"As far as his army record goes, Feyerabend claims in his autobiography that his mind is a blank. But in fact this is one of the periods he tells us most about. Having passed his final high school exams in March 1942, he was drafted into the Arbeitsdienst (the work service introduced by the Nazis), and sent for basic training in Pirmasens, Germany. Feyerabend opted to stay in Germany to keep out of the way of the fighting, but subsequently asked to be sent to where the fighting was, having become bored with cleaning the barracks! He even considered joining the SS, for aesthetic reasons. His unit was then posted at Quelerne en Bas, near Brest, in Brittany. Still, the events of the war did not register. In November 1942, he returned home to Vienna, but left before Christmas to join the Wehrmacht's Pioneer Corps.

Their training took place in Krems, near Vienna. Feyerabend soon volunteered for officers' school, not because of an urge for leadership, but out of a wish to survive, his intention being to use officers' school as a way to avoid front-line fighting. The trainees were sent to Yugoslavia. In Vukovar, during July 1943, he learnt of his mother's suicide, but was absolutely unmoved, and obviously shocked his fellow officers by displaying no feeling. In December that same year, Feyerabend's unit was sent into battle on the northern part of the Russian front, but although they blew up buildings, they never encountered any Russian soldiers.

Despite the fact that Feyerabend reports of himself that he was foolhardy during battle, treating it as a theatrical event, he received the Iron Cross (second class) early in March 1944, for leading his men into a village under enemy fire, and occupying it. He was advanced from private soldier to lance corporal, to sergeant, and then, at the end of 1944, to lieutenant. At the end of November that year, he gave a series of lectures to the officers' school at Dessau Rosslau, near Leipzig. Their theme was the (“historicist”) one that “historical periods such as the Baroque, the Rococo, the Gothic Age are unified by a concealed essence that only a lonely outsider can understand” (p. 49). His description of these lectures, and of his notebook entries at the time, reveals the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche in their fascination with this 'lonely outsider', 'the solitary thinker' (p. 48)."

Having returned home for Christmas 1944, Feyerabend again boarded the train for the front, this time for Poland, in January 1945. There he was put in charge of a bicycle company. Although he claims to have relished the role of army officer no more than he later did that of university professor, he must have been at least a competent soldier, since in the field he came to take the place of a sequence of injured officers: first a lieutenant, then a captain, and then a major, before he was shot during another heroic act of carelessness performed in the 1945 retreat westwards from the Russian army. The bullet lodged in his spine left him temporarily paralysed from the waist down, meaning that he spent time in a wheelchair, then on crutches, and thereafter walked with the aid of a stick. The war ended as he was recovering from his injury, in a hospital in Apolda, a little town near Weimar, while fervently hoping not to recover before the war was over. Germany's surrender came as a relief, but also as a disappointment relative to past hopes and aspirations. He later said of his stint in the army that it was 'an interruption, a nuisance; I forgot about it the moment it was over' (p. 111)."

"Heydrich's facial expression as he died betrayed an 'uncanny spirituality and entirely perverted beauty"

"Since it is opportunity which makes not only the thief but also the assassin, such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmoured vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the Fatherland not one whit. That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic"

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

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

NYRB: "The Strange Case of Paul De Man", by Denis Donoghue, in 1989, and by Peter Brooks, in 2014.  And Heidegger again. "Heidegger's 'black notebooks' reveal antisemitism at core of his philosophy. New publication shows highly influential philosopher saw 'world Judaism' as driver of dehumanising modernity."
Brecht somewhere called Benjamin a fascist.

"Second to this at least was my parents' recording of Der Jasager, the only opera that has ever made me cry, and which I've thought for years should be staged with the cast in the uniforms of the Hitler Jugend."



new tag: Mannerism and The Gothic

"With my political philosopher hat on, I can say that just states find ways to integrate their citizens across ethnic and linguistic divides…"

"Principled bigotry is still, you know, bigotry."
So Zionism is racism. etc. etc.

"He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland."

"The 'liberty' crowd, led by Ross Douthat of the Times, braces itself for persecution of its views"

[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau.21 Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts. Opponents, including Johnson, raised the same arguments that would be marshaled against affirmative action programs a century later, but well more than the necessary two-thirds of Congress concluded that the 13th and 14th Amendments authorized race-conscious legislation to ameliorate the social condition of blacks.

"Why I can’t stand white belly dancers."

"Black children might have been better off without Brown v. Board, Bell says"

“He got his Visionz from our visions.” They haven't learned a goddamn thing in ten years.

Halperin’s teaching promotes “homosexuality as a social rather than an individual condition and as a cultural practice rather than a sexual one”. He scrutinizes artefacts that he believes are indispensable to “gay acculturation” and the development of “gay male subjectivity”: Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, opera, diva-worship, pop and disco music, camp, and allied phenomena. This is because he believes that “gay sentiment”, the feelings of the “socially disqualified”… Elsewhere he explains that sexual acts between men can be “undignified, filthy, shameful, and perverse (at least if you’re doing it right)”

A more vivid proof, not mentioned by Butler, may be found in Ginsberg’s recent echoes of the totalitarian apologetics offered by some of the Modernists of the 1920s and 1930s. Ginsberg has placed his spiritual life in the care of a Tibetan guru (one consciously avoided by the Dalai Lama), the autocrat of a spiritual retreat and poetry workshop near Boulder, Colorado. Among the guru’s activities are punching recalcitrant visiting faculty in the face and having them stripped naked by his goon squad. Ginsberg defends the guru’s methods as an ‘experiment in monarchy’, and insists that he must not be judged by the standards of lesser mortals.

The German Federal Republic, although it has not yet recognized the State of Israel -presumably out of fear that the Arab countries might recognize Ulbricht's Germany - has paid seven hundred and thirty-seven million dollars in reparation to Israel during the last ten years; these payments will soon come to an end, and Israel is now trying to negotiate a long-term loan from West Germany. Hence, the relationship between the two countries, and particularly the personal relationship between Ben-Gurion and Adenauer, has been quite good, and if, as an aftermath of the trial, some deputies in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, succeeded in imposing certain restraints on the cultural-exchange program with West Germany, this certainly was neither foreseen nor hoped for by Ben-Gurion. It is more noteworthy that he had not foreseen, or did not care to mention, that Eichmann's capture would trigger the first serious effort made by Germany to bring to trial at least those who were directly implicated in murder. 

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." 

... Developments on the ground in Palestine, however, could not be ignored. On May 3, eleven days before Britain’s departure from Palestine, the US Consul in Jerusalem reported on the collapse of Palestinian government with the warning that “unless strong Arab reinforcements arrive, we expect Jews overrun most of city upon withdrawal British force.” [1] The same officer reported in April on the steady advances of Jewish forces in “aggressive and irresponsible operations such as Deir Yassin massacre and Jaffa,” as well as what occurred in Haifa in the same period. The US Consul reported that British and others agreed in early May 1948 that “Jews will be able sweep all before them unless regular Arab armies come to rescue.

"With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay." 

so bored.

Geuss is smart at least.

Aristophanes may or may not have got Socrates right in taking him to be a dangerous subversive, but Plato was certainly on Aristophanes’ side in thinking that a happy ending was possible only in a polity from which “sophists” were excluded. The difference is that Plato added to Aristophanes’ arsenal of satire, innuendo, drama, slapstick, and verbal pyrotechnics a highly developed variant of one of the sophists’ own weapons, ratiocination.

Leiter: "The capitalist case for studying philosophy. Here."

Huffington Post: The Unexpected Way Philosophy Majors Are Changing The World Of Business

Dr. Damon Horowitz quit his technology job and got a Ph.D. in philosophy -- and he thinks you should too.

"If you are at all disposed to question what's around you, you'll start to see that there appear to be cracks in the bubble," Horowitz said in a 2011 talk at Stanford. "So about a decade ago, I quit my technology job to get a philosophy PhD. That was one of the best decisions I've made in my life."

As Horowitz demonstrates, a degree in philosophy can be useful for professions beyond a career in academia. Degrees like his can help in the business world, where a philosophy background can pave the way for real change. After earning his PhD in philosophy from Stanford, where he studied computer science as an undergraduate, Horowitz went on to become a successful tech entrepreneur and Google's in-house philosopher/director of engineering. His own career makes a pretty good case for the value of a philosophy education.

repeats.
Philosophy without philology, logic without history. The original meaning of 'entrepreneur' was 'contractor';  a barista in Italy was and is a bartender; "real change" ain't what it used to be.

My business is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.

The ghost of Panofsky: "Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need"
Thank you, but this is now getting silly.

Marjorie Perloff on Karl Kraus

If this dialogue, written in 1915, strikes us as cleverly mimetic of street slang, think again; for the rhymed insults to the Russians, French, and British were actually taken from a German cartoon picture postcard (25 August 1914), in which two soldiers wearing spiked helmets (here designated as Willi and Karl) are attacking the enemy.

Reframed, the verses appear in what is probably the first—and perhaps the greatest—documentary drama written: Karl Kraus’s devastating Die Letzen Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind). Kraus’s dialogue, as in the scene above, sounds colloquial and nothing if not “natural,” representing as it does a variety of linguistic registers based on social class, ethnicity, geographical origin, and profession. But a large part of the play is drawn from actual documents, whether newspaper dispatches, editorials, public proclamations, the minutes of political meetings, or manifestos, letters, picture postcards, and interviews—indeed, whatever constituted the written record of the World War I years. “The unkindest actions reported here,” writes Kraus in his preface, “really happened; the unlikeliest conversations are reported here word for word; the most glaring inventions are quotations” (LTM, p. 9). Citations from Shakespeare and Goethe are interspersed, using the technique of montage, with cabaret song, patriotic ode, tableau vivant, vaudeville, puppet play, and, in the later acts, even photomontage so as to create a strange hybrid—part tragedy, part operetta, part carnival, part political tract—in which “high” and “low” come together in a strange new blend. “A document,” as Kraus puts it, “is figural; reports come to life as characters; characters breathe their last as editorials” (LTM, p. 9). And, throughout, the comic, the hilarious, the grotesque, the surreal dominate. “Here in Austria,” as Kraus had famously quipped, “there are unpunctual trains that cannot get the hang of their scheduled delays.

In its analysis of the role the media plays in disseminating the case for war, Kraus’s work is startlingly contemporary...

A heap of broken images

It's always odd to me how many people write about things that appeal to them without asking why they should like what they like. I still think of second order curiosity as the sine qua non of intellectual life.

I've never forgotten reading Willebald Saurländer describe what he felt to be the deeply personal relation of a contemporary author to his historical subject, even if the one name I'd forgotten was the author of the book he was reviewing.  I've never forgotten not because the idea was new to me but because it was a historian describing how we will the past into the present and the present into the past. It made me smile.
---
From Czechoslovakia to Texas metropolis
Who sampled?  So obvious I forget. new tag: Collage Mash-up Remix

"He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland."

Edward Mendelson on Auden

On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive.

I reposted the above, between two short paragraphs, in a comment at the Boston Review.

"Does Reading Literature Make You More Moral? This was the question posed by philosophy professor Debra Satz to three panelists—myself, David Kidd, and Joshua Landy—at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society earlier this month."

It's sad that almost every time I come here I come here to mock.
Does philosophy make you more moral? Why is it that people who teach Plato for a living don't feel any necessary obligation to teach him alongside Aristophanes, while teachers of Aristophanes have no choice but to teach both?...

"I am a serious person" is the claim of every philosophy professor, so we get very 'serious' discussions of whether to take 'non-philosophical' and 'non-serious' writing seriously at all.

And we're having this discussion about philosophy and literature for the same reason the US is repeating the absurdities of 50 years ago in foreign policy.
---
update. the ghost of Panofsky. posted above but it belongs here.

Raymond Geuss

Aristophanes may or may not have got Socrates right in taking him to be a dangerous subversive, but Plato was certainly on Aristophanes’ side in thinking that a happy ending was possible only in a polity from which “sophists” were excluded. The difference is that Plato added to Aristophanes’ arsenal of satire, innuendo, drama, slapstick, and verbal pyrotechnics a highly developed variant of one of the sophists’ own weapons, ratiocination.

Stephen Walt in FP.
No Contest

The Obama administration was clearly taken by surprise when Russia decided to seize Crimea by force. The real question, however, is why Obama and his advisors thought the United States and the European Union could help engineer the ouster of a democratically elected and pro-Russian leader in Ukraine and expect Vladimir Putin to go along with it? This remarkable combination of hubris and naiveté is even more striking when one considers that Washington has few, if any, options to counter Putin's move. 

A bouncer is paid to suppress violence, not fuel it.  It's not a job for insecure people or people who enjoy power and want more of it.

Wednesday 06 April 1994 AP MOSCOW - Ukraine sent top military officials and more special troops to the Crimean Peninsula yesterday amid fears of an impending crackdown on separatists.

The arrival of 30 special troops from the National Guard and Interior Ministry, added to 500 others newly moved to a Sevastopol naval base, gives Ukraine 51,000 troops in Crimea, the ITAR-Tass news service said. That compares with 18,000 two years ago.

Adding to the tension, the recently elected Crimean President, Yuri Meshkov, was several hours overdue in returning from Cyprus. And the commander of the Black Sea Fleet was hospitalised after reportedly shooting himself in the leg accidentally.

The odd series of events, heading into Sunday's third round of crucial parliamentary elections in Ukraine, increased speculation that Kiev may take strong steps to halt growing separatist moves.

After Crimean residents voted overwhelmingly for closer ties with Russia in an unofficial plebiscite on 27 March, nationalist politicians warned that armed conflict is likely this spring in the southern peninsula, where Russians comprise a majority.

If Putin made a mistake, the mistake will play out faster if the US stays in the background.
But that's not going to happen. Stupid

repeat.
Old writing. 1987-95. From the old version of what will be [unless something goes wrong] the book.

We generally assume that the intellectual and esthetic preoccupations of high modernism were antithetical to narrative or allegory. We think less often however of the ways in which this stance is responsible more than anything else for the failure of the many attempts of a self-consciously enlightened modernism to engage in politics and indeed in the world at large. Society is the product of dialectical processes very unlike the personal dialectics we find within one person's deliberately isolated imagination, yet this isolation remains the central image of modernist culture, indeed of all intellectual and high-cultural life up to and including our supposedly post-modern present.

My interest in the first part of this essay is to lay out and define the parameters of modernism and its relationship to the world; not the relationship desired necessarily by any of the participants, but the ones that existed. It is important to note at the outset that all aspects of culture were affected by the changes of the modern world. The template was the same, regardless of how the participants saw themselves; though some chose advocate for ‘progress’ and others for conservatism or reaction. The story of modernism is the story of how those groups or desires (often overlapping in the actors themselves) grew together and apart and together again, in ways few or any were able to foretell, least of all those who tried to.

High modernism’s preoccupations were twofold and contradictory: on the one hand in absolute identity, in self as opposed to society, and on the other in abstract principles as opposed to the individual elements, actions, or people, to which they were applied. Formalism, or structuralism (in its most general sense) describes an interest in the infrastructure of ideas and processes and was meant to oppose, or escape, any implicit and therefore metaphysical predisposition toward one or another technique or methodology. The goal was not so much to choose but to study the process of decision-making, since preference for A or B could be merely that, and not an objectively agreed-upon truth. It was this master allegory of objectivity and not objectivity itself that gave modernist political rhetoric its power. The paradigmatic form of this objectivity in intellectual life became an idea of analysis, in all of the ways in which we are now familiar with it, and its implication of scientific method.

Artists. thinkers and others at the beginning of the last century who were not comfortable with what was becoming an activist modernism were in a bind. Many were more comfortable with a known past than an unstable present and turned to what they considered the higher ground of the 19th century bourgeois. This chimera –it was not more an that- could not do well against the concrete reality of scientific and mechanical progress and the power that electric lights, and motors, and soon automobiles and airplanes could carry as popular and later universal metaphors. But if the recent past was seeming more remote it was still within living memory; how else do we describe Thomas Mann, Henry James, Eliot, Joyce or Proust, but as moderns -not modernists- remembering the time before modernism, documenting the change through the mediation (form) of often very up-to-date language.

If some succeeded, however unhappily, in living with their grief -this new anxiety-, others chose the lesser but equally Victorian sibling of 19th century high culture, the demimonde that followed in the literary footsteps of the Marquis de Sade. There tastes were for the sensual and an ideal of metaphysical immediacy. The Marquis, an anti-materialist from another generation, fought against an enlightenment that he could not take part in and a past that that he could not escape. If he desired release, if he desired an easy out from the social obligations of discourse, from the banality of conversation as chitchat, he could he no more accept the pretensions of those who argued for a Christian god than Alfred Jarry, over 130 years later, would accept the pontifications of those whom he would personify as Ubu. The willful self-destructive acknowledgement of impotence that marked de Sade would also mark his descendants, from Sacher-Masoch to Jarry, to Dada, Surrealism, and on. These esthetic radicals in turn share the fringes of modernism with conservative fantasists: Jung, Gurdjieff and painters such as Nicholas Roerich, all best defined as the defenders -or the shadows- of the 19th century metaphysical narrative tradition. With them they share an inability either to shut out, or control, the memories of the 19th century which artists such as the politically conservative but thoroughly modern Eliot or the vaguely left wing Picasso were able to do.

SUCCESS

The issue is one of successful mediation. ...

"I just watched Pan’s Labyrinth. I liked it. Belle and I debated whether it had a happy or a sad ending. I think it had a happy ending."
The intellectual level of contemporary academia

The contradictions of Tim Clark

Lecture II

Cubism, these paintings convince me, is a style directed to a present understood primarily in relation to a past: it is a modest. decent, and touching appraisal of one moment in history, as opposed to a whirling glimpse into a world-historicai present-becoming-future. It is commemorative. Its true power derives not from its modernity. that is, if we mean by this a reaching toward an otherness ahead of time, but from its profound belonging to a modernity that was passing away: the lonq modernity of the nineteenth century. ...

Cubism's world has the following structure. It wishes to state again, this time definitively, that the world is substantial through and through, with space only real -only felt- to the extent that it is constrained and solidified. Physical reality is something the mind or imagination can only reach out to incompletely, for objects resist our categories; and painting can speak to this ultimate non-humanness of things very well; but only by giving their otherness a certain architecture, a certain rectilinear -indeed "cubic"- constructedness. And this constructedness is only real if it is not far away, and smaller than us, or maybe just the same size. ...

Roger Fry says of Picasso in 1921, looking back to the line of work from 1908 to I916 —he says it a little regretfully— that "the obstinate fact remains that the limit of depth into the picture space is soon reached, that these pictures rarely suggest much more backwards and forwards play of planes than a high relief in sculpture. The immense resource [that painting has] of suggesting real distance and, perhaps even more important, circumambience of space seems to be almost cut off, or at most reduced, in its power to persuade the imagination." Well, yes: because the imagination should not be so persuaded; because the space of modernity is only falsely circumambient: it does not surround us like a circle—the great shape at the bottom of Still Lift in front of a Window could be understood as a parody of any such claim— it faces us like a piece of wainscoting. We lean on it like a table. We strum the strings of its guitar. We take off in our paper Montgolfier—Picasso actually made paper cutout versions of his  Young Girl's toys before reproducing them in paint—for a voyage around its four walls. And this proximity, this tactility, this coziness, is the condition of endless mad inventiveness about its particular states. Because the interior is the truth of space—for Bohemia, those last believers in the nineteenth century.

see the tags. more later.

As long as I'm at at…
More for Austin, Searle, etc.

Clark: "-Portrait of a Young Girl, is collage epitomized, for all that the stick-ons are illusions in oil-"

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief...

Art is use and reference.
And Searle now has his own tag

I just discovered contemporary philosophy has as one of its topics something called "The Paradox of Fiction." I'm still not cynical enough.

Two repeats, both recent. Looking for the second, I found the first, which fits with another even more recent post. It fits so well I'm embarrassed I'd forgotten it. "...a man who says his lines on a stage while acting in a play while he is indeed repeating lines composed by someone else, is not in general quoting the lines. There is a basic difference in that in parasitic discourse the expressions are being used and not mentioned."

More on Kristof.
Josh Marshall: "I was supposed to be a history professor"
Atrios was supposed to be an economics professor.

Bertram on Ukraine and Farrell on Snowdon are sincere, admonishing, superior, self-serving.
The End of Hypocrisy. No end to irony.

Victoria Nuland: "Matt, as you have made clear again and again in this room, we are not always consistent."

notetaking. a comment (mine) at The Immanent Frame

Humanism is defined by irony; modernity as it’s come down to us now knows irony mostly in it’s blackest form. Cries of “God is dead” were the cries of people who once believed now desperate to find a replacement, the secularism of the ex-theologian not the bemused and maybe slightly drunken village atheist. More’s the pity. The secularism of scientific determinism is secular anti-humanism. Compared to the author of “In Praise of Folly” the author of “Discourse on Method” wasn’t much of a humanist, so the pleasures of architecture lost out to the moral imperatives of engineering.
The rise of political Islam is a modern phenomenon in reaction to modern pressures -an ideology to meet what was perceived as ideology- but it’s also the result of partnerships of conservative elites with Western interests. It’s impossible to separate modern Saudi from the history of oil. Perhaps the author should do a bit more research on 20th century Arab secularism.
Still Iran today is more modern than it was under the Shah. The Iranian revolution has produced a broader based middle class than existed before. The same is true for Turkey under Erdogan. And secularization follows, always. The hope is that it follows the secularization of European Judaism rather than European Christianity, for which it was such a crisis. Europe’s Muslims are the new Jews. They’re where the next generation of European humanists will come from, or are already.

"Meine beiden Klempner"
German Humanists disdained science. Naturwissenschaft. Geisteswissenschaft. Scientific socialism was Engels, the British factory owner. Marx was a journalist and gave lectures in workingmen's clubs. He exchanged letters with American presidents. knew much of Shakespeare by heart. How did this turn into the Frankfurt School?

To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The litterateurs of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society. 

"the advance guard".
---

2/25 Marshall again

My old college professor Tony Grafton rightly made the point that scholars aren't narrowing their fields of inquiry for the hell of it. Narrowing of focus is often the price of discovering genuinely new information, opening doors to new knowledge. And narrowness itself is probably too ambiguous a word to be useful in this context.

It's sad that Grafton would fall for that, especially since the past is what's being forgotten, in the academy as much as outside it.

"The sociology of modern knowledge production..." etc.

link

@MaxBlumenthal Not only did #Obama admin officials meet with extremist #Svoboda leader Tyahnybok, Sen #McCain too. pic.twitter.com/vaMWuSbYMm
— dominique e. (@dominique_e_) February 24, 2014

Are the robots about to rise?

again, and again, and again,  No

Googling for "indecisive machines" still doesn't get much, other than me. The one link the USA Today doesn't include the phrase that appears in the link.

Build a machine with two separate and competing algorithms, for conditioned response and calculation, and a root level imperative for continued operation: survival.  Complexity itself isn't the issue.

At some point it will be possible, but it's not a good idea.

The Nuland-Pyatt leak: BBC

Stephen F. Cohen, Democracy Now

Where do you want me to begin? I mean, we are watching history being made, but history of the worst kind. That’s what I’m telling my grandchildren: Watch this. What’s happening there, let’s take the big picture, then we can go to the small picture. The big picture is, people are dying in the streets every day. The number 50 is certainly too few. They’re still finding bodies. Ukraine is splitting apart down the middle, because Ukraine is not one country, contrary to what the American media, which speaks about the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Historically, ethnically, religiously, culturally, politically, economically, it’s two countries. One half wants to stay close to Russia; the other wants to go West. We now have reliable reports that the anti-government forces in the streets—and there are some very nasty people among them—are seizing weapons in western Ukrainian military bases. So we have clearly the possibility of a civil war.

Patrick Smith, FPIP

Every time we overhear U.S. diplomats talking when we are not supposed to, the conduct of American foreign policy sounds less imaginative, more reckless, and astonishing in its fidelity to eras many of us thought would never come again. Who would have thought Obama’s conduct abroad would recall so closely Eisenhower’s — the years when the Dulles Brothers, Allen at the CIA and John Foster at State, made sheer havoc in the name of American security — and thus reproduce an eternal state of insecurity?

The Guardian 2004

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

repeats 2008

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. 

Savage Minds,  Anthropology + Design: Nicolas Nova.

my comment:

Natural language is not designed. Cultures are built but not designed. Myths don’t have authors. The stuff we refer to as ‘art’ is the product of a kind of making that tries to approximate the sense of something between natural and artificial, man made and not, that we find in fables. Artists we think of as great we see as seeming to have the imaginations of many, containing multitudes. The result is stuff we think of as engaging us without command. Art is something to think with, as we think with religious and political texts. The doctrine of “originalism” is a peculiarly American fixation compared with other democracies, but fundamentalism is part of our heritage.
Balkin: "Why are Americans Originalist?" SSRN

“Design” in the sense we use it now is not peculiarly American but it’s peculiarly modern. The art of command economies is command culture; people may enjoy living in a house by Frank Lloyd Wright but it’s considered perverse to follow his diktats for interior design. “Overdetermination” is the enemy of economics because it’s the enemy -social- life, therefore of art. Underdetermination is chaos. We’re awash now in fans of one or the other.

Art is fiction, a place we go to think seriously about things while actually doing nothing. It’s a place to think about teleology while being as close as we ever get to being without a telos. It’s engagement by choice and at leisure. Design is estheticized functionalism glossed with science, a velvet glove for an iron fist. It’s not the possibility of moving in any direction, it’s an arrow, a path, that tries to amuse us while telling us where to go. Art for neoliberalism. We’ve back with Grant McCracken. again [link added]

Short opinion pieces. The crafted description of observed events.
Fiction or non-fiction? Parasitic or no?

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The Garden
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

Searle, "Reiterating the Differences"

3. In what is more than simply a misreading of Austin, Derrida supposes that by analyzing serious speech acts before considering the parasitic cases, Austin has somehow denied the very possibility that expressions can be quoted. I find so many confusions in this argument of Derrida that I hardly know where to get started on it. To begin with, the phenomenon of citationality is not the same as the phenomenon of parasitic discourse. A man who composes a novel or a poem is not in general quoting anyone; [HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME] and a man who says his lines on a stage while acting in a play while he is indeed repeating lines composed by someone else, is not in general quoting the lines. There is a basic difference in that in parasitic discourse the expressions are being used and not mentioned. [HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME]

Sonny Rollins, tossing in a few bars of Easter Parade into Night in Tunisia at midnight on Easter morning is an act of quotation, citation, mentioning. O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag. Bad artists borrow; good artists steal. They don't make new things; they make things new. The pleasure felt by a sophisticated audience for philosophy as for music is in knowing the source and what's been done with it.

repeats of repeats of...

Aber etwas fehlt
Sitting in a bar reading Limited Inc.. One table away a young couple were facing a crisis. It would be hard to count the layers of falseness and dissembling, of performing for and lying to each other and themselves, of false confidence, feigned indifference, contempt and self-abasement, all as reflex. It was a less sophisticated version of Derrida and Searle. Ressentiment

A work of art is both fundamentally a thing unto itself—though affected by others and events—and a communicative act. The same was true of the couple's actions, as self-directed formalism and outward-directed performance. And most of the communication was in subtext. The spoken "I love you" was secondary to the unspoken, "I can walk away". And beneath that were all the communicated subtleties, if communicated is the right word, in gestures read by the audience but most likely not by the performers.

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

Derrida wants to replace the historian of art with the philosopher of art. Searle represents those who oppose history itself.
And we're suppose to choose one or the other.

J.L. Austin, Lecture I

Whatever we may think of any particular one of these views and suggestions, and however much we may deplore the initial confusion into which philosophical doctrine and method have been plunged, it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy.

Lecture II

We were to consider, you will remember, some cases and senses (only some, Heaven help us!) in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something. This topic is one development -there are many others- in the recent movement towards questioning an age-old assumption in philosophy- the assumption that to say something, at least in all cases worth considering, i.e. all cases considered, is always and simply to state something. This assumption is no doubt unconscious, no doubt is wrong, but it is wholly natural in philosophy apparently. We must learn to run before we can walk. If we never made mistakes how should we correct them?

Lecture III

So then we may seem to have armed ourselves with two shiny new concepts with which to crack the crib of Reality, or as it may be, of Confusion—two new keys in our hands, and of course, simultaneously two new skids under our feet. In philosophy, forearmed should be forewarned.

Ken Johnson on ‘Re-View: Onnasch Collection’

I want to protest. I think what happened with American and European art in the three or four decades after World War II was not a progressive shutting down of creative possibilities but a great opening up,...

The "opening up" was opening elsewhere.  An old girlfriend of mine taught me that the best way to read late Wittgenstein is to see him as ending where Proust began.

I hadn't read any Austin when I read Derrida and Searle.

update: or Dennett.

repeats

How can you say the cafe revolutionary represents the cafe more than the revolution? He doesn't talk about the cafe, so what relevance can it have to his ideas?

follow the link at the bottom of the page.

repeats

Ai Weiwei

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.

The huffing and puffing in response to this by academics is as annoying as the piece itself. The older generation of "public intellectuals" were not all academics and those who were were not defined by academic status. Complaints about intellectuals retreating into the ivory tower are not requests for them to come back down from the mountain. Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe were critics, not professors, and certainly not professors of political "science". Chomsky's activism is the activism of a citizen. He's very specific in separating his politics from his day job (more academic public intellectuals here).

Academic discussion of politics as such is left to political scientists and experts in "foreign policy". It's nationalist by definition. The Kennedy school educates new generations of bureaucrats.  Academic leftism, the politics of theory, I've covered enough.  At CT, Rakesh Bhandari in a comment, without mentioning that the majority of posters are from the UK, adds that no one on the site's mentioned the death of Stuart Hall.

"Public Intellectual"

I've asked this before: What's a "private" intellectual?

idea | īˈdēə | noun

-A logic or process common enough in practice to be recognized and articulated in speech, at which time its usefulness begins to fade while becoming even more popular, out of enthusiasm for the new.
-What a description becomes when it's applied to something else.
-An unoriginal thought.

Ludlow again.
Leiter

Kristin Case, Prof. Ludlow's attorney, sent me the statement to which The Daily Northwestern article alludes. I post it below in its entirety, but have replaced the plaintiff's name with "P" for plaintiff.
...Ms. Case may be contacted at The Case Law Firm, LLC here in Chicago, 312-920-0400.

The perquisites of power.

the fish rots from the head

Leiter

And some philosophers think aesthetic judgments are not subjective!
The 1964 reaction to The Beatles. Just to be clear, I enjoy the Beatles and I don't think any of these folks are wrong (or right).

Both Plato and Sophocles wrote dialogues; their words and those of Nietzsche and Goethe describe and make manifest the central issues of their times and places. If they're read now by different audiences that's a matter of contemporary taste, not the words on the page. We order the world according to our preferences.

An old argument, rewritten in a recent note to an editor:

To understand the complexities of Velazquez' portraits of Philip IV, you need to stand in front of one. I like to use Velazquez because he's my favorite painter and because its so obvious that his beliefs and his art are in conflict. He was an arch defender of the divine right of kings but he can't help but paint his king as a nebbish. And his painting technique was a tour de force of open artifice. His highlights are flecks of paint that show themselves as that; they move back and forth from ephemeral -as image- to material in a way that's totally unsuited to absolutism. If his paint handing were rougher or smoother -either way- it would not have the same effect, but his brushstrokes function as fully and amazingly illusionistic while reminding you that's what they are. It's psychologically destabilizing. I like to say about Velazquez that he's the first painter to paint not the glory of kings but the need to believe in the glory of kings. His royal portraits are tragic, and also important for the study of the history of Europe.

Rembrandt,  Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653, Metropolitan  Museum, NY

Charles Simic wasn't born in this country.

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.

"I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is."

repeats from 2008

Nov 24
Rules and Beer: Law is hard convention Convention is soft law

Between corporate and industrial culture and the cult of individual self-expression there's the culture of community, communication, and language. Nothing that's been made the same way for hundreds of years has actually been made the same way for hundreds of years; that applies to beer as much as law. It’s slow change. You put 20 people in a room you’ll get an argument. You put 3 people in a room followed by 3 more as the first ones leave and 3 more following again on and on for 500 years you might get something interesting, whether it’s or bread or beer or wine or cheese or Homer or the Bible.
Budweiser is not good beer. Microbrewers, by and large, miss the point. Of course they do, they’re beer geeks.

This is the critique from cultural “depth” which some conflate with mysticism or ‘spirituality.’ It’s simpler than that: subtlety takes time.

Nov 29
Time and Consensus
Marcella Hazan in the NY Times.

When my family and I ate out in the Italy of my youth and early decades of my marriage, we would look for any plain trattoria where we could find the kind of cooking that was closest to what my mother and father were putting on the table at home. The person making the meal may have been the owner or his wife or his mother, or someone working in total anonymity. He or she was never referred to as the chef, but as il cuoco or la cuoca, the cook.

This was the old world of Mediterranean family cooking, a world where satisfying flavors had been arrived at over time and by consensus. That world hasn’t disappeared, but it has receded, making room for a parallel world, one where food is often entertainment, spectacle, news, fashion, science, a world in which surprise — whether it’s on the plate or beyond it — is vital. This is the world of chefs.

There's also the subtlety of interpretation that accrues over time to objects or texts of less intrinsic interest. Religious relics and McGuffins, madeleines or urinals (Proust and Duchamp), engage time and range of reference. The references do the work.  And the best artists, like the best chefs -the best minds- all refer back to world of "cooks".

"It is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other"

Discuss

From Leiter, again.  Peter Ludlow again.

Two months later, Slavin emailed the student, telling her that the university concluded the professor “engaged in unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances” toward her. The director went on to say that the student was “incapacitated due to the heavy consumption of alcohol” purchased for her by the professor.

According to the suit, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office was made aware of Slavin’s findings, saying they would work with that office on “implementing needed corrective and remedial actions,” the suit stated.

A committee established to decide what kind of disciplinary action should be taken against the professor determined he should be terminated, but “Northwestern ignored its own committee’s decision and recommendation and continues to employ [him] as a professor,” the suit claims.

The student said philosophy Prof. Peter Ludlow sexually assaulted her following a downtown Chicago art show the two attended together in February 2012. According to the suit, filed Monday, Ludlow bought the student alcohol and ignored her repeated requests to return to Evanston, taking her to his apartment where she lost consciousness. The student said she regained consciousness early the next morning in Ludlow’s bed.

The student is suing the University for the payment of all past and future medical bills and education expenses, reparation for emotional distress and appropriate remedial actions, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit demands resolution through trial by jury.

"‘philosopher’ is an honorific term that we hand out to people whose thinking about foundational issues we admire and approve of. It’s like putting a gold star next to someone’s name. ...I gave myself the gold star."

"No baby... please... I understand you... you're a part of me! I have an extended mind!"

Colin McGinn was raised a Catholic. His arguments follow structures founded in Catholic doctrine: arguments concerning "truth" made from authority. His model is the model of ideal judgment. The same with the rest of them.

Subtext: As recently with Farrell, who couldn't see the meaning of an action that wasn't tied to the internal logic of its form. If I call your mother a whore, knowing that you'll take a swing at me and get thrown out of the game, the truth value of my statement is irrelevant. The statement had another form, the form of insult.

"The lawsuit demands resolution through trial by jury."
All people hate lawyers until they need one.

"Lawyers... are the rule of law." Lawyers, not judges, not philosophy professors.

...A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned.

No. Just no.

It's Rashomon, you idiots

repeats repeats repeats.
It didn't register that Ludlow writes under a pseudonym and is the founder of The Alphaville Herald
It just gets worse, and worse.

Futurism and Data Culture

"What is your secret? Tell me, Mr. Caution."
Men of my type will soon become extinct.
---

Why not?

The Blue Angel

Defendant denies that all of Plaintiffs communications with him were professional. While Defendant admits that some of Plaintiffs communications with him were professional, he affirmatively states that Plaintiff had several unprofessional communicusions with him including telling him Mai she was "real life-broke broke and second life broke," stating several tunes that she wanted to date him, and saying that she was "totally DTF" him which she explained meant "down to fuck"….

ANSWER: Defendant denies talking about his sea life and denies asking Plaintiff about hers. Defendant affirmatively states that Plaintiff told him that she wanted to date him and that when he raised a question shout their age difference she she told him that she had previously dated someone fourteen years older than her. Defendant admits that he told Plaintiff that he had dated one student at another university where he taught when he was younger but affirmatively states that he never violated any university policy in doing so. Defendant denies stating that he had slept with students at other schools….

ANSWER: Defendant denies kissing Plaintiff at the bar. Instead, Defendant states that Plaintiff leaned in and kissed him. Defendant admits that he did not initially pull away but…

It's tawdry and sad, and has no place in the discussion of philosophy if philosophy is designated by hard distinctions between serious and non-serious, or parasitic writing. If you don't make hard distinctions it's a comedy.

Aristophanes may or may not have got Socrates right in taking him to be a dangerous subversive, but Plato was certainly on Aristophanes’ side in thinking that a happy ending was possible only in a polity from which “sophists” were excluded. The difference is that Plato added to Aristophanes’ arsenal of satire, innuendo, drama, slapstick, and verbal pyrotechnics a highly developed variant of one of the sophists’ own weapons, ratiocination.

Who laughs at the the watchmen when the watchmen become voyeurs?

The first video is funny. The second is humorless and frankly tragic. [Justine Tunney, sitting on a bed, ranting about life]

Howard Cohen [archive.org]

Have I got stories for you!
I was there. In New York ad agencies during the Mad Men years of the ‘60s and glitz and glamour of the ‘70s.
I was there. At Woodstock and Fire Island when creativity was naked and so were we.
I was there. In LA, during the drug days and Hollywood haze of the ‘80s and ‘90s. And I’m still here, working with terrific people and loving this meshuggah business.
I’m Howie Cohen, the guy who wrote, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and “Try it, you’ll like it” for Alka Seltzer – both in the Clio Hall of Fame.

The crew was celebrating the wrap of a commercial shoot in London. "There were 20 of us around the table and [director] Milos Forman ordered for everyone — chicken, steaks, lobster. I'm a nice Jewish kid from the Bronx, so I ate everything, until I couldn't fit one more thing in my body. I leaned back in my chair and said, 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing.' And my wife said, 'There's your next Alka-Seltzer commercial.'"

Justine Alexandra Roberts Tunney [original archive.org]

Software engineer & Champagne Tranarchist
Justine is…
Helping Google design and implement some Internet infrastructure.
Pivoting Occupy Wall Street for the American Fall of 2014: Retribution & Exit.
Convincing the tech industry to be more benevolent & less threatening.
Wondering if her CelebDial business will ever make money.

The Nation 

Justine Tunney works for Google. Every day that she feels like it, Tunney goes to a playgroundlike office in Chelsea in Manhattan and eats her meals from the free gourmet rooftop cafeteria. She does her job and little else. On the beach in Puerto Rico this summer, at the wedding of two fellow Occupy veterans, she was working so hard on an algorithm designed to improve cloud computing that she lost track of time and got a sunburn.

“They basically bought my soul,” she says. But Tunney doesn’t seem to mind. “Google is the one company I don’t hate. I think Google is actually doing things that are making the world a better place.”

[update: It makes sense she later ended up a fascist (use google).]
Another leader of OWS

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"this meshuggah business."
Irony is a form of self-awareness; it's a form of sociability. The other two in their narcissism manifest the self-blind collectivism of ants.


"What is your secret? Tell me, Mr. Caution."
"Something which never changes, day or night. The past represents its future. It advances in a straight line, yet it ends by coming full circle."

repeat

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

The reciprocal relations of high and low, elite and popular, intellectual and not, or
the condescension of arrogant schoolmen and their students, of the best and the brightest.

The arts are Burkean.
---

Idaho. 1958


---
videos: Debussy plays Debussy, Golliwog's Cakewalk; Motörhead, 1916; The Original Stroll, a television dance show in Idaho in 1958.

Reading fiction as "fiction" is reading for plot. Books read for plot, fiction and non-fiction, are what you see by the checkout counter at the supermarket. The best of these books are read also as serious fiction and non-fiction is read, as form and observation of the world.

Language is formal structure and mimesis.

Any fiction worth reading seriously is not read seriously as "fiction". Any "non-fiction" worth reading seriously is read in the same way serious fiction is read. Both will be read as books. A "textbook" is not read as a book. It's read as a crutch.

The above continuing from previous posts, including Leiter's link to an interview with Philip Kitchner on philosophy of fiction and fiction as philosophy. Kitchner of course can only use the language that he knows, but change is change.

J.L. Austin on fiction: "These are aetiolations, parasitic uses, etc., various ‘non-serious’ and not full normal uses."

It really becomes clear that the relation of Modernism to philosophy was that Modernism as structure or formalism was an attempt to deal with the "parasitic" qualities of mimesis and fiction as forms of "un-truth".

"Plato, we know, looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art."
Gombrich

And formal science looks back to Plato. All so obvious in retrospect.

But now I have to read Riegl, and Clark on Picasso.
Clark is right about the change, from haptic to optic, but he defends Picasso in decline, and misunderstands the work from the start. Picasso's greatest works—also Eliot and Duchamp—were brilliant descriptions of impotence and failure.

From haptic, to optic.
---

I was assuming something about Clark's arguments from what I'd heard. I was wrong.

Oxford Philosophy is Killing the World Part II
Farrell

there’s a quite important difference between saying something is questionably of any moral value, and saying that it’s immoral. My annoyance at the ASA statement is that it seems to me to be an empty gesture that implicitly congratulates itself (and its drafters) for taking a real stance, but is in fact entirely rhetorical – a kind of hier stehe ich, but without the stehe-ing. Obviously the proposed legislation in NYS, Maryland and Pennsylvania is far from rhetorical.

He really is an idiot.
If the "entirely rhetorical" gesture drew a "far from rhetorical" response, then it wasn't "entirely rhetorical", was it?
"Don't think of an elephant!"

My mother once defined communication as "two people looking at the same object". She didn't come up with the line; she didn't announce it as if it were an important observation, and when I first heard her say it I thought of it only as a tidy description of a truism, at most something I took for granted without thinking about it. I'd learned it as my mother had by immersion and osmosis. I'm amazed, more and more, at how much that culture is lost. My parents were at the tail end of a tradition that's now being less rediscovered than rebuilt almost from scratch.

My mother's one sentence response to Rawls was to say that he wasn't interested in people; he was interested in ideas. Reading J.L. Austin I realized he's not interested in communication; he's interested in language. I've made the arguments before, but the line is a tidy description.

Two by Leiter, reposted in order.

George Lakoff: the Right-Wing Wins Because of Oxford Philosophy
This is not a joke, he really said it:

[Liberals] don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world.

Columbia's Philip Kitcher interviewed...
...at 3AM, but not by Richard Marshall. He is mostly discussing his recent work on Thomas Mann.

"Experimental philosophy" is experimental psychology poached by Oxford philosophers desperate for something more solid, and Leiter used to brag that he didn't talk to people from comp lit departments.
Now he's linking to a discussion of fiction as philosophy.

Lakoff's puffery is annoying and his arguments are obvious, or should be.

The model of a critical art, in the sense both of Adorno critique and political performance (why Dukakis lost and Clinton won), is a model or weakness. Criticism is response and response qua response is passivity. The connection between wonkish liberalism and Kafka doesn't run only through Bentham but through the library, the world of books, while most life is in the street. The theory of politics is not the practice of it; the ironizing of authority is not the wielding of it. If your only touchstones are what you're responding to or rebelling against then you're defining yourself as living in someone else's shadow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; the art of critique is minor art and the politics of critique is failure.

Revolution is not a value in itself, though it passed as one, and neither is science, though it too, etc...

"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Nazi party?"
"A German state for a German people"

Boycotts are a form of discrimination. BDS stands for Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions, the last being an expression of state power.

The Center for Constitutional Rights: The Legality of Academic Boycott: Frequently Asked Questions [PDF]

2. Does the academic boycott violate anti-discrimination laws? No.

Detractors of the academic boycott allege that singling out Israeli academic institutions amounts to anti-Semitism, that is, discrimination against Jewish people because of their religion or ethnic background. This allegation aims to deflect from the discrimination and racism that Israel practices by mislabeling those who advocate for justice for Palestinians as the offending parties. The academic boycott is politically motivated, targeting institutions. The individuals who could be affected by the boycott are those who directly represent Israeli state institutions in an official capacity. The boycott does not target institutions or individuals based on their Jewish identity or Israeli citizenship. To equate criticism of the Israeli state, or a boycott of Israeli state institutions, with anti-Semitism is as absurd as calling criticism of or sanctions against the Iranian government anti-Muslim or anti-Persian, and as illogical as classifying criticism of the Chinese occupation of Tibet as hateful against people of Chinese ethnicity. Common sense makes clear the distinction between anti-Jewish bias (based on the race, ethnicity or religious identity of Jewish people as individuals or as a group) and criticism of Israeli state institutions. The law also recognizes the distinction.

The law as mind-reader. It doesn't work. The problematics of liberals' fixation on their own original intent.

Crooked Timber

Anti-Boycott Bill Discussion Post
by Henry Farrell And Corey Robin On February 4, 2014

This post has been put up to allow commenters to engage in discussion on the academic freedom issues raised here. We ask commenters to debate the issues here, not there: the comments section for the original post is reserved for signatures to the letter.

The introduction to the linked post, also by Farrell and Robin.

Academics and commentators—including Crooked Timber bloggers—disagree over the American Studies Association’s decision to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. There should be far less disagreement over two bills recently proposed in New York’s and Maryland’s state legislatures. These bills prohibit colleges and universities from using state monies to fund faculty membership in—or travel to—academic organizations that boycott the institutions of another country. Designed to punish the ASA for taking the stance it has, these bills threaten the ability of scholars and scholarly associations to say controversial things in public debate. Because they sanction some speech on the basis of the content of that speech, they run afoul of the US First Amendment.

We write as two academics who disagree on the question of the ASA boycott. One of us is a firm supporter of the boycott who believes that, as part of the larger BDS movement, it has put the Israel-Palestine conflict back on the front burner, offering much needed strategic leverage to those who want to see the conflict justly settled. The other is highly skeptical that the ASA boycott is meaningful or effective, and views it as a tactically foolish and entirely symbolic gesture of questionable strategic and moral value.

This disagreement is real, but is not the issue that faces us today.

Henry Farrell, and Eric Rauchway on academic freedom, in 2008.

Farrell: I’ve suggested that academic freedom is a good thing on pragmatic grounds, but also made clear that it fundamentally depends on public willingness to delegate some degree of self-governance to the academy. If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom. 

Rauchway:  Academic freedom predates free speech. Although Prussia gave constitutional protection to Lehrfreiheit in 1850 (“science and its teaching shall be free”) academic freedom generally does not enjoy legal protection outside of contractual guarantees; rather, it rests on the authority and ability of a community of competent scholars to police their own discourse and on the willingness of universities to affirm this authority and ability. ...

[Perhaps Bollinger] knows the history and sources of academic freedom, but he thinks it uncongenial to assert them in this anti-elitist day and age. 

Most of the authors at CT, European liberals, believe in the banning of political parties. They would certainly defend a blacklist of fascists. And Israel was founded on the logic of European nativism.

Meanwhile on Sunday, Israeli daily Maariv published an interview with Interior Minister Eli Yishai, in which he stated that most of the "Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man."

"I will continue the struggle until the end of my term, with no compramises [sic]," Yishai continued, stating that he would use "all the tools to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains."

Anyone defending the two state solution is defending ethnic separatism. Opponents of BDS should be forced to admit that's that they're doing.

The subtext of the debate in the US and UK is that the morality of Zionism is part of normative assumption. That's changing. Once you accept Zionism for what it is it becomes easier to see that Israeli policy not Palestinian "intransigence" has undermined any chance that the two state solution might succeed.

The one state solution was always the only model that fit the definition of a modern liberal state; the failure of liberals to recognize that fact is responsible more than anything for the last 50 years of conflict. If they had admitted that a Jewish state was both illiberal by definition and a practical necessity then liberals could have bargained from strength. Instead they defended it as liberal, encouraging the right wing to demand even more, leaving liberals to argue from weakness. And of course the opinions of the Palestinians themselves were ignored.  The Likudniks were never the main obstacle to peace. Reactionaries are predictable. Liberals should not be in love with their own brilliance.

"I can't imagine what this is like, but I love my husband. Without your son's heart he will die."
"Then he'll have to die."

Fiction deals with philosophical questions as such. Philosophy qua philosophy deals in fictional solutions.