notes before returning to an argument.

Idealism vs the historicization of idealism. If humanism is the study of the past, rejecting authority but respecting tradition, as Panofsky put it, then it is not strictly speaking "idealist".  Idealism is dogma. The brief period we call the High Renaissance was the moment between idealist dogma and the moral panic: the affect of Botticelli and Bronzino. If balance is achieved it's only in passing, and mourning it too much only reinforces reaction.

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Periodization works. Historicism works. Relations exist, but tempora mutantur. Times change. 

Art and money are in tension, not opposition.  The seriousness in the art world, the world of "non-commercial art" was not a world without commerce.  The parallels are obvious.

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

Art and money in the art world—the world of "fine art"—are no longer in opposition, or no more so than the tension between design and money—design and architecture are distinct (that's a subject). But that tension exists more and more, and more openly, in film and other forms of entertainment, except gaming (and again).

Gaming will be an art form beyond design when designers introduce tragedy. As Schrader says:"it’s still in the realm of the techies." The other option is not in games as such but "world creation", something covered late in Halt and Catch Fire, when test players and marketers become confused, and nonplussed, because the game designer Cameron has designed a game that's impossible to win. This is 2017 looking back at 1995. Schrader's article came out in 2014. Tempora mutantur. 

Cannes vs The Biennale  

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."

etc.

Tarantino's indulgence in racism, and getting away with it, goes back to Scorsese, in a cab talking about killing his wife for fucking a black man. And then the scene above. Violence and comedy. Scorsese and Tarantino are both before anything else students of film. Not the first.  

I wish I could find a video of that included the transition to the street scene. But at the same time, since I'm still doing this, if I were a curator I would do a show of the best of YTMND

Reuters: How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

“You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work,”

The provenance of a tulip. 

Scorsese 

As recently as fifteen years ago, the term “content” was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against “form.” Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. “Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores. On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included. On the other hand, it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?

Curating isn’t undemocratic or “elitist,” a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.

Form and Content again. Paul Schrader now has a tag.

There's a lot to argue in Scorsese's piece. Fellini was a touchstone for me for a few years as an ex-teenager, but that's it. It's not the point here. 

Algorithms for news and entertainment are both threats to democracy. The personalization of everything is the privatization of everything. It's the end of public life and "public reason". Everything becomes utilitarian with the market as the only prior, the utopia of corporate geeks. Technocratic liberals don't get the point. They don't know what they're defending.

Perfect timing: Facebook blocks news in Australia over government's payment rules.

The announcement immediately becomes the most significant and severe split between Facebook and a foreign government over growing calls for big tech to pay publishers.

The piece as written is wrong. The ban applies everywhere. It's not limited to Australian users of FB. 

It'll be interesting to find out what Klonick and Hasen and other opponents of free, and "cheap" speech have to say.

Remember, Nwanevu hates politics and loves "truth" 

"But art is not essentially content. Art is essentially form. Art is object, not subject." Ursula K. Le Guin

“I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying." John Mortimer

"...imagine if that one taliban commander had not screwed up my plans to go with them when they conducted attacks, and i had seen that too. isnt that interesting? isnt it important to understand who they are? and most importantly, wouldnt it make for a fun read?" Nir Rosen.

Form and content. repeats. start here. also here [for Rosen] and here.

The second link includes a story about a lawyer in federal criminal defense: drugs and guns. I thought I'd told the whole story but I hadn't.  For whatever reason he took one pro bono case and discovered police had lied and falsified evidence. It's was new experience for him to have a client he knew was innocent. "You don't understand... I'm a lawyer... I don't care. It's not my job!"  It's not his job to care.  "But they fucked this kid. He was miles away. I have witnesses!! I'm gonna fuck those cops!"  

Mob lawyers are lawyers. Corporate lawyers are lawyers. Most lawyers, like most journalists, aren't crusaders. Arguments that they should be are like arguments for star teachers. 

A biglaw partner, to me, about legal philosophy: “Lawyers don’t read that stuff Lawyers are tradespeople!” Katyal wanted it both ways, to be both a hired gun and an earnest liberal. 

more of the same Jilani's geek sense of nuance.
Polygon, the gaming website from Vox.

Games need to return to black-and-white morality: Tales of good vs. evil are more relevant than ever

Gray morality presents a worldview that states these two poles aren’t that different: a perspective that actually widens the disparity in our fractured world. Our lives are already gray, and these shades seem to keep getting muddier. 

The distrust of black-and-white tales may stem from their prominence in many child-friendly franchises: Mario saves the princess, while Bowser kidnaps her. Guybrush Threepwood of Monkey Island fame rescues his lover as the earnest, wannabe outlaw, the antithesis to LeChuck’s scheming, undead pirate captain. Samus Aran blasts aliens to smithereens, versus the ghastly Mother Brain, who’s the ... brains behind the machinations of Metroid, I guess. 

Tales of black-and-white morality feature enemies that have always been bad, and will always be bad. While the heroes are good, and always find a way to succeed despite the odds, even if they have to strain against their own moral codes.

The author, a "non-binary"[?] corporate gamer geek from Singapore, an authoritarian corporate utopia.
Reminds me of Cyrus Eosphoros, "Kayla" Schierbecker,  and Justine Tunney.

Schrader, again

I recently watched a demonstration by the guys from Rockstar Games who did the Western video game Red Dead Redemption. They said that all new technology is essentially run by techies. And then at some point, somebody comes in from another field and makes it universal. And they were hoping that we were getting to that point with video games. We’re not there yet. It’s still in the realm of the techies. 

Farrell, again

John Gray on the disappearance of utopian dreams of social reform in science fiction here. His taste in SF is excellent and he has several good lines.

The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.

is particularly nice. It captures real (if not universal) differences without fetishizing the one as better than the other.

India was an alien environment for the British; Indochina was an alien environment for the French; Africa was an alien environment for the entirety of Europe. Henry Farrell can't deal with Palestine but he can justify "thought experiments" on Mars. Fantasy is escape. It's evasion.

Science Fiction was created by men trying to get away from the alien environment populated by their wives.

Engineers of shit.

In stead of lowering the Medicare age to 60, why not lower it to 0?

This would be good policy, plus it would have the added bonus of allowing us to make fun of Bernie diehards as they try to angrily explain why Medicare for all isn't Medicare For All...

— We need #TestAndTrace 🐇 (@Noahpinion) April 12, 2020

If he deletes it the text will stay on the page.

A few days ago Philip Mirowski opened up a draft of a paper for comments. I'd already made mine before I read the above.

"Democracy, Expertise and the Post-Truth Era: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Politics of STS Version 1.1"
It's a draft and I won't copy his words, but he begins with a quote.

One part of the US vote was a loud vote against expertise. Clinton became, among other things, a symbol for technocracy... Views and debates within STS about the nature of expertise seem oddly irrelevant in this context. The differences between accounts of expertise in realist terms (Collins and Evans, 2002), as institutionally constituted parts of larger regimes (Jasanoff, 2004) or as discrete networks (Eyal, 2013), while stark for readers of this journal, are subtle given the wholesale rejection of expertise by voters and the more selective rejection of expertise being continued in some announced appointments. It seems that optimism about the coexistence of democracy and expertise may be misplaced... (Sismondo, 2017)

The whole thing is a joke. No discussion of what the supposed "experts" achieved, or failed to. No reporting of fact. The history of ideas is rationalism built on priors and hot air. Nothing on the record of Volcker and Rubinomics, Greenspan/Ayn Rand, Krugman, Rodrik and Deaton, Tyler Cowen and Tom Nichols. As for "democracy" I brought up my old standbys: Latour is a neoliberal Catholic and The Church is a monarchy;  Feyerabend belongs with de Man and Robbe-Grillet; democracy is relativist as to truth but strict as to form; lawyers are orators not philosophers. "I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying." etc. Weber and Kafka. The absurdity of thinking of science as intellectual as opposed to technical. Engineers themselves aren't considered intellectuals, but engineering is seen as a model for intellectual activity, "creating concepts" etc. Game designers are seen as intellectuals, builders of virtual worlds, like philosophers' possible worlds. Science fiction is fantasy. Fantasy is not observation. From my comments:

Science is empiricism. The current wave of "science denial" is a backlash against rationalist bullshit claiming to be science. Shiller and Fama won the non-Nobel prize in economics in the same year for making diametrically opposed arguments. "Teach the conflict"? Angus Deaton won for discovering what they teach in every introduction to systems engineering: efficiency and stability are in inverse proportion. Or as they teach you in kindergarten: don't put all your eggs in one basket.

I should have included Schrader

"The Post-Truth Era." And when exactly was the "Era of Truth"?
What Exactly is neoliberalism? etc.

new tag for Video Games

Avant-Garde is Kitsch: An Essay on Modernism and Modernity in Politics and Culture
Academia.edu, or here

It's book length now. If I hadn't pissed off Sahlins it would've been published by years ago, but it would have been much shorter and not nearly as good. It's still not done but it's close.

I waste my life on this or something else.

It would be nice if someone at least gave me a response other than "It will never pass peer review", or that I should send to "X", who then says I should send it to "Y".

The sources of the image, because now I have to explain all my jokes.

A few changes. Now I'm taking a break.

If the intellectual model of fine art remains intellectual design (and the logic of original intent) the popular model is now theatrical design. There’s a relation: the children of conceptualists have returned to an art-making process the only way they could, as furniture makers.  There’s a similar culture of “crafting” in academia, of grad school knitting circles, economist coffee connoisseurs, philosopher illustrators and wood carvers. None of this amounts to much, or won’t until the preoccupations outpace the ideas.  The best example of this, going back to the beginnings of conceptualism, is Adrian Piper, who has had careers both as an artist and as an academic philosopher.  But her best, most tortured, work documents the sleep of reason, undermining all of her ideological pretensions.  Her work is the poetry of confused rage.  The new culture of crafting by comparison is another form of naïve decadence.  For academic crafters, knitting circles are the closest they’ll come to hammering out scenarios for The Wire.  But our more committed culture of geek enthusiasm is Fin-de-siècle Vienna restaged in ignorance, the overdetermined attachments of people desperate to escape their isolation while simultaneously seeing that isolation as a function of Truth. It connects to the art of the closet, without the humor or sadness. We now have a variety of geeks outside of science and tech, all with the moral philosophy of Asperger’s patients: so fixated on their manias that the only way out is the dream of the hive, the ultimate overdetermined community. Our culture is full of stories of dystopian worlds made by our idealism; contra the church, homosexuality is normal human behavor, and against all philosophers who followed Socrates, the distinction between dialogue and rhetoric is spurious. 

Paul Schrader tells a story.

I recently watched a demonstration by the guys from Rockstar Games who did the Western video game Red Dead Redemption. They said that all new technology is essentially run by techies. And then at some point, somebody comes in from another field and makes it universal. And they were hoping that we were getting to that point with video games. We’re not there yet. It’s still in the realm of the techies.[i]

Video games are dystopianism without the sense of loss. To take them beyond the realm of the techies would be to take them beyond the enthusiasts, the optimists, and to those who can introduce tragedy: out of the realm of games and into the realm of art. Schrader’s point of course is that if we’re not there yet, we will be. 

---

[i]  Paul Schrader, "Game Changers: The Birth of Narrative", Film Comment, July-August 2014

My first mention of the Schrader story here

Tweeted by Kaura: neurobio major often distracted by cogsci & philosophy // can't stop the weltschmerz

Moral phil/game dev are essentially the same job, you sit on a computer all day coming up with horrible scenarios to put imaginary people in

Retweeted by Justin Weinberg, the editor of Daily Nous.

Liked by Will Wilson: Mathematical physics and religious obscurantism. Computers are the worst tools except for all the others. Formerly: FoundationDB, Apple. Currently: Google.

Wilson, followed by Ross Douthat

tell me about it.

Culture, Determinism, Futurism and Data Culture, Make it Idiot-Proof, Mannerism and The Gothic, Naturalism, Pedants and Children, Philosophy, Sexuality, Utopia and Intentional Communities,

Art and The Auschwitz Album

Humanity is in particularity and partiality; the universal is literally inhuman, and there's no way to resolve the contradiction without sacrificing one or the other. ...

It's inhuman to deny intimacy, even the illusory intimacy of art.

The top two photographs will be remembered. The bottom one won't. Some people have said the only reason is context.

Alva Noë: How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience

my comment, on the fly.  Noë is an idiot.

Discussion of aesthetics is silly. Actors don't discuss the aesthetics of a performance of Hamlet. Consistency, nuance, dynamics, yes. Aesthetics no. Lawyers don't talk about aesthetics when talking about how to seduce a jury. Martin Luther King didn't talk about the aesthetics of religious oratory.

Art is the communication of experience, not of ideas; it's the communication of subjectivity. An actor's job is to make you feel emotions; their job is to manipulate. They don't have to feel a thing. But as artists and not simply con men their job is to lie while demonstrating how they're doing it, to make you cry while reminding you that you're crying for nothing, while still making you cry, so that you understand. They lie to you and smile at you and you thank them for lying and they bow.

Art is intimate empiricism. It's what makes you cry over a picture of a dead baby while another picture would simply make you a sad for a moment. It's the illusion of proximity. Why were people so upset by the pic of the dead kid on the beach? Because he was physically intact. He looked like he was sleeping but he was stiff, like an abandoned doll, a lonely image of death. That's what "aesthetics" means. But the photos themselves are crap illustration, because they aren't made to show you how they work.

Photojournalism is manipulative and voyeuristic. A mature work of art with an image of a dead child teaches you to respect the distance between you and others. You don't believe the fantasy that you're the child's parent; you know you're not and you know you're feeling the wish you were, and that's where it leaves you, in your own world, re-centered of your own world but with a respect for the experience even the tragic experience of others.

Photojournalism is cheap sentiment and cheap politics. It's pity and self-pity, not concern.

What really disgusts me about all this happy-talk-philosophizing about aesthetics is that it says nothing about the importance of art as describing pain and moral ambiguity as experience. It's not art it's "design". It says nothing about The Wire or The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, and that's just American TV. I won't even bring up the stuff you've never heard of.

The difference between design and art is the difference between the optimism of the makers of Grand Theft Auto and the moral pessimism of gangsta rap.

Of course neuroscience can explain it. It can explain away your entire life and the life of the condescending ass who's explaining it to you. Determinism means there's no difference between Alex Rosenberg and Lady Gaga. What then?

Tell me about it, assholes 

The Art of Future Warfare Project [new link] A project of the Atlantic Council

[original url and header: "the art of the future", archive.org.] 

Vision
A world in which artists — writers, illustrators, directors, videographers — and creativity enjoy a valued place in the defense establishment’s planning and preparation for the future of warfare and social conflict; in where unconventional, imaginative thinking and expression contribute meaningfully to the study and professional conduct of diplomacy, defense policy, and military operations; in which fiction about future wars hold a regular place on the reading lists of military professionals.

Mission
The Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project is driven by the Scowcroft Center on International Security’s mandate to advance thinking and planning for the future of warfare. The project’s core mission is to cultivate a community of interest in works and ideas arising from the intersection of creativity and expectations about how emerging antagonists, disruptive technologies, and novel warfighting concepts may animate tomorrow’s conflicts. We will create a platform for this community — the Art of Future Warfare web site, activate social media around this mission and host live events. The project will curate artistic renderings of future warfare through crowd-sourced “war-art challenges,” and publish collections of these works. The project also will cultivate an audience within the traditional defense community for this creative approach to understanding the future of warfare and social conflict.

August Cole
Dave Anthony and Call of Duty

Dave Anthony, former writer and director for the megahit video game franchise Call of Duty, wants the U.S. government to explore stationing soldiers in schools.

repeats and repeats. Instrumentalism and illustration, left and right, literally. "It is painful to note that we find similar errors in two opposed schools: the bourgeois school and the socialist school. ‘Moralize! Moralize!’ cry both with missionary fervor."

Fascism is military moralism. Conceptualism is reactionary, always. It's fantasy.

"Literature as art is the discussion of values as manifest in actions. That the actions are fictional is irrelevant."

The element of fantasy is secondary. More repeats, and relevant.

"But art is not essentially content. Art is essentially form. Art is object, not subject."
So Ursula Le Guin, [archive.org] a fantasy author, of all people, is the first to say the obvious.

also

War can be used as entertainment in two ways by two groups of people: those who treat it as a game played by choice -a deadly game but one that can be left and rejoined- and those who know only war. The most important difference is that the former have never been the victims of a war, only the warriors. They didn't learn to kill by feeling pain.

Jack Webb, cardboard, and "Collegiate Gothic"

Paul Schrader,

I recently watched a demonstration by the guys from Rockstar Games who did the Western video game Red Dead Redemption. They said that all new technology is essentially run by techies. And then at some point, somebody comes in from another field and makes it universal. And they were hoping that we were getting to that point with video games. We’re not there yet. It’s still in the realm of the techies.

repeat

Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy

This volume will convince readers that the swift ascent of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons to worldwide popularity in the 1970s and 1980s is “the most exciting event in popular culture since the invention of the motion picture.

Tolkien is Tolstoy; Derrida is Proust; Deleuze tops The Rolling Stones and The Journal of Philosophy will be remembered after HBO is forgotten.

More than anything it reminds me of bin Laden's predictions of a Caliphate. Sept 11, 2001 marked the beginning of the end of political Islam.

Conceptualism is the intellectualism of preadolescence: imagination before experience, before the influence of sex, and the knowledge of death. The philosophy of D&D is post-war rationalism seen through the eyes of the readers of L. Frank Baum. It's T.S. Eliot without despair and Borges without Nihilism. It's the pathology of cute, and the optimism of the designers of World of Warcraft




Tell me about it, assholes
---

If the videos die: Gears of War (Mad World)
Nas, The Message. "I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death"