David Hammons, In the Hood,  Rodin, Monument to Balzac

In a month, maybe. They make a good pair.

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We had two pieces by Hammons, but we didn't get the Rodin. We were looking for a study, but not enough time. I wanted a year; I got a month.

Flow of African migrants poses dilemma
No state founded on ethnic separatism can claim to be either modern or liberal.

Syria Comment
Various recent posts

"Stop Snitchin'" redux

Letter to President Obama from
Zainab Alkhawaja

Obama replies
I hope that explains things.
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4/13. Obama writes another letter

Shorter John Quiggin:
"I was thinking about reinventing the wheel, but someone beat me to it."

As'ad AbuKhalil is a bourgeois who styles himself a leftist intellectual, following the model of modernist as revolutionary aristocrat. At his worst he's an arrogant teenage boy who confuses love for himself with love for humanity, oblivious to the possibility of their confusion.

Chaos
Arab regimes (and Iran) often warn against change and revolutions: they try to scare us by warning of the potential for chaos. I say: we should work for the overthrow of all those regimes (Arab regimes and Iran) because chaos is far superior to those regime [sic]. At least, under chaos there is a stronger chance for change and sabotage (sabotage of oppression and injustice and occupation and conspiracies).

By that logic the half thought out invasion of Iraq was better for the future of its people than either a carefully planned and successful one or none at all, and a Pakistan in chaos, with nuclear weapons unaccounted for, is better than a stable dictatorship.

I read AbuKhalil as a reporter of fact, not as an intellectual. As an intellectual he's an ass.

I admire the brave Syrian communists that you struggled with against [sic] the Syrian repressive state, but you can state with a straight face that the struggle was for "democracy"? Is this a retroactive revisionism? Come on. Arab communists fought for social justice, workers' victory, the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, and liberation but not for democracy. Of course, no [sic] everyone wants democracy, even the lousy Muslim Brotherhood.

The age of Modernism is done.

Sit-ins

"The first thing we will do is escalate the military resistance activity and reactivate the Mahdi Army in a new statement which will be published later,” Mr. Sadr’s representative, Salah al-Obaidi, told the crowd. “Second is to escalate the peaceful and public resistance through sit-ins.”

Also: Goldstone

Recent posts at Arabist

Stephen Walt

TGIF!

SEC. GATES: We had a very good meeting. We met for about an hour and a half, one-on-one. It was an extremely cordial warm meeting. I think the relationship is in a good place. We talked about developments all over the region. We obviously talked about Iran....
Q. Did you talk about the Saudi troops in Bahrain? Did you raise that as an issue?

SEC. GATES: No.

Dennett on "chmess" [pdf]

Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core, and this fact cuts two ways. On the one hand, it excuses philosophers from spending tedious hours in the lab or the field, and from learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages....., empirical science, so they have plenty of time for honing their philosophical skills. On the other hand, as is often noted, you can make philosophy out of just about anything, and this is not always a blessing. The point of this little essay is to alert graduate students entering the field to a way in which the very freedom and abstractness of philosophy can be a weakness.

Consider, as a paradigm of a priori truths, the truths of chess. It is an empirical fact that people play chess, and there are mountains of other empirical facts about chess, about how people have been playing it for centuries, often use handsomely carved pieces on inlaid boards, and so forth. No knowledge of these empirical facts plays an indispensable role in the activity of working out the a priori truths of chess, which also exist in abundance. All you need to know are the rules of the game.

...Some philosophical research projects-or problematics, to speak with the more literary types-are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed-and seldom discussed-and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it-though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn't.

...One good test to make sure you're not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game.
Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you're right about whether Jones's counterexample works against Smith's principle? Another good test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don't "get it," you really should consider the hypothesis that you're following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.

...Of course some people are quite content to find a congenial group of smart people with whom to share "the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement." as John Austin once put it, without worrying about whether the joint task is worth doing. And if enough people do it, it eventually becomes a phenomenon in its own right, worth studying. As Burton Dreben used to say to the graduate students at Harvard, "Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship." Some garbage is more important than other garbage, however, and it's hard to decide which of it is worthy of scholarship.

The following is adapted from my comment elsewhere

"Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship."
The original quote, courtesy of Anthony Grafton

Scholem's absolute rigor and integrity--as well as his dedication to the study of magic--inspired Saul Lieberman, an authority on the Talmud, to offer the greatest backhanded tribute in the history of scholarly irony when introducing him at the Jewish Theological Seminary: "You know that I believe that mysticism is nonsense, total and complete nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship. And the man who is about to speak knows more about the history of nonsense than anyone has ever known."

According to Dennett the only difference between chess and chmess is that chess has a history. Chmess is to chess as a cult is to a religion; old whores, like old buildings gain respectability, which explains the failure of Esperanto to win out over French: a lack of richness or depth of reference, or more simply "depth"

"Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth."
Timothy Williamson

Dennett

"Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core."

"...Some philosophical research projects-or problematics, to speak with the more literary types-are rather like working out the truths of chess."

If Dennett agrees with the equivalence of philosophy to garbage and of the history to scholarship, how can he defend garbage at the expense of scholarship? Philosophy he says, "excuses philosophers from ...learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages...., empirical science." The study of history is empiricism. Philosophy at its best is like mathematics, chess, literary theory, and Catholic theology. Given the doctrines of the Church, how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? At its worst it's the formal analysis of things no one will care about in the future. Back again to Alex Rosenberg, Quine, and Descartes. History defeats them and Dennett as well.
Baseball is nonsense but the history of baseball is scholarship. Literature is nonsense. Art is nonsense. Law is nonsense. Philosophy is nonsense. Culture is nonsense. We're back to the structure and function of formalized social interaction, to the aporias of preference and the historical study of preference. Scholarship is nonsense as well but a study of the past makes for a more intelligent politics in the present.

I'd never read that piece before yesterday, though I'd heard of it of course. It's an amazing bit of work.
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update: and I ignored the digs at Austin.

FP Morning Brief

Top story: Following Saudi Arabia's intervention in Bahrain last month, Bahrain's ruling family has cracked down on the nascent protest movement. Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has instituted emergency laws that give the government's security forces the right to search houses without a warrant, dissolve political parties, and arrest those who participated in the protest movement.

After the government crushed the large-scale demonstrations and the protesters' encampment in Manama's Pearl Square, the opposition has had to adjust its strategy. The protest movement now relies on smaller demonstrations in Bahrain's outlying villages. Nevertheless, human rights activists have reported that 26 people have been killed, 300 have been imprisoned, and at least 35 people are missing in the three weeks since the crackdown began in earnest.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with Saudi King Abdullah on Wednesday, in an attempt to repair relations between the two countries that had frayed badly in recent days. Gates told reporters that he declined to raise the issue of Saudi Arabia's intervention in Bahrain with the king.

NATO airstrike hits rebels: A NATO airstrike in eastern Libya mistakenly targeted a group of Libyan rebels, killing 13.

Reuters via FLC

"I'm not sure it can be amended," Rice told a congressional hearing. "What we want to see is for it to disappear and no longer be a subject of discussion and debate in the Human Rights Council or the General Assembly or beyond." .... Rice told lawmakers the United States repudiated the Goldstone report as "deeply flawed" when it first emerged....
1,400 Palestinians were killed ... "

AP

WASHINGTON – South African jurist Richard Goldstone said Tuesday that he did not plan to seek nullification of his highly critical U.N. report on Israel's 2008-2009 offensive in the Gaza Strip and asserted that claims to the contrary by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai were false.

...Goldstone said, however, that he never discussed the report with Yishai in the telephone conversation. Israeli leaders have called for the report to be retracted since it was issued in 2009.

"There was absolutely no discussion about the Goldstone report on the call," the jurist said in a telephone interview from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

The Freedom Theatre

Ai Weiwei
What I said before

Ai will show you blueprints, sign a contract, take the check, and build something different and cheaper -paying for a wall of glass you’ll get three foot windows- and pocket the difference with his contractor. There are people for more deserving of release from Chinese prisons on grounds of conscience, but not impact. He’s a rock star with fans and acolytes and when he chooses to cause trouble he can do it.

Ai is a trickster capitalist, a Duchampian con man as oligarch. I don’t have to like him to like his work. But I don’t have to approve of it to like it.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

Juliano Mer-Khamis

SouthSouth

"...nudges the reader towards the Montaignian attitude of sceptical curiosity about self, others and the world."

Tag = Determinism,
with a capital motherfucking "D"

Link

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005 


Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1984

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.
de Kooning in the end was a mannerist, not a modernist.

Quiggin

fn1, The events in Libya have also started a new round of claims about the persistence or otherwise of US hegemony, clearly a related topic. As Phil Arena says here, it’s essentially a Rorschach test, with everyone seeing what they want to see.

Pathological as ever