The Berkshires is a bubble of liberal wealth serviced by a frowning Trumpian white lower middle and working class and an immigrant community of smiling ironists on the way up.
The vibe: nostalgia. Dylan, John Prine, The Dead, Mississippi John Hurt and mellow Lou Reed, introduced by voices with the soft tones of easy listening. I've heard Clapton playing with John Mayall more this summer than any year since 1975, and I inherited my sister's copy.
Biles withdrew first from team competition and only later from the individual, but liberals and pseudo-leftists can't make the distinction.
"Antifa as Political Antibodies", by the same author. From Bernard Knox and Ken Graeber, to this.
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| July 28 |
Baldwin and Avedon, now Baldwin and Mailer
Mailer, "The White Negro", Dissent, Fall 1957
Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted. and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.
The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it wits nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?
Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one's own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A. man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people.
II
It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster. the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l'univers concentrationnaire. or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry) , if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence. why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death. to live with death as immediate danger. to divorce oneself from society. to exist without roots. to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short. whether the life is criminal or not. the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself. to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness. and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future. memory or planned intention. the life where a man must go until he is beat. where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day. where he must be with it or doomed not to swing. The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance. quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one's power for new kinds of perception; and defeats. the wrong kind of defeats. attack the body and imprison one's energy until one isjailed in the prison air of other people's habits. other people’s defeats. boredom. quiet desperation. and muted icy self- destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms. one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life. or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society. doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.
A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man. almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz. and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation —that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously. some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War. Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity norjustice unless a man can keep his courage, and this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him feel good became therefore The Good.
So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to—face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk. The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, lob and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In such a pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro had stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could. Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations ofjoy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation, it had the communication of art even where it was watered, perverted, corrupted, and almost killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art because it said, “I feel this, and now you do too."
Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer" Esquire, 1961
I First met Norman Mailer about five years ago, in Paris, at the home of Jean Malaquais. Let me bring in at once the theme that will repeat itself over and over throughout this love letter: I was then (and l have not changed much) a very tight, tense, lean, abnormally ambitious, abnormally intelligent, and hungry black eat. It is important that I admit that, at the time I met Norman, 1 was extremely worried about my career; and a writer who is worried about his career is also fighting for his life. I was approaching the end ofa love affair, and I was not taking it very well. Norman and I are alike in this, that we both tend to suspect others of putting us down, and we strike before we‘re struck. Only, our styles are very different: I am a black boy from the Harlem streets, and Norman is a middle-class Jew. I am not dragging my personal history into this gratuitously, and I hope I do not need to say that no sneer is implied in the above description of Norman. But these are the facts and in my own relationship to Norman they are crucial facts.
Also, I have no right to talk about Norman without risking a distinctly chilling self-exposure. I take him very seriously, he is very dear to me. And I think I know something about his journey from my black boy's point of View because my own joumey is not really so very different, and also because I have spent most of my life, after all, watching white people and outwitting them, so that I might survive. I think that I know something about the American masculinity which most men of my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been. It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one‘s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. The relationship, therefore, of a black boy to a white boy is a very complex thing
There is a difference, though, between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose. Or, perhaps, I ought to put it another way: the thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence; It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally at pain of death I am I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives. It is a terrible thing to say, but I am afraid that for a very long time the troubles of white people failed to impress me as being real trouble. They put me in mind of children crying because the breast has been taken away. Time and love have modified my tough~boy lack of charity, but the attitude sketched above was my first attitude and I am sure that there is a great deal of it left.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki said the only German he ever met who fully understood the significance of the Holocaust to Jews was Ulrike Meinhof.
Baldwin can't recognize that Jews aren't white. He can't see Mailer's desire—Jewish desire—to assimilate, and the ability to pass. It's the central theme of Zionism and of Jewish life after the founding of Israel. It's the subtext to everything Mailer wrote.
"For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history,..." Mailer can't imagine the millennia of nameless slaves, serfs, and peasants. And Mailer and Baldwin both can't see a France beyond the tasteful intellectual bourgeoisie of talk and food and wine, oblivious to the romance of determinism and revolution, nihilism and utopia that was modernism. For both, America and Americanism is the center of the universe, and Europe is the other.
The White Negro begins with a passage from "Born 1930: The Unlost Generation", by Caroline Bird, Harper's Bazaar, Feb., 1957
Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying low. . . . You can’t interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can’t be shared with “squares.” He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.) . . . it is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times, he does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. . . . As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words.
Before the hipster, Bird describes other types.
The Corporate Man
Corporate man is easy to find. We found him through the personnel director of a multi-million dollar corporation. As an executive trainee, twenty-eight years old. he was used to being probed. polled and tested, and he answered our inquiries with a poise beyond his years. He took his present job. he volunteered. because the company had a reputation for treating everybody fairly and taking a real interest in you. He's happy in personnel work because he likes people. His wife likes them too—they have lots of friends in the new suburban develop- ment where they live. Her photo. graph comes easily out of his wallet and shows a pleasantly pretty. some what earnest girl in babushka and slacks. holding a baby. He talks easily. too. of their life together. He has no objections to the standardization of his home. The builders did a fair job. and he has built in his own touches of individuality—flan outdoor barbecue that is different in design from his neighbor's. a storage wall a that neatly includes the TV set. He speaks of the friendliness of development living, of block parties. shared responsibility for baby-sitting and car pools. He makes it clear that his is no life of quiet desperation. Its similarity to that of his neighbors doesn't depress him. In fact. he finds it reassuring: neither he nor his wife believe in being “cliquey.” Religion? They go to the Presbyterian Church because they like the minister and the Sunday school is the most popular, even though he himself was born a Unitarian. Politics? He guesses both parties are pretty much alike, but he voted Republican because he liked Ike and he's never forgotten that Ike ended the Korean War. It was the only war he was ever in, and it was enough. Reading? He wishes he had more time for it, though he subscribes to a weekly news magazine and the Reader’s Digest. His wife manages to read most of the best-selling novels. but he prefers nonfiction. He read Love Or Perish, and thought there was a lot of truth in it, but in general he likes books that give you information.
The interviewer can’t help feeling he’s really much nicer than Babbitt—more sensitive, less ambitious, more genuine. He is a good listener, attentive to nuances of personality. Personality, in fact, is one of his words. He speaks of it as if it were a commodity, something that can be manufactured and sold. It’s what he likes in entertainment figures. It’s what helps you to get along (he never says “get ahead"). His own personality seems so smooth that, for all his ingenuous frankness, the interviewer has a hard time getting a purchase on him. If he had gone to Princeton, he would have been known approvingly as “tweed"—the Ivy League slang for “regular guy" which describes him in terms of his uniform and leaves one wondering whether there is an unknown and possibly quite different man inside the clothing.
The Intellectual
While today’s young intellectuals would. for the most part, repudiate the notion of conformity. they are certainly less in conflict with the conventional ethos of their time— less adventurous and less embattled —than the intellectuals of the 1920’s and ’30's: the maverick and the Bohemian are becoming increasingly rare species among the young. Like his contemporary in the business world, the young intellectual prefers the security of working for a large institution to the hazards and high hopes of independence. and his sights are firmly set on the universities and the foundations. As a writer, he is more apt to devote his energies to scholarship and criticism, which will further his professional status. than to fiction and poetry. As a social animal. his style of dress and living, while informal. is more likely to be conventional than not. As a voter, he was probably for Stevenson, but by and large he is leery of political involvement. For one thing. the "loyalty" inquiries of recent years—though he had strong feelings about the issues at stake—impressed upon him the danger of going out on a political limb. In the second place, the whole climate of the age is not one in which causes are flourishing....Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the young intellectuals—an unusual one for this tribe—is their modesty. They are distinctly less dogmatic, assertive, exhibitionistic than their counterparts in previous eras. They are interested in their inner life, but they do not expect to interest everyone else in it.
She begins her list of categories with this
The Revolt Against Sexual Experiment
“I'm sick of hearing almut my father's generation as the lost generation.“ the heroine of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness says of her philandering father. "They weren't lost. They were losing us." To the generation born 1930 sexual laxity no longer seems smart. Too many of today's young people have felt its results. They have rediscovered—and for the children of divorce, the hard way—that sex has social as well as individual consequences. They are less interested in experiment than in building lasting marriages, and they fervently believe that the proper end of love is a child. Their actions speak even louder than their words. More young women are marrying: in 1920 almost half the girls aged 20 to 24 were single, while in 1953 the figure was down to 21 per cent. Both men and women are marrying earlier: between 1930 and 1955, the median age of marriage dropped a year and a half to 22.7 for men and a little over a year. to 20.2 for women. They are also having babies sooner: 56 per cent of women 21 to 25 are mothers, compared with 42 per cent in 1920.
The Revolt Against Criticism
The generation of 1930 grew up awash in words, victims of a generation hell-bent on explaining itself—in books, on canvas and in endlessly speculative palaver. In contrast, today's young adults are certainly not afflicted by the urge to communicate. Conversationally, they believe in playing it safe...
And ends...
The Future
Where are these silent, smooth young people going? To their elders. they seem to be building a somewhat savorless society, lacking in individual idiosyncrasy, intellectual vitality, or even political responsibility. Certainly they raise troubling questions for the sociologist. How. he asks, can our capitalist economy sustain its dynamism if so few are willing to take risks? What will happen to our culture if there is a continued decline in the American tradition of protest?
There is a chance that while the young seem tame, uncommitted, they may be invisibly moving in a direction so radical that we cannot as yet conceive it. For, as the phenomenon of the United States moved Alexis de Tocqueville to say so long ago: “Time. events, or the unaided individual action of the mind will sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion. without any outward sign of the change. As its enemies remain mute or only interchange their thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great revolution has actually been effected; and in this state of uncertainty they take no steps; they observe one another and are silent."
I should also add this, on Mailer and Baldwin, and the future that came to be, each generation knowing less and less about the past or a world beyond its own experience, repeating patterns of behavior, oblivious.
Especially for young kids first getting into the scene, punk purity is a powerful draw. I remember, as a disaffected teen, my sense was that everything sucked so completely that whatever could save me from the suckiness must feel, at least, as totalizing. The same teenage tendency to view the world as a monolithic either/or that turned me on to college radio and 7" records also made The Fountainhead my favorite book when I was 16. When we find out as punkish adults about the ghastliness of Ayn Rand's politics, it's easy enough to disavow our teen dalliances with Objectivism. But what do we do about punk when we realize that that purity to which we were so drawn was, in fact, homogenizing, exclusionary? That's the question, I realize, of a white punkish adult, as I am, and as are the editors of White Riot. For punks of color, that realization may have clouded the promise of punk from the beginning.
cn: self harm
— Neha Shah (@nehashah_) July 21, 2021
🧵 Last week, I resigned from a teaching job I really loved.
Constant + targeted discrimination from the school’s management about my self harm scars meant that I just couldn’t stay
I’m sharing this bc how schools treat their staff hugely impacts their students -
A historian at Oxford. More of the thread, my highlights
-I’m sharing this bc how schools treat their staff hugely impacts their students --(sorry this is quite a long thread but please stick with it if you can!)-a bit of context: anyone who knows (or sees) me irl will know that I have historic self harm scars on my arms and legs. It’s fairly obvious what they are, but I’ve become less self-conscious about them over time. Nowadays, I barely even think about them, let alone cover them up --during the January lockdown, I was in school every day supervising the vulnerable & key worker kids. One day, a kid asked about my scars + I explained that they were from a time I was unwell. As per school policy, I reported this conversation to a safeguarding lead &-asked for support with future conversations of this nature.
Below is a selection of the responses I received from members of the school’s senior leadership team:...
The medicalization of deviance, of discourse, and the bureaucratization of everything. Teachers should be vetted and then trusted. Shah should have been trusted to communicate her history to the kids going through the same struggle, and she should have trusted herself. But she can't. She asked to be policed, and complains at the result. But passivity reinforces itself: her submission to her "lead" is another form of self-harm. On the other other side of the coin: the earnest acceptance of self hatred as body and gender dysphoria.
Thug life is barbarism. It needs no written philosophy. It needs no defense. It's not opposed to art. As I've said more than once, maybe not here, if art were about morality, killers wouldn't know how to dance.
The philosophical, academic and intellectual defense of barbarism, the theory of barbarism, is no longer barbarism. It's fascism.
That's for Dembroff. Look at the photograph she posted, at the photo of her, and her self-description. Jenner by comparison is merely an idiot male misogynist playing dress up. Drag is the equivalent of gender Orientalism, a fetish for the other. Conscious fakery renders it comic. That's why it's called The Queer Art of Failure. The need to impose the acceptance of fakery on others as reality is... I've said it all before.
The ubiquity of "leads", and "lead investigators"
Professor Insole is the Lead Investigator for a major five-year programme, called ‘Redeeming Autonomy: Agency, Vulnerability, and Relationality’, funded and hosted by the Australian Catholic University, with co-investigators Dr David Kirchhoffer (ACU), Professor Jennifer Herdt (Yale), Professor Kristin Heyer (Boston), and Professor Yves De Maeseneer (Leuven).
Professor Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and film, the contemporary university, Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, and; especially for his work on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. He has lectured internationally and was recently invited as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Ewha University, Seoul National University, and in the winter of 2010 was appointed as the BK21 Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea.He has also served as a lead investigator of several other major multi-institutional research and interdisciplinary initiatives in addition to the Humanities Corridor Project, including the Trans-Disciplinary Media Studio (with SU School of Architecture) and The Perpetual Peace Project, a multi-lateral curatorial initiative partnered with Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the European Union National Institutes of Culture, the International Peace Institute, and the United Nations University.
Too bad for Arendt but likely the checkers on her pieces made them better and I can think of a couple others that might have also been improved with a bit more checking...
This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age" as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization.
I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:
It will not speak of me or others,
Of love or youth, or of anything else,
For it was composed while I was asleep
Riding on horseback.
etc.
To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms, which raised them to the dignity of a ritual. For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulae.
Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace. Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of winter were more real evils. Honours and riches were relished with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery. We, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed.
Then, again, all things in life were of a proud or cruel publicity. Lepers sounded their rattles and went about in processions, beggars exhibited their deformity and their misery in churches. Every order and estate, every rank and procession, was distinguished by its costume. The great lords never moved about without a glorious display of arms and liveries, exciting fear and envy. Executions and other public acts of justice, hawking, marriages and funerals, were all announced by cries and processions, songs and music. The lover wore the colours of his lady ; companions the emblem of their confraternity ; parties and servants the badges or blazon of their lords. Between town and country, too, the contrast was very marked. A medieval town did not lose itself in extensive suburbs of factories and villas ; girded by its walls, it stood forth as a compact whole, bristling with innumerable turrets. However tall and threatening the houses of noblemen or merchants might be, in the aspect of the town the lofty mass of the churches always remained dominant
The contrast between silence and sound, darkness and light, like that between summer and winter, was more strongly marked than it is in our lives. The modern town hardly knows silence or darkness in their purity, nor the effect of a solitary light or a single distant cry.
All things presenting themselves to the mind in violent contrasts and impressive forms, lent a tone of excitement and of passion to everyday life and tended to produce that perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness, which characterize life in the Middle Ages.
One sound rose ceaselessly above the noises of busy life and lifted all things unto a sphere of order and serenity: the sound of bells. The bells were in daily life like good spirits, which by their familiar voices, now called upon the citizens to mourn and now to rejoice, now warned them of danger, now exhorted them to piety. They were known by their names: big Jacqueline, or the bell Roland. Every one knew the difference in meaning of the various ways of ringing. However continuous the ringing of the bells, people would seem not to have become blunted to the effect of their sound.
Throughout the famous judicial duel between two citizens of Valenciennes, in 1465, the big bell, "which is hideous to hear," says Chastellain, never stopped ringing. What intoxication the pealing of the bells of all the churches, and of all the monasteries of Paris, must have produced, sounding from morning till evening, and even during the night, when a peace was concluded or a pope elected.
The frequent processions, too, were a continual source of pious agitation. When the times were evil, as they often were, processions were seen winding along, day after day, for weeks on end. In 1412 daily processions were ordered in Paris, to implore victory for the king, who had taken up the oriflamme against the Armagnacs. They lasted from May to July, and were formed by ever-varying orders and corporations, going always by new roads, and always carrying different relics. The Burgher of Paris calls them " the most touching processions in the memory of men." People looked on or followed, " weeping piteously, with many tears, in great devotion." All went barefootted and fasting, councillors of the Parlement as well as the poorer citizens. Those who could afford it, carried a torch or a taper. A great many small children were always among them. Poor country-people of the environs of Paris came barefooted from afar to join the procession. And nearly every day the rain came down in torrents.
Then there were the entries of princes, arranged with all the resources of art and luxury belonging to the age. And, lastly, most frequent of all, one might almost say, uninterrupted, the executions. The cruel excitement and coarse compassion raised by an execution formed an important item in the spiritual food of the common people. They were spectacular plays with a moral. For horrible crimes the law invented atrocious punishments. At Brussels a young incendiary and murderer is placed in the centre of a circle of burning fagots and straw, and made fast to a stake by means of a chain running round an iron ring. He addresses touching words to the spectators, "and he so softened their hearts that every one burst into tears and his death was commended as the finest that was ever seen." During the Burgundian terror in Paris in 1411, one of the victims, Messire Mansart du Bois, being requested by the hangman, according to custom, to forgive him, is not only ready to do so with all his heart, but begs the executioner to embrace him." There was a great multitude of people, who nearly all wept hot tears."When the criminals were great lords, the common people had the satisfaction of seeing rigid justice done, and at the same time finding the inconstancy of fortune exemplified more strikingly than in any sermon or picture. ...
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning. Towards the end of the Middle Ages the ground tone underlying life is one of bitter despondency. The note of an assertive joy of life and of a strong confidence in an individual’s powers, which permeates the history of the Renaissance and that of the age of Enlightenment, is barely audible in the French-Burgundian world of the fifteenth century. Was life really more unhappy then than usual? It may, at times, seem to be the case. Wherever one looks in the sources of that period, in the chronicles, in poetry, in sermons and religious tracts and even official documents—with few exceptions, only the traces of strife, hatred and malevolence, greed and poverty seem to have survived. One may well ask, was this age incapable of enjoying nothing but cruelty, arrogant pride, and intemperance? Is joyfulness and quiet happiness nowhere to be found? To be sure, the age left in its records more traces of its suffering than of its happiness. Its misfortunes became its history. But an instinctive conviction tells us that the sum total of happiness, serene joy, and sweet rest given to man cannot differ very much in one period from that in another. The splendor of late medieval happiness has still not completely vanished; it survives in folk song, in music, in the quiet horizons of landscape paintings and in the sober faces seen in the portraits.
But in the fifteenth century, it is tempting to say, it was not yet customary, it was not in good taste, to loudly praise life and the world. Those given to the serious contemplation of the course of daily events, and who subsequently pronounced judgment on life, were accustomed to dwell on only suffering and despair. They saw time coming to an end and everything earthly inclining to ruin. The optimism that was to rise beginning with the Renaissance, and to fully bloom during the eighteenth century, was still unknown to the French mind of the fifteenth century.
etc.
It’s the public proclamation of loyalty to a subculture; documenting the need to belong; atomization and the rise of pathologically over-determined imagined communities etc. etc. etc. It’s the sociality of baroque individualism.We now have food geeks as well as science geeks, all with the moral philosophy of Asperger’s patients: so fixated on their mania for [tube amps/Pouilly-Fuissé/Ducati two-stroke engines] that you’d be a fool not to hire them for your [high-end audio store/restaurant/Soho motorcycle salon]. Why be a well rounded adult when you can be an eternal [pre]adolescent and expert, and a happy cog and servant?
I'll quibble with Haskell, and with Huizinga. The Renaissance was lost to the Enlightenment. Descartes was an anti-humanist; Huiizinga was a humanist. And "Baroque" individualism was the wrong term. I was using Jason Stanley's definition against him, but scholasticism is not Baroque.
For, though the word Humanität had come, in the eighteenth century, to mean little more than politeness and civility, it had, for Kant, a much deeper significance, which the circumstances of the moment served to emphasize: man’s proud and tragic consciousness of self-approved and self-imposed principles, contrasting with his utter subjection to illness, decay and all that implied in the word ‘mortality.’
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I'm never going to read the new translation for pleasure; it's a product of 1990s academia. The 1924 edition, a collaboration between Huizinga and Hopman, was a product of the intellectual life and culture interwar Europe. Haskell: "(Huizinga’s style is said to be of the utmost distinction)". We're left to assume he wasn't able to judge for himself. I'm not either, but I trust Huizinga, and the older translation gives me shivers. He was a humanist in an anti-humanist age; the contradictions are in the voice.
For utopia, is anti-politics
The clueless narcissism of the American bourgeoisie.
WHEN I FOUND MYSELF in Chicago, I used to meet Lauren Berlant for a drink. I asked Lauren to pick a place, and the place they chose was a bar in a Whole Foods grocery. This is one of the thousands of things I learned from my intellectual hero Lauren Berlant: in Chicago, the Whole Foods has a bar.
It’s not what I would call a charming bar, but Lauren seemed to appreciate the genericness. Genre was one of their favorite topics, after all, and anyway why should we pretend to be people who would never set foot in Whole Foods? Lauren told me they liked to write here. The supermarket was crowded and fluorescent; I think it was a hideout, too.
I drank beer. To tell the truth, I would have preferred a cocktail, but I wasn’t sure whether this bar would serve me one, and I wanted to get my drink quickly, inconspicuously. I didn’t want any fuss. On this point, it turned out, my philosophy differed from Lauren Berlant’s.
I remember Lauren asking for a sparkling water with bitters. It wasn’t on the menu. It disturbed the flow of our transaction at the Whole Foods bar. In fact Lauren tried to engage the bartender in a whole conversation about bitters. What flavors were available? Any unusual ones? The bartender didn’t have very much to say on the topic, but Lauren kept at it. The exchange turned awkward a long time before it ended. At least once, Lauren and I exited the bar and walked out into the grocery part of the Whole Foods, where there were more bitters to choose from.
And this was hilarious
Berlant clarified the relationship between the “commons” and sensibility, challenging the normie “structure of feeling” framework that pervades much cultural Marxism,...
"Cultural Marxism!" And on and on.
THE FIRST TIME I met Lauren Berlant a bottle of Diet Sprite exploded in their hands.
Endlessly tickled by trivia researching my family history book. Today I learned that my friend Yasmina Keynes is related to me via an ancestor Ismail Mazhar, Darwin’s first Arabic translator. Her daughter is a descendant of Darwin himself as well as his first Arabic translator
— Hussein A H Omar (@chebhocine) July 13, 2021
It brings me no joy to say this, but I think my sample size is large enough at this point: Israeli restaurants do hummus better than Arabic restaurants. I can’t exactly figure out why though. Part of it is that Israeli restaurants make hummus the centerpiece instead of a side
— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) July 16, 2021
Recommended by John McCormick
There is a long history of controversy concerning the best way to vindicate democracy as a desirable and legitimate and/or authoritative political regime.1
1 Political legitimacy and authority have a complex relationship. In democratic theory, most scholars take the two to be related: John Rawls refers to the ‘legitimacy of the general structure of authority’ (1993, p. 136); Tom Christiano, following Joseph Raz, explicitly states that ‘the idea of legitimate authority as a right to rule to which citizens owe obedience gives each citizen a moral duty to obey, which it owes to the authority’ (2008, p. 242); Fabienne Peter uses legitimacy to qualify the notion of political authority, which under democratic institutions belongs to the people—‘democratic legitimacy thus qualifies the right of the democratic constituency to impose laws and regulations on itself’ (2009, p. 56); according to Philip Pettit, authority and legitimacy go together (2012, p. 149). However, some are more resistant to tying up the two. Allen Buchanan famously distinguishes political legitimacy from authority, claiming that the latter concept is dispensable (2002, p. 703) and he takes democratic decision- making to be a condition for both legitimacy and obligation (2002, p. 714). Daniel Viehoff refers only to ‘genuine authority’ and avoids talk of legitimacy altogether (2014, p. 340). David Estlund (2008) and Niko Kolodny (2014a, b) distinguish between legitimacy, which identifies moral permissibility of coercion, and authority, which constitutes the moral power to issue authoritative commands. For the purposes of this article, however, no distinction is required.
The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures.
Democracy doesn't need the vindication of philosophers, of John Rawls, Joseph Raz, David Estlund, John Roemer, or Chiara Destri, never mind Locke or Mill. Democracy doesn't reduce to a "truth". It's an amalgam, cobbled together by participants in a vulgar theater philosophers claim to rise above.
Googling Destri I found a video with Jan-Werner Mueller. It makes sense.
Following academics, the whole thing becomes depressing. I used to defend Jadaliyya but it still ends up the elite pretension to leftism without irony, because academics now are incapable of it.
I've met two men who came to the US from Europe at the beginning of WWII, got off the boat, signed up and returned to fight. One was a director of Wildenstein and Co. and the other was Leo Castelli. The director of Wildenstein was a third generation dealer; he sold to the rich but was bourgeois to the core. He told me his history while standing in the hallway of the building. He raised his foot on an antique chair and leaned on his knee. "This country has been at war almost continuously since 1945". He shook his head. The American revolution was one of the few that hadn't devolved into tyranny, and this is what it had become. He was an antifascist because like the tattooed and scarred Parisian pimp, he "understood", but he despaired at Cold War militarism. He was a high bourgeois anti-anti-communist.
The first time I met him I'd walked in off the street and he'd come out of an office. He said they didn't get much traffic without appointment, but it was a public gallery. He was smiling. Anyone who knew enough to want to be there should be welcome. I asked him the next time I saw him if he was a Wildenstein. His eyes widened "Oh no!". It seemed less a denial of wealth than of vulgarity.
Something new at the end of this.
Another example of the same argument, the product of the same drift, without the scholastic's need to separate philosophy from literature, pretend theory precedes practice. In both the religiosity is just under the surface, but rationalism is always the religion of mandates, looking down, and the metaphysics of empiricism looks out and up: iconic/hieratic vs narrative/demotic.
Communism is materialist Hermetic gnosticism. Hermetic gnosticism is a catastrophic luxury belief. Nobody will understand this tweet except Leftists, who might go ape-shit about it.
— James Lindsay, uncitable (@ConceptualJames) July 4, 2021
you can't use the clown emoji bro that's language which is structure which is structuralism which is interpreted through postmodernism which means we are contingent products of our culture and times which therefore means we don't actually have agency which means
— Syka 🧦🗽✊🤘🔆 (@demondogkid) July 5, 2021
