cheese it, the cops!

killing sylvia

don't tell anyone, but i love the poetry of sylvia plath. the july 11 new york review of books features a piece by terry castle ("the walter a. haas professor in the humanities at stanford") that is extremely hostile toward plath, reviewing a couple of new biographies. it's a good thing that terry is a woman, because if the piece were written by a man, there'd be a mob of angry feminists stringing him up right now. 

so, first off, she really goes for the 'slut-shaming': she seems to regard plath's promiscuity as discrediting, though she summarizes: "Her erotic quest seems at once impressive, chaotic, lascivious, and pathetic." or try this: "As many of her college contemporaries have since reported, the feverish Plath not only sought kudos for her studies, she also sought the role of reigning Smith-girl nympho." 

or how about this, claiming to defend plath but just trying to rip her - or indeed american women of her era in general - to shreds:

In her defense: Plath used the pain as best she could. Though attempts over the decades to see her as a proto-feminist oracle fail to convince, it has to be said that Plath's writing captured the central and most disturbing psychic component in the lives of conventional middle-class American heterosexual women of the 1950s and early 1960s: a toxic, typically unconscious longing - sadomasochistic in structure - to be both adored and degraded, cherished and abjected, by a powerful man resembling one's father. The fantasy contaminates (and sickens) any number of now-canonical Plath poems: "Electra on the Azalea Path," "Two Views of a Cadaver Room," "Medusa," "Cut," "Daddy," "The Jailer," "Lady Lazarus" - all those kitsch near-masterpieces that make the poet a sensation still (sometimes) among bulemic female undergraduates. Plath exposed, as no one had before, the quintessential "nice-girl" sex anguish of her time: a mode of female desiring as incoherent, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, and self-canceling as it was misogynistic, daddy obsessed, and morbidly heterosexual.

in a way, i admire the extreme violations of political correctness, though i might think that if castle wants a misogynist, she should look in the mirror. but i do think the piece as a whole is extreme in its attempt to discredit the work by discrediting the life, or indeed the whole era. it could have actually been a defense. ok, so maybe i do recognize this psychic formation she's identifying, though she goes awfully general. but so, i believe, did sylvia plath. she not only used her pain as best she could, she explored it, and all the issues that castle identifies, with consummate self-consciousness. if many, many young women, even bulemics (wait, did you just make fun of bulemics?), saw themselves in these poems, they also came to a sort of self-consciousness about their situation, and amassed a repertoire for expressing it. and then, there is the great music of her words. it wouldn't matter without that.

Soliloquy Of The Solipsist

I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
When my eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott any color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

o pole

been working on a paper on my teacher, richard rorty, for a conference next month in opole, poland. so scroll down to my name and you can dig it up on that page, if thus inclined.

safety second

it's hard to evaluate the claim that the nsa surveillance program has prevented attacks, and it's the sort of case where people have such obvious and powerful motivations to lie, distort, etc. that you'd be silly believe them without evidence. now on the other hand, the complete assurance of greenwald, snowden and others that the program isn't effective against terorism at all is at least equally hard to assess. but here's my view: i think we're at that choice point. i would take somewhat more terrorism in preference to universal oppression of the sort created by the nsa.

it's often said that the first duty of an american president is to keep americans safe. no, you sweet little kindergartner, that's the first duty of your mommy. the first duty of the american president is to keep americans free.

flora of the mid-atlantic

these are careless overall impressions more than systematic observations. i think the region where i live (let's say mid-atlantic) is considerably lusher than it was, say, thirty years ago. the vegetation is thicker, with vines and suckers all over everything. it's greener, and of course the east coast has overall reforested in the last half century, and existing forest has matured, even though logging continues in relatively small doses. 

the greening may well have something to do with warming, and the vibe is going from temperate to semi-tropical. but also, the way they farm out here is having perhaps underappreciated environmental effects. so the way operate around here is that they come early in the spring and spray round-up on everything with large combines, killing the spring green immediately. then a week or two later they seed soybeans or corn in rows and spray the fields with fertilizer. the seed must be round-up resistant. they return late in the fall and harvest, and that's the sum total of the interaction of farmer and field: it's all done with very big machines extremely quickly. i'm betting it's ten minutes or less per acre for the whole season.

i'm quite surrounded by intense ag at my little scholhouse is adams country, pa. i'm below many fields, and i think the runoff partly accounts for the incredible green fecundity all around me (also, this is a very wet area; every town named for a spring: york springs, boiling springs, mt holly springs, etc). but i also think that a number of species of plants around me have become herbicide resistant. it's been amazing trying to get rid of the poison ivy, which grows around here in a way that entirely covers whole barns or hundred-foot trees, or where you realize that what you thought were branches of that maple are gigantic ivy/oak vine/branches.

you can soak this viciously toxic vegetation pretty thoroughly in the stuff that home depot bills as 'poison ivy and brush killer,' and give it barely a pause. the crap is insanely hard to handle. i feel i have to kill it with herbicide before iattack it or else i'd need a head-to-toe hazmat suit. as it is, i've worked with coveralls and a mask at times. anyway, even to have a crack at it, i need to mix a triple-strength solution. 

i think the same is true of the english ivy and the honeysuckle around here. i've never seen anything like the honeysuckle: there's an acre of just thick bowers of vines around my house. the whole county smells like honey. here's a pic.

at any rate, i think we are in an experiment with this manner of farming to see what happens when you drench whole counties in herbicide every year. and then what happens to ag and everything else if a hundred resistant weeds emerge.

on the other hand, i wouldn't say that all this stuff seems to be making this area any less alive, per se: my heavens it's a blooming buzzing confusion of birds bugs animals and no doubt everything else.

The Mist....the mist...the mist...

 

In which Crusader AXE admits to some odd technical expertise, speculates on the on-going since about 800AD Islamic Civil War and indicates his hesitations about the whole Syria thing as just another bad idea gone bad and getting worse...

 

killin em dronestyle

fbi chief says we'll get him. people like mike rogers and diane feinstein think we ought to be trying snowden - and, what the hell, greenwald - for treason, espionage, etc. they wanna strip him naked and torture him in a cell for awile, a la bradley manning. at any rate, i don't know why he went hong kong. but he seems to be alive and free so he's doing something right.

socrates and snowden

whatever you do, don't let the debate come down to whether snowden is a 'whistle-blower' or rather a 'traitor.' the worst is just to say 'he committed a crime; it's just that simple.' really you can't get moral decisions out of definitions of terms like this, and it's a merely bullying set of moves. well, i blame socrates for the technique, the old shyster.

arm the populace

like i say, i think this is the fork in the road, where your way swung off, where you chose between freedom and slavery. it's revealing opinion-wise who takes what road. thomas friedman hesitantly throws his weight behind the view that the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance is legitimately a secret. gene robinson hesitantly goes the other way: so hesitantly that it's hard to tell. one very big sign that some mealy-mouthed colluder in totalitarianism has no idea what to say is that he's glad that the discussion has been opened. it's an important discussion. one way i'd like to take this significant, open discussion is to open up the question of arming the population as a militia. i do think that we could responsibly market high explosives to patriotic groups of all kinds through gun shows. we're definitely going to need anti-aircraft materiel, e.g. i think, simultaneously, that we're going to have to think about disarming all agents of state power. safety first.

no, honestly, anyone who ever considered themselves a journalist is out of their minds to be ambivalent about this. what happened to the media? oh y'all didn't go to fucking grad school in communications or something? christ. whom do you identify with? what is the place of your own freedom to speak in a democracy or free society? time to admit that you're just pr or whatever.

snowden contd

the quality of the arguments shows something about the intelligence of our leaders in various walks of life. but i do particularly like the portrayal of snowden as 'solitary' by brooks and others. this has a variety of rhetorical functions, even though it has no logical force. it's a typical bit of 'mere' rhetoric: the idea is a kind of ersatz peer pressure. even if it were real peer pressure, of course, it wouldn't be a reason. so, first off, if snowden were standing as a solitary sentinel against injustice - all alone at tremendous cost - that would be even more admirable, because even more courageous. but he's not alone. even these polls that people are trumpeting show 40% support or something. there are plenty of people who accept every word of the argument he made and who would have made it themselves. for all you know, he had a little group of libertarian friends. 

he's 'solitary' only insofar as the state is the social in its entirety: the same old saw about the state being all of us all together. anyone who doesn't agree with that is a howling savage, beyond the pale, an isolate. no, actually, such a person might have plenty of real community. there are many ways to make connections, and many ways that dissent or revelation contributes to the social fabric. the unity you're recommending is false because coerced, but you're identifying it with the possibility of human community per se. the actual means that you're using to form all of us up into one community is a secret program to watch everyone all the time. really, time to face up to it: you are a person who could make an argument like that for a conclusion like that. but even the mainstream community depends on its defectors and subversives and truth-tellers for whatever decency and truth it possesses.

i do think that being in an elite and in particular exercising authority has an epistemically distorting effect. it's really like these people have lost their reason. what you do instead of giving easons when you have authority is just keep repeating yourself more loudly, or start to rant and screech at individual victims in your proximity.

vicious and grotesquely fallacious

it is amazing what's happening to edward snowden. the outpouring of revulsion is remarkable: it shows you every flavor of the authoritarian personality. also it is bullshit. jeffrey toobin on cnn practically jumps out of his skin with hostility and - like many others - constantly makes reference to snowden's age. i suppose 29 is too young to do the obviously right thing. say rosa parks had been 29; she'd have been a laughingstock. and he goes with 'you just can't do that' as an argument; just a sheer repetition of the authoritarian imperative.  here are david brooks's complaints today:

 

He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. He made explicit and implicit oaths to respect the secrecy of the information with which he was entrusted. He betrayed his oaths.

keeping your promises is one dimension of honesty and integrity, but it can be over-ridden by other moral imperatives, including the moral imperative to help other people. understand, that is exactly what snowden took himself to be doing.

He betrayed his friends. Anybody who worked with him will be suspect. Young people in positions like that will no longer be trusted with responsibility for fear that they will turn into another Snowden.

this is assistant principal bullshit. everyone will be punished for your transgression.

He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.

to repeat, honor codes are important. they can be over-ridden by other considerations, and for that matter other honor codes. here the argument is that it's obligatory to violate your own basic values if you're being paid lavishly. that i guess is what david brooks would call a social contract.

He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.

this is unbelievably tendentious, fallacious claptrap. on brooks's view, it serves the cause of open government for it to be a secret that everyone is under surveillance at all times. revealing that just causes more secrecy. truly, the logic is depraved.

He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

this 'backlash' style of argument has got to go. your resistance to oppression is wrong because we'll double the oppression. the correct answer is then we'll double the resistance. seriously, here's why keeping all your crap secret is a bad idea: it forces us to reveal your ass to the world. don't make us do it. you'll have only yourselves to blame. you're just serving the purposes of julian assange again.

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

this is mindless. i don't know what the founders thought about 'solitary 29-year-olds,' but brooks does. i want to say this: edward snowden is not alone. he is not a solitary figure. what he did, he did at tremendous cost to himself and out of an evident commitment to actual public service. he has a worldwide community. 

the community brooks appeals to is an imaginary community simulated by secrecy and coercion. every one of these arguments is an argument that everyone should be secretly under surveillance at all times. but the arguments are just this anthology of desperate manipulations, meaningless spasms of the authoritarian mind, real stupidity.

no evil committed by an institution, whether a state or (for god's sake) a defense contractor cannot be justified by arguments like this. you could transpose these arguments directly to any fascist or communist dictatorship in the world; they could be and have been the ideology of every genocide. they are arguments that your conscience does not count, and hence you should do what we say. you don't even deserve to know the basis on which we're making our decisions.

you know, arguing for evil is annoying, but it's really the logic i find discrediting. so, your argument against revealing a massive secret police program to its victims is that the person who did it was a high school dropout. what's sweet about this as an example is that it both implicitly accuses snowden of stupidity on an inadequate basis (have you heard him talk?) and itself enacts stupidity (it's derangedly irrelevant, like a kind of incompetent surrealist poetry). 

an important moment

more notes: of course, anarchists are not the biggest fans of 'the rule of law' and the question of who's a criminal is not what interests me. but just for the hell of it, the constitution including the 4th amendment is the supreme law of the land, and hence snowden has exposed a vast criminal conspiracy.

so one of the people the administration is standing up there to threaten snowden and present a completely incoherent defense of this massive volation of our sacred way of life is james clapper, the director of national intelligence.

 

Over the last decade, much of the company’s growth has come from selling expertise, technology and manpower to the National Security Agency and other federal intelligence agencies. Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year.

The government has sharply increased spending on high-tech intelligence gathering since 2001, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen to rely on private contractors like Booz Allen for much of the resulting work.

Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies. Mr. Snowden, who revealed on Sunday that he provided the recent leak of national security documents, is among them.

As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.

from wikipedia, summarizing clapper's resume omitting booz hamilton.

James Robert Clapper, Jr. (born March 14, 1941)^[2][3] is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and is currently the Director of National Intelligence. He was previously dual-hatted as the first Director of Defense Intelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence alongside the position of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.^[4] Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. He served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency(NGA) from September 2001 until June 2006. Previously, he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1992 until 1995.

 

the state/corporate interface is the very center of this total info regime: google, apple, verizon, booz hamilton and entire defense-contracting infrastructure, intelligence agencies with facilties all over the country and all over the world, integrated with drone targeting and a thousand other aspects. they are developing databases for all global locations and all individuals at all times.

The gargantuan $1.2 billion complex at a National Guard base 26 miles south of Salt Lake City features 1.5 million square feet of top secret space. High-performance NSA computers alone will fill up 100,000 square feet.

The Utah Data Center is a data farm that will begin harvesting emails, phone records, text messages and other electronic data in September.

talking to a leftish friend last week, he was doing a common theme: i don't pay enough taxes. i want us to help each other... we're paying for the power that subordinates us. some of us are happy about it!

 

 

 

 

glenns and eds

also thank god for glenn greenwald. this is a test of basic decency or where you decided whether or not to support slavery. anyone who spends any time considering whether it might be alright to keep these programs secret, for example by focusing outrage on ed snowden,  is a mere lover of tyranny. don't let anyone obscure even the trivial question of legality; read the 4th amendment. 

i myself went at first with 'oh we figured that.' but it's one thing to vaguely understand that you might be under surveillance, and another to show in detail that and how this is possible. one thing is that a world in which some of the things they are describing are happening, they might get to the point of info control at which edward snowdens become impossible. but right now, they are still possible. practical measures of all sorts, legal and illegal, to keep them possible, are essential. 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

 

yes, edward snowden is an american hero

so all these mofos are on television saying 'string him up'. he's a felon. his felony was revealing the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance all the time. he didn't reveal the content of anthony kennedy's email; he revealed a fundamental fact about everyone's lives, a ground-level reality. that really is a felony.

if you are opposed to everyone knowing that everyone is under surveillance all the time, i think you really had better think about who you are and what you represent. it's surprisingly easy to become a monster, and you might want to go on a journey of memory, trying to figure out exactly when you turned that corner. reflecting on that moment might show us all something important about how evil gets into the world.

the kinds of arguments they're already giving are obscene: snowden is 'making his own rules,' for example. 'you just can't do that.' no: but it is admirable according to the rules to do evil as the rules demand. i want you telling god that shit later on.

from wikipedia on booz hamilton, the company snowden went back and forth to and from to nsa/cia. squishy totalitarianism; merger of state and corporate sector. correct? snowden is perfectly articulate; he speaks better for himself (and all of us) than anyone else.

Another controversy, related to some of the senior staff of Booz Allen (past and present) and related to its performance on some specific U.S. intelligence agency contracts, was brought to light on January 12, 2007 in an interview conducted by Democracy Now! with Tim Shorrock,^[71] an independent investigative journalist, and separately in an article he wrote for the Salon online magazine. Through investigation of Booz Allen employees, Shorrock asserts that there is a sort of revolving-door conflict of interest between Booz Allen and the U.S. government, and between multiple other contractors and the U.S. government in general. Regarding Booz Allen, Shorrock referred to such people as John M. McConnell, R. James Woolsey, Jr., and James R. Clapper, all of whom have gone back and forth between government and industry (Booz Allen in particular), and who may present the appearance that certain government contractors receive undue or unlawful business from the government, and that certain government contractors may exert undue or unlawful influence on government. Shorrock further relates that Booz Allen was a sub-contractor with two programs at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), called Trailblazer and Pioneer Groundbreaker.

 

he's not less safe by going public, i believe. but he's definitely not safe.

 

Muttering about strange places and dragons...

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the nature of valor, heroism and the waste thereof. Interestingly, I had a comment pulled on this at the site where I read the original article for my foul language. I referred to the evil bastards and ignorant fools who got us into Iraq. It was a veterans linked in site for Veterans. I'm actually miffed but mainly amused...the point of a polemic is to be polemical. I'm sure Crispin agrees. 

holding on to your soul in the police state

alright here is a list of soul by women singers. a lot of these are people i saw or even met, and millie jackson or donna summer could kill you on a good night. also it is heavy on my particular favorites, especially betty wright and ann peebles. there are incomparably ferocious performances here, such as tina on 'i idolize you' or betty wright on 'let me be your lovemaker'. i've tried to avoid the songs you've just heard too much, such as 'respect' or 'you make me feel like a natural woman'. obviously one can't omit aretha, so i listened through again. i toned down the motown because that didn't emphasize the single female voice , but i do have little doses of especially martha reeves and gladys knight, who i think were the soulfulest of that stable. i emphasize churchy shouters, for sure; that is the essence of soul music. but i try to register different modes like a more elegant etta james or overlaps into disco and or white-girl sex gospel. i put minnie riperton in there cause that was my song with my first gf jamie. it's not necessarily that listenable, even with the twittering birds.

 

Soul Woman

 

Betty Wright, "I Love the Way You Love"

Ann Peebles, "I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down"

Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)"

Gladys Knight and the Pips, "I've Got to Use My Imagination"

[Ike and] Tina Turner, 'I Idolize You"

Susan Tedeschi, "You Need to Be With Me"

Betty Wright "If You Don't Love Me Like You Say You Love Me"

Aretha, "Chain of Fools"

Martha Reeves, "Power of Love"

The Supremes, "Where Did Our Love Go?"

Janis Joplin, "Cry Baby"

Ann Peebles, "I Can't Stand the Rain"

Betty Wright, "All Your Kissin' Sho Don't Make Good Lovin"

Eurythmics, "Let's Go"

Ann Peebles, "I Pity the Fool"

Shirley Caesar, "Don't be Afraid"

Big Brother and the Holding Company, feat Janis Joplin, "Piece of My Heart"

Etta James, "At Last"

Millie Jackson, "Breakaway"

Donna Summer "Love to Love You Baby"

Big Brother feat Janis, "I Need a Man to Love"

Betty Wright, "Let Me Be Your Lovemaker"

Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles, "[1-2-3-4-5-6-7] Count the Days I'm Gone"

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Nowehere to Run"

Minnie Riperton, "Lovin' You"

Bettye Swann, "Chained and Bound"

Maria Muldaur, "Jon the Generator"

Gladys Knight and the Pips, "Heard it Through the Grapevine"

Betty Wright, "Clean Up Woman"

Anita Ward, "Ring My Bell"

Adele, "Rolling in the Deep"

Janis, "Move Over"

Tracy Nelson, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh;, It Takes a Lot to Cry"

Ann Peebles, "(I Feel Like) Breakin' Up Somebody's Home"

Bonnie Raitt, "You Got to Be Ready"

Irene Cara, "Fame"

Aretha, "Think"

Nina Simone, "I Put a Spell on You"

The Fugees, feat Lauryn Hill, "Killing Me Softly"

 

 

 

 

  

the material is as gender-problematic and interesting as the music being made by female country singers at the time. one flavor you get, as in both tina, below, and betty, above - and for that matter in shirley caesar in relation to god - is ferocious submission. this should tell you right there that this dominance/submission heterosexuality was always extremely complicated: a very rich erotic terrain or transaction. but then you know ike and tina's history and that song is hard to listen to. but then it is a performance of fearsome power.

safety first

well, you sort of figured they were scooping everything. really, obviously, most of us only depend for the non-detection of our crimes on the fact that there's too much information to actually read, though i'm sure the algorithims get better here as in china. but however: understand that anyone is arrestable at any time, in virtue of their tax posture, drug consumption, possessions of one sort or another, associations. that is really the squishy totalitarian sine qua non or some shit. yo y'all want this. you need to be safe! neo-cons and safetynetters agree. you have already been searched.

remember last week, when you were arguing that the government is all of us, working together, our agent of collective identity, our collective justice? funny what it takes to make that shit happen.

one thing you see immediately: the government regulates these communications companies, and these communications companies maintain an oligopoly, and they  and it are all one big sprawling machine when it comes to processing your information. also health-care, benefits, taxes are all worked in; you are never not embroiled. but you just just try to chill and there's no real reason you should particularly come to anyone's attention. can't intern everybody! but we could intern anybody.

where is russ feingold? paging russ feingold!

squishy totalitarianism: the political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common, for instance, by contemporary China, the European Union, Iran, and the United States. It is characterized by a complex so-called 'technocratic' merger of state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; welfare-state or 'safety-net' programs that enhance consumption and give large parts of the population a sense of dependency and security; a relative tolerance for some forms of diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption, combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance;  overwhelming police and military force and sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth and expertise; regulation of the economy by monetary policy and central banks in cooperation with banking concerns; an international regime of national sovereignty combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the circulation of wealth.  

 

i love the way you love

Ayn Rand and Vlad Lenin, Kim Il Sung and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedich von Hayek and Leo Trotsky, Alain Badiou and Augusto Pinochet, for all I know, disagreed on several matters. But they agreed on this, or said they did, or have been represented as saying they did, even if they acted entriely incompatibly with it: the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and to increase one was to reduce the other. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position. From an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, or anarchist point of view, this spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power/wealth. And also as a single ideology, it is merely false. Massively, quite obviously false; throughout the last five centuries, economic and political hierarchies have been massively mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that in some local moment the balance could really shift according to some left or right political progam; it is meant to point out that the choice is extremely constructed and incoherent.

 

as anselm argued, that is a vocal performance than which no greater can be conceived in soul music, proof of the existence of god. it's dynamic, baby.

 

that's - yes! - little beaver and willie clarke doing everything from b.b. to shaft.

casual forays into evidentialism

one way to construe the left-right spectrum is as state vs capital. but this distinction is a single ideology shared by ayn rand and vald lenin. look and see: they are not distinct and you will not be pulling them apart. 

Both left and right accepted an ideological framework in which state and capital were opposed; indeed to a large extent the left-right spectrum just is this idea. And yet as soon as this opposition is questioned empirically with regard to any particular fundamental development in practical political economy, it disintegrates. Panitch and Gindin adduce also the world financial crisis of 2007-2008, which was created in part by the American government's support for home ownership and the development of financial instruments based on them. Of course the American government and those of other nations, as well as international coalitions of bankers and officials massively infused the specific private financial concerns with cash in repsonse to the crisis. The United States government purchased and then re-sold domestic car manufacturers.

   The interlocked histories of the corporation and state war machines, for example Krup to Germany or Halliburton to the USA must on any account be regarded as fundamental to the nature and growth of both the modern state and the modern corporation.

   State repression of striking workers, for example the severe outbreak in the US in the 1890s, or the less violent outbreaks in Thatcher's Great Britain or Reagan's United States, is a tried and true tradition. State regulation of business concerns increases barriers to entry into the market and hence helps consolidate markets in established hands. This effect increases exponentially when the regulators are themselves essentially representatives of those very firms, who after all are the only ones who understand their segment of the market, and the health of which depends on their activity.

    The way the FCC has actually imposed corporate oligarchy on communications is entirely typical; in the public interest and so on they auctioned off and licensed first radio and then televion frequencies, and now cellular bandwidth made the networks possible, and for some time most Americans had perhaps four sources of information, all basically purveying the same interpretation of the world. The state enforced copyright laws in such a way as to limit publishing or the dissemination of music to a few large corporations. But it did the same with the railroads and mineral rights in the 19th century, for example, leading directly to the great American personal fortunes of that period. By the 1890s the American economy was being bailed out by J.P. Morgan, a gesture which it has repaid to the financial sector many times, and in response to which the idea of a central or national bank was expanded to include unidorm regulation of currency under the Federal Reserve. These mechanisms for mutual stabilization of state and capital were refined and internationalized throughout the twentieth century and still have their little drawbacks at times. One effect of a state that conceives itself and which is conceived by the population primarily as a distributor of benefits is that it stabilizes the supply and demand or manufacturing, sales, and consumption, by, for example, giving many people a certain amount to spend evry week or month. Consumption can be increased by increasing such benefts, for example in a slump with regard to unemployment benefits; this assures retailers, for example, of a certain minimal level of sales. To look at state and corporate interests as opposed in these dimensions is distorting. 

taxation as an art

one 10k item in the irs's party budget was a speech on 'leadership through art,' by a painter who, on the spot, created paintings of great leaders such as . . . bono. this tells you all you need to know about the current state of tax policy, visual arts, and music appreciation in this, the greatest nation in the history of my ass. joe scarborough, in rare form this morning, hopes that the work depicts bono playing poker with dogs.

momo

   The main historical point I want to make is this: the rise of capitalism is not explicable without state power, which has increased throughout the capitalist period. The modern state and capitalism have the same origins, or arose together, or really - simplifying slightly - are one thing. In many economic histories, the rise of capitalism is atributed fundamentally to colonialism, and state/corporate hybrids such as East India companies have appeared continuously in myriad variations. They are appearing still. The idea that free markets are historically distinguished from - or even are the very opposite of - large, powerful government is a completely ahistorical ideology, shared by the capitalist right and the communist left. In this regard and in a number of others, we might think of the left-right spectrum as a single ideology rather than as a taxonomy of opposites.  Thus, the left-right or Democrat/Republican splits, which define American politics as a hyper-repetitive, mechanical set of partisan bromides about free markets and positive government programs with egalitarian results, depend on a historical mistake. It is one so obvious that it is actually hard to see how anyone, much less everyone, made it.  Indeed, the entire history of capitalism is utterly bound up with the configuration of the state, and I do not believe that capital accumulations on the vast scales it has achieved are possible in the absence, for example, of pervasive domestic policing and the ability to project military power. The idea that you get to something like the British colonial economy - one capitalist apogee - without a state, is obviously absurd. The American robber-baron period is often held to have been to have led to hyper-concentration of wealth in a few private hands and to have been constrained ultimately by the state. I think that if you looked at the actual procedures employed by a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, you would see that they depended fundamentally on state sponsorship and state violence, which such men were in a position to command in virtue of their wealth. That this underwent various adjustments for various reasons in the so-called Progressive era does not indicate that at that point state and capital went their separate ways, putting it mildly. And if this oscillation toward state over corporate power (sort of perhaps her and there) increased equality, I would like to see the evidence.

    Many leftists hold that we live in an era of 'late' or 'global' capitalism. As they gear up to equip the state with ever more power to regulate economies (their proposed solution), redistribute wealth, and so on, they are simultaneously aware that all of these developments depend fundamentally on state power, sometimes in multi-state configurations: on central banks and currencies, for example; on the projection of military force to secure resources. This is central to the left critique of our situation, but to conclude from it that we need to funnel more resources and powers to the state and create programs that make many more people much more dependent on it is bizarre. If one thought a bit more carefully, for example, about the way that government energy policies and private energy concerns are interlocked, one would get less and less sense of any distinction. American democracy, or American politicians, depend on corporate cash, and any president who really tried to move decisively in other direction would be vitiating the economy and dooming his presidency. Just to say the obvious: regulators and corporate lobbyists and Congressional staffers are all the same people. You could go Soviet, but the most you do is sort of get rid of some of the lobbyists: you just hand your banking system and energy sector to state bureaucrats, who three minutes after that are the wealthiest people in the country, with the power to break you by raising their eyebrow.

mo

 

Little Crispy's Big Law (LCBL): hierarchies tend to coincide.

Corollary: resources flow toward political power, and political power  flows toward resources. 

 Economic power coincides with political power. This is not because economic power constitutes political power, any more than the other way round. So say you were looking for a political solution to your economic inequalities. Well, constituting the state as controller of the economy, or beefing up its mechanisms to redistribute wealth on a fairer basis is - apparent appearances to the contrary - liable in the long run to have the opposite efect. The more state control of the economy you have, other things being equal, the more entrenched and extreme the economic hierarchy. Putting it mildly, the left is confused about this. And also it is not subject to information: it does not matter what actually happens anywhere: the left will still demand intensified political hierarchy in order to pursue economic equality.

    In fact, whatever hierarchies there are will tend in the long run to coincide. As a practical matter, if you recommend any hierarchy, whether of experts, races, capitalists, the Party, etc etc, you are in reality recommending hierarchy in every dimension. So, if a hierarchy of education or expertise is important in your society, then resources and political power will flow toward experts. Same with a hierarchy of beauty or athletic prowess or race or gender, or whatever it may be. But the fundamental dimensions are economic and political. I'd say it's obvious that LCBL is roughly true, and everyone knows it to be true. A white-suprematist polity in which black people were wealthier than white people, for example, would be extremely surprising.  It would be no less surprising if there were no regulatory capture, for example. You could keep trying to institute reforms to pull economic and political power apart: I wonder what it would take empirically to show you that this was counter-productive. It's counter-productive because when you beef up the state to control capital, you only succesed in making capital more monolithic, more concentrated, and more able to exercise a wide variety of powers.

entanglements: left-right

i've been working on the political theory chapter of entanglements: a system of philosophy. probably won't surprise you that i am again undertaking the destruction of the left-right way of conceiving the political spectrum, which i do assert is one of the most grotesque conceptual messes ever inflicted on human populations. so i'll pull out some paragraphs, some of which started as blog entries anyway.

it's reached the point that i don't see how people ever used this way of thinking about politics, which is crazily and obviously incoherent and also practically disastrous. its ubiquity is proportional to its ridiculousness and i think if you start to actually look at it rather than from it, you'll agree with me.

    The left-right spectrum, since it is linear and not infinite, can be characterized in terms two extreme poles. One way to see that the thing is incoherent is that these poles can be defined in a number of mutually incompatible ways. So, for example, in the 1930s it was was totalitarian communism as against fascism. It is odd that the left could define the right pole as fascist one minute, laissez-faire the next. I don't doubt that you can make them identical by some conniption-fit of dialectical materialism or something, but of course then you're just writing fiction, as usual. The left pole could be an stateless society of barter and localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race, gender, and sexuality; or a giant Pentagon-style welfare state; or a Khmer-Rouge re-education regime. And I think that, bewildered by the endless jive that is the left-right spectrum, people sort of endorse all these serially or simultaneously. But it also strikes me that the incoherence is a bit hard to miss.

    It's possible to tell a coherent history of how the left/right spectrum arose, but I don't think there is any way to make it make sense conceptually. One possibility, which of course arises from the left, which I think is who invented the left/right spectrum, is that the left and the right want time to run at different rates or even in different directions. This would just make them both insane, I think, and I've already messed with these ideas in discussing 'reactionary progressivism.' Also, if progressives are people who want the pace of time to increase, they are also claiming the ability to foretell the future. It's going to be the future they want. Of course even if our fate was a world welfare state or something, that wouldn't show that the result was desirable. Claiming to read the direction of history is a characteristic derangement of many people, but even if people could do this, that something is in the future doesn't show it's good without some sort of extremely anti-naturalistic conception of human beings. Perhaps God is guiding us to redemption. Otherwise, it's a mess down here. Even if it's a Darwinian mess, that doesn't entail any sort of progress by any standard: natural selection will love our extinction as much as our triumph. 

    I'd replace left and right with up and down. There are two political philosophies: hierarchical and anti-hierarchical, statist and anarchist, totalitarian/squishy totalitarian and resistant. But whereas the squishy-totalitarian side funnels into a single situation - a frozen economic and political and knowledge hierarchy - the anarchist side is thousands upon thousands of possibilities, as many as there are possible voluntary arrangements: a million mutant communities. Don't think of it as single thing, think of it as all possibilities but one.

 The Nazi Party, Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand go-go capitalists, neo-conservative militarists, redneck beer swillers, and evangelical christians are all on the same side in your conceptuality. So are hacktivists, food-stamp officials, anti-globalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government. For heaven's sake, drop it and start again. 

  Now on the up/down spectrum, the Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, monopoly capitalism, the Communist Party, and American liberals are on the same side, some more extremely or mildly than others. I am a lot more comfortable with that, and I think it's more plausible. I hope that offends you. It ought to make yuou reflect. But of course any linear account is awfully simplistic.

your brain on jive

it's going to take a lot for me to think that any particular neuroscientist or interpreter of brain scans isn't just a fool or a charlatan, in particular with the way particular regions are supposed to be correlated with particular activities. but also in the way the brain is being thought of: seemingly as a swarm of little agents. i think astrology and alchemy are far more sophisticated intellectual structures with better empirical confirmation. really, the shit is amazingly ridiculous, but it has that pseudo-scientific jive quotient that silences people or makes them lose all sense and start nodding along. i am going to start collecting casual examples from the media or wherever. ok this is from this week's new yorker, the place where brains go to die, region by region.

Sleep deprivation is a key component of post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., according to Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatiatrist. . . . He told me that sleep is 'fuel for the friontal lobes of the brain,' which handle "ethical and emotional self-restraint" and "the ability to say 'This is now and that was then.'" In the sleep-deprived brain, there is only the eternal present."

i propose that 'frontal lobes' etc are, as usual, doing absolutely no work, and that if you tried to pay off in some specific way on this it would amount to a pile of crap. with better and better scanning technology, i suppose, we might detect the eternal present in your pre-frontal cortex: yo there it is! what 'frontal lobe' or whatever always does is just try to befuddle you with empty scientific-sounding hooha. the strategy is just to accept uncritically whatever arbitrary, superficial, or momentarily-culturally-approved ethics or normative therapeutic techniques or self-help you've got, freeze it into everyone's biology, and pretend that's an explanation. seriously, in a hundred years people will look back and just shake their heads at how large and neurologically active our stupidity centers were and how meaningless the stuff that came out of our language-mangling module.

i'm not saying this because i'm a dualist or because i think minds can't be accounted for physically. really, i'm not. i'm saying this because you're claiming ersatz authority by spouting drivel.

she does me like . . . wait, what?

obviously i am in reactionary mode right now. hard to tell why. maybe it's because i've been hanging out with my mom and reading richard rorty. while i'm at it, i've been listening to eric church. now, he's one of many male country singers who are basically working in a modified traditonalist vein and basically singing about the joys of getting drunk (well, hip hop, pop, my ex-wife, etc seem to be in an extremely drunken mode these days. party unto death, y'all.) the model is kenny chesney, which is quite unfortunate, though the boy can sing a country song and had good moments early on. also the thing with new male country stars is that they are emerging in this 'man-candy' era. so, you know, luke bryan takes longer getting into his jeans or having them painted on than beyonce. florida-georgia line is another example of the approach.

but i feel that eric church is a cut above: a bit better songs, a bit better singing. also, there is a twist of weirdness. what is up with his religion is interesting, and he throws jesuses around very cavalierly, saying that we need a country music jesus, or even more astonishingly that his woman loves him like jesus does. now, that really makes you wonder how jesus does love people, and also how people love jesus. on the other hand, i've also concluded that 'like jesus does' is an amazing song: both beautiful and interestingly bent. he has a lot of good songs, actually, and if i were predicting, i'd say that he's sort of an emerging george strait or alan jackson.

on man-candy: i guess we rather enjoyed our scopophilia before we got a bad conscience, so y'all knock yourselves out. i feel old and ugly, though. ah well, we deserve that too!

 

i don't know what you think about country music, but it's certainly the only genre where any major artist could sit down in front of a mic with a guitar at any time and blow you away. 'She knows the man I ain't/She forgives me when I can't." that is good.

 

that is classic country, and at least registers the other side of all the happy drunk songs.

 

 

yeah i wish i didn't have a heart.

education and equality

the other day i was being confronted yet again for the craziness of my anti-statism, and someone asked me: do you think people have a right to an education? well, i don't know. sure. problem is that no one has the right to educate them under compulsion. to read their right to be educated as your right to form their consciousness by force just shows everything dishonest and evil about your political philosophy, which is basically a bunch of la-di-da euphemisms for coercion to create a hierarchy with people like you at the top. your claim to know what they should know and how they should think is an attitude of incredible arrogance and elitism. the political philosophy of american liberalism is as hierarchical or more hierarchical even than, say, laissez-faire capitalism or hereditary aristocracy. but here is one difference; on the leftish side, the extreme enthusiasm for hierarchy is justified by egalitarianism. that is an amazing cognitive accomplishment.

the tea party is back

if the tea party continues to protest the common core curriculum, they can expect me to join right up. one thing about the tea party: somehow it literally makes liberals insane. they start arguing that dissent is never legitimate in a democracy, and then they just go crazed ad hominem: just throwing insults and shit like that's a reason. they can do this because they're only talking to their own demographic, where everyone nods along. right, these are ignorant white people. you fucking trailer trash! oh no actually they are the middle-class servants of capitalism. well, on this matter they are opposing bill gates, exxon-mobil, and so on. probably you who condemn them think you are yourself opposed to capitalism, which would indicate that you literally have no idea what you're doing or why. actually, we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a squishy totalitarian state/corporate merger. but it is capitalists who are driving this thing: they want to churn out american children as a uniform product; it's quality control. i picture the next generation as an army of sexually and racially diverse yet intellectually cloned bureaucrats who make rurality a crime and who literally are incapable of understanding how or why anyone could possibly disagree with them. no particular person among them will have to think at all, because they'll all be thinking together!

Looking into the abyss, inviting gawkers...

In which Crusader AXE links Charlies Estevez, Mel Gibson, Michelle Bachmann and Bob Dole to reflect Daniel Webster's theory that "God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States..." only not so well. 

 

where the modern era never ended

 in the june 20 new york review of books, there is a devastating portrayal of the activities of the andy warhol foundation and the 'andy warhol art authentication board'. the basic accusation is that members of these interlocked organizations were in a position to profit from authenticating and discrediting works, and that this has very much affected their various decisions. [the piece isn't up yet on their site and will likely be behind a paywall when it is.] 

whether it's corrupt or not, this whole situation is a remarkable emblem of a central fact about art in this period. postmodern artists, of whom warhol is perhaps the best and central example, attacked many of the basic teachings (or, dogmas) of modernism: the great individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. warhol's entire set of techniques and the nature of his images were completely incompatible with modernism: he was the opposite of a picasso or a pollock. but half a century into post-modernism, the art market and the museum system have hardly changed at all, and indeed most ordinary viewers of art still believe all the teachings of modernism.

with regard to these institutions, the post-modern era never happened at all. so, the authentication board stamps warhols as originals or not. this makes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of difference in their value. the stuff they're working through is tens of thousands of images. for the most part, these items were never touched by warhol except to add a signature, if that. both prints and 'original paintings' were instead more or less designed by him and executed in various shops around town, which warhol didn't even bother to visit. then various prints and paintings were executed that he didn't sign, or where it's not clear who authorized what when.

what is and is not an original warhol, in the art authentication board's definition, depends on what warhol was 'aware' of as they were being made: mere awareness is what is analogous, in warhol, to the hand of pollock. now, in my view, the hand of pollock is harder to distinguish from the hand of, say, a copyist, than such institutions like to pretend. but discerning the direction of warhol's momentary awareness in 1973 from here is really a job for an expert, a true connoisseur, or possibly an omniscient deity. and of course, many of warhol's works appropriated images from elsewhere: warhol swiped them from popular culture in the first place. the whole thing could be interpreted as a pointed demonstration that 'originality' is over or pointless in the era of mass media. 

and yet the entire discourse and institutional context that would be appropriate to, or at was least developed in relation to, a van gogh or a matisse or a picasso, are just reproduced by the warhol foundation, authentication board, museum, etc. it's frigging absurd, like you were trying to account for the latest results in physics using the intellectual equipment of medieval theology. or it's even worse than that because warhol was actually attacking the system of thought he is now completely absorbed into. if your goal is to preserve warhol's legacy, forget this whole idea entirely. if your mission is monetize warhol to the maximum possible degree, just keep right on.

there are, i am going to say, two reasons why, even if modernism died in actual art, it just kept going in the art market and museum system as though nothing had ever happened. first of all, modernism is extremely, extremely commercially excellent. get rid of the idea of originality and genius; ok, now try to sell that sucker for tens of millions of dollars. don't be silly. honestly, a reproduction of a warhol or an image of it on a screen is basically just as a good as an 'orginal,' and for that matter is just as original. in virtue of what, precisely, would you distinguish them? is it that the original was brushed at a distance of some miles by andy warhol's coked-up awareness? warhols were extremely, pointedly 'works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.' so the aura has to be imposed or invented, or is just a matter of let's pretend. and really, the difference is negligible even to its extreme proponents, having to do merely with warhol's awareness of the object, which means he was aware generally, say, that a hundred prints were made somewhere in brooklyn, e.g. this would be silly except for the $$$$.

and also, whole generations of art appreciators were trained in modernist dogma, and the claim of arts institutions to various forms of state or foundation support depend on it completely. you go to the museum to gasp at the stunning works of incomparable or super-human geniuses: incomprehensibly great figures that are infinitely more exalted and more important than the mere humans staring at their paintings. that's why an ordinary person staring at a picasso can experience transcendence of their pitiful lives. they need something higher, something seraphic. also they need us experts to tell them what is the product of genius, because admittedly it's not detectible on a visual inspection without a gigantic machinery of hooha, or expertise. you are really really going to need the hooha when the appreciators are staring at a warhol elvis, a lichtenstein comic strip, or a jenny holzer text. you've got some splainin to do, but all you've got is the van gogh schtick. hope people don't notice the difference, i guess, or that no one has enough self-confidence actually to say aloud what everyone is thinking. you might want to make sure they feel disqualified, to start with. shut up and gape, bitch; we'll tell you what to think and what to feel.

so the whole institutional economics of art - public or private - depends on what rosalind krauss called 'the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths.' it doesn't matter what you do: if you are an important artist, these institutions will portray you and market you as an original genius. the canvas on which you have someone in bangladesh stencil 'this is not a work of original genius' will be authenticated as a work of original genius and held to be more valuable than the economy of bangladesh as a whole.

it's odd, but the ideology of modernism seemed to be anti-capitalist, and the genius floats above commerce like a seraph. likewise one reason people loathed post-modernism was because it seemed to make its peace with commodification, advertising, and so on. this is a laugh. i think you'd be better off reading modernism as a symptom of capitalism and post-modernism as a critique of it. this is obvious, and can't be more clearly demonstrated than in this case.

so maybe actual artists and people who were trying to understand what they were doing came to think that modernism was just a bunch of bizarre and destructive fictions. and then maybe they even came back to it, or left the critique itself behind as boring, after decades. but the art market and the museum system never budged one iota. and though people might criticize the particular decisions and the venality of the andy warhol industry, it is amazingly effective in making an extreme anti-picasso into a picasso and stacking cash to the moon.

letting holder go

yes, absolutely, eric holder ought to resign. if he does not, i'd think about what recourse there is, up to and including moving toward impeachment of the president. the rosen situation (etc) is really grotesque: grotesquely unconstitutional, grotesquely partisan, grotesquely wrong. and let me say this: if you let the fact that the organization in question is fox affect your opinion on this at all, no one should listen to anything you say ever again, you partisan twit.

athwart rorty

i'm working on a paper on my dissertation supervisor, richard rorty, for a conference in poland this summer. now when philosophers describe me, they often start with the fact that i was rorty's student. at slippery rock u last month i was introduced (among other things) as 'a student of richard rorty, the most famous american philosopher of the twentieth century.' this description of rorty shocked me a bit, actually, but rorty's now-posthumous presence just seems to increase all the time. 

i often assert, which surprises people i guess, that i disagree with everything rorty ever said, adding that i frigging loved his persona of ironist/provocateur and that he was a conscientious supervisor despite the fact that the dissertation was incompatible with his whole schtick. and despite the fact that i did not at all share his politics either, which he knew perfectly well. and politics, it turned out more and more, was central to his persona and his philosophy. also when i was working with him (1985-89), he was going from significant figure to world-bestriding colossus; he was always jetting off to debate habermas or chill with derrida. yet he read my stuff quickly and pretty carefully. at the time i was pushing various versions of 'representative realism,' correspondence theory of truth, and so on: it was a mere reactionary stance (and rorty would have regarded it that way more than anyone; by that time he thought positions like that were boring), and i have abandoned these positions, even while maintaining a version of worldly realism and an anti-social conception of truth.

now, i have never really tried to refute rorty's philosophy or even argue with it in any direct or elaborate fashion, despite a bit of a stab in end of story. the reason for this is because everyone else in the world was already attacking him, and even though i thought they sometimes had good points, i have also been a bit protective. and all that attack is exactly what has made him a candidate for 'most famous american philosopher of the 20th century'; every attack has elevated his status, and if you do think his philosophy is mediocre or wrong or whatever, you're a fool to keep paying obsessive attention. meanwhile a strand of much more positive rorty-interpretation has emerged, especially since his death.

at any rate, i've been reading achieving our country (1997). now there is much to admire. for one thing, it does show the real moral seriousness that was there all the time underneath. also, the defense of left reform over left revolution, and the attack on marx (rorty defines his position as 'leftist anti-communism') are compelling, or could be compelling in debates within the left. but, since the man's dead, i might as well say it: the book also shows many of the problems with rorty's authorship. i'll give a couple of examples.

rorty there as everywhere else habitually lines up lists of names like that is an argument, and even keeps sort of asserting that his own philosophy is the future, because he's just narrated the history of modern philosophy to culminate in it. indeed, i think this was his primary argument for his positions, and the fact that it is irrelevant to their truth might cause one to reflect. see we labored under all this cartesianism, kantianism, foundationalism, 'representationalism,'  'logocentrism,' etc. but look, said rr, the most eminent philosophers of the twentieth century were all agreed that our experience of the world was linguistic all the down (and on all rorty's other basic teachings): are you really going to argue at once against the whole flow of intellectual history, or stand athwart it? (matter of fact i am. why not? but i wouldn't say i need to with regard to these doctrines.) athwart dewey, heidegger, wittgenstein, derrida, sellars, quine, brandom, davidson, all of whom said the same thing? 

Dewey abandoned the idea that one can say how things really are, as opposed to how they might best be described in order to meet some particular human need. In this respect he is in agreement with Nietzsche, and with such critics of 'the metaphysics of presence' as Derrida and Heidegger. For all these philosophers, objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman. Insofar as human beings do not share the same needs, they may disagree about what is objectively the case. But the resolution of such disagreement cannot be an appeal to the way reality, apart from any human need, really is. The resolution can only be political: one must use democratic institutions and procedures to conciliate these various needs, and thereby widen the range of consensus about how things are. (34-35)

 

so, you might think for a minute about whether nietzsche, for example, or heidegger, thought that "objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings". dude, you have got to be kidding; not only is that not their position; it's a position that cannot even be formulated on either of their terms. what role does 'objectivity' and its definition have in the philosophy of derrida, or any of these figures? it's true that in rorty's writings, all the people he admired just ended up saying what he wanted them to say without regard to what they did say. also it's true that this strategy - rorty's basic strategy - is a non-stop appeal to authority, and would be at least as fallacious as that would indicate even if the interpretations were better.

i just want to say that 'truth is whatever is polling well this week' is the very worst theory of truth ever articulated: you'd be better off with 'truth is whatever appears in a green font,' say. (see, now if you attack that view, you're begging the question, because after all the view itself appears in a green font and so is true according to itself.) and you would certainly be better off with the negation of rorty's theory. or this is my theory: truth is what your contemporaries torture you to death for saying. i also don't think that the pragmatic theory of truth is even vaguely plausible, but it is not as bad as rorty's theory. and his view that these are the same theory is false no matter what color the font. on the other hand, 'truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying' and all those incredibly dismissive formulations might just be a way of saying: this truth stuff is useless. let's talk about something else. he was just saying that truth is boring and the concept is really doing no work: certainly not at the abstract level of a theory or definition of truth. course the way he framed it made us all scream and refute, just a bonus for the playful strategy.

there is a defense of political correctness in the academy in achieving our country. and that is a completely typical rorty provocation; where most leftists pretend not to know what 'pc' means, rorty just embraces it, as he did 'bourgeois liberalism'; i'm telling you, at provocation, the man was an incomparable genius. and more widely, he gives an argument, or rather asserts, that the academy ought to be, or even by definition is, dominated by various leftist orthodoxies. now first of all, he portrays the left-right spectrum as an obviously valid trans-temporal structure for understanding political positions. i assert that it is a wacky conceptual mess that emerged in the nineteenth century, and that there's no hope for anyone to articulate a coherent position within it. also rorty has an egregiously simplistic and entirely tendentious conception of the left-right spectrum. "the right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed," he writes, for example. er, what? 

or how about this: "It is doubtful whether the current critics of the universities who are called 'conservative intellectuals' deserve this description. For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice." that's just mind-numbing jive. i could define you out of the debate or your job entirely too, dick, by asserting that 'intellectuals are supposed to be x.' what are they supposed to be and by whom? well, i personally suppose that intellectuals are supposed to think freely even about such concepts as justice.

at any rate, with all that and much more, dick rorty is a beloved memory for me now. just that little sparkle in his eyes, that half smile, the shrug when someone attacked him, was more than worth the price of tuition. on a good day, he was playing, batting stuff back and forth, relishing disagreements, even vituperative ones. i actually think it was this playfulness and the apparent lack of seriousness that it apparently entails, that pissed people off as much as anything. seriously, you'd hit him with the decisive refutation you'd spent the last few months working up, and he'd just kind of smile and shrug and throw something intolerably meta back at ya. that sort of play is one of the things i always wanted from philosophy, and the extreme seriousness of most academics is inversely proportional to the seriousness with which most people take them. if this isn't a game, it's pretty much indefensible; it's not like we're going to answer the questions, etc.

above all, my experience of richard rorty was of a really kind and decent person, which might be a better reason to take his positions seriously than those he actually gave. i have obviously gotten some professional mileage out of being rorty's student, and i'm grateful for that. i'm also uncomfortable having that centralized in my biography, for precisely the sorts of reasons i've been giving and because i'm all oedipal and shit and want to consider myself rorty's equal. (however, though i have often hinted that i came to my positions by systematic rejection of his, that's not true, fundamentally. i came is as an anarchist/libertarian, and also as a realist who believed in a hard real physical world to which truth is a surrender.) also because i don't want to be associated except under inversion with his positions. also because i am opposed to discipleship in philosophy. (or i might go a little further and say discipleship, or even real reverence for particular figures, is the opposite of philosophy, entirely incompatible with it. i would not at all associate philosophy conceptually with reason. but there is no philosophy where there isn't independent thought.) one of rorty's teachers was rudolf carnap, btw, so i imagine maybe he felt some of the same things.