The Supreme Court has unanimously held that Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Arnold Schöenberg’s music, and Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” are “unquestionably shielded” by the First Amendment. Nonrepresentational art, instrumental music, and nonsense: all receive constitutional coverage under an amendment protecting “the freedom of speech,” even though none involves what we typically think of as speech—the use of words to convey meaning.
Jackson Pollock from 1952,
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| Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles (Number 11) |
[Weber] imagines an impersonal relation to the world. It’s a common trope of the literature of the period, but the impersonal in art and technocracy, though the product of the same events are very different things....
By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile
“There is a big secret about sex,” wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. “Most people don’t like it.” The same might be said of translation, which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil.
Translation is transliteration. It's a necessary evil. Utilitarianism turns practical necessity into the ideal, so its weaknesses are now "secrets". And another name for the file of women getting their model of sexuality from homosexual men. Post-feminism is pre-feminism on crank, and rationalism makes you stupid. Or the other way around. An asshole doesn't have a clitoris. Call it female circumcision by category error.
In his films for children, Hayao Miyazaki has used the labor-intensive art of animation to study the major problem of adult life.
That was the subhead, but still. No fucking shit.
The director sticks to a deliberately vague line, one that could be applied to the most anodyne Disney venture, that all his films are about “how to live.” Few scholars or critics have done the work to penetrate this author’s statement. “What’s it about?” asked Nigel Andrews of Spirited Away. “Simple answer: Everything.” Ligaya Mishan writes that Miyazaki’s films seem to “thwart the Western mind.”
A world of idiots.
Miyazaki is the benign ruler of his domain. He's a master and treated as one by his employee/servants. He's a filmmaker and an artist. His wife "hasn't forgiven him" he says, for making her stop working as an animator. Nothing about any of this"thwarts the Western mind". There are many things in his work that are foreign to the Western mind, but French art is foreign to the English. You can't translate Rimbaud, Mallarmé, or Lady Murasaki, but there's nothing to translate in a painting—a material thing—or an image; the difference is in the perception by individuals and members of various groups. Japanese people understand Miyazaki in ways Europeans will not, but the thing absent perception is the same.
Spirited Away is a film about children and the adults who care for them. Miyazaki's closest equivalent in the US is Maruice Sendak. In Europe it's Tove Jansson.
When I met him at Princeton I was already trained as a scholar in Greek philosophy. But I had not fully realized that I could use philosophy to think about my life or what t means to be a human being.
Princeton philosophy in the 80's
"My students were all obsessed with sex. Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"
Rakesh Bhandari comments about Frankfurt's discussion of 1st and 2nd order desires. Maybe Frankfurt will be remembered for teaching geeks that there's more to life than being geeks, the same transition Derrida played a part in. One of them would be amused. I still think I coined the phrase second-order curiosity, meaning the ironic awareness of an interest, as a way of explaining the problems of analytic philosophy. Autism is the model of first order curiosity: subtext, and other people, are irrelevant. "I'm a liberal"; "I'm a nice guy!" "Some of my best friends..." "I have an extended mind!"
Mathematics can't tell you why you wanted to be a mathematician. "Science can't even justify science." Steven Weinberg, whose philosophy justifies Zionism, as Leiter's does.
A few weeks ago, my family went on vacation in Copenhagen, where we ate at several top-of-the-line restaurants. My reaction to the meals? “How incredibly creative of the chef.”
A few weeks ago, my family went to DC, where we met with several top-of-the-line law firms. My reaction to the briefs? “How incredibly creative of the partners.”
Briefs are referred to as well crafted. "Lawyers are tradespeople!"
None of these cases are about speech; they're about the relation of speech to commerce.
The idiot
A different example, with the same analytic structure, clarifies the problem. Switch from discrimination on the basis of religion to discrimination on the basis of race. Now the chef makes dishes to preserve white culture. An African-American comes to the restaurant, but the chef says, “Sorry, I won’t serve you because my message that these foods are preserving white culture would be diluted if people saw Black people eating at the restaurant.” We might say that the restaurant owner’s choice of a business model is his way of expressing himself: His expressive conduct is his expressive activity.
White Trash Cooking is a cookbook, and anyone can buy it. The KKK can open a restaurant, but it has to serve niggers, gooks, spics, and kikes. Equal access to the market, in a commercial culture: from Wickard vs Filburn to civil rights, the market takes precedence over social and private life.
After Tushnet's open letter:
—NBC, Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court.
—National Review[!], Harvard’s Mark Tushnet Wants Joe Biden to Become a Dictator
Tushnet is a famous opponent of judicial review, and now Alabama Republicans and supporters of the independent state legislature theory have heeded his call. On executive supremacy, Posner and Vermuele at least are consistent. And all of this and everything above, with the same paper-thin idea of language, and politics.
