Over at New York mag Laura June explains that the reason you'll never be as perfect a mom as a French mom is because France has the better nanny state. It always takes a village to raise a child, apparently, and apparently one of the signs of modernity is that the village that it is thought it takes to raise a child on the part of some New York writers is formal infrastructure.
It would appear last year marked a record low, lowest birth rates ever for females in the United States.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/08/not-having-kids-is-the-new-having-kids/495251/
...
Beyond the social implications of this relative decline in baby production, it may be the best recent news for human health at a population level, as Earth is unsustainably full of humans. That’s tough to say without sounding “evil,” I’m told, but it’s a question of math. There is not enough space to house and feed everyone. Population growth has us on course for catastrophic famine and war that result from overpopulating a planet that is growing ever less habitable.
It's not really new that people able to write thoughts for posterity have regarded humans as too susceptible to breeding. Ironically this sentiment goes back about a thousand years.
A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages
Walter Ullman
Penguin Books
first published 1965
ISBN-10: 0140207783
ISBN-13: 978-0140207781
The continuator of his commentaries on the Politics, his [Thomas Aquinas'] pupil at Paris and later Bishop of Claremont, Peter of Auvergne, struck up quite radical naturalist chords, particularly in connexion with social and economic questions and problems connected with marriage. For instance, he held that, since the State had to be self-sufficient, it was imperative to limit the number of citizens, otherwise poverty would follow. Hence he advocated limitations in the size of families. Aristotle's suggestion of abortion was not endorsed, but in order to avoid over-population he suggested restrictions of procreation between the ages of 37 and 55 with men and 18 to 37 with women, because then fewer children would be born. Beyond these age groups there should not be sexual intercourse with a view to procreation, but simply for the sake of health or some other valid reason.
So people with advanced educations have been fretting about the inability of the state to provide for the welfare of citizens if they're all reproducing at peak fertility seasons for a long time. The new variation of ecological catastrophe isn't even necessarily a new concern, it's a new variation an old concern, which was that human agricultural customs either couldn't keep up with human fertility or could damage the earth if it were deployed at a larger scale.
We live in an era in which the admonition to refrain from childbirth may not always be argued on the basis of global ecological health or the capacity of the state to provide. We also live in an era in which the political and economic freedom of the individual can be argued as a reason women should have the option to not reproduce.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/not-wanting-kids-is-entirely-normal/262367/
Lots of people didn't want to have children over the centuries and a lot of them also avoided having kids by not having sex. The puzzle of Western civilization at this point is that it seems sex is presented as the most liberating thing possible for those who have negotiated the privilege of having it ... and yet authors ranging from Slate to The Atlantic and ... well ... the pattern might be self-evident at this point ... regard parenthood as one of the ultimate forms of bondage.
With so many Americans not having babies letting the immigrants in might seem like it would solve the labor problem pretty easily. But the immigration process is (so I occasionally hear) pretty labrynthine and time-consuming. The nanny states of Western Europe may seem ideal to envious Americans but those cultures have been around for millennia and have more of a history of being cultural monoliths than the United States can ever possibly hope to be. Some of those nation states, in the Scandanavian region, have legendarily strict immigration requirements. One fellow I used to know tried to expatriate to that region and was told in the clearest possible terms he'd never be allowed in.
For those who have considered expatriation to Canada they may have had a chance to find out you need a sponsor and a way to demonstrate you can provide your share of financial contributions to the state. Americans seem loathe to admit there's such a thing as an opportunity cost, or that there's a price tag to stuff. Thus we don't just get guys talking about building walls whose price tags have not been assessed we also get gals proclaiming that other countries have better nanny states and that we should just implement that kind of program over here whether or not the national economy is necessarily solvent enough to get that to work for three to five generations.
Sometimes it seems that if the global ecological crisis is as bad as people fear it is that the most reasonable reaction would be a kind of revived birth-averse socially conservative Catholic approach. Nobody has sex unless they're planning to have babies and they should only even do that if they know they can afford to.
If we're at a record low for births in the United States it may be people have worked out that we can't afford to have those babies and are just voluntarily abstaining from reproduction. It's not going to make the crisis of who will be earning the income that can be taxed for the social safety net of tomorrow going away. For that matter even the most liberal welfare state has government workers. The job of the government worker is going to be maximizing tax dollar expenditures. Which is to say that even in the bluest of blue states the job of the social worker still includes an injunction to save as much money as possible when something doesn't need to be spent. If you don't need to be on food stamps you can be found ineligible. If the state thinks you don't "really" need to be given monetary aid for your condition or if the money just dries up they could cut you loose so that you can pay your own way.
In other words, as more and more Americans get elderly the brief scandal of the "death panel" stuff with health care reform was, on the right, presented as if it were a fundamental innovation. But why would it be? If your health care is paid for by the state the state can't avoid the question of whether it's worth it to keep you alive any more than you can avoid the question of what happens if they one day decide you're not worth keeping alive? This has been one of the reasons I can't regard either capitalism or socialism as different in contemporary technocratic societies. People must be treated as commodities because that's ultimately how these systems have to work.
Someone at The Baffler could say it's easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Jessa Crispin quotes a few people and then writes:
...
In other words, giving a voice to the impossible, the impractical, and the fantastical makes it all the more possible. Aiming high, rather than resigning yourself to what is practical and reasonable, is the important thing. In Greek mythology, Ouranos was the sky god, the god of ideas, the god of all that was possible. His son was Kronos, the god of time, the god of limits. Kronos castrated Ouranos, because that is what reality does to potential: it removes some of its power. Ouranos’s testicles were thrown into the sea, the realm of Poseidon, the realm of the imagination, and from that interaction was birthed Aphrodite, the goddess of art, beauty, and love.
In that sense there isn't really a secular left if by secular we mean a left which isn't informed by historicism. Materialistic historicism is ultimately a pseudo-secularized apocalyptic idiom wrested from Jewish or Christian apocalyptic idioms and rendered "scientific" by means of economic and social theories. But it is still ultimately a religious impulse by dint of being utopian (or dystopian).
If this weren't an article in The Baffler that sentiment could have come from a Word-faith teacher or a Joel Osteen or a Norman Vincent Peale. Or another variant, Mark Driscoll said a year or so back that you have to dream so big that if God doesn't bring about the realization of the dream then the dream really is impossible. It's like we've got Americans on the left and right of everything who feel like dreaming big impossible dreams regardless of whether or not we can pay the price tag for it because someone else is going to magically come through and pay for it all is the American way across the political and religious spectrum in the early 21st century.
Americans may find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the United States. Apocalyptic imagination has always had dystopian and utopian strains. Hell and Heaven. The trouble with the utopian strains in Western technocratic societies is that they tend to be inspired by fears of dystopian futures or presents and the history of Europe over the last century or two has suggested that if you move far enough left or right anti-Semitism is going to rear its ugly head in both directions.
The left seems to have been riven in the last fifty years with two concerns. One concern is that Western culture has not lived up to its promise of equality and opportunity for all. Another concern is that Western culture so endangers the global ecosphere and is so foundationally predicated on a fiscal system that is abusive and fraudulent that the system shouldn't exist. The trouble is that this seems, whether within a left perspective or from a right reaction, like an insoluable problem. If the economic engines that heretofore have generated the "wealth" that can be used to equalize outcomes or opportunities ravages the global biosphere then the freedoms the left would like all to have are immoral to reach for. As the right has spent decades wringing its hands over, just because rights for all are asserted doesn't mean the state has to pay for those rights to be available. Old line conservatives might try to roll out the distinction between natural and civil rights but we may live in an era where any residual, let alone explicit, appeal to natural rights deriving from natural law will be laughed out of the room.
In the age of Trump, however, the paradox is that the strong centralized state that many on the left regard as necessary for a just society is the apotheosis of evil if the wrong guys have control of that state apparatus.
Saturday, February 04, 2017
Thursday, February 02, 2017
so there was this thing called Books & Culture?
https://oldlife.org/2017/01/31/even-more-on-christian-intellectuals/
D. G. Hart has blogged a bit on the passing of Books & Culture. I admit I only heard of this thing within the last few years but it apparently had a decades-long run.
https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/5009/the-life-and-death-of-evangelicalisms-little-magazine/
...
Like many little magazines, Books & Culture was a response to a problem. As Wilson remarked in a recent podcast, "It was not accidental that The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind came out in '94 and the first issue of B&C in '95." Lamenting the persistence of anti-intellectualism within American evangelicalism,Scandal was an "epistle from a wounded lover," articulating Mark Noll's "hope that we American evangelicals might yet worship God with our minds."
In so many ways, Books & Culture was the concrete expression of this ideal. ...
Somehow missed the thing until just a few years ago. So it's reach was ... well ... limited I guess. I'd heard of Mockingbird thanks to Michael Spencer. I've loved writing for them and have been writing things for Mockingbird off and on since 2010.
One of the things I've noticed about the writings on evangelicalism and intellectualism is dismay at the loss of the evangelical intellectual. But ... Alastair Roberts raised a point that the intellectuals he heard people talking about within evangelicalism were not themselves evangelicals but mainline Protestants. While that's a point worth consideration in its own right I'm skipping ahead to my own concern, which is that it seems to one degree or another the trouble with evangelicalism in America is that the only crisis it seems particularly concerned with is the self-perceived loss of its own prestige. If evangelical intellectuals are out there and want to know where the other evangelical intellectuals have gone let's propose an idea, that what we try to do is not merely solve the prestige problem we perceive for ourselves but attempt to meaningfully address some problem that other people consider an actual problem.
As an amateur musician and composer I've spent much of my adult life ruminating on the problem of how the divide between high and low cultural expressions of music seem to be pretty rigid in one sense and expanding in another sense. As Richard Taruskin's liked to put it, the gap between the academic canon and the vernacular canon has gotten really, really big. But the controversy surrounding whether or not jazz was considered part of the Western art music canon over at Yale a few years ago was a vivid reminder that there's the white/black side of all this, too. You could imagine, perhaps, that evangelicals white and black who are musicians and worship the same risen Jesus as Lord could perhaps do some scholarly exploration. That the boundaries between styles like ragtime and early 19th century guitar sonatas by composers from Spain or Italy or Bohemia are permeable was something I spent an entire week blogging about. It's not something I've seen even secular academics discussing seriously over the last ten years. Unfortunately, but particularly with debates about cultural appropriation raging, it seems that groups have been fixated on who does or doesn't get the credentials of club membership for this or that guild of the champions of a particular style. If the mainlines have caught up to the polystylistic pluralism of music that is the present evangelicals have their respective ... neighborhoods.
I've had my doubts about academics on other grounds. It's taken me a while to catch up with arts criticism and critical theory stuff but it seems as though American colleges have been swamped with some kind of ethos in which people who can afford to get liberal arts degrees that cost more than twice what a lot of Americans can make in a single year are, somehow, exempt from being part of America's ruling castes because ... they can quote Walter Benjamin? Benjamin's easier to read than Adorno but still ... .
It's been hard to shake the sense in the last ten years as I've read on the edges of academic publishing and read some actually pretty lively academic books that the thing "is" still a prestige racket. There's still some fine stuff I've read from formal academics. That's how I learned about Hepokoski & Darcy's inspired cumulative work on sonata forms, for instance, and I think the Type 2 sonata explains a lot of the most substantial early 19th century guitar sonatas by the likes of Sor and Giuliani. So it's nice that academics are making works available to read for free for the public good. That would seem to be the ideal of scholarship ... but I bet textbook prices are still absolutely obscene.
In an era when little magazines fight to survive, where can evangelical eggheads go for intellectual edification?
the author had some specific publications in mind ...
My own pet interests have been establishing that genuinely contrapuntal music for solo guitar is not merely possible but practical. I've also been interested in exploring ways in which a non-dogmatic approach to eighteenth century developmental procedures (i.e. sonata and fugue) can take on vernacular American idioms such as ragtime, blues, country and jazz. It's taken years of shaking off what largely amounts to the vainglorious 19th century German idealist position as it was conveyed through music education to get back to what the 18th century composers actually did and not what 19th century and even 20th century pedagogues claimed they did. It's impossible to describe in words the realization that Anton Reicha wrote a fugue in 5/8 that had its subject in A major but its answer in E flat major in a work from the early 1800s. Somewhere along the line we got sold a bill of good about the 18th century being more staid and in need of Beethoven shaking it up than was actually the case. Beethoven thought some of Reicha's experiments were just too weird to condone.
I still dream of composing a guitar sonata that formulates a fusion of fugue with blues riffs and sonata form with the style of ragtime. If mainstream academics haven't explored this in a systematic or theoretical way why should I be surprised to find that it doesn't seem evangelicalism has done this, either? Theoretically the possibilities of pan-stylistic gestural mutation was laid out by George Rochberg and if the name didn't tip you off in itself he wasn't exactly what you'd call an evangelical. Still, Rochberg's got some ideas I find interesting. It's just too bad that the most vocal advocates of Rochberg seem to be ardent defenders of the stratification of high and low musical styles where the implications of Rochberg's proposal that gesture, and not style or language or system or method, would be the path to living in a world that must take musical pluralism for granted, would suggest that these boundaries can be obliterated. Given how balkanized our era seems to be perhaps those boundaries even "should" get obliterated. We've had centuries of stylistic profusion and splintering and we've had centuries of stylistic consolidation and integration. The early period of the Baroque had a lot of stylistic differentiation and fragmentation. The late Baroque was a consolidation process thanks to a number of figures. We seem to have an educational system that wants innovation rather than consolidation and I don't think the reason for that is copyright law but the residual ideological commitments of Romanticism. If evangelicals persist in being functionally reactionary rather than exploratory then the life of the mind evangelicals want to sustain isn't going to happen.
D. G. Hart has blogged a bit on the passing of Books & Culture. I admit I only heard of this thing within the last few years but it apparently had a decades-long run.
https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/5009/the-life-and-death-of-evangelicalisms-little-magazine/
...
Like many little magazines, Books & Culture was a response to a problem. As Wilson remarked in a recent podcast, "It was not accidental that The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind came out in '94 and the first issue of B&C in '95." Lamenting the persistence of anti-intellectualism within American evangelicalism,
In so many ways, Books & Culture was the concrete expression of this ideal. ...
Somehow missed the thing until just a few years ago. So it's reach was ... well ... limited I guess. I'd heard of Mockingbird thanks to Michael Spencer. I've loved writing for them and have been writing things for Mockingbird off and on since 2010.
One of the things I've noticed about the writings on evangelicalism and intellectualism is dismay at the loss of the evangelical intellectual. But ... Alastair Roberts raised a point that the intellectuals he heard people talking about within evangelicalism were not themselves evangelicals but mainline Protestants. While that's a point worth consideration in its own right I'm skipping ahead to my own concern, which is that it seems to one degree or another the trouble with evangelicalism in America is that the only crisis it seems particularly concerned with is the self-perceived loss of its own prestige. If evangelical intellectuals are out there and want to know where the other evangelical intellectuals have gone let's propose an idea, that what we try to do is not merely solve the prestige problem we perceive for ourselves but attempt to meaningfully address some problem that other people consider an actual problem.
As an amateur musician and composer I've spent much of my adult life ruminating on the problem of how the divide between high and low cultural expressions of music seem to be pretty rigid in one sense and expanding in another sense. As Richard Taruskin's liked to put it, the gap between the academic canon and the vernacular canon has gotten really, really big. But the controversy surrounding whether or not jazz was considered part of the Western art music canon over at Yale a few years ago was a vivid reminder that there's the white/black side of all this, too. You could imagine, perhaps, that evangelicals white and black who are musicians and worship the same risen Jesus as Lord could perhaps do some scholarly exploration. That the boundaries between styles like ragtime and early 19th century guitar sonatas by composers from Spain or Italy or Bohemia are permeable was something I spent an entire week blogging about. It's not something I've seen even secular academics discussing seriously over the last ten years. Unfortunately, but particularly with debates about cultural appropriation raging, it seems that groups have been fixated on who does or doesn't get the credentials of club membership for this or that guild of the champions of a particular style. If the mainlines have caught up to the polystylistic pluralism of music that is the present evangelicals have their respective ... neighborhoods.
I've had my doubts about academics on other grounds. It's taken me a while to catch up with arts criticism and critical theory stuff but it seems as though American colleges have been swamped with some kind of ethos in which people who can afford to get liberal arts degrees that cost more than twice what a lot of Americans can make in a single year are, somehow, exempt from being part of America's ruling castes because ... they can quote Walter Benjamin? Benjamin's easier to read than Adorno but still ... .
It's been hard to shake the sense in the last ten years as I've read on the edges of academic publishing and read some actually pretty lively academic books that the thing "is" still a prestige racket. There's still some fine stuff I've read from formal academics. That's how I learned about Hepokoski & Darcy's inspired cumulative work on sonata forms, for instance, and I think the Type 2 sonata explains a lot of the most substantial early 19th century guitar sonatas by the likes of Sor and Giuliani. So it's nice that academics are making works available to read for free for the public good. That would seem to be the ideal of scholarship ... but I bet textbook prices are still absolutely obscene.
In an era when little magazines fight to survive, where can evangelical eggheads go for intellectual edification?
the author had some specific publications in mind ...
My own pet interests have been establishing that genuinely contrapuntal music for solo guitar is not merely possible but practical. I've also been interested in exploring ways in which a non-dogmatic approach to eighteenth century developmental procedures (i.e. sonata and fugue) can take on vernacular American idioms such as ragtime, blues, country and jazz. It's taken years of shaking off what largely amounts to the vainglorious 19th century German idealist position as it was conveyed through music education to get back to what the 18th century composers actually did and not what 19th century and even 20th century pedagogues claimed they did. It's impossible to describe in words the realization that Anton Reicha wrote a fugue in 5/8 that had its subject in A major but its answer in E flat major in a work from the early 1800s. Somewhere along the line we got sold a bill of good about the 18th century being more staid and in need of Beethoven shaking it up than was actually the case. Beethoven thought some of Reicha's experiments were just too weird to condone.
I still dream of composing a guitar sonata that formulates a fusion of fugue with blues riffs and sonata form with the style of ragtime. If mainstream academics haven't explored this in a systematic or theoretical way why should I be surprised to find that it doesn't seem evangelicalism has done this, either? Theoretically the possibilities of pan-stylistic gestural mutation was laid out by George Rochberg and if the name didn't tip you off in itself he wasn't exactly what you'd call an evangelical. Still, Rochberg's got some ideas I find interesting. It's just too bad that the most vocal advocates of Rochberg seem to be ardent defenders of the stratification of high and low musical styles where the implications of Rochberg's proposal that gesture, and not style or language or system or method, would be the path to living in a world that must take musical pluralism for granted, would suggest that these boundaries can be obliterated. Given how balkanized our era seems to be perhaps those boundaries even "should" get obliterated. We've had centuries of stylistic profusion and splintering and we've had centuries of stylistic consolidation and integration. The early period of the Baroque had a lot of stylistic differentiation and fragmentation. The late Baroque was a consolidation process thanks to a number of figures. We seem to have an educational system that wants innovation rather than consolidation and I don't think the reason for that is copyright law but the residual ideological commitments of Romanticism. If evangelicals persist in being functionally reactionary rather than exploratory then the life of the mind evangelicals want to sustain isn't going to happen.
social media as sociological propaganda--the not-so-soft totalitarian impulses in the red state and blue state civic religions
Last year we spent quite a bit of time going through Jacques Ellul's Propaganda as a way to reflect upon the career of former Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll. Of course when Ellul published his book he was not thinking immediately about what we call megachurches because megachurches as we know them did not exactly exist back then. But he had a warning about what would happen if the Church were to embrace propagandistic techniques of the modern, technocratic sort influenced by the social sciences.
Last year, almost a year ago, actually, I made the case that a person like Mark Driscoll should essentially not be understood as a pastor at all in any conventionally historical sense of the term. Driscoll's own explication of what he's trained himself to do and how he does it makes him not so much a pastor who is the shepherd of flesh and blood souls but a propagandist, a master of multi-media messaging techniques. This isn't even much of an attack on Driscoll in itself, but rather a formal citation of Driscoll's own descriptions of what he did and why he did it with cross reference to what Ellul described propaganda entailing.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/03/mark-driscoll-as-propagandist-excerpts.html
But, of course, last year was an election year and so what Ellul had to say regarding propaganda is worth revisiting in light of that. There are any number of books that authors at Slate or The New Yorker or maybe a few other publications have said "predicted" Trump. Well, to throw yet another book on the pile, if we want to look at the work of an author who observed the persistence of populist agitator demagogues in American politics; and if we wanted to look at the work of someone who anticipated the balkanization of groups that avail themselves of propaganda then Jacques Ellul's book Propaganda could be said to have not only "predicted" Trump, but the potentially impassable red/blue deadlock in which both sides regard the activities of each other as nothing less than totalitarian gambits. I've seen more than just a few declarations on arts blogs to the effect that with the election of Trump the United States is already a fascist regime. If it is it couldn't have become one merely because Trump got elected because it's hard to know what executive powers Trump has right now that Obama didn't have about eight weeks ago.
This is not an endorsement of the red or the blue as such, more an observation about a deeper problem, which is that it seems the reason the United States will fail and deserve to is because the two party system has embraced propagandistic techniques that have trained their respective partisans to think and feel and react in essentially totalitarian ways.
PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 1965 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
page 249
... Once democracy becomes the object of propaganda, it also becomes totalitarian, authoritarian, and exclusive as dictatorship.
pages 249-250
... This really is the ultimate problem: democracy is not just a certain form of political organization or simply an ideology--it is, first of all, a certain view of life and a form of behavior. If democracy were only a form of political organization, there would be no problem; propaganda could adjust to it. ... But if democracy is a way of life, composed of tolerance, respect, degree, choice, diversity, and so on, all propaganda that acts on behavior and feelings and transforms them in depth turns man into someone who can no longer support democracy because he no longer follows democratic behavior.
pages 251-252
...
But the creation of the etiological myth leads to an obligation on the part of democracy to become religious. It can no longer be secular but must create its religion. Besides, the creation of a religion is one of the indispensable elements of effective propaganda. [emphasis added] The content of this religion is of little importance; these feelings are used to integrate the masses into the national collective. We must not delude ourselves: when one speaks to us of "massive democracy" and "democratic participation," these are only veiled terms that mean "religion." Participation and unanimity have always been characteristics of religious societies, and only of religious societies. [emphasis added]
page 256
... With propaganda one can lead citizens to the voting booth, where they seemingly elect their representatives. But if democracy corresponds to a certain type of human being, to a certain individual behavior, then propaganda destroys the point of departure of the life of a democracy, destroys its very foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society, who is not at ease except when integrated in the mass, who rejects critical judgments, choices and differentiations because he clings to clear certainties. He is a man assimilated into uniform groups and wants it that way.
... A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself--of the style of democratic life, understanding of others, respect for minorities, re-examination of his own opinions, absence of dogmatism. The means employed to spread democratic ideas makes the citizen, psychologically, a totalitarian man. The only difference between him and a Nazi is that he is a "totalitarian man with democratic convictions," but those convictions do not change his behavior in the least. Such contradiction is in no way felt by the individual for whom democracy has become a myth and a set of democratic imperatives, merely stimuli that activate conditioned reflexes. The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely "the sacred formulas of democracy" while acting like a storm trooper.
If you think the United States needs to be rescued from the Democratic or Republican parties to the point that you wish for a functionally single-party regime then you're a totalitarian ideologue. In Ellul's parlance, the only difference between you and a Nazi is that you're a totalitarian person with democratic convictions, but ... this doesn't mean you embrace democracy as a mode of governance, rather, you embrace democracy as an etiological myth that explicates the human condition.
You may actually be the totalitarian ideologue the United States needs to be rescued from, if it's even meaningful to speak of such a thing being possible. The United States may need to be saved from Trump but if it even merits saving (and I'm no longer sure it does) it may also need to be saved from you. Every empire crumbles at some point, after all and what's the use in exporting democracy to the rest of the world if here at home we increasingly behave toward each other on the internet like the fascist demagogues we pretend to ourselves and others we're afraid may hijack the future of the United States.
Which, in the end, seems to describe how people can behave on Twitter and Facebook and in reaction to those speakers whose ideas they believe cannot and should not and must not receive a hearing. The red and blue partisans at this point may both be totalitarian ideologues who have convinced themselves that "my" activism is democracy itself while "your" activism is evil, un-American, anti-democratic, and not worthy of constitutional protections. It is not necessary for civic religions to have explicit deities so long as rituals are observed. Americans have managed to fashion for themselves red state and blue state civic religions and some of these people even labor greatly to pretend that the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in the New Testament validate their respective civic religions.
Last year we also took a little stroll through the thing Ellul described as horizontal propaganda. It would seem difficult to read these descriptions of what it is and not think of how readily this is made, hour by hour, even minute by minute, on social media.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/05/ellul-on-effectivenss-of-horizontal.html
page 81
This propaganda can be called horizontal because it is made inside the group (not from the top), where, in principle, all individuals are equal and there is no leader. ... But the most remarkable characteristic of horizontal propaganda is the small group. The individual participates actively in the life of this group, in a genuine and lively dialogue.
page 82
Vertical propaganda needs the huge apparatus of the mass media of communication; horizontal propaganda needs a huge organization of people.
...
A member of a small group must not belong to other groups in which he would be subjected to other influences; that would give him a chance to find himself again and, with it, the strength to resist.
page 84
Horizontal propaganda thus is very hard to make (particularly because it needs so many instructors), but it is exceptionally efficient through its meticulous encirclement of everybody, through the effective participation of all present, and through their public declarations of adherence. It is particularly a system that seems to coincide perfectly with egalitarian societies claiming to be based on the will of the people and calling themselves democratic [emphasis added]; each group is composed of persons who are alike and one actually can formulate the will of such a group. But all this is ultimately much more stringent and totalitarian than explosive propaganda. Thanks to this system, Mao has succeeded in passing from subversive propaganda to integration propaganda. [emphasis added]
Thanks to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media networks horizontal propaganda is remarkably easy to create and distribute. Half a century after Ellul wrote about the difficulty of creating horizontal propaganda there may well be no easier kind of propaganda to create and distribute than horizontal propaganda in the age of social media. We make it and pass it on without even, perhaps, thinking that we are propagandists, if propagandists at a very low level. But your Facebook wall might as well be a propaganda platform if you use it to address the nature of society. Some people even know they're political advocates. Ideally they should also know they are participating in the generation of propaganda, too. Ellul's observation about propaganda was that it was no longer "optional". Every technologically advanced society would have no choice but to use it. That was half a century before Facebook or Twitter were developed. This has been an issue for far longer than any era of "alternative facts" because for partisans of red, blue, or green there can always be alternative facts.
Those who might suggest that education could defeat the effectiveness of propaganda might want to read the part where Ellul wrote that state-administered public education IS propaganda, at least pre-propaganda, a series of hoops kids jump through so as to prepare them for the more grown-up sorts of propaganda.
So far as the red and blue and what Christians are alleged to have to believe, what the red and blue civic religions have in common in the United States is that, to the extent that they wish Christians to take these things seriously, they retrofit Jesus in such a way as to ensure that a vote for the red or the blue is considered morally obligatory. Whether you have to vote for Trump or against Trump, for Clinton or against Clinton, what is at stake is not necessarily devotion to Jesus Christ as presented in the synoptic Gospels or the Gospel traditionally ascribed to John, but a red-state or blue-state Jesus.
page 230
... Propaganda is a total system that one must accept or reject in its entirety.
If the church accepts it, two important consequences follow. First of all, Christianity disseminated by such means is not Christianity. [emphasis added] We have already seen the effect of propaganda on ideology. In fact, what happens as soon as the church avails itself of propaganda is a reduction of Christianity to the level of all other ideologies or secular religions.
This can be seen happening throughout history. Every time a church tried to act through the propaganda devices accepted by an epoch, the truth and authenticity of Christianity were debased. This happened in the fourth, ninth, and seventeenth centuries (of course, this does not mean that no more Christians were left as a result).
In such moments (when acting through propaganda), Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all its expressions and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax. In such times there appear innumerable sweetenings and adaptations, which denature Christianity by adjusting it to the milieu.
Thus reduced to nothing more than an ideology, Christianity will be treated as such by the propagandist. [emphasis added] And in the modern world we can repeat in connection with this particular ideology what we have already said on the subject of ideologies in general. What happens is that the church will be able to move the masses and convert thousands of people to its ideology. But this ideology will no longer be Christianity. It will be just another doctrine, though it will still contain (sometimes, but not always) some of the original principles and the Christian vocabulary. [emphasis added]
The other consequence affects the church itself. When it uses propaganda, the church succeeds, just as all other organizations. It reaches the masses, influences collective opinions, leads sociological movements, and even makes many people accept what seems to be Christianity. But in doing that the church becomes a false church. it acquires power and influence that are of this world, and through them integrates itself into this world.
Perhaps it's preferable in the United States for civic religions to be malleable and to be adaptable and amenable to some pretense of Christianity. This is probably going to be less and less strictly necessary. The thing we may want to keep in mind is that when it comes to civic religion the more vaguely defined the divine principle is the better. It becomes more impossible to prove or disprove whether or not this or that policy conflicts with that civic religion, whether we're talking the red or the blue.
The Mediator
Emil Brunner
https://archive.org/details/mediatorastudyof013169mbp
page 25
...
Whether he adored his totem animal or the gods of the sun, the moon and the stars ; whether by the practice of magic he tries to gain control of supernatural forces; whether by the practices of asceticism and of Yoga he achieves union with the 'Wholly-Other'; or whether in union with his fellow-countrymen he brings a solemn sacrifice to the high gods, or somewhere in solitude he approaches the Ground of all being in mystical contemplation; one thing remains the same, namely, that just as man is homo faber, so also he is homo religious. He is this even when he renounces all mythology, all ideas of a supernatural being, and becomes an agnostic or an atheist. The dimension of the infinite, of the absolute, of the unconditioned, is not empty for any human being, even when he has cut himself adrift from all traditional religious ideas. If he no longer has any personal gods, all the more surely he has one or more impersonal gods-something which he regards as taboo, something which may not be touched at any cost, whether it be his Communism or his Nationalism, his civilization or 'life.' 'Man always has God or an idol.' ...
In our day and place those gods might be the Democratic and Republican parties to which loyalty is given regardless of what history may reveal. A Republican can convince himself the party has been in favor of small government regardless of whether or not Republican administrations have overseen the ballooning of the surveillance state and a Democrat can convince himself his party is against the hawkish politics of the Republicans in spite of the fact that Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all got us neck deep in military confrontations. These don't seem to be political machines that are dedicated to the responsible and restrained use of power so much as securing it for themselves and regarding it as tyranny that the other party should actually be able to wield whatever power the first party may have had at its disposal by way of the executive or legislative branch just a few months ago. If anything the abstracted ideals of what people tell themselves their parties stand for are all the better for not having to be tethered to questions of why it should be democracy when the favorite party has control and why it would suddenly be fascism when things are otherwise.
If the United States has only become a fascist state because Trump won then what powers did the government not have just a few weeks ago that it has now? Then again, if you regard whatever state you live in as an iteration of Babylon the Great and bear in mind the paradoxical teachings from Scripture that we are called to pray for those in authority and to remember that authority can play a positive role in promoting the good and discouraging evil while also recognizing these are always corrupted to one degree or another by sin, it doesn't have to be the end of the world if America as we know it comes to an end. It's going to come to an end at some point anyway. The trouble is that Americans seem to have reached a point where if America as we know it comes to an end then the world itself is somehow not worth living in.
For those who were once at Mars Hill ... now is probably not the time to become a brave internet warrior for truth, justice and the real American way. This would be especially true if you've switched teams in the years since you left Mars Hill. Why? Because, to once again reference Ellul, the thing that most likely happened when you dropped the propagandistic cultural dynamics of Mars Hill is that you may have simply embraced the propagandistic approach of some other team, and in the wake of the last election cycle that could simply be the Democratic or Republican party lines. The public good will benefit from fewer men such as Mark Driscoll and Dan Savage being taken seriously as having anything important to say about the human condition. Now if you were a conservative or a progressive at Mars Hill, say, ten years ago, and are still that now, well ... okay. The concern I have is that you don't regard the party lines as meaningfully synonymous with what Jesus taught. To put it another way, neither capitalism nor socialism should be regarded as more than the popular options among Westerners for the "best" way to commodify and monetize human lives.
Just because there are different ways of worshiping Mammon doesn't mean they aren't both worshipping Mammon. Just because Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll differed on a few points doesn't mean that "Savage Love" and Real Marriage can't reflect a core view about human sexuality. About ten or eleven years ago a Mars Hill member opined that Mars Hill was needed and Mark's teaching was vital because the alternative was stuff like Dan Savage giving sex advice in The Stranger. I remember reading the linked column and when I mentally compared it to what I remember Driscoll had to say about Song of Songs it seemed like Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll might as well have been the same guy. Sure, neither are current Catholics and neither has nice stuff to say about Catholicism as a cultural milieu overall, and maybe they may back more blue and red agendas respectively, but they're both media agitators who get off on telling people how to think and they might both well feel that a life without sex is in some sense a life not quite worth living.
But to the respective fans of Mark Driscoll and Dan Savage over the last fifteen years the similarities could not be taken seriously because they could not be considered.
Time will tell us (probably too soon) how Trump deals with the press and it's been a while since an entertainer has been in office. Trumps disdain for the media in its journalistic form and its entertainment form may be a contempt of the sort only an insider, if a gauche insider, can have for the industries. Trump could be described as a kind of propagandist.
PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
from footnote on page 252
... The propagandist is a technician and a member of an aristocracy of technicians that establishes itself above the institutions of a democracy and acts outside its norms. Besides, the employment of propaganda leads the propagandist to cynicism, disbelief in values, non-submission to the law of numbers, doubts on the value of opinions, and contempt for the propagandee and the elected representative; he knows how public opinion is fashioned. The propagandist cannot subject himself to popular judgment and democracy. Finally, the propagandist is privy to all State secrets and acts at the same time to shape opinions: he really has a position of fundamental direction. The combinations of these three elements make the propagandist an aristocrat. It cannot be otherwise. Every democracy that launches propaganda creates in and by such propaganda its own enemy, an aristocracy that may destroy it.
But then so could any and every member of Hollywood that condemns him as a propagandist. If entertainers look with contempt on the Electoral College because by means of it the uneducated farmers had a means to elect Trump rather than Clinton how is that not a form of looking with contempt on the institutions of a democracy or its norms? Have those artists and entertainers who have looked with contempt on elected representatives not shown themselves to be aristocrats of propaganda like the President they regard with scorn?
That the aristocracy of our media empires, our ostensibly journalistic and entertainment castes, regard the present state as horrible doesn't mean these aren't groups of people who may ultimately hold democratic processes in as much contempt as has been said about a recently elected official. The reason it seems the United States is ultimately doomed is that the red and blue partisans are totalitarian ideologues who only recognize the fascism of others and not themselves. We should be wary of overweening government power but if we can't guard against what totalitarian impulses exist in our own hearts we can risk embodying those traits we damn most in others because we can't concede the possibility of those traits existing within ourselves.
Last year, almost a year ago, actually, I made the case that a person like Mark Driscoll should essentially not be understood as a pastor at all in any conventionally historical sense of the term. Driscoll's own explication of what he's trained himself to do and how he does it makes him not so much a pastor who is the shepherd of flesh and blood souls but a propagandist, a master of multi-media messaging techniques. This isn't even much of an attack on Driscoll in itself, but rather a formal citation of Driscoll's own descriptions of what he did and why he did it with cross reference to what Ellul described propaganda entailing.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/03/mark-driscoll-as-propagandist-excerpts.html
But, of course, last year was an election year and so what Ellul had to say regarding propaganda is worth revisiting in light of that. There are any number of books that authors at Slate or The New Yorker or maybe a few other publications have said "predicted" Trump. Well, to throw yet another book on the pile, if we want to look at the work of an author who observed the persistence of populist agitator demagogues in American politics; and if we wanted to look at the work of someone who anticipated the balkanization of groups that avail themselves of propaganda then Jacques Ellul's book Propaganda could be said to have not only "predicted" Trump, but the potentially impassable red/blue deadlock in which both sides regard the activities of each other as nothing less than totalitarian gambits. I've seen more than just a few declarations on arts blogs to the effect that with the election of Trump the United States is already a fascist regime. If it is it couldn't have become one merely because Trump got elected because it's hard to know what executive powers Trump has right now that Obama didn't have about eight weeks ago.
This is not an endorsement of the red or the blue as such, more an observation about a deeper problem, which is that it seems the reason the United States will fail and deserve to is because the two party system has embraced propagandistic techniques that have trained their respective partisans to think and feel and react in essentially totalitarian ways.
PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 1965 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
page 249
... Once democracy becomes the object of propaganda, it also becomes totalitarian, authoritarian, and exclusive as dictatorship.
pages 249-250
... This really is the ultimate problem: democracy is not just a certain form of political organization or simply an ideology--it is, first of all, a certain view of life and a form of behavior. If democracy were only a form of political organization, there would be no problem; propaganda could adjust to it. ... But if democracy is a way of life, composed of tolerance, respect, degree, choice, diversity, and so on, all propaganda that acts on behavior and feelings and transforms them in depth turns man into someone who can no longer support democracy because he no longer follows democratic behavior.
pages 251-252
...
But the creation of the etiological myth leads to an obligation on the part of democracy to become religious. It can no longer be secular but must create its religion. Besides, the creation of a religion is one of the indispensable elements of effective propaganda. [emphasis added] The content of this religion is of little importance; these feelings are used to integrate the masses into the national collective. We must not delude ourselves: when one speaks to us of "massive democracy" and "democratic participation," these are only veiled terms that mean "religion." Participation and unanimity have always been characteristics of religious societies, and only of religious societies. [emphasis added]
page 256
... With propaganda one can lead citizens to the voting booth, where they seemingly elect their representatives. But if democracy corresponds to a certain type of human being, to a certain individual behavior, then propaganda destroys the point of departure of the life of a democracy, destroys its very foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society, who is not at ease except when integrated in the mass, who rejects critical judgments, choices and differentiations because he clings to clear certainties. He is a man assimilated into uniform groups and wants it that way.
... A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself--of the style of democratic life, understanding of others, respect for minorities, re-examination of his own opinions, absence of dogmatism. The means employed to spread democratic ideas makes the citizen, psychologically, a totalitarian man. The only difference between him and a Nazi is that he is a "totalitarian man with democratic convictions," but those convictions do not change his behavior in the least. Such contradiction is in no way felt by the individual for whom democracy has become a myth and a set of democratic imperatives, merely stimuli that activate conditioned reflexes. The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely "the sacred formulas of democracy" while acting like a storm trooper.
If you think the United States needs to be rescued from the Democratic or Republican parties to the point that you wish for a functionally single-party regime then you're a totalitarian ideologue. In Ellul's parlance, the only difference between you and a Nazi is that you're a totalitarian person with democratic convictions, but ... this doesn't mean you embrace democracy as a mode of governance, rather, you embrace democracy as an etiological myth that explicates the human condition.
You may actually be the totalitarian ideologue the United States needs to be rescued from, if it's even meaningful to speak of such a thing being possible. The United States may need to be saved from Trump but if it even merits saving (and I'm no longer sure it does) it may also need to be saved from you. Every empire crumbles at some point, after all and what's the use in exporting democracy to the rest of the world if here at home we increasingly behave toward each other on the internet like the fascist demagogues we pretend to ourselves and others we're afraid may hijack the future of the United States.
Which, in the end, seems to describe how people can behave on Twitter and Facebook and in reaction to those speakers whose ideas they believe cannot and should not and must not receive a hearing. The red and blue partisans at this point may both be totalitarian ideologues who have convinced themselves that "my" activism is democracy itself while "your" activism is evil, un-American, anti-democratic, and not worthy of constitutional protections. It is not necessary for civic religions to have explicit deities so long as rituals are observed. Americans have managed to fashion for themselves red state and blue state civic religions and some of these people even labor greatly to pretend that the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in the New Testament validate their respective civic religions.
Last year we also took a little stroll through the thing Ellul described as horizontal propaganda. It would seem difficult to read these descriptions of what it is and not think of how readily this is made, hour by hour, even minute by minute, on social media.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/05/ellul-on-effectivenss-of-horizontal.html
page 81
This propaganda can be called horizontal because it is made inside the group (not from the top), where, in principle, all individuals are equal and there is no leader. ... But the most remarkable characteristic of horizontal propaganda is the small group. The individual participates actively in the life of this group, in a genuine and lively dialogue.
page 82
Vertical propaganda needs the huge apparatus of the mass media of communication; horizontal propaganda needs a huge organization of people.
...
A member of a small group must not belong to other groups in which he would be subjected to other influences; that would give him a chance to find himself again and, with it, the strength to resist.
page 84
Horizontal propaganda thus is very hard to make (particularly because it needs so many instructors), but it is exceptionally efficient through its meticulous encirclement of everybody, through the effective participation of all present, and through their public declarations of adherence. It is particularly a system that seems to coincide perfectly with egalitarian societies claiming to be based on the will of the people and calling themselves democratic [emphasis added]; each group is composed of persons who are alike and one actually can formulate the will of such a group. But all this is ultimately much more stringent and totalitarian than explosive propaganda. Thanks to this system, Mao has succeeded in passing from subversive propaganda to integration propaganda. [emphasis added]
Thanks to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media networks horizontal propaganda is remarkably easy to create and distribute. Half a century after Ellul wrote about the difficulty of creating horizontal propaganda there may well be no easier kind of propaganda to create and distribute than horizontal propaganda in the age of social media. We make it and pass it on without even, perhaps, thinking that we are propagandists, if propagandists at a very low level. But your Facebook wall might as well be a propaganda platform if you use it to address the nature of society. Some people even know they're political advocates. Ideally they should also know they are participating in the generation of propaganda, too. Ellul's observation about propaganda was that it was no longer "optional". Every technologically advanced society would have no choice but to use it. That was half a century before Facebook or Twitter were developed. This has been an issue for far longer than any era of "alternative facts" because for partisans of red, blue, or green there can always be alternative facts.
Those who might suggest that education could defeat the effectiveness of propaganda might want to read the part where Ellul wrote that state-administered public education IS propaganda, at least pre-propaganda, a series of hoops kids jump through so as to prepare them for the more grown-up sorts of propaganda.
So far as the red and blue and what Christians are alleged to have to believe, what the red and blue civic religions have in common in the United States is that, to the extent that they wish Christians to take these things seriously, they retrofit Jesus in such a way as to ensure that a vote for the red or the blue is considered morally obligatory. Whether you have to vote for Trump or against Trump, for Clinton or against Clinton, what is at stake is not necessarily devotion to Jesus Christ as presented in the synoptic Gospels or the Gospel traditionally ascribed to John, but a red-state or blue-state Jesus.
page 230
... Propaganda is a total system that one must accept or reject in its entirety.
If the church accepts it, two important consequences follow. First of all, Christianity disseminated by such means is not Christianity. [emphasis added] We have already seen the effect of propaganda on ideology. In fact, what happens as soon as the church avails itself of propaganda is a reduction of Christianity to the level of all other ideologies or secular religions.
This can be seen happening throughout history. Every time a church tried to act through the propaganda devices accepted by an epoch, the truth and authenticity of Christianity were debased. This happened in the fourth, ninth, and seventeenth centuries (of course, this does not mean that no more Christians were left as a result).
In such moments (when acting through propaganda), Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all its expressions and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax. In such times there appear innumerable sweetenings and adaptations, which denature Christianity by adjusting it to the milieu.
Thus reduced to nothing more than an ideology, Christianity will be treated as such by the propagandist. [emphasis added] And in the modern world we can repeat in connection with this particular ideology what we have already said on the subject of ideologies in general. What happens is that the church will be able to move the masses and convert thousands of people to its ideology. But this ideology will no longer be Christianity. It will be just another doctrine, though it will still contain (sometimes, but not always) some of the original principles and the Christian vocabulary. [emphasis added]
The other consequence affects the church itself. When it uses propaganda, the church succeeds, just as all other organizations. It reaches the masses, influences collective opinions, leads sociological movements, and even makes many people accept what seems to be Christianity. But in doing that the church becomes a false church. it acquires power and influence that are of this world, and through them integrates itself into this world.
Perhaps it's preferable in the United States for civic religions to be malleable and to be adaptable and amenable to some pretense of Christianity. This is probably going to be less and less strictly necessary. The thing we may want to keep in mind is that when it comes to civic religion the more vaguely defined the divine principle is the better. It becomes more impossible to prove or disprove whether or not this or that policy conflicts with that civic religion, whether we're talking the red or the blue.
The Mediator
Emil Brunner
https://archive.org/details/mediatorastudyof013169mbp
page 25
...
Whether he adored his totem animal or the gods of the sun, the moon and the stars ; whether by the practice of magic he tries to gain control of supernatural forces; whether by the practices of asceticism and of Yoga he achieves union with the 'Wholly-Other'; or whether in union with his fellow-countrymen he brings a solemn sacrifice to the high gods, or somewhere in solitude he approaches the Ground of all being in mystical contemplation; one thing remains the same, namely, that just as man is homo faber, so also he is homo religious. He is this even when he renounces all mythology, all ideas of a supernatural being, and becomes an agnostic or an atheist. The dimension of the infinite, of the absolute, of the unconditioned, is not empty for any human being, even when he has cut himself adrift from all traditional religious ideas. If he no longer has any personal gods, all the more surely he has one or more impersonal gods-something which he regards as taboo, something which may not be touched at any cost, whether it be his Communism or his Nationalism, his civilization or 'life.' 'Man always has God or an idol.' ...
In our day and place those gods might be the Democratic and Republican parties to which loyalty is given regardless of what history may reveal. A Republican can convince himself the party has been in favor of small government regardless of whether or not Republican administrations have overseen the ballooning of the surveillance state and a Democrat can convince himself his party is against the hawkish politics of the Republicans in spite of the fact that Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all got us neck deep in military confrontations. These don't seem to be political machines that are dedicated to the responsible and restrained use of power so much as securing it for themselves and regarding it as tyranny that the other party should actually be able to wield whatever power the first party may have had at its disposal by way of the executive or legislative branch just a few months ago. If anything the abstracted ideals of what people tell themselves their parties stand for are all the better for not having to be tethered to questions of why it should be democracy when the favorite party has control and why it would suddenly be fascism when things are otherwise.
If the United States has only become a fascist state because Trump won then what powers did the government not have just a few weeks ago that it has now? Then again, if you regard whatever state you live in as an iteration of Babylon the Great and bear in mind the paradoxical teachings from Scripture that we are called to pray for those in authority and to remember that authority can play a positive role in promoting the good and discouraging evil while also recognizing these are always corrupted to one degree or another by sin, it doesn't have to be the end of the world if America as we know it comes to an end. It's going to come to an end at some point anyway. The trouble is that Americans seem to have reached a point where if America as we know it comes to an end then the world itself is somehow not worth living in.
For those who were once at Mars Hill ... now is probably not the time to become a brave internet warrior for truth, justice and the real American way. This would be especially true if you've switched teams in the years since you left Mars Hill. Why? Because, to once again reference Ellul, the thing that most likely happened when you dropped the propagandistic cultural dynamics of Mars Hill is that you may have simply embraced the propagandistic approach of some other team, and in the wake of the last election cycle that could simply be the Democratic or Republican party lines. The public good will benefit from fewer men such as Mark Driscoll and Dan Savage being taken seriously as having anything important to say about the human condition. Now if you were a conservative or a progressive at Mars Hill, say, ten years ago, and are still that now, well ... okay. The concern I have is that you don't regard the party lines as meaningfully synonymous with what Jesus taught. To put it another way, neither capitalism nor socialism should be regarded as more than the popular options among Westerners for the "best" way to commodify and monetize human lives.
Just because there are different ways of worshiping Mammon doesn't mean they aren't both worshipping Mammon. Just because Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll differed on a few points doesn't mean that "Savage Love" and Real Marriage can't reflect a core view about human sexuality. About ten or eleven years ago a Mars Hill member opined that Mars Hill was needed and Mark's teaching was vital because the alternative was stuff like Dan Savage giving sex advice in The Stranger. I remember reading the linked column and when I mentally compared it to what I remember Driscoll had to say about Song of Songs it seemed like Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll might as well have been the same guy. Sure, neither are current Catholics and neither has nice stuff to say about Catholicism as a cultural milieu overall, and maybe they may back more blue and red agendas respectively, but they're both media agitators who get off on telling people how to think and they might both well feel that a life without sex is in some sense a life not quite worth living.
But to the respective fans of Mark Driscoll and Dan Savage over the last fifteen years the similarities could not be taken seriously because they could not be considered.
Time will tell us (probably too soon) how Trump deals with the press and it's been a while since an entertainer has been in office. Trumps disdain for the media in its journalistic form and its entertainment form may be a contempt of the sort only an insider, if a gauche insider, can have for the industries. Trump could be described as a kind of propagandist.
PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
from footnote on page 252
... The propagandist is a technician and a member of an aristocracy of technicians that establishes itself above the institutions of a democracy and acts outside its norms. Besides, the employment of propaganda leads the propagandist to cynicism, disbelief in values, non-submission to the law of numbers, doubts on the value of opinions, and contempt for the propagandee and the elected representative; he knows how public opinion is fashioned. The propagandist cannot subject himself to popular judgment and democracy. Finally, the propagandist is privy to all State secrets and acts at the same time to shape opinions: he really has a position of fundamental direction. The combinations of these three elements make the propagandist an aristocrat. It cannot be otherwise. Every democracy that launches propaganda creates in and by such propaganda its own enemy, an aristocracy that may destroy it.
But then so could any and every member of Hollywood that condemns him as a propagandist. If entertainers look with contempt on the Electoral College because by means of it the uneducated farmers had a means to elect Trump rather than Clinton how is that not a form of looking with contempt on the institutions of a democracy or its norms? Have those artists and entertainers who have looked with contempt on elected representatives not shown themselves to be aristocrats of propaganda like the President they regard with scorn?
That the aristocracy of our media empires, our ostensibly journalistic and entertainment castes, regard the present state as horrible doesn't mean these aren't groups of people who may ultimately hold democratic processes in as much contempt as has been said about a recently elected official. The reason it seems the United States is ultimately doomed is that the red and blue partisans are totalitarian ideologues who only recognize the fascism of others and not themselves. We should be wary of overweening government power but if we can't guard against what totalitarian impulses exist in our own hearts we can risk embodying those traits we damn most in others because we can't concede the possibility of those traits existing within ourselves.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
Jerry Saltz and Michael Lind on the stifling, oppressive Western art history narrative and how the Germans of the 19th century are to blame for it
Since Jerry Saltz has made a defense of the material generated by Jeff Koons take this with a few cups of salt. But ...
http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/tyranny-of-art-history-in-contemporary-art.html
... our art history is not chronological; not neutral or about simultaneous cross-styles, outliers, and other things going on at any given moment. Our art history is organized teleologically — it's an arrow. Things are always said to be going forward, and progress is measured mainly in formal ways by changes in ideas of space, color, composition, subject matter, and the like. Artists and isms follow one another in a Biblical begatting based on progress toward a goal or a higher stage. Cubism was "a race toward flatness"; Suprematism was "the zero point of painting"; Rodchenko said he made "the last painting"; Ad Reinhardt one-upped him saying he was "making the last painting which anyone can make." In this system synthetic shifts and tics combine into things we call movements like Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Art Nouveau, Color Field, etc. The problem is anyone who doesn't fall into this timeline is out of luck. This paradigm has been in place for 200 years.
Saltz, ultimately, signs off on the Romantic fantasy of the artist, though.
http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/post-election-pain-is-good-for-art.html
... Recently, art has been this high-powered-success-machine mainstream sensation; artists have become celebrities; we’ve been treated to narcissistic pictures of pretty people at glamorous events wearing $2,000 worth of clothes. Outside the world of fine art, too, pop culture swallowed all of culture, and the entire cultural apparatus seemed to reorient itself to orbit the White House. One of the strangest features of the past eight years, which many of us on the left might not have even recognized as strange, was that our biggest pop star and our reigning rapper emeritus were actually friends with the president and First Lady.
I love Beyoncé, but it is not often that great artists do their great work while living so close to the glow of political power. For most of art’s long history, artists have lived on the edge of the village — poor, neglected, commiserating with one another, optical shamans transforming the world in mythic, mysterious, complicated, crazy, renegade ways, processing catastrophes through unexpected lenses, giving comfort, wisdom, relief, wonder, linking us with humanity, emotions, intellectuality, even the infinite. Alienation is the wellspring of art; in fact, feeling alone is often why you become an artist. Which means that, in times of artistic alienation, distress is often repaid to us in the form of great work, much of it galvanizing or clarifying or (believe it or not) empowering. That is because art isn’t a superfluous, elitist escape; it’s a way of knowing the world, a place to find common cause and not fall apart. Adorno said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Yet the very phrase is poetic
...
why would this startle someone who's made a case for the work of Jeff Koons? Most of art's history has been full of artists living on the edge of the village, poor, neglected, commiserating with one another ... ? Give me a break. Now a musician would tend to be reflexively skeptical of this kind of definition of why people become artists. One of the more annoying clichéd jokes about guitarists is how guitarists took up the instrument to get the attention of the ladies. Maybe they took up the instrument because it was the most affordable option? What about ladies who take up the instrument? At any rate, J. S. Bach was a musician because generations of his family line were musicians before him and he was carrying on the family trade. He wasn't a court and church musician because of alienation.
Artists and poets and writers and musicians like to think of themselves as prophets who speak truth to power. Guess what, it's always been that way. In case you haven't read the Bible in a few years (or ever) the prophets wrote books strewn from cover to cover with poetry and surrealistic oracles. The priests who had the power of literacy took care to sound off on the social, economic and political issues of their day. If literacy on the history of religious thought declines farther than it already has in the last few generations people in the arts might imagine that when they pontificate on politics they are somehow not doing what men and women who had poetic, literary or musical gifts were doing literally thousands of years ago.
http://sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9781589839984_OA.pdf
Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires
Edited by Alan Lenzi and Jonathan Stokl
Copyright (c) 2014 by the Society of Biblical Literature
ISBN 978-1-58983-997-7 (paper binding)
ISBN 978-1-58983-998-4 (electronic)
ISBN 978-1-58983-997-7 (hardcover binding)
It's a dry read but it's a worthwhile read. HT to Jim West for mentioning it. We've got a little review of the book over here.
Which is to say that artists and writers on the Left seem to keep forgetting that the drive to make the creative castes the priesthood of the day has been going on since about the French Revolution. The aim to make an art-religion that will usher in an era of human kindness hasn't worked out. If anything it seems that avant garde pioneers could and did latch on to totalitarian regimes or learned to live within them. But we've got a left and a right in the contemporary West that seems determined to "no true Scotsman" their respective teams out of a history of totalitarianism, whether it's Left types wo try to pretend there's no history of repression in the communist bloc or people on the right who try to downplay just how virulently racist the conservative aristocratic castes have been for centuries. Thanks to the internet era being what it is it seems the left and the right can only agree on the basic idea that it's only tyranny if someone-not-my-team does it. Name one executive power that Trump has now that Obama didn't have two weeks ago before him.
So, back to the Germans. Salz doesn't blame the Germans for the conundrum of contemporary art historiography, and perhaps that's because ultimately Salz is too beholden to the Romantic ideals of what the artist supposedly is.
For an actually official "I blame the Germans" there's Michael Lind:
http://thesmartset.com/originality-versus-the-arts/
In the last century, originality has killed one once-flourishing art form after another, by replacing variation within shared artistic conventions to rebellion against convention itself.
I blame the Germans.
It was the German Romantics who introduced the idea of “original genius” to modern society. The artistic genius, according to 19th-century romantics, is a special kind of human being with unique visionary powers. In ancient Greece and Rome, poets had sometimes claimed vatic powers; the “bard” sometimes posed as a quasi-prophetic figure, not a mere versifier, though this pose was usually not taken seriously. It was only in the 19th century, however, that the notion of this kind of visionary genius was generalized outside of poetry to what became known as the “fine arts,” including painting and sculpture and even architecture. Earlier, all of these arts had been classified among the utilitarian “crafts,” like textile-making and tile-making.
It’s not that originality did not exist in various arts before the German romantic virus corrupted our mental software. But originality took the form of expressive originality within convention. Michelangelo and El Greco created their own distinctive styles, but within the conventions of the European painting of their time.
The moment artists were taught to consider themselves superior mutant creative geniuses rather than practitioners of traditional crafts, it was only a matter of time before some would get tired of creative variation within the inherited conventions of their art and start rejecting the basic conventions. ...
The German idealists of the 19th century get the blame for insisting upon the idea that the genuine creative genius could cast aside the fusty old traditions and create vital, living art. If anything there was a historic obligation to do so. An author by name of David Roberts went so far as to propose that since the Enlightenment European history has been guided by a self-historicizing historicism, that whether progressive or reactionary European thought was fixated on history as a philosophical foundation through which to observe the human condition.
This might be something for historians of religious thought to play with but what about the possibility that millenarian (as opposed to amillenial) views of history had more sway or dominance in era that can be thought of as the Romantic era? It doesn't seem impossible to imagine that what a Marxist and a antebellum American Presbyterian could have in common is a kind of postmillennial optimism that takes for granted that "history" has a fixed and indisputable destiny that will usher in the ideal human society. Now as an amillenialist I find both forms of utopian thought to be terrible but I don't for a minute believe that imperial ambitions can't be defended by an appeal to an amillenial approach; I'm just proposing that certain types of manifest destiny, whether in the arts or in American expansion or in Marxism don't ultimately drink from a common well, the well of an essentially postmillennialist apocalyptic view of history in which those who tell the story of history's ultimate fate for global humanity have written themselves as the redeemers of that narrative.
So in that kind of narrative those with the freshest and most cogent revelations (i.e. innovations within the teleology of an academic history of the arts) have the highest levels of prestige. The paradoxical irony of this state of affairs is that the academics are the worst perpetrators of artistic canons. If all we wanted to do was to explore the ways in which the "total work of art" that was the dream of many a 19th century philosopher or artist has been realized in the 20th or 21st century then Wagner's Ring Cycle lives on in the popular cultural world. There are elements of it in Tolkien's Ring trilogy; in the Star Wars franchise; in Star Tre; in the Marvel cinematic universe (arguably a case study of a total work of art in which a sprawling cinematic franchise tied to comics and toys provides a new unifying civic religion). But these are branded franchises, not total-works-of-art that might be expected to usher in a new cosmic age of human enlightenment and love like Scriabin's Mysterium.
The denizens and advocates of high culture may want it both ways. They don't like the stifling restrictions of the art-religion narrative that has been refined since the Romantic era that was officially known as such. But when push comes to shove they don't want to concede the boundaries between high and low culture are as permeable as they are because you just can't concede the Marvel cinematic universe could be a defining artistic monu7ment for this era. Anything that could be construed as the product of global capitalism can't be considered real art .... although if we're going to be that way why should the products of 17th century autocratic patronage systems be kept in the art history narrative, exactly? If Richard Taruskin's polemical Oxford History of Western Music has any number of uses as a conversation starter among musicians one of those uses is how his history walks us through a millennium of dynasties of patronage--there are finally no "off the hook", benevolent dynasties of patronage.
I do think there's more than a little bit of truth to this polemic about the German romantics. I adore a great deal of Austrian-German music lineage from the 18th century. I admire Schutz, Buxtehude, Bach, Haydn. At the risk of keeping things too simple I find I admire music in the German linguistic tradition that pre-dates when the Germans saw themselves as the heralds of the divine light of civilization on behalf of humanity. Once we get into the 19th century a lot of German music after about ... Mendelssohn begins to sound bloated and self-important whether we're talking about Schubert (largely loathe his work) or Wagner (loathing might not be strong enough a word). By contrast I admire Bohemian (Matiegka, Reicha) and Polish (Chopin) and some Hungarian (bits of Lizst) music from the early 19th century. Taruskin savored the irony a bit too much when he pointed out that the signal composers of what was regarded as the "new German" sound were, none of them, Germans until Wagner came along.
I mean, it's not categorical--I like quite a bit of Brahms and I admire Hindemith. Hindemith, the kind of composer most people haven't heard of and wouldn't like when they hear him! So I guess I like some 18th and 20th century Germans because I even like Schoenberg's Violin Concerto and Berg's Wozzeck is quite a feat ... but Germans had the "we represent the best of humanity" in a way not unlike the same problematic impulse in Anglo-American or French discourse. Maybe every imperialist culture presumes to embody the best, highest and noblest of humanity. If that's the case the American Left is no better than the American Right for cultural imperialism. If anything, at least the Right tends to know what it wants is to restore the greatness of its empire. Not that that's good ... it's just slightly more self-aware on exactly one issue.
I can agree with writers on the liberal/left side that we need to jettison the German idealist Romantic notion of what art history is but we won't be able to do that if we still embrace the German Romantic ideal of what and who the artist/poet/painter/writer/composer/musician is. With the collapse of the institutional warrant presumed by the autocratic castes of the Catholic church, the nation-state churches and the royalty/court systems the temptation to elevate the artists as the new caste of priests extolling the new humanistic civic religion that had no need of deities was irresistible, apparently. That's the problem, we have a caste of professional entertainers who want to speak truth to power without conceding the degree to which they hold the power, if perhaps only within their civic religion of art-as-true-religion. When artists say they aren't priests they may just be reflecting their own ignorance of history.
As I get older and possibly too jaded it seems that the Marxists and the fundamentalists are the same in the end, they both derive a lot of their energy by breathlessly anticipating a pending apocalyptic rupture that "changes everything" and assures in a divine new era of fully-realized human potential in the form of an event that, we're constantly assured, will and must take place before this generation has passed and then, generation after generation, doesn't happen. The Marxist socialist and the fundamentalist Baptist turn out to be remarkably the same and in that respect they both want all of the arts as arts, to the extent that they have to exist, to be in the service of the one true church.
Maybe that's too gloomy an outlook ... .
http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/tyranny-of-art-history-in-contemporary-art.html
... our art history is not chronological; not neutral or about simultaneous cross-styles, outliers, and other things going on at any given moment. Our art history is organized teleologically — it's an arrow. Things are always said to be going forward, and progress is measured mainly in formal ways by changes in ideas of space, color, composition, subject matter, and the like. Artists and isms follow one another in a Biblical begatting based on progress toward a goal or a higher stage. Cubism was "a race toward flatness"; Suprematism was "the zero point of painting"; Rodchenko said he made "the last painting"; Ad Reinhardt one-upped him saying he was "making the last painting which anyone can make." In this system synthetic shifts and tics combine into things we call movements like Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Art Nouveau, Color Field, etc. The problem is anyone who doesn't fall into this timeline is out of luck. This paradigm has been in place for 200 years.
Saltz, ultimately, signs off on the Romantic fantasy of the artist, though.
http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/post-election-pain-is-good-for-art.html
... Recently, art has been this high-powered-success-machine mainstream sensation; artists have become celebrities; we’ve been treated to narcissistic pictures of pretty people at glamorous events wearing $2,000 worth of clothes. Outside the world of fine art, too, pop culture swallowed all of culture, and the entire cultural apparatus seemed to reorient itself to orbit the White House. One of the strangest features of the past eight years, which many of us on the left might not have even recognized as strange, was that our biggest pop star and our reigning rapper emeritus were actually friends with the president and First Lady.
I love Beyoncé, but it is not often that great artists do their great work while living so close to the glow of political power. For most of art’s long history, artists have lived on the edge of the village — poor, neglected, commiserating with one another, optical shamans transforming the world in mythic, mysterious, complicated, crazy, renegade ways, processing catastrophes through unexpected lenses, giving comfort, wisdom, relief, wonder, linking us with humanity, emotions, intellectuality, even the infinite. Alienation is the wellspring of art; in fact, feeling alone is often why you become an artist. Which means that, in times of artistic alienation, distress is often repaid to us in the form of great work, much of it galvanizing or clarifying or (believe it or not) empowering. That is because art isn’t a superfluous, elitist escape; it’s a way of knowing the world, a place to find common cause and not fall apart. Adorno said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Yet the very phrase is poetic
...
why would this startle someone who's made a case for the work of Jeff Koons? Most of art's history has been full of artists living on the edge of the village, poor, neglected, commiserating with one another ... ? Give me a break. Now a musician would tend to be reflexively skeptical of this kind of definition of why people become artists. One of the more annoying clichéd jokes about guitarists is how guitarists took up the instrument to get the attention of the ladies. Maybe they took up the instrument because it was the most affordable option? What about ladies who take up the instrument? At any rate, J. S. Bach was a musician because generations of his family line were musicians before him and he was carrying on the family trade. He wasn't a court and church musician because of alienation.
Artists and poets and writers and musicians like to think of themselves as prophets who speak truth to power. Guess what, it's always been that way. In case you haven't read the Bible in a few years (or ever) the prophets wrote books strewn from cover to cover with poetry and surrealistic oracles. The priests who had the power of literacy took care to sound off on the social, economic and political issues of their day. If literacy on the history of religious thought declines farther than it already has in the last few generations people in the arts might imagine that when they pontificate on politics they are somehow not doing what men and women who had poetic, literary or musical gifts were doing literally thousands of years ago.
http://sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9781589839984_OA.pdf
Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires
Edited by Alan Lenzi and Jonathan Stokl
Copyright (c) 2014 by the Society of Biblical Literature
ISBN 978-1-58983-997-7 (paper binding)
ISBN 978-1-58983-998-4 (electronic)
ISBN 978-1-58983-997-7 (hardcover binding)
It's a dry read but it's a worthwhile read. HT to Jim West for mentioning it. We've got a little review of the book over here.
Which is to say that artists and writers on the Left seem to keep forgetting that the drive to make the creative castes the priesthood of the day has been going on since about the French Revolution. The aim to make an art-religion that will usher in an era of human kindness hasn't worked out. If anything it seems that avant garde pioneers could and did latch on to totalitarian regimes or learned to live within them. But we've got a left and a right in the contemporary West that seems determined to "no true Scotsman" their respective teams out of a history of totalitarianism, whether it's Left types wo try to pretend there's no history of repression in the communist bloc or people on the right who try to downplay just how virulently racist the conservative aristocratic castes have been for centuries. Thanks to the internet era being what it is it seems the left and the right can only agree on the basic idea that it's only tyranny if someone-not-my-team does it. Name one executive power that Trump has now that Obama didn't have two weeks ago before him.
So, back to the Germans. Salz doesn't blame the Germans for the conundrum of contemporary art historiography, and perhaps that's because ultimately Salz is too beholden to the Romantic ideals of what the artist supposedly is.
For an actually official "I blame the Germans" there's Michael Lind:
http://thesmartset.com/originality-versus-the-arts/
In the last century, originality has killed one once-flourishing art form after another, by replacing variation within shared artistic conventions to rebellion against convention itself.
I blame the Germans.
It was the German Romantics who introduced the idea of “original genius” to modern society. The artistic genius, according to 19th-century romantics, is a special kind of human being with unique visionary powers. In ancient Greece and Rome, poets had sometimes claimed vatic powers; the “bard” sometimes posed as a quasi-prophetic figure, not a mere versifier, though this pose was usually not taken seriously. It was only in the 19th century, however, that the notion of this kind of visionary genius was generalized outside of poetry to what became known as the “fine arts,” including painting and sculpture and even architecture. Earlier, all of these arts had been classified among the utilitarian “crafts,” like textile-making and tile-making.
It’s not that originality did not exist in various arts before the German romantic virus corrupted our mental software. But originality took the form of expressive originality within convention. Michelangelo and El Greco created their own distinctive styles, but within the conventions of the European painting of their time.
The moment artists were taught to consider themselves superior mutant creative geniuses rather than practitioners of traditional crafts, it was only a matter of time before some would get tired of creative variation within the inherited conventions of their art and start rejecting the basic conventions. ...
The German idealists of the 19th century get the blame for insisting upon the idea that the genuine creative genius could cast aside the fusty old traditions and create vital, living art. If anything there was a historic obligation to do so. An author by name of David Roberts went so far as to propose that since the Enlightenment European history has been guided by a self-historicizing historicism, that whether progressive or reactionary European thought was fixated on history as a philosophical foundation through which to observe the human condition.
This might be something for historians of religious thought to play with but what about the possibility that millenarian (as opposed to amillenial) views of history had more sway or dominance in era that can be thought of as the Romantic era? It doesn't seem impossible to imagine that what a Marxist and a antebellum American Presbyterian could have in common is a kind of postmillennial optimism that takes for granted that "history" has a fixed and indisputable destiny that will usher in the ideal human society. Now as an amillenialist I find both forms of utopian thought to be terrible but I don't for a minute believe that imperial ambitions can't be defended by an appeal to an amillenial approach; I'm just proposing that certain types of manifest destiny, whether in the arts or in American expansion or in Marxism don't ultimately drink from a common well, the well of an essentially postmillennialist apocalyptic view of history in which those who tell the story of history's ultimate fate for global humanity have written themselves as the redeemers of that narrative.
So in that kind of narrative those with the freshest and most cogent revelations (i.e. innovations within the teleology of an academic history of the arts) have the highest levels of prestige. The paradoxical irony of this state of affairs is that the academics are the worst perpetrators of artistic canons. If all we wanted to do was to explore the ways in which the "total work of art" that was the dream of many a 19th century philosopher or artist has been realized in the 20th or 21st century then Wagner's Ring Cycle lives on in the popular cultural world. There are elements of it in Tolkien's Ring trilogy; in the Star Wars franchise; in Star Tre; in the Marvel cinematic universe (arguably a case study of a total work of art in which a sprawling cinematic franchise tied to comics and toys provides a new unifying civic religion). But these are branded franchises, not total-works-of-art that might be expected to usher in a new cosmic age of human enlightenment and love like Scriabin's Mysterium.
The denizens and advocates of high culture may want it both ways. They don't like the stifling restrictions of the art-religion narrative that has been refined since the Romantic era that was officially known as such. But when push comes to shove they don't want to concede the boundaries between high and low culture are as permeable as they are because you just can't concede the Marvel cinematic universe could be a defining artistic monu7ment for this era. Anything that could be construed as the product of global capitalism can't be considered real art .... although if we're going to be that way why should the products of 17th century autocratic patronage systems be kept in the art history narrative, exactly? If Richard Taruskin's polemical Oxford History of Western Music has any number of uses as a conversation starter among musicians one of those uses is how his history walks us through a millennium of dynasties of patronage--there are finally no "off the hook", benevolent dynasties of patronage.
I do think there's more than a little bit of truth to this polemic about the German romantics. I adore a great deal of Austrian-German music lineage from the 18th century. I admire Schutz, Buxtehude, Bach, Haydn. At the risk of keeping things too simple I find I admire music in the German linguistic tradition that pre-dates when the Germans saw themselves as the heralds of the divine light of civilization on behalf of humanity. Once we get into the 19th century a lot of German music after about ... Mendelssohn begins to sound bloated and self-important whether we're talking about Schubert (largely loathe his work) or Wagner (loathing might not be strong enough a word). By contrast I admire Bohemian (Matiegka, Reicha) and Polish (Chopin) and some Hungarian (bits of Lizst) music from the early 19th century. Taruskin savored the irony a bit too much when he pointed out that the signal composers of what was regarded as the "new German" sound were, none of them, Germans until Wagner came along.
I mean, it's not categorical--I like quite a bit of Brahms and I admire Hindemith. Hindemith, the kind of composer most people haven't heard of and wouldn't like when they hear him! So I guess I like some 18th and 20th century Germans because I even like Schoenberg's Violin Concerto and Berg's Wozzeck is quite a feat ... but Germans had the "we represent the best of humanity" in a way not unlike the same problematic impulse in Anglo-American or French discourse. Maybe every imperialist culture presumes to embody the best, highest and noblest of humanity. If that's the case the American Left is no better than the American Right for cultural imperialism. If anything, at least the Right tends to know what it wants is to restore the greatness of its empire. Not that that's good ... it's just slightly more self-aware on exactly one issue.
I can agree with writers on the liberal/left side that we need to jettison the German idealist Romantic notion of what art history is but we won't be able to do that if we still embrace the German Romantic ideal of what and who the artist/poet/painter/writer/composer/musician is. With the collapse of the institutional warrant presumed by the autocratic castes of the Catholic church, the nation-state churches and the royalty/court systems the temptation to elevate the artists as the new caste of priests extolling the new humanistic civic religion that had no need of deities was irresistible, apparently. That's the problem, we have a caste of professional entertainers who want to speak truth to power without conceding the degree to which they hold the power, if perhaps only within their civic religion of art-as-true-religion. When artists say they aren't priests they may just be reflecting their own ignorance of history.
As I get older and possibly too jaded it seems that the Marxists and the fundamentalists are the same in the end, they both derive a lot of their energy by breathlessly anticipating a pending apocalyptic rupture that "changes everything" and assures in a divine new era of fully-realized human potential in the form of an event that, we're constantly assured, will and must take place before this generation has passed and then, generation after generation, doesn't happen. The Marxist socialist and the fundamentalist Baptist turn out to be remarkably the same and in that respect they both want all of the arts as arts, to the extent that they have to exist, to be in the service of the one true church.
Maybe that's too gloomy an outlook ... .
Friday, January 20, 2017
Saturday, January 14, 2017
will eventually blog about some stuff .... but stuff happens. Nevertheless, preview of possible coming attractions (?)
A friend showed me Westworld season 1 and I mean to get to that.
It's wildly belated but I've meant to write about why I have problems with Captain America Civil War having managed to see it a second time. It completely falls apart and the weakness of the film is paradoxically organically tied to what Marvel Studios fans may regard as one of its great strengths, the overall cohesiveness of the Marvel film universe. There's a problem, and the problem is, whether you'll want to believe this or not, Jessica Jones. It just boggles my mind that Bucky seemed to have no real remorse for having killed a bunch of people as the Winter Soldier while Jessica Jones was haunted by killing just one person. Bucky was brainwashed? So what, Jessica Jones was under the thrall of Killgrave, a skeezy monster who can tell people to do things and they have to do it whether they want to or not. The more fully integrated the Marvel entertainment brand gets the more pressing the problem of this double standard in which Bucky Barnes is off the hook for killing countless people while Jessica's superhuman liver lets her not die from the alcohol she drinks in guilt over having killed someone. But we'll get to that later, I hope.
The "Legend of Entitlement" essay about the moral trainwreck that was Legend of Korra has yet to be written. And there's a little piece about the genius of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold retelling of Batman's origin I want to get to.
The selective Christian/pagan syncretism explicit in The Secret of Kells take on the Book of Kells might be another topic for another time. All that is to say I've felt overdue to write about animation for years. There's still a pile of stuff about Justice League/Justice League Unlimited I've wanted to get to. The DC films this far have generally convinced me that if you want to see versions of these characters done convincingly it's best to stick to the Dini/Timm continuity or catch The Brave & the Bold (which got me to love Aquaman and had an actually good story for Crazy Quilt!).
I haven't written much about Archer or The Venture Bros. Could but probably won't. Might instead mull over a general ethos that comes across in the Adult Swim brand in more general terms. But that, too, probably needs to wait.
Things come up and things go down.
This isn't the venue to get into that stuff.
I have, I will say, been working a lot more (again) on some musical projects. There was this gigantic cyclical project, a musical thing that I spent years working on. That's done. For the long time long time readers (and/or the people who know who blogs here) you might have already heard. It's not like there's never been lengthy discussions about contrapuntal music and the guitar here before. I'm hoping to get around to discussing contrapuntal cycles by Igor Rekhin, Castlenuovo-Tedesco, Rodion Shchedrin, Shostakovich (yes, that one), Henry Martin and ... eh ... I might even go back to Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis for old time's sake because I love that cycle.
I wish that when Slate did Wonder Week I'd gone back and recycled my "Counterpoint According to Stevie Wonder" blog post. But I didn't. Instead I wrote thousands of words about why that compound chorus in "Living for the City" is so amazing, which it still is!
But a lot of stuff happens in the off-line world. There's nothing wrong with feeling no huge obligation to meet deadlines that simply don't exist. A friend or two in the real world asked whether or not the blog was retired on account of a certain Richard Nixon of megachurch pastors up and quitting. Nope, still around. If anything the blog can finally belatedly get back to all the stuff it was intended to be about a decade ago. It doesn't mean people will want to read it but if they do I can be grateful.
Still, it was hard not to notice that when that evangelical advisory committee for Trump's campaign was announced there were some guys on that list who got mentioned in coverage of the Driscoll meltdown. Sealy Yates? Was that the person who, as reported by Warren Throckmorton, suggested Result Source could be used? Was that James MacDonald mentioned at The Elephant's Debt who showed up with Mark Driscoll at the Strange Fire conference? Never mind the matter of whether you think Trump should have gotten the RNC nomination or have won the Electoral College vote. The prodigious rate at which I've referenced Ellul in the last year might telegraph a skepticism about populist agitators and their fans whether it's red or blue. No, this is another point, that even "if" Trump were as pristine as undriven snow that some of the evangelical advisors (who may not want to be linked to the guy by now but, again, separate matter) were peole who ended up being documented as having played no compelling accountability role for Mark Driscoll in the last six years and in one case may have positively advised the use of Result Source to rig the New York Times Bestseller list. With an advisory committee tha tincludes people like that (or Paula White) nobody in the Oval Office, whether a Clinton or a Trump, would seem to be in "good hands".
But then these days my fatalism and pessimism abou the United States would be hard-pressed to find a gloomier outlook.
But then you can only do what you can where you can. What I feel like I can do is make some long-form cases for how and why the boundaries between pop music and art music need some conceptual dismantling. It's begun to drive me up the wall how some guys, and it's generally been white guys who ponticiate about jazz as musicians or journalists, traffic in an essentialist narrative of some kind or another about the history of the tradition. I've grown tired of reading white liberal journalists and musicians write about soulful black musicians in ways that don't convey that there is some seriously cerebral stuff going on in the music.
I'm getting tired of "reification" only being deployed in some Marxist sense and not a gestalt sense, because the gestalt sense of reification is in many respects founational to getting how jazz can work as a listener's art and a performer's art. I don't want to demystify the craft of music composition to make people stop loving the music they love. I want to demystify elements of music because I'm tired of the idiotic claims of writers that Stevie Wonder "broke all the rules" of music in a song chorus (you know the one) when he was using chromatic median pivot relationships and octatonic linear movement in ways that can correspond to things done by Stravinsky or Scriabin. There isn't a "white" or "black" way to deploy chromatic median relationships over octatonic linear movement!
It pisses me off that after generations of black musicians trying to articulate things about their music in a way that lets the music be appreciated as music there are still white liberal writers out there (and generally their guys) who sell the holy fool vibe. We don't need that. It seems condescending to say blues "broke the rules". One of my friends in college hated blues because for her the harmonic formula was too simple, too predictable and too impossible to do anything interesting with to make it worth learning. Whereas I can zone out blissfully to the endless variations John Lee Hooker introduces into 12/8 time. I love pre-World War II blues and it's one of the wells of inspiration I keep coming back to. One of my dreams is to find a way to arrive at a fusion of 18th century polyphonic and developmental thought processes with old Delta or Texas blues. If I could write a fugue for guitar inspired by the music of Blind Willie Johnson I would so totally do it!
... and try to get back to writing about some Batman cartoons.
But this hasn't been one of those phases in life where it's easy to just sit down and write 6k to 12k words in a day like I was doing back in 2012.
It's wildly belated but I've meant to write about why I have problems with Captain America Civil War having managed to see it a second time. It completely falls apart and the weakness of the film is paradoxically organically tied to what Marvel Studios fans may regard as one of its great strengths, the overall cohesiveness of the Marvel film universe. There's a problem, and the problem is, whether you'll want to believe this or not, Jessica Jones. It just boggles my mind that Bucky seemed to have no real remorse for having killed a bunch of people as the Winter Soldier while Jessica Jones was haunted by killing just one person. Bucky was brainwashed? So what, Jessica Jones was under the thrall of Killgrave, a skeezy monster who can tell people to do things and they have to do it whether they want to or not. The more fully integrated the Marvel entertainment brand gets the more pressing the problem of this double standard in which Bucky Barnes is off the hook for killing countless people while Jessica's superhuman liver lets her not die from the alcohol she drinks in guilt over having killed someone. But we'll get to that later, I hope.
The "Legend of Entitlement" essay about the moral trainwreck that was Legend of Korra has yet to be written. And there's a little piece about the genius of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold retelling of Batman's origin I want to get to.
The selective Christian/pagan syncretism explicit in The Secret of Kells take on the Book of Kells might be another topic for another time. All that is to say I've felt overdue to write about animation for years. There's still a pile of stuff about Justice League/Justice League Unlimited I've wanted to get to. The DC films this far have generally convinced me that if you want to see versions of these characters done convincingly it's best to stick to the Dini/Timm continuity or catch The Brave & the Bold (which got me to love Aquaman and had an actually good story for Crazy Quilt!).
I haven't written much about Archer or The Venture Bros. Could but probably won't. Might instead mull over a general ethos that comes across in the Adult Swim brand in more general terms. But that, too, probably needs to wait.
Things come up and things go down.
This isn't the venue to get into that stuff.
I have, I will say, been working a lot more (again) on some musical projects. There was this gigantic cyclical project, a musical thing that I spent years working on. That's done. For the long time long time readers (and/or the people who know who blogs here) you might have already heard. It's not like there's never been lengthy discussions about contrapuntal music and the guitar here before. I'm hoping to get around to discussing contrapuntal cycles by Igor Rekhin, Castlenuovo-Tedesco, Rodion Shchedrin, Shostakovich (yes, that one), Henry Martin and ... eh ... I might even go back to Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis for old time's sake because I love that cycle.
I wish that when Slate did Wonder Week I'd gone back and recycled my "Counterpoint According to Stevie Wonder" blog post. But I didn't. Instead I wrote thousands of words about why that compound chorus in "Living for the City" is so amazing, which it still is!
But a lot of stuff happens in the off-line world. There's nothing wrong with feeling no huge obligation to meet deadlines that simply don't exist. A friend or two in the real world asked whether or not the blog was retired on account of a certain Richard Nixon of megachurch pastors up and quitting. Nope, still around. If anything the blog can finally belatedly get back to all the stuff it was intended to be about a decade ago. It doesn't mean people will want to read it but if they do I can be grateful.
Still, it was hard not to notice that when that evangelical advisory committee for Trump's campaign was announced there were some guys on that list who got mentioned in coverage of the Driscoll meltdown. Sealy Yates? Was that the person who, as reported by Warren Throckmorton, suggested Result Source could be used? Was that James MacDonald mentioned at The Elephant's Debt who showed up with Mark Driscoll at the Strange Fire conference? Never mind the matter of whether you think Trump should have gotten the RNC nomination or have won the Electoral College vote. The prodigious rate at which I've referenced Ellul in the last year might telegraph a skepticism about populist agitators and their fans whether it's red or blue. No, this is another point, that even "if" Trump were as pristine as undriven snow that some of the evangelical advisors (who may not want to be linked to the guy by now but, again, separate matter) were peole who ended up being documented as having played no compelling accountability role for Mark Driscoll in the last six years and in one case may have positively advised the use of Result Source to rig the New York Times Bestseller list. With an advisory committee tha tincludes people like that (or Paula White) nobody in the Oval Office, whether a Clinton or a Trump, would seem to be in "good hands".
But then these days my fatalism and pessimism abou the United States would be hard-pressed to find a gloomier outlook.
But then you can only do what you can where you can. What I feel like I can do is make some long-form cases for how and why the boundaries between pop music and art music need some conceptual dismantling. It's begun to drive me up the wall how some guys, and it's generally been white guys who ponticiate about jazz as musicians or journalists, traffic in an essentialist narrative of some kind or another about the history of the tradition. I've grown tired of reading white liberal journalists and musicians write about soulful black musicians in ways that don't convey that there is some seriously cerebral stuff going on in the music.
I'm getting tired of "reification" only being deployed in some Marxist sense and not a gestalt sense, because the gestalt sense of reification is in many respects founational to getting how jazz can work as a listener's art and a performer's art. I don't want to demystify the craft of music composition to make people stop loving the music they love. I want to demystify elements of music because I'm tired of the idiotic claims of writers that Stevie Wonder "broke all the rules" of music in a song chorus (you know the one) when he was using chromatic median pivot relationships and octatonic linear movement in ways that can correspond to things done by Stravinsky or Scriabin. There isn't a "white" or "black" way to deploy chromatic median relationships over octatonic linear movement!
It pisses me off that after generations of black musicians trying to articulate things about their music in a way that lets the music be appreciated as music there are still white liberal writers out there (and generally their guys) who sell the holy fool vibe. We don't need that. It seems condescending to say blues "broke the rules". One of my friends in college hated blues because for her the harmonic formula was too simple, too predictable and too impossible to do anything interesting with to make it worth learning. Whereas I can zone out blissfully to the endless variations John Lee Hooker introduces into 12/8 time. I love pre-World War II blues and it's one of the wells of inspiration I keep coming back to. One of my dreams is to find a way to arrive at a fusion of 18th century polyphonic and developmental thought processes with old Delta or Texas blues. If I could write a fugue for guitar inspired by the music of Blind Willie Johnson I would so totally do it!
... and try to get back to writing about some Batman cartoons.
But this hasn't been one of those phases in life where it's easy to just sit down and write 6k to 12k words in a day like I was doing back in 2012.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
over at the New Republic, a rumination on the aging baby boomer rock stars and ambivalence about their legacy
https://newrepublic.com/
...
If you were a rocker in reasonably good health who put out a reasonably successful record in the 1960s or 1970s and had yet to write a book, chances are you wrote a book or had one written about you in 2016. As the publishing industry has become more vulnerable, it has become more risk-averse. Established names with established audiences—preferably older audiences, who spend money on things like books—have become increasingly valuable. After the success of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Keith Richards’s Life, and Patti Smith’s Just Kids, publishers are hot for baby boomer nostalgia, while musicians are just as hot to cash checks. In 2016, Bruce Springsteen, Phil Collins, Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Robbie Robertson, Johnny Marr, and Sebastian Bach all published memoirs—in a few cases, they even wrote them, too.
But, with the exception of Springsteen’s joyous memoir, a feeling of resentment permeates these books that are supposed to serve as well-earned victory laps. The desire to bask in glory turns out to be inseparable from the sense that credit hasn’t been given where it’s due. This curious mixture of self-satisfaction and resentment—call it the baby boomers’ revenge [emphasis added]—was reflected in the politics of 2016, which was defined by a reactionary nostalgia that led to the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, two catastrophic events that came over the expressed opposition of younger generations.
...
One thing these books have in common is a general ambivalence about the time period their authors are largely identified with. For Love and Robertson, it’s the 60s and early 70s; for Springsteen and Collins the 70s and 80s. These writers know that they made history, but are not quite sure what that history means. They are baby boomers who are abundantly proud of their generation’s cultural achievements but wary of its political legacy.
It's not entirely clear to me that the mixture of self-satisfaction and resentment is the peculiar domain of baby boomers who decided to go for Brexit and Trump. But then this is the New Republic we're quoting here. After all, it's the sort of magazine that can also feature stuff like ... :
https://newrepublic.com/article/139741/meryl-streep-donald-trump-share
...
So, Meryl Streep’s presidential address from the Golden Globes podium this weekend felt familiar. When FDR held his fireside chats over the radio, he codified the sound of both the American president and the American patriarch in his castle. Hollywood depictions of the American political voice have been various but contain certain definable strains. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra brought an existential sweetness to the Senate, throwing the system into a reassuringly contained and inconsequential chaos as an unknown enters the system by chance (literally, through a coin toss). Similarly, in Forrest Gump the hero accidentally makes an excellent speech about the unmentionable horrors of the Vietnam War due to an unplugged mic. On our televisions, The West Wing fooled us into thinking that grandiose monologues delivered by clever white people could right any wrong in the world.
Whoever this "us" was that actually thought Sorkin-penned dialogue solved anything at all must have been subscribing to The New Republic. I've mentioned how The West Wing and Gilmore Girls can be thought of as blue state power fantasy/wish fulfillment narratives in the way that 24 was a red state power fantasy somewhere else at the blog, but overall it seems that the temptation to regard yourself as part of the greatest generation is a temptation that will erupt in every American generation. As some old aging pop star put it in some song, "I won't be coming home tonight, my generation will put it right. We're not just making promises that we know we'll never keep."
Yup, because only baby boomers have that sense of entitled we'll-change-the-world hubris?
Generation X has had a few men and women who are able to simultaneously reveal self-satisfaction and resentment. There might even have been a local case study here in the Puget Sound area who wasn't even a rock star ... .
But the desire to bask in glory may, really, be inseparable from the sense that credit hasn't been given where it's due for any human being who is not simultaneously also Jesus.
There's this line from The Right Stuff where Wolfe described how all the astronauts wanted was to be led on to a stage where they then received at least as much adulation as the Pope and that this was really not so much to ask. Recognize that we changed the world and we'll feel like the world is a basically fair place, perhaps?
My thinking of late has been a great deal about whatever our legacies are are ultimately not things we can control. Legacy sounds great on paper but what it turns out to be is beyond you or me.
Kyle Gann blogged years ago about how he came across classes of students where not a single one of the students had heard a song by the Beatles. When a commenter lamented this observation Gann, iff memory serves, replied that he was glad there was finally a generation of students that wasn't obsessed with the Fab Four for a change because he never liked them half a century ago when they were a thing.
...
If you were a rocker in reasonably good health who put out a reasonably successful record in the 1960s or 1970s and had yet to write a book, chances are you wrote a book or had one written about you in 2016. As the publishing industry has become more vulnerable, it has become more risk-averse. Established names with established audiences—preferably older audiences, who spend money on things like books—have become increasingly valuable. After the success of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Keith Richards’s Life, and Patti Smith’s Just Kids, publishers are hot for baby boomer nostalgia, while musicians are just as hot to cash checks. In 2016, Bruce Springsteen, Phil Collins, Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Robbie Robertson, Johnny Marr, and Sebastian Bach all published memoirs—in a few cases, they even wrote them, too.
But, with the exception of Springsteen’s joyous memoir, a feeling of resentment permeates these books that are supposed to serve as well-earned victory laps. The desire to bask in glory turns out to be inseparable from the sense that credit hasn’t been given where it’s due. This curious mixture of self-satisfaction and resentment—call it the baby boomers’ revenge [emphasis added]—was reflected in the politics of 2016, which was defined by a reactionary nostalgia that led to the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, two catastrophic events that came over the expressed opposition of younger generations.
...
One thing these books have in common is a general ambivalence about the time period their authors are largely identified with. For Love and Robertson, it’s the 60s and early 70s; for Springsteen and Collins the 70s and 80s. These writers know that they made history, but are not quite sure what that history means. They are baby boomers who are abundantly proud of their generation’s cultural achievements but wary of its political legacy.
It's not entirely clear to me that the mixture of self-satisfaction and resentment is the peculiar domain of baby boomers who decided to go for Brexit and Trump. But then this is the New Republic we're quoting here. After all, it's the sort of magazine that can also feature stuff like ... :
https://newrepublic.com/article/139741/meryl-streep-donald-trump-share
...
So, Meryl Streep’s presidential address from the Golden Globes podium this weekend felt familiar. When FDR held his fireside chats over the radio, he codified the sound of both the American president and the American patriarch in his castle. Hollywood depictions of the American political voice have been various but contain certain definable strains. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra brought an existential sweetness to the Senate, throwing the system into a reassuringly contained and inconsequential chaos as an unknown enters the system by chance (literally, through a coin toss). Similarly, in Forrest Gump the hero accidentally makes an excellent speech about the unmentionable horrors of the Vietnam War due to an unplugged mic. On our televisions, The West Wing fooled us into thinking that grandiose monologues delivered by clever white people could right any wrong in the world.
Whoever this "us" was that actually thought Sorkin-penned dialogue solved anything at all must have been subscribing to The New Republic. I've mentioned how The West Wing and Gilmore Girls can be thought of as blue state power fantasy/wish fulfillment narratives in the way that 24 was a red state power fantasy somewhere else at the blog, but overall it seems that the temptation to regard yourself as part of the greatest generation is a temptation that will erupt in every American generation. As some old aging pop star put it in some song, "I won't be coming home tonight, my generation will put it right. We're not just making promises that we know we'll never keep."
Yup, because only baby boomers have that sense of entitled we'll-change-the-world hubris?
Generation X has had a few men and women who are able to simultaneously reveal self-satisfaction and resentment. There might even have been a local case study here in the Puget Sound area who wasn't even a rock star ... .
But the desire to bask in glory may, really, be inseparable from the sense that credit hasn't been given where it's due for any human being who is not simultaneously also Jesus.
There's this line from The Right Stuff where Wolfe described how all the astronauts wanted was to be led on to a stage where they then received at least as much adulation as the Pope and that this was really not so much to ask. Recognize that we changed the world and we'll feel like the world is a basically fair place, perhaps?
My thinking of late has been a great deal about whatever our legacies are are ultimately not things we can control. Legacy sounds great on paper but what it turns out to be is beyond you or me.
Kyle Gann blogged years ago about how he came across classes of students where not a single one of the students had heard a song by the Beatles. When a commenter lamented this observation Gann, iff memory serves, replied that he was glad there was finally a generation of students that wasn't obsessed with the Fab Four for a change because he never liked them half a century ago when they were a thing.
on the other side of the Electoral College decision, remembering Schumer's zinger that didn't come to pass
Not that I'm particularly thrilled with the outcome, but then I regard the empire as doomed either way. Still ... one of the reasons that some people found the outcome at least partly amusing was because of stuff like this:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/19/amy_schumer_reads_a_sarcastic_open_letter_after_trump_jokes_prompt_walkout.html
...
Schumer went on to promise that she would go to “rehab” to better please everyone, “both the rich, entitled, white people who are gonna vote for [Trump] and the very poor people who’ve been tricked into it.” She concluded, “I look forward to putting this all behind us in a couple weeks when Hillary Clinton is our motherf---ing president!”
If it had just been Dewey defeats Truman for one institution of the press that'd have been one thing. What happened late last year seemed to involve the majority of what passes for the Fourth Estate in the North American continent.
Depending on what does or doesn't happen we find out how long Trump is president ... but this was not Clinton's moment.
The temptation to retroactively imagine that the last eight years were actually somehow great is going to be too strong for some people. This may be less a function of a responsible or thorough reading of historical events than a rear-guard nostalgia prompted not so much but a clear-eyed view of the past as a panic-fueled vision of the future. The paranoid apocalyptic idiom that the red and blue cultivated together during the Cold War may have fractured into unique apocalyptic idioms favored by those red and blue but the paranoia has begun to smel the same. It's not even that there's nothing to be worried about. There's always been stuff to be worried about. Any number of genre/pulp classics are reminders that ever since we humans invented nuclear weapons and used them there's been reasons to worry that we'd incinerate ourselves. But it would seem the order of the era in the post-Cold War American idiom is to only have melt-downs that betoken the fall of Babylon the Great when your team isn't in power. It was weird reading David Gushee (was it?) lamenting overweening federal power as if the reach of the federal government was only terrifying because Trump won. Conversely, a decade ago someone I know was declaring that more or less the problem was the President DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH POWER to implement the War on Terror. In an age in which the greatest apostasies to advocates red and blue is to not be red or blue it would hardly seem any wonder that genuine threats from overseas would matter less to red and blue partisans than the mere existence of the other color.
It'd be easier to feel bad for the press if the press itself didn't seem to be one of the inveterate ruling castes these days. Just because they are so very often not particularly religious doesn't mean that the entertainment castes of the United States haven't embraced what could be described as a form of clericalism, but a clericalism of the artist rather than the formal priest.
and I guess lately I feel like a slightly anticlerical sort on the subject of the arts and entertainment. These people don't necessarily have special knowledge that's worth more than what you can have about the arts. It's not as though the red and blue partisans don't have a history of holding jup entertainers as saviors. It's not like Reagan always had his career in politics, after all.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/19/amy_schumer_reads_a_sarcastic_open_letter_after_trump_jokes_prompt_walkout.html
...
Schumer went on to promise that she would go to “rehab” to better please everyone, “both the rich, entitled, white people who are gonna vote for [Trump] and the very poor people who’ve been tricked into it.” She concluded, “I look forward to putting this all behind us in a couple weeks when Hillary Clinton is our motherf---ing president!”
If it had just been Dewey defeats Truman for one institution of the press that'd have been one thing. What happened late last year seemed to involve the majority of what passes for the Fourth Estate in the North American continent.
Depending on what does or doesn't happen we find out how long Trump is president ... but this was not Clinton's moment.
The temptation to retroactively imagine that the last eight years were actually somehow great is going to be too strong for some people. This may be less a function of a responsible or thorough reading of historical events than a rear-guard nostalgia prompted not so much but a clear-eyed view of the past as a panic-fueled vision of the future. The paranoid apocalyptic idiom that the red and blue cultivated together during the Cold War may have fractured into unique apocalyptic idioms favored by those red and blue but the paranoia has begun to smel the same. It's not even that there's nothing to be worried about. There's always been stuff to be worried about. Any number of genre/pulp classics are reminders that ever since we humans invented nuclear weapons and used them there's been reasons to worry that we'd incinerate ourselves. But it would seem the order of the era in the post-Cold War American idiom is to only have melt-downs that betoken the fall of Babylon the Great when your team isn't in power. It was weird reading David Gushee (was it?) lamenting overweening federal power as if the reach of the federal government was only terrifying because Trump won. Conversely, a decade ago someone I know was declaring that more or less the problem was the President DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH POWER to implement the War on Terror. In an age in which the greatest apostasies to advocates red and blue is to not be red or blue it would hardly seem any wonder that genuine threats from overseas would matter less to red and blue partisans than the mere existence of the other color.
It'd be easier to feel bad for the press if the press itself didn't seem to be one of the inveterate ruling castes these days. Just because they are so very often not particularly religious doesn't mean that the entertainment castes of the United States haven't embraced what could be described as a form of clericalism, but a clericalism of the artist rather than the formal priest.
and I guess lately I feel like a slightly anticlerical sort on the subject of the arts and entertainment. These people don't necessarily have special knowledge that's worth more than what you can have about the arts. It's not as though the red and blue partisans don't have a history of holding jup entertainers as saviors. It's not like Reagan always had his career in politics, after all.
a Francis Schaeffer retrospective at Mere Orthodoxy suggesta a third way between adulation and anathema ... we might be underselling some of the foibles a little
https://mereorthodoxy.com/francis-schaeffer-arts-retrospective/
....
He got some of the details wrong. He was an over-the-top generalist. The film series and book, How Should We Then Live? have a certain Cold War feeling that has now been succeeded by newer concerns, such as globalization and Islamicist terrorism. But he was fresh, and insightful, and had a “nose’ for trends and people. We can do a great deal with his heritage, whether in general areas or in the arts in particular. So many of his insights were right, though partial. May we be his worthy children as we build on his legacy and add to his insights!
He got some of the details wrong is too nice a way of putting it, depending on the subject. I still agree with Schaeffer's critique of art for the sake of art being a dead end. But Schaeffer's whole take on history blows up when you start breaking it down into the component disciplines. Musicians with a modicum of music history could find no end to the implications of what Schaeffer got wrong about just John Cage. But I'm incubating some thoughts about stuff like that which may or may not be presented in this particular context, i.e. this particular platform.
We can, certainly, do a great deal with his ideas and proposals, partial though they were--we can also, in another sense, remember that at most he provided a potential starting point and that perhaps the most valuable thing we can do is, and I'm trying to find a way to say this that can be construed as respectfully dissenting, move on from Schaeffer as clarion call to have Christians do X and go actually do X.
I'd write more but I'm still mulling over a lot of stuff ... and to some degree there's some stuff at Roger Scruton's end of things that merits some pushback. But I'm not sure how inspired I am to tackle that just yet ... maybe some stuff can wait for the weekend.
....
He got some of the details wrong. He was an over-the-top generalist. The film series and book, How Should We Then Live? have a certain Cold War feeling that has now been succeeded by newer concerns, such as globalization and Islamicist terrorism. But he was fresh, and insightful, and had a “nose’ for trends and people. We can do a great deal with his heritage, whether in general areas or in the arts in particular. So many of his insights were right, though partial. May we be his worthy children as we build on his legacy and add to his insights!
He got some of the details wrong is too nice a way of putting it, depending on the subject. I still agree with Schaeffer's critique of art for the sake of art being a dead end. But Schaeffer's whole take on history blows up when you start breaking it down into the component disciplines. Musicians with a modicum of music history could find no end to the implications of what Schaeffer got wrong about just John Cage. But I'm incubating some thoughts about stuff like that which may or may not be presented in this particular context, i.e. this particular platform.
We can, certainly, do a great deal with his ideas and proposals, partial though they were--we can also, in another sense, remember that at most he provided a potential starting point and that perhaps the most valuable thing we can do is, and I'm trying to find a way to say this that can be construed as respectfully dissenting, move on from Schaeffer as clarion call to have Christians do X and go actually do X.
I'd write more but I'm still mulling over a lot of stuff ... and to some degree there's some stuff at Roger Scruton's end of things that merits some pushback. But I'm not sure how inspired I am to tackle that just yet ... maybe some stuff can wait for the weekend.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Nat Hentoff has died ... and a semi-related link on arts critics positions withering away in newspapers
Well, as arts news goes 2017 started off with ... basically the death of Nat Hentoff. Perhaps not a name that would jump out or ring bells for readers, but it's a passing that deserves to be noted. If people were unhappy at so many artists and such dying in 2016 losing Hentoff at the start of 2017 hardly seems like an indication that this year will be "better".
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/01/totd-nat-hentoff-obituary/512567/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/nyregion/nat-hentoff-dead.html?_r=0
So thematically it would seem that we're witnessing the death of the era of arts critics in mainstream and local newspapers. Thus ...
http://www.cjr.org/the_feature/arts_music_critics.php
...
Blogs and niche arts websites thrive (if not economically, certainly in terms of traffic). But they can do great work, gather thousands of readers and still not plug the hole newspapers have left by pulling arts pages. Niche sites cater to niche audiences. They ghettoize content and normalize the notion that a story about a tremendous new rock act doesn’t belong between a report about a corrupt city council member and a recap of a Cleveland Cavaliers game.
...
“Newspapers are where most investigative journalism originates from, so it’s scary,” music publicist Jim Flammia of All Eyes Media says. “But it’s also scary for me professionally because I need places for our artists to get covered. My artists make their money on the road, so regional coverage is more important than national coverage, and that regional coverage comes from newspapers.”
There's a strange and not necessarily delicious irony reading this kind of stuff. The irony is that when I started blogging back in 2006 what I was aiming to do was write about chamber music; classical guitar involving musical traditions that were not the usual suspects of Spain and Spanish-speaking traditions (I'm fond of stuff more from central/eastern Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, though I'm a stereotypical guitarist in that I do admire Sor and Villa-Lobos); animation and other things.
It was only when local and regional media, to say nothing of national press institutions, seemed to be systematically failing to cover what I thought needed covering about the history of Mars Hill that this blog took what was arguably the largest half-decade detour a would-be arts blog could take. The blog came to be so utterly defined by investigative journalistic blogging about Mars Hill that when I saw a friend from the Mars Hill days a few months ago he asked if the blog was retired.
Nope, it's finally getting back to arts stuff.
But the ghettoizing effect of blogs is not merely a function of writing, it can be a function of the reading tendencies readers bring to their web experience. Traffic to the blog is a tenth what it once was, which is fine. The number of people who read the extensive series of posts late in 2016 I did on recapitulatory tendencies in early 19th century guitar sonatas is a mere fraction of the people who read about that memo proposing Driscoll get a raise. There are times when investigative journalism is more important than arts coverage. Ideally we can have investigative journalism and arts coverage.
But back when I was a student journalist I realized that a lot of what constitutes even the best arts coverage is still, in the end, advertising copy in a lot of ways. Take any article in The New Yorker about this or that book or author that allegedly "predicted" Trump and what have you got? A book of the month style advertisement for a book that the staff of The New Yorker imagine you either haven't bought/read yet or that you should read again. Now there's a great deal of value in arts criticism precisely when you don't intend to watch or read any of the stuff being discussed. That's not to say you want to be like Tom from Metropolitan, reading criticism rather than the books themselves as though you've read both. :)
So in a way this blog is a reflection of my intermittent feelings and thoughts that we could have more academic discussions of guitar literature. Those discussions are out there, to be sure, but they're not always easy to find.
And what we're really lamenting when we lament a decline in critics is institutional endorsement. The problem with a blog is that no matter how prestigious the author or content of a blog, it's not usually an example of the institutional press.
It's hard to forget that in the last six or seven years what ultimately shook the foundations of Driscoll's empire here in Puget Sound was not exactly mainstream press coverage, at least not by itself. Negative press coverage played a role but by no stretch of the imagination did Warren Cole Smith count as a liberal/secular journalist. Neither could that be said of Janet Mefferd. Driscoll's empire crumbled because of intra-evangelical, intra-Reformed critique. Had things been left up to the left (religious or otherwise) Driscoll's brand might be even more powerful now than it was in 2012. It may well be that a variety of the alliances of convenience through which different people who had criticisms of Mark Driscoll have withered away. That's probably as it should be.
An arts writer can make the difference between me reading a newspaper and not. I basically stopped reading The Stranger for the most part after Chris DeLaurenti stopped writing for them ... unless something unusually pertinent showed up in the paper's pages.
But my feelings about arts criticism and arts critics are profoundly mixed. I wrote a haiku a while back ...
every arts critic
must consecrate consumption
to live with their craft
isn't exactly an upbeat message. Given the failures of the Fourth Estate to anticipate the recent Electoral College decision (never mind the small lake of post-mortems) the press may need to ask itself whether or not we're going to miss the freedom of the press in a post-Hentoff media or not.
To put it another way, from where I've been blogging in the last ten-ish years, arts critics can have a comparable well of self-aggrandizing self-pity that north American Christian intellectuals can sometimes have. We've got folks who are sad about their declining influence in society while we don't always seem to have the most airtight case as to how much influence we had to begin with.
Some of my most persistent critical interests (i.e. what I've written criticism about) have been on subjects that I have rarely seen mainstream arts critics even bother with. Yeah, yeah, maybe Richard Brody will vent about childrens' movies and cartoons for kids being all moralistic. So what? How much mainstream coverage is there of animation as an art form? Not a ton, except in the comics scene, perhaps. We'll get coverage of stuff considered "grown up" enough to count, so we'll get stuff about The Simpsons, South Park, or Family Guy, or Archer, or maybe sometimes The Venture Bros. The pending Ghost in the Shell remake makes "some" headlines. Ghibli makes some news for people already dialed in.
But arts criticism tends to ignore animation as a medium because of stereotyped associations with kid stuff. One of my pet projects has been to occasionally write about cartoons and take them as seriously as I would novels by Dostoevsky or Camus or poetry by Levertov or Eliot or Stevens. Part of the fun of criticism as a discipline and an art form is that you can write about the stuff that interests you. I would propose that if you want to get a clear sense of where a society is at look into the stories a people considers safe enough to share with children. What ideological and metaphysical perspectives are endorsed in kid tales? If I were to take Batman stories more seriously than stories by Hemmingway that could be a reason why. Arts criticism can travel about in the things people want to watch and discuss and not just the stuff academics have decreed we have to discuss in order to graduate from high school. When the director Satoshi Kon died it was hardly news over here but it was sad news for me. More people noted the death of George Michael than Roland Dyens, I suspect ... .
and so then there's music, and if there's a topic that could be said to interest only academic sorts, the evolution of sonata forms in solo guitar literature would be such a topic.
All of this is stuff you can write about as much as you want at a blog. You could do it for a local newspaper but ... really ... could you? I can hardly think of more than maybe five articles (all reviews) discussing any of the music of Ferdinand Rebay. Now, sure, maybe his music isn't your bag and that's fine. What the role of arts criticism can play is in catalyzing conversations and debates. I'd like Rebay's guitar sonatas to get quite a bit more exposure because even though I actually do admire Ponce's guitar sonatas they're in danger of being overplayed lollipops, to borrow some phrases Matanya Ophee has used. Now perhaps Rebay's sonatas are lollipops but there's something to be said for sucking on a new lollipop once in a while.
I haven't even gotten around to discussing contrapuntal cycles by Kapustin, Shchedrin, Shostakovich or Henry Martin yet ... that's stuff I want to get to. You may be getting the idea here that what a blog has the luxury of providing is extended arts criticism that does not have to worry about a fiscal bottom line. Newspapers may have less and less ability to provide that platform for arts criticism.
It might be a good thing if arts critics have to have other jobs with newspapers. In the last few years of trying to catch up on arts criticism and the arts scene I've sometimes been discouraged and a little depressed at the solipsistic tendencies in arts criticism. The idea that someone like A. O. Scott can make any defense of the art of criticism by saying in any way that it's "the art of the voice" seems ridiculous. If I've never had confidence that art for the sake of art was ultimately a compelling life-long reason to make art that seems even more true about criticism for the sake of criticism if by criticism we mean the literary art form. The problem with the art of the voice is that you have to be willing to say something. Hentoff, it hardly needs to be repeated, was willing to say something.
One of the more memorable reviews of Scott Timberg's book Culture Crash was at Arts Fuse, where the author dryly observed that it could seem as though Timberg only thought the seismic economic changes that slammed the working classes across the United States over the last thirty some years were a big deal when he lost his job as an arts critic.
But then it seems the older I get the more I get the impression that writers in the United States by and large don't want to talk about the infinitesimally small odds that you or I can "make it" as a writer; it was illuminating to read that Sor had a desk job in the military while he was alive and doing his guitar composing thing. It was interesting to read that Wenzel Matiegka was a clerk in a law office for a while. To the extent that arts histories and arts coverage discuss the "what" of the finished products and not the possibility that very, very few of these people paid all their bills (or maybe any in some cases) doing what we remember them for ... it'd be nice if I could feel it was terrible that arts coverage has been declining in the last fifteen odd years. But for some reason I'm just not feeling that heartbroken about it this week. The art of criticism can withstand all this and the role of the vocational critic in the arts may e precarious as the role of the vocational artist. It doesn't seem those institutional jobs or that institutional clout is coming back any time soon ... if ever ... so what alternatives may emerge? Sometimes it seems the blog will have to do. It's only a small part but it can still be something.
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/01/totd-nat-hentoff-obituary/512567/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/nyregion/nat-hentoff-dead.html?_r=0
So thematically it would seem that we're witnessing the death of the era of arts critics in mainstream and local newspapers. Thus ...
http://www.cjr.org/the_feature/arts_music_critics.php
...
Blogs and niche arts websites thrive (if not economically, certainly in terms of traffic). But they can do great work, gather thousands of readers and still not plug the hole newspapers have left by pulling arts pages. Niche sites cater to niche audiences. They ghettoize content and normalize the notion that a story about a tremendous new rock act doesn’t belong between a report about a corrupt city council member and a recap of a Cleveland Cavaliers game.
...
“Newspapers are where most investigative journalism originates from, so it’s scary,” music publicist Jim Flammia of All Eyes Media says. “But it’s also scary for me professionally because I need places for our artists to get covered. My artists make their money on the road, so regional coverage is more important than national coverage, and that regional coverage comes from newspapers.”
There's a strange and not necessarily delicious irony reading this kind of stuff. The irony is that when I started blogging back in 2006 what I was aiming to do was write about chamber music; classical guitar involving musical traditions that were not the usual suspects of Spain and Spanish-speaking traditions (I'm fond of stuff more from central/eastern Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, though I'm a stereotypical guitarist in that I do admire Sor and Villa-Lobos); animation and other things.
It was only when local and regional media, to say nothing of national press institutions, seemed to be systematically failing to cover what I thought needed covering about the history of Mars Hill that this blog took what was arguably the largest half-decade detour a would-be arts blog could take. The blog came to be so utterly defined by investigative journalistic blogging about Mars Hill that when I saw a friend from the Mars Hill days a few months ago he asked if the blog was retired.
Nope, it's finally getting back to arts stuff.
But the ghettoizing effect of blogs is not merely a function of writing, it can be a function of the reading tendencies readers bring to their web experience. Traffic to the blog is a tenth what it once was, which is fine. The number of people who read the extensive series of posts late in 2016 I did on recapitulatory tendencies in early 19th century guitar sonatas is a mere fraction of the people who read about that memo proposing Driscoll get a raise. There are times when investigative journalism is more important than arts coverage. Ideally we can have investigative journalism and arts coverage.
But back when I was a student journalist I realized that a lot of what constitutes even the best arts coverage is still, in the end, advertising copy in a lot of ways. Take any article in The New Yorker about this or that book or author that allegedly "predicted" Trump and what have you got? A book of the month style advertisement for a book that the staff of The New Yorker imagine you either haven't bought/read yet or that you should read again. Now there's a great deal of value in arts criticism precisely when you don't intend to watch or read any of the stuff being discussed. That's not to say you want to be like Tom from Metropolitan, reading criticism rather than the books themselves as though you've read both. :)
So in a way this blog is a reflection of my intermittent feelings and thoughts that we could have more academic discussions of guitar literature. Those discussions are out there, to be sure, but they're not always easy to find.
And what we're really lamenting when we lament a decline in critics is institutional endorsement. The problem with a blog is that no matter how prestigious the author or content of a blog, it's not usually an example of the institutional press.
It's hard to forget that in the last six or seven years what ultimately shook the foundations of Driscoll's empire here in Puget Sound was not exactly mainstream press coverage, at least not by itself. Negative press coverage played a role but by no stretch of the imagination did Warren Cole Smith count as a liberal/secular journalist. Neither could that be said of Janet Mefferd. Driscoll's empire crumbled because of intra-evangelical, intra-Reformed critique. Had things been left up to the left (religious or otherwise) Driscoll's brand might be even more powerful now than it was in 2012. It may well be that a variety of the alliances of convenience through which different people who had criticisms of Mark Driscoll have withered away. That's probably as it should be.
An arts writer can make the difference between me reading a newspaper and not. I basically stopped reading The Stranger for the most part after Chris DeLaurenti stopped writing for them ... unless something unusually pertinent showed up in the paper's pages.
But my feelings about arts criticism and arts critics are profoundly mixed. I wrote a haiku a while back ...
every arts critic
must consecrate consumption
to live with their craft
isn't exactly an upbeat message. Given the failures of the Fourth Estate to anticipate the recent Electoral College decision (never mind the small lake of post-mortems) the press may need to ask itself whether or not we're going to miss the freedom of the press in a post-Hentoff media or not.
To put it another way, from where I've been blogging in the last ten-ish years, arts critics can have a comparable well of self-aggrandizing self-pity that north American Christian intellectuals can sometimes have. We've got folks who are sad about their declining influence in society while we don't always seem to have the most airtight case as to how much influence we had to begin with.
Some of my most persistent critical interests (i.e. what I've written criticism about) have been on subjects that I have rarely seen mainstream arts critics even bother with. Yeah, yeah, maybe Richard Brody will vent about childrens' movies and cartoons for kids being all moralistic. So what? How much mainstream coverage is there of animation as an art form? Not a ton, except in the comics scene, perhaps. We'll get coverage of stuff considered "grown up" enough to count, so we'll get stuff about The Simpsons, South Park, or Family Guy, or Archer, or maybe sometimes The Venture Bros. The pending Ghost in the Shell remake makes "some" headlines. Ghibli makes some news for people already dialed in.
But arts criticism tends to ignore animation as a medium because of stereotyped associations with kid stuff. One of my pet projects has been to occasionally write about cartoons and take them as seriously as I would novels by Dostoevsky or Camus or poetry by Levertov or Eliot or Stevens. Part of the fun of criticism as a discipline and an art form is that you can write about the stuff that interests you. I would propose that if you want to get a clear sense of where a society is at look into the stories a people considers safe enough to share with children. What ideological and metaphysical perspectives are endorsed in kid tales? If I were to take Batman stories more seriously than stories by Hemmingway that could be a reason why. Arts criticism can travel about in the things people want to watch and discuss and not just the stuff academics have decreed we have to discuss in order to graduate from high school. When the director Satoshi Kon died it was hardly news over here but it was sad news for me. More people noted the death of George Michael than Roland Dyens, I suspect ... .
and so then there's music, and if there's a topic that could be said to interest only academic sorts, the evolution of sonata forms in solo guitar literature would be such a topic.
All of this is stuff you can write about as much as you want at a blog. You could do it for a local newspaper but ... really ... could you? I can hardly think of more than maybe five articles (all reviews) discussing any of the music of Ferdinand Rebay. Now, sure, maybe his music isn't your bag and that's fine. What the role of arts criticism can play is in catalyzing conversations and debates. I'd like Rebay's guitar sonatas to get quite a bit more exposure because even though I actually do admire Ponce's guitar sonatas they're in danger of being overplayed lollipops, to borrow some phrases Matanya Ophee has used. Now perhaps Rebay's sonatas are lollipops but there's something to be said for sucking on a new lollipop once in a while.
I haven't even gotten around to discussing contrapuntal cycles by Kapustin, Shchedrin, Shostakovich or Henry Martin yet ... that's stuff I want to get to. You may be getting the idea here that what a blog has the luxury of providing is extended arts criticism that does not have to worry about a fiscal bottom line. Newspapers may have less and less ability to provide that platform for arts criticism.
It might be a good thing if arts critics have to have other jobs with newspapers. In the last few years of trying to catch up on arts criticism and the arts scene I've sometimes been discouraged and a little depressed at the solipsistic tendencies in arts criticism. The idea that someone like A. O. Scott can make any defense of the art of criticism by saying in any way that it's "the art of the voice" seems ridiculous. If I've never had confidence that art for the sake of art was ultimately a compelling life-long reason to make art that seems even more true about criticism for the sake of criticism if by criticism we mean the literary art form. The problem with the art of the voice is that you have to be willing to say something. Hentoff, it hardly needs to be repeated, was willing to say something.
One of the more memorable reviews of Scott Timberg's book Culture Crash was at Arts Fuse, where the author dryly observed that it could seem as though Timberg only thought the seismic economic changes that slammed the working classes across the United States over the last thirty some years were a big deal when he lost his job as an arts critic.
But then it seems the older I get the more I get the impression that writers in the United States by and large don't want to talk about the infinitesimally small odds that you or I can "make it" as a writer; it was illuminating to read that Sor had a desk job in the military while he was alive and doing his guitar composing thing. It was interesting to read that Wenzel Matiegka was a clerk in a law office for a while. To the extent that arts histories and arts coverage discuss the "what" of the finished products and not the possibility that very, very few of these people paid all their bills (or maybe any in some cases) doing what we remember them for ... it'd be nice if I could feel it was terrible that arts coverage has been declining in the last fifteen odd years. But for some reason I'm just not feeling that heartbroken about it this week. The art of criticism can withstand all this and the role of the vocational critic in the arts may e precarious as the role of the vocational artist. It doesn't seem those institutional jobs or that institutional clout is coming back any time soon ... if ever ... so what alternatives may emerge? Sometimes it seems the blog will have to do. It's only a small part but it can still be something.
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