cheese it, the cops!

i actually like the dead quite a bit, and i went through a fairly serious deadhead phase as a teenager in the seventies. and then i went back a few years ago and went mad for the records again, like "workingman's dead," "american beauty," "mars hotel" etc. but if you listen to the vid frederick posted in comments on the last post and this one, i think you'll have to admit that merle does this better than the dead in every possible dimension.(well, it's his, of course.) i'd be shocked if bob weir didn't agree with that assessment. the dead didn't do 'mama tried' ironically or as a parody, and all their best music was infused with country. or try the dead spinoffs new riders of the purple sage and old and in the way: straight country/bluegrass acts.

so i've been showing political/protest songs each day in my "recent political thought" course. so far: merle haggard 'okie from muskogee' and bob marley and the wailers, 'burning and looting. then this, located by my student jake (who's the treasurer of the college democrats). i'm not going to skew right in the long run because you'd have to say that most significant protest music has been on the other side. but here's what public enemy looks like today:

i think what we could say is that one would expect something like this to be quite a bit worse than this is. suddenly you realize that schumer/tumor is an inevitable rhyme, thanks jake sternberger.

yo remember white people? here's what they looked and sounded like:

been watching a bunch of world cup. for one thing i like sports that start at 7am, since pathetically i am asleep at 10 and up at 5. but anyway, how come every national anthem sounds like it was written in england? shouldn't brazil have a samba anthem, argentina a tango, nigeria highlife, usa something by duke ellington, korea a funny-sounding pentatonic thing or something etc? where's your nationalism?

today in america, we face a new war. a war not against cancer, drugs, poverty, climate change, or the oil assaulting our senses, not even against harry reid (though what the heck) but against 'war' itself: the word, the metaphor. we must engage in a bold national mobilization to find another image or parallel. with god on our side - though He has been messing with us continually - we must march forward to a future metaphor bright with promise. now some might say "the american people and our politicians are too dense to develop more than one metaphor per century." of course that's true, but it represents the kind of negative thinking that turns you into somalia. americans, though we are dolts, have always dreamed big, have overcome every challenge (well, some, anyway). there is nothing we can't do if we just keep telling ourselves how great we are, even though we actually aren't. maybe the gulf spill is a circus, a supernova. maybe it's blossoming like an evil tree, waking us up like an evil clock radio. it's like a microsoft operating system, like transformers 2, like a bad toupee, like a three-hour concert from james taylor and carol king (ok ok that's kind of hyperbolic). it's like a hairy poop or an emetic. it's like al and tipper's marriage, like a bad smoothie or starbucks instant coffee. just as long as it's not an assault.

i'll be damned! or perhaps not, after all.

bizarrely, he didn't even come out and start with: 'i'm speaking to you tonight, from the oval office, about the greatest environmental catastrophe we've ever faced, etc.' he started with 'we face many challenges; our number one priority is the recession.' huh? have you lost your mind? it's almost mind-bogglingly incompetent, especially given that obama is often the deftest of politicians. on this he has a complete tin ear; he hasn't had a decent moment in the whole thing. two months in you just can't be wrong-footed like that, or just flop around like an oil-soaked mackerel. you can't still not know what you're dealing with.

all these commentators are too chickenshit just to say: lord that sucked. it started out by sucking, and then it continued to suck, and then it sucked some more. it sucked in every manner, style, and dimension that something like that can suck. it sucked hard and then swallowed. then it sucked.

not only was that speech mere politics; it was bad politics. i predict now that people are going to turn against obama in a big way; maybe this is kind of like the end.

i was making fun of the idea that obama had to emote adequately. well, he didn't manage to emote at all, or express any connection to any actual people. if you do that, you express it directly. you manifest urgency, awareness of the actual details. you don't just slightly re-work an old campaign speech that had an emptiness problem in the first place.

oh my god that was pathetic. really? you're just gonna mutter a series of aspirational cliches? and then ditch after five minutes? christ. no content whatsoever. this is the absolute expression of exactly what's wrong with obama: to say that was empty rhetoric is generous; it was mere claptrap. why not just come on and say change hope and leave it there? yo if you have nothing to say, five minutes is way too long.

he's kind of irritating me cause he's not really addressing the spill; he's just letting it drive the agenda he already had (move off fossil fuels). right. ok. wrong moment. wrong speech. don't use this thing as a political tool: do something about it. or explain why you can't. say exactly how you're going to help people, don't hit me with our goddish aspirations as a people. actually deal with the extremely urgent actual situation.

make no mistake. let me be clear. make no be clear. let me be no mistake. clear me blet nistame. bet clee lee beer. nake me clet leer. lake no meer knee. bisto cake misnoke me. that's speechwriting baby! it sounds so decisive.

catalogue copy for *the practical anarchist*.

one thing i'd like to say to today's collectivists, like mark lilla, tony judt, or j.m. bernstein. you might well run into a set of "collective" decisions, procedures, rules, values that you would utterly repudiate. so for example what if individualism were a collective american value? chumps, it is. you can't have your general position and also ask "what's the matter with kansas?": your position, as far as i get it, would commit you actually to acquiesce to people you regard as ignorant yayhoos writing your children's school curriculum if you happened to be working at the university of texas. see what i mean? first of all, you can't be a collectivist and also a screeching elitist, which all of you are. the wave of explicit collectivism from our intellectuals corresponds to the election of barack obama, and it basically says, you should be willing to pay taxes to pursue the programs people like obama endorse. but can you look squarely at americans as a whole and pull together with them? tony judt wants the cabs to be black etc. what if the idea was abstinence-only education, or if the collective turned decisively against gay rights? stranger things happened the day before yesterday.

the collectivist ideal where we share values or (this is the nub) recognize the same authorities is a procedural stance: it does not itself prescribe a set of values, or it finds value specifically in having the same values together. but it's very not hard to imagine that our collective values as embodied in our government in 2013 would be such that you would utterly reject them, possibly for extremely good reasons. what if you found your intellectual liberalism a desperately subversive tiny splinter position? then all the arguments you just made would be turned against you utterly. plus you'd be angry.

[one note on the j.m. bernstein thing and anti-tea-party stuff. the idea that the tea party wants your hands off their medicare is based on one remark from one woman in a town hall a year ago; i haven't seen anyone even connect her to the tea party. it's a completely dishonest ploy, in other words, or the merest ridicule without any actual engagement. "philosophers" should do better, and it's just an ilustration that like most everyone else, "philosophers" will seize on any empty slop that is useful rhetorically. the constant harping on anger is just kind of stupid, as i've said. anger can be well-justified, as you could see by examining your own, or keith olbermann's, which you regard as well-justified. that you are opposed to the tea party does not entail that every reason given to oppose it is a good reason; you just lose your critical edge completly with regard to arguments for positions you agree with. that is an intellectual failure and a failure of character.]

i sure hope that obama emotes adequately tomorrow night, which is what we all need from our president. all i really want from a leader is someone who feels with me: like when i am in love, he is in love, and when i'm all sad and whiny, he is too. in fact, we might want a toddler as president: they mirror emotions extremely well and quickly and directly. anyway, i'd love to see him, you know, throw a paperweight (a generous gift from angela merkel and the people of germany) through a window, upend his historic desk, eye-gouge joe biden (no, really, i'd like to see that), or just start shaking a baby or something. i want him liquored up and abusive. show some passion, man! care! geez.

police: woman sets fire to friends

(york daily record)

ok let me try to explain how i see the 'irrealist' mistake very briefly: it starts (to simplify) in descartes: we start with dreams and hallucinations, cases wherein we (seem to) have mental images or 'ideas' without any external reference. we're going to try to explain our experience of the external world by moving outward from internal experiences such as dreams. this literally requires a supernatural chain of events to make the move. we're inferring the existence of a world from our pictures. this is, putting it mildly, bassackwards. but it is the founding thought of modern philosophy. also it is non-explanatory: images require physical apparatus to be seen just like cows. the best you'd get is an infinite regress of humuncular eyes. for this and other reasons, the problem invented by descartes is insoluble, ends you in scepticism about the external world.

so the empiricists disagreed with descartes' epistemology, the rationalists elaborated it, but they all shared this disastrous picture of what it's like to be a human being. it's not like that at all. the empiricists called their images 'sense impressions.' hume showed the end in scepticism. berkeley just dematerialized the world on this basis. logical positivism, e.g., is just a close reading of hume. 

kant 'solves' the sceptical conclusion by making the mistake much more thorough and pervasive. it's as though there's an external world because human consciousness cannot but shape a universe of space and time and causation; these are not our inventions, they are the very forms of human consciousness. but they are things we impose on an unknowable reality, not real themselves outside us. the picture is profoundly anti-naturalistic, and if we are the way we are because we've adapted to the world, as darwin taught, kant is wrong.

ok then you get hegel's absolute idealism, schopenhauer's version, etc. and as we move into the twentieth century, and moving from hegel, you start to see instead of sense impressions etc the social construction of reality through language. it's a very different position than empiricism, say, in a million ways, and it has important insights. but it still moves outward through consciousness to the world it...invents, constructs, discovers as a social artifact. hermeneutics and deconstruction and neo-pragmatism belong here. wittgenstein belongs here, maybe heidegger, maybe dewey.

now it's not that there aren't realist currents: indeed something so obviously true and fundamental even to our internal experiences or our use of language could not be killed. nietzsche has radically realist moments. marx does. even dewey and heidegger do, perhaps (though only moments). now it's time to say the world made us, and it is our bodies and it enters our bodies in perception, which is a form of ingestion. and now we are developing philosophical spokespersons for an actual world.

so we've got a little philosophical thing going about realism at minds and brains and plastic bodies and object-oriented philosophy (gary williams, tom sparrow, graham harman) on whether or not there are any anti-realists etc: first let me say that it's a matter of emphasis: you have a real world out there, but does it do any work? or are you stuck in your own little head looking at sense data or words, or jammed in the social with no way out, constructing the world together with the rest of your peeps, e.g. sarah palin? what work do things external to the human do in your philosophy? now really if minds and brains wants one example, i give you richard rorty's essay 'the world well lost.' but just a few highlights: logical positivism builds on british empiricism and says that the only actual access to reality comes via sense data, or images in the head. heidegger identifies the history of being with the history of western philosophy: our world was established when the greeks built a temple. all the contemporary textualists and narrativists have no time for realities out there: "there is nothing outside the text." a couple of passages of textualism (quoted in my end of story):

Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking): "If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference, but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world."

Richard Rorty ("Texts and Lumps"): "all thought is in language, so that thoughts have meaning only by virtue of their relations to other thoughts."

Hans-Georg Gadamer ("The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem"): "Language is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world."

russell, husserl, mead, carnap, wittgenstein, quine, davidson, derrida, lacan, french feminism, etc etc. deal with it!

sometimes going to graduation is like watching r kelly piss on your kid.

--immortal technique

if tony judt and i ever met, we'd annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter. you cannot be sitting there bemoaning the fact that there's no law against colorful cabs??? look you're just identifying collectivity with coercion. well, you are deeply, deeply confused. happily that fact is trivial, because you're not - thank the good lord - actually in charge of anything, much less everything. but at any rate the first thing you'd have to do is morally justify the coercion you are proposing, show that the power is morally legitimate by which you make me repaint my car or change my clothes in accordance with...what? your taste? your vision of a world that coheres in virtue of its obedience to your arbitrary whim, or pulls together because if we don't you'll chuck us in the clink? even if for some impossible reason we all agreed that this black cab thing was a good idea, you'd have to show that the benefits that would follow would outweigh the possibility that the power you are constituting will be abused to the tune of total oppression or much much worse. well, good luck with that. maybe kim jong il needs a minister of mediocrity. thanks chris bray.

it was a clown strike, and the clowns threw down their tools.

--elvis costello

latest toyota slogan: "because we know that there's nothing more important to you than your safety." nothing. that's why i haven't moved since 1972.

7 am at briar meadow, new freedom pa.

speaking of astonishing simpatico philosophical developments: in finland tom sparrow of duquesne introduced me to the idea that there is a "new realist" or "speculative realist" movement in philosophy: figures would include the freakish graham harman, and sparrow lists  iain hamilton grant (University of West of England), ray brassier (Middlesex), quentin meillassoux (Paris, ENS; moving to Montpelier). we fit in such figures as jane bennett, bruno latour, manuel delanda. there's even a blog.

all of these people in some form or another seem actually to believe that there is a world of objects etc out there outside of human consciousness, and that we didn't make this all up in a narrative, or construct it socially, or impose on it space and times as forms of perception etc: they are finally turning away from the kantian nightmare. it is actually hard for me to believe this is happening: i took to calling myself a bone-head realist circa 1985, and i really thought that i was the only person who could say the world was real, even if no one actually believd it wasn't (in other words: centuries of extreme insincerity = the history of philosophy since 1700).

at any rate, it's way past fucking time, and no doubt i'll be writing more about this as i find out more.

in some ways, the taliban is simply incomprehensible. how many people of whatever sort in whatever place of whatever belief can hear that you just hung a 7-year-old boy and think: what a good idea. i want those people in charge? it's hard to believe that such an organization could have any support of any kind from anyone.

my keynote paper from finland: the shape of the world: what if aesthetic properties were real?

when i first came out of grad school, i used to go to meetings of the american society for aesthetics. it was of course dominated by analytic philosophers, and remarkably, still by "formalists": people who understood the aesthetic properties of any thing, and what made something a work of art, to be elements of its...shape in opposition to its meaning, context, content etc.

we had a little group of people doing something else. the senior person was arnold berleant, whose book art and engagement both reflected and affected what i was trying to do. but also people like barabara sandrisser, yuriko saito, and mara miller. we were highly marginalized but we read papers to one another on things like art and environment, aesthetics of ordinary objects, etc. my first book 'the art of living' is my artifact of this era.

anyway at the nordic society for aesthetics' meeting in lahti finland last week on "aesthetics and environment" berleant came up in virtually every paper. young scholars from canada, denmark, usa, germany went right through his books and ideas, like you would plato at a conference on ancient greek philosophy. with saito and sandrisser etc he formed a pantheon of major figures. all i can say is i was entirely stunned. now no doubt american aesthetics is not there. but it's amazing how even academic philosophy can change in a couple of decades. i'll tell you this: aesthetics will be a far richer discipline for taking this tack.

back home from finland, i.e. suomi. i'm in that entirely traveled-out phase where i don't know when it is, where is here, or whether i exist.

it would surprise me if the people on the deck were yelling 'kill the jews.' but, who knows? one thing i will say for sure, i would have been yelling 'kill the assholes.' i wonder whhether it is the considered position of the israeli state that killing is justified in self-defense? if so the response of the people on that deck was awfully mild. the fact that all the deaths were the boatpeople is an odd coincidence, given that they were, according to the israeli government, armed to the teeth, and terrorist arms smugglers as well. yo from helsinki, boys and girls.