Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written.

The Americans introduce certain principles as “American principles” and claim that these apply to the entire world. The principles they introduce are human freedom, freedom of thought, human rights and the like. Are these “American” principles? Are these the qualities of the American society today? Was it not your government that massacred the natives of America and destroyed the Indians? Was it not the same government and its influential agents who enslaved millions of Africans - abducting young girls and boys from their homes- treating them atrociously for years?

Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written. These are the realities of the United States; this is the government of the United States; this is what distinguishes and characterizes the American establishment and showcases it to the world; not freedom, nor equality of humans! What equality? You do not consider white and black equal yet. To this day, a person having Native blood is considered “inferior “when it comes to recruiting individuals for various occupations. And you talk about equality of human beings and freedom of thought?

Statements at a meeting with government officials; March 18, 2002

His favorite novelist is Victor Hugo.

etc...

It is interesting to realize that America overthrew his government even though Mosaddeq had shown no animosity toward them. 

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“The Bicentennial Man,” by Isaac Asimov (1920--1992) has recently been published in Farsi. I came across it. In this book, a robot suddenly develops intellect, conscience and comprehension capability!  

He'll be remembered as a tragic figure, or more. Few Israelis now alive will.

Richard Serra from 2013, 2011, 2007, and 2003

2011

 

Richard Serra, Untitled, 1972, Charcoal on paper, 29 3/4 x 41 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John Coplans, 1975
There's something very interesting about this drawing. When it was made, and why.

"Philosophy opposes fiction, and theories of modern art opposed the 'fiction' of pictorialism. The implications of that preference are unexamined."
Look at the shape. How it appears flat and then seems to recede. The beginnings of a return to pictorial art: affirmed/denied/affirmed
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Coetzee likes to trespass on his own fictional territory. In Elizabeth Costello (2003) he was quickly on the scene to pause the action and deliver a little lesson in the nature of fictiveness: ‘The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.’ And so on.

The origin of all this "meta-fictional" crap isn't fiction—Shakespeare is "meta-fiction" by default. 

"The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."

And then

The 'seriousness' of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really is a question of art. 

Tristram Shandy as literature in the Age of Reason.

Various ways to repeat myself. I wish more people got the joke

Here again the convergences in the translations are striking. But the minor variants talk to us too. Proust’s narrator speaks of ‘l’idée que je me suis faite du sadisme’. Nelson’s phrase ‘my conception of sadism’ is close to Scott Moncrieff and Carter’s ‘my idea of sadism’, while the original Scott Moncrieff version expands the phrase into a sort of commentary: ‘my idea of that cruel side of human passion called “sadism”’. Kilmartin and Davis respond more openly to the mention of the idea’s making – ‘the notion I was to form’ (Kilmartin), ‘the idea which I formed’ (Davis) – and Grieve does so at greater length: ‘a certain notion of the meaning of sadism was to form ... in my mind.’ The little train of words Proust’s narrator offers to describe Mlle Vinteuil’s ‘air’ as she closes the shutters (‘las, gauche, affairé, honnête et triste’) creates a quietly interesting puzzle. All the translators but one start with ‘weary, awkward’ (Kilmartin goes for ‘languid, awkward’) and they all end with ‘sad’. ‘Affairé’ and ‘honnête’ turn out to be more elusive or questionable. The suggestions here are ‘fussy, prim’ (Nelson), ‘fussy, honest’ (Davis), ‘busy, trustworthy’ (Grieve), ‘bustling, sincere’ (Kilmartin and Carter), ‘preoccupied, sincere’ (Scott Moncrieff). Small differences, but our view of the narrator’s view of Mlle Vinteuil shifts quite a bit as it moves among them. And in this context, the choice between staying with Proust’s grammar and speeding it up is intriguing. Four translations out of six convert Proust’s ‘might perhaps still not have lost faith’ (‘n’eût peut-être pas encore perdu sa foi’) into ‘might still have continued to believe’; Grieve elaborates a little: ‘preserved some scrap of faith’. We are looking perhaps at the difference between relaying meaning and tracking movements of thought.

An hour or two drifting from Levinas on the Talmud, to the Talmud, and then to someone's memories of Quine. It still amazes me how many people search for the meaning in the world itself, as if meanings were subatomic particles. It's the definition of theology, and that's one thing I have no interest in at all.

I've said it all before. My writing's changed. I don't try as hard.

And drifting again, I end back here.

If you're going to spend your life studying Proust or Michelangelo, in the end you're using them to study yourself: your own perceptions of things. It's better to admit you're using them as material. The scholarship of false humility is creepy: the creepiness of biography, and journalism.

---

Philosophers vs historians again, on Arendt.

Geuss vs Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 

In terms borrowed from or suggested by the language of Hannah Arendt, this book has told part of the story of the revival in the early modern West of the ancient ideal of homo politicus (the zoon politikon of Aristotle), who affirms his being and his virtue by the medium of political action, whose closest kinsman is homo rhetor and whose antithesis is the homo credens of Christian faith. Following this debate into the beginnings of modern historicist sociology, we have been led to study the complex eighteenth-century controversy between homo politicus and homo mercator, whom we saw to be an offshoot and not a progenitor—at least as regards the history of social perception—of homo creditor. The latter figure was defined and to a large degree discredited by his failure to meet the standards set by homo politicus, and eighteenth-century attempts to construct a bourgeois ideology contended none too successfully with the primacy already enjoyed by a civic ideology; even in America a liberal work ethic has historically suffered from the guilt imposed on it by its inability to define for itself a virtue that saves it from corruption; the descent from Daniel Boone to Willy Loman is seen as steady and uninterrupted. But one figure from the Arendtian gallery is missing, curiously enough, from the history even of the American work ethic: the homo faber of the European idealist and socialist traditions, who served to bridge the gap between the myths of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is not yet as clear as it might be how the emergence of this figure is related to the European debate between virtue and commerce; but because industrial labor in America conquered a wilderness rather than transforming an ancient agrarian landscape, homo faber in this continent is seen as conquering space rather than transforming history, and the American work force has been even less willing than the European to see itself as a true proletariat. The ethos of historicist socialism has consequently been an importation of transplanted intellectuals (even the martyr Joe Hill left word that he "had lived as an artist and would die as an artist"), and has remained in many ways subject to the messianic populisms of the westward movement.

Fun and frustration, mostly frustration. 

In America there are comparatively few who are rich enough to live without profession. Every profession requires an apprenticeship, which limits the time of instruction to the early years of life. At fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education ends at the age when ours begins. 

Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate. 

Beginning in the 1950s and blossoming since 1961, a major scholarly controversy has sucked The Federalist into its gravitational field: What was its role in the great shift from republicanism to liberalism in American political thought? These complex bodies of ideas and practices have almost no direct links to today’s Republican party or modern American liberalism; moreover, these terms have become so vague that many historians have abandoned both words as useless.

Mishra, "Memory Failure", in the LRB.

In March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.

...Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany. The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. ‘Your philosemitism depresses me,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding ... You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.’ In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth’, who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish’. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. The Jews were in fact a ‘small, brave, heroic, genius people’. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis. 

There's a lot more. This is small but it made me laugh. 

...What then of Germany’s much lauded culture of historical memory? Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. ‘German historical reckoning has gone haywire,’ she wrote in October. ‘This philosemitic fury ... has been used to attack Jews in Germany.’ 

Nirit Sommerfeld was threatened with arrest in 2019. 

I had an email exchange with Neiman after she published her piece on Jacob Taubes . 

"In 1945 Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” She was wrong. Apart from a handful of German philosophers—all Jewish except Brentano—philosophy ignored the questions the twentieth century had raised again."

She was right. It's the subtext of everything in post-war Europe. Philosophers are pedants and pedantry is garbage. The history of pedantry, like the history of anything else, is scholarship. 

Post-war Germany was a culture of autism and denial. Nostalgia for the present.

de Man, Robbe-Grillet, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, On the Natural History of Destruction, The Tin Drum, Crabwalk, Deutschland im Herbst. everything, every fucking thing.

I won't post her response, but it wasn't enough. 

Longing for reconciliation indeed. The Taubes piece—a perverse discussion of a perverse man— previously here. 

And Leiter is a fan. I wonder what he thinks now.

Remember Jason Stanley who also never got the point. And does he now?

It's been fun watching left intellectual Germanophiles try and fail to come to terms with this crap. 

Neiman's new piece is here. I haven't read it yet.

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I'd forgotten Deborah Feldman.

1 

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

1

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

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

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

Before the passages quoted above

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

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

on Jäger and Zamora, previously

updated a bit for added fun.

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Artforum, 2003. 

Although he becomes only the eighth director in the seven and a half decades of the Whitney’s existence, he is its fourth in just over a dozen years. The board’s 1990 dismissal of Armstrong, who had led the museum since the early ’70s, was widely seen as a sign of newly powerful trustees making a break with the old guard. His replacement, Ross, a risk-taking and famously garrulous advocate of contemporary art, gave the institution a much-needed infusion of energy. But the Whitney’s increased visibility under Ross brought new scrutiny; it soon became the critics’ whipping boy—berated for “political correctness” for shows like the 1993 “Identity Biennial” (as it came to be known) and accused of succumbing to style over substance for its 1994 Richard Avedon exhibition.

I was looking for more old comments on Avedon. 

Michael Kimmelman from 1994. "If Mr. Avedon reminds me of any artist, it is Giovanni Boldini,..."

I lasted two minutes.

Kimmelman has a lousy eye. I don't think he realized how damning the comparison was. John Singer Sargent was a virtuoso, a brilliant technician and a failed composer of pictures. Boldoni was a hack illustrator. Avedon is better than that at least.

Artforum in the 90s was another world. I was there, and I forget. Picked at random and two articles about people from my past. The whole thing was corrupt and cynical, but the cynicism was still out in front, documenting itself. That honesty on "the NY scene" is almost unthinkable now.

May 1994, Rhonda Lieberman "Zen and the Art of Shopping, on Helmut Newton

The first two paragraphs and the last.

Recently, when I had reason to look at a lot of Helmut Newton photos, I underwent a reaction worthy of further investigation. Imaginarily disordered by the elixir of these fabulous images, not unlike Jerry Lewis turning into hipster Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor, I felt so glamorous that I went right into Bendel’s and found something on sale I never would have considered trying on, even venturing into the Fancy section, where I only go when I am feeling especially spirited, and handling really expensive pants. With a bit of reflection, my radical failure of sublimation, the palpable slippage between my enjoyment of the Newton photos and my urge to shop, began to seem less and less strange . . . but would others see it this way?

The conflict between Art and liking nice things has been noted by others greater than I. The intro to a volume of Stendhal’s travel pieces dismisses them as chiefly inspired by the author’s need, despite his 50-something years, to dress at the height of fashion (as if this put their literary merit in question!). Proust suspected Balzac, in his bourgeois novels of ambition, greed, and vanity, of indulging in the reader the very worldly tastes of which Art was supposed to purge you. I realize, through the years, that I have kept a mental file of Great Minds inordinately distracted by clothes and furniture. Kierkegaard was an interesting reverse case, trying to appear as the idle shopper and disowning his brilliantly tortured juvenilia Either/Or as written by someone else: he claimed he happened to find the manuscript in the drawer of a desk he had long coveted and finally bought from a furniture dealer after ogling it, and making daily visits to see it, for weeks, haunted. He describes the stalking process in familiar detail: “My daily route took me past this secondhand dealer and his writing desk, and I never let a day go by without fixing my eyes on it in passing.” In On the Genealogy of Morals, Uncle Friedrich makes short work of the question of one’s personal “interest” in the art object: he mocks Kant as a ridiculous prude for claiming that the Beautiful affects us precisely because it doesn’t affect us personally but appeals to our disinterest; he agrees with Stendhal, who saw in Beauty la promesse de bonheur, the satisfaction of selfish pleasures. Indeed, since galleries and museums are inevitably surrounded by nice stores, the experience of looking at Art has long been confused with shopping for nice things....

Reported on Page Six of the New York Post by Flo Anthony:

The authoress was sighted in the deluxe treatment program for acute mind-body aggravation at the Illinois Home for the Jewish Bewildered, in the exclusive Lee Krasner Memorial Wing, where she busily collects string and continues to dictate her column and to develop her profitable Psychic Whiners Hotline (celebrity spokesmodel Buddy Hackett). She is attended by her adoring photographer, her loyal bodyguard/handbag designer, her perky meditation coach, and fawning hospital staff who mercifully dress in last season’s Chanel and are required by contract to speed recovery by remaining at least ten pounds heavier than the client, like Vivian Vance on I Love Lucy. Her editor/manicurist commutes weekly from NYC to inspire her with rousing lectures on Femininity and Aggression, and makes sure her apartment is free of dust.

Every morning, radiant after thighmastering, she works on her big hook (the one they’re all waiting for!), Identity: Pro or Con?, set in a dry-cleaning store in New Haven, Conn. One of the highlights: just one week after a lobotomy, the heroine wows her audience by delivering a stunning paper on cross-dressing as it subverts culturally constructed gender roles. Snatched up in a record 20 minutes by Yale University Press, the book has already created a startling buzz in the publishing world, the immoderate advance explained only by its uniformly giddy assemblage of unexpected allies including Suzanne Somers (“A fresh approach to the subjectivities of mass culture. It’s great!”), Gloria Steinem (“It did wonders for my self-esteem!”), Slavoj Zižek (“I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats!”), Harold Bloom (“I keep it in my bathroom!”), and William Buckley (“I love the part about the Jews and the sailboat!”), whose tear-stained reader report gushed, “I keep it with me at all times. One of the most moving and inspiring first-draft manuscripts that I have ever read . . . the drama proceeds savagely, erotically . . . I now read Rhonda daily, there is wisdom on every page.”

In 2014 she's writing for The Baffler, and 2019 The New Republic

repeat

In the late 90s, a 40 year old woman, a well known artist,  told me me everything she'd learned about being a woman she'd learned from drag queens. The switch is important: from the artifice of femininity built out of biology and culture, out of necessity, to an art built out of fantasy—from representation to mannerism—and then returned to the source. 

again

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

It all brings back memories of sitting in the basement at the Gramercy Park Hotel listening to Joey Arias channel Billie Holiday.

Lorentzen on Martin Amis in the Financial Times

What magnificent prose and what a peculiar personality underneath it. Amis wrote a long feature on the pornography industry for Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine in 2001 and only at the end confessed to his horror of seeing pricks on screen. He made a speciality of low-life subject matter but he was always a bookworm, always a literary critic, at heart.

"Prick" and "dick", because "cock" forms the mouth into an orifice. The displaced/transposed O: "horror of seeing pricks" for "fear of seeing cocks".

His heroes across the Atlantic were Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, but the American writer that Martin Amis — who has died aged 73 — most resembled was Norman Mailer.

Because Lorentzen is unable to say "Hitchens".  Mailer himself said he was less a reader of literature than a practitioner of it.

Lorentzen, and n+1, etc: the literary culture of gentrified Brooklyn in post-9/11 New York; inward-looking, earnest, provincial.

" Nothing ends, Francis...."

I'm embarrassed I never thought of it before. It was always obvious.

Prescription vs description, speculation vs observation, theory vs history, faith vs scepticism, scholasticism vs popular culture, philosophers vs artists/comedians.

"It doesn't end. Never will it end." Gunter Grass, Crabwalk

Fukuyama now has a tag

in re:the last two posts

Her only piece of writing advice, if it can be called that, is: “If it’s not a risk then it’s nothing.”

What's the relation between those who want risk and those who want to be left the fuck alone?  Or those who've acclimated to risk and those who haven't? I'm not sure Annie Ernaux has thought that far ahead. She's an alienated individualist, in the sense of dedicating her life to the recording of her own experience, but she uses others as material only in the production of words. She instrumentalizes people from her past, expressing her superiority as an author controls characters, at the same time defending people as a whole, as a community, against those who would instrumentalize them in life in the service of wealth. Her life is dedicated to noblesse oblige. It's the moral superiority of a whore. "Better a victim than a victimizer" as my mother used to say. And my mother had a deep respect for whores. Leftism, Iris Murdoch and The Story of O. 

"No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun"

NYRB, Letter from an English Department on the Brink 

At the English department I chair, our major has grown by more than 40 percent in the last two years. We are being driven to the edge of extinction anyway.

...In their interviews with Heller, English faculty and administrators discuss an array of real issues with an alarming lack of coherence. They try to place blame both for what is happening at their own institutions and for what they consider broader national concerns: Middlemarch is too long for the TikTok generation; K-12 education is the problem; humanists haven’t made a strong enough case for how our areas of study prepare debt-ridden students for jobs; funding has dried up; a fusty curriculum drives students away; television exists.

Much more to the point are Heller’s interviews with students, who explain the fundamental problem quite clearly: universities do not value the humanities. This disregard is demonstrated in most universities’ built environments, real estate investments, hiring practices, staffing ratios, and unwillingness to direct resources toward the humanities even in appropriate balance with the often substantial revenue they bring in. I heard in these young people’s comments a real awareness of the funding priorities of the colleges they attend.

Students are quick to associate those priorities with their job prospects: when it comes to deciding on a major, they sense that their own personal, intellectual, and creative interests don’t really matter at all. As Ben Schmidt, a data analyst and former history professor, put it in a 2018 article on the declining number of humanities majors, “In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market.” What faculty and administrators have mistaken for a problem (declining enrollments) with an identifiable cause (take your pick), students correctly see as a story being spun by the universities themselves: this area of study lacks value, is in some sense wrong. That story has become powerful enough to shape their world, restricting the number of paths presented to them as real options. 

Also added here, as an update, to Jäger et al.

Jäger deserves a tag for retweeting this.

Bogost:  "Writer & game designer. Director of Film & Media Studies and Professor of Computer Sci & Eng @WUSTL " 

A problem the humanities—and universities in general—haven’t solved: They are playgrounds of the aristocracy that paid a historically temporary visit to populism, which was mistakenly  construed as permanent residency.

2 "historian of social knowledge, modern Europe and US. would rather be outdoors." 

More accurate: the university has long been both playground of the aristocracy (or haute bourgeois) and means for the upwardly mobile to enter the civil service. In Germany the Humboldts represent the former, Fichte the latter. The late-20th Century inflation of fees is novel...

"Who believes in this? –aside from a few big children in university chairs or editorial offices." Max Weber.

The US isn't Germany.  As always: from Brooklyn College students moving to Manhattan, to Harvard grads gentrifying Brooklyn. 

There's no way in hell I should be able to do this. But history is bunk.

work your way back.

1960

Whatever Greenwich Village may once have been or may now be supposed to have been, anyone who has recently strayed down MacDougal Street on a Saturday night knows that now it is a playground. What Coney Island was once to the honest workingman, Greenwich Village is now to the unmarried or ex-married young professional. The Village streets, pads, coffee houses, and bars are jammed with people who look a million times more sensitive, artistic, and "interesting" than William Faulkner or Igor Stravinsky, but who live by teaching economics, analyzing public opinion, writing advertising copy, practicing psychoanalysis, or "doing research" for political candidates. They are not intellectuals, but occasionally dream that they will be. 

And again.

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 author of the New Yorker piece, Nathan Heller, in 2016.

---

April 2023, NYRB: 

At the English department I chair, our major has grown by more than 40 percent in the last two years. We are being driven to the edge of extinction anyway.

...In their interviews with Heller, English faculty and administrators discuss an array of real issues with an alarming lack of coherence. They try to place blame both for what is happening at their own institutions and for what they consider broader national concerns: Middlemarch is too long for the TikTok generation; K-12 education is the problem; humanists haven’t made a strong enough case for how our areas of study prepare debt-ridden students for jobs; funding has dried up; a fusty curriculum drives students away; television exists.

Much more to the point are Heller’s interviews with students, who explain the fundamental problem quite clearly: universities do not value the humanities. This disregard is demonstrated in most universities’ built environments, real estate investments, hiring practices, staffing ratios, and unwillingness to direct resources toward the humanities even in appropriate balance with the often substantial revenue they bring in. I heard in these young people’s comments a real awareness of the funding priorities of the colleges they attend.

Students are quick to associate those priorities with their job prospects: when it comes to deciding on a major, they sense that their own personal, intellectual, and creative interests don’t really matter at all. As Ben Schmidt, a data analyst and former history professor, put it in a 2018 article on the declining number of humanities majors, “In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market.” What faculty and administrators have mistaken for a problem (declining enrollments) with an identifiable cause (take your pick), students correctly see as a story being spun by the universities themselves: this area of study lacks value, is in some sense wrong. That story has become powerful enough to shape their world, restricting the number of paths presented to them as real options. 

And I should have added this, 

"The sociology of modern knowledge production empowers the scholar over the humanist, and the collective/communal enterprise of scholarship over the inspiration of the individual thinker."

You have that precisely backwards. The humanist is embedded in culture by calling, the mathematician only by default, while embedded by choice in a private world of universals. What would you call the communal enterprise of neoclassical formal economics? Would you call it worldly or unworldly? Formal philosophy is formal economics with no need to ignore evidence.

--- 

June 16th, he rt's a link to a statement by the UK Royal Historical Society. I suppose the monarchist trappings could be taken as confirmation of something.

None of these problems can be explained by a decline in student numbers or interest in History, which remain strong. Instead we must look to political decisions to explain this troubling situation. UK universities now operate in a market economy. Institutions are placed in direct competition, with income generation via intake the principal measure of success. The lifting of the student cap in 2015 has established an environment of ‘feast and famine’ across the sector.

Cuts and closures are the starkest manifestation of this environment. But marketisation also brings turbulence and uncertainty to historians in ‘winning’ institutions, required at short notice to deal with sharp, and unpredictable, spikes in student numbers. Across the sector, uncertainty is exhausting, all-consuming, and impedes long-term thinking, planning and the delivery of high-quality teaching.

In the coming months, the Royal Historical Society is undertaking a project to assess the full extent of the losses, risks and concerns that now characterise History in UK Higher Education. We also seek to better understand the personal, institutional and disciplinary impact of change on academic staff, researchers, students and community partners. As is clear, the aftershocks of upheaval are long-lasting and have negative effects on the life of a department well after a programme of change has officially ended.

reworked. Lee Fang's "even-handed" podcaster is a fascist.

---

I shouldn't be surprised this is still up

I don’t really get why some of the “anti-woke” crowd is so uncritically pro-Israel. Israel is exactly what you get when you combine an identitarian movement, based on real historical grievance, with tanks and nukes.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) May 17, 2021

A good fit.

The answer to the confused identity politics of the Left is not an identity politics of the Right. https://t.co/tRqLxh9x6o

— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) June 7, 2017

Fang praises a podcaster: "I was blown away by his humanistic and even-handed series on the founding of Israel."  The podcaster replies, "Thanks Lee".

Podcaster Darryl Cooper, "Martyr Made". 

Pedro’s tribute to General Francisco Franco, who, with a little help from a few friends, saved Spain from communists (for a while, at least). Ordered a hard copy, I’m not waiting for the online version.

Spain 1936. The left has launched a crusade against Christians, burning churches and murdering clergy. They attempt to overthrow the government more than once before eventually winning a rigged election. The campaign of violence against its enemies escalates, sometimes with help from the police. Liberals do nothing to stop the left. Faced with no alternative, nationalist forces stage a desperate uprising to save Spain and are eventually led by a reluctant general: Francisco Franco. My tribute to Franco in  @EuroConOfficial.

A small leap: Cooper's a racist and an anti-Semite; his "even-handed" discussion of the founding of Israel is founded on the belief that Jews aren't European, even though Zionism was explicitly an ideology of conquest by the battered children of Europe. "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as a respected people" 

cf. Liberia. 

Cooper cohosts a podcast, The Unravelling, with Jocko Willink. "Jocko teams up with Darryl Cooper, creator of The MartyrMade Podcast, to pull on threads connecting the contemporary world to our shared past."  Willink, ex-Navy Seal and professional alpha male, is a co-founder of Echelon Front. Fang has a history defending Mike Cernovich, so it makes sense.

With Fang, at best, it's just the desperate need to be in the middle: the autistic corollary to black and white is a pathological grey. But like Jilani he's less concerned by anti-black racism. Asian anti-black racism gets less attention, but it's a given. Jews and Asians get respect from white nationalists. Muslims not so much. Half the history of the Reconquista is forgotten. It goes on from there to Holocaust revisionism.

Finally, @BarakRavid got a truly chilling response from @IsraeliPM: "Regarding the House of Destinies, the Hungarians have expressed the wish to create a consensus regarding the narrative as a condition for opening the museum. >>

— Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي (@NTarnopolsky) December 5, 2018

For Jäger and Leusder, and scholastic intellectuals, the process is aestheticized: political theology is more important than mere politics.

In the beginning was the word.

"The history of events merely provides a series of pegs to hang  the history of ideas on, and it is the letter that is of real interest. So, the time has come to turn to that history of ideas."  

Materialism for thee; Idealism for me. It's all so offensive. 

Follow the bouncing ball from Jager and "Franz Pokorny", to Lomez, Steve Sailer and Amy Wax, to First Things.

Steve Sailer ties all of the above, from Fang's fascists to Jäger's.

   Amy Wax

The AFA letter,  however, neglects the fact that some of the allegations concern not extramural speech, but speech and actions in the classroom; and some concern extramural speech on matters that impact the functioning of the school.  In the former category is the fact that Professor Wax invited an infamous (and unabashed) racist, Jared Taylor, to speak in her class and have lunch with her students.  It is dubious that the decision to host Mr. Taylor in her classroom can be defended on academic freedom grounds, as a professionally sound choice given academic standards in law teaching. 

Jonah Gelbach, via Leiter  and again, on Jon Haidt and Amy Wax.

I've rewritten everything above, so this has become secondary. But it's annoying. 

Jager rt's a friend, quoting Charles Maier's Among Empires

—“How not to die”: In I. M. Coetzee's dark Vision from Waiting for the  Barbarians.- “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of  Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day  it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of  Cities, the rape of populations. pyramids of bones. acres of desolation.—

The obvious association in 2022 is Israel, but not for a white European. It's too close to home. Necessity is the mother of elision.

The above, indirectly, from Mary Gaitskill. Read it, and the comment by Tavi Gevinson. If you don't recognize the name, google it. 

Gevinson

Also reminds me of a friend who's reading Bret Easton Ellis's new novel. I haven't read it so here's my friend's description: "the teenaged character is invited to a producer's hotel room who then says 'now you have to do something for me' and essentially rapes him.” In the novel the narrator says something like, “But I wasn’t a victim.” And my friend said that reading the novel, he (my friend) felt like the narrator was clearly pained and trying to reframe it. But in a podcast interview, Ellis talked about how that really did happen to him, and also said something like, “I decided I’m not a victim.” My friend said that in the novel the line felt nuanced, whereas in the interview—especially given that Ellis is typically pretty reactionary--it sounded more like a comment on the culture wars, somehow no longer about one person’s experience and psychology.

I guess this is not a revelation (that fiction can be capacious in a way non-fiction isn’t), but maybe if I have any point it’s that it still feels really important to me that writers grapple with this stuff in nonfiction contexts where the reader knows more about what is at stake for the writer. (Just knowing I May Destroy You was based on Coel's experience made me more attentive to and trusting of the show's ideological arguments, even though it shouldn't be read as purely autobiographical.)

The private world and the public world of politics.

Since our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm into which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence, even the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate lives is ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the public realm. Yet there are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene; there, only what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen or heard, can be tolerated, so that the irrelevant becomes automatically a private matter. This, to be sure, does not mean that private concerns are generally irrelevant; on the contrary, we shall see that there are very relevant matters which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance, love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. ("Never seek to tell thy love / Love that never told can be.") Because of Its inherent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world.

What the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essentially private character. Modern enchantment with "small things," though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among "small things," within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today's objects, may even appear to be the world's last, purely humane corner. This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but, on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant.

With some people I'm always torn between criticism and silence. I'm not sure I'm done with this.

A repeat visitor spent too much time looking for references to legal scholars of "law and literature".  I haven't read much and I'm not interested in people who've built careers defending the obvious. Their defensiveness weakens their arguments.

Interpretation of law originates in the interpretation of religious law. It's all the interpretation of texts.

The two posts that refer specifically, from 2010 and 2012. 

Another more generally—one of many—from 2020

Something I haven't said before. Watching the Jan 6th crap you heard legal analysts compliment the government briefs as well crafted. Think what that means.

 "Whaddaya wanna to do about it, asshole?" The words of one of the greatest trial lawyers in the history of this fucking country.

I guess I'm just having fun piling on. Fun and frustration.

---

Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry 

The greatest adhesion to the pure sense perception of the (seemingly objective) material individuality of objects and, therefore, the possible greatest assimilation of the material appearance of the work of art to the plane, yet not the optical plane, imagined by our eye at a distance from the objects, but the tactile plane suggested by the sense of touch, because on this level of development, to be certain about (touchable) impenetrability also means having the convinction of the material individuality. From the optical point of view, this is the plane which the eye perceives when it comes so close to the surface of an object, that all the silhouettes and, in particular all shadows which otherwise could disclose an alteration in depth, disappear.² The perception of objects, which characterizes this first level of the ancient Kunstwollen, is thus tactile, and in as much as it has to be optical to a certain degree, it is nahsichtig; ancient Egyptian art expresses it in almost its purest form.³ Foreshortenings and shadows (disclosing deep space) avoid this as painstakingly as the expression of mental states (disclosing the subjective psychic life). The main accent, however, is placed on the silhouettes which are kept as symmetrical as possible, because symmetry reveals to the exterior an uninterrupted tactile connection within the plane in the most convincing manner. Symmetry inherently belongs to the dimensions of the plane, it is limited, if not destroyed, by depth; for that reason in the visual arts of all of antiquity symmetry became the essential instrument of bestowing completeness on material entities on plane surfaces.

---

2) One can test this, for example, with ancient Egyptian statues by looking first from a distance where they make a flat and absolutely lifeless impression and then gradually from greater proximity, where the planes become increasingly lively, until eventually the fine modelling can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide over them.

3) As can be understood from its development over a thousand years, ancient Egyptian art also developed at various points beyond this indicated degree; on the other side the Greeks, even during an advanced period were still partly constrained by it.

"...until eventually the fine modelling can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide over them."

He knows because he's done it. I've done it. Riegl's not writing from an abstracted rationalized empiricism. He's fucking great.

That's the simple way to put it. The more complex way is to say he belongs fully to an academic milieu while still describing the the richness and immediacy of his own experience. 

The primacy of perception 

Christopher Wood, Introduction to Panofsky,  Perspective as Symbolic Form

This antagonism between the historicist scruple and the structuralist  imagination is revealed most graphically in Panofsky’s awkward chronological coordinations of art history and intellectual history. Synchrony is never better than approximate. Modern projective geometry as worked  out by Desargues corresponds to the directionless space of Descartes,  but it also corresponds to Alberti’s costruzione legittima and to Kantian  epistemology. The conceptions of space of Democritus, Plato and Aristotle all correspond to Greco-Roman landscape painting. The Aristotelian revival of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries correSponds to High  Gothic sculpture. These are great blind spots in Panofsky, spectacular  moments of irresponsible synthesis, forgiven because they serve as mere  rhetorical punctuation of lengthy and substantive arguments. But what  do they reveal about those arguments? The two kinds of events, philosophical and artistic, run in parallel because they derive from a common Weltanschauung. Because their relationships to that Weltanscbauung are  different — one is logical, the other symbolic — the time scales may  diverge. But once they are out of synchrony, we lose our grip on the  Weltanschauung. We are reduced to coordinating entirely unrelated sequences of events without any sense of Why they should be coordinated. The Weltanschauung is stripped of its historical reality, exposed as the  hypothetical least common denominator between art and philosophy. ¹⁵
---
15. One is not necessarily more confident when the synchrony is exact: see for instance Panofsky’s comments on Cubism and Einstein s relativity in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 5, n. 1.

Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, p. 5, n. 1.

In spite of all the changes in accident to which space was subjected from ca. 1400 to the end of the nineteenth century, it remained unaltered in substance. Even Mannerism and Raroque, even Matisse, Gauguin and Cezanne do not defy the assumption that space, whatever happens within it, is three-dimensional (cf. Cezanne's famous injunction to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that every side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point"), continuous and, therefore, static. It was only with Picasso, and his more or less avowed followers, that an attempt was made to open up the fourth dimension of time so that the objects cease to be determinable by three co-ordinates alone and can present themselves in any number of aspects and in all states of either "becoming" or disintegrating. In the present discussion the use of the term "modern" is naturally limited to a pre-Picassian or non-Picassian interpretation of space.

Stephen G. Brush, Physics Today, 2001

The French mathematician Henri Poincaré provided inspiration for both Einstein and Picasso. Einstein read Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis (French edition 1902, German translation 1904) and discussed it with his friends in Bern. He might also have read Poincaré’s 1898 article on the measurement of time, in which the synchronization of clocks was discussed—a topic of professional interest to Einstein as a patent examiner. Picasso learned about Science and Hypothesis indirectly through Maurice Princet, an insurance actuary who explained the new geometry to Picasso and his friends in Paris. At that time there was considerable popular fascination with the idea of a fourth spatial dimension, thought by some to be the home of spirits, conceived by others as an “astral plane” where one can see all sides of an object at once. The British novelist H. G. Wells caused a sensation with his book The Time Machine (1895, French translation in a popular magazine 1898-99), where the fourth dimension was time, not space.

 I'm ignoring the stupid title of the book and the art/science, beauty/truth crap.

Spending the day reading Wood above and his introduction to The Vienna School Reader. These people depress me. I just don't pay enough attention or I would have known sooner. 

p 47.  Interesting, but unsurprising, history and lazy thought.

Both Panofsky and Sedlmayr, for instance, aimed at a totalizing comprehension of historical phenomena. Both rejected the choice implied by the conventional dichotomies of connoisseurship and history, form and content. Both took the risk of extending Riegl’s project and trying to make the individual work of art do more historiographical work than it was capable of. Both trusted in the fundamental, deep-structural affinity between works of art and the world at large, what Charles Rosen calls the “unified stylistic field-theory.” One could argue that the links that Panofsky posited between work and world under the quasi-philosophical rubric “symbolic forms” were as irrational and unprovable as any of Sedlmayr’s. Peter Betthausen gave the example of the juxtaposition of Neoplatonic ideas and Michelangelo’s drawings in the article “The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo” (1939). Many aspects of the Many aspects of the “Viennese” Panofsky survived the emigration to America and his turn to plain English and common sense. Indeed none of Panofsky’s eidetic intuitions was more creative, and more difficult to prove, than the extended analogy between the Gothic cathedral and the Scholastic encyclopedia in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). This is not such a different kind of book from the treatise on the cathedral written the year before by his methodological “evil twin” Sedlmayr.

Only a decade later the comparison between the two methods was explicitly drawn by George Kubler when—in order to dismiss them both as wishful thinking, basically—he described iconology and Strukturanalyse (“configurational analysis”) as two modes of inquiry into “adherent meaning," with Strukturanalyse slightly preferable for being more  “perplexed” about discontinuities in the cultures under study.  

In the end, it is impossible to normalize Sedlmayr. The totalitarian vision is intrinsic to his art history. Joseph Koerner showed this in a reading of Sedlmayr's essay “Bruegel’s Macchia.” Sedlmayr, in his formal analysis of the atomized blobs of subhumanity on Bruegel’s picture surfaces, recapitulated the pitiless vertical  pitch of Bruegel's own society and the inhumanity of his original  aristocratic patrons and admirers. In this sense Sedlmayr was truly  re-creating the work of the historical artist, just as he had promised to do in “Toward a Rigorous Study of Art “ (pp. 147-48). His Bruegel essay is a chilling, anachronistic reanimation of a lost ideological world. Interpretative violence, which we prize in Riegl, Warburg, or Piicht, here converges with ideological violence.

But it is important to realize that the objection is not to Sedlmayr’s historical interpretation of Bruegel as such, but to the role that he forces Bruegel to play within his own grandiose, bitter critique of modernity. Sedlmayr's historical reading of Bruegel’s  paintings is powerful and not so easy to overturn. And that  reading is the direct product of the insight into the meaning of the color patch in the encyclopedic paintings. Empirical research  on its own could never have arrived at the link between the color  patch and the worldview. Empiricism is supposed to provide a  methodological guarantee against subjective, “interested” interpretations and pernicious ideological mystifications. Many today doubt that empiricism can actually do this. But even if it could,  it is not clear that it would be worth sacrificing the historical  insights yielded by the anti-empiricist, allegorical method. One  might well decide to take one’s chances with allegory. 

Even more disquieting than this comparison of art historical methodologies is the comparison between the attitudes of Sedlmayr, on the one hand, and of the liberal émigré art historians, on the other, toward modern art. What is striking is Sedlmayr’s extreme sensitivity, to the point of inflammation, to modernity and to modern art. Whereas Panofsky and Gombrich, as has often  been noted, made no serious effort to understand the art of their  time or the function of art in modern life, Sedlmayr hated modern art and wrote quite a lot about it. Not only that, but in his excoriating commentary on modern painting, sculpture, and  architecture he managed to hit almost all the right targets. Sedlmayr derided the eighteenth-century French architects Ledoux, Boullée and Lequeu for detaching their utopian buildings from  their natural base on the earth.  He chose a Duchamp readymade, the Porte-Bouteilles (1914), as the first illustration in his book Die Revolution der modernen Kunst. He saw how Walt Disney’s cartoons transformed the oneiric, crossbred fantasies of Grandville—sickly, unlawful, and terrifying to Baudelaire—into  “an idiom of innocence, a fairy idiom of pure fun.” The antiheroes of Art in Crisis: The Lost Center are Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Ledoux, Friedrich, Cézanne. Sedlmayr's vilification of modern art  was even more perspicacious than the National Socialists’ Degenerate Art exhibition eleven years earlier.

Sedlmayr lamented the tumult of postwar European society  but refused to acknowledge how it had all come about. insolently  he compared the images of the European cities reduced to rubble  by total war to the “dc-compositions” of surrealism, as if all  nations somehow shared the responsibility for the war, as they  surely did share the blame for surrealism. For modernism was,  of course, a European disease: a cosmopolitan and urban condition. Sedlmayr did not even look to German culture as a source of aesthetic salvation, except possibly in architecture. In fact  for Sedlmayr the trouble had begun in the age of the ascendant  nation-state. The solution was to be found, if anywhere, in the  feudal, Christian Middle Ages.

It is hard for us today to understand the impact Sedlmayr’s  book had in 1948.” At the time, he was the only German art historian of premodern art writing about the function and meaning of modern art and was recognized as such even by his enemies.  There was no German equivalent to Meyer Schapiro. Sedlmayr’s  theses were publicly debated at the Second Conference of German Art Historians in 1949. In 1950 he was one of two featured speakers, alongside the Bauhaus artist and teacher Johannes Itten,  on the first evening of the Darmstadter Gespra'ch, a major conference of artists, art historians, philosophers, theologians, sociologists, and scientists. The topic of the conference was “The Image  of Man in Our Time.” Sedlmayr’s lecture was interrupted by whistling, stamping, heckling, including the cry “Heil Hitler!,” but also applause. Sedlmayr’s surprising ally at the conference turned out  to be none other than Adorno, who had returned from the United  States only the year before. It has been suggested that Sedlmayr was perhaps one of the few participants who had any clear idea of who Adorno was. In his lecture Sedlmayr cited Adorno on Schoenberg. Later, in 1955 and 1976, he would again quote Adorno in his writings. At the Darmstéidter Gesprach, Adorno sided with Sedlmayr against Franz Roh and others who spoke of the reconciliatory function of art: “As much as I object to the cultural pessimism Sedlmayr brings to bear, he does on this point quite correctly  define something otherwise neglected by a too unbroken and  naive belief in progress. Speaking dialectically, I would say that  the harmony of an artwork consists in its bringing the riven, itself unreconciled, to unmisplaced expression, and that it withstand the  riven.” Adorno conceded in 1958-1959 that some of his writing on modern music ran “parallel to the work of Sedlmayr.” Werner  Hofmann has pointed out that Sedlmayr's entire polemic was a  partly understandable response to the ubiquitous postwar apologetics for autonomous art, which wanted to insulate art and exempt it from any “interrogation" whatsoever. [footnote to Kuspit attacking Fried] Many artists were sympathetic. Georg Grosz, for example, saluted Sedlmayr in a letter in 1955. Even Gerhard Richter has commented ruefully on the  “loss of the center" in modern art, with deliberately perverse reference to Sedlmayr but without irony. It has to be admitted that with his instinct for distortion, degradation, catastrophe, chaos,  deadpan evacuations of meaning, and Nietzschean mismatches  between subject and object, and his fascination with the ruin, the  fragment, and the spectacle, Sedlmayr never lost sight of “art." 

The contrast with. Panofsky is sharp. After reading Sedlmayr,  one starts to wish that Panofsky’s neat analogies between modernist painting and the early twentieth-century “worldview” had been somehow more anguished. Panofsky the cultural historian simply absorbed Picasso into the “unified stylistic field" by comparing cubism to Einstein’s theory of relativity. In 1933 Panofsky (with his co-author Fritz Saxl) expressed the naive confidence  that artistic and cultural crisis could be “overcome" by the “recourse" to classicism, as it always had been; here too he invoked Picasso. It is as if Panofsky and Sedlmayr were recognizing the  same crisis, but that one of them considered Picasso part of the solution and the other considered him part of the problem. Gombrich for his part has affected blasé or supercilious indifference to the art of his own time. His standard model of “making vs . matching" — conformity to schemata vs. direct imitation of nature  - leaves little room for a transfiguring artistic vision. Panofsky  and Gombrich’s discreet response to modern art’s promulgation  of the abject, the entropic, and the anarchic was to ignore it. Sedlmayr, by contrast, did not repress his panic but rather let it spill out into tasteless, gothic demagoguery. 

Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4 (1932-1933),  JSTOR 

Thus  the classical past, while it was more and more  thought of and investigated as a concrete historical phenomenon, simultaneously developed into an enchanting Utopia that was surrounded with a halo of sweet and melancholy resignation, as in some of the paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine. The idea of antiquity developed into a dream of bliss and happiness; the classical past became a visionary harbor of refuge from every distress. A paradise lamented without having been possessed and longed for without being attainable, it  promised an ideal fulfillment to all unappeased desires. From this we can understand why, from the crisis of the Counter Reformation in the sixteenth century, when the classicism of the Carracci led the way out of Mannerism into the baroque style, down to the crisis of  our own days, which, among other phenomena, has given rise to the classicism of Picasso, almost every artistic and cultural crisis has been  overcome by that recourse to antiquity which we know as Classicism.

An old friend and colleague of Panofsky, now as far as I can tell a cynic—he's given up—told me Panofsky was too generous. I don't question him on that. Panofsky always wanted to accentuate the positive. His refusal to accept  The Flaying of Marsyas as Titian's surprised me, but it makes sense. He even quotes Henry James in defense of his decision to exclude it. [I need to add the context in the manuscript] Picasso's turn to classicism in fits Panofsky's model perfectly, but it was shallow.  I doubt he took Picasso's work in 1932 that seriously, but the  article was published one month before Panofsky was dismissed from his position in Hamburg. 

The rest is old news for me but not for anyone who drops by, so why not?

Panofsky, 1934

Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive.

The belief that Panofsky "made no serious effort to understand the art of [his] time or the function of art in modern life" is absurd. Wood should know better. But he has a limited notion of "art"

The canonical account is that Panofsky was approached by Iris Barry in 1934, who was in the process of gathering support for a new Film Department at the Museum of Modern Art of which she would later become the founding curator....

In terms of the history of film theory, Panofsky’s film essay manifests many of the hallmarks of the first generation of theoretical writings on the cinema, which are, by and large, the product of the silent cinema era.  

Panofsky, 1938 

If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a Middle Ages in reverse—a satanocracy as opposed to the mediaeval theocracy—not only the humanities but also the natural sciences, as we know them, will disappear, and nothing will be left but what serves the dictates of the subhuman. 

Panofsky, 195? 

“They are not subversives, they are mass murderers! We are the subversives” 

Wood is a Zionist and an an admitted critic of humanism as defined by Panofsky, who was a universalist opposed to Zionism and nationalism as such. And I'm tired of defenses of Benjamin. There's of a lot of information in the passage above.

"Even Gerhard Richter" That's good for a laugh. He used to be a nihilist but he sold out. 

Looking through earlier reference to Grosz, I found this too. A good fit. Arguing with philosophers, and with Wood:

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic.

Find and Replace

Instead of treating scholarship as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that intellectual activity-especially theory, philosophy, and the humanities as such-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches the humanities as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of works comes from the intensities and sensations they inspire, not just their intention.

At some point in the 50s [George] Grosz have a lecture in NY earnestly defending figurative art and criticizing abstraction. The audience started to laugh, and he ended up reading his speech as a travesty. The audience loved it. He was humiliated. His estate has never allowed it to be published.

And since The Vienna School Reader is published by Zone,  I'll add the tag for Design as Crime

--

I'm going to be returning to this to add some of the footnotes I stripped from Wood's text. This is all just public notetaking.

It's obvious reading Sedlmayr that like all "philosophically" minded thinkers on "fine art" he's disgusted by the rise of fictions against eternal truths: the hieratic vs the demotic.

Art vs Theater. Thomas Crow vs Jean-Christophe Agnew. Worlds Apart. Going back to the beginnings of my manuscript in the late 80s

Panofsky isn't a snob. Adorno and Sedlmayr are equally opposed to democracy. Negative dialectics is a preference for ironic self-destruction. It gets boring. Grosz is a tragic figure.

Wood: "[Sedlmayr's] Bruegel essay is a chilling, anachronistic reanimation of a lost ideological world." 

The language of an angry schoolmaster staring out at the chaos of the playground.  

The mask—this “most profound deception” that disguises a  form and changes its meaning—is, as it were, the essence of this  process of estrangement concretized as a device, a process that  can take hold of any object or event whatsoever. Even without  the aid of the device of disguise, everyday things can be made to  appear no less fantastic and bizarre, suspicious and unfathomable than the masked actors representing “Carnival.” Such an active attitude consists in shedding all knowledge of the usual and self-evident sense of the course of everyday life, acting as if one knew  nothing of the meaning and function of persons and things —an  artificial and abstract attitude. Then the everyday world discloses  its hitherto concealed fantastic qualities.13 The first and classic  product of this estranged vision turned onto the everyday is Children’s Games. If one disregards what children’s games are, and what they mean for us and for children, then what children do  when engaged in these games is as absurd, uncanny, and suspicious as the behavior of a band of lunatics or other beings incomprehensible to us. There are monsters with ten legs and three  heads. The blindfolded boy looking for a pot with a staff is reminiscent of an executioner, the stilt walker of a cripple, the contortions produced by the games of epileptic seizures, the strange toys  of magical apparatuses -— the whole scene is one of “indescribable  mania.”

This is so easy. George Bernard Shaw: 

… Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.

"Brighouse’s philosophy, like Cohen’s, like all the liberalism of ideas, is deeply anti-social, laced with the melancholy superiority of a schoolmaster of a school for wayward youth."  

"In the end, it is impossible to normalize Sedlmayr." By that logic it should be impossible to normalize Plato or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Art in Crisis: The Lost Center

THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN  

The landscape garden had its origin in England about 1720 as a conscious protest against the architectural gardens of France. The French product's use of geometric forms in its layout was now rejected as something unnatural. From 1760 onwards the 'English Garden' swept the Continent with a rapidity and completeness which, in a matter of this kind, was wholly without precedent. Under the hands of artists of note its early and uncertain attempts to take shape gave place to creations of unparalleled grandeur. Everywhere the French parks were transformed, often at enormous expense, into English ones. Towards the end ofthe epoch- say, around 183o-whole stretches of territory began to be trans- formed into nature parks. Enthusiasm for the new art infected the widest circles. Even at the end of the epoch Prince Armin von Plickler-Muskau, who had twice attempted to transform his great Silesian properties into a single landscape and had ruined himself in doing so, could still speak of a prevailing 'Parkomania '.

Since the time of the Renaissance the rivalry of the arts for precedence had been a constant theme of discussion among artistic theorists. Now for the first time the gardener's art claimed the primacy. The artistic theory of the day bases this claim on a variety of grounds. Firstly, the art of the gardener is of all the most comprehensive since it comprises, and in a spatial sense actually contains, both sculpture and architecture, even as architecture contains sculpture, painting and decoration. It therefore brings into being the most comprehensive o f all imaginable works of art-a work of art that may well be termed 'super-comprehensive'. Yet there is a deeper sense in which the term comprehensive may be applied to this form of art, for it is indeed a rival to architecture, which it surpasses above all in the sheer size of its productions; moreover, it brings into being free creations in space of superlative magnificence. It composes with such organic masses as groups of bushes and trees, with hills and great expanses of lawn and with ponds and streams, it entwines among these tree masses the decorative element provided by flowering plants. Out of the constituent elements of nature it builds nature pictures which the painter can only hold fast within a two-dimensional framework; further-and here it is comparable to music-it creates entire successions of such pictures, an advantage to which other arts than music cannot aspire. In the different scenes that it calls into being it can ring the changes on all our feelings, can present us with grandeur, with charm, with the genial, the melancholy and the wild. Finally-and this is the weightiest ground of all-this art is most intimately connected with nature herself, and is, like nature, elusive and changing. 'None of the imitative arts is as interwoven with nature as is that of the gardener, none approximates to her more closely.' Such theoretical justification of the landscape gardener's primacy among the arts would mean but little did not the actual facts of the case clearly show landscape gardening to have aroused an enthusiasm far exceeding that felt for any other art at the time. 'Everywhere we find expressions of a veritable passion for these novel works of art, a passion comparable to the building passion of the Baroque.

All this proves that the landscape garden was something much more than a new kind of garden. It implied a revolt against the hegemony of architecture. It implied a wholly new relationship between man and nature and a new conception of art in general.

One condition was essential if the landscape garden was to come into being. The active relation of man to nature had necessarily to become a passive one!  

It's hard not to laugh. 

Wood: "At the time, he was the only German art historian of premodern art writing about the function and meaning of modern art and was recognized as such even by his enemies."

How is it the model of academia that scholars of the past are seen to have authority over the culture of the present? Isn't that what he was arguing against: a programmatic art? Panofsky didn't write about film as a man granting permission. He wrote as a hobbyist, and a lifelong member of the audience.

But that's the problem all reactionaries have: the need to burn the village to save it. It would really help if people like Wood would see themselves as aspects of their times. Riegl's sympathetic understanding of the human experience of touch belongs with Panofsky and Auerbach 

"It differs from the factual one in that it is apprehended, not by simple identification, but by "empathy". To understand it, I need a certain sensitivity, but this sensitivity is still part of my practical experience that is, of my everyday familiarity with objects and events. "

"He liked to quote Erich Auerbach’s assertion that in reading literature we need an ‘empirical confidence in our spontaneous faculty for understanding others on the basis of our own experience’."

And both were Jewish humanists who forswore Zionism, not as radicals but as liberals. That's never mentioned anywhere, because their principled liberalism is forgotten. Compared to that the debate over iconography or interpretation of form is a friendly game. I don't pick sides.

Kids these days don't know shit.  The parallel in Sedlmayr is Gombrich and The Preference for the Primitive; along with Wood, varieties of decadence in denial.  

Now I'm going to get drunk and read the Roger Kimball introduction.

In 1937, the Nazis mounted a show of modernist art and called it “Degenerate Art.” They were wrong about the art, but does that mean we are henceforth forbidden from describing any art as “degenerate”? Consider the photographs in Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious “X Portfolio”: would “degenerate” be out of place in describing them?... 

Sedlmayr writes as an Augustinian Catholic. For him, the underlying motive for the pursuit of autonomy is pride. The “lost center” of his original title is God. Autonomy, for finite, mortal creatures, is a dangerous illusion. “Autonomous man,” he writes, “does not and cannot exist—any more than can autonomous art, architecture, painting and so on. It is of the essence of man that he should be both natural and supernatural. . . . Man is fully human only in so far as he is a repository of the divine spirit.”

Seeing ourselves as a part of nature, even a English gardener, isn't enough. Self-hatred is key. Mapplethorpe said it himself: “There's this clock in Hell that chimes every hour, You will never get out . . . you will never get out . . . you will never get out."

Why is this so easy? Shouldn't I be able to make a living at this shit by now?