magic circle

Karl Giberson has a well-reasoned article in Salon called "What's wrong with science as religion", in which he argues that, though militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have essentially made science (since he includes Hitchens, "reason" might be a more accurate, albeit broader and less precise, term) their new religion, science could never really replace religion. It doesn't seem like that's what anyone was calling for exactly--Dawkins et all seem more interested in reacting to and arguing against the idea of religion than creating a new one. Still, though the odd slide from reason to atheistic religion isn't exactly new, it's refreshing to see the argument appear again. A taste:

Wilson, along with Atkins, Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others, persuades us that science has, for thinking people, discredited religion. Nevertheless, they are quick to borrow from a religion they reject and take delight in using biblical metaphors. And as their science evolves to meet the "mythopoeic requirements" of their minds, it increasingly resembles religion.

looking forward

Rob Walker has a thoughtful post about the new Girl Talk album on his blog. He argues that the success or failure of their pay-what-you-like distribution will be more telling than Radiohead's nearly identical experiment because Girl Talk didn't become famous through traditional music business models. One would assume that much of the rest of the commentary floating around about the album is roughly similar, perhaps with some tweaks of emphasis.

Everyone is late to the party, however. Theodor Adorno already has it covered:

"The work of art becomes its own material and forms the technique of reproduction and presentation, actually a technique for the distribution of a real object."

And later:

"With the liquidation of its opposition to empirical reality art assumes a parasitic character. Inasmuch as it now appears itself as reality, which is supposed to stand in for the reality out there, it tends to relate back to culture as its own object."

Theodor Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture"

Though it may not seem like much, Adorno allows for some hope at the end of this essay. If one were so inclined, one might even take his conclusion as a profound faith in the agency of the individual and the individual's ability to effect real change in the world. There is, of course, a cynical skepticism there as well: people have the ability to prevent the nightmare, but they are the same people who brought about the possibility of the nightmare. Still, you take what you can get: No political systems or historical processes have made this fate inevitable; people made it and people can undo it.

"Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror. Enthusiasm not merely betrays an unconscious eagerness to read the commands from above but already reveals the fear of disobedience, of those unconventional desires from the suspicion of which the sex murderer who kills his own beloved passionately strives to cleanse himself. This anxiety, the ultimate lesson of the fascist era, is already harbored within the very medium of technological communication. Anyone who has not been wholly inured by the oppressive self-importance of big business is unnerved to receive a telegram. The mutilated language condensed to carry the maximum information combined with the urgency of delivery imparts the shock of immediate domination in the form of immediate horror. The fear of disaster which the telegram might announce is only a mantle for the fear of the omnipresent disasters that can overtake us at any time. Above all on the radio the authority of society standing behind every speaker immediately addresses its listeners unchallenged. If indeed the advances of technology largely determine the fate of society, the technicized forms of modern consciousness are also heralds of that fate. They transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth abut the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical. The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it."