cheese it, the cops!

Politics and Geography

By Crispin Sartwell

There’s recently been a revival of an argument that goes back to the 18th century: that the form of government prescribed by the Constitution gives more representation to rural than to urban people, and to people from relatively sparsely-populated states than to people from populous ones. The clinching demonstrations of this are the composition of the Senate and, less extremely, the electoral college. Now, everyone takes the position on this matter that would help their own side get elected. Nevertheless, the question does show something fundamental about the nature of political representation.

The political reasons for the phenomenon are familiar from your history textbook: the US originates as an alliance among independent states. The less populous states were concerned that their voices and interests would be drowned out or swamped by those of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York; they had to be cajoled into the nation. Similar assurances about representation were required, for example, by smaller nations in constituting the European Union, and the United Nations pays lip service at least to a principle of equal sovereignty among nation-states, not representation in proportion to population. It had to start there if it expected smaller nations to join.

Most of us do not, any longer, think of the US as an alliance of independent nations; we consider the United States a single political unit in some sense. Under that presumption, and as an abstract matter in democratic political theory (which is liable to start with a principle of equal representation or one person/one vote), it is hard to argue that the 600,000 or so people of Wyoming should have the same representation in the Senate as Florida’s 20,000,000.

But whatever the theoretical and practical drawbacks of the system as it stands, it also shows some of the real complexities and some of the possibilities for beauty or profundity that lurk within the practices of political representation. The neutral, abstract scheme of one person/one vote yields a kind of minimalist or hyper-simplified picture, but the concrete practices of political representation on the ground are variegated, swirling, showing many relations of human beings to one another and to other bits or dimensions of the world.

In almost any real democratic system, the space or geography of the nation is represented to some extent as well as its human population. This is striking, in that it suggests that, in representative politics, the physical configuration of a country as well as its people is the subject represented: what the picture is a picture of, as a portrait represents the person who sat for it or a still-life painting a bowl of fruit. A democracy in some sense represents the place in which it is located as well as people it encompasses as citizens. In addition to being a portrait of the people, that is, a representative system is a sort of landscape painting or topographical map of the terrain it operates within.

The spaces that Florida and Wyoming occupy in the Senate chamber correlates better to their relative physical size than to their relative population, and in general the Senate comes closer than the House, for example, to resembling the sweep of the nation across the vast central plains and mountain west that has been central to the national narrative. Obviously, this doesn’t work so well for Delaware, but the point is that the different principles on which different branches and levels of government are selected ends up yielding a remarkably complex depiction of a nation.

Any representative democracy and indeed almost any political system is obliged to represent geographies as well as populations. Geography, after all, accounts to some extent for the distribution of populations in the first place. But any political situation or system of any size coordinates smaller units: provinces, counties, townships, and so on, and reflects to some extent the physical environment it occupies.

Indeed, when we think about America, we do not think of it only, or even primarily, as a group of people, but as a physical terrain (purple mountains and fruited planes, sea to shining sea, and so on). We might think of it, as well, in terms of located sub-cultures: Latino culture in southern Texas, peoples meeting in New Orleans at the mouth of Mississippi, Appalachia, and a hundred others. The principle of one person/one vote irrigates all the deserts, flattens all the mountains, and bridges all the rivers, but even the attempt to apply the principle with perfect neutrality ends up connecting to the highly differentiated landscape and acknowledging the connections of the people to it.

Every political system represents the space it occupies as well as the people occupying that space, and represents them as inseparable. We may want to ameliorate specific political inequalities that this generates, but I think it is more something we should try to become conscious of and even celebrate than something we should seek to expunge. 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Entanglements: A System of Philosophy (SUNY 2017).

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nonsense demography

like a bullet through a blancmange

hillary clinton, over and over: "I don't pay much attention to polls." i guess polls aren't polling well. it's the completely routine dishonesty, the continual falsehood of the self-presentation, that's so annoying. meanwhile the polls are freaking the clinton people out utterly, and she's scrambling left hour by hour to short-circuit bernie. so let me ask you this, do you care what someone says about immigration raids, or what they actually believe? because what they believe is surely a better predictor of what they will actually do when in office, for example. but ever since maybe 1992, we've been well beyond that; the first problem isn't whether bill clinton, al gore, john kerry, hillary clinton honestly represent their beliefs in public space; the first question is whether they have any beliefs at all or have transcended the whole idea. (oh, just to remind you: kerry ran a pro-war campaign in 2004: "John Kerry reporting for service!" he tried to run to bush's right, the old clinton approach. al gore never talked about climate change in 2000, instead he stuck to a handful of focus-grouped phrases, such as the idea that bush had a "risky scheme" for social security: he used the phrase literally hundreds of times, like some sort of mechanical playback device or wind-up toy, a round dozen in any given debate.)

say hillary is the nominee. expect her to try to get to ted cruz's right, ok? on national security, to start with, anti-terrorist fear-mongering etc. there will be little talk of guns or immigration, and stunning inaction in all areas in the skull-crushing clinton admin #2. if there are two viable candidates in the general election (for example, trump and clinton) then in the usual manner there will be little incentive for clinton to talk about, for example, immigration, or criminal justice reform: she will have the black and latino vote locked up and will start trying to pry out moderate independents. because she has no particular commitments, she will make this shift easily, with no conscientious qualms. this is how problems in minority communities grow ever-worse under democratic administrations. and on the day she is elected - which i think is unlikely - hillary will start running for re-election. please, let's not.

1992-2015 was the era of political discourse utterly divorced from all real-world content. i always thought it would be so easy to blow that shit up: all you had to do was appear as the actual human being you are in public space, and all that required was a kind of minimal human courage, the sort we all need to muster every day. anyway, trump has blown through that slop like a bullet through a blancmange. i hope he's never president. but i hope we never return to the mind-numbing yipyap. 

the hillary idea is that you just say anything that sounds good; your only goal in communication, or in your political career, is to manipulate people to serve your little ego. in the process, paradoxically, you become a non-being: whose ego is that ego? it's like it's become its own entity, displacing the person from hillary clinton's body. i'll say this again, there has been a whole theory of communication according to which the only goal of the whole thing is to get people to do what you want them to do, a model perhaps drawn from advertising. and then there's the sort-of pomo idea that the world is whatever we can persuade each other it is, to the point where you think that saying all day that you're winning the war makes it more likely that you will win the war, even while your'e getting your ass kicked. the question is how to 'frame' reality for people, to construct for them a world. that is a real good formula for being mugged all the time, over and over, disastrously, by actuality. 

and the question of the frame and similar approaches to communication has been dedicated to nothing except destroying your enemies. it's all been for partisan advantage, to get rid of the other party. it's individually self-serving, but it's collectively self-serving: it is dedicated to extruding your enemies from your reality, making them evil, stupid, anachronistic, without regard to any actual policy goals. it is fucking pathetic, but now we can see how it might be over.

mo pomo popomo

i'm teaching 17th and 18th century ('modern') philosophy. i think that we had enough tear-everything-down-and start over. that was bacon's project as he presented it, descartes', locke's, spinoza's. i had forgotten what prodigies of pride they were, especialy spinoza, who is always issuing broad corrections to his fellows. but they all gloat about how they're putting everything on a firm new foundation, and of course so does leibniz, kant, hegel, schopenhauer, etc. in retrospect, they shared a lot of assumptions, such as the 'idea idea' or the representational theory of perception. they weren't as shatteringly original as they thought they were, though some were pretty original. but then i feel like there was a long puttering out, like a century or more of diagnosis, of genealogy, hermeneutics, interpretation: a century of later wittgensteins and rortys and foucaults. now i think maybe new constructive projects are called for again, for the exhaustion is exhausted.

forward!

reflecting back on it, i had an interesting experience in grad school. at hopkins, working on my ma, i took some classes with stanley fish (and also played on his intramural softball and basketball teams!), and then my ph.d. experience at uva centered around rorty. indeed, i first studied rorty (consequences of pragmatism) with fish. now, these were both actually rather funny and ironic men who loved life (well, fish is still that, no doubt). but it was hard to miss a sense of the end: certainly of philosophy, pictured as so tired and over, but vaguely of everything, like western culture and values, meaning, and stuff. also, um, the real world. rorty projected an air of sort-of-amused disappointment that anyone would still go get a ph.d., years after he said the whole thing was over with heidegger. that someone still believed in reality in 1986 just sort of saddened him.

they both also affirmed some form of liberal democracy and other positive values, and these affirmations were sincere and grew more intense as time went on. yet there was always that deflationary wry detachment, that shrug of the shoulders, that well-i-can't-seem-to-think-of-anything-better so, whatever. so that is actually how i think of the postmodern moment, because that was the bit of it i was in. it was attractive in its way, and they were good advertisements for their positions: fundemantally decent people. and yet it all made me want to...begin again.

 you just have to find a way to reaffirm or go on after that, right? like you're after the end - even then it was getting longer and longer since the end of art, the death of the author, flies ditching fly-bottles, and so on and so forth: the pomo thinkers declared themselves to be a dead end, which leaves you in a bit of a quandary if you're trying to pull together a dissertation topic under their tutelage. (i think a fair amount of pomo theory could be accounted for by the disappointment of the left in that era, the dreams that ran aground on reagan and thatcher, the obvious evil and decline of communism.) but really if you're after after the end or whatever, you just...go on, don't you? that end shit got boring and odd, like a strange tic or not-quite-right recurrent phrase. and it was the teleological assumptions that these figures brought to bear - which they in turn inherited from their teachers - that brought on the disappointment or even exhaustion.

but i say to you straight up that we have not yet begun to inquire. there is plenty to do. sally forth!

keepin it real in the popomo era

one mark of this period in philosophy is its realism, by which i mean that philosophy in this period is convinced of the existence of a world independent of consciousness (or, let's start with that; believe me i have worked more carefully on formulating this). now one would say it's a return to realism, only guess what? western philosophy has been profoundly and almost continuously anti-realist throughout the modern era. descartes, locke, hume, kant, hegel, husserl: all locked us in a world of ideas and impressions and sensations. carnap constructed a universe out of "auto-psychological objects". hermeneutics and much of pomo phil (rorty, e.g.; but, wittgenstein, derrida), went textual instead of phenomenalist; we build a world from language, which adds a social element. i think of rorty or gadamer as linguistic idealists. baudrillard in a way makes the obvious move, yet again: oh well there's no sense in holding on to this old distinction between simulacra and reality.

but here are some elements of the realist backlash: externalism in philosophy of mind a la andy clark or mark rowlands (well, or me), timothy williamson's epistemology and response to dummett, etc, bruno latour, speculative realism a la graham harman and levi bryant (and now many others), lee smolin arguing that time is real. 

i'm reading coming to our senses, by viki mccabe, who is a cognitive psychologist. here's the nut:

Because we coevolved with and adapted to a world of complex systems in which we participate, our senses evolved to parse the structural information that specifies the properties of those systems. . . . Unlike most books about cognition and perception that focus primarily on us - what we think and how our brains work - this book takes its lead from the world itself. . . it is not about us and our ideas; it is about the world and the structural information its complex systems convey.

 

this, i have to say, is obvious when you think about it for a moment: on any sort of naturalistic account of human beings, our perceptual apparatus has to respond to real features of the environment: that is what our sensory systems are for, and if we were imposing space and time on the universe, for example, the real universe would long ago have expunged us. we experience space and time and causation (to begin with) because they are real features of the world external to us. (this is why i'm also arguing against half-assed interpretations of relativity, etc). lord knows how philosophy got away with not asserting that, for centuries. i have a notion that enlightenment-and-after philosophy as a whole is profoundly anti-naturalistic and anti-scientific, is fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of Spirit, Mind, or whatnot.

 

in a certain way, baudrillard becomes ever-more true. but all of this virtual reality sets up a yearning for an authentic reality: philosophy is also an index of what we need. i started out as a realist in this sense, but got more intense as time went on. studying with rorty and stanley fish or contemplating their heroes like gadamer or reading baudrillard, you just could not help longing for a reality external to consciousness; the pomo moment was so enclosing, and it explicitly had a sense of dead end: like, this is where we ended up. debord shows the dead end politically, for example. i always thought the backlash had to come. i felt totally alone trying to create some kind of realism in rorty and fish's grad seminars in the 80s, but i did try. i didn't seem to have much luck making it come in the early 90s or whatever - i still felt to myself like a lone voice - but i think it was actually happening all around by then. the full brunt of all this will emerge in entanglements.

just when you need jean baudrillard

it really is too bad that jean baudrillard croaked before world war 17, pitting north korea against sony entertainment. a comedy assassination is taken as an 'act of war' and leads to an overwhelming virtual response. also, it's about time a government went to war with a corporation, or i also think that the us government is now at cyber war with north korea on behalf of the japanese corporate sector. pundits are debating whether the hacking is 'terrorism'. really the virtual and the actual have flowed or flown into one another, at least in all the rhetoric; the distinctions have broken down...in the media! there does seem to me to be an important difference between actual and virtual murder and war and terror, though, even though cgi is getting better and better. i think the whole thing is entertaining indeed. if i was sony or kim, i'd be figuring out how to monetize this bad boy in terms of an ongoing podcast or an unfolding assassination contest or nuclear holocaust conducted on buzzfeed. 

well-deserved

the notion that obama would appoint a 'messaging expert' as ebola coordinator shows that they don't understand their own problem, which is that they have been unable to distinguish 'messaging' from responding to reality. this is why no one really believes what they're saying, and really, it's why no one has believed any american politician or bureaucrat for some decades now about anything. i think it's a kind of banalized post-modernism, narrative-theory thing. so sometime around 1970, someone pointed out again that there was no external world, only 'narratives' and so on. pretty soon, nike was running ads: 'we are the stories we tell'. it may be that people like obama and bush and clinton really can't tell the difference between the world and a story they are telling. that the story is incredibly self-serving is very hopeful: i can make the world adore and obey me if i can just utter the right phrase. their adoration of me will be their salvation, and then we'll all live in my hopey reality forever. let's focus-group some phraseology and work on 'the narrative', 'the message'. we've got to control the narrative, be more effective in our messaging. then, i think the growth of 'communications' programs and theories and 'strategic communications' exacerbates the effect, and some of the killer clowns who teach in those programs have a straight-up theory on which all communication is an attempt by me to get you to do what i want, and then the only question is, what noises can i make that best accomplish that? all communication is advertising.

in their human-centered, narcissistic, obviously false structure of non-thought, there can be no difference between medicine and messaging.

reality, see, is social, consensual, or 'what your contemporaries let you get away with saying'. then the only question is, what reality can you get people to consent to? unfortunately, the ebola virus is indifferent or impervious to whatever they consent to, as is everything else, even themselves.

for an actual creature in an actual world where something like natural selection operates to lose contact with reality, or to begin to live in its own fantasies and hallucinations, is to flow toward extinction. also, in this particular form, it is to deserve extinction.

mo, pomo, popomo

it's true. i'm stoned today. i actually don't think that experts can reliably detect the hand of pollock; that got a bit screwed up in the editing. sometimes it's funny but people can't quite seem to believe that i am actually asserting what i seem to be asserting. not that they disapprove, necessarily, or even disagree. it's just that it doesn't quite register. i seem to be somewhat hostile to both modernism and post-modernism, which would make me a reactionary of the early 19th century, i guess, or at any rate, ready for something else. but i am more hostile to modernism. picasso: creator and destroyer (you doink): or, maybe just a person who put paint on canvas. anyway, at least postmodernism has many playful moments, many anti-pretentious moments, and is open: there are many things you could do or be as an artist. no one can be what modernism held all great artists were.

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.

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.

against humanity

i realize that charles taylor is sort of a relativist, sort of a post-modernist, sort of a 'we-are-the-stories-we-tell' linguistic constructivuist, and (this is getting bad, i know), sort of a hegelian. still i wouldn't necessarily regard these as war crimes, though possibly the designation 'crimes against humanity' makes sense.

one big glowing thingummy

watcha readin, crispy? (yo sorry for no watchareadins; i've been too busy reading, writing etc)

i've been sampling parfit's on what matters and dworkin's justice for hedgehogs. i think that the parfit is quite the little slog, and that's only volume one. 'best work in ethics since sidgwick,' said the times literary supplement (i think phillip petit was the reviewer). parfit sent out the manuscript to 250 philosophers (supposedly) and responded with revisions. perhaps that shows: it's bristling with replies to objections from offstage. the dworkin is written more engagingly, but dworkin's always half-lawyer, and this can't have the philosophical dimensions of parfit. on the other hand, dworkin is remarkably sharp: a good thinker.

at any rate, both these books, putting the thing at its most general, bring all human values together in one big glowing thingummy. parfit's argument is that all the major western moral theories (utilitarianism, kantianism, contractualism, and so on) are - despite what their proponents thought - basically compatible. and dworkin seeks to suggest the reconciliation of aesthetic and political values along with those. that's more like neo-platonism than postmodernism! we might not want to go quite so far in the opposite direction, and i'll just signal that the situation is a lot more fragmented and equivocal than they want to make it: we're still just muddling through.

popomo me baby.

let the post-post-modern era be here now. this is from a review by ingrid wassenaar of helene cixous' memoir hemlock, from the times literary supplement (it doesn't seem to be up on their site; it's from the september 9 issue).

One day, her mother misplaces a precious letter, and in her agitation becomes temporarily unable to read the word for whale (baleine). There follows an extended improvisation on the theme of being at sea. Cixous says that she would like to write about her mother's use of language: "This will be difficult, somewhere between onomatopoeia and epic, maybe we'll call it happ...showing the surprise the pounce of the happnimal upon life, or the sudden dive through the paws of death. Happ! there she goes! That sudden brutal movement of a pounce, that one also finds in the Germanic languages."

Happ, Cixous's comic neologism, goes straight to the heart of one of the tensions in European thought between the bodily and the spiritual. It recalls the sound of animals wolfing other animals, and has echoes in many European languages. Part of Ciixous's radicalism lies precisely in how she fossicks among the Indo-European roots of words that have acquired sedimented readings. Happ sums up in a word that observing her frail mother is not so different from stalking her.

please, please stop.

 

sweet home popomo

i was talking to a colleague yesterday about the 'theory' course we require of our art history majors. five years ago, when i started teaching in the art department at dickinson, she and i both knew that theory was essential: that you just couldn't send someone to a high-powered graduate program without it: that art history was merging with art theory. now she kind of shrugged and wasn't sure it was so necessary. people now are back in archives, back teasing out the tiniest details, worrying about attribution, reading all the contemporaneous documents, etc.

i bet that it's kind of like that in art schools too (i used to teach all the theory/philosophy at maryland institute college of art). in 2000, everyone understood that you could be a web designer without reading barthes or baudrillard, but also that if we were actually going to produce any downtown art stars, we'd better get them on barthes asap. now i bet they're a bit back to hand skills and stuff.

another sign of the post-postmodern era.