Diasporic Dining XXXVIII: Hamlet in Chinatown

Know any Hamlet clones wandering around Chinatown (Feng Xiaogang’s The Legend of the Black Scorpion, originally released in China as The Banquet, finds its roots in the Shakespeare play)?  Wanton egg drop is the soup that's tailored made for them. The question remains is the fusion of two proud specimens of Chinese American cuisine beneficial to one’s health and well-being? Or is it a form of enabling? Will such institutionalized waffling become a metaphor for the dangers of equivocation and set the style not only for  culinary taste, but for life choices in general? Sure it’s easier not to make a choice. Let’s say I go to a diner and am tempted by the turkey meatloaf special but also have a hankering for the fried  chicken basket? Do I order the turkey meatloaf fried chicken basket? Do I go for matzo ball pea when I can’t choose between matzo ball and pea soup. On a macro scale you see this in the profusion of Chinese and Japanese restaurants whose so-called fusion cuisine is really an attempt to play both ends against the middle, resulting in a cuisine that is neither fish nor fowl. Fressers who grow up slurping mixed wanton egg drop and eating in Chinese Japanese restaurants are likely to turn into lawyer/ accountants, architect/ builders, editor/ writers or coach/athletes. While there are virtues to playing both sides of the fence in work as well as love (ie being AC/DC), the danger is always of a watering down the original intention. Whether it be in soup or lovemaking there’s a point where you don’t taste anything any more. In one sense mixed wanton egg drop is a product of our modern internet culture in which the amount of choices available through Google and other search engines makes it impossible to make decisions. But most everyone will agree, the last thing you want is Italian ISIS.

The Cars Come and Go Talking of Michelangelo

Will driving be akin to flying? Will you program your trajectory and contact the equivalent of air traffic control as you proceed to turn out of your driveway which will now be tantamount to a runway. In a recent Times piece (“Less Sexy, Better for Sex,” NYT, 7/5/14), Delia Ephron deals with the matter of Google’s “self-driving car” which was the subject of an interview with its inventor Sebastian Thrun,“Google’s Original X-Man,”  (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2013) ). In the Foreign Affairs piece Thrun comments,  “If you look at the twentieth century the car has transformed society more than pretty much any other invention. But cars today are vastly unsafe. It’s estimated that more than a million people die every year because of traffic accidents. And driving cars consumes immense amounts of time…if the car could drive itself, you could be much safer…cars could come to you when you need them; you wouldn’t have to have private car ownership.” But the issue is not only a matter of safety, it has to do with integrity. As Ephron points out the car is a symbol of autonomy, “In American middle-class life driving is independence. Remember your learner’s permit and that first venture out: you in the driver’s seat, Mom or Dad coaching? With the Google car, say goodbye to all that bonding as well as the psychological growth that the switch-around embodies.” However, independence as Ephron points out is also a matter of mastery and privacy. If Google does everything you no longer have to know how to drive, just like today no one really has to have the ability to write by hand or calculate since the computer will do it all for you. And yes if we look like our Interstate system as a gigantic airport, traffic flow will definitely be improved by the advent of a traffic controller and will you now simply be a cog in the wheel of Big Data. Ephron asks if Google can “eavesdrop on your car talk?” or “run you into a wall or over a cliff?" But it’s not just Google. Anyone who owns and Easy Pass has to realize that they’ve taken the first step in logging into the system.

The Death of the Cyberflaneur

“The advent of street traffic made contemplative strolling dangerous. The arcades were soon replaced by larger, utilitarian department stores. Such rationalization of city life drove flaneurs underground, forcing some of them into a sort of ‘internal flanerie’ that reached its apogee in Marcel Proust’s self-imposed exile in his cork-lined room (situated, ironically, on Boulevard Haussmann),” wrote Evgeny Morozov, in a Times Op Ed piece called “The Death of the Cyberflaneur" (NYT, 2/4/12). Morozov points out the concept of the flaneur was a product of the sensibilities of a wide swath of l9th and 20^th century intellects from Baudelaire to Benjamin and presupposed a kind of urbanity that wasn’t so structured as to mitigate against the solitary intellect, the wanderer, the seeker who didn't know what he was looking for. Morozov goes onto compare the world of l9th century Paris with its arcades to the Internet of the ‘90’s whose early search engines like Internet Explorer were conduciveness to browsing. Carrying Morozov’s point further, can we say that Google and later Facebook did to the Internet what Robert Moses did to the New York Metropolitan area and before that Haussmann to Paris and that the modernity both bring is purchased at the cost of the indigenous life? Traffic speeds forward but many neighborhoods are marginalized along the way. “If today’s internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook,” Morozov remarks, “Everything that makes cyberflanerie possible—solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking—is under assault by that company.” Advances are always met with a nostalgia for an idealized past, but if the slower pace is so much preferred, why is the walker still urged to get a horse?

Quiddity

Quiddity refers to the whatness of things, and it is precisely this whatness that is lost as we advance ever further into technological bridge building. In his famous graveside speech, Hamlet says, “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures?” referring to a departed lawyer. Cybernetics allows for an increase in efficiency at the price of progress. This is not to suggest that everyone must do the Boston AIDS ride to get a feeling for the distance that is lost when traveling by plane or car. Arguing for purity is like chasing windmills, but there are qualitative things that can be done to improve one’s relationship to the world of objects. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argued that the means of production resulted in the worker’s alienation from the world of things. The automobile production line epitomizes the kind of anomie in which workers are chronically estranged from the products they produce, but in modern life, more and more conveniences make it ever more difficult to actually have a hands-on relationship with anything. We push too many buttons. For instance, a new service called Doodle allows people to effectively coordinate group activities through an online calendar. It sets up future human interactions by surgically triaging all its clients before presenting a neat little diagram of availability. Seems innocuous enough, right? But it’s not. Such applications prevent all the usual grousing, bickering and love-hate that accompanies human congregation. It’s proven that even animals need others animals, and of all mammals Homo sapiens are perhaps most defined by their social needs. However, with the advent of cyber universes like Second Life, humans may no longer even have to have first-hand contact to arrange social events. Their avatars will Doodle via Google.

The Age of Acquirius

This could very well be the beginning of a new age! If China revalues the renminbi, the two-state solution finally gains traction in the Middle East, Google acquires the rights to most of human thought, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il finally acknowledges his polymorphic perversity and stops trying to silence critics of his dictatorship, then we can only assume that the problem of cold fusion will soon be cracked. Imagine a world in which energy is no longer something that major powers fight over. As Freud once said about analysis, once it’s over, the real problems begin. If we accept Marx’s analysis, the drive for economic hegemony infuses international politics. Without the struggle for resources, life will lose its meaning and many world leaders will walk around with sunken eyes, like Max Von Sydow losing his game of chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. 

   

What will this new age be called? The Age of Acquirius. When Wall Street is battered as it was in the past year, analysts say that the market is making an adjustment. Wasn’t Period of Adjustment the name of a Tennessee Williams play, later made into a movie starring Jane Fonda? But what is this new age? Thorsten Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is still an apt description of the overarching materialism that has spread exponentially in our time. Our economies have grown from the horse drawn chariot of supply and demand to the nuclear powered rockets of computer-generated algorithms. Profits of some hedge funds exceed the GNP of modest countries, while England is referred to as Iceland on the Thames and the entire country of Greece faces the equivalent of a massive foreclosure proceeding. An explosion of information has awakened whole continents of knowledge, yet newspapers are defunct and the democratization of truth via outlets like Wikipedia has crushed the notion of a moral center. Is this the paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn was alluding to in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?  Yeats’s oft-quoted lines ring true once again: “The best lack all conviction and the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity.”