Personal trauma and Zionism: Jessica Stern
And again: "The situation in Gaza suggests that suicide-murder can also be spread through social contagion."

Compare Robert Pape
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[late update]
Conal Urquhart in The Guardian in 2006

Hamas is to abandon its use of suicide bombers, who have killed almost 300 Israelis, in any future confrontations with Israel, its activists have told The Observer.
The Islamic group, which leads the Palestinian Authority, says, however, that it may resort to other forms of violence if there is no progress towards Palestinian statehood.

Yihiyeh Musa, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said Hamas had moved into a 'new era' which did not require suicide attacks.

'The suicide bombings happened in an exceptional period and they have now stopped,' he said. 'They came to an end as a change of belief.'

'They came to an end as a change of belief.'

For the rest see Cobban, Conflicts Forum, Badger etc.

The Scientist

Instrumentalism and the national surveillance state. Frank Pasquale at Balkinization

Second, on a cultural level, there is a gradual melding of surveillance programs with a) what Daniel Callahan calls the "research imperative" and b) the rhetoric of war. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg expressed the research imperative in its purest form when he said, "The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don't do it." Privacy advocates will need to find equally pithy and dramatic encapsulations of their values if the research imperative is not to run roughshod over extant privacy rights.

[update: I've used this quote a few times since and had forgotten that I didn't insert the whole thing here.]
The full passage from Callahan.

Though unfamiliar to most scientists and the general public, the term expresses a cultural problem that caught my eye. It occurs in an article written by the late Protestant moral theologian Paul Ramsey in 1976 as part of a debate with a Jesuit theologian, Richard McCormick. McCormick argued that it ought to be morally acceptable to use children for nontherapeutic research, that is, for research with no direct benefit to the children themselves and in the absence of any informed consent. Referring to claims about the “necessity” of such research, Ramsey accused McCormick of falling prey to the “research imperative”, the view that the importance of research could overcome moral values.

That was the last time I heard of the phrase for many years, but it informs important arguments about research that have surfaces with increasing force of late. It captures, for instance, the essence of what Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel laureate for his work on genetics and president emeritus of Rockefeller University once remarked to me: “The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don’t do it."

Anyone not employed directly or indirectly in maintaining or extending human life is a murderer. That includes astrophysicists, zookeepers, literature professors and architects not sworn to the service of utility. No more gardeners. No more violin lessons.

It’s War Communism in the war on disease. It’s Stalinism for the betterment of the race, and isn't that what Stalinism always was? Is that pithy enough for you, asshole? Productivism is anti-democratic and anti-social. It doesn’t matter what the product is. War as a model for general human organization has a name, it's called Fascism.

From the past

Science is the study of facts and philosophy the study of values. Conflating the two in favor of facts, values become assumed. Values assumed all questions are seen as those of expertise. Expertise as the goal terms of measurement are assumed. Curiosity is defined by the frame, values by the frame moral worth by the frame.

Democracy is undermined as a value and then as a goal.

Max Rodenbeck on Bernard Lewis

If it were only the present that Lewis perceived through a gently distorted mirror, this might not detract from his distinction as a historian. But he gets the past subtly wrong, too, often by omitting vital context. He says that when the Arabs rejected the partition of Palestine in 1947, it was simply because they refused to accept having a Jewish state next door. Yet Arabs were not alone in questioning the United Nations plan to allocate 56 percent of Palestine’s territory to a minority consisting mostly of recent immigrants, which made up barely a third of the population and owned just 7 percent of the land. Greece, India and Cuba, among others, also voted no, while China, Ethiopia, Colombia, Chile and Mexico abstained. The overriding motive of all these doubters was presumably not bigotry, as Lewis implies, but concern about Palestinians’ rights.

NYT: Deborah Solomon with Tzipi Livni

Your parents were among the country’s founders.

They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

It was a more romantic era.

[From Arabist.]

It's a shame that no one teaches reading anymore; schools teach ideas not the ability to recognize them. Follow the conversation as if it were dialogue in a work of fiction. Read it as an outsider and you'll sense in Livni the armor of arrogance over hypocrisy and cold cynicism. Varieties of fascism: Livni as active, and Solomon as servant of power, as bottom, as fan.

The Guardian

Yagiz has hung a German flag from the window, much to the confusion of his mother. "Of course I want Germany to win the World Cup," he says.
He also thinks it's fine that Ozil, the German-born son of Turkish immigrants, has chosen to play for Germany rather than Turkey.
"What should be strange about that? He was born here, brought up here, he speaks the language, understands the culture – just like me. I can identify with him."

The boy could be speaking for Ozil himself. But what's clear from talking to him is how natural it is for a whole generation of young Germans – known as "Generation M" or "multiculti" – that their national football team comes from a diverse range of backgrounds.

Not only is this German team the youngest it has been since 1934 – half the squad are 24 or under – it is also the most ethnically diverse it has ever been. No fewer than half of the players were either born outside Germany, are the sons of immigrants, or have one non-German parent. And what's more, says national coach Joachim Löw, "they have a strong sense of identification with the eagle on their breasts and with the nation as a whole".

The effect of such a radical transition cannot be overstated in a country that for years did not consider itself a land of immigration, and where foreigners brought in to fill the skills gap were deliberately called "guest workers" on the understanding, or hope, that they would go home.

The Best Party
They're the best party.

Jay Rosen again, on McCrystal, Politico and Thomas Ricks. He's good but not good enough. Nir Rosen's defense of his own actions [in comments] is much better

"i'm a journalist, not an american journalist. my job is not to serve as a propagandist for anybody, just to tell stories and my advantage is that i can tell stories that are hard to come by
...imagine if that one taliban commander had not screwed up my plans to go with them when they conducted attacks, and i had seen that too. isnt that interesting? isnt it important to understand who they are? and most importantly, wouldnt it make for a fun read?"

How refreshingly amoral. Nir Rosen knows that his primary obligation is ethical: that by doing his job, he's playing his part in the functioning of democracy.

A neighbor of a friend works in criminal defense, doing mostly federal cases, drugs and guns. He's a schmuck in a three piece suit who drives a BMW and he knows it's not his job to decide if his clients are innocent or guilty. He'll state to anyone who asks that he's "at the forefront of the defense of your civil liberties", and he is. But American reporters want to be moral philosophers, judge and jury. And they forget (as many liberals do) that the government is not the people, and that their readers are their clients. It's not rocket science or the critique of pure reason it's adversarialism, and in one form or another it's the foundation of democracy.

Interesting as time passes to watch Duncan Black

[M]any reporters have a conceit that because they pretend to be superhuman truthtellers unswayed by the petty concerns of mere mortals, that they actually are that. They begin to believe their impossible claim of having no opinions, and start confusing their opinions with facts.

At some point soon he'll realize that the press are the original "reality-based community."

Manet, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1878

It's a terrible painting. 

The Guardian: "Manet self-portrait fetches record £22m at Sotheby's auction"

The NY Times: "A Lackluster Art Auction in London"
Carol Vogel writes on auctions and the art business

The tone was set early on when the star of the event, a self-portrait from 1878 in which Manet depicts himself as something of a dandy — holding a palette and paint brush but dressed in an elegant tailored jacket — sold for the low estimate of $29.48 million, or $33 million including commission, with only one bidder.

Deal Book adds

It appears that Steven A. Cohen’s bet on a Manet self-portrait hasn’t exactly turned out to be the hedge fund billionaire’s most lucrative.
Mr. Cohen, who runs SAC Capital Management, bought the painting for what is believed to be between $35 million and $40 million almost a decade ago.

Richard Feigen is quoted as saying “It was a great picture, but he’s not an auction artist.” The second may be true, but I'm not so sure about the first. Most of the painting seems to me to present Manet at his most incompetent, and that's saying a lot.

Mozart wrote pieces that now are rarely played and Beethoven wrote works in his mature years that are called failures. But the art market is a market of speculators and speculators need material so I want to call this painting a well-timed and thematically well-placed failure. But it's also in the line of transition from a high material culture of great and greatly signifying craft, to a linguistic culture where objects are more like relics or touchstones to remembered arguments. This is something of a return to language. Failure for Manet is a given; more importantly it's his most important trait and primary subject. His best work is an articulate description of failure, but this one isn't so articulate.

The painting was at Sotheby's in NY a month before the auction and I spent about an hour looking at it, trying to separate the thing from its context: from the historical idea of Manet, from my idea of Manet, and from paintings by him that I like for what I imagine to be their internal logic. There's a kind of modern and contemporary art I sometimes call "cocktail party art", where pieces function more as part of an ongoing conversation than as free-standing things. A brilliant quip or retort loses its brilliance or even its intelligibility on its own, which is not to say it wasn't brilliant to begin with. A free-standing art is more resilient, because interpretable in different contexts and over time, whatever its original place. That's why many people -often conservatives- defend the notion of a "universal" art. But the intention or the claim of universality means little more than the claim of dogmatic specificity. History is the arbiter.

Manet's art was not fully situational nor was he anywhere close to being a master of communicative material craft (and at the time there was not yet a conflict, assumed or otherwise, in the relation of communicative immaterial craft to literature: Flaubert didn't have Manet's problems). He wasn't Duchamp and he wasn't Delacroix, though Delacroix was as famous for his weaknesses as for his strengths. Manet was in-between, and his work is awkward and ambivalent. That Duchamp's Fountain was and is one of the most important sculptures of the 20th century says as much about the century as about Duchamp.

From February: Leiter on Fodor on Darwin.
He linked to a review by Ned Block and Philip Kitcher, calling it "a judicious and utterly devastating assessment." I made a couple of comments at the time on rationalists' fear of the uncertainty, I wrote "instability", of empiricism, but I played it safe and didn't wade in too deep.

I missed this last month. A review by Lewontin. The conclusion

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

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

A judicious assessment. Also well written and with his usual sense of humor. Lewontin was always one of best reasons to have a subscription to the NYRB.

More from a "rejoinder" by Lewontin to a response to the paper linked to on monday. [PDF]. All published in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines

Bill Wimsatt's "Lewontin's Evidence (that There Isn't Any)" made me think about a lot of questions in my paper. I would like to point out that the rhetoric of this conference has undergone a sudden change. Up until Bill's presentation and mine, everyone read his or her paper. In the tradition to which I belong that would be considered very bad form. That rhetorical difference is a mirror of the differences that I want to talk about. The words that all of the rest of you use are conceived of as being the matter, and so you must choose them carefully, and, therefore, you have to compose your papers and read them. I, on the other hand and perhaps Bill as well, but especialy I, as a natural scientist, am nothing but the oracle of Delphi, sitting here on my stool with eyeballs rolled upwards, and through me Nature speaks. That explains, in my view, the difference in rhetorical tradition between a meeting like this and the ones at which I spend my time. No one in my tradition believes that the words are very important. After all, if I misspeak someone else will say the right thing because we are both talking about the same things and ultimately the gods will speak through us. So words are not the matter. It is extremely important to understand the origin of that difference in rhetorical tradition because it represents a very great difference in what scientists believe to be the nature of evidence in natural science. A conference on the questions of evidence is really a conference on the questions of theory and metatheory. We cannot begin to talk about the evidence until we talk about what it is we are trying to produce evidence of. And the very method which we use is itself a form of evidence.

The paper itself has examples of oversimplification and "just so stories."

All this reminds me that I didn't grow up reading "Theory" I grew in a culture of the humanities, and reading Lewontin, where the foundation of his arguments not specific to genetics were assumed.
I'll repost the Panofsky [PDF] as well.

Jay Rosen #3
(see last week and last year)
He's right, things are changing. He's changed.
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Helena Cobban at Foreign Policy
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Crooked Timber discusses other people concerned with the limits of democracy.

Theoretical assumptions.
The relation of corporate to academic life over time.

1

“Jeremy, theory doesn’t change the way data is gathered, it guides what data is do be gathered [sic] and how it is to be interpreted, what tests are run; that sort of thing.”

I’m would disagree with that. Look at Karen Ho’s Liquidated and Karin Knorr Cetina’s work on finance. The fact that they come from two different theoretical perspectives shapes the sites that they do their research on and their research methodologies. KHo looks at the habitus of investment bankers, and carried out ethnography and interviews. KKC looks at financial markets in terms of information flow across global networks – she did interviews and not participant observation.

2

In 1952, Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee. Together with representatives of the university, Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education. There were lectures and seminars led by scholars from Penn and other colleges in the area — 550 hours of course work in total, and more reading, Baltzell reported, than the average graduate student was asked to do in a similar time frame.

...Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival.

...What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”

...But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.

[unfinished]

Arabist
Panofsky: Reflections on Historical Time [PDF]
Lewontin: Facts and the Factitious in Natural Sciences [PDF]

note taking

The problem is when theory (the observer) becomes more important than the thing being theorized about (the observed). Absent some form of ironization -implicit in works of art- the observer model becomes a model of superiority and condescension. Reading Bourdieu years and years ago he pissed me off immediately because he reminded me of all those who used to argue [do they still?] that Jacqueline Susann is just as good as Shakespeare, which is the equivalent of saying Sarko’s second favorite singer Celine Dion [so much for "Distinction"] is Mozart and any anthro with two books is Levi-Strauss.

The reactionary avant-garde had a habit of attacking the ideal of mastery, by which they meant the mastery of craft; and what replaced it was the goal of the mastery of ideas. The definition of ideology. Ideology says that, ideology, subtext, meconnaissance, false consciousness, the subconscious and language games are for other people, not for us. A geologist looks at rocks. Anglo american academic theorists look at the the most complex forms of the human imagination as if they were rocks. Shakespeare’s plays are not rocks. Bourdieu is American in that regard. The French think of theory and philosophy as another form of literature, as forms of art, which is why those who use the American model of science have no patience. Or they try to pretend French rhetoric is like physics and make fools of themselves.

Your experience is a lens; the english language is a lens; the academic system is a lens. An American academic talking and writing about the Yanomami is writing by default about the present in the US as manifested in the structures of his or her imagination. Writing about anything you’re writing yourself. You can either use your subjects as fodder, which if your subjects are other human beings is profoundly disrespectful, or you can engage them in a reciprocal exchange. And if you’re a good writer you can describe the exchange later and maybe it will outlast you by a bit. Data is a McGuffin. A Ph.D. is a marker of status. And seeing everything in terms of ideology is ideology. It’s a Gordian knot. A great ethnographer is a great writer; a great craftsman. What’s a better way to honor the craftspeople you observe than to become one yourself? Theory at it’s best is an academic attempt to return to a model of writing as literature. At it’s worst it’s the celebration of the metaphysics of bureaucracy.
--

Rick is a “cultural materialist/ecologist” so welfare is the problem. A more “idealtional” approach would argue for racism as foundational.

Oy, Where to begin.

In NY they have French bistros. They have chefs who’ve studied the appropriate food and architects who know the appropriate interior designs but somehow it’s not Paris. The French forms of sociability aren’t there. The “forms” of social interaction aren’t there. The same is true for French theory in the US. American individualism replicates the ideas but not the manners and the manners are the underlying structure.

My mother was the worst technically proficient player of Bach keyboard works that I’ve ever heard. She “read” him while playing the keys that matched the notations on the page. Actual performance would have made it into something else, something personal. She did not perform she followed,

Rick’s “perfectly standard stuff” answers nothing except to give us another example of his politics (which in every other example he’s done a miserable job of backing up with evidence)
Interpretation of data requires that we become diagnosticians. What makes a good diagnostician? What makes a good interpreter? Interpretation is not following a tool, it’s using one. The hammer doesn’t drive the nail.

Jay Rosen a year ago, and now. No change.
Note taking

If political reporters took their role as advocates as seriously as entertainment reporters do we'd all be better off. ...If Nir Rosen can imbed with the Taliban and do his job, why can't you imbed with the Senate?

Reporters style themselves judges when they should model themselves on lawyers in private practice. But the model of moral semi-consciousness, of advocate for hire, in this case by the public at large, isn't respectable. Everybody hates lawyers.

But legal philosophers are taken very seriously.

A repeat, from less than a month ago, but with the order reversed. In response to this.

Clement Greenberg

Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain.

It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered "pure," and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. "Purity" meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.

Max Weber

[S]cience [i.e. Wissenschaft, scholarly or method-based disciplines] has entered a phase of specialisation previously unknown and ... this will forever remain the case. Not only externally, but inwardly, matters stand at a point where the individual can acquire the sure consciousness of achieving something truly perfect in the field of science only in case he is a strict specialist. All work that overlaps neighbouring fields, such as we occasionally undertake and which the sociologists must necessarily undertake again and again, is burdened with the resigned realisation that at best one provides the specialist with useful questions upon which he would not so easily hit from his own specialised point of view. One’s own work must inevitably remain highly imperfect. Only by strict specialisation can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialised accomplishment.

The practice Holbo asks about was in fact standard for centuries.


Masaccio, The Tribute Money. The figure of St. Peter is repeated 3 times.

In an age when the vast majority were illiterate, paintings were made by the church for the public, and paintings told stories. In an age of increasing literacy, technical advancement, and private wealth they moved away from it. As literacy increased even more painting continued to fade in importance to the point where Panofsky, who had no stake in Modernist pretension could write: "Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only 'art'—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning and 'commercial design,' the only visual art entirely alive."

Comics are a minor art. In an age of high cultural synchronic form, narrative thrived in common idioms. Holbo defends comics as simple preference, related but not identical to the defense of speculative fiction [see the post before last]. He enjoys them from on high, with a condescending irony, like Feynman's bongos, that gives comics and the arts less credit than they deserve. There was a lot of tragedy in Feynman but he had no secret wish to abandon physics for music. He had no interest in subtext, but he knew what he loved and did it happily, and had a hobby to let off steam. You get the sense with Holbo that he can't take seriously the one thing he really loves.

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

Henry Farrell approves

John Gray on the disappearance of utopian dreams of social reform in science fiction here. His taste in SF is excellent and he has several good lines.

The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.

is particularly nice. It captures real (if not universal) differences without fetishizing the one as better than the other.

India was an alien environment for the British; Indochina was an alien environment for the French; Africa was an alien environment for the entirety of Europe. Henry Farrell can't deal with Palestine but he can justify "thought experiments" on Mars. Fantasy is escape. It's evasion.

Science Fiction was created by men trying to get away from the alien environment populated by their wives.

"Debt-ridden Greece gets vote of confidence from China"

Helena Cobban, just back from Syria, posts on Turkey's expanding economic and political engagements, and adds:

So this latest Türk Telekom deal is really significant. As important for the M.E. region as was China's August 2008 announcement that it was investing $3.5 billion in developing Afghanistan's Aynak copper field, for Afghanistan. (Funny that in all the recent reporting in the U.S. about the Pentagon's recent "discovery" of Afghanistan's mineral wealth, that never got mentioned?)

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Brian Leiter and "Joshua Cohen (Stanford)" seem entirely ignorant of the history of the American fantasy of can-do individualism, perhaps because they partake in it themselves. It's a fantasy that's become harder and harder to maintain outside the academy as well. The proudly self-reliant population of red states is supported by the redistribution of income from the coasts, though it comes from those who otherwise treat them with contempt. Bernstein ruminates too much, indulging in a public display of imagination, but that doesn't make him wrong.

Eszter Hargittai at CT calls this "neat", and "very cool". The link was forwarded to her by a friend named Gilad Lotan, whose previous post on twitter reads: "Workin the Microsoft booth at pride - handing out bags, tshirts and doggy biscuits!"
Enthusiastic about banality because enthusiasm is good.

Andre Gide quotes Joseph de Maistre: "Whatever constricts man strengthens him." The context is a note on Calvinism and English literature. A few pages earlier he writes

I believe that never did the "rules"' embarrass any genius, neither that of the unities in France nor that of the three actors in Greece, and that Racine and Corneille as well as Aeschylus have sufficiently proved this. (That moreover they have no absolute value and that any great genius masters them, whether be finds support in them or negates them - and that to come along and claim that this or that great man was embarrassed by them is just as ridiculous as if a painter said that when painting he is embarrassed by his frame and exclaimed: "Oh if only I could spread out a little farther!" and that those who protest against them are like Kant's dove, which thought it would fly better in a vacuum.)

In general insubordination with regard to the rules comes from an unintelligent subordination to realism, from a misunderstanding of the ends of art, from that specious insinuation of empiricism which aims, through a scandalous generalization, to scoff at art by attacking it only where it has become artifice, and to label as factitious all supernatural beauty.

"Supernatural beauty" is no more or less than the pleasure we find in what pleases us.

Lotan exhibits the common nostalgia for the real. [archive.org] And he's a committed Zionist, elsewhere referring to Israel as "a moral society" and defending the assault on Gaza. Nostalgia on its own communicates nothing to those who don't share it. Communicating nostalgia to someone who doesn't takes skill. The communication of self-pity is not self-pity. Individualists think they don't manifest the behaviors of a type, and on that assumption they're more predictable and more malleable than those who recognize themselves in others, and who pay more attention to distinctions among perceptions and terms. The understanding of representative form -of language as both representational and formal, open and closed- is a thing shared if not always recognized by all adults. Ignorance of that is cowardice. You'd hope Lotan would see how his work is shadowed by Palestine and Palestinians. His melancholy is symptom. It presents without his being able to articulate it, even abstractly.

"...to scoff at art by attacking it only where it has become artifice," could refer to a preference on Gide's part for an art originating in ideas or in form [the reference to empiricism is too simple]. "Where it has become artifice" is where it has become no more than a pleasant way to waste the time for the maker or observer. But an art of ideas is still a designer's art, and a designer's art as opposed to one of craft and description is either meaningless diversion or meaningful lie; as in Lotan's case either banal or meaningful largely in ways opposite his own intent.

Novels are not designed they're written. Music is not designed it's composed, on paper or in real time. Films are made. The fact that buildings are now designed rather than built (theater and film sets are designed) is one of the weaknesses of contemporary architecture. Gide might say that empiricism opposes an interest in form [better to say "formality" than "formalism"] but you could also say that recognizing the necessity for communicative media -language as mediating form- mandates a respect for it.

There's also the sense that "to design" in english is to over-determine out of a sense of insecurity. It's meant that since sometime in the early 19th century.
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For more on blindness and self-absorption in Israeli art, see my earlier comments on Yael Bartana.
Also Gideon Levy , Ursula Lindsey and Naira Antoun on Waltz with Bashir

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Years later I'm adding the tag for Iran because as I said elsewhere it was constraints that forced Iranian filmmakers to work as hard as they did, and make the films as great as they are. And later I used a different translation: constrains for constricts, and I'd forgotten the source in Gide 

Kant, What is Enlightenment

Thus we observe here as elsewhere in human affairs, in which almost everything is paradoxical, a surprising and unexpected course of events: a large degree of civic freedom appears to be of advantage to the intellectual freedom of the people, yet at the same time it establishes insurmountable barriers. A lesser degree of civic freedom, however, creates room to let that free spirit expand to the limits of its capacity. 

de Maistre

Everything that constrains a man, strengthens him.