Dred Scott returns, motherfuckers

 It is almost eerie how the abortion decision follows the old paradigm of the slave versus "free" states. There is a story in the NYT with this paragraph:

"A top anti-abortion lobbying group, the National Right to Life Committee, recently proposed model legislation for states that would make it a crime to pass along information “by telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication” that is used to terminate a pregnancy."

That follows, to the letter, the Southern slaveholder doctrine about abolitionist literature. There was an article in Lithub a few years ago about the way Southern states censored the abolitionists:
"South Carolina was one of four southern states that outlawed the abolitionist writings in their jurisdictions. Slaveholders tended to justify such reactions by appealing to patriotic service at the expense of law. Some accused the postal system of supporting abolitionist endeavors."
I suppose it is one of those dialectical hiccups that the slaveowner cause - in this case, making women the wards of the state - is led by a black justice, Clarence Thomas.
When one right is flushed down the toilet, others will follow. Make no mistake about that: unless the Supreme Court's executioner judges are impeached or disobeyed, freedom in the U.S. will soon decline to the level of all those "shithole" countries that Americans think they are superior to.

Back to Normal Fails

 

Back in 2018, the NYTand all right thinking campaign consultants were giggling and acting shockedabout the undignified doings of this character named Trump, who was president.Instead of doing what presidents are supposed to do – remaining solemnly in the Oval Office, trying to look like a stuffed goose who was all about war for freedom, he was acting like a huckster, going out to rally his troops up and down the country.

The campaign industry people were right in the short run: the legislative races on the national level went against Trump. But in the long run, what an excellent strategy! This was not only using tweaking the demonstration form, merging it with the campaign rally, but it was hooking up the party to a national populist movement.

Now, of course, we have a D majority in the Senate and House and a D president. And they sit there helplessly as the R SCOTUS takes away everything the Dems produced in the last fifty years. They sit there helpless and the campaign industry geniuses think, hey, great time to cash in, sending out millions of spam ads, and the usual talking heads say, vote like your life depended on it. All pretending like the car is gonna move when it don’t have no gas, Sally.

Biden is sorta hopeless. I don’t think he has the energy or temperament to be a barker. What we need, desperately, is a barker. We have several women, as a matter of fact, who could do it. But instead of coordinating with these women – instead of going out there and in Trumpian manner vilifying the six outlaws, the six demagogues on the court, sitting on the citizenry – instead of making this a real fireworks election – we are getting pallid emails to VOTE! As if this was a just discovered thing. As if VOTING as in restoring the Civil Rights act of 1965 had not been voted down unceremoniously in Congress, without much after effect by the Dem executive branch. On to UKRAINE!

Trump, being a buncombe artist, discovered how to merge the kind of street politics that go into demonstrations and the political machine that is party politics. The Dems are so entirely blind to this obvious phenomenon in the age of Reality TV that they have planned – as far as I can see – nothing to make this a national campaign. Nothing about inflation, nothing about Roe Rights, nothing about the striking down of concealed weapons carry, nothing about how to limit, nay, dissolve the unconstitutional and undemocratic power of, the Court. Nothing, as the Fool said in King Lear, will get you nothing.  

I don't love my country

 Love is the wrong feeling one should have for a political vehicle. Love, rather, the culture, the dissent, the revolt, the force that goes out and takes on established power. 

But the U.S.A. as a political entitty? From slavery to the new (reaffirmation) of the second class citizenship of women, the U.S. has done all the bad things. 

What makes me sad is the idea that there's no organized entity that will push back. The Dem party is as useless as a sewing club against a drone missile. We are on our own. But this is where the love goes - cause American culture, the people, are endlessly inventive. I want to live long enough to see them rise up and wipe out this elite. 

The best and the brightest and Google Home

 We were given a Google Home for Christmas. Adam has adopted it as his sister, his chorus, his friend, his advisor, and his conversation partner. Google Home is ill adapted for complex conversations: it can sing a few songs when you ask the right question, and it has a few programmed jokes – but what it never does (under the heavy obligation of never scaring off a customer) is give its judgments about the best and the worst: “what is the best horror movie?” “what is the best episode of The Office?” “what is the worst album ever made?” and so on.

Adam, like me when I was a boy, is an ardent ranker. Although he is only nine years old, he can give you the IMBD ratings for dozens of movies right off the top of his head. I’ve discovered a good way to tease him: by giving some movie he doesn’t like a high, made up IMDB number – or vice versa.

I am tempted to call ranking, and canon-making in general, instinctive. I can see the NYT Bestseller list title in my mind: The Canon-Instinct. But I am not sure what kind of instinct that is, besides one in which comparison and discovering what is more important in a given circumstance is elevated to some fundamental unified force.

As a man who does try, mostly unsuccessfully, to follow Jesus’s precept “judge not that ye be not judged”, I have relegated ranking to a lesser aesthetic activity. That I think James Joyce’s Ulysses is better than the Walking Dead video game doesn’t tell me much about either. Heinrich Heine – whose precepts, unlike Jesus’s, often sound like jokes – wrote a nice dismissal of this canon-making instinct in aesthetics: “Nothing is more foolish than the question, what poet [Dichter]  is greater than the others. A flame is a flame, and its weight isn’t determined by pounds and ounces. Only the flattest grocer’s sensibility comes around with an old cheese scale to weigh genius.”

Of course, Heine was not a physicist. Fire weighs, according to Google Home, about 0.3 kg per cubic meter. Still, what a nice image! One that tugs me back from my critic’s desire to tell you x is a great book and y is a terrible video game. I compromise: I do judge, but I try not to let that get too in the way of thinking. That’s the best I can do.

In praise of Gregoire Chayamou: macronism predicted!

 

Philosophy almost always follows the event. The French revolution and Napoleon come first: then Hegel.

In a rare inversion of this order, Gregoire Chamayou’s The Ungovernable Society: a genealogy of authoritarian liberalism came first, in 2014, and then Macron.

Chamayou is one of the rare philosophers to follow Foucault’s work and actually do research. In Chamayou’s case, the research is on one of the turning points of the seventies – the emergence, within enterprises, consulting firms and conservative think tanks, of a grand strategy to fight back against civil rights movement, unions, and the formation of counter or at least a-capitalistic organizations. Although Chamayou does not talk about nudgery – the special addition to the mix identified with the Obama era – his diagnosis of, say, dialogue as a strategy by established power to make itself seem open and to label its opponents as extremists is uncannily predictive of the Macron strategy that has come so undone this year in the legislatives.

One can read the book as a horror story, or as a cynical affirmation of all that we already know. A particularly vivid illustration of this is in the chapter on Nestle’s discovery of dialogue. Nestle, as people of a certain age – my age – will remember, was making tons of money from powder baby formula, marketing  in areas, like Southern India, Central Africa, etc., where water was generally polluted, sometimes enormously polluted – due of course to the marketing of products from another multinational, Monsanto, among others. When this issue was brought up, Nestle dismissed it - which aroused fury among certain groups, which launched a boycott. Of course, in Switzerland Nestle used the tried and true method – suing distributors of pamphlets urging the boycott – to try to censor this (not an instance of cancel culture – cancel culture would only be involved if boycotters said nasty things about celebrities huckstering Nestle products. We have to remember, cancel culture targets people who are un-fireable, thus giving them a victim status that results in NYT op eds and cocktail party chatter) The boycott, especially in the U.S., started catching on – or at least the rhetoric directed against Nestle. Chamayou went through the archives of the people who were hired to undo the damage. It is there he found many communications about the need for dialogue – not dialogue involving third world women giving their kids corrupted baby formula, of course, but dialogue with “respectable” leaders of the boycott, or at least names in the liberal humanitarian set, that would have the strategic effect of creating respectability for those willing to “compromise”, and thus making those who weren’t seem like extremists who had … refused dialogue! Things go swimmingly, dialogue becomes a value in itself, which is always a good thing, as it allowed Nestle to go on selling its products while giving it the seal of approval of dialogue partners.

Transpose this to 2019, when Macron went on a “listening” tour in response to the Gilets Jaunes, and one finds the same thing – the need for “dialogue”, the finding of venues in which the dialogue would be managed the right way, Macron’s creating an image of a leader who listens, etc.

Cynicism only goes so far, however. Here one must supplement Chamayou with the invaluable essay by Erwin Goffman. Cooling the Mark out, from 1952. The problem with the boycotters, dissidents, unemployed disgruntled and dirty masses is that they might feel used. And this, of course, is the problem with marks in a confidence game. Ideally, they will not see through the game, and thus the con men can take to the road, trusting that they will not be caught.

“Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators' point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not. yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team﷓mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.”

As we all know, the coolers of the mark have an institutional position: they are, collectively, the establishment press. And that is their main job – to cool out the marks who bear, in their wounded lives, the impress of the organized con game that is politics in the era of democracy’s decline. In Macron’s case, there was an impressive array of coolers – from Le Monde to Figaro, from BMTV to Le Causeur. But the problem, for Macronia, is that the coolers themselves have interests. It might be in their interest – as it is in the interest of the owner of BMTV – to crown Zemour king. It might be that they can’t persuade their journalists to keep going along. Liberation, for instance, has moved away from Serge July’s neo-liberalism by sheer self-interest – July’s generation isn’t going to buy the rag, and the journalists who write for it just can’t stomach the sheer idiocy anymore – unless of course they can secure rich gigs with Institut Montaigne.

So, France is going through the era of cooling the mark out, and the bumps are going to be wild.

conversion stories

 All we know is that there are feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to recrystalize about it.”

If an angel took off the roofs of our American minimansions and suburban 3br 2 ba houses, she would find a museum of relicts left by once hot ideas and now dead interests: the wok in the kitchen, the dusty musical instruments in the kids’ rooms, the old magazines in boxes in the garage, a stray paddle from the white water rafting phase, etc. Where, exactly, is the enduring center, around which life crystalizes?

This is the problem posed by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Conversion is the name of the central chapter in that book, for good reason. It was a problem handed down by the puritans. It was a basic American narrative. It is at the existential heart of liberalism, even if liberals don’t know it.

 
One of the great words among the chattering and political class is “adult”. The great unwashed, the demos, may be “children”, but the elite class – the class that, broadly, embodies liberalism, in its present neo-lib varieties – pictures themselves as adult, a term that allows them, as well, to credit themselves with a youth they have sloughed off.

The opponents or contraries of adults are, of course, kids, teens. And this is no accident. James is very struck by the work of an American sociologist named Starbuck (a truly Melvillian name) who studied teens and religion. From his data, James draws certain conclusions: “The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and seventeen. The symptoms are the same, - a sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection and a sense of sin; anxiety about the hereafter, distress over doubts and the like.”

For good reason, Jesus said: Verily, I say unto you, if you are not converted and become as little children, you shall never enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
In the long liberal culture of adults, not entering into the kingdom of heaven, denying its existence, is part of the creed. Between a paradise that is essentially lost and a kingdom of heaven that is delusive, liberalism proposes an eternal in media res. At the same time, the society in which liberalism became possible was the same society that, through family household configurations, love marriages, and schooling created a youth culture – extruded from the world of work, but be-blinged with every consumer good. While age is affixed like a snitch jacket to the “adults”, all good things have shifted to the aura of youth. The culture of the aged – the sage – has been flushed down the toilet. The kingdom of heaven, now, is celebrity-hood – the fifteen minute kind, the courtroom kind, theInstagram influencer kind, and so on real world without end.

 
Among American conservatives, conversion is part of the everyday lingo – as it is not among the American liberals. The pathos of the American liberal is that he is always seeking the liberal under the conservative guise. What is your solution to poverty? What is your plan for health care? When of course under the conservative guise is a convert, who doesn’t think poverty is a problem but a judgment. Although certain conservatives, who tend to the libertarian side, speak of “solutions”, this is not the lingo of the brethren. Meanwhile, conservatives seek the conversion among the liberals. Surely they are secretly converted to something? Communism, pedophilia, something. The idea that, for liberals, conversion is a blank just doesn’t compute. And in fact liberals do, perhaps, worry about that blank themselves. To have no conversion moment, to regard existence as a perpetually in-between state of drift, is a curiously nihilistic attitude to found liberalism on.

 
This train of associations goes galumphing though my head every time I read a NYT article that analyses puzzles, like “why is the GOP audience not as shocked and moved by the Trump insurrection as we, who know the facts and are the adults, are?” Liberals seem incapable of turning such things into conversion moments – heavens, that would mean demagoguery and populism! Style, sometimes, is substance. Any convert knows this. 

Function dysfunction

 

In the 1920s, left-leaning writers in Germany became enamoured of questions like: what is the function of art? What is the function of poetry? What is the function of the novel? Und so weiter. These questions were echoed in the Cold War period, and you still see the phrase “the social function of the novel” or the like in criticism.

Which leads to the question, naturally, of the function of ‘function talk’.

When everything has a social function, the underlying image is of society as composed of parts, each of which is programmed to perform for some purpose. As in a machine, the parts have, ideally, one program and one purpose. The gears in a watch are programmed to turn in synch with each other, and not to do the cha cha cha. I just had a problem with my mouse, and I went, as per a helpful Internet site, to the task manager and solved that problem – because my mouse was performing badly: it was dysfunctional.

This view of function has received some dents, however, in the design philosophy that has grown up around affordances. “Affordance” entered the vocabulary of design psychology by way of James J. Gibson, and like so much about design and psychology, it all started in World War II. Gibson worked for the air force, which had numerous questions about pilot to environment interactions. Thus, he was provided with plenty of funding to experiment. For instance, he experimented with the notion that objects become smaller as they become more distant and then disappear. According to Gibson, this confuses “smaller” with “indefinite” – for estimates of the size of the object at increasing distance did not fall under the qualities of smaller or larger, but under the category of ground to figure.  Nice gestaltist terms.

Given what Gibson called the ecological view of perception, we require some ecological view of function. A key sentence in Gibson’s book, The Ecological approach to Visual Perception, rather shatters the mechanistic view of parts and functions: “ I suggest… that what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances, not their qualities.” As Gibson writes, further on, the term “affordance” is one he made up to refer to everything that implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. That means that perception, rather than translating immediately into a physical language of qualities, is immediately relative to the animal itself.  The physical world is first what it affords, for the animal.

To get back to our topic: in the view of the world expressed by the functional vocabulary, the program of, say, the novel is set by a positivist technology in which we have the epic, the novel, the film, the tv series, etc., each one supplanting the other. This is how critics have sometimes maintained that tv series have taken over the function of the novel. In fact, this view of the novel, in the U.S., was deeply embedded in the self-identification of novelists in the 50s through the 90s, and even now. Mailer, or Updike, or even Jonathan Franzen, in this ideology, write novels to capture something about America.

But, as many technological historians have pointed out, the idea of artifices that have one function supplanting each other in sophistication only works for some artifices, not for others. The bicycle did not die out with the advent of the automobile – although the horse and carriage did. The bicycle, the motorcycle, even, now, the motorized scooter all flourish. Television, despite my conviction that the computer would replace it, simply incorporated computer features. Poetry, far from being a dying art, is – if we look at songs as poems, which we should – one of the most flourishing of all arts. In combination with the radio and the car, poetry to a leap to a new niche. Similarly, in combination with audio technology, novels are now being read, in recording, to millions of drivers – thus, oddly, regaining a certain oral affordance novels used to have in cigar factories, when a person with the position of reader, a lector, read novels to occupy the hearing of cigar rollers. Although cars don’t “ “contain” bicycles, they contain an equivalent to the chain and the gearing that make bicycles work. Similarly, though tv series and movies don’t “contain” novels, they contain scripts that often come from novels. Walter Benjamin, that endless searcher, found this bit in his essay on Eduard Fuchs which I hold close to my heart:

“When the 1848 Revolution came, Dumas published an appeal to the workers of Paris in which he presented himself to them as one of their own. In twenty years, he had made 400 novels and 35 plays: he had been the source of the daily bread of 8,160 people.”

Dumas, in the end, lost, but his accounting – which encompassed the newspapers in which his stories were serialized, the printing presses that published them, the venders that sold them, the bookbinders and etc – and could have included the operas and plays made of them – gives us the very air of art, which is squeezed to death in an inventory of social “functions” that picks out and individualizes the “aesthetic.”

Function, function, what’s your junction, indeed. I’d prefer, in ongoing discussions of the function of art, that the word be spelled with a “k” – the funk-tion of art – because however scientific and engineering like the word function sounds, it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of affordances that you find in any playground, office or apartment.