Take away the sophistication of the language and the argument itself is at the level a bright and very serious 20-year-old.  

Marx and Nietzsche, the two lodestars of modern philosophical anthropology, differ most interestingly not in their moral outlooks--which are indeed contradictory--but in their explanatory methods. Marx has, as it were, no psychology, only an anthropology and economics, while Nietzsche relies almost exclusively on explanation in terms of individual psychology, appearing at times willfully blind to social and economic causes. This difference is most apparent in their contrasting approaches to human suffering. Marx understands suffering to be primarily a consequence of socio-economic circumstances, while Nietzsche traces it primarily to defects in individual psychology and physiology (the latter manifesting themselves at the psychological level). To put it crudely, for Nietzsche, most people are by nature “sick” and thus disposed to suffer, regardless of socio-economic circumstances, while for Marx, people’s suffering is an artifact of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus amenable to amelioration. 

I consider various kinds of evidence for Nietzsche’s thesis—including the existence of religious orthodoxy among the affluent; the social phenomenon of “aggrievement hunters”; and the prevalence of ascetic moralities and of non-guilty means for assuaging suffering—concluding that it does not clearly support Nietzsche’s explanation for suffering against Marx’s. Along the way, I show that Nietzsche (like Marx) views religion as an “opiate,” but (unlike Marx) he deems it a necessary one given the socio-economic prerequisites for great culture. I also examine Nietzsche’s opposition to blame for suffering. I conclude with a diagnosis of Nietzsche’s own antipathy towards the “sick” as a kind of Freudian reaction formation.

Most bright, serious 20-year-olds would disagree with Leiter's claim that "Marx’s general view about suffering... has prevailed in popular culture", but so does Leiter, which is why the paper is marked "not for quotation or citation". It's a draft; the line won't last. 

Nietzsche allows here that some human misery is due to socio-economic causes, but denies, by implicature, that all is--and that would clearly be true if most people suffer because of their innate condition.

Implication  The conclusion that can be drawn from something although it is not explicitly stated.

Implicature  The action of implying a meaning beyond the literal sense of what is explicitly stated.

Both definition from Oxford Languages.

Re-nouning a verb form. 

Implicature dates from 1975.  (Grice)

What's a distanced understanding of distancing as methodology? Is it Marxist? Nietzschean? Freudian?

repeats, ad infinitum:

Thoughts have become concepts.
Concepts are called objects.
Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers.
Contracts are called instruments.
Banking has become an industry.
Politics and economics are called science.
Rationalism has become empiricism.
Metaphysics has become physics.

All that is solid melts into air, and all that is ephemeral becomes material.

Late capitalism as 12th century nonsense, without irony.

I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:
It will not speak of me or others,
Of love or youth, or of anything else,
For it was composed while I was asleep
Riding on horseback.

"Capitalism, in an irony Marx would have enjoyed, returns us to the ancient past, the Bronze Age: the age of stories. The Golden Age is the age of kings, or at the very least aristocrats; capitalism at its grandest is gilded. Architects now are stage designers. The museum of capitalism is the shopping mall, our greatest art made from the conversations of observers of the scene, sitting and talking under the palm trees at Starbucks."

Leiter's on a roll.

"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."

From 2017. I've changed the ending a bit. Lemmy now gets the last word.

I keep thinking of this as a primer: easy to understand, almost obvious, like a lecture in images. I could run down the references and conflicts it it describes point by point. But I think no one gets the joke. And that's why Lemmy gets the last word.

Ubiquitous images of modernity: the grid and the individual imagination; universalism and one point perspective; ideologies of objectivity and subjectivity; fantasies of reason and resulting psychosis; rationalism and irrationalism, but also rationalism vs empiricism, pedants vs ironists, philosophers vs comedians and lawyers.

My lords, ladies and gentleman, we are here also to honour Mr. Fred Timson, leader of the Timson clan, that vast family of South London villains, petty thieves and receivers of stolen property. But, no violence in your record Fred right?

That’s right Mr. Rumpole. 

Mr. Timson conducts his life according to strict monetarist principles. 

So I do Mr Rumpole.

He does not believe in the closed shop. He believes that shops should be open at all hours of the night, preferably with a jemmy.   

Too right Mr Rumpole! 

But, without Fred Timson and his like, how many of us would be out of work? How many brother judges? How many of Her Majesty’s counsel learned in  law? How many Coppers? How many humble Old Bailey Hacks? Indeed, we may all be bundled out under the embankment in cardboard boxes…So my lords, ladies and gentleman, charge your glasses, Henry, fill'em up! I give you a toast to Fred Timson and the criminals of England!

The Museum of Capitalism. The quote is Daniel Bell.
I have to keep trying.

I fixed a few things.

Have the patience to make it through the first 2 and a half minutes. If the next section bores you, jump to 5:30. If that bores you, give up. Click full screen to read the subtitles, and if you watch the whole thing be warned that later the subtitles conflict with the audio.

I don't know why I'd assume people get the jokes, but the piece is meaningless without them.

Capitalism, in an irony Marx would have enjoyed, returns us to the ancient past, the Bronze Age: the age of stories. The Golden Age is the age of kings, or at the very least aristocrats; capitalism at its grandest is gilded. Architects now are stage designers. The museum of capitalism is the shopping mall, our greatest art made from the conversations of observers of the scene, sitting and talking under the palm trees at Starbucks. 

The performance ranges. The harmonica playing is mostly bad. He changes the lyrics for the worse.
And he's a performer not a writer. I'm not going to quibble over whether he deserves the award.

Pop stars as artists, artists as pop stars. "Popularity" is a drug. Drugs are problematic.

Keeping this at the top for now.


A few small changes and a coda, but it's probably still not done. Something I'm tempted to add; I haven't made up my mind.
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Since I replace the file, this url is always the most recent version.

Submitted 1/1/16
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For the Museum of Capitalism: A Dissent

When I heard about the competition I sent in a proposal immediately with an email, a youtube link and a request for the check. Frankly I was surprised to get a response. The writer wrote to call my bluff: anti-proposals were welcome, but I needed to register first.

The video link was a few minutes from D.A. Pennebaker's short film documenting Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York, a self-destructing machine installed in the garden at MoMA in 1960 and switched on in a show of discreet catastrophe for an audience of money-men, their wives, and cognoscenti. The low-res video images are horrifying, maybe more so than the film, hinting at the destruction of the 20th century, air-raids and ovens, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The event itself was a comic and nihilistic theater of anti-Fordism for an audience of Fords and Rockefellers.

If I were a designer or an architect or an artist interested in conceptual games I suppose I could draw up a proposal for a self-destructing building. But this isn't a proposal for a building, or an argument against a building made via the proposal of an impossible one. Anti-architecture, like anti-art, and anything predicated on opposition, is by definition an angry child, its anger predicated on the existence of a parent. Parents have responsibilities that children don't, and children on their own are no longer children; they have no choice but to be adults before their time.

Artists want the luxury to remain children; we’re always looking for indulgent parents to adopt us so that we can be angry with them. It's a new phenomenon over the last two hundred years. Entertainers are what artists used to be and architects still are: tradesmen and professionals who work to pay the bills. But architects are required to be optimists while entertainers have broader options.

Entertainment is the art of bourgeois capitalism. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction began with Gutenberg and the printing press, and includes both Shakespeare and the modern novel. Fine art, the art and craft of high-value commodities is a holdover from the ancien régime, and its partisans now play a role no less absurd than defenders of the eternal verities and the gold standard.

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. 

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. 

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

Capitalism, in an irony Marx would have enjoyed, returns us to the ancient past, the Bronze Age: the age of stories. The Golden Age is the age of kings, or at the very least aristocrats; capitalism at its grandest is gilded. Architects now are stage designers. The museum of capitalism is the shopping mall, our greatest art made from the conversations of observers of the scene, sitting and talking under the palm trees at Starbucks.

The designer of your webpage understood this, maybe unthinkingly. A 3D font is an illusion of physical and architectural space, but your designer chose a font that's doubly fictional, a contradictory illusion, the only appropriate form for a museum built to house them. It was a brilliant choice. My only quibble with the design was that reading the words “call for ideas”, my first thought was, “Where’s the number?”

After registering, I began to work on a film, a montage of youtube videos recorded in groups as screen captures (the web is the greatest library since Alexandria). I approached Werner Herzog about a voiceover, but I’ve been told now that you’re only reviewing static documents.

In the absence of that I offer the words above. Once you open, the film will be available for exhibition, as will my appropriation of your designer’s image, which I’m having enlarged to 11’x17’, in an edition of 3.

The final, at least something closer to it, is here


Another section. Something I've wanted to do for 20? years. This made it easy. Looking for a translation I remember, I didn't find it. But I found Philip Roth.

For the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity. For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring. For the repose and composure and gracefulness and the intense beauty of the soaring. For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.

The perfect Shiksa Goddess is a Nazi. A song by a Nazi, sung by a Nazi. The end of an illusion, of a dream and a nightmare. The end of the Reich. And the last of old Europe.

To be clear: the song is high decadence, a form devolved, a few notches about kitsch. It's not Mozart, or Beethoven; it's nostalgia, high mannerism. [update: See Thomas Mann and David Bowie, above.] Kafka laughed reading his stories out loud to friends. The first time I saw the scene above I couldn't help laughing. I still can't. Self-awareness mixes the tragic with the comic.


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A start.

Something about process. All of the footage obviously is off the web. The sound from the screen capture is external, from the computer mic. I downloaded the videos and used the sound files synced up to the captured image, putting individual video files in the editing timeline where necessary to sync image and sound, and then removing them, but leaving the sound. When you put a small format video into a large format timeline the image becomes is centered automatically. I left the second repeated Godard image in because looking at it while I realized it connected specifically to the Kubrick, the animation, and box/grid imagery, and monocular and binocular vision. It's not a new gesture; it's a trope. It I didn't think of it until I saw it. Not knowing what to expect, I saw something and used it. Art and invention is mostly observation. I don't "create".

The question for me at the moment is whether my manipulation of Godard, to make say him what I want him to, is too tricky. It's never a question about whether my work may or may not represent morality, immorality, humanism, anti-humanism, nihilism, etc. That I'm trying to craft something for an audience is the sum total of my requirements. Questions of whether or not that audience is large or small, what I'm aiming for and whether I succeed or not will be answered and re-answered over time.

What is certain is that the model of philosophic art doesn't spread beyond its core audience. The poetry of academics as academics simply does not last. It assumes too much and is not seen in the future to have described what has become the past. The Wire and Breaking Bad were not made by college professors. Whether anything I do is good or not, is too arcane or just bad, is irrelevant. Whiggish art describes intent, and original intent works for art no more than law.

New tag for Kubrick. And one for Baudelaire. I'm surprised I hadn't made one earlier.

A screaming comes across the sky

Museum of Capitalism, redux.

I sent my proposal without registering, including a request for payment. They asked me to resubmit, following the rules.

You might be surprised how positively our planning committee and jury might respond to proposals that are entirely speculative, conceptual, "jokes", or critical of our Museum or the competition itself.

It helps that my email signature includes this

(\__/)

(='.'=)
(")_(")

"I like the idea, and your cute bunny image."
Americans always see a rabbit not a cat.
A friend found it it. I've always assumed it was designed by a Japanese teenager.

I'm going to resubmit my proposal in the form of a dissent.

There's one more damned than all. He never gambols,
Nor crawls, nor roars, but, from the rest withdrawn,
Gladly of this whole earth would make a shambles
And swallow up existence with a yawn
-Baudelaire

The form of wood is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.
-Marx

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
-Werner von Braun

I didn't send the proposal unawares. The lead juror is Chip Lord, but I wasn't sure anyone still had a sense of humor. And the idea of a museum kind of disgusts me. All museums are museums of capitalism: filing cabinets full of objects and people. Capital dissolves meanings. All that is solid melts into air, and all that is not becomes material. "Philosophers' concepts are called objects. Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers."

An amusing thing about the pitch for the competition is that the designer used a 3D font based on optical illusions: the image of solidity is not only illusion of three dimensions but a self-defeating one. My anti-proposal made the same argument.

Capitalism:

The Museum of Capitalism is an institution dedicated to educating this generation and future generations about the history, philosophy, and legacy of capitalism. Representing the collaborative efforts of a multidisciplinary team of curators, artists, designers, and historians, the Museum strives to broaden public understanding of capitalism through multifaceted programs: exhibitions; research and publication; collecting and preserving material evidence, art, and artifacts related to capitalism; commemorations, reenactments, and other events; and a variety of public programming. As part of an initiative to build a more permanent public presence, the planning committee seeks bold proposals that answer the question: What should the Museum of Capitalism look like? 

Proposals may address questions beyond the visual appearance of the Museum’s design. How will it be built, where will it be located, and how will it interface with its surroundings? How might visitors be drawn to experience capitalism, to think it and to feel it, through interaction with museum spaces? The committee seeks answers to these questions in the form of strong architectural ideas and images.
The Museum of Capitalism’s curatorial vision includes consideration of the close historical ties between museums and capitalism. How might museum spaces reference the role of museums in projects of colonialism, modernization, and industrialization, the social and ecological impacts of the museum’s traditional function in preservation of cultural materials, or the role of museums as ritual spaces for the performance and production of citizenship, identity, and other subjectivities? Entrants are encouraged, though not required, to reflect upon these questions. Who inhabits museum spaces, and why? Who or what is on display, and how does it come to be there? What were the origins and implications of its ordering and classification, its constructed narratives and experiences, its participation and interactivity? And how do the answers to these questions change in a museum that memorializes the era of capitalism? There are no restrictions on scale or scope of proposals—site, square footage, height, materials, budget, etc.—as long as submissions follow competition rules and meet the criteria for entry.

This public competition is the first stage of a design process intended to help guide the thinking behind an eventual building project without imposing any constraints. Designs may be proposed for specific sites or surroundings, may be of reworkings or recontextualizations of existing buildings or sites, and may consist of entire buildings or specific rooms, galleries, or parts of the museum. Though we encourage proposals that are highly conceptual or speculative, the written part of the proposal and its accompanying visual materials should be clear and powerful.

submitted: "My proposal follows the model laid out in the video, but of course on a larger scale."


Museums are for the foreign and the dead. The attempt at the theorization of the living by the living is the biggest delusion of modernity. It turns everything into design, and design is death. Art, even as the description of death, even as synonymous with dying, is not yet synonymous with death.
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update: "please resubmit"