The mood of conservatism had rapidly shifted from Reaganesque optimism and belief that the future would be better than the past to a much darker mood in which many valuable things—perhaps the country itself—were slipping from the grips of “normal Americans.”
disillusionment does not know Dem and Rep, however. it goes both ways
All intellectual ideas undergo a certain simplification by the time they are used by mass movements of any stripe
Niebuhr, Moral Man, Immoral Society
salvation of Western civilization
oof
The Progressives favored a ‘living constitution,’ which in their account was said to be wholly at odds with the actual Constitution
this belief---that 'living constitution' is just gussied-up anarchy---explains the difference b/t those who favor and those who avoid that construction of jurisprudence
Methodologically, the approach that Pestritto took from Kesler, and that eventually filtered down to Beck and other popular conservatives, was to analyze Progressives’ thought largely independent of the political conflicts in which they were engaged—regulating railroads, reforming urban police departments, fighting big-city political machines. Such abstraction, perhaps inherently, has a tendency to accentuate the movement’s more radical pretensions and to deflect from the nature of the opposition that Progressives faced.
agree w/ the point but does that really change so much?
traumatic
lol
You can never waste a good crisis
the right takes this to mean "Any relief measures furnished to combat new problems"
hey don’t need to go to Congres
punt everything to electoral stronghold
The wrong response to Tea Party fundamentalism is to respond in kind and simply hunker down in an alternative belief system
but alternative belief systems do not cede ground. need to present the third option
The sixteenth-century wars of religion, the English Civil War of the 1640s, and the French Revolution, which also became a civil war, show how difficult it is for democracy to recover from the deep wounds inflicted when civil war destroys the ethic of reciprocity on which democracy depends
how plausible is the creation of democracy at gunpoint?
He learned to think about American history and politics in the way most scholars now see it
although a hefty dose of exceptionalism runs through
when he decided to launch his 2012 campaign for reelection in Osawatomie, Kansas, he did so precisely because he wanted to emphasize his debts to Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party
ok but who noticed this except politicos? this is the APD equivalent of saying that ppl vote on their economic interests. the speech itself, however, is postmodern b/c it works on many levels. no one level is important, but that there were multiple levels. a speech meant to be heard and overheard
it was his persuasive power
relies on a personality, on charisma to get the job done
captures the heart of democracy
Alain Locke's cross-division pollination
Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal
self-fulfilling prophecy
A growing body of experimental literature has examined the value of interpersonal contact and social networks in generating involvement, focusing particularly on get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts in electoral campaigns
but this is just a long GOTV effort. there is no investment in politics outside of the election
One in 10 survey respondents—approximately 100,000 people—indicated interest in using the organizing skills they acquired through their work with OFA to run for public office
this would be the crown jewel of organizing
Approximately 95 percent of neighborhood team leaders and 75 percent of volunteers in Obama for America (OFA)2 said that they will continue to volunteer in their communities as a result of their involvement in the campaign.
any follow-up on this?
stronger people and stronger communities
seems like the former happened; idk bout the latter
volunteers that they were transformed by their experience on the campaign itself
this book focuses on how the volunteers were changed rather than on the electoral system
flex their muscles
or were judges just now receptive to already-flexed muscles?
Right to appeal adverse decisions (laws granting access to courts).
reconfigure law for social action
Weber placed his rhetorical weight on the last quality, proportion tempering passion and producing a politics of reason. He prized the carpenterly eye of the master builder, whose patience guides the “strong, slow boring through hard boards,” thereby allowing a cause to be achieved and a structure to be built
policy architects are therefore the best politicians. the US system may not be structured for this; we vote for candidates not parties, so we need magnetic candidates far more than capable policymakers
These moves presuppose, in effect, a Deweyan, knowledge-able public, capable of self-government when properly informed
or, a cynic who tasks themselves with degrading scientists to the level of the public rather than elevating the public to the level of the experts
His strategy worked in the short run, as union membership shot up to about 35 percent of the labor force in 1954. But in the long run, the economic inefficiencies of a collective bargaining system led to its eventual breakdown; by 2013, unions were down to 6.3 percent of the private labor market. As markets became more global and competitive, monopoly rents shrank
ok chill out. post hoc ergo propter hoc
I could certainly propose that monopoly pricing hurts those who depend on the consumer
By the efforts of organized labor, Loewe “became a major political issue in the 1912 national election”
Epstein seems to sneer at this idea that the people can politicize issues
Unlike the poor, the rich made a difficult, privileged target. Progressive reformers could pass laws to improve working-class tenements in New York City, but they couldn’t put limits on Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s vast chateau, which took up one whole blockfront along Fifth Avenue.
another paradox: you can legislate a lack of something, but not the presence of it
The paradoxical result is that academia has and continues to produce tens of thousands of would-be democratic “statesmen” without, at the same time, providing the intellectual and moral foundations for an authoritative democratic state.
government without public
they find this tilt toward top-down management a subtle betrayal of Progressivism’s historical commitment to democratic exchange
Would a true Progressive deny the power these nudges have? B/c presumably, you're always making a choice about how to engage, so might as well make an enlightened one, right?
Progressives were emboldened to challenge the structural constraints of the Constitution because they were confident in the new discipline to be provided by science and the objectivity of experts.
Doesn't Dewey reject this?? "jettison all such dogmas" etc
They experimented with “direct democracy,” thinking that they might eliminate intermediaries and put power in the hands of the people themselves
Mass movements require the masses; a new amplifier of power that propagates much faster and wider than do representatives
It dispelled the notion that the Constitution was a work of timeless truth and that later generations were compelled to defer to the Framers’ ideas
Charles Beard
American politics is now polarized around the governing mores of the progressives’ century
seems like a cultural divide threatens America much more deeply than does governance
The rate of college tuition compared to other consumer goods.
this is just price discrimination by universities. So that means that rich people aren't inherently wiser, but that they are willing to play the game, because the game still produces benefits, though it may be due to the water breaks rather than the goals scored.
Far more expensive than more obvi-ous signs of status like a watch or bag or car, these investments genu-inely shape life chances and intergenerational mobility.
but these are enduring signs of conspicuous consumption. perhaps they work on longer-term cycles (one can get a new watch every year, but it's not wise to go to a new school each year), but even at the point of consumption, they are in active competition with other elites for the most elite choices. so what if they are inconspicuous to the middle class? the homes that house topiary gardens and ferraris do not sit in middle-class neighborhoods
intersection of the eco-nomic, cultural, and social values of particular classes
weber
The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man
mixing labor with nature. here is the clear connection to Nye's American Sublime
only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest
but once she plays it too well, she is thrown away, like "men had the right to do in those days"
In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates
not just from the position of Scottie, but also by spatial distortion of the field of view: the camera is definitely non-isometric
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female
the power that Madeleine holds is powerful, however. It is Judy that seems passive, rather than the active nature that is in fact forcefully subdued by the American man. BUT Madeleine is also possessed, passive against her history
with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
In Vertigo, is this simultaneous? It seems like it happens in series
their 'pretension' leaves the petit bourgeois particularly disarmed in the less legitimate or not-yet legitimate domains which the cultural 'elite' abandon to them, whether in photography or in cinema
unmapped territory by the elites means that there's no direction in which to aspire
the strategies aimed at transforming the basic dispositions of a life-style into a system of aesthetic principles, objective differences into elective distinctions, passive options (constituted externally by the logic of the distinctive relationships) into conscious, elective choices are in fact reserved for members of the dominant class
dominant in the sense that they have choices
This claim to aristocracy is less likely to be contested than any other, because the relation of the 'pure', 'disinterested' disposition to the conditions which make it possible, i.e., the material conditions of existence which are rarest because most freed from economic necessity, has every chance of passing unnoticed. The most 'classifying' privilege thus has the privilege of appearing to be the most natural one.
Unlike the working classes, who as Weber notes are trapped in Stahlhartes Gehäuse, and as such are determined (to a greater extent) in their activities when compared to the flaneur, the flow of liquidity which keeps the shell from hardening into its constrictive casing, and which allows for the randomness that undefines upper class people from each other
makes it possible to tour the whole area of art and luxury without ever leaving it
and yet the economy of cultural capital is not quite circular: imports from the political, social, or financial still pass customs
exclude any 'naive' reactionhorror at the horrible, desire fo r the desirable, pious reverence fo r the sacre
that is, any 'interested' reaction
can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art
aka one cannot be the cowboy who looks at the sunset and sees not sublime beauty but waning daylight
so that a reference to Jan Breughel's Bouquet of Flowers lends dignity to Jean-Michel Picart's Bouquet of Flowers with Parrot, just as, in another context, reference to the latter can, being less common, serve to enhance the fo rmer.
a citation draws the citer nearer to the citee, but also the citee to the citer. It is a Chinese fingertrap exchanging signification
I'd put there what I lack-mountains, vineyards, meadows, goats, cows, sheep, reapers and shepherds
perhaps asserting art's autonomy is the same as asserting the artists property: in this canvas domain the artist has what they have; "autonomous art" is really the manifestation of the "autonomous artist" that is not a social fact
Separated from right and duty, cultivated and pursued as the highest though�t of the soul and the supreme manifestation of humanity, art or the ideal, stripped of the greater part of itself, reduced ro nothing more than an excitement of fantasy and the senses,
art understood as functional is the aesthetic of the revolutionary, not of the high-class who is content to sit back and watch art while his nice life unfolds
Under the influence of property, the artist, depraved in his reason, dissolute in his morals, venal and without dignity, is the impure image of egoism. The idea of justice and honesty slides over his heart without taking root, and of all the classes of society, the artist class is the poorest in strong souls and noble characters
what does this mean? artists aren't petit bourgeois! what is he talking about?
These two hands unquestionably evoke a poor and unhappy old age'
Or, this teacher is just well-trained in the tropes of imagery. This sign may be unintelligible for someone without such an acculturation.
legitimate works of art
what the hell does this mean??
'A photo of a pregnant woman is all right fo r me, not fo r other people',
location of self among others
This 'aesthetic', which subordinates the fo rm and the very existence of the image to its fu nction, is necessarily pluralistic and conditional
what if the thing being pictured is something unusual or difficult to understand without context? FBI photographic analysts have jobs because of their special skills in identifying what is represented
the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated ' aesthetic' which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics
I feel like this works both ways actually: the so-called dominant aesthetic also pretends as if its marginalized and about to be stamped out at any minute. Saving the world from the numb, unthinking, kitschy mass cultures is our purpose.
photographed or by the possible use of the photographic image, is being brought into play when manual workers almost invariably reject photography fo r photography's sake (e.g., the photo of pebbles) as useless, perverse or bourgeois: 'A waste of film', 'They must have film to throw away', 'I tell you, there are some people who don't know what to do with their time', 'Haven't they got anything better to do with their time than photograph things like that?' 'That's bourgeois photography.'
rationalization, in the Polanyin sense
being less fo rmalized (compare, fo r example, acrobatics with dancing) and less euphemized, they offer more direct, more immediate satisfactions
is this true? I wonder if it was in the 1980s too. Football is a complicated production, with rulebooks that only true fans know. we have commentators, but certainly we have all watched a sporting event where we too get annoyed with the superfans which know immediately the import of some play, while we suffer on the outside
to the extent that they can be forgotten and do not get in the way of the substance of the work
what the hell does this mean? get in the way of what?
Alain Locke
also Claude McKay, Richard Wright and Hughes(!)
hameless borrowing”
pastiche
“not by simplechronology but by the fact that their members frame the same sorts of questions and try to workthrough them within the same ... horizon or ... problem-space.
same episteme
A conjuncture is “a fusion of contradictory forces that nevertheless cohereenough to constitute a definite configuration.
why do they cohere? Maybe it is by sheer repetition. Rorty says in CIS that language sprouts from dead metaphors, that live metaphors flower from poetry, but when they are dried up they are decomposed and reborn in our everyday "literal' language
oneconsequence of adopting the method of assembly is that it reminds us to avoid “giving [theconjunctural subjects of our inquiries] a sequential form and imaginary unity they neverpossessed
How does this speak to narrative form WRT Hayden White? he says that narrative, rather than the anatomy and other forms of description lends itself to history
constitutive element in thefabric of the wider world of ideas, movements, and events
Stretton, how to do history reading for PST
A group of uprooted Africans engagedin an act of bricolage: they used what was at hand, both culturally and materially, to cobbletogether the beginnings of an African American culture.
defined some version of togetherness, in opposition---this is, after all, all culture is---in defiance(?)
It is 1790, and you are at a seaport in South America
particular narrative, like the Hooks
Who can say what will happen to this word "minimalist." Who knows how it will be changed, re-fashioned by the thick patois that is our Southern black tongue. T
sort of joy and excitement that comes along with using a big fancy word and getting the chance to do what one will with it
The days when only programmers griped about this pattern are long past; Dilbert cartoons hang over executives' desks now.
proletarianization...but for bureaucracy...some Kafkization of management
Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's ``egoless'' programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.
took capital, contracts, and physical nearness---all factors the Internet sought to antiquate---to foster this kind of programmin
But we've examined in this essay an number of ways in which the process of open-source development falsifies the assumptionms behind it—and, empirically, if Brooks's Law were the whole picture Linux would be impossible.
or maybe that these assumptions only hold in a world of cathedrals
a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
Jobs' idea that you need to give people something they didn't know they needed. This is a bit less dystopic and domineering, but two sides of the same coin
`Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.''
Connection to Feynman's method may be interesting, esp. considering the biography of Saint-Exupéry
I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, encouraging people to participate.
at least 60% of success is marketing success
Each one approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem.
also finds different bugs. It's not that all 1000 users are working on the same problem
``Debugging is parallelizable''. Although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic.
contrast this to physical manufacturing:
Manufacturing today is rarely evolved to the modular stage for complex projects (such as code), and yet it proceeds across oceans, machinery, and---more frequently---across languages. Programming standardizes the languages of production while allowing the languages of collaboration to be multiple. These multiples are the parallel clusters around the world hacking away at their own thing. They are friends, they are scientists, they are entrepreneurs, they are all of the above.
delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity
possibly even more important for the functioning of a team
What made Mathematica’s notebook especially suited to the task was its ability to generate plots, pictures, and beautiful mathematical formulas, and to have this output respond dynamically to changes in the code.
can RMarkdown do all of this?
often suppressing the very visual aids that mathematicians use to make their discoveries
also furthers the gatekeeping practices in math
the great free-standing wall of Wells Fargo Court (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) -- a surface which seems to be unsupported by any volume, or whose putative volume (rectangular? trapezoidal?) is ocularly quite undecidable
ok but the flatiron building...
Our digression on cartography, however, with its final revelation of a properly representational dialectic of the codes and capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself.
seems like he's really proud of himself here and wants this to be THE POINT, but i don't really get it
These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or "empirically") they really do inhabit a "postindustrial society" from which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist -- a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis
without orienting frameworks (moral compasses, ideologies with firm referents), we will still be adrift in this social space. We may ideologies to point us, but if these ideologies don't know where they are in the first place, then we are like Jack Sparrow's compass, always turning to a new destination when we've sought the same destination all this time
not only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it
much like architects with their corporate HQs
"critical distance."
implosion of critical distance
the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city
locks you in, creating a simulacra within its walls
The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp
my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel's tripartite scheme
economic determinist
urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes when expressed in commodification
Fight Club; Se7en
becomes available for more joyous intensities
jouissance?
Bob Perelman
Like Lynch's Rabbits, this is a bunch of meaningful sentences shoved together to create meaninglessness. We cannot contextualize this, but we hope to. And that hope drives our conception of the piece
thereby isolated, that present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material -- or better still, the literal -- signifier in isolation
sublime in postmodernism: the true, raw, horror of the thing that serves now as experience
This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only "represent" our ideas and stereotypes about that past
why can't it represent, where others could? Seems as though we have collectively decided that we can no longer access this past, and this decision---rather than any actual thing occurring---has wrought this loss of innocence. Aka, you are innocent until you are aware that you lost your innocence
something which lends the text an extraordinary sense of deja vu and a peculiar familiarity one is tempted to associate with Freud's "return of the repressed" in "The Uncanny"
we the readers fill this historical novel with our own lives?
the objects of representation, ostensibly narrative characters, are incommensurable and, as it were, of incomparable substances, like oil and water -- Houdini being a historical figure, Tateh a fictional one, and Coalhouse an intertextual one
why the shit should that matter?
This approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage
I feel like the same could be said of film noir
This "death of the subject" in the institution of the star now, however, opens up the possibility of a play of historical allusions
the actor becomes that blank canvas by not being a star, killing the off-screen persona rather than dissolving the distinction
the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian) dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts
Heisenbergian???
More interesting, and more problematical, are the ultimate attempts, through this new discourse, to lay siege either to our own present and immediate past or to a more distant history that escapes individual existential memory
these pose questions about how nostalgia works. one is not nostalgic of so far or so recent a past: in the former, there is no emotional attachment, no people that one could have known; in the latter, there is no agreement about an interpretation, even among a small subset, as people continue to process its effects
what is as unique and unmistakable as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body
Okay but bodies haven't changed...what has changed is the hope that newness would have attached meaning, some moral triumph over the forces of capitalism or ableism or racism etc etc. Now its hopelessness that "makes" things less unique, and thus the present is no better than the past (and in fact worse, since it simply has fewer shelves stocked with the goods of artists)
In this situation parody finds itself without a vocation
one cannot be camp all the time, for then one would be selfish --- Sontag, Notes on Camp
in other words, parody have some referent, some sameness its listeners can conjure in order to understand the difference of criticism
the explosion of modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms has been followed by a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed
no more dominant culture? there may be a core, but it is not polar
postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.
Could not the same be said for the modernism? Jameson is arguing that something has changed---so why must this change be bad? Now it is more honest at least
The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of duree and memory
plausible
the end of the psychopathologies of that ego
end of anxiety? where?
gap between Earth and World
Zwischenwelt
has not been innocently or randomly chosen
pre-empt criticism
the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic -- the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example -- the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself
Overawed by the sublimity of the model?? Trying to find a way out but unable to see around this big mass of theory? Creating a labyrinth so intricate that you yourself cannot wriggle through? I could maybe see the point that a single person could fail to engage with a model at all levels, but not that a collection of critics could fail to chip away at a big model
architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic
TV?? Blockbusters??
degraded
Dostoyevsky