The close relationship between the United States and Europe transcends geographic proximity and transactional politics. It represents a unique bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilizational heritage.

Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty. This tradition flows from Athens and Rome, through medieval Christianity, to English common law, and ultimately into America's founding documents. The Declaration's revolutionary assertion that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights who recognized that all men possess natural rights that no government can arbitrate or deny. America remains indebted to Europe for this intellectual and cultural legacy. 

samuel.samson · Pathways (Piano Covers)

Kitsch, Politics, Philosophy, Pedants and Children, Naturalism, Determinism, Make it Idiot-Proof,

Whole hour of pure 🌅https://t.co/jHZefUSzfj

— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) October 6, 2024

Awakening from his dogmatic slumber. 20 years ago he would have called that unoriginal observation anti-Semitic. And it would have referred to him. He's outgrown some of the pathology. 20 years from now he'll feel some secret regret.

A lot of Israelis seem to have convinced themselves that the world is so irrationally set against them that their own conduct becomes irrelevant to how they are seen in the world, which gets them stuck in a cycle of overreach, backlash, and paranoia.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 12, 2024

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OK

The second one reminded me of something from the past 

Some of the hostages held by Hamas have German citizenship, so when I asked a politician from Germany’s governing coalition what the government’s position was on those people, I was shocked when his response, in private, was: Das sind doch keine reinen Deutschen, which translates to: well, those aren’t pure Germans. He didn’t choose from a host of perfectly acceptable terms to refer to Germans with dual citizenship, he didn’t even use adjectives such as richtige or echte to refer to them not being full or proper Germans – instead, he used the old Nazi term to differentiate between Aryans and non-Aryans.

"Germany is a good place to be Jewish. Unless, like me, you’re a Jew who criticises Israel"

Germany is not a good place to be Jewish. The piece is hard to read. 

Whenever I told people I was of German descent, they would argue with me -- then upon discovering that I was Jewish, would say "Oh, so you're not German, you're Jewish" (strangely, I never heard anyone say to someone, upon discovering that they were Christian, "Oh, so you're not German, you're Christian"). 

Self-hatred runs deep. Feldman, Lipton, Stanley, Lipstadt, Corey Robin; the last two can at least look for evidence in the mirror. With the possible exception of Feldman, every one of them defends the existence of the Jewish state in conquered Palestine.

Feldman's latest book, Judenfetisch, isn't available in English.

Feldman in The Forward in 2015, returning to the scene of the crime.

Andrew-Lloyd-Mother-Fucking-Webber

updated, more than once. rilly.

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"There is no easy path from the aesthetic experience to politics."

From the "Brooklyn Institute" to Jacobin, 

Oduor, previously. It's almost impressive.

And now I'm going to watch Tár, to see if my assumptions were off in any way at all.

There is no "path" from the aesthetic experience to politics; they're inseparable. Your preferences are shown in the record of your actions, not what you claim for them.

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I'm a few minutes beyond the credits and it's absolute kitsch. She's blurbed as being an EGOT winner, along with Mel Brooks, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Whoopi Goldberg, and Andrew Lloyd Motherfucking Webber. It's not a film about art; it's a film about Aaahhrt. And it's just going to get worse. Brooks at least would get the joke. Jäger and everyone else, from the New Yorker and the NLR  is fucking blind.

But no. I was wrong. He's following Ruben Östlund, Force Majeure, The Square, and Triangle of Sadness. It's still shallow and reactionary—lazy, obvious, at least to... what, the old? the actually sophisticated? And Brody, Jäger et al. are still fucking blind.

Jäger

This is perhaps why the moralistic commentary on Tár runs into an explanatory impasse; for it is not Lydia’s personal culpability but these impersonal forces that are the real subject of the film. 

The most obvious among them is the stratified sphere of classical music – in which the lower ranks can only improve their career prospects by cultivating informal relationships with those higher up the ladder.

He makes it so easy. From Lydia Tár to Avital Ronell, because in fact it's the other way around.

"The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures."

Mocking Gopnik's script, and Lydia’s personal culpability, from the start. 

He runs down the list of EGOT winners, cross-cut with shots of Blanchett at work, ending on "...Andrew Lloyd Webber, and of course... Mel Brooks."  The audience laughs and Blanchett looks up from the page, as if hearing the laughter.  It's not just the cheapness. That one leaves a bad taste.

This is the core issue: the film was made as parody, and being received as serious it's become kitsch. Or maybe Field can't make up his mind what kind of cheap moralist he wants to be. Either way I don't care.

Jäger: "Throughout, Field meticulously evokes the authentic world of the Bildungsbürgertum".

"Authentic" He sounds so American.

And I'd forgotten this.

This could all hinge on my snobbery against others'; never mind the Spaceballs vid. But I've never forgotten the description of Adolph Green's last night, written by his son, and this:

We argued the relative merits of classical composers (any suggestion that Tchaikovsky had a maudlin streak or that von Suppé might not have been the last word in profundity infuriated him).

I don't like Tchaikovsky, but through Strayhorn, there'd be no Ellington without him. My father hated Kerouac but loved Pynchon. He was right about both, but couldn't accept the relation. That more than anything is the beginning of my argument with modernism as ideology as opposed to modernity as fact.  Mel Brooks will outlast Andrew Lloyd Webber. Adolph Green knew he loved crap and minor art, and he didn't care. He worked with the maudlin and the sentimental and made something out of it. That's more than Field is capable of, or Östlund for that matter. And Sir Steve McQueen is a good filmmaker, but his politics is not the politics some think it is.

---

My father hated musicals but he could quote lines from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. My parents loved Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford. Gilford was an old friend of David Graeber's parents. My mother's last words were lyrics from Oklahoma. 

Fukuyama published the essay "The End of History?" in 1989, the book in 1992.  The Future was released in late November.

Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room, my secret life
It's lonely here
There's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
And stuff it up the hole
In your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I've seen the future, brother
It is murder

I wanted to say it came out before the election, because it would have been part of the background for my beer with Trudeau. The man who threw the party was a Cohen fan, and the album was part of the  soundtrack of social life that I was part of or witnessed for the next few years. There was an of-the-moment perfection that everyone enjoyed, everyone "got". We sang along and laughed. The Future was kitsch. These were also the years when U2 discovered irony. It was all about the end of something, but not history. And it was the beginning of the present where club kids are more cosmopolitan than college professors, even as college professors are becoming club kids. 

---

The obvious, and the blindingly obvious. 

"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.

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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.  

Eurotrash

But in the earlier and Hungarian phase of his life, Lakatos was a Stalinist revolutionary, the leader of a communist cell who persuaded a young comrade that it was her duty to the revolution to commit suicide, since otherwise she was likely to be arrested by the Nazis and coerced into betraying the valuable young cadres who constituted the group (Bandy 2009: ch. 5; Long 1998 and 2002; Congden 1997). So far from being a fallibilist, the young Lakatos displayed a cocksure self-confidence in his grasp of the historical situation, enough to exclude any alternative solution to the admittedly appalling problems that this group of young and mostly Jewish communists were facing in Nazi-occupied Hungary. (“Is there no other way?” the young comrade asked. The answer, apparently, was “No”: Long 2002: 267.) 

Feyerabend tells how, without falling for Adolf Hitler’s charisma, he appreciated Hitler’s oratorial style. Austria was re-unified with Germany in 1938. Jewish schoolmates were treated differently, and Jewish neighbours and acquaintances started disappearing. But, as usual, Feyerabend had no clear view of the situation:

"Much of what happened I learned only after the war, from articles, books, and television, and the events I did notice either made no impression at all or affected me in a random way. I remember them and I can describe them, but there was no context to give them meaning and no aim to judge them by. (pp. 37–8). 

For me the German occupation and the war that followed were an inconvenience, not a moral problem, and my reactions came from accidental moods and circumstances, not from a well-defined outlook." (p. 38).

...As far as his army record goes, Feyerabend claims in his autobiography that his mind is a blank. But in fact this is one of the periods he tells us most about. Having passed his final high school exams in March 1942, he was drafted into the Arbeitsdienst (the work service introduced by the Nazis), and sent for basic training in Pirmasens, Germany. Feyerabend opted to stay in Germany to keep out of the way of the fighting, but subsequently asked to be sent to where the fighting was, having become bored with cleaning the barracks! He even considered joining the SS, for aesthetic reasons. 

Although Graeber and Wengrow concern themselves primarily with humanity’s early history, they begin by examining how Western thinkers have previously treated the subject, and in doing so they first turn to the French Enlightenment. This happens to be my own area of expertise, and I was curious to see what they would make of it. Quite frankly, I was appalled. 

The western romance of the other. David never understand culture because he denied that he had one. Utopianism is religious. The White Goddess, and Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not going to spend the money to read Appiah's review.

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I forgot I have a second NYRB account that I can use to read recent articles. Once you start paying and then let it expire, you lose the option.

Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis.

They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig.

And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet....

Appiah pretty much disgusts me as a thinker. Graeber only annoys me, for reasons of loyalty if nothing else. Both of them, as "liberal" or "anarchist" are asocial, anti-cosmopolitan individualists. Graeber's model of community is a fantasy dreamed up by someone for whom actual communality, common culture, was impossible.

Joachim Fest's Hitler  

The boy who fled the disciplines of school and then fell prey to the delusive promises of the big city found his idol in the Master of Bayreuth. Many young men of his generation followed the same course, and with similarly exalted expectations. It was a way with great appeal to gifted “outsiders” who otherwise would have no choice but to sink into mediocrity. It may surprise us to find that this unprepossessing son of a Linz customs official represents so typical a phenomenon. With the turn of the century legions of these sons of the nineteenth—century middle class made . their appearance. In 1906 Hermann Hesse, in Under the Wheel, vividly described the sufferings of one such youth under contemporary conditions and gave a dismal forecast of his future. Robert Musil, in Young Törless, and Frank Wedekind, in The Awakening of Spring, were among the many writers who dealt with the same theme. Whether these heroes sought escape from the toils of the world or went down to destruction, all of them opposed to the bourgeois world a wild enthusiasm for the arts. They despised their fathers’ mean accomplishments and felt only contempt for their values. By contrast, an artist’s existence was noble, precisely because it was socially unfruitful. Everything that stood for order, duty, endurance, they dismissed as “bourgeois.” The bourgeois mentality, they maintained, promoted efficiency but did not tolerate the extraordinary. The tremendous intensifications of true culture, on the other hand, the glories of the “spirit,”could be achieved only in isolation, in extreme human and social aloofmess. The artist, the genius, the complex personality in general, was bound to be utterly out of place in the bourgeois world. His true locale was far outon the fringes of society, where the morgue for suicides and the pantheon for immortals were both situated—as Henri Murger, the first analyst of this type bathetically observed. Though the lodginghouses to which Hitler betook himself were squalid, though his notion of being an artist was ridiculously highflown; though no one so far had acknowledged his talent; though his actual life in the home for men was marked by deceit, parasitism, and asociality—wall this could be secretly justified in terms of the prevailing concept of genius. And Richard “Wagner was the supreme example of the validity of that concept.  

Hitler himself, in fact, later declared that with the exception of Richard Wagner he had “no forerunners,” and by Wagner he meant not only the composer, but Wagner the personality, “the greatest prophetic figure the German people ”has had.” One of his favorite ideas, to which he returned frequently, concerned Wagner’s towering importance “for the development of German man.” He admired the courage and energy with which Wagner exerted political influence “without really wishing to be political,” and on one occasion admitted that a “literally hysterical excitement” overcame him when he recognized his own psychological kinship with this great man. 

The parallels are, in fact, not at all hard to detect. The points of contact between the two temperaments—all the more marked because the young postcard painter consciously modeled himself after his hero—produce a curious sense of family resemblance, which Thomas Mann first pointed out in his disturbing essay Brother Hitler. In 1938, when Hitler was at the height of his peacetime triumphs, Mann wrote: 

Must we not, even against our will, recognize in this phenomenon an aspect of the artist’s character? We are ashamed to admit it, but the whole pattern is there: the recalcitrance, sluggishness and miserable indefiniteness of his youth; the dimness of purpose, the what-do-you-really-want-to-be, the vegetating like a semi-idiot in the lowest social and psychological bohemianism, the arrogant rejection of any sensible and honorable occupation because of the basic feeling that he is too good for that sort of thing. On what is this feeling based? On a vague sense of being reserved for something entirely indefinable. To name it, if it could be named, would make people burst out laughing. Along with that, the uneasy conscience, the sense of guilt, the rage at the world, the revolutionary instinct, the subconscious storing up of explosive cravings for compensation, the churning determination to justify oneself, to prove oneself. . . . It is a thoroughly embarrassing kinship. Still and all, I would not want to close my eyes to it.

I don't know what else to do but repeat myself.

The vulgarity in Wagner and incipient in Beethoven—hence the need in Rosen’s terms for ‘tact’—is not the vulgarity of subject but of the composer’s assumptions about and attitude towards language.  Beethoven is in a line of gradation with Wagner, Gerome and Helmut Newton, in the sense that Wagner indulges a bombast that Beethoven at his best merely passionately describes.  Wagner’s music is written for Wagnerians in the same sense that Newton’s photographs are made for voyeurs, yet identification—as pseudo-community—is encouraged but not yet a requirement.  All communities are communities of selves and others.  Collective identity, as imaginary collective unity, is either a false—unrealizable—ideal, from fascism to The Singularity, or mere collective reflex: the community of tech geeks, fetishists and junkies. 

 

The experience of the sex act is social, formal, communicative, and if the world is seen as the social realm, world-creating.  The moment of orgasm as reflex is aformal, asocial (isolate), ecstatic and if the world is seen as social, world destructive.  Sex as performance is a form of communication; orgasm is artless.  The pretense of an ‘art’ of orgasm is vulgar.  The popular understanding of Pollock’s work is as an ‘act’ of ‘expression,’ as orgasm not structure.  Mondrian saw structure. The what and how of communication for Pollock’s work are complex; as complex in their way as the question of orgasm in Beethoven.  

 

What Rosen is debating with Brendel is the increasing presence of instrumentalism in form: the growing tendency to craft to reflex that reaches its apogee in the illustration and the false community of the fetish: of pure instrument.  Wagner is preaching to the choir (and Pollock is in there somewhere); Gerome is a soft-care pornographer playing to an audience, Newton and his audience are almost interchangeable, his form of communication identification with the masturbator, which is to say barely communication at all, one step away from the final shift, the final descent from interpersonal communication to masturbation in public.  

If communication is a circuit, reflex is a short.  The fantasy of the premature ejaculator is a state of eternal orgasm. It’s also the logic of the perfect economic man.  The mania for progress becomes no more than simply the desire to go faster.  If knowledge is measured in conclusions not in processes then the shortest distance between two points, the short circuit, is the obvious choice. Pornography and technical illustration are the model of art in a technocracy: immediate gratification. This is the crux of the struggle over the human imagination that begins in the 18th century, with the rise of idealist anti-humanism.   

Earlier

Manet, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1878

The shock of Manet was the shock of shame and recognition.  For Cezanne it was less publicly sexual and political but the same rule of recognition applies.  His work continues the move away from representation and mimesis by limiting even further the reproduction of psychology, of the full personhood of his sitters.  He reproduces shapes not character, at least not in comparison with those who came before him.  There’s a lot to be said about Cezanne and representation.  And what made his work bad when it was is almost as important in its way as what made it great when it was.  Because he failed at something, and that failure was consistent, making works that were both obscene and absurd.  In a very real sense Cezanne began with kitsch, with grand intent—often violent—and overreach.  But he turned to articulating what he could learn to articulate well: the space between ourselves and the objects around us.  But again its down to specifics, since what he articulated was the space around himself and the objects around him and what we sense is his sense of the world through his use of the rhetoric of pigment on canvas.  And again, against the logic of philosophic art and of intent it’s not a question of whether Cezanne was right or not.  If he was right then about what?  The basis of our interest in both Manet and Cezanne is that they describe their sensibilities, rather than merely indulging them.  The most complex pleasure to be found in their paintings is not the pleasure of liking them—is not Roberta Smith’s pleasure of enthusiasm, of a simplified sense of identification—but the pleasure of asking: “Why?” The pleasure is in engaging something foreign brought close by something universal: technique in common form

Cezanne, Abduction, 1867

On the lousy Manet, in 2010

Graeber being a fool, about 50 mins in.

A mother takes care of a child so that child can grow and thrive of course, but on the immediate level, what are they doing right now to facilitate that child doing, it's mostly so the child can go and play, and play is the ultimate expression of freedom for its own sake... [fading, quickly]  One could argue that it's one of the constitutive principles of the universe, [fading out, vocal fry] but that's another... another argument. [Laughter.]

When met him he read Robert Graves and worshipped the White Goddess. He never stopped being a fantasist. He's one of the reasons I went from having no interest in Dungeons and Dragons to actively hating it.

Having no interest is an understatement. 

repeats It even mentions David. And he has a tag.

So much bullshit. He loved being a celebrity.

Grant McCracken is a research affiliate with the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT who has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Ford, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a Futures of Entertainment Fellow and a member of the IBM Social Networking Advisory Board. 

He is author of the forthcoming book Culturematicfrom Harvard Business Review Press. Previously, he authored the 2009 book Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, the 2008 book Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture,the 2006 book Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, the 2005 book Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management, the 1997 book Plenitude: Culture by Commotion, the 1996 book Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, the 1990 book Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, and the 1988 book The Long Interview. For the Convergence Culture Consortium, he wrote "Assumption Hunters: A New Corporation in the Throes of Structural Change". 

Grant has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, and an adjunct professor at McGill University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.[i]

The central thing to understand about all of this is that once again art as craft has been separated from meaning, while the statements of academics are granted the authority of truths. But this time the false dichotomy of aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, central to Modernism since Benjamin –a distinction would have made Baudelaire  howl– has become a unified positivist theory of capitalism.  If the study of communication is akin to botany, or since this is MIT, akin to physics, it makes sense this is where Chomsky's rationalist formalism reaches its nadir, in the same place where 'theory' is now the theory of advertising as taught in business schools. An outsider might notice that MIT linguistics is akin to Chicago economics, but technocracy knows no subtexts.

This is the crude positivism that allows the crossover from Marxism to marketing. The shallowness is the same, and the pedantry, as mode or form, becomes more  important than the subject matter. It's easy to say that Analytical Marxism has the same relation to Marx as the debates of scholastic theologians had to the teachings of Jesus, but both exist at the end of a tradition, and traditions can be full or empty, thick or thin, can function as part of a debate in the wider world, or decay into arguments among specialists and pedants. This is something else: a scholastic philosophy of market practice, a high theory of the practice of the low, the theology of confidence tricksterism, not as trade school in comic theater but within the scholastic tradition of the search for truth. In the logic of modern philosophy, and theory, Episteme undermines and supplants Techne and then replaces it with an enlightened Praxis. That's been bad enough. In America, following Tocqueville's description of the focus on the practical, every craft must have its own theology, so even Cornell University now offers degrees in "Hospitality Science", while not yet at least going beyond offering an MFA in creative writing. Some programs now offer PhDs.

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[i ] http://www.convergenceculture.org/aboutc3/people.php

[ii] https://sha.cornell.edu  

I've linked to it recently, but my history with McCracken begins here. I should probably reuse some of the writing from 2006.

I've been coy about it if that's the best word but all the footnoted posts recently, different fonts etc., have been cut and pasted from my continuing disaster. [also here] It's spinning out of control but I'm enjoying the ride.

McCracken


My transcription of the first minutes.

What we're gonna talk about today is culture, which is a kind of dark matter for the commercial world, not so much for the creative world, but it's exactly that thing, that interface between the creative community, the cultural creatives as we now talk about them. And the world of commerce and the world of business and the world of some part of marketing doesn't really get the cultural proposition... The world has just got steadily more more complicated right? It changes almost almost as you look at... Joseph Schumpeter is one of the great kind of economists here to glimpse the fact that capitalism was a creative destructive force in the world... He had no idea what the world is going to look like. He was active about 80 years ago. We could you know bring him back to life and prop him up he would be astonished by just how destructive, how creative, capitalism has become.

The same is true of Alvin Toffler right? This is the guy who talked about Future Shock, the sheer force of the world the speed of the world how difficult that is how new that is as a structural feature of our world, and I think he too would look at the speed at which we're moving now and go oh my god. Clayton Christensen of course has this has blessed us with this notion of disruption, given us this idea that disruption is built into the playbook of capitalism. So capitalism is now eating itself in some sense, right? The takeaway here for this little section is the sudden, the difficult truth that capitalism is complicated and turbulent... And the good news here is that the people in this room can help a corporation live in a world like this. 

So strategy is struggle, right? Strategy was the the traditional way with which the corporations said OK what's out there? And how do we make ready for what's out there.... Peter Schwartz, this is the guy who was at Shell, and created the Global Business Network and his notion is that organizations exist in a state of perpetual surprise... You just wake up one day and you go oh my god my business model just got ripped out from under me what now? This is our own Michael Rayner. He was the co-author for the Disruption book written by Clayton Christensen. And he works here in Toronto I think at DeLoitte. But he wrote a book The Strategy Paradox in which he said strategy is dead. It doesn't work. We can't use it the way we used to. That's how difficult the world has become. And this of course is Nassim Talib, the guy who talked about black swans. And for me black swans is another language for disruptions right stuff can happen a Black swan is something out there on the horizon that you can't anticipate you can think as hard as you want about the future but you can't anticipate this black swan until it's upon you until it's sweeps into the marketplace, rips your business model out from under you.

A repeat from 2013, because the subject came up today.
Read the linked "previous post", and the one at the bottom of the page.

"Heydrich's facial expression as he died betrayed an 'uncanny spirituality and entirely perverted beauty, like a renaissance Cardinal,' according to Bernhard Wehner, a Kripo police official who investigated the assassination."

He's off by a few years, in both directions. But again, there's a difference between a mannered pose or work of art and a mannered life.  Repeats: A standard definition of kitsch is to be "more Catholic than the Pope." So I guess this makes it explicit that I'm continuing from the previous post.

Jean Fouquet, Etienne Chevalier with St. Stephen, left half of the Melun Diptych c.1454

According to his Wikipedia pages Wehner had a rich career after the war, and was chief of criminal investigations for the Dusseldorf police dept. from 1954-70. It's unsourced in the english, but sourced in German.

Later discussion of Paul Feyerabend

A tortured, milquetoast epistle. What she's describing, while leaning on the opinions of career coaches and scholars of management, is the wallflower's internal exile in response to fascism. But it's still the bookworm's concern for the fascism of bookworms, in the library, of Borges and the Church. The article is another symptom of the rot it so tenderly describes.

Literature teachers used to make their livings teaching books written by people who never went to university; teachers of philosophy teach books by people who never left. Criticism is engaged readership founded on an adversarial respect. Philosophers claim superiority to both artists and critics. Now every teacher is a philosopher or theorist or analyst. Just read the first fucking line. "In the course of interviewing some seventy graduate students in English for a book on the state of literary criticism,"

...I’ve encountered two types of people who are having trouble adapting to the field. First, there are those who bridle at the left-political conformity of English and who voice complaints familiar from the culture wars. But a second group suffers from a malaise without a name; socialization to the discipline has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition and loss.

Those in the latter group share a quality of inwardness. In interviews, they strike me as reflective, intuitive individuals, with English teacher written all over them. These are the people who say that something in this intellectual environment is eating them alive. Gina Hiatt, the president of a large coaching service for academic writers, tells me that many of her clients in the humanities have a similar experience. She believes these clients sense “an immorality they can’t put their finger on” in the thought-world of the humanities. They struggle as writers because talking the talk would make them feel complicit, yet they cannot afford to say, in Hiatt’s words, that “the emperor has no clothes.” Some keep their best ideas out of their scholarship for fear that if they violate certain ideological taboos, others will “hate” them (a verb Hiatt hears repeatedly). Hiatt describes these individuals as “canaries in the mine.”

...The reflections that follow focus largely on English, my home discipline and a trendsetter for the other modern language disciplines. These days nothing in English is “cool” in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole. Some years ago Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick touched on this complex in her well-known essay on paranoid reading, where she identified a strain of “hatred” in criticism. Also salient is a more recent piece in which Bruno Latour has described how scholars slip from “critique” into “critical barbarity,” giving “cruel treatment” to experiences and ideals that non-academics treat as objects of tender concern.

...Halberstam’s article hardly represents the best theoretical work of the 1990s. I introduce this piece because it embodies, almost in caricature, a studied coldness that enjoyed a vogue in that decade and has influenced subsequent criticism. Readers who know the novel The Silence of the Lambs or Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation will recall the murderer Buffalo Bill, who fashions a cloak from the skins of his female victims. In a well-known reading of the film, Halberstam suggests that Bill is as much “hero” as villain. For he “challenges the . . . misogynist constructions of the humanness, the naturalness, the interiority of gender.” By removing and wearing women’s skin, Bill refutes the idea that maleness and femaleness are carried within us. “Gender,” Halberstam explains, is “always posthuman, always a sewing job which stitches identity into a body bag.” The corpse, once flayed, “is no woman”; “it has been degendered, it is postgender, skinned and fleshed.” Halberstam blends her perspective uncritically with the hero-villain’s posthuman sensibility, which she sees as registering “a historical shift” to an era marked by the destruction of gender binaries and “of the boundary between inside and outside.”

The management scholar Ann Rippin, borrowing an image from a fairy tale, describes the “silver hands” with which organizations endow their members. Recruits to professional organizations, Rippin writes, are trained in glossy but dehumanized ways of speaking and feeling. The work they learn to do “is silver service done at arm’s length, hygienically, through a polished, highly wrought intermediary instrument.”

...Finally, a small subset of work in ELH glamorizes cruelty in the name of radical politics, though this motif abates after 2006, perhaps because of a change in editorial leadership. The piece I find most troubling is an article on a short story by Henry James. This article proposes that if one faces a choice between having sex with children and protecting them, “perhaps one should let oneself desire the child, and—relinquishing the gratifications of protection—let the child die.” Sexually precocious children should “perhaps” be allowed a death of “innocence” that will supplant the pleasures of childhood with “other pleasures” delivered by adult lovers. James’s short story supposedly conveys this moral. But the lesson is said to apply in real life as well, wherever adults might be tempted to issue “calls for the protection of children.” The story is said to reveal “the dire results of protecting children from desire”—anywhere. For today’s anti-pedophile perpetrates the “potential violence” of “speaking on [children’s] behalf.” 

"Jack" Halberstam. repeats and repeats.  

this post continued, here
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and jumping ahead, a day short of a year.

A new tag, covering everything from Nazi Germany and the USSR to transsexuals, Israel, hippies, Al Qaeda, and geeks. Added now because it covers the recent posts relating to Germaine Greer.

Utopia and Intentional Communities

Obviously there are a lot of posts from the past that fit it. I'm not going to search back and add them all. That's not the point.

17
… But now we have another problem.
What is that?
What if we find out what makes each of us internally consistent? What if I find your proper name, that thing which describes exactly what you are?
Than I will always be honest, or predictable at least. And you will be able to interpret everything I say and never be wrong. And of course I’ll know your name as well.
No dishonesty, no subterfuge, no Freud, no art… Then we can all be logical positivists.
But it doesn’t matter. That dream’s irrelevant.
I want unification.
It’s an illusion.
I want the illusion.
Do you want the illusion or do you want the illusion to be real?
What’s the difference?
One means that you have an appreciation of the arts. The other means that you’re a fascist.

As long as I'm causing myself trouble... repeat from 2014
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An old post I never wrote. related to one just below, and one earlier, and back. [the video is gone, or no longer public. The story is here]


To be born and raised in a community is not to have a choice: the world is what it is. We can go on to try to change the order of that world (which in fact is changing always), but "intentional" communities do more than that; they're founded in self-description, denying not only outside interference but outside interpretation, demanding acknowledgement for a world of their own making. At the lowest level it's simple fascism. "Israeli" is more of an invention than "Palestinian",  if less so than "Aryan", but the opinions of outsiders in both cases are claimed to mean nothing.

In fact those claims are merely cover. Any serious definition of fascism puts the lie to them. Self-love and self-hatred are inseparable, the first being merely an ideologized -armored- reinforcement of the basic need for self-respect. The difference between camp and kitsch is the difference between the fat bearded man in a tutu who expects you to laugh and the fat bearded man in a tutu who points the gun at your head and dares you to say he's not a ballerina. Fascism by definition is kitsch. And we're back to Freud

In a passage from one of the Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis Freud says that as the result of a successful treatment repression is replaced by 'a condemning judgment'. He doesn't explain the difference between the two. What's the difference between "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother" and "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother." Is the first, louder and more nervous? More declarative? More cocksure? I don't know but it's a question conceptualists can't answer.

Conceptualists don't/can't understand performance. They refuse to interpret, or they oppose it. The irony, as I've said again and again, of liberals mocking Scalia's originalism reading the past is their own originalism reading into the future. That written words "mean what they mean" and that I "mean what I say and say what I mean", and that I am "what I say I am", all make make the same argument. Scalia's Catholic anti-individualism and liberal individualism both stand against interpretation, which can only be the interpretation of others, in the present and future: the judgment of outsiders and the judgment of history.

The woman above wants her government to see her as she sees herself. Why does it matter so much to her? She stumbles over the admission that she was born female. Why is she fixated on binaries? Why does she take the government bureaucracy so seriously that she needs it's approval of her self-disgust?

Old and new: the sad absurdity of demanding the world live your fantasy.

Hustling to grab my carry-on and shoes, two TSA agents escorted me to a private room with fogged glass walls and a small table. Once inside the room, the agents started speaking quietly to themselves. I stood awkwardly, adjusted my shirt, opened and closed my fists.
“Sir, we need to know what’s in your pants,” said the male agent, not at all hiding his lingering gaze at my crotch.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.” I said, trying (and failing) to hold back my rage.
“Actually, it is our business, because we know it’s not a penis,” said the female agent, smugly, like she’d just discovered an important secret.
Before I could think about what to say or how to say it, I reached into my jeans and pulled out my packer (a small prosthesis) and threw it on the table. “There! Is that what you’re worried about?”
Both agents turned red and started giggling. I was livid. Frantically, I started unbuttoning my dress shirt and lifted up my white undershirt to show them my chest binder. “And this, this is the other thing you’re worried about?” I shouted at them, hoping my newly deepened voice was audible to other travelers beyond the fogged glass walls.
“Now, sir, er, ma’am, uh ... there’s no need to get upset,” said the female agent. “We are following protocol.”
“Protocol my ass.” I retorted. “You can’t treat me like this just because I’m transgender. And stop calling me ma’am. I’m a dude.”
“OK, Mister Charles,” the female agent said, mockingly. “No need to get hysterical.”
At hearing that word, I felt the blood rush to my face, and I blinked hard to keep from screaming at both of them, who just eyed me, still suspicious. “Are we fucking done here?” I demanded.
“Yes, sir,” The male agent replied quietly, vaguely aware of the embarrassment and rage I was feeling. “We’ll step out to give you a minute to collect your things.” The female agent glared at me as she left.
I buttoned my shirt back up, stuffed the packer into my bag instead of my pants, and stepped quickly out of the room and towards the throng of people heading to their gates, eager to blend in. It wasn’t until I had reached the relative safety of a stall in the men’s bathroom that I set down my bags and wept into my hands.

The whole thing would be tragic if it weren't for the fact that the author is unable to face it.

It's the same narcissism that Leiter decries as the new infantilism. Unfortunately it's also the same infantilism he represents: a fragmentation into micro-cultures with borders so strictly maintained that the borders themselves become the reason for the cultures' existence, and the life within them becomes hollowed out: Israel.

---

Jumping forward 

As I’m sitting there, already clearly embarrassed, I leaned over to the screener and explained to her what I think the anomaly is,” which she could clearly see was in her groin area. Despite the explanation, the supervisor still had to address the situation. Richards was escorted to a closed-off room, and two female officers explained that she had to endure a full body search. When she was asked if she had any prosthetics or implants, she explained, “I’m transgender. I have a penis.” The officers then “freaked out” and claimed they needed to go get male screeners, but Richards insisted, “No, I am legally female. I do not want to be screened by a man. You can screen me; I’m just telling you what it is. They were just unprepared for the situation.

updated. with additions, and to be clearer.

Leiter: "Can someone explain what Greer's view is about what makes someone a woman (or a man)?"
Judging by the comments, his readers should agree that Rachel Dolezal is black.

Biology is physical experience. Transexuals who choose to identify strictly either as female or male base their understanding not on experience but fantasy. The politics of fantasy is delusion, always in the strictest sense reactionary: the Bauhaus as symptom. In desperation it's the root of fascism.

Gender reassignment surgery is the most extreme of extreme makeovers.

Leiter and "reaction formation": he can't use the term in relation to sexuality for the same reason others can't see the reactionary nature of Zionism: caste/tribal/familial loyalty and taboo. It would have been interesting watching the confusion if Dolezal had been a white man identifying as a black woman.

I doubt Greer would say anything against honest hermaphrodites. After all, who would?
Ambiguity is not the problem.  The inability to accept ambiguity is the problem.
[Greer on Caster Semenya, in 2009. It was determined later that Semenya was born intersex.]
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Leiter again, (also fitting in with the previous post)

A good piece in The Guardian on the Greer controversy  

Here. The idea that anything Greer said is "hate speech" is preposterous, but also shows how dangerous that category can be in the hands of zealots.

"in the hands of zealots." That argument against hate speech regulations is that law applies equally to all. Who defines who is and is not a zealot?

repeats againandagainandagain: Leiter reviews Waldron

...it seems to me a virtue of Waldron's book [The Harm of Hate Speech] is that by making an often vivid case for the harm that the content of speech can inflict on the vulnerable, Waldron forces us to take seriously Herbert Marcuse's old worry: namely, that while the toleration of harmful speech "in conversation, in academic discussion...in the scientific enterprise, in private religion" is justified, perhaps "society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake." Waldron does not explore that implication of his argument, but it is one that warrants renewed consideration if one shares Waldron's core intuition that harm to the vulnerable, even harm inflicted by speech, deserves legal notice.

Leiter: The Case Against Free Speech

I also argue for viewing "freedom of speech" like "freedom of action": speech, like everything else human beings do, can be for good or ill, benign or harmful, constructive or pernicious, and thus the central question in free speech jurisprudence should really be how to regulate speech effectively — to minimize its very real harms, without undue cost to its positive values — rather than rationalizing (often fancifully) the supposed special value of speech. In particular, I argue against autonomy-based defenses of a robust free speech principle. I conclude that the central issue in free speech jurisprudence is not about speech but about institutional competence; I offer some reasons — from the Marxist "left" and the public choice "right"— for being skeptical that capitalist democracies have the requisite competence; and make some suggestive but inconclusive remarks about how these defects might be remedied.

Organizing for BDS in France is now a crime

The rulings passed on Tuesday by the Paris-based Court of Cassation confirmed the convictions of 12 individuals by the Colmar Court of Appeals in connection with their 2009 and 2010 actions in supermarkets near the eastern city of Mulhouse.

The individuals arrived at the supermarket wearing shirts emblazoned with the words: “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel.” They also handed out flyers that said that “buying Israeli products means legitimizing crimes in Gaza.”

The court in Colmar imposed fines to the collective tune of $14,500 and court expenses on Laila Assakali, Yahya Assakali, Assya Ben Lakbir, Habiba Assakali, Sylviane Mure, Farida Sarr, Aline Parmentier, Mohammad Akbar, Jean-Michel Baldassi, Maxime Roll, Jacques Ballouey and Henry Eichholtzer.

They appealed the ruling citing their freedom to express their opinion.

In confirming the sentences, the Court of Cassation cited the French republic’s law on Freedom of the Press, which prescribes imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000 for parties that “provoke discrimination, hatred or violence toward a person or group of people on grounds of their origin, their belonging or their not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race or a certain religion.” 

Picasso Sculpture, at MoMA

From haptic to optic.

Picasso's greatest works were tactile. Most of the greatest modern paintings, paintings in the beginning of the age of photography, had moved to the haptic, one thing photography could not do. Impressionism is physical, but so is Courbet.
Picasso's sculptures don't go downhill as quickly as his paintings do. Optical painting in the modern period is in a mode of deep irony: surrealism to pop. And what is Ingres?

More work to do.