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

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

TR: What other documentary filmmakers do you admire?

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

TR: In what sense?

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

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

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

TR: And his response is?

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Godard on Leacock.

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

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

From an academic who found this interesting.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The adulation for Augustus puzzles me. During the civil war, he, Octavian, would have sons and fathers fight each other to death for entertainment. Just one example. Even for the time this was considered real sicko stuff. Historical distance plays strange tricks on our minds. https://t.co/vMfDVKve8V

— New Left EViews (@NewLeftEViews) June 27, 2023

Zuckerberg knows the history. There's nothing to be puzzled about.

Leusder again, quoting the New Yorker's music critic on Ernst Jünger

We like to think that novelists possess a special ethical strength, yet the morally compromised writer can project a strange kind of honesty—especially when his society is compromised to the same degree.

"We like to think..." No, we don't. 

Fintan O'Toole: Writers are the last people we should look to for moral clarity

For the uncomfortable truth about literature is that morally virtuous people are less likely than morally slippery people to be great writers. Having a clear set of values and sticking to it through trials and tribulations makes for a splendid human being, but seldom for a splendid novel.

My response at the time

No. The ability to face the complexities of the world begins with the acceptance of the possibility of failure. The way to understanding the frailties of others begins with an ability to recognize your own. Most people who consider themselves virtuous haven't been tested, or they're less virtuous than they imagine 

right-thinking, bien pensant, 

Leusder, Jäger et al. are fans of of all variety of fascist adjacent culture but moralize about those who cross a line, unless of course it's the one about which earnest Europeans hold their tongue.

Memories of Taruskin. Moralists' ideas of art. 

And again, both linking back to the same history:

Thug life is barbarism. It needs no written philosophy. It needs no defense. It's not opposed to art. As I've said more than once, maybe not here, if art were about morality, killers wouldn't know how to dance.

A comment that labeled me a "nihilist":

12 years ago on the subway, I watched a man playing the accordion. My first thought was that he knew how to handle a knife. His playing was hard, cold and precise, but it was turned in an instant from jagged to fluid, from points to curves, swooping and stabbing. The music described the violent moral universe that made him. He was trailed by a stoop-shouldered woman with a cup. The expression on her face was heartbreaking. 

Also from Jäger, Habermas replies:

Please allow me a final intellectual historical observation. Professor Parsons has claimed that Max Weber's teaching is a development towards bringing about the end of ideology. Weber is said to have broken the trilemma of historicism. utilitarianism and  Marxism, and to have led the way into the free field of discussion  beyond the European fronts of civil war. I envy our American  colleagues their political traditions which permit such a generous  and (in the best sense of the word) liberal interpretation of Max Weber. We here in Germany, who are still seeking for alibis,  would only too gladly follow them. But Weber's political sociology  has had a different history here. At the time of the First World War  he outlined a sketch of Caesar-like leader-democracy on the  contemporary basis of a national-state imperialism. This militant  latter-day liberalism had consequences in the Weimar period  which we, and not Weber, must answer for. If we are to judge  Weber here and now, we cannot overlook the fact that Carl Schmitt! was a ‘legitimate pupil’ of Weber’s. Viewed in the light  of the history of influences, the decisionist element in Weber's  sociology did not break the spell of ideology, but strengthened it. 

No fucking shit. 

O'Toole again, on Pinter. All I do is repeats

He goes on to quote, as if from memory, lines from The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil like "What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut/ With diamonds?"; "There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts"; "My soul, like to a ship in a black storm/Is driven I know not whither"; "I have caught/ An everlasting cold. I have lost my voice/Most irrecoverably." And, of course, "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young." He adds, "That language made me dizzy." 

These assholes read Brecht as a radical, when he needs to be read as Jünger is, as I read Brecht even as a child.

Reinhard Heydrich on his deathbed reciting the lyrics of his father. 

The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself.
We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.

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

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Hanif Kureishi 

RUDE

I had the good fortune earlier this week to be visited here in Rome by an ex-student who was brought up in Nigeria and has been working on a novel set there. I’ve only read the beginning of the book and have been unable to read more. (At the moment I can’t read much because I haven’t figured out how to scroll down though documents without the help of Isabella.) Anyhow, when the student had written a considerable amount of the book, she decided to show it not to an editor, friend, publisher or agent, but to a so-called ‘sensitivity reader’. She was concerned about whether her work would be politically correct or considered offensive to some or other reader; she was worrying about whether the book would even get past an agent, let alone to a publisher. This is a trend I’ve noticed with other students and also with editors at publishing houses: whether their work will be condemned for sexism, racism, cultural appropriation and so on. This is the contemporary anxiety for young writers today.

Some people are turned on and excited by the power of controlling others’ speech and freedoms. There is an element of the left which is bursting with aggressive self-righteousness and is puritanical and self-defeating. The writers I prefer, the ones I grew up with, are the wild ones, the demented ones, the rude ones who don’t give a damn. I can give some names and will present a mere handful: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Plath, Rhys, Celine, Burroughs, Miller, Baldwin. I could add many more and it would be a list of some of our greatest and most admired writers. They are artists who write without fear or inhibition; writers who may or may not be offensive to someone or other, writers who have been condemned or even prosecuted for their work. Think of what the great Salman Rushdie has been through in the name of free speech. The fatwah, in February 1989, was the first time I was aware that there could be real-life consequences for attacking tyrannous institutions and regimes. After the fatwah I know there were writers who were afraid to speak freely about the politicised version of Islam, or even about Muslims in general.

It has to be part of the writer’s job to be offensive, to blaspheme, to outrage and even to insult. I believe Kafka says in one of his notebooks that ‘Art should be an axe to smash the sea frozen inside us’. Art should not be safe or complacent; it should frighten, alarm and make us want to throw the book across the room. I don’t want to live in an atmosphere of fear and inhibition where writers are afraid of expressing their true selves for fear of offending someone or other. It is the work of great writers to turn the world upside down, to present opinions which go against the prevailing trends. It is not our job to please but to challenge, to make us think differently about our bodies our sexuality, politics and normativity.

Would these writers have passed the test today when it comes to political correctness? What would a ‘sensitivity reader’ have made of the work of D.H. Lawrence or William Burroughs? One of the things I’ve noticed about my students is that they are already inhibited. A student of mine wrote a good thriller from the point of view of a promiscuous American lesbian and was thoroughly criticised by his tutor for even thinking from this angle. How could he imagine for a moment that he was American, let alone a lesbian? The writer then got himself into a terrible tangle about who can write what and from which perspective. He re-wrote the book and made it much worse having been made to believe he was committing a literary crime by entering the mind of someone other than himself.

When I began my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, I was determined to write the book with as much disinhibition and freedom as possible. I would make it as dirty and funny as I felt my mind to be. I wouldn’t hold back or hesitate to say anything I truly felt. It wasn’t my job to deliberately shock but to tell the story in the most candid way.

Before this I can recall working on the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in the early Eighties with my friend the director Stephen Frears. Stephen is not keen on script development but his note to me when I began the rewrites was to make it ‘dirtier, outrageous and more shocking’. I felt liberated by his remarks and this script was the first thing I felt I had written in my own voice, something that was truly my own. I wonder with these early works of mine – My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Black Album and Intimacy – what a ‘sensitivity reader’ would have made of them and what butchery would have gone on; whether I would even have a career now. I’m relieved not to be a young writer today working in this atmosphere of self-consciousness and trepidation, this North Korea of the mind. The Buddha is full of racial insults and lewd, politically incorrect language, it being written from the point of view of a dirty minded seventeen-year-old mixed-race kid.

My youngest son, who is twenty-four, tells me of what an environment of apprehension and reserve he lives in when it comes to speaking and creativity. We should not forget that the insult can be an indication of friendship and admiration; that we call one another cunts and arseholes out of fondness rather than cruelty.

I believe this over-corrected behaviour has been created by the right to make us lefties and liberals seem foolish and petty with our silly disputes about language and point of view. The work of those of us in political opposition is not to fight amongst ourselves but to create a world in which there is no inequality or structural racism.

Our business is not to provide fuel to the right over minor disagreements but to continue as artists who are brave, bold and push the boundaries of what can be said and thought.

There's plenty to quibble with.  Shakespeare never wrote "without fear or inhibition". 

Kureishi misses the point, or actually two points. For the first, I'll use an example I'd forgotten about—not the de Maistre, which I've used often enough, but the source I used only once:

Andre Gide quotes Joseph de Maistre: "Whatever constricts man strengthens him." The context is a note on Calvinism and English literature. A few pages earlier he writes

I believe that never did the "rules"' embarrass any genius, neither that of the unities in France nor that of the three actors in Greece, and that Racine and Corneille as well as Aeschylus have sufficiently proved this. (That moreover they have no absolute value and that any great genius masters them, whether be finds support in them or negates them - and that to come along and claim that this or that great man was embarrassed by them is just as ridiculous as if a painter said that when painting he is embarrassed by his frame and exclaimed: "Oh if only I could spread out a little farther!" and that those who protest against them are like Kant's dove, which thought it would fly better in a vacuum.)

In general insubordination with regard to the rules comes from an unintelligent subordination to realism, from a misunderstanding of the ends of art, from that specious insinuation of empiricism which aims, through a scandalous generalization, to scoff at art by attacking it only where it has become artifice, and to label as factitious all supernatural beauty.

The second point is clear in the words of the Substack censors above, who want to foster a polite, safe conversation, safe from the vulgarity of the street, and the real world of social and political life, and which they can bleed for profit. Kureishi is attacking individual passivity but not the forces that encourage it or in fact mandate it.

Cultures opening out and cultures closing down. The difference between renaissance and mannerism, or monarchism, democracy, and fascism. Iranian and Israeli film. I always have to repeat this shit. 

Modern ideologies discount cultures as systems fostering stability and see them only as based on teleology: derogating means for ends. Democracy is as theatrical as monarchy. Fascist theater is something else entirely.

Science is the study of facts and philosophy the study of values. Conflating the two in favor of facts, values become assumed. Values assumed all questions are seen as those of expertise. Expertise as the goal terms of measurement are assumed. Curiosity is defined by the frame, values by the frame moral worth by the frame.  

Democracy is undermined as a value and then as a goal.

I wrote that years ago. I was reminded of it a week ago reading Leiter

Scientists are useful people, but there is more to philosophy than being useful to science or solving "social problems," although I do think philosophy could do a lot more of the former, and has done almost none of the latter.  Genuine philosophers are legislators of value, as one 19th-century German observed,..

He means Nietzsche, of course, who wasn't much for democracy.

Values are the product of the community, formed and reformed over time.  High art has the relation of low art that haute cuisine has to generations of grandmothers. All of this for me goes back decades, but here 2008 will do: on the history of law, food, and beer. The absurdity of Fukuyama, Perry Anderson, and anyone who follows them, is that Schmitt and Kojève have the relation to Hegel that Shostakovich has to Beethoven. It's all riffing on the themes and structures of the past European tradition. But these assholes pretend, (and this continues from yesterday).

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

From the manuscript, posted here in 2015. 

The history of modern intellectual life, more even than the history of modernity itself, if it were to be written now would need to need to be written by a historian from Mars, someone so far removed from the events of the past century that their biases are wholly other. Objectivity does not exist; the sociological history of the present describes the present no more than cognitive science describes the mind. You can’t pretend to describe yourself and call it science. Skinner was right to call cognitive science “the creation science of psychology”. There’s no scientific study of ideas as ideas; there’s no scientific study of metaphysics. They’re what we are as persons, as people with experiences, desires, and names. Once you’ve acknowledged yourself as “Rudolf Carnap” any hope of the end of metaphysics is gone. It was never there to begin with. 

But this is perfect: "the authentic world of the Bildungsbürgertum". von Karajan at the Machine:

update at the top. It just gets worse.

Jäger: "Oh buddy"

Fukuyama: “the invasion of Ukraine was such a shock bc in our lifetimes we’ve never witnessed one country militarily invading another.” 

Chris Hayes: “Well, Iraq.”

Fukuyama: “Yeah but…well, ok” 

Jäger: "We should just cryogenically preserve the Fukuyama of 1991 and not listen to the other versions." 

Fukuyama hasn't changed. And they're not talking about the Iran Iraq war. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon doesn't' count. A lot of invasions don't count. Wikipedia has a list.

---

Jäger rt's a pic of a text of Alexander Kluge, with images by Richter. The passage fits every argument I've ever made about the Gothic anti-humanist logic of modernism. It's almost too perfect.

A transcription of texts (just as if evolution had been tinkering with their DNA texts) doesn't only create lines to new, future texts. It can also be reconstructed in the direction of paradise. The way there leads through indeterminacies. (Nearer, my God, to Thee’ was the music played by the orchestra on board the Titanic as the ship went down. But  it is also the working instructions to copyists of all countries, who are driven from the omphalos of experience into the parallel world (heterotopia), the pre-world (history) and the future world (the world of our children, who are so attached to life). For copyists, all images are NOW—TIME.

The medieval world of monastic copyists, of the memorization as opposed to interpretation of the Koran, the Talmud, the Bible, or any religious text. Allegiance to dogma: the innocence of the eternal present.

And he rt's this

Schmitt: “... your point on page 215 would change all of present philosophy”

Kojève: “Yes, everything essential appears on my page 215”

*Allan Bloom cuts page 197-224 from the English edition*

— Julien (@grainofglass) May 16, 2023

In order to give to divine Spirit the fullness of being, it is necessary to situate divine Spirit within the World, to conceive of it as the “entelechy” of the World. Now, to conceive of it [215] in this way is to conceive of it as worldly, that is to say, human Spirit, and no longer as God. In short, Man who seeks to understand himself fully and completely as Spirit, can be satisfied only by an atheistic anthropology. And this is why the Schicksal, the Destiny of every Theology, of every Religion, is, in the final analysis, atheism.

And this documents how fascism and other forms of ideologically committed authoritarianism in the 20th century could be "a-theistic". It's all interesting as a matter for history and sociology, but with these idiots we're back to Fukuyama, and the moral imperatives of faith, in ideas, in the word, in a metaphysical reality.

Before that he rt'd Loren Balhorn's sad emoji for the last playlist of Ryuichi Sakamoto, avatar of ironic kitsch pop. Sakamoto was wishfully pretentious, but he had a light sad sense of irony and an awareness his own limitations. And he didn't pretend to be a leftist. Jäger can be good with facts; he says he prefers ideas, but his real preference is fantasy. All of them indulge the waking dreams of people who've watched too many movies 

There's an attitude in Godard, despite the assertions of wanting to converse, that says, Don't argue or cross me about such things. And this book does not alter the notion of his brilliant immaturity. The most fascinating point of all applies more broadly than to Godard; it reaches out to anyone who believes that film is more important than the world. Maybe film is not the great new language of engagement with the world that Bazin hoped it would be. Perhaps it is, instead, a vehicle more suited to dreaming, sensationalism and not wanting to grow up. Perhaps language--the construct of words--was always subtler, deeper and more humane.

All art relates to dreams; film is the nearest art to dreaming itself. It's the nearest thing to a drug: that's its weakness. No other art makes it so easy to deny the fact of artifice, but every great film, one way or another puts artifice out front. The corollary is that bad films try to replace reality. "Trash cinema" is credited with giving the lie to smooth commercialism but wouldn't exist without it. It's dependent. Negative dialectics is the sincerest form of flattery.

Milanovic 

If you think neoliberalism at its peak (20y ago) ideologically meant globalization (in danger now as trade blocs are being formed), privatization (which has been discontinued), no industrial policies (which are being reintroduced), no export controls (which are making a comeback)

no attention to workers' rights (see Jake Sullivan recent speech), development investment in institution-building (which both BRI and US AID now deride), no price controls (which are being introduced), it is not clear to me how it has not been rejected.

A good reply

Neoliberalism is also deeply connected to financialization, i.e. the proliferation of financial relationships (e.g supermarkets selling insurance, small farmers' incorporation into global financial networks) and the political power of financial actors, both of which continue now 

A better one

In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today.

— Twitter Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) May 13, 2023

repeat 

For those of you who have been with us so far, you'll know that we've been thinking and talking a lot about how the First Amendment should adjust to the new challenges of the platform era.

Varieties of technocratic authoritarianism.  "Looping back from a post-communist romance with libertarianism, to begin again."

I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications. We think of many kinds of people as objects of scientific inquiry. Sometimes to control them, as prostitutes, sometimes to help them, as potential suicides. Sometimes to organise and help, but at the same time keep ourselves safe, as the poor or the homeless. Sometimes to change them for their own good and the good of the public, as the obese. Sometimes just to admire, to understand, to encourage and perhaps even to emulate, as (sometimes) geniuses. We think of these kinds of people as definite classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will be able to control, help, change, or emulate them better. But it’s not quite like that. They are moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. I call this the ‘looping effect’. Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. I call this ‘making up people’.

What sciences? The ones I shall call the human sciences, which, thus understood, include many social sciences, psychology, psychiatry and, speaking loosely, a good deal of clinical medicine. I am only pointing, for not only is my definition vague, but specific sciences should never be defined except for administrative and educational purposes. Living sciences are always crossing borders and borrowing from each other.

Emergence is about the past, yes, but it is subtitled A Philosophical Study. I never called it history. It was the first long piece of writing, in any language, that captured, adapted and applied “the new kind of analysis that Michel Foucault called archaeology. At the time, few readers who came across the book were familiar with his work. Today his achievements are almost too well known, beloved by some, loathed by others. I continue to be a fan, but I have no intention of writing about Foucault. I continue to use him in my own way, with no thought about whether I am faithful to the traditions he began. 

From idealism to mannerism (negative idealism) to humane irony. That's how it works. I'm too much of a determinist to be impressed by the obvious. And the thought of Foucault beginning a tradition is annoying. 

"...the impersonal in art and technocracy, though the product of the same events are very different things."

"[Weber's] value-free science is as much the product of an age as he was."

Panofsky, Auerbach, et al.

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.

 Gavinson on Tár, in the New Yorker.

I grew up worshipping artists and the exchanges they have with their audiences. My dad is a high-school English teacher who shares and interprets canonical works; my mom is an artist who weaves tapestries inspired by sacred Jewish texts and traditions. When I started writing, I saw myself in part as a professional fan. Through a fashion blog that I started when I was eleven years old, and then through an online magazine that I created for teen-agers, I was able to interview artists I admired, siphoning their wisdom, believing that creative ability and strength of character went hand in hand. The magazine, Rookie, celebrated fandom in all its forms. Our writers wrote of artists as queens, kings, gods, goddesses, dream B.F.F.s. Our readers sent in photos of homemade shrines to their heroes. In regular columns, famous artists gave our readers life advice. I delivered talks at universities and lecture halls arguing that the fan’s capacity for enthusiasm was as holy as the works of art we lived by. I would quote a passage from Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” comparing a performer’s audience to “Christ Himself,” a righteous entity worthy of serving. I found similar comfort in a scene from “Manhattan” in which Woody Allen’s character asks what makes life worth living, then rattles off a mix of cultural touchstones (before landing, of course, on “Tracy’s face”). At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power. 

The first time I saw Chloe Sevigny, sometime before or after, she was a lower east side street urchin, huddled in a corner on the floor with her boyfriend, head down. We were in the same, extended, circle, though I was in and out by choice. The last time I saw her she cruised me like a movie star, and that was still years before this pic. 

Watching smart people who grew up with no knowledge of the past find their way. And I'm one of them. The "New York intellectuals" were petty bourgeois snobs, the bookish children of immigrants, reinventing the past. But I was left to figure that out for myself, and I'm an heir, literally of that "tradition". My parents' book collection was called the best private library in Philadelphia, and still they knew nothing. Their world began with them. And this is the future. Humanism is reduced to an an appreciation of ambiguity in a world ruled by greed and pedantry. Or maybe that's what it always was. But more and more history is lost. I want to give Gevinson credit, but then I don't. I haven't seen Tar. I have a bet with myself that it's just kitsch; like Todd Haynes, a fantasy of art and women, voyeurism and in this case, overt misogyny, putting a woman on a pedestal to watch her fall.

At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” 

I would've been embarrassed to write that at 19 or admit it at 26. And the Woody Allen reference. To Allen's credit I've always thought he married his step-daughter because she was more of a critic than a fan. It was the best of both worlds: he met his mother before she met his father. 

Gevinson

One of the few characters to challenge Lydia directly—a “bipoc pangender”-identifying Juilliard student who struggles to connect with Bach because of his “misogynistic life”—is not given the time to make a full or coherent argument for a more inclusive canon.   

Richard Brody

Yet, at the same time, Field has the chutzpah to liken today’s #MeToo era—in which, one character claims, to be accused is to be considered guilty—to the supposed excesses and false accusations of Germany’s postwar period of de-Nazification.

Brody has always annoyed me, but the disconnect is wild. My mother described Mahler as a writer of art songs who never understood symphonic form. I'm sure she got that from somebody but she agreed, and so do I. Frère Jacques played slowly in a minor key is just a cover.  Tár reeks of kitsch, and the moralizing about Nazis seals it. But Gevinson is very smart, and Brody's pretension annoys me more.

Gaitskill, Gevinson and Didion: Holly Golightly, and Louise Brooks

I have two connections to Leacock, through one of his daughters and one of his girlfriends in the mid 80s. He told her she reminded him of Brooks, an ex lover. Brooks in old age reminds me of my mother.

---

I've watched as much of Tár as I could take. It's a moralizing parody. Field is cribbing from Ruben Östlund. That no one gets the joke—including Field?—is sort of amazing. 

no politics but decadence

Design as Crime and "architectural favela porn"

And remember that both Reed and Jäger publish on a site named for a word coined by Robert Smithson, and that Michael Fried is on the editorial committee. Two reactionaries one more honest than the other.

Vanguardism is elitism, and radical snobbery is like liberal Zionism. Rationalists rationalize.  

To read the text in the second pic, right-click and open in a new tab or window.

The publisher's name is Alex Stavrakas. His last failed attempt

Bedeutung is a magazine of Philosophy, Current Affairs, Art and Literature – an intellectually radical, political, engaged, daring and aesthetically captivating publication. The essays and imagery that appear in Bedeutung are intended to be uncompromisingly incisive. The thinkers and artists collaborating with Bedeutung range across many disciplines: philosophers, academics, authors, poets, film directors, composers, documentarists, painters, photographers, designers, architects, critics, actors.

We publish texts and imagery regardless of their contentiousness. We promote diversity where it is really needed: not in social, racial or sexual particularities but in conceptual and ideological struggles. Bedeutung is a magazine that promotes multiplicity precisely by ignoring ostensible constituents: we focus on ideas, we promote commitment, we welcome agendas, we undersign engagement.

Stavrakas was the publisher, editor-in-chief, and "creative director" 

I've found an archive. All three issues. It includes an interview with someone so absurdly pretentious and social climbing that he became a running joke at AFA. That's an achievement in itself.

Wikipedia includes a link to the Guardian. It's not pretty.

"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?"

Lorentzen on Cormac McCarthy

According to Alicia, the love between the siblings is a matter of mutual recognition in a world where neither of them otherwise belongs. ‘I knew that I wasnt supposed to be in Wartburg Tennessee and I thought it possible that Bobby had found where it was that I was supposed to be. Where we were supposed to be.’ She names the mountains of Romania. ‘For how long did you entertain this fantasy?’ Cohen asks. She replies: ‘I entertain it yet.’

Her comment suggests that the motive of her suicide might be to join her brother, whom she has taken for dead, and that the act is something beyond her free will. Bobby’s realisation that he is in love with his sister, when he was a grad student and she was thirteen, is similarly presented as something beyond his conscious reckoning: ‘Watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.’ What he is watching is Alicia performing the role of Medea, alone and in costume, on the floor of a quarry, lit by smoky homemade kerosene lamps. It’s a powerful image and one that comes completely out of the blue. There is another temptation for the reader: to connect these children and their behaviour to their father, the bomb maker, to see the bomb as something that emerged from the collective human unconscious, something animals made while tending to their own survival. Alicia tells Cohen that ‘anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language ... and it may be number one.’ As for its makers: ‘I think most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they’d never had so much fun in their lives.’ Some have their fun actually burning down the world, others write novels.

2007 One I haven't repeated, 

Dennett and Determinism, Bill and Buddha Nature: Killers as Heroes (and actors as gods) in the Films of Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino's movies are as politically reactionary as Mel Gibson's, but only one of them gets called for it. Honesty in Kill Bill is the following of one's true self. Clark Kent is the sham persona. Bill reminds Beatrix that she's a killer, and that her daughter is one as well. This is neither moral nor immoral but simple determinism, whether genetic or metaphysical is irrelevant. And Beatrix is both the hero and the victor. The best killer wins.

tags: Mannerism and The Gothic. The Dark Knight and Epic Cinema, Determinism, Kubrick, etc.

We'll meet again, Don't know where, Don't know when, But I know we'll meet again some sunny day

I could add something about Game of Thrones, but that would be obvious.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Aubade, Philip Larkin

Just trying to cover all the bases. 

"By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile."

I'm going to keep hammering on this. It's embarrassing how little these idiots know about the world. Bungacast and Jäger: like autistic 12 year olds.

The debate over fascism is a debate over the meaning of words as opposed to the meaning of acts. Debating fascism vs Bonapartism as natural kinds in a crisis is an act of evasion. 

When a man tells me he's a fascist it's not worth arguing, and when an Israeli says "not all fascists are Nazis" I agree. We were drinking with a man who says "I used to be a Nazi" and probably still is. And neither of them annoy me as much as the Americans who call themselves "socialists", or even worse "communists." That became our running joke. Will the cast of Aufbunga Bunga, Jäger, and Tooze, ever be subject to an analysis as to whether they're actually "leftists"?  They aren't. So what do they represent? What natural kinds do they manifest? 

Jäger on Badiou's Saint Paul. "People don't realize it but this is one of the best critiques of identity politics ever written"

And he rt's a reply. "Probably the best, especially since he successfully shows how the most consequent realisation of identity politics is Nazism."

Saint Paul is the model for Christian fascists. Badiou still calls himself a Maoist. Is he? Alex Hochuli styles himself "Modernist". Modernism and democracy have never mixed well. Badiou at least tries, in a painfully earnest way, to respond to Israel. No one else above will even go that far. Jewish identity politics n'existe pas. So much for value free science. 

Inaction is a form of action. Since Hochuli and Curtis Yarvin are both writing for Sohrab Ahmari, this, on Rawls and Shklar, and Moyn, is a good fit. 

Remove yourself from the world in order to think about it, and then you worry about the result.  The refusal to participate in the political world is a political act, and an anti-politicalact. The letter and its subject are formed out of denial.

Ahmari. Decadence recognizes itself. 

Tributes are pouring in for Mike Davis, the chronicler of urban apocalypse who died Monday at age 76. Most of these eulogies have focused on the political passions—fellow feeling for the dispossessed, hot-burning rage for their class enemies—that animated Davis’s remarkable life and career. This is fair enough. But attention should also be paid to his form and craft, the mastery of literary nonfiction that gave rise to a body of work that will long endure.

...I devoured City of Quartz, and then I read everything else Davis had written up to that point, and I was left wanting more. Still, it’s City of Quartz that remains my favorite, and that I returned to last summer as I was setting out on my own latest book project—not for any specific piece of research, mind you, but just to get in a writing sort of mood. That’s how important Davis’s craft is to me, and I know I’m not alone in this regard.

repeats from November: T.J. Clark on Davis 

I made a comment on Jäger's piece on Baudrillard that included this

The fascism of reactionary Catholics will fail only because the deeply self-loathing will always be a small minority. It’s a rare thing when ressentiment drives the population of an entire country. It's happening now in Israel. 

There are contradiction in those statements that I'd like to edit out but Bonapartism is not based on ressentiment;it's the foundation of fascism. These idiots think of fascism as something that only exists as a function of the mass: the aggregate. They can't think in specifics because it reminds them that's what they are: individuals, particularities. I've referred dozens of time to fascism as self-hatred but ressentiment is the word these assholes recognize. Technocrats can think in terms of public health, but doctors treat patients. Back to Jerome Groopman.

Peter Mair's Ruling the Void, gets good press. 

The key element within this transformation, whether seen in terms of the location of the parties within the polity, or in terms of the functions parties are expected to perform, is the ascendancy of the party in public offce. Parties have reduced their presence in the wider society and become part of the state. They have become agencies that govern – in the widest sense of the term – rather than represent. They bring order rather than give voice. It is in this sense that we can also speak of the disengagement or withdrawal of the elites. For despite the rhetoric, it seems that they too are heading for the exits, although with this obvious dierence: while the exiting citizens are often headed towards a more privatized or individualized world, the exiting political elites are retreating into an official world – a world of public offices.

The safe havens that are being sought in the wake of the passing of the mass party may be different; the withdrawal is mutual, however, and this is the conclusion that needs to be most clearly underlined. It is not that the citizens are disengaging and leaving hapless politicians behind, or that politicians are retreating and leaving voiceless citizens in the lurch. Both sides are withdrawing, and hence rather than thinking in terms of a linear sequence in which one of the movements leads to the other, and hence in which only one side is assumed to be responsible for the ensuing gap – the crude populist interpretation – it makes much more sense to think of a process of mutual reinforcement. The elites are inclined to withdraw to the institutions as a defence against the uncertainties of the electoral market. Just as state subventions to political parties have compensated for the inability of parties to raise sucient resources from their own members and supporters, so the security of an institutional or procedural role can compensate elites for their vulnerability in dealing with an increasingly disengaged and random electorate. At the same time, citizens withdraw from parties and a conventional politics that no longer seem to be part of their own world: traditional politics is seen less and less as something that belongs to the citizens or to the society, more and more as something done by politicians. There is a world of the citizens – or a host of particular worlds of the citizens – and a world of the politicians and parties, and the interaction between them steadily diminishes. Citizens change from participants into spectators, while the elites win more and more space in which to pursue their own particular interests. The result is the beginning of a new form of democracy, one in which the citizens stay at home while the parties get on with governing.

It's the end of the chapter 3 "The Withdrawal of the Elites". No mention of the withdrawal of a subset of the elite into the ivory tower.

They have become agencies that govern – in the widest sense of the term – rather than represent. They bring order rather than give voice.

To give voice would require a social tie to those you rule, a personal as opposed to impersonal relation. The existence of managers is a given, but they come in different forms. 

This link is as good as any. It covers all the bases.

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

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

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

"Perception does not know the concept of infinity"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've always hated Borges, but not Smithson.

Vesely, (again)  p 207

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

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

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

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

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

Smithson, The Collected Writings,

Jack Flam's introduction

p. XV

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

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

p 59

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

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

Sirs:

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

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

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

Jonathan Edwards

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

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

p 138 A Cinematic Atopia (1971)

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

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

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

p. 350 

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

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

p. 352 

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

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

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

—————————

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

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

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

————————— 

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

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

--- 

Gregory of St Vincent, 1647 

Guarini, Cappella della Sacra Sindone, completed in 1694 

Tony Smith Model for Smoke, 1967

Tony Smith, Smug, 1973

Robert Smithson, Alogon #2, 1966

Mirror Stratum, 1966

Spiral Jetty, 1970 

Gyrostasis, 1968

Plunge, 1966