1. J R After lugging the book around with me from country to country for decades, I finally committed to “doing the work” and have just finished reading William Gaddis’s J R, the American author’s 770-page glossolalic masterpiece, which first appeared twenty years after his 1955 debut,
Very good read, but I think you're wrong in your (pre)judgement of Oppenheimer, which I saw as a film that explores the end of a world of causality and certainty in physics via quantum mechanics, and how it historically extends to moral reasoning, certitude and justification in the life of an individual. Felt like Nolan was pulling a fast one on folks in getting so many normies to watch it. Anyway, take it fwiw, or ignore this philistine.
It's fascinating that the very people most outwardly evangelical about the tyranny of binary structures often resort to binary positions and/or political stances to define their objections ("I'm binary!" "How dare you! I'm non-binary!; or, as James Baldwin so eloquently stated so many lifetimes ago, "I am only black so long as you are white.") To simultaneously lament a world that defines and/or judges a human being on the basis of their gender/sexuality/ethnicity, and then to champion gender/sexuality/ethnicity as primary aspects of identity makes me shake my head in a way that reminds me to buy a new bottle of whisky. Lo and behold, even a term like non-binary (fluid is much more apt) as a linguistic identification still requires its opposite to be defined ... and so remains a binary definition.
Such a tired belief in the “us versus them” mentality (whoever THEY may be, on any side of the aisle) is precisely the kind of categorical, knee-jerk style of reaction you’ve experienced with taking a risk with your fiction, which is at it’s core what fiction should be all about—an oscillation between two poles. Thanks for questioning the supposed “truths” ANY era espouses to be "true" & respecting the spectrum by championing complexity via dialogue instead of one-sided, politicized preaching.
The view that we can (and ought to) ‘understand’ what motivates cultural idiosyncrasies presupposes a meta-level normative framework by means of which we could grasp these disjointed fragments of apparent nonsense and ‘make sense’ of them. This hypothetical framework is at work already in the use of language, and in the construction of sense/meaning by thought alone, and therefore extends to all humans, to all cultures. The exercise of understanding (at least for an intellectual) can then be reduced to discernment between sense and nonsense, while diligently keeping an eye on the possibility that our own methodology of assessment may also be contaminated with nonsense. The conditions of sense are simple and inescapable: non-contradictions, excluded middle, identity, from which we can formally derive the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ as a condition of ‘knowledge’, but in natural languages the process is complicated by the subjective use of language. To overcome this difficulty requires deliberation, which I agree is not just ‘exchange’ of already constructed meanings but also a continuous construction of ‘meaning held in common’ in a particular conversation.
Let us analyse the controversy of gender identity and the associated normative prescription that gender identity of every person ought to be socially accepted and respected.
Premise 1: Gender-identity of X consists in being a Woman in virtue of her sense of having a female body, different from a male body. Her deeply felt sense of being different from the male sex is part of her gender identity.
Premise 2: Gender-identity of Y consists in being a Woman with a male body (Transgender).
Consequence 1: For X to recognise Y (a male) as a Woman entails invalidation of X’s own gender identity, expressed by the word Woman. Specifically, X’s acceptance of Premise 2 would amount to denying her ‘deeply felt sense of difference from the male sex’ being part of her gender identity and expression.
Consequence 2: For X to preserve X’s own gender identity necessitates invalidation of Y’s gender identity, expressed by the word Woman, because of X’s ‘deeply felt sense of difference from the male sex’ being part of her gender identity and expression.
Informally, what it means to be a woman for Y is logically inconsistent with what it means to be a woman for X, which either invalidates the concept of womanhood (by violating the Law of Identity) or entails that one of the mutually inconsistent identities is false. Legal protection of the gender identity and expression of one person (or any personal demands to that effect) may thus discriminate against the gender identity and expression of another; the exercise of the law (or social principle) violates itself, which is absurd, therefore false.
Some social principles (all cultures actually, to various degrees) are logically inconsistent, and if one remains within the terms of reference given, no solution is possible. One must extend the terms of discourse to resolve the contradiction, but this requires good faith on both sides of the controversy.
"A truly autonomous sphere"? I wonder if Brando's " Have you ever considered any real freedoms?" is closer to the mark - and not just an expression of "thick-skulled dogmatism of the right" (itself a comforting view for 'intellectuals')?
What if the push to an 'autonomous' sphere actually dovetails with the culture of late capitalism? "Rebellion", dissent and transgression as its official style (Thomas Frank). Other spheres then get subsumed under this notion of 'autonomy' so that what counts (as creativity) is the expression of the "autonomous" or lonely will. Very convenient for capitalism!
Personally speaking, the views of Danto just sound like a 'higher illiteracy'.
Of course the current progressives aren't going to support the avant garde. A great deal of what passed as avant garde art was just transgressions against whoever was in power. You take their sacred cow, you dunk it in piss and then trololo our way to a tenure position at an MFA program. This is basically the only way Banksy gets attention, since it seems actually breaking the law is about the only thing left that seems transgressive, and in places like California even that is going out the window.
So the progressives don't support the avant garde because they are obviously in a dominant position, and they aren't going to let some artists take the piss out of them. You aren't going to transgress against their sacred cows, even as they pretend said cows don't actually exist. If the lesson of the last 8 years has been anything, it's that any form of transgression against their consensus will be punished harshly. There will never be a "Piss Tranny" getting displayed in any museum. Hell, this comment will probably be flagged by an AI even for putting those words together.
I'm sorry that the current regime of identity-reductionist rich people supports it's normative rule through an appropriated and incoherent form of social constructivism, but that doesn't mean that this abused form of post modernism isn't still the outward ideology of the regime. Online right wingers who constantly point out the utter absurdities and contradictions in this façade are doing a better thing for society than the people who are still pretending like the academe hasn't become the worst version of what the post moderns originally claimed it was.
"In part this has to do with the near total disappearance from the radars of the progressive left of any interest in what might be called the avant-garde. The left is almost entirely absorbed in critiquing and bickering about the most inane industrial productions of popular mass entertainment, just like everybody else. One way of seeing this is, again, as the culmination of the process that J R was stoking fifty years ago — the forces that J R was lampooning won, decisively and permanently, and nobody even thinks anymore, to listen, but really listen, for the beauty that can still squeak through the tubes of even the most spiritually impoverishing new technologies."
This is a very Mark Fisher-like stance and I absolutely agree with you about Barbie/ Oppenheimer. However, neither of you are/were engaged with videogames! Like opera fans in the 1970s ignoring all the interesting experimental cinema!!
Very thought-provoking stuff, thanks for a layered read. Do you think it would be possible to create avant-garde work any more even if we gave it our best effort? Can the envelope be pushed any further?
Regarding what I could read of your story that was not behind a paywall, it fails to capture the sense of existential terror and siege that motivates a lot of progressive identity politics. My queer friends talk all the time of the coming queer holocaust, talk about needing allies who will hide them from the roundups and death squads. They fear that any compromise will get them and all their friends literally killed or forced into conversion therapy/the closet.
For your story, I guess the metaphor would be rhetoric about how the facists (heh) are going to kill half of the MPDA people and cut the rest's offending body parts off/turn them into Futurama-style heads in jars?
Reminds me of my second life at night visiting now 2 years on Dawn of Everything book clubs. The Davids make clear they are proposing a general basis for a specific doubt that anything except 123 Arcane knowledge 2 charisma and3 raw force created the jack booted nations we see. Now specialists voice their sureties that only jack boots could have created the art at Teotihuacan and in ancient India. I propose those of us who breathe easier imagining cities along other lines follow the objections and continue to imagine joining forces to shame the excesses of our long time paths of least resistance. There is even from Graeber this non sequitor in which he baldly states his wish that we all become maintenance men. His utopia, in honesty to what writing does to steer attn, he gave a recusal in an otherwise citated document. Not to mention that they say they are hoping up front to be as myth seeding as Rousseau...
brilliant ride especially loved how you brought in that still image film and her blinking as tie-in to the the J.R. novel (so glad it wasn't a book about tv show "Dallas" you were reading lol) love to hear your thoughts on say "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or even the film "Closer" as your panning of the film "The Hours" got me to thinking yeah i liked it mostly because it illuminated a Virginia Woolfe reality previously unknown to me but as an artistic thing was probably fairly lame....you are writing an opera???/ JESUS CHRIST u go dude!!!
Cliff Geertz's "thick description" is not a new idea. The basic idea was called "idiographic description" in the 19th century Methodenstreit (struggle concerning the Logic of Methods, not just about techniques of research, or "methodology" in the narrow sense). But ironically, Geertz does not really illustrate the idea of "thick description" in his often reprinted paper on "Deep Play." What he says about the Balinese cock fight is interesting and worth noting. But it is not something he achieved through thick description. I have published on this question, and also on "Grounded Theory." I admire Prof. Geertz' work on Indonesia, but also do not accept many of his conclusions in Agricultural Involution and in Negara. I am on Academia.edu (But be careful. The name "Hans Bakker" is very common. I am not "Hans T. Bakker" for example.) Much of my empirical research has been archival. But I also did Malinoswki style ethnographic fieldword in Sulawesi with the Bajo (Bajau, Sea Nomad) people in Southeast Sulawesi.
Very good read, but I think you're wrong in your (pre)judgement of Oppenheimer, which I saw as a film that explores the end of a world of causality and certainty in physics via quantum mechanics, and how it historically extends to moral reasoning, certitude and justification in the life of an individual. Felt like Nolan was pulling a fast one on folks in getting so many normies to watch it. Anyway, take it fwiw, or ignore this philistine.
It's fascinating that the very people most outwardly evangelical about the tyranny of binary structures often resort to binary positions and/or political stances to define their objections ("I'm binary!" "How dare you! I'm non-binary!; or, as James Baldwin so eloquently stated so many lifetimes ago, "I am only black so long as you are white.") To simultaneously lament a world that defines and/or judges a human being on the basis of their gender/sexuality/ethnicity, and then to champion gender/sexuality/ethnicity as primary aspects of identity makes me shake my head in a way that reminds me to buy a new bottle of whisky. Lo and behold, even a term like non-binary (fluid is much more apt) as a linguistic identification still requires its opposite to be defined ... and so remains a binary definition.
Such a tired belief in the “us versus them” mentality (whoever THEY may be, on any side of the aisle) is precisely the kind of categorical, knee-jerk style of reaction you’ve experienced with taking a risk with your fiction, which is at it’s core what fiction should be all about—an oscillation between two poles. Thanks for questioning the supposed “truths” ANY era espouses to be "true" & respecting the spectrum by championing complexity via dialogue instead of one-sided, politicized preaching.
Thanks, Justin. Reading you keeps one sane.
The view that we can (and ought to) ‘understand’ what motivates cultural idiosyncrasies presupposes a meta-level normative framework by means of which we could grasp these disjointed fragments of apparent nonsense and ‘make sense’ of them. This hypothetical framework is at work already in the use of language, and in the construction of sense/meaning by thought alone, and therefore extends to all humans, to all cultures. The exercise of understanding (at least for an intellectual) can then be reduced to discernment between sense and nonsense, while diligently keeping an eye on the possibility that our own methodology of assessment may also be contaminated with nonsense. The conditions of sense are simple and inescapable: non-contradictions, excluded middle, identity, from which we can formally derive the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ as a condition of ‘knowledge’, but in natural languages the process is complicated by the subjective use of language. To overcome this difficulty requires deliberation, which I agree is not just ‘exchange’ of already constructed meanings but also a continuous construction of ‘meaning held in common’ in a particular conversation.
Let us analyse the controversy of gender identity and the associated normative prescription that gender identity of every person ought to be socially accepted and respected.
Premise 1: Gender-identity of X consists in being a Woman in virtue of her sense of having a female body, different from a male body. Her deeply felt sense of being different from the male sex is part of her gender identity.
Premise 2: Gender-identity of Y consists in being a Woman with a male body (Transgender).
Consequence 1: For X to recognise Y (a male) as a Woman entails invalidation of X’s own gender identity, expressed by the word Woman. Specifically, X’s acceptance of Premise 2 would amount to denying her ‘deeply felt sense of difference from the male sex’ being part of her gender identity and expression.
Consequence 2: For X to preserve X’s own gender identity necessitates invalidation of Y’s gender identity, expressed by the word Woman, because of X’s ‘deeply felt sense of difference from the male sex’ being part of her gender identity and expression.
Informally, what it means to be a woman for Y is logically inconsistent with what it means to be a woman for X, which either invalidates the concept of womanhood (by violating the Law of Identity) or entails that one of the mutually inconsistent identities is false. Legal protection of the gender identity and expression of one person (or any personal demands to that effect) may thus discriminate against the gender identity and expression of another; the exercise of the law (or social principle) violates itself, which is absurd, therefore false.
Some social principles (all cultures actually, to various degrees) are logically inconsistent, and if one remains within the terms of reference given, no solution is possible. One must extend the terms of discourse to resolve the contradiction, but this requires good faith on both sides of the controversy.
Reading this was time well spent. I will now be buying what you are selling.
"A truly autonomous sphere"? I wonder if Brando's " Have you ever considered any real freedoms?" is closer to the mark - and not just an expression of "thick-skulled dogmatism of the right" (itself a comforting view for 'intellectuals')?
What if the push to an 'autonomous' sphere actually dovetails with the culture of late capitalism? "Rebellion", dissent and transgression as its official style (Thomas Frank). Other spheres then get subsumed under this notion of 'autonomy' so that what counts (as creativity) is the expression of the "autonomous" or lonely will. Very convenient for capitalism!
Personally speaking, the views of Danto just sound like a 'higher illiteracy'.
Of course the current progressives aren't going to support the avant garde. A great deal of what passed as avant garde art was just transgressions against whoever was in power. You take their sacred cow, you dunk it in piss and then trololo our way to a tenure position at an MFA program. This is basically the only way Banksy gets attention, since it seems actually breaking the law is about the only thing left that seems transgressive, and in places like California even that is going out the window.
So the progressives don't support the avant garde because they are obviously in a dominant position, and they aren't going to let some artists take the piss out of them. You aren't going to transgress against their sacred cows, even as they pretend said cows don't actually exist. If the lesson of the last 8 years has been anything, it's that any form of transgression against their consensus will be punished harshly. There will never be a "Piss Tranny" getting displayed in any museum. Hell, this comment will probably be flagged by an AI even for putting those words together.
I'm sorry that the current regime of identity-reductionist rich people supports it's normative rule through an appropriated and incoherent form of social constructivism, but that doesn't mean that this abused form of post modernism isn't still the outward ideology of the regime. Online right wingers who constantly point out the utter absurdities and contradictions in this façade are doing a better thing for society than the people who are still pretending like the academe hasn't become the worst version of what the post moderns originally claimed it was.
"In part this has to do with the near total disappearance from the radars of the progressive left of any interest in what might be called the avant-garde. The left is almost entirely absorbed in critiquing and bickering about the most inane industrial productions of popular mass entertainment, just like everybody else. One way of seeing this is, again, as the culmination of the process that J R was stoking fifty years ago — the forces that J R was lampooning won, decisively and permanently, and nobody even thinks anymore, to listen, but really listen, for the beauty that can still squeak through the tubes of even the most spiritually impoverishing new technologies."
This is a very Mark Fisher-like stance and I absolutely agree with you about Barbie/ Oppenheimer. However, neither of you are/were engaged with videogames! Like opera fans in the 1970s ignoring all the interesting experimental cinema!!
this just convinced me to read this book
Very thought-provoking stuff, thanks for a layered read. Do you think it would be possible to create avant-garde work any more even if we gave it our best effort? Can the envelope be pushed any further?
Regarding what I could read of your story that was not behind a paywall, it fails to capture the sense of existential terror and siege that motivates a lot of progressive identity politics. My queer friends talk all the time of the coming queer holocaust, talk about needing allies who will hide them from the roundups and death squads. They fear that any compromise will get them and all their friends literally killed or forced into conversion therapy/the closet.
For your story, I guess the metaphor would be rhetoric about how the facists (heh) are going to kill half of the MPDA people and cut the rest's offending body parts off/turn them into Futurama-style heads in jars?
Reminds me of my second life at night visiting now 2 years on Dawn of Everything book clubs. The Davids make clear they are proposing a general basis for a specific doubt that anything except 123 Arcane knowledge 2 charisma and3 raw force created the jack booted nations we see. Now specialists voice their sureties that only jack boots could have created the art at Teotihuacan and in ancient India. I propose those of us who breathe easier imagining cities along other lines follow the objections and continue to imagine joining forces to shame the excesses of our long time paths of least resistance. There is even from Graeber this non sequitor in which he baldly states his wish that we all become maintenance men. His utopia, in honesty to what writing does to steer attn, he gave a recusal in an otherwise citated document. Not to mention that they say they are hoping up front to be as myth seeding as Rousseau...
brilliant ride especially loved how you brought in that still image film and her blinking as tie-in to the the J.R. novel (so glad it wasn't a book about tv show "Dallas" you were reading lol) love to hear your thoughts on say "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or even the film "Closer" as your panning of the film "The Hours" got me to thinking yeah i liked it mostly because it illuminated a Virginia Woolfe reality previously unknown to me but as an artistic thing was probably fairly lame....you are writing an opera???/ JESUS CHRIST u go dude!!!
Cliff Geertz's "thick description" is not a new idea. The basic idea was called "idiographic description" in the 19th century Methodenstreit (struggle concerning the Logic of Methods, not just about techniques of research, or "methodology" in the narrow sense). But ironically, Geertz does not really illustrate the idea of "thick description" in his often reprinted paper on "Deep Play." What he says about the Balinese cock fight is interesting and worth noting. But it is not something he achieved through thick description. I have published on this question, and also on "Grounded Theory." I admire Prof. Geertz' work on Indonesia, but also do not accept many of his conclusions in Agricultural Involution and in Negara. I am on Academia.edu (But be careful. The name "Hans Bakker" is very common. I am not "Hans T. Bakker" for example.) Much of my empirical research has been archival. But I also did Malinoswki style ethnographic fieldword in Sulawesi with the Bajo (Bajau, Sea Nomad) people in Southeast Sulawesi.
Mangling -isms for marketing grist is a national pastime.
Patrick Deneen’s analysis of Marxism on Fox News is 170 degrees from his book’s analysis.
They’re all characters aboard Melville’s Fidèle.