Amor Mundi – 5/19/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Jonathan Lee interviews Twelve Tribes of Hattie author Ayana Mathis, who talks about the way that indecision (in her education) and doubt (of her religion) has affected her development as a person and as a writer. Mathis, who was Marilynne Robinson's student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, says that, despite her doubt, there's something deeply, uniquely human about honest religious experience: "A belief in God may not be fully within me anymore, but there's still a belief in belief. The high drama and power of the Church has stayed with me. As a child in church, I saw grown men at the altar crying out for God's mercy. And the idea of someone doing that has become a joke in the popular culture, but when you are there and you see it, you experience-for a moment-an incredibly raw, honest, strange insight into what it means to be a human being. Those experiences don't leave you."
Maria Popova points to the American Rock 'n Roll historian Greil Marcus' recent commencement address to the School of Visual Art's class of 2013. In his speech, Marcus rails against the high and low divisions of art and culture, suggesting that there's something controlling in those categories, something that totally degrades the mystery of art.
All last week, The New Yorker's Page Turner blog has been sharing excerpts from a collection of Italo Calvino's letters. On Christmas Eve 1959, Calvino shared his impression of New York with a friend: "But really it is not this I mainly wanted to talk to you about, it's more to say that this country here knows nothing about us Europeans-and Russia here you can feel is part of Europe, and with no great differences either-because they are totally devoid of a sense of history. To put it briefly, I am beginning to understand something about America, but I have not got the time even to think never mind writing. I am leading the life of a business man, because this is the real way to live in this city-I say business, but all I do is see publishers and have endless business lunches with them-I act as ambassador for an imaginary Italian Democratic Republic, because I feel it is my duty and responsibility to do so, being one of the few men of the left who has been given the chance to visit this country for six months."
On its seventy-fifth anniversary, Mike Hume writes about George Orwell's book about the Spanish Civil War, Letters from Catalonia. "Orwell," he writes, "was obviously deeply touched by the decency and heroism of the ordinary Spaniards and foreigners fighting for freedom by his side. Isolated on the frontline with the workers' militia, he recalls: 'One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word "comrade" stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.'"
The Official U.S. Opening of the biopic, Hannah Arendt in NYC
Learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Lance Strate considers the existence and meaning of the public realm, and Roger Berkowitz looks at the continuing debate about the merit of MOOCs.
Georgia O’Keeffe on Thinking
“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes
and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t
occurred to me to put them down.”
-Georgia O'Keeffe
Thinking Metaphors
This Quote of the Week post was first published on August 27, 2012.
“What connects thinking and poetry [Dichten] is metaphor. In philosophy one calls concept what in poetry [Dichtkunst] is called metaphor. Thinking creates its “concepts” out of the visible, in order to designate the invisible.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, vol. 2, p. 728 (August 1969) (translation my own)
Arendt’s Denktagebuch is less a “book” than a collection of “thought fragments”. These fragments, such as the one quoted above, are perhaps best considered not as advocating some position, but as specific angles or starting points from which we are invited to think something through.
All too often, her published works are understood in an “advocatory” fashion. Accordingly, The Human Condition, is sometimes read as a “plea” in favor of the vita activa over and against the vita contemplativa. In fact, however, Arendt explicitly denies that she wishes to reverse the traditional hierarchy between the two ways of life. Rather, she is questioning the conceptual framework within which both ways of life have traditionally been understood.
Hence, I take it to be her aim not only to liberate acting [Handeln] from its being reduced to nothing more than an instrument in the process of making [Herstellen], but, analogously, to liberate the activity of thinking from its being reduced to nothing more than an instrument in the process of cognition culminating in contemplation, in “seeing” the truth which, in turn, serves as blueprint for the process of making. She notes that both the process of making, which uses mute violence, and the end of contemplation, which is reached in a state of speechless wonder, entail a loss of language.[1] As a consequence, the element of speech has disappeared not only from our conception of action (including politics), but also from our conception of thinking (including philosophy).
If not from the model of the passive contemplation, how does Arendt wish to understand the activity of thinking? In my view, there are at least three thinking “motifs” which can be traced throughout her oeuvre. The first, and certainly the best known, is that of “dialectical thinking”, that is, the soundless dialogue between me and myself (“two-in-one”). It is used in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and it keeps recurring in many of her later works, including The Life of the Mind. The second, somewhat less prominent motif is that of “representative thinking”, which denotes the capacity of placing oneself in the perspectives of (more than two) fellow human beings, and which prepares the formation of opinions and judgments. The notion itself occurs for the first time in ‘The Crisis in Culture’ (1960), but it is clearly related to, if not identical with, the “communicative” thinking introduced in her essays on Karl Jaspers a few years earlier.
The third motif, “poetic thinking”, is perhaps the most interesting one. Although she uses the term itself exclusively in her essay on Walter Benjamin (1968), a description of the underlying phenomenon recurs in The Life of the Mind, more specifically in its two chapters on metaphor. Arendt describes the function of metaphor as “turning the mind back to the sensory world in order to illuminate the mind’s non-sensory experiences for which there are no words in any language.” (The Life of the Mind, vol.1, p. 106)
As soon as we realize, as do the poets, that all language is metaphorical, we will, as thinkers, be able to assess the crucial role of our language in bridging the gap between the visible phenomena of the outer world and the invisible concepts of our inner mind. To give an example, by tracing a concept – such as “politics” – to its originally underlying experience – the Greek polis – we will be able to assess whether the way in which we employ it, is “adequate”, that is, whether we actually employ it in any meaningful way, whether it really “makes sense”.
In concluding her chapters on metaphor, Arendt raises the challenging question whether there exists a metaphor that could serve to illuminate the invisible activity of “thinking” itself. The most she is willing to offer, however, is the metaphor of “the sensation of being alive”, of which she herself readily admits that it “remains singularly empty” (idem, p. 124).
Why does she not mention the metaphor of poetry here? In the Denktagebuch fragment quoted above, written while she was preparing The Life of the Mind, Arendt clearly points to a certain correspondence between the role of metaphor in poetry and the role of concept in thinking. Perhaps we may go so far as to suggest that she uses poetry – or rather, since she uses the substantivized German verb “Dichten”, the activity of “making poetry” – as a metaphor for thinking.
However, the word “poetry” itself is derived from the Greek word “poièsis”, which should be rendered as “making” [Herstellen]. Hence, she might have thought that by using poetry as a metaphor for thought, she would have reiterated the traditional problem of the activity of thinking having been overlaid with the contemplative element in the experience of making. Indeed, in The Human Condition, in the section titled ‘The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art’, she seems to imply that writing poetry involves “the same workmanship which, through the primordial instrument of human hands, builds the other durable things of the human artifice.” (The Human Condition, p. 169)
Yet, in the very same section another, more promising, understanding of “poetry” is beginning to emerge. Arendt calls music and poetry “the least “materialistic” of the arts because their “material” consists of sounds and words” – note her use of quotation marks here – and she adds that the workmanship they demand is “kept to a minimum”.
Moreover, after having suggested that the durability of a poem is not so much caused by the fact that it is written down, but by “condensation”, she speaks of poetry as “language spoken in utmost density and concentration” (idem, p. 169). The German word for condensation is “Verdichtung” and for density “Dichte”. While being absent in the English expression of “making poetry”, both words clearly resonate in the German verb “dichten”.
Arendt does not draw any explicit connection between the activity of condensation and the use of metaphor. Still, she might have had it in mind. One page earlier (idem, p. 168), she referred to a poem by Rilke in order to illustrate the “veritable metamorphosis” a work of art is capable of bringing about, being more than a mere reification, more than a matter of “making” in the ordinary sense. Consider especially the second strophe, which simultaneously articulates and demonstrates the power of metaphor in “calling” the invisible:
Here is magic. In the realm of a spell
the common word seems lifted up above...
and yet is really like the call of the male
who calls for the invisible female dove.[2]
- Wout Cornelissen
Amor Mundi 4/14/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Kehinde Wiley: King of the Art World
Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason explores the wild and wonderful world of super-artist Kehinde Wiley. "Wiley, as some of you may know, is an American artist, an unusually successful one. In the decade of his career to date, he's become one of the most sought-after painters in America. Holland Cotter, of The New York Times, called Wiley "a history painter, one of the best we have.... He creates history as much as he tells it." Even if you don't know him by name, you've likely glimpsed his grand portraits of hip-hop artists-LL, Ice-T, Biggie. Maybe you've even seen his massive portrait of the King of Pop: the one of MJ in full armor, astride a prancing warhorse. If all this suggests that Wiley, a 36-year-old gay African-American man, is court painter to the black celebretariat, that misconception has been useful to promoting his brand, up to a point."
Mason is skeptical, but if you don't know the Wiley brand, the route through Wiley's world of surfaces is about as fine a reflection as you'll find of the challenges facing the artist in a consumer society.
Zainab Al-Khawaja is sitting in a Bahrani prison reading Martin Luther King Jr. Al-Khawaja is a political prisoner. She is in a cell with 14 others, some murderers. To maintain her dignity and to announce her difference from common criminals, she has refused to wear an orange prison jumpsuit. As a punishment, she is denied family visits, including by her baby. She is now on hunger strike. "Prison administrators ask me why I am on hunger strike. I reply, "Because I want to see my baby." They respond, nonchalantly, "Obey and you will see her." But if I obey, my little Jude will not in fact be seeing her mother, but rather a broken version of her. I wrote to the prison administration that I refuse to wear the convicts' uniform because "no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice." (Thoreau)." Al-Khawaja's thoughts on dignity and non-violence are more than worthy testaments to her mentor.
Sara Horowitz takes on the "micro-gig," a new kind of freelancing that allows people to employ others for small tasks, like delivering or assembling IKEA furniture. Horowitz, however, worries about what "micro-gigging" might mean for workers: "It's as if we're eliminating the "extraneous" parts of a worker's day--like lunch or bathroom breaks--and paying only for the minutes someone is actually in front of the computer or engaged in a task." Welcome to our piece-work future.
Chloe Pantazi considers the work of the photographer Chim, also known as David Seymour, on the occasion of a showing of his work at the International Center of Photography. Pantazi focuses in particular on Chim's photos of children, saying that as he "offers up the every day lives of such adults working within the industry of war (as soldiers, munitions workers) we trust that Chim's postwar photographs of children yield something close to their every day, as vulnerable innocents who-like the newborn seen suckling at its mother's breast in a photograph taken of the crowd at a land reform meeting at the brink of the Civil War, in Spain, 1936-were virtually reared on the conflicts of their time."
Lucy McKeon explores Russian poet Kiril Medvedev, who has renounced the copyright to all of his works. McKeon recounts Medvedev's rebellion against the bourgeois idea of artist as private citizen-a type idealized by Joseph Brodsky in his 1987 Nobel Prize address. Medvedev is searching for a post-individualized and post-socialist culture-what he calls new humanism. "Logically, Medvedev's answer to individualized disconnectedness calls for a synthesis of twentieth-century leftist political and intellectual thought, a situation where several senses of the word 'humanism' begin to collide." Where something from poetry meets something from philosophy; where postmodernism, logocentrism, psychology, culture and counterculture, "and probably something else, too, that we haven't though of yet," writes Medevedev, join to form "a new shared understanding of humanity." Only in this utopian future society could the artist as private citizen responsibly exist and create."
Music in the Holocaust: Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism
Part II: Music of Warsaw, Ludz and other Eastern Ghettoes
April 20, 2013 at Olin Hall, Bard College at 7:00 PMLearn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center blog
Roger Berkowitz lauds the idea of early college. Jeffrey Jurgens considers Jeremy Walton's recent article "Confessional Pluralism and the Civil Society Effect." Cristiana Grigore responds to the recent New York Times article, "The Kings of Roma" by describing her own Roma upbringing in Romania. Kathleen B. Jones takes on New Materialism from an Arendtian point of view.
Amor Mundi 3/24/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Poet T.R. Hummer uses the recent discovery of a Thomas Edison recorded reading of Walt Whitman's "America," spoken by a man who may or may not be the poet himself, as an opportunity to consider the nature of the poem. Hummer describes its grand goal as "nothing less than the reinvention of the human voice, and the human consciousness behind that voice, through writing-through the process of writing and writing's product, transmogrified. There are volumes yet to be written about his achievement, the often misconstrued depth of his ambition for humanity."
On the occasion of the latter's new book of non-fiction, Brad Fox spoke to writer Aleksander Hemon. In the interview, Hemon, a Bosnian originally from Sarajevo, touches on nationalism, the importance of the stories we all tell ourselves, and expresses a good deal of cynicism about the role of art in society. He ends, however, with a slightly more hopeful impulse: "despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art. I make money doing this, and I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better. I do believe-and I know I shouldn't-that art transcends money and success and any of that."
Bonnie Honig speaks with Nick Pearce about politics, democracy, Antigone, and the importance of a common public realm. Also about her fascination with Hannah Arendt: "I was drawn to [Hannah Arendt] because of her insistence on the central importance of what she calls 'the political' to the study of politics. She was correcting for political science's attention to bureaucracy, administration, and civic order and for philosophy's focus on the eternal and the universal, each to the detriment of the contingent and the fragile that are, for her, the stuff of politics. Contingency, fragility, change, unpredictability - these are central elements of political life and yet they were inaccessible from a philosophical point of view and were seen by political science as something to be overcome. Arendt worried that the political, as a concept, could disappear beneath the pressure of political science and philosophy."
Jessica and Tim Lahey enjoy pillow talk about the importance of failing. The teachers-one in middle school and one in medical school-share their intimate conversations about how our unwillingness to let our children fail is hurting their ability to succeed. Parents and teachers both must learn that "when children try to preserve their parents' perception of their intelligence, they can be less likely to work hard, and less prepared for the inevitable challenges of schooling, and life after it."
Finally, Evgeny Morozov warns against the perils of what he calls solutionism, "an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are "solvable" with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal." Morozov argues that "whenever technology companies complain that our broken world must be fixed, our initial impulse should be to ask: how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph into the complex social actors that we are?"
Featured Upcoming N.Y.C. Event
Blogging and the New Public IntellectualAn Ongoing Series of discussions moderated by Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead.
April 9, 2013 at Bard Graduate Center
David Frum, blogger for The Daily Beast & The Huffington Post.
Learn more here.
"David Frum is back. And he's jockeying to be the front and center of the post-Romney American conservative movement". - Eddy Moretti
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Wolfgang Heuer considers what happens when the revolution is over, and whether or not revolution is necessarily followed by dictatorship. Jeff Champlin reviews Allen Speight's essay "Arendt on Narrative Theory and Practice." And Roger Berkowitz looks back to Hannah Arendt's 1965 essay "The Christian Pope" to raise questions about the ascension of Pope Francis I.
East Side Gallery
We commonly assume that political acts and claims are shaped by some form of reasoning. How then do we respond to political stands in which arguments are piled atop arguments in contradictory ways, and where the force of the various arguments is less important than victory? We see in political discourse a definite willingness to embrace any argument that helps one win, whether or not it makes sense.
One example of our cynical embrace of bad arguments is the recent controversy over the East Side Gallery in Berlin. The Gallery is comprised of a series of murals that, over the course of the past two decades, an international cast of artists has painted and re-painted on an approximately one-mile stretch of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, the East Side Gallery occupies the longest existing remnant of the Wall, and it has become a significant landmark not only for those visitors who seek to experience something of the city’s Cold War past, but also for those long-time residents who regard it as an embodiment of the city’s contemporary feel and texture.
The tumult of the past few weeks erupted over the plans of a developer, Maik Uwe Hinkel, to construct luxury apartments and an office complex in the former border zone—now a modest green space—that lies between the East Side Gallery and the Spree River. According to the agreements reached by Hinkel and the local government, these new buildings would entail the creation of an access road and pedestrian bridge to allow passage to pedestrians, bicyclists, and emergency vehicles. The road and bridge, in turn, would require the removal of two stretches of the East Side Gallery and their replacement in the adjacent green space. Local planners had first approved the construction and the alteration to the East Side Gallery back in 2005, and since that time Hinkel’s plans had aroused little concerted opposition.
When workers lifted out one concrete slab from the Gallery on Friday, March 2nd, however, hundreds of demonstrators flocked to the site to prevent any further removals. A group of activists hastily organized a larger demonstration that same weekend, one that ultimately drew a raucous crowd of more than six thousand people. In the face of these surprising protests, Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit declared that all further work on the site would be postponed until at least March 18th, when a meeting of the major players would decide its fate. Since then, the developer and the relevant local officials have all declared their eagerness to find a solution that preserves the East Side Gallery in its current state. Even the slab removed earlier this month seems destined to return to its former location.
Yet the apparent success of the protest threatens to overshadow the problematic aspects of the demonstrators’ arguments. On the one hand, many of the organizers and protesters regarded their opposition as a small but significant rejoinder to the insistent tide of commercial development in post-Wall Berlin. To adopt the terms of Sharon Zukin’s recent book Naked City, they saw the East Side Gallery as an embodiment of the city’s distinctive authenticity and rootedness, which they argued should be protected from the homogenizing onslaught of upscale growth and gentrification. To wit, one of the coalitions that spearheaded the protest calls itself “Sink the Media Spree” (Mediaspree Versenken), a name that invokes developers’ recent efforts to transform the area along the river into a headquarters for high-tech communications and media. Its webpage declares that this portion of Berlin should preserve “the neighborhood” as it currently exists and not fall victim to “profit mania” (Kiez statt Profitwahn).
But the East Side Gallery cannot be cast so readily as an incarnation of local authenticity, especially the kind that stands opposed to commerce. First of all, many government actors and city residents were far more eager to see the Wall dismantled in the months and years after November 1989 than to see it preserved, and they condoned if not actively contributed to its wholesale removal. As a result, the survival of the East Side Gallery represents the exception, not the rule, in the city’s engagement with the Wall as a material structure. Second, artists from around the world initially established the East Side Gallery as a celebration of artistic and political liberty, but their murals received support from the local and national governments because they helped to draw tourists to Berlin and added to the city’s cachet as a cultural destination. In the light of this state patronage, I find it rather curious to hear activists pitching the East Side Gallery against the forces of capital and development.
On the other hand, many demonstrators contended that the alteration of the East Side Gallery would amount to an intolerable attack on the city’s historical inheritance. One variation of this position is that the removal of the two sections constitutes a dilution if not erasure of Germany’s traumatic past. According to this argument, the East Side Gallery should be left intact so that residents and visitors can confront the traces of the country’s division. Another, more strident variation insists that the construction plans display a callous disregard for those who suffered under the East German regime and, more specifically, lost their lives while attempting to escape it. In the words of one activist in Der Tagesspiegel: “the most important point is not whether the Wall will be opened. We are against the combination of removing the Wall and building hotels and apartments in death strips.”
Again, the East Side Gallery’s connection with Germany’s fraught past is not nearly as straightforward as the activists and demonstrators have suggested. As Brian Ladd details in his book The Ghosts of Berlin, the murals of the East Side Gallery were not painted until the early 1990s, after the Wall had fallen and East Germany had ceased to exist. In fact, this portion of the Wall could not have been painted before 1989, because it stood in East Berlin, and anyone who attempted to leave a mark on it, or even lingered near it, would have been apprehended by East German police officers or border soldiers. Of course, amateur and professional artists did draw and paint some striking imagery on the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, but they created it on the Wall’s “outer” surface while standing in West Berlin, where they had much less to fear from East German border personnel. The muralists who launched and maintained the East Side Gallery certainly meant to evoke and further this tradition of “Wall art,” but in the process they abstracted it from a prior historical era and relocated it in another part of the city.
I note these objections not because I support the proposed construction or the alteration of the East Side Gallery. In particular, I am not at all convinced that the partial removal of the Wall is really necessary, whether or not Hinkel and the city go ahead with the area’s development. But I am troubled by the protesters’ reluctance to take the ironies and complexities of the current circumstances more fully into account. They are too eager to cast the developer and local officials as the villains in this story, particularly when the city and the federal government have in fact created a substantial memorial landscape related to the Wall. And they are too quick to position themselves on the moral high ground. Given the Wall’s disappearance from virtually every other part of the city, their demands for preserving the East Side Gallery seem more than a little belated.
-Jeff Jurgens
Sigrid Weigel on Poetry and Philosophy in Arendt’s Thought Diary
Sigrid Weigel, "Poetics as a Presupposition of Philosophy: Hannah Arendt's. Denktagebuch," Telos, 2009, 146: 97-110.
Sigrid Weigel describes the Thought Diary as an explicit decision on Arendt's part to turn from the personal and literary reflections of her earlier diaries to explicit reflection on questions of political philosophy following the publication of Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. However, in contrast to the earlier split in Arendt's writing between the private diary and public work of the academic dissertation on Augustine, in the Thought Diary "poetics no longer designates the other of philosophy […] but, rather, it now describes the path of or to thought" (102). "Poetics," translating "Dichtung" in Weigel’s original German, refers not merely to rules of producing literary works but to the broader study of the original representational potency of art. Weigel’s "or" opens in two directions, leading us to ask if poetics is the path to the goal of thought (a path that will be familiar to readers of Hegel’s Aesthetics) or an inseparable way of thinking itself.
Weigel’s broader argumentation tends toward the second reading. Commenting on an entry on Hans Blumenberg, she draws out a striking note from Arendt: "In philosophy, one calls concept what in poetics is called metaphor" (105). Weigel continues: "The same words can be understood as concepts or metaphors, yet their designation as metaphor reflects the moment of transmission that is always inscribed in them─at least when it is a question of the designation of the invisible" (105). What appears in the metaphor is the relation to the unseen. Something emerges from darkness and gains minimal perceptibility. Here the "or" in the phrase "concepts or metaphors" can be productively thought of as a conjunction ("and") rather than an alternative. In ways that are only now becoming clear, Arendt reads and writes in a double motion, bringing out fundamental moments of appearance and clarifying structures through conceptual precision.
-Jeff Champlin
“If”
My girlfriend and I walked by a clothing storefront and noticed the print on some of the t-shirts at the lower right corner of the window and went in. She had mentioned this Imaginary Foundation (IF) before. They make print t-shirts.
I went to school at an expensive liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley—everyone there makes print t-shirts. It is like a business you start as a college sophomore as a way to convince yourself that you are a ‘creative entrepreneur’ before you enter the corporate world (or, alternatively, as a penance for inherited culture and comfort) the not-for-profit world.
Often, I cannot stand them —the print t-shirts. There is something out of shape about them, as if the juxtaposition of body/shirt/image, sets askew some intrinsic agreement in the marriage of fashion and identity. And yet, the IF designs spoke to me. There is something dreamy and yet sincere about these prints. If le petit prince was looking for a print t-shirt, he would buy one of these.
It just so happened that the owner of the company was visiting this Seattle distributor and was in the store. He was awkward, skittish and European. I liked him, and before we left I told him that I blog for a thinking and humanities institute out east and may want to write about his brand. That’s how I got into the Imaginary Foundation.
The shirts are not exactly ‘pretty,’ or ‘fashionable,’ rather, their attraction is a gesture beyond themselves -- a rare feat in a culture that positions branding as the apex of success. I’ll describe one shirt and if interested you can invest your own time in the Imaginary Foundation.
The “Being There” shirt has three anonymous human heads (one of the cloud suit, one of the water suit, and one of the fire suit). The heads are in peripheral view and are aligned, with a slight skew (allowing us the view of all three faces), as they break through a wall, the veil of the universe.
Other shirts handle concepts of psychosis and love “Love Science,” science and discovery in a reach towards heaven “Reach,” and other such concepts widely considered esoteric or cliché within the lens of our popular culture. But, we no longer understand what a ‘cliché’ is. I have long held the view that a cliché is a truth, or a point of interest and perspective insight, that has simply been worn out by overexposure. But who has worn it out? How have we taken the liberty and quiet pleasure of the private sphere (the realms of reflection, contemplation, meditation as it is thought of in the Greek terms), out of our living cycle, our consciousness, our daily existence? Why is the call for private contemplation no longer a necessity of existence? It seems we should have more time then ever for such practices. So many of our daily chores, our basic needs, are met through the economic matrix. I no longer have to chop wood for warmth, hunt a boar for food, trek down to the river for a water simply, etc... Why shouldn’t I spend more time in private contemplation, or even public conversation on these more subtle topics of the human necessity? Why shouldn’t I be making something in an effort to communicate those private necessities? The actualization of the humanist requires space for such a practice. And yet, anything that requires a slowing down of, a calling for the work of the mind and private reasoning, is now, quite often immediately, labeled a cliché.
In The Human Condition Arendt writes “The emancipation of labor and the concomitant emancipation of the laboring classes from oppression and exploitation certainly means progress in the direction of non-violence. It is much less certain that it was also progress in the direction of freedom.” She is not saying that laboring classes should not have been emancipated. Rather, that the humanist goal has been blurred by some glitch. Instead of moving towards freedom from wasteful labor (a waste of human power -- physical, mental, spiritual) we instead have emancipated labor. Most of us have become imprisoned in a non-sustainable cycle that for the continuation of its forward motion requires an ever-increasing consumption and waste. This waste can be seen in terms of power. The core power of the human psyche originates in the liberty of free private thoughts—a psychological space for contemplation. A mapping of one’s stillness that is only possible in the acquisition of free time. Free time is a result of freedom from labors necessity. What Arendt’s thoughts gesture towards is that the set of basic necessities that we have been freed from, have been replaced by another, far more complicated and disguised set—the necessity to perpetuate a system that is moving much faster then us; a necessity to consume and continue consuming. To be ‘a part of‘ is, today, to be a consumer—to take ones place in the labor of waste.
Oh right, I wanted to tell you about a product...
“IF” is a creative project. It gains the viewers attention and borrows the imagination. This is a beginning. It does not steal, it borrows. It suggests the prospect of resonance rather than ownership.
I checked out the company website. The “about” page describes the development of the Imaginary Foundation: “a think tank from Switzerland that does experimental research on new ways of thinking and the power of the imagination. They hold dear a belief in human potential and seek progress in all directions.” The page is dotted with black and white images from the sixties, shaggy haired men and turtle-neck clad women engaged in contemplative, laissez-faire, light spirited dialogue. The imaginary director of the foundation is described as a “70-something uber-intellectual whose father founded the Dadaist movement.” The foundation is imaginary. It is a base, a canvas, for the products (the t-shirts) and the ideas behind them.
The blog section of the site imagines a list of contributors: Isadore Muggll, Kamilla Rousseau, etc. These architects, as is the back story, are too imaginary. “IF” is a fictional foundation for the product. But the product is real and engaging.
What is captured here goes beyond the tangible properties of the product (t-shirts). It is about what the product delivers—the wonder of creativity and science, the archetypes of the IF. Imagination IS the foundation of this product.
The blog itself is a venue for artists who marry technology and art, as well as other thought provoking materials. The image I use at the head of this article is taken from the blog. Cloud, idea, light, community, play—IF: all these are represented in the Cloud installation. This art installation is a discovery I am brought to by the Imaginary Foundation.
I once taught a course on the development of contemporary advertising, heavily focused on Edward Bernays and the peripheral route of persuasion. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Woodrow Wilson’s image advisor, the father of the term "Public Relations," and the architect of the torches of freedom (Lucky Strikes) campaign, among many others. His theory, though terribly simplified here, was that the modern consumer does not purchase with his mind; rather, he defers to his emotions in most choices. The rational-actor is a fiction. If consumerism became god, branding became its religion.
Ad campaigns have become remarkably creative, and even, at times, beautiful. Have you ever felt the urge to cry during a Jeep commercial? Many have. I think I have. The central conceptual premise of the AMC show Mad Men, depends upon this tension: between art and consumption; the rendering from black and white, to color; the effective marketing and selling off of the human experience. In question is the art aspect of advertising. It is at the core of Don Draper’s motivations, and the one that despite his many character failings keeps endearing him to us. Ultimately we are asking, will he reconcile his artistic urge (his private motivation) with his office at the homunculus of the consumerism model (his role in the corporate arena). Exposed is a manipulation, an incongruence, an infidelity in the marriage of advertising and art. Where as art points towards something beyond itself, beyond even the image and the medium, the ad campaign points only to one purpose—back into itself. No idea behind it. Nothing living. It consumes.
Advertising is like the Ouroboros, the dragon that swallows its own tail; having entirely swallowed itself, the modern advertising campaign defies the laws of balance, it is only the un-relentless, hungry serpent head of consumption -- devoid of the body of life. The only urge driving it is to possess.
It is the difference between the work of Egon Schiele and Penthouse, the writings of Georges Bataille and a godaddy.com super bowl campaign.
Seduce ->consume. This is the current mandate of the ad campaign. But this relationship is only sustainable through incompletion. It requires continual doses. Seduce -> consume -> feel a lack even in the possession of product (contract unfulfilled) -> be seduced again -> consume. Ad infinitum. A terrible loop.
How can consumerism and individual consciousness (the most private sector) be made sustainable? Is it possible for a product to speak beyond itself? To fulfill the promise of its persuasion? And if it could, what would that mean for us?
Here I position the word sustainability to face two directions. In part it refers to what Arendt terms as “worldly,” the creation produced through work and not labor, something that has the potential to last beyond the productions of time, something that maneuvers into the arena of the eternal. I also want to posit the word in terms of its evolving contemporary potential. The one sector of the public, and political sphere that allows for the platform of this conversation is the environmental movement. It is where we have begun to contemplate the world beyond the shortsighted view of individual lifetimes. We speak of the sustainability of our planet; we are considering new ways to move our habits from wasteful and consumptive, towards lasting and sustainable power. It is a fairly new conversation and the word “sustainability” is evolving with each new perspective we bring to it.
Sustainability goes beyond consumer awareness. It is about the awareness of the product, how a brand gains consciousness. I need to explore here a definition of “consciousness.”
I have come to understand definitions as ever evolving in accordance with society and the pressures put upon it by the conditions of the time, the fractals of our world (more simply put, the culture stew).
Consciousness is the expanding of space into which one can resonate. To learn of the world around us, to acknowledge it, to consider its multiple dimensions, is to become more conscious -- to create space into which we can move by the will of our imagination and invention.
The Imaginary Foundation is an example of this bridge. It acknowledges itself and its fiction. It allows for play. It is a small company that uses the fabrication of its narrative to bring the consumers attention to the mimetic principles behind its product. Revealing the architects conceit brings me (the consumer) into co-authorship of the story. It endears itself to me. We do not only consume the product. We consume the narrative of the product. Even if I do not purchase, if I am thinking about it, I am talking about it, I have bought in. If it generates new ideas and deeper order thoughts, then I have begun to take ownership of the product. I consume the myth, I begin to co-author it -- I don it in the neural network of culture. And thus the product has gained consciousness, has begun to be carried beyond the object -- it resonates.
My study of this product is limited. I am not encouraging anyone here to purchase a shirt. I have not purchased a shirt. What I think this opens up is a table for negotiations between the current consumerism model, and individual consciousness—an opportunity to examine sustainable consumerism in all implications.
-Nikita Nelin
Infinitely Intoxicating
Louis Pasteur once wrote:
I see everywhere in the world, the inevitable expression of the concept of infinity…. The idea of God is nothing more than one form of the idea of infinity. So long as the mystery of the infinite weighs on the human mind, so long will temples be raised to the cult of the infinite, whether it be called Bramah, Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus…. The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequethed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—En Theos—“A God Within.” The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who hears a god within, and who obeys it. The ideals of art, of science, are lighted by reflection from the infinite.
To bear a god within is not an easy task for us mortals. The god within—even more so than the god without—demands to be obeyed. Having a god inside us—or Socrates like a daimon on our shoulder—is no recipe for happiness.
It can lead to unbearable obligation and even to martyrdom. And, if the god is a muse, it can lead to the travails of the artist.
All great art and all great artists are consumed by the infinite. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars.” Those are the artists, the ones who amidst the muck feel part of something higher, something everlasting, the infinite.
The great enemy of the infinite is reason. Reason is calculating. It is rational. It is logical. It insists that everything is knowable and comprehensible. Ends justify means. And means can achieve ends. Reason insists on explanation. The self—the mystery—must be made knowable.
David Brooks in the NY Times today lauds the entry of behavioral psychology into politics and policy. We want to know, he writes, how to get people to vote and how to get congress to cut the deficit. If science can tell us how what to put in their drinking water, how to frame the question, what books to read to them in vitro, or how to rewire their brains to be rational, wouldn’t that make policy all the more reasonable? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Science can make us more rational. That of course is the dream of people like Ray Kurzweil as well as the social scientists who insist that humans can be studied like rats. Let’s not object to the fact. We can be studied like rats and that is what university social science departments around the country and the world are doing everyday. This research is eminently useful, as Brooks rightly remarks. If we employ it, we can be made to be more reasonable.
What the rationalization of humanity means, however, is not a question science can answer. Max Weber began the study of the rationalization of mankind when he proposed that the rise of the enlightenment and the age of reason was bringing about an “Entzauberung” or a “de-magicification” of the world. Capitalism emerged at this time for a number of reasons, but one main reason, Weber understood, was that capitalism provided in the profit motive rational and objective criteria for measuring human endeavors. The problem, as Weber so well understood, is that the elevation of reason and rationality brought about the devaluation of all highest values—what Nietzsche would call nihilism. This is because reason, derived from ratio, is always a relation. All values are relative. In such a world, nothing is infinite. Stuck amidst the relations of means and ends, everything is a calculation. All is a game. There is no purpose or meaning to the game of life. As we become more rational, we also become less consumed by the infinite. That is the true danger of the rise of the social sciences and our rationality-consumed culture that insists that all human behavior be made understandable so that it can be made better.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt is concerned with the way that the rise of reason and rationality is challenging the quintessence of the human condition—at least as that human condition has been experienced and known since the dawn of humanity. The rise of the social sciences, she writes over and over, are subjecting the mystery and fecundity of human action to the law of large numbers. While each and every human action may in itself be surprising and mysterious, it is nevertheless true that studied in groups and analyzed over time, human action does fall into comprehensible patterns. The more we study and know these patterns, the more we come to think of humans as predictable animals rather than surprising and spontaneous selves. This sociological and psychological reduction of man to animal is very much at the heart of what Arendt is opposing in her book.
Nowhere is the rationality of our times more visible than in the victory of labor and the marginalization of art. We are, all of us, laborers today. That is why the first question we ask others we meet is: What do you do? Our labor defines us. It gives our lives meaning in that it assigns us a use and a value. Even professors, judges, and presidents now say regularly: this is my job. By which we mean, don’t blame us for what we do. Don’t hold me to some higher standard. Don’t expect miracles. It is our job to do this. We do this to make a living.
The one group in society who is at times excepted from this reduction to labor is artists. But even the artist is today is taken less and less seriously. Insofar as artists are enthusiasts consumed with the infinite, they are ignored or viewed as marginal. Art is reduced to playfulness. A hobby. “From the standpoint of “making a living,” every activity unconnected with labor becomes a “hobby.”” And those artists who are taken seriously, whose work is bought and sold on the art market, turn artistic work into the job of making a living.
Art, Arendt writes, is a process of magic. Citing a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, she insists that the magic of art is the artist’s transfiguration of something ordinary—the canvas, clay or word—into something extraordinary, an expression of the infinite in the finite world of things.
Because art figures the infinite, poetry is the “most human” of the arts and the art that “remains closest to the thought that inspired it.” The poem, of all artworks, is the most lasting because its medium is the least subject to decay. It is the closest expression of the infinite we humans possess.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose resonance with Arendt in so many things has been too infrequently remarked, agrees that poetry is the art form in which the individual artist can access and figure in the world a public and common truth. In “The Poet,” Emerson writes:
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself ), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draw by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the universe; his speech is thunder; his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, “with the flower of the mind”; not with the intellect used as an organ but with the intellect released from all service…inebriated by nectar. As the traveler who has lost his way throws his reins on his horse’s neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers, and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theaters, traveling, wars, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact.
I take this quotation from Emerson’s “The Poet” from an exceptional recent essay by Sven Birkirts. The essay appears in the latest edition of Lapham’s Quarterly, an entire issue focusing on the merits and need for inebriation.
As Birkirts writes:
For Emerson, the intoxication is not escape but access, a means of getting closer to “the fact,” which might, with heartfelt imprecision, be called life itself. What he means by “public power,” I think, is something like what Carl Jung and others later meant by the phrase collective unconscious, the emphasis falling on the unconscious, that posited reservoir of our shared archetypes and primordial associations—that which reason by itself cannot fathom, for it is, in essence, antithetical to reason.
Birkirt’s reflects not only on the need for inebriation in the pursuit of artistic infinity, but also on the decreasing potency of intoxicants today. For him, the rise of the mass market in art, the globalization of experience, the accessibility of all information all have made the world smaller, knowable, and accountable. What is lost in such access is precisely the portal to the infinite.
Artistically and in almost every other way ours has become a culture of proliferation. Information, perspectives, as well as the hypercharged clips and images of our global experience are within the radius of the keystroke. Nothing is unspoken, nothing is unaccounted. Every taste is given a niche and every niche is catered to. Here, one might argue, is more material than ever; here are opportunities for even greater acts of synthesis. But I am skeptical. Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” The temptation is to invert the phrases and ascribe causality: where everything is permitted, nothing is true. Where nothing is true, where is the Emersonian fact to be found? This bears directly on the artist’s task. The idea that writers can keep producing grandly synthesizing or totalizing work—that has the ring of truth, of mattering—is debatable.
Birkirt’s essay may not be the intoxicant of your choice this weekend, but it should be. It is your weekend read. And you might check out the surprising selection at the bar at Lapham’s Quarterly as well.
And for those with time to spare: Arthur Koestler, from whom I first learned of the Louis Pasteur quote at the top of this essay, was consumed with the connection between intoxication and the infinite. I have discussed Koestler’s pursuit of the infinite at length. You can read that discussion here.
-RB
The “E” Word
The New York Times tells the story of Benjamin Goering. Goering is 22. Until recently he studied computer science and philosophy at the University of Kansas. He felt “frustrated in crowded lecture halls where the professors did not even know his name.” So Goering dropped out of college and went to San Francisco, where he got a job as a software engineer.
I applaud Goering for making a risky decision. College was not for him. This does not mean he wasn’t smart or couldn’t cut it. He clearly has talent and it was being wasted in courses he was not interested in that were costing him and his family many tens of thousands of dollars every year. In leaving, Goering made the right decision for him. Indeed, many more college students should make the same decision he did. There are huge numbers of talented people who are simply not intellectuals and don’t enjoy or get much out of college. This is not destiny. A great or good teacher might perk them up. But largely it is a waste of their time and money for them to struggle through (or sleep through) classes that bore them. If anything, the forced march through Shakespeare and Plato make these students less engaged, cynical, and self-centered as they turn from common sense to the internal pursuit of self interest in partying and life in private.
The story should raise the big question that everyone tiptoes around in this current debate about college: Who should go to college?
The obvious answer is those who want to and those who care about ideas. Those who see that in thinking and reading and talking about justice, democracy, the scientific method, and perspective, we are talking about what it means to live in a large, democratic, bureaucratic country at a time of transition from an industrial to a information-age economy. College, in other words, is for those people who want to think about their world. It is for people who are willing and eager to turn to the great thinkers who came before them and, also, the innovative scientists and artists who have revealed hidden secrets about the natural and the human worlds. It is, in other words, for intellectuals. And this of course raises the “E” question: the question of elitism.
It is folly to think that everyone is or should be interested in such an endeavor. In no society in history have intellectuals been anything but a small minority of the population. This is not a question of privilege. There is no reason to think that those who love ideas are better or more qualified than those who work the earth, build machines, or engineer websites. It may very well be otherwise.
Hannah Arendt was clear that intellectuals had no privileged position in politics. On the contrary, she worried that the rise of intellectuals in politics was specifically dangerous. Intellectuals, insofar as they could get lost in and captivated by ideas, are prone to lose sight of reality in the pursuit of grand schemes. And intellectuals, captivated by the power of reason, are susceptible to rationalizations that excuse wrongs like torture or suicide bombing as means necessary for greater goods. The increasing dominance of intellectuals in politics, Arendt argued, is one of the great dangers facing modern society. She thus welcomed the grand tradition of the American yeoman farmer and affirmed that there is no need to go to college to be an engaged citizen or a profound thinker. The last of our Presidents who did not attend college was Abraham Lincoln. He did just fine. It is simply ridiculous to argue that college is a necessary credential for statesmanship.
While intellectuals have no special claim to leadership or prominence, they are nevertheless important. Intellectuals—those who think— are those people in society who stand apart from the mainstream pressures of economy and influence and outside the political movements of advocacy and propaganda. In the Arendtian tradition, intellectuals are or can be conscious pariahs, those who look at their societies from the outside and thus gain a perspective from distance that allows them to understand and comprehend the society in ways that people deeply embedded within it cannot. Those who stand apart from society and think are important, first because they preserve and deepen the stories and tales we as a society tell about ourselves. In writing poetry, making art, building monuments, writing books, and giving speeches, intellectuals help lend meaning and gravity to the common sense we have of ourselves as a people.
One problem we have in the current debate is that College has morphed into an institution designed to do many (too many) things. On the one hand, college has historically been the place for the education of and formation of intellectuals. But for many decades if not many centuries, that focus has shifted. Today College is still a place for the life of the mind. But it is also a ticket into the middle or upper-middles classes and it is equally a job-training and job-certification program. Of course, it is also a consumer good that brands young people with a certain mystique and identity. For many localities colleges are, themselves, job creation machines, bringing with them all sorts of new businesses and throwing off patents and graduating students that reinvigorate local communities. The university is now a multiversity, to invoke Clark Kerr’s famous term. When we talk about college today, the debate is complicated by these multiple roles.
It is difficult to raise such issues today because they smack of elitism. Since college-educated people think they are superior to those without a fancy diploma, their egalitarianism then insists that everyone should have the same experience. We are not supposed to entertain the idea that some people may not want to go to college. Instead, we are told that if they had a better education, if they knew better, if they just were taught to understand, they would all want to sit in classrooms and read great books or do exciting experiments.
We are stuck today with what Hannah Arendt called, in a related context, the “democratic mentality of an egalitarian society that tends to deny the obvious inability and conspicuous lack of interest of large parts of the population in political matters as such.” In politics, Arendt argued that what was needed were public spaces from which a self-chose “élite could be selected, or rather, where it could select itself.” Similarly, in education today, colleges should be the spaces where those who want to select themselves as an educated élite might lose themselves in books and experiments and amongst paintings and symphonies. There is simply no reason to assume that most people in society need to or should be interested in such an endeavor.
One reason the question of elitism is so present in debates about college is the disgusting and degenerate state of American public high schools. If high schools provided a serious and meaningful civic education, if they taught not simply reading and writing and arithmetic, but history and art—and taught these well—we would not need to send students to remedial education in college where they could be taught these subjects a second time. While many academics wring their hands about making college available to all, they might do much better if they focused on high schools and grammar schools around the country. If we were to redistribute the billions of dollars we spend on remedial college education to serious reform efforts in high schools, that money would be very well spent.
To raise the question of elitism means neither that college should be open only to the rich and connected (on the contrary, it should be open to all who want it), nor that the educated elite is to be segregated from society and kept apart in an ivory tower. When one reads Shakespeare, studies DNA, or dances with Bill T. Jones, one is not simply learning for learning's sake. Few understood this better than John Finley, Greek Professor at Harvard, who wrote General Education in a Free Society in 1945. Finley had this to say about the purposes of a college education:
The heart of the problem of a general education is the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition. Neither the mere acquisition of information nor the development of special skills and talents can give the broad basis of understanding which is essential if our civilization is to be preserved…. Unless the educational process includes at each level of maturity some continuing contact with those fields in which value judgments are of prime importance, it must fall short of the ideal.
What college should offer—as should all education at every level except for the most specialized graduate schools—is the experience of thinking and coming to engage with the world in which one lives. College is, at its best, an eye opening experience, an opportunity for young people to learn the foundational texts and also be exposed to new cultures, new ideas, and new ways of thinking. The ideas of justice, truth, and beauty one learns are not valuable in themselves; they are meaningful only insofar as they impact and inform our daily lives. To read Plato’s Republic is to ask: what are the value of the ideas of good and the just? It is also to meditate on the role of music and art in society. And at the same time, it is to familiarize oneself with characters like Socrates and Plato who, in the world we share, epitomize the qualities of morality, heroism, and the pursuit of the truth wherever it might lead. This can also be done in high schools. And it should be.
It is simply wrong to think such inquiries are unworldly or overly intellectual. Good teachers teach great texts not simply because the books are old, but because they are meaningful. And young students return to these books generation after generation because they find in them stories, examples, and ideas that inspire them to live their lives better and more fully.
As Leon Botstein, President of Bard College where the Hannah Arendt Center is located, writes in his book Jefferson’s Children,
No matter how rigorous the curriculum, no matter how stringent the requirements, if what goes on in the classroom does not leave its mark in the way young adults voluntarily act in private and in public while they are in college, much less in the years after, then the college is not doing what it is supposed to do.
The basic question being asked today is: Is college worthwhile? It is a good question. Too many colleges have lost their way. They no longer even understand what they are here to offer. Faculty frequently put research above teaching. Administration is the fastest growing segment of university education, which is evidence if anything is that universities simply do not know what their mission is anymore. It is no wonder, then, that many of our brightest young people will begin to shy away from the thoughtless expectation that one must attend college.
All around us, people are opting out of college. The mania for online education is at least in part fueled by the hunger for knowledge from students and others who do not want or need to attend college. The Times highlights Uncollege and other organizations that advocate “hacking” your education. Recall that Lincoln was better schooled in the classics of poetry and politics than most every college educated President who followed him. At a time when many colleges are so confused and trying to do so many things, they often do none well. It may be the case today that we need to evolve new networks and new organizations where intellectualism can flourish. And it may be small liberal arts colleges that are more flexible and more able to make that transition than large, bureaucratic research institutions.
The real question this debate needs to raise, but avoids, is: Who should get a college education? The answer, “not everyone,” is one few want to hear. And yet it might be the beginning of a real conversation about what a college education is for and why we are today so often failing to provide it to our students.
-RB
The Irony of Sincerity
A few weeks ago, Christy Wampole, a professor of French at Princeton, took to the New York Times to point to what she sees as a pandemic of irony, the symptom of a malignant hipster culture which has metastasized, spreading out from college campuses and hip neighborhoods and into the population at large. Last week, author R. Jay Magill responded to Wampole, noting that the professor was a very late entry into an analysis of irony that stretches back to the last gasps of the 20th century, and that even that discourse fits into a much longer conversation about sincerity and irony that has been going on at least since Diogenes.
Of course, this wasn’t Magill’s first visit to this particular arena; his own entry, entitled Sincerity: How a Moral Ideal Born Five Hundred Years Ago Inspired Religious Wars, Modern Art, Hipster Chic, and the Curious Notion That We All Have Something to Say (No Matter How Dull), came out in July. Magill very effectively recapitulates the main point from his book in his article for the Atlantic, but, if you were to read this new summary alone, you would both deny yourself of some of the pleasures of Magill’s research and prose, as well as spare yourself from some of his less convincing arguments, arguments which, incidentally, happen to suffice for the thrust of his recent article.
The most interesting chapters of Magill’s book deal with the early history of the rise of sincerity, which he traces back to the Reformation. In Magill’s telling, the word “sincere” enters the record of English in 1533, when an English reformer named John Frith writes, to Sir Thomas More, that John Wycliffe “had lived ‘a very sincere life.’” Before that use, in its origin in Latin and French, the word “sincere” had only been used to describe objects and, now, Frith was using it not only for the first time in English but also to describe a particular individual as unusually true and pure to his self, set in opposition to the various hypocrisies that had taken root within the Catholic Church. Magill sums this up quite elegantly: “to be sincere” he writes “was to be reformed.”
Now, this would have been revolutionary enough, since it suggested that a relationship with God required internal confirmation rather than external acclamation—in the words of St. Paul, a fidelity to the spirit of the law and not just the letter. And yet reformed sincerity was not simply a return to the Gospel. In order to be true to one’s self, there must be a self to accord with, an internal to look towards. Indeed, Magill’s history of the idea of sincerity succeeds when it describes the development of the self, and, in particular, that development as variably determined by the internal or the external.
Image by Shirin Rezaee
It gets more complicated, however, or perhaps more interesting, when Magill turns towards deceptive presentations of the self, that is, when he begins to talk about insincerity. He begins this conversation with Montaigne, who “comes to sense a definite split between his public and private selves and is the first author obsessed with portraying himself as he really is.” The most interesting appearance of this conversation is an excellent chapter on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who suggested that people should aspire to self-sameness, should do their best to “reconcile” one’s self to one’s self, a demand for authenticity that would come to be fully expressed in Immanuel Kant’s moral law, the command that I must set myself as a law for myself.
Sincerity, the moral ideal first put forth by John Frith, started as the Reformation’s response to the inability of the Catholic Church to enact that particular principle, in other words, its hypocrisy. This follows for each of the movements that Magill writes about, each responding to the hypocrisy of their own moment in a specific way. On this matter he has a very good teacher, Hannah Arendt, an inheritor of Kant, who was himself a reader of Rousseau. Arendt writes, in Crisis of the Republic, what might serve as a good summation of one of Magill’s more convincing arguments: “if we inquire historically into the causes likely to transform engagés into enragés, it is not injustice that ranks first, but hypocrisy.”
Still, while what makes the sincerity of Frith (who was burned at the stake) or Wycliffe (whose body was exhumed a half century after his death so that it, too, could be burned) compelling is the turn inwards, it is Rousseau’s substitution of the turn back for that turn inward that appears to interest Magill, who decries “the Enlightenment understanding of the world” that “would entirely dominate the West, relegating Rousseau to that breed of reactionary artististic and political minds who stood against the progress of technology, commerce, and modernization and pined for utopia.”
The whole point is moot; Rousseau was himself a hypocrite, often either unable or unwilling to enact the principles he set out in his writings. As Magill moves forward, though, it becomes clear the he values the turn back as a manifestation of sincerity, as a sort of expressing oneself honestly. The last few hundred years in the development of sincerity, it seems, are finding new iterations of the past in the self. He writes that the Romantics, a group he seems to favor as more sincere than most, “harbored a desire to escape a desire to escape forward-moving, rational civilization by worshipping nature, emotion, love, the nostalgic past, the bucolic idyll, violence, the grotesque, the mystical, the outcast and, failing these, suicide.” In turn, in his last chapter, Magill writes that hipster culture serves a vital cultural purpose: its “sincere remembrance of things past, however commodified or cheesy or kitschy or campy or embarrassing, remains real and small and beautiful because otherwise these old things are about to be discarded by a culture that bulldozes content once it has its economic utility.”
The hipster, for Magill, is not the cold affectation of an unculture, as Wampole wants to claim, but is instead the inheritor “of the the entire history of the Protestant-Romantic-rebellious ethos that has aimed for five hundred years to jam a stick into the endlessly turning spokes of time, culture and consumption and yell, “Stop! I want to get off!”
There’s the rub. What Magill offers doesn’t necessarily strike me as a move towards sincerity, but it is definitely a nod to nostalgia. Consider how he recapitulates his argument in the article:
One need really only look at what counts as inventive new music, film, or art. Much of it is stripped down, bare, devoid of over-production, or aware of its production—that is, an irony that produces sincerity. Sure, pop music and Jeff Koons alike retain huge pull (read: $$$), but lately there has been a return to artistic and musical genres that existed prior to the irony-debunking of 9/11: early punk, disco, rap, New Wave—with a winking nod to sparse Casio keyboard sounds, drum machines, naïve drawing, fake digital-look drawings, and jangly, Clash-like guitars. Bands like Arcade Fire, Metric, Scissor Sisters, CSS, Chairlift, and the Temper Trap all go in for heavy nostalgia and an acknowledgement of a less self-conscious, more D.I.Y. time in music.
Here, Magill is very selectively parsing the recent history of “indie music,” ignoring a particularly striking embrace of artificial pop music that happened alongside the rise of the “sincere” genres, like new folk, that he favors. There’s no reason to assume that Jeff Koons’s blown up balloon animals or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are any less sincere than the Scissor Sisters’s camp disco, just as there is no reason to assume that a desire to return to nature is any less sincere than the move into the city. Although Magill makes a good argument for the hipster’s cultural purpose, that purpose is not itself evidence that the hipster is expressing what’s truly inside himself, just as there’s no way for you to be sure that I am sincerely expressing my feelings about Sincerity. Magill, ultimately, makes the same mistake as Wampole, in that he judges with no evidence; the only person you can accurately identify as sincere is yourself.
-Josh Kopin
Attending Phaidon’s Century
Submitted by D. Grace Reid.
"One hundred years of human progress, regression, suffering and hope."
Glowing River of Books
Literature versus Traffic by Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus.
An installation of 10,000 LED-lit books at Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia for The Light In Winter festival.
The books, recently retired from area public libraries, were given a second life as a glowing river that flowed through the square and into a nearby street. On the final day of the installation, onlookers were invited to take the books home.
See more great images here.
What is “Art” According to Arendt?
“That the arts must be functional, that cathedrals fulfill a religious need of society, that a picture is born from the need for self-expression in the individual painter and that it is looked at because of a desire for self-perfection in the spectator, all these notions are so unconnected with art and historically so new that one is tempted simply to dismiss them as modern prejudices.”
-Hannah Arendt, "Crisis in Culture"
Today, within the context of contemporary art, post-Marcel Duchamp, post-Sherrie Levine, it’s no longer interesting to ask the question “What is art?” Anything and everything can now be appropriated into art’s frame or become part of an artwork. In Andrea Fraser’s words, “It’s art when I say its art.”
Sherrie Levine, Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A.P.), 1991. Bronze, 14.5 x 14.25 x 25 inches.
When we approach contemporary art with Hannah Arendt in mind, however, we must begin by understanding what she means when she uses the word, “art.” She works with a traditional idea of what art is. And she is quick to point out that what constitutes art for her may have little to do with what constitutes art for a given population in a given point in time. When we speak of art today in the current discourse surrounding contemporary art, we speak differently from Arendt. Which is reason enough to consider her definition.
One case in point is the cathedral. It is not a coincidence that Arendt chooses an ornate cathedral to exemplify her definition of art, since art for Arendt is distinguished by having no utilitarian purpose. A cathedral is a place of worship, and thus may serve a purpose. And yet a cathedral itself serves no purpose. The people of Chartres, for example, could gather and worship without their infamous building’s spires and rose window. These elements were made, to quote Arendt, ad maiorem gloriam Dei [for the greater glory of God]. Chartres Cathedral possesses qualities above and beyond any functionality. Art, for Arendt, is this totally non-functional thing that exists in the world merely to appear. Art objects may—and almost always do—have other purposes, yet this is not what qualifies them as art.
Chartres Cathedral, France. This cathedral was built over generations in the 12th and 13th Century.
Art, as Arendt understands it, must also be free from its commodification in the art market. When art is commoditized, it is subject to becoming just like any other consumer commodity, which can be purchased, consumed, and therefore destroyed. Still, I don’t believe that an art object’s status as a commodity necessarily disqualifies it from constituting Arendt’s definition as art. As many contemporary critics, such as Diedrich Diedrichsen, have pointed out, art is not a regular commodity, and it is not assigned value or circulated in the same way, even if it is given a price tag.
“Beauty”—another fraught term in contemporary art discourse - is the quality that makes something last forever, and constitutes the world of appearance. Obviously, this quality is threatened by commodification, which, in theory, reduces art to dollar signs, making a painting’s value equal to that of a luxury apartment. And like a luxury apartment, when it circulates freely in the market, it is subject to demolition. Although, even when art is not circulating in this market, it is subject to destruction.( In the example hyperlinked, it is merely art’s comparison to monetary values that became “rationale” for its destruction. This museum director is what Arendt would call a “philistine”.)
The term “beauty,” like the question “What is art?”, is contentious mainly because it has ceased to mean anything. As the idiom goes, “it is in the eye of the beholder.” Not so, according to Arendt, who deploys this quality normally defined by its subjectivity and indefinability, in a super definitive and specific way. Beauty is the quality that transcends all needs and makes something last through time, and it is not a subjective descriptor. Following Kant, she argues that the person who judges whether or not something is beautiful must put themselves in the place of others who are judging the work in the same time and place, and they must produce judgments to “woo the consent of everyone else” (here I quote Arendt, quoting from Kant) in the hopes of coming to some eventual agreement about what is beautiful.
Consent about what is beautiful is important because it determines what is preserved over time. What unfolds in “Crisis in Culture,” the essay from which I’m drawing and to which I will continue to refer in these posts, is what happens to art and “culture” (which I will have to save for another week) within “mass society.” Or, what happens to the world of appearances, a necessary condition for politics, when everything is produced in order to be consumed (and therefore destroyed)?
-Amy Zion
The Splintering of Culture
Earlier this month I attended a lecture by Matthias Lilienthal, the former artistic director of Hebbel am Ufer (HAU). HAU as it is affectionately known in Berlin is an organization with three performance spaces in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, and is one of the largest, best funded, and risk-taking performance theatre complexes in the world. As one of the most important and innovative avant garde theatre directors, Lilienthal has "created, instigated and nourished many of the most important developments in theatre in recent decades," according to Tom Sellar of Yale who introduced him.
Lilienthal was interviewed after his talk by Gideon Lester, my exciting new colleague who now is director of the theatre program at Bard.
While Lilienthal is an artistic director and has a background in the theatre, he calls himself a "booker" of talent more than an artist or a curator. He is committed to theatre that has social and political impact. His mission is to constantly create friction. Friction means in his telling, "to be polemic against society and be an urban laboratory for the future." That said, Lilienthal insists that he remains an artist, someone who in his words cares most about the aesthetic experience his works bring about.
Lilienthal discussed a number of his past projects to explain what he means by a theatre of friction. One of the most famous and interesting is FOREIGNERS OUT! SCHLINGENSIEF'S CONTAINER, a performance, installation, and movie that he produced in collaboration with the filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief.
FOREIGNERS OUT! premiered in Vienna in the summer of 2000, at a time of great anti-immigrant sentiment in Austria—it was shortly after the xenophobic politician Jörg Haider came to power in Austria. Schlingensief and Lilienthal put two large containers in the public square in front of the Viennese Opera house and filled them with 15 asylum seekers. Above the asylum seekers, the artists hung a sign that read: "Foreigners Out." They then gave the Austrian population the opportunity to vote which foreigner to expel from the country. Over 10,000 Austrians voted every day and the first person sent home was a Nigerian woman.
Lilienthal speaks of a "hysterical longing for reality in today's theatre." Much of his work and the work he "books" mixes reality with theatre. His most famous performance piece, performed all over the world, is "X Wohnungen" or "X Apartments." Artists are asked to create artistic experiences that last up to ten minutes and take place in private apartments or houses. In one example that Lilienthal showed a clip from during his talk, audience members in groups of two are led into apartments of immigrants in Cologne where they are told to kneel in front of doors with keyholes. Through the keyholes they watch a Muslim woman in a burka and hijab strip naked and recline on a couch. They are then interrupted, given tea and told to go out.
Lilienthal explains that "we are playing a private reality, with voyeurism and with exhibitionism." His participatory performance art is "a kind of playful treatment of reality. You are playing with prejudgments against migrants. You are playing with your own voyeurism." The effort is partly to create discussions about Islam, religion, and sexuality. But it above all, in his words, to "to bring together experiences of reality."
Lilienthal was quite critical of the New York art scene, arguing that NYC artists are too commercial and that there is no meaningful artistic forum in the U.S. as there is in Germany. His point is that his HAU stages have, in his telling, become the center of German and European art worlds, presenting all the most interesting and most important artists from around the world under a single umbrella. He lamented the fact that there was no similarly dominant and unifying artistic space in NY or in the U.S. New York, he said provocatively, in the East Village, is a provincial state.
Lester asked Lilienthal what would he have done in NYC had he accepted a job here? He answered, (I am paraphrasing here),"I would have presented art that offers a polemic against society. I would like everyone to know me and then I would have been... perhaps they would kill me after a year."
There is something both noble and anachronistic in Lilienthal's Socratic dream to create art so full of friction and power that he would be killed for it. It is a noble dream because it imagines that art, like philosophy, might still have the power and importance to be seen as a threat to the state or the society. It is anachronistic because art and philosophy have long since lost such centrality.
When I asked Lilienthal about this, his answer was that it was different in Berlin, where the arts are more central and given more public financing and public attention. But I don't accept the argument that the arts are so much more important in Berlin than in NYC. In Berlin, as everywhere today, the intellectual world is just no longer governed by a unified aesthetic or a single dominant medium. There is a mass culture, but the premise of the mass culture is consumerism. Everybody buys what they want and art connoisseurs consume what they like. Most intellectuals and educated people now consume art and news that is hardly distinguishable from middle or low-brow tastes; indeed, the distinction between high and low is now illegitimate. But more important even than that, is the fact that those who do like the best art or best philosophy or best theatre or the best philosophy do not agree on what the "best" is.
One sees this fracturing of culture everywhere. The New York Times was, for a period of time, the arbiter of what mattered in the United States. That is no longer the case and has not been so for decades. It is not the Internet that brought about the factionalization of cultural and political opinion, but, on the contrary, the loss of any single or dominant opinion made the cacophony of voices and platforms on the Internet appealing and powerful.
Similarly, philosophy is broken into analytic and continental schools, and within each there are esoteric sub-schools so specialized that advanced papers and thinking can be read and understood by only dozens of people around the world. The same fission occurs in literature and art as well. Who now feels the need to read all the books profiled in the NY Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books? The selection criteria are ever more arbitrary and there are no longer any acknowledged gateways to culture.
There are, of course, still important artists and writers, but they appeal to ever-more specialized and localized crowds of followers. Lilienthal's dream of a unified artistic world with a single influential cultural world is long gone. And this is true in Berlin as well as in NYC. We will never again have a situation where the chattering classes are all reading the same books and seeing the same shows. The culture is simply too diffuse and differentiated and democratized. There are no measures of quality that are widely accepted. So what we have are simply sub-groups and sub-genres and sub-cultures.
A version of this argument is made by Peter Sloterdijk in his essay Themes from the Human Zoo. Sloterdijk writes:
Because of the formation of mass culture through the media—radio in the First World War and television after 1945, and even more through the contemporary web revolution—the coexistence of people in the present societies has been established on new foundations. These are, as it can uncontrovertibly be shown, clearly post-literary, post-epistolary, and thus post-humanistic. Anyone who thinks the prefix `post' in this formulation is too dramatic can replace it with the adverb `marginal'. Thus our thesis: modern societies can produce their political and cultural synthesis only marginally through literary, letter-writing, humanistic media. Of course, that does not mean that literature has come to an end, but it has split itself off and become a sui generis subculture, and the days of its value as bearer of the national spirit have passed. The social synthesis is no longer—and is no longer seen to be—primarily a matter of books and letters. New means of political-cultural telecommunication have come into prominence, which have restricted the pattern of script-born friendship to a limited number of people. The period when modern humanism was the model for schooling and education has passed, because it is no longer possible to retain the illusion that political and economic structures could be organized on the amiable model of literary societies.
What Sloterdijk rightly sees is that literate means of cultural analysis have lost their once-dominant place in the social and political formation of society. Books and theatre and artworks have been replaced by mass entertainments and diversions, so that literate works are relegated to sub-genres of importance only to their particular fans and followers. Art and philosophy, therefore, become socially and politically marginal.
Instead of seeking to bring back a unified culture of art in which artists matter to the social and political worlds, as Lilienthal dreams, it would be more radical and more honest to admit that we live today in a world in which those who make art, write literature, and think philosophy matter ever less. To think the challenges of doing art and thinking in a world immune to the charms of art and thought is the challenge we are faced with today.
Matthias Lilienthal's talk is fascinating and, as you can see, provocative, which is justification enough to spend one hour this weekend watching him. Thanks to Theatre Magazine for posting the video of the talk. Here is your weekend read.
-RB
Between Shadow and Light
One of my favorite images in Arendt's writings comes not from Arendt herself, but her citation of the poem "Magic" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke's poem reads (in an approximate translation):
From indescribable transformation originate
Amazing shapes. Feel! Trust!
We suffer often: To ashes turn our flames;
Yet art can set on fire the dust.
Magic is here. In the realm of enchantment
The ordinary word appears elevated
But sounds as real as if the dove called
To seek its invisible mate.
Arendt cites Rilke's poem in the final section of the chapter of the Human Condition on Work. It is part of her discussion of art and her claim that "the immediate source of the art work is the human capacity for thought."
Art, Arendt writes, has its foundation in thinking. Works of art, she writes, are "thought things." They are thingifications of thoughts, or to use a word that is so often abused, they are reifications of thoughts—The making of thoughts into things. It is this process of transformation and transfiguration that Rilke captures in "Magic": To "set fire to the dust" and bring beauty and truth to the real world. That is what art does.
My mind turned to Rilke's poem as I watched the great South African artist William Kentridge deliver the first of his 2012 Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
Kentridge spoke in praise of shadows, and situated his talk within a reading of Plato's allegory of the Cave in Book VII of the Republic. The story of the cave begins with prisoners shackled and unmovable who see shadows along a wall projected by a fire. First one sets himself free and climbs out into the light of the sun and, slowly, painfully, comes to recognize in the light of the sun that the shadows were indeed shadows, untrue. The parable illustrates the error of sensible things and is one part of Plato's illustration of his theory of ideas. The ideas, supersensible truths of reason and logic, do not deceive and change like the shadowy things of the world. Only what lasts eternally is true; all that is sensible and fleeting is false.
Kentridge tells the story of Plato's cave to explain why he sees art, and especially his art, in opposition to the Platonic idea of truth. If Plato celebrates the primacy of the eternally true over the shadows, Kentridge argues that art elevates the image above the truth. For this reason, at least in part, Kentridge's art works with shadows. Shadow figures and shadow puppets.
Kentridge lauds shadows. In the very limitations of the shadows, in the gaps, in the gaps that inspire in us leaps to complete an image, that is where we think and learn. The leanness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition. It is in shadows that we find our agency in apprehending the world.
Art by William Kentridge
Shadow art is, for Kentridge, political. Plato's politics depends on a truth known and understood by the few and then imposed on the many. In this sense philosophy is, in Arendt's words, opposed to politics, and the philosopher either must seek merely to be left alone by the people (which is difficult because philosophers are dangerous), or they will always seek to dominate and tyrannize the polity with their reason. Arendt's lifelong battle is to free politics from the certainty of rational and philosophical truth, to open us to a politics of opinion and openness.
Knowledge is power and there is, in Kentridge's words, a relation between knowledge and violence. Kentridge embraces shadows and silhouettes to oppose the philosophical and Platonic tyranny of reason. He writes elsewhere:
I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.
Optimism must be kept in check since any certainty about the destination can underwrite the need for violence to bring others to that end. For Kentridge, "There is no destination. all destinations, all bright lights, arouse our mistrust."
Kentridge offers us an image of the artist. He speaks from the studio and from his notebook to emphasize the source of artistic truth in the thought image rather than the logical word. An artist thinks. He sees. He makes art. He makes things that reflect not truth and certainty but gaps, misgivings, and questions. Kentridge gives reality to the questionability of the world in his shadow art. In this way his art reminds us of the magic of Rilke's fire that transfigures dust into flame.
Few modern artists work magic like William Kentridge. His Norton Lectures are a great introduction to his art and the thinking behind his art. If you are not graduating this weekend, take the time to hear and look at what Kentridge says and makes.
You can view Kentridge's First Norton Lecture here. Consider it your visual weekend read.
Defining Humanism
Martin Heidegger's Letter on Humanism is one of the great works of the 20th century. It was written in 1946 after his experience of the war and being stripped of teaching duties as Rectorship of Freiburg University as well as losing his membership in the Nazi party. The Letter is an attempt to re-cast his past work on a current and future path, seeking to save humanity from inhumanity.
The Letter remains controversial for many reasons, not least because Heidegger refuses to see Nazism as the name for the inhumanity threatening our world. Instead, he attributes the dehumanization of mankind, including Nazism, to a general homelessness that has its roots in what he calls the age of Technik.
I am just finishing up a semester-long seminar on Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, a course I try to teach every other year. I always end the course by reading the one text on Heidegger's Letter that I find both intelligent and provocative.
In Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism, Peter Sloterdijk sets Heidegger's text in the context of humanism. While this may seem obvious, it is not. Heidegger goes through a history of humanism in two short pages of his text, and never addresses it again. But for Sloterdijk, the text is to be read as a last effort to save a dying humanist tradition.
The core of the humanist tradition, in Sloterdijk's provocative telling, is the book as love letter. Books, he writes, citing the poet Jean Paul, "are thick letters to friends." Humanism, as love letters, are messages sent out in printed form looking for friends. A humanist writes a book to move others to love what he himself loves. Humanism is thus a "communitarian fantasy" in which "participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages."
The power of humanist writing is the power to communicate love of humanity to others whom one does not know. It is to awake in others the love for being human, for living as human, in the way and manner of a human being. And for most of Western humanism, the essence of that human being that inspires such love and devotion has been the human capacity to think, to reason, and to create. It is because humans can create beautiful works of art, found great empires, and devote themselves to truth and to God that humans are different from animals and worthy of our love.
Humanists must, Sloterdijk knows, distinguish themselves from animals. Thus:
Anyone who is asking today about the future of humanity and about the methods of humanization wants to know if there is any hope of mastering the contemporary tendency towards the bestialization of humanity.
Sloterdijk sees humanism as the effort to tame the human beast—the beast in the human. It is the desire to influence for the good the constant tension in human beings between beastialization and humanization.
It is because humanism is always one side of a struggle against a perceived threat of the bestialization of human beings that humanists must, of necessity, stand apart not only from animals, but also from mass culture. Sloterdijk presents this point in the context of Roman humanism with clarity:
Ancient humanism can be understood only when it is grasped as one opponent in a media contest: that is, as the resistance of the books against the amphitheater, and the opposition of the humanizing, patient-making, sensitizing philosophical reading against the dehumanizing, impatient, unrestrained, sensation-mongering and excitement-mongering of the stadium. What the educated Romans called humanitas would have been unthinkable without the need to abstain from the mass culture of the theaters of cruelty.
From these premises, Sloterdijk makes the surprising claim that humanism, "the question of how a person can become a true or real human being becomes unavoidably a media question." The great event of our time, in Sloterdijk's telling, and that which ends the humanist endeavor, is the telecommunications revolution. The end of the book, the loss of the medium of high culture that will distinguish itself from the masses and thus the massification and bestializaiton of man is, he writes, a death knell for the very idea of a humanity that is to be held separate from and higher than animals.
Hannah Arendt fought her life against efforts of human rights activists to reduce man to a living being and against the dreams of social scientists to make of man a predictable member of a mass.
Her fight was, on her own terms, the fight to preserve an idea of the human distinct from animals that also powers Heidegger's exploration of humanity in the Letter on Humanism. Sloterdijk's account of Heidegger's effort, and his judgment of its unavoidable failure, is well worth your time this weekend. It is your weekend read.
-RB
The Story of Reconciliation
"It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the Day of Judgment”.
- Hannah Arendt, “Isak Dinesen: 1885 – 1963” in Men in Dark Times
According to Arendt, it is through action – and all action is but acts of speech – that human beings disclose themselves in their whoness rather than merely on the basis of their whatness. Her indebtedness for storytelling comes from a two-fold source: The Greek world on the one hand - the poets and the historians, and on the other the writings of Isak Dinesen.
Arendt devoted no theoretical effort to pass Dinesen under the lens of theory, other than some occasional mention and a literary profile in the book that Auden called her most German book – because of the form of epic legends in which the stories of the anti-heroes, under the shadow of dark times, are told.
Herself a talented storyteller, her books can be read better against this background of storytelling than on theoretical impetus; this is not because Arendt wasn’t a vehement defender of the life of the mind but because of her insight about the inability of intellectual traditions and history to understand and comprehend the events of her century.
Her reading of Dinesen conforms to the difficulties of understanding Totalitarianism. Spanish philosopher Fina Birulés puts in the following words: “While storytelling does not solve any problem and does not master anything forever, it adds yet another element in the repertory of the world, it is a way for human beings to leave a lasting presence in the world, not as species, but as a plurality of who’s”.
The relationship between storytelling and reconciliation is laid out by Arendt through Dinesen: “The reward of storytelling is to be able to let go: “When the storyteller is loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence”. To let go is an act of reconciliation.
Arendt writes the story of this anxiety and melancholy of her own through Dinesen: “That grief of having lost her life and lover in Africa should have made her a writer and given her a sort of second life was best understood as a joke, and “God loves a joke” became her maxim in the latter part of her life”.
Agnes Heller writes that Arendt knows in advance what it is that she wants to find in her storytelling, in spite of – often – finding something unexpected.
Dinesen becomes a reflection of mirrors for Arendt who in writing about Dinesen’s own storytelling that seems artificial and blurs the distinction between truth and fiction, finds the detachment necessary to comprehend the world, temporarily: “To become an artist also needs time and a certain detachment from the heavy, intoxicating business of sheer living that, perhaps, only the born artist can manage in the midst of living.”
The flight into imaginary worlds at the hand of Dinesen’s pen isn’t simply a performance and re-enactment of the Gothic – as is for example William Beckford’s “Vathek” – but rather a coming to terms with the present by telling a story about its burdens.
It is nothing but an anchoring on the present at a time when the foundation of the present itself – the past – seems irrevocably lost. A similar example of storytelling through mirrors would be, for example, Susan Sontag’s review of Anna Banti’s “Artemisia” for The London Review of Books in 2003.
“Artemisia” is a novel written late in the Second World War about the life of Artemisia Gentilenschi, a 17th century Italian painter: Banti, trained as an art historian, is meticulously careful about her treatment of sources on Gentilenschi’s life and writes in what Sontag calls “a double destiny”; according to her, Anna Banti does not find herself in Artemisia and is careful enough to write in the detachment of the third person, only available to the truly committed storyteller in a game of hide and seek: “We are playing a chasing game, Artemisia and I”.
More than a biography or a historical novel, Artemisia is a deeply emotional but sober and detached portrait of a woman in the early 17th century, tainted by the scandal of a rape that disgraced her family and haunted no more by her total commitment to art, than by the immense loneliness of living as an artist in a male-dominated world – but told with more grace than resentment.
The story about Banti and Artemisia that Sontag is telling is one of permanent displacement and loss; not only because of the female story being told but because the original novel was lost under the ruins of Banti’s house in Borgo San Jacopo when the mines detonated by the Germans wrecked the houses near the river, including hers.
Without knowing as much, Susan Sontag is writing about Banti in the same way that Arendt is writing about Dinesen: Behind a story of loss and womanhood, there is an affirmative and rather reckless anchoring in the present – in Sontag’s case, the world after Totalitarianism: The Cold War, Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. It is against this background that she is writing about a “phoenix of a novel”, which is in itself a testimony to Sontag’s own work.
What both writers learnt from their own writers is a bitter lesson in contemporary history, as eloquently put by Arendt about Dinesen:
Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art (as Goethe had done) or use it for the realization of an “idea”. Life might contain the “essence” (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the “elixir”; and eventually you may even be privileged to “make” something out of it, “to compound the story”. But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat it as such it will only play its tricks on you.
When Lebanese writer Mira Baz left Yemen in 2011, in the course of the revolution and just before the deadly “Friday of Dignity” massacre, after nearly a decade teaching and writing in the mysterious land – similar to Dinesen’s Africa seen through Arendt and Banti’s Florence seen through Sontag, a sort of paradise lost and not without heavy taxes levied by the status of paradise, she was to become displaced and would turn her poetic travelogue of Yemen into a vast vault of memory.
In March 2012 she wrote – exactly a year after the massacre – about the experience of the displacement, invoking the following lines from Dinesen:
“If I know a song of Africa,
Of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back,
Of the plows in the field and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers,
Does Africa know a song of me?”
After which she writes:
The house and the garden had quickly become my home, where in the mornings I fed my regular guests Bulbuls and Serins, and found serenity when, through watching them, I meditated on existence, on cycles, on life, on everything and nothingness. Out there was Yemen. Within the garden walls, and all the walls, was me, inside my head.
Through reading and writing, life cannot be changed, but it can be made understandable and livable, after the same fashion of John Updike when he described the prose of Bruno Schulz: “The harrowing effect of Schulz’ prose is to construct the world anew, as from fragments that exist after some unnamable disaster”. The disaster is always the turbulence of history and the unnamable is the loss, but here storytelling becomes a privilege, a sign of truth, and the burden of a presence – entering the world once again, even if it had been lost once.
Fina Birulés concludes her timely meditation on Arendt and Dinesen: “The political function of the narrator – historian or novelist – is to teach the acceptance of things as they are. From this acceptance, that might be called as well veracity, is born the faculty of judgment, by means of which, in words of Isak Dinesen, in the end we will have the privilege to see and to see again, and that is what is called Day of Judgment.”
-Arie Amaya-Akkermans
The Art of Reading
"St Catherine of Alexandria Reading a Book" by Onorio Marinari (1627-1715).
A Study in Orange
Mixed Media on paper and wood by Shy Abady.
This piece currently resides at the Hannah Arendt Center.
Gatekeepers of Culture
Last week I discussed Part One of Hannah Arendt's The Crisis in Culture, and the social importance of the crisis. As promised, this weeks Weekend Read offers you Part Two of Arendt's incredible reflections on politics and art.
The connection between politics and art is that artworks, if not the activity of the artist, always appear in public. Like words and deeds that appear on the political stage, artworks "can fulfill their own being, which is appearance, only in a world which is common to all." The public realm offers a space of appearance—an opportunity for display—to artworks that must, as works of art, appear and show themselves to others.
Culture, from the Latin colere—to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve—is that political and aesthetic judgment that judges what political words and deeds and what works of art will be preserved, cared for, and cultivated in public. Politically understood, culture is an activity of judgment, so that "cultural things" can only be loved and preserved "within the limits set by the institution of the polis." In other words, the cultural critics and gatekeepers of culture must know which cultural products to cultivate in the political sphere.
Enjoy Part II of The Crisis in Culture which begins on page 211.
-RB
“Downton Abbey”, a “Crisis in Culture”?
Everyone, so I am told, is watching and talking about "Downton Abbey." It is a TV show, for those living under a bigger rock than I am. So the other day I asked the person charged with keeping me alive to the real world why the show was so compelling.
The answer arrived in my email later that morning in the form of an article: "The Philistine's Guide to Downton Abbey: Why Everyone in the Universe Should Watch Downton Abbey."
Cast of "Downton Abbey"
A philistine, let us recall, originally named a biblical enemy, a part of a host so large and superior in numbers that it would overrun Judeo-Christian civilization. In its modern usage, a philistine is part of mass society, those who judge all things in relation to their material or utilitarian values.
So what does a philistine want from "Downton Abbey"? First and foremost, it seems, he wants to be educated. Here I quote from the article on Gawker:
The first season of the show dealt with the sinking of the Titanic, Marxism, and the burgeoning women's rights movement thanks to the Earl's progressive youngest daughter, Sybil. This season is all about the Great War, as the Brits call it. It's teaching history! There are also all those damn costumes and beautiful interiors and characters with complex motivations being penned in by a restrictive society. It's all the best parts of Middlemarch without having to lug around a thousand page novel all the damn time.
For those who aren't afraid to lug around Middlemarch as well, the New York Times offered a front-page story Wednesday with book recommendations for those following the series. According to the paper of record, Julian Fellowes, the show's creator, "has been deliberate about dropping open-ended references into the scripts" that are designed to send viewers to their libraries (or at least their IPads). The show clearly plays into the long-standing cultural demand for entertainment that doubles as education. It seems we are desperate to sugarcoat our need for distraction with the promise that we are actually making productive use of our downtime.
The New York Times article comes complete with recommendations for books of history and poetry, and even other works of historical fiction, each designed to occupy the hours between the episodes of the show. But one essay recommendation was conspicuously absent from the list.
The current mania for "Downton Abbey" calls to mind Hannah Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Culture," Arendt's most powerful explorations of the role of art and the artist in contemporary life. The essay is actually in two parts. Part One addresses the relation between culture and society. Part Two concerns the connection between culture and politics. So this week's weekend read is Part One of "The Crisis in Culture." Next week I'll discuss Part Two. I hope you enjoy it in-between episodes.
In raising the question of the crisis of culture, Arendt is not assuming the mantle of culture warrior. She explicitly refuses to condemn low-brow culture—we all need entertainment. Nor is critical of the masses. The problem she is concerned with has its origins not in mass society but in good society. She is not criticizing those who enjoy their sitcoms. No, her critical eye is focused on the elite PBS viewers of "Downton Abbey."
Arendt's essay begins with a distinction between culture and society. Simply put, artists, intellectuals, and defenders of culture accuse society of "philistinism." The philistine concerns himself only with utility while the cultural artist aims at truth and beauty.
The problem emerges when the philistines come to find that culture is useful. Then the "educated philistine" emerges, someone who seeks to advance his own social standing by monopolizing culture. The educated philistine embraces culture. He collects art, sits on the boards of universities and symphonies, and displays his "contempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking." The educated philistine despises entertainment and amusement, because no "value" can be derived from it. It is the educated philistine, not the artist, who is the snobbish culture warrior committed to demeaning pure entertainment.
As Arendt tells it, culture comes increasingly to be valuable as a currency that guarantees and advances social standing. But as culture becomes valuable, it loses its distinction from the other values of society. Cultural objects lose their distinction—that they can arrest our attention and move us. Arendt offers the example of Gothic cathedrals, which were built for the glory of God. Of course the cathedrals were useful too, but their immense and extraordinary beauty cannot be explained by their usefulness. Their beauty, she writes, "transcends needs and functions."
The beauty of cathedrals lasts through the ages. The cathedrals become part of our world, as do mosques and temples, paintings and sculptures, and all the public buildings and political structures that give form and meaning to our otherwise transient mortal lives. Yes, human beings can live without a culture; many have. But when they do, they live simply to live. For Arendt, that is not a distinctly human life in a human world.
We only live in a human world when "the totality of fabricated things is so organized that it can resist the consuming life process of the people dwelling in it, and thus outlast them." Lasting works of art make our world a human world, they give the world its distinction and its humanity. It is this worldliness that makes the world human. And this worldliness and humanity are born from the work of artists (visual, poetic, and political) who create the lasting institutions and things that give the world meaning as our world. Because culture concerns the lasting and immortal architecture of our human world, it is concerned with art—things made for no other purpose than to be beautiful and true.
The challenge posed by the mania around a show like Downton Abbey is that it is part and parcel of a cultural moment when art abandons its transcendent and protected realm and appeals to the needs of overly busy "educated philistines" who want their entertainment also to be useful. Arendt's examples are rewritten versions of classics like Shakespeare that are made as entertaining as My Fair Lady. There is nothing wrong with My Fair Lady. But the demand to make Hamlet entertaining—or to make entertainment educational—means, Arendt writes, that "culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment." Hamlet as a great work that can stop us and make us think and re-think our lives and our world can survive neglect; but it cannot survive being repackaged into entertainment. And this raises the true specter haunting Arendt's essay: that all the cultural goods that make up our world will be repackaged as entertainment, thus loosening the immortal bonds that tie us together as members of a common world. This means, for Arendt, the threatened loss of culture and with it of the specifically human world. As she writes:
The point is that a consumer's society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all object, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.
I hope you enjoy "Downton Abbey." But I also suggest you take the time to read "The Crisis of Culture."
-RB
Nietzsche via Julian Young via Scott Horton
You could do far worse than spending a few minutes on a Sunday reading Scott Horton's brief interview with Julian Young on the philosopher of the bent bow.
A Snippet:
“Without music life would be an error” is a great T-shirt slogan, but its meaning is far from obvious. Here is how Nietzsche glosses his aphorism in a letter from 1888, the last year of his sanity:
Music … frees me from myself, it sobers me up from myself, as though I survey the scene from a great distance … It is very strange. It is as though I had bathed in some natural element. Life without music is simply an error, exhausting, an exile.
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Richard Wagner, is constructed around the duality between the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” Apollo stands for intellect, reason, control, form, boundary-drawing and thus individuality. Dionysus stands for the opposites of these; for intuition, sensuality, feeling, abandon, formlessness, for the overcoming of individuality, absorption into the collective. Crucially, Apollo stands for language and Dionysus for music. What, therefore, music does is to–as we indeed say–”take one out of oneself.” Music transports us from the Apollonian realm of individuals to which our everyday self belongs and into the Dionysian unity. Music is mystical.
Since the human essence is the will to live–or for Nietzsche, the “will to power”–the worst thing that can happen to us is death. Death is our greatest fear, so that without some way of stilling it we cannot flourish. This is why musical mysticism is important. In transcending the everyday ego we are delivered from “the anxiety brought by time and death.” Through absorption into what Tristan und Isolde calls the “waves of the All,” we receive the promise and experience of immortality.
Later on, Nietzsche realized that not all music is Dionysian. Much classical music, based as it is on the geometrical forms of dance and march, is firmly rooted in the Apollonian. Yet as the 1888 letter indicates, he never abandoned the musical “antidote” to death. Without music, life would be anxiety and then extinction. Without music, life would be an “exile” from the realm of immortality.
The Hannah Arendt Series, by Shy Abady
This series of portraits of Arendt by Israeli Artist Shy Abady capture her intensity. You can read Abady's account of his encounter with Arendt and his decision to paint her portraits in Thinking in Dark Times.
http://www.shyabady.net/en/node/62
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