Richard Serra from 2013, 2011, 2007, and 2003
2011
repeats
Thoughts have become concepts.
Concepts are called objects.
Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers.
Contracts are called instruments.
Banking has become an industry.
Politics and economics are called science.
Rationalism has become empiricism.
Metaphysics has become physics.All that is solid melts into air, and all that is ephemeral becomes material.
1— Coming Soon Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society
The shift from the sale of physical computer hardware, frst to packaged software and then to web services as the basis for success in Silicon Valley, fostered a frm belief that “code” could and should solve most problems facing society. For the region’s “technological solutionists,” disregard for legal rules, hierarchies of knowledge, and existing organizational forms was the price of progress. There were echoes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who also acknowledged capitalism’s astonishing power to rip up the world and replace it with something new and almost incomprehensibly dynamic. “All that is solid melts into air”: capital discards obsolete technologies and flls up junkyards; it sheds the chrysalides of antiquated social structures, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake; it mocks ideas whose time has passed and incites the laity to pray to new idols. The metamorphosis is painful for everyone, even capitalists. To survive, they too must undermine their own production base. Joseph Schumpeter, himself a fne reader of Marx, termed the process “creative destruction”: the opening of new markets, the creation of new capacities, and product innovations, which “incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within, forever destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”27 While the new revolution was made of code rather than coal, scripts rather than steam, its language and im- agery was curiously and inescapably industrial. Code was made, it seemed, in forges, with engines, through pipelines, by foundries—an entire metaphorical world of intensely physical production was conjured up to represent the activities of people who spent their days in front of screens, typing. They were not writing; they were building. Soon they would be mining also.
2—Something almost as annoying: Alberto Tuscano, "Undoing Oslo", NLR
Eid teaches English literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and is a founding member of the BDS movement. He is the author of ‘Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo, as well as the editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba (2017), a collection of writings by American, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals which makes the case for one secular democratic state. As part of the systematic scholasticide visited upon the Strip – an intensification of Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinian intellectual life – Eid’s university has now been obliterated along with all other higher education institutions in Gaza. Scores of its academics and students have been murdered; all have been displaced and are now facing famine.
Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught, which Eid and his family were eventually able to escape because of his South African citizenship. A prologue, dated 26 October, captures the scale and ubiquity of the destruction: ‘I am standing over the ruins of a house in Gaza City, peering at the horizon. Most probably, the body of a martyr lies under the rubble. The body of someone who could not respond to an Israeli “warning.”’ In a poetic ‘out of body’ meditation, Eid surveys the pulverized landscape as if from the standpoint of a ghost. A further prologue, composed in Rafah five days later, describes his efforts to evade Israeli bombs with his wife and young children, fleeing from the razed Gaza City neighbourhood of Rimal to the north of the Strip and then down to the border with Egypt. It concludes by reiterating the demands for a ceasefire and ‘immediate reparations and compensation’, as well as one democratic state.
As I said elsewhere, if a rebel has a gun and uses it while also writing poetry I might want to read the poems. If a man with a pen and a foundation grant writes poems and calls them bullets, odds are I won't.
This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT.
For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.
My blogging is about two things: (1) the radical changes wrought by modern communication technology; and (2) the inability of the epistemic technologies of the written word to understand point (1).
I find this dialectical tension to be generative, but I can see how readers looking for answers might find it unsatisfying.
A recent paper in Nature, titled “Online images amplify gender bias,” makes the point in a more familiar format. Consider the first full clause of the first sentence of the abstract:
“Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images”
BOOM. Footnoted: “Time spent reading. American Academy of the Arts and Sciences https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/time-spent-reading (2019).”
I’ve frequently claimed that the age of reading and writing are over,...
It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year.
So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I’ll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest Noah, but I know him to be a genuinely decent person. What he says of Acemoglu and Johnson is what I’ll say about him – his heart is in the right place. Sometimes … he does not go out of his way to make himself lovable to lefties, but as someone who has been known to get involved in stupid and tendentious spats on the Internet myself, I’m in no position to heave rocks at glasshouses.
And Gaza, on actual politics (class and foreign relations, social in every sense), as always, useless: passive, hand wringing, willed ignorance and worse. Anglo-American left liberals are unreadable. I don't even pay attention anymore. I'm not going to waste my time with CT. If you're not following opinion outside the bubble, including the bubble of the western left, and the west itself, there's not much to say. I try. I follow what I can.
Again, the importance of Palestinian political scientists and Arab academics (writing in english) is that they exist. It's got nothing to do with any inherent value in academia.
Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.
meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”
— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024
A lot of Israelis seem to have convinced themselves that the world is so irrationally set against them that their own conduct becomes irrelevant to how they are seen in the world, which gets them stuck in a cycle of overreach, backlash, and paranoia.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 12, 2024
Coetzee likes to trespass on his own fictional territory. In Elizabeth Costello (2003) he was quickly on the scene to pause the action and deliver a little lesson in the nature of fictiveness: ‘The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.’ And so on.
The origin of all this "meta-fictional" crap isn't fiction—Shakespeare is "meta-fiction" by default.
"The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."
And then
The 'seriousness' of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really is a question of art.
