A tortured, milquetoast epistle. What she's describing, while leaning on the opinions of career coaches and scholars of management, is the wallflower's internal exile in response to fascism. But it's still the bookworm's concern for the fascism of bookworms, in the library, of Borges and the Church. The article is another symptom of the rot it so tenderly describes.

Literature teachers used to make their livings teaching books written by people who never went to university; teachers of philosophy teach books by people who never left. Criticism is engaged readership founded on an adversarial respect. Philosophers claim superiority to both artists and critics. Now every teacher is a philosopher or theorist or analyst. Just read the first fucking line. "In the course of interviewing some seventy graduate students in English for a book on the state of literary criticism,"

...I’ve encountered two types of people who are having trouble adapting to the field. First, there are those who bridle at the left-political conformity of English and who voice complaints familiar from the culture wars. But a second group suffers from a malaise without a name; socialization to the discipline has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition and loss.

Those in the latter group share a quality of inwardness. In interviews, they strike me as reflective, intuitive individuals, with English teacher written all over them. These are the people who say that something in this intellectual environment is eating them alive. Gina Hiatt, the president of a large coaching service for academic writers, tells me that many of her clients in the humanities have a similar experience. She believes these clients sense “an immorality they can’t put their finger on” in the thought-world of the humanities. They struggle as writers because talking the talk would make them feel complicit, yet they cannot afford to say, in Hiatt’s words, that “the emperor has no clothes.” Some keep their best ideas out of their scholarship for fear that if they violate certain ideological taboos, others will “hate” them (a verb Hiatt hears repeatedly). Hiatt describes these individuals as “canaries in the mine.”

...The reflections that follow focus largely on English, my home discipline and a trendsetter for the other modern language disciplines. These days nothing in English is “cool” in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole. Some years ago Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick touched on this complex in her well-known essay on paranoid reading, where she identified a strain of “hatred” in criticism. Also salient is a more recent piece in which Bruno Latour has described how scholars slip from “critique” into “critical barbarity,” giving “cruel treatment” to experiences and ideals that non-academics treat as objects of tender concern.

...Halberstam’s article hardly represents the best theoretical work of the 1990s. I introduce this piece because it embodies, almost in caricature, a studied coldness that enjoyed a vogue in that decade and has influenced subsequent criticism. Readers who know the novel The Silence of the Lambs or Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation will recall the murderer Buffalo Bill, who fashions a cloak from the skins of his female victims. In a well-known reading of the film, Halberstam suggests that Bill is as much “hero” as villain. For he “challenges the . . . misogynist constructions of the humanness, the naturalness, the interiority of gender.” By removing and wearing women’s skin, Bill refutes the idea that maleness and femaleness are carried within us. “Gender,” Halberstam explains, is “always posthuman, always a sewing job which stitches identity into a body bag.” The corpse, once flayed, “is no woman”; “it has been degendered, it is postgender, skinned and fleshed.” Halberstam blends her perspective uncritically with the hero-villain’s posthuman sensibility, which she sees as registering “a historical shift” to an era marked by the destruction of gender binaries and “of the boundary between inside and outside.”

The management scholar Ann Rippin, borrowing an image from a fairy tale, describes the “silver hands” with which organizations endow their members. Recruits to professional organizations, Rippin writes, are trained in glossy but dehumanized ways of speaking and feeling. The work they learn to do “is silver service done at arm’s length, hygienically, through a polished, highly wrought intermediary instrument.”

...Finally, a small subset of work in ELH glamorizes cruelty in the name of radical politics, though this motif abates after 2006, perhaps because of a change in editorial leadership. The piece I find most troubling is an article on a short story by Henry James. This article proposes that if one faces a choice between having sex with children and protecting them, “perhaps one should let oneself desire the child, and—relinquishing the gratifications of protection—let the child die.” Sexually precocious children should “perhaps” be allowed a death of “innocence” that will supplant the pleasures of childhood with “other pleasures” delivered by adult lovers. James’s short story supposedly conveys this moral. But the lesson is said to apply in real life as well, wherever adults might be tempted to issue “calls for the protection of children.” The story is said to reveal “the dire results of protecting children from desire”—anywhere. For today’s anti-pedophile perpetrates the “potential violence” of “speaking on [children’s] behalf.” 

"Jack" Halberstam. repeats and repeats.  

this post continued, here
---
and jumping ahead, a day short of a year.

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte
repeats of repeats of...  because I was in the mood.



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

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

I think of Fassbinder

I experienced the modern version of The Floating World for the first time in the late 90's, at a small private party in a rented room on the lower east side. I said to someone it felt like Limbo as an airport lounge in 1974. The soundtrack was Air, and I amused myself a bit more by deciding that Prada was Halston in brown.

The effect is akin to a narcosis that not only slows but regulates motion. It's Chaplin's Modern Times at 5 frames per second, with the gears wrapped in fine silk: aestheticized anesthetic motion. The rhythms, bass and snare and little clicks invite improvisatory response, touches of free will in a rigidly deterministic world. At 1:20 when the strings come in and at 1:29 when they modulate and the plane begins to glide across the screen I get a shiver of aphasia.
And the the scream at 0:26 is Hitchcock.





Voodoo Lounge, Las Vegas. 4 AM, Feb, 2008

Doris Days, To Ulrike M,  I:Cube, Adore,  FC Kahuna, Hayling

Teju Cole on Faceboook

Trump is a dangerous clown, and we must continue to strongly oppose him and his hateful crowds. But it is important to understand that his idea of "banning all Muslims," scandalous as it is (intentionally scandalous, because he is of course doing it for media attention), is far less scandalous than the past dozen years of American disregard for non-American Muslim lives. And that wasn't Trump. Trump didn't murder thousands of innocent people with drones in Pakistan and Yemen. Trump didn't kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people with bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump didn't torture people at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, or the numerous black sites across the planet. Trump's weapons aren't incinerating Yemen now, and didn't blow up Gaza last year. No American president in the past fourteen years has openly championed Islamophobia, but none has refrained from doing to Muslims overseas what would be unthinkable to do here to Americans of any religion. This deadly speech we are hearing towards the Muslim members of our family is nothing new: it is a continuation in words of what has been real on the ground for a long time. Our legitimate dismay at Islamophobic statements must be situated inside this recent history, a history in which a far wider swath of the country than Trump's base is implicated.

As a matter of American politics, the issue is not the culpability of the political elite, but the ignorance of the majority. That's what Trump plays on. The self-congratulating moral superiority of intellectuals does nothing to help. It doesn't help to explain how Trump came to be. Except of course it does.

HUP, Jan 2015. World Philology, Edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, Ku-ming Kevin Chang

Philology—the discipline of making sense of texts—is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding.

Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read.

Covering a wide range of cultures—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European—World Philology lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline.

Link from the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

The maturing of postmodernism: from mannerism, in the shadow of modernism -of modernist idealism predicated on timelessness, using synchronic forms- to humanism and narrative form.
Panofsky describes the baroque as a return to the ideals of the renaissance after the crises of the counter-reformation. We're a long way from that.

The post the the JHI blog has a comment by Grafton, who can't see through the fog of his own pleasure. See here and here.

If there's going to be any progress of the sort they want, there needs to be more than a fading from one mode to another, from  "History of Philosophy: Just say No!", to a rekindled romance with the past.

Today US airstrikes hit Syrian army positions in Deir Ezzor. ISIS followed up with attacks on the same positions. Just stupid.

Adding to the below, DD could make the same defense of MSNBC and CNN. Adversarialism is a formal system. The fiasco today was driven by ratings, and by mindless reflex.

DD, in a series of comments on a post by Quiggin, defending bankers, as usual, by saying they were only following the logic of their job.

He repeats a question defined by another commenter.

I think the question is best framed as “what made mostly Anglo elites increasingly prefer finance as the main means of extracting their share of the common pool?”

I’m honestly not sure what I could say to put this more clearly. A policy of:

a) real wage stagnation as a consequence of outsourcing and trade agreements + China

b) government investment reduction

c) demand management by expansionary monetary policy

Is, de facto, a policy of financial sector expansion.

He's mocked by most of the others, as he deserves to be, for ignoring all the work that went into changing or eliminating the laws that governed financial regulation.

Redirecting the question: What made mostly Anglo elites increasingly prefer ideas as the main means of extracting their share of the common pool?

All that is solid melts into air. Philosophers' concepts are called objects. Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers. The exemplary ideas of mediocre minds.

Arendt is very good on all of this, including the anti-politics of political philosophy.

Zardoz is a parable of the rule of Bloomsbury bohemians.

updated a bit.

note-taking, record-keeping, reposting my comments elsewhere.

Answering bullshit at Language Log

“Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.”

"A spatial object must lie in infinite space. (A point in space is a place for an argument.)"

"To hear the melody move from C to E flat is to hear the E flat as called into being by the C – a virtual force operates between the notes"

"Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science."

"She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves"

European Jews and their descendants, including those with blonde hair and blue eyes, have a "right" to "return" to Palestine, and to force the native inhabitants, including Jewish converts to Islam [and Christianity], off of their land. Having done so they nonetheless maintain the right to refer to themselves and their ideals as "modern" and "liberal".

Harry Frankfurt is a master bullshitter. Philosophers and economists have a lot in common. Believing your own bullshit is something a good bullshitter should try to avoid.

The first is Chopra. The second is Wittgenstein, etc.

I didn't read the comments before I made my own. I didn't know about the Penguin Poetry Hoax.
The one thing my comment adds is what I wrote in my own words, adding real politics to what's otherwise a discussion of language games.  Language is problematic as a means of communication, but it's all we have.

At the bottom of the post is a link to "relevant past posts". Clicking a couple of times brought me to What would a 'return to philology' be a return to?"  I've been using that phrase for a few years, but I haven't looked for it. I should've. After all, I'm describing historical change, not causing it. It's obvious philology should be drifting back towards the surface.

Philology is the study of language use, meanings, in context. It's the practice -not the theory- of empiricism and makes a mockery of the rationalist model of "doing philosophy". There is no science of meaning that does not destroy meaning; language without meaning is mathematics; mathematics is anti-political, as evidenced in the absurdity of the paper linked above.

Gödel and Addington again.
---

The ghost of Panofsky: New Philology

A great comic moment with Ittoku Kishibe, in Takeshi's Zatoichi. An actor playing a gangster playing an actor, and getting a bad review. It has no direct relation to plot line mentioned in the earlier post.

Leiter

Panic and fear at colleges nationwide...

...and I'm sure it will only get worse, since the country is awash in firearms and the insufficiently regulated Internet provides a forum for crazies and malcontents to spark terror.

"The Case Against Free Speech," revised...

...after lots of helpful feedback and workshops over the last year or so. My "case" is only against arguments that speech has some unique positive value; I think the libertarian approach towards speech regulation in the U.S. is basically the right one, given the nature of our political culture. I also think, but don't discuss in this paper, that universities are a special case (something Marcuse also thought in the famous, or infamous, essay on "Repressive Tolerance"); I will take that up in a separate paper.

"the insufficiently regulated Internet"
"the libertarian approach... given the nature of our political culture." [emphasis in orig.]

Is there anyone else calling him on this shit?  But he's only read by people who, one way or another, are opposed to free speech.

The worst of populist demagoguery is rooted in the most extreme snobbery of an elite. The fish rots from the motherfucking head.

Hofstadter is probably the purest American symptom. "The Decline of the Gentleman". I'm pretty sure he had no idea what it meant. He belongs in the book. I've been lazy.

Aristocratic pessimism vs technocratic optimism. Service and self-sacrifice as an ideal vs liberty as an ideal. Republican virtue, conservatism, democratic pessimism, unthinkable, etc. etc.

And again since it's the issue de jour: liberalism associates freedom of speech and freedom of property; republicanism can see see them as separable. Freedom of speech as freedom of inquiry is necessary to facilitate self-government.  As a corollary, if your life is governed by triggers, you should give someone power of attorney until you're able to you're able to fulfill your obligations as a citizen.

The first one is the same but the second one's gotten more complex. Teaching myself After Effects.

Two great "failures" signal the break between painting and architecture –Leonardo's Last Supper and Michelangelo's Last Judgment. That both works are about "last" events suggests that in the minds of their creators there might have been some other last thoughts. Wall decoration obviously was not the kind of ambitious goal Leonardo had in mind for painting –witness his inability to make emulsified paint stick on walls. If Leonardo expressed ambivalence about decoration, Michelangelo went even further, unleashing pure anger and frustration. There is no doubt about Michelangelo's intentions in the Last Judgment: he totally destroyed the visual coherence of the Sistine Chapel by blasting out the end wall. It is very hard to know what this mural means to say about painting. Michelangelo's florid aggressiveness seems to attack everything that has gone before, including his own work on the ceiling immediately above. The Last Judgment is illusionism run rampant. There is no compositional restraint, no pictorial enframement, no sense of physical weight; the figures float high and wide. Pictorial cohesion, architectonic space, sculptural gravity –all these aspects of Michelangelo's genius become just so many pieces of driftwood. Painting before the Last Judgment was painting one could look at, or at least into; after the Last Judgment painting became something one could walk through. Michelangelo dissolves the end wall of the Sistine Chapel so that we can exit the church through heaven and hell, moving out of the Renaissance toward Caravaggio's world, a world of sensuality and spatial incongruity beyond even Michelangclo's imagination. 

I looked through a copy of Stella's book soon after it came out. I think I stole one. But I put it down pretty quickly when it became clear he was still speaking as a formalist; he sensed the dynamism of Caravaggio's sense of space but couldn't describe the cultural change that produced it. Intellectually he was and is a modernist. But his work is not.

Here Berenson is writing about Perugino and Raphael, but we have a hard time keeping Caravaggio from our thoughts: "Art comes into existence only when we get a sense of space not as a void, as something merely negative, such as we cus-tomarily have, but on the contrary, as something very posi-tive and definite able to confirm our consciousness of being, to heighten our feeling of vitality" (Italian Painters of the Renaissance, vol. z, Florentine and Central Italian Schools, London, Phaidon, 1968, p. 88). After setting the scene for the importance of the positive effects of space on art and experience, Bcrenson notes that "space-composition is the art which humanizes the void, making of it an enclosed Eden, a domed mansion wherein our higher selves at last find an abode." He continues: "Space-composition ... woos us away from our tight, painfully limited selves, dissolves us into the space presented, until at last we seem to become its permeating, indwelling spirit ... And now behold whither we have come. The religious emotion ... is produced by a feeling of identification with the universe; this feeling, in its rum, can be created by space-composition; it follows then that this art can directly communicate religious emotion ... And indeed I scarcely see by what other means the religious emotion can be directly communicated by paining—mark you, I do not say represented" (pp. 88-89, no-91).

Stella's point is that Berenson doesn't like Caravaggio but nonetheless describes, unawares, the sense of pictorial space that only begins with him. I'd add that Stella's book describes the importance of cinematic space without noting the importance of film. Even more surprising, there's no mention of Bernini.  I want to say to Stella what Le Corbusier said to Oscar Niemeyer: "Oscar, what you are doing is baroque. But it's very well done."

That's not an insult. My argument is always that it's up to others to describe what we do. They do a better job of it. It's important to let them. Still...

Painting before Caravaggio could move backward, it could step sideways, it could climb walls, but it could not march forward; it could not create its own destiny. Without a deliberate sense of projective space, painting could not become real. The road to pictorial reality must pass through the dissolution of perimeter and surface. This is the road paved by Caravaggio to lead great art toward what we now call great painting.

That's where observation ends and fantasy begins. Art is never "real", and it does not "create" it's own destiny. What Stella is describing is Caravaggio's realization that with artists' new technical facility painting could now become a profoundly compelling lie. Theater is fiction. But then all art is fiction, including the art of the Church.  Mannerism recognized that but the art is torn between poles of indulgence and guilt. Caravaggio's work is not torn. It's at home with the new world of ambiguity.

Setsuko Hara 1920-2015

Donald Richie

Tushnet: "Mathematicians" and the Law

A fair number of the mathematicians say that in the course of their work they have made more than a few mistakes -- pursued lines of analysis that didn't pan out, thought they had proved something when they hadn't, and the like. (The thought here is clearly stronger than the one Andrew Wiles articulates in connection with his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which in its initial version had a mistake that forced Wiles to do quite a bit more work before he eliminated the error.) 

That led me to wonder whether academic law really has a category of "mistakes." One test that occurred to me was this: What's your estimate of the number of papers presented at workshops that are never published, just put back in the drawer, because the author[s] concluded that the paper was just wrong? My own estimate is "not many at all" (I don't exempt myself from this -- I do have a handful of papers in my "drawer" that I'm never going to publish because they didn't work out, but not many).

A new tag. Kurt Gödel meet David Addington
---

Robert Reich

The other night I phoned a former Republican member of Congress with whom I’d worked in the 1990s on various pieces of legislation. I consider him a friend. I wanted his take on the Republican candidates because I felt I needed a reality check. Was I becoming excessively crotchety and partisan, or are these people really as weird as they seem? We got right into it:

Me: “So what do really you think of these candidates?”

Him: “You want my unvarnished opinion?”

Me: "Please. That’s why I called.”

Him: “They’re all nuts.”

Me: “Seriously. What do you really think of them?”

Him: “I just told you. They’re bonkers. Bizarre. They’re like a Star Wars bar room.”

Me: “How did it happen? How did your party manage to come up with this collection?”

Him: “We didn’t. They came up with themselves. There’s no party any more. It’s chaos. Anybody can just decide they want to be the Republican nominee, and make a run for it. Carson? Trump? They’re in the lead and they’re both out of their f*cking minds.”

Me: “That’s not reassuring.”

Him: “It’s a disaster. I’m telling you, if either of them is elected, this country is going to hell. The rest of them aren’t much better. I mean, Carly Fiorina? Really? Rubio? Please. Ted Cruz? Oh my god. And the people we thought had it sewn up, who are halfway sane – Bush and Christie – they’re sounding almost as batty as the rest.”

Me: “Who’s to blame for this mess?”

Him: “Roger Ailes, David and Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh. I could go on. They’ve poisoned the American mind and destroyed the Republican Party.

Me: "Nice talking with you.”

Him: “Sleep well.”

repeats: Tony Judt

But this is not at all the conclusion Robert Reich would have us reach. In his version of our present dilemmas no one is to blame. “As citizens, we may feel that inequality on this scale cannot possibly be good for a democracy.... But the super-rich are not at fault.” “Have top executives become greedier?” No. “Have corporate boards grown less responsible?” No. “Are investors more docile?” “There’s no evidence to support any of these theories.” Corporations aren’t behaving very socially responsibly, as Reich documents. But that isn’t their job. We shouldn’t expect investors or consumers or companies to serve the common good. They are just seeking the best deal. Economics isn’t about ethics. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed, “If people want morality, let them get it from their archbishops.” 

In Reich’s account, there are no “malefactors of great wealth.” Indeed, he contemptuously dismisses any explanation that rests on human choice or will or class interest or even economic ideas. All such explanations, in his words, “collapse in the face of the facts.” The changes recorded in his book apparently just “happened,” in a subjectless illustration of the creative destruction inherent in the capitalist dynamic: Schumpeter-lite, as it were. If anything, Reich is a technological determinist. New “technologies have empowered consumers and investors to get better and better deals.” These deals have “sucked...social values... out of the system.... The story of what transpired has no heroes or villains.”

repeats: some evidence for Reich.
The link to Reich's blog via Leiter, whose "hermeneutics of suspicion" consistently puts him above it.

"He'll go a long way in life, that little lad."

Pedantry is a form of immaturity, but pedants by definition see themselves as the most serious of serious adults. Though their opinions adapt, the pedantry is constant; the illusion of consistency is all that matters.

I forget how many times I've said this. Weimarization begins with an elite isolated from the experience of the larger community: one part openly corrupt, concerned with wealth and power, the other engaged with intellectual formalisms, earnestly but as a result of the arbitrariness of their constructions -the foundations are contingent- with the same concern as their peers for power politics, on a much smaller scale.

America and technology have spread the neotenization of the elite to the broader middle class. Our new sophisticates have the arrogant provincialism of the petty bourgeois.

Academics as a group are the most unobservant, unintellectual, anti-intellectual people I know, and yet they see themselves as justified in leading. The academicization of intellectual life, bureaucratic reason from Max Weber to the Frankfurt School, is the proximate cause of the rise of the radical right. If technocracy is authoritarian rationalism, the governing of individuals as tokens, as the mass, irrationalism becomes the only model for life as individual experience. Anger is the only agency that's left.

Weber was a model of technocratic anti-humanism. Adorno was a petulant, moralizing, self-hating adolescent. Benjamin was a child. They were the confused children of technocracy.

If you live for ideas then you're living for the next test. Every experience must fit into one or another narrow predetermined category, living life by inches, or by millimeters. Mechanistic authoritarianism is fundamentally perverse, and it dumbs you down.

Art schools and degrees in creative writing: the academic study of ourselves by ourselves is a prescription for brittle mediocrity. Film schools are still trade schools; that saves them from the worst of it.

I'm tired of being right. I just want to enjoy my life.

Introduction to Politics

When trying to make a good bend, there's more than on way home. Just make sure your method can accommodate improvisation. 

You must overbend the material past the desired bend angle and allow it to return to the desired shape with the springback.

I lost patience with a couple of journalists who were complaining about the "fascist", "Maoist", student "thought police", so I thought of a way to explain political activism in the simplest way possible.

repeats: Political journalists imagine themselves as moral philosophers, but their job is to be ambulance chasers and get the story. No one listens to reason when their own deeply-held beliefs are questioned. No one, includes angry college students and pompous reporters.

I'm not impressed by the students. I'm not impressed by anyone. But the students are acting as their own advocates and journalists should do the same for their readers.

Related: the annoying response to the CNN anchors berating the representative of a French Muslim organization. The questioning was absurd, “If your camp is the French camp, then why is it that no one with the Muslim community knew what these guys were up to?”, but so was his reply.

“Sir, the Muslim community has nothing to do with these guys. Nothing."  

The CNN interviewers were right to be impatient. By that logic no community, religious or secular, has anything to do with groups who commit crimes in its name. It's the "no true Scotsman" argument, a form of evasion accepted by guilty liberals while liberal Zionism is more simply denial. Denial is a luxury of the powerful. But of course liberal Zionists are among the first to defend the spokesman's response as such.

Of course CNN would never interview an angry Arab after the Paris attacks unless he was full of inarticulate rage.

With all the talk about the relation of Syrian refugees to Jewish refugees in in the 30s, including the absurdity of Zionist moralizing -Ten Jewish Groups Urge Congress to Allow Syrian Refugees Into U.S.,   Where's the Jewish Morality in Decision to Shun Syrian Refugees?- the most obvious parallel is ignored by all sides.

Syrian refugees to Europe are the legal equivalent of European refugees to Palestine in 1947.

The Syrians haven't come with dreams of conquest.

Faith-based groups, who play a key role in resettling refugees to the United States, say they are dismayed by the wave of anti-refugee fervor set off by the Paris terrorist attacks and are urging supporters to contact elected officials on behalf of victims of the Syrian civil war.
Evangelical Christians, as well as Christians more broadly, are a core group in the Republican electoral base and are among the most passionate advocates for aiding refugees.

Serious conservatives are always worthy of respect.

We, the undersigned Black alumni of Yale University who work in multiple fields pertaining to racial justice and Black culture, write with deep frustration, concern, and offense over the hostile and violent racial conditions that your students recently brought to national attention. Having lived through experiences like this at Yale and been made painfully aware of similar environments elsewhere, we applaud and are inspired by the students’ assertion that they are unstoppable; we raise our voices in solidarity with theirs in order to further bring light to the systemic violation facing students in institutions of higher learning across this country, and indeed, around the world. We know that Black students at Yale are underrepresented, as are Black faculty...

The tensions within an enclosed self-regulating community, and an enclosed self-regulating class.
One of the signatories makes an appearance here.

The President of Amherst

Student protesters themselves are engaged in serious conversations about the importance of free speech and have asked themselves questions about uses of language that respect that freedom. They are also asking themselves and us how the College protects free expression while also upholding our anti-discrimination policies and our statement of Respect for Persons. Censorship and silencing are not the answer. I believe our students know that. It takes time, attention, and serious discussion to sort out and make clear how we protect free speech while also establishing norms within our communities that encourage respect and make us responsible for what we do with our freedom. That is the discussion we need to have. It must involve all members of the community—students, faculty, staff, alumni—and it must be the kind of discussion that reflects the traditions of Amherst and a liberal arts education at its best.

Leiter has two posts criticizing a piece by "two philosophers... Kate Manne (Cornell) and Jason Stanley (Yale)":  "When Free Speech Becomes a Political Weapon"

Another post: "Philosopher Robert Paul Wolff on events in Paris"  Wolff's post is bland, passive and useless.

Manne and Stanley's piece is silly, an earnest attempt at opening up a closed community while defending its status as exclusive.  I made roughly the same comments there as below. The defenses of "free speech" are defenses only of "appropriate speech".  It's the same with Hebdo and the defense of the Muhammed cartoons. All the major participants would say that hate speech laws are justifiable, with the powerful left to define what's hateful and not.

At the end of Leiter's first post.

ADDENDUM: Several readers point out that Manne and Stanley also, falsely, state that "hate speech" is an exception to the constitutional protection for speech, along with 'fighting words" and slander. Although this mistake is perhaps telling, it's also largely irrelevant to what is so wrong-headed with the argument in this piece.

From my comments at The Chronicle

Angry claims of threats to "freedom of speech" have become like claims of those who defend "the right to bear arms" and who say "abortion is murder". Ask the former if the right includes shoulder held rocket launchers and the latter if women should be tried for murder and both say "no". 

This isn't about freedom of speech but insult and deference to authority. The kid with the video camera in Mizzou is autistic and the whole thing has now reduced him to tears. But he can't imagine that the kids forming a circle were protecting friends who were as oversensitive as he is. Autism is self-blindness. And that's what philosophy has been reduced to: the objective, aperspectival reason of autistics, now brought to bear on emo kids. It's sad all around.

The screaming at Yale is about the cluelessness of dorm daddies and dorm moms. It's not about the classroom and it's not about tenure, but it's definitely about prep school. Even Leiter refers to "Christakis's odd e-mail", odd and deemed inappropriate by many. Again, were the kids oversensitive, maybe, but what the hell is the response?

I'd only glanced at the reddit link. It gets much more interesting.

I wanted to help Mark and agreed to be his temporary, pro bono publicist for the next few days, and to interview him at Skepticon live on stage, mostly with questions I prepared in advance. During the session, Mark said multiple indefensibly racist things that, in my opinion, cannot be reconciled with a continued relationship with him.

Schierbecker claimed his speech rights were violated. They weren't. The same holds for protestors who interrupt speeches by Israeli politicians.

"These students had the courage and conscience to stand up against aggression, using peaceful means. We cannot allow our educational institutions to be used as a platform to threaten and discourage students who choose to practice their First Amendment right."

You have no legal right to interrupt a public speech. If you think you have a moral duty, that's something else. Politics is messy, even pushy. Leiter thinks pushiness is tantamount to fascism.

Legal realism, Leiter's preferred model of law, is predicated on the distinction between law and morality and on the assumption that for the purposes of legal decision-making, reasons are not causes: ideology is the best predictor of results.  The only parties exempt from this judgment of course are legal realists themselves and their closest kin. "Determinism for thee but not for me"

Leiter sees the culture of debate in the closed system of elite academia as based in a form of morally neutral super-law where questions of earthly law and morality are discussed. All adversarialism is bounded by the collaborative model of the academy as for France and Laïcité, it is bounded by state morality.

The discussion of free speech has gone off the rails on all sides.  Bureaucracy has become so ubiquitous as state and social institution, that people need to refer to a higher authority for everything, even their gender and need to rebel.

enough for now.

Schjeldahl

I don’t know what to make of Stella’s later works. His most famous apothegm—“What you see is what you see”—is no help, if seeing is supposed to imply comprehending. Looking is futile except as an inspection of the wizardly ways in which Stella made the works, with welds, flanges, castings, and, increasingly, computer-generated patterns. Always, there are self-consciously poetic titles, a habit of Stella’s since he gave the Black Paintings names like “Die Fahne Hoch!” (“The Flag on High!,” from a Nazi anthem) and “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II.” In the eighties and nineties, he made works referencing the hundred and thirty-five chapters of “Moby-Dick.” The titles function as apostrophes of meaning. Meaning exists. It’s just not “what you see,” except through tortuous efforts of association.

Stella made a permanent difference in art history. He is extraordinarily intelligent and extravagantly skilled. But his example is cautionary. Even groundbreaking ideas have life spans, and Stella’s belief in inherent values of abstract art has long since ceased to be shared by younger artists. His ambition rolls on, unalloyed with self-questioning or humor. The most effective installations of Stella’s later works that I have seen are in corporate settings, where they can seem to function as symbols of team spirit. Rather than savoring his work now, you endorse it, or not.

Ben Davis (Artnet)

At Princeton, Stella took his BA in History, writing a thesis on the political context of medieval manuscripts. Still, his principal interest was studio art, and he later remembered diverting his thesis into a long aesthetic aside, theorizing “how decoration becomes art and when it ceases to be just decoration." The argument hinged on a comparison of Jackson Pollock and Celtic knotwork: “One happened to be painting and one was manuscript illumination, but they both reached the category of art and left the lower category of simple repetitive design or pedestrian decoration far behind."

Thus, Stella was always notably more interested in problems of form than social content. His thesis, it would seem, theorized Pollock's Abstract Expressionism as the superhero version of decoration; the beatnik angst that had been part of Pollock's reception in, say, Harold Rosenberg's 1952 description of it as “Action Painting," was of no interest.

As Stella was graduating from Princeton, the cozy New York art scene was beginning its long maturation into the professionalized “art world" we know today. One harbinger of this was the 28-year-old Jasper Johns's show at Castelli Gallery in 1958, which caused a sensation and sold out, a then almost-unheard-of feat. This coup couldn't help make an impression on the young Stella, who was nothing if not ambitious.

Jerry Saltz

For 15 years this artist was as unstoppable as an icebreaker in his painterly progress, churning out series after series, building on and advancing not only his art but painting....

That decade-and-a-half period began in 1958 — when this exhibition begins, too — with four muddy-colored, sodden strippy paintings that look like walls divided into fuzzy strata. You see him riffing on art history, using text and brush-y gesture. But you also see the Minimalism that is incipient. Then, from 1959 to his Diderot Series of 1974, Stella hits the equivalent of 15 years of almost all home runs. That’s a run longer than Cubism; and in between there, between 1971 and 1973, is my favorite of all of his paintings, the Polish Village Series, in which Stella breaks the flat surface of painting, begins working on constructed, shifting planar three-dimensional surfaces. Between 1970 and 1987 he'd had not one but two Museum of Modern Art retrospectives. Everyone had to deal with Stella; the theory crowd revered him, ditto curators, critics, decorators, architects, and museums.

But around 1977 Stella had gone off the optical-topological reservation, making art that made his critical support evaporate almost overnight....

I’m a Stella fan who can't deny his importance but who also wouldn't want to live with most of these things. From his gigantic, early fluorescent-colored Protractor Series ­— one at the Whitney is 50 feet long (!) — to the late tarantula-like psychedelic-colored hyperconstructions, Stella's art doesn't have human scale; it's not really for people so much as the superorganism of art history. Or skyscraper lobbies, public spaces, the Vatican. And let's face it: Due to his wild-style sense of color, pocked lava-flow surfaces, and cacophonous compositions that look like three-dimensional maps of Pangaea, Stella's art can be really garish.

Roberta Smith

Going through this show may be a matter of deciding how far you can stick with Mr. Stella. You could say it allows us each to answer the question, “Where was Frank Stella when you went off his work?” But also: “Where was he when you came back?”

We have all waxed and waned. Here the “Irregular Polygons” come on strong, with the “Protractor” works not far behind. Also in the running: “The Fountain,” a mural-like 1992 detour to flatness that collages together five print mediums. But the aluminum reliefs rule, culminating with a beautiful representative from the “Heinrich von Kleist” series (1996-2008), inspired by that German writer’s stories. “ ‘At Sainte Luce!’ [Hoango] [Q#1]” of 1998 has a captivating papery softness but is actually made of elaborately painted cast-aluminum elements clearly devised on the computer, and less clearly derived from photographs of smoke rings that are also in the show.

It’s hard not to be impressed with the hulking aluminum and steel sculpture “Raft of the Medusa(Part 1)” (its splashes of once-molten aluminum conjuring the waves of Géricault’s 1818 painting of that name, not to mention Richard Serra, Anselm Kiefer and recent Matthew Barney), or the two big star sculptures from 2014 on view nearby. But for all their pizazz, Mr. Stella’s sculptures seem generic, as if they could have been made by someone else with access to his resources....

Mr. Stella is postwar and abstract painting’s great jester and adversary, which is not to demean his achievement. Moving through this compelling, feisty show can bring to mind Wallace Stevens’s high-minded yet grounded advice. In the long poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens stipulates the requirements of great art in the headings he gives its three sections: “It must change/ It must be abstract/ It must give pleasure.”

I should  write something on Stella.

Most of the reviews are off the mark, as judgment and even as description.  Roberta Smith's review is the best, and the only one that doesn't smack of moralism.

Stella is the most important American "fine" artist alive. That's my bet, though I'm going to be around long enough to find out if I win.  But he's made a lot of work and he's made a lot of crap, and critics and other members of the self-described sophisticated audience for art (as opposed to film etc.) still follow preferences based on their ideological positions.  Smith's tastes, within her preference for abstraction, are more catholic than most.

repeats and repeats and repeats. At this point the silence is absurd. TPM can mock republicans but adds nothing.  Benjamin Wittes trolled the debate on Twitter, bemoaning the lack of seriousness. I said he was no better and today he responded. I replied with the usual, facts not opinions, and no reply.

France’s booming arms trade has proved one of the few bright spots for the country’s struggling economy. But as President François Hollande heads to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, will there be a moral and strategic cost to the deals he might bring back?

"...other people have rights too" Christakis misses the point entirely. His voice makes me cringe; his response predicated on the people he's defending being as earnest and well-meaning as he is and somehow only misunderstood.  He's a library nerd defending frat boys, but he can't bring himself to think of them that way. A defense of free speech begins as the defense of schmucks.

The girl yelling at him has the anger of a campus anti-porn campaigner in 1985. It's the anger of someone fully vested in the system, already a member of the elite, demanding and still struggling for full equality within  it.  It's the anger of a moralizing bourgeois reformer of her own class. They deserve each other. That in itself is a sign of progress.

The video above via Leiter, who draws sharp distinction between protests at Yale and in Missouri. The people he links to don't.


Conor Friedersdorf calls it "weaponizing safe space". Maybe it is. But shoving a camera in the face of someone in tears does not become a moral act if the scene is played out in public, and the government did not stop them from publishing the record of the exchange. The student journalists could just as well interviewed the protestors standing in front of them as opposed to those being protected, and photographed the group from a distance. As it is they defend cheap voyeurism as enlightened "objectivity". As with Christakis, both of them, the condescension is offensive, the lecturing by those who identify unthinkingly with power.

Cobb:  Race and the free speech diversion
Friedrichsdorff: Free speech is no diversion.
Dialogue as Diversion. About Israel and BDS. Neither Friedersdorf nor Cobb would make the connection.

Politics is not an idea; and people who think the principle of free speech is founded in idealism miss the point, which is why so many oppose it as misguided idealism and not principled conservatism.
Idealists divide speech into the important and unimportant, the "high-value" and "low value", the "propositional" and the merely expressive. Those who proclaim "the harm of hate speech", including Leiter, would never see condescension or contempt as actionable. They proclaim the existence of a line where none exists.

BOSTON (AP) — It's not always the slurs and the other out-and-out acts of racism. It's the casual, everyday slights and insensitivities.

Sheryce Holloway is tired of white people at Virginia Commonwealth University asking if they can touch her hair or if she knows the latest dance move. At Chicago's Loyola University, Dominick Hall says groups of white guys stop talking when he walks by, and people grip their bags a little tighter. And Katiana Roc says a white student a few seats away from her at West Virginia University got up and moved to the other side of the classroom.

As thousands of students took part in walkouts and rallies on college campuses across the country Thursday in a show of solidarity with protesters at the University of Missouri, many young black people spoke of a subtle and pervasive brand of racism that doesn't make headlines but can nevertheless have a corrosive effect.

There's even a word on campuses for that kind of low-grade insensitivity toward minorities: microaggression.

The logic of hate speech laws results in authoritarian micropolicing. But for the powerful to ignore the corrosive effect on others of lives lived under constant low-level aggression appears to those others as itself a form of low-level aggression.  Claims to "objectivity" are seen as expressions of contempt.
---

The obvious parallel to the protective circle around the protestors in Missouri.

On Friday, the holy day for Islam, Christian protesters in Tahrir Square joined hands to form a protective cordon around their Muslim countrymen so they could pray in safety.
Sunday, the Muslims returned the favor.

more above.

Also the kid with the video camera is autistic, and a racist.
Autism as contemporary intellectual model. That's a bingo.
---
Mark Schierbecker is now "Kayla" Schierbecker.

UCLA, The Daily Bruin
Zoey Freedman: Free tampons would slow flow of gender inequality

To most government officials, feminine hygiene products are a luxury item. But, every day, women are being poisoned by their own bodies because they lack access to even the most essential health products. 

Meanwhile, most men have no problem getting covered for pills that will help them get a boner. ...

Inserted before the first sentence. Italics in original

Editor’s note: This blog post refers to individuals who menstruate as women because the author wanted to highlight gender inequality in health care. We acknowledge that not all individuals who menstruate identify as women and that not all individuals who identify as women menstruate, but feel this generalization is appropriate considering the gendered nature of most health care policies.

The last of these.

Terry Turner is dead.

More at Survival International

I first read him when I was living with Graeber in Chicago in 87.  He didn't publish much. He gave his students copies of unpublished manuscripts.

repeats

Guardian "Amazonian tribe take initiative to protect their lands from dam project"

In September, a group of Munduruku made one last attempt to put pressure on the authorities. Making another long journey to Brasilia, they met Maria Augusta Assirati, then president of Funai. In an exchange filmed by one of the Indians on his mobile phone, Assirati conceded: “You are right. It is essential that your land is guaranteed because the land is under pressure from loggers, miners and a series of other elements.” 

However, in a tacit admission that she was being sidelined, Assirati added: “But I can’t dictate the priority interests of the government.” Nine days later, she left office. A few weeks after that, the Munduruku started the long process of digging posts in the ground to mark out their land.

Terry Turner, Chicago and Cornell, on the history of tribes with cameras.

"I realized that this is a way a very material way in which you can study the process of the formation of representations. It's a material… it's an objective correlative as TS Eliot might put it of that process and it it's a it was profoundly interesting. I thought it's an interesting …it's a field method. You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman as he edits footage. If you’ve done a shot record you have a total inventory of what the raw material, of the representation is, and then you cans see how he plays over this raw material and shapes it into a finished construction."

When he refers to people giving cameras to the Kayapo before he got there, I assume he's referring to visits in the 80's. He's been working with the Kayapo since 1962.

"You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman..." He's not laughing when he says that. He's smiling; I cracked up.
---
Terry Turner: The Kayapo against the dams again

This will not be the first indigenous encampment organized by the Kayapo in their effort to stop the building of dams on the Xingú. In 1989, when the government first set out to implement its plan for a giant hydroelectric complex on the Xingú, with financial support from the World Bank, the Kayapo led a great rally of 40 indigenous nations at Altamira against the scheme, setting up an encampment of several hundred Indians at a Catholic retreat center just outside the town. The five-day rally was extensively covered by national and international media, and succeeded in persuading the World Bank to withdraw its planned loan for the construction of the dams.

I don't like anthropological films. Turner put himself in the position of an anthropologist studying filmmakers.

A new tag, covering everything from Nazi Germany and the USSR to transsexuals, Israel, hippies, Al Qaeda, and geeks. Added now because it covers the recent posts relating to Germaine Greer.

Utopia and Intentional Communities

Obviously there are a lot of posts from the past that fit it. I'm not going to search back and add them all. That's not the point.

17
… But now we have another problem.
What is that?
What if we find out what makes each of us internally consistent? What if I find your proper name, that thing which describes exactly what you are?
Than I will always be honest, or predictable at least. And you will be able to interpret everything I say and never be wrong. And of course I’ll know your name as well.
No dishonesty, no subterfuge, no Freud, no art… Then we can all be logical positivists.
But it doesn’t matter. That dream’s irrelevant.
I want unification.
It’s an illusion.
I want the illusion.
Do you want the illusion or do you want the illusion to be real?
What’s the difference?
One means that you have an appreciation of the arts. The other means that you’re a fascist.

Something I worked on a few years ago, then stopped. Part of something longer, as usual. I've started to work on it again. I wish the camera had been better. Rough cut, and no grading.

Candy says I've come to hate my body
and all that it requires in this world
Candy says I'd like to know completely
what others so discretely talk about

Candy says I hate the quiet places
that cause the smallest taste of what will be
Candy says I hate the big decisions
that cause endless revisions in my mind

I'm gonna watch the blue birds fly over my shoulder
I'm gonna watch them pass me by
Maybe when I'm older
What do you think I'd see
If I could walk away from me

"I've been up all night alone, wondering about my identity. Trying to look for an explanation for living this strange, stylized sexuality. Realization cuts feeling off. I try to explain my identity as being a male who has assumed the attitudes and somewhat the emotions of a female. I don't know what role to play."

Waters' facade is annoying. He blanks out the tragedy.

continuing. A commenter on Green's post

Even if you were right that “woman” is currently used in a way that these historical attributes are necessary conditions, this may still be a harmful linguistic practice. If our current talk about women indeed excludes trans women, why not adopt a less harmful way of using the term “woman” in which the shared attributes become sufficient? Linguistic practices can be oppressive but this is no reason to justify them. 

 From Green's reply

The first problem is that if I am correct that our concept of ‘woman’ excludes MTF transgendered people, then it is a morally pernicious concept and should be reformed. I think it is clear that I neither denied nor affirmed that. I do assume that there is a fact of the matter about what our concept of woman is (and that it is not ‘in one’s head’) though I say that it is vague (and vaguer than ‘female’–a different concept.) 

The exchange is absurd. Green:

No one thinks we could cure ‘gender discrimination’ in the bar by encouraging male lawyers to transition to MTF.

Scott Aaronson considered medical castration, to cure him of sexism, but he isn't a lawyer.
In the end Green comes to the right conclusion, but he works much too much in order to get there.

I lean towards more boxes. Some TG/TS people feel the same way. They want to be accepted and recognised *as TG/TS*, or *as FTM* etc, and not boxed in to the binary at all. They feel it oppressive that, just because they are unwilling or perhaps unable to see themselves as ‘men’ they must therefore see themselves as ‘women’. I see merit in their argument. And also merit in the argument that we should always use the pronouns, predicates etc that people would like us to use when speaking of them. That is not just required by courtesy, but by respect. 

Dan Savage

During this part of the talk a student interrupted and asked me to stop using "the t-slur." (I guess it's not the t-word anymore. I missed the memo.) My use of it—even while talking about why I don't use the word anymore, even while speaking of the queer community's history of reclaiming hate words, even as I used other hate words—was potentially traumatizing. I stated that I didn't see a difference between saying "tranny" in this context and saying "t-slur." Were I to say "t-slur" instead of "tranny," everyone in the room would auto-translate "t-slur" to "tranny" in their own heads. Was there really much difference between me saying it and me forcing everyone in the room to say it quietly to themselves? That would be patronizing, infantilizing, and condescending. Cox gamely jumped in and offered that she had used "tranny" in the past but that she now recognizes its harm and has stopped using it. The student who objected interrupted: as neither Cox nor I were trans, "tranny" was not our word to use—not even in the context of a college seminar, not even when talking about why we don't use the word anymore. I asked the student who objected if it was okay for me to use the words "dyke" and "sissy." After a moment's thought the student said I could use those words—permission granted—and that struck me a funny because I am not a lesbian nor am I particularly effeminate. (And, really, this is college now? Professors, fellows, and guest lecturers need to clear their vocabulary with first-year students?) By the not-your-word-to-use standard, I shouldn't be able to use dyke or sissy either—or breeder, for that matter, as that's a hate term for straight people. (Or maybe it's an acknowledgment of their utility? Anyway...)

This student became so incensed by our refusal to say "How high?" when this student said "Jump!" that this student stormed out of the seminar. In tears. As one does when one doesn't get one's way. In college.

Okay, gang, remember our let's pretend game at the top of the post? What's one of the worst things you can call a trans person? What's arguably worse than the "t-slur" itself? It. After the student who challenged, interrupted, and yelled at me and Cox stormed out of the room, a friend of this student informed Cox, who had used a standard pronoun to refer to this person after this person left the room (while Cox observed, with great sensitivity and tact, that some feel very strongly about this issue), that this person's preferred pronoun was "it."

And... scene.

Ridiculous... fucking... scene.

Jayne County

I know that my alter ego, Wayne/Jayne County, is known for offending many people, but really, death threats? All because I have fiercely defended the use of the word “tranny.” Hey, that dreaded word belongs to me. And as I see it, no one has any right to take away a word that has been a part of my vocabulary for many years! And a lot of other people feel the same as I do.

Green studied with Joseph Raz. His field is jurisprudence, the analytical philosophy of law. He's interested in law as truth, not as collective decision-making. He needs all arguments to resolve to an objectively justified authority, neither time nor context dependent. But as a liberal he gives credence to individual desires and this conflicts with his interest in -his preference[!] for- truths.

Words are not subatomic particles. They change their meaning and changing their meaning change their function. Debates over the use of "female" or "woman" as modifiers are debates over the present. The best argument for the biological definition of woman and man, and the only argument not founded in bigotry, is that biological definitions limit subjectivism in law, keeping desires and emotions as far away as possible from the public realm. The ambiguities Caster Semeya presents are not a matter of how she feels but what she is. They have little relation to the ambiguities presented by a biological male who identifies as female.

Law is a blunt instrument; a necessary crudity. Founding gender in desire as a matter of law ties the law in knots. How is the law supposed to respond to a biological male who identifies as female and wants to compete in high school basketball? If her teammates approve how about opposing teams? That's a very different issue than an election for homecoming queen, of who gets to wear a tuxedo or who a dress. It's simple enough to say school administrators should have no say. The only important matter as a question of law is that students, or anyone, regardless of how they identify should by physically safe and free from harassment. But micro-aggressions are a given, a part of life, and concern for them is thinking small in every way, the luxury of the safely cloistered in an age of global war.

[The ghost of Panofsky: "Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need"
"What's the se…?" "Timing."]

"Jurisprudence: Beyond Extinction?"
Abstract

Of the various subjects of legal study, jurisprudence is the one in which the most momentous and profound questions about law are addressed, or in which, as Holmes put it, we might hope to "connect . . . with the universe and catch an echo of the infinite." Or so we might suppose . . . but it seems we would be wrong. In recent years, at least, the questions addressed under the headings of "jurisprudence" or "philosophy of law" hold little interest for any but the purest (i.e., the most incorrigibly academic) of theorists. It is hard to resist the impression that the questions are merely semantic, and that some of the most powerful minds in the profession are amusing themselves with word play.

How to account for this peculiar state of affairs? Is jurisprudence a dinosaur that has outlived its time? This essay, written for a general-audience symposium collecting short interpretations of the state of jurisprudence today, reflects on those questions, and suggests that classic jurisprudential claims and questions have been translated into a secular vocabulary and framework that deprive them of their meaning and significance.

 via Tamanaha at Balkin

Leslie Green: Germaine Greer is right about trans-women
Feminist Philosophers Social Construction And Gender Identity

I wrote a comment; Green posted half of it. I wrote a second pointing out that although rejecting comments is his prerogative, editing without the right of refusal is a particularly sleazy form of censorship. Obviously that one didn't show up at all. I posted a two comments at Feminist Philosophers, but they were rejected as well. Credit to Green for at least leaving in the question about Dolezal, which still no one has answered.

On both sites, my comments restated points I've made before, see below, on intentional communities and hypertrophied individualism. Liberals, Oxbridge philosophers, Israelis, and transgender feminists: "I am what I say at I am. Take me at my word!" "I'm an artist!" "I'm a poet!" "I'm a scientist!" Bruno Latour and David Chalmers.

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

We are judged by others. Understanding that, fosters self-awareness; ignoring it is dangerous.

Peter Ludlow, a Northwestern University professor of philosophy, resigned his position effective Monday, Nov. 2, 2015, and is no longer employed by the University.

Richard Prince retweeted a link, deadpan: it's been 25 years since the Mapplethorpe fiasco in Cincinnati. The working class Catholics who were horrified by the photographs were horrified because they understood them as Mapplethorpe did.  I remember howling with laughter at the time reading descriptions of the expert testimony for the defense: "the arc of the urine being directed into a man's mouth...  a classical study of symmetry".  "Art is good for you".

The peasants got schooled by their betters.

The defense brought in art experts from across the country to testify about Mapplethorpe’s technique.

“He was a classical photographer most of the time, all about lighting and position of the model. He wasn’t radical in that sense,” Barrie said. “The flowers were a lot more sexy than the X Portfolio,” which contained the S&M photos.

The prosecution said the pictures would speak for themselves, but “there were no experts in the art world saying this was pornography,” said Richard Meyer, an art history professor at Stanford University and the author of “Outlaw Representation.” The jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting Barrie and the CAC.

The trial was “a PR disaster,” said Vice Mayor David Mann, who was a City Council member at the time. “It kind of made us the laughing stock of sophisticated communities.”

Things got worse before they got better. A 1993 city charter amendment made Cincinnati the only U.S. city to ban enactment or enforcement of gay rights laws until 2004.

“We didn’t know it then, but” the Mapplethorpe case “was the last stand of the organized West Side Catholics, led by Marine veteran and Sheriff Simon Leis, against the inevitable transition from a city with a Roman Catholic ascendancy to a city where power was up for grabs. Still is,” said Albert Pyle, who was a staff writer for Cincinnati Magazine at the time of the Mapplethorpe case. “The West Siders were shocked that the city wasn’t ashamed of itself. The non-Catholic whites were embarrassed for the city to take a hit in the national press. Black Cincinnati, who had no stake in the CAC but who were social conservatives, thought it was a lot of white nonsense.”

And critics who don't try to reclaim Mapplethorpe for some sort of banal liberalism try to recast him as radical.

His self-portrait with a bullwhip up the bum, like the master-slave couple in a bourgeois apartment, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979), shows self-evident irony that inevitably complicates the issue of what a portrait portrays. However, in her lurid accounts of the sex that is supposedly expressed, documented, or otherwise depicted, Morrisroe opts for a horrified literalism that comes to defend a barely disguised sense of disgusted fascination. 

At this point, Mapplethorpe takes over as the dinge-queen from hell. In her descriptions of rather hopeless affairs with black boyfriends, Jack Walls and Milton Moore (who, it turns out, was Mr Polyester), Morrisroe confirms every worst fear and fantasy. ‘It has to be racist,’ Mapplethorpe says knowingly at the height of racist chic. When he fails to find a black Adonis in Kellers bar he goes to a yacht party only to be disappointed. ‘You’re looking for an intelligent, successful black millionaire who wants you ­ a white man ­ to call him “nigger”?’, a black female friend asked. ‘I wouldn’t call him “nigger” all the time,’ he replied, ‘Only during sex’.

I'm living in a silent film
Portraying
Himmler's sacred realm
Of dream reality
I'm frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain't got the power anymore
No I ain't got the power anymore

In American intellectual life it's impossible to treat people with any respect at all without also being obliged to celebrate them. So prostitution can be only a mortal sin, a rebuke to bourgeois hypocrisy, or something everyone's daughter should try. Academia follows the same logic, minus the option for sin. Technocracy is Aristotelian. American culture on the other hand is conservative and pessimistic, or the optimism is so bright that the perversity is plain to see.

If you assume your own rationality then you're free to trust the opinions of those you see as kindred and dismiss the opinions of outsiders. It's up to you to define what's offensive and what's not, according to your own objective reason.

"The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny"

Kaurismaki, Kiarostami, Spielberg, and Samuel L Jackson on violence in American culture.





My second attempt at Feminist Philosophers. I've used the Ludlow quote often enough, but without going back to the source. The reference to Kristeva slipped by. That was a mistake. The full paragraph is even more damning because even more absurd.

I'll try again. Why no defense of Dolezal? If she hadn't tried to hide her background but still made the same claims, would anyone take her seriously? Eminem doesn't claim to be black. Why should a man be accepted as "being" a woman?

In related news, Peter Ludlow just resigned. Here's Ludlow interviewed in 2013

Well, I think that '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 guess your question then is this: When did I decide to try and get the gold star? I started college as a business major, but existential trauma propelled me into courses on Kierkegaard and so forth. Those courses didn't help with the existential trauma but they did help my GPA. After rny junior year I took a summer school graduate course at the University of Minnesota. It was taught by Herbert Hochberg and it was all about Quine and then Kripke. That's when the existential trauma lifted. That's also when I gave myself the gold star. But you know, many years later I was at a dinner with Julia Kristeva and I told her the story of how Quine and Kripke cured my existential trauma. She didn’t talk to me the rest of the meal, so, you know, I don’t think everyone has the same ideas about who should get the gold star. And I’m o.k. with that!

Three passages, three points
1- 'philosopher' is an honorific term
2- I decide to try and get the gold star
3- I gave myself the gold star.

Ludlow gave himself an honorific. He calls himself a philosopher and therefore is a philosopher. Germaine Greer says men should not be able to say that they're women. Perhaps in both cases the designation is best left for others to bestow. Ludlow and McGinn rationalize their absurd behavior. Zionists do the same thing. "Liberal Zionist" is a logical contradiction, but the Palestinian experience has been ignored. Maybe we leave our political designations to others as well. Am I a liberal?

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

Leiter treats that statement as a joke. Obviously it's not. Things get messy when people who identify themselves as "others" have an "other" of their own. But that's how the world works. We are each other's "others". That's a problem philosophers don't face very well, because they want to come to terms with otherness, if they do at all, only to escape it.

Again I'll repeat what I said before: gender reassignment surgery is the most extreme of extreme rnakeovers. Are there other forms of such behavior feminists accept with so little question? What sort of body horror drives people to work so hard to go against their own biology? And this has nothing to do with those born intersex. 

The blindness to Zionist ideology and behavior is based on affiliation. "I'm a liberal and rny friends are liberal" Therefore they can not be illiberal. There can be so self-hating Jews, who identify with white Europeans as they torture and kill their own closest relations. Jews are now white. Transgender self-hated? Impossible. That's for desperate housewives not drag queens.

Radically intentional communities are artificial: over-designed, over-theorized, overdetermined. The politics of phobia is reactionary. But reactionary desire isn't the problem. The desire for utopia is the problem.

Six posts now on Greer, Jenner, Dolezal, Caster Semeya, Candy Darling.
A tag I've wanted to make for a while: Utopia and Intentional Communities.
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added a few months later: Transhumanism and Transgender

As long as I'm causing myself trouble... repeat from 2014
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An old post I never wrote. related to one just below, and one earlier, and back. [the video is gone, or no longer public. The story is here]


To be born and raised in a community is not to have a choice: the world is what it is. We can go on to try to change the order of that world (which in fact is changing always), but "intentional" communities do more than that; they're founded in self-description, denying not only outside interference but outside interpretation, demanding acknowledgement for a world of their own making. At the lowest level it's simple fascism. "Israeli" is more of an invention than "Palestinian",  if less so than "Aryan", but the opinions of outsiders in both cases are claimed to mean nothing.

In fact those claims are merely cover. Any serious definition of fascism puts the lie to them. Self-love and self-hatred are inseparable, the first being merely an ideologized -armored- reinforcement of the basic need for self-respect. The difference between camp and kitsch is the difference between the fat bearded man in a tutu who expects you to laugh and the fat bearded man in a tutu who points the gun at your head and dares you to say he's not a ballerina. Fascism by definition is kitsch. And we're back to Freud

In a passage from one of the Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis Freud says that as the result of a successful treatment repression is replaced by 'a condemning judgment'. He doesn't explain the difference between the two. What's the difference between "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother" and "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother." Is the first, louder and more nervous? More declarative? More cocksure? I don't know but it's a question conceptualists can't answer.

Conceptualists don't/can't understand performance. They refuse to interpret, or they oppose it. The irony, as I've said again and again, of liberals mocking Scalia's originalism reading the past is their own originalism reading into the future. That written words "mean what they mean" and that I "mean what I say and say what I mean", and that I am "what I say I am", all make make the same argument. Scalia's Catholic anti-individualism and liberal individualism both stand against interpretation, which can only be the interpretation of others, in the present and future: the judgment of outsiders and the judgment of history.

The woman above wants her government to see her as she sees herself. Why does it matter so much to her? She stumbles over the admission that she was born female. Why is she fixated on binaries? Why does she take the government bureaucracy so seriously that she needs it's approval of her self-disgust?

Germaine Greer, Rachel Dolezal, Caster Semeya, Caitlin Jenner, and Oscar Pistorius

Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women's names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn't polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man's delusion that he is female.

Five years ago, it would've been hard to imagine Semenya as the subject of a quietly pleasant bit of gossip like this. In September 2009, after a month of whispers brought on by her dominant victory in the 800 at the world championships in Berlin, Semenya was outed as intersex and subjected to a run of leering freak-show coverage that tended to ignore the utter normality of abnormality in top-flight sports. (Think Michael Phelps's elongated torso.) Raised as a girl, Semenya had no ovaries or uterus, according to the results of a test obtained by Australia's Daily Telegraph, which referred to her, primitively, as a hermaphrodite. She had both external female genitalia and undescended testes, the paper reported, leaving the impression that she was enjoying the competitive fruits of the extra testosterone. (It's not so simple: The biochemical processes that lead to intersexuality often affect the body's ability to make use of the testosterone inside it.)

The questions regarding Semeya concerned how to respond fairly as a matter of bureaucracy, of rules  and regulations, to an ambiguous reality. Greer's arguments are not about the intersex.

Questions about Jenner are are more related to questions about Pistorius.