The article photo with the Jeff Koons culture is practically a self-implicating statement all on its own but ... an author asks the question of how the art world (presumably defined in the most vastly inclusive sense possible) can ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/02/06/how-can-the-art-world-resist-trump-probably-not-very-well/?utm_term=.90bbc362fd7a
...
Those in the American arts are in a difficult position at the dawn of Trump time: damned if they damn him, damned if they don’t. Lamenting the president in public, they face eye-rolling and charges of self-importance; avoid taking a stand, and they risk vitriol, too. But are artists even capable of political influence nowadays?
Right-wing commentators have spent years sniping at liberals in the arts, with notable success. A generation ago, “politicized artist” might have conjured, say, the Soviet dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Today, “politicized artist” is as likely to evoke a whiny, entitled, bobble-headed creative.
The irrelevance of art owes partly to the ascendant populist mood, and partly to protest art being so reliably liberal, so soothingly safe. Artists may claim they’re nailing “redneck racists,” but how many of those attended the gallery opening? Politics in the arts often looks more like group bonding than anything that might effect change.
Not that artists aren’t trying. Efforts to avoid a Trump presidency ranged from slapping down cash to sketching in bodily fluid. Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, Ed Ruscha and Chuck Close are among those who made contributions to try to help elect Hillary Clinton. One young artist drew an imagined nude of Trump with a notably small penis; another portrayed Trump in the medium of her own menstrual blood.
Somehow, none of this — no degree of scorn, no foe — could stop The Donald.
...
How would any of that have stopped Trump from being elected by the Electoral College? Contributing to a political cause, sure, and voting, but the thing about districting seems to have made it clear that as the red and blue districts sorted into what they were and districting happened that, as some liberal/left folks have been lamenting for months now, a bunch of rural red districts ensured Trump won the Electoral College. The "Hamilton" moment for the electoral vote had Clinton losing pledged votes. And amidst all that what do artists think they can do?
Something like not doing something like this? It may be a strange testament to the irrelevance of some types of modern art that I'd never before heard of this person until this year.
Rachman name-dropped Solzhenitsyn as the point of contrast between an artist or author as dissident and what we have today. Sure, but Shostakovich's status as a dissident is, to put it politely, hotly contested and yet the music he wrote is still pretty popular. Perhaps too few artists and writers in the West are capable of grasping that artists and writers who live in totalitarian regimes have to live with the impossibility of some kinds of freedoms.
But at another level, if the National Endowment for the Arts actually gets gutted the art world will get a chance to find out how it gets by in the age of Trump.
But if the art world consists of people like Jeff Koons who says it needs to survive? Wouldn't this be the perfect moment for people to make art for the sake of art and make it at a constant monetary loss as an offering made to the beautiful? Or is that too ... religious a motivation for making art? Kind of back to Solzhenitsyn a bit there, whose Russian Orthodoxy has had its detractors but even a new atheist like Christopher Hitchens could appreciate that if that gave Solzhenitsyn the courage to dissent when and how he did we should be grateful for that.
This WaPo piece is a reminder that when the old left and old right complain about the self-congratulatory vices of social justice warriors or academics or entertainers that, well, it's not really funny because it's like shooting fish in a barrel. The writers and artists seem eager to volunteer for the public record that their entertaining the mere possibility that art could somehow defy a regime is the same as having an alternative.
I admit I've tended to be moderately conservative on both religion and politics my whole life and I figured the DNC had ensured Clinton would get the nom so there was no point in either voting against Clinton in a blue state on the one hand by voting for a conservative candidate or for voting for any Democratic contender that wasn't Clinton (i.e. Sanders). Sanders fans seemed to be angry radicals not entirely unlike the angry reactionaries who seemed to be drawn to Trump, though perhaps it'd be good to say it's not necessarily Sanders' fault. Still, Sanders' approach seemed to fit broadly into a social democrat/New Deal reborn view. We did that in the 1930s and if you're going to run blue you might as well go for it. Clinton's compromises were more numerous and serious than her fan base has wanted to concede and if it came down to who was more willing to vote for X just to spite Y, well, we saw how that played out. In a way both candidates were running campaigns of self-congratulatory entitlement but one of them managed, in the eyes and ears of the press, to seem dignified about it. Unfortunately dignity can be appearance. It was hard to shake the impression that if these two candidates were what the two party system was going to give us we're screwed. Maybe we should be.
The entertainment and arts scene has become a kind of default priesthood in Western cultures. It's been a long time taking shape and the failure of the arts to reconstitute themselves as a kind of post-Christian civic religion in the West has inspired legions of books spanning the spectrum left and right, religious and irreligious. For any artist to ask what artists can do in the age of Trump besides voting for causes you believe in and seeking to inform the public is lunacy. You either have to admit your art has to serve the purpose of propaganda (because its' not just propaganda only when someone else makes art for a team you dislike). or you have to settle for the possibility that your art won't matter as political speech. So per the WaPo article and picture ... if Jeff Koons can't identify his whole career and work as part of the problem he's not going to be part of a solution. What may be most galling for the arts/entertainment world in the election of Trump is that, reality TV star though he's been, he's still very much one of them, just not the highbrow respectable sort.
It might almost go without saying that if an artist is making stuff that gets coverage from WaPo or The New Yorker it's probably not having an impact. I know it seems a little too jaded but there's a point at which you have to concede that maybe arts coverage is still advertising by another name. Certainly marketing types get this, and even performers and writers can grasp that the business is business. That being the case, how far can you go in repudiating someone you believe is in it for their own advantage and renown if you are trying to do the same?
Now I can certainly say that writing the truth as best you can document can and does change things but not overnight, not in any usually observable ways, and only when literally thousands of people take what is reported and make decisions that can't be controlled for. In no ay did this blog "take out" Mars Hill, and that wasn't even the goal. There wasn't even a goal, beyond documenting things so they could be considered for public record. Properly understanding the power of artistic communication can depend on understanding just how profound its limitations are. It also helps if you understand that even the most solitary act of artistic creation is simultaneously a social act.
But then I recall reading an interview with Denzel Washington about his early politically engaged films and he said something about how he was proud of the work he did on those movies and of the movies overall but that he had to realize that not very many people went and actually watched those movies. Washington may have reached a point where he realized that if he was trying to use his role as an entertainer to be a prophet or priest in the hopes of getting a message out that he wasn't just "preaching to the choir" that choir was himself and he concluded he had to make his politics his politics and his work his work.
Recognizing that there are real limits to your influence doesn't have to be discouraging. Knowing how little influence you really have in this giant world could give you a clearer appreciation of what it is you can do within the sphere of influence you do have.
POSTSCRIPT
As to what I'd personally say an artist can do, I wrote a guest piece for Internet Monk back in 2012.
There Is neither Art nor Pop, neither Indie or Mainstream…
a little reflection on passages from Galatians and Colossians, and how if Christ has reconciled all things to Himself; if in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female; then in music we should not think that people from every tribe and tongue can find salvation in Christ but their musical expressions are not included.
Thursday, February 09, 2017
via Rod Dreher, one of his commenters describes the social justice warrior as a result of neo-liberalism
Now it seems a bit of an over-statement to describe all social justice warriors as
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/dont-dismiss-sjws/
...
SJWism is the logical result of neoliberalism. As such, they will reinforce the globalist, imperialist Empire. The power of the meritocratic society gives our untitled aristocrats a belief in the rightness of their rule through the power of the resume and college credentialing. It’s kind of like being Born Again, except there’s not even the ghost of a belief in Sin to keep them in check. And there’s nothing like Confession, except making a list of grievances.
There’s a reason they’ve attached themselves to identity politics and gender ideology as opposed to climate change. They can jet to Southeast Asia for a semester, volunteer in South America for a year, travel to Turkey twice a year, and never think twice about their carbon footprint. They dine out more than any generation ever has, but they vote the right away and never think about warehouses or trucking lines. One fights climate change through the government, not through one’s personal choices.
Put that way it might seem that the social justice warrior as an iteration of neoliberalism combines the worst aspects of a liberal nanny state thought police officer (often self-appointed at an informal level but able to hold roles of institutional power) with the most libertine elements of libertarian ideas. Or as the satirical website Stuff White People Like said about "hating your parents", the white parent is screwed either way because if they provide firm boundaries they get labeled as controlling and abusive and if they don't provide boundaries and the kid ends up in a Thai prison the parents are to blame for not establishing safe boundaries. Or something vaguely like that. One of my conservative friends lamented that it would appear that 16 year olds should be able to have as much sex as they want with access to birth control options across the entire spectrum because "we" can't stop them from being mature enough to handle their own sexuality ... and then ten years later they want complete forgiveness of their student debt? The disconnect is in the power to bring new life into the world through sexual reproduction on the one hand and the ability to fiscally manage merely one's own life on the other. If you can't pay your own bills how do you pay the bills for the person you could bring into the world?
Neither the let nor the right seem worth anything there. The social conservative seems aghast that people are post-poning the debt-incurring processes of starting families and raising kids on the one hand but the beef seems to be the benchmarks of socially recognized adulthood as formalities. If people on the left seem to view sex as liberation they sem to view actual family life as some kind of invisible hell/gulag that follows you everywhere you go unless the state steps in. It sometimes feels as if the left and the right are both really just totalitarian ideologues whose only debate is about what kidn of police state they want. If there's a mainstream comedic show that gets anywhere near this point it might be South Park.
Still, one of the problems I keep seeing with how the left and the right write about each other is it hardly seems as though there have been coherent alliances on either the left or the right. If anything ... we'll get to that later. There's this from the commenter quoted at Dreher's post:
...
It almost makes you long for an aristocracy where the power was an accident of birth, where there were reciprocal obligations. Interesting that the gap between the rich and the poor has never been greater than in the global meritocracy. They believe they actually have earned the right to tell the lower middle class why they were replaceable, or the poor why they should be grateful to be forced to stay in their failing schools. I, too, fear where this will lead.
Not really! The aristocratic castes of yore didn't feel a whole lot of obligations to be nice to people they didn't consider worthy of niceties. What was different back then was that the aristocracies may have had established religions within which they could get arguments from theologians about how far afield of the professed ethics of the religion of the realm they were ruling. Now that's possible now, and if anyone were going to be in a position to make that kind of constraining case it would, on paper, be social justice warriors. But the problem may be that the paragons of privilege are the social justice warriors who have, at times, acclimated themselves to only seeing the privilege of other people
When the different ruling castes have an ideology or religion in common there's room to "speak truth to power" from somewhere close enough to the seats of power to get a message across. One of the more famous examples of this in the Old Testament would be Nathan and David, for instance. More often than not the speaking-truth-to-power not only falls on unreceptive ears the prophet could ... often get killed or exiled.
Neoliberalism presents a slightly different possible case. You can hardly exercise a prophetic voice speaking to the powers that be when the powers that be ultimately regard themselves as above reproach both in the abstract and in actual practice. King could write a letter from a Birmingham jail appealing to a common faith. What do we have? In a sense what the social justice warriors are doomed to fail for is the lack of an ideological rationale for the kind of plurality they want. If in the last decades we've had "the end of history" or talk of the problems of teleological views of history then you can't even appeal to being on the right side of history anymore. You can't because all histories are power claims and once all histories are power claims truth is a matter of whose power claims should be granted for grounds that may or may not correspond to what may be traditionally described as facts. So as odious as alternative facts may really be it's a little tough to get worked up about that in a post-structuralist neoliberal order.
The last couple of years have highlighted a breakdown between the old right and new right and the old left and the new left. While the new left, which seemed to back Clinton avidly, seems devastated at Trump's victory, people with more old/hard left inclinations seem dismayed but not the least bit surprised.
There was a commenter at Dreher's blog noting that the right and left fringes can start to sound really similar. Which reminded me of something John Halle blogged about the self-rewarding nature of this era's cognitive elites.
http://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/pierre-bourdieu-on-racism-of-the-intellect/
(Translation of Bourdieu’s 1983 Racisme de l’intelligence republished here.)
It is necessary to understand that there is no such thing as racism. Rather there are racisms-as many racisms as there are groups which need to justify their status, which is the usual function of racism. It seems to me therefore very important to apply the same analysis to forms of racism which are undoubtedly the most subtle, the most elusive and therefore the most rarely denounced, possible because usually those making the denunciations are themselves inclined to this form of racism. I’m referring to the racism of the intellect.
If we could translate that into a possible interpretation of the last ten or so years we could try this, college students who have the privilege of attending liberal arts colleges and get humanities degrees or go into social sciences can't exempt themselves from being bourgeouis class enemies in more traditionally Marxist dialectics of history just because they can quote Derrida or Walter Benjamin. In the wake of Trump's election pretending that that was all about anti-intellectual loathing is too easy a way for academics to let themselves off the hook.
But ... in spite of the fact that a great deal of higher education quite literally is the government ... it seems that education is in peril.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/
Not since the era of witch hunts and “red baiting” has the American university faced so great a threat from government. How is the university to function when a president’s administration blurs the distinction between fact and fiction by asserting the existence of “alternative facts”? How can the university turn a blind eye to what every historian knows to be a key instrument of modern authoritarian regimes: the capacity to dress falsehood up as truth and reject the fruits of reasoned argument, evidence and rigorous verification?
The atmosphere of suspicion and insecurity created by the undermining of truth provides the perfect environment for President Trump’s recent actions on immigration. The American university’s future, indeed its most fundamental reason for being, is imperiled by a government that constructs walls on the Mexican border, restricts Muslim immigrants and denigrates the idea of America as a destination for refugees.
One of my black friends startled me last year by saying he voted for Trump. He really likes Trump. But, more than that, he also really distrusts Clinton and he said that people who simply assume the Democratic machinery leaders actually have the best interests of black people in mind don't know how the Democratic party has had no problem screwing over black communities when it suited their goals. He also told me that if Sanders rather than Clinton had gotten the nomination Sanders probably could have won. At least he was clearly against high finance big banking sectors.
Unfortunately the level and nature of the scapegoating by people on the left and right for the electoral demographics on the opposite teams suggests that neither the left nor the right will get past their historically cultivated grievances to agree on stuff. That might change, and we can certainly hope for that, and people can suggest ways in which working together for the public good can happen. But it can seem as though the people least likely to have help to offer would be the Clinton supporters who deluded themselves into thinking that the Clintonian legacy, cumulatively, was anything but a raw deal for working class types.
While a joke could be made that the old left and old right seem to agree on stuff and that seems crazy (and it is if that thing were anti-Semitism) the agreement that the social justice warrior set are basking in a privilege they are hyper-tuned to spot in others but never examine in themselves doesn't seem crazy at all.
[INTERRUPTING POSTSCRIPT]
The Stranger's reaction to Trump's victory was what I would have expected (imagine so many iterations of a short word that starts with "f" that it'd be pointless to replicate the title), but the irony of The Stranger editorial staff lament in light of their explicit "rural Americans aren't real Americans and don't matter" in The Urban Archipeligo is hard to forget. It's easy to look with contempt on rural redneck voters for being racist ignorant rubes and some of them, no doubt, are. But it's often felt like the people who are in positions to feel this way don't have the honesty or nerve to admit to themselves they are part of a ruling class. Some of them, however, are, and not just old school conservative elitists of the Roger Scruton type, either. We all expect that of Scruton, don't we because he's been saying so for decades, right? ;)
[and back to the rest of the first draft]
When cases for epistocracy are explicitly discussed in mainstream outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker this might not really be a sign of neoliberalism as such, because the paradoxical possibility here is that many a social justice warrior can get angry about the long-term influence of neo-liberalism, it might be a sign that the academic ruling castes are getting closer and closer to the point where they just admit they think they have the right to rule world by dint of their wisdom. That would get us back to medieval scholastic clerics reaching a somewhat similar conclusion but back in medieval Europe there was room for a Protestant Reformation to happen by challenging established institutional interpretations. The kind of scholastic orthodoxy American intellectual life may eventually settle on may never provide such a countervailing possibility. It's not just that, as the left would have it, capitalism can assimilate dissent.
It can, but academic life has millennia of history to demonstrate that it can exonerate itself from complicity with whatever the reigning repressive regime is in play. The ideological justifications for aristocratic castes can change but the end result seems to be that the aristocrats of our ages always agree that they deserve to run our lives because of good reasons. The trouble with the social justice warriors may not be that they notice their demographic is under-represented in the ruling castes but that they don't yet get that the ruling castes won't be different just because they see someone who reminds them of themselves in a power position. Or as Pete Townsend put it in a song, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/dont-dismiss-sjws/
...
SJWism is the logical result of neoliberalism. As such, they will reinforce the globalist, imperialist Empire. The power of the meritocratic society gives our untitled aristocrats a belief in the rightness of their rule through the power of the resume and college credentialing. It’s kind of like being Born Again, except there’s not even the ghost of a belief in Sin to keep them in check. And there’s nothing like Confession, except making a list of grievances.
There’s a reason they’ve attached themselves to identity politics and gender ideology as opposed to climate change. They can jet to Southeast Asia for a semester, volunteer in South America for a year, travel to Turkey twice a year, and never think twice about their carbon footprint. They dine out more than any generation ever has, but they vote the right away and never think about warehouses or trucking lines. One fights climate change through the government, not through one’s personal choices.
Put that way it might seem that the social justice warrior as an iteration of neoliberalism combines the worst aspects of a liberal nanny state thought police officer (often self-appointed at an informal level but able to hold roles of institutional power) with the most libertine elements of libertarian ideas. Or as the satirical website Stuff White People Like said about "hating your parents", the white parent is screwed either way because if they provide firm boundaries they get labeled as controlling and abusive and if they don't provide boundaries and the kid ends up in a Thai prison the parents are to blame for not establishing safe boundaries. Or something vaguely like that. One of my conservative friends lamented that it would appear that 16 year olds should be able to have as much sex as they want with access to birth control options across the entire spectrum because "we" can't stop them from being mature enough to handle their own sexuality ... and then ten years later they want complete forgiveness of their student debt? The disconnect is in the power to bring new life into the world through sexual reproduction on the one hand and the ability to fiscally manage merely one's own life on the other. If you can't pay your own bills how do you pay the bills for the person you could bring into the world?
Neither the let nor the right seem worth anything there. The social conservative seems aghast that people are post-poning the debt-incurring processes of starting families and raising kids on the one hand but the beef seems to be the benchmarks of socially recognized adulthood as formalities. If people on the left seem to view sex as liberation they sem to view actual family life as some kind of invisible hell/gulag that follows you everywhere you go unless the state steps in. It sometimes feels as if the left and the right are both really just totalitarian ideologues whose only debate is about what kidn of police state they want. If there's a mainstream comedic show that gets anywhere near this point it might be South Park.
Still, one of the problems I keep seeing with how the left and the right write about each other is it hardly seems as though there have been coherent alliances on either the left or the right. If anything ... we'll get to that later. There's this from the commenter quoted at Dreher's post:
...
It almost makes you long for an aristocracy where the power was an accident of birth, where there were reciprocal obligations. Interesting that the gap between the rich and the poor has never been greater than in the global meritocracy. They believe they actually have earned the right to tell the lower middle class why they were replaceable, or the poor why they should be grateful to be forced to stay in their failing schools. I, too, fear where this will lead.
Not really! The aristocratic castes of yore didn't feel a whole lot of obligations to be nice to people they didn't consider worthy of niceties. What was different back then was that the aristocracies may have had established religions within which they could get arguments from theologians about how far afield of the professed ethics of the religion of the realm they were ruling. Now that's possible now, and if anyone were going to be in a position to make that kind of constraining case it would, on paper, be social justice warriors. But the problem may be that the paragons of privilege are the social justice warriors who have, at times, acclimated themselves to only seeing the privilege of other people
When the different ruling castes have an ideology or religion in common there's room to "speak truth to power" from somewhere close enough to the seats of power to get a message across. One of the more famous examples of this in the Old Testament would be Nathan and David, for instance. More often than not the speaking-truth-to-power not only falls on unreceptive ears the prophet could ... often get killed or exiled.
Neoliberalism presents a slightly different possible case. You can hardly exercise a prophetic voice speaking to the powers that be when the powers that be ultimately regard themselves as above reproach both in the abstract and in actual practice. King could write a letter from a Birmingham jail appealing to a common faith. What do we have? In a sense what the social justice warriors are doomed to fail for is the lack of an ideological rationale for the kind of plurality they want. If in the last decades we've had "the end of history" or talk of the problems of teleological views of history then you can't even appeal to being on the right side of history anymore. You can't because all histories are power claims and once all histories are power claims truth is a matter of whose power claims should be granted for grounds that may or may not correspond to what may be traditionally described as facts. So as odious as alternative facts may really be it's a little tough to get worked up about that in a post-structuralist neoliberal order.
The last couple of years have highlighted a breakdown between the old right and new right and the old left and the new left. While the new left, which seemed to back Clinton avidly, seems devastated at Trump's victory, people with more old/hard left inclinations seem dismayed but not the least bit surprised.
There was a commenter at Dreher's blog noting that the right and left fringes can start to sound really similar. Which reminded me of something John Halle blogged about the self-rewarding nature of this era's cognitive elites.
http://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/pierre-bourdieu-on-racism-of-the-intellect/
(Translation of Bourdieu’s 1983 Racisme de l’intelligence republished here.)
It is necessary to understand that there is no such thing as racism. Rather there are racisms-as many racisms as there are groups which need to justify their status, which is the usual function of racism. It seems to me therefore very important to apply the same analysis to forms of racism which are undoubtedly the most subtle, the most elusive and therefore the most rarely denounced, possible because usually those making the denunciations are themselves inclined to this form of racism. I’m referring to the racism of the intellect.
Racism of the intellect among the dominant classes is distinguished in several ways from that which one typically designates as racism, namely, the petit bourgeois form which is the target of most critiques, most notably beginning with that of Sartre.
This form of racism is characteristic of a dominant class whose maintenance depends to some extent on the transmission of inherited cultural capital understood as inherent and therefore natural and innate. Racism of intelligence is that through which elites aim to produce a “theodicy (rationalization) of their own privilege”, as Weber characterizes it, which is to say a justification of the social order which they dominate. It is this which makes elites convinced of their own inherent superiority.
All forms of racism are based on essentialism and racism of the intellect is the rationalization of the social order characteristic of the elite class whose power resides in the possession of credentials which, as do scholarly credentials, are supposed to confer the possession of specialized knowledge. These have taken the place of aristocratic titles of previous epochs in many societies-and confer access to positions of economic power-in the same way that the latter did.
This form of racism is characteristic of a dominant class whose maintenance depends to some extent on the transmission of inherited cultural capital understood as inherent and therefore natural and innate. Racism of intelligence is that through which elites aim to produce a “theodicy (rationalization) of their own privilege”, as Weber characterizes it, which is to say a justification of the social order which they dominate. It is this which makes elites convinced of their own inherent superiority.
All forms of racism are based on essentialism and racism of the intellect is the rationalization of the social order characteristic of the elite class whose power resides in the possession of credentials which, as do scholarly credentials, are supposed to confer the possession of specialized knowledge. These have taken the place of aristocratic titles of previous epochs in many societies-and confer access to positions of economic power-in the same way that the latter did.
If we could translate that into a possible interpretation of the last ten or so years we could try this, college students who have the privilege of attending liberal arts colleges and get humanities degrees or go into social sciences can't exempt themselves from being bourgeouis class enemies in more traditionally Marxist dialectics of history just because they can quote Derrida or Walter Benjamin. In the wake of Trump's election pretending that that was all about anti-intellectual loathing is too easy a way for academics to let themselves off the hook.
But ... in spite of the fact that a great deal of higher education quite literally is the government ... it seems that education is in peril.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/
Not since the era of witch hunts and “red baiting” has the American university faced so great a threat from government. How is the university to function when a president’s administration blurs the distinction between fact and fiction by asserting the existence of “alternative facts”? How can the university turn a blind eye to what every historian knows to be a key instrument of modern authoritarian regimes: the capacity to dress falsehood up as truth and reject the fruits of reasoned argument, evidence and rigorous verification?
The atmosphere of suspicion and insecurity created by the undermining of truth provides the perfect environment for President Trump’s recent actions on immigration. The American university’s future, indeed its most fundamental reason for being, is imperiled by a government that constructs walls on the Mexican border, restricts Muslim immigrants and denigrates the idea of America as a destination for refugees.
Again, to the extent that American universities are extensions of the state (Ellul went so far as to describe all state-funded and state-administered education as, by definition, some form of pre-propaganda), the education sector living in fear of government is one extension of government fearing another level of government. That the educational ruling castes fear what the executive and legislative branches may do is understandable but it can blind people in those ruling castes from their actually being in one of the ruling castes of the United States. If anything the realm of narratives predicated on alternative facts that are themselves predicated on identitarian political narratives might be one of the weirder self-fulfilling prophecies of American academics in the course of the last twenty years.
I get the part where it's frustrating to have German idealist philosophers cripple the terms of discourse in a range of subjects. I get that part. I think Adorno was wrong about jazz but then MOST Americans who know what jazz is and know what Adorno said about jazz probably think he was wrong about it.
I admit I've kept coming back to this idea that neither the left nor right have been coherent teams in the last few years but perhaps something from The Baffler can elucidate why, even within what might be dubbed the liberal/left spectrum there were people who regarded Clinton as worse than just boring and compromised.
...
How, exactly, had this carefully choreographed moment of executive feminist triumph come so disastrously undone, after so much concerted mobilization of Democratic clout and expert planning and largesse over the past two years? To get to the bottom of this catastrophe, we must begin with the many elite-engineered catastrophes that have gone into Hillary Clinton’s storied résumé.
How, exactly, had this carefully choreographed moment of executive feminist triumph come so disastrously undone, after so much concerted mobilization of Democratic clout and expert planning and largesse over the past two years? To get to the bottom of this catastrophe, we must begin with the many elite-engineered catastrophes that have gone into Hillary Clinton’s storied résumé.
And this requires some careful acts of historical reconstruction, since there is so much Hillary Clinton wanted us to forget. There was her role in helping to bring about the “end of welfare as we know it,” and the disastrous effects of that policy reversal on the lives of the poor. There was the 1994 Crime Bill, which she promoted from the bully pulpit of her historic mid-nineties “co-presidency,” and which coincided with an equally historic rise in mass incarceration—together with that now-infamous clip of her maligning black youth as “superpredators.” There was that ridiculous lie about sniper fire in Bosnia. And there were, of course, the entirely uncontrollable stories about her husband’s multiple dalliances.
After all of that it could seem as though when the shoe was on the other foot red state voters could decide that if personal character's really not relevant to holding high office then, well, okay then! This is another point at which the old/hard left may have had a clearer understanding of what the new left/pro-Clinton scene really gave up in terms of being able to assert some kind of clear moral high ground. Even the uglier tales of what Trump's said to have done still seem to veer into the zones of things done by a Kennedy or a Polanski that people have been willing to overlook.
After all of that it could seem as though when the shoe was on the other foot red state voters could decide that if personal character's really not relevant to holding high office then, well, okay then! This is another point at which the old/hard left may have had a clearer understanding of what the new left/pro-Clinton scene really gave up in terms of being able to assert some kind of clear moral high ground. Even the uglier tales of what Trump's said to have done still seem to veer into the zones of things done by a Kennedy or a Polanski that people have been willing to overlook.
One of my black friends startled me last year by saying he voted for Trump. He really likes Trump. But, more than that, he also really distrusts Clinton and he said that people who simply assume the Democratic machinery leaders actually have the best interests of black people in mind don't know how the Democratic party has had no problem screwing over black communities when it suited their goals. He also told me that if Sanders rather than Clinton had gotten the nomination Sanders probably could have won. At least he was clearly against high finance big banking sectors.
Unfortunately the level and nature of the scapegoating by people on the left and right for the electoral demographics on the opposite teams suggests that neither the left nor the right will get past their historically cultivated grievances to agree on stuff. That might change, and we can certainly hope for that, and people can suggest ways in which working together for the public good can happen. But it can seem as though the people least likely to have help to offer would be the Clinton supporters who deluded themselves into thinking that the Clintonian legacy, cumulatively, was anything but a raw deal for working class types.
While a joke could be made that the old left and old right seem to agree on stuff and that seems crazy (and it is if that thing were anti-Semitism) the agreement that the social justice warrior set are basking in a privilege they are hyper-tuned to spot in others but never examine in themselves doesn't seem crazy at all.
[INTERRUPTING POSTSCRIPT]
The Stranger's reaction to Trump's victory was what I would have expected (imagine so many iterations of a short word that starts with "f" that it'd be pointless to replicate the title), but the irony of The Stranger editorial staff lament in light of their explicit "rural Americans aren't real Americans and don't matter" in The Urban Archipeligo is hard to forget. It's easy to look with contempt on rural redneck voters for being racist ignorant rubes and some of them, no doubt, are. But it's often felt like the people who are in positions to feel this way don't have the honesty or nerve to admit to themselves they are part of a ruling class. Some of them, however, are, and not just old school conservative elitists of the Roger Scruton type, either. We all expect that of Scruton, don't we because he's been saying so for decades, right? ;)
[and back to the rest of the first draft]
When cases for epistocracy are explicitly discussed in mainstream outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker this might not really be a sign of neoliberalism as such, because the paradoxical possibility here is that many a social justice warrior can get angry about the long-term influence of neo-liberalism, it might be a sign that the academic ruling castes are getting closer and closer to the point where they just admit they think they have the right to rule world by dint of their wisdom. That would get us back to medieval scholastic clerics reaching a somewhat similar conclusion but back in medieval Europe there was room for a Protestant Reformation to happen by challenging established institutional interpretations. The kind of scholastic orthodoxy American intellectual life may eventually settle on may never provide such a countervailing possibility. It's not just that, as the left would have it, capitalism can assimilate dissent.
It can, but academic life has millennia of history to demonstrate that it can exonerate itself from complicity with whatever the reigning repressive regime is in play. The ideological justifications for aristocratic castes can change but the end result seems to be that the aristocrats of our ages always agree that they deserve to run our lives because of good reasons. The trouble with the social justice warriors may not be that they notice their demographic is under-represented in the ruling castes but that they don't yet get that the ruling castes won't be different just because they see someone who reminds them of themselves in a power position. Or as Pete Townsend put it in a song, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Wednesday, February 08, 2017
incubation phase 3
the "what" to write about hasn't exactly changed. It's just there's a ton of reading to do for a couple of these projects and for some of the other stuff a lot of watching cartoons.
Which is to say between now and March 11 I might be watching a whole ton of Samurai Jack. Writing about animation is one of the things that happens here. Batman: the Brave and the Bold is going to get some attention but it's going to take a month or so. This month there's the Lego Batman film and supposedly a new release by Studio Ghibli, The Red Turtle, which is temporarily impossible to find any showings for in Seattle.
I'm trying to soak up a bunch of Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Emil Brunner, some of Gann's writing on John Cage, and a few other things. I finished a book by David P Roberts on the total work of art in the European avant garde, which was a fascinating if at times diffuse read. Still not quite done with Taruskin's gigantic Oxford History of Western music but I've got 3.7 of the 5 books read through, I think. I've been rereading some of Leonard B. Meyer's landmark books.
I'm also experimenting with a ragtime fugue for banjo and guitar. I've written bits and pieces here in the last year about ways to manipulate durational units within the syntax of sonata form and ragtime form to arrive at a fusion of ragtime with sonata forms. I'm doing something sort of like that with ragtime vocabulary and contrapuntal procedures this year.
Ever since I read that there was a Blind Willie Johnson tribute album I couldn't bring myself to listen to it, just read about it. I've loved Blind Willie Johnson's music since I was a teenager and I've loved Blind Willie's work more than Robert Johnson's stuff or just about any other blues performer from the pre-war period. Not that I don't like other singers. I like Patton and Hurt, for instance, and Lonnie Johnson did some amazing stuff with Armstrong and Ellington besides his own charming work. But Blind Willie Johnson's work has been a touchstone for me. So I've been incubating a guitar sonata that doesn't attempt to cover any of Johnson's catalog and bears no direct resemblance to his stuff but draws on his guitaristic approach--it's going to be refracted through a whole lot of Bach and Haydn, though, and some Joplin and Monk.
I'd write more about the possibilities of a fusion of ragtime with sonata form but to do that I might need to soak up some more theoretical stuff on music. Gestural manipulation across styles and languages of music must be a field of study but sometimes it feels like the identity narratives can stifle musical exploration at a more technical level. If you're not already a fan of Haydn or Clementi on the one hand and of Joplin and other ragtime composers, then I could try to explain the significance of regarding structural repeats as essential rather than redundant to understanding the manipulation of associative memory for hybridizing forms. For now I'll just say that the further away I get from German 19th century pedagogical concepts about what sonata forms "ought" to be, the easier I find the possibilities of synthesizing blues, ragtime, country and jazz vocabularies into sonata forms. The very idea that sonata forms are somehow obsolete or that 19th century guitarist composers didn't master sonata forms because they didn't approach sonatas like Beethoven is something I've rambled about before.
If you choose to think that you can't write sonata forms inspired by Hank Williams Sr or Stevie Wonder choruses or Blind Willie Johnson songs then it's a matter of course you won't be able to do those things. the snobbery on both sides of the high/low divide can be aggravating. People who are into blues might quote John Lee Hooker saying that you don't need fancy chords or nothing, you just need a big beat. Sure, and I love Hooker's stuff and his ability to vary 12/8 vamps is marvelous!
Years ago when I ... wrote that bad review of Andrew Durkin's Decomposition, one of the things I found weak was his insistence on the limitations of Western musical notation. It's a pedestrian point to say that the Western notational system only conveys so much. And yet last year Ben Johnston's strin gquartets got released, recordings of works defined by microtonality and just intonation. When a composer can hear the difference between tones that are one cent apart we're talking a rarified ability to hear thesmallest differences in pitch. If a string quartet with thousands of discrete pitches can get recorded the canard that Western notation is so limited turns out to be a canard. It'd be one thing to say that blues and jazz performances traffic in microtonal nuances that are perceptible to the ear but not considered WORTH the trouble of commiting to meticulously accurate notation we can say the music is generally predicated on folk idioms and live performance and leave it at that. But if we've done that then trying to mystify notational systems is a waste of time.
I was on board with the idea that even the most solitary artistic work is ultimately a social endeavor. It's just a shame Durkin didn't fish more for examples of contextual collaboration. The most explicit case study of consciously chosen contextual collaboration in the Western art music tradition would be someone like Haydn or Mozart, knowing enough of audience receptivity to pander to their interests. Haydn was direct in saying he constantly gauged audience response and revised his work according to what audiences enjoyed and steering away from effects that alienated them. When one of the most famous composers in the Western canon plainly states that giving audiences more of what they tell you they want by their applause it would have been worth it to quote that composer. I'm biased, of course, since I love Haydn's music.
And yet I keep getting older and still don't like a lot of Romantic music. The 19th century composers I find I do enjoy (Chopin, Mendelssohn) tended to be into Bach. They also tended to be Bohemian or Russian more than German.
I've been thinking of writing a bunch of stuff in response to things by Roger Scruton and others at the Future Symphony Institute. Their abjection of pop music in some of their pieces is more than just annoying. But I'm not sure I'm going to tackle that just yet. This is still incubation time.
And there's a lot of music I've been trying to write. Ever since that controversy where Yale said they wouldn't have jazz and that jazz wasn't part of the Western musical canon that set me off. I was unhappy with Yale's approach but also unhappy with the pro-jazz reactions. Why people seem so set on snobbery for one and against the other when both styles are as inextricably bound up on Western musical art as first and second practice in Baroque music is beyond me. We've got another version of first and second practice in musical art. If jazz has brought back or rediscovered the art of composing via improvisation on standard grounds that was once characteristic of Baroque music I say make MORE people learn how to play jazz. The idea that you can't teach jazz, anyway, seems idiotic to me. It's actually offensive because the kind of essentialist narrative that claim has to presume needs to be examined for the kind of racist essentialism that it is. If you put the shoe on the other foot and tried to walk a mile in it you'd have to actually agree with Wagner in his claim that Jews couldn't write decent music because they lacked soul. This gets to another problem I had with Durkin's book, you can't attack the idea of authenticity as some abstracted notion of a reified performance or score o fa particular work, you have to attack authenticity as the social contract of club membership as to who is or isn't legitimately on the team. Stereotypes about how soulful and intuitive jazz is will miss how abstract, esoteric and thoughtful it is. There's a whole lot of Romantic era detritus emphasizing music as if it conveyed the feelings of the composer or musician rather than bein ga shared game of associative memories and memory-building. Music is a game of cognition that can, ideally, engage both hemispheres of the brain. Unfortunately the partisans of this or that style of music seem pretty hell-bent on emphasizing just one hemisphere over against another. The Western avant garde overdid the left hemisphere, so to speak, while pop music has overdone the right.
But I've rambled enough at this point.
Which is to say between now and March 11 I might be watching a whole ton of Samurai Jack. Writing about animation is one of the things that happens here. Batman: the Brave and the Bold is going to get some attention but it's going to take a month or so. This month there's the Lego Batman film and supposedly a new release by Studio Ghibli, The Red Turtle, which is temporarily impossible to find any showings for in Seattle.
I'm trying to soak up a bunch of Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Emil Brunner, some of Gann's writing on John Cage, and a few other things. I finished a book by David P Roberts on the total work of art in the European avant garde, which was a fascinating if at times diffuse read. Still not quite done with Taruskin's gigantic Oxford History of Western music but I've got 3.7 of the 5 books read through, I think. I've been rereading some of Leonard B. Meyer's landmark books.
I'm also experimenting with a ragtime fugue for banjo and guitar. I've written bits and pieces here in the last year about ways to manipulate durational units within the syntax of sonata form and ragtime form to arrive at a fusion of ragtime with sonata forms. I'm doing something sort of like that with ragtime vocabulary and contrapuntal procedures this year.
Ever since I read that there was a Blind Willie Johnson tribute album I couldn't bring myself to listen to it, just read about it. I've loved Blind Willie Johnson's music since I was a teenager and I've loved Blind Willie's work more than Robert Johnson's stuff or just about any other blues performer from the pre-war period. Not that I don't like other singers. I like Patton and Hurt, for instance, and Lonnie Johnson did some amazing stuff with Armstrong and Ellington besides his own charming work. But Blind Willie Johnson's work has been a touchstone for me. So I've been incubating a guitar sonata that doesn't attempt to cover any of Johnson's catalog and bears no direct resemblance to his stuff but draws on his guitaristic approach--it's going to be refracted through a whole lot of Bach and Haydn, though, and some Joplin and Monk.
I'd write more about the possibilities of a fusion of ragtime with sonata form but to do that I might need to soak up some more theoretical stuff on music. Gestural manipulation across styles and languages of music must be a field of study but sometimes it feels like the identity narratives can stifle musical exploration at a more technical level. If you're not already a fan of Haydn or Clementi on the one hand and of Joplin and other ragtime composers, then I could try to explain the significance of regarding structural repeats as essential rather than redundant to understanding the manipulation of associative memory for hybridizing forms. For now I'll just say that the further away I get from German 19th century pedagogical concepts about what sonata forms "ought" to be, the easier I find the possibilities of synthesizing blues, ragtime, country and jazz vocabularies into sonata forms. The very idea that sonata forms are somehow obsolete or that 19th century guitarist composers didn't master sonata forms because they didn't approach sonatas like Beethoven is something I've rambled about before.
If you choose to think that you can't write sonata forms inspired by Hank Williams Sr or Stevie Wonder choruses or Blind Willie Johnson songs then it's a matter of course you won't be able to do those things. the snobbery on both sides of the high/low divide can be aggravating. People who are into blues might quote John Lee Hooker saying that you don't need fancy chords or nothing, you just need a big beat. Sure, and I love Hooker's stuff and his ability to vary 12/8 vamps is marvelous!
Years ago when I ... wrote that bad review of Andrew Durkin's Decomposition, one of the things I found weak was his insistence on the limitations of Western musical notation. It's a pedestrian point to say that the Western notational system only conveys so much. And yet last year Ben Johnston's strin gquartets got released, recordings of works defined by microtonality and just intonation. When a composer can hear the difference between tones that are one cent apart we're talking a rarified ability to hear thesmallest differences in pitch. If a string quartet with thousands of discrete pitches can get recorded the canard that Western notation is so limited turns out to be a canard. It'd be one thing to say that blues and jazz performances traffic in microtonal nuances that are perceptible to the ear but not considered WORTH the trouble of commiting to meticulously accurate notation we can say the music is generally predicated on folk idioms and live performance and leave it at that. But if we've done that then trying to mystify notational systems is a waste of time.
I was on board with the idea that even the most solitary artistic work is ultimately a social endeavor. It's just a shame Durkin didn't fish more for examples of contextual collaboration. The most explicit case study of consciously chosen contextual collaboration in the Western art music tradition would be someone like Haydn or Mozart, knowing enough of audience receptivity to pander to their interests. Haydn was direct in saying he constantly gauged audience response and revised his work according to what audiences enjoyed and steering away from effects that alienated them. When one of the most famous composers in the Western canon plainly states that giving audiences more of what they tell you they want by their applause it would have been worth it to quote that composer. I'm biased, of course, since I love Haydn's music.
And yet I keep getting older and still don't like a lot of Romantic music. The 19th century composers I find I do enjoy (Chopin, Mendelssohn) tended to be into Bach. They also tended to be Bohemian or Russian more than German.
I've been thinking of writing a bunch of stuff in response to things by Roger Scruton and others at the Future Symphony Institute. Their abjection of pop music in some of their pieces is more than just annoying. But I'm not sure I'm going to tackle that just yet. This is still incubation time.
And there's a lot of music I've been trying to write. Ever since that controversy where Yale said they wouldn't have jazz and that jazz wasn't part of the Western musical canon that set me off. I was unhappy with Yale's approach but also unhappy with the pro-jazz reactions. Why people seem so set on snobbery for one and against the other when both styles are as inextricably bound up on Western musical art as first and second practice in Baroque music is beyond me. We've got another version of first and second practice in musical art. If jazz has brought back or rediscovered the art of composing via improvisation on standard grounds that was once characteristic of Baroque music I say make MORE people learn how to play jazz. The idea that you can't teach jazz, anyway, seems idiotic to me. It's actually offensive because the kind of essentialist narrative that claim has to presume needs to be examined for the kind of racist essentialism that it is. If you put the shoe on the other foot and tried to walk a mile in it you'd have to actually agree with Wagner in his claim that Jews couldn't write decent music because they lacked soul. This gets to another problem I had with Durkin's book, you can't attack the idea of authenticity as some abstracted notion of a reified performance or score o fa particular work, you have to attack authenticity as the social contract of club membership as to who is or isn't legitimately on the team. Stereotypes about how soulful and intuitive jazz is will miss how abstract, esoteric and thoughtful it is. There's a whole lot of Romantic era detritus emphasizing music as if it conveyed the feelings of the composer or musician rather than bein ga shared game of associative memories and memory-building. Music is a game of cognition that can, ideally, engage both hemispheres of the brain. Unfortunately the partisans of this or that style of music seem pretty hell-bent on emphasizing just one hemisphere over against another. The Western avant garde overdid the left hemisphere, so to speak, while pop music has overdone the right.
But I've rambled enough at this point.
Saturday, February 04, 2017
links for the weekend, the anxieties of too many or too few babies and the persistence of apocalyptic imagination
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.
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.
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
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