writing rewriting

Conclave and La Nona Ora

 

It's a standard trope of the modern novel that the central figure is more an observer than an actor: someone moved by forces beyond his control. In a novel, or written language, the first protagonist is the writer. In film because of the immediacy of connection to the image of the person on the screen, the performer leads. Fiennes is impressive because he shows all the confusion, but he's more impressive than the character he plays. A stronger director, cinematographer, editor, would pull the interest back to the observing eye. As it is Cardinal Tedesco is the greatest figure on the screen. Another option would have been to give him much more time, to give the devil his due.

In Barry Lyndon the central figure was a lousy actor, a blank playing a blank. I want to see it again.

Ali Bati, the ad that became a meme. 

The original drawing was about progress as it gradually became more skillful from left to right.

art vs illustration, intent vs reception, reading images, and time, left to right, in the West. I always liked the meme. I saw it today used to describe the Biden administration and decided to look for the source. That's when I learned that the one move was to flip the drawing. A simple transformation, and brilliant.

Jokes are popular art. Duchamp was a joker. There are a few cases where Bati could sue, but he seems to take in it stride.

Foucault and the obvious, again and again, and again.

From an academic who found this interesting.  

There has been a lot of debate about Michel Foucault’s political orientation. He himself seemed quite content that readers found it hard to place him on a conventional left-right spectrum. But where did he stand, in the end?

I have been thinking a lot about this question. Foucault always subscribed to a number of social projects. And in his texts he was talking to readers in an ongoing transformative process. Over the past year I edited his 1971–1972 lectures at the Collège de France, together with Bernard Harcourt, and it became clear to me that his thinking revolved around the idea of change, of transformation, of individuals and collectives. In the stale climate of the 1960s we thought the transformation could occur only through literature and art. And in the early 1970s, when things were opening up, Foucault thought that social change was possible merely by changing a small number of very important relations of power — for example, the prison system. But already in 1976 he realized that this project of social change was a failure, and that people are much more easily mobilized by religious motives or nationalistic ones. The great movements weren’t social. He didn’t give up on his project of social change. But it had gotten more complicated.

The aristocratic critique of bourgeois democracy and moralism. click on the tags 

“What’s on the menu?” asks Kissinger, and I can barely restrain myself from shrieking, “What’s on the menu, Henry? Would that be Operation Menu?”

Liberals are idiots. Optimists are first optimists about themselves. The demimonde is always full of monarchists, etc. etc. But Ewald seems sort of grotesque.

The coverage of the Palestinian experience in the American press has never been this open. 

I got a laugh saying the fact that Bella Hadid exists is more important than anything Edward Said ever wrote. It's called naturalism. 

1 

Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. John Milton sold Paradise Lost to a publisher for five pounds, but he produced it ‘for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity wholly natural to him.’ In its free, harmonious expression of human powers, art is a prototype of what it is to live well. It is radical not so much because of what it says as because of what it is. It is an image of non-alienated labour in a world in which men and women fail to recognise themselves in what they create.

The aesthete, then, possesses more of the truth than the political left generally imagines. The point is not to substitute art for life, but to convert life into art. Living like a work of art means fully realising one’s capacities – this is Marx’s ethics. It is also the basis of his politics: socialism is whatever set of institutional arrangements would allow this to happen to the greatest extent. If artistic work is a scandal to the status quo, it is not because it champions the proletariat but because to live abundantly in this way isn’t possible under capitalism. Art prefigures a future in which human energies can exist simply for their own delight. Where art was, there shall humanity be.

Self-realisation, however, must be more than individual, which is the reason Marx adds a crucial rider to this humanist case. You must realise your powers reciprocally, through the equal self-expression of others. Or, as The Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This is the way he converts an essentially aristocratic ethic into communism. Oscar Wilde would do much the same in his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, in which layabouts like himself who don’t have to work anticipate a socialist order in which this will be true of everybody. In his belief that the political goal is to get rid of labour rather than make it creative, Wilde is closer to Marx than William Morris is, though Morris was a Marxist and Wilde was not.

There are difficulties with the self-realisation thesis, as there are with any form of ethics. It seems to assume that human powers are positive in themselves, and the only problem is that some of them are being blocked. But the urge to shoot down schoolchildren should be restrained whatever the harm to your creativity. The idea also implies that our various capabilities are in harmony with one another, which is far from true. Like postmodern culture, it errs in seeing diversity as inherently valuable. But why should a life rich in a variety of impulses be more worthwhile than one devoted to a single activity? Emma Raducanu may have led a fuller life if she had played less tennis, but people have good reason to envy her all the same. 

2

As cash transfers became increasingly popular as a fix to the American welfare state, UBI’s status diminished in the United States, while in Western Europe it gained adherents. The cause for this, the authors argue, was a growing European “left-wing anti-statism and a new post-work sensibility.” Across the continent, large swathes of the Left had come to accept the postindustrial fate of the West, brought about by the increase in free-trade-facilitated international competition, as an unchangeable fact of life. Fordism was apparently bleeding steam, and intellectuals on the order of André Gorz were saying adieu to the working class. The proliferation of European post-work organizations in the late 1970s and early 1980s — the Dutch Council Against the Work Ethic, TUNIX in Germany, as well as French and Italian groups — testified to the Left’s move away from a vision of revolution centered on the industrial working class. In the philosopher George Caffentzis’s words, the excitement surrounding the possibility of a basic income revealed “a failed politics” whose platform presumed that “behind everyone’s back, capitalism [had] ended.”

Of course, UBI’s appeal was premised not on capitalism’s end, but the supremacy of markets. Nowhere was this clearer than in UBI’s surprising discursive turn to the Global South. Jäger and Zamora’s decision to focus on the developing world is both unconventional and welcome. Far from ushering in a postindustrial, post-work, postcapitalist society, in India, Mexico, and Brazil UBI proved itself a useful method for intensifying market relations without actually investing in development. While Julius Nyerere had argued that poor nations could not escape poverty “without industrialization,” the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank pushed poorer nations to adopt transfer payments in lieu of heavy capital investment. In place of an industrial policy to create national independence, transfer payments became the go-to policy in a development scheme that would, ultimately, maintain and reinforce preexisting structures of market exchange. 

Eagleton goes up and down, and ends with an absurd note and a bad joke. He needs to see art as teleology: the avant-garde must be a high point rather than a product of immaturity and desperation, honest without being articulate.

For the second, the Brahmin left, Oxbridge bankers and Oxbridge philosophers, and the servants in the first class carriage.

Here, Bruges is a good example of the European garden. Yes, Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build - the three things together. And here, Bruges is maybe a good representation of beautiful things, intellectual life, wellbeing. 

The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.  

The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.

[Josep Borrell apologises for controversial 'garden vs jungle' metaphor but defends speech.] 

The myth that Look Back in Anger marked an absolute breach with all that went before has been dispelled over the years. But Soden points out that Coward didn’t merely manage to carry on, he found himself in tune to a surprising degree with the Angry Young Men, the satire boom and the sexually liberated 1960s. He didn’t like postwar England any more than John Osborne did, and he quite liked Look Back in Anger. For his part, Osborne wanted to put on a production of Design for Living, which, like his own play, dramatises a love-hate triangle. Edward Albee got Coward’s work back into print in America and Coward enjoyed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the amount of screaming and hurling of household objects is no greater than at the end of Private Lives. Soden also sees parallels with Orton: the dark sexual undertow and the delight in playing with the conventions of farce.

[Osborne] died just after his 65th birthday, on Christmas Eve 1994, and was buried in his Turnbull & Asser smoking jacket with his old copy of “Hamlet” stuffed in a pocket. (It had every part crossed out except Hamlet’s.) He died a club man, an Anglican, a country gentleman, a collector of teddy bears. Not the world he was born into, or that which his early work seemed to inveigh against, but a vanishing world that Osborne identified as England. Only those who had missed the nostalgia in “Look Back in Anger” saw him as a sellout. As Jimmy Porter says of the remnants of Edwardian England in 1956, “if you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”  

2

Far from ushering in a postindustrial, post-work, postcapitalist society, in India, Mexico, and Brazil UBI proved itself a useful method for intensifying market relations without actually investing in development.

The book seems less about welfare for markets than welfare for the rich, and restricting the market. The "sovereign consumer" is in the "global north". Like Rodrik's defense of military dictatorship, opposing the creation of a new bourgeoisie in Turkey.  It was left to Milanovic to describe the spread of capitalism to the world. 

1

The aesthete, then, possesses more of the truth than the political left generally imagines. The point is not to substitute art for life, but to convert life into art.

John Milton was not an "aesthete", and neither were most of the names Eagleton lists that Marx loved and quoted and riffed on. Eagleton's inability to consider the relation of posing to thinking, and his need simply to celebrate adults who never wanted to grow up, Tzara or Benjamin, and we can add Picasso, Duchamp, Wilde, Coward, Osborne, on down the list, all they way to Elvis and Warhol, is just stupid.

Turning life into art is fascism. The desire to turn life into art is born of desperation, and art made out desperation can be very good. Aesthetes are fans who make art out of fandom, and then become fans of themselves. 

Before the passages quoted above

Marx is one of the sources of what we now call cultural studies: the single work of fiction to which he devoted most space was the bestselling sensationalist novel The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue. He was also one of the first exponents of the historical study of literature. He championed what he called ‘the present splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England’, among them Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell and the Brontë sisters, claiming that they revealed more social and political truths than all the moralists and politicians put together; but like his collaborator and financial backer Friedrich Engels he was wary of literary works that had political designs on the reader. He used the term ‘literature’ to cover all writing of high quality, yet he scorned those who confused the kind of truth appropriate to poetry and fiction with other modes of knowledge. To demand a philosophical system from poets and novelists struck him as absurd. Truth for a writer was not abstract and invariable but unique and specific.

Art is a fine-tuned empiricism, "containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself." Marx was a classicist with no interest in fantasy. He would have hated Benjamin, and all the crap that followed.

on Jäger and Zamora, previously

updated a few times by now

John Ganz got into a twitter feud with a wise-ass, who turned out to be an asshole, but it started when the asshole made a point that was obvious to Panofsky 90 years ago, though the asshole overstated his case. It wasn't obvious to Ganz so I paid my 5 dollars and subscribed again, just so I could use the quotes I have for years. I riffed a bit on Richter and the art world, told stories and name-dropped. After that I cancelled my account. I don't think Ganz knows it was me. He liked the comment. Or maybe deleting it might have been difficult. Or maybe he'll still do it. If Shadi Hamid can like and delete, why not Ganz? 

Film art is the only art the development of which men now living have witnessed from the very beginnings; and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent. It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.

From this we understand two fundamental facts. First, that the primordial basis of the enjoyment of moving pictures was not an objective interest in a specific subject matter, much less an aesthetic interest in the formal presentation of subject matter, but the sheer delight in the fact that things seemed to move, no matter what things they were. Second, that films—first exhibited in “kinetoscopes,” namely, cinematographic peep shows, but projectable to a screen since as early as 1894—are, originally, a product of genuine folk art (whereas, as a rule, folk art derives from what is known as “higher art”). At the very beginning of things we find the simple recording of movements: galloping horses, railroad trains, fire engines, sporting events, street scenes. And when it had come to the making of narrative films these were produced by photographers who were anything but “producers” or “directors,” performed by people who were anything but actors, and enjoyed by people who would have been much offended had anyone called them “art lovers.”

The casts of these archaic films were usually collected in a “café” where unemployed supers or ordinary citizens possessed of a suitable exterior were wont to assemble at a given hour. An enterprising photographer would walk in, hire four or five convenient characters, and make the picture while carefully instructing them what to do: “Now, you pretend to hit this lady over the head”; and (to the lady): “And you pretend to fall down in a heap.” Productions like these were shown, together with those purely factual recordings of “movement for movement’s sake,” in a few small and dingy cinemas mostly frequented by the “lower classes” and a sprinkling of youngsters in quest of adventure (about 1905, I happen to remember, there was only one obscure and faintly disreputable Kino in the whole city of Berlin, bearing, for some unfathomable reason, the English name of “The Meeting Room”). Small wonder that the “better classes,” when they slowly began to venture into these early picture theaters, did so, not by way of seeking normal and possibly serious entertainment, but with that characteristic sensation of self-conscious condescension with which we may plunge, in gay company, into the folkloristic depths of Coney Island or a European kermis; even a few years ago it was the regulation attitude of the socially or intellectually prominent that one could confess to enjoying such austerely educational films as The Sex Life of the Starfish or films with “beautiful scenery,” but never to a serious liking for narratives.

Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”— not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning, and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive. The “movies” have reestablished that dynamic contact between art production and art consumption which, for reasons too complex to be considered here, is sorely attenuated, if not entirely interrupted, in many other fields of artistic endeavor. Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 percent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters, and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies the social consequences would be catastrophic.

I also added something because the asshole made a comment about Ganz' connection with Zwirner. Ganz is now writing for Artforum and has a piece on Richter. 

I don't know what this guys fucking problem with me is but this absurd. I don't have any "proximity" to David Zwirner, you can not like my writing but implying that I wrote it on behest of the gallerist or whatever is scurrilous https://t.co/BeAXHnhnDp

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) May 6, 2023

Fine art is a luxury commodity. Galleries are luxury boutiques, not bookstores. And of course you're connected to Zwirner. When you were an "artist" in Bushwick did you have any friends who were born there? Any social connection at all to the working class other than as idea? In 1993 Zwirner told me with a shrug to me that there was no difference between art and fashion anymore. Art is now style, and HBO has more art than Chelsea. Panofsky was right. Fine art and couture are vestiges of the old regime. Art for the rich. The connection to philosophy is tied to that and the lie that philosophy is superior to fiction, as theology concerns "truth" and fiction is lies.

All of the above is obvious in 2023, except to pretentious American liberals who call themselves leftists: Ganz and the Brooklyn Institute. I have friends born in Bushwick and I've known Zwirner for 30 years. Ganz the earnest gentrifier doesn't talk socially to art dealers, art collectors, or the working class. The only union members he knows are grad students, or maybe WGA, probably not even even IATSE.  He stays in his bubble, and that's never good. Now I'm wondering if the Richter show I mentioned is the one where I told Roberta Smith that she had her head up her ass writing about late Picasso. Saltz was there too. About Richter he asked me "Do you really think this is art for the ages?" I said, of course not, but I was sympathetic. I should have asked him if he thought Donald Judd was art for the ages, but that would have started a whole new fight, with his wife.

Everything above is a repeat, except some of the name-dropping.

---

...and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent.  It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.

But Panofsky is wrong.  If we want to be optimistic, the relation of art and and technology is reciprocal. Pessimism—or materialism—says art follows technology: secularization and the printing press, painting on walls or wood panels that can be bought and sold, theater and the novel, the rise of the middle classes, democracy. We're back to free will and determinism, which goes back to Richter and HBO and the Nolan brothers, Westworld, Devs, Tenet, The Dark Knight. But as a teacher of mine said about Gursky, "he used to be a nihilist, but he sold out". Another old story. The same is true for Richter. 

But that's why the asshole was wrong. It's not that the "fine" art is meaningless, only which forms give us the most compelling description of the present.

I can't make a living at any of this—art or criticism—only because I'm always best at pissing people off. Talking to a woman at Christie's a few years ago I said only billionaires could be honest talking about what they liked and why, but that I was raised to behave as if I were a billionaire. She looked back at me and smiled sweetly. "Then you're free." I guess I am. The rich and the poor can be honest. Everyone else lies to themselves first, and then everyone else.

Ganz helped to gentrify a working class neighborhood, admitting he formed no social connections to people who lived there; he writes about romanticism, the sublime, and hope, as manifest in multi-million dollar baubles on display in a luxury boutique, and with earnest moral fervor about the killing of a homeless man on the subway, all without the slightest sense of self-awareness.

Richter's work at best is a notch above kitsch, describing a desperate need for cheap sentiment to be more than it is. Modernism is full of that, and I have a sympathy for it. He's fighting his own numbness. Ganz by comparison is earnest, shallow, callow, self-absorbed, self-serving, and on down the list. From my grandfather's job as a hired killer to my father's essay on Hammett, I have him cold. It doesn't matter.

I remember walking around the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, sitting in on crits, and one student's video, or it might have been a film, which was nothing but him on a beach yelling at the sea, shouting his name at the top of his lungs at the surf, demanding to be recognized: an over-the-top, absurd, derivative but full-throated performance, an expression of humility.

If a character in a novel lights a cigarette, the cigarette is part of a work of art. In a play the cigarette is a prop. In the older definition of art objects the craft supplied a formal logic internal to the piece. The iconography supplied a formal logic external to it. For relics as opposed to artworks the logic was external only: absent its place in a narrative a thighbone is a thighbone, a cigarette is just a cigarette, a madeleine... etc.

Duchamp has a tag. click it.

Tooze in the FT: The west’s limited support for Ukraine fails to measure up

Europe and the US may sincerely want Kyiv to prevail over Moscow but they are failing to match ends with means

In the first 12 months of the war in Ukraine, the condemnation of Russia and rhetorical backing of Kyiv by the governments of Europe and the US has been intense and largely unanimous. But the economic numbers tell a different story. Judged against current potential and historical standards, the war looks like an exercise in calculated restraint.

This is not necessarily a sign of strategic failure. Though the moral force of war may seem to demand absolute commitment, total war is the dream of fascists or revolutionaries. For the rest of us, total war should be an absolute nightmare. War that does not envision the overthrowing of all order must involve the weighing of means and ends, costs and benefits, even in the face of death. And this is true for both combatants and their allies.

Tooze on Substack

What does it feel like to see a major war coming? Not to “sleepwalk” but to wake to the reality that one state, with deliberation and intent is about to invade another with massive military force? With drastic consequences for millions of people and huge loss of life.

We have experienced this before. For many of us that moment came in 2002 and 2003 when we watched with horror the massing of the “coalition of the willing”, including our own country’s forces, for the invasion of Iraq. Around the world the memory of that moment hangs like a shadow over events today. This, indeed, is one of the points brought out by Politico’s oral history of the Biden administration in the autumn of 2021. This remarkable collage of interview segments conveys vividly what it was like for those who were privy to the most top-level military intelligence to face the dawning realization of Putin’s intent.

Tooze on twitter with a screengrab from Politico 

VICTORIA NULAND: Suffice to say that in December I brought all of my shower stuff, a couple of changes of clothes, things to sleep in, a blanket and a much more nutritious array of snacks into the office, because I knew it was unpredictable what our hours would look like.

Nuland, then and now

repeats: Ragozin, from last October and December 2021, beginning with Zagorodnyuk's article in Foreign Affairs: Ukraine's Path to Victory  

Ragozin. (click the link and read the whole thread):

For context, Zahorodniuk left defence minister’s post on March 4, 2020 - same day as prime minister Honcharuk. Together they soon landed in the US and in the Atlantic Council during the election year devising a new hawkish strategy for resolving Ukrainian conflict.

This resulted in an abrupt change of tack in Zelensky’s policies the moment Biden entered office. It also resulted in Atlantic Council’s radical strategy for resolving the conflict which was published in March 2021, just before Putin started amassing troops at the border.

Enter Biden. His White House takeover in Jan 2021 coincides with Zelensky’s radical change of tack with regards to Russia. Ukraine is suddenly proactive and assertive in the manner that suggests some pre-planning. Ex-PM Oleksiy Honcharuk’s posting to the US is of note here. 

 Le Monde Diplo: Western media as cheerleaders for war

Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression. Nothing short of a crushing victory for Ukraine is conscionable. The risk of escalation is rarely mentioned.

After speeches by British prime minister Rishi Sunak and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at a joint press conference on 8 February at a military base in southwest England, it was time for questions. BBC Ukraine correspondent Natalia Goncharova greeted Zelensky with, ‘I would really like to hug you, but I’m not allowed.’ Ignoring his security service, Zelensky got down from the podium and embraced her to general applause. Then Goncharova asked Sunak, ‘You know that Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day. Don’t you think that that decision about warplanes is taking too long?’ In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the embedding of journalists with the US military had caused some in the profession to wince; 20 years on, in the Ukraine war, it’s become a journalism of the all-out embrace.

Wapo: In race to arm Ukraine, U.S. faces cracks in its manufacturing might

The war has exposed an inability to rapidly surge production of many weapons needed for Ukraine and for America’s self-defense

SCRANTON, Pa. — A sharp hissing sound fills the factory as red-hot artillery shells are plunged into scalding oil.

Richard Hansen, a Navy veteran who oversees this government-owned munitions facility, explains how the 1,500-degree liquid locks in place chemical properties that ensure when the shells are fired — perhaps on a battlefield in Ukraine — they detonate in the deadly manner intended.

“That’s what we do,” Hansen said. “We build things to kill people.”

Ragozin adds

US arms producers are going to have a decades-long bonanza because of war in Ukraine. Of course it will help them if Putin’s regime remains intact, Ukraine remains a hot or frozen battlefield and a new Cold War ensues.

NYT: Pentagon Blocks Sharing Evidence of Possible Russian War Crimes With Hague Court

President Biden has not acted to resolve a dispute that pits the Defense Department against other agencies.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence with the International Criminal Court in The Hague gathered by American intelligence agencies about Russian atrocities in Ukraine, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.

American military leaders oppose helping the court investigate Russians because they fear setting a precedent that might help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. The rest of the administration, including intelligence agencies and the State and Justice Departments, favors giving the evidence to the court, the officials said.

President Biden has yet to resolve the impasse, officials said. 

 The FT: The Iraq war left western societies unchanged

Twenty years on, the political and cultural legacy of a divisive war is minimal

...Yes, US casualties were far higher in Vietnam. Yes, a conscript war scars a society in a way that an all-volunteer one can’t. But Iraq was easily the most controversial war fought by a western state in the past half-century. It set citizen against citizen in Britain and Germany as much as in the US (no European nation participated in Vietnam). Those who lived through it might have assumed it would mark our culture for a generation: that pro and antiwar would become signifiers of one’s wider worldview, even one’s tastes, as Leave and Remain now are in the UK. Instead, it is often an ordeal to persuade the young what a saga it all was.

And that, I think, is what makes this 20th anniversary so eerie. At least within the western world, the Iraq war has left little trace.

Tooze adds: "Discuss"

Marlene Laruelle, "Russian Studies’ Moment of Self-Reflection" Russian Analytical Digest No. 293

Almost the entirety. It's hilarious. From Ragozin and Kevin Rothrock.

Anglophone Russian Studies are largely autarkic, existing with little knowledge of (or at least reference to) what is produced outside of the English-speaking world. The very limited references made to the Russian-language literature belie the richness of Russian publications, as any visit to such Russian intellectual hotspots as the Falanster bookstore in Moscow would have shown—at least until the onset of the full-scale war. And this does not even take into account what is published in Russia’s regional capitals, whose publishing markets are segregated from those in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Even within so-called “Western” academia, publications in French, German, and other national languages rarely transcend their national borders to be engaged by the English-speaking literature. By contrast, history and literature seem to have been better able to integrate locally produced scholarship.

A second feature is that in contrast to old “Sovietology,” social scientists working on contemporary Russia are rarely invited to train in and enter into dialogue with the humanities. How many U.S. political scientists studying Russia have read Viktor Pelevin? More globally and more structurally, social sciences struggle to put into practice their self-proclaimed commitment to multidisciplinarity, or at least crossdisciplinarity. Segments of Anglophone political science on Russia, by stressing the need for causal identification study designs, have contributed to an overreliance on data from surveys with experimental designs at the expense of interactions with history, cultural anthropology, sociology, or geography. Here, too, the segregation is largely internal to the “Western” and especially Anglophone realm: Russian publications display much deeper cross-disciplinary approaches. And except in such marginal subfields as Russia’s Arctic policy, climate change, and sustainability policy, there is even less dialogue between the social sciences, geography, and the natural sciences.

A third feature relates to the succession of prisms or lenses used on Russia that have created distortions in analyses. At least four such prisms can be identified. First is a Putin-centric prism that entails looking at Russia through its president, his professional background, his inner circles, trying to identify his ideological gurus, illuminating his supposedly “irrational mindset,” or offering purely instrumentalist analysis of the regime.

Second is a Moscow-centric vision of Russia in which the capital city and its more liberal-minded residents obscure regional perspectives, which are often ideologically more diverse and are generally more nuanced. Similarly, internationally well-connected Russian scholars from the two capitals are frequently seen as the only legitimate “Russian voices” —because they are the only ones known in the West and able to speak its language, both literally and symbolically.

Third is an ethnic Russian-centric reading of Russia in which the ethnic minorities who were so intensively studied in the 1990s have become one of the blank spots of research. This contributes to the difficulties of capturing potentially “hidden scripts” of ressentiment—aggravated by the general Western lack of knowledge of Russia’s national languages and the marginalization of identity politics, seen as a “sub-area” that cannot explain Russia’s general features.

Last but not least is a Western-centric prism imposed on Russia, its regime and society, which are always com- pared to the West’s as the obvious normative benchmark. This approach, which treats the West as the only mirror of Russia, blatantly excludes views of Russia from non-Western perspectives. Scholars from countries neighboring Russia have increasingly called to be recognized as agents in interpreting Russia on the basis of their own experiences. Scholars from the Global South, too, look at Russia and at the West through their own prisms and experiences, including a vivid postcolonial approach.

Where do we go from here?

Acknowledging academic inequalities in knowledge production—of which there are many—would be a first step. The most obvious starting-point is probably that native scholars and indigenously produced work should be acknowledged as critical additions to the field that cannot be ignored. But there are other knowledge hierarchies, too: of English-speaking works over non-English ones; of Western-centric views over those from the post-Soviet world and from the “Global South”; of political science—the “reigning” discipline through which (Western) understandings of the Russian regime and society are developed—over sociology, cultural anthropology, history, and the humanities.

A second step would be to favor more granular and grassroots approaches that would allow for thicker conceptual knowledge. The Post-Soviet Affairs special issue shows us the path: it would entail, among other things, changing the questions we ask; being cognizant of the issues related to aggregative approaches and the need to blend survey data with qualitative analysis; going back to long-neglected ethnographic methods; looking at societal transformations over the course of generations; focusing on vulnerable segments of the population (both classes and ethnic groups); borrowing from social psychology to study ressentiment-based politics and collective emotions; and opening up to new comparative frameworks.

This is a transformative time for the Russian Studies field. Russia scholars have the opportunity—and duty— to both rethink the systemic features of their field and to contribute to changing the lenses applied to Russia in the hope of contributing modestly to new pathways for the peaceful coexistence of the nations that share the Europe-Asia continent.

Remember, the humanities are dying. "The End of the English Major"

Leiter reads the New Yorker too.

In 2022, though, a survey found that only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies. From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses. (For bureaucratic reasons, Harvard doesn’t count history as a humanity, but the trend holds.) “We feel we’re on the Titanic,” a senior professor in the English department told me.

Students lacked a strong sense of the department’s vaunted standing. “I would never say this to any of my English- or my film-major friends, but I kind of thought that those majors were a joke,” Isabel Mehta, a junior, told me. “I thought, I’m a writer, but I’ll never be an English major.” Instead, she’d pursued social studies—a philosophy, politics, and economics track whose popularity has exploded in recent years. (Policy, students explained, was thought to effect urgent change.) But the conversations bored her (students said “the same three things,” she reported, “and I didn’t want to be around all these classmates railing on capitalism all day”), so she landed uneasily in English after all. “I have a warped sense of identity, where I’m studying something really far removed from what a lot of people here view as central, but I’m not removed from these cultural forces,” she told me.

English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.

"philosophy, politics, and economics track whose popularity has exploded in recent years."

PhD PPE

Isabel Mehta's choices describe the situation of humanism in a world of ideological instrumentalism and moral certainty: positivist, leftist or capitalist. She didn't want to know the history; she can't take it seriously, but she does it anyway, because she needs to tell her stories. Her LinkedIn page reminds me of Nwanevu.

I can't not think of LinkedIn as embarrassing. But that reminds me of my mother's reaction when I told her a friend of a friend had asked me to ask her for an introduction to a friend of hers. Her eyes widened: such things were not done. Mehta went to my high school, which means she probably was there for more. I got in, in the last year of elementary school, through the matriarch of one of the oldest families in Philadelphia, whose grandson was a staff lawyer at the ACLU. These were the days when the ACLU was principled, and frankly fun. The school had a few scholarship kids from my neighborhood but I never thought to mention to anyone that I was the only white or demi-white kid in the school who had a sibling who'd gone to the public school the scholarship kids had succeeded in avoiding. I'm not sure anyone would have gotten the joke. In my 20s I told my mother I was a tradesman. She was horrified. I said I was a carpenter and she was relieved. She's thought I meant I was "in trade".

Agnes Callard again, this time in the New Yorker. She now admits what was always obvious.

A new Smithson tag, mostly now for notes. All the below will have to be fit into the manuscript continuing or expanding on this.

I always understood the weakness in Smithson's work, that his preoccupations were transitional, but I loved them for describing the situation we were in: the negative idealism, the association of narrative with banality, searching for an absolute of some sort.

Humanism at its most mature is a focus on man as she is—I'll be cute and mix it up—not as she want to be; even the use of prescriptive rhetoric only overlays a descriptive core. So the greatest art of humanism achieves a balance not out of ideology or pedantry but respect for the things being balanced, including sobriety and drunkenness. In art, communicative form, drunkenness is the description of the experience, not the thing itself, but it's hard to give due credit without experience. 

"Perception does not know the concept of infinity"

The Baroque was the last flowering of absolutism, manifest in hierarchy able to describe itself as flexible without losing its authority. At the same time its scholasticism can produce an art that rather than describing a mechanism or a function begins to follow it.  

Reading Smithson he's the mirror of Fried: a decadent moralist, a reactionary post-humanist (seeing humanism only as pedantry), elitist, anti-democratic, etc. 

—Jorge Luis Borges begins his From Allegories to Novels by saying, "For all of us, the allegory is an aesthetic error."

—Duchamp shares Shakespeare's disgust when it comes to the elevation of expressive naturalism over the rules of the game.  

Like Borges, he only understands the novel from the world of allegories, and like him they're all he's good for. His comment about Duchamp and Shakespeare is absurd. He reduces the rules of the game to a mechanism which his own work serves only to illustrate. He's closer to Frampton than he admits. But he would've gotten a kick of David Thomson on Godard.

Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism", October, Vol 12. (Spring, 1980) JSTOR  

A week or so ago I updated a post mentioning October.

I've always hated Borges, but not Smithson.

Vesely, (again)  p 207

The problem of infinity was not new. It was discussed in antiquity, during the Middle Ages, and throughout the Renaissance, but always with reference to the transcendental nature of divine reality. From the human point of view, infinity could be only potentially present in a world that was by definition finite. This situation had changed by the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, when, for the first time, infinity was thought of and experienced as a plausible actuality. The new appreciation of infinity has much to do with developments in mathematics and with the appropriative nature of introverted representation. The contrast between the introverted experience and the indeterminate beyond, which could not be grasped but could no longer be ignored, was probably the main source of the anxiety often expressed in seventeenth-century writing. The contemplation of infinity. Kepler writes "parries with it I don't know what secret hidden horror: indeed one finds oneself wandering in this immensity to which are denied limits and center and therefore all determinate places. His tone comes close to that of the famous fragment by Pascal: "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me."

This fear of the infinite is not shared by Guarini, but it finds its place in his commitment to move beyond the uncertainties and ambiguities of the finite, sensible world and in his elaborate effort to come to terms with the problem of infinity. Guarini's commitment was based on a deep faith in the continuity between the finite human world and the infinity of the divine mind. This faith was combined with an awareness, common in the Aristotelian tradition. that there is not a direct proportion between finite and infinite things or realities. However, if the traditional proportions are raised the level of universal proportions, the ratios can be generated toward infinity. This possibility is a key to Guarini's universal mathematics and metaphysics (prima philosophical, which rests on the assumption that geometrical proportion is both generic and universal in relation to all other proportions.

The important step that Guarini takes is to contemplate approaching the problem of infinity through the continuous progression of ratios in asymptotic approximation. As he himself acknowledges, "the boundary of progression is the end of a series to which no progression can approach, even if it is contained in infinity[,]... but it approaches it in perpetuity" (E.A 213) The progression of ratios to infinity closely corresponds to the principle of diminishing proportions in Renaissance perspective. But there is an important difference: the shift from the human to the divine point of view and from perspective to projection. This shift is readily apparent in the discussion of proportions in the Euclides adauctus, which leads to a consideration of the problem of continuity and culminates in the interpretation of the continuous geometrical proportion of surfaces and their projective relationships. Surface plays a unique role in Guarini's thinking because it is continuous and infinite, and generates geometrical proportions by its very nature--that is, by being a surface. This may explain why Guarini uses the planimetric figure of the hexagon as a primary element in the construction of the Sindone dome. The pyramidal stacking of the hexagons follows the rule of gnomonic difference, which is a proportional difference between individual figures. The sequence may be developed into an infinite series of terms belonging to the same continuous analogy. The key to this idea of the construction of the dome is a relatively little known drawing preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Turin. showing the stereographic pyramidal projection of its triangular elements. (figure 4.16)

The Trinitarian meaning of the triangle is preserved in its transformation into a hexagon. as well as in the twelve rays of the sun achieved by the hexagon's rotation. But the hexagon in the dome is open to more than one interpretation. We can see its meaning as a fulfillment of the primary theme of the chapel, the Passion culminating as a resurrection on the first day of the new creation (the day of sun)in other words, as a new expression of the cosmogonic role and meaning of light in the six days of creation (hexaemeron). Supporting this interpretation is another rather interesting, important fact: the dome is composed of six hexagons (six steps in the journey toward the sun; figures 4.17 and 4.18). [14.18 see below s.e.]

Guarini's geometrical language becomes comprehensible only in the context of his oeuvre as a whole, which also helps us to enter into the culture of the Baroque in which his architecture was received and understood. Broadly speaking, the Baroque culture of the seventeenth century was still dominated by symbolic thinking, which included mathematical speculation and representation (figure 4.19). More specifically, symbolic representation was sustained by dialectical thinking. It is probably no accident that Guarini titled Expensio V of his Euclides "De proportione dialectica." The section treats the dialectical relationship between quantitative entities (magnitudes) and their qualitative meaning. However, the title refers more specifically to the dialectics of geometrical operations in their relation to theological or philosophical discourse. What is new in Guarini's dialectics is its hidden and often enigmatic nature, which must be discerned behind apparently pure geometrical constructions and arguments. This aspect of Guarini's thinking is brought out by his references to Proclus and Nicholas of Cusa, the authors he followed most closely.

Smithson, The Collected Writings,

Jack Flam's introduction

p. XV

In a way, Smithson saw and treated the world as an enormous text, reminiscent of the library in Borges's "Library of Babel," which is synonymous with the universe itself, "composed of an indefinite and perhaps an infinite number of hexagonal galleries"-which seem to prefigure the crystalline structures that Smithson himself favored. Borges's library, moreover, is defined as "a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circurriference is inaccessible," recalling Smithson's favorite quote from Pascal, that "Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." Significantly, in a 1968 citation of Pascal's statement, Smithson added "or language becomes an infinite museum whose center is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere."

p.52  Towards The Development of an Air Terminal Site (1967)

p 59

Tony Smith writes about "a dark pavement" that is "punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights." (Artforum, December 1966.) The key word is "punctuated." In a sense, the "dark pavement" could be considered a "vast sentence," and the things perceived along it,"punctuation marks.""... tower ..." =the exclamation mark(!)."... stacks . . ."= the dash(-).". . .fumes ..."= the question mark(?)."... colored lights .. ." = the colon (:).Of course, I form these equations on the basis of sense-data and not rational-data. Punctuation refers to interruptions in "printed matter." It is used to emphasize and clarify the meaning of specific segments of usage. Sentences like "skylines" are made of separate "things" that constitute a whole syntax. Tony Smith also refers to his art as "interruptions" in a "space-grid."

p. 66 Letter to the Editor, Artforum (1967)

Sirs:

France has given us the anti-novel, now Michael Fried has given us the anti-theater. A production could be developed on a monstrous scale with the Seven Deadly Isms, verbose diatribes, scandalous refutations, a vindication of Stanley Cavell, shrill but brilliant disputes on "shapehood" vs. "objecthood," dark curses, infamous claims, etc. The stage should subdivide into millions of stages.

The following is a "prologue" from an unwritten TV "spectacular" called The Tribulations of Michael Fried.

. . . there will be no end to this exquisite, horrible misery, when you look forward you shall see a long forever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts.

Jonathan Edwards

Michael Fried has in his article "Art and Objecthood" (Artforum, June 1967) declared a "war" on what he quixotically calls "theatricality." In a manner worthy of the most fanatical puritan, he provides the art world with a long-overdue spectacle-a kind of ready-made parody of the war between Renaissance classicism (modernity) versus Manneristic anti-classicism (theater) . Fried, without knowing it, has brought into being a schism complete with all the "mimic fury" (Thomas Carew) of a fictive inquisition. He becomes, I want to say, in effect the first truly manneristic critic of "modernity." Fried has set the critical stage for manneristic modernism, although he is trying hard not to fall from the "grip" of grace. This grace he maintains by avoiding appearance, or by keeping art at "arm's length." Fried discusses this "grip" in Anthony Caro and Kenneth No/and—Some Notes on Not Composing (The Lugano Review, 1965/III-IV). What Fried fears most is the consciousness ofwhat he is doing—namely being himself theatrical. He dreads "distance" because that would force him to become aware of the role he is playing. His sense of intimacy would be annihilated by the "God" Jonathan Edwards feared so much. Fried, the orthodox modernist, the keeper of the gospel of Clement Greenberg has been "struck by Tony Smith," the agent of endlessness. Fried has declared his sacred duty to modernism and will now make combat with what Jorge Luis Borges calls "the numerous Hydra (the swamp monster which amounts to a prefiguration or emblem of geometric progressions) ... ", in other words "Judd's Specific Objects, and Morris's gestalts or unitary forms, Smith's cube ... " This atemporal world threatens Fried's present state of temporal grace - his "presentness." The terrors of infinity are taking over the mind of Michael Fried. Corrupt appearances of endlessness worse than any known Evil. A radical skepticism, known only to the dreadful "literalists" is making inroads into intimate "shapehood." Non-durational labyrinths of time are infecting his brain with eternity. Fried, the Marxist saint, shall not be tempted into this awful sensibility, instead he will cling for dear life to the "surfaces" of Jules Olitski's Bunga. Better one million Bungas than one "specific object." Yet, little known "specific demons" are at this moment, I want to say, "breaking the fingers" of Fried's grip on Bunga. This "harrowing" of hellish objecthood is causing modernity much vexation and turmoil-not to say "gnashing of teeth."

At any rate, eternity brings about the dissolution of belief in temporal histories, empires, revolutions, and counter-revolutions—all becomes ephemeral and in a sense unreal, even the universe loses its reality. Nature gives way to the incalculable cycles of nonduration. Eternal time is the result of skepticism, not belief. Every refutation is a mirror of the thing it refutes-ad infinitum. Every war is a battle with reflections.What Michael Fried attacks is what he is. He is a naturalist who attacks natural time. Could it be there is a double Michael Fried-the atemporal Fried and the temporal Fried? Consider a subdivided progression of "Frieds" on millions of stages.

p 138 A Cinematic Atopia (1971)

Going to the cinema results in an immobilization of the body. Not much gets in the way of one's perception. All one can do is look and listen. One forgets where one is sitting. The luminous screen spreads a murky light throughout the darkness. Making a film is one thing, viewing a film another. Impassive, mute, still the viewer sits. The outside world fades as the eyes probe the screen. Does it matter what film one is watching? Perhaps. One thing all films have in common is the power to take perception elsewhere. As I write this, I'm trying to remember a film I liked, or even one I didn't like. My memory becomes a wilderness of elsewheres. How, in such a condition, can I write about film' I don't know. I could know. But I would rather not know. Instead, I will allow the elsewheres to reconstruct themselves as a tangled mass. Somewhere at the bottom of my n1.emory are the sunken remains o fall the films I have ever seen, good and bad they swarm together forming cinematic mirages, stagnant pools of images that cancel each other out. A notion of the abstractness of films crosses my mind, only to be swallowed up in a morass of Hollywood garbage. A pure film of lights and darks slips into a dim landscape of countless westerns. Some sagebrush here, a little cactus there, trails and hoofbeats going nowhere. The thought of a film with a "story" makes me listless. How many stories have I seen on the screen? All those "characters" carrying out dumb tasks. Actors doing exciting things. It's enough to put one into a permanent coma.

Let us assume I have a few favorites. Ikiru? also called Living, To Live, Doomed. No, that won't do. Japanese films are too exhausting. Taken as a lump, they re- mind me of a recording by Captain Beef Heart[sic] called Japan in a Dishpan. There's always Satyajit Ray for a heavy dose of tedium, if you're into tedium. Actually, I tend to prefer lurid sensationalism. For that I must turn to some English director, Alfred Hitchcock will do. You know, the shot in Psycho where Janet Leigh's eye emerges from the bathtub drain after she's been stabbed. Then there's always the Expanded Cinema, as developed by Gene Youngblood, complete with an introduction by "Bucky" Fuller. Rats for Breakfast could be a hypothetical film directed by the great utopian himself. It's not hard to con- sider cinema expanding into a deafening pale abstraction controlled by computers. At the fringes of this expanse one might discover the deteriorated images of Hollis Frampton's Maxwell's Denton? After the "structural film" there is the sprawl of entropy. The monad of cinematic limits spills out into a state of stupefaction. We are faced with inventories of limbo.

p. 349  Ivan the Terrible to Roger Corman or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism as reflected in he Cinema (1967)

p. 350 

Manneristic art is often called pseudo, sick, perverse, false, phony and decadent by the naturalists or truth tellers, yet it seems to me that what the Mannerist esthetic does disclose or recover is a sense of primal evil. Both Eisenstein and Poe seem to have been acutely aware of such a malevolent condition. Parker Tyler in his Classics ofForeign Films has this to say, "Eisenstein knew perfectly well that 'Mephistofeles' and 'wild beast,' the labels he had given Ivan, also applied to himself, to the history of his career as man and film artist." Such an awareness not only locates him within the Mannerist esthetic, but also makes him an artist of the first order.

The Mannerist is not innocent of corruption. He casts a cold eye, and what he sees he treats with humor and terror. A great example of pictorial humor and terror is The Allegory ofEurope or the Beheading ofJohn the Baptist by an unknown Mannerist master (collection of the Prado).The very word "allegory" is enough to strike terror into the hearts of the expressive artist; there is perhaps no device as exhausted as allegory. But strangely enough Allan Kaprow has shown interest in that worn-out device. Jorge Luis Borges begins his From Allegories to Novels by saying, "For all of us, the allegory is an aesthetic error."

p. 352 

Duchamp shares Shakespeare's disgust when it comes to the elevation of expressive naturalism over the rules of the game. 

Sam Wagstaff, "Talking with Tony Smith", Artforum (1966)

I’m not aware of how light and shadow falls on my pieces. I’m just aware of basic form. I’m interested in the thing, not in the effects—pyramids are only geometry, not an effect.

—————————

My speculations with plane and solid geometry and crystal forms led me to making models for sculpture, but what I did always made use of the 90-degree angle, like De Stijl. I only began to use more advanced relationships of solids after working with Wright and then related the thirty and sixty-degree angles to the ninety-degree angles.

—————————

We think in two dimensions—horizontally and vertically. Any angle off that is very hard to remember. For that reason I make models—drawings would be impossible.

—————————

I’m very interested in Topology, the mathematics of surfaces, Euclidian geometry, line and plane relationships. “Rubber sheet geometry,” where facts are more primary than distances and angles, is more elemental but more sophisticated than plane geometry.

————————— 

When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art. 

 The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe—abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me. There is a drill ground in Nuremberg, large enough to accommodate two million men. The entire field is enclosed with high embankments and towers. The concrete approach is three sixteen-inch steps, one above the other, stretching for a mile or so.

--- 

Gregory of St Vincent, 1647 

Guarini, Cappella della Sacra Sindone, completed in 1694 

Tony Smith Model for Smoke, 1967

Tony Smith, Smug, 1973

Robert Smithson, Alogon #2, 1966

Mirror Stratum, 1966

Spiral Jetty, 1970 

Gyrostasis, 1968

Plunge, 1966 

"Institute of Art and Ideas"

IAINews, Henry Shevlin, "The artist is dead, AI killed them Can AI be genuinely creative?"

Shelvin

Henry Shelvin, University of Cambridge 

"Our mission at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) is to build a new interdisciplinary community of researchers, with strong links to technologists and the policy world, and a clear practical goal: to work together to ensure that we humans make the best of the opportunities of artificial intelligence as it develops over coming decades."

"Henry Shevlin (PhD, CUNY Graduate Center, 2016; BPhil, Oxford, 2009) is a Senior Research Fellow with the Kinds of Intelligence programme and Course Co-leader of the MSt AI Ethics and Society. His work focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and animal cognition, with a particular emphasis on perception, memory, and desire. Since 2015, he has been serving as a student committee member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness."

Remember Saint-Simon,  the avant-garde and the future of war, and the previous fucking post.  The positivist model of art is kitsch. 

I never stop posting comments, but I don't expect much. Some typos fixed, added links, misc.

If a scholar wrote an essay making an original argument using nothing but quotes from other writers with a few words in-between it would be called plagiarism. Academics don't write well, but there you go. Plagiarism wasn't an issue you 300 years ago and now it is. 

But you have no understanding of what art is. Art isn't forward looking; it's retrospective. It's not "creative" it's observational, that's why it ages well, when it does.

"So what Brasilia became in less than 20 years wasn't the city of tomorrow at all. It was yesterday's science fiction. Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future." Robert Hughes had his weak points, but here he's on the money.

Picasso painted the present in 1906. It's the same present described by TS Eliot. "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME" Plagiarism or collage? 

Most importantly both made art about arrogant schoolboys terrified of women. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a castration scene. Eliot and Duchamp were political reactionaries, and Picasso was a cafe communist (who made a fortune speculating on his own artwork). But more importantly they were all brilliant 20th century boys, and they describe that reality—specific to place and race and class-better than their peers, or at least better than those that we know of. They describe their present better than you describe ours.

There's no such thing as AI. Intelligence is animal. Proust wrote about memory and loss: the descriptions of emotion. When you invent a program that fears its own obsolescence or death let me know. But I don't think any of us want a delusional supercomputer.

---

Jason Allen used a program as a tool. He's playing a language game using technology. The tool didn't make the art. And Eno at this point is a designer of sound and image. Design is a subcategory of art, but it doesn't force to rethink anything. His early work, a mixture of the Beatles, Gilbert and Sullivan and coin-tossing, did. But Eric Satie is less a great composer than a charming one. 

I've added this because I'm going to go off as a pedant on what is or is not art. Computers make patterns and patterns are aesthetic by definition. 

If you want to think about the relation of art and design and Warhol soup cans you should watch this film—Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See [no link code allowed: repeat]—and understand how much work goes into the designs we take for granted, and remember that Warhol was both a homosexual and a devout Byzantine Catholic. His printed paintings are both ironic and sincere. The works in his Death and Disaster series are terrifying. Warhol will be remembered for the art he made out of his confusions and fears, because if you pay attention you begin to understand them, through a visceral, animal, neurological, "sympathetic vibration". 

“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.” Callie Angell 

It's a common desire these days. In the future people will ask how that came to be. Art ain't rocket science, but it goes along way to describing the minds of rocket scientists.

I spent too much time trying to find the post with the Boston Robotics video.  

A small grocery-store owner in a town outside St. Petersburg has added antiwar labels to his price tags in solidarity with Sasha Skochilenko, the activist who did something similar and now faces 10 years in prison. Her trial starts this week. https://t.co/ryi3PgBAvl pic.twitter.com/8H0kIdxFBd

— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) May 16, 2022

archive.org  The first link above, to a Telegram channel, still works.

If you follow the academics, then "conceptual art" is a new form of philosophy, when the good stuff never was or is. There's something Protestant, or Anglo-Protestant-academic, in the need to make modern and supposedly secular philosophy into science, and then "fine art"—historically associated with "truth" (unlike stories or "fiction")—into pedantry. The little gestures above are serious because they undermine pedantry. They're serious because they're funny, and their humor represents everything the state claims to. Sometimes farting in church is a moral act.

I should really make this in to a poster or a t-shirt. In all the years I've put this out there not one person has told me that they simply got the fucking joke. Not one person has laughed. 

Hand-made/factory made, decent/vulgar, public/private, virgin/whore. It's fucking hilarious. And it's Duchamp's joke, not mine.

The poverty of positivism/the poverty of originalism

"There is no better way of finding out what a writer meant than to attempt to state his meaning in different words, preferably in another language."

Gombrich, "Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods"

We may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme. The relation may be supposed to be this: if conceptual schemes differ, so do languages. But speakers of different languages may share a conceptual scheme provided there is a way of translating one language into the other. Studying the criteria of translation is therefore a way of focussing on criteria of identity for conceptual schemes. If conceptual schemes aren't associated with languages in this way, the original problem is needlessly doubled, for then we would have to imagine the mind, with its ordinary categories, operating with a language with its organizing structure. Under the circumstances we would certainly want to ask who is to be master. 

Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I Choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things." .
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—‘that’s all.”

I never paid much attention to Davidson—the argument itself was enough for me to laugh—but the Lewis Carroll connection above was clear. 

Carroll and Borges and Aaronson, Nabokov, Nino Scalia, and Scott Soames. Aesthetics is the manifestation of ethics. Hooray for induction.

I'd written "every writer knows language is the master", but that separates writers from philosophers and artists from illustrators: those who recognize that language is the master, and those who refuse to admit it. Writers are craftspeople.

"But art is not essentially content. Art is essentially form. Art is object, not subject." Ursula K. Le Guin

---

I know I repeat myself, but anyone finding one page would miss the full argument.

---

New Scientist, Alice's adventures in algebra. 

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Even Dodgson’s keenest admirers would admit he was a cautious mathematician who produced little original work. He was, however, a conscientious tutor, and, above everything, he valued the ancient Greek textbook Euclid’s Elements as the epitome of mathematical thinking. Broadly speaking, it covered the geometry of circles, quadrilaterals, parallel lines and some basic trigonometry. But what’s really striking about Elements is its rigorous reasoning: it starts with a few incontrovertible truths, or axioms, and builds up complex arguments through simple, logical steps. Each proposition is stated, proved and finally signed off with QED.

For centuries, this approach had been seen as the pinnacle of mathematical and logical reasoning. Yet to Dodgson’s dismay, contemporary mathematicians weren’t always as rigorous as Euclid. He dismissed their writing as “semi-colloquial” and even “semi-logical”. Worse still for Dodgson, this new mathematics departed from the physical reality that had grounded Euclid’s works.

By now, scholars had started routinely using seemingly nonsensical concepts such as imaginary numbers – the square root of a negative number – which don’t represent physical quantities in the same way that whole numbers or fractions do. No Victorian embraced these new concepts wholeheartedly, and all struggled to find a philosophical framework that would accommodate them. But they gave mathematicians a freedom to explore new ideas, and some were prepared to go along with these strange concepts as long as they were manipulated using a consistent framework of operations. To Dodgson, though, the new mathematics was absurd, and while he accepted it might be interesting to an advanced mathematician, he believed it would be impossible to teach to an undergraduate.

Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the “semi-logic” of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.