Wherein Haraway's Cyborgs Outbreed Rosin's Plastic Women

Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (orig. 1985)
in Manifestly Haraway (2016)

A definition:

Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity. (16)

Actually, the "chemical nuclear" sense of "affinity" has for me connotations not of choice but of absolute (or perhaps simply intractible) physical laws. The opposite approach would mean ascribing free will and consciousness to inanimate molecules. But as for human politics, the word and usage seem quite apt.

Once again, it is awfully hard to ignore Fromm's insight into the matriarchal origins of Blood-and-Soil affinities. Perhaps then affiliation by choice (hence entailing conditional rather than unconditional affinity) is one patriarchal value worth salvaging?

The feminization of poverty—generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectations that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children—has become an urgent focus. The causes of various woman-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. (39-40)

A missed opportunity, as is customary in all things Feminist, to deconstruct/interrogate this notion of "sustain[ing] daily life," which would of course immediately render it a far less appealing reference to drop in the heat of rhetorical battle. This is because sustenance-as-cross-to-bear is also integrated, but in a decidedly NOT-new way, with natural/singular identifications (i.e. Blood and Soil) as given on p. 18. Willfully-chosen affinity group parenting of an optimally scaled cohort is an obvious solution to the burdensomeness of one- or two-parent household-based arrangements, which even when perfectly equitable impose an unacceptable sacrifice on both parents. But this presupposes an affinity, a will, a choice, and so forth; i.e. a rejection of the "naturaliz[ed] matrix" on both the level of the big tribe (race/nation) and the little one (family).

In light of various "integrations" of feminized home life with feminized work life, and of the overall "redefini[tion]" of work "as both literally female and feminized," is it not telling that the precious few ascendant "new areas of high skill" are marked by a near-obsession with collaborative structures, maximally open physical work space designs, etc.? Certainly there is a sort of total availability associated with such Creative Class sectors, which indeed dovetails with the wider postindustrial "mockery of a limited workday," but the turnover seldom betokens "vulnerability" (in fact the job-hoppers customarily have the leverage). This is the mediation that the children of the liberal high-bourgeoisie have effected with the postindustrial new-normal; we know that historically this demographic may have an inconsistent moral compass, but also very good taste and a keen eye for their own self-interest. Hence while I myself am not too inclined to work in groups, as a matter of Affinity and willfullness, it seems to me that the system gain of small-group organization as against Going It Alone is the clincher in favor of group parenting. But in how many cases even among the High Creatives does domestic life mirror/"integrate" with work life? Is this perhaps a bridge too far, even for them? Here is either a test of or a crack in this notion of "integration" of post-industrial and (post-?)domestic production.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life and so have a privileged epistemological position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life.

But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. (66)

This is the only passage here where the cyborg trope seems essential to the broad objectives of the essay; otherwise it seems decidedly inessential, ham-handed, and attention-seeking; perhaps at once an adademic branding maneuver and an opening for a Theorist to play at Writing. There is, having said all of that, a certain logic in the metaphor as it applies to questions of daily competences and their residual+ongoing genderedness. To fully self-actualize, we must actively construct ourselves.

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]

Haraway—Situated Knowledges

Donna Haraway
"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Persepctive"
Feminist Studies 14/3 (1988)

on the "strong" social constructionist theory of scientific (non-)objectivity:

So much for those of us who would still like to talk about reality with more confidence than we allow the Christian right when they discuss the Second Coming... We would like to think our appeals to real worlds are more than a desperate lurch away from cynicism and an act of faith like any other cult's..." (577)

This itself is just rhetoric, but it's refreshing anyway. The more recent Intersectional emphasis on Local Knowledge Claims seems to me, seeing as it is yet more Local than what DH is discussing here, to be a yet more volatile maneuver: some of the most pervasive/insidious prejudices (especially racial ones) are propagated through Local Knowledge Producers, and it remains unclear to me what the epistemological distinction is between these racists and the antiracist Intersectionalists.

the further I get in describing the radicial social constructionist program...the more nervous I get. The imagery of force fields, of moves in a fully textualized and coded world...is, just for starters, an imagery of high-tech military fields, of automated academic battlefields... Technoscience and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality—war. It shouldn't take decades of feminist theory to sense the enemy here. (577-578)

This is a brilliant insight, as well as, I would add, a sort of left-becomes-right moment. From "the strong social constructionist perspective," "all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as power moves, not moves toward truth." (576) DH can see that this orientation treats the world as irremediably hostile, confrontational, and subject to (at least potentially) the rule of might-makes-right; and she ever so delicately implies (I am reading between the lines here) that the apparent absence of any genuine reluctance among such theorists could itself suggest motivations/agendas, i.e. a desire to see the world this way whether it is accurate or not.

Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. ... Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well... In traditional philosophical categories, the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology. (579)

Indeed, ethics/politics and epistemology are quite mutually interdependent and dynamically linked, but ultimately it is ethical behavior out-in-the-world which is the goal, the question on which the success or failure of all other epistemological endeavors hinges. Feminists have too often blanched when science turns up knowledge we'd rather not know (B. Thorne and L. Eliot's books on boys/girls spring immediately to mind); but DH leads us out of the dark here, I think, with the insight that bedrock ethical principles enable us to pursue knowledge without any fear of how it might be used.

We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. Self-identity is a bad visual system. Fusion is a bad strategy of positioning. The boys in the human sciences have called this doubt about self-presence "the death of the subject" defined as a single ordering point of will and consciousness. That judgment seems bizarre to me. I prefer to call this doubt the opening of nonisomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject. (585-586)

So, the subject has not died; it lives, but it is no longer "isomorphic," which is to say that it no longer resembles its (same)self in all times and places; which is to say that in time and space the subject is not of a fixed/constant nature but rather undergoes changes. I'm inclined to embrace this part (perhaps because I can actually understand it). There are ways in which this is (for the most part unfortunately) revolutionary in its simplicity. Just ask politicians who claim to have learned and evolved since their younger days only to thereby invite epithets like Wishy-Washy or Flip-Flopper. ... On the other hand, it only seems to solve the problem raised by bell hooks of individual subjectivity being questioned just as the subjugated have arrived to claim it. Indeed, "we are not immediately present to ourselves," and "self-identity is a bad visual system." Hence the "subjugated" subject who arrogates to speak as such in fact commits the same commutative/associative fallacy as does the ignorant outsider who asks "What do YOUR people think?"

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]

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.

Parsons on Ideological Skewness

The relation of an ideological system to the social system in which it takes root is highly complex, and subject to a great deal of variation in different circumstances. In a well-integrated society the dominant ideology in large measure reflects and interprets a large part of the system of actually institutionalized patterns. But even in the most stable societies the ideological patterns are selective relative to the institutional. Ideological formulation often reflects a need to justify, which may imply a sense of insecurity. Hence, those patterns which are most completely taken for granted are likely to play a small role, if any, in explicit ideology. The system is thus "skewed" in the direction of emphasizing elements which are felt to be "problematical." Consciousness of contrast with other societies is one major factor in this." (267)

Talcott Parsons
"The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change" (1945)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 238-274

Note (4 June, 2016): A brilliant analysis. Essentially he's pointing out the same logical conundrum of the notion of something being "extremely average." The ideological average/LCD by definition does not have a strong enough profile in either absolute or relative terms to be consolidated into powerful political statements. Attempts at this fall flat just as sayings like "extremely average" or "intensely mediocre" come off as humorous and/or ironic no matter the affect with which they are uttered. Hence, the harder the political center tries to consolidate its message, the more ridiculous they look. Meanwhile, various extremists gain notoriety all out of proportion to their logical underpinnings and real level of support simply because they appeal to baser lizard-brain impulses and have a very strong/distinctive profile built into them. I have been maintaining this election season that the "center" represented by H. Clinton and other status-quo candidates (or are there any in the repub. party?) is essentially a crudely calculated mirage which simply takes the average of strong-left and strong-right positions and consolidates it in order to appeal to the LCD. I feel that it thus represents very few actual people's views. The increasing struggles of mainstream candidates and the increasing success of relatively extreme insurgents back this up. All indications are that the polity is highly polarized right now, which means that while this fake center tries to stigmatize "extreme" left and right views as if their common extremeness were their defining feature and their many substantive differences irrelevant in light of this, the fact is that these VAST differences are TOTALLY relevant, and hence that one or the other of the "extreme" candidates collectively represent far more people than the centrists ever could hope to. Hence their conundrum, and ours. Here TP sounds a cautionary note from the mainstream, reminding us extremists that our "ideologies" are undoubtedly rooted to some extent in our "insecurity" and in our "us-against-them" mindset (our "consciousness of contrast" with the other), and that just because we can't detect any common sense emanating from the center doesn't mean that it is not there (i.e. things are inherently "skewed" towards extremes). In a vacuum, I'll drink to that. In the actual world I live in, there are all manner of additional factors to consider which lead me to feel comfortable supporting Bernie and less and less comfortable with Hillary on any level. The current mainstream might literally be the worst of all evils. But TP's is a timely note of caution even so.

...the objects of ideological formation are mainly in the "remote" category to most persons–or are high-level abstractions with a similar significance. Hence, they are less fully controlled by realistic considerations and constitute particularly favorable opportunities for the operation of such nonrational and irrational mechanisms as projection, displacement, identification. Where there are severe and definitely structured tensions in a society there are almost certain to be ideological patterns which contain conspicuous elements of unrealism, romantic idealization, and distortion." (268)

Note (4 June, 2016): A partner statement with the previous one, and clearer connection between psychoanalytic theory and real-world political/ideological phenomena than any of the psychoanalysts themselves seemed to be capable of formulating.

Parsons on the Romantic and the Methodical

...the dominant character structure of modern Germany had been distinguished by a striking dualism between "A: an emotional, idealistic, active, romantic component which may be constructive or destructive and anti-social," and "B: an orderly, hard-working hierarchy preoccupied, methodical, submissive, gregarious, materialistic" component.

In the traditional pre-Nazi German society it is overwhelmingly the B component which has become institutionalized. The A component arises from two principal independent sources: certain features of the socialization process in the German family, and the tensions arising from life in that type of institutional order. It is expressed in romantic, unrealistic emotionalism and yearnings. Under other circumstances the dissociation has historically been radical–the romantic yearning has found an outlet in religion, art, music and other-worldly, particularly a-political, forms. (248)

...

The peculiarity of the Nazi movement is that it has harnessed this romantic dynamism to an aggressive, expansionist, nationalistic political goal–and has utilized and subordinated all the motives behind the B component as well. In both cases the synthesis has been dependent at the same time on certain features of the situation and on a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols. The first task of a program of institutional change is to disrupt this synthesis and create a situation in which the romantic element will again find an a-political form of expression. This will not, however, "cure" the basic difficulty but only its most virulent and, to the United Nations, dangerous manifestation. (248-249)

Talcott Parsons
"The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change" (1945)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 238-274

Note (4 June, 2016): This resonates strongly with my conception of the aesthetic realm as, at minimum, a "padded cell" for various human impulses to inhabit without being enabled to do real damage (or, it is fair to add, make improvements) to the "real"/outside world. It would, of course, be great if in the first place there was not so much inner destructiveness flowing from human beings out into the world that we needed a special reservoir just to drain it off. I don't know that TP's discussion here anywhere near fully accounts for that. Even so, it is also not to be assumed a priori, as some postmodern Critical Theorists seem eager to do, that pure/absolute aestheticism is so inherently destructive in and of itself. As TP describes it here, the Nazi synthesis of "A" and "B" was an unusual and unlikely achievement, and one that could be disrupted precisely by recreating an apolitical space for romanticism to inhabit. And so, has the American academic left not been working quite diligently since the 1960s at forging and promoting just such a synthesis between industriousness (i.e. activism) and romanticism (i.e. art and aesthetics), accompanied by "a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols?" Hate to say it, but I think that description fits almost perfectly. Perhaps the antidote is also the same.

Note (23 April, 2021): I know that you're never, ever supposed to liken anyone to the Nazis. At the same time, such a taboo effectively limits what we are allowed to learn from history. Obviously there are many, many more differences than similarities here. That caveat should be superfluous, but I realize that in the present environment it is not. The point is that here we have one single instance of an influential speculative thinker offering up the speculation that art and politics make for an explosive combination. This seems to me very much worth considering in light of current events all over the political spectum. Perhaps we cannot learn much here, but surely we can learn something.

Krens' Footprints and Oteiza's Paradox

Oteiza’s paradox consists in that while New York’s world-class artists will consider him as their equal (Serra conceded to a reporter that he thought Oteiza was the greatest living sculptor, and Gehry called him one of the three or four fundamental artists of the century), the Krensified franchise museum will reduce him to a local artist whose value is seen as quite negligible.

But Oteiza is only one instance of this paradox. The same thing happened to the great Eduardo Chillida. Initially, when Basque critics charged that there would be no work by Basque artists at the new museum, Krens always countered that one gallery would be devoted to Chillida. But then he refused to buy Chillida’s work. When the Guggenheim was about to open its doors in Bilbao, a snubbed Chillida had to complain in the Basque press that Krens was unwilling to purchase any of his work—purchases that, needless to say, would be done with Basque taxpayers’ money. Krensification means that the museum mandarin from New York has the right to levy money for the purchase of art from the host society and then spend these public funds of the franchised public the way he best pleases. If this implies humiliating the most consecrated local artist, then so be it.

But the key lesson for local artists to be learned from Chillida’s case is something else. It has something to do with the repositioning of the artist as deserving a global or local audience. Chillida clearly belonged to the international elite art community when New York’s Guggenheim exhibited his work in 1981. Then the Guggenheim purchased Chillida’s work. But in the 1990s and in his home Basque Country, was he still a global artist whose work deserved to be collected? Krens decided that he was not. Suddenly, in the eyes of the Guggenheim, Chillida had become a minor artist unworthy of his interest. His work did not deserve the new museum’s international space. When I asked Krens about it, his cryptic reply was that his modus operandi was to buy two works and receive one for free. In other words, Chillida was unwilling to bend to the Krensified museum’s patronizing rules and had been punished for it.

Joseba Zulaika
"Desiring Bilbao: The Krensification of the Museum and Its Discontents"
in Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim
pp. 158-159

Besides a "paradox," I also smell a rat: members of the "international elite art community" indeed stoop to the level of local yokels when they demand the "elite" treatment on the basis of their local origins. They reduce themselves when they deal in terms of honor and status at the expense of practical considerations. They reduce themselves when institutional conduct "implies" things about them rather than does things to (or for, or with) them. In my home town, a long way from Bilbao in geographic terms, even the nonelite like to turn this trick. I have since grown to despise it.

If art itself shows a "tendency to reproduce something absent" (O. Rank), then so too must we permit the audience to meet their own "dynamic need of equalization" via occasional indulgences in novelty. Behemoth art franchises can suck all the air out of the room, but they also (and this too is something of a paradox) are importers of rare goods otherwise unavailable locally. Infusing more local work into these behemoths is the worst of both worlds. That is not their ecological function. Use them to equilibriate yourself as needed! Otherwise ignore them! Nobody can "humiliate" you without your permission! Not even a Yale MBA!

It's hard to take seriously the notion that "the Krensified franchise museum" is either necessary or sufficient to "reduce" an "international elite" artist "to a local artist whose value is seen as quite negligible" on the local level. Anything ever-present will be taken for granted. There is more than a ring of truth to the notion that a prophet will never be recognized in his own land. There is also a material reality, a reality which transparently unethical behavior by the gatekeepers (and there does seem to have been some of that here) can too easily obscure. When the local scene's greatest export demands to be acknowledged in every local endeavor (as many of them do!), he himself has become the behemoth who sucks all the air out of the room. Frankly, there is no "key lesson for local artists" here that they do not learn quickly on their own. Perhaps it is only elite success which causes them to forget.

(Please forgive my indulgence in masculine pronouns here on the grounds that the principals happen to be men. True "murderous rage" over the failure of a project is such a guy thing, no?)

---

As MASS MoCA evolved into an element of the Guggenheim Museum's expanding international network, it raised the issue of the cultural preservation or homogenization of local identities. Would a conceptual museum of avant-garde art overshadow the humble folk art traditions of North Adams? Would the preservation of the old factory buildings also preserve a local working-class identity? Under any circumstances, making a museum the arbiter of local identity risks undermining the cultural understandings that support any social community. In a fragile economy, making that community financially and emotionally dependent on a transnational museum adds irony to tragedy.

Avant-garde art is usually associated with metropolitan centers. It diffuses slowly to other areas. Tourism may accelerate this process, as it did with modern music and dance in the Berkshires, but it does so within limits. Local museums outside a metropolitan setting rarely present avant-garde works. They perform educational and curatorial functions. They commemorate local histories. They preserve fossils found on native soil, paintings and sculptures by regional artists, and encyclopedic—rather than topical—displays.

We do not know whether Conceptual and Minimalist art, and its descendants in feminist and other installations, can command an audience in rustic or humble surroundings. Until now, the summer visitors who patronize arts festivals in the Berkshires come for mainstream modernist and Impressionist works. They fill evenings in their vacation schedules.

The MASS MoCA proposal essentially argued that space does not matter: art can be appreciated anywhere. The North Adams site was a "museum of space," in one meaningless expression, which meant that it was to be considered an outpost of global culture rather than a local social institution. Thomas Krens theorized that visitors would go to North Adams to see a definitive display of a highly specific art that was created elsewhere. While this strategy works for the Guggenheim's core museum in New York and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, few people thought it would work for North Adams. But who creates the social and spatial context in which a specific cultural strategy "works"? Could avant-garde art "work" without a critical mass of avant-garde artists to produce and view it, without a public already trained to "see" it?

Sharon Zukin
The Cultures of Cities (1996)
(pp. 103-104)

"Outposts" are indeed no substitute for (and can be highly destructive of) "local social institutions." About that there is no doubt. But again, the Localist Paradox: access to "global culture" is a necessity and a human right which "local social institutions" can't always provide. Bollocks on any art czar who would banish "global culture" from "rustic or humble surroundings!" Or vice versa!

Zukin's gambit here is very much a "populist resistance to change," though she has earlier written of that orientation as if it were someone else's and not her own. "Avant-garde art is usually associated with metropolitan centers." Fine. But to question in this context whether "art can be appreciated anywhere" the volk are not "already trained" (Yikes!) I find rather shockingly contemptuous of these ruralites. I for one can say that I've seen some rather remarkable things happen in some rather unlikely places. Yes, I have seen truckers sobbing openly after a free jazz blowout, and I have seen rural children stage a swoon-in over a brass quintet. Certainly I have not seen these things everywhere I have performed. I have never seen anything like them in the city! Supply and demand is not too facile a construction here! Localism reproduces something present!

Appreciation by everyone, everywhere, all at once, is not the point. Also not the point: giving people exactly what they say they already want, or more of what they already have. Probably North Adams did not need a whole Guggenheim, but I'll bet that someone in North Adams needed modern art, and damned if they didn't get some!
---
Local and personal reality is always more granular than a distant consumer of print can do justice to. Both the genius and the folly of print is how impersonal it can be. None of what I write on matters such as these is to be taken "personally," but I realize that it cannot help but be taken this way. I happen to recognize many elements of these stories even though I have never been to Bilbao or to North Adams. Such public-facing print accounts are undoubtedly reductive; still, they are tools the rest of us can use to guide ourselves through similarly fraught territory. For me there are lessons here, just not the ones the authors explicitly state.

COVID Confessional—On Maintaining Just the Right Amount of Skepticism

Among the many challenges of the past thirteen months has been the everyday-epistemological challenge of staying grounded and vigilant in an environment of ever-polarizing opinion. Recent conversations with two valued friends reveal the danger of the post-COVID world bifurcating absolutely into sheep and denialists. I hasten to insist that these are not the only two options.

I am someone who will not even take a pain killer except in the most extreme of circumstances. I am willing to accept science while reserving the right to limit my exposure to scientific error. Science has given me a few new sets of front teeth over the years, no small matter in my case, and yet I shudder to think what toxins I may have ingested this way (and may yet ingest again). I am an enthusiastic but late adopter of technology in something like Mumford's mode, seeking to enhance life through machine use and to avoid outsourcing life to machines. I don't like to change, but in a pinch I am often surprised at just how adaptable I can be. I think this is a fine way to live. The pandemic is, nevertheless, something of a challenge to this outlook. Like a really bad headache or a baseball to the chops, the pandemic forces the issue. It also forces us to consider how our decisions affect others in a way that literal aches and pains, being perhaps the exceptional "individual" problems, do not.

Somewhere between an "abundance of caution" and "throwing caution to the wind," I would posit a workable middle-ground location, something like a "minimum of caution," meaning: take all the precautions that don't cost you anything; prioritize the basics. I speak now somewhat in the language of N.N. Taleb, who, with a much greater technical and practical arsenal at his disposal, handles these sorts of epistemological questions brilliantly and in precisely the way I, albeit supremely lacking in such technical and practical equipage, have often tended to think about them, especially in the realms of ingestion and vaccination. I confess that my inner "negative empiricist" tends to rather selectively conjure himself in matters of ingestion and vaccination. I am also guilty of focusing too exclusively on downsides and of underrating upsides, as Kahneman and colleagues have shown is endemic to our "fast" brain. (I accept this science!) And I know much, much less than any committed consumer of news likely does about the granular details of vaccine ingredients and reactions. Taleb, Kahneman, and others have curated for lay consumption the quite troublesome phenomenon of more information leading to worse decision-making. I don't know that the vaccination question truly falls into this category, but I am very comfortable applying the "minimum of caution" heuristic to it, because that is the heuristic I apply most everywhere else. So, given my membership in the new untouchable subcaste of "workers who can't work from home," I decided to get vaccinated without thinking too hard (okay, without thinking at all) about ingredients, reactions, science, or politics.

There is a third branch of the barbell which Taleb, bless him, promises to take up but never really does (or not to my satisfaction), this being ethics and morals. With COVID we have a perfect irritant for this epistemological wound: the various corrective measures, from the least to the most intrusive, are really more about protecting others than about protecting ourselves. My "minimum of caution" works well for decisions which affect only me, but it is not such a simple proposition here.

Masking and distancing seem to me like archetypal barbell propositions: most of the benefit can be had this way without costing us much. The more onerous, top-down measures further limiting what masked, distanced people are allowed to do are, on the other hand, very costly, and more importantly, they are differently and inequitably costly. Some curious rhetoric has come out of this sagging barbell. Late last summer I heard a scientist-commentator claim, in response to the proposal that restictions be eased for low-risk groups on grounds of limiting economic damage, that the science on risk factors was not conclusive enough to permit such a policy. Perhaps so, but then much policy had already been made based on this fairly crude science. During the period where grocery stores blocked off the early morning for high-risk groups to shop, I never heard anyone waiting in line at Whole Foods invoke the ultimate uncertainty of science so that they could get in faster; and yet this tack was enthusiastically taken by a well-established scientist in order to avoid litigating a bedrock ethical/worldview conflict. This I find frustrating.

I draw a very different conclusion from uncertainty: if all science is to some degree uncertain, then moral urgency is always already part of how we use science, and this is where the real action is. In the moral framework I am calling a "minimum of caution," we do not treat science as certain until we are forced by circumstances to do so. When we are forced to confront a life-threatening injury or to bring a serial rape suspect to trial, we behave as if we are certain of the science even if in reality we know we cannot be; and then, implicitly at least, we consent to live with the possibility of being wrong. The notion of degrees of certainty, of whether we are 50%, 90%, or 99.99% confident in a given piece of science, is, I want to argue, quite easily and quite often rendered irrelevant by extenuating circumstances, and this more often than we would like to think. Put another way, for each of these percentages there is a countervailing degree of moral urgency which can dictate quick and dirty adjustments, adjustments which are quite unscientific but not at all irrational. If this were not the case, all science would continually be moving halfway toward usability without ever arriving. Colloquially speaking, in the end we are either "in" on some given piece of science or we are "out" on it. In deed if not in word, the percentages are always either zero or one hundred. Because of ultimate uncertainty, it is safer for the ego to be "out" on it all! Especially if, like Taleb, your personal success heuristic ("not being a sucker") is sensitive to the small-minded judgments of others¹. But it is not possible to get out of the game entirely. The pandemic has enabled us to be certain at least of that.

For the aforementioned scientist-commentator, then, I am left to think that the moral urgency of long lines at Whole Foods was low, while that of general containment of the virus was extremely high. The preliminary and crude understanding of risk factors was good enough for one and not for the other. She was not going to be certain of her results unless forced to (or, more to the point, allowed to) by circumstance. I accept this reasoning. But this is not the reasoning that came out of her mouth. It is not the reasoning that laypeople like me, who already were ignoring the news even before we read Taleb's diatribes against following the news too closely, were accosted with that day upon daring to come up for epistemological air. Only sheep and dinosaurs can survive on such meager rations.

There are a few reasons why I have become fixated on this single instance. One is that, admittedly, skepticism comes easily when you've been cut off at the knees. Another is that I previously associated the uncertainty card only with the rightest of climate deniers and the leftest of social constructivists. In those cases too, litigation of the science is more interesting intellectually than it is morally necessary for laypeople. Pollution and waste were already killing us a thousand other ways (even my old roommate the climate denier did not deny this); similarly, perfect knowledge of the genetic-social nexus is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to how we interact with others. Even where the science itself is pursued with perfect disinterest, it might as well still be called ideological science. The wider world makes it so.

One area where we need science most is when the consequences of our actions are otherwise hidden from us. Some such things are perfectly transparent though, and others can be made transparent rather easily, without formal scientific intervention. I suspect it is the things we have learned this way that have always shaped how we use science more so than anyone's notion of scientific certainty. If we can stay open, honest, and yes, just slightly skeptical, this is precisely as it should be.

1. Taleb is best read for general thrust and not for small details. He himself has noticed as much, and he's right. That said, I think the construction of the "sucker" heuristic has a transparent epistemological flaw which is pragmatically significant, even in Los Angeles. The "sucker" heuristic may work brilliantly in the realm of global trading, but it does not work well at all in, say, a 5-on-5 basketball game. The defender who tries the hardest and looks the worst is often the best defender on one team, who is customarily tasked with guarding the best scorer on the other team. On the professional level, the try-hards more often get "posterized" by spectacular dunkers while the deadbeats simply get out of the way and start jogging up court. The advent of Analytics has somewhat exonerated the "suckers" here, at least in the eyes of their employers; fans of course are another matter, and fans ultimately are very important to revenue. At the recreational level, since I am often the tallest, I have been the try-hard "sucker" many times. I also have observed and participated in many games amongst young men for whom "not being a sucker" was almost as important as winning, and a few where it was transparently much more important than winning. This is how I learned what it feels like to "win" while also being a "sucker." It is not a good feeling! Different from losing, but just as bad. There is nothing absolutely wrong with any of this vis-a-vis mere recreation, but needless to say it is a rather extreme departure from the archetype "basketball." It is also, I would contend, a strong indication of trauma given the near-universality of competitive play among men and the lengths to which men typically go to win even in the recreational realm.

I am reasoning by induction here, which a true negative empiricist wouldn't allow. Perhaps I should reformulate: basketball is a single counterexample which disproves any conceit that "not being a sucker" has universal applicability to zero-sum games. (At least if you like to win. Even in Minneapolis.)

Parsons on Universalistic and Particularistic Systems

Social systems in which a considerable number of individuals are in a complex and delicate state of mutual interdependence tend greatly to limit the scope of "personal" emotional feeling or, at least, its direct expression in action. Any considerable range of affective spontaneity would tend to impinge on the statuses and interests of too many others, with disequilibriating consequences for the system as a whole. (187-188)

[A footnote to this passage...]

This tendency for multiple-membered social systems to repress spontaneous manifestations of sentiment should not be taken too absolutely. In such phenomena as cliques, there is room for the following of personal inclinations within the framework of institutionalized statuses. It is, however, probable that it is more restrictive in groups where, as in kinship, the institutionalized relationships are particularistic and functionally diffuse than in universalistic and functionally specific systems such as modern occupational organizations. In the latter case personal affective relationships can, within considerable limits, be institutionally ignored as belonging to the sphere of "private affairs." (188)

Talcott Parsons
"The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States" (1943)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 177-196

Note (4 June, 2016): It would be interesting and productive to consider the various contemporary trends toward social theories of art in light of this observation. Such theories seem hell-bent on delivering a more particularistic, functionally diffuse relationship between artist and audience in place of the universalistic and functionally specific relationship that persisted in earlier European high culture. Of course, the larger implications of this are never sufficiently considered, either on the side of drawbacks to contemporary social theories of art or of benefits of the supposedly outmoded romantic/modernist theories, and so the various systemic-level drawbacks articulated by TP throughout his later essays could make for potent rebuttals. The notion that particularistic/diffuse/interdependent social structures inherently restrict "spontaneous manifestations of sentiment" certainly would be a damning charge if it could be proven.

Parsons on the Instrumental and the Expressive

If we are right in thinking that special pressures operate on the younger generation relative to the general pressures generated by social change, on the other side of the relationship there are factors which make for special sensitivities on their part. The residua of early dependency, as pointed out above, constitute one such factor. In addition, the impact on youth of the general process of social differentiation makes for greater differences between their position and that of children, on the one hand, and that of adults, on the other, than is true in less differentiated societies. Compared to our own past or to most other societies, there is a more pronounced, and above all (as noted) an increasingly long segregation of the younger groups, centered above all on the system of formal education. It may be argued especially that the impact of this process is particularly pronounced at the upper fringe of the youth period, for the rapidly increasing proportion of the age cohort engaged in higher education–in college, and, very importantly, in postgraduate work. These are people who are adults in all respects except for the element of dependency, since they have not yet attained full occupational independence (172)

...

What I have called the romantic trend can be broadly expressed in two directions; the tentative terms "regressive" and "progressive" are appropriate, if not taken too literally. ...the former, at social levels, tending to resist change, the latter to anticipate and promote it.

...The cult of physical prowess [e.g. athletics] has clearly been a reflex of the pressure to occupational achievement in a society in which brains rather than brawn come increasingly to count. From this point of view, it is a regressive phenomenon. (175)

...

On the other side, the progressive one, the most important phenomena are most conspicuous at the upper end of the range, both in terms of the sociocultural level and of the stage of the life cycle. This is the enormous development of serious cultural interests among students in the more elite colleges. The most important field of these interests seems to be that of the arts, including highbrow music, literature, drama, and painting.

The first essential point here is that this constitutes a very definite upgrading of cultural standards, compared with the philistinism of the most nearly corresponding circles in an earlier generation. Second, however, it is at least variant and selective (though not, I think, deviant) with respect to the main trends of the society, since the main developments in the latter are on the "instrumental" rather than the "expressive" side. As to the special involvement of elite youth in the arts, it may be said that youth has tended to become a kind of "loyal opposition" to the main trends of the culture, making a bid for leadership in a sphere important to balanced society yet somewhat neglected by the principal innovating agencies. (176)

Talcott Parsons
"Youth in the Context of American Society" (1962)
in Social Structure and Personality, pp. 155-182

Note (12 May, 2016):
So, among the "romantic," "progressive" elements of youth culture, the arts present a sort of path of least resistance, an opening created by the slippage between society's stated valuation of the arts on one hand and its material/actual devaluation of them on the other. The arts are both socially acceptable and (TP explicitly denies it, but I would not) in some sense also deviant. Further, as TP perceptively identifies here, the source of the arts' deviant tinge is the broader trend of society in the "instrumental" direction at the direct expense of "expressive" concerns. Rapid change of this type creates anomic strain, which feeds youthful romanticism (the "unreality" component TP identifies elsewhere with "romanticism" is very apt here too). Even so, the "elite," "progressive" elements of youth culture, while they are not immune to romanticism and unreality, are still of their own volition bound to common social values and norms; hence, their brand of "youth culture" is merely "loyal opposition" rather than out and out rebellion. TP only IMPLIES that this "loyalty" is a direct and predictable product of this youth's socialization as "elite." He doesn't actually say so, at least not here. But isn't it obvious that those born "elite" have an awfully tough time later admitting that the society which delivered them to such privilege does not treat all people equally or equitably? IMHO, this is an important explanation for the "loyalty" of their "opposition" to a society which they inevitably, be it consciously or unconsciously, come to understand as fundamentally inequitable. The dialectical ring of the term "loyal opposition" is a reflection of the unresolved inner guilt which underlies it. So, it's true, TP has perhaps underemphasized the elements of class conflict here, choosing instead to conduct distinct analyses of the "regressive" and "progressive" elements. I would say that this approach is "incomplete" without being out-and-out "flawed." In fact, this is a brilliant take on the explosive escalation of post-secondary arts education that was just beginning to take shape as he was writing. VERY perceptive.

---

Kluckhohn, among others [The Evolution of Contemporary American Values, 1958], comments on the current expansion in America of aesthetic and expressive activities "greatly beyond mere 'comfort.' Riesman [in The Lonely Crowd] calls attention to the concern with taste in the widespread sophistication about food and dress. We suggest that this rise in aesthetic appreciation, in hedonism, if you will, is not merely an effort to establish new criteria of status through marginal differentiation but mainly a heightened expressiveness–complementary to, rather than conflicting with, a rise in instrumental demands for achievement. (229)

"The Link Between Character and Society"
(with Winston White) (1961)
ibid, pp. 183-235

19 April, 2021: In other words, this "expansion" of "aesthetic and expressive activities" is compensatory and equilibriating in a world where the "main developments" have for long been "on the 'instrumental' rather than the 'expressive' side." The idea is facile. Probably it is all but untestable scientifically. But there is lots of anecdotal evidence for it, and it holds great explanatory power.

Chasing The Over-a-Hundred Prize

The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new innovation is a "breakthrough," that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate. ...

Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later, turn out to be breakthroughs.

So time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the "ten hottest papers" in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty.

If we replace scientific results with scientists, we often get the same neomaniac hype. There is a disease to grant a prize for a promising scientist "under forty," a disease that is infecting economics, mathematics, finance, etc. Mathematics is a bit special because the value of its results can be immediately seen—so I skip the criticism. Of the fields I am familiar with, such as literature, finance, and economics, I can pretty much ascertain that the prizes given to those under forty are the best reverse indicator of value... The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don't get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.

Should we have a prize, it should be for "over a hundred": it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically—along with what we dubbed the philosopher's stone. His work stayed obscure all this time."

N.N. Taleb
Antifragile (2012)
pp. 329-330

These prizes have their counterparts in the music world, and there too they are well-known as strong "reverse indicators of value," at least to everyone outside the immediate social orbit of the committee and the recipients. A certain amount of focus on the under-forties arises from a good-faith response to a good-faith criticism: lifetime achievement awards are obscene when the elderly achiever really could have used that money to stay afloat during their starving-artist years. This, together with the realization that many small grants to individual artists would do more good than a few massive grants to superstars and large organizations, has (re)shaped the landscape somewhat for the better. I suspect there are good intentions behind this; yet NNT's observations here supply the necessary damned if you do caveats. Radical postmodernists get the most attention for rejecting the cleansing effect of time, for junking the Thirty Year Rule that historians formerly observed, etc., and yet functionally the bourgeois mainstream has also rejected these things, much more quietly but with equal thoroughness and equally strident rationalizations. In one respect it is obvious that people need the money more when they are younger. The problem, though, is that it is not so easy to see the future. To attempt to do so is a fragilista maneuver through and through.

In borrowing this Talebism, I am certainly wary of embracing Taleb's peculiar brand of Darwinism. He is not the least bit convincing when he claims, after all else he has written here and prior, to be content with merely passing on his genes and riding off into the Darwinian sunset. Clearly he lives to read, argue, eat and drink, put mice down people's shirts, and so on. (How I wish I'd had this last idea when I was sitting in Dr. Damschroder's theory classes!) I'm not in favor of a full Hunger Games approach to artisthood. The point, rather, that Taleb's arguments reveal, and which is in my experience simply not yet acknowledged in artists' circles, is that the fragilizing effects of awards are even worse than the trappings of a pure survival competition. They compound "cumulative advantage," lead to "Matthew effects," and claim to see the future. They "penaliz[e] those who don't get them and debas[e] the field by turning it into an athletic competition." I'm sure we will continue to have them even so. We all might as well apply just in case. But please don't believe anything anyone involved says about the recipients or the process, and please don't believe that competitions and awards are about supporting the next generation's finest practitioners. They cannot be about that. The list of Pulitzer winners speaks for itself here.

Synchronically, lifetime achievement awards are indefensible; diachronically they are the only defensible kind of award in fields that are, for our purposes here, the opposite of math, where the value of results is very rarely immediately seen, indeed where this value is all but guaranteed to change, and where this guarantee in and of itself does not need to be elevated to a risk by our having previously bet against it. Of course we can collectively decide to redefine value as strictly limited to that which can be immediately seen. It may seem like this has already happened; but watch those pomos carefully, especially when they don't know they are being watched, and you will find all the evidence you'll ever need that this presentism is no more a part of who they really are than their mismatched tube socks.

The Genetic Fallacy in Art and Life (i)

(2016, rev. 2020-21)
(Previously: Author's Disclaimer/Preface)
(a part ii may or may not be forthcoming, perhaps before, during or after another massive series)


It is always tempting to assign blame for unsavory social or scholarly trends to partisans of particularly visible brand name thinkers: to the Damned Freudians, the Fucking Marxists, the Obstinate Foucauldians. If not for Fanon, there would be no political violence on the Left! Blame the white male descent into anarcho-capitalism on Milton Friedman and his 10 Quotes to Make Liberal Heads Explode! The strongest appeal of such genetic explanations lies in their parsimony. They are simple and tractable in comparison to the actual complexity of the phenomena for which they purport to account. But as complex as human society actually is, so rarely are such simple, gratifying explanations justified.

Just ask an artist. In artmaking itself as well as in the scholarship surrounding it, those who most noisily fly the flag of a brand name, by name, are to be trusted the least, most of all by their own brand-name standards. How ironic is it that the ever-quotable Friedman himself said something precisely to this effect? Flag-waving is first and foremost an attention-getting maneuver. In the case of books which almost no one actually takes the time to read, the boisterousness of true believers most often belies their miniscule numbers and great vulnerability. Much like the autonomic puffing of furry animals caught in conflict situations, the point is to make themselves appear bigger than they actually are. The attention the rest of us can't help but pay reinforces the overall impression of a discernible ideological paper trail. (We are mammals too, after all.) Perhaps there are indeed a few exceptional individuals and microcommunities where such a trail can be established and followed back to its source; but how trustworthy, really, are their self-reported narratives of the "Aha!" moment?


Breadth and depth of learning are the best medicine. They are highly destructive of certainty rather than constitutive of it. Certainty is the badge of an uncultivated mind.


From the semblance of direct intellectual paths arises the first, best set of questions towards testing genetic hypotheses: How many of us on the Left have actually surveyed a representative sampling of Freud? Marx? Foucault? How many of our Rightist foils can quote Milton Friedman from books rather than from clickbait? How could such bodies of work, in all their complexity and internal contradictoriness, possibly lead to the drawing of common conclusions on a mass scale? Fromm defined ideology as "socially patterned rationalizations," and reading is not much of a social activity, eh? How many of us are both constitutionally and materially equipped to understand this work literally, let alone with any nuance whatsoever? And to pursue a personal synthesis? I would say not too many at all. This factor alone (not to mention the general problems of willfully putting "theory" rather directly into "practice") severely limits the possible impact of scholarship on mass politics, even as it clearly can have momentous impacts on the trajectories of individuals and their achievments, and even as it is customary for such individuals to deflect forthcoming accolades toward payment of these intellectual debts, in word if not always in deed.


"Individual initiative" is never an answer but merely a restatement of the question. It is tautological. It is a fallacy of parsimony.


When it comes to the problematization of individual subjectivity, the death of the author, the dethroning of high art, and so many other canonical art-theory tropes which challenge essentialism's hitherto unchallenged assumptions, it is important to keep in mind that questions of reading and misreading nonetheless pale in comparison to those of non-reading, non-engaging, non-struggling as socially-patterned antiphenomena, the massive cold spots on any given intellectual heat map. I'll bet lunch that the "Marxist" heat map in particular is actually pretty frigid, and that cold is the absence of something rather than the presence of something else. And if I am wrong about this, then the expansion of the epithet "Marxist" to include everything left of center still wins me the bet on a technicality. The actual Marxists, bless their bleeding hearts, need not enter into it at all.

If simply correcting literal misreadings or encouraging creative ones, if establishing baseline empirical facts or reinterrogating the ones we (think we) already had, if any of these were the path to salvation, we would have arrived long ago. In fact we have rightly learned to be suspicious of those flag-wavers who posit just such tasks as Final Solutions rather than the trifling preparatory obligations they are. Another MF periodically reminds us that even the most seemingly radical thinkers are "merely conduits for the zeitgeist," at least in the colloquial sense of cause and effect. To be sure, genetic logic is cause-and-effect logic, i.e. it is uniquely well-suited to the task of mistaking one for the other. Conduit Theory, to the contrary, cannot be fooled by this primitive trap, no matter the social scale. Thought which issues from a particular cultural milieu cannot help but find corroboration therein. There is nothing mystical or prophetic about this dynamic, not even in the hands of mystical or prophetic writers. Further, as the Freudian brand admonishes us, the particular ways in which writers are wrong are also supremely informative. Too bad Freud's method of analyzing "fortuitous actions" has found its most amenable habitat in the GOTCHA culture of the Twitterverse. That is a flesh-eating waste of a promising idea.


It is galling to find so many online user reviews opining that a given book is both worth reading and "outdated." Pick one motherfuckers.


Psychoanalysis provides useful cover for any schlub who wants to claim, for any reason, that their rhetorical opponent is actually self-loathing, self-deceiving, that they literally don't believe what they themselves are saying...because who else ever could believe it? Psychoanalysis, the field of inquiry taken collectively, indeed furnishes such tools lovingly and in abundance; and yet psychoanalysis, the field of inquiry taken collectively, can only ever be equal parts cause and effect. It represents the crest of a larger wave of skepticism which has since overtaken Western intellectual life and would have done so just as readily even without constructs such as the Freudian unconscious to help it along. GOTCHA culture just happened to wash up on the beach in its wake.

I am of course wary of condemning and exalting vulgar relativism in the same breath; of implying that it doesn't matter what we read, just that we read. On a personal level I must mention that I absolutely am becoming less and not more certain the more I learn. But I would also say that the Author is only Dead if we Leave Him Be; that is, if time or ignorance leaves us utterly lacking in context for His ideas. (Hell, the way things are going we'll be lucky if people can still read well enough to parse Him literally.) Yes, (re)building context under such circumstances can be quite the pain in the ass; and yes, postmodernists, institutional-level med[dl]iation in that process is quite often more ideological than altruistic, more destructive than constructive, and more contrived than inevitable. But if we can humor the notion of individual initiative for just a moment, every one of us must individually be capable of establishing which authors are worth the trouble, for us; and if, for whatever reason, we don't take the initiative to build context that enables us to make some educated guesses as to who these authors might be, then we might as well not bother either with art or with life. Certainly we may not accuse our political opponents of being dupes. To make that accusation, you damn well better have done your homework.

For me at least, there is a middle phase of discovery about a new topic during which writers become interchangeable, but also a later critical mass of understanding beyond which the particular value of individual contributions reemerges into view. The sample rate must nonetheless always remain sufficient to capture the full spectrum of the issue. True consensus belongs only to extremes which are logical impossibilities: total ignorance and total knowledge. In practice we all are doomed to inhabit incommensurable positions across the vast middle ground which lies between these two extremes. It is a region which inexorably defies genetic logic, confluences of chance notwithstanding. No one actually lives in a poleplace where genetic logic comports with the intellectual environment. If they say they do then they are lying. I just said certainty is hard to come by, but I am certain about this.

As a result, and also because we are, it must be said, exceedingly weak and simple creatures relative to the social edifices which we unwittingly help to construct, we do seek facile comforts in times of distress and later rationalize them as Parsimonious Solutions, as if to appoint ourselves lead scientists conducting cutting edge research on the culture in which we ourselves are subsumed. Hence we blame Frantz Fanon for Eco-Terrorism and Milton Friedman for Paleo-Conservatism even as the vast majority of Eco-Terrorists and Paleo-Conservatives remain variously but powerfully under-educated, no matter what the wide circulation of reductionist glosses might seem to indicate. After all, causation just feels better than correlation. The thrill of the hunt is most intoxicating when our prey is just elusive enough to keep us entertained but not so elusive as to be unattainable; and so we distort its image in our own heads until our ideational porridge is just the right temperature. This is, incidentally, one of just a few psychic maneuvers that orthodox psychoanalysis, itself an infamous bastion of overreliance upon genetic reasoning, has had pinned down from the start, so blatant and endemic is it to human social life. It is just too unsettling a proposition for too many people to leave the answers to pressing existential questions permanently floating in the ether; and yet the effort at spearing, skinning, cleaning, and curating them is obviously the greater of the two evils.

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.