Avant-Garde is Kitsch

updating for fun. More piss. more vinegar, more comedy (Walid Jumblatt)

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The below because one of the globalized subaltern academic "leftists" was mourning Bersani's death. 

And the same people mourning the author of Homos, now support arguments that claim homosexuality as such, most specifically lesbianism, is the equivalent of racism.

David Halperin reviews Homos, in the LRB in 1996

Bersani begins magnificently. ‘No one wants to be called a homosexual.’ 

Remember that Halperin is the author of How to be Gay.

And "Jack" Halberstam wrote The Queer art of Failure.

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Dale Peck, Leo Bersani  Bersani is dead.

You also discuss sex in terms of the “pleasure in being the lowest of the low.”

New Republic magazine pulls down homophobic op-ed

"Susan Sontag divides her essay 'Fascinating Fascism' into two parts, two ‘exhibits’, the first attacking Leni Riefenstahl for lying about her past, and the second defending the fascist theatricality of the 70s demimonde as merely aesthetic game-playing." It doesn't work.

[jumping ahead: MLA 2005, "The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory"]

Self-hated is the foundation of fascism. Self-hatred directed outward: the Catholic Integralists and faggots disgusted by the fact that most people don't know enough to hate themselves.

“There's this clock in Hell that chimes every hour, You will never get out . . . you will never get out . . . you will never get out."

 "Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship." 

Richard Grenell, Peter Thiel,

On and on it goes. If you inter-railed across Europe, only stopping with gay fascists, there aren't many sights you'd miss. France's leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was not batting for the straight side. Germany's leading neo-Nazi all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, "For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were 'especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.'" 

And it wouldn't be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight. They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as "evil", and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying, "The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world's journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures repulsive." 

But scratch to homophobic surface and there's a spandex swastika underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote a four-page pamphlet detailing his 'affair' with Nick Griffin. "Griffin sought out intimate relations with me," openly-gay Webster explained, "in the late 1970s. He was twenty years younger than me." Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, says it's all too plausible. Homosexuality is "extremely prevalent" in the upper echelons of the British far right, and at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement's organisers were gay, he claims. 

Click on the Peck/Bersani link and everything that pops up will tell the same story, of the centrality of self-hatred to homosexuality. Now think of claims for the centrality of self-hatred for women and Jews. Jews of course means Ashkenazim: "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies."

"Céline is my Proust"

I've said it all before.

 

"Humor and Style in Panofsky’s History of Art", Introduction to Irving Lavin, ed., Erwin Panofsky. Three Essays on Style, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995, 1-14; revised English version, unpublished, 2014 https://publications.ias.edu/sites/default/files/Lavin_IntroThreeEssaysStyle_2014.pdf

note 22 

Panofsky’s concrete, humane, sympathetic, and modern evaluation of the Baroque contrasts markedly—and I sometimes think deliberately—with that of Walter Benjamin who, while he also saw the Baroque as the beginning of the modern era, interpreted the style pessimistically as a kind of paroxysm of allegory, and essentially degenerate. In 1927 Panofsky had read and disapproved of the section on Melancholy, much indebted to the recent work on the subject by Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, in Benjamin’s subsequently famous study of German Baroque drama, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, London-New York, 1977;...)

George Steiner's introduction to the English translation, with its references to Marxist millenarianism, doesn't really help.

Thirdly. Benjamin pleads, though in a voice muted by concurrent hopes of academic acceptance, for the rights of the esoteric. It is not only his material—the neglected plays and emblem-collections of the German seventeenth century— that is esoteric; it is his critical task. How could it be otherwise? How could the empathic decipherment of many-layered texts in an idiom long-forgot, pretend to perfect clarity? In this contest opaqueness and inwardness of semantic arrangement are a manifest of honesty. No doubt, this plea reflects very strong traits in Benjamin‘s personality, traits which find expression in his love of the arcane, in his pretense to kabbalism, in the condensations and bracketings that mark his own prose. But once more, we are also dealing with a motif of the moment. The esoteric is a decisive symptom throughout the modernist movement. whether in Yeats‘s mature poetry, in Ulysses in the Tractatus or in the abstract art and music of the 1920s. Benjamin’s hermeticism represents a bias in himself and in the atmosphere of the day. 

That's a defense of a work of literature, not scholarship, and a literature that exemplifies the decadence and desperation of Mannerism. 

This is the Baroque.

Previously, 2020, Panofsky's "unenthusiastic" response to Benjamin.

reading and scribbling about this shit for years and I've never read Dilthey. I really am lazy.

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Arendt v Mannheim, Panofsky & Mannheim

Mannheim

To give a still clearer illustration of the 'meaning' character of cultural phenomena, and of its threefold differentiation, we shall mention a concrete example. And we have deliberately chosen a trivial example, so as to make it clear that our concept of the 'cultural' embraces, not merely cultural products endowed with traditional prestige, such as Art or Religion, but also manifestations of everyday life which usually pass unnoticed—and also that these manifestations already display the essential characteristics of meaning as such. Take the following case:—

I am walking down the street with a friend; a beggar stands at a corner; my friend gives him an alms. His gesture to me is neither a physical nor a physiological phenomenon; as a datum, it is solely the vehicle of a meaning, namely that of 'assistance'. In this process of interpretation, the event which is mediated by visual sense-data becomes the vehicle for a meaning which is something entirely different from the visual data and belongs to the sociological field, where it is theoretically subsumed under the category 'social assistance'. It is only in a social context that the man at the corner will be a 'beggar', my friend 'one who renders assistance' and the bit of metal in his hand an 'alms'. The cultural product in this case is solely the event 'assistance', to be defined in sociological terms; in so far as the meaning of the event (by which it is constituted as an event) is concerned, my friend as a psycho-physical individual is quite irrelevant; he enters into the context merely as a 'giver', as part of a 'situation' that can only be grasped in terms of meaning and that would be essentially the same if his place were taken by any other person.

No knowledge of the intimate content of my friend's or the beggar's consciousness is needed in order to understand the meaning of 'assistance' (which is the 'objective meaning' of the situation); it is sufficient to know the objective social configuration by virtue of which there are beggars and people with superfluous cash. This objective configuration is the sole basis of orientation which enables us to grasp the meaning of the event as one exemplifying 'assistance'.

Panofsky 1939

When an acquaintance greets me on the street by lifting his hat, what I see from a formal point of view is nothing but the change of certain details within a configuration forming part of the general pattern of color, lines and volumes which constitutes my world of vision. When I identify, as I automatically do, this configuration as an object (gentleman), and the change of detail as an event (hatlifting), I have already overstepped the limits of purely formal perception and entered a first sphere of subject matter or meaning. The meaning thus perceived is of an elementary and easily understandable nature. and we shall call it the factual meaning; it is apprehended by simply identifying certain visible forms with certain objects known to me from practical experience and by identifying the change in their relations with certain action or events.

from Joan Hart, "Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation", Critical Inquiry, Spring, 1993

Arendt was with Heidegger. It's too simple to say Panofsky was with Cassirer. Panofsky was a historian; no attachment to philosophy can undermine that. Arendt's attachment to philosophy as constituted in the 20th century made for an insecure humanism; she wrote from the position of the individual under threat. Panofsky could refer to the human sciences without worrying about positivism.  I prefer Panofsky's Kant to Arendt's.

Panofsky 1932,  Translated 2012. 

Even if Dürer himself had commented directly on the ultimate aim of his work (as later artists have attempted on various occasions), it would soon be clear that even these comments miss the true intrinsic meaning of the sheet and, rather than furnish us with its correct interpretation, become themselves objects in urgent need of interpretation.After all, just as the degree of politeness in lifting a hat is a matter of the will and consciousness of the person doing the greeting, but it is not in his power to control what message about his innermost nature others may take from his gesture, so likewise even the artist knows only ‘what he parades’ but not ‘what he betrays’ (to quote an intellectually stimulating American). [C.S. Peirce]

The source of the interpretation of intrinsic meaning is effectively the worldview of the interpreter, as is no less apparent in Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant than it is in the accounts of Rembrandt by Carl Neumann or Jacob Burckhardt.  That is, this source of knowledge is fundamentally subjective, and one may say that its absolutely personal nature is even more in need of an objective corrective than either the vital experience of living (with which we grasp the phenomenal meaning) or the literary knowledge (with which we uncover the meaning dependent on content). Such a corrective does exist, and it belongs to the sphere of historically situated factuality which provides a boundary that must not be crossed by any interpretive ‘violence’ in order not to turn it into ‘roving arbitrariness.’
It is a sense of general intellectual history which clarifies what was possible within the worldview of any specific period and any specific cultural circle, just as the history of styles delimits the sphere of what kind of representation was possible in a given context or at any time and the history of types clarifies what was imaginable. In summary we might say, the history of styles instructs us about how pure form coalesces with specific factual and formal meaning within the process of historical change; the history of types instructs us about how factual and formal meaning coalesces with specific meaning dependent on content within the process of historical change; finally, a general sense of intellectual history instructs us about how meanings dependent on content (for example, the concepts of language or the melismas of music) are redolent of the outlook of a specific worldview within the process of historical change. 

So, for example, art historians use the intellectual testimonia of the Renaissance (among which naturally the writings of Dürer himself must be included) to show the worldview within which Dürer’s Melancholia united a typus Acediae with a typus Geometriae and thus for the first time brought together in a single conception the sufferings of creatures with a sense of fateless agency. The possibilities of this worldview alone draw a line against what we might otherwise lean towards interpreting as depression [Weltschmerz] in the modern sense. Likewise the intellectual history of the eighteenth century allows historians of philosophy to see the limits of a Kantian ontological exegesis, provided that such an exegesis has the aspirations and the duties of conforming to the rules of historical interpretation.*

*One could conceive of an approach which declares itself independent of historical correctives on principle and only postulates that the picture it constructs of a given phenomenon is in itself consistent and meaningful, no matter whether it fits into any historic circumstances. Such an approach (which neither extracts from texts what they ‘say’ nor what they ‘want to say’ but—adhering to the principle of consistency—what they ‘should have had said’) can however no longer be defined as ‘interpretation’ but rather as creative ‘reconstruction’. Its value or nonvalue is not dependent on the standard of historical truth but on that of systematic originality and consistency. This approach is unassailable as long as it is aware of its transhistorical or, even, extrahistorical aims, but it must be resisted the moment when it is tempted to defend itself by replacing history with some other aspiration. 

Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" 

Thus, while science endeavors to transform the chaotic variety of natural phenomena into what may be called a cosmos of nature, the humanities endeavor to transform the chaotic variety of human records into what may be called a cosmos of culture.

There are, in spite of all the differences in subject and procedure, some very striking analogies between the methodical problems to be coped with by the scientist, on the one hand, and by the humanist, on the other.*

*See E. Wind, Das Experiment und die Metaphysik, Tiibingen, 1934, and idem, "Some Points of Contact between History and Natural Science," Philosophy and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, Oxford, 1936, p.255ff. (with a very instructive discussion of the relationship between phenomena, instruments and the observer, on the one hand, and historical facts, documents and the historian, on the other).

David Wagner, "Peirce, Panofsky, and the Gothic"

Abstract
This paper aims to show that Peirce’s analogy of scholastic logic and Gothic architecture merits more than the dismissive note John F. Boler grants it in his essay “Peirce and Medieval Thought” (Boler 2004). Peirce does not just anticipate art historian Erwin Panofsky’s view of an analogy between the scholastic Summa and the Gothic cathedral. Habitus and habit-taking play a vital part in both analogies. I present William Whewell as a likely source of inspiration arousing Peirce’s interest in Gothic architecture, and suggest that Edgar Wind played a part in transmitting to Erwin Panofsky the Peircean idea of unconscious beliefs as expressed by habits. Thus this essay deals with two connections: on the one hand, the relation between ideas as embodied in the structure of scholastic treatises and of cathedrals, and on the other, the concept of habit linking Peirce and Panofsky. Research on the latter benefits from the publication of Panofsky’s correspondence, which reveals that his study of Gothic architecture and Scholasticism commenced four years earlier than hitherto suspected.

I really doubt Panofsky needed much prodding. 

From Leiter, and it's comedy gold

Eric Schwitzgebel: "Qualitative Research Reveals a Potentially Huge Problem for Standard Methods in Experimental Philosophy"

Mainstream experimental philosophy aims to discover ordinary people's opinions about questions of philosophical interest. Typically, this involves presenting paragraph-long scenarios to online workers. Respondents express their opinions about the scenarios on simple quantitative scales. But what if participants regularly interpret the questions differently than the researchers intend? The whole apparatus would come crashing down.

Kyle Thompson (who recently earned his PhD under my supervision) has published the central findings of a dissertation that raises exactly this challenge to experimental philosophy. His approach is to compare the standard quantitative measures of participants' opinions -- that is, participants' numerical responses on standardized questions -- with two qualitative measures: what participants say when instructed to "think aloud" about the experimental stimuli and a post-response interview about why they answered the way they did.

Kyle's main experiment replicates the quantitative results of an influential study that purports to show that ordinary research participants reject the "ought implies can" principle. According to the ought-implies-can principle, people can only be morally required to do what it is possible for them to do. Thompson replicates the quantitative results of the earlier experiment, seeming to confirm that participants reject ought-implies-can. However, Thompson's qualitative think-aloud and interview results clearly indicate that his participants actually accept, rather than reject, the principle. The quantitative and the qualitative results point in opposite directions, and the qualitative results are more convincing.

It was always obvious what was going on.

Tooze doubles as a well-paid tour guide for the 10%, and now he's married to his boss. Blyth makes offhand comments about the fate of his "hedge-fund friends", because he has them. Milanovic likes dining alone in our "utopia with a twist..." with "stains of human passions... lost amid the chromium gleam.". Nir Rosen thinks "some of you people take this war too personally." And all of my money, what's left of it, for now is in oil and gas. 

Following American self-styled leftists going back and fourth between attacking the anti-democratic state, and defending it against "anarchist libertarians" who oppose vaccine mandates. School vaccines have never been mandatory in Canada and the UK and France changed the law in 2018.  Two from "Carl Beijer", as symptomatic of a suburban high-school romance with an imagined past. Arguing with himself on Marx, Lenin and state censorship it just reminds you how far removed Americans are from the rest of the world.

Another way to put it is to say that truth is private, and politics is public, and liberals with their "politics of truth", square the circle in defense of their own self-image and self-interest. Their lies begin as lies to themselves.

Beijer's idealistic authoritarianism is fundamentally liberal, and stupid. 

The Ghost of Panofsky: "Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need."

Timing is everything.

Leiter, a few days ago on "Standpoint Epistemology", and now, on  Truth, freedom of speech and academic freedom, linking to CHE and to himself. The arguments are absurd. Academia is an institution, and no institution is an arbiter of truth in the way these idiots fantasize. They're defending a fucking church, which is why Leiter is against  freedom of speech for the rest of us.

I've made that point a thousand times but I don't think I've ever used the word "Hayek" when the name doesn't appear in a quote. The market tells you nothing about what it means to be a woman or a slave, and the academy is no better. Women's, Ethnic, Jewish, Black, and "Subaltern" Studies, are the result of change not the cause of it, which is why I'm following the globalized subaltern academic bourgeois celebrating communism, nationalism, internationalism, fascism—without acknowledging it—modern poetry, and Ermenegildo Zegna. 

James C. Scott, anarchist control freak. I'm not surprised he worked for the CIA. "Academics... don’t take ideas seriously. For academics, ideas are games."

*MS. NULAND: * Matt, as you have made clear again and again in this room, we are not always consistent.

I've switched out videos with Matt Lee I've posted over the years. A lot of them died. Now they're all CSPAN or the State Dept.; they'll last a bit longer.

Nuland on Ukraine, the leaked phone call from 2014: "Fuck the EU"

The list of US crimes is getting longer, and this one's pretty much out in the open. Only Nixon could go to China; only a Democrat could be goaded into crimes against humanity. 

A woman I knew years ago in the extended family of Zahir Shah, born under house arrest and raised in Queens, went to Afghanistan and came back with stories of NGO workers zooming around Kabul in their new Mercedes.   

repeats: from Afghanistan to Haiti and vice versa, both with links the LRB because bourgeois liberalism doesn't have to be absolute shit.

From Leiter: Mearsheimer on Ukraine from 2014. 

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An old friend's grandparents were blacklisted in the 1950s. They were communists. The husband lost his government job. To pay the bills they opened a childcare center. They lived in New Jersey, and the parents of one of the children in their care were at the Afghan mission to the UN. J's grandmother, who'd been a barnstormer in the 20s,  had fond memories of "little Najib". When I introduced her grandson to the grandniece of Zahir Shah,  I introduced him as the grandson of the babysitters of her babysitter.

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Yemen, 2015,  2016, 2021, now.

When I was rooming with Graeber in Chicago  we sat on one of the Comaroff's dual seminars. David was done with coursework—he was waiting for funding—but he liked them both and liked to show up. A few minutes in I wanted to jump off my chair but didn't, though David saw me struggle and it annoyed him.  John Comaroff was talking about the 1922 South African miner's strike, and shamans' declaration that the mines had become taboo. He called it a great example of political art, and I fought the urge to protest.

"Political art" engages with authority, and is predicated on the existence of what it seeks, or claims to seek, escape from. This was the opposite: the disengagement from authority.  The image, or scene, that came to me at the time or shortly after—they're joined in my mind—is of two men sitting on a bench while a man behind them is screaming at them to get back to work. One of the men turns  to the other: 

"Did you hear something?"

"It's just the wind" 

"Want to go fishing?" 

"Sure" 

And they walk away, while the man screams. Comaroff was right that that it was a brilliant act, but he wasn't able to describe what made it so good. Neither could David of course. Every defender of an independent non-ideological art (the standard argument) would smile at the shamans' refusal.

14. But Harvard’s investigation only exacerbated Plaintiffs’ nightmare. Harvard dragged the process out for over a year, foisted inordinate burdens on Plaintiffs, then willfully ignored the overwhelming evidence they marshalled. During the process, Harvard obtained Ms. Kilburn’s private therapy records without her consent and disclosed them to Professor Comaroff....

66. Professor Comaroff, meanwhile, continued to harass students with impunity. He even boasted about it publicly. At an October 2017 dinner with faculty and graduate students, Professor Comaroff compared himself to Harvey Weinstein, and remarked, “They’re coming for me next!” Professor Jean Comaroff, also in attendance, disparaged women who confront or report sexual violence, commenting, “Whatever happened to rolling with the punches?”

The filing is full of references to Jean Comaroff facilitating her husband's continued abuse. His record goes back to the 70s.  I remember her from the seminar, her manner and her scarf. And when I first heard of the case and saw the photographs of the plaintiffs, this one, of Amulya Mandava, stood out. 

Feminism and Post-feminism: the defensiveness and anger of "ladies", who willingly spent lives deferring to male attention and authority. 

It's not hard for me to imagine women following the same conservative feminine prerogative who would have spit in John Comaroff's face. But maybe they'd be the first to admit their own conservatism.

It's almost too neat: I moved in with Graeber because he was the only person I knew in Chicago when I moved there to hang out at the Art Institute, where I sat in on a class, every week, with Babette Mangolte. 

A few years ago watching an episode of Gotham, listening to the dialogue I realized that the script had written by a playwright; that whatever the necessities of network tv, the writer had been allowed on a scene by scene basis, to build exchanges and set pieces. It didn't feel like a "screenplay"; it seemed more theatrical than filmic, but not in a way that undermined the result. TV as a medium is still very different than "film" (digital or not)—it's different in scale and structure—and the new black box surrealism is an interesting thing. 

Still fucking with this.

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The change of medium and scale, from projection to glowing box, changes the focus from picture to story. The French New Wave, as literary filmmakers, were also filmmakers for the age of television. 

The new tv surrealism goes back the old tv surrealism; it goes back to Ernie Kovacs. 

This is an important part of understanding the debate, IMO. MMT is clearly a political movement, that aims to change how fiscal policy is debated in this country.

What counts as success in academia is not as important to them.

MMTers are influential because they try to be. https://t.co/vEre95Zd66

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) February 6, 2022

Truth and Politics. more later

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Links die: Summers' thread, with the tweet Weisenthal quotes.

I am sorry to see the @nytimes taking MMT seriously as an intellectual movement. It is the equivalent of publicizing fad diets, quack cancer cures or creationist theories.

[linked: NYT, Is This What Winning Looks Like? Modern Monetary Theory, the buzziest economic idea in decades, got a pandemic tryout of sorts. Now inflation is testing its limits. ]

Yes article does point out data it regards as inconsistent w MMT & quotes 

@jasonfurman as being critical but this is like reporting symmetrically on the ongoing argument btw evolutionary biology & creationism & noting a development on evolutionary side. Fundamentally misleading

I greatly admire @jeannasmialek's reporting but I was very disappointed this time out. She was also victimized by an egregiously misleading headline, if the goal of her story was to point out MMT’s weakness.

There are things MMT says that are true and things it says that are new but unfortunately there is no overlap.

This is not about politics or agreement with me. I deplore the @nytimes and economic journalism in its general neglect of Marxist and post Keynesian scholarship, most of which is very critical of my views and policy choices.

I am all for intellectual diversity and wish that the NYT would give more attention to Marxist scholars like Steve Marglin, whose book Raising Keynes deserves extensive debate, or other left scholars like Tom Palley, Dean Baker or Jamie Galbraith. 

[linked: Marglin, Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory] 

Serious leftist scholars submit their work to peer review, are willing to engage in public debate with their critics and carry out empirical work that others can try to replicate.  Not the MMT movement.

It would be valuable for the Senators to verify that Fed nominees are not in the thrall of MMT. 

"Anything we can actually do we can afford.” Keynes in 1942: on the BBC, an orator, a political actor in wartime.

Still fucking with this thing, and fucking with Adolph Reed.

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Jäger, a good one

Very weird when EU analysts continue to describe Brexit as this insular, endogenously ‘British’ event when clearly it was the 2011 ECB rate hike that turned Britain into an employer of last resort for a eurozone pushed into recession and handed Leave one of its key weapons.

— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) February 1, 2022

Adolph Reed, is an ass.

Next month, Reed will publish a book that is, in the context of his polemical writing, unusual. Called “The South,” it is an account of growing up in segregated Arkansas and New Orleans, and of navigating, as a young man, Jim Crow’s immediate aftermath. The book read to me as a memoir, a term he adamantly rejects. He told me my interest in the book made him regret writing it; he did not want to receive mainstream attention for his reminiscences. 

Reed is a vanguardist, and vanguardists are snobs.  

What a fucking idiot.

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I call Reed an idiot—he isn't—because he's a pedant. It is a fact that race is less of an issue. It is a fact that people argue from self-interest and not "truth". It is a fact that "Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism." It is a fact that the fading of race as an issue will return class the the central role that Reed prefers. And it is a fact that Reed is so angry that the peasants aren't intellectuals that he can't think straight.

And elitism, as I've said again and again, has a double edge: the elect are permitted to indulge sins forbidden to the common people: "To the pure all things are pure", "Homosexuality for us, but not the masses" "Don't call it a memoir!!" 

In my twitter days, I trolled Catholic rightists by telling them they wanted people to share their own self-hate. Innocence was a lie. The lack of self-hatred disgusted them. They agreed. I was less trolling them than the liberals reading them who didn't get the point.

"Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God." A quote attributed to Cyril Cusack, whose performance in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is a pitch-perfect model of the priest to Oskar Werner's boy. I saw the movie as a boy and don't remember if Cusack reminded me of Daniel Berrigan, whom I met as a 5 year old—he stayed at our house for for a few days when he was on the run—or the reverse.  I've never forgotten his face, moving down towards mine as he shook my hand. I recoiled, pulling my head back, and later asked my mother to explain just what it was I'd reacted to. Her reply was, "Unctuous". Years later I saw the same expression in a part-time student, model, hustler, from my circle—not the director of the Halston bio—who'd been raised by Jesuits. He had the smile of a man who wanted to seduce anything alive. Even his friends didn't trust him.  

Reed is offended by the thought that he's been outed as a storyteller, an orator, not a philosopher, and interested in telling a story about himself. Only members of the elite, his own kind, are allowed to know his secret.

Corey Robin makes my job even easier: "I once said that Adolph is the closest thing to Max Weber we've ever had in this country." And as I once said about Weber:  "The fantasy of objectivity is the fantasy of the universal through the elision of the particular, beginning with the elision of the particular self." All of this in various ways goes back to my comments about The Name of the Rose, from 30 (40?) years ago: the decay of scholasticism. And now the rise of the black bourgeoisie, offends the righteous academic left.

I'm sympathetic to elitists. My stockbroker stocks up on marijuana edibles at places that look like Apple stores; it's something out of A Clockwork Orange.  I miss the days when good drugs were left to criminals and serious intellectuals, who understood the cost.

Unlike Reed I get the joke: "Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself."

 

I'm playing cute with all this. It's fun playing at being catty. I take all this shit for granted and I can't write as if anyone has the slightest idea what the fuck I'm talking about, or if they do, that it matters.

speak softly and carry a big black stick

Biden saying that he was going to choose a black woman was the worst kind of white pandering, and politically incompetent. If he'd had the guts to play hardball he would have spoken only about policy, and then nominated one of the same women he's looking at now. It's not the battle; it's the war. Leave proud statements of moral superiority to others.

In other news I'm still in the Berkshires and obliged by my host to watch MSNBC, where the talking heads of every color are praising Biden's moral superiority, calling for war with Russia, and silent about the US policy of death and destruction in Yemen and starvation in Afghanistan.

And Whoopi Goldberg is being criticized for saying Jews are white.

"Crypto and the politics of money", Tooze and Morozov 

EM: The whole new field of “cryptoeconomics” seems to ignore the macro-level and just focuses on getting the Homo Economicus to behave through better-designed incentives… If one were to write an intellectual history of cryptoeconomics, it’s going to be almost exclusively dominated by mechanism/market design and game theory, its non-existent macro-economics stuck in denial somewhere between the extremes (all on the far-right) of someone like Murray Rothbard and his libertarian opponents who preach Free Banking. This ignorance of the macrofinancial is premised on what seem like wrong-headed ideas about the nature of fiat money and it not being “backed” by anything… Could you briefly tell us why in your opinion the standard crypto critique of fiat money makes a mistake in ignoring the ways in which the structures of macrofinance actually do back, say, the US dollar?

AT: Well it is a vertiginous realization isn’t it? That money is not backed by “anything.” I’ve shocked year after year of smart college students by forcing them to face that reality. There are always a significant minority who cling to some version of the gold standard. They actually do believe that when you “take the note to the central bank,” you will get “something” in exchange. It’s not an easy idea to give up. It’s not unlike the vertiginous feeling that is engendered by realizing that language is not “backed” by anything. We are familiar with solutions to this problem. Create a physical object that can be used as a reference for a word, a definition, a standard, etc.

I pasted the above a week ago and set it aside. It made me laugh. I had that "vertiginous feeling" a long, time ago, but I wanted to put this to good use.

Leiter just posted "Realism About Precedent" to SSRN 

In jurisdictions with a doctrine of precedent (or stare decisis), later courts are supposed to be bound by the decisions (the ratio or holding) of earlier courts, either those above them in a chain of authority (vertical precedent) or their own earlier decisions (horizontal precedent, where the later incarnation of the same court usually retains the option of overruling its earlier decision). The later court, in either the vertical or horizontal cases, is bound only by those decisions which are “on point” or “the same in relevant respects” to the case currently before the court. Since cases are never identical in all particulars, this always requires figuring out which general categories that subsume the particulars of different cases are the relevant ones: I will call this “relevant similarity” in what follows. Relevant similarity is typically assessed in light of either the reasons the earlier court actually gave for the decision or the reasons that can be imputed to the earlier court based on the legal decision that court reached. Analogical reasoning figures crucially in ascertaining whether an earlier case that might be precedent is, in fact, “relevantly similar.” Indeed, there is no doctrine of precedent without analogical reasoning, since in any jurisdiction with a doctrine of stare decisis, any earlier decision by a court is a possible precedent for a later court considering the same legal question, and any earlier decision considering the same legal question is potentially distinguishable as involving facts that are not “relevantly similar.” Uncontroversial judgments of relevant similarity deal with most of the former cases. 

Leiter pretends to be an observer, not a player; he thinks his arguments are "backed" by something more than pedantry. Using his own definition, trial lawyers are the only legal realists. 

My only real comment on Morozov is from 2013, but his name's come up a few times. I'll give him a tag

Pollitt on Srinivasan 

The Right to Sex is clever, well-written, and worth reading, but I don’t quite understand why it’s received so much attention. Srinivasan was even profiled in British Vogue, hardly a bastion of socialist feminism. Perhaps her tendency to avoid hard conclusions is part of the appeal. Then, too, attacking earlier generations of feminists is always popular. As is sex. What is most striking to me about the book is the near absence of most of the issues that have historically been feminism’s major concerns. There’s almost nothing about marriage, motherhood, child care, equality with men in the workplace, domestic labor, political representation, reproductive rights, misogynist culture, women’s health, the medical pathologizing of women’s bodies and minds, the continuing power of sexism to shape women’s expectations and behavior from birth, and the myriad obvious or subtle ways so many women are pushed, little by little, into becoming the support system for a man. The urgent and growing threat of fundamentalist religion and semi-fascist nationalist movements around the world goes unmentioned, as do the millions of mothers who were forced out of their jobs, some permanently, when the pandemic closed day-care centers and schools. It’s a truism of reviewing that you have to permit a writer her choice of subject; you can’t blame her for not writing a different book (it’s also true that the overambitious subtitle “Feminism in the Twenty-First Century” is an add-on for the U.S. edition). Still, I found myself wondering if the most important issues in the lives of most women have been around so long, with so little fundamental improvement, that we’d just rather talk about something else. Like incels and pornography and professors who sleep with their students.

Smart but too polite. Since I skimmed the book using word searches I missed some amazing bits of  rationalizing and self-justification.

From, Coda: The Politics of Desire

21. If this is right, in what sense is political lesbianism, as Andrea Long Chu insists, a failed project? 

22. In an interview Chu responded at length to ‘The Right to Sex’. She acknowledges the phenomenon with which I am concerned: ‘Obviously something like “no fats, no femmes, no Asians” is a desire that has a history, and has a politics, that can be described by reference to political processes: imperialism, white supremacy, and also, like, the world-historical defeat of the female sex.’ But she adamantly resists the idea that we can or should do anything about it. ‘I can’t stand body positivity,’ she says, alluding to my discussion of Lindy West. ‘I cannot stand it. It is just anathema to me. It’s moralizing. It’s really fucking hard to figure out a way to tell people to change their desires that isn’t moralistic.’[6]

23. Is there no difference between ‘telling people to change their desires’ and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want? Must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (wilfully altering our desires in line with our politics) – or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?

[6]- "Wanting Bad Things" Long Chu and Anastasia Berg

ALC:...The story that begins the article is an account of me in high school, long before I’ve transitioned. I’m on the athletics bus as the manager of the girls’ volleyball team, and I’m the only boy on the bus, and we’re driving to an away game. And it was like this really intense erotic experience for me. And one of the things you do as a trans person, especially if you don’t have the luxury that some of us have of sort of always having felt “this way,” is when you do transition you go back and think, Okay, so what are the signs? So I was looking for signs. And this bus ride seemed to be demonstrative of something, of a way that I sort of felt without knowing that I felt that way. So that was where the piece came from in terms of some of the more personal aspects, but it was a lot of things I’d just been thinking about, and sort of dying to say and not feeling like I had a space to say it. 

AB: You conclude the story of being on the bus by saying, “The truth is I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.” And I think for some readers who are less familiar with how debates within feminist discourse and trans discourse have been going on this could sound pretty innocent. But actually this isn’t very much an innocent statement at all—to talk about liking women and wanting to be like women in one and the same breath—because this is the kind of thing that has been used as an accusation.

ALC: Oh, absolutely. Something that’s kind of lurking in the background in this piece that doesn’t get discussed explicitly, I don’t think, is that the first accounts of transsexuality and transvestitism—we’re talking about Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for the Science of Sexuality in Berlin in the early twentieth century—those first accounts are sexual accounts. Transsexuality and transvestitism are understood as being essentially erotic projects, you know. One hears an echo of that in the discourse around the bathrooms, for instance, as if the reason that trans women transition is so that they can have easier access to little girls in bathrooms. As a result, we’ve had a hard time talking about the role that desire, sexual desire, erotic interest—all of those things—play in transition, which is… it’s so—it’s so incredibly real.

AB: Why did that—transsexuality as having to do with desire—become something that got denied and replaced with the model that you discussed of identity?

ALC: Well, the problem with the Hirschfeld model or the models that followed, the difficulty with those accounts is that the sexual valence that was treated to transsexuality was a pathologizing one. That was a part of a way of marking it as a form of perversion, which is something that again continues to today. In recent sexology there’s this largely debunked theory that transsexual women are in fact men, and you can divide them into two categories: homosexual transsexuals, or straight trans women, and autogynephilic transsexuals, men who are aroused by the idea of being women.

An explicit defense of sexual "Orientalism", fetishizing the other. When liberal optimism accepts the demimonde, some pathologies need to be recategorized. Cosmetic surgery for men who want to be women is accepted, and thus also and secondarily, for women who want to become men, but women who want to look younger to attract men are just sad. Political lesbianism may be more necessary than ever.

"They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won't have sex with trans women."

And clicking down the rabbit hole of rationalism,  Berg, a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an editor of The Point, recommends an article, by Gal Katz, with a quote: "I’m from Palestine myself, or as I like to call it, 'a place usually designated as Israel."  Men are the new women;  Zionists are the new Palestinians; Rachel Dolezal is still a liar.  As I said years ago, all that's clear is that blacks as a group get the benefit of a knee-jerk sympathy from liberals that women as a group do not.

Back to Srinivasan

48. I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling. Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas? Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?

49. Consider the gay men who express delighted disgust at vaginas. Consider the idea of the ‘Platinum Star Gay’, the gay man who, birthed via a caesarean, never even made bodily contact with his mother’s vagina. Is this the expression of an innate, and thus permissible revulsion – or a learned and suspect misogyny?

An innate and thus permissible misogyny. What a fucking idiot. Liberalism tying itself into knots.

We've come a long way in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, since 1985—"It was strange. My students were all obsessed with sex.... Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"—and then again, we haven't. 

After going through the archives for the various repeats of that story, told by Callie Angel about a grad student returning to Columbia and the Journal of Philosophy after teaching summer school at Princeton, I'll go with this one. 

"The banality of much of the the New York cultural scene is beginning to get to me."  From 2003. My writing's gotten more informal, and less.

Srinivasan now has a tag.

This is still pretty good.

Ask and ye shall receive

Robert Corn-Revere:

In a recent opinion piece, two highly respected scholars at the Berkeley School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky and Prasad Krishnamurthy, offer a modest proposal to prevent “unaccountable technology monopolies serving as the nation’s speech police.” They point to the long-defunct fairness doctrine, which purported to require broadcast stations to cover controversial issues of public importance in their communities and to do so with “balance,” and suggest Congress could pass a law forbidding “designated social media platforms from discriminating against users and content on the basis of their political views.”

With all due respect to Dean Chemerinsky and Professor Krishnamurthy, it is hard to imagine a proposal that would more thoroughly break the internet. Their proposal ignores the sad history of failure and abuse that led even the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) to abandon the fairness doctrine as unworkable and unconstitutional; it rests on an unsound constitutional premise that already has been rejected by the Supreme Court; and it would empower a federal bureaucracy to become the nation’s speech police for “designated social media platforms” (but apparently not for others). The proposed cure is far worse than the disease.

My reply:

Chemerinsky and Krishnamurthy reply:

The power to censor speech, whether in the hands of the government or private companies, should be of great concern to all of us. Although we disagree with virtually everything President Trump said, we are deeply concerned that Twitter’s lifetime ban deprives him of the ability to speak and 88 million followers of the ability to hear his message. At this time, a relatively small number of media companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google, Youtube — exercise enormous control over what all of us can see and hear.

A modest proposal 

In light of this, we advanced a modest proposal: Congress should pass legislation that forbids designated social media platforms from discriminating against users and content on the basis of their political views. Platforms would still be free to remove unprotected speech such as libel, slander, threats, and the intentional dissemination of untruth. They would also be permitted to remove posts that do not conform to their community standards of decency and mutual respect. But platforms would not be permitted to censor speech based on its political content. We believe that the Supreme Court’s decisions upholding the fairness doctrine, such as Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC and Turner Broadcasting System v. FCC, provide a constitutional basis for such legislation.

Robert Corn-Revere, an eminent First Amendment lawyer and scholar, has opposed this by saying that we are urging Congress to create a fairness doctrine for the internet. He then proceeds to say that the fairness doctrine was a disaster and would “break the internet.”

Mr. Corn-Revere creates a straw person and then attacks it. We do not argue for a fairness doctrine for the internet. We mention the fairness doctrine cases because they support the constitutionality of what we propose: federal legislation to prevent monopoly social media platforms from discriminating against users and content on the basis of their political views.

Critical questions

There are three critical questions: First, should social media platforms be able to exclude speech based on the political views expressed? Mr. Corn-Revere does not defend the desirability of their doing so. We believe that censorship based on political views is wrong whether done by the government or powerful private entities and is harmful to freedom of speech.

Second, is there a workable way to prevent social media platforms from excluding speech based on political views? Mr. Corn-Revere opposes creating an agency with this power. We never advocated such an agency. Perhaps a cause of action against social media companies when they do this would be the best option. Mr. Corn-Revere describes how litigation was strategically used by incumbent political parties to harass or silence broadcasters, especially smaller ones, under the fairness doctrine. But our proposal covers monopoly social media platforms, so there is much less of a likelihood that they can be pressured by baseless litigation. If it is agreed that social media platforms should not exclude speech based on their political views, the conversation should be about how to implement that.

Third, would such restrictions be constitutional? Unlike Mr. Corn-Revere, we find no indication that the Supreme Court ever has repudiated Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC or Turner Broadcasting System v. FCC. Reno v. ACLU declared unconstitutional some provisions of the Communications Decency Act, but did not consider any of the issues we are raising or the problems with monopoly social media companies that simply did not exist then. The argument must be that social media companies are the “press” under the First Amendment and to hold them liable for the choices they make in regards to content violates the Constitution. The irony is that under Section 230, social media companies purport to be anything but the press. More importantly, the constitutional question is whether government regulation to further free speech outweighs the institutional interests of social media companies to not be regulated. We do not deny that this is a difficult issue, but we ultimately believe that the central goal of the First Amendment is more speech — and that is what we are urging.

C and K, again:

Platforms would still be free to remove unprotected speech such as libel, slander, threats, and the intentional dissemination of untruth. They would also be permitted to remove posts that do not conform to their community standards of decency and mutual respect. But platforms would not be permitted to censor speech based on its political content. 

"standards of decency and mutual respect" as opposed to "political content". 

My reply: Fuck you. 

Facebook is not a "platform". Platforms are under no obligation to remove unprotected speech, because they are not liable for unprotected speech. Removing posts is the prerogative of publishers with comment sections. The power of platforms and providers is something worth discussing. Fair?

tags: Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom,  Futurism and Data Culture, etc.

we'll see...

In an email from the NYRB, reminding me why my parents subscribed from the start, adding each issue to a pile in a room on the third for of our house, in the apartment of our imaginary maid.

V.S. Pritchett on Stendhal and his contemporary critics in 1969

Mr. Peter Brooks’s essay comes in a learned book with a good subject; worldliness in Crébillon, Marivaux, and Laclos; and since Laclos particularly was Stendhal’s master, this is a study of great importance. The balance of scholarship and discernment is admirable. Mr. Brooks is very subtle and exact about the double attitude to social absolutism and “le monde“:

Stendhal then both regrets the loss of le monde, a public system of values and rules, gestures and codes, and sees a liberation in the demise of an enclosed, monolithic, ethically conformist order.

This is obvious, but then comes the finer point:

It follows that “worldliness” from a natural and inevitable stance in life and literature, becomes one among many view points, one conceivable attitude in the world, one possible style in what Stendhal, in a very eighteenth-century definition, liked to call the pursuit of happiness, la chasse du bonheur. Worldliness…is no longer the style of life, it becomes a problem in Style. In his own existence, Stendhal tended to respond with the pose of the dandy, the stylized social being who insists that life meet him on his own terms, who creates his own history and his own milieu by his personal style—a figure that was to have importance throughout the 19th century [Baudelaire, I suppose] as more and more writers sought to set the imaginative creation against life and history, and to affirm the autonomy and superiority of the artifact.

In his life Stendhal’s preoccupation with style as a form of tactics was a stumbling block; but in his novels he achieved an eccentric blend of humeur à l’Anglaise, comedy, and High Romance which has never been equalled. His interest in Fielding is not so astonishing as it seems at first.

It's hard to be precise and plain in descriptions of sense and perception. To be sensitive is to be receptive, but to be social is to be armored (and it helps to be rich). Pritchett says one of Stendhal's strengths was "the vast pride of the timid." All humility is false humility. 

In "age of disenchantment", self-invention is a given, at least among the professionally disenchanted. It all comes down to how you handle it. And it's up to others to gauge self-invention and self-enchantment.

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. 

Pritchett: "This is obvious, but then comes the finer point:...  'Worldliness…is no longer the style of life, it becomes a problem in Style.'" And then "[Baudelaire, I suppose]". For Pritchett, a bridge too far.

If the first point is no longer obvious, it's because being obvious it was taken for granted, and the foundations of the argument were lost.

We can’t re-fight old battles every time a subject comes up; there are limits to the human capacity for recall. Years after spending time and effort to come to a conclusion it’s the conclusion not the process that sticks in the mind. But that means that no matter how hard we once fought our response now is based on received opinion, even if received from our younger selves. So it’s good occasionally to revisit the past in detail, especially in cases where our relation to the past is the thing under debate. 

Brooks' eighteenth-century terms go back to the seventeenth century: je ne sais quoi,

'Worldliness…is no longer the style of life, it becomes a problem in Style." Aristocracy devolves into fashion: style once denoting substance, now replaces it. For those who claim substance as such, it becomes the opposite of politics, of perception: the realm of reason. And for judges of character, gauging self-invention and self-enchantment, a world becomes worlds apart, a free-floating game.

Stendhal (and Baudelaire and all of us) live in a world where pedantry is winning out over judgement, and a new social absolutism, more inflexible than the old. The pose of the dandy is a social armoring, the affect of self-awareness and indifference. Pritchett's manner is a pose, staged over many years  of a kind of stability. 

This is all varieties of repeats, but the one-sided exchange between Pritchett and Brooks set me off. What was obvious to them was obvious to me, like a joke among friends, or between the two of them and my imaginary parents. And as long as I'm repeating myself...

An assistant editor of HamasMag in the New Left Review, and two months later in Foreign Policy.

Mills felt that in key respects the bourgeois task of abolishing non-economic hierarchies had not yet been accomplished in either country. Both were riven by deep inequalities that were inseparable from the racial form in which they were manifested. In 1970s Jamaica not one top firm was controlled by black people, despite their making up ninety percent of the country’s population. For the young Mills however, this entanglement of race and class did not justify a move away from socialism, but merely proved that the cultural domain was also a material one. In ‘Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconcilable Paradigms?’, a magisterial essay published in 1987, he sought to explicate the oft-quoted dictum of Stuart Hall that race is the modality through which class is lived, arguing that Hall did not mean to suggest that there was a perfect correlation between the two categories. Rather, racial classifications were the result of conflicts between social groups and represented different relations to economic and political power. On this basis, Mills concluded that ‘the ideologies and cultures of resistance that develop in the Caribbean will be most strikingly characterized by the reciprocal valorisation of blackness, whether in the form of Garveyism, Rastafari or Black Power.’

The dominant forms of Anglo-American Marxism however largely did not exhibit the subtlety of thinking about culture that Mills believed was necessary to navigate the relationship between class and race. Much of his early career was spent wrestling with conceptual matters – questions of history, ideology and morality – which he felt that this work had misconstrued. Analytical Marxism, which took as its starting point G.A Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), aimed to apply a scientific rigour felt to be lacking in the interpretations emerging out of France and Germany by borrowing the tools of analysis developed by economics and logic to address issues of agency, class interests, and the relationship between base and superstructure. The concept of ideology however – the subject of Mills’s thesis – presented serious problems for this paradigm, since it seemed to suggest that an essential component of Marx’s theory was a rejection, on epistemological grounds, of the autonomy of social practices and morality.

Foreign fucking Policy

There exists a strand of social thought, stretching from Georg Hegel in the 19th century through to Max Weber in the early 20th and Juergen Habermas in the postwar era, that insists that a hallmark of modernity is the differentiation of forms of human knowledge. The sophistication of culture is defined in part by the autonomy of science, morality, and art from religion, and their mutual incommensurability. Any undoing of this development, according to these thinkers, would mean regression to a less sophisticated form of culture.

What then is to be made of “theory,” a term that became en vogue among English-speaking intellectuals in the second half of the last century? Defined not by a focus on a specific subject domain—biology, say, or sociology—but instead by its commitment to producing concepts that could then be applied to different forms of thought, theory became a catch-all phrase for whole swathes of (primarily French) philosophy and cultural criticism from the late-1960s on. There were, however, some unifying features of the genre, including the commitment on the part of its most famous practitioners—Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze—to breaking out of the confines of orthodox Marxism, often in ways that mirrored the criticisms put forward by uncritical defenders of the free market.

...Unlike the socialist political economy and philosophy of the early 20th century, postwar theory was propelled not by any kind of practical engagement but by a constant demand for innovation and newness, needed to keep up with a postwar political landscape that was thoroughly fragmented. The social transformations theory attempted to make sense of—disillusionment with communism, anti-colonial movements, women’s liberation, the existence of an underclass, the continued existence of capitalism—undermined so many assumptions about the world held across the political spectrum that it was hard to see how any overarching ideas could synthesize them, or whether theorists’ inability to do so should be considered a failure.

The contradictions make your head spin.

  

Mills: from  "liberalism is racist", to "deracialized liberalism"; from Tolkien to Fanon to Black John Rawls. Arguing with G.A. Cohen is even more of a waste of time than reading him. 

But John-Baptiste Oduor is a fan of Geuss, the fan of Fanon and "Ghandi", while Arendt "was certainly not a philosopher at all,... nor "a particularly good practitioner of her chosen profession of historically oriented political journalist." Violence or non-violence, as long as it's pure: pure Jesuitical sleaze. 

And the NLR publishes puff pieces by the same author about makers of luxury commodities—$1,575,000 at Sotheby's—because "fine art" is like "philosophy", and now the "fine artist" is black and a woman. Here she's chatted up in Vogue. The last time I made this point it was Christie's; the philosopher was a woman and the artist was a man, also touted in Vogue.  I guess "the bourgeois task of abolishing non-economic hierarchies" has been accomplished. Where does that leave John-Baptiste Oduor, the New Left Review, and HamasMag? Perhaps theorists' inability to synthesize a response should be considered a failure.

The prices for Yiadom-Boakye's paintings have no relation to anything beyond the bubble—or bubbles within bubbles—of the market, and are only slightly less absurd than the valuation of an NFT.  But what do I know? I'm just a sociologist from Mars.

12 years ago a gallery director offered to help me pitch the drapery project to Massimiliano Gioni—a name mentioned in Vogue, not the NLR—but when he read what I'd written he backed off. I've never blamed him for it.  And this was the same man who saw me at an auction at Christie's and gasped "What are you doing here! This is evil!" We both laughed. He's player, a cynic and survivor, but he loves the art he loves, and he defends it, which is why he was at the auction. But I'm not a player; I can't pull it off. I wish I could. But since timing is everything, here's one post about the project.

Pseudo leftists aren't what they were. They celebrate Hollywood liberalism and now preadolescent fantasies of communism—the womb or the hive—proclaim the end of intellectual conservatism while praising a "scholar of the demimonde". Geuss at least still understands the obvious, that communism and monarchism, taken seriously, have a lot in common. 

Martin Scorsese is a conservative. Tarantino is a conservative. Stephen Frears calls himself a "Queenist"

And on and on.

Liberalism is a fucking disaster. And innocence in adulthood is a form of decadence.

---

repeat and update: the Teddy Roosevelt statue is gone.  And Hammons is represented by Bob Mnuchin, father of Steve. His connections to Goldman, financial and social, date back decades. The MoMA show was great, but as always, and as any dialectical materialist should know, the medium is the message, and Hammons is a conservative.  

Andrew Elrod has been getting a lot of play, building on his dissertation on the history of price controls. The inflation debate: Boston Review, and Equitable Growth. See also, Tooze

Elrod

It was the effort to control supply lurking within the project of price stabilization that produced the late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century taboo against overtly political control of markets.

 J.W. Mason

And then at some point it will occur to us that, after all, isn't the interest rate itself a price? In which case, the debate isn't price controls, yes or no, but merely about exactly which prices to control. 

 Jäger replies:

Yes x1000 - if the interest rate is simply the ‘price’ of money, how have we not been doing intense price control for over a decade already?

When I read all this I think of all the time wasted on trolley problems. The doctrine of double effect, again, and so soon.

The language in the thing has changed. It was more concise a decade ago, but the link on the right side of the page is still there.

The man who swings the axe is called the "Executioner"; the man who gives the order is called only "Governor". Officers send enlisted men to almost certain death but may not befriend them. Stanley Milgram’s 1963 experiments showed that physical proximity, of authority to subject and subject to “learner”, was the main factor in affecting the level of obedience to the command to cause harm.

A governor has an indirect relation to the execution that he's ordered. Interest rates have an indirect relation to price hikes. A manipulated economy and a command economy are not perceived as the same thing. And the fatalism behind the popular acceptance that power will out no longer holds when power is indecisive.

Democratic government is artificial, and democratic governance is always a bit of a sham. Most people have no interest in the work of self-government but they can still recognize the hypocrisy of self-interested leaders who claim to be selfless. They'll accept simple unfairness as natural but chafe at controls imposed by moralizing hypocrites who can't make up their minds. Putting an economy on a "war footing" succeeds only because it's temporary. And either way if unfairness goes too far people will rebel out of what they sense as self-preservation, still without wanting the full responsibilities of self rule.

Information is decentralized, and the point of government intervention should be to keep it that way. A sham democracy is still better than open rule of an elite, if only because the elite in a democracy is being refreshed from below and outside; experts need to fear amateurs and amateurs need to be watchful. It begins with that fact that you can't predict what will change you, and expands out to the world.

Agreements among stakeholders, including worker representatives. Ordoliberalism? 

I don't argue with specialists by pretending to be one. I don't argue with car mechanics about engines. I don't argue with soldiers about the best gun for the job. I don't argue grammar with grammarians. I don't argue technics; I argue application. Even arguing about art I'm a generalist. 

"Someone will write something about Didion and her beginnings as a Goldwater Girl and California libertarianism. But it won't be me." And now I guess they have. 

And the same people now tut-tutting Didion are mourning Terry Teachout.

repeat from 2018

If I were to teach a course in how to convey moral complexity in art, I'd show my students "The Third Man." It isn't subtle, but it lays out with great clarity several irreconcilable moral points of view—and doesn't make the mistake of trying to reconcile them in the last reel.

— Terry Teachout (@terryteachout) February 12, 2018

I'd always thought of Teachout as an overly earnest, shallow, self-serving moral conservative, but now nihilism is a moral option.

Teachout was an aesthete. Aestheticism is a form of denial; if nihilism isn't overt it slips out. Didion understood. What artist isn't tempted by nihilism in an age of crisis?

Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings with its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them.

The Third Man is about the limits of friendship and the seductions of fascism; to claim that fascism is a moral point of view is to already admit being seduced. "Twee fascism". I should've used the phrase, and for Bacharach too. I'm almost curious what he has to say about all this. 

Marfrks: "For academics, ideas are games", without weight, connecting Teachout and Scialabba to technocrats, and why technocrats are gamers. Graeber's inverted technocracy is a form of positivism. Nihilism is an inverted moralism. So we end up with art critics interested in aesthetics but not art, because honesty scares them. Jeet Heer is an earnest liberal Zionist who writes about comics. His conservatism is manifested in the same childishness, again, without weight.

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Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus. Conservatism at it's best is human strength identifying itself with/as weakness; Fascism is weakness identifying with/as strength. It's the difference between "I serve the law" and "I am the law". "Unto the pure all things are pure", is a license to anything. Barbarians don't need a license. They accept responsibility for their choices. But if Biden is starving Afghanistan it's because he thinks he had no choice; following the doctrine of double effect he's been granted absolution. Doctors and nurses on the ground, doing their jobs in a crisis, are conservatives; social workers, people wanting to help, are liberals. It's the difference between behavior and ideation. Baudelaire and Didion would get the joke. A lot of people would, and do, but few "philosophers" "theorists" or "social scientists", most of whom identify as liberals. 

An appropriately scathing review of Teachout's biography of Louis Armstrong. "Teachout has tailored Armstrong’s life story along lines that recall Horatio Alger." The art itself becomes meaningless.   

Vergera—see previously on the Chilean election— is one of the new breed of theorists of republicanism who still by their own definition have a hard time accepting that their interests are as much a document as "effective forces in history". That their interests are what they are now was itself predictable.

Vergara, "The Plebeian People of Populism" (uncorrected proofs)

Abstract
Mainstream definitions of populism have detached populism from the historical  and material conditions in which it arises. Perhaps the most pernicious of these abstractions is the conception of the people. According to most definitions, any politics appealing  to “the people” against “the elites” is populist, regardless of their different conceptions of  the people, platforms, and relations to liberal democracy, which has led to the conflation of  populism with ethnonationalism. Through a radical republican approach, in this article I give theoretical ground to effectively separate the people of populism from conceptions of the  people based on ethnicity. Relying on Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics as disagreement, and Jeffrey Green’s theory of the plebeian subject as second-class citizen, I argue that, seen from a historical and material perspective, the people of populism is constructed from a  plebeian identity based on class that is egalitarian and inclusive, constructed from a position of no-rule, in resistance to oppression against the oligarchic order.

Jeffrey Green, The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. This pioneering book makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one, arguing that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see, instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. 

The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy

In this sequel to his prize-winning book, The Eyes of the People, Jeffrey Edward Green draws on philosophy, history, social science, and literature to ask what democracy can mean in a world where it is understood that socioeconomic status to some degree will always determine opportunities for civic engagement and career advancement.  

Vergara

The political dispute challenges the foundations of the system of police through a radical egalitarian logic that does not speak to the system but disrupts it through the political performance of the people, of those who do not have a part in the system but nevertheless claim it. “Politics means the supplementation of all qualifications by the power of the unqualified,” the visible action of the people, of those who are not supposed to act because ignorant and unqualified (Rancière, 2010, p.53).

Given its egalitarian logic, Rancière is adamant that politics has a very specific subject that cannot be constructed along identitarian lines because it “exists only in the form of disjunction” (ibid.). The democratic subject is “not definable in terms of ethnic properties” or identified “with a sociologically determinable part of a population,” but a subject made up of “those who have no part,” who do not “coincide with the parties of the state or of society, floating subjects that deregulate all representation of places and portions” (Rancière, 1998, p.99). This construction of the democratic people based on an egalitarian logic of alterity and disagreement is not only different from identitarian constructions of the people but also stands opposed to them. 

Rancière, 2010 (p.53)

For that to happen the logic of the police has to be thwarted by the logic of politics. Politics means the supplementation of all qualifications by the power of the unqualified. The ultimate ground on which rulers govern is that there is no good reason as to why some men should rule others. Ultimately the practice of ruling rests on its own absence of reason. The 'power of the people' simultaneously legitimizes and de-legitimizes it.

This is what demos and democracy mean. The demos is not the population, the majority, the political body or the lower classes. It is the surplus community made up of those who have no qualification to rule, which means at once everybody and anyone at all.

Those who have no qualification to rule. 

Protestant authority and Catholic authority... and the demos, the plebeians and comedians.

However good some of these people are as critics, they're still critics, pretending they're not playing on the same stage as the rest of us. But the Catholics are better than the Protestants. The arrogance of the Protestants is beyond belief.