Chomsky—Politics of Accommodation

Noam Chomsky
American Power and the New Mandarins
(1967)

[9] By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity. This is the feeling I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming... In an important way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness. There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past. It is no more debatable than the Italian war in Abyssinia or the Russian suppression of Hungarian freedom. The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction—all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured.

...

[10] I suppose this is the first time in history that a nation has so openly and publicly exhibited its own war crimes. Perhaps this shows how well our free institutions function. Or does it simply show how immune we have become to suffering? Probably the latter. So at least it would seem, when we observe how opposition to the war has grown in recent months. There is no doubt that the primary cause for this opposition is that the cost of the war is too great, unacceptable. It is deplorable, but nonetheless true, that what has changed American public opinion and the domestic political picture is not the efforts of the "peace movement"—still less the declarations of any political spokesmen—but rather the Vietnamese resistance, which simply will not yield to American force. What is more, the "responsible" attitude is that opposition to the war on grounds of cost is not, as I have said, deplorable, but rather admirable, in keeping with the genius of American politics. American politics is a politics of accommodation that successfully excludes moral considerations. Therefore it is quite proper—a further demonstration of our superior acuity—that only pragmatic considerations of cost and utility guide our actions.

Lasch—Intellectuals as a Status Group

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type
(1965)

[ix] The intellectual may be defined, broadly, as a person for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play; more specifically, as a person whose relationship to society is defined, both in his eyes and in the eyes of the society, principally by his presumed capacity to comment upon it with greater detachment than those more directly caught up in the practical business of production and power. Because his vocation is to be a critic of society, in the most general sense, and because the value of his criticism is presumed to rest on a measure of detachment from the current scene, the intellectual's relation to the rest of society is never entirely comfortable; but it has not always been as uncomfortable as it is today in the United States. "Anti-intellectualism" offers only a partial explanation of the present tension between intellectuals and American society.
[x]
The rest of the explanation lies in the increased sensitivity of intellectuals to attacks on themselves as a group. It lies in the intellectuals' own sense of themselves, not simply as individuals involved in a common undertaking, the somewhat hazardous business of criticism, but as members of a beleaguered minority. The tension is a function, in other words, of the class-consciousness of intellectuals themselves.

...

The growth of a class (or more accurately, a "status group") of intellectuals is part of a much more general development: the decline of the sense of community, the tendency of the mass society to break down into its component parts, each having its own autonomous culture and maintaining only the most tenuous connections with the general life of the society—which as a consequence has almost ceased to exist.

...

[xiii] Everyone who has studied the history of American reform agrees that the reform tradition underwent a fundamental change around 1900. Some people identify the change with a changing attitude toward government, a new readiness to use government (particularly the federal government) as an instrument of popular control. Others associate it with an abandonment of the old populistic distrust of large-scale institutions, like corporations, and an acceptance of the inevitability of the concentration of wealth and power. Still others define the
[xiv]
change as a movement away from the dogma of natural rights toward a relativistic, environmentalist, and pragmatic view of the world. All of these developments, in truth, were going on at the same time, and all of them contributed to the emergence of the new radicalism. Equally important was a tendency to see cultural issues as inseparable from political ones; so that "education," conceived very broadly, came to be seen not merely as a means of raising up an enlightened electorate but as an instrument of social change in its own right. Conversely, the new radicals understood the end of social and political reform to be the improvement of the quality of American culture as a whole, rather than simply a way of equalizing the opportunities for economic self-advancement. It is precisely this confusion of politics and culture, so essential to the new radicalism, that seems to me to betray its origins in the rise of the intellectual class; for such a program, with its suggestion that men of learning occupy or ought to occupy the strategic loci of social control, has an obvious appeal to intellectuals newly conscious of their own common ties and common interests.

This

confusion of politics and culture

is a theme throughout the study and does seem important. The thesis of a status group looking out for its own interests, meanwhile, is quite a bit more cynical and a bit less convincing, even nowadays with the credibility of intellectuals continuing to take a beating.

Half a lifetime later Lasch would admonish "elites" to meet representatives of poor and working class communities on equal democratic footing rather than poaching them for induction into elite circles and thereby robbing their communities of any competent leadership. This I find compelling, but it also raises the question, for me, of what exactly we are to mean by detachment here. It's the same question I have about defining the "aesthetic" outlook as "contemplative." These are loaded terms which plant the writer's flag behind enemy lines while the terms of battle are still being worked out. There's plenty of evasive rhetoric available to the skpetic here: contemplation can be unconscious too, working in the background to put it in brain-as-computer terms; legislators don't need to be (and usually aren't) particularly intellectual but they do need a certain amount of detachment; etc., etc. If these traits are not so exclusive to the intellectual or the aesthete, how can they serve as the defining features? How closely are the functions of the intellectual or the aesthete tied to their styles of engagement?

[xv] The intellectual in his estrangement from the middle class identified himself with other outcasts and tried to look at the world from their point of view. This radical reversal of perspective was still another distinguishing feature of the new radicalism, socialist or progressive. ...

That point of view—the effort to see society from the bottom up, or at least from the outside in—seems to me to account for much of what was valuable and creative in the new radicalism. On the other hand, the very circumstance which made this feat possible—the estrangement of intellectuals, as a class, from the dominant values of American culture—also accounted for what seems to me the chief weakness of the new radicalism, its distrust not only of middle-class culture but of intellect itself. Detachment carried with it a certain defensiveness about the position of intellect (and intellectuals) in American life; and it was this defensiveness, I think, which sometimes prompted intellectuals to forsake the role of criticism and to identify themselves with what they imagined to be the laws of historical necessity and the working out of the popular will.

Anna Freud—Adolescence, Ego, Intellect

There is a type of young person whose sudden spurt in intellectual development is no less noticeable and surprising than his rapid development in other directions. We know how often the whole interest of boys during the latency period is concentrated on things with have an actual, objective existence. Some boys love to read about discoveries and adventures or to study numbers and proportions or to devour descriptions of strange animals and objects, while others confine their attention to machinery, from the simplest to the most complicated form. The point which these two types usually have in common is that the object in which they are interested must be a concrete one, not the product of fantasy like the fairy tales and fables enjoyed in early childhood, but something which has an actual, physical existence. When the prepubertal period begins, a tendency for the concrete interests of the latency period to give place to abstractions becomes more and more marked. In particular, adolescents of the type which Bernfeld describes as characterized by "prolonged puberty" have an insatiable desire to think about abstract subjects, to turn them over in their minds, and to talk about them. Many of the friendships of youth are based on and maintained by this desire to meditate upon and discuss such subjects together. The range of these abstract interests and of the problems which these young people try to solve is very wide. They will argue the case for free love or marriage and family life, a free-lance existence or the adoption of a profession, roving or settling down, or discuss philosophical problems such as religion or free thought, or different political theories, such as revolution versus submission to authority, or friendship itself in all its forms. If, as sometimes happens in analysis, we receive a faithful report of the conversations of young people or if–as has been done by many of those who make a study of puberty–we examine the diaries and jottings of adolescents, we are not only amazed at the wide and unfettered sweep of their thought but impressed by the degree of empathy and understanding manifested, by their apparent superiority to more mature thinkers, and sometimes even by the wisdom which they display in their handling of the most difficult problems.

We revise our opinion when we turn from the examination of the adolescent's intellectual processes themselves to consider how they fit into the general picture of his life. We are surprised to discover that his fine intellectual performance makes little or no difference to his actual behavior. His empathy into the mental processes of other people does not prevent him from displaying the most outrageous lack of consideration toward those nearest him. His lofty view of love and the obligations of a lover does not mitigate the infidelity and callousness of which he is repeatedly guilty in his various love affairs. The fact that his understanding of and interest in the structure of society often far exceed those of later years does not assist him in the least to find his true place in social life, nor does the many-sidedness of his interests deter him from concentrating upon a single point–his preoccupation with his own personality.

We recognize, especially when we come to investigate these intellectual interests in analysis, that we have here something quite different from intellectuality in the ordinary sense of the term. We must not suppose that an adolescent ponders on the various situations in love or on the choice of a profession in order to think out the right line of behavior, as an adult might do or as a boy in the latency period studies a piece of machinery in order to be able to take it to pieces and put it together again. Adolescent intellectuality seems merely to minister the daydreams. Even the ambitious fantasies of the prepubertal period are not intended to be translated into reality. When a young lad fantasies that he is a great conqueror, he does not on that account feel any obligation to give proof of his courage or endurance in real life. Similarly, he evidently derives gratification from the mere process of thinking, speculating or discussing. His behavior is determined by other factors and is not necessarily influenced by the results of these intellectual gymnastics.

There is yet another point which strikes us when we analyze the intellectual process of adolescents. A closer examination shows that the subjects in which they are principally interested are the very same as have given rise to the conflicts between the different psychic institutions. Once more, the point at issue is how to relate the instinctual side of human nature to the rest of life, how to decide between putting sexual impulses into practice and renouncing them, between liberty and restraint, between revolt against and submission to authority. As we have seen, asceticism, with its flat prohibition of instinct, does not generally accomplish what the adolescent hopes. Since the danger is omnipresent, he has to devise many means of surmounting it. The thinking over of the instinctual conflict–its intellectualization–would seem to be a suitable means. Here the ascetic flight from instinct is exchanged for a turning toward it. But this merely takes place in thought; it is an intellectual process. The abstract intellectual discussions and speculations in which young people delight are not genuine attempts at solving the tasks set by reality. Their mental activity is rather an indication of a tense alertness for the instinctual processes and the translation into abstract thought of that which they perceive. The philosophy of life which they construct–it may be their demand for revolution in the outside world–is really their response to the perception of the new instinctual demands of their own id, which threaten to revolutionize their whole lives. Their ideals of friendship and undying loyalty are simply a reflection of the disquietude of the ego when it perceives the evanescence of all its new and passionate object relations. The longing for guidance and support in the often hopeless battle against their own powerful instincts may be transformed into ingenious arguments about man's inability to arrive at independent political decisions. We see then that instinctual processes are translated into terms of intellect. But the reason why attention is thus focused on the instincts is that an attempt is being made to lay hold and master them on a different psychic level.

We remember that in psychoanalytic metapsychology the association of affects and instinctual processes with word representations is stated to be the first and most important step in the direction of the mastery of instinct which has to be taken as the individual develops. Thinking is described in these writings as "an experimental kind of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them" (Freud, 1911, p. 221). ["Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning"] This intellectualization of instinctual life, the attempt to lay hold on the instinctual processes by connecting them with ideas which can be dealt with in consciousness, is one of the most general, earliest, and most necessary acquirements of the human ego. We regard it not as an activity of the ego but as one of its indispensable components.

Once more we have the impression that the phenomena here comprised in the notion of "intellectualization at puberty" simply represent the exaggeration, under the peculiar conditions of a sudden accession of libido, of a general ego attitude. It is merely the increase in the quantity of libido which attracts attention to a function of the ego performed by it at other times as a matter of course, silently, and, as it were, by the way. If this is so, it means that the intensification of intellectuality during adolescence–and perhaps, too, the very marked advance in intellectual understanding of psychic processes which is always characteristic of an access [sic] of psychotic disease–is simply part of the ego's customary endeavor to master the instincts by means of thought.

Anna Freud
trans. Cecil Baines
The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defense (1966) [orig. 1936]
pp. 160-163

The Latest Unavoidable Editorial Notice

Periodically bloggers call a 30-second time out to step out of their virtual bodies and observe. Here we go again.

The consciously-stated guiding principles here (staying on topic, avoiding making myself part of the story, and overall continence in rate of production) have been stetched over the years, and they're being stretched to the breaking point now. Where to go from here? On the topical front, it no longer seems constructive (or even possible) for every post to relate directly/explicitly to music. Still, music is the focus. This can no longer be an editorial policy vis-a-vis content itself, but it is very much still true of the larger project. Everything here can still be read with this front of mind. If doing so makes a particular item seem especially farfetched or off topic, then that is your cue as the reader to keep searching for the connection. These are my intentions at least, and I am stating them. I won't tell anyone how to think. I used to read a lot of musicians' blogs and felt that in most of them there really was no such connection, nor much of anything else worthwhile. This I found frustrating in light of the obvious potential of the medium, and this frustration has informed my direction here. At this point I can forgive any reader who finds my insistence that music is still the focus to be insincere and/or meaningless. For me this focus is very much still there.

The quote-mania aspect needs to be addressed specifically. I realize that it is often unsightly on any number of levels. Specifically,

--things taken out of context will be misunderstood, rendered useless, etc.

--authority and/or proof will be implied where they should not be

--the reason for posting the excerpt (am I agreeing? disagreeing? bolstering myself? questioning myself? looking busy?) is not always transparent in absence of more (any) commentary

--there is an element of aggression, showboating, etc. in saying, essentially, hey everyone, look at me and how many obscure books I've read and taken notes on

I am aware of all of these dangers. For me, now, they are trumped by a deeply-felt need (the first rumblings were here) to ground my thinking (and action!) in something bigger than the peasant empiricism which previously prevailed here. I'm comfortable courting each of the above dangers in order to try to get at something better.

Biases and perversions are more than mere social deviancies. They also channel our attention in constructive ways. For every basic reality they cause us to overlook, there is a hidden (to others) reality which they cause us to notice. I do a lot of playing with rhetoric and verbiage, because I enjoy those things and we're allowed to have fun sometimes, but my ultimate aim here is to notice things, secure in the knowledge what is biased or perverted about my noticing sense is precisely what makes my observations worth sharing publicly. My end of the bargain is to also mix in some sources which compensate for my blind spots.

Some biographical details which may or may not explain my behavior as an adult:

--Sometime around eighth or ninth grade, I had a teacher assign us to write our homework assignment on an index card. Often teachers would merely suggest materials, but I remember that in this particular case the requirement that we use an actual fucking index card, as opposed to any other kind of paper product fashioned into index-card-like form, became non-negotiable and was factored into grading. I believe the conceit here was to condition high-level "academic" skills and organization, but I'm not sure. In any case, despite my father being a goddamned tenured college professor and my mother an exceptional salt-of-the-earth intellectual, despite the house being filled to the ceiling with intellectual artifacts both externally procured and internally generated, the proper index cards which this teacher considered to be as essential to academic production as the books themselves were not an item that our household typically kept in stock or would have any reason to. Without a car, before Amazon, and in a midwestern city that runs on farmer's hours, it was, odd as it sounds since this was not really that long ago, hardly the easiest thing in the world to acquire the cards in time for me to earn full credit on the assignment. Happily, Mom did eventually manage to locate an old supply of recipe cards, buried deep in the scratch-paper cupboard underneath the kitchen phone, lost among all manner of hoarded paper oddities (more on this later). I suspect the card was older than I was, perhaps even older than my teacher. It was college-ruled with very thick dark blue lines, which I found obnoxious. I suppose you could say we got through this together, a strong intellectual family weathering (this time) the tyranny of mediocrity which prevails in intellectual life and in every other kind of human institution. Memories change the more we access them, so some detail could be off here, but the point is that I recently started accessing this memory more often after realizing that I have spontaneously/organically lurched toward a maniacal-compulsive perversion of the index card theory of intellectual inventory management. The glib observation that students in more vulnerable home circumstances don't always receive these small pieces of support is VERY apt here, and it does make me viscerally angry, RIGHT NOW, as I type this, to think that small-minded bullshit like this is undoubtedly part of various Achievement Gaps that can indeed be placed at the doorsteps of the petit-bourgeois overachiever index-card class of college completers. I had GREAT teachers, actually, but this still happened, there was real trauma involved, and it pisses me off a lot because it's so unnecessary. I had to "unschool" for about a decade before I could function intellectually. At that point I started buying Post-Its and Moleskines by the case. No seriously, I spent almost $400 online on a case of Moleskines because single Moleskines are crazy overpriced at OfficeMax! I had to look really hard to find this, even on today's internet! This will only pay off if I eventually use them all! My mock-superstition is that when I fill the last page I will die! But at least I will die at my own hand rather than that of some small-minded bureaucrat.

--Sometime later in high school, when we had started writing pretty serious papers and shit, the bibliography bugbear really began to roar. My thoughts on this nowadays are basically the same as above, and my evolution has followed the same ironic path. The index card moment here was the time I found I had failed to harvest all of the bibliographical info I needed from a certain library book which had since been returned. I made a special bus trip downtown, found the book on the shelf, took down the info, and probably missed a couple of hours of sleep which undoubtedly will come off the end of my life. I never considered just fudging the info, never considered that as hard as it was for me to retrieve it so hard would it be for the teacher to check it, never considered that teachers (even the good ones) don't love grading papers, they just want their students to "get" the lesson. I did not need the lesson and was punished for it. By myself or by the teacher? Here is a good old liberal vs. conservative topic for talking-head debate! I wish this trip downtown had not happened, but I survived and have now lived long enough that it has shaped me in what I feel to be a constructive and meaningful way. Now the internet has made bibliographies both too easy and too difficult. Now it seems excessive, aggressive, showboaty, etc. to provide even the minimal bibliographical detail that I do here. But in my working notes I record ALL THE THINGS MOTHERFUCKERS, just like a GOOD FUCKING BUREAUCRAT, and then I FUCKING SIT ON THEM like a goddamned mother hen.

--My dear mother, of scratch-paper cupboard fame, has unfortunately never quite gotten her act together in the area of actual intellectual production. What she has done is filled the family home to the ceiling with her sources, refused to cull a single one of them until she has produced her masterwork, and then neglected to get on with it. I'm omitting lots of relevant details from this story. The point is, now that I know what this looks like, I reeeally don't want it to happen to me. I often receive books from LAPL which previous patrons have mutilated with notes, underlining, pages folded over, etc. Usually this is unobtrustive, but sometimes it's not. The first bell hooks book I got my hands on this way had had the entire final chapter ripped out; it must be really good or really bad! People have a thousand and one ways of avoiding the hard work of intellectual production, by which I mean not merely formal publication but rather ANY personal practice of intellectual synthesis. Passive consumption is fine too, but only if you are content with it. Contrary to the boat stabilization brigade (BSB), I think that few people really are content with it, and I wonder if every neatly folded page corner in a library book is not really a cry for help, a coping mechanism of high-functioning procrastinators (HFPs). Fucking write it down! At least take a fucking picture of it with your goddamned smartphone. DON"T JUST STAND THERE, DO SOMETHING! And do it NOW, while the spark is fresh. You can clean the toilet and shave your crotch tomorrow. This cannot wait. I made many blind lurches away from HFP without ever quite breaking free. It is a disease that you have to confront, and you may have to change your surroundings in order to be able to confront it. I finally stared it down for good in the CalArts library (yes, I came crying back to school one last time) when, having once again strapped myself to the railroad tracks of small-minded bureaucracy, I was required to produce program notes for my graduation recital. Instead of just blowing off empirical steam on my blog, I found that I could launch myself off of other authors like a missile. I could launch onto my desktop, into my email, or straight onto the 'net; I could unburden myself into stacks of Moleskines, index cards, stickie notes, or junk mail; I could post it, stick it, stack it, hoard it, or cull it; I could indulge in creative mutilation of books I own while respecting the sanctity of my community-of-choice's Clean Copy. Only pension-chasing crotch-grooming overachievers have absolute beliefs about which of these is The Way. What matters is that you strike while the iron is hot so that you can move on without fear of loss, so that your living space doesn't become a suffocating fire trap, and so that the few other people who give a fuck about the same things you give a fuck about don't have to smell your stale shit in every library book you've ever touched even though you scrape the shit off your toilet bowl faster than you can expel it from your body. You will retain more knowledge and less shit this way, rendering your prior productions inessential to your general ability to think, and therefore liberating yourself from fear of loss. If you are steadily improving yourself, your best production always lies ahead of you and your previous productions cannot dominate you by threatening to pass out of existence (as all our productions eventually will, it must be said). It's also fine to read with no prententions beyond the moment! But please don't let your unrealized pretensions kill you, not from the inside and not from the outside, and please don't project them onto shared community materials. We all have our own demons to grapple with and don't need yours staring back at us.

Quite unexpectedly, just as I was really starting to launch into this process, I got a full-time job. I was still able to read and record at about 70-80% of the previous rate, but eventually some "synthesis" beyond stream-of-consciousness notewriting needed to happen, and now there was no time for it. Though I was growing on the inside, I still felt headed for stifled hoarderism. And then of course, as jobs do, even more quickly than it had appeared it went away. This brings us more or less up to the present. From unschooling to unstifling.

For any readers here, the most important result of this to be aware of is that this blog has acquired a new function for me, hopefully in addition to those which it already served and not in place of them, but perhaps in place of them for yet-to-be-determined stretches of time. Namely, I want to gather as many of my virtual "index cards" as I can and begin organizing them by topic. Only time will tell whether this has been worth the trouble, but from where I stand (and I do stand at the computer, because I'm over six feet tall) some objectives seem obvious:

--when casual conversations turn uncasual, it's nice to have one's sources organized, available, and sharable anywhere via the information superhighway's most infamous vehicle

--though it seems unlikely that I'll ever do mainstream publication, I also won't rule it out, and so it's best to get organized now than later; why not do it here?

--many things I wrote previously really badly need to be fact checked, rethought, qualified, footnoted, bolstered, demolished, reiterated; or, less spectacularly, they need to be incrementally revised, deepened, fleshed out, balanced out, etc. I remain committed to avoiding revision of the old posts themselves wherever possible, such that the blog remains an honest and true document of my thinking in particular moments, even when this thinking now strikes me (and could strike others!) as quite wrong. Rather, any "post" can now also become a "thread," living and dead at the same time. From an intellectual perspective I find this a very intriguing (mis)use of the basic blog architecture, a use for which said architecture is made worse and not better by the vicious McLuhanization which has now maimed every other online medium that might have served similar purposes. The comment functionality here is actually much more awkward than a shoebox full of index cards! The crotch-trimmers get some poetic justice! Yet this awkwardness can also be, to conjure a precious faux-deviant academicism, reclaimed as a generative strategy. Hence I am sticking with Blogger for as long as Blogger will stick with me!

Regarding the flimsiness of the sources themselves, I must beg forgiveness and patience. I started with psychoanalysis because it seemed to be underlying (often explicitly but not always) most of the assumptions about art that I wanted to work towards refuting. What I found instead is, first of all, that holders of said assumptions cannot possibly have actually read or understood any of the seminal psychoanalytic writers. Secondly, I found that works which are ultimately completely crazy and wrong can still be quite edifying, and that certainly they can help to explain "intellectual history" even if they hold little water otherwise. Third, I believe I also found that psychoanalysis is not totally full of shit, even if it is mostly full of shit. These three points apply equally to my second major reading project, Guy Debord and the Situationists. Again, forgiveness and patience please. I had been involved in a performance which claimed to take Situationist "psychogeography" as one of its inspirations. The architect of this monstrosity has either not read or not in the least understood the Situationists. But I only suspected that. I had to confirm it on my own. In book time, this confirmation is costly and comes slowly. I'm sure it would be more ideal to have Marx, Habermas, or Bourdieu under my belt by now. These have long seemed, from a distance as it were, like urgent oeuvres for this tuba player to encounter. Yet no one in my working life was making them quite so urgent. I have decided to make daily necessity my guide. This is a thoroughly reactive rather than proactive posture, which I hate in principle, but it does ensure motivation and purpose, and even, dare I say it, some direct quotidian applications of some very academic ideas. The next themed investigation relates to my job, and it's under wraps until that situation resolves itself. If you think these are intellectually trifling bodies of work that I have thus far worked though, you simply will not believe what this latest one ended up being! But the same three discoveries apply, and this time they reflect more poorly on my own people than on my opponents. Around the edges there have been some side projects (how I despise that term) which relate only distantly to these themes. And eventually, for balance, there came a period of free-for-all, in which we currently find ourselves. All of which is to say that this has not unfolded in any kind of intellectually logical or ideal way. That's life. It doesn't always work for the logic to come first. My sincere hope is that the logic might emerge, eventually, from the emergent, ever-sprawling Fickle Ears.

The Genetic Fallacy in Art and Life—Author's Disclaimer/Preface

(2020-21)

The bulk of the forthcoming essay was written between four and five years ago. That time already seems more like a past life. I abandoned this project when I realized that I could not (and possibly no one could) bring off its full demands in an intellectually responsible way. Also when I remembered that I have grown to hate reading things like this. Also when I accepted that this was a desperate lunge toward equilibrium borne of a living situation which had become unpleasant. It arises most directly from this latter consideration. After CalArts, I rented a room in a North Hollywood apartment for about four years. (Later I would learn that almost everyone who moves to LA rents a North Hollywood apartment for some similar stretch of time.) My apartment-mate was a Valley native almost exactly my age whose backstory and views could not have been more different from mine. Our more intense political discussions are among my most valued as well as my most traumatic memories. Supposedly this was and is exactly what a Divided America needed to be doing more of. Frankly I think we might just have another civil war if we all did intentionally what I did accidentally. I for one have had my fill for a good while. Give me time for about 500 more books before I next confront the specter of an alt-right cohabitant. Politics aside, I grew to deeply respect this guy for bootstrapping himself after being dealt a really terrible hand in life. I also realized that underneath all the bluster he was off-the-charts brilliant. I consider him an intellectual equal and often wondered if he was not in fact my superior. I am not one to confuse education and intelligence. No one who has been to graduate school should need any clearer empirical demonstration that the one does not follow from the other. To my detriment, it seems that I veritably radiate the contrary impression; either that or there are just certain things anti-academic people like to say about people who finished college, whether or not these things are true. If the latter, then they stand guilty of projection, that most Freudian of thought crimes, and Freud's ghost gets to have a chuckle at their expense while the ghost of Ernest Jones whacks him off. If the former, then maybe I just need to be more mindful of managing impressions, and maybe ghosts don't actually whack each other off. Anyway, about my roommate, curiosity eventually turned into avoidance when I found that subtleties of context and idiom made discussion of anything more than the weather extremely difficult for both of us. In between breakthroughs, we spent way too much time hammering out semantic and historical baselines. While I was making my great leap into books, he did almost all of his reading on the internet (as I formerly did too) and openly questioned my frequent trips to retrieve materials from the library. The library was but a five minute walk away. Susan Sontag used to go there after school to work on her editorials for the North Hollywood High School newspaper. I thought that was cool. He thought it was part of the problem. One time I got him to at least consider the usefulness of public libraries by invoking the specter of a tech company monopolizing the electronic distribution of "books." But by that time I was just bluffing, trying to survive rather than thrive. Needless to say this made the discussions even less constructive than they had already become. Finally, as Trump's 2016 candidacy gained momentum, my cohabitant became enraptured, he seemed to identify personally with the man, and the frankly racist test-balloons which he had previously learned not to float over my airspace gradually reemerged as well-rationalized "racialist" aircraft carriers. Alienation of affection set in. It was felt, and it is felt still. The only other people I know who voted for Trump did so with little to no enthusiasm, the same level of enthusiasm with which I voted, in my first one of these obscene spectacles, for Al Gore. One such unenthusiastic maybe-Trumper whom I work with told me in the course of a comparatively tame political conversation that I go "straight out of the liberal playbook." This recapitulated my old roommate's assertion that I would agree with him/them if only I could reject the lies I had been taught in school. That is reason enough to post this, albeit a reason I wish I didn't have. They won't read it and wouldn't understand it. Those are facts and not insults, empirically tested ones no less against which the next countervailing evidence will be the first, and against which offense taken is merely creeping doubt projected. Neither education nor intelligence nor the twain can guarantee understanding; and understanding, though it is a practical necessity, is not a moral quality. Sometimes I too do not understand, literally or otherwise, what these gentleman are on about and I can't find my way there by any available route that I can see. Their opinion of me, apparently, is that I have not bothered to look, and that my education has consisted of passively-ingested propaganda. The two of them actually are as different from each other as I am from each of them, but they have this opinion of me in common, along with their contempt for the public libraries and used bookstores where I have sought and found many things which they remain ignorant of. The first time I said I was going to the library after work, my co-worker told me "You have a disease." That is an insult. (Technically it's also a microaggression, which I do believe is a real thing, even though I'm skeptical of multiculturalism, the Situationists, government arts funding, the anti-gentrification movement...) This essay was one attempt to reckon with all of these issues and more, all at once, complicated yet further by the burden of its concurrent therapeutic, equilibriating function, resorted to instinctively after one too many invitations to a debate on the genetic diversity of American Blacks, a debate for which I was and probably will remain ill-prepared, I confess, to take any informed position at all. The exercise here was to explore what such mutual ill-preparedness means without moralizing about it. This is not easy to do. I think it might be impossible. Certainly it is impossible for anyone to think that you have achieved it unless you engage in some serious impression management. All these misgivings and others aside, following an emergent pattern here, another frozen essay is hereby defrosted, heated, and served. Just don't start any civil wars.

The Mind on Furlough

I am still furloughed and still on the public dole. It has been just over six months, and if it goes on for only another six that will hit the under for most people's bets. I have been tremendously productive in ways which probably don't count for much. The first thing that happened was that my apartment got very clean; now it is extremely messy, even by my standards. I stopped practicing on July 1 and have not yet resumed. Instead, I have torn through books and records, scrabble word lists and annotated games. I have given the life of the mind due regard. I would rather have my job back, but I also could never relate to those who found themselves "bored" or stir-crazy when the first lockdowns hit. Privately I already had enough on my plate for ten lifetimes, and much of it was going to require a lockdown of one sort or another anyway. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

The immediate future is very uncertain, but I have become more preoccupied with the long-term. Specifically, I cannot fully repress the thought that as I have just begun to find full self-actualization in the cultivation of the mind, the efforts and the thrust of the wider world are all directed toward rendering the human mind obsolete. I am reminded of this by things as varied as: Quackle simulations (a Scrabble computer program which plays quite well but not infallibly, and which almost every serious player now uses to self-evaluate); a podcast about the uses which VR and game engines are finding far outside of their conventional bailiwicks; the need for constant rule tweaks just to keep pro sports entertaining now that minds real and virtual have been unleashed upon them, thus exploiting the existing rules so brashly and effectively that the "product" suffers; and of course, the LAX jetpack stories, which remind us of just how far behind schedule we have gotten in fulfilling bygone pop-technological prophecies.

We may still be a long way off from the singularity, but I don't know that we are all that far off from a world where all of the mind-based abilities I have so enjoyed cultivating are either superfluous, obsolete, or politically retrograde. Life will surely go on, but I will look awfully silly. Silly, and incapable, and certainly unnecessary. Because this relates to closely-held values and to identity, I do care what people think about me in this respect. What the man-without-god question was for my god-oriented forbears, so the man-without-mind question has become for me. Of course we did get some good philosophy and cantatas out of the old paradigm; the bygone prophets of doom would probably be surprised to know just how much mileage we've gotten out of these old things even without an imaginary friend to guide us. Yet these too are mind activities, which just makes the analogy more troubling, makes it harder to imagine that life will indeed just go on, because it has to, just like it had to when god (and the author close behind him) died or were killed.

Aside from a couple of college summers, I have never had so much time to devote to my own work. I have often found myself thinking even so that lack of brain has been a far greater obstacle than lack of time. There are days where I can find 9-letter words through disconnected tiles, and there are days when I can't keep my 3s straight. There are days when I can read for 12 hours and other days when I can barely focus for more than a few pages. As for my former work life, there were days on the ol' Metrolink where I could fully absorb a difficult book chapter and other days where I had to punt and aim for a much-needed nap. I have always been this way, regardless of what else is going on in my life. Where I am almost inhumanly consistent is that I wake up every day, regardless of how much brain I have, with a burning desire to progress, develop, actualize. Like my coworker's old Powerbook G4 which I coaxed into running Lubuntu, my own power module flashes the message "No Kernel Support," which means I eventually overheat and have to rest. This can be demoralizing. The occasional triumphs are gratifying. But they seem increasingly like triumphs which technology will soon render superfluous.