“Non-things” by Byun-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This is Han’s latest treatise directed against the age of modernity. The book returns to many of his previous themes—thinking, lingering, ritual, time, community, and technology. Translated from German, it has less of his usual neo-Hegelian influence and more of a Heideggerian flair.

Han begins with his concept of Things and their displacement in modernity, “Things are the calm centres of life. They have now been wholly enveloped by information. Information is anything but a calm centre of life. It is not possible to linger on information. It is relevant only fleetingly. It lives off its capacity to surprise. Information’s fleetingness alone can account for the fact that information destabilizes life. It constantly attracts our attention. The tsunami of information agitates our cognitive system. Information is not a stable, uniform entity. It lacks the solidity of being…. Things are increasingly receding into the background of our attention…. We are obsessed not with things but with information and data. We now consume more information than things. We are literally becoming intoxicated with communication…. The industrial revolution solidified and expanded the sphere of things, distancing us from nature and the crafts. But only digitization puts an end to the paradigm of the thing. It subordinates things to information…. The informatization of the world turns things into infomatons, that is, into information-processing actors.”

Many moderns celebrate the fact that they have become less materialistic. They prefer to live a life of experiences rather than compete with the materialism of their ancestors. Han sees a dark side. “Today, we prefer experiencing to possessing, being to having. Experiencing is a form of being…. We no longer want to be tied to things or people. Ties are untimely. They restrict the space of possible experiences, that is, freedom in the sense of consumption…. We even expect the consumption of things to provide us with experiences. The informational content of things, for instance their brands, is more important than their use value. We perceive things primarily with regard to the information embedded in them…. What determines the value added is the distinguishing information that promises the consumer a special experience — or even the experience of specialness…. The aesthetic-cultural content of a commodity is the actual product. The economy of experiences replaces the economy of things.”

The modern perspective of art has transformed the artistic process. “Artworks are things…. Art that is committed to meaning is hostile to pleasure…. A work of art, being a thing, is not just a bearer of meaning. It does not illustrate anything. The process of expression is directed not by a clear concept but by an indeterminate fever, a delirium, an intensity, an urge or desire that cannot be articulated…. What is problematic about today’s art is its inclination to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction: that is, its inclination to communicate information. Conception precedes execution…. Art is no longer handwork that forms matter, without intention, into a thing, but thought work that communicates a prefabricated idea…. It wants to instruct rather than seduce.”

Han returns to the intimacy of personal ties—between people and objects. “Intense ties are becoming less and less important. First of all, they are unproductive, for consumption and communication can be accelerated only by weak ties. For this reason, capitalism systematically destroys ties. Things that are close to our hearts are also rare today; they are increasingly being replaced by disposable items." Han quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore.” Han concludes, “A re-romanticization of the world would presuppose its re-materialization…. Ecology must be preceded by a new ontology of matter, one that views it as something that lives.”

“Dilla Time” by Dan Charnas

“J Dilla Changed My Life.” Few rap producers have garnered such fervent underground esteem and accolades. James Yancey was a creature of habit. “Every day, no matter how late Jay stayed up, he rose at 7:00 a.m. From 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. he swept, wiped, and dusted every inch of his studio while listening to music, usually records that he had recently purchased, listening for sections to sample and manipulate on his Akai MPC3000 drum machine. He didn’t just skip through the records, “needle-dropping” for interesting parts. He listened to entire songs, listened and listened. His vigilance was almost always rewarded by an element deep within a track. From 9:00 a.m. until noon, he made “beats,” or individual rhythm tracks for rappers to rhyme on or singers to sing over. He created them quickly, one after the other, finished them, and then moved on. At lunchtime, he took a three-hour break. Sometimes he’d use that time to pick up visiting musicians and artists at the airport and take them back to his home studio. Then he’d work again from 3:00 p.m. until 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., and use the rest of the evening to hang out—go eat, go to the strip club—often returning to make more beats.”

In the late 1990s, Dilla invented a whole new style of beat making. “This approach did have a name. Between brothers, James and T3 called it “simple-complex”: If you listen to it casually, it sounds like one thing, something whole; but if you listen more carefully, you hear that it isn’t whole at all—there are many different things going on at the same time. It’s simple: it sounds good, and the rhythm is countable. But it’s complex: it’s really not a straight rhythm. It’s simple-complex…. As this predictable/unpredictable rhythm made its way outward among James’s mentors, collaborators, and admirers, they started giving it their own names: that “Jay Dee swing” or “bounce” or “hump,” designations that would shift to terms like “Detroit swing” a few years later when some of his protégés began using the time-feel…. That time-feel arose not from a musical scene, nor from the conservatory, nor from the avant-garde, but from one man using a machine in a basement in Detroit. That time-feel cannot be understood as either straight or swing time. It is not the median or midpoint or gradation between the two. It is the deliberate juxtaposition of multiple expressions of straight and swing time simultaneously, a conscious cultivation of rhythmic friction for maximum musicality and maximum surprise. It is conflicted time.”

Arguably, the golden moment for Dilla’s career was his teaming up with D’Angelo, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and James Poyser—the so-called Soulquarians. “As the musicians bounced between Electric Lady’s three studios, A, B, and C, the lines between projects—Common, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, each paid for out of different recording budgets by different labels—were often blurred. They’d jam all day and divvy up the tracks at night…. The sessions at Electric Lady also blurred lines that James had drawn in his own mind. James saw himself as a programmer, but here he found partners who saw serious programming and serious musicianship as one and the same, and thus treated him as a serious musician.”

Even amongst those with years making hits in the music industry, Dilla’s skills in the studio were uncanny. Questlove simply called him “The God.” Dave Cooley, Madlib’s sound engineer, related another story about their first session recording together. “Cooley assumed James would have a heavy hand, like most producers. But James rarely second-guessed members of his team. Even accomplished musicians like [Karriem] Riggins tended to be deferential to the producer—asking James if he wanted them to do things differently, or record another take…. “Nah,” James would often say. “We got it.” James wasn’t being polite. When he said “We got it,” he literally knew he had every single bar that he was going to need for the final mix, and that he already mapped it out in his head during people’s takes. After everyone left, he would rattle off to Cooley how to compile the performance: Use take 1 for bars 1 through 4, use take 2 for bar 5, use take 3 for bars 6 and 7, but cut away halfway through 7 and go back to take 1…. It was the most eerie thing Cooley had ever seen in a recording studio. He’s Yoda, Cooley thought.”

“Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne” by Katherine Rundell

This short biography of the poet John Donne recounts his life from Catholic heretic to privateer in Lord Essex’s fleet to impoverished courtier to resplendent Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and King James I’s personal preacher. He wrote verse all the way. “Even in the early 1590s, Donne’s verse was thought remarkable. The dramatist Ben Jonson, gossiping tipsily over dinner with the Scottish diarist William Drummond of Hawthornden, said that Donne had ‘written all his best pieces ere he was 25’, which would have been 1597…. For Donne, divergence from the accent and peculiar breaks in form contain the very stamp of what he meant: they were never aimless…. Donne’s five Satires are among the hardest to scan and read aloud: deliberately so: they sound exclamatory, darting from expostulation to fluency and back again, poetry that is quick on its feet and angry at you…. He accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language.” Donne wrote, “I sing not siren-like, to tempt, for I/Am harsh.”

Posterity has only an account of one of Donne’s poems written in his own hand. Instead, his verse was scribbled out and copied on looseleaf and saved in private collections. “There are more than four thousand copies of his individual poems, in 260 manuscripts…. Inevitably, the poems vary from copy to copy — sometimes just a letter or two, sometimes whole lines — and are often almost impossible to date…. Titles of Donne’s verse are plain, descriptive and uncomplicated. This is because they were largely not written by him…. His poetry left his hands unnamed, allowing it to gather up titles and edits and little flourishes from each poem’s new owner. The poems were akin to living organisms, changing shape and colour as they were copied and recopied.”

Rundell suggests that the beauty of Donne’s verse was in its surprise and the challenge of struggling with his lines. “The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it…. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His startling timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don’t see him coming.” In a sermon, Donne suggests, “Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.” On his deathbed, he framed humanity’s relationship with one another, in some of his most enduring lines, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

“The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” by Erving Goffman

Goffman is considered a founding doyen of American sociology, although originally hailing from Canada. This book, written in 1959, is an example of personal fieldwork mixed with broader anecdotal reporting. It is concerned with the public persona that all humans put on in the face of company. “This mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.” Goffman conceives of all public interactions as akin to performances. “A performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself and his products…. A performer often engenders in his audience the belief that he is related to them in a more ideal way than is always the case.” He quotes the authority of William James, “[An individual] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares…. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends.”

Goffman stresses the tenuousness of the public mask that we are constantly forced to maintain, “The impression of reality fostered by a performance is a delicate, fragile thing that can be shattered by very minor mishaps…. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups and downs…. A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every appointed time…. A false impression maintained by an individual in any one of his routines may be a threat to the whole relationship or role of which the routine is only one part, for a discreditable disclosure in one area of an individual’s activity will throw doubt on the many areas of activity in which he may have nothing to conceal…. When one’s activity occurs in the presence of other persons, some aspects of the activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the fostered impression, are suppressed.”

The performative Self is most often the Self that accrues status and recognition in society. “A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be realized.” Goffman furthers James’ observation that any one Self requires multiple masks for each of his multiple settings, which requires a fair amount of juggling. “The answer to this problem is for the performer to segregate his audiences so that the individuals who witness him in one of his roles will not be the individuals who witness him in another of his roles…. Incapacity to maintain this control leaves the performer in a position of not knowing what character he will have to project from one moment to the next.” Even in the most intimate of settings, we all still put on some type of mask. “There are very few friend relationships in which there is not some occasion when attitudes expressed about the friend behind his back are grossly incompatible with the ones expressed about him to his face…. Secret derogation seems to be much more common than secret praise, perhaps because such derogation serves to maintain the solidarity of the team, demonstrating mutual regard [within the friend group] at the expense of those absent.” In fact, roles and performances are always in flux and open for recalibration, based on the facts revealed and the interplay of the performers. “The performance given by a team is not a spontaneous, immediate response to the situation, absorbing all of the team’s energies and constituting their sole social reality; the performance is something the team members can stand back from, back far enough to imagine or play out simultaneously other kinds of performances attesting to other realities. Whether the performers feel their official offering is the “realest” reality or not, they will give surreptitious expression to multiple versions of reality, each version tending to be incompatible with the others.”

Goffman notes that the audience is an active member in any kind of public performance. They can be generous or biting in their understanding of the mask the performer seeks to convey to his public. They can give the benefit of the doubt or act as unbelieving skeptics. “This involves: the giving of a proper amount of attention and interest; a willingness to hold in check one’s own performance so as not to introduce too many contradictions, interruptions, or demands for attention; the inhibition of all acts or statements that might create a faux pas; the desire, above all else, to avoid a scene…. When performers make a slip of some kind, clearly exhibiting a discrepancy between the fostered impression and a disclosed reality, the audience may tactfully “not see” the slip or readily accept the excuse that is offered for it. And at moments of crisis for the performers, the whole audience may come into tacit collusion with them in order to help them out.”

Putting on this constant public performance is not always easy for the Self to maintain. The harder one tries to perform an unreality for the public, the greater the strain to the psyche. “To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” This is hard to pull off, in the sense that every Self cannot but help project some sort of public front when in the presence of other humans. The discrepancy might be small or large, but some performative aspect is always there. “When an individual appears before others, he knowingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part.” Goffman concludes, “The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited…. The whole machinery of self-production is cumbersome, of course, and sometimes breaks down, exposing its separate components.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction to the final book of the Torah, “The Book of Deuteronomy is the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Bible. It is presented, after all, as Moses’s valedictory address, which he delivers across the Jordan from the promised land just before his death.” Alter goes on to clarify, “If one tries to imagine, however, the actual audience for which Deuteronomy was first framed, it will begin to be evident that its impressive deployment of rhetoric serves another purpose. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion, and the rhetoric of Deuteronomy is meant to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is represented in this text—the national assembly in trans-Jordan that was a second covenant after the covenant at Sinai…. The midrashic notion that all future generations of Israel were already present as witnesses at Sinai is adumbrated, perhaps actually generated, by this rhetorical strategy of the evocation of witnessing in Deuteronomy.”

Alter relates some of the syntactical moves in Deuteronomy. He claims, “The role of stylistic indicators of temporal and spatial location and orientation—those “pointing words” that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to the creation of this general effect.” Specifically, he points to Deuteronomy 3:12, “And this land we took hold of at that time. One of the earmarks of Deuteronomic style is the fondness it exhibits for demonstrative pronouns. Moses, recapitulating the recent history of the Israelites for the benefit of the people, likes to use what linguists call deictics—“pointing words”—to indicate what is before their eyes, the familiar objects of their collective experience.”

In Deuteronomy 5:12, Alter relates a midrash when explaining a slight variation of word choice in the Biblical text, “Keep the sabbath day. The Exodus version has “remember” (that is, be mindful of) rather than “keep.” The Midrash Mekhilta famously announced, “‘keep’ and ‘remember’ in a singular utterance,” and the two acts are, indeed, joined in a tight nexus: because we remember or are mindful of something, we keep it. But shamor, “keep,” “observe,” “watch,” is a recurrent term in the didactic rhetoric of Deuteronomy, and so it is hardly surprising that this verb would be favored here.”

Alter combines his knowledge of geography, superstition, and literary style in his exposition of Deuteronomy 11:29, “the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal…. In keeping with the orientation to the east, Gerizim is on the favored right hand and Ebal on the suspect left, and Gerizim is covered with vegetation whereas Ebal is desolate. The theology of Deuteronomy is beautifully concretized in the stark opposition of these two mountains, for the book repeatedly stresses the forking alternatives of prosperity and disaster.”

The Book of Deuteronomy is particularly harsh on the pagan practices that predated monotheism. In Deuteronomy 12:2, Alter relates, “You shall utterly destroy all the places…. There have been exhortations earlier in Deuteronomy to eradicate all vestiges of the local pagan cults, but here that imperative of iconoclasm is coupled with a revolutionary insistence on the centralization of the Israelite cult.… In point of historical fact, what the Israelite religion did was to take over places of Canaanite worship and adapt them for the worship of the God of Israel…. For the Deuteronomist, the very existence of such local places of worship carries with it the danger of syncretism—the mingling of pagan rituals and concepts with the worship of the one God, and, especially, a leakage of the adoration of natural deities (“on the high mountains and in the valleys and under every lush tree”) into the cult of YHWH. Thus, the whole apparatus of local cults must be utterly destroyed, and instead, one central, exclusive place is to be designated for the worship of Israel’s God.”

In Deuteronomy 17:18-19, Alter gets into issues of literacy, the primacy of the written word, and the political structure of early Israelite society, “he shall write for himself a copy of this teaching. The king is to be actively engaged in personally producing a text of the teaching…. The location of religious authority in a text, a revolutionary idea, is made dramatically clear…. Many commentators have cited this whole section as a demonstration that the government of ancient Israel was in essence a constitutional monarchy…. This does not make his regime a constitutional monarchy, but one founded on theocratic authority, the Torah or constitution to be expounded by the priests at the central sanctuary.”

Alter notes another aspect of word choice in Deuteronomy 19:1, “the lord your God … the Lord your God. It is a stylistic peculiarity of Deuteronomy that the Lord, YHWH, very rarely occurs without “your God,” and even the substitution of a pronoun, as here, is generally avoided. This linguistic oddity reflects the didactic emphasis of the book, tirelessly reminding Israel that YHWH is its God.”

In Deuteronomy 27:3, Alter relates a bit of historical context, “write on them the words of this teaching. The most plausible reference of this phrase is to the code of laws (chapters 12-26) that has just been enunciated, although it could refer to the whole Book of Deuteronomy. Jeffrey H. Tigay notes that two steles the size on which the Code of Hammurabi are inscribed could contain more than the entire text of Deuteronomy…. Inscribing “the words of this teaching [torah]” on stone is a powerfully concrete image of the idea of the text as the enduring source of authority, which is the central ideological innovation of Deuteronomy.”

Alter makes the case that the Book of Deuteronomy seeks to link the people of Israel for all times—past, present, and future. To that end, in Deuteronomy 29:14, he states, “but with him who is here standing with us this day … and with him who is not here with us this day. This idea is paramount for the whole theological-historical project of the Book of Deuteronomy. The awesome covenant, evoked through Moses’s strong rhetoric, whereby Israel binds itself to God, is a timeless model, to be reenacted scrupulously by all future generations. The force of the idea is nicely caught by the rabbinic notion that all unborn generations were already standing here at Sinai.” Finally, Alter concludes with Deuteronomy 34:4, “the land that I swore to Abraham. This final mention of the promise to the forefathers links the end of Deuteronomy with the beginning of the Patriarchal narrative in Genesis.”