The Beautiful Game

The Kyrgyzstan Football Federation released this clip for their upcoming World Cup Qualifier against Team Melli pic.twitter.com/pnU6Za86BZ

— Alireza Talakoubnejad (@websterkaroon) November 14, 2024

Twitter may not last.

Coetzee likes to trespass on his own fictional territory. In Elizabeth Costello (2003) he was quickly on the scene to pause the action and deliver a little lesson in the nature of fictiveness: ‘The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.’ And so on.

The origin of all this "meta-fictional" crap isn't fiction—Shakespeare is "meta-fiction" by default. 

"The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."

And then

The 'seriousness' of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really is a question of art. 

Tristram Shandy as literature in the Age of Reason.

Various ways to repeat myself. I wish more people got the joke

Youssef is a comedian, speaking from experience as comedians do.

I'll ignore the claim that Hamas is dedicated to Israel's destruction.

Also, blasts from the past

2015, WSJ, "Al Qaeda a Lesser Evil? Syria War Pulls U.S., Israel Apart

Mountaintop on edge of Golan Heights illustrates complexities." 

2017, Times of Israel, "Ex-defense minister says IS ‘apologized’ to Israel for November clash

Moshe Ya’alon’s office refuses to elaborate after alluding to contact with terror group"

and my old standby

As always, amazing and absurd to think that Israel just did the local branch of Al-Qaeda a favor by carrying out an airstrike.

— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) January 18, 2015

@glcarlstrom why? Hezbollah+Iran are a much bigger threat to Israel than Al-Qaida have ever been.

— Anshel Pfeffer (@AnshelPfeffer) January 18, 2015

608.    No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with  thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain-processes. I mean this: if I talk or write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the centre? Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos? The case would be like the following—certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produced—but nothing in the seed corresponds to the plant which comes from it; so that it is impossible to infer the properties or structure of the plant from those of the seed that comes out of it—this can only be done from the history of the seed. So an organism might come into being even out of something quite amorphous, as it were causelessly; and there is no reason why this should not really hold for our thoughts, and hence for our talking and writing. 

609.    It is thus perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them.

And John King, another former student, testifies to Wittgenstein's distaste for British (as opposed to American) movies precisely on the ground of their theatricality. "The Mill Road cinema . . . was the one he most favoured," King recalls, "and here he sat as far to the front as he could get, leant forward in his seat and was utterly absorbed by the film. He never would go to any British film; and if we passed a cinema advertising one he pointed out how the actors looked dressed-up, unnatural, unconvincing, obviously play-acting, while, in comparison, in the American films the actors were the part, with no pretence" ("Recollections of Wittgenstein," in Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein, p. 71). 

Cooper's ability to project his personality onto his characters played an important part in his appearing natural and authentic on screen. Actor John Barrymore said of Cooper, "This fellow is the world's greatest actor. He does without effort what the rest of us spend our lives trying to learn – namely, to be natural."[88] Charles Laughton, who played opposite Cooper in Devil and the Deep agreed, "In truth, that boy hasn't the least idea how well he acts ... He gets at it from the inside, from his own clear way of looking at life."[88] William Wyler, who directed Cooper in two films, called him a "superb actor, a master of movie acting".[399]

In his review of Cooper's performance in The Real Glory, Graham Greene wrote, "Sometimes his lean photogenic face seems to leave everything to the lens, but there is no question here of his not acting. Watch him inoculate the girl against cholera – the casual jab of the needle, and the dressing slapped on while he talks, as though a thousand arms had taught him where to stab and he doesn't have to think anymore."[88]

Cooper's style of underplaying before the camera surprised many of his directors and fellow actors. Even in his earliest feature films, he recognized the camera's ability to pick up slight gestures and facial movements.[400] Commenting on Cooper's performance in Sergeant York, director Howard Hawks observed, "He worked very hard and yet he didn't seem to be working. He was a strange actor because you'd look at him during a scene and you'd think ... this isn't going to be any good. But when you saw the rushes in the projection room the next day you could read in his face all the things he'd been thinking."[174] Sam Wood, who directed Cooper in four films, had similar observations about Cooper's performance in Pride of the Yankees, noting, "What I thought was underplaying turned out to be just the right approach. On the screen he's perfect, yet on the set you'd swear it's the worst job of acting in the history of motion pictures."[401]

A novel is a thing crafted out of a plot, and judged as that. It's less an essay than a house. Language, as event and communication is an aspect of life. Philosophy and theology are parasitic on that. Literature, art, is both descriptive and formal. History, describing both art and the world, is observational and secular. 

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

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

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

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

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

"We like to think..." No, we don't. 

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

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

My response at the time

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

right-thinking, bien pensant, 

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

Memories of Taruskin. Moralists' ideas of art. 

And again, both linking back to the same history:

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

A comment that labeled me a "nihilist":

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

Also from Jäger, Habermas replies:

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

No fucking shit. 

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

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

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

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

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

1 

Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. John Milton sold Paradise Lost to a publisher for five pounds, but he produced it ‘for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity wholly natural to him.’ In its free, harmonious expression of human powers, art is a prototype of what it is to live well. It is radical not so much because of what it says as because of what it is. It is an image of non-alienated labour in a world in which men and women fail to recognise themselves in what they create.

The aesthete, then, possesses more of the truth than the political left generally imagines. The point is not to substitute art for life, but to convert life into art. Living like a work of art means fully realising one’s capacities – this is Marx’s ethics. It is also the basis of his politics: socialism is whatever set of institutional arrangements would allow this to happen to the greatest extent. If artistic work is a scandal to the status quo, it is not because it champions the proletariat but because to live abundantly in this way isn’t possible under capitalism. Art prefigures a future in which human energies can exist simply for their own delight. Where art was, there shall humanity be.

Self-realisation, however, must be more than individual, which is the reason Marx adds a crucial rider to this humanist case. You must realise your powers reciprocally, through the equal self-expression of others. Or, as The Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This is the way he converts an essentially aristocratic ethic into communism. Oscar Wilde would do much the same in his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, in which layabouts like himself who don’t have to work anticipate a socialist order in which this will be true of everybody. In his belief that the political goal is to get rid of labour rather than make it creative, Wilde is closer to Marx than William Morris is, though Morris was a Marxist and Wilde was not.

There are difficulties with the self-realisation thesis, as there are with any form of ethics. It seems to assume that human powers are positive in themselves, and the only problem is that some of them are being blocked. But the urge to shoot down schoolchildren should be restrained whatever the harm to your creativity. The idea also implies that our various capabilities are in harmony with one another, which is far from true. Like postmodern culture, it errs in seeing diversity as inherently valuable. But why should a life rich in a variety of impulses be more worthwhile than one devoted to a single activity? Emma Raducanu may have led a fuller life if she had played less tennis, but people have good reason to envy her all the same. 

2

As cash transfers became increasingly popular as a fix to the American welfare state, UBI’s status diminished in the United States, while in Western Europe it gained adherents. The cause for this, the authors argue, was a growing European “left-wing anti-statism and a new post-work sensibility.” Across the continent, large swathes of the Left had come to accept the postindustrial fate of the West, brought about by the increase in free-trade-facilitated international competition, as an unchangeable fact of life. Fordism was apparently bleeding steam, and intellectuals on the order of André Gorz were saying adieu to the working class. The proliferation of European post-work organizations in the late 1970s and early 1980s — the Dutch Council Against the Work Ethic, TUNIX in Germany, as well as French and Italian groups — testified to the Left’s move away from a vision of revolution centered on the industrial working class. In the philosopher George Caffentzis’s words, the excitement surrounding the possibility of a basic income revealed “a failed politics” whose platform presumed that “behind everyone’s back, capitalism [had] ended.”

Of course, UBI’s appeal was premised not on capitalism’s end, but the supremacy of markets. Nowhere was this clearer than in UBI’s surprising discursive turn to the Global South. Jäger and Zamora’s decision to focus on the developing world is both unconventional and welcome. Far from ushering in a postindustrial, post-work, postcapitalist society, in India, Mexico, and Brazil UBI proved itself a useful method for intensifying market relations without actually investing in development. While Julius Nyerere had argued that poor nations could not escape poverty “without industrialization,” the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank pushed poorer nations to adopt transfer payments in lieu of heavy capital investment. In place of an industrial policy to create national independence, transfer payments became the go-to policy in a development scheme that would, ultimately, maintain and reinforce preexisting structures of market exchange. 

Eagleton goes up and down, and ends with an absurd note and a bad joke. He needs to see art as teleology: the avant-garde must be a high point rather than a product of immaturity and desperation, honest without being articulate.

For the second, the Brahmin left, Oxbridge bankers and Oxbridge philosophers, and the servants in the first class carriage.

Here, Bruges is a good example of the European garden. Yes, Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build - the three things together. And here, Bruges is maybe a good representation of beautiful things, intellectual life, wellbeing. 

The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.  

The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.

[Josep Borrell apologises for controversial 'garden vs jungle' metaphor but defends speech.] 

The myth that Look Back in Anger marked an absolute breach with all that went before has been dispelled over the years. But Soden points out that Coward didn’t merely manage to carry on, he found himself in tune to a surprising degree with the Angry Young Men, the satire boom and the sexually liberated 1960s. He didn’t like postwar England any more than John Osborne did, and he quite liked Look Back in Anger. For his part, Osborne wanted to put on a production of Design for Living, which, like his own play, dramatises a love-hate triangle. Edward Albee got Coward’s work back into print in America and Coward enjoyed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the amount of screaming and hurling of household objects is no greater than at the end of Private Lives. Soden also sees parallels with Orton: the dark sexual undertow and the delight in playing with the conventions of farce.

[Osborne] died just after his 65th birthday, on Christmas Eve 1994, and was buried in his Turnbull & Asser smoking jacket with his old copy of “Hamlet” stuffed in a pocket. (It had every part crossed out except Hamlet’s.) He died a club man, an Anglican, a country gentleman, a collector of teddy bears. Not the world he was born into, or that which his early work seemed to inveigh against, but a vanishing world that Osborne identified as England. Only those who had missed the nostalgia in “Look Back in Anger” saw him as a sellout. As Jimmy Porter says of the remnants of Edwardian England in 1956, “if you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”  

2

Far from ushering in a postindustrial, post-work, postcapitalist society, in India, Mexico, and Brazil UBI proved itself a useful method for intensifying market relations without actually investing in development.

The book seems less about welfare for markets than welfare for the rich, and restricting the market. The "sovereign consumer" is in the "global north". Like Rodrik's defense of military dictatorship, opposing the creation of a new bourgeoisie in Turkey.  It was left to Milanovic to describe the spread of capitalism to the world. 

1

The aesthete, then, possesses more of the truth than the political left generally imagines. The point is not to substitute art for life, but to convert life into art.

John Milton was not an "aesthete", and neither were most of the names Eagleton lists that Marx loved and quoted and riffed on. Eagleton's inability to consider the relation of posing to thinking, and his need simply to celebrate adults who never wanted to grow up, Tzara or Benjamin, and we can add Picasso, Duchamp, Wilde, Coward, Osborne, on down the list, all they way to Elvis and Warhol, is just stupid.

Turning life into art is fascism. The desire to turn life into art is born of desperation, and art made out desperation can be very good. Aesthetes are fans who make art out of fandom, and then become fans of themselves. 

Before the passages quoted above

Marx is one of the sources of what we now call cultural studies: the single work of fiction to which he devoted most space was the bestselling sensationalist novel The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue. He was also one of the first exponents of the historical study of literature. He championed what he called ‘the present splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England’, among them Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell and the Brontë sisters, claiming that they revealed more social and political truths than all the moralists and politicians put together; but like his collaborator and financial backer Friedrich Engels he was wary of literary works that had political designs on the reader. He used the term ‘literature’ to cover all writing of high quality, yet he scorned those who confused the kind of truth appropriate to poetry and fiction with other modes of knowledge. To demand a philosophical system from poets and novelists struck him as absurd. Truth for a writer was not abstract and invariable but unique and specific.

Art is a fine-tuned empiricism, "containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself." Marx was a classicist with no interest in fantasy. He would have hated Benjamin, and all the crap that followed.

on Jäger and Zamora, previously

" Nothing ends, Francis...."

I'm embarrassed I never thought of it before. It was always obvious.

Prescription vs description, speculation vs observation, theory vs history, faith vs scepticism, scholasticism vs popular culture, philosophers vs artists/comedians.

"It doesn't end. Never will it end." Gunter Grass, Crabwalk

Fukuyama now has a tag

Andrew-Lloyd-Mother-Fucking-Webber

updated, more than once. rilly.

---

"There is no easy path from the aesthetic experience to politics."

From the "Brooklyn Institute" to Jacobin, 

Oduor, previously. It's almost impressive.

And now I'm going to watch Tár, to see if my assumptions were off in any way at all.

There is no "path" from the aesthetic experience to politics; they're inseparable. Your preferences are shown in the record of your actions, not what you claim for them.

---

I'm a few minutes beyond the credits and it's absolute kitsch. She's blurbed as being an EGOT winner, along with Mel Brooks, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Whoopi Goldberg, and Andrew Lloyd Motherfucking Webber. It's not a film about art; it's a film about Aaahhrt. And it's just going to get worse. Brooks at least would get the joke. Jäger and everyone else, from the New Yorker and the NLR  is fucking blind.

But no. I was wrong. He's following Ruben Östlund, Force Majeure, The Square, and Triangle of Sadness. It's still shallow and reactionary—lazy, obvious, at least to... what, the old? the actually sophisticated? And Brody, Jäger et al. are still fucking blind.

Jäger

This is perhaps why the moralistic commentary on Tár runs into an explanatory impasse; for it is not Lydia’s personal culpability but these impersonal forces that are the real subject of the film. 

The most obvious among them is the stratified sphere of classical music – in which the lower ranks can only improve their career prospects by cultivating informal relationships with those higher up the ladder.

He makes it so easy. From Lydia Tár to Avital Ronell, because in fact it's the other way around.

"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."

Mocking Gopnik's script, and Lydia’s personal culpability, from the start. 

He runs down the list of EGOT winners, cross-cut with shots of Blanchett at work, ending on "...Andrew Lloyd Webber, and of course... Mel Brooks."  The audience laughs and Blanchett looks up from the page, as if hearing the laughter.  It's not just the cheapness. That one leaves a bad taste.

This is the core issue: the film was made as parody, and being received as serious it's become kitsch. Or maybe Field can't make up his mind what kind of cheap moralist he wants to be. Either way I don't care.

Jäger: "Throughout, Field meticulously evokes the authentic world of the Bildungsbürgertum".

"Authentic" He sounds so American.

And I'd forgotten this.

This could all hinge on my snobbery against others'; never mind the Spaceballs vid. But I've never forgotten the description of Adolph Green's last night, written by his son, and this:

We argued the relative merits of classical composers (any suggestion that Tchaikovsky had a maudlin streak or that von Suppé might not have been the last word in profundity infuriated him).

I don't like Tchaikovsky, but through Strayhorn, there'd be no Ellington without him. My father hated Kerouac but loved Pynchon. He was right about both, but couldn't accept the relation. That more than anything is the beginning of my argument with modernism as ideology as opposed to modernity as fact.  Mel Brooks will outlast Andrew Lloyd Webber. Adolph Green knew he loved crap and minor art, and he didn't care. He worked with the maudlin and the sentimental and made something out of it. That's more than Field is capable of, or Östlund for that matter. And Sir Steve McQueen is a good filmmaker, but his politics is not the politics some think it is.

---

My father hated musicals but he could quote lines from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. My parents loved Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford. Gilford was an old friend of David Graeber's parents. My mother's last words were lyrics from Oklahoma. 

"The Meaning of Rape" 

The current UK zeitgeist favours a drive to remove the use of the word “woman” from as many areas of public policy as possible. The word has become unfashionable as a means of describing the female body and this includes the literature and conversation specific to women’s health. Women are “people who menstruate”, “pregnant people” or “people with a cervix”. Even Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, has said “it isn’t right” to say that only women have a cervix. The word “woman’’, it is claimed, is just not inclusive enough and so other words must suffice. 

At the same time news reports invite us to believe that a male rapist is “she” and public outrage is the only way to ensure that a trans-identified man who rapes women, as in the case of Isla Bryson/Adam Graham, is rightly housed in the male prison estate. The court Bench rules have been updated to advise that a woman giving evidence should describe her rape by a man by talking of “her penis” if he identifies as a woman, or be reprimanded by judges who must abide similarly with the chosen pronouns of those entitled, rapist men.

Using brute force or state power to compel others to accept your self-definition. "Subjectivism as law". Click the fucking link, scroll down and click again.

Trannies, nuns, D. Boon. Because it works.

Update at the top, because the spoiled children at Stanford Law and the "Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion", a former "Chief Program Officer at the ACLU of Northern California",  are concerned about "harm" and "safety". If the discussion were on twitter or Facebook and the speaker were't in a position of authority, the adults at Stanford law, like Daphne Keller would agree with them.

---

I keep returning to this. It's a perfect teaching model for art, of how it's made and how it functions. Look at the man between the two trees at the top left of the frame beginning about 0:14., and watch him moving away to make room for the woman. And remember that every actor in the frame has been told when to move and where to stand and where to plant their feet. It's as formal as ballet. The scene is artificial, and the artificiality is explicit, undeniable, but at the same time functions as representational "realism". Is it the cognitive reconstruction of non-cognitive activity? In its artificiality it achieves an unnatural perfection: everything comes before our eye as an ordered series of events. It contains the irony that Plato could never muster. That would would require the character of Socrates reminding us that Plato was the author of his words! This goes back to my point that the "Euthyphro problem" is described more richly by Euripides in Alcestis, and also of the pathetic absurdity that we now have autistic professors of philosophy.  Next is AI. Computers can now beat people at chess so why not? If Chomsky is right and linguistics is physics, why not? 

Sorry, no. 

repeats. on the use and abuse, the flattening, of language.

One of my favorite linguistics lessons to teach students is on prosody, which is about how intonation, stress, tone, loudness, and other elements do a lot of work to communicate meaning in speech. This Erica Ash video on the versatility of the word “bitch” shows it beautifully. pic.twitter.com/Ws2eexeZTW

— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) August 9, 2020

I've posted the Freberg before but I can't find it. Lehrer I've posted too many times to count.

Martha Nussbaum 

It simply is not among the goals that make up the form of life of these creatures to be eaten by predators. Their form of life is their own, and they seek to live it undisturbed, just as we do, even though at times we too are also prey for aggressors. These species would not have survived if they were not pretty good at escape. To say that it is the destiny of antelopes to be torn apart by predators is like saying that it is the destiny of women to be raped. Both are terribly wrong, and demean the suffering of victims.

Yes, it's stupid, but par for the course.

Nussbaum in 1999, attacking Judith Butler. 

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all.

and 2007

I do not plan to discuss the specific facts concerning boycotts of Israeli academic institutions and individuals. There are three reasons for this silence. First, I believe that philosophers should be pursuing philosophical principles—defensible general principles that can be applied to a wide range of cases. We cannot easily tell whether our principles are good ones by looking at a single case only, without inquiring as to whether the principles we propose could be applied to all similar cases.

Butler defended Ronell. Stock defended Tuvel.

It's amazing what you're able to rationalize sitting alone in a room.

The unfairness of caring for your own children

These relationships appear inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial relationships may exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields and have special responsibilities to one another that give them the right, and sometimes the duty, to further one another’s interests in ways that may interrupt equality. Scheffler calls this observation (when made in an appropriately hostile manner) the ‘distributive objection’ to special responsibilities: ‘the problem with such responsibilities is ...that they may confer unfair benefit. ...special responsibilities give the participants in rewarding groups and relationships increased claims to one another’s assistance, while weakening the claims that other people have on them’.4 Indeed, participants in these protected relationships benefit twice over. They enjoy the relationship itself, and they enjoy the claims that it enables them legitimately to make on one another, to the exclusion of those outside the relationship.

A new one: In all my ignorance I had no idea Jameson was this stupid. It still amazes me that subtle readers of the past, or present, can be desperate babbling idiots about the future.

Specifically military fears include issues of violence, of hierar­chy and discipline, of regimentation, and ultimately of aggressiv­ity itself, as that is fantasized to be a fundamental feature of human nature or the human "essence" (feminism has thematized this conception of aggressivity as patriarchy or male violence). It is worth reminding the reader that the universal army here proposed is no longer the professional army responsible for any number of bloody and reactionary coups d'etat in recent times, whose ruth­lessness and authoritarian or dictatorial mentality cannot but inspire horror and whose still vivid memory will certainly astonish anyone at the prospect of entrusting a state or an entire society to its control. Removing such justified and visceral fears would certainly be the first task of any utopian therapy, were it not for the situation of dual power from which the new universal army emerges, which begins life as a parallel force alongside the state and its official army and finds its first tasks, and indeed its vocation, in the fulfillment of neglected social services and in a coexistence with the population of a wholly different type. The "nation at arms" which emerges from this situation is above all a general population in which everyone participates and a principled reac­tion against just such enclaves which enjoy Weber's "monopoly of violence" and have come to lead an autonomous life independent of society in general. (Current American reactions against isolated police forces present ready-made analogies.)

An American Utopia, edited by Zizek. Zizek's a clown and I like him as a clown. He's a liberal trying to give liberalism a foundation in faith of something better. I've always ignored his religious shit, but unlike Americans he's a social animal.

Jameson, 

In fact, the possibilities for utopian thinking were always bound up with the fortunes of a more general concern, not to say obsession, with power. The meditation on power was itself an ambiguous project. In the 1960s this project was a utopian one: it was a question of thinking and reimagining societies without power, particularly in the form of societies before power: here Levi-Strauss's revival of Rousseau gave rise to the utopian visions of early Baudrillard, of Marshall Sahlins in his Stone Age Economics, of Pierre Clastres, and of that supreme utopian vision, The Forest People by Colin Turnbull.

Turnbull's book wasn't a vision, let alone a supreme one; it was a description, maybe oversimplified, of a culture where individualism was suppressed, perhaps because it was unnecessary. It's the closest thing I've ever read to a description of actual utopia, but its the opposite in every way of modern individualism. 

From the book that includes his essay on Fukuyama, Perry Anderson's review of Marshall Berman:

Any compressed reconstruction of its general scheme must sacrifice the sheer imaginative sweep, the breadth of cultural sympathy, the force of intelligence, that give much of its splendour to All That Is Solid Melts into Air - qualities that over time will make it a classic in its field. Let us simply say at the outset that a stripped-down analysis of the principal case of the book is no adequate measure of the importance, and attraction, of the work to hand.

Berman's visionary argument starts as follows: There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others of life's possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience "modernity" To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind.

A friend loaned me Berman's book in the 90s. She loved it and reminded me she wanted it back. We had a falling out a few months later and I've had it ever since. I hated it. And I realized reading through it that she misunderstood my arguments about almost everything we'd ever talked about. But that was because she misunderstood or refused to face her own preoccupations. She was deeply conservative. She loved Kubrick, and Warhol's films. 

Berman celebrated individuality and individualism. It's stupid. This goes back to Graeber's asocial, pseudo-social, anarchism, the loneliness that craves community only if it controls it, and the culture of illustrated fantasy.

Streeck wrote this in 2014, reviewing Mair. I was watching it in the 70s in high school, thinking about the fucking hippies. I was raised by their teachers.

Streeck, years too late. Someone should get the joke.

In the order that seems to be emerging, social bonds are construed as a matter of taste and choice rather than of obligation, making communities appear as voluntary associations from which one can resign if they require excessive self-denial, rather than as ‘communities of fate’ with which one either rises or goes under.

And that link is the one that includes Streeck and Eric Rohmer.

Philosophers write about freedom vs egalitarianism or "freedom and equality." The actual issues are freedom and obligation. Equality, as a noun, is passive, saying nothing about how that relation might come to be. It can be imposed by others. Obligation describes a relation of active participants in a situation imposed not by others like us but by gods or nature: the fact of our limits and the limits of the world. The culture of the Mbuti in the Ituri forest is conservative. The only option given the fact of our own individualism—the modern condition, and irreversible—is a willed conservatism. Most people accept that; they themselves as part of a community. Berman's Americanism is a fantasy and a disaster.

The arts are Burkean. I'm with Eisenstein and Antoine Vitez, the communist from the Comédie-Française. 

The end of politics is the end of argument, the end of conversation. Wishing for the end of politics is like wishing for immortality.

2008

Cultural acts, directed from within culture, engaging their embeddedness, address the other by definition. "Craft" is always addressed from and to the community. Speech as craft engages both reception and the gap between speaker/author/maker and receiver. Can the vanguard as vanguard ever engage the other? Has it ever engaged craft as communication? If it breaks the bonds of language how can it reach back to the community it left behind? When has a vanguard ever made a new community? The best it's been able to do is teach by failure. All political thinkers should read Eisenstein. The last 20 years of my thinking ended up in that paragraph.

Carlo Ginzburg

Let’s start by quoting the magnificent words of the Sinologist Marcel Granet: ‘The method is the path once you have travelled it.’ Microhistory was the result of a convergence and a common discussion among a group of Italian researchers, but each one arrived at it with different experiences. For me, it was the case study. When I was ten years old, my mother [the writer Natalia Ginzburg, 1916-91] regularly brought me the books published by Einaudi. One day I came across The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein. I understood very little of the book’s content, but the impression it made on me was immense, even though I had not yet seen Eisenstein’s films. Then I read his text on the close-up, which became very important for me.

Working on a case in an analytical way is close to this. But, of course, you also have to take into account the off-screen, otherwise the close-up would not make sense. This implies that in any close-up the global perspective is implicit. Every singular case assumes the possibility of a generalisation, and there is a back and forth between the one and the other. 

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My contempt for utopianism goes back as far as I remember. I associate with with Christianity. I was raised a secularist with the understanding that Judaism focused on the responsibilities in this world, not dreams of another, making it relatively easy to sacrifice the religion itself and keep the burden. 

A repeat visitor spent too much time looking for references to legal scholars of "law and literature".  I haven't read much and I'm not interested in people who've built careers defending the obvious. Their defensiveness weakens their arguments.

Interpretation of law originates in the interpretation of religious law. It's all the interpretation of texts.

The two posts that refer specifically, from 2010 and 2012. 

Another more generally—one of many—from 2020

Something I haven't said before. Watching the Jan 6th crap you heard legal analysts compliment the government briefs as well crafted. Think what that means.

 "Whaddaya wanna to do about it, asshole?" The words of one of the greatest trial lawyers in the history of this fucking country.

And update to a some previous comments on art. I could have done this years ago, but it didn't occur to me.

Example 1.1 (The Miners Problem)

Ten miners are trapped in a shaft and threatened by rising water. You don’t know whether the miners are in shaft 𝐴 or in shaft 𝐵. You have enough sandbags to block one shaft, but not both. If you block the right shaft, all miners will survive. If you block the wrong shaft, all of them will die. If you do nothing, both shafts will fill halfway with water and one miner (the shortest of the ten) will die.

Act II

The chorus explains that the teacher, the boy, and three older students are on the way back, and the boy is exhausted ("Die Leute haben die Reise in die Berge"). As they approach their shelter, the boy confesses that he is not well ("Wir sind schnell hinangestiegen"). The teacher tells him it is forbidden to say such things on the journey, but the three students have overheard and demand to speak to the teacher. He admits that the boy is ill, and the students remind him of the strict old custom that whoever falls ill during the journey over the mountains must be hurled into the valley ("Wir wollen es dem Lehrer sagen"). The teacher reminds them that the sick person may also demand that the entire party turn back. Then he goes to the boy and offers him the choice ("Höre gut zu"). The boy decides that he knew the risks and should not impede the expedition. He asks only that the three students fill his jar with medicine and take it to his mother, and they agree. Then the three students bear him gently to the cliff and throw him over. The chorus reiterates the theme ("Wichtig zu lernen" reprise).

FRATERNIZATION

Key references: Article 134, UCMJ; U.S. NAVY REGULATIONS 1165 (applies to both Navy and Marine Corps); OPNAVINST 5370.2C (applies only to Navy); Marine Corps Manual 1100.4 (applies only to MC).

Background: The U.S. Navy has historically relied upon custom and tradition to define the bounds of acceptable personal relationships among its members and unduly familiar relationships between officers and enlisted members have traditionally been contrary to Naval custom, because they undermine the respect for authority. Acceptable conduct varies between the services based on differences in custom and tradition.

Definition: Generally, fraternization is an unduly familiar personal relationship between an officer member and an enlisted member that does not respect the difference in rank or grade. Relationships between officer members and between enlisted members that are prejudicial to good order and discipline or of a nature to bring discredit on the Naval service are unduly familiar and also constitute fraternization.

So fucking bored with philosophy.

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Using Brecht as a model of tradition and community doesn't work. I need to distinguish the libretto from its source,  decadence from classicism, formalism from formality. Brecht's theater is mannerist: simultaneously moralizing and corrupt.

Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama

What is neglected in these accounts of Brecht’s lasting success in the theater is that his work is not so much a modernist reform of the theater as one directed against it. Indeed, the most central features of Brecht’s theater arise from a vehement and at times fundamental polemic against actors and the audience. And so we must recognize that Brecht counts as one of modernism’s most successful theater reformers because he was most successful in making his resistance to the theater productive for a reform of the theater. This resistance to the theater is visible in Brecht’s attacks on expressionist plays, on the theater industry, and on Max Reinhardt’s seductive spectacles. His most categorical and fundamental condemnation of the theater emerges, however, when he, like many turn-of-the-century and early-twentieth-century reformers, speaks against the figure whose exploitation of theatricality never ceased to haunt modern theater, namely, Richard Wagner. 

Neither Wagner nor Brecht are useful as models. It looks like an interesting book, but he's still more partisan than observer. I loved Brecht's operas because they set my skin on fire, and then I had to ask why. Brecht vs Eisenstein.

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I'm getting old. I forget everything!

In for a penny... and an overdue tag for Eisenstein

"Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today" (1944)

People talked as if there had been no dra­matic or descriptive music before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Moliere; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.

George Bernard Shaw

...When Griffith proposed to his employers the novelty of a parallel "cut-back" for his first version of Enoch Arden (After Many Years, 1908), this is the discussion that took place, as recorded by Linda Arvidson Griffith in her reminiscences of Biograph days:

When Mr. Griffith suggested a scene showing Annie Lee wait­ ing for her husband's return to be followed by a scene of Enoch cast away on a desert island, it was altogether too distracting. "How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people

won't know what it's about."

"Well," said Mr. Griffith, "doesn't Dickens write that way?" "Yes, but that's Dickens; that's novel writing; that's different." "Oh, not so much, these are picture stories; not so different." 

But, to speak quite frankly, all astonishment on this subject and the apparent unexpectedness of such statements can be ascribed only to our—ignorance of Dickens. 

All of us read him in childhood, gulped him down greedily, without realizing that much of his irresistibility lay not only in his capture of detail in the childhoods of his heroes, but also in that spontaneous, childlike skill for story-telling, equally typical for Dickens and for the American cinema, which so surely and delicately plays upon the infantile traits in its audi­ ence. We were even less concerned with the technique of Dickens's composition: for us this was non-existent—but cap­tivated by the effects of this technique, we feverishly followed his characters from page to page, watching his characters now being rubbed from view at the most critical moment, then see­ ing them return afresh between the separate links of the parallel secondary plot.

As children, we paid no attention to the mechanics of this. As adults, we rarely re-read his novels. And becoming film­ workers, we never found time to glance beneath the covers of these novels in order to figure out what exactly had captivated us in these novels and with what means these incredibly many­ paged volumes had chained our attention so irresistibly. 

Apparently Griffith was more perceptive...

But before disclosing what the steady gaze of the American film-maker may have caught sight of on Dickens's pages, I wish to recall what David Wark Griffith himself represented to us, the young Soviet film-makers of the 'twenties.

To say it simply and without equivocation: a revelation. 

Try to remember our early days, in those first years of the October socialist revolution. The fires At the Hearthsides of our native film-producers had burnt out, the Nava's Charms of their productions had lost their power over us and, whis­ pering through pale lips, "Forget the hearth," Khudoleyev and Runich, Polonsky and Maximov had departed to oblivion; Vera Kholodnaya to the grave; Mozhukhin and Lisenko to expatri­ation.

The young Soviet cinema was gathering the experience of revolutionary reality, of first experiments (Vertov), of first systematic ventures (Kuleshov), in preparation for that un­ precedented explosion in the second half of the 'twenties, when it was to become an independent, mature, original art, immediately gaining world recognition.

In those early days a tangle of the widest variety of films was projected on our screens. From out of this weird hash of old Russian films and new ones that attempted to maintain "tradi­tions," and new films that could not yet be called Soviet, and foreign films that had been imported promiscuously, or brought down off dusty shelves-two main streams began to emerge.

On the one side there was the cinema of our neighbor, post­ war Germany. Mysticism, decadence, dismal fantasy followed in the wake of the unsuccessful revolution of 1923, and the screen was quick to reflect this mood. Nosferatu the Vampire, The Street, the mysterious Warning Shadows, the mystic crim­inal Dr. Mabuse the Gambler,· reaching out towards us from our screens, achieved the limits of horror, showing us a future as an unrelieved night crowded with sinister shadows and crimes. . . .

The chaos of multiple exposures, of over-fluid dissolves, of split screens, was more characteristic of the later 'twenties (as in Looping the Loop or Secrets of a Soul ), but earlier Germman films contained more than a hint of this tendency. In the over-use of these devices was also reflected the confusion and chaos of post-war Germany.

All these tendencies of mood and method had been fore­ shadowed in one of the earliest and most famous of these films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), this barbaric carnival of the destruction of the healthy human infancy of our art, this common grave for normal cinema origins, this combination of silent hysteria, particolored canvases, daubed flats, painted faces, and the unnatural broken gestures and actions of mon­strous chimaeras.

Expressionism left barely a trace on our cinema. This painted, hypnotic "St. Sebastian of Cinema" was too alien to the young, robust spirit and body of the rising class.

It is interesting that during those years inadequacies in the field of film technique played a positive role. They helped to restrain from a false step those whose enthusiasm might have pulled them in this dubious direction. Neither the dimensions of our studios, nor our lighting equipment, nor the materials available to us for make-up, costumes, or setting, gave us the possibility to heap onto the screen similar phantasmagoria. But it was chiefly another thing that held us back: our spirit urged us towards life—amidst the people, into the surging actuality of a regenerating country. Expressionism passed into the formative history of our cinema as a powerful factor—of re­pulsion.

There was the role of another film-factor that appeared, dashing along in such films as The Gray Shadow, The House of Hate, The Mark of Zorro. There was in these films a \vorld, stirring and incomprehensible, but neither repulsive nor alien. On the contrary—it was captivating and attractive, in its own way engaging the attention of young and future film-makers, exactly as the young and future engineers of the time were attracted by the specimens of engineering techniques unknown to US, sent from that same unknown, distant land across the ocean.

What enthralled us was not only these films, it was also their possibilities. Just as it was the possibilities in a tractor to make collective cultivation of the fields a reality, it was the boundless temperament and tempo of these amazing (and amazingly useless!) works from an unknown country that led us to muse on the possibilities of a profound, intelligent, class­ directed use of this wonderful tool.

The most thrilling figure against this background was Grif­fiths, for it was in his works that the cinema made itself felt as more than an entertainment or pastime. The brilliant new methods of the American cinema were united in him with a profound emotion of story, with human acting, with laughter and tears, and all this was done with an astonishing ability to preserve all that gleam of a filmically dynamic holiday, which had been captured in The Gray Shadow and The Mark of Zorro and The House of Hate. That the cinema could be incomparably greater, and that this was to be the basic task of the budding Soviet cinema-these were sketched for us in Griffith's creative work, and found ever new confirmation in his films.

Our heightened curiosity of those years in construction tmd method swiftly discerned wherein lay the most powerful affec­tive factors in this great American's films. This was in a hith­erto unfamiliar province, bearing a name that was familiar to us, not in the field of art, but in that of engineering and elec­trical apparatus, first touching art in its most advanced sec­tion—in cinematography. This province, this method, this prin­ciple of building and construction was montage.

Mike Leigh works with professional actors who research and improvise and participate in the writing of their lines. Ken Loach finds non-actors who fit his ideas for a role an has them read the lines he gives them.

repeats, without comment this time.

William Klein, Mr Freedom. It won't be up very long.

The ICP extended the dates of his retrospective—tomorrow is the last day—but it should be at MoMA.

"Mr Freedom" John Abbey, is in one scene playing a character I've never forgotten.

 

Cars, like everything else. 

The understanding man scrutinizes the car serenely and comprehends ‘what is for what’: why it has so many cylinders and why it has big wheels, where its transmission is situated, and why its rear is cut in an acute angle and its radiator unpolished. This is the way one should read.

Viktor Shklovsky

These, then, are what I have facetiously called the ideological antecedents of the Rolls-Royce radiator. The composition of this radiator sums up, as it were, twelve centuries of Anglo-Saxon preoccupations and aptitudes: it conceals an admirable piece of engineering behind a majestic Palladian temple front; but this Palladian temple front is surmounted by the wind-blown “Silver Lady” in whom art nouveau appears infused with the spirit of unmitigated “romanticism.” The radiator and the radiator cap have not been changed since the first Rolls-Royce car was delivered at the beginning of 1905; the “Silver Lady,” modeled by Charles Sykes, R. A., was added as early as 1911. 

Erwin Panofsky 

So I finally just stopped the car and made him get out. I just flat left him there by the road, man, and just drove off. Said, 'See you later, Max.' 

Robert Irwin 

A repeat from 2008

From the list of unrealized projects

 

Flag, 2001-8, sewn and appliquéd in white nylon, 72"x48"

I made one—had one made—in 2001. It's in a box somewhere in Germany. I've toyed with the idea of doing the entire UN.

Years later, through a mutual friend,  I gave this one to David Hammons. As a one-off it fits his work more than mine; it's almost an imitation. I told her to tell him he could use it any way he wanted. I gave up all rights to it.

The thought of 193 white flags crumpled up on the floor would be less Hammons than me. Not great maybe, but not bad. I spent more time on the fabric project and that fell apart. I'm not much as a salesman. I never wanted to be, but sometimes I wanted the result. 

NDPR vs IMDB 

Captain Miller: You see, when... when you end up killing one of your men, you see, you tell yourself it happened so you could save the lives of two or three or ten others. Maybe a hundred others. Do you know how many men I've lost under my command?

Sergeant Horvath: How many?

Captain Miller: Ninety-four. But that means I've saved the lives of ten times that many, doesn't it? Maybe even 20, right? Twenty times as many? And that's how simple it is. That's how you... that's how you rationalize making the choice between the mission and the man.

IMDB 1 — NDPR 0

Always so fucking obvious. The words of a non-fictional professional soldier:

So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect. Democracy is the antithesis of the military life; it’s chaotic, dishonest, disorganized, and at the same time glorious, exhilarating and free — which you are not.

After a while, if you stay in, you’ll be tempted to say, “Look, you civilians, we’ve got a better way. We’re better organized. We’re patriotic, and we know what it is to sacrifice. Be like us.” And you’ll be dead wrong, son. If you’re a career soldier, you may defend democracy, but you won’t understand it or be part of it. What’s more, you’ll always be a stranger to your own society. That’s the sacrifice you’ll be making.

I just watched the film for the first time and it's everything its critics said it was. Spielberg will last, in spite of his best intentions. That's true for most artists; their works are more interesting than they are.

When Kaminski started out he didn't have a reel. He had a book of of images of Norman Rockwell paintings. "You want this? I'll give you this." He's an asshole who helps his friends. One of those  friends made the same offer to me and I turned it down. I can't imagine saying yes, but I wish I could.