“No one does ‘existential dread’ as well as Philip Glass”

If there's one filmmaker I hate, to the point of wanting to beat him to a pulp, it's Errol Morris 

TR: What other documentary filmmakers do you admire?

EM: Certainly Fred Wiseman. We both live in Cambridge too, and he’s a friend of mine. I find this kind of universe he’s created, the Fred Wiseman universe, the Fred Wiseman cosmology, to be endlessly fascinating. I often am perplexed at how he is perceived as a kind of sociologist, as if he is going from one institution to another and chronicling it much as a sociologist might study organisations by examining each of them in turn. But I think his enterprise is very, very different from that, and that Fred has created a whole sort of deeply expressionistic, surreal films. Very much Samuel Becket-like in their essence. If you like, various theatres of the absurd. And he also strikes me as one of the most truly perverse filmmakers, maybe the most perverse filmmaker of all time.

TR: In what sense?

EM: Because he has created one nightmare after another. Man at his most dysfunctional. And insane.

TR: But surely he would say that he simply sits back and watches?

EM: Well, yes, he does. But the end result of his watching is something that is so much about Fred and about how Fred sees the world, which is a wonderful thing, not a bad thing. It seems like the enterprise and the essence of art. Fred has actually managed to create a kind of personal universe on film that I find compelling. I call him the king of misanthropic cinema.

TR: And his response is?

EM: I think he takes it, as well he should, as a compliment.

I followed the Morris/Kuhn fracas, probably through Leiter. I thought I must have written something here, but I didn't. I've mentioned him and my dislike twice. 

I hated The Thin Blue Line. I saw it when it came out, and I knew what it was. I already knew what Philip Glass had become. I probably saw it Chicago, when I was living with Graeber again, and sitting in with Babette Mangolte. I'd published my piece the year before, and I was already working on the megillah.

If the point is to get an innocent man out of prison, then everything else is irrelevant. If the point is the creation of "art", then the life of the man in front of the camera is secondary. Morris reduces art to illustration, but then indulges aestheticized artiness He believes in "truth", so art is emptiness. Then why even bother? It's the definition of scholastic decadence, Mannerism without irony.  He calls Wiseman "the king of misanthropic cinema" because Wiseman says his films are "fictional".  Morris, the condescending hypocrite and pedant, accuses Wiseman of nihilism. 

As has been said many times over the past year, every accusation is a confession.

---

I found of video of Wiseman on a French TV, chatting in French. I've never seen him so comfortable in an interview. He's always been a sort of honest conservative classicist.

Godard on Leacock.

"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."

This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT.

For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.

A Stanford professor and editor of N+1, linking idiot Adam Kotsko. 

And this, at CT. 

My blogging is about two things: (1) the radical changes wrought by modern communication technology; and (2) the inability of the epistemic technologies of the written word to understand point (1).

I find this dialectical tension to be generative, but I can see how readers looking for answers might find it unsatisfying.

A recent paper in Nature, titled “Online images amplify gender bias,” makes the point in a more familiar format. Consider the first full clause of the first sentence of the abstract:

“Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images”

BOOM. Footnoted: “Time spent reading. American Academy of the Arts and Sciences https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/time-spent-reading (2019).”

I’ve frequently claimed that the age of reading and writing are over,...

Maybe Kevin Munger should stop writing.

On the declining abilities, and general resilience, of students. repeats 

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. 

The technocrats who rule our world are not going to start communicating only in memes. But the fact of fading literacy is only the problem now of how the class of designers and managers communicate with the managed. The era of "citizenship" is over.

And Farrell is as sleazy as ever

So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I’ll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest Noah, but I know him to be a genuinely decent person. What he says of Acemoglu and Johnson is what I’ll say about him – his heart is in the right place. Sometimes … he does not go out of his way to make himself lovable to lefties, but as someone who has been known to get involved in stupid and tendentious spats on the Internet myself, I’m in no position to heave rocks at glasshouses.

And Gaza, on actual politics (class and foreign relations, social in every sense), as always, useless: passive, hand wringing, willed ignorance and worse. Anglo-American  left liberals are unreadable. I don't even pay attention anymore. I'm not going to waste my time with CT. If you're not following opinion outside the bubble, including the bubble of the western left, and the west itself, there's not much to say. I try. I follow what I can.

Again, the importance of Palestinian political scientists and Arab academics (writing in english) is that they exist. It's got nothing to do with any inherent value in academia.

Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.

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update

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

jumping ahead, June

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.

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.

Scorsese on Godard, 

When you’re watching an actor in a fiction, to what degree are you watching a character and to what degree are you watching a human being in action? What exactly is a story on film—is a shot or a sequence of shots equivalent to paragraphs in a novel, is it instants of ongoing reality recorded by the camera, or is it both at once? Only someone who loved the cinema as much as Godard and who knew it as well as he did could have asked these questions and approached them with such a mixture of rigor and freedom. 

All art is documentary: the record of an event. And all documentary is fiction.

This made me laugh. 

My favorite of Godard’s films is Contempt. It’s a genuinely tragic experience, a film about real betrayal: the betrayal of a wife by her husband, the betrayal of cinema (personified by Fritz Lang as himself—his spirit also haunts Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us) by Jack Palance’s producer, the betrayal of Homer, of myth, of antiquity. The final moment, when the camera pans away from the film being made to the calm ocean in the distance over calls for silence, never fails to move me deeply. It’s an elegy for cinema, for love, for honor, for western civilization itself.

The top bit was quoted elsewhere by someone who wouldn't pay attention to the second.  Art is conservative or its reactionary. Bourgeois vulgarianism and aristocratic sadness. Get the joke now?

I've posted the first a few times over the years but not the second. It's an unscripted test, cut roughly for sound. I wanted to use it as the basis of a more fully realized pitch, but as it is, in a few words, it connects all of my arguments. At one point the director of... [not Tilton] told me to write up a proposal and offered to forward it to the curator and director of an Italian foundation. When he read the result he backed off. It was well written but informal, a friendly letter. His offer had been predicated on me knowing how to behave. He knew it was my role to be a supplicant, as he had been and is, and as the foundation director is to the people above him. I have a hard time with that. I'm a lousy actor.

The best short description I could think of was to ask them to imagine a collaboration between Jeff Wall and Christian Lacroix for the Paris Opera Ballet. I imagined the big one in the end as a muslin, sewn by the best seamstresses using every technique in the book. I wanted to make the whole thing a master class in the baroque, taking it seriously rather than merely indulging, taking having your cake and eating it as far as it could go. The show at Tilton was all part of the same big project. I'm a determinist. I knew someone was going to make a Phantom Thread within a few years. In the widest sense I've predicted everything.

Jeff Wall but also Wiseman and Robert Wilson, both of whom have worked with the Comédie-Française. Varieties of classicism. And now Wiseman has a tag.

Corey Robin et al. and the German idea of democracy. 

The professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth. In one myth, they are locked in conflict, sparring over the claims of reason and the imperative of power. Think Socrates and Athens, or Noam Chomsky and the American state. In another myth, they are reconciled, even fused. The professor becomes a politician, saving the polity from corruption and ignorance, demagoguery and vice. Think Plato’s philosopher-king, or Aaron Sorkin’s Jed Bartlet. The nobility of ideas is preserved, and transmuted, slowly, into the stuff of action. 

The sociologist Max Weber spent much of his life seduced by this second fable.... His “secret love,” he confessed to a friend, was “the political.”...

On the page, Weber told a different story. In the last years of his life, which ended in 1920, he delivered two lectures in Munich, one on the vocation of the scholar and the other on the vocation of the politician.... In Weber’s hands, the professor and the politician are not figures to be joined. Each remains a lonely hero of heavy burden, sent to ride against his particular foe: the overly structured institution of the modern mind, the overly structured institution of the modern state. (Weber assumed both of his protagonists were male.) Neither has much probability of success; in part because of that improbability, each is possessed by a great determination to prevail....

Education and government, said Freud, are two of the world’s “impossible professions.” Weber had a theory as to why. Every effort of the professor and the politician is haunted by the spectre of its disappearance. As a scholar, the professor wagers his soul on getting “this specific conjecture exactly right about this particular point in this particular manuscript.” The smaller the question, the larger the devotion—a “strange intoxication,” Weber concedes, “mocked by all who do not share it.” That is the poignancy of the scholar’s vocation: to demonstrate his worth by taking on a task that no one believes is worth doing, and in which “success is by no means guaranteed.” Even if he is successful, the scholar must face the fact that his work will produce new questions. Those can be answered only by new scholarship, which, one day, will surpass his. It is the “destiny,” and even the “point,” of the scholar’s work to be “left behind.”...

Weber delivered the first of the two lectures, on the scholar’s work, on November 7, 1917, the day of the Bolshevik Revolution. One year later, a wave of revolution and counter-revolution swept across Germany. It didn’t break until after Weber delivered his second lecture, on the politician’s work, on January 28, 1919. Weber makes occasional, if oblique, reference to the swirl of events around him, but the dominant motif of both lectures is neither turbulence nor movement. It is stuckness. The particles of academic and political life have slowed to a halt; all that was air has become solid.

Weber’s complaints will sound familiar to contemporary readers. Budget-strapped universities pack as many students as possible into classes. Numbers are a “measure of success,” while quality, because it is “unquantifiable,” is ignored. Young scholars lead a “precarious quasi-proletarian existence,” with little prospect of a long-term career, and the rule of promotion is that “there are a lot of mediocrities in leading university positions.” Every aspiring academic must ask himself whether “he can bear to see mediocrity after mediocrity promoted ahead of him, year after year, without becoming embittered and broken inside.” The “animating principle” of the university is an “empty fiction.”

The state is equally ossified. Most people lack the time or wealth to devote themselves to politics. Those who have the resources see politics as business by other means. There’s no way that politics can be “institutionally organized to correspond to any kind of ‘higher calling.’ ” For Weber, the only place where “unconditional, ruthless political idealism” is to be found is “among the classes who own nothing.” They don’t participate, except in a revolutionary period, which Weber doesn’t believe he is in. The events of 1918 and 1919 are a “carnival being dignified with the name of ‘revolution.’” 

The spectre haunting Weber is neither bureaucracy nor capitalism (although capitalism does play an under-remarked role in these lectures). Instead, it’s an ancient tension between hero and fate, transposed to modern life. Where classical tragedy sees the hero felled by a destiny that he resists, the nemesis of the Weberian actor is absorption in the institutions that he’s meant to oppose. Society is a siren, forever tempting us to forsake our tasks and seek the smaller goods of reputation and status. The scholar becomes a scribe; the politician, a hack. The danger is not defeat of the opposing self from without but corruption of the self from within, where the self’s diminishing desire to oppose comports all too well with society’s needs....  

It’s tempting to see Weber’s theory as an empirical description of the modern world, particularly as the engines of social movement have slowed, and after we’ve elected a President whose appeal, as a candidate, was the promise of blank stability. 

As the political theorist Steven Klein argues in his enormously clarifying study, “The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State,” Weber had a suspicion, almost a fear, of the realm of everyday needs, particularly material needs. A need or want demands gratification. Sometimes, that demand sets the stage for revolutionary leaders who transform society, whether with a social contract or a worker’s republic. Even capitalism, according to Weber, was once the work of a charismatic cohort of schismatics. But while unmet needs may elicit acts of extraordinary creativity, both moral and political, met needs limit our capacity to experience suffering, and to generate meaning from that suffering. When fulfillment replaces frustration, social structures degenerate into flattened planes of existence, free of friction. For Weber, capitalism and socialism, the market and the welfare state, firms and social movements, economics and politics—all spell the same end: people getting what they want. With that satisfaction comes the retirement from striving, the disappearance of tragedy, and the loss of the tutelage of suffering.

In an age of deep polarization, neoliberalism, and global warming, Weber’s vision can seem like an appealing one. (The fact that he died at the tail end of a pandemic, which may have taken his life, and in the midst of a street battle between left and right, only adds to his aura.) His spirit of melancholy—a word often heard on the academic left—registers a desire for something different without committing us to the confidence that collective action requires. Yet for all the potency of that vision, Klein’s reading suggests the perils of overstating the vice grip of the material world and underestimating the possibilities of political action—possibilities not for the tragic elevation of the self or the sadness of social movements but for the collective transformation of the world. 

Needs, after all, can and should be met. If the last half century’s struggles over the economy have taught us anything, it’s that the provision of comforts will always be contested; social democracy will always need defending. We needn’t worry too much about the end of con!ict or an abundance of ease. When Weber constructed his theory, it was less a description than a prayer, a desperate bid to $nd friction in a world supposedly smoothed by structure. He was hardly the only social theorist to over-structure reality, to mistake the suspended animation of a moment for the immobilisme of an epoch. Tocqueville suffered from the same malady; Marcuse, Arendt, and Foucault shared some of its symptoms as well. But Weber needed the malady. The question is: Do we? 

"who codes as". The language of tech geeks, statisticians and pedants.  And the last paragraphs... as if Weber's melancholy were anything but conservative, or in fact reactionary.

Klein, The Work of Politics.
From the Introduction.

This book is about the dilemmas and possibilities that the social welfare state presents to political movements aspiring to enact democratic transformations. By democratic transformations, I mean a mode of politics that brings critical scrutiny upon previously unchallenged and rigid forms of domination and that thereby seeks to change not just the distribution of material goods or the electoral fortunes of a particular party but the basic structure of social relation- ships. As a confrontation between the first modern, nation-wide social welfare institutions and a movement seeking such democratic transformations, the clash between Bismarck and the SPD distills the questions I address: Can democratic political movements use social welfare institutions to achieve lasting change in society? Or will participation in hierarchical state structures inevitably dissipate the transformative aspirations of such movements?

In response to these questions, I advance a theory of democracy and the welfare state that rests on two fundamental pillars. The first is a reconceptualization of the means of social democracy: the democratic welfare state. I develop a theory of welfare institutions that shows how they can function, not as bureaucratic, passive-client-creating entitlements, but as mechanisms for collective democratic empowerment and participation. The second is a reconceptualization of the goal of social democracy. Against the idea that the purpose of welfare institutions is material equality, redistribution, or social rights, I argue that social democratic movements have and should aspire to transform entrenched structures of social domination through participatory welfare politics. Together, these two threads provide a reconceptualization of social democracy as a political theory and historical political project, one that emphasizes the democratic rather than merely protective dimensions of welfare politics.

This is a work of historically grounded political theory. I develop its central arguments by moving between concrete historical examples and reflection on the conceptual categories through which political theorists interpret democratic politics in the welfare state. As a result, my method is dialogic and diagnostic rather than deductive: I search, not for higher-level normative principles that could justify welfare institutions but for the theoretical concepts that can illuminate the traces of past transformative and utopian movements embedded in our current political practices and institutions. I examine three of the most influential twentieth-century theorists of democracy and the welfare state – Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas – to diagnose the theoretical deadlocks behind current approaches to the welfare state and to develop my own positive vision of transformative politics in the welfare state. In each case, I unearth the basic philosophical and socio-theoretic concepts animating their respective thoughts. However, I view these concepts not as self-contained, philosophical edifices, but as always-partial efforts to make sense of our common world and the political events contained within it. Connecting this analysis up with the history of political mobilizations in Bismarck’s welfare institutions and the postwar Swedish welfare state, I show that they can illuminate concrete political dynamics of democratic world-making in the welfare state.

Most briefly, my argument is that democratic theorists are unable to articulate the participatory aspects of welfare politics because they inherit the horizon of political possibility generated by Max Weber’s thought.... By accepting Weber’s assumptions, democratic theorists reduce welfare institutions to state mechanisms of mastery and calculation, thereby foreclosing possibilities for popular democratic participation in those institutions.

I turn to Arendt’s thought for an analysis of the relationship between democracy and the welfare state that overcomes Weber’s socio-theoretic categories. Against the widespread view that Arendt was irredeemably hostile to “the social question” – that is, to using democratic state power to address economic or social injustices – I recover unappreciated elements of her thought that prove vital for thinking about democratic politics in the welfare state. Developing her implicit dialogue with Weber, I use elements of Arendt’s thought to develop a view of the welfare institutions as what I call worldly mediators between calculable material needs and non-calculative, political judgments. I show that once political theorists understand welfare institutions to be the result of democratic world-making – the lasting, worldly objects produced in the course of political struggle – they can better see opportunities for democratic participation and engagement that welfare institutions create. 

Weber pissed me off so much as a "social scientist" that I treated him only as that, to play him off others I read as writers. "Fachmenschen ohne Geist, Genußmenschen ohne Herz", "hollow men,"  torn between positivism and irrationalism, and also in his case with fantasies of Übermenschen. So now he's being read a a writer, but still for his model-making as if the models weren't another form of art. I was so fucking lazy. Weber is closer to Adorno, but unlike Adorno he refused to rebel.

The stupidity of all of the theory of democracy shit is explained by Krieger.

Better to watch a Wiseman film than read Klein. Democracy is sport, not romantic poetry. More than that it's team sport, not for pedants.

I'm not done with this one.

---

I’m being unfair to Weber. He contradicts himself, as writers do. He’s torn between romanticism and positivism. He’s perfectly capable of discussing Rembrandt’s art[i] or the “plebian” German people[ii], and aesthetics as inseparable from ethics, in those other than himself. And then this, from the same lecture quoted above.

 

After Nietzsche's devastating criticism of those 'last men' who 'invented happiness,' I may leave aside altogether the naive optimism in which science--that is, the technique of mastering life which rests upon science-–has been celebrated as the way to happiness. Who believes in this? –aside from a few big children in university chairs or editorial offices.

 

Weber’s pessimism is founded in irrationalism, an irrationalism he nonetheless champions, defending an inevitably authoritarian bureaucracy in the absence of the justifications of an almighty god. He mourns the death of heroes. So much for disenchantment; who needs gods when you have ghosts?  But for the sociology and political science of the children of university chairs, the source of the argument needed to be forgotten. 

   

Stephen A. Kent in 1983

 

Ideas formulated by Nietzsche were major sources of Weber’s inspiration for the last, pessimistic section of The Protestant Ethic (Mommsen, 1974: 106-, see 79). Those of us who know Weber’s work primarily through Parsons’ translation fail to realize this because, once again, of deficiencies in Parsons’ rendering of a crucial and revealing phrase.[iii]

 

Earlier Kent had discussed the mistranslation of stahlhartes Gehäuse, and now it’s “last stage” for “last men” Kent quotes Parsons’ translation adding the original where needed.

 

No one knows who will live in this cage (Gehäuse) in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of the old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage (die 'letzten Menschen') of this cultural/development it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.' 

 

The translation problem is clear: in the original German Weber referred to Nietzsche’s “last men” as those who would be “‘specialists without Spirit, sensualists without heart.’” He even put letzten Menschen in quotation marks, so that his readers would be certain to pick up the Nietzschean allusion to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Parsons’ translation of the German phrase as “the last stage,” not to mention his omission of the quotations around it, inarguably misrepresents what Weber tried to convey. The “specialists without spirit” quotation that Weber offered was not taken verbatim from Nietzsche. Rather, Weber himself constructed it with the tenor of Zarathustra in mind. [iv]

 

Kent sprinkles the text with sources and I’ve removed them for simplicity. His source for the last claim is Wolfgang Mommsen, in 1965.  Anthony Giddens, in his introduction to the Parsons translation in 1976, refers without reference to it as a quote from Goethe.[v]  

 

Franz Kafka published “The Metamorphosis” ten years after Weber published The Protestant Ethic. In 1905 Kafka was a student of Weber's younger brother; In the Penal Colony is now assumed to have lifted images and phrases from Alfred Weber's essay, “Der Beamte,” (“The Official” or “The Bureaucrat”)[vi],  so it’s safe to say Kafka had read Die protestantische Ethik. Even with debates over the Parsons’ translation, the first reference to Kafka I’ve found is from 2001, and stahlhartes Gehäuse translated simply as “shell as hard as steel”.[vii]

 

By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile. Concepts come late to the game. Sensibilities predate their clear articulation. Most serious scholars of Eliot and Kafka, and the literature from the period have read Weber, and know the connection. The reverse is less common, at least in English.  This isn’t a matter of taste or aesthetics but error, the mistake Weber himself makes, though he was a broadly literate man in a time when it was assumed a man in his position would be. It’s a mistake all philosophers make in imagining themselves an unmoved mover, the cause but not the product, imagining their own freedom even as their arguments describe, and prescribe, the lack of it for others. Their followers, in their role as followers compound this, smoothing out the conflicts their masters’ works describe. 

 

We need, finally, to separate Modernism from modernity. They are not synonyms. 

---

[i] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Translated byTalcott Parsons, Introduction Anthony Giddens (1976), George Allen and Unwin Ltd. p.169

[ii] Max Weber, "Suffrage and Democracy in Germany", in Weber: Political Writings. Edited by Peter Lassman. Translated by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge University Press, 1994. pp-119-121

[iii] Stephen A. Kent, “Weber, Goethe, and the Nietzschean Allusion: Capturing the Source of the ‘Iron Cage’ Metaphor.” Sociological Analysis, vol. 44, no. 4, 1983, pp. 297–319.

[iv] ibid

[v] Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Parsons, Introduction by Giddens (1976), pp. vii-xxvi.

[vi] Austin Harrington, “Alfred Weber's essay `The Civil Servant' and Kafka's `In the Penal Colony': the evidence of an influence”, History of the Human Sciences, August 2007 20: 41-63

[vii] Peter Baehr, "The "Iron Cage" and the "Shell as Hard as Steel": Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." History and Theory 40.2 (2001): 153-69.

sympathy for the devil

"My older brother is in charge of finding lower income housing in London for people that need it and my sister is involved in supporting farmers' rights in Latin America. My younger brother is the political editor of The Guardian. He is very successful, very brilliant… And my two brothers and my sister… I think…they are very amused by what I do… they... they...  They're amused."

The above and the few minutes before and after remind you that everyone around her fears her except those that matter. Even her daughter laughs at her. The interview is shot at the breakfast room table; as Wintour is leaving it cuts to a shot of dog looking down at her from the top of the stairs. The newly introduced mood music continues in the next scene. At the office an assistant is talking about a facialist about to open a new boutique in London. Wintour's expression is dead. The scenes are cut to cut her for slumming.

I watched the documentary for this scene. It goes to the question of why a Brit or an American could never write The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and why Alexander McQueen was a costume designer not a couturier. To be in fashion and to take it seriously you have to begin by not taking anything seriously, then you can choose to take the frivolous seriously and even be a genius.

I went to a funeral for a minor, female, gay icon. The two people who spoke who brought tears to everyone's eyes were the among the most willfully shallow people in the room, but each in simple precise language described small moments on a beach or in a park with their late friend that could stand for anyone's perfect moments of happiness.

It's interesting the number of people in the fashion industry who say that fashion isn't art. Some fashion photographers say the same thing about their work. What would they say? "We're just pretending!" "We're just pretentious!"  Fashion photography is less pretentious than war photography. Fashion is art, but so is gardening. It's deeply problematic, but so is ballet. Ballet has maintained a level of seriousness because for all the glamour there's no money in it.

Grace Coddington

Anna saw the celebrity thing coming, way before everybody else jumped on that bandwagon, and whilst I hated it I'm afraid I have to admit she was right. You can't stay behind. You  know, you have to go charging ahead, and she did and the magazine is very successful because of it. And... whilst I wouldn't really care if I never saw another celebrity, obviously if a magazine doesn't sell I don't have a job so it would be silly... You've got to have something to put your work in otherwise it's not valid.

Coddington is from the other side of the UK class system, a convent girl from Wales, rising up into sophistication rather than down. She makes the most of it.

It's too bad Wiseman didn't make the film. It would've been much better.

I've never liked Errol Morris' films. He tarts them up to make what he calls art. Wiseman doesn't tart things up and he calls his films fictions. Herzog is in another category, but there's no contradiction between liking his films and Wiseman's.

On their different understanding of surrealism: Herzog's a German who lived through hell and Morris is an American who grew up watching horror movies. Morris doesn't understand how the word can have weight. To him it's only a term of what he would call art.

"Freedom of expression" can also have a negative connotation -- a lack of rigor in what is being said.
— Sam Husseini (@samhusseini) January 15, 2015

Jon Stewart's "dissent" is like tweeting --it could always be taken back, dismissed as a joke.
— Sam Husseini (@samhusseini) February 11, 2015

Leiter:

The priceless sayings of Werner Herzog...
...turned into posters; (even more here).
Here's a gem:

Morris, Husseini and Leiter all make the same mistakes, about art, politics and intellectualism in general. Leiter allows Herzog's humane moral pessimism only if it can always be taken back, dismissed as a joke.

"Public higher education is under aggressive ideological and political—but not necessarily partisan—attack, and is fostering a fervent political defense."  Siva Vaidhyanathan

A comment, posted on a piece on education and education "reform" by Siva Vaidhyanathan, "a cultural historian and media scholar" (see previous). The formatting was stripped; this a lot easier to read. The last bit repeats paragraphs quoted just below in the post on Joshua Cohen, for the same obvious reasons. Rough, I fixed the spelling and that's all, and all repeats here. It'll do. [comments were stripped years later] 
---
This essay is full of the sort of confusions endemic in our age when academics style themselves "public intellectuals" while indulging the biases of the academy: they’re always coming down from the mountain.

What does it mean to defend the research model for the entirety of academia while condemning instrumentalism? (I'll pretend for now that the author is defending the humanities as such, even though it's clear he isn't.) The researchers I know dislike teaching, especially teaching undergrads, because it takes them away from research. And the research model has infected the humanities so that professors now see themselves as akin to scientists or technicians, and also therefore “producing” something, even if it's only cubic yards of pseudo-radical hot air. Economics and Anglo-American philosophy are open in their claims to the status of science, as Marxism and Freudianism once were, but like literary theory and Continental philosophy there’re all forms of high scholasticism, as self-supporting as the Roman Catholic Church, certainly no defender of free thinking and curiosity for curiosity's sake.

And as far as academic radicalism is concerned, Martha Nussbaum was right about Judith Butler's self-indulgence, while Butler is now actively defending liberal principles, in Israel and Palestine, that Nussbaum is too much of a coward to stand for. The same goes for the current popstar Zizek, who's called a Stalinist by liberals who refuse to stand by their own principles, which he and Butler are left to do, as leftists. To see an amusing take on Zizek from something more engaged in what Raymond Geuss would call “real politics” see this.

And as the recent fiasco in Montana should make clear to social "scientists", there is no feedback loop in geology. Money spent studying the average man or woman on the street would be better spent raising the average: in education, not "research". The academy's constant focus on measuring to the mean puts downward pressure on the mean: it makes us all dumber. Seekers of the impossible goal of a “value free” social science are themselves models of moral passivity.

But as I said at the top, the author of this piece isn't really attacking instrumentalism, he's attacking short term instrumentalism

Some time in the 1980s, states forgot that universities benefit the broader society, not just the students who attend. They are part of the cultural and social fabric of each state. They preserve and enhance local art, music, poetry, and drama. They make sense of our past and predict our future. State universities invented Mosaic, the most influential early Web browser, and made those “waves of grain” that feed much of the world possible and profitable. 

Call it serious rather than knee-jerk neoliberalism, the thinking man’s productivism, or Fordism for adults. And the mention of “art, music poetry, and drama” reminds me of Howie Cohen, the ad man who credits Woodstock and acid for giving him the imaginative freedom to come up with the lines "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" and "Try it, you'll like it!"

And now to "disruption" which the author calls "an ahistorical and specious concept". Google "modernism radical disruption" for the history and "disruptive dissensus" for the current vogue. See also of course the current popularity of anarchism. Disruption is ahistorical only because all tag lines and political fantasies are ahistorical: predicated on forgetting the lessons of history. Disruption itself is a modernist trope, just as permanent revolution is a capitalist fantasy, as “creative destruction”. Taylorism and Fordism are not the inventions of a professor at Harvard Business School. [they're the justification: the Harvard program started in 1908] The theme of the relation of modern man as individual to the collective that made him (and of which he’s a member whether he likes it or not) is as old as Hamlet. The ideal of sleepless curiosity is Goethe’s Faust: the definition of Modernity.

And now to the movies. Andrew Rossi:

One of the key themes of Ivory Tower is the idea of disruption, which has been at the core of almost every movie I've made in the last thirteen years. 

Well then, there you go. And Peter Thiel:

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

The author of this piece is defending technocratic capitalist liberalism against anarchist capitalism. I’ll offer a third option, that any professor in the humanities should recognize, though more and more they don’t. And that is the most important change in the academy over the last century, from Weber and Ford to Sputnik, a change Siva Vaidhyanathan and other academics of this age have no knowledge of because they’re the product of that change. Neoliberalism made you. You’re a product of culture without knowing how it would be even possible to be anything but “free to choose” as uncle Miltie would say.

 
Frederick Wiseman is not a “documentary” filmmaker. He calls his films “fictions”. He’s “generated deep respect from critics, film scholars, and other filmmakers.” because he’s a very good filmmaker, as some writers are very good writers. “Through his long career offering almost anthropological observations of American institutions…” He’s made films about the Comédie-Française and The Paris Opera Ballet. Wiseman makes movies about systems and the people within them. He was going to do a film about a Las Vegas casino, but the casino backed out. A wise choice, but not because Wiseman was going to reveal hidden corruption. He was simply going to be an honest observer, sympathetic to people going through their daily routines. Wiseman the filmmaker is not a teacher.

So here’s a small taste of what you’re not. The Learning Knights of Bell Telephone. 

The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises. 

In 1952, Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee. Together with representatives of the university, Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education. There were lectures and seminars led by scholars from Penn and other colleges in the area — 550 hours of course work in total, and more reading, Baltzell reported, than the average graduate student was asked to do in a similar time frame. 

...Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival. 

...What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.” 

...But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.

The last link's a third time repeat 

note taking. more on Sahlins. comments elsewhere

From Dorothy Thompson’s introduction to The Poverty of Theory

“Of course it produced responses. Some of these emerged at an extraordinary evening at a History Workshop conference in Oxford in December 1979. This was for some reason held in a dimly-lit ruined building, and had been set up as a discussion. It ended up however as an emotionally-charged event whose repercussions continued for months if not for years. 

…At the end of the evening a leading History Workshop character asked whether he would continue to publish relevant material. Edward replied that he thought he would not be publishing much of anything for a while, since he felt that his time would be taken up trying to organize opposition to cruise missiles in Britain. The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?’”

“The answer was ‘Cruise what Edward?’” Rilly.
The rise of the neoliberal academy.

“I expect pissed-off lefties like Terry Turner to be ready to take the fight to the enemy. What I always find so depressing about these periods of academic blood letting is how poorly the ‘scientists’ behave as they extol an ideal of dispassionate objectivity while simultaneously savaging anyone who suggests to them that they may not be living up to their own ego ideal.”

It’s not just the ‘scientists’ Witness an author on this blog “Sahlins move seems to represent a transformation of the conflict out of the arena of measured debate and into the symbolic.”

Such wounded reasonableness. “Why is Sahlins getting so angry?” A question asked from tribal loyalty, except for the fact that its tribal loyalty while denying even the possibility that that’s what it could be.

Tribal loyalty is human. The model of collaborative reason denies politics, so that arguments from authority and dripping with condescension if not outright contempt are allowed against outsiders. “What do women want?” the concerned men ask each other. “Why are they so angry?” Should it mean something that men are all scientists? Should it help their argument? Should it hurt?

Language is politics. The academy needs more open argument not less. It needs intellectual bloodsport to counter bureaucratic politesse, the intellectual model of the courtroom to counter the model of the lab. Courts aren’t barbaric they’re necessary. The defenders of Chagnon, not only “scientists” but petty bureaucrats, pretend politics are beneath them, but they live by it.

It’s not a “kerfuffle” it’s a fight over the definition of moral responsibility. If you don’t want to argue about that, stop pretending you have any intellectual interests at all. You’re just a happy technician. The model of the neoliberal academy.

---

I’ll add one more point before bowing out, since things are heating up, as they should.

I had arguments with David Graeber 30 years ago and later in Chicago when I realized. putting it bluntly, that anthropologists as academics no longer understand culture because they don’t understand their relation to the culture they’re a part of.

Any filmmaker will tell you that moral questions are the most important ones. To a humanist they’re the most interesting and most fun. They’re the good stuff. Everything else and you’re just a bricklayer or a file clerk of some sort or another. But here the good stuff is treated as a side issue that’s gotten in the way of science.”The Great Kalahari Debate” The moral questions are front and center. But the debate itself makes people uncomfortable.

The offense taken at Zero Dark 30 was that questions had gotten in the way of answers. What if torture works sometimes, as it did in Germany 10 years ago (Magnus Gäfgen) and it’s still wrong? In Lincoln and Argo it was the other way around. Too many answers not enough questions. And the CIA won the oscar for best picture. Chagnon would never have ended up as important as he is if moral questions were seen as interesting in themselves. Obviously they bored him a bit. And obviously also for some there’s a good career to be made in moralism. But reminding people of that is just another way of avoiding the questions of morality itself. And Chagnon is a moralist, isn’t he? The argument is that his moralism made him an incompetent scientist.

If you’re wondering about your relations with the people you study and you know you can’t treat them the way you treat your mother, just as an experiment spend a week treating your mother the way you’d treat the people you study. And when that makes you scared you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, until you get lazy and your subjects or your mother call you an asshole. And then you get scared again, as you should be. Anthropologists are part scholar and part scientist. Scientists are just plumbers. That’s my side of that argument. 

What do I know about science? I’m only an artist, but I know the only anthropological films that are more than visual file clerking are by Wiseman. He’s one of the most important filmmakers alive and he calls his films "fictions". He keeps his eye right in the sweet spot.

I’m with Sahlins. But I’m too young to feel this old.

---

If questions of morality were only practical we wouldn’t need lawyers. As it is, give me the nihilism of lawyers, including and especially underpaid public defenders, over the idealism of philosophers. Lawyers have a formal relation to their clients. They’re paid advocates.
How primitive is that?

Housewives invented feminism, railroad porters started the civil rights movement and teary-eyed drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland started the public fight for gay rights. No one gave a damn about the Jews and until recently no one gave a damn about the Palestinians.
Practice precedes theory.

I haven’t seen that Downey vid in years, and of course I forgot about Rouch. That was stupid.

“Science is exciting, fun, and joyous…” Enthusiasm is more dangerous than heroin.

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

Continuing from the previous post

Wiseman 

The importance of documentaries as political instruments for change is stubbornly clung to, despite the total absence of any supporting evidence. 

Documentaries, like plays, novels, poems, are fictional forms that have no measurable social utility.  

I have no way of determining what is or is not representative in any sequence. It’s enough for me that it occurred while I was present and that it fits into the themes I find in the material. I am not interested in ideological film-making, whether of the right or left. I remember being criticized by some on the left when I made Hospital. They knew from their ideological positions that white middle-class doctors and nurses exploited poor blacks and Hispanics. Therefore a film like Hospital which showed many white doctors and nurses (as well as black and Hispanic doctors and nurses) working hard, long hours to help their patients was ideologically offensive. Film ideologues are not interested in the discovery and surprise aspect of documentary film-making, or in trusting their own or anyone else’s independent judgement, but want documentary film-makers to confirm their own ideological, abstract views which have little or no connection with experience. Some documentary film-makers urged on in their self-generated political fantasies by academics and other ideologues, by film barons and bureaucrats, and by all those who form the parasitic platoons fluttering around film-makers, believe documentaries must educate, expose, inform, reform and effect change in a resistant and otherwise unenlightened world. Documentaries are thought to have the same relation to social change as penicillin to syphilis. The importance of documentaries as political instruments for change is stubbornly clung to, despite the total absence of any supporting evidence.

Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.

"Is Art useful? Yes. Why? Because it is art. Is there such a thing as a pernicious form of art? Yes! The form that distorts the underlying conditions of life. Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings with its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them. Study all the sores, like a doctor in the course of his hospital duties, and the good-sense school, the school dedicated exclusively to morality, will find nothing to bite on. Is crime always punished, virtue always rewarded? No; and yet if your novel, if your play is well put together, no one will take it into his head to break the laws of nature. The first necessary condition for the creation of a vigorous art form is the belief in underlying unity. I defy anyone to find one single work of imagination that satisfies the conditions of beauty and is at the same time a pernicious work."

Wiseman's work has had more impact than most, but that's not the point. There's no contradiction between Wiseman and Baudelaire. Diagnosis is not cure.