Role Play indeed.

Dylan Riley, Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Field, dept. of Sociology, UC Berkeley, 

in NLR, "Decapitalizing Culture", (filed under society) 

There are countless debates among sociologists and economists concerning the terms ‘human capital’ and ‘cultural capital’. The general view is that the former implies a rational instrumental attitude to the attainment of skills, whereas the latter suggests an investment in what Bourdieusians call illusio: the denial that the game of culture is in fact a game. Iván Szelényi once characterized the distinction slightly differently, writing that human capital denoted skills that are rewarded because of their contribution to productivity, while cultural capital was fundamentally a claim to rent. It seems to me, however, that we ought to be raising a different set of questions. In particular, it is important to ask: under what historical conditions does culture take the form of an ‘asset’ or ‘quasi-asset’? 

John-Baptiste Oduor, editor at Hamasmag, in NLR, "Role Play", (filed under culture)

Untitled (Woman Standing Alone) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990, © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Oduor previously, on Charles Mills, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Weems belongs with Hammons.

repeat. It's absurd how much is lost when the goal of disinterest devolves into a fiction of objectivity.

Stanley Hoffman reviews Distinction 

But if “using rare words and tropes in place of common words and phrases” is a strategy of “deliberate transgression” of the norms of clear prose characteristic of the dominant classes and is opposed to “the hyper-correction strategies of pretentious outsiders,” then Bourdieu is a master strategist. Words such as lexis, allodoxia, chiastic, askesis, espace hodologique, hysteresis, and of course habitus (and, indeed, hysteresis of habitus) are scattered throughout the text. That a work of social science should—”unlike the sometimes illuminating intuitions of the essay”—require an effort on the part of the reader is fair enough. Here, however, reality disappears into the hypertrophied rhetoric of the Ecole Normale.

Simply as a critic, never mind the pretension to politics, Oduor doesn't know enough. A first person essay about why he likes the work, what it means to him as a writer, would be the only honest choice, but he'd never make it.

"There's no point in having sharp images if you've got fuzzy ideas. Leacock's lack of subjectivity leads him ultimately to a lack of objectivity. He doesn't even know he's a metteur-en-scene, that pure reportage doesn't exist."

“Documentaries are thought to have the same relation to social change as penicillin to syphilis.”

Jeff Wall: [Referring to Delacroix] Violence is only a theme in this kind of art; the art itself isn’t violent. That makes it very different from, even opposed to, the art of the avant-garde, which expresses aggression against the idea of art itself. This aggression is no longer viable. I don’t think its necessary or possible to go beyond the idea of bourgeois art -that is of autonomous art- towards a fusion of art and its context. Or if its possible it isn’t very desirable. We have learned how the aggression against autonomous art was consistent with aspects of totalitarianism, from the Stalinist period for example, and how state violence could benefit from that kind of aesthetic. The concept of art as autonomous, and therefore less amenable to that kind of instrumentalization, is a central concern of the modern, and I’m most sympathetic to that. 

A-MB/RM: Modernity and avant-garde, to you, are two separate things? 

JW: We can’t confuse them anymore. 

"A Democratic, a Bourgeois Tradition of Art: a Conversation with Jeff Wall" 

Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews 

Chevrier, cited by Odour, is in the same volume. I have a lot of respect for Wall, and I've watched him work a room. See previously on Hammons. Fine art is conservative, or it's reactionary. And Fried is a fucking idiot. Always a moralist, I should have guessed that when when he adapted to change he'd become a fan of Greuze.

“more a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing”

rewritten a bit, for fun.

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With friends like these...

Jed Perl

Over the years I’ve had conversations with friends, often artists, who tell me they much prefer Bonnard to Matisse and Braque to Picasso. For them it’s Bonnard, not Matisse, who understands the poetry of the everyday. And it’s Braque, not Picasso, who gives Cubism a lyric power. 

Danto

When I started reading The Sight of Death, I, too, thought this was the chance of a lifetime. Poussin had always left me cold, and though Richard Wollheim was one of my closest friends, part of my life, really, he was never able to awaken much enthusiasm in me for his favorite painter. But there is nothing more enriching, I have found, than to stand with someone I admire—an artist like David Reed or Knox Martin, say—and listen to them talk about the work before us.

Those two paragraphs were almost enough to make me stop reading. Danto. aka "Miss Piggy" didn't look. It took too much effort, or sense data scared him. He read or listened to other people's stories and found things to match his assumptions. And name-checking Knox Martin is a notch below name-checking Paul Jenkins, though both bring out a certain sense of of nostalgia: a mural by the West Side Highway and Allan Bates in An Unmarried Woman. 

I haven't read The Sight of Death, but Clark comes off well here, on Poussin, and the book. When he's not defending a "project", only looking the only way we can, from a point-of-view—honestly from his own experience—he's very good. You can write about an artwork to write about yourself. Every portrait is a portrait of its painter: A Titian is a Titian, not a Charles V.  If scholars are obliged to tip the scales away from themselves, as they get older they begin to tip back. 

What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.

Clark was always a conservative. Radicals are iconoclasts; art historians are at most the loyal opposition. Perl is a conservative committed to art at the expense of any commitment to the world, the commitment that makes art itself possible. 

Perl, Authority and Freedom, the blurb

Perl embraces the work of creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. He contends that the essence of the arts is their ability to free us from fixed definitions and categories. Art is inherently uncategorizable—that’s the key to its importance. Taking his stand with artists and thinkers ranging from W. H. Auden to Hannah Arendt, Perl defends works of art as adventuresome dialogues, simultaneously dispassionate and impassioned. He describes the fundamental sense of vocation—the engagement with the tools and traditions of a medium—that gives artists their purpose and focus. Whether we’re experiencing a poem, a painting, or an opera, it’s the interplay between authority and freedom—what Perl calls “the lifeblood of the arts”—that fuels the imaginative experience. This book will be essential reading for everybody who cares about the future of the arts in a democratic society.

Houellebecq has now confirmed the obvious. He never lied. He described his perceptions as a man whose world is dying. I'll take Houellebecq's truth over Macron's lies.

In the long run, if a still extant artwork isn't relevant to our interest in the past it's ignored.

Fried is such a rube

If a single question is guiding for our understanding of Manet’s art during the first half of the 1860s, it is this: What are we to make of the numerous references in his paintings of those years to the work of the great painters of the past? A few of Manet’s historically aware contemporaries recognized explicit references to past art in some of his important pictures of that period; and by the time he died his admirers tended to play down the paintings of the first half of the sixties, if not of the entire decade, largely because of what had come to seem their overall dependence on the Old Masters. By 1912 Blanche could claim, in a kind of hyperbole, that it was impossible to find two paintings in Manet’s oeuvre that had not been inspired by other paintings, old or modern. But it has been chiefly since the retrospective exhibition of 1932 that historians investigating the sources of Manet’s art have come to realize concretely the extent to which it is based upon specific paintings, engravings after paintings, and original prints by artists who preceded him. It is now clear, for example, that most of the important pictures of the sixties depend either wholly or in part on works by Velasquez, Goya, Rubens, Van Dyck, Raphael, Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Le Nain, Watteau, Chardin, Courbet . . . This by itself is an extraordinary fact, one that must be accounted for if Manet’s enterprise is to be made intelligible. It becomes even more extraordinary in the light of his repeated assertions, the truth of which cannot be doubted, that he had only tried to be himself and no one else. His pictures, he wrote in 1867, were above all sincere: “C’est l’effet de la sincérité de donner aux oeuvre un caractère qui les fait ressembler à une protestation, alors que la peintre n’a songé qu’à rendre son impression.”* This statement and others like it rest on familiar assumptions of mid-century realism. But they raise the further question of how those assumptions can be reconciled with the scope and explicitness of his involvement with the art of the past.

*It is sincerity which gives to works of art a character which makes them appear an act of protest, when in fact the painter has only thought of rendering his own impressions.

“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".  Leo Bersani

The only time I've cited Bersani straight[!], and it's taken from Nochin's "Imaginary Orient"

Fried's realism and Bourdieu's Flaubert. 

"Impressions" are not "the world as it is"; they're the world "as I see it".

Courbet and Manet are remembered for good paintings that are directly related to their bad paintings that are ridiculous kitsch. They both struggled to do something, and we're left to think about what that is.

repeats. Clark on Mike Davis 

Marxism, whatever else it may be, is not a view of life. It seems to do best when it is grafted, often improbably, onto a deeper metaphysics – Messianic half-hopes, Hegelian negativity, existentialism, even a dazzled vestigial faith in poetry or music.

He would claim that as a strong defense of his "projects". It isn't.  But it is a description of the desperation Clark, and Davis share with Courbet and Manet, and many others, resulting in great hopes, wishful thinking—reach exceeding grasp—in art and life, formal rigor and melodrama: the story of modernism. 

At some point I began to assume humanprovince was a woman but recently he's referred to a wife. No guarantees but I'll switch. It's not the point anyway. This was a good one 

I have always really appreciated that France gets heavy hitters to do their x for dummies books. 

"Bourdieu argued that racism was the core structure of the colonial polity, and that colonial regimes transformed even nonracist Frenchmen into racists. The colonial system "creates the ‘contemptible’ person at the same time as it creates his  contemptuous attitude” (1958, 1962)"

I day later Steinmetz is rt'd by Jäger, the earnest European intellectual anti-colonialist, with exceptions.

Jäger then rips John Ganz a new asshole for his criticism of Jäger's article about Putnam.                           

"Simply doing a copypasta from an undergrad reading list is not a refutation of an argument."

The article itself is stupid, and Jäger is blind. He's in another league in sophistication and academic decadence, above Ganz, but they're both self-important soi-disant leftist intellectuals, debating the leftist response to Trumpism while (1) having nothing to say about Zionism ["Because it is something colonial" (Herzl to Cecil Rhodes) ], and (2) petty bourgeois reformers are the ones doing all the work and winning. Maybe the intellectuals should just shut up. 

Fetterman and Warnock don't pretend to be leftists and are pathetic on Israel, but most Palestinians are petty bourgeois realists, and I follow their lead.

---

I opened my copy of Goffman's Presentation of Self... again, to a random page and read a few paragraphs.  The same response every time: Don't we know this already, living around other human beings? The first time I read him I thought of Godard. 

"There's no point in having sharp images if you've got fuzzy ideas. Leacock's lack of subjectivity leads him ultimately to a lack of objectivity. He doesn't even know he's a metteur-en-scene, that pure reportage doesn't exist."

It could've been Wiseman, who consistently underplays the politics that Godard overplayed, for a while. It could have been Panofsky, or Auerbach. 

And years later I read Jay Rosen on journalism. This country is so backwards. 

I had a conversation with a historian of science specializing in 19th c. Germany, and Goffman came up. "Isn't what every old Rabbi is supposed to know?" He agreed, or at least didn't argue.

By pure coincidence, today. Wolf Liebeschuetz, East and West in Late Antiquity. 

From the author's introduction, also an elegy. 

I have been interested in history as long as I can remember, inspired by my mother. She was a doctor and research physiologist,1 but she had to leave her research institute at the Hamburg University Hospital at Eppendorf on get- ting married, and was stopped from exercising her venia legendi at Hamburg University by the National Socialist government. She therefore had plenty of time to devote to her three children, and particularly to myself, the eldest. She told fairy tales, and drew pictures to illustrate them. One of her favourites was Heinrich Hoffmann’s König Nussknacker und der arme Reinhold (Nutcracker king and poor Reinhold). She had an extraordinary visual memory, which enabled her to reproduce that book, text and illustration, from memory for her eldest granddaughter nearly thirty years later. Mother regularly told us stories from the Bible: the creation, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the exodus from Egypt, Saul and David and Jonathan, selected incidents from the Books of Kings, and the heroic story of the Maccabees. In an account of our life under the Nazis that mother wrote she records that she had learnt from her parents that a fighting spirit is the only antidote against the low self-esteem experienced by outsiders, such as the Jews, and that this is what she was nursing in her chil- dren. She also related the stories of the Trojan War as well as much more recent history, notably of the “victorious war” of 1870−71 and “the lost war” of 1914−18, in accordance with our patriotic perspective of those days. I seem to remem- ber that Hindenburg, then president of Germany and in some ways the man who let Hitler in, figured quite prominently. Mother also read from a series of books by Elisabeth Averdiek about a Hamburg family in the first half of the nineteenth century. I particularly remember an account of the great fire that destroyed much of the old city in 1842. I also heard quite a lot about Napoleon and his campaigns from the memoirs of Louis de Ségur, Napoleon’s aide-de- camp. Later, mother read us a lot of plays, mainly historical ones: Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (as well as the autobiography of that knight with an iron hand); Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, his Wallenstein plays, and Jungfrau von Orleans; and then Shakespeare, first in German translation and later in English, starting with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and going on to Henry IV Part I and Macbeth. So history played a prominent role in my early life.

I have not yet mentioned my father, Hans Liebeschütz, who was a historian. He had received the classical education then provided by German gymnasia at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg. When he left school he wanted to become a rabbi and had spent 1913 as a student in Berlin at the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums, a seminar for training Liberal rabbis. He was at the same time registered as a student at Berlin University, where he heard, among others, Ulrich von Wilamowitz and Eduard Meyer. The impression lasted for the rest of his life. When he resumed his studies after war service in France he specialised in Medieval History. But he kept a particular interest in the language and literature, and especially the history, of the Greeks and Romans. Homer and Plato (especially The Republic) were his favorite Greek authors. Of Roman authors, he preferred Lucretius to Virgil. In the late 1920s and up to 1933 he taught a combination of German, Latin, History, and Religion (Kulturkunde) at the Lichtwarkschule, an experimental progressive school run by the city authorities. At the same time he obtained the venia legendi to teach Medieval Latin and Medieval Literature at Hamburg University. Of course he lost both jobs when Hitler came to power. After a short interval he began to teach at the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where he had attended courses before the war. So in term time he was away from home during the week. But he had many books, which I was free to look at and read. It might be worth mentioning that thirty or so years later my children did not read my books. Fathers are not what they used to be! Their power (potestas) may be much the same, but their influence (auctoritas) has been much reduced. My father’s books included Carl Oppel’s Das alte Wunderland der Pyramiden (4th ed., 1881) (Wonderland of the Pyramids), a book that he had read as a boy, and that I found fascinating as soon as I was able to read it. Another book I read quite early was James Breasted’s Geschichte Egyptens (History of Egypt), a German translation of a book originally written in English, and published in 1936. The library also included Georg Dehio’s Geschichte der Deutschen Kunst (History of German Art). I was fascinated by the architectural illustrations. The volumes are at Nottingham now, and they still show evidence of serious childish misuse As long as I can remember I have been interested in looking at historical buildings, and was sorry even then that Hamburg had so few of them, and that apart from the destruction caused by the great fire of 1842, the citizens of Hamburg had been quite ruthless with their architectural heritage. Since then, of course, the war has destroyed almost all that was left, except for two beautifully restored Gothic churches.

Ten years ago: Dylan Riley on Tony Judt. 

2020, on Erik Olin Wright, 

In ‘a Tale of Two Marxisms’, his stimulating critique of the life-work of Erik Olin Wright, Michael Burawoy raises a crucial question for the left. What is the relationship between capitalist development and the project of socialism? In the classical Marxist schema, the competitive and unplanned nature of capitalist investment meant that manufacturing overproduction would result in periodic, and perhaps worsening, crises. At the same time, capitalism was producing a new class, the industrial proletariat, with the capacity to establish another form of social production based on democratic planning—and with a keen interest in so doing. The scientific analysis of capitalist development was thus intimately linked to the socialist political project. The factory and, later, the large corporation contained the cell form of the planned society to come, while the working class provided the social muscle for its achievement.

The strong point in this account has always been its explanation of the rhythms of capitalist production; its weak point was its sociology of class formation. As Bernstein observed in 1899, capitalist society does not simply produce class polarizations, but a host of intermediate positions as well. Subsequent thinkers, from Sorel to Wright and Burawoy’s ‘sociological Marxism’ and beyond, have pondered whether these layers could unite in an anticapitalist coalition.2 Yet as Burawoy points out, Wright’s interventions in this discussion were somewhat paradoxical. Rather than producing a new synthesis of class analysis and socialist politics, the two demarcated different phases of his intellectual career: class theories and empirical investigations of increasing scale and complexity preoccupied Wright through the seventies and eighties; the ambitious international project of Envisioning Real Utopias and its satellite volumes consumed his energies over the next thirty years. In this cursus, class analysis and real utopias seemed to have little to do with one another.

This poses what Burawoy correctly identifies here as the central conundrum of Wright’s work: the move 'from a class analysis without utopia to utopia without class analysis.'

2017, on Bourdieu

Given this intellectual and political profile, it is quite understandable that Bourdieu would be an unavoidable point of reference for the contemporary intellectual left: a brilliant and indefatigable sociologist who combines the intellectual sophistication of Lévi-Strauss or Jean-Paul Sartre with the empirical rigor of Anglo-American survey research and ethnography while also carrying on the venerable French tradition of the engaged intellectual, especially toward the end of his life. Indeed, the social theory that he has singlehandedly created is to the contemporary intellectual left what neo-Marxism was to the students of the 1960s.

Distinctively, however, Bourdieu, while attractive to the avant-garde, also appeals to the stolid mainstream of American social science, whose tolerance for French imports is usually quite limited. What explains this strikingly broad appeal? This essay will consider two accounts: the view that Bourdieu’s is a grand sociological theory (or what I will refer to hereafter as a macrosociological theory) like those of Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, and a contrasting view that Bourdieu’s sociology resonates with the social conditions that char- acterize elite academics, especially in the United States.

Macrosociological theories are distinguished by their explanatory ambition. In particular they have three characteristics: They link structural divisions in society to observable behaviors; they develop explanations for why, given those divisions, societies can reproduce themselves; and they sketch the processes through which societies change. When successful, these theories thus offer some account of stratification, reproduction, and social change. Marx’s theories of class conflict and mode of production, Weber’s sociology of domination, and Durkheim’s accounts of the division of labor, anomie, and social solidarity are all macrosociological theories in this sense. Bourdieu’s work also presents itself as just such a theory, but a close examination of his work reveals that his explanations are often tautological or weak. Indeed, this essay strongly endorses Philip Gorski’s recent claim that “Bourdieu’s oeuvre does not contain a general theory of social change.” This, I argue, poses a puzzle: If Bourdieu’s sociology is largely nonexplanatory, his current popularity cannot be accounted for by the power of its macrosociology.

I then turn to a second account suggesting that Bourdieu’s appeal is based on the unmatched ability of his work to articulate the experiences and political hopes of elite academics in the contemporary period. 

 The last paragraph on Olin Wright. 

This brings us to a simple question. What is the purpose of re-describing the socialist project in terms that confusingly equate it with a variety of patently non-socialist institutions and outcomes, just because these seem to be in some way tangible? The problem of socialism doesn’t strike me as a lack of vision; the goal is human emancipation in every dimension, as it has been from the start. The problem is political: the need for a collective will. Re-describing present-day institutions as if they were ‘partly socialist’ has only a soporific function. Socialists would be better served, in my view, by a comprehensive investigation of their opponents’ resources and an unremitting analysis of the system’s weak links. This, it seems to me, is the most useful way of honouring the memory of Erik Olin Wright.

"the goal is human emancipation in every dimension,..."  After all the clear analysis, it's a pity.

The simplest reminder that I know that utopian bullshit does nothing but undermine the fight for actual existing human decency: Harry Brighouse's sincere belief that Beyoncé Knowles would be a good running mate for Hillary Clinton.

Fallen Rock Stars of the 70s. It should be a tag.

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"the goal..." The other option would be to read it as an explication of conflicts within religious doctrine, with no claims made for the beliefs themselves. But given the source...

A repeat from 2014, with additions, relating to Mark Fisher, art as life, fascism, and the rest.

A friend of mine had it on vinyl, or maybe on a tape. I remember him translating it for me, laughing. 

"Everything is going according to plan." The line gave me a flashback from 20 years ago.

I didn't know about the Adam Curtis Massive Attack collaboration.

Curtis is a political romantic who uses irony only to put himself beyond irony. He refers to desperation and nihilism to indulge without admitting the indulgence, and the denial magnifies it. If art is reification, it describes the maker's desires as the desires of a person, not absolutely as the state of the world. Art is response; it's not the world. The little space between the two is irony.  Curtis collapses that space. What's left is simple determinism.

Curtis is the Chris Marker of the BBC, a romantic reporter of fact. Marker by comparison is just a man observing and responding to what he sees, while admitting that what exists may be something else entirely.

---

Better to say Curtis is cross between Marker and Errol Morris. Curtis annoys me. Morris disgusts me.

Mirowski, "Hell is Truth Seen Too Late"

Recall that neoliberalism predicates itself on the observation that most humans are one or two bottles shy of a six-pack when it comes to rational thought. Hence, anyone who had read Hayek, such as Cass Sunstein, long ago projected that the internet would promote the isolation of people within their own filter bubbles and that this might have implications for the way politics would play out in the future (Sunstein 2007). Sunstein’s reading of the situation was characteristically superficial, leading to his own prescription that people might be “nudged” toward certain political activities without realizing that they were being manipulated by their political over-lords. Others, starting from the same premise, took the position that the internet just naturally tended to degenerate into dreck, especially because so much of it came to depend on “user generated content [UCG]” (Feldman 2016). Neoliberals do not mind blaming any debilitating epistemic fallout on the agents themselves because it reinforces the message that the market just gives the masses whatever they want. Here, however, is where some on the left attempt to push back. Evgeny Morozov, for one, insists that the onus rests solidly on the economic organization of the platforms that structure internet activity (2013). While this points us in a promising direction to understand the neoliberal character of fake news, the indictment may still be misleading: Is the dumbing down of the populace a mere unintended natural consequence of the pursuit of profit, an unfortunate by-product of progress, or is it something else? 

The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has long been warning us that something much larger and more pervasive has been going on well before the contemporary moment of frenzy over posttruth. As he puts it, “We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can’t counter it with a coherent narrative of their own.”27 Curtis finds one incisive theoretical discussion of the new regime in the work of the Russian Vladimir Surkov:

[The pervasive] defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control—and to understand how this is hap- pening you have to look to Russia and to a man called Vladislav Surkov who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisors and has helped him maintain his power for fifteen years, but he has done it in a very new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career say that what Surkov has done is import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.

His aim is to undermine people’s perception of the world so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly-changing piece of theatre: he sponsored all kinds of groups, from Neo-Nazi skin-heads to liberal human rights groups, he even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake.

As one journalist put it, “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable,” which is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year. In typical fashion as the war began Surkov published a short story about something he called Non-Linear War, a war where you never know what the enemy are really up to or even who they are. The underlying aim Surkov says is not to win the war but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.

Here Curtis suggests the approach derives from the traditions of 1980s conceptual art, but in his earlier films, he sought the inspirations in political developments of neoliberalism. While one sector of recent punditry (at least in the United States in 2017) seeks to pin the practice of “fake news” on the Russians, in a manner similar to Curtis, it may be more pre- cise and more comprehensive to regard its advent as a distinctly global phenomenon, with earlier roots. Of course, falsehoods, propaganda, and misinformation have been with us since time immemorial, but what Curtis and others point toward is something far more insidious than George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Once the neoliberal image of the market as both means of conveyance and validation of ideas took hold, then it consequently shaped and informed changes in the very means and conduct of argumentation in general. Befuddlement became an active political strategy very different from the top-down broadcast model of early twentieth-century “propaganda.” The recent fondness for Orwell’s 1984 as master narrative turns out to be another red herring. Now, disinformation rests on the creation of a fog of confusion and disillusion, and less directly on straightforward media manipulation (the bugaboo of the nostalgic Left) than the harvesting through social media of the inchoate folderol of the general populace, subsequently feeding it back to the masses through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and new model “journalism.” Dissimulation rechanneled becomes its own special “spontaneous disorder.”

Surkov saw the chaos and fragmentation in the politics in western consumer societies and sped up the process. He studied theater just like David Bowie and Richard Spencer, but he's the manager. He "discovers" people. Curtis on Russian despair, punks, Letov and Limonov.  I hate fans, and especially fans of the avant-garde in 2021. 

In the acknowledgements of her intellectual biography of Clement Greenberg, aptly titled Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Caroline A. Jones thanks Benjamin Buchloh, historian, critic, and theoretician of left-wing high seriousness in contemporary art, for his “stimulating aperçu regarding the ‘administrative sensibility’ of post-Greenbergian conceptual art.” It’s left at that. 

Mannerism is the continuing defense of old beliefs revealed as empty. They're all you have, and if they're empty you are too, so you embrace the morbid symptoms. The love of knowledge devolves to the love of bureaucracy and filing systems. The love of art becomes the love of style.

Curtis' films are documentaries about heroin with a cast of pixellated fashion models and a humming soundtrack. They work in a narcotic flow. They're made for fans of Gerhard Richter who can't admit to sharing his nihilist passivity. After all the films are merely "documentaries".

Moralizing poets are read in the long run because they describe their failure honestly. Dishonest journalists evade responsibility by living vicariously through their subjects, and as fans they're voyeurs. But a suicidal fascist is no less a fascist because he's suicidal, and the adoration of a fascist is still the adoration of a fascist. See also Jon Ronson.

"Fake news." Before there was Murdoch there was Hearst. 

"Post-truth."  Orwell again, and Henry Farrell and Truth. 

Mirowski isn't defending democracy; he's defending one institutional elite against another, both equally sure of their own status.  

Friedman, as usual, dumbed down the Hayekian message for those with limited attention spans: “Businessmen, who may be bankrupted if they refuse to face facts, are one of the few groups that develop the habit of doing so. That is why, I have discovered repeatedly, the successful businessman is more open to new ideas . . . than the academic intellectual who prides himself on his alleged independence of thought” 

Merchants vs priests, academics, and "scientists". Disinterested reason defends either unbridled self-interest or itself. Either way "truth" is key. And the choices for the majority are few.

STS and Democracy. When political theorists are called scientists, and are horrified that awards granted for theology are given to "charlatans", it's no wonder people are suspicious. But no one demands a democratic vote on how to install their kitchen sink.

Hippie drug dealers didn't start out reading Hayek; they discovered him after the fact. Neoliberalism wasn't invented in a lab. The Lippmann Colloquium wasn't a cause; it was an effect.  "By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile."

repeats.

Quinn Slobodian and Mirowski were two of the editors of Nine Lives of Neoliberalism.
Slobidian blocked me on twitter for reminding him that intellectual history is not synonymous with history. The French, most of them, have a sense of irony that American academics will never get.
It's good that Americans are reading Piketty now and not Bourdieu.

But if “using rare words and tropes in place of common words and phrases” is a strategy of “deliberate transgression” of the norms of clear prose characteristic of the dominant classes and is opposed to “the hyper-correction strategies of pretentious outsiders,” then Bourdieu is a master strategist. Words such as lexis, allodoxia, chiastic, askesis, espace hodologique, hysteresis, and of course habitus (and, indeed, hysteresis of habitus) are scattered throughout the text. That a work of social science should—”unlike the sometimes illuminating intuitions of the essay”—require an effort on the part of the reader is fair enough. Here, however, reality disappears into the hypertrophied rhetoric of the Ecole Normale.

The best defense of democracy is pessimistic. Neoliberalism, vanguardism, radicalism, are all modern forms of inflexible elitism. A program of broad-based public education is a guard against the rise of a ruling class in all its forms: of wealth or expertise.

continuing

---

Film is narrative by definition, even more so than literature. Until recently you couldn’t push rewind; you still can't in the theater. To dream of a non-narrative film is to dream of turning time into the timeless, a human being into an immortal one, into an idea. Ideas feel no pain; they don’t ‘die’.  An idealist working in narrative is always returning to the scene of a crime. That’s why the narrative art of idealists is either formal, hieratic, distancing, or reduces to melodrama, the narrative form of kitsch, either way to forms of pre or post or anti humanism.

Hollis Frampton was a friend of Andre and Stella, and following all the rules of Greenbergian Modernism applied to film, using the  “characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”.  Remember my mother’s insistence–and she was only half a decade years older than any of them–that’s Eliot’s poetry was “about language”.  

Frampton was the son of a coal miner. He was born in Ohio. He says he barely spoke when he was young and described himself as having been “borderline autistic”.  At 15 he wrote himself an application to Phillips Academy Andover, and was accepted in full scholarship.  That’s where he met Andre and Stella. Later he decided he wanted to be a poet and started a correspondence and then friendship with Ezra Pound, but he decided he wasn’t a good poet, and switched to photography and film.

J. Hoberman  calls Frampton’s film-cycle Hapax Legomena  “crypto-autobiographical”. At the same time he quotes Frampton referring to himself as a “a spectator of mathematics like others are spectators of soccer or pornography”[i], again the same dichotomy of incorporeal formalism and base physicality.

Zorn’s Lemma begins with a black screen and a woman’s voiceover, an unprofessional reading of the 24 couplets  (without I or U, following custom derived from Latin,)  of  The Bay State Primer, from 1800. 

 In Adam's Fall/ We sinned all.
 Thy Life to Mend/ God’s Book Attend.
 The Catdoth play/ And after slay.
 A Dogwill bite/ A Thief at night.
 An Eagle'sflight/ Is Out of sight.
 The Idle Fool/  Is Whipt at School. …

The second section begins with the a montage, each shot lasting one second, -24 frames- of close-up images of the 24 letters of the Roman alphabet  (without J or V- reversing/mirroring the above ) in order,  each formed by typing into a sheet of tin foil.  At the last letter the alphabet begins again, this time formed by footage of signs and lettering on Manhattan streets, again each for one second­ –24 frames. The first shot is a hand holding up a large plastic letter A. Shots continue to loop through the alphabet, the photographs for each letter changing with every repeat. Some of the shots are stable, some  hand held, shaky, with camera motion. Gradually over repeated loops the words are replaced with wordless images. The first four substitutions are a bonfire at night (X),  reversed footage of waves breaking on a beach (Z)  a tracking shot of cattails in the wind (Y)  steam from a street vent (Q), for the four classical elements:  fire, water, earth and air.  Some of the substituted shots are repeated on each loop, some, peeling and eating a tangerine, changing a tire, continue on each loop where they’d had left off. The second section ends when all the words have been replaced  images, which coincides as well with the endings of the continuing shots.

The final section begins with an empty shot of a winter landscape with a tree line in the distance. A man and a woman walking with a dog pass the camera from behind and begin to  move out into the distance. Six female voices in succession recite individual words, timed by a metronome at one second each, from a section of  “On Light, or the Ingression of Forms”, by  Robert Grosseteste, a 13^thcentury English prelate and scholastic philosopher. Frampton used his own translation[ii] By the end of the reading, the figures have moved out of sight.

The first bodily form I judge to be Light. For Light, of itself, diffuses itself in  every direction, so that a sphere of Light as great as you please is born instantly from a point of Light.

But Form cannot abandon Matter because Form is not separable and Matter cannot be emptied of Form. 

Form is Light itself or the doer of its work and the bringer of dimensions into Matter. But Light is of a more noble and more excellent essence than all bodily things. 

Since Light, which is the first Form created in first Matter, could not 

abandon Matter, in the beginning of Time it drew out Matter along with itself 

into a mass as great as the fabric of the world.

When the first sphere has been completed in this way, it spreads out its daylight from every part of itself to the center of the whole. This daylight, in its passage, does not divide the body through which it passes, but assembles and  disperses it. And this assembling which disperses proceeded in order, until 

the nine celestial spheres were perfected. 

Matter for the four Elements was assembled within the ninth sphere, which is the sphere of the moon. The ninth sphere, engendering daylight from 

itself, and assembling the Mass within itself, has brought forth Fire. 

Fire engendering Light has brought forth Air. 

Air engendering from itself a bodily spirit has brought forth Water and Earth….

P. Adams Sitney 

In Zorn’s Lemma Frampton followed the tactics of his two elected literary masters Jorge Luis Borges and Ezra Pound. From Borges he learned the art of labyrinthine construction and the dialectic of presenting and obliterating the self. Following Pound, Frampton has incorporated in the end of his film a crucial indirect allusion; it is to the paradox of Arnulf Rainer’s reduction.* In Grosseteste's essay, materiality is the final dissolution, or the point of weakest articulation, of pure light. But in the graphic cinema that vector is reversed. In the quest for sheer materiality - for an image that would be, and not simply represent - the artist seeks endless refinement of light itself. As the choral text moves from Neo-Platonic source-light to the grosser impurities of objective reality, Frampton slowly opens the shutter, washing out his snowscape into the untinted whiteness of the screen.[iii]

* Arnulf Rainer. 1960 film by the Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka, made up of cuts between black and white leader with changes so small, down to one or two frames, that the viewer is unable to register them. It’s a film about film, made to be read about, and ‘understood’ but not experienced. 

Zorn’s Lemma manifests the same paradox we’ve seen before, depending of whom we’re talking about, of autism and the closet: the expressive and insistent denial of expression, of the self. Wanda Bershen, writing in Artforum in 1971, fittingly considering the date, sees this anti-Humanism as liberating. 

Having established itself as belonging to the generic category of "film," Zorns Lemma proceeds to totally ignore normal movie conventions. Not only does the structure lie bare, unclothed by any vestige of "content," but that structure is self-constructed. The film maker has provided a set of conditions and allowed them simply to take their course as if programmed by a calculating machine. A 24-letter alphabet at 24 f.p.s. provides the entire structural frame of the movie. The implication here, of course is that the artist is less "responsible" than usual for his work. Rather than an inventor or "maker" he is a kind of "engineer," a director of forces which already exist in his world.

The 24-letter alphabet is man-made, while the 24-f.p.s. film speed is a requirement of film machinery. Philosophically this suggests a considerably less egocentric concept of the artist than has prevailed even in the earlier decades of our own century. And if the artist is not permitted full control of his creation, neither is the audience. Room is left for real interaction, for real discourse, in "real time" between the spectator and the thing observed. A work like Zorn's Lemma is incomplete without the viewer's participation. If the film is indeed a model for the general category of film-viewing, that fact has broad implications. What does it mean for an event to be "complete"? Does not each interaction of each viewer with each event (or object) produce a unique situation? Is not experience (and therefore knowledge) of every sort finally subjective, and personal, and beyond a certain point, incommunicable?[iv]

Rather than an inventor or "maker" he is a kind of "engineer," a director of forces which already exist in his world. Remember Daston and Galison. This is also a twist on Bourdieu’s mocking of the “singularity of experience” in art, since it “elaborates no laws”[v], and therefore is merely a function of banal entertainment. And now we have an argument that rules and laws promote a singularity of experience because there is no author. Bourdieu’s bureaucratic dehumanization has become a celebration of atomization. 

Allen S. Weiss, writing in October in 1985 is both more aware of the conflicts and more committed to radical esotericism, so even more committed to erudite denial. I’ll begin where he does. 

Copulation and mirrors are abominable. For 

one of those gnostics, the visible universe was 

an illusion or (more Precisely) a sophism. 

Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable 

because they multiply and disseminate that 

universe. 

—Jorge Luis Borges 

I do not believe there is such a thing as a 

perfect appearance. Even an epiphany is not 

in the theological sense a perfect appearance. 

Appearance itself is imperfect, 

— Hollis Frampton 

To the abominations of copulation and mirrors one might add cinema. In a world where error, as Nietzsche teaches us, is the very precondition of thought, truth and beauty are always proximate to sophism and illusion, Cinema disposes of yet another set of codes which are available for ideological misappropriation. This disposition by means of seriality, exemplification, listing, and cataloguing operates within the limits of two antithetical functions. Either such listing is a subversive activity, destroying all taxonomic schemes, or lists serve as formal Imperatives, constituting structures and systems. In the former case, a hermeneutic schema entails a de-centering and de-totalizing logic of events, operating according to the aleatory conditions of' existence. In the latter, a hermeneutics entails a centering and totalizing logic of structures and formal systems, constituting a determinate axiomatics.

Hollis Frampton's film Zorn’s Lemmais structured according to a twofold axiomatic system. The first axiom is indicated by the film's title, which refers to mathematical set theory: "Zorn's lemma. The maximal principle: If T is partially ordered and each linearly ordered subset has an upper bound in T, then T contains at least one maximal element." The second axiom derives from the mystical philosophy expounded by Robert Grosseteste in On Light, or the Ingression of Forms, which offers a combination of neo-Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy to express a theology, ontology, and cosmology of light. A section of this text is read in the third part of the film. 

These two axioms are already figured within the text recited in the first part of the film, the eighteenth-century Massachusetts elementary school lesson book called The Bay State Primer. The production of the sets and subsets in the  second part of the film is determined by a system of substitutions and progressions ordered by the (abridged) twenty-four-letter alphabet of the English language used in the primer. The mathematical axiom is operative in the alphabetical order of the text; the theological axiom is operative in the biblical content of the text. Thus the twofold axiomatic system is articulated according to a double coding: structural and ontological. [vi]

Here he adds a footnote

Thus Annette Michelson is correct to claim that in this film Frampton "translated the contradistinctions between lyric and analytic modes" (Annette Michelson, "About Snow," October, no, 8 [Spring 19791, p, 116), Here, the lyrical is an expression of the mystical praise of God, a  poetic mode of knowledge; the analytic is an expression of the mathematization of sign systems, a "scientific" mode of knowledge. Both trades are expressed by Grosseteste's onto-theoÎogy,

All of this once again is reactionary, as intellectualism and as art. Frampton exhibits a high-brow variant of Mapplethorpe’s self-destruction,  like Borges through asceticism rather than orgasm, but still it’s Arendt’s Vita Contemplativa via nihilism and scholastic philosophy, old and new, because the alternative, mere subjectivity, can never be a truth. Frampton speaks about mathematics and irony, but the ending of Zorn’s Lemma is sadness. “He aspired to recognition as a ‘stoic comedian’”[vii] The phrase comes from Hugh Kenner, writing about Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett.  And this from Kenner’s 1962 article, “Art in a Closed Field” 

Let me put this as flatly as possible: the dominant intellectual analogy of the present age is drawn not from biology, not from psychology (though these are sciences we are knowing about), but from general number theory. [viii]

Frampton’s model was Flaubert, but again it was the Flaubert’s statements, the Flaubert of Bourdieu and pretensions to science, not the novels themselves. Frampton’s art aspires to the art of “Modernism” the art of positivism, an art we only look at now, if we do, because the artist failed in his goals.

The weakness in Frampton’s films is the gap between the earnestness of his desire to make an art without subtext, and the subtext’s insistent presence. The amateurish ‘plainness’ of  the technique, from camera to voiceovers, combined with the rigor of the ideas, mean that the sadness is left to leak in around the edges. And it’s almost shocking to me how much the sadness, the sense of loss, is ignored by critics. His hyper-rationality combined with his intellectualism –two distinct things–­ combine to undermine whatever instincts he had that might have allowed his subtexts have free rein, the advantage artists have by following their craft more than intellect so that their contradictions are allowed to flower. Being an ironic control freak doesn’t make you any less a control freak.  As Callie Angell said to me about Warhol, “People say 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.”  Warhol had a brilliant eye. His technique was mechanical, but the humanity of the people in his films pours out almost uncontrollably.  Frampton’s eye was mechanical. He made a scholastic art of citation, committed as idea, not as art. The art is there, but he undermines it, undermining rather than using own subjectivity, needing to leave himself an out, as a conceptualist and critic. He was a brilliant man, with an IQ tested as a child at 187, and his fits the model of early 20^thcentury allusive representation, of Eliot et al. to a T. He did everything to fit the bill, and not strategically. After writing to Ezra Pound he ended up moving to DC and visiting him every day for two years until they had a falling out, apparently over the color of Aphrodite’s hair. This could read as the debate of mad poets out of  The Horse’s Mouth, but it seems closer to debates among players of Dungeons and Dragons over Cthulhu.

Frampton wasn’t a nihilist like Borges, or a sadist; at heart he was earnest, behind a wall of erudition. His last completed work was his most emotionally direct. You get the sense that he was growing out of isolation. This he shares with Wittgenstein and Eliot, and also Robert Wilson as I’ll make clear later.

The text below is from Gloria! his last completed film, words scrolling up a  computer screen as he typed.

These propositions are offered numerically, in the order in which they presented themselves to me; and also alphabetically, according to the present state of my belief.

1. That we belonged to the same kinship group, sharing a tie of blood. [A]

2. That others belonged to the same kinship group, and partook of that tie. [Y]

3. That she kept pigs in the house, but never more than one at a time. Each such pig wore a green baize tinker's cap. [A]

4. That she convinced me, gradually, that the first person singular pronoun was, after all, grammatically feasible. [E]

5. That she was obese. [C]

6. That she taught me to read. [A]

7. That she read to me, when I was three years old, and for purposes of her own, William Shakespeare's “The Tempest”. She admonished me for liking Caliban best. [B]

8. That she gave me her teeth, when she had them pulled, to play with. [A]

9. That she was nine times brought to bed with child, and for the last time in her fifty-fifth year, bearing on that occasion stillborn twin sons. No male child was born alive, but four daughters survive. [B]

10. That my mother, her eldest daughter, was born in her sixteenth year. [D]

11. That she was married on Christmas Day, 1909, a few weeks after her thirteenth birthday. [A]

12. That her connoisseurship of the erotic in the vegetable world was unerring. [A]

13. That she was a native of Tyler County, West Virginia, who never knew the exact year of her own birth till she was past sixty. [A]

14. That I deliberately perpetuate her speech, but have only fragmentary recollection of her pronunciation. [H]

15. That she remembered, to the last, a tune played at her wedding party by two young Irish coalminers who had brought guitar and pipes. She said it sounded like quacking ducks; she thought it was called “Lady Bonaparte”. [A]

16. That her last request was for a bushel basket full of empty quart measures. [C]

This work, in its entirety, is given in loving memory of Fanny Elizabeth Catlett Cross, my maternal grandmother, who was born on November 6, 1896, and who died on November 24, 1973.  

It’s a deeply sad film, the sentences scrolling up like the words of a melancholy computer: the memories of HAL.  The text is “bracketed by quotations” as Sitney describes them –with unnecessary detail– of  “two films from the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress”, though unnamed by Frampton, Murphy's Wake, and A Wake in Hell's Kitchen,both from 1903, short silent comedies about dead men who aren’t so dead after all and have fun at their own funerals, at the expense of the mourners. Frampton’s film is silent until the end of the 16 propositions, after which over the empty green screen we hear “an auditory quotation of  ‘Lady Bonaparte,' an Irish gig [sic]”. In fact  we hear the entire song, played by Finbar Furey. Then the second silent film cuts in, ending with the deceased, having scared off the last of his friends, left to dance and drink from an abandoned bottle of whisky.  The film cuts to black over which the typing begins again, the last sentence not rising off the screen like the  previous texts but to the top and fading to black. 

4. That she convinced me, gradually, that the first person singular pronoun was, after all, grammatically feasible. [E]

She helped him say “I”. She helped him to learn to accept a self, a subjectivity, what it means to be human.  

It’s a beautiful film, but a small one. To say that it’s more is to buy into a lie of a positivist art, an art of statements, and the lies that Frampton told himself and that his work undermines, but not strongly enough. 

    

---

[i]  J. Hoberman, “Hollis Frampton at Anthology: Here, There, Everywhere”. The Village Voice, March 25^th2009 

 https://www.villagevoice.com/2009/03/25/hollis-frampton-at-anthology-here-there-everywhere/

[ii]Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton,ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press 2009 p. 194

[iii]  P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film:
The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000,Oxford University Press, 1974 (2002) p 369

[iv]Wanda Bershen, "Zorns Lemma," ARTFORUM, September, 1971, pp. 41-45. 

[v]Bourdieu, Rules for Art, p. xv

[vi] Allen S. Weiss, “Frampton's Lemma, Zorn's Dilemma”, October, Vol. 32, Hollis Frampton (Spring, 1985), pp. 118-128 

[vii]P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, Oxford University Press 2008. p.102

[viii]  Hugh Kenner, “Art in a Closed Field”, The Virginia Quarterly Review,Vol. 38, No. 4 (Autumn 1962), pp. 597-613 

continuing here.

97

102

103

Three pages (approximate match to the US edition) from Todd's Who is Charlie?

"Individualist egalitarianism" opposing "cooperation and mutual aid". He's so much more sophisticated than Anglo-American pedants. He seems not to like Bourdieu much; that's always a plus.

He sees the ambiguities of communication of which intellectualism is merely a rarified example, a rarified form of social life.  He's a "continental" thinker.

repeats: Egalitarianism as an idea, individualism as a fact.

etc.  etc.

"If her interests have the same value as his, then my interests must have the same value as yours."

Why bother opening the door for anyone? Why bother with courtesy?

another one for the archives. you can't make this shit up

Farrell

But there’s also a much bigger point there, about the kind of space that the Internet has created. Liberalism of the small-l kind goes together with a strong emphasis on free speech. The implicit assumption is that we will all be better off in a world where everyone can say whatever they want, to whoever they want, even if it is inconvenient, or wrong minded, or crazy.

However, this assumption rests on empirical assumptions as well as normative ones. And as speech becomes cheaper, it may be that those assumptions don’t hold in the same way that they used to (see further Zeynep Tufekci, Rick Hasen and Timothy Wu, as well as Molly Roberts’ forthcoming book).

Hasen: "Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (to American Democracy)"
Wu: "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?"

"Cheap Speech" and "Low-Value" speech

Piketty on twitter

New research on WID.world : Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising inequality and the changing structure of political conflict. In order to understand the rise of "populism", one first needs to analze the rise of "elitism". http://wid.world/news-article/new-paper-on-rising-inequality-and-the-changing-structure-of-political-conflict-wid-world-working-paper-2018-7/

"Brahmin Left." Piketty, economist and friend of Bourdieu, misses the distinction from aristocrats and technocrats

Corey Robin on Elie Wiesel: "Trigger Warning: This post may upset you."

I replied to his post on FB pointing out the obvious: that the "sacralization' of the Holocaust (Robin's term) and the dehumanization of Palestinians are inseparable. He deleted my comment.
[Actually he didn't; he blocked my access to his page. It's still up and visible to me if I'm not logged in. But it's not visible on my "activity log" so I couldn't delete it even if I wanted to.]

Maria Farrell comments on Brexit, as any proper army wife would, quoting an angry mournful squib by a former military officer.  [history, again, of the obvious]

More from Pankaj Mishra, (quoted below)

In the neoliberal and technocratic worldview, the quantitative emphasis on what counts and what can therefore be counted (empirical data) has long obscured what does not count (subjective emotions). Today, GDP cultists and pollsters everywhere find themselves helpless before angry electorates convinced, as Belinsky was in his own hopeless situation, that ‘negation is my god.’ Nor can vulgar rationalism cope with the possibility that now universally emergent Underground Man may take pleasure in defying his rational self-interest.

Ressentiment in post-Thatcher Britain was long lucratively stoked by its tabloids, keeping left-behind masses roused with everyday ambushes of evidently globalised elites and their swarthy multicultural wards. It now seems that the vindictive passions were looking for a spectacular final act of negation.

The Etonians who ranged themselves on either side of a reckless referendum confirmed the cunning of unreason. Most of Sunderland’s – and England’s – electorate then found a chance to enact the Underground Man’s rebellion against an overpowering and demeaning reality. ‘Of course,’ he admits, ‘I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it … but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.’

I shouldn't be surprised but I am that no one -or no one else- comments on Leiter's use of the term ressentiment. I've said for years that somewhere Leiter says he has no friends in literature departments; in fact he was quoting Fodor. I've also quoted a friend (of mine) who's said that Fodor expresses surprise at colleagues with friends outside academia. And in fact Leiter "loves" literature, he just doesn't take it seriously. Literature includes the author as subject and object. Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky describe themselves as both master and slave. Where most people read Nietzsche as they read the others, Leiter takes him at his word. Bourdieu, a French bureaucrat rather than an American one, does the same with Flaubert.

Leiter, ressentiment, and "condescension from below"

The existence of "slave mentality", "victim mentality", or  "reaction formation", is not an argument in the defense of masters.

The search terms make no reference to race.
"Fiction deals with philosophical questions as such. Philosophy qua philosophy deals in fictional solutions."

continued in the next post.