The machine as symbolizing its action: the action of a machine—I might say at first—seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean?—If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined.
We talk as if these parts could only move in this way, as if they could not do anything else. How is this—do we forget the possibility of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don't think of that at all. We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine. For instance, we give someone such a drawing and assume that he will derive the movement of the parts from it. (Just as we can give someone a number by telling him that it is the twenty-fifth in the series i, 4, 9, 16, . . . .)
"The machine's action seems to be in it from the start" means: we are inclined to compare the future movements of the machine in their definiteness to objects which are already lying in a drawer and which we then take out.——But we do not say this kind of thing when we are concerned with predicting the actual behaviour of a machine. Then we do not in general forget the possibility of a distortion of the parts and so on.——We do talk like that, however, when we are wondering at the way we can use a machine to symbolize a given way of moving—since it can also move in quite different ways.
We might say that a machine, or the picture of it, is the first of a series of pictures which we have learnt to derive from this one.
But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved differently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine. As if it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically determined in advance, but they had to be really—in a mysterious sense—already present. And it is quite true: the movement of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense from that in which the movement of any given actual machine is predetermined.
The officer realized that he was in danger of having his exposition of the apparatus held up for a long time; so he went up to the explorer, took him by the arm, waved a hand toward the condemned man, who was standing very straight now that he had so obviously become the center of attention -- the soldier had also given the chain a jerk -- and said: "This is how the matter stands. I have been appointed judge in this penal colony. Despite my youth. For I was the former Commandant's assistant in all penal matters and know more about the apparatus than anyone. My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle, for they consist of several opinions and have higher courts to scrutinize them. That is not the case here, or at least, it was not the case in the former Commandant's time. The new man has certainly shown some inclination to interfere with my judgments, but so far I have succeeded in fending him off and will go on succeeding. You wanted to have the case explained; it is quite simple, like all of them. A captain reported to me this morning that this man, who had been assigned to him as a servant and sleeps before his door, had been asleep on duty. It is his duty, you see, to get up every time the hour strikes and salute the captain's door. Not an exacting duty, and very necessary, since he has to be a sentry as well as a servant, and must be alert in both functions. Last night the captain wanted to see if the man was doing his duty. He opened the door as the clock struck two and there was his man curled up asleep. He took his riding whip and lashed him across the face. Instead of getting up and begging pardon, the man caught hold of his master's legs, shook him, and cried: 'Throw that whip away or I'll eat you alive.' -- That's the evidence. The captain came to me an hour ago, I wrote down his statement and appended the sentence to it. Then I had the man put in chains. That was all quite simple. If I had first called the man before me and interrogated him, things would have got into a confused tangle. He would have told lies, and had I exposed these lies he would have backed them up with more lies, and so on and so forth. As it is, I've got him and I won't let him go. -- Is that quite clear now? But we're wasting time, the execution should be beginning and I haven't finished explaining the apparatus yet." He pressed the explorer back into his chair, went up again to the apparatus, and began: "As you see, the shape of the Harrow corresponds to the human form; here is the harrow for the torso, here are the harrows for the legs. For the head there is only this one small spike. Is that quite clear?" He bent amiably forward toward the explorer, eager to provide the most comprehensive explanations.
It feels a little cheap. I always thought it was obvious in a general sense, but reading the first tonight I saw a chance to go cute. If you don't get the joke, copy and google the two texts.
For Dworkin, understanding law is akin to understanding language. As we have
noticed, Dworkin sees interpretation as a pervasive feature of many aspects of
human existence. He believes it to be of central importance to jurisprudence.
Dworkin explains that because “law is an interpretive concept, any jurisprudence
worth having must be built on some view of what interpretation is.”98 As we shall
see, Dworkin makes far too much of the work of interpretation.
Before turning to the role of interpretation in law, we need to look closely at
Dworkin’s general claim that understanding in law (or any other social practice) is a matter of interpretation. Perhaps it is best to begin by reminding ourselves of
the putative work of interpretation. To do this, recall the following statement by
Dworkin: “We interpret the sounds or marks another person makes in order to
decide what he has said.”99 What role does Dworkin assign to interpretation in
his account of one person understanding the written or spoken words of another?
In the sentence just quoted, it is fair to say that interpretation mediates between
the sounds or signs emanating from the mouth or pen of another and the act of
meaning apprehension on the part of the listener or reader. Interpretation, as
Dworkin says, is something we do. And why do we do it? What results from it?
We do it “in order to decide what [another person] has said.”100
Presumably, if we interpret another correctly, we have grasped the meaning
of his words. If not, then we have interpreted him incorrectly. Whether correct
or not, the act of interpretation is interposed between the utterance and our grasp
of its meaning. Interpretation is an act of mediation: Done correctly, it results in
the apprehension of meaning. Done poorly, comprehension eludes us.
Dworkin’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, understanding an utterance is not a matter of deriving its meaning through an act or operation of mind.101
The criterion for understanding an utterance is not engagement of a process;
rather, it is acting appropriately in response to the utterance.102 For example, one
evinces understanding of the request “Please pass the salt” by passing the salt or
by explaining why it is impossible to do so. Understanding is made manifest in
the act of passing the salt, and the act is a criterion for having understood the
utterance.103 Understanding is acting properly in response to the request. If the
request is vague or otherwise opaque, interpretation of the request may be necessary, otherwise not.
This last point suggests a certain logical problem endemic to accounts such
as Dworkin’s, which assign a primordial role to interpretation in normative
activities. As mentioned, interpretation is best thought of as an activity we engage in when our understanding of an utterance is somehow in question (e.g., a
request to pass the salt when the salt is directly in front of the person making the
request). Interpretation is an activity of clarification: we take the utterance in
question and appraise competing construals or interpretations of it in an effort
to clarify its meaning.104
If all understanding were interpretation, then each interpretation would itself
stand in need of interpretation, and so on, infinitely regressing to infinity.105 This
logical problem, one long ago recognized,106 suggests that there is something
deeply wrong with assigning to interpretation a mediating role between utterances and the understanding of them. The only way out of this vicious regress is
to recognize that the normativity of rule-guided behavior (e. g., law) lies not in
the act of the individual (e.g., interpretation) but in a practice. Of course, Dworkin
argues that law is a practice, and in this he is surely correct. He has simply misstated the role of interpretation in that practice.
[99-100, cite Dworkin, Law's Empire, the restcite P.M.S. Hacker, "Language, Rules and Pseudo-Rules" notes below in the original]
101. See Hacker, supra note 13, at 168 (arguing in the spirit of Wittgenstein that understanding is best explained as an ability).
102. Id. at 167—68 (“Understanding sentences of a language is a skill that is manifest in using sentences correctly in appropriate circumstances, in reacting appropriately to their use, and in explaining (if asked) what they mean.” (emphasis added)).
103. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty § 29 (G. E. M. Ansombe 8: G. H. von Wright
eds., Denis Paul 8: G. E. M. Anscombe trans, 1972) (“Practice in the use of the rule also shews what is a mistake in its employment.”)." 104. See Hacker, supra note 13, at 168 (arguing that interpretation is explanation and that explanation is usually required only when a statement contains “[o]bscurities, ambiguities, or complexities”). 105. A recent discussion of this problem in the context of rule-following is Charles Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” in Rule: and Convention: 167 (Mette Hjort cd., 1992). 106. Wittgenstein mentions the problem in the following discussion: “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying a rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases. Hence there is an inclination to say: every action ac- cording to the rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term ‘interpretation’ to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another.” Wittgenstein, supra note 1[Philosophical Investigations, Anscombe], at § 201.
Hacker, "Language, Rules and Pseudo-Rules"
Philosophers, unlike linguists, are not typically tempted to assimilate mastery of a language to a mental state. They recognize that it is an ability. But they insist that this ability can only correctly be characterized by reference to a theory of meaning for the language. They point out correctly that an ability is characterized by specification of what it is an ability to do. The investigation and determination of a person’s abilities involve studying the exercises of his abilities in practice. But philosophers are immediately thrown off the track by the idea that to understand a sentence is to assign to it its truth-conditions, and by the correct observation that there is no limit to the number of sentences that a speaker of a language can understand (although this platitude is usually cast in the form of the incorrect claim that one can understand an infinite number of sentences).From this it seems to follow that since one cannot list all the sentences of a language and pair them with their truth-conditions, one must construct a recursive theory consisting of axioms, rules and principles which can ‘generate’ the truth-conditions of any arbitrary sentence of the language. Such a theory will, it is held, be a ‘model’ of what it is to understand a language. There are many reasons for doubting the coherence of this picture. Here I shall point out only one salient disturbing feature. Assigning truth-conditions to a sentence is not an act which human beings engage in; it is not a piece of human behaviour that manifests the ability that we call ‘understanding a language’. Asking and answering questions, issuing requests, pleas or orders and complying with them, passing judgment, making statements, describing things are exercises of one’s linguistic abilities. These and a myriad other acts (including buying and selling, signing cheques, making contracts and wills, following instructions, obeying regulations, building and using complex machines) manifest one’s understanding of a language. But these are not, nor do they involve, acts of assigning truth-conditions to sentences.Understanding sentences of a language is a skill that is manifest in using sentences correctly in appropriate circumstances, in reacting appropriately to their use, and in explaining (if asked) what they mean.
To understand an utterance is not to perform any act of derivation whereby the meaning of the utterance, conceived as its truth-condition, is derived from the meanings of its constituents and its structure in accord with the rules and principles of a theory of meaning. The criteria for whether someone has understood an utterance are not criteria for the performance of a derivation of a theorem from axioms and rules. To understand the question ‘Is the door shut?‘, the request ‘Shut the door, please’ or the assertion ‘The door is shut’ is not to engage in any computational process, although it is of course true that if one does not know what ‘door’ means, one will probably not understand these utterances. A person manifests his understanding of the question ‘Is the door shut?’ by answering ‘Yes, it is’ or ‘No, it isn’t’ or ‘I can’t see from here’ etc.; but not by absurdly saying ‘It is a theorem of English that “The door is shut” is true if and only if the door is shut’.
Similarly it is a grievous error to think that in understanding an utterance one always or even usually engages in interpretation. To interpret an utterance is to explain it, typically to paraphrase it in the same language or to translate it into a different language. But when I ask ‘What is the time?’ I understand what I have said without interpreting my own words, and if my addressee speaks English he too will understand my words without interpreting them. Obscurities, ambiguities or complexities may call out for an interpretation, but it would be wholly incoherent to think that all understanding is interpreting. For then the interpretation given, i.e. the paraphrase, would itself stand in need of an interpretation in order to be understood; and a vicious regress would be generated. This misconception has manifold roots. One is the bizarre idea that what we hear or utter are mere sounds which have to be correlated with or mapped on to meanings in order to be understood. But we no more hear or utter mere sounds than we see or paint mere patches of colour. We hear and utter meaningful words and sentences, just as we see multicoloured objects such as chairs and tables, trees and flowers. The idea that all understanding is interpreting is a transposition onto a linguistic plane of the empiricist dogma of the ‘bare given’ (sense data, sensibilia, ideas or impressions) that constitutes the raw data of experience. A second source of misunderstanding is the correct insight that if someone understands an utterance he can explain what it means. Indeed, how a person explains as sentence uttered on an occasion is one criterion for whether he understands it. But it does not follow that to understand is to explain or interpret. For another criterion of understanding is what one does in response to an utterance. One manifests one’s understanding of the request ‘Shut the door, please’ by shutting the door, not (typically) by saying ‘I take it that you wish me to close the portal’.
T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and his Problems"
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their “interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.
Hacker, "To understand the question ‘Is the door shut?‘, the request ‘Shut the door, please’ or the assertion ‘The door is shut’ is not to engage in any computational process"
"Shut the front door, Robot" Question Begging 101, with Prof. Descartes, aka The Wizard. “That which cannot be said must not be said. That which cannot be said, one must be silent thereof.” Getting Is from Ought. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Replacing Chomskian absurdity with more of the same. Jesus fuck. [video added 2/05, because why not?]
Patterson again, "Against a Theory of Meaning"
A language is not something about which one can have a theory. Nor is a language itself a theory. Quantum mechanics and historical materialism are theories. Each is formulated in a language in terms of laws and explanatory principles. Thus, to construct a theory, one must already have mastered a language. A fortiori, it is implausible to speak -as Chomsky does 1-of children learning their native language by constructing theories of grammar. 2
1. See Noam Chomsky, A Review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour, 35 LANGUAGE 26,57 (1959) ("The child who learns a language has in some sense constructed the grammar for himself on the basis of his observation of sentences and non-sentences (i.e. corrections by the verbal community).").
2. The most complete and thoroughgoing rout of the philosophical excesses of linguistics is GORDON B. BAKER & PETER M. HACKER, LANGUAGE, SENSE AND NONSENSE (1984).
Patterson: You can't make series of observations and inferences without language. Bullshit.
Reminds me of the first time I read Searle, beyond his exchanges with Dennett. All the same shit. At some point it all comes down to an assumption: a virgin birth, a can opener, a self.
Patterson and Hacker from 2010. I forget these things.
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Perverse scholasticism, but not the sort I complain about. I can disagree with it, but I don't complain about any artist's sense of necessity. And this is hilarious. A brilliant, brilliant, conservative moralist.
This is comic too, and academic, but again criticism maybe, but no complaints.
Gould's Solitude Trilogy is available on Amazon, Apple, Spotify etc.
And John King, another former student, testifies to Wittgenstein's distaste for British (as opposed to American) movies precisely on the ground of their theatricality. "The Mill Road cinema . . . was the one he most favoured," King recalls, "and here he sat as far to the front as he could get, leant forward in his seat and was utterly absorbed by the film. He never would go to any British film; and if we passed a cinema advertising one he pointed out how the actors looked dressed-up, unnatural, unconvincing, obviously play-acting, while, in comparison, in the American films the actors were the part, with no pretence" ("Recollections of Wittgenstein," in Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein, p. 71).
more. Wittgenstein, TS. Eliot, and legal philosophy.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
The difference between self-abnegation and self-destruction, between ideas and responsibility.
2006
The advantages of literature over philosophy. Gravity's Rainbow describes two acts of collective suicide by two groups of Herero tribesmen almost half a century apart: the first as a refusal to accept death at the hands of Germany and as a last humanist act of choice against the inhuman; the second by the remnants of the Schwarzkommando, the elite Herero stormtroopers, as last act of nihilism after their war is lost.
2008
2 decades ago as a 21 year old I read Gravity's Rainbow and a pair of fragments from it became touchstones of my intellectual life: the description at different points in the novel of two acts of self-destruction, the mass suicides of the Herero in Südwest as a refusal and denial of the authority of their masters, and of the Schwarzkommando as the final act of nihilism. The significance was context: that identical actions could signify categorical opposites. Academic freedom historically has been tied to general freedom of thought and to democracy, but now it's linked to institutional privilege and defended with references to monarchy.
2013
He's not G.A. Cohen, and yet he's unable intellectually to engage the Golden Rule any more than he can The Story of O, or Gravity's Rainbow: to engage the dualities of obligation in human society, to self and other, to self-interest and selflessness, nobility not of ideas but behavior. He wants to resolve conflicts; he's unwilling to face them. Corey Robin mocks "agonistic desire" and "agonistic romance", seeing them as elitist. He forgets they're the foundation of democracy.
etc.
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.
Expressionism is the emotion escaping the denial of emotion; it’sthe melodrama behind positivism, from Vienna to Weimar. In the atomic age, of technocratic order and annihilation, it’s the relation of Strangelove to von Neumann. This is what Brendel and Rosen, and Kerman, as exegetes, interpreters not pedants, who are neither positivists nor emotionalists, rationalists nor irrationalists, are describing and debating.If music is formal, how can a gesture that breaks with the form, function within it? Rosen says Brendel defends farting in Church; he misses the logic behind the change. If Beethoven puts an explosion at the end of the metrical line, then formal art has become mimetic.One of my teachers, Abe Ajay, an arch modernist, a friend of Ad Reinhardt who worked with him atThe New Masses, used to complain that Beethoven ruined his music with images. "All those wonderful notes and then... Birds!!" Abe wasn’t joking, but I laughed. This is what Schoenberg and Babbitt rebelled against, not Beethoven but the only option for those following him into the 20th century: the vulgar romance of Korngold and the program music of Hollywood, music of the classical western tradition no longer independent, now subservient to another form, the art of images.
The culture of modernism in modernity, of rationalism, autism, geeks and one-dimensional men, of perfect order and psychosis.
Charles Grant, "Observations On the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals; and on the means of improving it.—Written chiefly in the Year 1792." Papers &c. (East India Company) (Fourth Part) House of Commons, Session, 24 Nov-22-July, 1812-1813, Vol X. p. 149
Responding to objections debated previously, "Specific Arguments, Fourth Class, 3d."
The principle of not communicating to the Hindoos the Christian religion lest this should in the end, destroy our government over them, is however here fairly acknowledged and argued upon. The establishment of seminaries and colleges in our American colonies, is in the same spirit adverted to in a way of warning; as if Christianity had produced the revolution there, when in fact they were men of infidel opinions, who planned both the America and French revolutions.
The reason assigned in justification of this precautionary principle also deserves attention; “because holding one religion is the most strong “common cause with mankind.” If the proposal had been that the English should become converts to Hindooism, this argument might have been well placed; but applied to the present scheme, it can only operate in favour of it.
Edmund Sigismond Somers, Medical Suggestions for the Treatment of Dysentery of Intermittent and Remittent Fevers As Generally Prevalent at Certain Seasons Among Troops in the Field, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816. p. 71
A judicious Classification and separation in Hospital, of the various Diseases, is of most essential importance; much indeed of the Hospital Practitioner’s success will ever necessarily depend upon the due observance of this precautionary principle.
A friend of mine had it on vinyl, or maybe on a tape. I remember him translating it for me, laughing.
"Everything is going according to plan." The line gave me a flashback from 20 years ago.
I didn't know about the Adam Curtis Massive Attack collaboration.
Curtis is a political romantic who uses irony only to put himself beyond irony. He refers to desperation and nihilism to indulge without admitting the indulgence, and the denial magnifies it. If art is reification, it describes the maker's desires as the desires of a person, not absolutely as the state of the world. Art is response; it's not the world. The little space between the two is irony. Curtis collapses that space. What's left is simple determinism.
Curtis is the Chris Marker of the BBC, a romantic reporter of fact. Marker by comparison is just a man observing and responding to what he sees, while admitting that what exists may be something else entirely.
---
Better to say Curtis is cross between Marker and Errol Morris. Curtis annoys me. Morris disgusts me.
Mirowski, "Hell is Truth Seen Too Late"
Recall that neoliberalism predicates itself on the observation that most humans are one or two bottles shy of a six-pack when it comes to rational thought. Hence, anyone who had read Hayek, such as Cass Sunstein, long ago projected that the internet would promote the isolation of people within their own filter bubbles and that this might have implications for the way politics would play out in the future (Sunstein 2007). Sunstein’s reading of the situation was characteristically superficial, leading to his own prescription that people might be “nudged” toward certain political activities without realizing that they were being manipulated by their political over-lords. Others, starting from the same premise, took the position that the internet just naturally tended to degenerate into dreck, especially because so much of it came to depend on “user generated content [UCG]” (Feldman 2016). Neoliberals do not mind blaming any debilitating epistemic fallout on the agents themselves because it reinforces the message that the market just gives the masses whatever they want. Here, however, is where some on the left attempt to push back. Evgeny Morozov, for one, insists that the onus rests solidly on the economic organization of the platforms that structure internet activity (2013). While this points us in a promising direction to understand the neoliberal character of fake news, the indictment may still be misleading: Is the dumbing down of the populace a mere unintended natural consequence of the pursuit of profit, an unfortunate by-product of progress, or is it something else?
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has long been warning us that something much larger and more pervasive has been going on well before the contemporary moment of frenzy over posttruth. As he puts it, “We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can’t counter it with a coherent narrative of their own.”27 Curtis finds one incisive theoretical discussion of the new regime in the work of the Russian Vladimir Surkov:
[The pervasive] defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control—and to understand how this is hap- pening you have to look to Russia and to a man called Vladislav Surkov who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisors and has helped him maintain his power for fifteen years, but he has done it in a very new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career say that what Surkov has done is import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.
His aim is to undermine people’s perception of the world so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly-changing piece of theatre: he sponsored all kinds of groups, from Neo-Nazi skin-heads to liberal human rights groups, he even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake.
As one journalist put it, “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable,” which is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year. In typical fashion as the war began Surkov published a short story about something he called Non-Linear War, a war where you never know what the enemy are really up to or even who they are. The underlying aim Surkov says is not to win the war but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.
Here Curtis suggests the approach derives from the traditions of 1980s conceptual art, but in his earlier films, he sought the inspirations in political developments of neoliberalism. While one sector of recent punditry (at least in the United States in 2017) seeks to pin the practice of “fake news” on the Russians, in a manner similar to Curtis, it may be more pre- cise and more comprehensive to regard its advent as a distinctly global phenomenon, with earlier roots. Of course, falsehoods, propaganda, and misinformation have been with us since time immemorial, but what Curtis and others point toward is something far more insidious than George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Once the neoliberal image of the market as both means of conveyance and validation of ideas took hold, then it consequently shaped and informed changes in the very means and conduct of argumentation in general. Befuddlement became an active political strategy very different from the top-down broadcast model of early twentieth-century “propaganda.” The recent fondness for Orwell’s 1984 as master narrative turns out to be another red herring. Now, disinformation rests on the creation of a fog of confusion and disillusion, and less directly on straightforward media manipulation (the bugaboo of the nostalgic Left) than the harvesting through social media of the inchoate folderol of the general populace, subsequently feeding it back to the masses through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and new model “journalism.” Dissimulation rechanneled becomes its own special “spontaneous disorder.”
Surkov saw the chaos and fragmentation in the politics in western consumer societies and sped up the process. He studied theater just like David Bowie and Richard Spencer, but he's the manager. He "discovers" people. Curtis on Russian despair, punks, Letov and Limonov. I hate fans, and especially fans of the avant-garde in 2021.
In the acknowledgements of her intellectual biography of Clement Greenberg, aptly titled Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Caroline A. Jones thanks Benjamin Buchloh, historian, critic, and theoretician of left-wing high seriousness in contemporary art, for his “stimulating aperçu regarding the ‘administrative sensibility’ of post-Greenbergian conceptual art.” It’s left at that.
Mannerism is the continuing defense of old beliefs revealed as empty. They're all you have, and if they're empty you are too, so you embrace the morbid symptoms. The love of knowledge devolves to the love of bureaucracy and filing systems. The love of art becomes the love of style.
Curtis' films are documentaries about heroin with a cast of pixellated fashion models and a humming soundtrack. They work in a narcotic flow. They're made for fans of Gerhard Richter who can't admit to sharing his nihilist passivity. After all the films are merely "documentaries".
Moralizing poets are read in the long run because they describe their failure honestly. Dishonest journalists evade responsibility by living vicariously through their subjects, and as fans they're voyeurs. But a suicidal fascist is no less a fascist because he's suicidal, and the adoration of a fascist is still the adoration of a fascist. See also Jon Ronson.
"Fake news." Before there was Murdoch there was Hearst.
Mirowski isn't defending democracy; he's defending one institutional elite against another, both equally sure of their own status.
Friedman, as usual, dumbed down the Hayekian message for those with limited attention spans: “Businessmen, who may be bankrupted if they refuse to face facts, are one of the few groups that develop the habit of doing so. That is why, I have discovered repeatedly, the successful businessman is more open to new ideas . . . than the academic intellectual who prides himself on his alleged independence of thought”
Merchants vs priests, academics, and "scientists". Disinterested reason defends either unbridled self-interest or itself. Either way "truth" is key. And the choices for the majority are few.
STS and Democracy. When political theorists are called scientists, and are horrified that awards granted for theology are given to "charlatans", it's no wonder people are suspicious. But no one demands a democratic vote on how to install their kitchen sink.
Hippie drug dealers didn't start out reading Hayek; they discovered him after the fact. Neoliberalism wasn't invented in a lab. The Lippmann Colloquium wasn't a cause; it was an effect. "By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile."
Quinn Slobodian and Mirowski were two of the editors of Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. Slobidian blocked me on twitter for reminding him that intellectual history is not synonymous with history. The French, most of them, have a sense of irony that American academics will never get. It's good that Americans are reading Piketty now and not Bourdieu.
But if “using rare words and tropes in place of common words and phrases” is a strategy of “deliberate transgression” of the norms of clear prose characteristic of the dominant classes and is opposed to “the hyper-correction strategies of pretentious outsiders,” then Bourdieu is a master strategist. Words such as lexis, allodoxia, chiastic, askesis, espace hodologique, hysteresis, and of course habitus (and, indeed, hysteresis of habitus) are scattered throughout the text. That a work of social science should—”unlike the sometimes illuminating intuitions of the essay”—require an effort on the part of the reader is fair enough. Here, however, reality disappears into the hypertrophied rhetoric of the Ecole Normale.
The best defense of democracy is pessimistic. Neoliberalism, vanguardism, radicalism, are all modern forms of inflexible elitism. A program of broad-based public education is a guard against the rise of a ruling class in all its forms: of wealth or expertise.
Varieties of liberal optimism, enthusiasm, narcissism, authoritarianism.
"[W]e must abandon traditional doctrinal and regulatory analogies and understand these private content platforms as systems of governance."
This is the moment.
Facebook has referred Trump's suspension to the @OversightBoard, an independent global body of freedom of expression experts and will abide by their decision.
I've been inside FB following the creation of this Board for the last 2 years. Some thoughts: 1/ https://t.co/zaRdSUD2LJ
Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.
Truly an idiot.
On the positive side, Trump did not start any new wars. He ordered only two attacks: the one in Syria early in his presidency, and the one on Soleimani. Luckily, neither led to a bigger conflict. And he tried to wrap up US war in Afghanistan whose purpose no one understands.
The Intercept October 2, 2019. Civilian Deaths in U.S. Wars Are Skyrocketing Under Trump.
This September, in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a wedding party was turned into a massacre after a commando raid by Afghan forces operating with U.S. support. Over 40 people were killed. Just days earlier, a drone strike in Nangarhar province blew up a gathering of pine nut farmers resting after their day’s harvest. “We had huddled together around small bonfires and we were discussing the security situation in our villages, but suddenly everything changed,” one survivor later told reporters. “There was destruction everywhere.” A letter that had been sent to local authorities informing them about the presence of the farmers failed to save them from the drone. As many as 30 people were killed, with 40 more injured.
FP May 22, 2020 Trump Inherited the Drone War but Ditched Accountability.
On March 10, a U.S. drone fired a missile, turning a passenger vehicle outside Janaale, Somalia, into a heap of burnt and broken metal with fresh corpses inside. Whether the people killed that day were “terrorists” or ordinary Somalis is actively disputed. It is also a reminder that the United States’ targeted killing program persists to this day, another legacy of the forever war that has now lasted for three presidential administrations and shows no signs of stopping in the next one. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, however, an already opaque and murderous set of rules has become even more widely applied, and ever less accountable.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Iraqi protestors occupy government buildings, November, 2019
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Monday, January 18, 2021
writing-rewriting
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What is striking about the videos, though, is how often this entitlement is laced with insecurity. The attackers profess ownership of this house, but so much of their commentary betrays discomfort and alienation within it, bordering on a sort of provincial awe.
The petulance of angry tourists. An angry herd of anxious individualists, the spoiled American petty bourgeoisie, once bought off, now in decline.
The sentence above was quoted by The Economist's Middle East correspondent, Greg Carlstrom, on Twitter. AbuKhalil used to say it was the only mainstream publication worth reading, because it was truly international, like capitalism.
The Parler videos are collected here and here; the New Yorker writer's video is here.
Hoberman reviews Jaden X, "The Storming of the Capitol", in Artforum.
Tape recorders, ordinary cameras, and movie cameras are already extensively owned by wage-earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at factories, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere there is social conflict.
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” New Left Review (1970)
HOW QUAINT that question seems today.
Hoberman wrote without knowing Sullivan's history, allowing him to bypass the fact that if the people storming the Capital had been black, or associated with BLM, they'd have been shot. The update and amendation isn't quite enough.
The cloying theatricality of American protests, or those that attract an audience. Occupy vs Wisconsin, again.
Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism....Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism.
The black bourgeoisie rising, in racial and class solidarity. Coates is predictable
Videos from Cairo in 2013. al Sisi's coup: the Muslim Brotherhood records the destruction of their protest camp by the military. Full post-production, color grading and music. They posted the raw footage, but youtube removed it. There's art to this –politicized aesthetics is aestheticized politics– but it's not cosplay.
Party boy rebels and moralists always come home to conservatism.
The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness. Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences perceived them as neutral arbiters.
Taibbi was always an idiot.
Ames is better, but even when moralists aren't open hypocrites they contradict themselves.
Ames, Jan. 17
Social media is a giant snitching machine, right alongside its “disinformation” problem. Always surprised me how many eager police informants this country produces, given the opportunity—cuts across ideologies. Once upon a time, snitches were considered the lowest lifeforms.
Jan. 14
Apparently the correct position on AOC fearing for her life is...scorn?
In his first book-length work, John Maynard Keynes, Minsky analyzed what he called “big government” capitalism. His goal was two-fold. First, he sought to re-interpret Keynes by distinguishing the so-called hydraulic Keynesianism of the postwar era from the author’s actual written work. He argued that postwar governments which boosted inflation through private profits contradicted Keynes’ original system. Keynes believed that the state should facilitate long term economic development by directly planning economic activity, including the distribution of investment over the long run. Postwar American policymakers, however, created a policy that protected private sector profits during downturns. The United States government did not create the structures which could sustain the production of a baseline basket of goods and services from market instability during upswings. Instead, it pumped up aggregate demand via employment in the military-industrial complex and its attendant investment goods.
The second goal of the book was to warn about the inflationary tendencies of this approach. Government was forcing “overinvestment” in capital intensive industries like auto manufacturing and aerospace. While this created good jobs, it also meant that workers would have more money to spend on things made by less capital intensive, nondurable consumer goods industries. Wage inequality between these two sectors caused increasing industrial conflict. In the United States and Western Europe, a pattern emerged in which managers made wage concessions to the most highly productive workers to keep at bay demands for greater union participation in company decisions, thereby further increasing the demand for consumer goods.
Because returns to capital intensive goods were high, the investment capital needed to expand capacity in consumer goods was scarce. With rapidly increasing demand, the price of these goods began to rise, leading to a wage-price spiral. In industries with no anticipated profits, capitalists had no incentive to expand capacity. Consequently, output remained stable while prices rose. In the labor market, some workers held on to their jobs while others were relegated to chronic underemployment.
My father called it the bourgeoisification of the working class.
In the United States and Western Europe, a pattern emerged in which managers made wage concessions to the most highly productive workers to keep at bay demands for greater union participation in company decisions, thereby further increasing the demand for consumer goods.
There's a real tragedy in the story of the American left. It no longer has any peasants or workers, only priests and dilettantes. My father used to refer to what he called "the bourgeoisification of the working class". Give them enough color TVs and a new car every 2 years and they'll shut up. Marx made the same complaint about the British. He blamed it all on backyard gardening.
Throughout the Trump era, there have been understandable but misguided calls to pass a domestic terrorism law expanding an investigative dragnet around Radical White Terror. Every law needed to combat Radical White Terror already exists. Further empowering law enforcement is more likely to give the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and local police tools to target people who meant to donate money to legitimate right-wing causes and religious charities—after which, in keeping with historical practice, they will have an expanded domestic ambit to target nonwhite and left-wing groups, causes and enterprises. The very police entities that would be empowered tend to make common cause with those they ostensibly target.
The calls are already starting. The Wall Street Journal reported shortly after the riot that President-elect Biden plans to prioritize passing a domestic terrorism law. Hillary Clinton advocated “immediately” passing “new criminal laws at the state and federal levels that hold white supremacists accountable and tracking the activities of extremists such as those who breached the Capitol.” On The View on Monday, Meghan McCain said she was “not against sending these people to Gitmo.” But the 9/11 era, with all the reactionary forces it unleashed, helped get the U.S. here. It will never be reverse-engineered to get the U.S. out. It can only get the U.S. deeper into a democracy-draining quagmire.
No mention above of economics. New terror laws won't help, but neither will liberal moralism. Blyth is good here. Later on, less so.
Blyth is a fan of Milanovic; two smart men who've cultivated a view from a distance, interested in policy, less so in democracy. Neither have an epistemology that models change in their own opinions as an aspect of change in the world.
The problem of monopoly and limits on free speech are problems of information. That's not a defense of a free market –markets are never free– but it's certainly not a defense of technocracy, even ruled by Blyth and Milanovic.
The fact of bougie Palestinians in the west will be the end of Zionism. Nothing else, not "enlightenment", not "reason". The feminism of men is a result of the feminism of women. Technocracy can't model that. The model of benign authority ends in decadence. "The golden age" was rotten to the core.
During World War II, Balmoral was a hothouse again, as Elizabeth, consort
of George VI and today the aged Queen Mother, was seized with a passion for
one of the military detachment based there. Her lover was a married man who before the war had attended the London School of Economics and there became
a member of the Communist Club, confessing to the club’s secretary, J .B., that
he had read no Marx but all the works of Lenin. With the invasion of the Soviet
Union he volunteered and was subsequently posted to Balmoral, where his love
affair with the King’s wife commenced. He told his wife of it. She was not
pleased but remarked that at least she could be sure the relationship had no
future.
As did many leftists of the period, the couple had adopted a Basque baby
orphaned in the Spanish Civil War. At the funeral of her mother years later,
this young woman told intimates that finally the great secret could be disclosed.
Widowed in the early 19505, Elizabeth conceived a passion for Cointreau, for
at least one other military man and, some say, for Bourguiba of Tunisia,
exchanging the dour surroundings of Balmoral for pleasures amid the ruins of
Carthage.
My grandfather Jack Arbuthnot, an officer in the Scots Guards, used to visit
Scottish fastnesses such as Balmoral and Glamis, home of the Queen Mother’s
family, the Bowes-Lyons, early in the century, and the future consort of George
VI used to commandcer him as her steed, perched on his back and galloping
him around the drawing room. Perhaps this formed the foundation for her later
predilections.
I shall wear a little Tampax pin with pride. As dear Jack Finnegan used to
boast in his Scottish accent as thick as John Brown’s, ‘Finnegan, ML–Monarchist-Leninist’.
The golden age isn't in us, and everything he wrote demonstrates the fact. But that's ok.
Monarchist-Leninist has stuck with me ever since I read in it 93. Every once in a while I look it up.
Throwing Trump off Twitter and shutting down Parler using corporate monopoly power, driving the loons underground; out of sight is out of mind, but they're still there, angrier than ever.
Iran: Facebook deletes Press TV page
Iran's state media Press TV wrote on Twitter that Facebook has deleted its main page "without any warning or explanation."
2018, Guardian: Is Facebook a publisher? In public it says no, but in court it says yes
Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of the news industry: it is a tech platform, not a publisher or a media company.
But in a small courtroom in California’s Redwood City on Monday, attorneys for the social media company presented a different message from the one executives have made to Congress, in interviews and in speeches: Facebook, they repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the first amendment.
The contradictory claim is Facebook’s latest tactic against a high-profile lawsuit, exposing a growing tension for the Silicon Valley corporation, which has long presented itself as neutral platform that does not have traditional journalistic responsibilities.
If algorithms control what you see, then platforms become editors. Like the defense offered by the makers of the Jon Ronson spambot, "It's not us, it's the bot", doesn't cut it.
Ronson's breathy passivity is annoying in any context; here it becomes almost unbearable. But it's hard to say who in the video is more passive aggressive.
Free speech for fascists doesn't mean that a monopolistic media source with no risk of liability should have the right to funnel fascist opinion to those who want it.
In court filings late Tuesday, Amazon said it flagged dozens of pieces of violent content to the social media app starting in November. The company argued that Parler violated its contract with Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, when it failed to remove the content and that AWS suspended Parler’s account “as a last resort.”
“This case is not about suppressing speech or stifling viewpoints,” Amazon wrote in its response to Parler. “It is not about conspiracy to restrain trade. Instead, this case is about Parler’s demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of AWS content that threatens public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens.”
Threats, incitement, and conspiracy are covered by law. Fascists force the hand of the state, and then they'll blame the state.
Strange personalities arise in the cracks of disintegrating institutions. They are often marked by extravagant dress, inflated rhetoric, and a show of sexual power. The first Trumper of the postwar era was the Danish tax rebel, Mogens Glistrup, the founder of the nationalist Progress Party, who, having put his principles into practice, went to prison for tax evasion. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Boris Johnson in England are hairstyle Trumpers. Pim Fortuyn and Jörg Haider were both dandies. They died in their finery. Beppe Grillo, Nigel Farage, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, are each one third of a full Trump.
Friday, January 08, 2021
Henry Farrell, self-exiled Irishman who abandoned one church for another –Catholic for Rational Action– spouts Orwell.
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to … exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
As far as ideas go, twentieth-century Britain imported them largely from Central European Jewish émigrés like Hobsbawm himself. Wittgenstein, Namier, Eysenck, Popper, Melanie Klein, Isaac Deutscher, Isaiah Berlin: One can imagine the Neanderthal condition of modern English culture without these brilliant blow-ins and carpetbaggers. Much the same happened in the literary arena, as the heights of "English" literature were effortlessly monopolized by a Pole (Joseph Conrad), three Americans (Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) and five Irishmen (Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett). The Irish were expected to write most of England’s literature for it, such being the burdens of empire, as well as supplying them over the years with rents, cattle and cannon-fodder.
Farrell's responding to the fascist Hawley, who's been dumped by Bertelsmann. Hawley calls it "Orwellian", being thrown over by globalists. He can publish with Regnery. But I'm sure Farrell is happy Trump's been thrown offline and his supporters even more underground.
12 years ago Farrell was happy to entertain arguments for social Darwinism by economic policy, and his favorite literary critic ranks Shaw over Shakespeare. Henry loves Truth. He lies to himself before the rest of us.
Moralists hate ambiguity; they refuse to learn how to read it, or they're incapable, and need the rest of us to be as purblind as they are. They don't defend free speech; they defend the power of the sovereign, and the authoritarianism of fiduciaries.
