Pink-Letter Day in France

Cover of tomorrow's Libération. (twitpic.com)

[UPDATE: Added video links]

As the iPhone app beside this paragraph indicates, it was kind of a big day for the Parti socialiste in France, who managed to win control of 21 of 22 regional councils in metropolitan France. Only Alsace squeaked by with a UMP majority, and overseas, the UMP won control of the council in La Réunion and possibly in Guyane as well. No “grand chelem” this time around, alas.

I’m less inclined to provide the same kind of analysis as I did for the first round, largely since I’m leaving France in less than two days, but also since not much actually changed. The abstention rate fell a bit, but it was still historically high. The UMP representatives on television still acted largely clueless, and even their candidates looked lost on the television. Valérie Pécresse, in fact, looked so lost, that the French Twitterverse erupted in speculation over how in the cups she may have been. (video) Frédéric Lefebvre kept up the same level of stupefying idiocy he showed last weekend, arguing that without the Front National, the PS would not be celebrating. But the UMP also fell back on the argument that it’s not their policies that are to blame here, but, rather, la crise, man.

It is interesting that even Corsica was captured by the PS this time around (while the news explained this, they cut to footage of Corsican nationalists shooting flares at a government building while brandishing the intimidating Corsican flag, particularly given that the leftists were not able to build a similarly strong coalition in Alsace. But Alsace will probably require some greater analysis. All I can provide here are the numbers. In the first round, the UMP won with 35% of the vote, followed by a split left (19% PS, 16% E-E). But the FN got 13% of the vote, and the extreme right 5%, and MoDem 4%. In the second round, UMP support soared to 46%, the PS support climbed to 39% (PS + E-E + 4 more points), and the FN picked up not even two points. The question then is whether those nine extra points came from MoDem. Furthermore, turnout improved in Alsace in the second round, showing that UMP did have some reserves, after all.

In any case, the funeral for the UMP has possibly begun, signaled by François Fillon’s wearing a black tie when addressing the nation on the embarrassing results shown by his party. (video) “Fillon en noir : c’est un deuil?” asked one person on Twitter. That seems to be the case.

As a final thought: in France, a campaigner or supporter–that is, anyone who is at an election night party–is called a “militant.” Hearing that word over and over without the radical connotation it has in the US was kind of jarring.

Tags: Alsace, Corsica, Europe-Écologie, François Fillon, France, Frédéric Lefebvre, Front National, Libération, MoDem, Parti Socialiste, UMP, Valérie Précresse

Priorities. (click to see original tweet)

Everyone in the US knows that the more removed an election is from a presidential election, with emergency special elections inhabiting the limit point away, the more turnout will be depressed. Furthermore, everyone in the US knows, since the Christian Coalition rode this pony into power, that the lower turnout is, the fewer votes you need to win. So if you excite your base and get them to vote in a number not representative of the population, with just a small number of votes, you can look very important.

This fact of democracy is among the themes emerging out of Sunday’s elections, suggesting that, nationwide, the Front National’s performance (about 12%) was the result of a base more motivated to vote than the average French population, so that when you have global abstention at greater than 50%, the FN’s performance can look out of whack. But does it stand up? Libération began to address this question in their article “FN et abstention : le cocktail que dit non,” which provided two maps showing region-by-region rates of both votes for far right parties (usually the FN) and for abstention. I took crummy photos of the maps and reproduce them here.

Abstention rate. (click to enlarge)

A glance at the abstention rate suggests, and this is helped by how Libé chose to color it, that France seems split in two, with the western half more inclined to vote than the eastern half. Yet Franche-Comté, the sole region in the east with a below 50% abstention rate bucks this trend. Similarly, it’s unclear whether the 51.2% rate in Brittany is that much different from, say, the 53.7% rate in Bourgone. Furthermore, given the national rate of 53.64%, having two colors above and three below the rate further confuses things. It’s useful to have this information, but it needs a bit more context.

Regarding the right-wing vote, Libé was content to lump it in correspondence with the rate of abstention. “A l’est d”une ligne Marseille-Rouen, soit on boude les urnes, soit on vote Le Pen,” they write. Yet in this image, the coloration is even more severe. Not counting Corsica (which is, interestingly, off the pace of both abstention and extreme right voting), there is only one color category for the entire swath of France that voted below the national average. Furthermore, the coloring suggests a stronghold in PACA, where Le Pen père was at the top of the list, and in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, where Le Pen fille was the top of the list. Yet Marine Le Pen’s performance was bested in Alsace, and Picardie brought in a huge result–a result so surprising, that one of my coworkers gasped upon looking at the map.

Extreme Right vote. (click to enlarge)

Libé, or, at least, the article’s author, Eric Aeschimann, commits a grave sin in pushing home his point, however. He provides two examples of the correspondence between the two variables, explaining how in Vitrolles, near Marseille, the abstention rate hit 62%, yet the FN collected 21.5% of the vote. The numbers were similar in Lens: 60.5% and 21.4%. Yet this is (all together now) cherry picking.

The two questions, then, that this post hopes to answer are: is there a demonstrable correlation between the abstention rate and the vote total received by the far right? Might there be a correlation with the other parties, as well? That is, could Libération be picking on the FN out of general, national shame over the 12% result?

Time to make a dataset! I put the abstention rates for each region into a table along with the performances as given in today’s Libé. This conflated the FN and other “far Right” parties, thereby raising their values a bit, but not, I hope, by too much. I then added the results for the PS, UMP, and Europe-Écologie, which Libé reprinted in their own maps. The far Left fall beneath the scope of even this leftwing newspaper, so I relied on online results to tabulate a combined total for the Front de Gauche and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste.

The vote totals, among the 22 regions, distributed into boxplots, show the variance between vote totals in the various regions. Some element of explanation is necessary for some of the outliers. First, the outlier for the PS, its 7% showing in Languedoc-Rossillon, is the result of the explusion from the PS of Georges Frêche, who, still very popular in his region, fronted his own leftist list, which carried the plurality in the region (34%), leaving the official PS list in the dust. The green coalition did not field a list in Corsica (which is itself an outlier in terms of abstention rate), which explains their 0 there. Nevertheless, the squat box for E-É shows that they enoyed very little variance in the nation as a whole. The two outliers are Rhône-Alpes (17.8%) and Île-de-France (16.6%). Just behind them, interesting, is Alsace at 15.6%. Alsace, of course, was one of the only two regions carried by the UMP in 2004, suggesting the possibility of a combined green-pink front to knock over UMP this upcoming Sunday. Finally, the far-left outlier is from Auvergne, where the separate FG and NPA lists combined to net 18% of the vote. Lest one consider this an NPA stronghold, 14 points of that total come from the FG list.

But now that the reader is familiar with my color scheme, I can add the second chart, which plots the performances of the five groups per region against the abstention rate in the region. To show where this argument is going to go, I’ve also included color-coded regression lines for each party that show the correlation between the group/party’s performance and the region’s rate of abstention. The regression lines help one guess other, theoretical values.

So here are the numbers to go with the chart. For the far-Right parties, the adjusted R^2 was .44. R gave a statistically significant level of correlation (p < .01). For the UMP, the adjusted R^2 was .05 with a p of .17. For the PS, -.04, with a p of .72. For the ecologists: .35 and p < .01. And, finally, the for the far Leftists: an adjusted R^2 of .05 and a p-value of .15.

What do these numbers tell us? First, they give credit to Libé’s suspicion. There is a positive, strong correlation between abstention and the amount of votes the far Right received at the ballot box. The dark blue line racing up the chart suggests that the worse the turnout, the better the result for the FN. For the far Left, PS, and UMP, the correlation is not strong at all, yet the model does suggest that apologists for the far Left are not entirely without reason in complaining that they were particularly harmed by the bad turnout, especially considering their astoundingly negative regression line. Of course, it seems entirely unlikely that if the turnout rose to 60%, the FG/NPA would get 40% of the vote, but that’s the problem with R^2 that close to zero: awful predictive value.

But Libé is not entirely off the hook here, since note that Europe-Écologie also showed a statistically significant relationship between low turnout and high vote totals. This suggests that Green voters are as passionate as far right voters about showing up at the polls, as they do better the fewer people vote. On the other hand, when I remove the big 0 in Corsica from the E-É total, the statistical significance collapses. In fact, only the far right maintains its level of strong correlation with Corsica taken out of the picture, though also further shrinking the sample size, which is its own risk.

Of course, these models are rather simplistic and make outrageous assumptions, like that the distribution of Greens, xenophobes, and commies is more or less evenly distributed in France. Furthermore, it would be helpful to compare these totals with other totals with other rates of abstention over time, and so on and so on. But it’s better when the model confirms your suspicion (“only crazy people vote”) than when it doesn’t.

Tags: Europe-Écologie, France, Front de Gauche, Front National, GIS, Libération, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, PS, statistics, UMP

Here are a few things that I’ve read about since I wrote my generalized description of the regional elections in France last night:

• I wondered about the 53% rate of abstention (47% turnout) in comparison to previous elections. Turns out it’s pretty bad. The rate has been climbing over the past 25 years, though, 1998 saw a 42% rate slightly worse than the 39% rate in 2004. In 1992, 31% of the voters stayed home, and in 1986, it was 22%. Libération compares the turnouts of non regional elections, too. Though the abstention rate in the European elections edged toward 60%, no other election since 2004 (municipal, presidential, or legislative) has topped 40%.
• Rue89 interviewed three political experts on the successes of the FN and E-É as well as the failure of the NPA. The two success stories were not terribly interesting, but the taking to task of the NPA was. On the one hand, Olivier Besancenot no longer seems like a radical, which suppresses the interest of potential voters. On the other hand, the anti-pragmatism marginalizes the party, when actual votes do matter. They performed worse than in both the European elections last year and the last regional elections, leaving themselves, in the words of the commenter, a fringe party not unlike the Lutte Ouvrière.
• Le Figaro referred to the NPA campaign as a bet for autonomy (from the Front de Gauche) that they lost badly. Libération called the result a nice slap. “We maintain our independence from traditional parties,” Libé quotes Besancenot as saying, “and we pay a huge price for that.” (Le Monde didn’t seem to consider the NPA worth writing about.)
• MoDem’s failure is captured in a little graph in Libé that compares their withering support since the 2007 presidential elections with the surge in Verts/E-É support, which has its local high point in last year’s European elections. I wonder if it’s the case that E-É has been picking off votes from MoDem. From my understanding of political alignments, however, it seems that in the US, if a green party were to jump from ~7% to ~16%, a bulk of that new support would indeed come from straight up centrists.

Tags: Europe-Écologie, France, Front de Gauche, Front National, Le Figaro, Libération, Lutte Ouvrière, MoDem, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, Olivier Besancenot, Rue89

Anarchists tease Leftists. (click to enlarge)

Tonight the polls closed on the first round of the sexennial elections for the 22 regional councils in France.¹ In comparison to the US, the regional councils are sort of like state governments, and their primary dossiers involve education, transportation, and land use. Rue89 has conveniently put together a “Regional Elections for Dummies” page, but, as it’s actually called, “Les régionales pour les nuls,” you can guess that it’s in French, and, hence, not very useful. But it lays down the groundwork.

The way the elections themselves run is a bit peculiar as well: various parties present lists to the voters in the first round, and they vote. If a party (/list) wins an outright majority, there is no second round in that region (from my understanding), and 75% of the seats in the council are distributed via the proportional representation of the rest of the various parties, provided they scored 5%.² Should a party fail to win 50% (as is nearly guaranteed) in the first round, a second round follows.

It’s important to keep in mind this second round while trying to make sense of the performances of the various parties, as well as trying to understand how this first round is being read as a tremendous rebuke to Sarkozy and his policies. But more on that below.

In the second round, only the parties that got at least 10% in the first round can run again. Parties that had at least 5% of the vote, however, are allowed to merge with other parties, to form a united front. Then the winner of a simple plurality gets the bonus seats, and the other 75% are distributed based on performances of the remaining parties.

The temporary winners in Île-de-France. (click to enlarge)

Now some historical background: in 2004, the first time these elections had this 25% bonus seat rule, put in place to defang the ability of the Front National to mess up majorities, The Parti socialiste went to town. They had majorities in 20 of 22 regions in Metroplitan France. But much has happened since. Sarkozy was elected, which helped unify the center-Right under the UMP banner. Furthermore, the center-Left was humiliated at the European Parliament elections, winning only 14 seats (as many as the unified Greens won) to UMP’s 29 seats.

So coming into these elections, the broad, national questions were clear: was the center-Left finished in France? How would the Front National do with a center-Right party at the Élysée? Would the FN’s support be boosted by Éric Besson’s debate on national identity? How would the centrist/liberal faction, represented by the terribly named MoDem, fare between the UMP and PS juggernauts? And, for my own interest, how would the far Left parties, split into basically two factions, the Front de Gauche, made up of the PCF and other parties, which was willing to join executives headed by the PS, and the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, which was nationally mute on the topic, but argued locally against collaborating with the center-Leftists.

So, first, the Sarkozyan failure and the explosion of the PS. Libération put together a slightly buggy little web application that shows a map of France and shows the various results. If one looks at it right now, one sees:

First round results. (click to enlarge)

As one can see from the Île-de-France (greater Paris) results, the color scheme is not what Americans might expect. Pink is the socialists, and blue is the UMP. In any case, for a party that got just 16% of the vote last year during the EU elections, it certainly has its distinctive pink color splashed around a whole bunch of this map. But considering how little of the map was blue in 2004, how can this be considered a huge night for the Left and a slam of Sarkozy?

Pierre Haski at Rue89 spells out three specific FAILs of the Sarkozyan régime:

1. The UMP rallied the “Presidential majority” in round 1, and failed to win 50% anywhere. Where, exactly, their extra votes are coming from is totally unclear. Look at a case like Île-de-France in the picture above. Infamous Valérie Précresse won almost 28% of the vote, but who will jump aboard to push her list over 50%? The E-É Green faction will almost certainly fuse with the PS (their national numbers are down a bit from last year’s triumph, which saw them match the PS’s performance). The FN will likely not crossover. And MoDem is effectively finished as a political movement, possibly to be embraced by the Ségolène Royal wing of the PS.³
2. The UMP’s transparent play for far-right votes by launching the debate on national identity failed to neutralize the FN, which only had its numbers suppressed a bit. By clearing 10% in 12 regions, the FN will find itself with seats in 12 regional councils.
3. Sarkozy’s brash egomania has been soundly rejected by a PS in ascendence.

Parisians are not fans of the FN. (click to enlarge)

The FN’s performance I find rather fascinating. Many people tweeting about the elections continually expressed their shame at the performance of the party (see here, here, and here), but it remains a force: Jean-Marie Le Pen, running in PACA (far southeastern France), cleared over 20% of the vote. His daughter Marine, running in the traditional left-wing stronghold of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, cleared 18%. It’s only in western France and Île-de-France where the FN failed to reach 10%.

All the same, the FN’s 11.7% performance at the national level suggests a possible new third party in France, and it’s Europe-Écologie. Their leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (an MEP) was all over the television this evening, sticking it to the UMP representatives–some of whom went so far as to point out that the UMP might be able to fuse with the E-É list in order to bring a coalition over 50%. Île-de-France’s E-É candidate, Cécile Duflot, however, explained that it’ll be green-pink coalitions that are made, not green-blue. And though the E-É performance of 12.5% off their pace from last year, by topping the FN, the Green faction has established itself as the main third force in French politics.

The less said about MoDem, the better. It seems fitting that the best MoDem story of the night I’ve relegated to a footnote.

Olivier Besancenot and the NPA. (click to enlarge)

But now we get to the juicy, stuff, the tussle of the far Left parties. I don’t fully appreciate the distinctions, nor do I know all the back stories, of the myriad far Left parties. I know that with them I share a skeptical view of the PS (exemplified by Besson, a PS defector who worked overtime to burnish his new right-wing credentials, and by Royal, always willing, like a New Democrat, to look for allies on the Right instead of on the Left). But I also, like them, hate the Sarkozyist France more than the PS vision.

Simply put, while the Front de Gauche did well enough to merge with the PS lists in some regions, including Île-de-France, the NPA was humiliated. I have no idea what Olivier Besancenot, the head of the Île-de-France list, expected from the party (he is not their head, as the NPA has no head), but a 2.5% national performance is not a good sign for the future. Emerging out of the far Left success in the presidential elections, the NPA surely had higher hopes, but now they will seat not a single person in any region, except in places like Limousin, where they united with the FG. In fact, in Limousin, the 13% performance means that they stand a chance to seat a person without having to (further) compromise with the PS.

Additionally, Besancenot was totally absent from the television today (at least while I was watching, but I remembered rather late that I could watch TV on my telephone), and, if anything, hurt his image when he did show, allegedly wearing a pair of Nikes. That is probably not the best fashion sense for an anti-capitalist allegedly concerned about globalization. All the same, the NPA came out with a call for a strike on March 23 (just after the second round), calling it a third round of action. The document put out by the NPA after the election, however, further fascinated me.

In this document, the NPA complained that the resounding anti-UMP sentiment of the electorate allowed the PS to escape culpability for its own failures over the past six years of regional control. Furthermore, the executive council asserts, the racist politics of the UMP have only served to keep the FN on the playing field. All the same, the party exhorts its members to make certain that the door is closed to Sarkozyism in the second round. “We’ll deal with the weak Left later,” they seem to say.

Non-voters win! (liberation.fr) (click to enlarge)

But there is one more point made by the NPA that was variously remarked upon by many tonight: the outrageous level of abstention (as they say in France) of 53%. Or, as we’d say in the US, the awful turnout of 47%. The NPA sees in that mass of silence much of its future support (and I’m inclined to agree), but that tremendous number has been finessed in many different ways beyond as a mark of shame. For the Left in general, it was seen as an explanation for the strength of the FN. As in the US, it’s the extremely motivated (read: fringe) who tend to vote in smaller elections. So turnout is higher among the FN than among, say, the PS. For the Right, including Frédéric Lefebvre, the low turnout was proof of dissatisfaction with the PS. This point, which Lefebvre repeatedly made on television, was then twisted as showing how a rejection of the UMP in the polls was actually to their benefit.

I don’t know what the standard turnout for this sort of election is, but talking about the rate was the big topic all night, as mentioned. It’s a shame for parties like the NPA and FG (I do believe that their support comes from people most likely not to vote, even if they are fringe actors), but that’s how things are.

So what will come next Sunday? It’s hard to see how the PS doesn’t, again, practically run the table. Alsace and Corsica will probably stay UMP, as they have substantial majorities over the PS, although the strong performance of the E-É in Alsace might even make that region turn pink-green. Wherever else the UMP has chiseled out a lead after the first round, the PS is nipping at its heels. The opposite is, of course, often true, but the UMP has more or less maxed out its appeal, as noted above.

What, then, that all means is totally unclear, since it’s not like France is a Leftist paradise at this current time. Alas.

1. There are 25 total, including the départements d’outre-mer. Those three also had elections today. [↩]
2. Incidentally, the candidate party lists must have a 50/50 gender split. Also interesting is how this system, unlike anything in the US, that I know of, relies on a tiered list. So if the party in question wins just one seat, it’s the top person who gets the seat. If they win two, they include the next person down, and so on. It’s an amazing hierarchy built into the system. [↩]
3. One of tonight’s touching bits of television theater was during the loser speech of MoDem head François Bayrou. A microphone began to feedback, and he sarcastically thanked it, suggesting that dude just couldn’t get a break tonight. [↩]

Tags: Éric Besson, Cécile Duflot, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Europe-Écologie, François Bayrou, France, Frédéric Lefebvre, Front de Gauche, Front National, identity, Libération, MoDem, nationalism, Nicolas Sarkozy, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, Olivier Besancenot, Paris, Parti Socialiste, PCF, Pierre Haski, Rue89, Ségolène Royal, UMP, Valérie Pécresse

Since 1998, part of my excitement over the World Cup has been stoked by ads leading up to it. Usually, Nike makes charming and witty ads, like this one, in which the Brazilian national team messes around at the airport, having just been told that their flight to Paris is delayed:

What Eric Cantona is doing aboard a plane in this ad is a mystery, and the ad is full of other ironies, like the prominent role played by Denílson, despite being a bench player in France, and the hilariously prophetic failure to finish on Ronaldo’s part. The dejection shown by the three young fans as Ronaldo’s shot clangs off the bar of the makeshift goal was an expression fans of the Seleção, myself included, got very used to making during that World Cup. Nike has since provided a whole stream of excellent ads, usually featuring Cantona, often the Seleção, and other stars. I’ll just embed as many as I can find at the end of this post, since holy smoke are they fun to watch over and over and over and over.

So I was a bit worried, however, about how the run up to the 2010 World Cup would go, especially since I suspected that as light a touch might not be as evident, since ad agencies have no clue what to do with “Africa,” still considered a massive unity in the Western consideration. So today, while watching Spurs beat up on Blackburn, I saw the first big-time ad using the World Cup as hype to push product, Pepsi’s “Oh Africa!” campaign, featuring an Auto-Tuned Akon:

But while trying to find the above embed, disturbed as I was by how the percussionists make up, literally, the background of the shot, I found the long-form, star-heavy version of the ad, which includes, from what I can tell, Kaká, Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, and Andrej Arshavin. It begins rather innocuously, with a group of players walking around an open-air market, admiring the bootleg football shirts (something I’ve done countless times at the Maxwell St. Market). Kaká amusingly finds a Messi shirt, the men giggle, and then Thierry Henry decides he wants a Pepsi, and everything falls to pieces:

Drogba asks where the pitch is, a whistle sounds, and out of thin air, an autochthonous pitch made up of humans (including Akon) appears.¹ Nature conspires against the professional footballers, throwing trees, meerkats, and tall grass in their way. But the people themselves who make up the boundaries of the pitch also conspire, constantly moving the goal farther and farther away from the pros. Finally, Ivorian Drogba, who between this ad and the previous one seems to be Pepsi’s idea of the spokesman of the South African World Cup, lines up a shot and lobs it. The pitch spins around, yielding an own goal.

Despite losing, the footballers get their Pepsis, and Henry gives up his shirt (which he of course just bought), to then to have his body painted (so that, perhaps, he can literally blend in with the background like the percussionists in the Akon video above). I was flooded with a bunch of different readings of the ad, and none of them was particularly good. Above, I already hinted ad my discomfort over the continental-scale theme of the song “Oh Africa” itself, but I won’t push on that too hard. However, it bothers me greatly that suddenly out of thin air a thousand (or so) CGIed “Africans” emerged to play the role of a painted line. It further bothered me that they had to rely on trickery in order to win, showing themselves as seemingly incapable of competing by the rules set by the foreigners. And, finally, it bothered me that, despite winning, they still gave up their natural resources (Pepsi) willingly to the people who marched in, demanded it, and failed to pay the price set for it.²

The ad does have one moment I liked, at the end, when Messi, lost in the tall grass (he’s short, get it?) calls out for his Barça teammate, Henry. Messi may be the only Argentinian player I have ever liked.

I haven’t seen any other ads yet for the World Cup (which strikes me as strange), even on company websites (much less on YouTube). The Adidas France page, for example, still has Vancouver images on the font. Yet in hunting around, I found this sort of feel-good PSA about the World Cup, in which an Australian chastises a whining South African about infrastructural problems (at an airport):

Hopefully once Nike and Adidas début their ads, they will be more like this and less like the “Lion King with humans” ad that Pepsi has tossed out.

So here’s the huge postscript, provided by YouTube:

First, Nike returned in 2002 with the Terry Gilliam–directed “Secret Tournament” run, which featured the most famous song in the world of 2002:

Ah, Edgar Davids. Your team did not even qualify for the World Cup. Cantona is so charming throughout. There was a coda to this ad:

Around 2004 (judging from personnel and shirts), Nike put out this ad featuring a match between Portugal and Brazil. Cantona cameos again:

In 2006, Nike returned to the Brazil focus and added a new version of “Mas que nada,” this time performed by Black Eyed Peas. This ad… wow. First, it’s tender as the “Robinho hazing” ad. Adriano’s gentle kiss of the ball kills me each time:

Cantona is in full beach football mode here. Also notable: the shirts in the dressing room are different from the shirts in the game footage, and the final shot of the goal celebration includes Kaká, who, as an Adidas spokesman, I imagine was not allowed to goof off in the locker room with the others in filming a Nike ad.

Adidas responded with their own all-star ad, which makes me choke up. The two kids are adorable in their precocity (“¡Soy el capitán!”), and the idea of calling forward Franz Beckenbauer (with Zizou’s touching call for Michel Platini) was a fantastic touch. It’s a shame Adidas’s stable of players, which includes two teams I hate (France and Argentina) is not as dynamic, though I like the idea of Jermain Defoe playing in goal (oh, he scored today!):

Ah! I’d forgotten the funny homage to 1966 with Lampard “scoring” on Oliver Kahn off the crossbar. Good stuff, Adidas.

1. I was at first reminded of how boundaries are determined in women’s lacrosse, but whatever. [↩]
2. I was surprised, in fact, that there was no reference to The Gods Must Be Crazy, at least from my dim, dim, dim recollection of that movie. [↩]

Tags: Adidas, advertising, Andrej Arshavin, Argentina, Barcelona, Blackburn Rovers, Brazil, colonialism, Denílson, Edgar Davids, Eric Cantona, football, France, Frank Lampard, Franz Beckenbauer, Jermain Defoe, Kaká, Lion King, Lionel Messi, Michel Platini, nationalism, Nike, Oliver Kahn, Pepsi, Ronaldo, Seleção, South Africa, Terry Gilliam, Thierry Henry, Tottenham Hotspur, World Cup, Zinedine Zidane

I have been posting of late, just not here. I’ve put up three posts over at Lithchat discussing the Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the song chosen by the Lithuanian people to represent them at the contest, the subversive “Eastern European Funk.”

The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown in.

The second post is a 3000-word monster that looks at the fate of songs with political messages in recent Eurovision contests, Eurovision as a whole, InCulto’s song in comparison to the Lithuanian entry in 2006 (which coincidentally beat out InCulto’s offering that year), and the song’s relationship to funk and punk. Then I shift into high gear and talk about miscegenation, economic inequality and the egalitarian fantasy of democratic equality. Then I close with some complaints on the ghetto, particularized punk of Gogol Bordello. Oh, and there’s like four embedded videos and links to who knows how many other songs on YouTube.

The third post is a quick roundup of recent press on the song, which includes news that the European Broadcasting Union, the people behind Eurovision, is investigating InCulto’s song for the possible political content of the lyrics.

Tags: democracy, economic inequality, Eurovision, exceptionalism, Georgia, Gogol Bordello, InCulto, miscegenation, nationalism, neoliberalism, Russia

A way to spend the day.

I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest.

And now, I don’t get it. I think the movie did a good job of showing how being in EOD is viewed as being a job, though a job that could either kill you every day or a job that can drive you bats. The movie handled the mundane and quotidian reasonably well (and then shat on it by having Beckham become a body bomb), much like Generation Kill did. The end, then, silliness with the son notwithstanding, showed the possibility of different kinds of mundanity, not necessarily hierarchically organized. James’s everyday life doesn’t involve choosing from hundreds of types of cereal, it involves bomb disposal.

Still, as the movie dragged along, it got more and more unbelievable, from the totally incomprehensible scene with the professor to the insanely unlikely 3-man chase after the insurgents (which is when the movie lost me). I’ve read that this is the “most real” depiction of the war in Iraq (whatever that means), and it’s not like I have my own anecdotal evidence to go on, but it seems that a “more real” depiction would be even more mundane.

Which leads me to my primary issue with the movie, which seems to be a result of narrative strategies of realism. Nancy Armstrong opens her essay on the fiction of bourgeois morality in the second volume of Moretti’s The Novel by asserting that

Literary history has indeed smiled on fiction that sets a protagonist in opposition to the prevailing field of social possibilities in a relationship that achieves synthesis when two conditions are met: (1) the protagonist acquires a position commensurate with his or her worth, and (2) the entire field of possible human identities changes to provide such a place for that individual.

The payoff Armstrong insists on is missing in the movie (to its benefit), but the setup was all too familiar. The protagonist is bigger than the space he (or she) inhabits. As soon as I saw that Guy Pearce was dead, I knew that his replacement would be a cowboy. Sure enough, James doesn’t follow the rules; he’s idiosyncratic. Sanborn reads this as a testament to James’s being a hillbilly redneck. I saw it as a sign that we’re dealing with a serious protagonist. And then, somehow, I got bored. Something about the police officer/soldier who doesn’t follow the rules but gets results is starting to bore me as a narrative device (and if we believe Armstrong, we believe that there’s no other way to make a lasting narrative about war or the police). We saw this in the fifth season of The Wire: we had loved what a loose cannon McNulty was in the first four seasons, but his antics in season five started to seriously alienate his coworkers and, if I recall correctly, many viewers.

Can you, then, think of examples of narratives of war or police where the main character does always follow protocol? Would that even be watchable? Would it, on the other hand, be/feel more real?

As a side note, how can a movie be considered pro-Army propaganda (as this one is) if the entire fuel of the plot is based on the assumption that Army protocol–in fact, the very idea of protocol–is wrong?

Tags: everyday life, Franco Moretti, individualism, Kathryn Bigelow, Nancy Armstrong, realism, The Hurt Locker, The Wire

I wrote a little something about James Verini’s fascinating Vanity Fair article about the Moscow newspaper, the eXile, edited by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, over on Lithchat. Mostly, the piece prompted an opportunity to think about how my own experiences during the ’90s, especially as they pertained to Eastern Europe, would have been different had I been about eight years older (making me just older than Matt Taibbi).

If you want to skip me as a middleman and just read Verini’s article, here it is.

Tags: James Verini, Mark Ames, matt taibbi, Moscow, regret, Russia, the eXile, Vanity Fair

Image from GRE subject test in literature, c. 2021.

Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient.

After all, if one takes that waste of time as a given, who cares what people are brawling about at MLA? Similarly, in general, it seems that it’s only professors (and their putative replacements, graduate students) who complain about the problems corrupting the current university as a whole. I imagine that, for the most part, people are content with the perceived value of a (non-humanities) degree in terms of future employment prospects.

So I wasn’t surprised when a friend (and colleague) google-shared Sharon Begley’s Newsweek article introducing the field of “cultural neuroscience” with a (to my ears) defensive tone, arguing that this field offers the best avenue of proof that “humanities-types aren’t just b.s.’ing [their] way through the academy.” Now, said friend is also, generally, into cognitive science, so I may be overreading the defensiveness, but the comment in general struck me for a number of reasons tying back to last week’s post.

Most obviously is this fear that there is some kind of “b.s.’ing” going on in the humanities. I mean, I strongly doubt that the MLA board (or whoever) gets together the day after the annual conference, opens up a keg of Heineken, and parties in a collective “we can’t fucking believe what bullshit artists we are to the degree that thousands of deluded, bright dipshit kids want to try to emulate us by applying to literature PhD programs every year!” So it’s not that we, as a field, think (secretly) amongst ourselves that we’re full of shit. Maybe (strike that…definitely) we think a colleague here or there is full of shit, but the entire organ of study?

Which means, then, that we worry that outsiders think we’re full of shit. It’s obviously true that (many|most) outsiders think that, but I’m not sure how much we should be defensive about it. My first year of grad school, John Guillory came to give a lecture that explained the best reason for being defensive: namely that humanities departments have to use the language of the business world to justify funding, hiring, and tenure decisions. Since then, I’ve also heard concerns about enrollment numbers (in undergrad courses, but this includes the various numerical ways of measuring PhD programs as well). These four areas are probably the four elements that keep the standard department alive at any university: you have to make sure you can pay people, figure out whom you want to hire to teach, decide who should stay forever, and have enough students to continue the circle of life.

And all four areas have been quantized–spreadsheetable so that accountants in Admin buildings can get a snapshot of a department (“their time-to-degree sucks, but they rake in mad majors”). Scholarship becomes a question solved by pencil-pushing, and now it becomes easier to conceive of scholars as laborers, alienated like any other.

So defensiveness toward an increasingly actuarial university administrative structure is one thing, but should the humanities feel defensive toward other divisions within the academy? Toward the public? I read my friend’s comment as saying that, yes, we should, and that by adopting more of those world’s techniques and (implicitly) values, we will justify ourselves in their eyes. Which leads us to cultural neuroscience.

Begley’s article, which has already yielded some 2k clicks via bit.ly, introduces the field by way of showing how people from different cultures use different parts of their brain when describing themselves, when doing math, and so on. Begley quickly brings up the “cultural cliché” that scientists are now “proving,” and ends up postulating that this field would probably tell us nothing that anthropology already has not (namely the overarching claim that Westerners value the “individual,” whereas Easterners value the “collective,” to the sadness of western communists the world around). That may be true, but unlike anthropology, cultural neuroscience uses fancy (and expensive, and, therefore, valuable to the university) sciency techniques, which inbue the results with a “hardness” that make the findings more marketable and press releasable, reflecting value back on the university.

So as I remarked on twitter, cutural neuroscience sounds basically like Thomas Friedman with an fMRI, as we have our cultural stereotypes and valuation of an indelible pluralism validated (somehow even Begley’s math-based example of a “surprising” result still serves to affirm a stereotype), much in the same way that racialist science kept finding new ways of proving, scientifically, differences between races (hear this 2008 episode of Radiolab to see what a cockup scientific racial difference has become).

I’m a bit interested in how this research might go about confirming the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, though I actually see its future more in a bizarro world of multicultural-positive, racially profiled human resources, as job listings emerge including qualifications like “able to spatialize numbers, Chinese native-speaker preferred.” In other words, I see a future where an fMRI session will replace the job interview.

But since this is a post about us “humanities-types,” I should return to the implications in my friend’s note. I’m generally very friendly toward rigorous quantitative analysis of literature–friendly to the degree that my current chapter makes reference to Z-scores and includes a Monte Carlo simulation. But I’m uncertain about whether I think that’s the future of literary study as a whole.

Digital humanities to me means, basically, using computational methods to do literary study, and that means doing things that are pretty much impossible to do without a computer. This approach lies in contrast to one that makes use of things that are simply easier to do with a computer. So, for example, a Monte Carlo simulation (or a quantitative analysis of titles) is appropriate as a new approach (as “doing digital humanities”), but a wordle (or a google book search on weeds) is not. What computers make possible has to be in the service of something else, otherwise it’s just “old hum but on the iPad,” as @sepoy says, not a true digital humanities.¹

In this sense of openness to quant, something like fMRIs and literature strikes me as a (possibly interesting) future avenue of research, but I wonder if, in doing that, we follow ourselves down a reader-response rabbit hole, where the object of study moves from being literature to being how the reader responds to literature to being about the reader herself, thereby becoming no longer a humanistic pursuit, but, rather, a social scientific pursuit.

Avoiding this rabbit hole has forced me to limit my own whatever quantitative analysis to the text itself (which then limits the number of potential texts for study, but OK). This is in contrast to scholars like Moretti, who seems like he can’t help but move to a quantitative history of books-in-the-world (see the third and final chapter of his Atlas or the “Graphs” and “Trees” chapters of Graphs, Maps, Trees) from an analysis of the worlds-in-the-book (earlier chapters of the Atlas, “Maps” from G,M,T). To me, that move to books-in-the-world, pace dear friends in history of the book projects, becomes far too close to history for me (even Moretti qualifies it as “abstract models” for a “literary history”), which means, by the weird UofC rubric, that it becomes somehow extra-humanistic, for what it’s worth. This is, incidentally, partly why I feel bizarrely New Critical often when writing. It’s a dizzying time.

What I mean is that if some level of disciplinary distinction remains important (and I think “nodes on a rhizome” is a good model for this), it is important to figure out what exactly literary study looks like when it’s appropriating not just theories from other disciplines (like during the slutty 80s when there wasn’t a social theorist who couldn’t be quoted in a literature journal) but now also methods, as well. And since I can’t hook up Elizabeth Bennett to an fMRI, I’m skeptical about pinning the future of the humanities on fields like neuroscience, cultural or otherwise.

The point comes around to itself then. My friend’s note begs the question of the humanities bs-ing its way around town. And while there are administrative reasons why these kinds of public appearances are important, I see the future publicly clean image of humanistic research not in images of brain activity, but in the scholarship on the streets.

1. Importantly, there’s the public/social/ethical/collaborational aspect of digital humanities that I’m not discussing here as well. [↩]

Tags: digital humanities, Franco Moretti, humanities, John Guillory, mla, multiculturalism, New Criticism, quantitative analysis, racism, Radiolab, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Sharon Begley, statistics, Thomas Friedman

Gaining life.

This is, I imagine, the much shorter version of a post I have had simmering in my head for a few weeks now–or, well, actually, many of the issues dovetail with another post that’s been around since new years. But somehow I haven’t sat down to figure out my point rigorously yet, and so I don’t want to commit the multiple thousand words to wax.

Our current academic crisis, defined in many increasingly encompassing ways, seems to be gaining steam in coverage on the webs. First there’s the very inside-baseball humanities “discussion” over what digital humanities add to the humanities, culminating, for now, with the MLA president’s encouraging grad students, which is to say, the people who have the most to lose by being so outrageously bold, to blow off the monograph form of a dissertation for something new and collaborative. I am very much ok with being more collaborative in my life (my take home message of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was how worthwhile it is in life to have a collaborator–note, not “spouse”), but I will not risk future hireability figuring out how on earth one does PhD-level work collaboratively. That sort of stuff must come from the top down, much as it does in the sciences, where grad students work far more closely with their advisers, at least at my school.

From the level of the humanities, the concern spins out to a tension between the humanities and the sciences, or as Mark Slouka calls it in his piece for Harper’s from 2009 that I only read recently, “mathandscience.” Slouka makes a common argument for the role of the humanities in an especially well-written way. Mathandscience have taken over the university, and, in so doing, have changed the role of the university into something that is uniquely geared toward making Americans ready to enter the workforce. Study of the humanities, on the other hand, makes them not better workers (though the writing skills they pick up are often very handy) but better citizens. This, of course, is an argument that’s similar to the one Max Weber made 100 years ago in “Science as a Vocation“: “Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer, the only question important for us: “what shall we do and how shall we live?”‘ That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable.”

I was thinking about this sort of thing in the context of ethics and public responsibilities the other night while unable to sleep, and it grows out of some of these collaborational arguments about the digital humanities. Very simply, it’s not that a prof with twitter is a good citizen, but it’s a means of getting the word out. And then once the word is out, the prof can show how her work is helping the world. In the humanities, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of many examples of this sort of thing outside of Michael Bérubé, who has been blogging about all sorts of things very publicly for years now, leading up to his pleasant book on a topic similar to this, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? (he’s written even more to the topic, but I’ve not read that work).

But what I started imagining was what a press release about my dissertation (or about the work of anyone in my department) might look like. Outside of biographies about authors–and those we never get sick of–it seems unlikely that an English Department would get much press these days for its other scholarship. I was discussing this later with some students at the center, and the argument was that, in fact, during the 80s, English Deparments were making news. Similarly, I get the sense that they made noise in the first part of the Twentieth Century when English professors were more generally public intellectuals. This position in the public, in fact, is what makes Quiz Show an even moderately interesting movie, for example.

These days, though? Not a chance. Part of the argument is that newspapers compete with humanities departments in the “covering aesthetic production” beat. That is, the science beat covers scientists in science departments, but the books beat covers not literary critics, but, rather, authors of books. This might explain the biographical interest, of course, since it’s via these sorts of “new” discoveries that old books get reloaded in the public consciousness in newspapers. And when English professors do make the news with their scholarship, it’s a small number of intensely high-profile profs who work on high-profile authors–people like Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare who are, to be polite, in the back end of their careers.¹

On the other hand, given the narrow interest of science journalism–”how will the future be better?”, and “how are men and women irredeemably different?”–maybe it’s good that my work will never have to be subjected to that sort of thing. Still, it has some kind of public component, I must imagine, and that seems to be the subject of Astra Taylor’s documentary Examined Life, a 2008 documentary that tracks a handful of “philosophers” and sees them mobilize their work in a public arena. As the trailer suggests, it puts philosophy “in the streets.” Jonny Thakkar’s review in The Point argues that the movie is at its most successful when it demonstrates philosophy generated for public consumption (much like Socrates’s was), not for other academics, with a later “popularization” (read: dilution) to come. This is an interesting sort of proposition when I imagine it: the goal of graduate study is to prepare someone like me to be then unleashed into the wild, into the public, where I can do stuff.

This is, of course, a crude but tantalizing definition of any sort of educational pursuit. Spend some time away from the real world to then be able to negotiate it better. Woodshed with your sax so you blow for real onstage, etc.

So now the argument spins out from humanities vs. sciences to higher education in general, and here I turn over to the stuff I’ve been reading on my neighbor at the center’s blog about the precarity of jobs in higher education. Precariousness, of course, allegedly hits the humanities harder than the sciences, to the point where Thomas H. Benton’s Chronicle article on advising people not to grad school in the humanities was forwarded all over cyberspace faster than a lolcat. But even the sciences are hurting, as AAUP president Cary Nelson argues in his blog post about the impending furlough/pay cuts University of Illinois professors are facing. The cost of turning disciplines into vocational preparation has been a perverse reëvaluation of what kind of scientific research is valuable. You can’t get money for your research unless a company thinks that, down the line, it can make money off your research. So, sure, the sciences get piles more cash than the humanities, but it doesn’t come for free.

Nelson then argues to take the case to the streets, too, by taking advantage of the furlough days to agitate against the administration. And again, academia is back in the public.

Anyway, I’ve veered over 1200 words, and I don’t want to go much longer. I find it interesting that at all three rings of conflict, what remains the ultimate argument is figuring out what the role of higher education is in the public. Maybe that’s always been the case, and I’m suffering from a presentist bias, but there it stands.

When it goes out into the streets, I know what I’ll be singing.

1. I await counter-examples. They must exist, but I can’t think of them. [↩]

Tags: AAUP, Astra Taylor, Cary Nelson, Chronicle of Higher Education, citizenship, Decasia, digital humanities, Eli Thorkelson, Emily Dickinson, ethics, Harper's, humanities, ivory tower, Jonny Thakkar, Mark Slouka, Max Weber, Michael Bérubé, Michael Chabon, mla, Science as a Vocation, Sidonie Smith, Stephen Greenblatt, The Point, Thomas H. Benton, William Faulkner