Buster Keaton, "One Week"
Courtesy of Charles Simic

Note taking etc.
The problem with attacks on [religion, mysticism etc] is that they're always led by groups whose names all might as well be "The Society for the Prevention of the Irrationality of Other People."
If pedantry is a form of incompetence and incompetence is an unfounded faith in your own abilities or understanding, then attacks on irrationalism as such tout court are irrational.
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Noting a significant number of fashionably well dressed but reserved men, old and young, at the Bronzino exhibition. In pairs or the young in small groups. All very Tom Ford. Serendipity, or cultural determinism?
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What Does the Iranian Public Really Think?

Analysis of Multiple Polls Finds Little Evidence Iranian Public Sees Government as Illegitimate

Not news, and not much coverage of course.

Albrecht Dürer, St Philip 1526 Engraving, 122 x 76 mm.

While it is true that commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is equally true that noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up as an old maid. Non commercial art has given us Seurat's "Grande Jatte" and Shakespeare's sonnets,but also much that is esoteric to the point of incommunicability. Conversely, commercial art has given us much that is vulgar or snobbish (two aspects of the same thing) to the point of loathsomeness, but also Durer's prints and Shakespeare's plays. For, we must not forget that Durer's prints were partly made on commission and partly intended to be sold in the open market; and that Shakespeare's plays -in contrast to the earlier masques and intermezzi which were produced at court by aristocratic amateurs and could afford to be so incomprehensible that even those who described them in printed monographs occasionally failed to grasp their intended significance— were meant to appeal, and did appeal, not only to the select few but also to everyone who was prepared to pay a shilling for admission.

It is this requirement of communicability that makes commercial art more vital than noncommercial, and therefore potentially much more effective for better or for worse.

The second figure, 23, is the Gini for Sweden, the world’s most egalitarian country. Whereas most of Europe, Canada and Australia have Ginis in the low 30s, the US has over the past several decades developed inequalities usually found only in poor countries with autocratic governments.
So what? Isn’t inequality merely the price of America being No. 1?
“That’s almost certainly false,” Bowles tells SFR. “Prior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just
greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it’s sand in the wheels.”

"...Suppose instead what we did is this: We said, ‘Look, when somebody turns 18, he gets a quarter of a million dollars and, after that, you’re on your own,’” Bowles says. “Once you’ve got your quarter-million, you’ve got to make a decision: ‘Should I go to college or do I want to start a business?’—which you could do with a quarter of a million.”

And Henry Farrell calls him a leftist. The reason for Sweden's low GINI is the cultural opposition to individualism. Bowles is an American individualist trying to solve problems according to his moral sensibility.

Reading Hermann Broch on the irrationalism at the heart of any value system.

Related to that: when I first heard the terms emics and etics my immediate association given my interests was not "phonemic" and "phonetic" but "poemic" and "poetic". I invented a word on the spot, but one that fits the original meaning just as well, if as I imagined poemics would mean the esthetic understanding of the poet and poetics the understanding of a reader. Bowles practices the poemics of American culture and specifically American economics, generalizing from that subjective "knowledge". My standard example is transportation policy. If all you have is a hammer than everything is a nail, and if all you know is cars then everything's a highway. Individualism is a mythology and public transportation, as foreign, is irrational.
As always, pretty basic. But Broch is a smart man

(2) Religious beliefs do not answer ultimately (or at the limit) to evidence and reasons, as evidence and reasons are understood in other domains concerned with knowledge of the world. Religious beliefs, in virtue of being based on "faith", are insulated from ordinary standards of evidence and rational justification, the ones we employ in both common-sense and in science.

The above by Brian Leiter from "Why Tolerate Religion?" Quoted by Andrew Koppelman in "No Respect: Brian Leiter on Religion" [SSRN]

They both should spend more time around criminal law, and lawyers who argue the causes fate hands them rather than those they choose. The mandate against the institutionalization of religion can and should mean simply that there is no special place for it and the express right to freedom of religion can be seen logically, in its historical context, as the equivalent of statements of the right to be free from racial discrimination, with no special rights.

No two people can ever know between them what truth is the best they will do is agree, and agreement is a function of social life not the absolute. The law is designed first and foremost for conflict resolution, truth itself is always private. As I always remind people, the rule of law protects us from the [mis]rule of reason. Steven Weinberg's belief that we "need to know" certain facts about the universe is as irrational as his racism, if less divisive. I wouldn't interfere with his right to have his curiosity follow his tastes any more than I would want the state to mandate against his phobias, though I might argue against funding his research, compared to funding work on AIDS and Malaria. I might or might not, and either why it's an opinion and a matter of values, not truth. Leiter's response to Brian Tamanaha in their arguments over formalism and realism seem to me to be as based on faith, as opposed to empiricism, as his defense of a naturalized epistemology that sounds (again to me, in my opinion) like desperate science envy. His philosophy tracks with science, in his fantasies, and he's unwilling to defend the humanities as such as having value, so his defense of philosophy falls flat. Read the Guardian link he posts. Did they really need a "philosopher" or would anyone with an imagination have been good enough? Maybe a parish priest who's a good judge of people.

Leiter pretends that philosophy is technical and cumulative but the facts and history seem to show only that tastes change. Remember that according to Leiter and his friends "history is bunk". [see the first post yesterday or begin here] I remember Leiter smiling fondly at Jerry Fodor saying with mild contempt that he -Fodor- didn't even know anyone in Comp Lit., though I know from another source that Fodor thought it was odd that one of his colleagues had friends outside the academy itself.

Academics' work -as expertise- represents their preoccupations to themselves. Some academics like to look out the window but it's not enough. Scholasticism is academic formalism, when outside information undermines that formalism the data is ignored. The formalism of practicing lawyers on the other hand is the formalism of craftsmen, of rhetoric, not as a model of the objective world but of communication. The formal tropes of oratory are not the formalisms of mathematics. Yet that equation is precisely the model now in the academy: the model of a science of rhetoric. The goal of mastery of a skill has become the goal of the mastery of truth. A formal structure used for clarity is now imagined as a self-supporting manifestation of ideal order. That is a very dangerous logic. Leiter doesn't understand language, he doesn't understand law. He doesn't understand his relation to the world -beyond his fantasies of it- and he doesn't understand democracy. Neither do most academics.

I've done enough on Blackburn and McGinn on this page but it's well laid out here [PDF] in the conclusion and 'final note.'

The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates and forced open closets. Finally they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. The Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of Al Qaeda.
They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, US forces released Rahman's cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.
"We've called his phone, but it doesn't answer," said his cousin Qarar, the agriculture minister's spokesman. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar's family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were "enemy militants [who] demonstrated hostile intent."
Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. "Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government," Qarar said. "Rahman couldn't even leave the city, because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him."
Beyond the question of Rahman's guilt or innocence, it's how he was taken that has left such a residue of hatred among his family. "Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?" Qarar asked. "They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn't they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime? We would have forced Rahman to comply."

Link from IPA. Click on the subscribe tab to sign up for press releases. I've been getting them for years but never thought to pass it along.

Also Ursula Lindsey on Egypt's wall

Looked over this again: Marshall Sahlins on Levi-Strauss. Available in a slightly different form here [PDF]

Yet a similar “logic of the concrete” is fundamental to our own economic conduct, although in defining economics as the maximization of returns with the monetary or capital means on hand the economists banish the cultural schemes of persons and things that order material value to an unexamined limbo of what they call ”exogenous” or even “irrational” factors. In part the culture of economics remains unconscious because neither are the ordinary participants aware that behind their apparently rational choices—they do not buy hamburger or hot dogs for honored dinner guests—is a whole code of symbolic values that has little to do with nutritional utility but everything to do with the meaningful distinctions between persons, goods and occasions. The economy is ordered by the differences between lunch and dinner, carved and ground meats, muscle and organs, prepared dishes and sandwiches, familiarity and respect, members and guests, ordinary meals and “special occasions,” etc. Nor would all the monetary good sense that we put into buying clothing explain the characteristics of dress that mark distinctions between men and women, holidays and ordinary days, businessmen and policemen, adults and children, people of different regions or ethnic affiliations—think of all the ways that clothes signify. Perhaps we have been too quick to celebrate the “disenchantment of the world” ushered in by the retreat of spiritualism and the growth of scientific naturalism since the 17th century. Rather what happened was the enchantment of Western society by the world: by the imagined values of the material rather than the spiritual. We live in a material world enchanted by the symbolically constituted “utility” of gold, oil, pinot noir grapes, outdoor barbecues, Mercedes cars, heirloom tomatoes, blue jeans, cashmere sweaters, hamburgers from McDonalds and purses from Gucci. Levi-Strauss did not go that far, but structuralism has something to say about an economy of monetary values that is actually embedded in a greater cultural order of meaningful values.

And a little something from Levi-Strauss as well. Both originally from Savage Minds

I'd wanted to insert links in the text: to Brad Delong defending the rational choice for cardboard tomatoes, admitting that it was not one he would make [google it, it's there] and to Crooked Timber for some appropriate stupidity; but it's overkill. Levi-Strauss was perhaps of the last generation of academics who understood that we're always at best aspects, at worst symptoms, of our culture and our age. And it's neoliberal logic to say that others may be either but not "us." The logic of the neoliberal academy, and the academy is neoliberal now almost in its entirety, is that the academy has transcended history, even if the rest of us haven't.

Addendum, and repeat:
Alex Rosenberg, "History is Bunk" (see #8). Link of course from Brian Leiter

Once again Brian Leiter defends a jurisprudence of how things ought to be. We "ought" to see things "as they are."
So what's the difference between the twin and opposed oughts of morality and realism? Ought is a term of morality you dumb fuck.

It's like listening to a prosecutor arguing that justice is defined by the prosecutorial ethos. So is the defense expected to say the reverse, or rather that justice is best served by a formal adversarialism in which both sides play their part? That after all is how the system is designed, but it takes an ironic understanding of one's own role to get the point.

Again, and again, and again: The history of justice -and history precedes theory in importance if not now in popularity- is the history of debate among competing doctrines of interpretation, of the relation of words to words, of people to people and of each to the other. These are moral questions. We argue form to argue value. Dworkin's Hercules is a fictional character, but the closest analogy I can come up with (which Dworkin may not like, but then he doesn't seem always to understand his own arguments even when he's right) is that of a novelist or poet trying to come up with the right answer to the problems of a particular piece, therefore putting great moral weight as poets do on the construction of a descriptive model of the world. It's not the decision that matters it's the act of justification you stupid fucking jackass. And Dworkin and Posner and Leiter and Shakespeare and Pope (and the Pope) spend most of their lives engaged in the justification of their ideas: in the presentation of intellectual, formal, rhetorical and moral constructions before a public, and posterity, which will judge whether to agree or approve or not. Law in a republic is not the laws themselves, which are no more than buoys on the water, or pins on a blank map, but the process of their forming. Democracy is the acknowledgment that it has always worked this way and that it's better and more honest to admit it rather than allow self-serving authority to hide behind a lie. You want people to agree with you you pedantic little fuck. That fact is more foundational to your ideas than your ideas are to anything else. "Democracy is the culture of language in use." How many times have I written that?

The difference between Dworkin and Posner is that Dworkin asks questions concerning morality and Posner answers questions according to what he assumes is moral. Leiter's like a strutting peacock who says he doesn't care what others think. The cognitive dissonance is painful. The rationalism of vanity. Fucking academics

Took at look at The Craftsman yesterday. Searched the index for "Literature", "Novel", and "Law." Zip. Nada. Zilch.

The Republicans made a mistake letting Obama speak to them on camera and somehow this is seen as news, even among liberals. Democrats avoid confronting Republicans in public, even though if they stuck to the principles they claim to represent, they'd win every time. But liberals have contempt for the conservatives' audience, and their fear and insecurity keeps them from facing them. This is true at the level of blogs as well. Snobbery is a sign of insecurity, not confidence. The logic of the Republican base is that it's better to be lied to by a friendly con-man than be condescended to by a pedant. And every slip of the mask of blithe moral superiority worn by the pedant gets paid for in political blood. Again as I've said, the interesting thing about Stewart and Colbert is that they don't condescend. They have right-wingers on and show them for what they are, and the right-wing base doesn't attack.

Polling and Passivity.. Stewart leads the way again in popular discussion of political philosophy. He explains the problem but doesn't range for enough. Politicians fear and have contempt for the people, the right and the "left" fear and have contempt for each other and the end result is an elite culture of political mediocrity, a culture that includes Atrios, TPM, Media Matters and all those who mock the "cool kids" to the extent that all of them lag behind the pundits of Comedy Central in political maturity. And though they're loathe to admit it (and even Stewart may not quite understand his role) this begins with the academic now institutional fear of subjectivity and the desire for "objective" information, so that as Stewart points out now you get graphs of the opinions of people who don't know anything because all they're ever heard is descriptions of the opinions they supposedly already have. And over all this the liberal intellectual elite moan and groan about the mediocrity of others. Liberals are so caught up in their pretensions of individualism and so horrified by the possibility that they're as tribal as the right that they refuse to face them. And Zionist liberals have to see themselves as liberal even if they're not. American Manichaeism as phobic. Krugman backed Bernanke and the response was not even polite criticism but silence. Why? Because when everyone claims to be idealist the fact of real politics has to be hidden.

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Chris Matthews is from north-east Philadelphia: "the Great Northeast." You can hear his background in his accent. He's from "Phiwy." And no one from the city would ever forget he's white.

Back to Steinberg, because I'm still reading, and it's apropos: the intellectual's unawareness, méconnaissance, of sexuality, their own and others. He spends a lot of time arguing that the central figure in the painting is in an ambiguous position: upright signaling recumbence. And he worries that he may be wrong.



Recumbency, passivity and objecthood. Posing, presentation and gender roles. Googling the phrase "her arms framing her face" got 8 hits. "Her arms frame her face" got 547. And on... The aggression was new, recumbence and mockery, in 1906.

As always, in the public arguments over social policy, whether it's the hijab or late term abortion, liberal positions are couched again and again only on the laziest and most self-serving terms. It's not a choice between "freedom", "choice", and "morality", but between cheap moralizing and moral seriousness.
As with my earlier comments on the Citizens United and Brown decisions as similarly outside the curve of public sentiment (and we can add Roe), there's a tension between public freedom and public responsibility. And tension in the question of who should decide. I've been waiting for someone to bring this up and someone finally did, in comments elsewhere: ban the niqab, ban the cloister. Ban the Christian veil. Ban the requirement that ultra-orthodox women shave their heads (a wig is their hijab).

The arguments in this case are stupid. But there is a difference between the obligations of citizens to society and claims of an empire that its subjects who are its victims owe it deference. In Australia there is no freedom not to vote, and I'm not opposed in principle to the opposite: strict requirements to earn the right of suffrage. The only universal foundation required of a just society is the right to leave. There are fundamentally unjust societies but there are also varieties of justice; the main division and I've been arguing this point since I was in my early 20's is the division between culture and its opposite: the anti-society of fascism. The settlers on the west bank are fascist, Hamas is not. Conservatives and even most reactionaries are not fascist. Pretty girls in Fendi scarves are no danger to the republic and It's deeply counterproductive to think otherwise. People who are made nervous by the hijab should be made nervous by a nun. Or if they're not, maybe it's something else?

Fun with anthropologists
"Glamour is the performativity of the sexually intimidating woman - intimidating according to conservative gender roles: the woman not as passive but as judge."

Reading Steinberg's "The Philosophical Brothel."

Still surprised by the filters used by modern/modernist intellectuals to interpret the preoccupations of themselves and their compatriots. As with Eliot, the theme is not "form" but a fear of the power of representation and of what will be represented if representation is allowed its full weight. And it is allowed that weight here as in Eliot's poetry. That's the greatness and the terror. The painting first and foremost is if not a castration scene then a description of the terror that the act or worse may be in the offing, with the painter/viewer as the victim. Talk of form and formalism was an absurd cover, as absurd as any talk of "advancement" in the arts; and even those who eschew formalist arguments still to this day argue from pretensions of progress.

The importance of Les Demoiselles D'Avignon is less that it marks the beginning of Cubism than that it marks the high point. The work after it slides downhill -first gradually, later quickly- away from representation towards formalism, the "meaning" of ideas, and the logic of intention.
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...the three central figures address the observer with unsparing directness. Neither active nor passive, they are simply alerted, responding to an alerting attentiveness on our side.

5 lines later

The Picture is a tidal wave of female aggression, one either experiences the Demoiselles as an onslaught, or shuts it off.

It's less that all these terms are mutually exclusive than that Steinberg is still coming to terms with them.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, are crap at the media war and any Palestinians who come across in the West as sympathetic, well-informed, persuasive, are sure to be sidelined by a Palestinian leadership ever alert to internal threats to their power (hence not much sign of Hanan Ashrawi on the box recently).

White people talking to white people about the negro problem.

My comment (I didn't think it would go through, it was for Bertram to find in the filter) was written by As'ad AbuKhalil

"It is of course coincidental that American media are now paying tributes to Salam Fayyad (the Israeli/American puppet in Ramallah and who was assigned as the successor to Abu Mazen when the latter is still alive which explains the tensions between the two puppets these days). One article after another. The Israeli press is more coy because they know that they would hurt their puppet with praise. But I want to finally say a word about Hanan Ashrawi: I never met her although we appeared once in a TV interview. Edward Said was right in his suspicions about her especially after Oslo. She clearly wants to play it safe and both ways: she claims that she speaks for human rights when (as the article in Newsweek clearly shows) she is very close behind-the-scenes to Salam Fayyad. Let us not forget that she and Fayyad ran on the same list in the last Palestinian legislative election-under-occupation and they both received a whopping 2.4% of the vote. Ashrawi praises her partner (I almost said collaborator) by saying that he does not "aim to please." She must have meant that he does not aim to please the Palestinian people because he is busy aiming to please the American-Israeli masters. Ashrawi was silent about the corruption of the PLO and the secret deals and collaboration between the Ramallah gang and the Israeli occupying master. Ashrawi lost her ability to have it both ways a long time ago: she should be considered exactly where she squarely is: fixed in the Dahlan camp."

Read Bertram's quote again. Understand how self-serving i is.

Architecture as material and idea, and historicist kitsch, by Anton Furst for Tim Burton (1989) and Michael Graves for the Humana Corporation (1985).

Architecture as experience, and as light, again by Edward Yang, Yi Yi, though you could just as easily use Wong Kar Wei, Hou Hsiao-hsien or any number of others...



and by Jean Nouvel.

L'Institut du Monde Arabe

Architecture as material and as experience: Yi Yi...





and The Wire

Last link from a friend.

From the immateriality of ideas -and idées fixes- to the immateriality of light.

Architecture and culture: Batman by Tim Burton and Production designer Anton Furst, and 20 years later by Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister; Koolhaas, Graves, Stern, to Jean Nouvel; capitalism. The Joker: Jack Nicholson's camp killer clown to Heath Ledger's psychotic deity. All that is solid melts into air and all that is not becomes manifest in form. Burton/Furst's Gotham was Gothic Art Deco: overdetermined historicist kitsch - a city by Michael Graves as bad joke- and Nolan's (in The Dark Knight) is modernist post Jacques Tati and Dan Graham and Alphaville/Tokyrama, Hong Kong by Godard, John Woo and Ringo Lam; but also Edward Yang's Taipei. Objects and structures framing windows and mirrors are now less important than the light that passes through or reflects off them.

Yi Yi

Two posts from the past on the old WLIB and the politics of Air America.
Now gone

Democrats in elected office are not that 'liberal,' they're Republicans without the courage of their convictions. The Republicans lead them where they're afraid to go on their own, and then they blame "the people." Josh Marshall et al go back and forth from laying blame and decrying the blame game.
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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There is the question of "right answers" and also of what we value. Does the court in Citizens United describe what we value now as a country? Did the court, in Brown v Board of Education describe what the nation valued at the time?

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As always: what applies to the democrats applies to the "serious" culture of the country as a whole.
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A friend pointed out who David Walker works for.
I watched the clip, not the show.

From recent archives

Something to add to the list.
Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).

The Modern age begins around 1500 with the Renaissance, not the Enlightenment. That big shot college professors who call themselves humanists could say otherwise, and in the most offhand way, is just bizarre to me. On my mind again, since I've just found more examples.

The implications are not good.
The US should go in under cover of the UN, even if it's only a facade. But Americans are always on the lookout for another justification for exceptionalism.

Tracy Kidder

THOSE who know a little of Haiti’s history might have watched the news last night and thought, as I did for a moment: “An earthquake? What next? Poor Haiti is cursed.”

But while earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade. And the history of Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters — to floods and famine and disease as well as to this terrible earthquake — is long and complex, but the essence of it seems clear enough.

Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)

Hence the current state of affairs: at least 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Some of the money that private aid organizations rely on comes from the United States government, which has insisted that a great deal of the aid return to American pockets — a larger percentage than that of any other industrialized country.

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