old and new "Behind the chiliasm..." etc.

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

Discovering the obvious/reinventing the fucking wheel, again and again and...

"my left-wing defence of Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’, or how capital’s controlled demolition of the public sphere in the 1980s and 1990s made society both more lonely and less fascist."

"In the six years since Donald Trump’s election, a waspish debate on whether he should be classified as a fascist has overtaken American and European academia. The January 6 riots proved shocking and unsurprising to these observers."

Academics quibbling about the meaning of fascism, without understanding the roots of fascism—Stanley and Robin are moralizing idiots. Meanwhile, Jan 6th was an attempted coup.

Weimar: elite alienation, intellectual distance, aestheticized politics, and passivity.

It's unlocked so I read the thing. Jesus.

Last year, the Survey Center on American Life published a study tracking friendship patterns in the United States. The report was anything but heartening. Registering a “friendship recession,” the report noted how Americans were increasingly lonely and isolated: 12 percent of them now say they do not have close friendships, compared to 3 percent in 1990, and almost 50 percent said they lost contact with friends during the COVID-19 pandemic. The psychosomatic fallout was dire: heart disease, sleep disruptions, increased risk of Alzheimer’s. The friendship recession has had potentially lethal effects.

The center’s study offered a miniaturized model of a much broader process that has overtaken countries beyond the United States in the last thirty years. As the quintessential voluntary association, friendship circles stand in for other institutions in our collective life — unions, parties, clubs. In his memoirs, French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa said that one of the most disconcerting moments of his childhood was the day he discovered that there were people in the village who were not members of the Communist Party. “That seemed unimaginable,” he recalled, as if those people “lived outside of society.” Not coincidentally, in May 1968, French students sometimes compared the relationship of workers to the Communist Party with that of Christians to the church. The Christians yearned for God, and the workers for revolution. Instead, “the Christians got the church, and the working class got the party.”

Branko again. No Fucking Shit, again.

Now, almost half-a-century later, as I was writing about the war, I realized how Marxism in that case really fulfilled the essential functions of a religion. 

 Ad infinitum, ad nauseam  

"Perhaps more than an ambiguity, it was an irony of history. The real legacy of May ’68, as we see in France today, is individualism, the rejection of civic sense and ideology, the rehabilitation of the idea that personal and financial success is a worthy pursuit — in short, a revival of capitalism. To borrow an expression of Lenin’s, we were useful idiots. Indeed, the uprising was more a counterrevolution than a revolution....

It was the strike, not the student revolt, that truly paralyzed the country for three long weeks. The paradox is that these two movements never encountered each other. The students marching toward the factories to “meet the workers” found the doors closed. The unions didn’t want them: the workers found the students disorganized and irresponsible." 

"What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won." 

Eric Rohmer

"I wasn’t hostile to May ’68, but whereas the people who participated in it saw it as a beginning, I saw it rather as an end. May ’68 was the first stone thrown into the pond of Marxism. The ideological collapse of Marxism began in ’68. Because I believe that May ’68, paradoxically, cured many people, including perhaps me, of communism and anticommunism. I think that the kind of Marxist fever that took place after May ’68 carried within it its condemnation and its end, it was a last flare-up."

--- 

12/11

And again, remembering the obvious, because I've used it so many times: Branko the jackass. I'd forgotten he even makes the reference!

Is the life where we “bowl alone”, dine alone, exercise alone, go to concerts alone, live alone our ultimate objective? It seems to be the case....

Being alone is both our preference and a response to a world of competitiveness, commodification and higher incomes. The new world that we can glean will not be dystopian. It will be a Utopia, with a twist.

And maybe this is why Leusder just shut down his Soundcloud account. Klub kid wants to grow up.

---

12/6  more later, yes.

An absolutely must read piece by Anton Jäger. It offers an eye opening contemporary reflection on Putnam’s Bowling Alone—the 20th anniversary of which strangely received little attention (until now): https://t.co/9CQzf21v8i

— Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (@daniel_dsj2110) December 6, 2022

Jäger, Nov 8 

I’m in this spicy new issue with a left-wing defence of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone — assessing the argument twenty years later, and how the book still speaks to our era of class dealignment and resurgent ‘fascism’.

Because Putnam's obvious points in earnest language weren't spicy the first time; only their rediscovery by intellectual edgelords years makes them hot. 

---

12/5 more later maybe.

2016

Americans and Europeans share many things: a commitment to fundamental democratic principles, a strategic alliance that has shaped the world order for more than half a century, and despite serious economic challenges in recent years, some of the highest living standards in the world. Still, there are notable differences across the Atlantic. As our polling has found over the years, Americans and Europeans often have different perspectives on individualism, the role of government, free expression, religion and morality.

 2017 

There's an apparent paradox in modern life: Society as a whole is getting smarter, yet we aren't any closer to figuring out how to all get along. "How is it possible that we have just as many, if not more, conflicts as before?" asks social psychologist Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

The answer is that raw intelligence doesn't reduce conflict, he asserts. Wisdom does. Such wisdom—in effect, the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise—comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study by Grossman and colleagues.

"This work represents the cutting edge in wisdom research," says Eranda Jayawickreme, a social psychologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

 2018

Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle-class counterparts, lower/working-class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self-concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working-class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely held view that working-class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat. The fact that middle-class norms of independence prevail in universities and prestigious workplaces makes working-class people less likely to apply for positions in such institutions, less likely to be selected and less likely to stay if selected. In other words, social class differences in identity, cognition, feelings, and behaviour make it less likely that working-class individuals can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances. This means that redistributive policies are needed to break the cycle of deprivation that limits opportunities and threatens social cohesion.

2022

Psychologists have increasingly come to recognise the role that social and cultural factors play in shaping how we think and behave. While some human experiences may be universal, research has shown that the society we come from can have a profound influence on everything from our perception of music to the way we interpret emotions. 

There has been less of a focus on how social class is reflected in our psychology. And yet, a growing number of studies finds that much like our culture, our class background also influences our thoughts and behaviour. What’s more, research suggests that in a society where middle class norms and ways of thinking are prioritised, these differences can end up further disadvantaging individuals from lower-class backgrounds.

Class: A form of culture?

In some ways, class is a form of culture: people from different class backgrounds grow up in environments with particular norms and values, and this shapes their behaviour and sense of identity. For instance, note Michael W. Kraus and colleagues in their 2019 book chapter Social class as culture, for working class individuals the ‘self’ tends to be tied more to others, and there is an emphasis on strong social bonds. In contrast, middle class individuals tend to define themselves as separate from others and more focused on their own uniqueness. Young children are taught these identities from early on, the researchers write: middle class parents are more likely than working class parents to encourage their kids to speak up at school, for instance, or choose their own hobbies.

Alex Rosenberg now has a tag.

Consciousness tells us that we employ a theory of mind, both to decide on our own actions and to predict and explain the behavior of others. According to this theory there have to be particular belief/desire pairings somewhere in our brains working together to bring about movements of the body, including speech and writing. Which beliefs and desires in particular? Roughly speaking it’s the contents of beliefs and desires—what they are about—that pair them up to drive our actions. The desires represent the ends, the beliefs record the available means to attain them. It is thus that we give meaning to our actions, and make sense of what others do....

Several sources of evidence suggest that we have an innate mind-reading ability more powerful than other primates. It’s an ability to track other people’s actions that is triggered soon after birth.  Child psychologists have established its operation in pre-linguistic toddlers, while primatologists have shown its absence in other primates even when they exceed infants in other forms of reasoning. Social psychologists have established deficiencies in its deployment among children on the Autism spectrum. fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have localized a brain region that delivers this mind-reading ability. Evolutionary anthropology, game theory and experimental economics have established the indispensability of powerful mind reading for the cooperation and collaboration that resulted in Hominin genus’s rapid ascent of the African savanna’s food chain.

Humanity has converted this innate mind reading ability into a theory of mind with a powerful but nearly invisible role in our understanding of human action. We’ve built our cultural, legal and political institutions on this theory that people’s actions are caused by choices made rational in the light of their beliefs and their desires.

The theory of mind we all carry around with us almost since birth creates our craving for stories with plots, narratives about human achievements, with intriguing beginnings, tension filled middles, satisfying denouements. The taste for narrative driven by the theory of mind fosters our demands for history and for historical fiction—for stories–true or artfully created.

But here’s the problem: the theory of mind we call carry around with us and use every day has no basis in what neuroscience—Nobel Prize winning neuroscience–tell us about how the brain works. Neuroscience has revealed that the theory is quite as much of a dead end as Ptolemaic astronomy. It’s been around for such a longtime only because it was the predictive device natural selection came up with, in spite of being fundamentally mistaken about how things were really arranged.

I remember when Yasmina Reza's play Art was performed in the US, and discussion of the disconnect between French and American audiences, forms of male friendship, and the meaning of copain. 

Capitalism has never been that popular in France, and "Americans aren't social!"

I never argued with Rosenberg's determinism, only that he exempts himself. But if autism is the future, then the future is the the future of managers and the hive.

---

Jäger will always end up confirming that his preferences are not what he claims.

No surprises. Determinism has been a ubiquitous trope in popular culture for 40 years.

Indecisive machines. 

"Build a machine with two separate and competing algorithms, for conditioned response and calculation, and a root level imperative for continued operation: survival. The result will be a neurotic machine, "haunted" by past actions."

Julian Jaynes is most interesting for his fanbase.  Tanya Luhrmann is a fan. The co-writer of the episode—with the writer of this—is Christopher Nolan's brother. He and his wife are listed as co-creators of the show and show-runners. She's the daughter of immigrants, British and Taiwanese, a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Law, who passed the California bar and worked for McKinsey and Company. 

I could have written the first lines myself, but the next, not included above, follow the old stupidity of mixing determinism with the desire to be gods, or the theater of humility performed by Calvinists: "Determinism for thee..." But Ford isn't the hero of the piece, and that's why it's interesting. 

"Determinism for thee..."  A site-search of my blog for that phrase gets most if not all of them.  A web search gets me at Crooked Timber, on conservatism and culture, and at Balkinization on living constitutionalism and judicial review.

"I love the melancholy poetry of reactionary homosexual Fordist anti-humanism"

Arendt's distinction between Social and Political.

An argument made by a person raised with the distinction between means of address: Sie and du,  formal and informal. But both are equally formal: equally coded. The issue is less the distinction between social and political than the collapse of formal acknowledgment of the distinction between self and other, between individuals as such. 

 "Legitimate Parental Partiality"  Friendship is anti-egalitarian.

---

Immigrants and voting. No surprises.

By 2000, the Muslim community in America was several decades old, and had started to mature as a political entity. Muslim organizations almost unanimously endorsed George W. Bush. I voted for Bush that year. I would have voted for Bob Dole in 1996 if I weren’t so busy with medical school that I forgot to vote; I would have voted for Bush Sr. in 1992 if I weren’t still 17-years-old.

In the 2000 election, approximately 70 percent of Muslims in America voted for Bush; among non-African-American Muslims, the ratio was over 80 percent.

I've said it all before 

From 2008 and still good.  I'd written that change is too slow. But it won't change.
There are no adults. I'm tired.
---

Rule#1. Make it idiot-proof.
I hate explaining this shit, but it's all I do.

geek |gēk|
noun informal
1 an unfashionable or socially inept person.
• [with adj. ] a person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest : a computer geek.
2 a carnival performer who does wild or disgusting acts.
DERIVATIVES
geeky adjective
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the related English dialect geck ‘fool,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch gek ‘mad, silly.’
---
The bottom two drawings are obviously models of human interaction: either in the present (mediated by language) or in the study of the past (mediated by language and time). The top two are diagrams of common utopian/dystopian fantasies [hopes] of far too many people.
I should have made this clear long ago, but I take people too much for granted.

We study the past not by studying the preoccupations of those who were there but by studying the record of those preoccupations. We live alongside one another through another version of the same process. We cannot claim to share their interests -in terms of the present we can't claim identity- though in some cases we can claim an affinity with them, but there remains a gulf between us and our subjects and each other. This gulf can be wider or narrower depending on their interests and ours. The  applications of Mathematics can appear to collapse historical time and the distance between individuals, numbers live in an eternal present and in unity with one another, but we don't.
Our society is a society built upon isolation and simultaneously upon a fixation on a desire/fear of simple absolute unity. Raves and The Borg are products of the same fear, desire, sadness.
A geek is someone who is so wed to his own fixations that he is unable to imagine the world through the mind of another. Americans are the prototypical geeks, unable to imagine non-Americans. But geeks now rule academia, even the humanities. Literature is now studied in academia by literature geeks. Our soldiers are military geeks. That specifically is dangerous, but so is the rest.
The above is, objectively, how the world works. It's the diagram for water-cooler chitchat, presidential elections, academic advancement, and how to pick up girls. It's the model of life as theater, assuming of course that actors know they're being observed. It's the model for intellectual "progress" in that progress is only possible if the model is seen to apply to human behavior. It is also therefore a defense of the arts, of craft, as a mode of reflexive activity and social engagement. [lawyers are craftsmen]. It's the model of artists' relation to one another and of artist to critic, if the critic sees himself in a reciprocal relation rather than as voyeur vampire, what academics become when they imagine themselves as observers and others as animate objects. The sciences and the pseudo-sciences have become not only asocial but anti-social. I've linked to Colin McGinn enough, but I've been pointing out examples of this for years. "Truth" is the metaphysical glow that attaches itself to unknown facts. It fades with familiarity and those facts return to their previous status as mundane.

If you don't understand that what you are and represent is being recontextualized constantly, and if you're remembered at all it will be as others see you, then you have no right to call yourself an "intellectual." Even then it's a term best left for others to use to describe you, if they choose.

Reading any text, examining any man-made thing, you ask yourself what to respond to: text or subtext, the intention of the maker or what the thing seems now to represent. Ideally you learn from both, but perhaps you have no way of knowing the maker's intent. Either way you may learn to respect the maker of a resilient, dynamic, order -a structure- and begin to reconstruct the categories they worked with, that were their preoccupation. You ask: “Is there more to learn from this person as thinker or as symptom?" Just as meeting someone on the street you ask: "Is this someone to laugh at, or with?" The stuff that lasts never becomes dated; the memorable minds are never merely symptomatic. Philip Roth is a practitioner of philosophical naturalism. Brian Leiter is a professor of a branch of a school of late scholastic philosophy. Post-war rationalism, late modernism, baroque idealism: these are the categories that will be used to describe it. They're categories of history, not reason.
At some point this will become so obvious that even PhD's will understand it.

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

Continuing, not in the manuscript yet.
I should have thought of it a long time ago.  I knew about the film

see also  Technocracy and the individual imagination. Atomization and the desperate need for community. etc.

Titles by Saul Bass


The plot description, from Wikipedia, for his only feature film as a director.

Phase IV

Due to an unknown cosmic event, listed in "phases", ants have undergone rapid evolution and developed a hive mind. A scientific team begins investigating strange towers and geometrically perfect designs that ants have built in the desert. Except for one family, the local human population flees the strangely acting ants. Scientists James Lesko and Ernest Hubbs set up a computerized lab in a sealed dome located in an area of significant ant activity in Arizona. The ant colony and the scientific team, along with the holdout family, fight each other, though the ants are the more effective aggressors.

The narrative uses the scientific team as the main protagonists, but there are also ant protagonists going about their duties in the colony. The ants immunize themselves to the humans' chemical weapons and soon infiltrate their lab. Teams of ants penetrate the computers of the lab and short them out. After Lesko decodes an ant message, Kendra Eldrige (a young woman who has taken refuge with the scientists), becomes convinced that her actions have enraged the ants. Seeking to save the two scientists, she abandons the lab and apparently sacrifices herself.

Hubbs and Lesko begin to have different plans for dealing with the ants. While Lesko thinks he can communicate with the ants by means of messages written in mathematics, Hubbs plans to wipe out a hill he believes to be the ants' central hive. Delirious from a venomous ant sting, Hubbs can barely get his boots on but is determined to attack the hive and kill the ant queen. Instead, Hubbs literally falls into a trap – a deep pit that the ants fill with earth. Helpless to save Hubbs and convinced that the ants will soon move into desert areas where their growth will exceed man's ability to control them, Lesko chooses to follow Hubbs's plan. He sets out to the hive with a canister of poison. Descending into the hive, Lesko hunts for the queen, but instead finds Kendra reaching out from under the sand. The two embrace, and Lesko realizes that far from destroying the human race, the ants' plan is to adapt the human race and make them a part of the ants' world. In voice-over, Lesko states that he does not know what plans the ants have, but he is awaiting instruction.

Writing, rewriting. Rougher, still not done. Some of the sources aren't footnoted. All in the manuscript (also here). The ad man anthropologist is Grant McCracken. I could have used Simon Sinek, and Danah Boyd
New tag Design as Crime

And since it includes Warhol and Hitchcock
---
Continuing from here, and here.  I haven't put Babbitt into the manuscript, but I will.

Earlier mention of Sharits here.

There are other examples both more extreme than Frampton’s, and less.  Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,N,G restages Duchamp’s demispheres and Anemic Cinema, as desperation. The flickering image of a man with his tongue sticking out between the blades of a pair of scissors is such an obvious image of castration that it renders anything else secondary. Add to that the voice repeating the word “destroy-destroy-destroy-destroy…”  –the auditory equivalent of a flicker– and you get an art of symptom described by the artist and appreciative critics as “structuralism”.  

I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid two  dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames;  the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector  operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness.  In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects; light  as energy is released to create its own objects,  shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia  and the flickering shutter mechanism of film projection, one may generate virtual forms. create actual  motion (rather than illustrate it), build actual color- space (rather than picture it). and be involved in  actual time (immediate presence).[i]

This is  the denial of representation in the presence of representation in its most blunt form. It’s not the elision and denial of Eliot or James; it’s exhibitionismand denial, more absurd than the earnest description of Mapplethorpe photographs, if only because Mapplethorpe himself didn’t write them. T,O,U,C,H,N,G, likeso much 20^thcentury art –Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, like all philosophy is the theological literature of rationalism – is about the desire and refusal of  contact, wanting and refusing to be touched. It didn’t shock me or offend me the first time I saw it. I saw the antecedents. I’d never go out of my way to argue that it was ‘bad’. But I was shocked to hear the film described as formal and not pathology and ritual. 

…Paul went to the piano and he sat down at the piano and he had a wine glass and he was out of his mind and he beat the wine glass on the piano and then he beat his hands on the glass until he was just bleeding and numb and dizzy. He started to get up and I happened to be at his elbow and I said “Whoa, whoa, Paul, wait, whoa wait a minute,” because he was gushing blood everywhere, and I said, “Is anyone a doctor here? Is anyone a doctor?” And the place was completely packed shoulder to shoulder at this party, so one of the people near by was a doctor. Paul was just in a daze and I said, “Look at this—is this life-threatening?” And he said, “No, it’s not life-threatening, it’s O.K.,” and I said “Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.”  And Paul went around bleeding out of his hands with his hands held in front of him, almost like Frankenstein and created a swath of horror in front of him. It was a very startling moment, and there were other episodes that people will happily relate to you, in which Paul wrecks a car or climbs up on top of a roof and drops off and breaks his this or that. Paul went through a series of things where he acted out and finally what I began to notice about these things is that Paul would never hurt anybody else. He may have once or twice actually done something that was importune, but only secondarily, and it was mainly something that hurt Paul somehow, and always in a very flamboyant situation. He liked to live dangerously. Paul liked life. He seemed like he needed this kind of way of doing things. He really did. 

He lived on a special plane somehow that normal people can’t touch.[ii]

Sharits behavior is less unnerving than the equally pathological response of his friend and fellow avant-gardist Tony Conrad. This is the hip, underground, American Modernist version of the American straight-world, Time-Life­–CBS view of Warhol as a celebrant of style. But glamour is vanity. Warhol's Jackies and Marilyns,  Disastersand Electric Chairs,  his films with his Superstarswere all equally memento mori. He watched people who were out of control and let them be, as Callie Angell put it, out of a Catholic understanding of free will, while Conrad is a voyeur blind to his own desires.  The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny.

“Paul, go for it, just hold your hands up and walk around.”  A medical professional would call it enabling.

But Hawthorne and Lawrence, and Tarantino, Spielberg and Pynchon, novelists and filmmakers, are not ‘artists’, and Frampton and Sharits are. Their work is shown only in the context of the contemporary art world as defined by Arthur Danto, which American philosophy is optimistic.

It’s telling that Fried makes an exception for film, which he refers as “the movies”,  ignoring the avant-garde entirely.     

It is the overcoming of theatre that modernist sensibility finds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmark of high art in our time. There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapes theatre entirely—the movies.* This helps explain why movies in general, including frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility whereas all but the most successful painting, sculpture, music, and poetry is not. Because cinema escapes theatre— automatically, as it were—it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theatre and theatricality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge—more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theatre and not a triumph over it, absorption not conviction—means that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.


*Exactly how the movies escape theatre is a beautiful question, and there is no doubt but that a phenomenology of the cinema that concentrated on the similarities and differences between it and the theatre—eg., that in the movies the actors are mot physically present, the film itself is projected away from us, the screen is mot experienced as a kind of object existing, so to speak, in a specific physical relation to us, etc. –would be extremely rewarding.  Cavell, again, has called attention, in conversation, to the sort of remembering that goes into giving an account of a movie, and more generally to the nature of the difficulties that are involved in giving such an account.[iii]

The footnote is taken from the essay as published in Artforumand later in Battcock's anthology. Reprinted in 1998, beautifulis replaced with difficult, rewarding has been stripped on its modifier, and the last sentence with the reference to Cavell and memory has been removed.[iv]  

The last paragraph 

This essay will be read as an attack on certain artists (and critics) and as a defense of others. And of course it is true that the desire to distinguish between what is to me the authentic art of our time and other work, which, whatever the dedication, passion, and intelligence of its creators, seems to me to share certain characteristics associated here with the concepts of literalism and theatre,' has largely motivated what I have written. In these last sentences, how ever, I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theatre. We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace. 

The final sentence almost makes me laugh­… Sharits’ “immediate presence”.

In 2004 MIT press published Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s.  Chronophobia: the fear of time. The author calls it a neologism, but it isn’t. It’s also at the core to the author’s own writing. Pamela M Lee, now at Yale has the title “historian and theorist of contemporary art”.  She’s a historian of the present. Forgetting the Art World, came out in 2012,  48 years after Danto named it. Her most recent book is  The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption,  “How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth.” 

Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of “disruptive” technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists—Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms—who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.

The foreword is written by a curator at MoMA. Again it’s the aestheticization of politics, and the aesthetic shared by philosophy and luxury commodities, but also now an almost explicit combination of (ersatz) moralism and technocratic decadence. No longer even sincere hypocrisy or earnest contradiction, it’s a blank obliviousness, the innocence of the children of the conflicted and hypocritical who’ve never had to even pretend to face real politics. 

Chronophobia isn’t wrong about the 60s any more than the curators of the Duchamp exhibition were wrong to mention David Lynch. But they ignored Hitchcock, and so does Lee. There’s plenty of discussion here of “nuclear apocalypse and entertainment”; there’s an interesting chapter on Tinguely and Homage to New York, but no mention of Kubrick and Strangelove. There’s discussion of the Jonathan Edwards and Fried’s earnest academic moralism –hard to ignore since Fried begins and ends with him– but none of the deeper because visceral Puritanism in the work of  Judd or Andre. 

Lee ignores Hitchcock, but So does Barbara Rose. Lee has a chapter on Bridget Riley and on Op art, describing an art not of communication but  effect. The connections by now should be clear.

To what extent do we see this painting? In what lies its retinal appeal? To what extent do we not so much see it but feel it, experience the picture less as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity visited on the body—a body endlessly subjected to the vagaries of time? Stand a little longer, look a little harder, and then what happens? In time, the surface begins to flicker, like a stroboscope; or wave, like a lenticular screen. Look longer still, and surprising colors—psychedelic phantoms—emanate from between the lines. Spangles of gold, pink, and green burst and flash, lining the eyelids, rattling the skull. The eye is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or even a blinding headache. 

…Op’s virtual fetish of visuality occasions a reading of the body under the conditions of a shifting technological culture and, more to the point, how the time of that body speaks to the repressive consequences of a burgeoning technocracy. The body, I want to argue, is the blind spot to Op’s obsession with the technological; and it is its temporality that gives the lie to this. The body performs what Op’s supporters insistently failed to see. More often than not, this body is
a specifically gendered body, feminized and thus deemed impotent. 

Lee, following the logic of the academic culture that made her, she’s now an editor at October, both condescends to Riley and defends her: critics’ description of  passivity and impotence is merely the dismissing of the female. We’re back to another version of the art of the index, an art that can be read as an art of ideas, of intention, whether admitted or not. Somehow or other, art has to have a program, a “project” and a core of optimism.

This notion is critical to the deepening suspicion, even paranoia, about Op. Nevertheless, Op was considered user-friendly stuff in spite of the aggression attributed to it, its eye-hurting glare, virtually hypnotic powers, and nausea-inducing effects. As Barbara Rose put it cynically: “Op is absolutely gratifying in this respect because you know that you have gotten the message once nausea or vertigo set in.” 

The title of  Rose’s review is “Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art At The Modern”.  Lee makes one reference to Hitchcock elsewhere, mentioning him in his connection Saul Bass—“the graphic designer best known for his title sequences to Alfred Hitchcock”, but no mention of their most famous collaboration.  I dealt with this more than 30 years ago, linking Duchamp to Hitchcock to mechanically ‘optical’ abstraction:

Vertigo is an early precedent here as it is to all later artistic use of psychedelic imagery, images of the subconscious, Op-Art patterning or illustrations of drug-induced states. Pynchon uses similar terms, central to the American romance –what it has become– and its relations with the physical world and the psychosis of modern life. These are images of the loss of the self, unable to define its surroundings, to distinguish itself from them, and thus being relegated to passive observation. 

My language is stilted but it makes the point.  The illustration –graphic stimulus– of immediate sensorial effect is experience without effort, passive. Much of the art of the 1960s describes that experience, because much of popular visual culture manifests it.  Lee quotes a newspaper editorial responding to the show. 

And what is the point of this, someone will ask? Well the point is this, that art is the expression of the age. The pressures and upheavals of our time have the same effect on our observers: Now you see it, now you don’t. Now the facts are clear, now the facts are muddled grey. The distortion of old values, and the crowding of new cultures, presents a peculiar aspect to the eye. It is painful.

Who is to tell what are the facts in Viet Nam, for instance? The government of one day is not the government of the next; the actions of our own officials there are deliberately distorted, and friend slips into foe and back again. The alliances with Europe are not what they seem, and the image of the Communist world clashes with reality. . . . It is all painful. 

Lee adds, “One might forgive the authorless editorial its tired clichés about art (‘art is the expression of the age’)" .

And what else is it? 

And what else is she?  Lee is roughly my age. After undergraduate years at Yale she went to The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, at the time a hotbed of artistic and political radicalism, where academic theory met luxury commodities. We have mutual acquaintances if not friends: people who are now curators at major US Museums and the people who told me I couldn’t be a leftist because I worked with my hands, who condescended to me even as I built their projects, since they designed their art and were proudly manually incompetent. They dealt as she does with ideas and concepts, the idea of art and the of idea of politics,  neither of which are synonyms for the things themselves; the aestheticization of politics is the politics of design. Immateriality is clean by definition.  The curatorial and critical studies program at the ISP has been rebranded. and students are now “Helena Rubinstein Fellows”, fitting culture of vanguardism and culture of “disruption”of Madison avenue. 

The weakness of Chronophobia becomes clear once you realize she needs to take “Art and Objecthood” seriously as anything more than a relic, her belief that it must be more than a product of its age, because it was written by an academic, about fine art. 

This book takes the oblique view of technology and art in the 1960s and it does so with a concept introduced at the outset: the matter of time. Time and technology, I want to argue, are twinned phenomena in that decade; and works of art provide special insight into this relationship as much as they model that relationship in turn. Time, we shall see, plays no small role in the richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making. From performance to painting to sculpture to “new media,” time becomes both a thematic and structural fixture, an obsession, for critics, artists, and audiences of that moment. It will come to signal something about technological change.

The “richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art making” includes The Rolling Stones, Pierrot le Fou, The Armies of the Night, The Flintstones, Albert Ayler, and Woodstock. That list is a joke because any list would be. Lee refers to Slaughterhouse Five and an article by Pynchon from 1984 but as with her discussion of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, she focuses on things that are now seen by most people as relics.  And Snow is a relic too

Snow’s position was critical in articulating the historical confluence of arts and sciences from the sixties forward: the lecture anticipated, in numerous ways, what would later be described as the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity within academia. 

   

This is the academia of “modernist projects”, of Weber and von Neumann, of post war rationalism and the capitalism of the golden age, the technophilia of Daston and Galison, and MIT, the home now of “The Futures of Entertainment” 

The Futures of Entertainment is an annual event which explores the current state and future of media properties, brands, and audiences and the way these groups interact and intersect with one another. By combining a mix of leading media studies scholars and cutting-edge media and marketing practitioners from a diverse range of locations and sectors--in conjunction with fans, activists, journalists, analysts, and other voices--in lengthy discussion, this two-day conference explores how the media industries are evolving, how storytelling is changing and the shifting dynamics in how people relate to media properties and brands.

The tagline for these events is that they are “at the intersection of industry and academia”.

The positivist definition of art is illustration.  If fine art has devolved into design, it still performs the function of art: the following of sensibility, responding to experiences, perceptions. But to ad men, like philosophers, art is successful communication as seen in metrics, and is designed as computer games are in the service of “fun”. The MIT communication department model of creativity follows the enthusiasm of the designers of Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War, blind not even to subtext but to direct meaning, a blindness matching the enthusiasts of the “formalism” of the films of  Paul Sharits.  For all the discussion of  the delivery of  content, the content itself is seen as meaningless.  This is the world of ideas, the academia that claims to provide a foundation for capitalism and anti-capitalism,  revolution, Wall St. and Madison Avenue.  But for all the empty pretension of the technocratic intellectual elite, most of life, one way or another, is craft.  

I remember once, long ago, I used to not do commercials and said I didn’t believe in them. And then they said, “Ken Loach has done quite a few of them.” So I phoned up Ken and he said, “If you don’t take money out of those capitalist pockets, then someone else will, and you’ve got mouths to feed. Do it!”[v]

Mike Leigh, just like the biggest Hollywood directors, production designers and cinematographers, makes commercials. The money flows like water. You can have a lot of fun spending three million dollars for a 30 second spot.  But as with cathedral ceilings, it’s not the dogma that matters, but what you do with it. As I tried to explain to one of the leaders of the MIT symposia, an anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, the interesting thing about ads now is that they’ve become almost independent of their function: a good spot can by no more than a 30 second movie with a name at the end; the actual “ad” is 2 seconds, now associated with the 28 second comedy that preceded it. Or it’s tiny film with "product placement". The definition of art hasn’t changed, because people haven’t changed. And the men and women, the craftspeople, some with hand tools and paint who get their hands dirty, and some with electronics, who together make the ads that the intellectuals of Madison avenue dream up, laugh. And if the ads are remembered they’ll be remembered as cathedral ceilings are, by people who have no interest in Jesus Christ or Alka Seltzer. Beyond that of course, all comparisons fall apart. Ads are art, but they’re disposable, what jingles are to pop songs. But to the academics who study and serve Madison Avenue, corporate communication is art in the service of a cause. Instead of Church censors’ stamp of approval, or Diderot’s defense of Greuze’ moralism, or the bromides of  socialist realism, or the  art of the “Modern Project”, we get a new brand of philosophic art, the vanguardism of the marketplace. 

---

[i]  Paul Sharits, "Notes on Films/1966-1968”, Film Culture 47(Summer 1969) p.13.

[ii]  Tony Conrad, “On Paul Sharits: An Excerpt from ‘I Was a Flawed Modernist’”, The Brooklyn Rail, April 1 2017,

https://brooklynrail.org/2017/04/film/On-Paul-Sharits-An-Excerpt-from-I-Was-a-Flawed-Modernist

[iii]Fried 

[iv]  Jonathan T. D. Neil, “’Structural Film,’ as Technique of History”, 2004 unpublished http://jonathantdneil.com/pdfs/StructuralFilmAsTechniqueOfHistory.pdf

[v]  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mike-leigh-his-amazon-backed-peterloo-all-my-films-have-been-funded-by-a-reprehensible-force-1138732

The New Yorker: WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS
-New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”... 

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

Since theorists dreamed up rational action it only makes sense that it could only be debunked when researchers "discovered" it was bullshit.

Our legal system is founded on the formalization of "myside bias". History is the history of actions mostly founded on delusion; literature is the intimate description of failure. But scientists, or those who claim to be, don't read either, because art is subjective and history is bunk.

The New Republic: In Defense of Cultural Criticism in Trump’s America
-Why the arts need a space the state can't touch—and how we get there.

Call it progress: "We succumb to binaristic thinking"

When scholars read literature of the early imperial era of Rome—Lucan, in her example—they almost always make a big mistake. They rush to identify the author’s attitude toward the new emperor on the scene, “as though when Tiberius came into power the Roman elite woke up and were like, ‘Oh fuck, this is DIFFERENT and this is all we can think about now.’” But in fact, Romans saw the régimes of Tiberius and Nero not as sea changes but rather as “grotesque” exaggerations of “features that were long baked into Roman politics and culture.”

Approaching Lucan in this narrow way would be akin to 31st-century scholars poring over the novels of, say, Jonathan Franzen to discover whether he thought Donald Trump was good or bad, instead of absorbing his depiction of the features of American politics and culture in the early 21st century on its own terms. Binaristic readings of Lucan—was he appeasing the emperor or subverting his rule?—blot out vast swaths of meaning. They also totally fail to see that Lucan’s political epics “work as spaces to reconfigure agency and the political (or philosophical) self,” as Regler put it. In simpler terms: “It’s not always about Nero.”

It's hard for me to imagine classicists being as unthinking and intellectually flat as the author describes. It reads like 9th grade, but parts aren't bad.

Art is about creating those spaces evident in Lucan’s epics. It’s as if a zone is staked out for a variety of ideas and postures to flex and interact. This zone is the place where the arts play. It is not an apolitical place, it is just not owned by government. In this aesthetic space, the arts explore a less confined politics than the one that controls the state. The state is not the beginning, end, or the reason for this space.

That's better than Graber and Tushnet, but it's unclear if she understands that free speech means free speech for Nazis. She refers to Ranciere and dissensus [etc], forgetting or ignoring that "disruption" is now the language of Uber, as others with the opposite form of selective memory forget that it was once a ubiquitous Modernist trope. Ranciere is still a Modernist.

Most arguments against mass surveillance don't respond fully substantively to claims that you shouldn't worry if you "have nothing to hide".  Defense of personal freedom isn't enough.  What's needed is an argument in defense of the need for citizens in a democratic state to be able to be all kinds of wrong, all kinds of confused, creepy, conflicted, desirous, weepy or hate-filled, so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness. The choice is between a community of adults with a minority of the inveterately childish and criminal or a community of children ruled by moralists and crime lords. 

The two pieces above set me off. I'm not sure why I'm picking on the author at the New Republic. PhD or not, she's a kid. Dan Sperber is an adult, or he's supposed to be. The link in the paragraph above is good for him too. He's a man who claims the authority of a philosopher or judge, and lawyers laugh at judges behind their backs.

The authors of another book discussed in the New Yorker piece have an op-ed in the Times.
The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.

Why We Believe Obvious Untruths

Recently, for example, there was a vociferous outcry when President Trump and Congress rolled back regulations on the dumping of mining waste in waterways. This may be bad policy, but most people don’t have sufficient expertise to draw that conclusion because evaluating the policy is complicated. Environmental policy is about balancing costs and benefits. In this case, you need to know something about what mining waste does to waterways and in what quantities these effects occur, how much economic activity depends on being able to dump freely, how a decrease in mining activity would be made up for from other energy sources and how environmentally damaging those are, and on and on.

We suspect that most of those people expressing outrage lacked the detailed knowledge necessary to assess the policy. We also suspect that many in Congress who voted for the rollback were equally in the dark. But people seemed pretty confident.

The authors' bias is clear, but rather than epistocracy it's more the old argument for "a vital center", Arthur Schlesinger's managed mediocrity, adding only that Fernbach is a professor of marketing at a business school.

I may have linked to this before. I don't remember.

We're returning to the notion that knowledge is collective, not that the collective needs to be imposed on us but that it's constitutive of what we are. But the arguments are still anti-political, still trying to rise above politics rather than engage it. Jason Brennan is merely more explicit.  And the author at the New Republic is still more interested in theory than culture itself, as practice.

If knowledge is collective then politics is central, and the model is not Plato or Mill and Bentham and Weber but everything Plato opposed. Politics is an art.

I've quoted parts of what's below a dozen times by now but left out important parts, on this page if not elsewhere. He's writing in the late 1930s; so much has been lost.

I
Nine days before his death Immanuel Kant was visited by his physician. Old, ill and nearly blind, he rose from his chair and stood trembling with weakness and muttering unintelligible words. Finally his faithful companion realized that he would not sit down again until the visitor had taken a seat. This he did, and Kant then permitted himself to be helped to his chair and, after having regained some of his strength, said, ‘Das Gefühl für Humanität hat mich noch nicht verlassen’—’The sense of humanity has not yet left me’. The two men were moved almost to tears. For, though the word Humanität had come, in the eighteenth century, to mean little more than politeness and civility, it had, for Kant, a much deeper significance, which the circumstances of the moment served to emphasize: man’s proud and tragic consciousness of self-approved and self-imposed principles, contrasting with his utter subjection to illness, decay and all that implied in the word ‘mortality.’

Historically the word humanitas has had two clearly distinguishable meanings, the first arising from a contrast between man and what is less than man; the second between man and what is more. In the first case humanitas means a value, in the second a limitation.

The concept of humanitas as a value was formulated in the circle around the younger Scipio, with Cicero as its belated, yet most explicit spokesman. It meant the quality which distinguishes man, not only from animals, but also, and even more so, from him who belongs to the species homo without deserving the name of homo humanus; from the barbarian or vulgarian who lacks pietas and παιδεια- that is, respect for moral values and that gracious blend of learning and urbanity which we can only circumscribe by the discredited word "culture."

In the Middle Ages this concept was displaced by the consideration of humanity as being opposed to divinity rather than to animality or barbarism. The qualities commonly associated with it were therefore those of frailty and transience: humanitas fragilis, humanitas caduca.

Thus the Renaissance conception of humanitas had a two-fold aspect from the outset. The new interest in the human being was based both on a revival of the classical antithesis between humanitas and barbartias, or feritas, and on a survival of the mediaeval antithesis between humanitas and divinitas. When Marsilio Ficino defines man as a “rational soul participating in the intellect of God, but operating in a body,” he defines him as the one being that is both autonomous and finite. And Pico’s famous ‘speech’ ‘On the Dignity of Man’ is anything but a document of paganism. Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ He does not say that man is the center of the universe, not even in the sense commonly attributed to the classical phrase, “man the measure of all things.”

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, the humanist par excellence, is a typical case in point. The church suspected and ultimately rejected the writings of this man who had said: "Perhaps the spirit of Christ is more largely diffused than we think, and there are many in the community of saints who are not in our calendar." The adventurer Uhich von Hutten despised his ironical skepticism and his unheroic love of tranquillity. And Luther, who insisted that "no man has power to think anything good or evil, but everything occurs in him by absolute necessity," was incensed by a belief which manifested itself in the famous phrase; "What is the use of man as a totality [that is, of man endowed with both a body and a soul], if God would work in him as a sculptor works in clay, and might just as well work in stone?"

II
The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition. Not only does he respect it, he looks upon, it as upon something real and objective which has to be studied and, if necessary, reinstated: "nos vetera instauramus, nova non prodimus" as Erasmus puts it. ["we are reviving the old, without betraying the new."]

The Middle Ages accepted and developed rather than studied and restored the heritage of the past. They copied classical works of art and used Aristotle and Ovid much as they copied and used the works of contemporaries. They made no attempt to interpret them from an archaeological, philological or "critical" in short, from an historical, point of view. For, if human existence could be thought of as a means rather than an end, how much less could the records of human activity be considered as values in themselves.

In mediaeval scholasticism there is, therefore, no basic distinction between natural science and what we call the humanities, studia humaniora, to quote again an Erasmian phrase. The practice of both, so far as it was carried on at all, remained within the framework of what was called philosophy. From the humanistic point of view, however, it became reasonable, and even inevitable, to distinguish, within the realm of creation, between the sphere of nature and the sphere of culture, and to define the former with reference to the latter. ie., nature as the whole world accessible to the senses, except for the records left by man.

Man is indeed the only animal to leave records behind him, for he is the only animal whose products "recall to mind" an idea distinct from their material existence. Other animals use signs and contrive structures, but they use signs without "perceiving the relation of signification,  and they contrive structures without perceiving the relation of construction.

To perceive the relation of signification is to separate the idea of the concept to be expressed from the means of expression. And to perceive the relation of construction is to separate the idea of the function to be fulfilled from the means of fulfilling it. A dog announces the approach of a stranger by a bark quite different from that by which he makes known his wish to go out. But he will not use this particular bark to convey the idea that a stranger has called during the absence of his master. Much less will an animal, even if it were physically able to do so, as apes indubitably are, ever attempt to represent anything in a picture. Beavers build dams. But they are unable, so far as we know, to separate the very complicated actions involved from a premeditated plan which might be laid down in a drawing instead of being materialized in logs and stones.