Atrios

We Have No Manchester

Watching the first episode of the American version of Life on Mars it occured to me that we don't really have an equivalent to Manchester in the public consciousness. Relocating the story to New York makes sense in a conjure up image of gritty city way, but lacks the ability to convey the pecularities of smaller city crime and policing that I think were rather important in the original series. New York is too big of a canvas.

It's what The Wire did with Baltimore, but Baltimore had to be explained to people instead of simply being invoked.

I've called Duncan Black a technically educated no-nothing with a good compass, moral and otherwise, that shows how the country has changed, and is changing.
That's an interesting paragraph.
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Of course he made up for it the next day

Note taking

I would spend all I had to save the life of someone I loved, while I would spend less on someone I was merely fond of, and maybe I’d toss some money to Oxfam for a kid somewhere.
Viewed objectively all three are equally deserving, but that’s not the way the world works.

Also: is Tony Judt a leftist in the US but merely a liberal in London?

Is liberalism rationalism and systems-building, or is it cosmopolitan empiricism and the cultivation of the flexibility required to negotiate their inevitable failure?

The comments above were rendered illegible, "disemvowed," by Chris Bertram: "I thought I’d made it clear that you aren’t welcome to comment on my posts. Any more, and you’ll get a comprehensive ban from CT as a whole."
I sent him an email and told him just to do it. I'd posted an additional comment, writing that the post itself was probably the most honest thing he'd ever written at the site, if not ever. Snide but true. Rather than disemvowel it he simply made it vanish.

I want to write more about the post itself. maybe when I'm sober. I'm still reading essays by and about Michael Fried which by chance also have a connection [see wednesday] And there's an obvious relation to this:


from this post

If you take the above model as describing how we respond to each other, how we learn about each other and ourselves, then the the failures of liberalism, and of the human imagination, are less traumatic. In fact they're only traumatic to idealists who think those failures can be avoided or righted. They can't.

The advantage of the arts over the sciences as a basis for philosophy is that in the arts it's better to be good than right. That this is a subject for philosophy as a whole rather than aesthetics is shown by the fact that the same rule holds for lawyers. Lawyers are craftsmen not scientists.

I've written those two sentences in various forms dozens of times by now. One of these days it's gonna stick

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte

Listening to the second in a series of mixes by the house DJ at a boutique hotel in Paris and wondering at the first track. Looking it up and realizing both what should have been obvious and how it makes perfect sense.

There I held a trembling hand
Seeking shelter in strange apartments
Til the day they turned her in
Being Judases of nowadays

Doris Days-To Ulrike M.
I think of Fassbinder

This made me smile.

... China would impose two conditions. First, it would declare that the offer of money was conditional on the US government’s adopting a particular approach to rescuing the banks, namely to favour in the next round the use of government money to recapitalise the banks. Europe has been using this approach and evidence suggests it is the most effective way of dealing with large-scale financial crises.

The US government – like third world governments in the past – has been unable to adopt the most efficient course of action. This stems from an ideological obsession against “socialising” banks or because inducement is necessary to overcome any domestic opposition to it.

The second condition would relate to “social safety nets”, which had become standard embellishments to World Bank/IMF adjustment programmes. China would stipulate that monies be devoted to cushioning the impact on vulnerable homeowners, so that they would not be forced into forgoing the American dream of home ownership. Chinese conditionality on this front would achieve an outcome that several economists on the left and right have argued for on grounds of fairness, and also to address the fundamental problem in the housing market.

For China, this offer of help would have three virtues. First, it would be riding to the rescue of a situation partly created by its own policies of undervalued exchange rates, which led to lax global liquidity conditions. Second, its economic interest would be served because successful US efforts at rescuing its financial sector could help avert an economic downturn, protecting China’s exports, its growth engine.

Perhaps most important, it would seal China’s status as a responsible superpower willing to deploy its economic resources for the sake of protecting the world economy. And if the means for achieving that are by providing the current hegemon with the largest aid package the world has ever seen with a healthy dose of sensible conditionality, well, what could be more statesmanlike than that?

From Helena Cobban, who I think had the same reaction.

This is not a laughing matter. So I want to be clear what I was alluding to when I referred to “borderline criminal incitement.” John McCain has a first amendment right to smear and (at least free of criminal penalties) slander Barack Obama by suggesting he’s in league with terrorists. But as we’ve seen many times, even offhandedly threatening comments directed at a Secret Service protected individual, can earn you a visit from the guys with the earpieces. And McCain and Palin are now routinely holding rallies in which they whip supporters into such a delirium by castigating Obama as a dangerous terrorist-lover that members of the audience shout what can very reasonably be interpreted as threats against Obama’s safety. Am I saying they’re breaking the law? No. But I do think they’re nudging up against the envelope and getting near that line beyond which, if McCain were not a presidential candidate, his rallies would be getting some attention from those charged with protecting Obama’s safety.)

Others don't seem to get the point.

More on the science of the passive.
Germans and Israelis agree: Shiksas are hotter

The software program, developed by computer scientists in Israel, is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.

Scientists took the data and applied an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, or between the eyes.

Essentially, they trained a computer to determine, for each individual face, the most attractive set of distances and then choose the ideal closest to the original face. Unlike other research with formulas for facial attractiveness, this program does not produce one ideal for a feature, say a certain eye width or chin length

...Agreeable arts are those which have mere enjoyment for their object. Such are all the charms that can gratify a dinner party: entertaining narrative, the art of starting the whole table in unrestrained and sprightly conversation, or with jest and laughter inducing a certain air of gaiety. Here, as the saying goes, there may be much loose talk over the glasses, without a person wishing to be brought to book for all he utters, because it is only given out for the entertainment of the moment, and not as a lasting matter to be made the subject of reflection or repetition. (Of the same sort is also the art of arranging the table for enjoyment, or, at large banquets, the music of the orchestra-a quaint idea intended to act on the mind merely as an agreeable noise fostering a genial spirit, which, without any one paying the smallest attention to the composition, promotes the free flow of conversation between guest and guest.) In addition must be included play of every kind which is attended with no further interest than that of making the time pass by unheeded.

Fine art, on the other hand, is a mode of representation which is intrinsically final, and which, although devoid of an end, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interests of social communication.

Pretty is passive. Beauty takes effort.

"Nationalizing the Means of Production...

As Atrios puts it: Awesome!

WASHINGTON — Having tried without success to unlock frozen credit markets, the Treasury Department is considering taking ownership stakes in many United States banks to try to restore confidence in the financial system, according to government officials.

Treasury officials say the just-passed $700 billion bailout bill gives them the authority to inject cash directly into banks that request it. Such a move would quickly strengthen banks’ balance sheets and, officials hope, persuade them to resume lending. In return, the law gives the Treasury the right to take ownership positions in banks, including healthy ones.

The Treasury plan, still preliminary, resembles one announced on Wednesday in Britain. Under that plan, the British government would offer banks like the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC Holdings up to $87 billion to shore up their capital in exchange for preference shares. It also would provide a guarantee of about $430 billion to help banks refinance debt.

Only Nixon could go to China. Only Bush can finally bring the Marxist Revolution home!

As a friend in the market, and who spent the day buying, said tonight: "I'll pay. But if you're gonna turn this country into Europe, then I want better cheese, better wine and topless beaches."

a good time to repeat myself.
There's no way to escape the need not only for quantifying rationality but also for the more obscure notion of "judgement" and for discussions of and concerning values. The rationalism of unfettered individualism is done. If the consensus is that people act as individuals alone and strictly in their own interests, then that consensus helps create and maintain itself and the culture it describes (and if anyone argues against it you'll point to your "research.") But by the logic of simple reinforcement description then becomes prescription.

Now however for a period of time at least, we're going to managers with a major role in large financial institutions who aren't making a percentage. It won't be the end of the world. The crisis was well timed: if we're waking up in the morning with a more social democratic economic policy, we've been building a more social democratic culture.

The basis of society (and therefore social democracy) is not in Aristotelian non-contradiction -rules- but in the way people choose to face contradictory obligations. The man who opined in favor of better wine and topless beaches also berated me for thinking that I should have sold over the past week to buy. I sold nothing and I'm down $200,000. "Don't be an asshole. You'll be fine. Imagine if everyone did that. Stop thinking short term!"
The eternal conflict between self-interest and self-respect.
Self-respect is a function of the social; and my stockbroker is more of a humanist than any economist I know.

I'm more pissed off—disgusted—by people who lie to themselves than I am by those who only lie to others. Choosing to lie is an acknowledgment of responsibility; lack of self-knowledge is beginning of the end of it. 

Apropos contemporary American politics and social life, and other things:
Robert Pippen, "Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art History JSTOR
Michael Fried, "Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday" JSTOR

more

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I hadn't read Arendt on the politics and truth.

Big Bro looks so serious.

Visser on the Democrats again

During yesterday’s vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden repeated the basic thrust of Barack Obama’s comments on Iraq one week ago. According to Biden, “John McCain was saying the Sunnis and Shiites got along with each other without reading the history of the last 700 years.”

In other words, Barack Obama’s apparent assumption of an endless conflict between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq was more than a slip of the tongue. Instead this seems to constitute a key ingredient in the Democratic narrative on Iraq: the country can be held together only by a strong ruler, otherwise Shiites and Sunnis would be at each other’s throats. Biden’s incarnation of the argument also served to clarify that Democrats quite literally are thinking of hundreds of years when they advance this contention; by his counting, the problems began in the early fourteenth century. That is certainly a slightly odd place to start, since Baghdad at the time was governed by Mongol rulers who themselves were rather difficult to label, sometimes they were pro-Shiite, sometimes pro-Sunni. At any rate, even if the exact number of centuries in this case may be attributable to a Biden idiosyncrasy, the main point is clear. Democrats do not think Shiites and Sunnis have any tradition of coexistence in Iraq.

This assumption overlooks the fact that there were in fact no more than three major episodes of large-scale sectarian violence in Iraq prior to the rise of the Baathists: in 1508, 1623 and 1801; in all cases violence was instigated by foreign invaders from Iran or the Arabian Peninsula. Still, many will dismiss this entire discussion. Why should we care about such historical details when there are bigger issues at stake such as the US economy? The reason these matters are important is that they relate to a more fundamental aspect of Democratic strategy in Iraq which has become clearly evident over the past weeks, despite apparent attempts by Joe Biden to avoid going into too much detail about his notorious “Iraq plans”. Democrats want a “settlement” in Iraq, otherwise they think that US forces will have to be sent back there again. (Biden told reporters a few weeks ago, “Without a political settlement, Tom, we’re going to be back there in another year or two or three or five.”)

A shift to the political sphere instead of the almost exclusive emphasis on the military found among many Republican strategists, now that seems perfectly plausible. But the danger with regard to Democratic strategy has to do with exactly how they want to perform this shift and what sort of knowledge about Iraq is going to inform it.
more

The Crisis in the Market and in the Academy

"The question here is what better describes the current situation.
Is it A: A lack of data which science and bla bla bla will help us to bla bla bla until we are able to bla bla bla to a new scientific understanding?
Or is it B: The population of his fucking country is so divided among delusional Lay-Z-Boy riding frontiersmen, a reactionary peasantry, and condescending intellectual pseudo-aristocrats with fixations on Bloomsbury (without the sex) that nothing is going to get done?"

A comment -since removed- made here.
I made others that were better received, at least by readers.

Writing, rewriting. Too sloppy, too slick. Too casual, too tight. Later.
A good time or better to revisit my problems with academic political discussions. Ingrid Robeyns' bookish anxiety is really annoying.
It's a discussion of political ideas held in the context of a very real crisis. But the crisis concerns less a lack of ideas -the majority of economists seem to be in agreement- than the fact that our political class is divided between the corrupt and the cowardly. The crisis becomes an excuse to have a discussion of academic interests that bear only secondary relation to the situation on the ground. Yet the tone is panicked. This discussion replaces a discussion of political maturity that will not happen because maturity is too amorphous an idea for a philosopher to grasp. Formalist academics are fundamentally immature -formalism is childish- and since such a discussion is off limits they're unable to recognize what they represent.
There are two kinds of narcissism, The narcissism of those who do nothing but stare in the mirror, and the narcissism of those who never have and never will.

Discussions of ideas constructed from ideas are the discussions of specialists. Discussions of cowardice and courage, discussion of ideas built on acts, can use the common language. The common language is where this discussion belongs. This isn't a defense of "theory" as opposed to "analysis" but as I said in another comment, at least Althusser came clean in the end.
Precision is desirable to most people only as the capacity for precise description, but precisionism is a value system: a moral esthetic, and a brittle one.
All conversation is social bonding. New threats need to be responded to by the existing social/linguistic order. That's the root of Robeyns' anxious questions.

It's interesting to watch Democrats, and especially famously self-important Democratic policy-wonks, bash the know-nothing Republicans for shooting down a bill that they themselves know has no evidence to support it's basic premise. All that's left to defend it is the notion of serious people posing like models in ads for Wachovia and UBS while giving money away.

Economics as theater, defended by proponents of rational action.

Roubini Against:
"Thus the claim by the Fed and Treasury that spending $700 billion of public money is the best way to recapitalize banks has absolutely no factual basis or justification. "

Dean BakerAgainst:
"The Banks Have a Gun Pointed at Their Head and Are Threatening to Pull the Trigger"

DeLong For:
"The important issue is "Perception."

DeLong's description and Baker's are not necessarily in conflict.
As I said a couple of days ago the answer begins in an acceptance of the possibilities of big responsible government, a possibility that Democrats, following Republicans (and greedy ex-hippies) have for years done nothing but discount.
DeLong is a competent technocrat but he doesn't question the values of his own variety of technocratic logic.
He's too much a scholar of self-interest.
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update: The "DeLong Plan" is back

Bring Congress Back into Session After the Election...

...and go for the Swedish plan: nationalize the insolvent large financial institutions: dare Bush to veto that after the election.

Vote Count:

Democrats: 141 Yea, 94 Nay
Republican: 66 Yea, 132 Nay.

This Republican Party needs to be burned, razed to the ground, and the furrows sown with salt...

Hilary Bok [aka "Hilzoy"] in The Washington Monthy, in June

...I don't think I really appreciated, on a visceral level, exactly how much this would mean to African-Americans until sometime around November. At that time, Obama was trailing Clinton by around 20 points among black voters, which I found odd, until I read some article -- I can't recall which -- with a number of interviews of black Democrats. Those interviews made it clear that most of the people quoted in the article did not believe that a black candidate -- any black candidate -- could win the nomination, let alone the Presidency. Once I had noticed that, I seemed to hear it a lot: just a few days ago, I was listening to CSPAN in the car, and a black voter called in and said that until Iowa, he had assumed that Obama was "some kind of stunt".

I suppose I live a sheltered life, but for some reason it hadn't crossed my mind that many African-Americans would think not just that it was very hard for a black man to win the nomination, but that it was impossible. But once it did, I found it horrible and heartbreaking, all the more so because, on reflection, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to think. (At least in its milder form -- 'he can't win' -- as opposed to the more ominous 'they won't let him win.')

Linked by Duncan Black, who adds: "I know and have friends and acquaintances who are African-American"

I know and have friends and acquaintances who are African-American, but that's something very different from being plugged in to the African-American community in any meaningful sense. There isn't one monolithic AA community, of course, but it is something which in broad general terms exists. The couple of times I went to Obama-linked primary parties I had a chance to have a pretty sharp reminder that African-American supporters of Obama are often coming from a very different place than his other supporters.

You'd think by this point there would be a more general understanding among the self-proclaimed enlightened intellectual elite of the anger and fears of blacks and Jews, of women, of homosexuals and Palestinians. But of course by the time you get to that last group the answer's obvious. And of course the American political intelligentsia has little interest in psychology, especially their own. As an aside I'll add that this [archive.org] from the bigot M.J Rosenberg, is just grotesque.
This subject came up talking with a few friends this weekend.

Josh Marshall initially thought the debate was a draw and wondered why Obama hadn't been more aggressive. The major newspapers with the exception of the NY Times also called it a draw. But the public says it's a clear win.

How would it have appeared to the block of narcissistic but all-important "undecided" white voters to see a young black man attack an old white man as aggressively as white liberals imagine they would if they were in his place? That's not to say Obama's reticence is conscious and strategic, only that it's how he's played the game; and it's important to understand he never had a choice.

Hilzoy: "I suppose I live a sheltered life,"
No shit.
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more of the same a month later.

Fall repeats. From 2006 and removed from the original context but it still works. Notes from anger and bemusement

Armatures and intellect. Figuration and abstraction in art. Religion not as faith but structure. The Bible and the Bhagavad Gita are books, in which gods are characters. Religion is law founded on smoke and mirrors: it's the laws that are the point, not the smoke.
Sociologists and lack of affect: why do these people annoy me so much? Smiley-faced studiers of other things.
The rhetoric of science, or Justice as Contract. The logic -predicated on what?- of culture as exoskeleton, as constraint, rather than constitutive -"Dude, subtext is for other people" "Economics is science" - and everyone must have the same desires, must be pretty much identical. Subjectivity not as constitutive but as a thing to be avoided. Individualism as argument in effect the end of the individual sense: Individualism is the triumph of generalization.

Narcissism, the fragile fantasy of the hypertrophied self matches the illusion of the opposite: the atrophied self. Autism is the narcissism of the deeply shy. Marx was either a failed scientist or a great novelist like Robert Heinlein and a determinist just like Ayn Rand, except Rand was better cause she was right.
What does it mean to see the construction of the adult self as a social act? What's the moral philosophy of the good craftsman? Libertarians: again, nothing left but gurgling infants and sociopaths.

How do you gauge the movement of a drifting boat? If we're defined by culture how do we remember what language was in the past? If you refuse to look behind you how can you judge what you've become, even for the purpose of description? Modernity becomes a narcissist, referring to itself for justification. History is the history of ideas through the history of craft. it's the history of what people were not what they wanted to be. Terrifying thought? The only way not to fall victim entirely to determinism is to be observant. Invention without observation is the invention of children. Scientists left to their own devices revert to infantile asociality: gurgling infants and sociopaths again

Dean Baker says: "I'm with the DeLong plan!!!!!!"

On monday Atrios linked to Josh Marshall while claiming pride of place for making the argument first. Here's the argument, from Ed Kilgore:

For McCain and other Republicans, voting "no" on Paulson without accepting the consequences of that vote is the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe: it will please the conservative "base," distance them from both Bush and "Washington," and let them indulge in both anti-government and anti-corporate demagoguery, even as Democrats bail out their Wall Street friends and big investors generally. You simply can't imagine a better way for McCain to decisively reinforce his simultaneous efforts to pander to the "base" while posing as a "maverick."

Democrats are right to demand significant substantive concessions before offering their support for the Paulson Plan. But just as importantly, they need to demand Republican votes in Congress, including the vote of John McCain. If this is going to be a "bipartisan" relief plan, it has to be fully bipartisan, not an opportunity for McCain to count on Obama and other Democrats to save the economy while exploiting their sense of responsibility to win the election for the party that let this crisis occur in the first place.

Digby responds

He's right. If they go this way, McCain gets to distance himself from Bush by standing on the sidelines wielding a phony pitchfork while Obama, as the head of the Democratic party and thus the leader of the congress, gets splashed in all this muck. It's quite ingenious and a very possible scenario in my opinion.

I posted a comment at Kilgore's site and another the next day, both stating the obvious: that if the democrats had not betrayed their principles years ago they would not have to run against their new ones now. The era of small government in this country ended more than a century ago. The post office is big government; highways are big government; the military is big government; earmarks are big government. The Republicans live off it and lie about it. And the choice now is not between big and small but between responsible and irresponsible, and the Republicans have given us the latter. The Democrats have abetted them in that in word and less so at least in action. Bill Clinton ended welfare as we knew it, and to many of us that was a mistake, if not worse. But he didn't destroy FEMA. He was not an incompetent and a promulgator or ideologist of incompetence. The Democrats need to bring the fight to the Republicans, even if it means running against their own recent history. If they are afraid to do that, if they're afraid to take responsibility, then they'll need to worry about taking the blame.
I made that argument twice- the second more directly- and it didn't pass the guard.
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I don't know enough to say whether we need to be in a rush, but I tend to think that's not the important question. The markets run on perception, and the perception of panic is the biggest danger. Of course for the republicans panic is a strategy to get them what they want. Panic is a tool: the defense of the decision in Bush v Gore.
Atrios on WaMu,

No, the fact that a highly regulated bank was, as prescribed by law and regulation, seized in an orderly fashioned and sold off with no cost to taxpayers is in no way a "wake-up call" suggesting that Congress needs to give large amounts of money to the largely unregulated shadow banking system

Helena Cobban

Did you know that China has over $900 billion of exposure/investment in US Treasury bills and in debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-- and that the Chinese government has therefore (quite understandably) been exerting its influence in Washington and elsewhere to prevent the US financial system tumbling completely off the cliff of insolvency?

You might never know that fact if you read only the mainstream media in the US, which have been dominated by highly Americo-centric stories about the anguished interplay among the big players in the US government and economy.

But an article buried deep within today's WaPo tells us this:

As U.S. financiers scrambled this week over how to deal with possible collapse of major financial institutions, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan arrived in Washington with a message: To survive the crisis, U.S. equity markets need countries such as China that have massive foreign exchange reserves to jump in a big way.
... China ... is estimated to hold a fifth of its currency reserves -- as much as $400 billion -- in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt. In addition, its banks have billions of dollars worth of exposure to the American International Group, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and other companies in crisis. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, for example, has $151 million in bonds issued or linked to Lehman; China Merchants Bank has $70 million of Lehman bonds; and the Bank of China has $75.62 million of Lehman bonds.

...In a week of epochal market turmoil, for the Bank of Japan being very careful has meant being aggressively interventionist. Besides injecting the equivalent of about $96 billion in four days into money markets for overnight loans, the bank has gone into the business of making dollar loans.

It joined with four other central banks in a $180 billion currency swap with the Federal Reserve and will use its $60 billion share to supply dollars to local and foreign institutions.

...Andy Xie, an independent economist who was formerly Morgan Stanley's chief Asia economist, said the United States needs to accept that a large amount of U.S. assets must be transferred to other countries' ownership. "If the U.S. is not willing to accept that," Xie said, "they will have to print money and the dollar will fall. And we will be headed toward a global financial meltdown."
Companies in the United States and in Europe are already reaching out to Chinese investors.

Read the WaPo article and Cobban's analysis.

Dude.

I laughed out loud
"Best 2 day the Dow has seen since 1929 "

Look at the chart

Big Fun
"The current excess leverage now unwinding was the result of a purposeful SEC exemption given to five firms."

Three of which are now gone.

RGE Monitor-Roubini
Calculated Risk

As Helena Cobban says. "The Earth is shifting."
It has been for a long time. People notice the last straw, but that's all it is.

Visser: Biden and the Democrats on Iraq.

"Have you no sense of decency sir? At long last..."

It's coming.

The Impossibility of Corruption

Josh Marshall misses the point (again)

But the conclusion and packaging of the article is that both candidates deceive equally and that they do so because it works. (There was another example, though not quite as egregious, by Jonathan Weismann last week in the Post.)

We hear a lot about the steep and perhaps terminal decline of the business model underlying daily print newspapers. But this corruption in the basic conception of the craft [my emphasis] -- which is actually related to the economic decline -- gets discussed much less.

The corruption "in the basic conception of the craft" began with the rise, only recently, of the presumption that objectivity is desirable, based in turn on the assumption that it's possible. It isn't.

No one argues that judges are objective, only that they mediate between two designated advocates. If the press is "the ref" as we hear it is, then it can be no more so than a judge. But has the press ever passed even that test? Never, not in any country: not in the history of its existence. The justice system is formal: formal ethics precedes abstract morality. The press has no such rules, nor should it but it should have the same principles. The logic is simple, and I've said it before: If the political press treated politicians with the respect that the entertainment press deemed appropriate for Britney Spears we'd all be better off. But the political press takes itself seriously, and in a way specifically that it should not. Journalistic values as they are now defined begin in error.

The press cowers before assumptions, both its own and popular. The pretense among the American intellectual and political nomenclatura that objectivity is possible is allied to their assumption -Joshua Marshall's assumption- that they themselves are objective. The link list on the right holds proof enough that they are not.

The belief that you can use language without it carrying values leads to a flight from values: a flight to neutrality. The press is afraid of being seen as biased. It is afraid of the perception of bias. And in language we cannot escape perception. Rationalists pretend this is not so. The press desires to be seen as objective and American intellectuals desire to see themselves as rational actors.

The fundamental corruption of the American press and of the American technocratic elite is the fundamental denial of the possibility of their own corruption. At some point, you have to choose not to defend not objectivity but values. This is the question to ask McCain, Palin and their defenders: "What do you value?"

We all want to be rational, but wanting does not make it so.

In the context of a discussion of how to respond to creationists in the classroom.

Always be ready to defend any argument from the ground up. It keeps your mind sharp, and we’re all capable of making lazy assumptions. Zionists continue to imagine their 19th century racialist ideal of the state is modern, and Henry Farrell worries about how to respond the the Georgians in Russia without an acceptance of the notion of “Spheres of Influence.”

Reuters just reported: "Honduras ... told a U.S. envoy not to present his credentials as ambassador on Friday in a diplomatic snub in support of Bolivia. Bolivia and ... Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are in a fight with Washington over what they see as U.S. support for violent protests against Bolivian President Evo Morales. ...

"The United States imposed sanctions on aides to Venezuela's Chavez on Friday in retaliation for his expulsion of the U.S. ambassador, escalating a crisis that raises the specter of a possible oil supply cutoff. ...

"Violent anti-government protests have killed eight people in Bolivia, where rightist governors have rebelled against the popular president, demanding autonomy and rejecting his plans to overhaul the constitution and break up ranches to give land to poor Indians."

We’re not rational actors, we’re animals who make use of logical mechanisms in the pursuit of our interests and preferences.
Preference precedes reason, always trying [I'd written endeavoring which was pompous] to twist it to its purposes.

09.12.08 -- 10:00AM // link | recommend (36)
ONCE AGAIN
Obama leads on foreign policy; Bush eventually follows; and McCain is too proud to admit he was wrong.

--Josh Marshall

See Cambodia, below.

It's been an amazing couple of days.
George Bush has succeeded in almost destroying the old Republican party.

"That is not an 'inappropriate sexual relationship' - that is a federal employee sexually assaulting a subordinate while on federal government business and it’s a felony."
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"Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill -- signed into law by Knowles -- that banned the practice statewide.
"There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla," Knowles said
A May 23, 2000, article in Wasilla's newspaper, The Frontiersman, noted that Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies regularly pay for such exams, which cost between $300 and $1,200 apiece.
"(But) the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests," the newspaper reported.

It also quoted Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon objecting to the law. Fannon was appointed to his position by Palin after her dismissal of the previous police chief. He said it would cost Wasilla $5,000 to $14,000 a year if the city had to foot the bill for rape exams."

Bush Said to Give Orders Allowing Raids in Pakistan

Perhaps now would be a good time to revisit the history of Cambodia.

Oliver North

A little late on this
Text Of The Draft Iraq-US SOFA

Report from England. My niece:

This is completely pointless since you can't do anything about it but I'm going to bitch anyway.

This happened yesterday and pissed me off royally. What the hell is wrong with AQA? I studied that poem for a year, and I haven't turned into a knife wielding psychopath. The rest of the anthology isn't any different. The other things in that section include two poems by Robert Browning, both about murder, a short story by Sylvia Plath which has a disturbing passage about prison camps in the second world war and a poem called Hitcher where a guy picks up a hitchhiker and beats him to death with a krook lock! I find it really patronising that they don't think 15 and 16 year olds can cope with serious issues. It's like they don't believe we can take it in it's context. The poem was written in the height of Thatcherism, the reasons behind knife crime and social issues today are entirely different. It just seems sad to me that AQA can't even interpret a poem in their own anthology. Also, giving in because of three complaints? That is pathetic, three reactionary, uninformed, ignorant people and they cave.
Anyway, rant over. I'm fine, sixth form starts tomorrow, which is very exciting.

Hope you're doing well,
Helen.

Funny
The republicans call McCain a war hero, the democrats should counter: "No, he's a survivor."

Notes

The problem with language is that [if] you pick one definition for a term you'll be able over time, and through a process of proximity and drift, to have the word come to mean the opposite. You can't do that with numbers. Liberalism is optimism. The pursuit of happiness as anything other than the happiness of pursuit is the pursuit of banality.

Liberalism as individualism stands for generalized as opposed to individual experience.
Howzzat?

The book is silly, not because it's illogical or wrong, but because it's rational and logical and unobservant.

I remember picking up The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World when it came out and expecting some sophisticated argument. [I hear it's now called a classic by some people] I figured after Foucault et al., there had to be some reference to the obliteration of the body in pain and pleasure. Nada. Zilch. I thought of writing "The Body in Ecstasy: The Making and Unmaking of the World" but got bored and gave up.

From Marquis' essay.

The argument is based on a major assumption. Many of the most insightful and careful writers on the ethics of abortion-such as Joel Feinberg, Michael Tooley, Mary Anne Warren, 1-1. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., L. W. Suiiiner, John T. Noonan, Jr., and Philip Devine'believe that whether or not abortion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end. The argument of this essay will assume, but not argue, that they are correct.

They aren't. The social world is not the world of simple moral logic, and the issue of abortion centers not on the fetus but the state. But as in economics I guess... "Assume 'A' "

This is similar to the attempts to construct a formal moral logic of illegal downloading. But at some point if a crime has become ubiquitous its time to change not the law but the system that made the ubiquity inevitable. But of course no one I know has ever had an abortions for pleasure, or even jouissance. [at least no one I know of]
If philosophy is to be more than the philosophy of knots, it has to include the philosophy of knives, the philosophy not only of untying but of cutting.
An expansive and vibrant philosophy can never be more than a philosophy of engagement. The philosophy of solutions is risible.

"What sort of critique is possible?
Everything is a critique. That means nothing.
Sado-masochism is a critique of the Humanist ideology of the body and the self.
Monarchism is a critique of democratic idealism and of our supposed need to be free.
I’ve always liked The Story of O.
I once had a girlfriend who told me that while she lay on the beach in the south of France reading that book she thought of me.
What happened to that relationship?
Ended badly.
Why?
She was a monarchist.
And what about you?
Oh, you know… king for a day."

A Glass in the Sink. From 2002. On my mind recently, and still on the server

[file replaced years later.]

The President #2 and #12, 2003

Your Gold Teeth II, 1997, oil on canvas, 78"x 93"

More on Bad Acting

Franz Boas

Jay Sosa at Savage Minds "It’s always fun display anthropologists looking ridiculous and going native."

I pointed out in comments that this was both a misunderstanding and offensive. Odd that I had to point this out to an anthropologist. Boas looks as out of place as a college professor at a rave: no more, no less. His foolishness is the byproduct of his sincerity.

Brian Leiter says he's in the habit of calling Hillary Clinton "fake". He's right, she's a bad actor; but where in his philosophy is there any place for such a mode of judgement?

Poetry isn't like getting drunk—isn't the "sincere" expression of drunkenness—it's the description of that sensation to others. If art were about sincerity being in love would get you laid. Lon Chaney answering a question about the response of moviegoers to his tortured characters: "I don't feel my characters' emotions, it's my job to make you feel them."

The documentation of passion is not passion. The passion for documentation is the passion of the schoolman, and schoolmen are lousy actors. From being lousy actors it's a short step to discounting he importance of theater and mediation in communicative action. This is the tension between artists and critics that rationalism refuses to see as productive. Leiter discounts theater but then refers to it without thinking.

An awareness of the risks of narcissism.

What makes a good actor?

The chicken or the egg? Watch his hands, while he's talking about hers. He uses them because he thinks he should, as he thinks she should, not because he knows how to do it well. His performance is funny because it's incompetent -at the very least overdetermined- and because he's unaware.
News is a shallow business and always has been. Sensationalism is broad brushes and vulgarity. Bill Clinton played to that and won.
Ads: when there's a copy on youtube I'll get rid of this one.

The Panofskys [Look at the book links on the right.]

Mantegna (whose favorite saying is reported to have been "virtuti semper adversatur ignorantia") as well as Rosso [Fiorentino] tried to express the -fundamentally unchristian- idea that ignorance rather than wickedness, not knowing what is right rather than not willing what is right, is the cause of all evil: No one sins willingly, as Socrates is believed to have said.

Pandora's Box. The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol. It's good to be reminded again that the origin of rationalism is in religious argument. The history of religion is the history of fictional absolutes nudged into compliance -by elision: smoke, mirrors, poetry- with material and social fact. The history of Christian iconography is the history of the humanization of god, of bringing god literally down to earth. No theologian worth his weight, in any period, would admit to being a part of this process- admit to being a point on a predetermined route- but denials change nothing.
Nothing undermines ideology more and better than the act of putting it in context: the historian's job. Nothing undermines theology more than the study of history. Nothing undermines contemporary American liberalism, academia, and the rest, more and better than the history of what preceded them.

JERUSALEM, Aug 25 (Reuters) - The United States says Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank threaten any peace between Israel and the Palestinians -- yet it also encourages Americans to help support settlers by offering tax breaks on donations.

As Condoleezza Rice flew in on Monday for another round of peace talks, Israeli and American supporters of settlements defended the tax incentives, which benefit West Bank enclaves deemed illegal by the World Court and which the U.S. secretary of state has said are an obstacle to Palestinian statehood.

Pro-settler groups say they are entitled to the tax breaks because their work is "humanitarian", not political, and reject any comparison to Palestinian charities, some of which face U.S. sanctions over suspected links to Islamist groups like Hamas.

The full extent of tax-exempt U.S. funding for settlements is unclear because so many groups are involved and their spending practices are not always transparent.

But a review by Reuters of U.S. tax records found 13 tax-exempt organisations openly linked to settlements that have raised more than $35 million in the last five years alone.

Related to the last post.
At this point the parallels between the Clintons, their spokesmen and followers and Nader are obvious. If the republicans represent politics as policy, the democrats' position -to be fair not always by choice- as the party of abstraction means they run the risk of conflating themselves with their goals, something that occasionally results in a level of narcissism republicans don't often match.

Republicans are ideological simpletons but political realists. Liberal intellectuals can afford to be intellectual idealists, but many of those who would life to vote for them can't afford to be idealists at all.

Neotenization and the American Liberal.
Two from Duncan Black [scroll down for the second]

CNN is informing that Hillary Clinton has to do 15 things simultaneously with her speech, and wise Soledad finally remarked that some of these things may be contradictory.
Our discourse is so stupid.
---
Back in 2004 the media were obsessed with the idea that if the Dems showed any negativity about Bush they'd be doooooooooooooooomed.
Now they're obsessed with the idea that the Dems aren't showing enough negativity.
Whatever.

I've said this too many times: "Serious" American liberals come from the ranks of those who've never understood why they didn't get laid in high school. They know this and are proud of it, wearing it as a badge of their own superiority. 'We were the smart ones."
Watching American politics at the national level is like watching a pick-up game between a crew of locals and prep-school boys who always end up whining about being fouled. Earnest and well-meaning sons of privilege angry and confused at the petty Darwinism of daily life; I'm All Right Jack, with John Kerry standing in for Ian Carmichael.
It's not that I have a particular fondness for determinism, it's just that nobody's come up with a better description of how the world works. Rationalism and wishing don't make it so.

"Our discourse is so stupid" Here as everywhere. But the inability to deal with that as a matter simply of getting things done is a peculiarly American stupidity. We're a nation of pedants, con-men and drunks.
"There are no grown-ups." And more importantly in an intellectual climate where sophistication is deemed sophistry even by the educated, no one who aspires to becoming one.

test

Badger
Links and comments.

Visser
"Why Obama–Biden Could Mean More of the Same (Or Maybe Something Worse)"

It'll be removed:

Privatization, Finlandization, spheres of influence, and Israel

Israel warned tonight that an attempt by peace activists to sail two boats to the Gaza Strip was a “provocation” and said it would consider “all options” to prevent them reaching their destination. 

A group of 46 activists set sail this morning from Cyprus and were hoping to reach Gaza tomorrow to challenge the economic blockade Israel has imposed on the territory, as well as delivering a cargo of 200 hearing aids for a deaf school and 5,000 balloons. 

Among those on board is Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law. “I’ve been nervous, but today I’m excited,” said Booth, 41, shortly before the boats sailed. “It’s not about our fear, it’s about the people waiting in Gaza. You can’t think about anything else.” 

Israel has already warned the two boats not to undertake the journey and tonight Aviv Shiron, the spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, said the journey was a “provocation” and that “all options” were under consideration to prevent the boats reaching Gaza.

No need to go into discussion of Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

“[Clinton] tried to convince Boris Yeltsin that if Russia developed in a democratic direction…”
read: non threatening to the west, militarily or economically

The weakening of international law and its supplanting by private actors... In the context of the world community the US is a private actor and US sponsored security operations are those of a private police force. “Trust us” But NATO is not the rule of law any more than George Soros is the UN. And Henry can’t help but see himself in the best light, and with the best intentions.
The post is sleazy.

Material Language

I rewrite extensively sometimes. If it's anything topical I don't hide anything. Still working on this one. All notes.

What offended me about the original post at Savage Minds was that those for whom a sophisticated understanding of language is supposedly part of their job -for whom language is a tool- would find it necessary to study a minor decorative art to gain an understanding of craft. From the draft of an article linked in the post [PDF]

Through understanding imagination as a generative force in practice, we can reconsider the role it has been scripted in theories of culture. Practice is not that through which we imagine, the cockfight is not a theatre of expression and display of what the Balinese men might imagine themselves to be, as Clifford Geertz argues. Imagination is an imperative of practice itself. The more deeply you imagine, the more deeply you practice – and, conversely, the deeper the practice, the deeper the imagination. Practical imagination, material imagination, the imaginative substance of practice complete with all in which the practice itself is engaged, embedded, intertwined, as a constituent element of practice itself is constitutive, not expressive, of culture- imagination, the lungs of culture. "

The author's mistake is in forgetting that language is material
---

Posted elsewhere but rewritten, and expanded (and expanding)
Art and criticism are joined in a fruitful antagonism, and historians and biographers are in a similar relation to those they study. But while artists may hate critics and biographers may dream secretly of supplanting their subjects in authority, only Theory as presently constituted is seen by its adherents as preceding and superior to practice.

What place do arguments from a "naturalized" epistemology have in artmaking? What place have they had in theories of Modernism and of modernist culture-making?
The foundation of theory is in its analogical relation to the sciences. Intellectual design is intellectual engineering, words replacing numbers. Theory reverses the connoisseur's placement of cause and effect, not in defense of a preferred moral truth but of a proposed logical one, and doing so attempts to undermine the role of historical/retrospective knowledge.

Theory has its origin in the prerogatives of Modern criticism, and in a very specific variant of Modernism. My experience, and here I'm publicly treading private ground, is with what I've come to think of as something post-Talmudic. "In the beginning was the word." If the first man was a believer, the second was a critic. The artist was at worst a maker of graven images, at best no more than secondary. Combined with the Modern telos of progress we get the myth of the critic as "social" scientist and not as describer but prescriber.

If art is defined as a free imagination at play, it is defended because that freedom is assumed to perform an important function in society. Action and exegesis are divided not absolutely but unevenly between artist and critic as between history and historian. Theory argues against this division of labor in both cases: history is secondary and a free imagination is unnecessary (often leading to irrationalism.) Art under theory, as culture under neoliberalism, is illustration, advertising, or indulgence.

I want to write something on Yi Yi as pattern making -invention- and observation. Good art as good empiricism always defeats theory.

As a general comment for those who are having trouble following along:
The best art in the romantic tradition, and I'm using this example only because it would otherwise seem to contradict my point, is the art that best describes romantic desire to those who would otherwise have no interest. The art that has come down to us as the most sincerely romantic has also come down to us as minor, at most secondary. That includes bad Beethoven.
Got me?

The last generation has marked the ascendency of technics in the social sciences. In the past few years I've run into a lot of melancholy if not openly miserable technicians. What am I supposed to say, I told you so?

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.

From a few days ago, a bit rewritten (in both places)

Craftsmanship manifests self-awareness. Experience is private, but the communication of experience through a common medium -the definition of craft- re-situates us and returns us to the public world.
Art is less expression than description:

"Try writing a dialogue where the implications of each speaker’s words undermine the stated intent... try writing a dialogue [for two] that’s also a quartet."

Attention to craft can reverse-engineer an understanding of the complexities of experience, can make evident how much we craft our relations otherwise without thinking, how much we construct patterns in response to pattern, as reflex. Again this returns to the difference, and tension, between invention and observation. I almost want to say that con men are empiricists and marks are unfailingly rationalist.

The inability to experience language -communication- as polyphonic. The inability to read or listen at two or more levels, of tone and implication. And the inability to recognize that you yourself communicate in this way without even thinking.
Anyone who refers to "content" is missing the point.

"Although my embodied knowledge mostly comes from the performing arts (where my only ‘tool’ is my body)"
It devolved pretty quickly

The difference between invention and observation. And "creativity" is defined as inventiveness. My grandfather was inventive. Before that he was observant.


Fordism is now foundational.

In US public discourse, Finlandization is generally seen as a form of humiliating appeasement, and something to be avoided at even a very high cost. (Strange, then, that these same westerners have consistently been urging the Palestinians to accept a deal from Israel that gives them terms considerably less favorable than what Finland won from Moscow?)

Read the comments as well.

Statements of the the obvious [archive.org] And another one, [archive.org]  less obvious

And we should not kid ourselves that we will find Democratic allies in Congress or the Obama campaign that are going to argue that our policy has been all wrong all along. That will never happen. If this conflict becomes a matter of debate in the presidential campaign, it will not be over the wisdom of the overall policy. Obama would be abandoned by the foreign policy Establishment in a New York Minute.

Reading around more, I'm now not so sure that's true. There's a real fight going on. Here are Anatol Lieven [Dead-available through a library-see image below] and Scott Horton. [archive.org] But Henry Farrell is a very specific kind of idiot.

"But this also implies that Steve’s suggestion – that Western powers should have traded off Kosovan independence for recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – would have been an even worse option. It would have been tantamount to an effective recognition of spheres of influence,"

Farrell is incapable of seeing anything through an imagination other than his own. He has the best intentions—I won't argue—but he also assumes his own impartiality. And he seems unable to tell the difference between his moral right to state as a private citizen that there should be no spheres of influence and his responsibility in arguments concerning the behavior of state actors who act on the knowledge that they exist. Moral seriousness is not moral responsibility. Manners are not actions. The US supports democracy when it's seen to suit our leaders' definition of American interests but otherwise is happy not to. Pakistan is only today's example. All this ties into my annoyed but sloppy comment here. Craftsmanship manifests self-awareness. Experience is private, but the communication of experience through a common medium -the definition of craft- re-situates us and returns us to the public world. Art is less expression than description:

"Try writing a dialogue where the implications of each speaker’s words undermine the stated intent... try writing a dialogue [for two] that’s also a quartet."

Attention to craft can reverse-engineer an understanding of the complexities of experience, can make evident how much we craft our relations otherwise without thinking, how much we construct patterns in response to pattern, as reflex. Again this returns to the difference, and tension, between invention and observation. I almost want to say that con men are empiricists and marks are unfailingly rationalist. --- * Cognitive dissonance two days later

Maureen Dowd doesn't root for Democrats. She uses her column to mock Democrats, drive wedges between Democrats, and to reinforce negative stereotypes about Democrats.

I guess the point is not that she's always wrong but that she's insulting and frivolous.

---

Clark refers often to the origins of Modernism in the striving of the petty bourgeoisie, caught in the push-pull antagonism of individual and community. By the end of the book we find him celebrating the lyrical overreach of Adolph Gottlieb.

If successful Modernism is overreach laced with irony, then the next step is to admit that Modernism was from the beginning caught in a dance of or to the death with Kitsch. Modernism at it's best was nothing more than a formally subtle (rigorously beautiful) argument for the efficacy of kitsch desire: an intensely, desperately, mediated dithyramb against mediation. And Fascism was nothing less than Modernist desire, replacing the formal argument with the fist in the face.

Irrational Exuberance or "Military Advantage in History"

Russian troops and tanks pour into South Ossetia
I'm rewriting this in response to an idiot commenter elsewhere; and I wasn't happy with it.
It would have been far wiser for the US to encourage a continued "Eastern Bloc," even if it wouldn't have been immediately as democratic as reformers would wish. Eastern European countries who wanted to join NATO should have been told instead to work with one another. The expansion of NATO has always read like a victory lap, and the reaction of an isolated Russia was predictable. It's logical to think that a less threatened Russia would have become a less threatening one.

October 2007: "Russian President Vladimir Putin has compared US plans for a missile shield in Europe to the Cuban missile crisis"

July 2008: "U.S. general warns against Russian bombers in Cuba"

It's all been remarkably short sighted, and frankly stupid. Self-interest and false idealism or irrational exuberance, won out. The long term interests of the US would have been best served by strengthening others and strengthening the UN. Instead an overconfident US already at the end of its economic dominance did the reverse.
There's a direct connection to the previous post, notes taken from comments now removed at Crooked Timber.

Also related

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History". Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history's most powerful empires.

notes

“Engagement” is not success, and efficiency limits engagement by focusing on ends rather than means: product rather than process.

At 11d:
“In fact, we seem even more unhappy about the rugrats than we did in the past. Some point to the increasing difficulties of mixing work and family.”
People no longer see self-sacrifice as a form of engagement: a form of pleasure. Individualism makes for lousy parenting. [see the second link here]

Inventiveness is now called “creativity.” Observation, the basis of art, is considered secondary, and reflection (an uneconomic activity), a waste of time.
I thought this stuff was covered in Freshman Comp if not 9th grade English class.
---

There’s no secularism without absurdity, though some people seem unaware of that.
A little serendipity for you.

“I’m guessing that there’s already a ton of papers…”
Most literature ever written, in any language. But now I’m reduced to quoting Talking Heads lyrics. It’s shameful.
I’m ashamed.

Heaven
Heaven is a place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens.

I used to like that song because it encapsulated the intellectual curiosity of early adolescence.

“Does this desire to participate in the institution of competitive soccer amount to a vision of the good life? If so, would a really rational person be willing to transcend the principles of this institution when reason demanded that?"

Does this desire to participate in the institution of the law amount to a vision of the good life? If so, would a really rational person be willing to transcend the principles of this institution when the guilty go free?

This post and many of the comments have to represent some sort of low point in the history of human life.
---

John Quiggin 08.08.08 at 5:45 am
Seth, if you had even once, in your long history here, contributed anything valuable, or even coherent, I might be inclined to pay some attention to your assessment. As it is, I can only invite you to take yourself elsewhere. Whatever others here may decide, I’ve certainly had enough of you. Consider yourself banned from commenting on my posts.

Chris Bertram 08.08.08 at 6:59 am
John, I’ve now removed all SE’s comments from this thread by marking them as spam. He’s banned from my threads too.

And then he spends a half hour reading my site.

"-as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality."

And I'm supposed to respond to this fantasy life how? With respect? With deference?

August 6th 1945

Mirroring by Spectrum Coatings

John Wayne in The Searchers. John Ford, 1956

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, Oil on canvas, 7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4"

On the one hand the comparison is obvious to the point of banality; on the other it's a secret, hidden in plain sight. The image of John Wayne in the doorway has become iconic but has to be seen as synecdochic. A movie frame is not a movie. It is by definition a mediocre photograph, incomplete. Films are built in overlapping images of action and out of a variety of perspectives and contexts. Time is the primary constitutive element.

Both images above are arguments for something, but Newman's is less argument than statement or aphorism. Not predicated on context itself it nonetheless requires one to be understood. Claiming to stand alone, it doesn't. By comparison, and this is dangerously glib, The Searchers is about the claim itself. Both works may come to the same conclusions but only one is loaded with caveats and doubts. One is made to be iconic, and the other is a description of how that same icon is constructed

---

It all ended up in the manuscript.

Helena Cobban

Klub Kid Kollectivity: I'm alone, I'm everyone

2003: Chris Bertram hearts Colin McGinn.

Sometimes, when I’m reading or listening to a paper which excites me with its novelty and brilliance, perhaps because it contains some really elegant move, a mental image comes into my head of Steve McManaman running with the ball, circa 1996. Colin McGinn, writing in the latest Prospect about how he became a philosopher, would see the parallel

The metaphor that best captures my experience with both philosophy and sport is soaring: pole vaulting, gymnastics and windsurfing clearly demonstrate it, but the intellectual highwire act involved in full-throttle philosophical thinking gives me a similar sensation – as if I have taken flight, leaving gravity behind. It is almost like sloughing off mortality. (Plato indeed thought that acquiring abstract knowledge is a return to the prenatal state of the immortal soul.) There is also an impressiveness to these physical and mental skills that appeals to me – they evoke the “wow” reflex. Showing off is an integral part of their exercise; but as I said earlier, I don’t have any objection to showing off. In any case, there is not, for me, the discontinuity between sports and intellectual activities that is often assumed. It is not that you must either be a nerd or a jock; you can be both. It has never surprised me that the ancient Greeks combined a reverence for the mind with a love of sports: both involve an appreciation of the beauties of technique skilfully applied. And both place a high premium on getting it right – exactly right.

2008: Henry Farrell hearts My Bloody Valentine. 


...not even as a guilty pleasure. Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum—the violence and warmth—of neurological overload. Henry Farrell as rationalist, rational actor, and club kid.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)1950, National Gallery of Art

T.J. Clark on Jackson Pollock [Farewell to an Idea, Chapter 6] makes arguments for Pollock's Modernism rather than concerning it.  When he refers to "the nightmare of Modernism" his Modernism is the dreamer, not the dream. The nightmare is that Cecil Beaton was right.

Cecil Beaton for Vogue, The New Soft Look, 1951

The nightmare for Colin McGinn is that My Bloody Valentine is right, that they will be seen as his rightful descendants, and they are. Cecil Beaton was right.

It's not a question of indifference or even opposition to the raw pleasures of experience—to ecstasy of one sort or another—but of a necessary return to a questioning or doubting empiricism, even regarding the self. I have memories of a childhood ecstasy that the closest I'm come to seeing described in print was a paragraph from a woman's remembrance of the onset of childhood schizophrenia. Soon is basically one sonic image of the dance of death as led by the skipping children, "unkillable infants," of a laughing god. It works on those attuned to it first and foremost as reflex, and awareness of that does as much damage to its dream as Chris Farley's radical recontextualizations of Goth Talk. And isn't that also what Beaton does to Pollock?

In the arts it's not a question of philosophical truth. The central mistake of Modernism was to imagine that questions of right and wrong, or correct and incorrect, could apply to art even more strictly than to politics, and both of course were subject to overdetermined logic. But art is always no more or less then a record of our preoccupations, whatever they are. Most things end that way, as history, but art accepts its fate. At it's best it exists, after the fact of its making, as both the most honest and most intimate description of ourselves and our failures. Preoccupations are not truths except to admit that we have them. The question for Pollock, or My Bloody Valentine, or Cecil Beaton is whether they are giving us a rich description. I would say Beaton undermines Pollock without offering us anything better. What that would be, and who would supply it?
--
Update, January 12, 2009. Continued here
---
Much longer discussion in an essay. A passage below on Pollock, referring to an exchange between Alfred Brendel and Charles Rosen on Beethoven.

The experience of the sex act is social, formal, communicative, and if the world is seen as the social realm, world-creating. The moment of orgasm as reflex is aformal, asocial (isolate), ecstatic and if the world is seen as social, world destructive. Sex as performance is a form of communication, orgasm is artless. The pretense of an 'art' of orgasm is vulgar. The popular understanding of Pollock’s work is as an ‘act’ of ‘expression,’ as orgasm not structure. Mondrian saw structure. Duchamp thought nothing about cutting off a few inches of Mural (1943) because it was too big for Peggy Guggenheim’s wall. And Pollock didn’t complain. The what and how of communication for Pollock’s work are complex - as complex in their way as the question of orgasm in Beethoven.

The manuscript, Working Title: Avant-Garde is Kitsch, is here, and here

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It's worth remembering Farrell's interviewer in 2008 was Norman Geras