Question about signs

AKMA remarks on a seemingly hasty and confused NPR piece about "symbols" and evolution:

I’m persuaded that we do better to theorise about meaning on the broader, more prevalent evidence of non-verbal expression and inference.

As AKMA notes, NPR's Alix Spiegel enjoys making huge radio leaps in causality and time without acknowledging that we are leaping. I would merely note that this seems in line with numerous other signs of flimsy, careless, and negligent editorial oversight inside the All Things Considered production effort. Not the first time to wonder if the program should be named Certain Things Adverted To Via Single Source Marketeers, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Punishingly Cute RadioTricks (CTATVSSMADDAPCRT.)

All Things Considered

One problem with the piece is, it mushes various signifying modes into one catchall word, "symbol." An entire field deriving from Pierce and de Saussure in the last century tried to make some headway in sorting out different modes of signification, even as grammar theory and rhetorical analysis looked more closely at the conditions of making meaning, the tricks of arranging signifiers and the tropes that mould, bend, and transfer signification. But hey, this is NPR radio, we're doing science here, not egghead, or even eggcorn,stuff not on the radar of our sponsors.

My question for AKMA is, to what extent he views "non-verbal expression and inference" to be distinct from linguistic entanglement. That is, are we to view verbal language as a subset of a larger realm of signifying powers that may use different sensory and expressive means, but share, at some more basic level, the same structures that produce meaning? Or is it more a matter of other modes of representing meaning that fall completely outside the material, means, and ends of verbal forms and communicative structures?

I ask because while it certainly seems worth saying that the study of meaningful articulations all too frequently remains narrowly concerned with verbal forms of language, it seems equally fair to suggest that in our haste to comprehend all kinds of signs, artifacts, and modes of expression within terms like "symbol," we tend to minimize the role of words, of linguistic structures. We tend to see the verbal element as non-problematic, which might be the same as saying we tend to not see them at all. We overlook our linguistic medium with all its peculiar properties and peculiarities and still not very well understood manners of development in time, we take its apparent transparency for an open window, and leap to conclusions about evidence, truth, objectivity, and so forth with NPR-like ease.

So that's my question to AKMA, who has a longstanding fascination with non-verbal expression, but not just to him -- to you as well, allthingsconsidering reader: If human nature involves making signs, do our modes of expression in all their multifarious glory relate to the verbal order, and if so, how, or do they seem to you to exist free from it?

The stax of our trax

Am I wrong?

One needs to hear as wide a variety of musics as possible when young. Listening to Beethoven (e.g.) when one is 14 unlocks doors in the soul the way repeated video game use unlocks hidden areas and characters. Listening to music may very well chalk forth something of our destinies.

Listening to Beethoven (e.g.) on NPR (or the wretched WQXR) when one is older than, say, 40 opens nothing. It's merely reaffirming the purported validity of familiar parts of the soul.

"Meat-Girl" courtesy of April Winchell's fine blog.

Future to the back

NPR:

So if Howard Dean with his millions of small donors was Orville Wright, and Obama with his wired grass-roots army was Neil Armstrong, what will be next?

That's easy: Fredericka the Australopithecine Televisionator:

Sara Taylor, the former political director of the Bush White House, has one idea.

"We're at a place in the country where almost everybody has a cell phone, but not many people have a smartphone, meaning a video-enabled phone. But that will change over the next three to four or five years," Taylor says.

She envisions a campaign in which "they'll be able to serve you advertising via a text message that links right to video with your candidate speaking in a beautiful video" about certain issues.

Mara Liasson gave this a pass, saying "it's just technology." Let's review what we've learned: the entire Net is merely a grunt at the service of ideological power.

They're here

Weekend Edition Saturday, July 19, 2008 · In northern California, organized crews of poachers are raiding residential recycling bins and are sometimes threatening homeowners who get in the way. Authorities in the Bay Area say it's a sign of the sour economic times, but it's costing cities plenty. San Francisco alone estimates it's losing $500-thousand a year to recycling bandits. NPR's Richard Gonzales reports. (4:10) NPR

If it's a sign, well, how about reading the sign. Why "poachers"?

No poets, no entrepreneurs, no ragpickers, no priests, no judges, no lawgivers, no soliders, no mothers.

Marching lockstep with the general degradation of value, (yesterday's NYT had a front page video ad for iphone starring david pogue) NPR is more consumer spectacle, more Night of the living dead, than journalism. Especially All Things Considered and Scott Simon.

Big Mac Panic Attack

Peter Overby at NPR:

Fannie and Freddie have kept their profiles high because of their odd situation: They're not government agencies, but they're not regular corporations either. As government sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, they're often thought to have guarantees of federal support. It lets them get discounts when they borrow money.

To maintain that advantage and others, they hire well-placed politicos for big salaries.

A rival lobbyist once described Fannie Mae as a political organization that happened to be in the mortgage business.

Italics added.

What Overby, a very sharp reporter, is describing could be termed a "rhetorical object." This is not the guarantee of the federal government, but the appearance of that guarantee, the promise of a promise. The underlying blurry charter, history, and function of the Macs depend on the actions of a market that is constantly in need of being persuaded that something that could be true, or could just as well be illusory. Its status is constantly being contested and depends not upon a legal determination but upon the greasification of certain surprisingly august palms.

According to The Center for Investigative Reporting, the gaggle of palms, a distributed chorus of hortatory specialists, includes the likes of James A Johnson, Louis J. Freeh, Rahm Emanuel, Susan Molinari and more who work to maintain this state of affairs because upon its undecided status rests a good portion of their income as well as a considerable portion of their juice:

In the first three months of the year alone, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spent a combined total of about $3.5 million on lobbying and hired 42 outside firms.

If the object that undergirds so much of the housing, lending, and credit industry worldwide indeed is rhetorical in nature, rather than stable, fixed, and "guaranteed," it might be useful in public discussion to acknowledge this, rather than proceed as if the question of the Big Macs' promise were, in the reductive sense alone, rhetorical.

Update: Another take at Gifthub.

love what you've done with your cognitive reduction system

Note to self:

If corporate media and academic JSTOR*izers work to place human experience on a pay-per-view basis, NPR music programming works to ensure that our open range aural worldview consists of mincing pissant bullshit.

*Did you know...

• JSTOR includes 1,856,206 full-length articles across 47 disciplines [that you can't read].
• There are 1,387,437 book reviews in JSTOR.
• The oldest content in the JSTOR archive was published in 1665.
• JSTOR is active in Facebook.

Reality of TV

The noxious drivel spewing from the large flat eye in your "living" room got a bit of attention on Morning Edition today. If we do the math:

Writers Guild Strike Hits Scripted Programming

by Kim Masters

Listen Now [4 min 52 sec] add to playlist

Morning Edition, November 7, 2007 · A number of scripted programs are halting production as the strike by the Writers Guild of America plows into its third day. Late-night talk shows were the first to go off the air.

Hollywood Producer Reflects on Last Writers' Strike

Listen Now [4 min 3 sec] add to playlist

Morning Edition, November 7, 2007 · Hollywood producer Robert Morton, who was executive producer of Late Night with David Letterman during the last writers' strike in 1988, talks about what it was like when the Letterman show resumed production without writers and why they made that decision.

Union Rule Raises Questions for Hollywood Writer

by John Ridley

Listen Now [3 min. 19 sec] add to playlist

Read and comment on John Ridley's thoughts at his "Visible Man" blog.

Morning Edition, November 7, 2007 · NPR blogger and commentator John Ridley says the Hollywood writers' strike has already had quite an effect on life in Los Angeles — even on what can be talked about over lunch.

4 min. 52 sec.
4 min. 03 sec.
3 min. 19 sec.
__________

Total Morning Edition Minutes spent on TV strike: 12 min. 14 sec.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Morning Edition devoted somewhat less time to the unpleasantness surrounding Musharraf in Pakistan:

U.S. Strikes Delicate Balance on Pakistan

by Jackie Northam

Listen Now [3 min 57 sec]

Musharraf Must Reverse Emergency Rule

Listen Now [48 sec]

3 min. 57 sec
0 min. 48 sec
__________
Total Morning Edition Time spent on crisis in Pakistan: 4 min. 45 sec.

19 aspects of NPR music programming in Florida

NPR classical music programming in Florida is

1. the Charmin of the soul.
2. a plush replica of Henry VIII's codpiece.
3. the antennae of forgotten ancestors from Switzerland.
4. the cream in your lungs.
5. a way of being acoustically engineered to play golf.
6. the plan of the petite bourgeois' mastery of his existence.
   
7. a cummerbund girding the arse of Naples, FL.
8. the doily between your ears.
9. an aural mask sufficient unto the day.
10. the salt in your wounds.
    
11. the logo of corporate anaesthetism.
12. a songfest for senile folk on beta blockers.
13. a lullaby for the poor in spirit but not in the biblical sense.
14. the representation of happy times 221 years ago in Vienna.
15. sturm of traffic, drang of spouse.
16. a gated community doorbell.
17. the starch in your paycheck.
    
18. the top-25 hit parade for anglophiles.
    
19. the pompandcircumstancing of your morning, Mendelssohnization of your noon, Borodinning of your early cocktail, Brucknerfest of your evening meditation.

Huh?

Taking judicial review of highly compromising federal surveillance activities away from the judicial branch and handing it over to...Alberto Gonzales would seem cause for some consternation.

Remarkably, there's a strange disconnect between the fury of many bloggers and the condemnation of groups like the ACLU on the one hand, and the relative reticence of large media, including not just the Times but even tonight's breezy NPR discussion via Andrea Seabrook on NPR. (Schorr had his own take.) Strange, that something reaching so far into basic principles of rights(including physical searches), powers, and priorities would garner this mass of dead air between squealing mice and bovine placidity.

Greenwald, of Congress:

...what they’ve done is they convened Congress and stayed in session under the President's order to revise a law at his direction, that they actually have no idea how it’s been administered and what this government has been doing.

Marjorie Cohn, about the law:

It basically hands over the power. It takes the power out of a judge’s hands and puts it in the power of Alberto Gonzales and the director of intelligence.

Is it that there are no publicly available media mechanisms for examining and judging this sort of thing? Too many campaign dollahs at stake? The only thing clear is that MSM has punted the punting of Congress.

Has the entire country turned into a quivering mass of bushdumb chickenshit?

Strange.

A Picturebook Ameriqan Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, Roland E. Arnall headed a boiler room subprime lending enterprise that made Enron look like Doctors Without Borders, according to a killer report by NPR's Chris Arnold.

In July, 2005, Arnall was nominated by George W. Bush to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of Ameriquestia to the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

On which day it was already quite well documented that his company, Ameriquest, was under investigation in 30 states for Extraordinary and Plenipotential Predatory Lending practices.

Some congresspeople apparently had reservations about the presidential wisdom of making an Ambassador out of a man whose trainers, according to Arnold's report, used the film Boiler Room to educate salespeople in the finest points of how to rip off financially strapped homebuyers.

Ameriquest's success (billions of dollars of refinanced loans) was built on a "culture of deception," a former loan officer tells Arnold, who spoke with four ex-employees of Ameriquest. These folks describe straight-up fraud techniques, loans that were essentially financial time bombs. Some loan officers allegedly whited-out income numbers on W-2s and bank statements, enhancing income figures to qualify loan applicants for loans they couldn't afford. This was called taking the loan to the art department.

Vin Diesel shows Ameriquest trainees the ropes.

But Ambassador Arnall hadn't emulated the Ken Lay Action Figure in vain:

Along with his wife, Dawn, Arnall was listed as a Bush Ranger for the 2004 campaign, and the Washington Post reports that the couple has raised at least $12.25 million for the president since 2002, making the couple the president’s single largest fundraisers.

In the ensuing $325 million Settlement with 49 states' Attorneys General, Ameriquest admitted no wrongdoing.

"This agreement is good for consumers and good for the company," the company said in a written statement.

The active citizen and philanthropist had the joy of presenting his creds to Her Majesty Queen Beatrix on March 8th, 2006.






And the company lived happily ever after.




Update: Phil unearths predatory philanthropists. And Mark Winston Griffith on the Myth of the Risky Sub-Prime Borrower.