“On the contrary, the gratuitous plural is itself a potentiated function of what has not been solved. It is the expression of an equality predicated on an enforced objectlessness. As such, equality fails to subserve fairness. If this sounds a bit like Rawls, it should. Rawls’ concept of fairness could be extracted from its shallow science fiction of the “original position” by being brought into relation to Adorno’s idea of the primacy of the object. Fairness can only be conceived in the primacy of the object freed from self-preservation. For when equality is not a technique of fairness, but rather a goal in itself, it becomes the dynamic of society as a “guilt context of the living”—the phrase in which Benjamin captured the quintessence of a mythical world. Objectless equality is the internal mechanism of the perpetually guilty condition of the gratuitous plural.”
—Hullot-Kentor, op. cit.
July 2010
26 posts
“Likewise, the cartoons of Bush as the hunched, low IQ monkey would need to contribute to the self-conscious recognition of the primitivism of this moment of the social totality red in tooth and claw, instead of acting as furtive allies of Bush in their disdain of what we really are, in the comprehension of which we would be more than that. Those images represent the quintessence of our moment: the repression of the insight into the primitive in which radical modernism originated, and, most urgently, this has blinded us to the primitive quality of the reality that we now increasingly inhabit.”
—Robert Hullot-Kentor, op. cit.
“Briefly, idealism—Hegel’s idealism—is, of all philosophy, the one that is densest with historical reality. It came to this achievement in wanting to recover for the mind its place in opposition to the rise of the mechanical universe by turning over the entire objectivity of the universe to the subject. Not a pin could be left out that would not pop the bubble. Idealism undertook to internalize the historical universe whole by deducing the categories of the subject from the object. It thus made itself a philosophical Moebius strip, the secret of whose twist is that it paradoxically seeks the primacy of the object as that of the subject’s sovereignty; by devoting itself to the object, the subject continually rediscovers its own truth. In this development idealism so filled the subject with the object, with world history itself, that this left no plausible remainder to the individual as an individual psychological subject, a layer of reality that would have amounted to considerably more than a pin. The startling achievement of the subject’s sovereignty in idealism, in other words, is paradoxically at the price of the subject itself who is at the same time deprived of its object.”
—Robert Hullot-Kentor in Conversation with Fabio Akcelrud Durão - The Brooklyn Rail
“Every object, however near the eye, has something about it which you cannot see, and which brings the mystery of distance even into every part and portion of what we suppose ourselves to see most distinctly.”
—from Modern Painters I, John Ruskin (via telemachy)
“And yet that same sense of inevitable doom, the spectacle of abjection rather than the drama of choice, is what generates the considerable emotional interest in Williams’s best work. This lies in the pathetic tension between the characters’ illusions about themselves (the dainty white outfit) and the crushing disappointments that, we know, await them (poverty, the sordid reality of lust). We respond to his heroines not because they are particularly good—they are, if anything, often unattractive; nobody in his right mind would want Blanche DuBois as a houseguest any more than Stanley Kowalski does—but because, since we all have secret fantasies and illusions, we are bound to be moved by the spectacle of characters who can’t, or won’t, give in to the sordid realities of life.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, op. cit.
“The sense of inevitability that haunts [Tennessee] Williams’s most powerful plays is the reason they are not tragedies in the classical sense but rather dramas of pathos. What makes classical tragedy irresistible is the spectacle of a great figure, powerful and competent, brought unexpectedly low by some flaw in himself, some bad decision rooted in his character that leads, with awful irony, to inexorable destruction. In Williams’s plays, the bad decisions have already been made by the time the curtain rises; the emotional core of his drama lies not in a critical moment of choice but in the spectacle of abjection, of an already doomed, ruined person struggling to hang on to something beautiful. Greek tragedians tend to be interested in character, which is why the suffering comes at the end of their plays (it’s the result of bad choices). Williams is interested in personality, which is why he begins with the suffering, with the poverty or the madness.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, Victims on Broadway, rev. of The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, dir. David Leveaux, at Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, March 22–July 17, 2005, New York Review of Books, May 26, 2005
“
Vast swaths of American youth aspire to be the next Hunter S. Thompson. Most of them seem to have come to this noble goal by watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Johnny Depp. After a certain point, the mention of Hunter S. made me want to weep. One boy sent me a video of himself pretending to be his girlfriend’s bra, walking around with his hands cupped over her bare breasts. Hunter S. might have liked that, actually—but it wasn’t writing.
I got increasingly fed up with hearing about their sex lives, the banal assumptions reflected in what was “crazy” to them, the childhood victories that convinced them they were bound for penmanship and glory. They crowed about their “passion for words” but made the grammatical mistakes of the poorly read. I tired of their repeated demands that we give them a job because they were excited and enthusiastic. (Excited about what, exactly? Music! What music? All music! And words! Their passion for music and words!) When I got to the 700th “I want to inspire people,” I wrote in my notes, “I hate you.” They claimed to be “inspired” by Hunter S. Thompson—but not inspired to mock hypocrisy and greed, not inspired to rage at a world that needed their rage to wake it up. They were just “inspired.” They were inspired by fame. They were excited to join the passionate and musical adventure in the sky that was a job at Rolling Stone.
” —Michelle Chihara, I’m From I’m from Rolling Stone: Fear, Loathing, and MTV, n+1, April 9, 2007
“How did the film companies propose to sell the Twist to a still apathetic teenage audience? Columbia’s campaign book for the cinema managers coins new superlatives—‘it’s Twisterrific’.”
—Encounter June 1962, 55 (quoted in OED s.v. ‘-rific’ draft entry)
“
rhyparograph, n.
Now rare.
Forms: 16- rhyparograph, 17 ryparograph. [rhyparographos painter of low or sordid subjects (Pliny) ruparos] filthy, dirty (rupos] dirt, filth, of unknown origin + -[aros], extended form of -[ros], suffix forming adjectives) +-[graphos] -GRAPH comb. form. Compare French rhyparographe (1611 in Cotgrave as riparographe). Compare slightly earlier RHYPAROGRAPHER n.
Greek *[ruparographos] is apparently not attested.
The sense ‘a painting’ in English is probably due to the influence of LITHOGRAPH n., PHOTOGRAPH n., etc.]
A painter of sordid or distasteful subjects; = RHYPAROGRAPHER n. Also occas.: a painting of such a subject.
” —OED draft entry, June 2010
“Helvetica is a product of the times because it is a deconstruction of pretense. In previous centuries the most popular fonts were those that exhibited fine detail and evident craftsmanship, and those were a reflection of the culture in which they were made. Helvetica’s success lies in its versatility of uses for a culture where people are bombarded by many different and competing images and styles.”
—Ned Shalanski in Kristen Scharold, Architecture of Type, interview with Shalanski and Ellice Lee, Wunderkammer Magazine, April 19, 2009
“Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Dehumanization of Art writes, “I no longer believe in any ideas except the ideas of shipwrecked men.” This seems to have something to do with the idea that people speak deeper truths when they are wrestling with the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs rather than tweaking things at the tip-top of the pyramid. Grudin’s Design and Truth seems to be written almost exclusively for people at the top of the pyramid, people who worry most about which refrigerator will best reflect who they are as an individual, people who see flimsy remotes as examples of true evil in the world. This is a book for people interested in maximizing their daily routine and getting increased performance out of their desktops. This design theory will not save those who actually need saving.”
—Luke Neff, Design Shall Not Set You Free: A review of Design and Truth by Robert Grudin, Wunderkammer Magazine, May 25, 2010
Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes, NY Times →
nytimes.com
The NYT last weekend covered the rise, paralleling that of chillwave in the music world, of high-tech replications of low tech. Rob Walker focuses on the Hipstamatic iPhone app (pun on ‘hipster’ obviously intended), which makes photos taken with that expensive device look like they were taken with a 35 mm camera some 35 years ago.
Walker picks up on the double chuckle here. The iPhone is really the fulfillment of over a century of design and technology; its customers want that, are indeed dedicated exponents of this virginal-white consummation. Yet here are many of them, rejecting the transparency of its 2- to 5-megapixel camera in favor of..graininess.
With these retroists, look closer: they treasure grain, the residuum of the medium itself. They don’t want a pellucid image that looks, hey!, just like the damn dull business that squirted into the viewfinder. They want something else, the texture of the 35 mm (slash vinyl, slash filmstrip, slash..) age, the age Momus calls the “age of Analog Baroque.” This was the age, he writes, “[w]hen limitations, in the way that only limitation can, set us free.”
Though he uses minimalist boilerplate, the power of self-denial, Momus’s end is maximalist: hence his celebration of “new sounds, new colours, and new textures to play with.” Contrapositively, in the hands of all but the most skilled practitioners (e.g.) the transparent hi-res photos the iPhone takes by default have no adornment, nor at the other end even the aesthetic appeal of the minimal. It is maximalism without joie de vivre, which amounts to a heap of stillbirths.
(I speak aesthetically here only; the memorializing functions of cell photos are clear enough. Of course, Analog Baroque snapshots seen today perform that same function, but it is now immanentized in the medium itself—the grain—and thus more honest. And more fun to look at!)
The other half of Walker’s chuckle arrives in his last paragraph:
Not that anyone is complaining about digital abundance. The number of people who actually cling to what one flaw-tool endorser calls “the oh-so-last-century idea of film” remains small. Another enthusiast concedes the technologies of imperfection fall short of matching the qualities the actual outdated tools produced — but they’re so much easier to use that it’s worth the trade-off.
..Oh. So after all that aesthetic apologizing, utility wins. Almost: Hipstamatic does cost ($1.99), so if no one cared about the resulting look no one would get it. And tools that don’t ride on infernal cutting-edge machines, and that thus totally externalize the aesthetic’s production, are readily available at your local Urban Outfitters (e.g.). Which doesn’t sound like a terribly promising epicenter from which the physical and the flawed can wage a sustainable rearguard action against the Windex spirit of mega-megapixels. But someone has to be the catalyst.
(Photo by Lucyrk in LA)
“
Doing beautiful things is its own reward,” he says, when I ask what enjoyment he can still derive from a trick he has pulled off many thousands of times before. “If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before – you can’t beat that.” He gulps suddenly, like a snake trying to swallow an egg, and when he speaks again his voice has a wobble to it.
“There is that great line in Sunday in the Park with George,” he says, referring to Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 musical about Georges Seurat, “ ’Look, I made a hat where there never was a hat’.” He falls silent again and, as unexpectedly as those coins turn to fish, big fat tears start rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t say that line without choking up, because it states, in profoundly poetic terms, what I have always wanted to do with my life. It’s so simple and so funny, but boy it hits me deep.”
” —Benjamin Secher, Penn and Teller interview, Telegraph, July 9, 2010
“
I thought about the week before, to a night when K___ was promoting (a word, like networking, that means absolutely nothing and yet so many bad things) a party at a club by the High Line. Inside was another multitude, this one having spent its day working at a coveted internship, or for their mom’s friend—exhausted, depleted, eager to preen and regenerate. Tall, proud, dumb looking boys leaned against their tables, faces puffing with drinks and the hope of licking someone.
Were you to transcribe the conversations taking place, they would all be typed out in Comic Sans. Nobody in New York ever wants to be where they are at any given moment, and so bars and clubs serve mostly as a loud, dark place to text other people and ask what they’re up to. All mouths were constantly agape—I was greeted with a hoarse chorus of HeyyEyeyyHeyyyHeyyyyyyyyyy!
” —Diary of an Unemployed Class of ‘10 Philosophy Major in New York City, Part 3 - The Awl
“Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right — the “right to be let alone” — that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did.”
—George F. Will, Another Round of Prohibition, Anyone? The Washington Post, July 8, 2010
“In a comment recommended by many readers, Rosie accuses me of going further than this, of ignorantly “continu[ing] to conflate being sexy with being promiscuous.” The word “continuing,” I take it, is meant to evoke the specter of certain prominent second-wave feminists — Catharine MacKinnon leaps to mind — who indeed hold the view that, in a misogynistic world, a woman’s investment in being sexy is inevitably a form of self-objectification. Would that things were this straightforward; at least it would be obvious that they needed to change, and how. But the situation is decidedly more complicated than MacKinnon and her ilk insist. To say that a woman’s wanting to be sexy can’t possibly amount to more than a desire for self-objectification or wanton promiscuity is to fail to take women’s experience of themselves and their intentions seriously. This kind of move should be antithetical to feminists.”
—Authority and Arrogance: A Response - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
“Finally, I would like to point out that it is not necessary to change the world or to create a nation of sovereign individuals. What matters – and what one can do right now – is to live as a sovereign individual, staying close to those who respect you as such, and avoiding the manipulators and those who desire to live as parasites on your energy, talents, and virtues. Therefore, we may achieve freedom to a large extent during our lifetimes, independently of any eventual failure to end the serfdom perpetrated by the state. If you behave as a sovereign individual in your personal relationships, you will be contributing to your happiness and also to the transmission of the concept of individual sovereignty. That chain of good, I am certain, will abolish the chains of evil.”
—Helio Beltrao (founder and president of Instituto Mises Brasil), The Sovereign Individual, The Free Market (Ludwig von Mises Inst.), May 2010, 4
