperative has appeared in the world, one that presents itself as an exhortation addressed to everyone and no one: Change your life!

— Peter Sloterdijk, 2009

Isabelle Huppert at the Carlton, shot by Helmut Newton, 1976
 

Donnacha Dennehy, “These Are the Clouds,” 2011, performed by Crash Ensemble; Dawn Upshaw, soprano.

These Are the Clouds
W.B. Yeats (1912)

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye:
The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,
Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
And discord follow upon unison,
And all things at one common level lie.
And therefore, friend, if your great race were run
And these things came, so much the more thereby
Have you made greatness your companion,
Although it be for children that you sigh:
These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye. 

Because we were afraid, Edgar, Kurt, Georg, and I met every day. We sat together at a table, but our fear stayed locked within each of our heads, just as we’d brought it to our meetings. We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood, it will slip out through your fingers.

— Herta Müller, Herztier, 1994

Tintoretto
The Resurrection of Christ, 1578-81
Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice

Sept. 24.— I have had a draught of pictures to-day enough to drown me. I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was to-day—before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters and put him in the school of Art at the top—top—top of everything, with a great big black line underneath him to stop him off from everybody…. He took it so entirely out of me to-day that I could do nothing at last but lie on a bench and laugh.
—John Ruskin, 1845, in a letter to his parents

O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
[…]
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split’st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1603–04

iPad fury

One Apple Store was not enough; there are now two within walking distance of my apartment, and outside each of them earlier this month I watched dozens of diehards, mostly men, camp out to get their hands on a new tablet computer. It was during that strange balmy week this past March, when I’d wander down Broadway late at night in my shirtsleeves. Perhaps this will be how we mark the seasons from now on. Climate change may force tulips up in January, but when the annual new iPad comes, you can be sure that winter is over.

It has a nice sharp screen, this new, unnumbered iPad, and a spiffy new wireless card that will stick you with a bill of several hundred a month if you’re not careful—further proof that the real winning strategy under what we once called late capitalism is not to control the means of production but just to charge rent to use the pipes. Yet Apple has already demonstrated, with its exceedingly minor retouches to its iPhone last year, that step change is no longer required to sell millions of new devices, even to customers who have already bought the last few iterations. They will come.

Apple is the company that everyone has an opinion about, only more so now thanks to Mike Daisey (and here, an aside: do you all listen to This American Life? All of you? Am I the only one who goes to the Public instead?), but Apple is no longer just a company, just as its products are no longer just technology. Apple is also culture, and ought to be assessed as such. It might upset the legions of live bloggers and fanboys who advertise gratis for the Cupertino brigade to be compared to autograph-seeking fans outside the Ed Sullivan show, but the release of new Apple products now bears a much closer resemblance to a concert or a movie release (back when we cared about movies, back when we actually left our houses to watch them) than to a product launch.

Apple’s great leap forward, and Mao would not be unhappy to see the term borrowed, was to collapse hardware and software into one controlled experience, and the iPad is the ultimate example of the translation of a tool into a cultural artifact. (The anthropologist James Clifford remains the go-to source on how this process happens.) Unlike similar products by, say, LG or Samsung, the iPad is not a device but a triumph of contemporary design. At a moment when people actually think that the ridiculous Mad Men is some sort of cultural achievement, this is, I suppose, to be expected. Any critical understanding of contemporary design ought to account, surely, for the Asian roots of all our shiny devices; iPad worship, on the other hand, is nostalgia in the cloak of novelty, a doomed yearning for a faith in the progressive capabilities of technology that was already dated last century.

(More than one critic has highlighted the debt Apple owes to Braun, the German appliance company, and it’s indeed curious that 21st-century technology looks so retrospectively space-age – to me, the rounded edges and gleaming black or white surface seem like the sort of thing you might see in a World’s Fair prototype kitchen. But Blake Gopnik has proposed that the real roots of Apple design lie even further back, in the steel and chrome of the Depression, and suggested that calling an iPad modern is “like giving a rave to contemporary paintings that rehash Mondrian’s grids.”)

“Designed by Apple in California, assembled in China,” your new iPad says on the back, though even that is a recent, begrudging acknowledgment of the product’s true roots. But at least that split-personality designation can help us recall that design is not just a synonym of form, but a process that encompasses questions of economic costs, sustainability and ethical production. Apple is not alone in its tolerance for brutal working conditions and ecological spoliation, but the company’s penchant for secrecy and relentless profit-hording have had uncommonly devastating effects. Do not let Daisey’s (justifiable or unjustifiable) embellishments make you forget the critical and arduously reported New York Times investigation from earlier this year. Last May a factory grinding out iPad cases in Chengdu went up in flames, killing multiple workers and injuring dozens, because the building lacked a ventilation system. Ventilation: a Victorian innovation. It’s not that the manufacturer was unsophisticated - on the contrary, FoxConn is among the most advanced electronics producers on the planet. Rather, Apple’s brutal margins and accelerated production schedule led FoxConn to cut safety, with appalling results.

Of course there is no way for Apple to tell those camped outside that a new iPad will only come out every other year, or that they’ll have to pay double the current price to ensure a fair wage or greater worker protections. A new iPad, like new TV shows every season, is almost a birthright now. Not only that - food prices may go up, gasoline might get more expensive, but an Apple product can never get pricier. Steve Jobs, whose death revealed how thoroughly and creepily corporate interests have weaseled into our emotional lives, originally called the iPad a “magical device,” and that statement carries the germ of something: an acknowledgment that the iPad transcends objecthood, makes a desire into a necessity, and ensures through some alchemical process that the economics and the exploitation inherent in the product vanish into air. We must have a new iPad because that is who we are, and the rest falls away.

That is the surest sign that Apple has definitively progressed from a technology company to the heights of the culture industry: not primarily the obsession and even love of its users, which can get so bad that some sleep with their iPad by their sides, but the fantasy of self-actualization it affords. It’s not news, however, that the strategy of the culture industry comprises an illusion of individual choice and taste that cloaks ever more standardization and subservience to the powers of the day. Almost 70 years ago now, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote that the culture industry allows just a “pseudoindividuality” that permits deviation only to the extent that we still accept its assumptions, and that “individuals have ceased to be themselves and are now merely centers where the general tendencies meet.” Not much has changed since then, except that the tools we use to work are now themselves cultural commodities, and even our production has been absorbed into the logic of consumption.

It’s nice to be told to “think different,” as the Apple ads once had it, but that ungrammatical command is the one thing the culture industry cannot allow. Thinking differently would mean thinking about the meaning of a 51% net profit margin on the backs of untold millions of workers. Or about the ecological consequences of junking high-end devices each and every year in exchange for a shinier screen and half a grand. Or about how increasingly fast cultural consumption numbs us to our own decreasing economic potential. Thinking differently is hard; buying an iPad is much easier, so much so that I am sorely, sorely tempted to just get one already.

(Image: police quelling a riot outside the Apple Store in Sanlitun, Beijing)