cheese it, the cops!

satan will welcome you home

bye to lemmy. i interviewed him once (maybe '88?), i think for circus magazine. there was some controversy raging over the satanic influence of metal bands like motorhead and twisted sister on the youth of that day, and that generation has, of course, amounted to a chronic infestation of demons. anyway, he was extremely smart and funny on this, and started with a long description about how he and dee snider sacrificed minority children in his basement; that's how they became rock stars in spite of being lemmy and dee snider. cause of death? the coroner suspects that it was death.

 

like jim morrison and jimi hendrix, lemmy was a fatal genius-baby who prophesied his own death. only 30 years after he wrote 'killed by death', he's all dead and shit.

yang country

i try not to gloat, but i was all over that chris stapleton album the week of its release. i said at the the time (may) that it was the only certifiably excellent country album i'd heard this year; it's still the best, anyway. i was shocked to watch it start cleaning up awards.

 

 

however, i also loved the chris janson album buy me a boat, for the title cut (which went #1 this fall), but throughout.

 

 

i'm going to say that i'm not a big fan of male country music right now. it oscillates between lukebryanfloridageorgialine bro and various springsteeny bellowers. one person who does the latter pretty well, while having some other modes, is eric church, and mr. misunderstood was better than last year's outsiders, anyway. that was merely bombastic; this one works that in, but many other modes too.

 

[feat. susan tedeschi]

 

tyler farr alternates between that and a more trad country mode on the pretty-good suffer in peace.

 

i do want the next jamey johnson album, e.g., which seems past due. also josh turner.

in a way the men of americana are the opposite of the men in msc (mainstream country). the former are, shall we say, extremely sensitive. maybe ryan adams is sort of the model. everybody loved on jason isbell's something more than free this year, and i used to rave about the drive-by truckers in the nypress, etc, where southern rock opera was my #1 one year.  anyway, i can't really bring myself actually to like the album, though it's about as good as you can do in this mode.

 

you got schlonged

if you're hillary, i don't believe you want to tangle with donald. among other things, that gives him time to preview a general election matchup. someone who's willing to say what the average person might say about the clintons etc has got infinite ammo. i think the hillary operation (apparently fronted by the world's least effective spokething, jennifer palmieri) is utterly unprepared for this. hillary says she's being bullied. that shows you what's good for trump about the putin love: negotiating with vlad, she'll be all 'he's bullying me!' i very much think trump can trounce her in a general election, so everybody better think about that right now....

on mass killings

we're in a patch where people are trying to kill as many people as possible, very frequently in very many places, in the name of many different ideologies, or because of many different pathologies: for any reason or none. the question begins to occur, whether people are engaging in mass killings because of their beliefs, or whether they're cultivating beliefs in order to justify engaging in slaughter. the pattern of behavior is similar, whether it's islamist radicalism, white suprematism, a disgruntled employee, a fundamentalist christian going after planned parenthood, a bullied student, a schizophrenic, or whatever it may be. perhaps people look for a way in, something to justify their radical break with the species. or at least, the causation - the interaction between beliefs or illnesses and actions - might be complicated, for while the motivations or causes for the killings are various, the patterns of behavior are relatively repetitive, stylized, salient. it is the act of mass killing and the technologies that make it possible or articulate its forms, rather than the reasons or psychology of the killers, that is characteristic of our time.

it may be that you informally suppose that human beings are social creatures, that there's nothing worse than isolation, and that pulling together for unity is the very essence of human goodness, where we should go or even are going in the slow victory of progress. but, on the other hand, 'the social' is dark, dark. other people all around you, at the office, on the strip, in trains and planes and automobiles, can be extremely difficult in a million ways: this is truer of the people close to you than others. really both are true: we feel the urge to unify, and our unifications are incredibly problematic and oppressive.

some people love a crowd. and some people feel profoundly claustrophobic in a crowd. some people are happy to agree with their friends; some people constantly feel constrained by the epistemic and a thousand other social constraints. this is the reality of us. from cradle to grave, people might nurture and assist you; they might break you down or oppress or destroy you pointedly, or they might spend your whole life pretending you don't exist at all. i do think a lot of these people have reached the point where they were negating the whole species, in all of us and in themselves, where they reached the (bent?) judgment that we, all of us, homo sapiens, are better off not existing than existing. whether we deserve to exist: i think that is an open question, myself. but once you become certain that we don't, you may have released yourself to attempt maximum destruction. (actually i think that the right response is a hearty yet despairing belly-laugh.) then you might be asking yourself: ok, where's an opportunity, or what's a justification, etc?

yin country

true, i'm going to do a 'round-up of country, 2015.' maybe not a top ten this year but just some artists, albums, reflections. bizarrely, country is still cisgendered. so let's break it down like that.

two of my very favorite female artists, ashley monroe and kacey musgraves, released albums this year. i was bitterly disappointed with both, even more so in retrospect than at the moment of their release. on the other hand, there was cluster of extremely promising debuts toward the end of the year. one of my favorite slices of music this year was maren morris's eponymous debut, and perhaps "drunk girls don't cry" was my favorite song this year.

 

also i particularly loved the hailey whitters ep "black sheep"; download 'city girl,' 'long come to jesus,' and 'one more hell.' a fine new voice is country is named 'cam' (also touched on in the last linked entry). really, in terms of a distinctive yet trad new female country voice, she is wonderful. i think probably her whole team was caught a little by surprise when 'burning house' - a really beautiful and tough tradtional song - went to #1, and the album, 'untamed,' might have been rushed into production with some boilerplate, including the miserable title cut. but check 'mayday' or even 'i want it all": bad self-esteen lyrics, maybe, but very very catchy.

 

i still want more from caroline ('kissin ain't the same as talkin') spence. and i await the heartbreak, cheating-bastard, d-i-v-o-r-c-e album from miranda lambert. you can whine if you like, but i say this: miranda is the best artist working now, the queen of country music, a worthy inheritor of tammy, dolly, and patty loveless.

 

who owns bernie?

what surprises me more than anything else in the sanders/dnc info flap is that the dnc, and not the sanders campaign, controls the data generated by the sanders campaign. perhaps the party sucks all info in by offering the campaigns supposedly excellent software (which seems to have had extreme problems) for dealing with it? it's completely obvious that the dnc and the clinton campaign are one. now let that be a lesson to you: never lose control of your own data, bro! surely the party can't require that they themselves have exclusive ownership of data generated by campaigns? anyway, the situation does not appear to make sense. i'd be pretty psyched to see sanders run as an independent, though, and surely he's thinking that way now. i want to see both these parties disintegrate.

Tragedy of the Intellectual Left

By Crispin Sartwell

   One of the most striking features of intellectual life over the last century and a half has been the pervasiveness of Marxism. Generations of eminent thinkers have paid homage to Marxist economic and political theory, returned to it, revived it again and again. Some we might mention: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Donna Haraway. Even at this late date, long after the fall of the Wall and of the world Communist movement, new waves of revival are being rolled out by figures such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Frederic Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. Some of the concepts developed in more recent Marxist theory, such as 'late capitalism' and 'neo-liberalism' have become the common coin of the world left.

    One thing that strikes me, looking over this history, is that often these thinkers took up Marxism despite the fact that it was flatly incompatible with their own philosophies. I don't think that Foucault's analysis of power, for example, can very well reduce it to economics or eventuate in a proletarian revolution, and yet when he debated Noam Chomsky on a famous occasion in 1971, Foucault retreated, when pressed, into a series of Marxist buzzwords. Adorno was, in his aesthetics and his taste in art, a true snob, which is hard to square with his professed radical egalitarianism.

    A particularly famous and excruciating case is Sartre, who developed his existentialism as a vision of radical freedom and individual self-creation, and then spent decades desperately trying to square that with dialectical materialism. In relation to his own period, Sartre called Marxism "the humus of every particular thought and the horizon of all culture." There was supposed to be no way out or around for any thinker, all apparent alternatives being bourgeois delusions. That position mirrored the views of ruling Communist parties all over the world, and is inimical to human thought, Sartre's not least.

    In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of modern philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, who paid homage to Christianity even when they were working out pictures of the world that were flatly incompatible with it.

     The persistence of the thing is remarkable. Contemporary figures influenced by Marx face an entirely transformed economic and political situation with theoretical equipment developed to account for the economy of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The phrase "late capitalism" is a symptom of the situation: on a Marxist view, capitalism has been late since around 1890, and the phrase is more of a wish than an analysis.

    In purely intellectual terms, then, I think the persistence of Marxist theory is unaccountable. But in historical terms it makes some sense. In the second half of the 19th century there were two predominant radical, anti-capitalist movements in Europe and the US: Marxist communism and anarchism, which perhaps were of roughly equal size. They had much in common, and a lot of it came from Marx; they had similar pictures of history as class struggle and a similar analysis of capitalism.

    But the anarchists called the Marxists "authoritarian socialists" and believed that every positive prescription to be found in Marx presaged a totalitarian state. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx and Engels sketched a progressive vision of history and promised a liberation from all forms of hierarchy. On the way there, however, the state (the "dictatorship of the proletariat") would seize control of all communication, education, finance, transportation, and so on.

     In other words, the cure for hierarchy was to be more hierarchy, the cure for oppression a more thorough oppression. And when, for example, Emma Goldman ended up dealing with Lenin after the Bolshevik revolution, she reached the conclusion that Marxist communism was at least as bad as the conditions it promised to cure. Despite the fact that she had supported the revolution as a practical attempt to realize her own ideals, Goldman believed that in the crackdowns that immediately followed every misgiving she had about authoritarian socialism was being realized.

   This lurch into authoritarianism is what I think of as the tragedy of the left, the fatal flaw in a noble set of ideas.

      Several factors contributed to the decline of the anti-authoritarian left at the beginning of the twentieth century. Anarchism discredited itself as a mass movement with a series of bombings and assassinations, including the murder of William McKinley. The 1917 revolution in Russia galvanized the world left and began a political polarization of Europe into two camps, both of them profoundly authoritarian. By the 1930s it seemed that if you were an anti-communist you were by default a fascist and if you were an anti-fascist you were by default a communist. Many people, including many eminent intellectuals, maintained their faith in Marxism even as the Marxist dictatorships in the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and elsewhere descended into genocide.

    For much of the century, Marxist communism constituted the most viable mass movement, or even the only mass movement, for resistance to fascism and capitalism or for realizing justice and equality. People perhaps joined up despite misgivings; it seemed like the only practical approach. Marxist philosophy kept promising to explain the shape and destination of history, seeing a new dawn at its end. It was an inspiring millennial vision, characteristic of the religious and political orientations of nineteenth-century Europe.

     This orientation, in milder or more severe versions, has dominated the entire left ever since. The left since the early twentieth century has been for the most part devoted to the political state as an agent of progress and as a source of collective identity and even of collective redemption. I believe the position is flatly contradictory of the left's professed ideals: the ideals that, for example, drove mass movements for racial, gender, and sexual equality. The dominance of Marxism both in the theory and the practice of the left has precluded a thousand anti-authoritarian experiments.

    Within the world of theory, Marx was indeed a remarkable thinker, and many of his illusion-puncturing economic ideas have been fundamental to the thinking of almost everyone on all sides ever since he wrote. The anti-authoritarian left, though it produced some outstanding thinkers (such as Peter Kropotkin), perhaps never developed a philosophy as systematic or as compelling.

      And for both intellectuals and others, Marxism was inspiring: it assured us that the world was going in the right direction, and that we could help if we joined together in world solidarity. But with every historical attempt to realize Marxism practically, the inspiration grew more abstract and the nightmare (or just the grinding bureaucratic dullness and everyday evil) more obvious.

    And with every intellectual revival, decade after decade, authoritarian socialism has lost a little of its ability to inspire; after so very many iterations, it begins to seem both mechanical and exhausted. What we need to see is the emergence of new leftisms or the revival of forgotten ones. We need find ways to realize justice and equality that focus not on the supposed direction of history and the ways to force history to completion, but on how persons and peoples can realize their own vision of how to live.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is How to Escape, a collection of essays.

thoroughly postmodern terrorism

you know, i often approach the zeitgeist through pop music, but terrorism would do just as well. today's terrorists are so, as it were, today.

in paris, a female terrorist's last words before self-detonation, as the police closed in: 'he's not my boyfriend!' kaboom! how many times have teenage girls texted that in the last ten years? (a: 3,274,498,622,007; the fbi is interrogating all the senders)

 

the san bernadino folks went back and shot up the office party, like a sit-com in its season finale.

 

and then there is the monstrous san bernadino suspect enrique marquez. 

he hates our sacred way of life!

 

the american people are anxious, jittery, trepidatious, agitated, twitchy, tremulant, unmanned, unstrung, shaken, quivering, quavering, quaking, prostrate, prostate, and whatnot. you can read it in our selfies and emoticons, our encryption and our assault rifles. 'who will calm a jittery public? who, who will keep us safe from enrique?,' asks the greatest nation this world or any other has ever seen, as it wets itself. one man. only one. or rather, at most one. 

ted "the ooze" cruz

 

[courtesy peters orchard, gardners pa]

it's like a horoscope, but more eerily accurate. a lovely mention of my dear pappy: golden delicious 'asshole' sartwell.

what worries me about baltimore right now is that conditions in the city are in many ways a little worse now even than they were a year ago.

an interpretation of adele

 ok i watched the adele special with my gf, and have been listening to the new album with my daughter (yes, it's true, they are both named jane. my view is this: if you were to date somebody because she had the same name as your daughter, that would be strange and disturbing. on the other hand, it would be sad to eliminate someone on account of a name, for the rose is sweet. however, i also have janes as an ex-mother-in-law and an aunt. it's like an infestation! of beautiful flowers.)

in one way adele's appeal is easy to account for, or at least describe: she is old-fashioned universal pop star, like say dionne warwick or diana ross or barbra streisand or whitney or bruce. she reminds us of a time when like everyone, or at least all sort-of middleclass middlebrow people, were listening to the same thing, or before the audience fragmented even more than it had already. actually the history goes like this: the popular music audience was pretty fragmented in, say the 1940s and 50s, what with race records and hillbilly records and novelty records and double entendre and super-wholesome pop. then it coalesced in the fifties and sixties to some extent. then maybe started to fragment again in the '90s. i'd like to see it as fragmentary as possible, asamatteroffact. i'm going to say that i prefer genre, for whatever reason. i'll seek out the corners of country, hip hop, reggae, punk, cajun, and so on; i find that interesting on cultural and intercultural grounds as well as finding the music more powerful and sincere. but that's just me.

but adele can be listened to by several generations, all regions, etc., though the audience might be a wee bit gendered. but few or perhaps no other artists have audiences of that scope; she becomes an instant touchstone; we will always associate her songs with certain moments in this decade. grandma is not going to listen even to taylor except under coercion. her big special on network tv is really like what american entertainment was like in 1972, unless you got a little off the beaten path, like a peggy lee christmas special.

the material has both obvious appeal and an underlying banality, i must say, and i also am just going to say i don't much like the new album, although the biggest pop hit ever 'hello' is pretty irresistible. maybe that's the only cut i would drive to #1, though. there's a lot of perhaps too-intense emoting on way too many draggy power-ballads; there are no 'rolling in the deep's. the lyrics don't sustain the always flamboyant and frequently despairing emotion. of course the voice is extremely suited for launching extreme emotional fireworks. but i'd like to hear her with a lot more restraint a lot more often. that would make the geysers more moving.

but...gotta admit it: she's just a trascendently excellent singer. not a soul singer, quite, not in any genre, and not pop as that is understood now: top-40 teenagery music. um, 'adult contemporary' to revive an ancient format. but however we place her, she's like whitney on steroids: true power, true range, that real phase-shifty thing that was whitney's trademark, except that adele does it effortlessly all the time. she could sing anything from broadway to opera to aretha and kind of kill you, i bet. she'll be around for the next fifty years. (plus she was super-charming onstage in that special; cackling and herself yet shy and nervous. both human and killer.)

all these years later, and i still love camille paglia. she was at her most vibrantly, delightedly destructive back in the first pc era (say, 85-93). now we need her again in the worst way. it's like we turned on the bat signal.

oh dang, we made another mistake

most everyone has finally got to the oops, sorry phase on no child's behind left/total-immersion standardized testing as a national strategy for achieving control over children's neurology. it really did have its successes, though: i'd say every year for the past decade the mind of the average college freshman is more mechanical than the last. so, anyway, maybe we made a mis-step. right. it was a mis-step that coincides roughly with my 15-year-old daughter's entire life. now, if i were personally picking out a moral crisis of our moment, it wouldn't be climate etc; it'd be government education. you can't envision any alternative. but it's just (a) literally kidnapping (look up the statutes), (b) a direct attempt at consciousness-formation applied largely for economic reasons to entire populations, and (c) a matter of surrendering your children to real idiots, mediocrities and cant-yappers like say arne duncan or margaret spellings who have done nothing in decades-long careers but utter cliches and administer repulsive bureaucracies, to say nothing of fuckwads such as george w. bush, bill clinton, bill gates, or barack obama. those people are themselves now 're-thinking' what they before pseudo-passionately advocated with their meaningless catch-phrases and tried to force on your baby. i don't know how people look at folks like that on tv and think they know what they're doing or that they have ever had an idea. maybe they wear good clothes or something.

i swear to god what drove the whole thing was a sheer combination of nationalism and capitalism. seriously, read the tom friedman education columns from the 90s and even unto today: our kindergartners are in competition in a globalized economy with the kindergartners of finland and sigapore, a competition we always lose. so what we need is the world's richest man to write a common core curriculum. then leftists are all: i'm an advocate of public education! yes, and neo-liberalism or whatever else you call that.

but, at any rate, making the choice to snatch children from their families is making the decision to turn them over to people and institutions who are no smarter and no morally better on average than these families themselves, to put it gently. but in contrast to these families, there is no moral justification for these people's involvement. (perhaps you think you can give a rational justification for public compulsory education. the only reason you think that is because you've never faced any skepticism, because i'm telling your argument is a tissue of fictions.) really i think we ought to implode all these internment facilities.

the good part is that education isn't what most people, or most politicians, think or say it is. even with many hours every day for whole childhoods, actual persons prove profoundly recalcitrant in a thousand dimensions to your alleged knowledge and your discipline. education has effects, but you can't make people over into whatever you please. the idea that we can, however, has been the fundamental thought behind educational theory since plato. that's more or less why education is always, always in a 'crisis.' it is always failing, never satisfactory. thank god.

Mass Shootings and Original Sin

By Crispin Sartwell

Responses to mass shootings, in the media or around the television or water cooler, long ago became merely routinized. People try, for example, to feed the latest event - from whatever particular angle it comes - into their political processors, after which they produce the same sentences over and over, each time around. They seem to think it is terribly important to find the right single word: is it 'terrorism' or 'murder'?

     This is one way that we try to grapple with apparent incomprehensibility, the excess, the extremity, the seemingly inhuman in the human body, the unsayable or unfaceable, the opacity to us of things apparently so very much like ourselves. 

     It's an understandable response, even a necessary one. It allows us to take something that might seem impossible or debilitating or even wrong to assimilate and gives us somewhere to put it, a way to set it aside in its particularity and embed it in general categories or principles which we can grasp and affirm and communicate. But it's also a way of falsifying the real event, of failing to face it and experience it. Well, sometimes we need our cowardice.

    But perhaps before we turn on a dime and renew our commitment once again to more surveillance or fewer guns, before we lob the event effortlessly into its pigeon-hole, we should try to live for a moment in the incomprehensibility, in the explosion of the event itself. The incomprehensibility of what happened in San Bernadino, for example, is important. It's scary not to understand it, but it's even scarier to understand it.

    To say that an event like that is incomprehensible is, among other things, to disavow it, to say 'I would never do that.' Nonetheless, even if it seems strategic, I myself feel this incomprehensibility; I rarely write about mass shootings anymore because I don't know what to say. We need distance from the perpetrators to assure ourselves and one another that we are not just about to tip suddenly into violence directed randomly at the people around us.

     In lieu of an explanation, then, an observation: we suck. I really do believe that in many dimensions human beings - and by this I mean myself as well as you - are irremediably flawed. Though I am an atheist, I feel the power of the doctrine of original sin: a seed of depravity or destruction inherent in all of us, inherent in myself.

    When Christians such as Augustine or Jonathan Edwards asserted the doctrine of original sin, they had to grapple with the mystery of why a good God would create fundamentally depraved creatures or suffer them to exist. This is another way of saying that our hearts are incomprehensible to ourselves. We don't even know what we ourselves might do. And, in agreement with Augustine and Edwards, I don't think a treatment for this condition can come from pretending to be exempt from it, or pretending that we can leave it behind through policies or progress.

     A treatment for our inherent evil could only begin by really knowing this about ourselves, knowing that we ourselves are irremediably flawed, that we ourselves are the sorts of things that are capable of killing, for almost any reason or for no reason at all.

    Now, to produce a secular version of original sin, we'd have to generate some sort of naturalistic explanation. Perhaps it's a random mutation gone horribly awry. Evolution has produced, for examples, creatures with allergies and without eyes in the back of their heads. It's compatible with a lot of what we might tend to think of as mistakes. At any rate, it is pointedly indifferent to our moral aspirations for ourselves.

    Counter-productive or gratuitous violence and rage varies historically in its objects and its forms. It might be a giant bureaucracy organized for genocide or a cult of human sacrifice or an outbreak of mass shootings, but as long as there have been human beings, we have been like that.

    Anyway, that's no explanation, more of a feeling. But what I do want to say is: this is what we really are.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His latest book is How to Escape, a collection of essays.

[piece i couldn't sell]

unbaseless

apparently, the american people are feeling profoundly scared. we have only one question as the infestation of pollsters indicates an oncoming presidential election: who will keep me safe? oh man, maybe marco rubio can keep me safe! americans definitely are in a crisis, a crisis of confidence with regard to which roget, consulting his excellent thesaurus, might describe us as poltroonish, cowardly, cringing, quailing, weak-kneed, craven, invertebrate, milksop, lily-livered, pluckless, spineless, gritless, spiritless, and base. those are all polling well.

bring the nightmare

trump really is something else. i saw him do the better part of an hour on morning joe this morning. he destroyed the panel of joe and mika, mark halperin and whatshername the bush flack. they were practically choking on their rage: scarborough made a point to cut him off and go to break in a completely gratuitous grandstand. but trump was actually reasonably genial and responsive. he will sit there and take any question, over and over. when people are hostile, he just repeats his poll numbers and seems unconcerned. he's actually remarkably undefensive. if that's a fascist demagogue, it's a new variety. really it's republicans who are freaking out worse than anyone: where is he taking us? (chris cuomo did better on cnn.)

condemning trump this morning is just redundant; everyone is doing it. but yes, we are at some sort of crossroads: quite a scary moment. trump and isis operating in yinyang could really bring the nightmare.

i think the republican field might now consolidate suddenly; i bet there's a round-robin of calls with preibus etc this morning. if it doesn't, it's just egos in a pissing match. i'd say kasich, bush, graham etc better collapse into rubio.  christie is plausible, at this security-type moment, but he might be too damaged. 

 

that's so bourgeois

 

i'm working up a book proposal for the tragedy of the left, which is about how apparently good-hearted intellectuals have spent a century and a half endorsing authoritarianism and how apparent egalitarians have spent a century and a half endorsing extreme hierarchy. at the moment i am reading althusser's for marx and sartre's critique of dialectical reason (which, as madden would say, is an all-day sucker), and i'm having another crack at horkheimer and adorno's dialectic of enlightenment. obviously, these are all different marxisms. but i believe that these thinkers and many others were fundamentally and arbitrarily distorted by marxism; even intellectuals at this level are claiming orthodoxy and condemning their opponents within marxist theory as apostates, and so on. surely this thing will be over at some point, and then this material will have that flavor of exoticism and rational arbitrariness of medieval theology, warped into a labyrinthine fictional world by social pressures and powers. 

be this as it may, one thing is conspicuous about this world above all; one thing marks its prose in all its permutations and lends the whole thing a definite identity: the use of the word bourgeois. it's like a drumbeat or a wine-dark sea, except that homer didn't use 'wine-dark sea' in every single sentence. let's say that this usage shows the extreme remarkable theoretical primitivism of the whole thing, the blunt running-together of everything. so, right, the idea is that ideas reflect underlying conditions of production, and various sorts of apparently abstract concepts and so forth are deployed for 'ideological' reasons. so, the doctrine of natural rights, for example, seems like some kind of theoretical construct but the concept emerges with capitalist economy, frees the worker precisely to sell his labor to the capitalist, etc. this makes concepts historical, which is an important insight marx gets from hegel.

individual rights are 'bourgeois' in this sense. but now this just becomes - quite as it was in the hands of marx himself - a mere term of abuse that you hurl at your opponents and your opponents' concepts. in real life, millions of people were executed for being 'bourgeois'; in intellectual life millions of concepts and assertions and theories were. it's really pretty hilarious: you're sitting in a seminar room at johns hopkins with your fellow children of privilege, and we spend all day accusing each others' theoretical constructs of being bourgeois.

anyway, i'm happy if my theory is bourgeois as long as it's true. it's quite like hurling a racial slur at an idea or something: that's a chick idea! but whatever: all these professors and aesthetes and stuff are bourgeois. get over it. but the idea of the intelligentsia, the bit of the bourgeoisie that suddenly comes to consciousness of history and breaks off and cures the proletariat of its false consciousness is fundamental, if nothing else, to the self-image of high-end marxist theorists. the idea that they themselves can escape their own epoch or their own class origins or affiliations is nonsense according to their own theories. 

i had forgotten that horkheimer and adorno spend a good chunk of the book describing homer's odysseus as bourgeois, lord knows how or why or to what effect. but really: here's what we want out of this: a condemnation of all individualism. that's one of the central dimensions of the multifarious meaning of 'bourgeois', and a characteristic of capitalism is 'the invention of the individual.' i'm going to say that here is the thought that perhaps accounts for the real power of marxism: we used to all be one thing, non-distinct from one another! we used to be collective consciousnesses! then capitalism split us up into our bodies or whatever. i just want to say that this is about your loneliness and your yearnings, not about the human condition. we are both non-identical with one another and mutually connected. sorry! and then: you are going to recreate our alleged primordial non-distinctness from one another through extreme repression and coercion, yes? because that is how collective consciousnesses are actually produced, or simulated. suddenly your constant utterance of 'bourgeois' becomes a drumbeat for forced labor.

anyway, reading althusser or adorno, they seem like pretty smart people. but using 'bourgeois' as a bludgeon on every page for decades on end: almost anyone under any circumstances can think more clearly and creatively than that. it is a sort of epistemic slavery and stupidity that really ought to see them deleted from all canons. i think they will be, actually; any minute this sort of discourse has got to become an historical curiosity rather than any sort of going concern. it's not viable.

 

me on yik yak and campus politics, from the dickinson college paper.

how we are

the response to mass shootings long ago became routinized, mechanical; with apparently renewed passion, the nytimes calls for sensible gun laws, if you can imagine that. you feed it from whatever angle into your political machine. this is one of many ways to try to grapple with the apparent incomprehensibility, the excess, the extremity, the inhuman howling from within the human. 

i do think the 'incomprehensibility' is important; it's scary not to understand it, but it's even scarier to understand it. to say it's incomprehensible is to say, among other things, 'i would never do that.' and yet i too feel the incomprehensibility; i don't usually write about mass shootings anymore because i don't know what to say.

nevertheless, an observation: we suck. i really do believe that in many dimensions human beings - and by this i mean myself as well as you - are irremediably flawed. i feel the power in the doctrine of original sin, and the mystery of why a good god would create fundamentally depraved creatures or suffer them to exist is another way of saying that our hearts are incomprehensible to ourselves. we don't even know what we ourselves might do.

you know, i'd owe a naturalistic exploration, though it'd be half-assed. but evolution produced, for examples, creatures with allergies or like without eyes in the back of our heads. it's compatible with a lot of what might be thought of as mistakes. anyway, the historical form of demented or wholly counter-productive or gratuitous violence and rage varies in its objects, its forms. it might be a giant bureaucracy organized for genocide or a cult of human sacrifice or take-a-ride-in-the-suv-and-shoot-up-the-holiday-party. we ain't gettin no better, putting it mildly.

anyway, that's no explanation. more of a feeling. but what i do want to say is: this is us.

performing trump

usual punditry on trump: he's channeling the anger and fear of many (white) people. he projects strength. these do sound like the rise of a grim fascisty demagogue. but i think this misses what's at the center of his personal appeal: his humor, congeniality, his familiarity to people, how comfortable and informal he is on camera, and how often hilarious. this might make you worry more or less. it makes me worry less. i think you always hear a certain self-consciousness and irony in his bragging, for example: you can see that he's aware of performing it. this is one reason he doesn't usually get in trouble for saying outrageous things: well, would you get pissed off with dave chapelle for saying outrageous things? you shouldn't, anyway. however, of the course, the responsibilities of a president are somewhat different - though they overlap with - the responsibilities of a comedian.

among the most disastrous consequences of the global climate change crisis is that it is the most boring subject ever by a very long way, never moreso than in the mouth of a head of state. i'd try to do something about it if i were physically capable of paying attention!