(11:15 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

More State of Exception Goodness

Even a year or two ago, as Agamben’s more far-out warnings began to seem plausible, it did look like we were heading for the apocalypse. But, of course, just when it looked as if the Bush Administration was leading us into never-ending worldwide war and internal repression, more curious things happened.

The first was the military catastrophe of the occupation of Iraq and the surprising, gross ineptitude of the Administration, despite the remarkable competence and initial successes of the armed forces. Originally, we had to anticipate a plan of continuous war against the “Axis of Evil,” and a wholesale attempt to reshape the world militarily; that is now sidelined, and the mismanagement of Iraq has helped to preserve the fragile American Republic. The second was that there was no large-scale crackdown, even covert, on the internal dissent against the War in Iraq before it occurred; such people just were ignored. An implication was that the members of the Bush Administration might not conceive of themselves as determinedly antidemocratic in the way they first appeared, when they put in place the initial structures that (as Agamben, via Arendt, reminded us) once had led to totalitarianism; rather, they might just have put antidemocratic institutions in place for immediate pragmatic reasons, power hunger, and greed. Indeed, so far it seems the rhetoric of democracy may still restrain them to just the degree necessary for the United States to survive a second Bush Administration. Third, government entities outside immediate executive oversight were not as hopeless as suspected. Though the Congress continues to be a disappointment—essentially turning into an adjunct for party and presidential politics, rather than asserting its genuine rivalry with and perhaps superiority to untrammeled presidential power—the professional political classes of the CIA, the intelligence community, and the ambassadorial service expressed useful doubts about Administration policy, and, in one of the most absolutely crucial events of the last four years, the same US Supreme Court that had unjustifiably intervened to hand Bush the 2000 election slowed down the possibility of denationalizing citizens as “enemy combatants” in the case of Yasser Hamdi (though not yet in the more egregious case of José Padilla, deferred on a problem of jurisdiction). And, fourth, a presidential election in 2004 forced the Democratic Party to reassert the national political divisions of a two-party system, critiquing the war at last, and offering a reminder that there is a choice of sorts for the population. Perhaps most important—though it’s not clear the message ever got across—Kerry, for all his defects, did not embrace the overall “security” or “terror” model put forward by the Bush administration (which would be essential to the totalitarianization of the United States) and followed, instead, an “anti-terrorist model” of more limited reach (for which he was pilloried, after expressing these ideas to the author of a New York Times Sunday magazine article). Bush’s reelection may be a disaster, but the moment of real danger, when it seemed a totalitarian consolidation might occur, may also have passed. We can be curiously relieved that Bush is distracted with destroying the social and economic fabric of the United States, through the dismantling of Social Security, retention of tax cuts, and enlargement of deficits, rather than developing his internal security apparatus.

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(10:04 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Brad Johnson, PhD

Brad just e-mailed to say that he passed his dissertation defense and is now officially a Doctor of Philosophy. I'm sure he'll have more to say about it in coming days.

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(6:30 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:

Paul, the law, anti Judaism pt. 2

[the weblog turns 2000, posts that is, sometime this weekend probably]

So to this point, what we have is some good examples of a very unhappy position, a very bad reading of Paul, that makes its way into the broad stream of Catholic thinking, affirmed in some way or another by the very most important of Christian theologians (Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas). However, at this point I think it fair to say that Dave's suggestion with respect to 20th century thinking (positions on the abolition of the law are critically intertwined with theological anthropology, etc.) does not hold for these thinkers. That is, one could readily excise the doctrine of keeping the law as mortal sin from Augustine or Aquinas' broader system of thought without doing major immediate damage to the overall structure. Michael Wyshogrod (Jewish theologian in the tradition of Rosenzweig, married to the more widely read Edith) has suggested how this doctrine could easily be voided in Aquinas' thinking in an essay he wrote in the 80's on Aquinas' Treatise on the Law (Summa Theologiae II.I q. 90-110 or so). Keeping the law for Jewish Christians could be seen as retrospective rememberance rather than as an active denial of the sufficiency of Jesus' sacrifice. On another front, Ratzinger's pre-papal take on Judaism deftly avoids the doctrine in Aquinas and tinkers with a line of thought actually rather amenable to my position.

The situation from the Reformation forward is something of the reverse, especially with respect to Luther. It is not nearly so easy to pin such a noxious doctrine as 'keeping Torah = mortal sin' on Luther. Luther, to his credit, rightly rejects the Catholic tradition on this point and, later in life, develops the concept of a 'third use of the law.' For Luther, keeping the law is audiaphoric, neither here nor there. In Pauline language 'circumcision or uncircumcision is meaningless.' (Calvin, by the way, for all his love of the law, maintains Aquinas' tripartite division of the Torah and the insistence that keeping the ceremonial law is damnable.) The source of Luther's offensiveness, however, is absolutely impossible to purge. One has to reject Lutheranism in toto to reject Luther's anti-judaism.

I can't do Lutheranism justice in a short post, so I'll simply take off from Dave's argument that my polemic is overdetermined by the late Luther's undeniable anti-semitism. The problem is that the late Luther is fully present in utero, as it were, from the Reformation get go. Luther's grumpy old anti-semitism stems from bitter disappointment. Early on, Luther enthusiastically assumed that Jews would come pouring into the Christian camp as a result of the Reformation. Luther, misreading everyone from Paul to Erasmus and 1500 years or so of Judaism to boot, fervently believed that Catholicism had perverted the Gospel of Grace so immediately and so badly that Jews had never really seen an alternative to a religion of works, and, further, that if Jews could only understand 'justification by faith', they'd begin jumping upstream like spawning salmon.

What's more, the whole doctrine of 'justification by faith' that Luther supposedly gets from Paul is highly problematic. I say supposedly because the Lutheran take on 'justification by faith' actually repeats in a new and subversive way the errors of Paul's opponents in places like Romans 1-4. Adam's 'Epistle to Romans pt. 1 and 2' (see St. Paul Week archive) gets much right that has been wrong in Protestant readings for the last 500 years. Luther and the mainline Protestants who have followed have accomplished something truly remarkable. Radical individualism and totalitarian statism. 'Your own personal Jesus' and 'obey the governing authorities' bitch. There has been a major revolution in Pauline studies within the New Testament guild, a revolution that I can't narrate here. Agamben should probably be aware of what's going on as he is the only one of the Pauline philosophy folks who has made an attempt at secondary sources (but it seems to me from a cursory look that he has only dabbled, and ignored stuff that would seriously upset what he is doing with Paul, but ultimately could supercharge his larger project - so it goes, sadly).

To state the problem briefly: the 'justification by faith' or Gospel of Grace models require as their obscene other a religion of works or a Gospel of Law, and Judaism is seen to be the originator of the obscenity which must be flushed out of the system. New readings of Paul in the New Testament guild, however, are recovering another Paul. I should probably do a post or two sometime (no promises) that is something of an annotated bibliography of the field.
My take on Paul actually originated in working through the New Paul in New Testament studies and, only then, trying to figure out what was going on with the New St. Paul in philosophy.

One doesn't have to go all the way down the road with my judaizing political theology to deal with this set of problems in Pauline thought. I hope that my particular misreading of Paul is more faithful than other misreadings to Paul's original misreading of Moses (a brilliant and radical and universalizing misreading). One could say something like this about Paul and the law (and this, I gather, is the contested consensus within the New Testament guild): Paul universalized Judaism precisely by not requiring gentiles to become Torah observant Jews first in order to become Christians. Paul's thinking on the law, however, doesn't abolish it altogether. Former gentiles, now Christians, have to observe a certain minimum of the law (no idolatry or porneia) and might keep other provisions of the law where expedient, but are otherwise free from the demands of Torah. On the other hand, Paul doesn't for a moment attempt to keep Jewish Christians from observing the law ('to the Jews I became as one under the law that I might win a few').

I would only add, that Paul's narrative leaves the door cracked on the future of gentile Christian law keeping, and Paul's letters actually provide moments where, as Jodi commented with respect to Zizek, the law is still kept by all, only from a different perspective.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2006

(12:01 AM) | Anonymous:

Happy Deterritorialized Birthday Gilles Deleuze.

Gilles Deleuze would be eighty-one today if he had not taken his own life on the 4th of November ten years ago. Do not expect any grand discussion of his suicide, where one relates it to Spinoza's conception of suicide or Nietzsche's conception of overcoming. That certainly could be done, but I'm not the one to do it. (You all know I'm more suited to comment on how handsome he is in this picture.) I can only express my gratitude for the thought that came from his life and the radical redirection my own thinking took after I experienced reading Deleuze.

In many ways I find myself wanting to pledge my fidelity to Deleuze and Deleuzianism, knowing that this would demand precisely the opposite. It's strange the chance encounters we have with thinkers, the new paths they set us charging down, the new commitments our acceptance of their thought calls for. Those of us who do work in philosophy, especially what goes by the misnomer of European philosophy, are often accussed of guruism. I can't deny that there is some sting in that charge, but why would we ever want to think with those with whom we didn't have a profound respect.

Today I look for a line of escape, knowing that I am all the time being reterritorialized within an insane regime of signs, but looking nonetheless. Happy Birthday Gilles, keep exposing the fissures in our being and following those lines in and through us.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2006

(9:55 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

If I weren't a grad student

What would I be doing? I'd probably be working as much as possible in order to pay off my student loans as soon as possible, which I'd be doing in order to give myself something to do, some kind of goal. Maybe I would go to the Art Institute on Tuesday mornings, more often than my current once-a-year visit. Maybe I would be wearing better clothes, or at very least, I would get new clothes more often than once a year (viz., Christmas). Maybe I would "go organic."

I would buy a bike and start riding places. Maybe I'd get a gym membership. I would buy a cookbook and learn how to cook. I'd play piano more -- maybe once my loans were paid off, I'd actually buy a piano (used). I would visit parts of the bookstore other than philosophy or religion. I'd finish reading Middlesex after being approximately halfway through it for a year and a half (and counting). I'd go out more often. I'd play Grand Theft Auto, all the versions, just to catch up. I haven't played a new video game in years -- I'm afraid of becoming addicted. I would find restaurants and tell my friends about them.

I would get my hair cut more often. I wouldn't have a beard right now. I'd eat fewer egg sandwiches. Maybe I'd go to church, just to pick up some tail at the singles group.

I assume I'd still read, but what? How does one even read nowadays, without having to make something else out of it, "use" it? I'd read about science more, probably. I'd read about Islam, and I'd read leftist economic theory. I'd give myself a decade or so to work my way through Proust.

One thing's for sure: I wouldn't be learning Latin. Or maybe I would. I'd go to the symphony, and I'd also go to more shows. I'd subscribe to Netflicks. Would I have my own cat? I guess this is quickly turning into a "what if I weren't a grad student and I could afford my own place" -- in that case, I'd put a lot of maps on the walls. Maybe a studio apartment wouldn't be bad -- think of all the time I'd save not having to open doors all the time.

I'd definitely buy Nutter Butters more often. In fact, that's something I can do right now, even though I'm a grad student. Next time I'm at the store: Nutter Butters. But from now on, I think I'm shopping at Trader Joe's for toothpaste. That Tom's of Maine stuff is awesome -- my mouth has never felt cleaner. That's what I'd do -- I'd research which stores carry Tom's of Maine toothpaste.

Maybe I'd write. Maybe I'd write better.

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(8:56 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tuesday Hatred: A promising career as a data entry facilitation specialist!

I hate that every company in the world seems to have a link on its website for "careers." Not "jobs," but "careers." Do they even still do careers anymore? Even top executives can't seem to hold down a job nowadays -- they gouge and defraud a company faithfully for a couple years, then move on to the next pasture. I hate that researching fast food restaurants has given me a serious craving for a hamburger, specifically, the kind of hamburger I got at Steak and Shake on my drive through the desert wastes of western Michigan. I initially was thinking Fuddrucker's, but I don't think their buns are really that great.

I hate that so many people from the desert wastes of western Michigan seem to be so proud of coming from said desert wastes -- I've heard that the same is true of all Michigan people, and if so, perhaps I just don't notice it in people from my own region, or else the Flint area is a special case. I am not a fan of any kind of patriotism or strong identification with much of anything at all, though.

I hate that I'm most likely going to miss 24 most weeks, due to working Mondays. It's not very difficult to get it from BitTorrent, but there's always the risk that I'll accidentally stumble upon some plot information. I hate that they killed off Michelle but that Tony is still in critical condition. I hate President Whiny Little Short-Sighted Bitch (both on 24 and in real life).

I hate that I got a ticket for parking a truck in a residential area despite having my residential parking permit clearly displayed on my windshield. I'm sure that I can successfully appeal it, and it's only $25 if I can't, but it's still an annoyance I'd rather do without. I hate any situation that brings me into contact with the police.

I hate bars that are too loud, particularly when they are not dance-oriented. If it's clearly just the kind of place people go to hang out and talk, turn the damn music down (Street Side Cafe!).

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Monday, January 16, 2006

(10:15 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:

No Feinstein = No Filibuster

Here.

Oh well, would have made things even more interesting for a bit.

Now we'll have to wait and see if Bush gets a third pick (a pick to replace one of the five remaining Roe supporters, that is) to see some real domestic fireworks.

Democrats have decided that they'd rather spread themselves thin by fighting a dozen or so lousy battles rather than picking one or two and making a stand.

Predictable.

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(9:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Martin Luther King Day

On this, the most traditional of blogs, my tradition for Martin Luther King Day is to post a link to this article:

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

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Sunday, January 15, 2006

(8:59 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

War with Iran

I am unequivocally opposed to any American military action against Iran. I just wanted that to be part of the public record.

UPDATE: Holy crap (via eb).

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Saturday, January 14, 2006

(7:27 PM) | John Emerson:

State of Exception

Giorgio Agamben
Chicago, 2005

Agamben’s State of Exception seems to be about George Bush’s lawless personal rule and his imperial ambitions, and it seems to be making the forbidden comparison with Hitler or perhaps Mussolini (i.e., Hitler without death camps). Given the neocon dreams of a liberal imperialism, preemptive war, “preponderance”, and a monopolar world, and given Bush’s dismissive attitude toward any political, constitutional, or internationalist limitations to his power, this is all to the good. (Just the other day the TV screamer Chris Matthews explained that for a President, breaking the law can be a necessary part of his job – and Matthews is not the worst of the bunch.)

Walter Benjamin’s post WWI debate with Carl Schmitt is the ostensible topic of Agamben’s book, and once again my problems with the German Seriousness, as well as my lifelong difficulties with critical theory (sensu lato), stand in the way of my liking the book much. Benjamin’s debate with Schmitt, like Strauss’s, focussed critically on the boundaries and limits of liberalism and constitutionalism, with which none of the three had much sympathy.

Benjamin was a revolutionary (presumably an ultra-leftist), while Schmitt was an authoritarian conservative who later became a Nazi. In their different ways, both valorized the violent, extra-legal context of legality and civility, and both of them were concerned that political action (revolutionary in Benjamin’s case, and authoritarian in Schmitt’s) not be excessively constrained by legalities – though given what we know about subsequent history, their worries were unnecessary.

If you trace any legal system back to its beginnings you will find that it was founded by extralegal violence, so if the real nature of a thing is to be found in its foundation, then the essence of law is extralegal violence. Likewise, in a familiar Hegelian way of thinking, the legal order is knowable only from its contrast to ilegality and disorder, and furthermore, as we all know, the state is by definition the monopoly of legitimate violence. But Schmitt and Benjamin (pp. 23,54) show far too much enthusiasm for this line of thinking, defining the “limit concept” of law which is “neither external nor internal to law” (i.e., the suspension of law in the “state of exception”, also called martial law or the state of emergency) -- as the essence of law:

“Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the “thing” of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being in the meshes of the logos.” (p. 59).[1]

In the Schmitt / Strauss book legalistic liberalism was the big question, whereas in the present book it seems rather to be utilitarianism. Again, while utilitarianism may be an inadequate philosophy, the answer does not seem to be to declare an absolute indifference to results. I’ve liked some of Benjamin’s writing, but some of the Benjamin passages here seem like nothing more than meaningless verbiage justifying a mystified violence:

“Here appears the topic…. of violence as “pure medium” that is, as the figure of a paradoxical “mediality without ends” – a means that, though remaining such, is considered independently of the ends it pursues. The problem, then is not that of identifying just ends but that of “individuating a different kind of violence that certainly could not be either the legitimate or illegitimate means to those ends but is not related to them as means at all but in some different way.” (p. 62).

Much of Agamben’s book consists of an intrinsically interesting discussion of auctoritas and potestas in the Roman tradition., and perhaps this does illuminate the thought of Strauss, Schmitt, and Benjamin. But Agamben, quite rightly, ends up speaking primarily to contemporary concerns. This passage looks promising:

“As long as the two elements [auctoritas and potestas ] were correlated, yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Rome’s contrast between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europe’s contrast between the spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic – though founded on a fiction – can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridicio-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.“ (p. 86).

However, his conclusion seems close to Benjamin’s, and is to me unintelligible:

“To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without relation to any end. And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.” (p. 88)[2]

According to the jacket blurb, Judith Butler understands Agamben’s book thus:

“This is an erudite and provocative book that calls us to ‘stop the machine’ and break the violent hold that law lays upon life”.

This may also what Agamben thinks, but to me it's all wrong. If the lawless state of exception has become the basis of modern state power, it would seem that the corrective would be a return to lawfulness. Butler is apparently talking about something like Benjamin’s “pure violence”, outside the law, to counter the lawlessness of the state of exception, but for a variety of reasons I think that that proposal is ludicrous. As I’ve said elsewhere, the German Left between the two World Wars has to be regarded as the most unsuccessful political movement of all time, and seems unlikely to provide us with a usable model for our own practice. Furthermore, the violent potentials in the world of today seem almost all to be from the right, and it seems ill-advised to dream of “pure violence”.

Like many others I’ve been looking for a vantage from which to resist the rightist hegemony. The US has been continuously mobilized ever since 1941, before I was born, and an authoritarian form of militarism seems to be on the point of wiping out all domestic resistance. But I don’t find Agamben’s book, well-researched and well-written though it is, to be of much help.

(Crossposted at Idiocentrism)

NOTES

[1] Actually, this is Benjamin speaking of Schmitt, and not Benjamin’s own view, but Benjamin shares Schmitt’s contempt for bourgeois legality. Agamben carefully describes a “debate” between Schmitt and Benjamin, but I do not think that the terms are well-defined enough for it to be a real debate, mostly because of the mushiness of Benjamin’s concepts. I am reminded of the duel of grimaces in Gombrowicz’s Pornografia, or the mime debate in Rabelais, in both of which the criteria for a successful argument are unknown to the reader, though we are assured in each case that one of the contestants was triumphant.

Agamben (p. 79) seems a little tentative about Benjamin's approach, but does not reject it: "Under extreme conditions (that is to say, under the conditions that best define it, if it is true that a legal institution's truest character is always defined by the exception and the extreme situation)....” A Straussian could probably read this passage as a coded statement of something or other.

While law can indeed be defined in terms of the state of exception, just as life can be defined in terms of death, there are a lot of reasons to define things in terms of their messy, perishable, unexciting middles, rather than in terms of their serious, profound Grenzbegriffen.

_[2] Agamben’s identification of law and the state of exception, respectively, with langue and with parole strikes me as terribly farfetched (pp. 36-7, 60). Parole does not suspend langue.

[UPDATE: See comments. While I still am not sure that Agamben's analogy is intelligible or valid, my reading of what he said is probably wrong.]

Paul Dunne, the proprieter of the Shamrockshire Review of Books has commented on the Adorno page of mine I linked to above.

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(3:19 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Feature Wishlist

What do you wish your computer would do that it doesn't currently do?

One useful feature would be some type of guide to two-sided printing. Currently you have to figure it out yourself, but it would seem to be a simple matter to create some kind of prompt system where it would say, "Now put the pages just printed back into the tray, in this particular direction, etc." and would take care of keeping track of reverse print order issues for you.

I also wish that iTunes had a more powerful filtering system (perhaps using regular expressions) and that all albums would show up as a subfolder on the sidebar -- I disproportionately listen to albums for which I've made lists on the sidebar, and I don't want to go through and make lists for each individually. It would also be great if iTunes could run as a tray icon instead of a taskbar item, since I leave it running all the time so that my mp3s will be available through Anthony's computer (which has speakers, whereas mine does not).

I wish that my computer would automatically collect every PDF I look at in a subfolder in "My Documents," for easier reference.

So, computer dorks, tell me about the existing software that would help me with all this.

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(11:56 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

One year ago today

was the last night I spent at my house in Bourbonnais, and so I suppose I've been living in Chicago for a year. I remember at the time thinking it would be somehow better to move on January 1 -- tidier, for tax purposes. As it stands, I'll be getting another W-2 from the chiropractor's office this year, even though it seems like forever ago that I worked there. Unlike most Americans, I eagerly look forward to tax time and file my taxes as soon as possible, since I have cleverly remained below the poverty level in order to deprive the government of its rightful share of my productive capacity.

I find myself wanting to listen to the music that was playing most at this time last year -- every year I go through this same kind of cycle, as though I have to come to terms with the past in order to move forward. This year, the repeated music choices are Interpol's Antics and Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine (bootleg version). Objectively speaking, neither one is strikingly good, particularly lyrically. The worst offender is Interpol: "You make me want to strap on a guitar and celebrate the myriad ways that I love you." Right.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this post. Do I make the sudden turn away from mundane details toward deeper reflections, or do I end it here? After all, I have a lot of market research reports to do today -- and what a relief that's turning out to be, and to be fairly confident that I'll have more of that work waiting for me this summer. To some extent, if last year was the year of intense stress and adjustments, this year seems like it could potentially be a little more straightforward, in terms of "infrastructure" issues. Hopefully I at least won't feel like my life is falling completely apart every two months.

I know about the city stickers and the special parking permit for trucks now. I've got a pretty good grasp of the relevant parts of the public transit system. I don't get lost now when I drive. I know the numbers of the streets for the most part (2000N, etc.). I have some idea now of how the academic publishing business works, and particularly of the huge amount of lag time involved at every step. I've got my language requirements met. I have a set route to walk every day -- walking two miles a day, every day, like I'm a healthy person. My beard is coming along nicely. Everything's pretty much in place. Doug covers the blog for me Thursdays, and maybe Brad will do Wednesdays. I've got the Tuesday Hatred and Friday Confession pretty well under control. Within the next (calendar) year I'll be mainly done with my coursework and will have probably taken the 20th century exam. I will have moved into my own place (hopefully) -- a more settled situation, "hunkering down" for the long stretch of the PhD. Hoop-jumping: under control. Money situation: probably basically under control over the medium term.

I've got my infrastructure. Theoretically, this should open up a space of freedom for me -- right? With nothing to worry about, really, my energies should be freed for creative work, for exploring relationships, making new friends, trying new and interesting types of food, etc., etc. Right?

There's an alternate theory, of course -- that the space for real creativity is only opened up by taking "all that" and throwing it away. Perhaps it's better to think in terms of different kinds of creative work -- domesticated and wild, perhaps. I had in mind the difference between a classical composer and a rock star, but then I remembered reading about the life of Mozart (from my German reader, as part of my dutiful and timely fulfillment of requirements). His life fits much more closely the model of the genius down on his luck, the kind who always tempts us to view his suffering as instrumental, as though he "wouldn't have been Mozart" if he had had a better infrastructure. Vicarious suffering -- it's almost impossible to get away from. The artist, the exceptional person, suffers, lives a life of deprivation, all so that he can produce something that is meaningful precisely for domesticated people. We are quick to say that the art wouldn't have been as good if he hadn't been in such difficult circumstances -- do we ever ask whether our appreciation of the art would be much better if we weren't in such comfortable circumstances?

The artist suffers for us, but also enjoys for us. It's not that the art wouldn't have meant as much to us had he not suffered, but ultimately that it wouldn't have meant as much as him -- the artist is the priest who offers himself up to art for us. Might our task then be to reread aesthetics as Christology?

I wonder about Karl Barth's attraction to Mozart -- if Mozart represented for him a different route that Barth could have gone down. Barth, the country parson and labor organizer who made his name with a Bible commentary that was, improbably, a genuine work of art, who in a sense gave "all that" up for a domesticated professorship where he produced a very different kind of work, one that paid its scholarly dues almost to excess -- was his love for Mozart a testament to his hope that the work he did, weighed down by the responsibilities of domesticity and scholarship, could despite everything be as light and free and daring as the work of a man with no place to call his own?

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Friday, January 13, 2006

(12:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

"If boredom is a moment of danger, I just fell out a fifth-story window into an abandoned mineshaft full of quicksand."

The title of this post is a direct quote from The New Criterion's predictable, pedantic, patronizing critique of n+1 (via Brad Johnson). Here's the conclusion:

N+1 strives for seriousness (or thinks it does) to compensate for the many little magazines that don’t. Unfortunately, that means it can poison the well in a way that a quirky amusement like McSweeney’s could never dream of. A McSweeney’s reader may be wasting his time, but he doesn’t really think he’s reading a valuable reflection on policy, morality, or culture. An n+1 reader, however, may believe that the magazine’s strain of pseudo-thoughtful logorrhea is the same thing as real argument—the kind that takes a side and proposes what to do. (Isn’t this, after all, the same demographic that regarded John Kerry’s tortuous illogic as “nuanced thinking”?)

Even so, it seems inevitable that n+1 will recede from view [...]. It will fail less because of its obnoxious hype machine than because, as the world’s troubles become more dire and more immediate, nobody’s going to turn to the Kunkels for the answers. A civilization declining within and attacked from without can’t afford to ponder its fate in the same glib, nugatory way that it ponders “trends in network comedy.” So nobody will turn to n+1. They’ll just wonder, one hopes, why they ever made such idols of Progress and Thought—without a moment’s attention to where they were going or what, if anything, they were thinking.

Reading this, I thought, "You know what we need here? A Weblog Manifesto." We need a high-minded statement of why we -- precisely we -- exist, why here, why now. We live at a serious juncture in history, in which the very continued existence of humanity itself is in continual radical question -- but insofar as this radicality is continual, it is experienced as a given fact, even as boring....

Perhaps I should start a Manifesto Wiki. I'm young and hip and do everything on my computer -- masochistically.

Oh God, I just ran out of things to think -- quick, is there anyone with a comp lit PhD around to fill my empty head with more nonsense?

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)