Material Language

I rewrite extensively sometimes. If it's anything topical I don't hide anything. Still working on this one. All notes.

What offended me about the original post at Savage Minds was that those for whom a sophisticated understanding of language is supposedly part of their job -for whom language is a tool- would find it necessary to study a minor decorative art to gain an understanding of craft. From the draft of an article linked in the post [PDF]

Through understanding imagination as a generative force in practice, we can reconsider the role it has been scripted in theories of culture. Practice is not that through which we imagine, the cockfight is not a theatre of expression and display of what the Balinese men might imagine themselves to be, as Clifford Geertz argues. Imagination is an imperative of practice itself. The more deeply you imagine, the more deeply you practice – and, conversely, the deeper the practice, the deeper the imagination. Practical imagination, material imagination, the imaginative substance of practice complete with all in which the practice itself is engaged, embedded, intertwined, as a constituent element of practice itself is constitutive, not expressive, of culture- imagination, the lungs of culture. "

The author's mistake is in forgetting that language is material
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Posted elsewhere but rewritten, and expanded (and expanding)
Art and criticism are joined in a fruitful antagonism, and historians and biographers are in a similar relation to those they study. But while artists may hate critics and biographers may dream secretly of supplanting their subjects in authority, only Theory as presently constituted is seen by its adherents as preceding and superior to practice.

What place do arguments from a "naturalized" epistemology have in artmaking? What place have they had in theories of Modernism and of modernist culture-making?
The foundation of theory is in its analogical relation to the sciences. Intellectual design is intellectual engineering, words replacing numbers. Theory reverses the connoisseur's placement of cause and effect, not in defense of a preferred moral truth but of a proposed logical one, and doing so attempts to undermine the role of historical/retrospective knowledge.

Theory has its origin in the prerogatives of Modern criticism, and in a very specific variant of Modernism. My experience, and here I'm publicly treading private ground, is with what I've come to think of as something post-Talmudic. "In the beginning was the word." If the first man was a believer, the second was a critic. The artist was at worst a maker of graven images, at best no more than secondary. Combined with the Modern telos of progress we get the myth of the critic as "social" scientist and not as describer but prescriber.

If art is defined as a free imagination at play, it is defended because that freedom is assumed to perform an important function in society. Action and exegesis are divided not absolutely but unevenly between artist and critic as between history and historian. Theory argues against this division of labor in both cases: history is secondary and a free imagination is unnecessary (often leading to irrationalism.) Art under theory, as culture under neoliberalism, is illustration, advertising, or indulgence.

I want to write something on Yi Yi as pattern making -invention- and observation. Good art as good empiricism always defeats theory.

As a general comment for those who are having trouble following along:
The best art in the romantic tradition, and I'm using this example only because it would otherwise seem to contradict my point, is the art that best describes romantic desire to those who would otherwise have no interest. The art that has come down to us as the most sincerely romantic has also come down to us as minor, at most secondary. That includes bad Beethoven.
Got me?

The last generation has marked the ascendency of technics in the social sciences. In the past few years I've run into a lot of melancholy if not openly miserable technicians. What am I supposed to say, I told you so?

In US public discourse, Finlandization is generally seen as a form of humiliating appeasement, and something to be avoided at even a very high cost. (Strange, then, that these same westerners have consistently been urging the Palestinians to accept a deal from Israel that gives them terms considerably less favorable than what Finland won from Moscow?)

Read the comments as well.

Statements of the the obvious
And another one, less obvious

And we should not kid ourselves that we will find Democratic allies in Congress or the Obama campaign that are going to argue that our policy has been all wrong all along. That will never happen. If this conflict becomes a matter of debate in the presidential campaign, it will not be over the wisdom of the overall policy. Obama would be abandoned by the foreign policy Establishment in a New York Minute.*

Reading around more, I'm now not so sure that's true. There's a real fight going on. Here are Anatol Lieven and Scott Horton. But Henry Farrell is a very specific kind of idiot.

"But this also implies that Steve’s suggestion – that Western powers should have traded off Kosovan independence for recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – would have been an even worse option. It would have been tantamount to an effective recognition of spheres of influence,"

Farrell is incapable of seeing anything through an imagination other than his own. He has the best intentions -I won't argue- but he also assumes his own impartiality. And he seems unable to tell the difference between his moral right to state as a private citizen that there should be no spheres of influence and his responsibility in arguments concerning the behavior of state actors who act on the knowledge that they exist. Moral seriousness is not moral responsibility. Manners are not actions. The US supports democracy when it's seen to suit our leaders' definition of American interests but otherwise is happy not to. Pakistan is only today's example.

All this ties into my annoyed but sloppy comment here.
Craftsmanship manifests self-awareness. Experience is private, but the communication of experience through a common medium -the definition of craft- re-situates us and returns us to the public world.
Art is less expression than description:

"Try writing a dialogue where the implications of each speaker’s words undermine the stated intent... try writing a dialogue [for two] that’s also a quartet."

Attention to craft can reverse-engineer an understanding of the complexities of experience, can make evident how much we craft our relations otherwise without thinking, how much we construct patterns in response to pattern, as reflex. Again this returns to the difference, and tension, between invention and observation. I almost want to say that con men are empiricists and marks are unfailingly rationalist.
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* Cognitive dissonance two days later

Maureen Dowd doesn't root for Democrats. She uses her column to mock Democrats, drive wedges between Democrats, and to reinforce negative stereotypes about Democrats.

I guess the point is not that she's always wrong but that she's insulting and frivolous.

Clark refers often to the origins of Modernism in the striving of the petty bourgeoisie, caught in the push-pull antagonism of individual and community. By the end of the book we find him celebrating the lyrical overreach of Adolph Gottlieb.

If successful Modernism is overreach laced with irony, then the next step is to admit that Modernism was from the beginning caught in a dance of or to the death with Kitsch. Modernism at it's best was nothing more than a formally subtle (rigorously beautiful) argument for the efficacy of kitsch desire: an intensely, desperately, mediated dithyramb against mediation. And Fascism was nothing less than Modernist desire, replacing the formal argument with the fist in the face.

notes

“Engagement” is not success, [engagement is unending] and [an interest in] efficiency limits engagement by focusing on ends rather than means: product rather than process.

At 11d:
“In fact, we seem even more unhappy about the rugrats than we did in the past. Some point to the increasing difficulties of mixing work and family.”
People no longer see self sacrifice as a form of engagement: a form of pleasure. Individualism makes for lousy parenting. [cf. the second link here]

Inventiveness is now called “creativity.” [This follows from the assumption that ends are more important that means.] Observation, previously the basis of art, is considered secondary and reflection (an uneconomic activity), a waste of time.
I thought this stuff was covered in Freshman Comp, if not 9th grade english class.
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There’s no secularism without absurdity, though some people seem unaware of that.
A little serendipity for you.

“I’m guessing that there’s already a ton of papers…”
Most literature ever written, in any language. But now I’m reduced to quoting Talking Heads lyrics. It’s shameful.
I’m ashamed.

Heaven
Heaven is a place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens.

I used to like that song because it encapsulated the intellectual curiosity of early adolescence.

“Does this desire to participate in the institution of competitive soccer amount to a vision of the good life? If so, would a really rational person be willing to transcend the principles of this institution when reason demanded that?"

Does this desire to participate in the institution of the law amount to a vision of the good life? If so, would a really rational person be willing to transcend the principles of this institution when the guilty go free?

This post and many of the comments have to represent some sort of low point in the history of human life.
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John Quiggin 08.08.08 at 5:45 am
Seth, if you had even once, in your long history here, contributed anything valuable, or even coherent, I might be inclined to pay some attention to your assessment. As it is, I can only invite you to take yourself elsewhere. Whatever others here may decide, I’ve certainly had enough of you. Consider yourself banned from commenting on my posts.

Chris Bertram 08.08.08 at 6:59 am
John, I’ve now removed all SE’s comments from this thread by marking them as spam. He’s banned from my threads too.

And then he spends a half hour reading my site.

"-as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality."

And I'm supposed to respond to this fantasy life how? With respect? With deference?

John Wayne in The Searchers. John Ford, 1956


Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, Oil on canvas, 7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4"

On the one hand the comparison is obvious to the point of banality; on the other it's a secret, hidden in plain sight. The image of John Wayne in the doorway has become iconic but has to be seen as synecdochic. A movie frame is not a movie. It is by definition a mediocre photograph, incomplete. Films are built in overlapping images of action and out of a variety of perspectives and contexts. Time is the primary constitutive element.

Both images above are arguments for something, but Newman's is less argument than statement or aphorism. Not predicated on context itself it nonetheless requires one to be understood. Claiming to stand alone, it doesn't. By comparison, and this is dangerously glib, the Searchers is about the claim itself. Both works may come to the same conclusions but only one is loaded with caveats and doubts. One is made to be iconic, and the other is a description of how that same icon is constructed

Klub Kid Kollectivity: I'm alone, I'm everyone

I'm expanding this and including all of Bertram's post, for the record and just to make it clear. The italics are mine.

2003: Chris Bertram hearts Colin McGinn.

Sometimes, when I’m reading or listening to a paper which excites me with its novelty and brilliance, perhaps because it contains some really elegant move, a mental image comes into my head of Steve McManaman running with the ball, circa 1996. Colin McGinn, writing in the latest Prospect about how he became a philosopher, would see the parallel

The metaphor that best captures my experience with both philosophy and sport is soaring: pole vaulting, gymnastics and windsurfing clearly demonstrate it, but the intellectual highwire act involved in full-throttle philosophical thinking gives me a similar sensation – as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality. (Plato indeed thought that acquiring abstract knowledge is a return to the prenatal state of the immortal soul.) There is also an impressiveness to these physical and mental skills that appeals to me – they evoke the “wow” reflex. Showing off is an integral part of their exercise; but as I said earlier, I don’t have any objection to showing off. In any case, there is not, for me, the discontinuity between sports and intellectual activities that is often assumed. It is not that you must either be a nerd or a jock; you can be both. It has never surprised me that the ancient Greeks combined a reverence for the mind with a love of sports: both involve an appreciation of the beauties of technique skilfully applied. And both place a high premium on getting it right – exactly right.

2008: Henry Farrell hearts My Bloody Valentine.



...not even as a guilty pleasure. Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum -the violence and warmth- of neurological overload. Henry Farrell as rationalist, rational actor, and club kid.

Clark on Jackson Pollock [Farewell to an Idea. Chapter 6] makes arguments for Pollock's Modernism rather than concerning it.


Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, National Gallery of Art
When he refers to "the nightmare of Modernism" his Modernism is the dreamer, not the dream. The nightmare is that Cecil Beaton was right.

Cecil Beaton for Vogue, The New Soft Look, 1951

The nightmare for Colin McGinn is that My Bloody Valentine was right.
[No. The nightmare for Colin McGinn is that they would be seen as his rightful descendants. And they are.
Cecil Beaton was right.]

I added and then removed a fact that I think belongs here. Unless I'm misremembering the song above is the one that was playing when I ended up in the emergency ward -outpatient- with a self-inflicted knife wound. I was dancing.
It's not a question of indifference to experience, but of an a necessary return to a questioning empiricism.
I have memories of a childhood ecstasy that the closest I'm come to seeing described in print was a paragraph from one woman's description of the onset as a young girl of schizophrenia. Soon is basically one sonic image of the dance of death as led by the skipping children - "unkillable infants"- of a laughing god: it works on those attuned to it first and foremost as reflex. And awareness of that does as much damage to its dream as Chris Farley's radical recontextualizations of Goth Talk. And isn't that also what Beaton does to Pollock?

It's not a question of philosophical truth. One of the mistakes of Modernism is to imagine that questions of right and wrong, or correct and incorrect, apply to art. In the end art is always no more or less then a record of our preoccupations, whatever they may be. At it's best it exists, after the fact of its making, as both the most honest and most intimate description of ourselves and our failures. Preoccupations are not truths except to admit that we have them. The question for Pollock, or My Bloody Valentine, or Cecil Beaton is whether they are giving us a rich description. I would say Beaton undermines Pollock without offering us anything better. What that would be, and who would supply it?

I had a more cutting, more glib, version of this up. I probably should have left it.

Atrios: "I Roll My Eyes. Nothing else to do."
In response to this:

"Uniformity of style is one of the depressing aspects of globalization, and nowhere more so than in the [...] business."

I'd agree that wine isn't the most important example, but connoisseurship is not simply refined taste -or even refined taste in inessentials- its refined awareness and the ability to communicate that awareness to others: it's both awareness and description. Written with a capital "C" it implies snobbery, but otherwise it's simply the most complex manifestation of social engagement we have: not simply a record of preferences, but of the enjoyment of sharing them, and of refining or altering them through discussion. It's a form of observation that reflects back on us as self-awareness, beginning with a very simple question simultaneously about the world and oneself. "Why do I like X? " "Why do I like Tolstoy?" "Why do I like blondes?." Fandom or unquestioning enthusiasm by comparison is little more than narcissistic (passive) self-obliteration.

Expertise of course is not based on self-reflection at all. It's an interest in externalities in which the very notion of preference is elided. I'll repost this from a few days ago:

There's a mode of argument that renders one passive and irresponsible before an ideology. If one assumes American exceptionalism one doesn't even have to argue for it, and in arguments on foreign policy one then becomes merely a calculator, objective and neutral, or just indifferent. Arguing for what you believe rather than from it makes you human: reengages you and reminds you that you're responsible for your choices. We're all capable of sliding into unreason. Those who imagine themselves -who analogize themselves- as calculating machines are capable of greater errors, and greater crimes, because they've insulated themselves from doubt.

Connoisseurship is the foundation of intellectualism. Expertise without it is just itself (or even less: a symptom). Anyone is capable of sliding into arguments for or from unreason. But of the two anti-social unreason is far more dangerous.

Again "Awaiting moderation"

Excuse me Daniel, I posted a link concerning a war between a nominally secular state (one backed by secularists as a triumph of modernity) and those whom that state has thrown off their land. First came "waiting for moderation," then nothing: gone. Or does a military occupation by the champions of modernity and democracy not warrant a reply?

In a related note: Eric Shinseki writes a letter

I am greatly concerned that OSD processes have often become ad hoc and long established conventional processes are atrophying. Specifically, there are areas that need your attention as the ad hoc processes often do not adequately consider professional military judgment and advice. . . . . Second, there is a lack of strategic review to frame our day-to-day issues . . . . Third, there has been a lack of explicit discussion on risk in most decisions. . . . Finally, I find it unhelpful to participate in senior level decision-making meetings without structured agendas, objectives, pending decisions and other traditional means of time management.

The military isn't run on democratic process, but its a process nonetheless. And Rumsfeld never thought it was necessary. We use processes because no one has a monopoly on reason. I don't give a shit if my neighbors think the moon is made of green cheese. I do give a shit if they think they have a right to barge in my house and put a gun to my head and steal everything I own. Cracker or Body of Christ, neither is the point except to absolutists; and absolutism makes for lousy politics. 300 comments fighting over that obvious point.

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On another post at CT Henry Farrell writes

A bunch of Democratic foreign policy types, which once included Susan Rice of the Obama campaign, have come out with a new document, the so-called Phoenix Initiative. Now in one sense, manifestoes like this are ten a penny at this stage of the election cycle – they’re the calling cards that foreign policy elites use to try to sell themselves to a potential incoming administration. But what’s unusual about this one is the near total lack of self-congratulation about the US as the one essential nation, leader of the free world etc. Instead, the document’s main message...

is not the point here. Here the main thing is a question: How would one define "American Exceptionalism" as anything but a faith, now gratefully becoming but not yet a shibboleth?
The best argument for leaving others alone in their bizarre beliefs, for being curious but not contemptuous, is the recognition of your own capacity to believe things equally as odd. That argument -that possibility- never occurs to some people. DD was unable to articulate it.
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Rereading. The Painting of Modern Life. Discussion of the Goncourts. Their critical observations of the changes around them being picked apart by Clark through critical observations of their work and what they represented. And me observing Clark: a never ending process of review.

There's a mode of argument that renders one passive and irresponsible before an ideology. If one assumes American exceptionalism one doesn't even have to argue for it, and in arguments on foreign policy one then becomes merely a calculator, objective and neutral, or just indifferent. Arguing for what you believe rather than from it makes you human: reengages you and reminds you that you're responsible for your choices. We're all capable of sliding into unreason. Those who imagine themselves -who analogize themselves- as calculating machines are capable of greater errors, and greater crimes, because they've insulated themselves from doubt.

"I don’t think in the 5 years I’ve been reading this page, I’ve read one description of a logically and emotionally complex situation that didn’t rely on generalizations, boilerplate and cheap sentiment."

Here's one example; and another dug up by accident.

notes old wine in new bottles

Still waiting for someone to burn the flag of the secular Israeli state.
Still waiting for Blubba to take a stand on the Gaza and the occupied territories.

Tension About Religion and Class in Turkey. Which side are you on Bubba? John? Read the link for once before responding. Both of you.

The issue as I said above isn't religion but the metaphysical valuation of inanimate objects as anything other than themselves. Myers is a modernist and a Platonist. "A brick is a brick is a brick." as someone once said. "Whaddaya mean Love is a rose? Love is an emotion. A rose is a goddamn plant!!"
It's no longer an argument over delusions, but over whether its possible for a secularist to be delusional. It is, obviously.

There is no god. God is a McGuffin. [Look that one up. Learn something.] God, and the Host, are synecdoches for community.
Weinberg, a much more important figure in the movement to which Myers belongs, the self-described "Brights," is a self described Platonist and secularist. I have no idea how it's even possible to be both. I linked to his book Facing Up: Science and it's Cultural Adversaries and its Chapter 15. Zionism and Its Adversaries This is the Platonism and reason of a Nobel Prize winner. Racism.
I will not defend the politics of Platonism. That link is to a screed by another "Bight" quite famous in his field.

We exist as objects in the world of facts. We live as creatures in a world of perceptions. It's a mistake to pretend that as creatures we have unshaded access to the world of facts. Desire for unknown facts is not reason but desire. Falling in love with rocks and insects is not more valuable to our society than the articulation of the ambiguities of perception as they relate to justice and law in a community. The rule of law is not the rule of reason. In the rule of reason there are no laws. The doctrine of Stare Decisis has no place in science but is central to our political order.

It is always a mistake to assume. As I wrote on an old post at Myers' page

Scientists do tend to be optimists. But they also tend to use words like 'truth.' as in 'ultimate truth' but truth is a term of metaphysics, and science is not concerned with truth but FACTS; facts which are mundane until someone has the desire to discover them and then revert to it after the post coital glow of discovery has faded.

You defend assumption and desire. And in doing so you act to defend the crimes of those who share your assumptions.

Colin McGinn "Philosopher" and Bright

I myself see a close link between democracy as a dogma and the idea that everyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's: that is, between equality in respect of voting power and forms of relativism about truth. For if people's opinions do not have equal value, how can we justify giving their votes equal power?

And again

Well, if truth, reason, virtue, etc are not objective qualities that people exemplify to varying degrees, but are rather relative to each person, we have a way out: everyone is as smart and good as anyone else to himself. Then democracy rests on no lie, since everyone really is cognitively and morally equal. Relativism steps in to save democracy from its noble lie. Thus relativism finds a foothold. But relativism is rubbish; so where does that leave democracy?

Myers is small town pedant who doesn't even know what he's defending.

note taking

Brian Leiter, Simon Blackburn, Richard Posner, Colin McGinn, the “New Atheists, ” all share Chomsky’s rationalism and his idealism. All more and more express contempt for democracy and the “illiterate” “irrational” majority. Chomsky is on record for his contempt for empiricism as a methodology, but empiricism, as a journalist, is what’s made him as famous as he is. Put that list of names above alongside the link to Kos above [Kos the hack political operative]. Perhaps Chomsky’s a good reporter because he thinks it’s just banality, so he shrugs and does his Joe Friday act. It’s a better model for the press then we have now: he doesn’t take himself seriously.
But Chomsky is a defender of democracy because of what he assumes about people and their behavior Those assumptions are ridiculously simple-minded, in fact self-serving, but he sticks with them, while those who share his modernist rationalism have replaced that naive hope with arch cynicism. But he seems oblivious.

Intellectually Chomsky is in a time warp; his idealism concerning humanity as such is as dated as his linguistics, but he’s still a hero to the young. Yet when he’s caught being sloppy or indulgent he never admits it. He tries to argue his way out of anything, even if it would he easier to just own up and move on. It’s the same with his philosophical arguments. His brilliant imagination is also thin and brittle. You can contextualize him, as a post war rationalist, and still value his insights. But you’ll always have to pick and choose what to keep and what to throw away. True with anybody actually. But context, history and ambiguity, empiricism, are not things he takes seriously. However good a reporter he is, his intellectual model as a thinker and a philosopher, and his model of the world, is deeply deeply flawed.

This and the previous [two down] taken from discussion here. Another commenter linked to a post by Markos Moulitsas, "Kos." It's a good one. Very basic stuff, in a good way.

"The model of intellectualism as expertise elides the earlier questions of preference. The myth of individual self-invention renders such questions irrelevant, renders history irrelevant. The subject imagines himself founded not on preferences developed in infantile experience, as reaction and response, but as something generated solely by himself, godlike, and yet impersonal, objective, Platonic. "

Posted elsewhere

False consciousness is Chomsky's rationalist assumptions as to the roots of human behavior. It's abb1's simplistic assumptions concerning the US; it's Engels' conflation of his own righteous anger with thoughtful analysis; it's Henry Farrell's knee-jerk fixation on libertarianism as a means of escape from the backwards reactionary communalism of his country of birth. It's Miracle Max's disgust with Gangsta Rap and effusive praise for the psycho killer revenge porn of Dexter, which allows him to vent his frustrations at the world and the idiot adolescent blogosphere from the comforts of a rec room in suburban Maryland. The most violent rap is flooded with tragedy. Dexter by comparison is more the cynical marketing of symptom . It's corporate gangsta-pop.
And Max is one of the good guys. What makes DD and Max and Perrin bearable is that all of them start from and cultivate their own subjectivity, using reason as a tool to argue what they believe: in fact what they assume, and hope. You'll never hear any of them claim "Reason made me an asshole" or "The numbers made me do it." And they're all assholes too. God luv'em.

What are the economics of the passive voice?
Assume: People act out of self-interest.

What are the economics of the ambiguities of the the world?
Observe: People are greedy, and yet they're often torn. Many, even most, are raised not to be greedy so live negotiating the anxiety of multiple and conflicting obligations.

But if they have multiple obligations, then people are not free, and don't people want freedom?
By and large, people don't want freedom, they want respect. Freedom is an invention, in fact, an illusion. It's an idea and an idée fixe, never a reality. People who celebrate it are celebrating themselves. As it exists in this world it's the freedom of newborn babies laughing and rolling in their own shit and sociopaths who kill without anger or regret.

The logic of the passive voice: The assumption that people are monads does not begin with observation but the preference for monadism. Show the supposedly impersonal logic for what it is: taste, sensibility, reaction, and you'll begin to reconstitute society as social in origin.
Max, put down that computer manual and pick up some Philip Roth. Better yet, read Armies of the Night. And drink more.

Observe: educated liberals act largely out of self-interest but have feel-good hobbies and the most engaged ones the best intentions. Working class conservatives act in their personal lives of out obligation that liberals disdain. Working class conservatives, like educated liberals, recognize the false consciousness of others. You follow me now?

The last lines of this post

If you won’t be in Austin for the conference, you can follow along online in Second Life. See NNinSL.org for details. All the main events will be streamed and they also promise inworld parties and special events. And, unlike the meatspace version, this one is free.

Meatspace
I won't bother linking to a definition. At this point everyone but John McCain knows the word or understands the meaning. The question concerns not what the word means but how it does so: its history and genealogy and the implications of its use, the terms of it's defining the relation of the psychic world to the material one.

Let's be clear: "Meatspace" isn't the language of dualism, it's the language of dualism and disgust. At least Lawrence Lessig has an excuse: he was molested as a child.

What is Futurism? What's defined it in the past? [and it has a past.] What changes in society does "geek culture" represent? [it doesn't have much of a past at all.] What does it manifest? Rationalism is never without a context. What's the definition of knowledge for those for whom self-awareness -awareness of one's own body, of one's presence as a body among bodies and of your own as a sensing organism- is for whatever reasons out of bounds? What's the rationale of geekdom?

I'll quote an old friend from memory about Warhol:
"People think that Andy said he was a machine. But he didn't. He said he wanted to be a machine and that's not the same thing at all."

What gives you pleasure and why? These are the foundational questions of any intellectual life. What is preference? What do I prefer and why do I prefer it? Tools can't help you with these questions; tools come later. You choose your tools after you choose your preferences. And tools are for adults not 5 year olds.

Geeks dream themselves as asexual preadolescents -constructing a fantasy of preadolescence as asexual- armed with enthusiasm, certainty, and tools. What do they prefer? Why do they prefer it? The model of intellectualism as expertise elides the earlier questions of preference. The myth of individual self-invention renders such questions irrelevant, renders history irrelevant. The subject imagines himself founded not on preferences developed in infantile experience, as reaction and response, but as something generated solely by himself, godlike, and yet impersonal, objective, Platonic.

Notes towards something

The esthetics of oratory- the beautiful argument
The esthetics of sense: the beautiful shape.
TJ Clark: The falseness of the courtesan/The falseness of cubism
The falseness of language in TJ Clarks late writing: the beauty of ideas not as representations but as things. politics is being absorbed back into esthetics as an esthetic criterion. The esthetization of politics, politics for art's sake, so no longer "representative" of anything other than itself as idea.
Eliot, Duchamp, Reactionary Modernism. The preference for language over the world. TJ Clark in his labyrinth.

There's the world and there's what we make of it. The greatest poetry allows each person to experience the gap between the author's representations and the external (and unknowable) but the greatest poetry is always representative. Ming vases are secondary form Architectural is primary (as mimetic.) The poetry of ideas as opposed to representations is secondary and a perverse hybrid, sometimes wonderfully so.
The best Modern art is the art of crisis: of dubious representation overcome by slight of hand: by formal tricks.

The imagery of Modernism is often kitsch [Avant-Garde is Kitsch] Often its mode is pornographic -illustrational- kitsch representation. with the poetry/esthetics recuperated by other means. Duchamp's Fountain is a porcelain figurine; cut to the chase: it's a pussy


It's figurative art: "Manet's Olympia, for 1917"; but it's also a step backwards. It's a step backwards from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, as an act of representation. Les Demoiselles was "Manet's Olympia for 1907." though the painting wasn't shown until 1916, and even then was labeled obscene.
Duchamp's sexuality is closer to Gerome's than Courbet's. He was always the schoolboy, mischievous or twittering (your pick). The curves of his porcelain whore were as blandly stylized as Picasso's beatific bathers from the 20's.


Kitsch: the choice for desire over craft; the short circuiting of process to get results, results that lets face it are always silly. What's a happy ending without a story? Cezanne begins with kitsch, and struggles with it. He was a failed painter before he decided to make his limitations his subject. If his work succeeds as representation it's only in the representation of the space -physical and psychological- between the object and the eye. Only one step away from the representation of "ideas."
Clark is doing Pynchon in reverse: tightening up, ending up Harold Pinter. Ending up a Modernist.

On the subject of rationalism, rationalization, and cowardice; on empiricism and the responsibilities of awareness of others as others. From June 2005, as my mother was dying.

There's a difference between caring for someone, in the sense of emotional attachment, and being attentive to them, to their wishes or their pain. Pain itself is lonely and expressions of sympathy are often theater used to hide incomprehension and fear.
I'm watching the old watch their friend die. They have become professionals at this. They are honest actors: the most aware both of the distances between people, and the similarity of their experience.

Rule#1. Make it idiot-proof.
I hate explaining this shit, but it's all I do. I'm rewriting the last paragraphs.





geek |gēk|
noun informal
1 an unfashionable or socially inept person.
• [with adj. ] a person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest : a computer geek.
2 a carnival performer who does wild or disgusting acts.
DERIVATIVES
geeky adjective
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the related English dialect geck ‘fool,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch gek ‘mad, silly.’
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The bottom two drawings are obviously models of human interaction: either in the present (mediated by language) or in the study of the past (mediated by language and time). The top two are diagrams of common utopian/dystopian fantasies [hopes] of far too many people.
I should have made this clear long ago, but I take people too much for granted.

We study the past not by studying the preoccupations of those who were there but by studying the record of those preoccupations. We live alongside one another through another version of the same process. We cannot claim to share their interests -in terms of the present we can't claim identity- though in some cases we can claim an affinity with them, but there remains a gulf between us and our subjects and each other. This gulf can be wider or narrower depending on their interests and ours. The applications of Mathematics can appear to collapse historical time and the distance between individuals, numbers live in an eternal present and in unity with one another, but we don't.
Our society is a society built upon isolation and simultaneously upon a fixation on a desire/fear of simple absolute unity. Raves and The Borg are products of the same fear, desire, sadness.
A geek is someone who is so wed to his own fixations that he is unable to imagine the world through the mind of another. Americans are the prototypical geeks, unable to imagine non-Americans. But geeks now rule academia, even the humanities. Literature is now studied in academia by literature geeks. Our soldiers are military geeks. That specifically is dangerous, but so is the rest.

The above is, objectively, how the world works. It's the diagram for water-cooler chitchat, presidential elections, academic advancement, and how to pick up girls. It's the model of life as theater, assuming of course that actors know they're being observed. It's the model for intellectual "progress" in that progress is only possible if the model is seen to apply to human behavior. It is also, therefore, a defense of the arts, of craft, as a mode of reflexive activity and social engagement [lawyers are craftsmen]. It's the model of artists' relation to one another and of artist to critic, if the critic sees himself as in a reciprocal relation rather than that of a voyeur vampire. That's what the social sciences become when they're seen not as acting within models of interpersonal activity but of relations of observer to inanimate object. The sciences and the pseudo-sciences have become not only asocial but antisocial. I've linked to Colin McGinn enough, but I've been pointing out examples of this for years. "Truth" is the metaphysical glow that attaches itself to unknown facts. It fades with familiarity and those facts return to their previous status as mundane.

If you don't understand that the most of what you are and represent is constantly being recontextuaized and that if you are remembered at all it will be as that, then you have no right to call yourself an "intellectual." You're merely a technician.

Reading any text, examining any man-made thing you ask yourself what to respond to: text or subtext; the intention of the maker or what the thing seems on its own to represent. Ideally you learn from both but perhaps you have no way of knowing the maker's intent. You can still you learn to respect the maker of a resilient, dynamic, order -a structure- and can begin to reconstruct the categories he worked with that were his preoccupation. You always ask: “Is there more to learn from this author as thinker or as symptom." Meeting someone on the street you ask: "Is this someone to laugh at, or with?" The lasting stuff never becomes dated. The memorable minds are never merely symptomatic.
Phillip Roth is a practitioner of philosophical naturalism. Brian Leiter is an academic and a professor of a minor branch of the minor school of late 20th century scholastic philosophy. Post-war rationalism, late modernism, baroque idealism: these are the categories that will be seen to define that school of thought. These are categories of history, not reason.
At some point this will become so obvious that even Ph.D's will understand it.

To any readers from Savage Minds, if you want, type McGinn's or Leiter's last name in the search bar above. Otherwise this is just note taking: The same shit, but some good lines:

Language is public. Numbers are impersonal, indeed anti-personal, but are also private.

There's a lot in that one. Definitely a keeper.

Technical disciplines make status definitions relatively simple, and if anything tend to encourage competition to the point that competition becomes a central aspect of the discipline itself. Any culture of technical expertise is a bubble culture and of limited interest to outsiders; but If you seek to generalize from that bubble out into the world, as if it were the world, it becomes what’s called a ghetto culture. But the world is not the lens through which you choose to see it.

Leiter’s academia is a ghetto culture, and he spends as much time discussing gossip and academic bed-hopping as philosophy. But he does not discuss the philosophy of bed-hopping. If he were I’d have more interest.
It’s not status-seeking that annoys me it’s the status-seeking of moralizing priests. McGinn like Leiter claims to be an atheist and a freethinker, but neither come close. McGinn is obviously a product of his experience and of his time, in ways that he will not admit. He’s blind. We’re all products of culture. We’re not all hypocrites.
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The rule of law is the rule of chosen words in the common language and the rule of argument over their meaning. That argument itself is constitutive of democratic society. Language is public. Numbers are impersonal, indeed anti-personal, but are also private.

“I remember… when we used to sit
In the government yard…
in Zagreb,”

Feh

[Rough. I'll fix it later. I'm sick of this shit.]

As always I return to the same points: the necessity for (and the obvious presence of) divided loyalty among individuals [or "nodes"] and the strange willingness of academic intellectuals to accept self-reported data as long as they're the one's reporting it.

No one network can foster both dynamism and stability, only multiple overlapping networks, constructed among the same points. The only way to avoid recognizing this easily demonstrated fact is if out of little more than ideological bias, you choose to see yourself as undivided, as a unified reasoning mechanism. There is no evidence for this in human history.

The definition of a renaissance is of a moment of dynamic tension between individuals and community. It's not freedom that produces such moments. but the discovery of freedom by those still bound by obligation. The dynamism of social democracy is the dynamism of self-interest held in check by community. I've been reading recently that Descartes is associated with the birth of the subject. The only people who could argue this are those ignorant of both Michelangelo and Shakespeare. I myself would say Masaccio, whom Michelangelo revered. Self-awareness begins not with a fallacious clarity but with an acknowledgment of anxiety and doubt.

Why has no one ever responded to my comments over these past few years about my old landlady and our neighbors who refused to charge market rent? There has to be a way to put this data [and it is data!] into an economic model. Why does DeLong throw up his hands in frustration at the existence of the Scandinavian model? The answer is that economists like DeLong and you can't allow for the presence of competing imperatives in the same body: people must be either selfish or selfless, they must make a choice! But they never do. The genius of European social and cultural life is not idealism (far from it) but the pressures that designate money and wealth as vulgar, that keep the fact of it a little below the surface. A community of entirely and openly self-interested monads will fail. So a statement that "all people are self-interested" means nothing, unless it is tied to a further statement "all people are bound by obligation."

Another study someone should make: Compare Google to Apple. Google deals in information and money and in the the esthetic of the abstract and intangible. [On money and invisibility I owe a debt to my old roommate. I'm one of the two dedicatees for that paper so I'm returning the kindness.]

Apple is preoccupied not only with abstraction but with the material presence of it's products, not only with conceptual but physical design. It's an example of a boutique capitalism that's also as a result self-limiting. The only way for Apple to go beyond it's chosen niche would be for it to be joined under a conglomerate cf. Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Steve Jobs will never be as rich as Bill Gates and Apple will never be as malign a force as Microsoft, or this site's chosen idol, Google. You prefer the latter because unlike Microsoft, it's a competent organization, but if anything that makes it more dangerous. Competent hegemons always are, yes?

Again and again: The genius of our justice system is not in complex networks but in the adversarial relations of two: the prosecutorial network and the network of the defense attorneys. The genius of consciousness is not in one complex system but in the overlaying of neural networks of computation with those of conditioned response that compete and contradict.
It doesn't matter how complex your system is. If you're only building one you're wasting your time.

This is still a provincial country. And It's not that anti-intellectualism is so prevalent but that American political intellectualism is seen as antidemocratic, not only by those who distrust it but in fact by those who advocate it. Intellectualism and it's opposite are equally individualist and atomistic in origin: "I can speak for others" vs. "No one can speak for me." Communities are founded out of necessity or fear, but thinkers dream of "freedom." It's the dilemma of America that individualism and democracy are in conflict.
Cultural intellectualism is something else: apolitical, anti-political, expatriate, or sincerely democratically indulgent. But I know of no other country where the class of political thinkers -or of those who want to consider themselves in that role, left and right- are so incapable of seeing themselves through others' eyes, all while being so urgently, arrogantly, indulgently, sincere.

It's not only about idiots like David Brooks, but bright men like DeLong and Krugman, Josh Marshall and Robert Reich; about worried Zionists who think that a willingness to talk about Palestinians is the same as a willingness to talk with them, and then while refusing to admit the original error, are willing to talk to them without seeing the need to take them seriously. The same process holds for the history of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Over time people acclimate, and rationalize in defense of whatever assumptions they may now have, but they themselves were never wrong and of course they are not now. For an American who takes himself seriously the observation that his understanding may be incomplete is like an accusation of mortal sin.
Will American liberals ever understand that they're mocked for their hypocrisy as much by European Social Democrats as by conservatives in their own country? Will they ever realize that its not the contradictions that damn them but their inability to see that they exist?