source

Quoting myself from the past

On the front page of the NY Times this morning, below the fold, is a photograph taken by a camera hovering two feet above the ground, of a naked emaciated child with her head leaning on her mother's thigh.

Get up and walk away from the keyboard, into the middle of whatever room you're in. Bend forward and put your hands in front of your face as if holding a camera; close one eye and look towards the ground with the other and imagine that child at your feet. Move your index finger downwards toward your thumb and make a clicking sound, and see if you can understand what you've become.

Journalism is hackwork; it's ambulance chasing. Photojournalism is lower still because less necessary, but claims for photojournalism as art are more offensive than the work itself. Both the photographs above are crap, but one of them won an award.

Journalism needs to be defined again as advocacy not for justice or truth or high morality but simply for the public's desire, and need, to know. Advocates by title are not gatekeepers. Once journalism is defined again as it once was, then honest hacks will be more willing to accept responsibility for their actions, and on occasion may choose to intervene or at least not take the shot.

Weegee would have made something interesting out of the first shot, but he wouldn't have felt the need to travel very far to shoot it. He found his voyeurs and dead bodies where he lived, and voyeurs as much as anything were his subject. He photographed the totality. And again, the voyeuristic photograph here won the award.
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Following the link above, takes you to a discussion in English and more links. It's interesting to follow the moral logic, the sense of professional distance and false intimacy: referring to the dead girl by her first name; the discussion out of a photo-club debate in 1955, of pudgy voyeurs in denial.



Regardless of the discussion of follow-up with the her family, and the rhetoric of journalists as medical diagnosticians of war the most obvious point is forgotten: if it were taken in Sweden and the girl were white the award-winning photograph would never have been published.

Jean Léone Gérôme, The Slave Market, 1866

Gérôme, like journalists, economists, and philosophers, saw himself as having an "extended mind"; he was observing barbarism, not taking part in it.

Photographs, from the top: Nathan Weber, Paul Hansen, Jan Grarup/NOOR Images, Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star

Jack Balkin: George W. Obama and the OLC

The comments at the bottom are rewritten
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Kristof for Liberal Fascism and military paternalism

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works.

...“It’s the purest application of socialism there is,” Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. And he was only partly joking.

“It’s a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well,” he added. The country can learn from that sense of mission, he said, from that emphasis on long-term strategic thinking.

The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees.

Wild in the streets, in Vancouver

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

Gerry Kahrmann/Postmedia News Service

and Athens

Louisa Gouliamaki /AFP/Getty

Laws in a democracy are an extension of citizens' informal obligations to their neighbors. Democracy is a system of authority, but people owe allegiance to the community, not its leaders. The theory of democracy abstracts from practice: authority ascends before it descends; laws are the result, not the cause. This is something that philosophers, first as theologians and now as liberal or even "radical" technocrats, do not or cannot understand. Kristof and Clark defend authority but not democracy.

In Greece they're rioting against mismanaged paternalism. In Canada, under well-managed paternalism, they're rioting out of boredom.

Vancouver

 Jason Payne/Postmedia News Service

Contemporary defenders of naturalism are prone to argue from a very artificial sense of self. Dan Sperber in the NY Times, NewAPPS and elsewhere. I'm beginning to think all academics now descend from priests. It's depressing.

We reason when we perform basic functions, calibrating our actions when we walk, ride a bicycle and drive a car. From Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket

Joker: "How could you shoot women and children?"
Door Gunner: "Easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

The question is formed by and concerns complex reason: intellectual, philosophical, moral. The stated answer is formed by and concerns simple reason: basic empiricism, calculation. The exchange itself, in a screenplay and therefore as art, is formed by and concerns reason as reflection (intellectual and philosophical, empirical and rational), playing off the disjunction between the two forms of reason proffered at cross purposes, the whole manifesting as ironic comment.

Simple reason is driven by simple preference, though it may include complex calculation. Complex reason is ruled often by complex desire. Reason in the service of greed or glory is not reason as such. We tend to believe what we want to believe; and loyalty, to dreams and to people, is considered generally to be a virtue.


"He studies the ashtray, and tries to rule out/ preference/ preferring over/ not preferring/ but he prefers."

Robert Ashley, from Private Lives.
It's dated, and in a sense it was when in was made. But the first few minutes have stayed with me.
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I prefer his line reading in the original video.

The Leveretts:
Iran's 2009 Election, two years on

The educated class

"I started reading superhero comics over the last couple of years."

I don't even bother criticizing Republicans.
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update: John Holbo quotes J.S. Mill in a discussion of X Men

“Speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.”

Modernism, from tragedy to farce. Philosophy reduced to a 12 year old boy's fantasy of power. Mill was simply wrong. I don't know what to say about Holbo.

Google Books "Ngrams" Charting references in "lots of books"

I discussed Holland Cotter's review of the Alexander McQueen Show here, and McQueen in relation to the Bellini installation at the Frick (also Bronzino). Now Cotter has written a review of the Bellini, and it's interesting to compare them.
On McQueen:

In galleries that combine the look of baronial halls and meat lockers, clothes come at you like electrical zaps: a blouse threaded with worms, a coat sprouting horns, shoes that devour feet. A pert little jacket is printed with a crucifixion scene; the hair on a full-length hair shirt is carefully waved and combed; a corset has a cast-metal animal spine curling out from behind.

And everywhere there are arresting delicacies. The yellow-green beadwork is so fine it looks as soft as moss. Floral-patterned lace has been cut up, flower by flower, then stitched together again, but only partially, to give a dress the illusion of having being torn.

On Bellini, more specifically on St. Francis:

He was, in life, exceptional: a spiritual power generator, a social lightning rod, and a charmer. He was born in the Umbrian hill town of Assisi around 1181, the son of a rich cloth merchant. He had poetic tastes and immersed himself in romantic tales of chivalry. By temperament he was ardent, wired, prone to emotional extremes.

...He could be impossibly self-depriving; people had to persuade him to eat, wear shoes. But he was correspondingly self-giving. You needed a bandage, a pep-talk, a prayer, a kiss? Francis was your man. If he found a hurt bird he nursed it back to health; if he met a wolf with a mean streak, he’d say, “Watch your mouth,” and give it a pat.

Some people thought he’s a lunatic, this guy who suddenly bursts into song, in the middle of nowhere, for no reason, as if he was plugged into an iPod:

“Praised be You, my Lord, with all Your creatures, Especially Sir Brother Sun, Who is the day and through whom You give us light.”

And he’d go on and on this way, about Sister Moon, and Brother Wind, and Sister Water — “very useful and humble and precious and chaste” — and Brother Fire, and Sister Death.

Maybe it was all a performance, a theatrical method of preaching and teaching. But he approached life in a genuinely countercultural way. On the verge of the great age of Humanism, he was an un-Humanist, in the sense that he didn’t hold Man up as the crown of creation. He considered all beings, from bees to bears to people, equally reverence worthy. He was like the Buddha in this. Or maybe the Buddha was Francis in an earlier life.

Though I didn't say anything specific, in the earlier posts I didn't give Cotter the credit he deserves. I read the decadence and anti-Humanism (post-humanism to what Cotter refers to as "un-Humanism" of St. Francis) but missed the commentary in his closing paragraphs on McQueen.

...you have to ask critical questions. The chief problem with the fashion-as-art fad of the 1990s was precisely that it didn’t ask them.

To take two examples, for its 1997 exhibition “The Warhol Look: Glamour Style Fashion,” the Whitney Museum did little more than fill a floor with Warhol paintings, back issues of Interview and a Diana Vreeland tape and basically said: Let’s celebrate.

Two years later the Guggenheim — though it denies this — effectively rented its Manhattan premises to Giorgio Armani for his retrospective. (Such deals are now the norm, and the Met is forthright about stating that most of the money for the McQueen retrospective comes from the fashion house called Alexander McQueen.) My point is: If you’re going to deal with fashion as art, treat it as art, bring to it the distanced evaluative thinking, including social and political thinking, that scholars routinely apply to art.

Such an approach is standard in exhibition catalogs that accompany most Met shows, but not in the McQueen catalog, which, beautiful though it is, is heavy on pictures, skimpy on text.

To be fair, the show and the book were both assembled in record time during the year following Mr. McQueen’s shockingly sudden death. Suffice it to say that future researchers will want to take him out of the all-purpose tent of Romanticism and place him firmly in the cultural milieu he shared with artists like Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney and Leigh Bowery, not to mention Lady Gaga, with her cutlet couture.

And why not compare him, as a politically minded designer, with one from an earlier generation, Rudi Gernreich. They make an instructive pair. Mr. McQueen deserves this detailed accounting.

McQueen belongs with Hirst and Bowery. How long any of them will be remembered is another question.

That a critic should associate Humanism more with the Enlightenment than the Renaissance documents the fine arts' self-reported relation to philosophy as opposed to history, and that's part and parcel with the mannerism his writing describes: from pre-Humanism to post-Humanism, the young saint like the fashion designer, "ardent, wired, prone to emotional extremes."

The Enlightenment Cotter would call Humanist derived its rhetorical force from the sciences, and was anti-historical. High art (and expensive craft) derived authority from the ideal Church and the Monarchy, and their defenders if they could made the logical switch to the idealism of science, philosophy, and/or revolution. Couturiers had fewer options. The complexity of 19th century art, and of 'fine' art up to the present is the complexity of forms torn between their aristocratic heritage and bourgeois reality. McQueen, Cotter, the curators at the Frick and at the the Met all understand this, without thinking, as does Michael Kimmelman, writing about Manet. It would be better if they all thought about it a little more.

Joseph Massad in Al Jazeera
Under the Cover of Democracy
link from Nir Rosen

"...Whaddaya wanna to do about it, asshole?"

It's always amused me that Brian Leiter was "Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law" at UT Austin. Below are two videos of Joe Jamail. Watch the first one. It's short.




"Lawyers... are the rule of law." Lawyers, not judges. Joe Jamail is a legal realist. Brian Leiter is not.

Legal realism as naturalism is empiricism in practice, and theory only as derived from and returned to practice. I never want to see Leiter in a courtroom as anything other than an advisor or an expert witness. Like Quine, he's a theoretical empiricist, and we don't live our lives in a theoretical world. We live our experience. To pretend otherwise is the politics of pretension.

Philosophers defend themselves as judges, within and above a system. Advocates defend themselves only as within a system. They're not judges they're players, and Jamail is a playa. He's a storyteller, and defends the humanities with more force than a philosopher ever would, or could. [see the previous post.]

If the videos vanish at some point: The first is "Texas-Style Deposition." Joe Jamail and others in action.

Jamail is off camera to the right. He is deposing (what I assume to be) an expert witness for the Defendant in that case, the Monsanto Corp. The guy just off screen to the left is Edward M. Carstarphen, the Defense attorney representing Monsanto. The other voice you hear ('Tucker") is either a co-plaintiff's or co-defendant's attorney. Joe begins by asking the witness if he met with the attorney for Monsanto and what was discussed. Since the attorney represents Monsanto, and not the witness, there is no attorney-client privilege over such communications. The witness doesn't answer the question truthfully. It degrades from there. Carstarphen objects and tries to instruct the witness. Since he isn't the attorney for the witness, he gets called on instructing him.

 "...Whaddaya wanna to do about it, asshole?"
"I'd like to knock you on your ass"
"Come try it. Come over here and try it you dumb son of a bitch."

The second video is Jamail at Stanford. The man who introduces him is an asshole. He begins by telling a story of Jamail bragging about the size of his collection of single malt scotches:"the biggest collection you ever heard of," at 12, while the schmuck from Stanford has 36. I was surprised at Jamail's claim, but it's clear he's still a small town lawyer who made it big. He's a billionaire, but he comes off well. He defends the honor of lawyers, plying their trade as storytellers for their clients. His humility is not an act.

Chris Bertram on Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit

However, the central idea of the book, that receipt of a certain type of humanities education is necessary for people to acquire the capacities for empathic imagination that (according to MN) are necessary virtues of democratic (and indeed global) citizenship strikes me as (a) obviously false and (b) insulting to those of her fellow citizens who haven’t been the beneficiaries of such courses. Those given a more technical education are described as “useful machines” as early as p.2. There is very little empirical support adduced for any of the causal claims in the essay which tend to rely on more or less a priori arguments from various educational and psychoanalytical thinkers that Nussbaum likes.

Henry Farrell on Gambetta and Hertog's Engineers of Terror

Their preferred explanation lies in the combination of a particular mindset given to simplification, monistic understandings of the world and desire that existing social arrangements be preserved, with key environmental factors (most importantly, frustrated professional aspirations due to a lack of opportunities). Interestingly, Gambetta and Hertog suggest that the same mindset which drives engineers in the Islamic world to become terrorists, may lead to the marked tendency of US engineers to adhere to strongly conservative political views. This is the kind of topic that lends itself to the worst kind of uninformed pop-journalism academics, but as best as I can tell (I’m a consumer rather than a producer of the statistical literature) Gambetta and Hertog are extremely careful about their analysis, and up front about the limitations of their data.

[Concerning the above I'll ignore the lack of differentiation, (none of this is new). See below on Hamas, and again, Robert Pape on suicide bombing.]

The Guardian

Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.

Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from "land grabs" that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in the poorest countries in the world.

The new report on land acquisitions in seven African countries suggests that Harvard, Vanderbilt and many other US colleges with large endowment funds have invested heavily in African land in the past few years. Much of the money is said to be channelled through London-based Emergent asset management, which runs one of Africa's largest land acquisition funds, run by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency dealers.

Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent's clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns.

Richard Serra, Untitled, 1972, Charcoal on paper, 29 3/4 x 41 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John Coplans, 1975
There's something very interesting about this drawing. When it was made, and why.

"Philosophy opposes fiction, and theories of modern art opposed the 'fiction' of pictorialism. The implications of that preference are unexamined."
Look at the shape. How it appears flat and then seems to recede. The beginnings of a return to pictorial art: affirmed/denied/affirmed
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

South is South: The Women of Hamas

While preparation for the film began before the 2006 election of Hamas, Arraf found herself unable to travel to work on the film due to the Israeli blockade. She directed her contacts to film without her, and their sensitive eyes and ears capture not only the central narrative—four leading women in the Islamic resistance—but the seldom-seen sensory experience of Gaza. Children too young for the avalanche of traumatic events in their surroundings play together as children everywhere else. Street corners and alleyways are tagged with both politically-motivated graffiti and the solitary hearts of the lovelorn. Arraf combines these scenes with a wonderfully creative use of interviews that distinguishes this film from other ‘Skyped-in’ films I’ve seen. Her discussions and banter (both light and serious) with one crew member in particular, 28-year old Azhar, make for exciting cinema.

Having filmed in Gaza at the height of the Israeli military siege, Arraf’s concerns about finishing her film rang funny and true. Example: ‘If you go the fence and throw the tapes over…’ is considered a serious mailing option in a place where the average DHL shipping service runs $400-500 per package, military interventions notwithstanding.

Suha Arraf Q&A at the BFI.

From the past: Helena Cobban here and here

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian

...Of course, occupations damage the occupier no less than the occupied. Revanchist nationalism has corroded democratic and secular institutions in both India and Israel, which, not surprisingly, have developed a strong military relationship in the recent decade. Hindu nationalists feel an elective affinity with Israel for its apparently uncompromising attitude to Muslim minorities. In 1993 the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, reportedly advised the Hindu nationalist leader LK Advani to alter the demographic composition of the mutinous Kashmir valley by settling Hindus there. Advani, later India's deputy prime minister, fondly quoted from Netanyahu's book on terrorism, given to him by the author. Israeli counter-insurgency experts now regularly visit Kashmir.

India and Israel, both products of botched imperial partitions, were the Bush government's two most avid international boosters of the catastrophic "war on terror", fluently deploying the ideological templates of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – democracy versus terrorism, liberalism versus fundamentalism – to justify their own occupations.

The Guardian

Rock stars tethered their jet skis to the back of it during the film festival in Cannes, its clean lines have impressed quayside onlookers in Antibes, and England footballer Frank Lampard is reportedly set to propose to his television presenter girlfriend on board.

There can be no doubt that Roman Abramovich's enormous yacht Luna is enjoying the spotlight this summer as it tours the Mediterranean. But the citizens of Venice, a city more familiar than most with extravagant displays of wealth down the centuries, are not impressed.

The Russian oligarch's £115m, 377ft behemoth moored unannounced last week at one of the city's most stunning lagoon locations, as Abramovich and his girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova, pitched up for the Venice Biennale.

Local residents, accustomed to stunning views over St Mark's Basin, found themselves staring straight at the twin helipads and bulletproof windows of the vessel, which dwarfs all rival yachts at what has become an annual reunion of some of the most expensive private vessels in the world.

Cannes and the The Biennale:
An awards ceremony and marketplace for the makers of products that offer an ephemeral experience, products which are available relatively cheaply and in many cases worldwide; a festival based on the market for valuable objects, nonetheless including theater of the sort fit for an audience of aficionados of contemporary objecthood.

Cannes deals in visual "entertainment" while also making claims to seriousness. The Biennale deals in visual "art" and claims to represent a heritage of vanguardism. What are the economics, the politics, the philosophics of each? Which is more modern, more democratic, more post-democratic, more reactionary? What are the relations of modernism, anti-modernism, and anti-bourgeois conservatism, to authoritarianism, fascism, anti-fascism, and democracy? Complex questions. At some point people will begin to ask them.

Philosophers descend from priests, and contemporary philosophers if they're interested in art, choose to ignore that the first art in the age of mechanical reproduction was the novel. Philosophy opposes fiction, and theories of modern art opposed the "fiction" of pictorialism. The implications of that preference are unexamined.

Richard Serra, Untitled, 1972, Charcoal on paper; 29 3/4 x 41 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John Coplans, 1975
There's something very interesting about this drawing. When it was made, and why.
more later.
update: here

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Continuing, indirectly, from the previous post

That this is from Think Progress shows how much things have changed, not the facts but their presence in the public consciousness; and not through reason but through seepage.

The event took on the trappings of a spectator event on Israeli television, which broadcast the scene live with running commentary from reporters on the ground.

"Hopa!" exclaimed a correspondent for Israel's Channel 10 television. "A Palestinian youth just bolted from a trench. An Israeli sniper fired at him three times, but it looks like he missed."

How do we put discussions such as these in the broader context that includes the above? Or are we better to puts the specifics of the events in the Golan in the "broader context" of theoretical debate?

I've quoted this before. The last paragraph of Skinner's, last paper, finished the day before he died. Can Psychology be a Science of Mind?

But what about the illustrious philosophers who throughout the centuries have tried to follow the injunction of the Delphic Oracle and to know themselves through introspection? Is there a similar justification or have they been uselessly pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp? To say so would seem little short of arrogance if there were not an illuminating parallel. Equally illustrious men and women have searched much longer and with greater dedication for another Creator, spelled this time with a capital 'C,' whose reported achievements are also being questioned by science. It was Darwin, of course, who made the difference. It holds for the origin of behavior as well as for the origin of species. After almost a century and a half, evolution is still not widely understood. It is vigorously opposed by defenders of a creator. As a result, it is still impossible to teach biology properly in many American schools. A creation science has been proposed to be taught in its place. The role of variation and selection in the behavior of the individual suffers from the same opposition. Cognitive science is the creation science of psychology, as it struggles to maintain the position of a mind or self.

Seymour Hersh on the Arab Spring, "Disaster" U.S. Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Looming Crisis in Iraq

Another reason you’re so antithetical to T.S. Eliot’s stance as impersonal poet and critic? 

B: Oh, he’s a fake about that. The man’s a strong poet because of his personality, a High Romantic imagination with power over rhetoric and diction. His supposed stance as poet and critic is completely bogus. I’m tired of talking about him. You can’t educate people if they don’t want to understand the truth about Eliot.

Every poem is fake, and every poet is a con man. We read to watch the mechanics of the con and ourselves be conned. Bloom is a con man as critic: an explicator and fan of great cons. He's criticizing Eliot for the dryness of his art, not for his ideas. Or maybe he wants poets to believe their own lies fully, so that the secret ironies are only for critics to discover. Between garbage and scholarship, scholars prefer their garbage-dealers innocent. Maybe it's best when they are, but Bloom's art is just as problematic. England, perverse conservatism, (monarcho/anarcho-populism), and Gilbert and George. A couple of practical cats.

On the situation in Syria

Practice precedes theory
note taking. posted -by me- here and here

Wilmers [NYT] seems to think of banking as a social exercise. His 'rational self-interest' is bounded by a sense of obligation.
"honorable profession"
"involved in their communities,"
"the prudent extension of credit that furthers [the] commerce [of others]"

Gamblers are fundamentally asocial but good ones do well even in a crisis. Wilmers has imbibed or was raised into a moral ideology that obliquely or not abjures the 'objective' model of individualism. He's a practicing social democrat.

The idea of the social isn't very interesting. It isn't even very social.

Nocera:

Wilmers’s report, however, was less about the company’s numbers than about the dismal state of his beloved profession. Wilmers, it turns out, is that rarest of birds: a banker willing to tell harsh truths about banking. That, for instance, much of the money the big banks earn comes from trading profits “rather than the prudent extension of credit that furthers commerce.” That derivatives had helped bring about the crisis and needed to be regulated. That bank executives were wildly overpaid. That the biggest banks — the Too Big to Fail Banks — were operating, as he put it, an “unsafe business model.”

...This was a problem for several reasons. First, it meant that banks were taking excessive risks that were never really envisioned when the government began insuring deposits — and became, in effect, the backstop for the banking industry. Second, bank C.E.O.’s were being compensated in no small part on their trading profits — which gave them every incentive to keep taking those excessive risks. Indeed, in 2007, the chief executives of the Too Big to Fail Banks made, on average, $26 million, according to Wilmers — more than double the compensation of the top nonbank Fortune 500 executives. (Wilmers made around $2 million last year.)

Finally — and this is what particularly galled him — trading derivatives and other securities really had nothing to do with the underlying purpose of banking. He told me that he thought the Glass-Steagall Act — the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks — should never have been abolished and that derivatives need to be brought under government control. “It doesn’t need to be studied for two years,” he said. “I would put derivative trading in a subsidiary and tax it at a higher rate. If they fail, they fail.”

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His sister is/was the founding editor of the LRB, which exists through a growing debt to the family trust, with "no intention of the lender seeking repayment of the loan in the near future"

The continuing turn to narrative, and the emerging acknowledgment of the subsidiary role of the fine arts. Two weeks ago an art critic in the NY Times reviewed a show of dresses by a recently deceased fashion designer and another now defends filmmaking

But it is also hard not to feel impatient and to wish Mr. Weerasethakul would go the extra miles to give his vision the kind of narrative and metaphorical coherence of his more conventional but also more captivating “Uncle Boonmee.”

This is an old problem. The defender of the avant garde will argue that breaking with tradition enables the emergence of new forms of consciousness that the kitschy conventions of popular entertainment usually block. Be that as it may, Mr. Weerasethakul’s fragmenting, multiscreen approach is conventional in its own way. It focuses attention as much on how we experience projected moving imagery and puzzle together narrative in our own minds as it does on its ostensible subject matter. In that respect, its appeal is academic. But it doesn’t do anything much more advanced than Mr. Weerasethakul’s experimentalist heroes did back in the 1960s.

What is more disappointing is that in its self-consciously anti-stylish style, it muffles its own heartbeat: the story of young men caught in the unpredictable flux of history trying to imagine a better future.

"The defender of the avant garde will argue that breaking with tradition enables the emergence of new forms of consciousness"

Philosophers of course are still committed avant-gardists but there's no record of vanguardists of any stripe living up to that claim, at least in any way that they should be happy about. To say otherwise is to argue that Bill Ayers and the Weathermen are more important to the history of the U.S. in the 1960's than Martin Luther King and the SCLC. The best the cultural avant-garde could claim once is to have humanized its present. And to understand the intellectual vanguard now is to recognize that academic philosophers want to be called scientists for the same reasons investment managers want to be called financial "engineers."

The Fine Arts section of the Times has been shrinking for years. It's half the size it was even 10 years ago.

The show's been up for a bit, but they've been tweaking it. The press release went out yesterday. Co-curator with J.T., for the gallery.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
FABRIC AS FORM at Tilton Gallery
8 East 76th Street, New York, NY 10021
May 26 – July 9, 2011

The depiction of fabric, of folds, of draped cloth crosses the barriers of style, time, and continents. From ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, 4th century Ganhara Indian sculpture and 6th century Khmer art, though European Middle Age illuminations, Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, to Rubens, Titian, Durer, Delacroix, Gainsborough, Sargent, and Rodin, the painterly illusion and sculptural manifestation of draped fabric has clothed figures, adorned scenes and infused art with movement and abstract form. The grand sweeps of form inspired by what fabric used to do informs contemporary art as well, as abstract metaphor in the metal folds of Lynda Benglis sculpture, the draped mixed media works by Senga Nengudi and in the folded metal sculpture of John Chamberlain. Folds of actual cloth also appear in works that incorporate fabric by David Hammons and Richard Tuttle, and in the sweeping cloth of installations by younger artists such as India Lawrence, Scott Anderson and Martha Tuttle. Contemporary photographs by Bill Jacobson, James Welling and Barbara Morgan take up where Japanese prints and Renaissance etchings left off to bring movement in the form of cloth to their images, whether realistic or essentially abstract.

An historical stylistic element gives sway to visual form, and the story of its use changes with every era and culture. Fabric as Form brushes the surface of this subject and presents a visual gallop through the ages to sample the different approaches, metaphorical uses, and simply, visual examples of delight. Tilton Gallery invites you to an exhibition that allows your eye to roam. Fabric defines form. Form defines fabric. Historical meaning and formal analysis both define and defy the visual reality of each work of art.

Included are works by:

Scott Andresen, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Henri Pierre Danloux, Honoré Daumier, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Albrecht Dürer, Nicolas Edelnick, Madame Gres, Zaha Hadid, David Hammons, Wenzel Hollar, Bill Jacobson, Christoffel Jegher, Titus Kaphar, Torii Kiyomasu I, India Lawrence, Issey Miyake, Barbara Morgan, Senga Nengudi, Brie Ruais, Katsukawa Shuncho, Martha Tuttle, Richard Tuttle, Rembrandt van Rijn, James Welling, Charles White.

Recently, Mr. Romer has been been an advocate of a concept he calls “charter cities,” in which a poor country would turn over a piece of land to be managed by a more affluent country or countries.

"You can trust me, I have an extended mind."

Obama, Hands off our Spring

The first wave of Arab revolutions is entering its second phase: dismantling the structures of political despotism, and embarking on the arduous journey towards genuine change and democratisation. The US, at first confused by the loss of key allies, is now determined to dictate the course and outcome of this ongoing revolution.

What had been a challenge to US power is now a "historic opportunity", as Barack Obama put it in his Middle East speech last week. But he does not mean an opportunity for the people who have risen up; it is a chance for Washington to fashion the region's present and future, just as it did its past. When Obama talks of his desire "to pursue the world as it should be" he does not mean according to the yearnings of its people, but according to US interests.

And how is this new world to be built? The model is that of eastern Europe and the colour revolutions; American soft power and public diplomacy is to be used to reshape the socio-political scene in the region. The aim is to transform the people's revolutions into America's revolutions by engineering a new set of docile, domesticated and US-friendly elites. This involves not only co-opting old friends from the pre-revolutionary era, but also seeking to contain the new forces produced by the revolution, long marginalised by the US.

As Obama put it last week: "We must … reach the people who will shape the future – particularly young people … [and] provide assistance to civil society, including those that may not be officially sanctioned." To this end he has doubled the budget for "protecting civil society groups" from $1.5m to $3.4m.

The recipients are not only the usual neoliberal elements, but also activists who spearheaded the protest movements, and mainstream Islamists. Programmes aimed at youth leaders include the Leaders for Democracy Arabic project, sponsored by the US state department's Middle East partnership initiative. A number of Arab activists, including the Egyptian democracy and human rights activist Esraa Abdel Fattah, were invited to an event hosted by the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington last month – one of many recent conferences and seminars. Meetings between high-ranking US officials – such as the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer – and the Muslim Brotherhood took place in Cairo last month, while the deputy chairman of Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party has recently returned from a visit to Washington to "discuss democratic transition".

Washington hopes that these rising forces can be stripped of their ideological opposition to US hegemony and turned into pragmatists, fully integrated into the existing US-led international order. Dogma is not a problem, as long as the players agree to operate within parameters delineated for them, and play the power game without questioning its rules. It remains to be seen, however, if they risk losing their popular base in return for US favours.

Containment and integration are not only political, but economic...

From a paper [SSRN] linked at Balkinization

Living constitutionalism is largely dead. So, too, is old-style originalism. Instead, there is increasing convergence in the legal academy around what might be called “new textualism.” The core principle of new textualism is that constitutional interpretation must start with a determination, based on evidence from the text, structure, and enactment history, of what the language in the Constitution actually means.

This ties into the new themes in philosophy. The focus on the "actual" meaning of the Constitution is akin to the focus on "objects" and is founded on the same error: that what we perceive is identical to what exists beyond our perceptions.

"...what the language in the Constitution actually means." I really thought we were beyond this shit.

Emotive communication as rhetoric, true lies and performance

And Mr. Costello inhabited his characters completely when he sang: all the ache, all the venom. None was more telling than “I Want You,” a slow, seething, self-lacerating and furious confession of passion and need, with jabs of bitter lead guitar. It didn’t feel like show business at all. Maybe that was the real proof of Mr. Costello’s showmanship.

This is all a repeat, but it's necessary.

John Protevi is a philosopher.

...Because we all know that one could craft criteria so that it does, or doesn't, depending on one's desires. That strikes me as not the sort of thing we'd like on our blog.

John Mortimer was a lawyer.

I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.

We reason always in service to desire. There is no arguing otherwise. Lawyers are paid craftsmen, and Protevi sounds like Antonin Scalia.

...Because we all know that one could craft criteria so that it does, or doesn't, depending on one's desires. That strikes me as not the sort of thing we'd like on our society.

The model of a "living" Constitution which is the liberal model of legal interpretation, is that it applies to all texts: a Constitution, a Beethoven Sonata, or The Genealogy of Morals. The living Constitution describes a living language. And it's the only model that describes the history of changes that have already occurred. Meanings change through argument, but we always argue from the present and from contemporary sensibilities. The Constitution is what we desire it to be, within the constraints of language. In the future people will desire something else.

Democracy is due process: results are secondary. The process of democracy is argument, and there are a lot of arguments breaking out, so there's real politics. even among academics: 1, 2, 3

The Palestinians are still objects of debate, or at best concern, rather than subjects to be listened to. For liberals the main theme in the end is self-regard. John Quiggin wonders why he's seeing a resurgence of "Reality-based journalism?"

The fact that, with no observable exceptions, the Republican Party relies on delusional beliefs for most of its claims about economics, science and history has been obvious for some years. But, until recently it’s been outside the Overton Window. That seems to have changed,

He's seeing change, but are the Palestinians?
The only change is in normative language and reference. The Palestinians, unlike homosexuals (now), are still outside, beyond the boundary. Anthropogenic global warming is somewhere in-between. What's grotesque in liberalism, seen in Quiggin's use of the terminology of the "Overton Window" is that the term can never be used to refer to the user's own limitations.
I've been reading Bruno Latour and bits and pieces on the Extended Mind (mentioned earlier) Thinking of reading Harman. I'm beginning to see the themes: the world as collective as seen through an expanded diversified networked self.

The Israeli philosopher says to the Palestinian farmer: "I see myself in you and you in myself."

The Palestinian farmer responds: "You can't speak for me, so why pretend?"

The other is other. The expanded, networked, self will act according to it's own bias. The philosopher as a type is comparable (as I've said) to the Continental European legal role of Investigating Magistrate. Both originate in the Church.  However much the philosopher magistrate wants to claim an expanded, networked consciousness, he is still only a self: the sexist who calls himself a feminist; the asshole who claims to be "a nice guy".

The other is other. The defense attorney's other is the prosecutor. By law s/he can be nothing else. A class on feminist theory taught by a man to male students is not enough. It will not do the job. There can be no discussion of feminism without the presence of women. There can be no discussion of the Palestinians without Palestinians. Various claims to "see the other in myself" are pure rhetoric and wishful thinking. Embodied consciousness is not an idea it's what we are. And what we are are individuals defined by individual perceptions. That we can not live or thrive alone is something else entirely. You can not understand the need for community without understanding the borders of the self.

Philosophers want judges to be at the intellectual and moral center of our justice system, but they aren't. Ambulance chasers are at the center of our justice system. I had a short email exchange with Protevi, but it wasn't helpful.

The Met is swamped with viewers for the Alexander McQueen show. The roped-in waiting line runs along the main corridor of the 19th Century painting galleries, which because it's filled now with people waiting more than looking, is as loud as the main hall of the building.

Here's the crossover marketing in action.

I won't repeat my argument. The show isn't very interesting and the installation's vulgar, but that's not to diminish its significance or the significance of the public response.

At the same time, the Frick has rehung Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert, after sending it to the Met for analysis, in a temporary installation in the Oval Room. The Bellini, "is a masterpiece of spiritual poetry that has enthralled generations of visitors to The Frick Collection," but the curators, in a move as perverse as anything in the McQueen show, have added two more Van Dyck's to the others that usually flank the central staging area, surrounding and dwarfing St Francis with what are now Baroque giants, almost pagan gods, depicted in monuments to earthly luxury and pomp.


It's a great room and for the same reasons the public are lining up a few blocks away at the Met. The themes are identical, but handled here on a much higher level by curators of or near the same generation as McQueen and the designers of his retrospective. 

I called the curatorial department at the Frick to compliment them. The woman on the phone burst out laughing and she thanked me.

---

previously, on McQueen et al., and jumping forward again on McQueen and Bellini.

note taking. Synthese again, at scienceblogs/pharyngula.

Philosophers still argue among themselves whether or not what they do is "garbage", so perhaps they should be more cautious throwing accusations of "non-epistemology" at outsiders.
And empiricists should be cautious taking sides in arguments that are fundamentally theological.

update: a reply that misses my point completely, and a rejoinder.

And empiricists should be cautious taking sides in arguments that are fundamentally theological.
"When theologists stop making claims about what is real I will stop engaging them for empirical evidence."
---
A smart defender of ID can point to debates among philosophers as evidence that their own arguments should be taken seriously. Defenders of evolution should not be defending philosophic pretension to science.

That last should not be understated.
Myers himself is a model of scientist as anti-political, therefore anti-intellectual.

Previously
Leiter
New Apps etc.

5/21: And again at New APPS

I'll repeat and expand on what I said elsewhere:
A smart defender of ID could -and probably should- point to debates among philosophers as evidence that their own arguments should be taken seriously. Those wanting to defend the teaching of evolution should therefore not become trapped into defending philosophic pretension to science. Evolution should be defended in the most vulgar terms foundational to common understanding. The arguments of philosophers, as opposed to scientists, should be avoided like the plague.

It's obvious the EIC's of Synthese had no idea of the politics involved in what I can only imagine they saw as another special issue on a specific question of epistemology, and therefore of no consequence in the wider political and intellectual world. When they found out that some people took the underlying issues seriously enough to be angry, they freaked. This is not to their credit. At the same time, given all I've read over the past years, including the discussion linked above, accusations of "non-epistemology" hurled by academic philosophers make me laugh. I write this as someone whose mother was attacked in writing as evil incarnate for her work at the ACLU, and as a vile representative of the perversities of liberalism. I shudder to think of the abuse if any of her critics had ever found out she'd never been to law school or that her Ph.D. (strictly speaking AbD) was in English Literature.

The first paragraph of Panofsky's What is Baroque?

The late Scholastic logicians devised amusing helps to memory by which the many forms or figures of syllogism (conclusions from a major and minor premise) could be remembered. These mnemonic devices consisted of words of three syllables partly real and partly made up for the purpose. Each syllable stood for one of the three propositions, and the vowels therein signified the character of these propositions. The vowel a, for instance, denoted a general and positive statement; the vowel o, a partial and negative one. Thus the nice name Barbara, with its three as, designates a syllogism that consists of three general and positive propositions (for instance: 'All men are mortal all mortal beings need food consequently all men need food"). And for a syllogism consisting of one general and positive proposition and two partial and negative ones (for instance: "All cats have whiskers some animals have no whiskers consequently some animals are not cats"), there was coined the word Baroco, containing one a and two os. Either the word, or the peculiarly roundabout fashion of the main of thought denoted by it, or both, must have struck later generations as particularly funny and characteristic of the pedantic formalism to which they objected in medieval thought , and when humanistic writers, including Montaigne, wished to ridicule an unworldly and sterile pedant, they reproached him with having his head full of "Barbara and Baroco," etc. Thus it came about that the word Baroco (French and English Baroque) came to signify everything wildly abstruse, obscure, fanciful, and useless (much as the word intellectual in many circles today). (The other derivation of the term from Latin veruca and Spanish barueca, meaning, originally, a wart and by extension a pearl of irregular shape, is most improbable both for logical and purely linguistic reasons.)

Obama:
FLC
Arabist
Weiss

etc...

note taking. a two-fer (related). posted (be me) elsewhere

The extended mind hypothesis is no more than a fantasy of the hypertrophied self. The fact that we make cues and markers from the world around us, and that we create or build our subjectivity out of our experience of the world is not news. Mnemonic devices are not a recent discovery, or even a recent rediscovery. And then there's Proust. All this is evidenced in science and art. But the notion that the self itself is external to our bodies is no more than religious fantasy. And on top of that the politics are neoliberal and reactionary. If my self extends out into the world than my cell phone and my car and my girlfriend are all aspects of me, and I have to right to speak [equally] on their behalf. If they are objects in the world that I have only partial access through my perceptions, then my obligation is curiosity, and humility, even in relation to inanimate objects.

We construct our internal worlds out of our experience of the external world. Everything in science leads to to say they're tied together. Nothing leads us to say they're identical, even less that our minds encompass the world, That's nothing more than colonialism as cognitive science. I can't speak for my girlfriend, any more than Israel can speak for Palestinians.

I've come to understand recently what professors of philosophy are talking about when they refer to the new relations of Analytic and Continental philosophy: they now share poeticized fantasies of the expanded, [but] empathetic, self, speaking for the other. But we're individuals tied together. Individuality is not individualism. Aestheticized -poeticized- individualism is no more than an ideology, a theological fantasy.

scienceblogs.com/pharyngula

The essay in Synthese is titled "On the Non-Epistemology of Intelligent Design" but professional philosophers are still debating whether or not philosophy is "garbage" and therefore non-epistemology.

At the moment I'm reading arguments, made by respected philosophers (respected even by Brian Leiter) for the "Extended Mind Hypothesis", which argues that "the human mind has never been ‘bound and restricted by the biological skin-bag, … the ancient fortress of skin and skull' " and for "freeing ourselves from mere bio-chauvinistic prejudices."

Bio-chauvinism!!

If philosophers can't tell valid reasoning from garbage they should leave the arguments to scientists, and specifically to scientists who pay less attention to philosophers. Another reason to read Lewontin.

Of course there's no hard and fast rule for valid reasoning about the world. I made that point in a final comment.

Nir Rosen in Al Jazeera
Western media fraud in the Middle East

Nir Rosen (on Facebook) is right: "fucking brilliant!"
[the link is dead. The same piece posted, at Mondoweiss.]
NY Times March 20 1947

Whatever the degree of their superiority complex, however, the Jews are certainly confident of their ability to bring the Arabs to terms - by persuasion if possible, by might if necessary. The program of the largest terrorist group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, is to evacuate the British forces from Palestine and declare a Zionist state west of the Jordan, and "we will take care of the Arabs."

NY Times May 14 2011

After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed. The refugees and their descendants remain a central issue of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Monday/Friday

The show at Tilton is up.

Fabric as Form
Jack Tilton Gallery
8 East 76th St

I'm co-curator: nothing by me in it. But it began for me years ago, so I may as well link to the history.

Or use the tags below.

note taking. posted [by me] elsewhere

I think it should be hard now for anyone to deny the political aspects of what we call "knowledge", given the the things I've read on this page "thick with certain problematic assumptions", given those "stunned by Plantinga's close involvement" or concerned for the "redemptive power of philosophy and one's own religion," given that Noam Chomsky could write "[u]ncontroversially" George W. Bush's crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden’s," and be attacked as irrational, and given that one of the guest editors at Synthese is a board certified 9-11 truther. Chomsky the linguist is a rationalist who discounts empirical data that contradicts his assumptions. And I'm writing this on the anniversary of the Nakba.

The best guard against irrationality isn't reason, its a knowledge of history.

The Synthese Affair
And here

63 years.
Ali Abunimah
Gideon Levy

Quine: "To be is to be the value of a bound variable."
I can't think of a better example of mid-century Mannerism.

Rereading Panofsky's What is Baroque? the passages on Bronzino.

Christ at the Orgy

The "Nakba": 63 years.

Tim Parks

I’m English and live in Italy. During March, within two or three days of each other, I received: from The New York Review, four novels by the Swiss author Peter Stamm; from the Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, in English and Italian; and from a New York publisher, a first novel, Funeral for a Dog, by the young German writer Thomas Pletzinger. The last was accompanied by some promotional puff that begins: “Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn’t know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly.”

What a wonderful insight this careless moment of blurb-talk gives us into the contemporary American mindset! ...

"Fog in Channel. Europe cut off."
It's too early for summer repeats.

Political scientist Henry Farrell, in comments, links approvingly to a profile of Paul Krugman

A few years ago, Krugman, having decided that he was going to be writing about politics and so he should know more about it, did a very Krugman thing. He didn’t talk to people who worked in Washington. Instead, he started to read the political-science literature. Krugman had never understood the press coverage of politics, which seemed to emphasize its most irrelevant aspects. Why dwell on a presidential candidate’s psychology when the trends in unemployment would tell you who would win an election? But viewed through the prism of political science, politics began to seem much more familiar to him. There was a mathematics to it—you could assemble data, draw correlations, understand what was essential and what was noise. The underlying shape of politics came sweeping into view: If you arranged members of Congress from left to right based on how they voted on welfare-state issues—Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance—it turned out that this left-to-right axis could predict every other vote: On Iraq expenditures, on abortion, whatever. “When you realize the fundamental divide in U.S. politics is just this one- dimensional thing, and that is how you feel about the welfare state,” Krugman says, “that changes things.”

An actual scientist responds...

Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science. True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time. The cytogeneticist Jakov Krivshenko used to dismiss merely plausible explanations, in a strong Russian accent that lent it greater derisive force, as “idel specoolations.”

Even at the expense of having to say “I don’t know how it evolved” most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations.

twice.

In trying to analyze the natural world, scientists are seldom aware of the degree to which their ideas are influenced both by their way of perceiving the everyday world and by the constraints that our cognitive development puts on our formulations. At every moment of perception of the world around us, we isolate objects as discrete entities with clear boundaries while we relegate the rest to a background in which the objects exist.

I've linked to the first piece by Lewontin before.
Politics is complicated, even in this country.

Trita Parsi at FP

One of the great bluffs in the foreign policy community in the previous decade was that Israel would have no choice but to attack Iran's nuclear facilities unless Washington stepped up and took military action first. With predictable frequency since the mid-1990s, reports emerged claiming that Israel was months, if not weeks, away from bombing Iran. And every time a new dire warning was issued, a new rationale was presented to convince the world that the latest Israeli warning was more serious than the previous one. The Israeli threats, however, were bluffs all along. Israel did not have the capacity to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. But the huffing and puffing ensured that the American military option remained on the table; that Washington would not deviate from the Israeli red line of rejecting uranium enrichment on Iranian soil; and that the Iranian nuclear program was kept at the top of the international community's agenda.

But the persistent bluffing also carried a price. ... [more]

funny

Al Jazeera knew all along that Parvatz left Damascus on May 1 (FLC, here)... As to why Al Jazeera decides to sort of speak truthfully, today, on Parvatz' whereabouts, I figure that as the tempo decreases in Damascus, focus needs to shift elsewhere... [.FLC reported that Parvatz was in Iran and that even her US senator knew that, on May5.]

Rump Modernism:

I read that he [Wael Ghonim] has just signed a deal to write a book for Westerners about the Egyptian "revolution." That is a book I won't read. (I give him credit for donating all proceeds to the families of victims of Mubarak repression). If the Egyptian uprising wants to progress toward a revolution, it has to push aside all lame liberal voices.

I'm not a fan of Ghonim, the man from Google, but AbuKhalil's radical idealism or reactionary authoritarianism -take your pick- is stupid. He's sounding more and more like Brian Leiter, another snobbish intellectual aristocrat (adding a specifically aristocratic/vanguardist argument for violence). Add to that also the anger of the native colonial elite. All dated; and all too fucking predictable.
---
5/11
More stupidity

McClatchy: While Bahrain demolishes mosques, U.S. stays silent.

Laleh Khalili at Jadaliyya: What Churchill Said

"We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic."

The image of Samar, then 5 years old, screaming and splattered in blood after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005, illuminated the horror of civilian casualties and has been one of the few images from this conflict to rise to the pantheon of classic war photography. The picture has gained renewed attention as part of a large body of work by Chris Hondros, the Getty Images photographer recently killed on the front lines in Misurata, Libya.

I've asked this question before about other examples of photojournalistic "art": Could you have taken it?

The paragraphs below were written by an art critic not a style writer, and did not appear in the style section but in the section now named Art & Design.

A hairstylist friend of mine used to place leather bondage gear in her downtown shop window to scare off what she called “the wrong element,” meaning anyone wanting a nice wash and trim. She wanted to be sure that if you sat in her chair, you were ready to accept whatever look she decided on for you, because it would change the way you saw yourself in the world. That was the deal.

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a survey of the career of the British fashion designer who died last year, a suicide at 40, is similarly about control and change. The show, or rather what’s in it, is a button-pushing marvel: ethereal and gross, graceful and utterly manipulative, and poised on a line where fashion turns into something else.

40 years ago the explicit collapsing of categories would have been unthinkable. In 1994 when the New Yorker published an issue of articles on the fashion scene its writers were accused of slumming.*


Frank Gehry: "One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini."


Descartes: "History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it."
Eric Hobsbawm

Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and for the historian of culture, one of the most central.

Contra Descartes, as I've said a thousand times, language is change. "The primacy of the theoretical" will become always the primacy of fashion. The dream of a "scientific philosophy" is just that.
____

I saw the show this afternoon.
McQueen wasn't a couturier; he was a costume designer, and that gives both the credit they deserve. But as with almost everything put on by the Costume Institute the installation turns the Met into Madame Tussaud's. It's more vulgar—bought and paid for—than the Guggenheim at its worst.

And I'll say again that the arts that cater only to the tastes of the various pseudo-aristocracies under capitalism lend themselves easily to kitsch. "Live the fantasy" is a tag-line in the fashion world, but whether the fantasy is of beauty and eternal youth or intellectual significance, the basic structure is identical. And again there's something about Americans and the British and their relationship to France. A popular definition of kitsch is to be "more Catholic than the Pope", and McQueen's work—more French than the French—is as desperately overdetermined as an english language discussion of French theory. What's interesting about Gehry, and I've said this before too, is that his interest in Bernini doesn't originate in the academy. He sees the old world with fresh eyes.

Academics tend to forget that invention begins with observation and that erudition is only a tool. The librarian is never the best model for intellectual life.
---

* The issue is now on the web. One article in particular caused a bit of a stir. Below are the last paragraphs of Hilton Als' profile of Andre Leon Talley

“Look, LouLou!” Talley shouted. “The color of this ring is divine, no? Just like the stone you gave me!”

“What?” LouLou de La Falaise asked, barely disguising her boredom.

“This ring, child. Just like the stone you gave me, no?”

LouLou de La Falaise did not respond. She nodded toward Roxanne Lowitt, and Lowitt instructed her to stand behind Maxime de La Falaise and Talley. LouLou de La Falaise said, “I will stand there only if André tries not to look like such a nigger dandy.”

Several people laughed, loudly. None louder than André Leon Talley. But it seemed to me that a couple of things happened before he started laughing: he shuttered his eyes, his grin grew larger, and his back went rigid, as he saw his belief in the durability of glamour and allure shatter before him in a million glistening bits. Talley attempted to pick those pieces up. He sighed, then stood and said, “Come on, children. Let’s see something. Let’s visit the house of Galliano.”

More on McQueen, and Holland Cotter, and Bellini at the Frick.

Ahmadinejad and Mashaei.
Also here.
And last year

Duncan Black

I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is.
...The kids are fine. It's our elite overlords that are all screwed up.

American liberals identify with American children as American conservatives identify with those they see as American adults. And this is the result:
NYT

Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights on the most recent national civics examination, and only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, according to test results released on Wednesday.

At the same time, three-quarters of high school seniors who took the test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unable to demonstrate skills like identifying the effect of United States foreign policy on other nations or naming a power granted to Congress by the Constitution.

And again (my comments, continuing from here)

There's nothing Nietzschean about learning from precedent, or pointing out the obvious parallels between the various disastrous attempts to "naturalize" the humanities [or if you want to indulge pop references: to see the relation of the cloistered academic Modernism of Quine to the tortured puritan Modernism of his nephew Robert, the junkie guitarist]. I have to admit when I first heard Law and Economics described as the new Marxism I didn't know enough to get the joke.

The argument that philosophy "invents concepts" and "makes futures possible" is predicated on the assumption that philosophical ideas have no parallel in other forms of culture. The evidence shows otherwise. But in modern philosophy myopia is a given, if not an imperative. It's a form of academic exceptionalism with its own parallels, in the US specifically.

I don't quibble over the representational power of formalist mathematics, but the lie of the representational power of formalist language played a major role in most of the great crimes of the last century. The attack on economic science by defenders of philosophical science is well deserving of mockery.

Zaha Hadid Pavilion installation time lapse

my comments elsewhere

"All philosophers that enter the public sphere -- Heidegger, Mill, Socrates, Adam Smith, Rousseau, etc -- can expect that people will be interested in more than just their arguments, but also how those arguments relate to their public activity."

By their nature all philosophies enter the public sphere. Quine's politics descend from his philosophy.

Eric Schliesser is a promoter of a "scientific philosophy" that whether he likes it or not tracks attempts at "scientific" economics or "scientific" history. All three are based on faith more than reason and all three will suffer the same fate.

There's no evidence that philosophers "make future(s) possible". None.
Modernists attempts to defeat history have gone from tragedy...

The Patriot Reflex

Tariq Ali

In 2006 on my way back from Lahore I encountered an acquaintance from my youth. Shamefacedly he confessed that he was a senior intelligence officer on his way to a European conference to discuss better ways of combating terrorism. The following conversation (a lengthier version can be found in The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power) ensued:

‘Is OBL still alive?’
He didn’t reply.
‘When you don’t reply,’ I said, ‘I’ll assume the answer is yes.’
I repeated the question. He didn’t reply.
‘Do you know where he is?’
He burst out laughing.
‘I don’t, and even if I did, do you think I’d tell you?’
‘No, but I thought I’d ask anyway. Does anyone else know where he is?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
I insisted: ‘Nothing in our wonderful country is ever a secret. Someone must know.’
‘Three people know. Possibly four. You can guess who they are.’
I could. ‘And Washington?’
‘They don’t want him alive.’
‘And your boys can’t kill him?’
‘Listen friend, why should we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?’

Now the Americans have killed the goose themselves. What was the bounty promised and to whom? Would that they also now brought to an end the war and occupation that was supposedly fought to take out Osama and that has already led to civilian casualties that are, at the very least, four times higher than the casualties of Twin Towers. Will they? Like hell they will.

Peter Bergen (apparently) on CNN: "Killing bin Laden is the end of the War on Terror. We can just sort of announce that right now."
Not hardly.

Ted Koppel

The Israeli government is so concerned that America's adversaries may miscalculate U.S. intentions that it is privately urging Washington to make it clear that the U.S. would intervene in Saudi Arabia should the survival of that government be threatened.

Watch for the reference to the Shiite "minority" in Bahrain. Obscene. And pathetic. From FLC and AA