a suggestion for art forum

I read Carol Vogel’s piece about the new Damien Hirst exhibit in the NYT today, and found it interesting in a repulsive way. Just to check, I read a number of reviews and previews of art openings in the 60s and 70s in the New Yorker, and I did not find one that even mentioned the price of the pieces. Vogel’s whole article is devoted to the price of Hirst’s work. For good reason. The work, of course, is absolute shit. One dimentional one offs which don’t deserve a second of eyetime. But the prices – ah, the prices are in a sense sublime. Unfortunately, the article was illustrated with pictures of Hirst’s pieces, instead of pictures of checks, piles of Euros, dollars. The 750 thousand Euros that one of his pieces apparently sod for is a complex object, with many dimensions of dread and bloodshed, and nicely printed. The art world of which Hirst is a sort of master example no longer produces anything as interesting as the prices that are paid for the pieces circulating within it. I think that eventually, the message, which has been hammered home with a vengeance over the past twenty years, will finally achieve an objective correlative in some art magazine that only illustrates the prices of the pieces. 

Why not eliminate the middleman? Burn the fucking Hirst shit. Just trade 750 thou for, say, 1 million. Finally, we would achieve the full circle of the collapse of art in our time.

fondane 2: silence is out there

2

There’s a long dispute in the philosophy of science about the ontological status of probability.

The dispute goes back to the founder of modern probability theory, Laplace. Laplace – with some help from the man who edited a posthumous paper by Bayes outlining one way of thinking about narrowing down probabilities – came up with equations to help us through the jungle of chance. There’s a good book by Sharon McGregor on the subject. McGregor, in keeping with the current trend, is a Bayesian.

Laplace, famously, had no place in his hypotheses for God. But he did have a place for what one might call a God Point. From the God Point, held, Laplace imagined, by a genius calculator, the universe would be revealed in its certainty. For this viewpoint, there would be no probabilities. Where we see, for instance, a raindrop, which splashes on our nose, the divine calculator would see the entire course of causes from which that raindrop issued. It would see the water evaporating from the surface of the earth, condensing into a cloud, and at some point of critical mass falling, once again to the earth, perhaps crashing into a mingling with other drops, until finally your nose is wet. And it would see all this the way we, for instance, see a tree – all as one thing, all as a certainty.

Underneath this vision is the idea that probability derives from a radical lack of knowledge. Lack of knowledge can sound, here, like a very subjective thing, but it isn’t necessarily so. We can model it mechanically. It is not subjective in the way of a state like: what it is like to be a bat.

However, as Mcgregor points out, for the positivists of the 19^th century, and for the first generation of physicists who theorized quantum mechanics, there was something sneaky about this way of thinking about probability. Ed Jaynes puts it like this: “are probability statements of  quantum mechanics expressions of empirically verifiable laws of physics,[which would mean that they are out there, in the universe the good Lord is looking at] or merely expressions of our incomplete ability to predict, whether due to a defect in the theory or to incomplete initial information [in which case Laplace’s god is in his place and all  is right with the world].

I mention this controversy as an analogy to the case for silent films that Fondane wants to make. For, just as the early generation of quantum physicists and Machian positivists like Richard von Mises placed indeterminacy out there as a constraint on frequency, so, too, does Fondane place silence out there as a fundamental construction principle of film. Fondane is saying that sound is not an act of creative destruction, but instead destroys something essential about film.

Fondane builds up to this point by constructing a history of film that situates its beginnings in a sort of popular anarchy, something happening on the margins.

“The silent art is of low birth the child of business men without business, of employee without employment, of ignorant adventureres, of apprentice photographers. At no time would these people have consented to work for any other purpose than to expand the means, nourish the image making capacity, fortify the singular virtues of the power of a machine whose activity was as far as possible from what one might want to call, retrospectively, “art”.

This is an argument not so much from unintended consequences but, rather, from the surrealist principle that Fondane puts at the center of his essay: the ‘malentendu’. The misunderstanding or misprision of things and signs is, in Fondane’s work, a standing for the surrealist fascination with chance juxtaposition, with the principle of association gone wild. It is the surrealist sublime: the famous umbrella encountering a sewing machine on an ironing board. Exactly this kind of thing, on a mass scale, happens when silence and the moving image meet each other.  

Goodbye filibuster. Don't let the door hit you on the ass as you leave

The GOP has decided to blow up the filibuster, but just this once. Standard rightwing talk - that's how the supremes elevated the knownothing from Texas into the white house in a nice little coup, noting that their decision should never ever serve as a precedent for any other suit - an absurd clause that marked the decision as coming from a country club junta. In many ways, I think the 2000 decision marks a symbolic decision that America has not gotten over. A sort of last kick against the corpse of democracy. But the GOP is, I think, unleashing an ultimately benevolent monster. After all, the bad parts of Obamacare are there precisely in order to reach the 60 senator mark. Abolishing the 60 senator mark means that legislation only needs 51 senators. In a senate composed of reactionaries, this means that a lot of shit will be coming our way. But the only way that the GOP will be reduced to the minority status it deserves is if GOP voters get full in the face what they voted for. Already, polls show Trump's support in rural areas, the ones that voted for him, has collapsed - due to the fact that the ACHA that he supports is like a bomb dropped on their communities. The filibuster has the effect of both moderating conservative viciousness and limiting liberal programs - in other words, of making conservatism acceptable and compromising liberalism so that its obvious appeal is muted. The filibuster, like much of the American apparatus of governance, was constructed to make white male property holders supreme. The plutocracy has nothing really to fear from the way checks and balances result in checks for them and balances for the rest of us. (Not of course that the plutocracy realizes this. The insane fear experienced by billionaires wanting to save their spare millions from the taxman is proof that marginal utilitarianism goes against human feeling in the same way that quantum mechanics seems to defy common sense.) Part of why I am optimistic that a Dem it yourself movement can radically transform the Dem party is that the shell shocked response to what the Reps are doing when they have ample space to do it has more power than any of the tricks and sleights of the professional "campaign consultant" class. The Dem establishment model is: nudgery in the past, nudgery in the present, nudgery forever. This is founded on the pragmatic observation that the Congress is run so that no progressive bill can really make it through. This excuse is about to be bulldozed. Interesting times ahead.

Destructive destruction and Benjamin Fondane

La cinéma parlant est là pour remplacer le film muet, et toutes nos protestation ne feraient rien contre. – Benjamin Fondane, 1930.

As we are carried forward in great lunging steps by money and technology, we are assured on all sides thaat this is what we want. A magical vocabulary has sprung up to explain it all to us, where the abracadabra is “disruption” or “creative destruction” or the old standby, “progress’. That the destruction could be vast and negative – destructive destruction – doesn’t enter the picture. Nobody, in the late nineteenth century, voted to obliterate the night sky. It just happened, electrical lights just happened, it was all very exciting. There was no discussion of the fact that ever since we were lemurs on the floor of the jungle, we have always had the night sky. It was simply taken away, and replaced with a new paler version. That this act might have untold consequences on our collective circadian rhythm wasn’t even on the ledger, under costs. It just happened.

It is an odd characteristic of the age of democracy and progress that populations have much less choice about the vaster changes in their environment. The slaves of the Romans and Greeks, in their misery, had a freedom they did not know about: the freedom to live in the same environment they were born into, and their parents before them. They were all the more vulnerable to disease and the lot, you’ll say. And you’ll be right! Which only goes to show that costs and benefits are both on the ledger. The freedom I am talking about was assumed into the industrial age. In fact, so deeply assumed that we have no word for it. Freedom to retain our paradigm circumstances? We can only gesture towards it in crippled phrases. And even those will touch on a mass incomprehension, since, though our senses and memories know something is happening here, we don’t know what it is.  

However, ahem, to turn from these vast panoramas to my miniature,  the purpose of this little ditty: creative destruction in the film industry. About 1930, the silents were replaced by the talkies. This in retrospect has been presented as a kind of repair. Silent films were defective, and Vitaphone  repaired them.  It is as if movies were born deaf, and an operation gave them hearing.

But there were protests, among which I want to signal Benjamin Fondane’s as one of the strongest and most logical – a protest that puts its finger on the larger issue of the structure that was being ‘replaced’.  This is all the more interesting because  Fondane has become a cult figure for a very small cult,  one of those twentieth century writers that exist on the margins of our consciousness, a ghost of sorts, who lights a fire in certain readers. 

The cult goes back, in part, to his end. He belongs among the murdered. When he was arrested by the Nazis, Jean Paulhan, the influential intellectual wheeler dealer,  somehow got him a reprieve. But Fondane refused it, because it didn’t include his sister. Instead, he went with her to Auschwitz and perished. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. Not a verset we are callled upon to take literally, we all think.

Fondane came from Romania to France in the 20s, and he made films. He made films up to 1936 – as per this Youtube bit, he made an absurdist film in Argentina under the patronage of Victoria Ocampo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oFygwg52DY There seems to have been a lovely bit with a man looking like Paul Valery in a ballerina tutu. The whole thing, a sort of mixture, it seems, of Bunuel and the Marx Brothers, never made it past the producer’s ire, who obviously did not sense the hunger in the Argentine masses for a hilarious send up of Paul Valery; and the complete film has been lost.  

Fondane is better known to posterity for his essays and his poems. The lament for the end of the silents was published in Bifur in 1930: From Silent to Talking: greatness and decadence of cinema (Grandeur et decadence has a lilt in French more like the English Decline and fall). It is a big essay, and I’m just rollin up  my sleeves here. Gonna work on it in a future post.    

where are the radical children's storybooks?

I don’t blame Ayn Rand. I blame Batman.

Adam has become an enthusiastic fan of the comics. And so I have been learning about the comics.

American comics generally participate in an ideology which radiates out from a central preoccupation with crime. And not any crime. The two great crimes are jewel robberies and bank robberies. There’s a reason for that: these crimes make the rich the victim.

This is the great animating vision of the primal American super-world. Once you catch on, you can detect it in other children’s books as well. It nourishes the topsy turvy vision of reality that infects American politics, and that identifies celebrity with heroism.

Unfortunately, the political struggle for the hearts of children has not been fought very hard by the American Left. Mister Moneybags, that funny character who pops up in translations of certain texts of Marx, never made it to Gotham City. But as I have recently learned, looking around the Internet, some radical factions in the post 68 generation turned their eyes to this theater of struggle.

My discovery of this site has been eyeopening: https://children68.hypotheses.org/. Unfortunately, it does not have a long list of these ultra-leftist books. And so far, it neglects comic books. On the other hand, it does give publicity to a book that still needs to be translated into English – Histoire de Julie qui avait une ombre de garçon.

But to return to the comic book world – here one faces an ideological conundrum at the very root of the superhero ideology. Alan Moore has, I think justly, called the mania for superheros a “cultural catastrophe”; his phrase evokes that idea of a cultural product that squats like a nightmare on the shoulders of the living. 

“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times. “

The super antihero, I suppose, is yet to be born. My suspicion is that it can’t be born in a world inscribed with the principle that the rich are victims – a world of childish mystification.  

a poem

I turned off the light. In the sudden flush

Of the dark you took my blinded hand.

Leading me into the next room, hush,

you minted light in the time a coin lands

on heads, then out went the annunciation.

To bed, to bed, you said I said

In this way haloed the occasion

And bed it was, and bed…

origami, metaphysics, and Lichtenberg

A week ago I was going out of the public library in kind of a hurry. It was nearly time for me to pick up Adam. But, as I passed through the main lobby, I was too attracted by a display not to stop. Two people were behind a desk, making paper cranes. In front of them, an interested girl was being instructed in the oragamic art as well. I thought, Adam would like one of those cranes, so I asked the woman if I could have one. The answer was no, but I could make one. And due to one of those failures of the will to which I am subject, instead of saying no, I’m in a hurry, or saying no, I am the most lousy folder ever to set foot on planet earth, a menace to gift wrap and boxes,  I said alright. What followed was a painful five minutes for both me and my teacher, who must have thought, as I clumsily folded the wrong way here and sloppily failed to make one fold equal to its other there, that I’d been sent to test her. She passed the test. Now and then she’d grab my misshappen piece of paper and correct what I’d done wrongly, and hand it back (disappointing my hope that he was letting me off the hook) with some encouraging word. And of course once again my hand grew six thumbs. But in the end, I did come up with a crane.

I’m trying to make an analogy here, although I fear I’ve put too much thumb into it. The folding process for me involved two twin awkwardnesses. First was my mechanical incompetence in folding the piece of paper through a series that lead to the crane. Second was my mental blindness that saw in each twist of the paper another sort of shapelessness. There’s an essay by Paul Valery, Man and shell – man here being l’homme – in which Valery marvels not only at the spirals of the sea creature, mussel or nautilus, which he acknowledges a geometrician could generate with a formula, but also at the lips of it, where the marvelous symmetry breaks down and the creature itself appears and disappears, making of the mineral a living function.  The crane, of course, never takes off and flies – it is no crane. But its living function is to symbolize the crane. It is no mirror image of the bird, but a ritualistic image.

Hence, my analogy: between the oragami master and what Lichtenberg does in his Waste books. For there, too, much folding and shapelessness, much seemingly aimless advance, is generated. To call these entries “aphorisms” is to point us a little too firmly away from their waste content. Sometimes Lichtenberg is the master, sometimes not – but I think in Lichtenberg’s most beautiful examples, the final image surprises him. He represents, in a way, both my cluelessness and my guide’s artistry. To think with a pen involves a lot of seemingly unnecessary folding, and even the result, for those without the eye for symbol and silhouette, may seem arbitrary and unsupported.

Okeydokey then. Here’s the translation of one of Lichtenberg’s bits of rubbish in notebook F, 1776-1779, in which highly romantic, even cabalistic metaphors are attached to highly materialistic models. This gives a certain vertiginous feeling to the entry – this is long before the philosophy of mind had developed its controversies and categories. So we can see hints as to a wet mind theory of consciousness – which brings consciousness back to the specific material constitution of the brain, and rejects the cog sci idea that mental functions are indifferent to the material platforms where they are performed – and other hints of an entirely different orientation, in which we imagine other materials making  minds, or souls, still. Overall, though, hangs a metaphysics of the inscribed that sounds almost familiar.     

“Those psychologists that have looked around in the natural sciences have always reasoned more connectedly than the others who began with psychology. The more I compare Hartley’s theory with my experience [David Hartley, the British philosopher who tried to apply Newton’s vibration theory to the nervous system and laid down the foundations for associationism in psychology] the more it confirms itself with me, so entirely does it agree with our other experiences. If we shoot a pea into the sea outside Helvoet [a port of Rotterdam], I would presumably be able to trace the effect of it on the coast of China if the sea were my brain. This effect would however be strongly modified through every other  impression all the other objects make on the sea, through the wind that pushes against it, through the fish and ships that move through it, through the sea caves that break its force on the shore. The form of the surface of a countryside is a history written with natural signs of all its changes,  every grain of sand is a letter, but the language is for the most part unknown to us. On the surface of this earth there are crowds of round bodies with thick roots out of which arise many small ones,  which  live in the air like polyps live in water {the brain, nerves, spine) and hang down their roots like polyps do their limbs.  They sit in a sort of shelter, which serves them as a cover in which they can continue to operate, and are so constituted, that their weakest roots do not have to set themselves on other bodies, while material is through this shelter strained and purified in such a way that its outflow is being continually replaced. These bodies, too, like all others, are continually being altered, and are, as all others, written upon with natural signs that spell out the history of all the changes they have experienced. It is like a tin plate whose scratches and marks tell the tale of all the meals that it has been through. The matter in which they are constituted is of a specific constitution that is originally so soft and almost fluid, yet not capable of taking in all impressions like water; it has more stickiness. And because it records  not only  simultanea, but also of successiva, so will each moment be somewhat fixed, and the body will become ever tougher, so that at last it is less able to register than to express. I the I that writes this has the fortune to have such a body. That’s the way it is. If our soul is a simple substance, why doesn’t it read the changes of the earth as well as of the brain? The brain is not just as incapable of reading impressions of changes as the sea.   (beasts are notably changed through light, perhaps more than other bodies, perhaps through the electrical fluid, it is probable that water does not register the successiva of light). Maybe it is possible to conceive an animal whose brain was the sea, to whom the north wind meant blue and the south wind red. If a simultanea and successiva is enclosed together  in a  body that only records simultanea, or only lets in certain bodies, it would thus only compute certain changes. It is much to be wished, that one here saw something like an intention. To give you a symbolic idea of these alterations just think of a drop of water on which something is reflected or through which a ray is broken, the smallest change in its figure brings about the entire destruction of the image.”