Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker.

April 21st, 2012

Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. [But] capitalism cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.

John Lanchester quoting Karl Marx (but substituting the word capitalism for the bourgeoisie) in his excellent essay on “Marx at 193,” which I came to via Irredenta. I’m familiar with Marx’s errors, particularly his anthropologically- and morally-confused prescriptions and his overestimation of dialectics as an “objective” mechanism in historical development, but this essay recalls his talents as a diagnostician.

In particular, capitalism’s “constant revolutionizing” is why capitalist culture invariably becomes youth culture, and it is why youth is ever-more-respected as a summary font of natural, progressive, authentic wisdom, despite being by definition the most experientially (and often culturally and intellectually) ignorant part of the population. Given the power culture has to shape political discourse, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say, then, that capitalism brings about kakistocracy, even as it does indeed show the power humanity has to shape itself and the world.

In a revolution, the young are of course those with the least to lose. In our constant revolutions it is therefore natural that the young should become the reliable agents of fury, upheaval, change: this is emphatically not because such change necessarily benefits the young or anyone else; after all, youth tend to be sufficiently ignorant of history and indifferent to their own moral incoherence that one cannot seriously claim that their enthusiasm for change is based on anything like analysis. Rather, the phenomenon of maturing alongside revolutions infuses youth with a sense of their own global, ideological, moral importance. For them, “change” is the fruition of their sole, and probably initial paradigm, while for older individuals revolutions are the disturbance of mostly-uninterrogated paradigms according to whose values their entire life’s meaning has been determined.

Thus: capitalism raises each generation alongside a revolution in “the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” Each generation comes of age with technologies, media, industries which radically alter the nature of social existence, the structure of cities, the dynamics of relationships, the meanings and values which ostensibly sustain and guide us but which now seem merely to tag along. And quite understandably, each generation thinks that this new paradigm —their paradigm, after all, which they absorb easily and even think they shape— is the last paradigm, or at least that it is largely faultless even if it will be superseded. In its turn, each generation comes to think, too, that its reconnection with lingering traditions is enough to preserve them, that its necessitated reinvention of all culture will endure. The evangelical zeal of youth, whether expressed politically or aesthetically, derives in part from the seemingly historic nature of any given teenager’s maturation: not only is the great bulk of cultural and market activity directed at the young, but they occupy a position of magical moral inevitability: a young person might not be allowed to wear what she wants at the office, but does anyone doubt that the world will be remade in her image, and not that of the dreary old morons from previous generations, already dying on the vine?

Capitalism seems therefore to promote a narcissistic infantility of disposition which itself produces more constant revolutions, especially once enshrined in a national “rebellion” myth instantiated in countless films, books, songs. We produce children who coincide in their growth with the fruition of revolutionary technological and economic phenomena; we inculcate them with stories of revolutionaries and rebels, indeed suggesting that to be young is to rebel, whether or not there is any real, enduring purpose, whether or not the values of one’s forebears are “right” or not (such determinations are incoherently considered invalid, epistemologically, even as they form the basis for all continuing moral action). In other words, capitalism raises revolutionaries: children contemptuous of the past in all aesthetic, moral, and political senses who automatically rebel against everything passed down, and who feel that their arrival is the culmination of a history from which they can learn only trivia, not meanings and values which, having been vetted for millennia experientially by humans no different from them, can direct them in their own lives. In doing so, capitalism increases the likelihood that additional revolutions will occur: every atomized revolutionary inventing culture from scratch has a chance at building the next billion-dollar-gadget, the next attention-sucking media platform, the next block-busting franchise of food or films.

Of course, one errs if one denies that she might also develop any number of manifestly necessary, vital, life-saving and life-improving ideas; even Marx could not deny that it was, after all, this system which has at last shown “what man’s activity can bring about.” It is only a matter of considering the basis of our youth culture: it is not any axiom or principle we’ve discerned through the millennia, nor any scientific theory which supports the infantilization of culture and the empowerment of youth. It is capitalism’s constant revolutions which empower the young, separate them from their forbears, given them their unearned sense of historical apotheosis, and relegate tradition- or elder-based phenomena like “wisdom” to the margins of culture.

Reblogged from irredenta

April 3rd, 2012

Authenticity and the Deformation of Character

I. Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction famously details the consequences of our capacity to reproduce works of art, or, more broadly, sense experiences, with ever-increasing fidelity. Technology allows the transmission and re-creation of more and more, and Benjamin was one of the first to note a cost, in 1936:

In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus —namely, its authenticity— is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object… One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

The aura of the work of art withers in the age of mechanical reproduction, and the self is a kind of work of art, too. As with a work of art, a person’s “most sensitive nucleus,” his or her “authenticity,” is interfered with by the reproduction of the self, its transmission and portrayal and multiplication. While “no natural object is [similarly] vulnerable,” selves and works of art, and all that self-aware humans intentionally create, are not natural in the sense meant here: unselfconscious, automatic, invulnerable to attentive or perceptual interference. Selves are negotiated, photonic: affected by detection, observation, relay.

Shortly before World War II, Benjamin saw the coming crisis of authenticity, the diminishing of auras and meanings. He was sensitive to an anxiety that would soon register with artists and philosophers everywhere, and within a decade or so would inform an enormous amount of discourse from the academy to the arcade. In its second half, the twentieth century concerned itself with authenticity.

II. A crucial moment: in 1951, J.D. Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye, whose protagonist Holden Caulfield despises, with the timeless fury of youth, everything he considers “phony.” Fools like Polonius have always advised us to be true to our own selves —without explaining which parts of them are “our own,” if any— but it is Caulfield who announces the promotion of authenticity to a moral virtue and the classification of phoniness as a capital crime. At the halfway point of the century, the moral law was established. Salinger is sometimes credited with the popularization of this fetish, this preoccupation with phoniness; sometimes, it is attributed to the existentialist philosophers and their ideas about “bad faith” and so on. But neither philosophers nor novelists much affect the attitudes of the public, and the Tolstoyan view of history is, in this instance, accurate: men like Jean Paul Sartre and Salinger sensed and obeyed the mysterious, unwilled moral injunctions that arose in the 20th century from “History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind…”

III. The herd’s obsession with authenticity is an anxious response to the technological reproduction of perceptual experiences, which has improved such that we fear that essences too might be fungible. Just as the primacy of the original artwork is reduced by ten million posters, so the primacy of the original self is reduced by ten million portrayals: by the flickering face on seas of screens, the exhortatory voice filling fleets of commuting cars, the flesh of bodies on billboards along crowded interstates. The multiplexed multiplicity of personality and identity drives us deeper into the self to search for what cannot be reproduced, devalued, commodified, into the world of intentions, subjective states, secrets. We flock to the aura of the artwork and to the Platonic self: an unmediated self of inimitable, irreducible, meaningful purity. We vigilantly test for forgeries and phonies.

We want what the camera cannot show: a person’s fidelity to his innate truth. We want the soul we doubt, the core we have learned isn’t there. We want the antidote to personality, the desperate and neurotic fictions of the performative self. We want the inner, abiding fact: may it abide beyond death.

IV. As the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s pass, authenticity is increasingly a criterion of intense importance; its absence provokes devastating judgements. The zeitgeist, particularly in the counterculture, demands a pure transformation of artless, unconstrained, uncontemplated intent into action. Indeed, the best action is purely thoughtless; spontaneity —which can as easily be considered a liberating delight or an abrogation of contemplative ability— is sanctified, consecrated; improvisation is the technique of the day, especially in music. Criticisms of moral systems like religions, of social mores, of individuals concentrate their fury on the great accusation of the 20th century: hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy emerges as our leading sin as nearly all other sins are being recategorized, legalized, made ordinary. The forces of change —science, technology, urbanization, globalization— chase away our souls, commodify our selves, give us a new crime to fear, and provoke us to persecution. We become a police state of Holden Caulfields, rooting out whatever is contrived or inauthentic, and like any pogrom there are innocent victims: we turn, too, against the deliberate, the thoughtful, the mediated. With phonies must go manners, self-possession, self-creation. For decades, no one will admit that they attend to their appearance; for much of the century, we claimed to none’s credulity that we “just roll out of bed and throw whatever on.” We speak our minds; we do what we feel; our revolution is against self-control. A constellation of judgments attends such words as “artificial”; schools of analysis argue that intentions in art scarcely matter, as though to recover the act of the art from the problematized will of the artist.

From splashed paints on a canvas to junkie saxophonists screaming their rage into the horn to the real awkwardness, real stupidity of reality television, we are finished with trained performances and the demands of propriety; we demand the real, the pure and true, the ejaculations of Freud’s atavistic psychic entities straight out into the world, uncorrupted. (But uncorrupted by what? The rational mind against which we’ve turned, the sober and dispassionate author of civilization, with its rules, schemes and structures, machines and automations? The rational mind whose technologies are now reproducing our selves with such facility that we cannot believe that we’re special? Reason: the factory foreman; the self: sausage being made).

If hypocrisy is a sin, however, it is original and universal. No self-aware creature can escape the first consequence of self-awareness: the ability to consciously influence what were once instinctual processes. As soon as one becomes of oneself and begins to control how one acts, one is calculating, disguising, living twice or more within one identity. One is a hypocrite: one says one thing and does another. One contains multitudes. That the contemporary world criminalizes what all humans share, of course, means only that it is precisely like the ancient world; the moral values of a culture don’t reflect the culture as it is but as it wishes to be, and the sins it prosecutes are those it perceives as threatening infections.

V. But while this fetishized and extended notion of authenticity is an anxiety-induced obsession, it is nevertheless the case that we all know and detest ordinary conversational falsity. Nothing is more unpleasant than interacting with someone who is not truly themselves, someone whose performative identity necessitates unfelt reactions from you. Their act makes demands of an audience; their laughter at their own jokes is really an “Applause” sign. When someone’s personality is a lie, they oblige you to lie back to them, to feign credulity, to simulate the responses they seem to expect.

The excruciating deformation of selves by other selves, the pressures selves put on one another without the awareness of their owners, so to speak, is the focus of much of Witold Gombrowicz’s hilarious and brilliant fiction. In his novels, selves are bloated, hypertrophied things which push against one another, jockey for space in small rooms, wear from friction or expand when flush with trivial successes. The dynamics of these collisions are unintelligible to the characters, as they are to us: some people seem to draw us out, others to push us in; around some we are funny, around others hopelessly awkward; who we are and how we act is constrained, deformed, molded by the accidental and degraded selves of others, themselves thusly shaped, and so on.

…if I am always an artefact, always defined by others and by culture as well as by my own formal necessities, where should I look for my ‘self’? … I have found one answer: I don’t know who I really am, but I suffer when I am deformed. So at least I know what I am not. My ‘self’ is nothing but the will to be myself.

The self is nothing but the resistance to deformation. It is a kind of relation or process, not an inner truth to which one is faithful or not. The principle demand of authenticity, then, is not that we scrupulously compare our behavior or personality to some inner ideal; to be authentic should mean, above all, that we never deform the selves of others. It means permitting others to be who they are, not insisting that we are a certain kind of unedited immediacy which others must accept.

If reproductive technology has eliminated the aura of the work of art, it has also problematized our belief in the inimitable, unmediated self. As film, television, and computers proliferate, culture develops an obsession with authenticity in a silly sense, prosecuting a pointless search for bad faith, phoniness, and eventually even self-composure and self-control. But this is no different from interrogating works of art to find their real aura: the point is that there is no aura anymore. And there is no soul-like self underneath expressions of personality, only our laudable, instinctive discomfort when we’re forced to be something we’re not.

March 5th, 2012

Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, from Frank Chimero. Alternatively: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

Reblogged from via Frank

February 6th, 2012

Maerchenerzaehlungen fuer Klarinette, Viola und Klavier

Eric Le Sage, Antoine Tamestit, Paul Meyer

Ms. Odradek posted Robert Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen, op. 132, II. Lebhaft und sehr markiert and the delightful analysis that follows below:

“Schumann’s Fairy Tales: Music, Literature and Painting

This is the second of four pieces in a cycle composed in 1853. It is, in the words of Peter Ostwald, “almost futuristic music” made of “dark melodies, nervous rhythms, and subtly contrapuntal texture”. At the same time it also has, paradoxically, an ancient quality that could recall an intoxicated Carnival parade or a medieval Death Dance:

—Alfred Rethel, Dance of Death: Death the Strangler (1850?). (The hypothesis of a connection between Schumann’s Märchen pieces and the works of his friend the painter Alfred Rethel has been proposed, writes Nicholas Marston, by Leon Botstein.)

Fantastic tales, both newly created and versions of traditional stories, were one of the fixtures of German romanticism, and since the very beginning, writers spoke of them in relation to music:

One striking instance of the evocation in music of a fairy-tale ambience can be found in the late chamber music miniatures of Robert Schumann, in particular Märchenbilder, op. 113, for piano and viola, and Märchenerzählungen, op. 132, for piano, clarinet, and viola. (…) The music ranges from rhapsodic to epic, melancholy to nostalgic, with the listener left free to establish the nature of the relationship between such music and the fairy tale. It is perhaps in this stimulation of the imagination, coupled with the mercurial quality of the music, that we can locate Schumann’s own attraction to the tales.

(…) The question of whether fairy tales could be said to be like music was raised briefly toward the end of the eighteenth century, in the early years of German Romanticism. Responding to the Kantian notion that, left free to roam, the imagination produces only nonsense, authors such as Novalis and Ludwig Tieck explored the idea of a mode of imaginative writing unconstrained by the demand to make sense. The fairy tale seemed fit for the purpose because of its lack of conventional characterization, disregard for motivation, and uncannily repetitive plots. It was in the perceived dreamy incoherence of the fairy tale that a link could be established with music (…)

—Stephen Benson, “Music”, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase, Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 649-650. Bold mine.

Schumann lived during a time when the Märchen (fairy tale) developed and flourished in Germany, both the simple, folklike tales of Andersen and the more elaborate ones of Tieck, Novalis, Hoffmann, and Arnim. He read them for his own enjoyment and to his children, and, inspired by them, created several musical counterparts. (…)

Writers of Märchen were quick to note its musical association. Märchen, wrote Ludwig Tieck, need to possess “a quietly progressive tone, a certain innocence of representation … which hypnotizes the soul like quiet musical improvisations without noise and clamor.” Novalis described the Märchen as resembling “a vision in a dream—incoherent— an ensemble of wonderful things and events, for example, a musical fantasy—the harmonic sequences of an Aoelian harp—nature itself.”

—Eric Frederick Jensen, Schumann, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 341-342. Bold mine.

And if you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend you let yourself get bitten by the Schumann bug by reading noxrpm’s fantastic posts.”

Reblogged from Ms. Odradek

February 5th, 2012

Argos, dog of Odysseus

At the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus returns home in disguise after two decades of war and wandering; his old swineherd, Eumeaus, taking him for a stranger, walks him across his property and nearby his old dog, occasioning one of the earliest sentimental descriptions of the human-canine bond (from the eighth century BCE):

Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears…
It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus’ dog
he trained as a puppy once, but little joy he got
since all too soon he shipped to sacred Troy.
In the old days young hunters loved to set him
coursing after wild goats and deer and hares.
But now with his master gone he lay there, castaway,
on piles of dung from mules and cattle, heaps collecting
out before the gates till Odysseus’ serving-men
could cart it off to manure the king’s estates.
Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the old hound Argos.

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength left to drag himself an inch
toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side
and flicked away a tear, hiding it from Eumaeus,
diverting his friend in a hasty, offhand way:
“Strange, Eumaeus, look, a dog like this,
lying here on a dung-hill…
what handsome lines! But I can’t say for sure
if he had the running speed to match his looks
or he was only the sort that gentry spoil at table,
show-dogs masters pamper for their points.”

You told the stranger, Euamaeus, loyal swineherd,
“Here, it’s all too true, here’s the dog of a man
who died in foreign parts. But if he had now
the form and flair he had in his glory days —
as Odysseus left him, sailing off to Troy —
you’d be amazed to see such speed, such strength.
No quarry he chased in the deepest, darkest woods
could slip this hound. A champion tracker too!
Ah, but he’s run out of luck now, poor fellow…
his master’s dead and gone, so far from home,
and the heartless women tend to him not at all…”

With that he entered the well-constructed palace,
strode through the halls and joined the proud suitors.
But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos’ eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away.

Translation by Robert Fagles, 1990; brought to my attention by Abby.

February 3rd, 2012

The wonderful CK/CK shared this photograph, taken near London in November of 1942. Breaking between missions flying machines less sophisticated than a contemporary car in a war of annihilation with a nearby and superior enemy, a pilot breaks for a haircut, reading, and a pipe. The insistence on the accouterments of culture, on leisure —the book and pipe, of course, but also the nearly formal attire of the barber and the pattern of the sheet wrapped around his shoulders— seems so British, so laudable, so impossible to imagine today for innumerable reasons one hardly has the energy even to consider.

Reblogged from ck/ck

December 19th, 2011

"The Power of the Powerless"

My friend Stuart Carlton —who writes here and at Wings of Reason— took the time to clean up and post a copy of Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which is otherwise a bit hard to track down online.

Havel, who died on Sunday, was a surprisingly human figure for a man so heroic and transformative; he seemed, despite suffering imprisonment and terror after the attempted cultural annihilation of his country by the Soviet Union, never to lose the spark of humor and felicity that made him an artist. He witnessed real horror, fought against real evil at a time when the odds were long, yet retained the charming and creative attitude of the optimist, as a child of the Enlightenment should.

Though he started as a playwright and rebellious intellectual and became, after decades of uncertainty, the president of a reborn Czechoslovakia, his was not a transformation in the traditional sense; he never stopped being an Enlightenment thinker, an artist, an heir to what his friend Milan Kundera called the culture of the novel: that world which sees the highest morality in resisting reductive moral judgment in favor of comprehension.

It is perhaps hard for people to believe today the incredible, total faith humans had until recently in political solutions to human problems, or perhaps it isn’t; it is impossible to imagine, however, a man of Havel’s unconventional and literary bent becoming the leader of a country. But countries in East Central Europe, Kundera has argued, are more aware of the value of Western humanism because they’ve been recently deprived of it by both Germany and the Soviet Union. They value the artist, in other words, because they have seen how essential art, and the liberal arts in general, are to a civilization, how bleak a society without them is. (The rest of us will learn someday).

In any event: while parts of the essay have aged, much of it remains bracingly clear, profound, enduring:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something ‘supra-personal’ and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic, but at the same time an apparently dignified, way of legitimising what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed towards people and towards God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own ‘fallen existence’, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

There are excellent obituaries in both The New York Times and The Economist.

Reblogged from Grumblings

September 1st, 2011

“All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.”

So David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity, his breathtakingly profound and impossibly affecting new book. He continues:

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not of prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress… If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

A disciple of Karl Popper and a quantum physicist, Deutsch is everywhere concerned not with positive absolutes but with the process of conjecture, refutation, and the gradual improvement of our explanatory understanding of the world, as well as the corresponding ability to control it. Amidst his many lucid, remarkably direct assertions about what we can know, what we can do, and the moral repercussions which follow therefrom, he tentatively offers only one moral imperative: “…the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative… all other moral truths follow from it…”

If optimism is “a way of explaining failure,” it is because of another of his pronouncements, which he advises humanity to chisel on stone tables: problems are inevitable; and problems are soluble. That is: there is no possible stasis of sustainability for humanity, or any other species, within any ecosystem or civilization. Only a continuous process of problem-solving will suffice to ensure our survival, and not only our survival but our gradual triumph over evil.

Evil! It is not a word he uses often, nor is it a word often-used today, although I suspect this is less because any of us denies the existence of evil -death abounds, injustice abounds, the suffering of the innocent abounds- but because we deny the existence of the good. In any event, discussing evils caused by insufficient knowledge, Deutsch writes:

If we do not, for the moment, know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know in theory but do not yet have enough time or resources (i.e., wealth), then, even so, it is universally true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it [or not]… The same must hold, equally trivially, for the evil of death -that is to say, the deaths of human beings from disease or old age. This problem… has an almost unmatched reputation for insolubility… But there is no rational basis for this reputation. It is absurdly parochial to read some deep significance into this particular failure, among so many, of the biosphere to support human life -or of medical science…

That humanity has not yet conquered death is due to one fact alone: that we have only been engaged in the critical, open-ended creation of knowledge for a few centuries, since the Enlightenment. Before it, fits and starts of such knowledge-creation are well-known, but none were sustained; all fell, all halted, some due to authoritarian political developments, some due to reactionary religious awakenings, and others due to happenstance accidents of history. Above all, Deutsch maintains, those societies in which proto-Enlightenments occurred tended to have a sense of optimism about the solubility of problems and the value of progress, an optimism more fragile than it appears, an optimism easily damaged.

He describes two heartbreaking interruptions in detail: Sparta’s defeat of Athens and Savonarola’s campaign against the Medici’s Florentine Renaissance- before concluding his chapter on optimism with a paragraph I will never forget, particularly when considering the real value of different cultural and political systems:

The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404 BCE could be forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn’t factually true. For they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the power of science or even the laws of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the Enlightenment got under way. At the moment of defeat, it must have seemed at least plausible to formerly optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic Florentines that Savonarola might be. Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

I will never forget this. Conflict between those who critically examine, creatively conjecture, seek understanding and technological mastery and the atavistic and retrograde elements who believe in some holy antiquity or some savage’s noble edenic idyll is a real one, a suprapolitical one, and it has real victims. All of us who will die count among this number.

August 24th, 2011

Persons who would never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fused, intransigents made concessions to popularity, tastes already formed relapsed into uncertainties… There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can’t put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period’s seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older.

Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities.

May 29th, 2011

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.

Jonathan Franzen’s essay on social media, on ‘liking’ as a pitiful, narcissistic dilution of real experience, seems to have been met with wide acclaim; it is quoted everywhere, it seems immediately, obviously true, it resonates. Many of its points are fascinating, but most interesting is the claim above: “To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.” By asserting the centrality of pain -and thereby of suffering, death, and evil- to human life, Franzen echoes a broadly-held, mostly intuitive sense that the so-called “problem of evil” is not a meaningful philosophical problem at all. That is: it is not hard to imagine how suffering, death, and evil could be vitally important for human life to have meaning, how they could be in fact be necessary for the existence of the good with which we hope to technologically replace them.

Earlier, Franzen writes that

“…the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.”

By calling them “our wishes,” Franzen rhetorically trivializes our preferences: to not be killed in hurricanes, to not see our children starve to death, to not be eaten away by disease, to not languish in a life whose circumstances reflect arbitrary fortune, the bad luck of being born poor, marginalized, persecuted, weak. The virtualization of reality is an effort to combat the arbitrary, unearned suffering which has defined our lives since the dawn of the species. Technology seeks to make our agency primary among organizing forces in the universe; we want not to be victims. We want not to suffer, particularly pointlessly. We want happy, safe lives for ourselves and others.

Yet Franzen’s argument insists: a painless life is not a real life, and as a result pain is as integral to the order of human reality as love, as sex, as hope. What is noteworthy is that this argument is so commonly accepted that he scarcely expands on it, offers it as a claim which is prima facie the case. Even in popular culture, it has become something of a narrative trope: in films, literature, even in music one regularly encounters the depiction of nightmare utopias, dystopias, in which the capacity to suffer has been eradicated, in which chance has been eliminated. These depictions show us reduced worlds in which, say, androids provide us with sex without the immense difficulties of relationships, or in which we are genetically modified to be incapable of irrational sorrow. They are not happy stories, though; they invariably assert that something crucial is lost if there is no suffering, no death, no conflict, no evil.

That is: this “telos of techne” is revolting to us even as we seek it.

In a sense, we are like children who rage against the rules and fiats of our parents but desperately depend on them to circumscribe reality, to structure our moral and experiential lives, or we will be terribly deprived, lost. But of what are we deprived? The possibility of heroism? Of sacrifice? Of devotion? Of goodness against evil? And how does suffering structure heroism, nobility, love? And how might one argue that the suffering of others is a morally-acceptable cost for the leavening, as it were, of one’s own reality? It is simple enough to dismiss such questions as superstitious, as epistemologically imprecise; unless one is religious, one can perhaps avoid thinking of the relationship between evil and love for one’s entire life. But only an ideologue would insist that there is no mystery to the human need for conflict, anguish, pain.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, sentenced to a decade of imprisonment and exile in the Soviet Union for critical remarks about the monster Joseph Stalin, knew much about the suffering wrought by evil in the world; even had he not experienced torture and banishment, that he lived through World War II and what followed in Russia would have acquainted him with the full range of human barbarities. The temptation to blame systems of government or economics, ideologies, parties, others would have been enormous. Yet Solzhenitsyn did not think that evil was apportioned to some and not to others:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

In the heart of every human being there is good and there is evil; it is not possible to imagine a human without evil, or at least it is clear that such a creature is not human as we understand the term. To be human is to be divided against oneself, and to be both wounded by the evil in others and saved by the good in them; it is to depend on this ambiguous, moral and immoral heart.

Franzen discusses the insidious redaction social networks prompt: how we are eager to be liked and therefore mask, conceal, censor what is unlikeable about ourselves, falsifying our humanity and acting against the spirit of love in the process:

“If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick.”

To experience the fullness of love, one cannot partialize oneself, amputate those elements of oneself that play poorly on profile pages, accustom oneself to perpetual public performance. That we do so by the hundreds of millions, oddly, answers Solzhenitsyn’s question: “And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” If Franzen is to be believed, it turns out that nearly all of us are.

That we recognize, however, the facile surreality of this act, that authors write op-eds in the New York Times denouncing it while we all nod in assent, seems not only to suggest that the cultural change is not nearly so novel or permanent as Franzen claims -I recall feeling contempt for people who liked my performative personality in high school- but also to offer a kind of glimpse into the popular conception of the world’s moral order, a referendum on theodicy, as it were.

Is it the case that despite our intellectual arguments, we intuitively do not want a life free from conflict, pain, evil? Do we know in our hearts that such a life would be a kind of stagnation, a distracted, superficial trance, an anti-life without the possibility of transcendence? It is discomfiting to say so in the face of the horrors wrought by evil in our world; even Franzen cannot bring himself to the honest conclusion of his argument, absurdly saying that “pain hurts but it doesn’t kill.” But of course pain kills; and what causes pain -evil, chance- is as likely to cause death as anguish. A novelist is unlikely to have a popularly palatable moral worldview, but it seems that even Franzen feels some pressure to redact himself here: our age is the age of technological teleology, and to assert as a lunatic anachronism that pain -the pain of war, the pain of abuse, the pain of crime, the pain of violation, the pain of murder, the pain of inequality, the pain of politics- is necessary to the human experience is sure to prompt the kind of defriending few of us can bear.

March 7th, 2011

It all began with music, “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts”:

“There was a place for everyone in this brave new world, where the player [piano] offered an answer to some of America’s most persistent wants: the opportunity to participate in something which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none.”

By 1945, as the player piano itself was fading from national memory, William Gaddis had come to see it as paradigmatic of the effect technological democracy had on the arts. In Agapē Agape, which he wrote fifty years later and just before his death, his partially insane, terminally-ill narrator traces this analysis from that ludicrous inversion of the “piano player”

“…Plato’s chance persons pouring out Für Elise without a flaw till the last perforation in the roll passes over the corresponding hole in the tracker bar and democracy comes lumbering back into the room…”

back through Walter Benjamin’s concerns about “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and then much further: through the imitation of Nietzsche heartlessly enacted by his sister, through Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” through Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s stylistic anticipation of reductive technologies to come, through Plato, even through Homer. At every turn, he sees the consequences of the democratic urge to reduce art to pleasure, to reduce creation to performance, to smash the Apollonian and hand out a thousand awards a year to all the Americans whose “art” is pantomimic, entertaining. He rages with Flaubert:

The entire dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

And he implies, with impressive lexical elision, that technology has eviscerated the creative arts not solely because the middle-classes want art-as-pleasure, but also because artists themselves misunderstood the import of their human presence:

You want the essence of elitism there [Flaubert] was, his idea of art that “the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature, that the artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed,” good God, the rate things change a generation lasts about four days what posterity? Everywhere present and nowhere visible leads him right into the embrace of the death of the author whose intentions have no connection with the meaning of the text which is indeterminate anyway, a multidimensional space where the modern scriptor is born with this, this detachable self this second voice inside predicting the future in its hoarse belly-voice, Strabo?

God is absent from nature; he is the clockmaker; now man, ever the imitator, seeks to absent himself from culture, allow clockmakers to drive creation: the movie industry; the music industry; the publishing industry. The raving of the dying man is often strikingly-clear despite his splenetic outbursts; he bleeds on the mountains of notes he’s accrued obsessing about technology and art, his arms are bruised from the needles in his arms, he cannot focus, he cannot breathe, he continues on his rant: a taut, frantic, desperate dictation. The text itself is a mechanical constraint: it is obliged to record his words as he speaks them, at length and digressively, abandoning tangents as he searches for pills, selecting, disgorging, then departing from ideas that revolve around his themes. There is little time for punctuation, none for chapters; the technology of text is imperfect, we all know, for speech; in your life, no one demarcates your sentences with “he said,” but we must have it in books; and here, we haven’t even the time for that. This is a piano roll: the man is gone, dead, but the transcription of his voice, lifeless, without the proper pauses or dynamics, without the heart of the speaker, runs on and on.

What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!

Rash Beethoven must have flushed so angrily at criticism of his execrable Wellington’s Victory, or, the Battle of Vitoria, Op. 91 in part because he knew it was awful. It was composed with technological imperatives, written for and performed by Johann Maelzel’s panharmonicon:

….a mechanical keyboard instrument that automated the playing of flutes, clarinets, trumpets, violins, cellos, drums, cymbals, triangle, and other instruments [including the sounds of guns, used in the piece].

The device, like the composition, was a failure. Inhuman art tends to be, and our art is more driven by market forces and algorithmic analyses of consumption than by that solitary, authentic artist we all half-hate, half-deride. What a fraud! To think, as he must, that he’s any better than we are! For him to labor so absurdly on his work, when what we make, what we like, is just as good! And why should I have to struggle to understand anything?

(Whatever its merits, the panharmonicon -shown above- was destroyed in a WWII allied bombing raid on Stuttgart. Man’s urges -to mechanize, to conquer- do not change, and therefore history is repetitive).

But mechanization and monetization, the narrator fumes, march on. When Jonathan Franzen repudiated Gaddis, it was in part because he felt that the latter’s anxiety about, fury with, protests of contemporary technological democratic capitalism were “seriously misconceived.” It would be nice to think so; being a popular and wealthy American artist, living in power, comfort, and freedom surely helps. Franzen is sanely acclimated to this world, but Gaddis’ narrator is firmly aligned with the insane, citing Pascal’s claim that everyone is “so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” Moreover, he subscribes to Melville’s views on popularity on art; they sound embittered to us in this, the triumphal era of pop-culture:

…only revenge the mob has…is to go to the movies, thirty fifty a hundred million dollars against a hundred and forty-five dollars and eighty-three cents [how much Melville owed to his publisher after he wrote Moby Dick], the final great stupefying collective. No more illusion of taking part, of discovering your unsuspected talent when the biggest thrill in music was playing it yourself, your own participation that roused your emotions most no, no. The ultimate collective, the herd numbed and silenced agape at blood sex and guns blowing each other to pieces only participation you get’s maybe kids who see it come to school next morning and mow down their classmates no more elitism no more elite no wherever you turn just the spread of the crowd with its, what he did call it, what Huizinga called its insatiable thirst for trivial recreation and crude sensationalism, the mass of the mediocre widening the gap the popularity of a work is the measure of its mediocrity says Melville no news there is there? The masses invading the province of the writer says Walter Benjamin…

The idea of “unsuspected talent” remains a crucial illusion; one will wait forever for happiness if he can dream that success lies hidden within him, ready to spring out at any moment. Gaddis saw in the history of music and literature much of what would develop in the world of technology -the urge to imitation, to enactment, to the Platonic lie- but he didn’t foresee reality television and the Internet, how they’d enable that same old illusion to a greater degree than ever before. One cannot even be sure if it is an illusion, whatever its statistical rarity.

If the idea of replacing the piano player with the player piano seems less a metaphor than a delightful efficiency, and if all seems well with the methods by which we assign value to art, artists, people, cultures, then it might seem pointless to wrestle with a decaying and curmudgeonly old man who still cares about authenticity in the age of ceaseless, ubiquitous self-promotion, teenagers redacting themselves for Twitter, real people talking about their brands.

But if you ponder why we favor simulacra over substance, from what we’re fleeing, how we can find some reality in a culture that tried to force air through preserved, removed human larynxes in order to combat the rising cost of opera stars two hundred years before it cloned a sheep, Agapē Agape is very much worthwhile. Can one disentangle the desire to learn from the habit of imitation? Is there culture without the mimetic? What is the relationship of the arts to democracy, of democracy to technology, of technology to individual freedom?

Gaddis’ narrator, with a sorrowful fire just beyond his words, answers no questions, but as he casts his eye through oddities of Western cultural history -even touching on the Aristotelian ideas in A Confederacy of Dunces- he reminds us of why one might be willing to work a bit at reading fiction, in case we’ve grown accustomed to having our thought automated, our morals mass-produced.

December 23rd, 2010

The body of Grauballe Man, whose throat was slit in the 3rd century BCE, was preserved by the chemical properties of the peat bog in which he was left. One of several such bog bodies, he came to my attention when I was quite young and reading an article in a magazine about bogs, which have ever since seemed magical to me.

The article quoted the wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney- whom The Bronze Medal quoted this morning- about Grauballe Man, the opening lines of which I like to pretend describe Pierce:

“As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself.”

Those lines, and the entire poem, seem extraordinary to me. Incidentally, I believe they refer to the kind of quasi-in-situ presentation of the body I first saw in the magazine as a child. While the serene expression of Tollund Man perhaps justifies his greater fame, I find what I perceive to be resigned, extinguished sorrow on the face of Grauballe Man, and whether I imagine it or not it is sufficient to fascinate me.

Both photographs were taken by rcorp.

November 21st, 2010

This is one part of the exceptional Stars and Watercarriers, a Danish film about the 1973 Giro d’Italia. The rest is here. Even those not especially interested in cycling —like Abby— find a great deal in it to be fascinating, particularly the incredible, hypnotic narration and music. This section, on Ole Ritter’s “Trial of Truth,” mesmerizes.

The rest features the customarily dominating Eddy Merckx, the delightful amusements of a stage race in Italy —the riders stopping at shops and restaurants, the villages turned out to cheer on the boys—, moments of surprising emotional impact, beautiful countryside, a classic synthesized score a la Kraftwerk, and nightmarish climbs on steel bikes. (Another great chapter).

Thanks to Ryan for showing it to us; he also shared that A Sunday in Hell is online as well, and has since transcribed some of the remarkable narration.

November 13th, 2010

12 Études, Op. 25: Étude No. 12 in C Minor

Murray Perahia

Chopin: 24 Études (Expanded Edition)

Étude Op. 25, No. 12 - Frédéric Chopin (here performed by Murray Perahia).

I am ordinarily averse to quoting what I have not encountered in my reading, but I am too fond of what exposes how little changes to ignore Chopin’s irritation with ambient music:

“England is so surrounded by the boredom of conventionalities that it is all one to them whether music is good or bad, since they have to hear it from morning till night. For here they have flower-shows with music, dinners with music, sales with music…”

It is an odd idea: that an art’s ubiquity would reduce the aesthetic standards applied to it. One might assume that if one were immersed in music all day, in all places, one would become more discerning, not less. But perhaps what is not scarce, made special by its rarity, experienced apart from the sleepwalking of typical, everyday life, cannot affect us, or appear to us in sufficient depth and detail for real judgment and discretion. Imagine hearing music only when you sat and focused on its live performance! How dramatic its impact might be!

(To say nothing, of course, of how debased an art is by its constant appropriation by advertisements, theatrical trailers, jingles, ringtones, and so on. Will anyone ever hear the Carmina Burana or Beethoven’s Fifth again without thinking of action movies and ninety-nine-cent french fries?)

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