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| 0804741174
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| 0804741174
| 4.26
| 23
| Dec 11, 2008
| Dec 11, 2008
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really liked it
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Walter Benjamin's vision of history seems ubiquitous but remain difficult to grasp: much quoted, much debated, and evidently hugely influential, the d
Walter Benjamin's vision of history seems ubiquitous but remain difficult to grasp: much quoted, much debated, and evidently hugely influential, the disparate nature of his writings as much as the compressed, sybilline form they often take, make them difficult to integrate into a coherent whole. Alongside Umberto Beck's The Moment of Rupture, Mosès's book does an excellent job of placing them in a broader context, here that of XXth century German-Jewish philosophy and its peculiar relationship to time and history. By bookending his discussion of Benjamin with overviews of two very different thinkers who share in his rejection of 'empty homogenous time', Mosès gives us a more stable grounding to examine Benjamin's puzzling and seemingly inconsistent pronouncements. Those he organize in three successive periods, each of which recuperate and reinterpret the previous ones (first youthful mystical one, followed by an aesthetic one, turning eventually to a rather heterodox Marxism). One could perhaps ask for more historical context (i.e. XIXth century Jewish thought) or a discussion of the common-ground between those philosophies of history and other contemporary ones (i.e. Carl Schmitt), but all in all this is a work of impressive clarity, concision and depth, which stands out in the abundant literature on the subject.
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| 3.95
| 2,578
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it was ok
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I was reading this in parallel with the Aeneid, written some 20 years later, and the contrast between the two is striking, and not in Cicero's favour.
I was reading this in parallel with the Aeneid, written some 20 years later, and the contrast between the two is striking, and not in Cicero's favour. What a strange idea to compare an epic poem with a collection of fatherly advice, you might say; well I am not hugely versed in Roman thought, and all I can say is that Vergil, for all his poetic license, surprised me at every turn with his 'modernity' - which is but a gaudy way to say his characters are both finely observed and relatable in their inner-life. Cicero, on the other hand, shows (predictably) no concerns for emotions and is relentlessly prescriptive. This of itself is not a problem - however neither is he very systematic about it (the circumstances of his writing might explain this) and not always as insightful as one might expect given his undying fame. There is something endearing in his unashamed satisfaction with his own achievements, but this comes perhaps bound with a pious blindness to the faults of his social order, generally excused by appeal to an omnipresent and amorphous notion of 'nature' inherited from the stoics. We find here, too, the classic formulation of the conservative cult of moderation, which suffers already from the evident shortcomings that dogs it to this day. Finally, the central thesis of the book, namely the inalienable identity of the beneficial and the honourable, is repeated rather than defended, which is perhaps the inescapable consequence of Cicero's unexamined notion of honour. ...more |
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Jun 20, 2020
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| 1784785717
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| 4.07
| 1,439
| 2016
| Sep 20, 2016
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really liked it
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We hear much talk of the Frankfurt School lately, and I think an accessible book on the subject was more than warranted. Stretching over most of the X
We hear much talk of the Frankfurt School lately, and I think an accessible book on the subject was more than warranted. Stretching over most of the XXth century, and from Leninist orthodoxy to public-sphere liberalism, the twists and turns of this current nearly preclude talks of a ‘school’. The first half of the book leaves much room for Benjamin, whose Frankfurtness is debatable. This makes for a thrilling read, since his short but intense life has understandably inspired many novels, but leaves little space for other Marxist precursors (Lukacs most of all, is regrettably discreet). Adorno and, later on, Marcuse, get the attention they deserve, while Horkheimer at the close of the book remain a bit of a mystery. Other peripheral members such as Neumann are only brushed, but Fromm’s description might catch the attention of even hardened freudophobics like me. It is well written, and strikes a balance between ideas and narration which I thought was very well suited to our age. There is a little gossiping or an unexpected aside every time the flow of history slows down, and as many other reviewers note, the book is a page-turner. I did not find the repetitions annoying, and I think they will be helpful reminders to readers truly unfamiliar with the subject. While Jeffries mammoth biography does a good job at tracing the immediate context in which those thinkers were writing, notions like Adorno’s negative dialectics appear somewhat maimed because of the author’s reluctance to delve further in the XIXth century. Neither ‘dialectical’ nor ‘materialism’ for example, get a proper treatment. While concerns of size and audience might explain this a little, I suspect that references to Benjamin’s ‘messianic’ thought juxtaposed with insistence on his material method could be quite confusing if I were not already vaguely familiar with those issues. The cultural context however is enticingly depicted, sprinkled with occasional outings in contemporary issues, most of them relevant. I noticed a few minor mix-ups on the cultural front (I do not believe Loos was ever a member of the Bauhaus) and Adorno’s dismissal of jazz was (as ever) dismissed with a smirk, but other than that it is excellent. ...more |
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Jan 12, 2019
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Jan 12, 2019
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Jan 12, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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| 0691129983
| 9780691129983
| 0691129983
| 3.48
| 80
| Oct 01, 2008
| Jul 21, 2010
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it was ok
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Living in West London, I seem to be faraway from everything, most of all from my friends who predominantly live in the North and the East. The upside
Living in West London, I seem to be faraway from everything, most of all from my friends who predominantly live in the North and the East. The upside of this exile is that my local tube station has a 'self-service' book exchange, a little shelf were people leave their books and pick new ones, a touchingly successful show of local solidarity. Among low-grade fictions (Daniel Steele to JK Rowling) there is regular gems popping up, and my friend picked up an exciting book on manuscript marginalia just the other day. I have found a few interesting books there over the past few months, and when I saw Wolin's book on the shelf just as I was embarking on short 'China-themed' reading spree, I was very excited: a nice, clean and sturdy hard-back with a snappy wrapper, at the cross-road of two appealing themes (the sixties and Maoism). The back cover, with its endorsements by Martin Jay and Tony Judt sounded promising, and the summary, promising a chronicle of the Maoist moment in French radical politics, delusional warts and all, and an account of its paradoxical outcomes, was more than enticing: even knowing as little as I do about the politics and factions of May 68, I had read enough about the Cultural Revolution to see how unlikely a standard-bearer for libidinal politics Mao was. Wolin writes well, and his book is an very readable piece of popular intellectual history - he returns to human interest stories every other page, and his cast of larger-than-life celebrity thinkers (Sartres, Foucault, Kristeva, etc.), wriggling out of the ivory tower of academia, is both at times endearing, and occasionally comical. The oral and free-flowing tone of the book even manages to smooth out the wrinkles of his poorly structured argument, which translates in many repetitions. Repetitions I find often excusable in popular history, and since I don't often read books in one sittings, they are even often welcome reminders of a book's general thrust. In Wolin's case however, they tend to highlight the author's main failing, namely the superficiality of his argument and the poverty of his critique: Here's the main problem of the book: its relentlessly unsympathetic, patronising and smug tone. Wolin is a social democratic defender of Western liberalism, and he has carved his niche lampooning the excesses of the Left, Marxism and post-structuralism in particular. Though I am probably less convinced than him that actually existing democracies represent the end of history, I am quite aware of the short-comings of revolutionary rhetoric, and of the self-undermining aspects of post-structuralism. I am also more than willing to hear a historically informed take-down of those movements, especially in their late sixties incarnation, which I know little about but vaguely sense as the turning point in radical politics were identity and recognition overtook institutions and redistribution. Wolin's critic however, seems to revolve around two main themes: on the one hand, the 'fashionable' character of sixties radicalism, and on the other the upper-class origins of its actors. I work in the clothing industry, so I might be more attentive to questions pertaining to 'fashionable' ideas than others: when one reduces someone else's adoption of ideas as a 'fashion', a 'trend', or qualifies a doctrine as 'chic' or 'up-and-coming', one avoids the problem of actual causes for this move. Social factors are dismissed, and decision are reduced to opportunism. It is a lazy (if still widespread) reduction, and Wolin's book is literally littered with this sort of sleight of hand, every other page or so. As a result, don't expect to learn much about Maoism in this book: you do have one or two mentions of the great crimes of the CCP, but how it differed from Stalinism, or why it appealed to the French radicals (orientalism aside) is never really tackled. For Wolin Mao is a convenient place-holder and little more, a badge for intellectuals vying for radical-chic. Similarly, I knew much about the ebbs and flows of Tel Quel's allegiance at the close of the chapter concerned with them, but virtually nothing on their own ideas, beyond a few condescending nods to structuralism and its crumbling. Finding a silver lining to the failures of the the May 68 revolution is not an easy task - the betrayal of the Communist Party did achieve some gains for the workers, and certainly gay rights did eventually benefit from the visibility gained during the period. Changes in the law on contraception in France predate the May events. If I am glad all powers never went to the soviets, I cannot shake the impression that those transferred to the imagination were never put to great use. Wolin, however, is keen to salvage to legacy of May 68 for his own reformist agenda: the splintering of the Left, and the crippling of its radical wing, is celebrated as the birth of a new idea of 'participatory democracy', translating into the empowerment of NSMs and civil society. Identity politics is seen as a the salutary sign of a new individualism, which transcends class boundaries to embrace universal human rights. With the benefit of hindsight, it would maybe be unfair to smirk at Wolin's enthusiasm, had he not been so smug throughout the book: but as today the radical right is increasingly appropriating the identitarian logic, and as the impotence of carnivalesque, 'everyday life' protest is blatant, I think Wolin's thesis can be safely consigned to the dustbin of history. Not everything is dismal in the book: Foucault and Sartres are portrayed with somewhat less malice than the rest of the cast (as is Cohn-Bendit, Wolin's unsung hero) and the book does offer a nice chronological outline of the events. I even learned a few interesting tid-bits, such as Sartres late turn toward levinasian ethics, while Foucault's eventual enthusiasm for human rights is nicely contextualised. On the whole, though, the book is 'annoying', more because of its tone than because of its thesis, though the later did little to alleviate my irritation. Wolin's 'The Seduction of Unreason' has long been on my reading list, but although the subject of that book (and the acclaim it received) still very much appeals to me, I am not sure I can stomach another shrill and righteous popular reduction like the one in 'The Wind from the East'. ...more |
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| 0553385666
| 9780553385663
| 0553385666
| 4.17
| 1,688
| Jan 01, 2013
| Jun 03, 2014
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it was ok
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At first I thought the book was a very good introduction. The premise, I think, are interesting but accessible: a retelling of two and a half millenni
At first I thought the book was a very good introduction. The premise, I think, are interesting but accessible: a retelling of two and a half millennia of ideas through the lens of Aristotle's foundational reaction to Plato's doctrine. Of course, as many other reviewers noted, this a very narrow—procrustean, in fact—lens, one that necessarily starts by obscuring the many continuities between the two philosophers, and then proceeds to reduce a long string of philosophers (from Augustine to Ayn Rand) to the 'platonic' or 'artistotelian' category. As a result, both the innovations of later philosophers, and the synthetic character of their doctrines, are downplayed, presenting the history of thought as a matter of 'tradition(s)' rather than 'invention'. Herman, in other words, is not frightened of 'grand narratives'—and that seems for me the strength of his book: as an introduction, or a work of popular history, it is necessary to adopt some kind of narrative, and leave it to the perspicacious reader to search for its biases once she finished the book. And as grand narratives go, the near-gnostic confrontation between the two titanic forces of Plato and Aristotle throughout history is a compelling one! Many a time in the first half of the book, I caught myself thinking this would translate wonderfully well in a high-fantasy TV series à la Game of Thrones, with the secret war between the Academy and the Lyceum reverberating throughout history. Herman writes well, weaving anecdotes, explanations and facts in a compelling comic-book chronicle, which, if it often favours the picturesque over depth of analysis, still manage to provide a coherent and absorbing account. Up until the XVIIIth c., Herman seems—as he should—to avoid taking side: Whereas the Platonic tradition (Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Ficino, Galileo...) accounts, with its idealist thymos, for justice and heroism, the Aristotelian one (Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Ockham, Locke...) accounts for realism and 'moderation'. Platonists provide the ends, Aristotelians examine the means. Simplistic and worn out as it is, as a grid to read the history of ideas, I find it not irrelevant. 'Moderation', of course, is the well-offs' perpetual argument for preserving the status-quo : one for which I am yet to read a defense both coherent and honest. To our modern mind, the 'middle of the road' seems transparently circumstantial: both the Nazi and the Fascist movements had a 'leftwing' and a 'rightwing', and I doubt not some among them claimed to advocate 'moderation' (post-Lateran Mussolini certainly did). The conservative (Aristotelian, in Herman's scheme) thinker must thus posit some (arbitrary) ahistorical and universal spectrum, on which to base their advocacy of restraint: that's the role of 'human nature', which in narrative of 'The Cave and the Light' is kindly provided by the Enlightenment. Herman, who elsewhere described 'How the Scots Invented the Modern World', brushes aside the impact of slavery, and then paints a rosy picture, first of Locke and Voltaire, then of Hutcheson, Kames and of course Adam Smith, who stand as the heroic Aristotelian discoverers of eternal Human Nature, constituted mostly of an acquisitive propensity and a divine right to property. From here onward, it's all downhill for Herman's book. Now that the Scottish liberal Enlightenment has brought the Aristotelian tradition to its historical telos (XIXth century British capitalism, supposedly), the platonic gadfly has lost its right to be, and one after the other of its representative is dismissed as insane, opportunistic, dishonest, totalitarian or puerile. Thus Rousseau, in many ways, is for Herman the root of all evil. Having radicalised and secularised a harmless platonism (harmless as long as it stuck to religion and its realm of ideas), he is found to be an advocate of 'Strength through Joy' and 'Arbeit macht Frei' both (p. 395 – 'Arbeit macht Frei', if anything, sounds more like Locke actually!), motivated mostly by resentment at his lower middle-class station and bohemian artistic failures. While other deluded intellectuals, inspired by him, turn into terrorists, the 'ordinary people' (397 – Herman unfortunately provide us with no reference) turn on him – here, embodying not the ochlocratic threat Aristotle warned about, but rather the indignant voice of reason. Now as long as the author keeps his wits about and provide a balanced account, I have no grudge against carlylian history: for history to become a story, it must be couched in the idiom of the day, which in our age dominated by popular culture, is still one of heroes and villains, of great deeds and unexpected plot twists. 'The Avengers' might not be such a bad model to tell the story of 'The Academy'. But as Herman turns from narration to pamphlet, he falls immediately into the worse kind of ad-hominem argument, revealing first of all that he (predictably) stands steadfastly on the aristotelian side of divide he constructed, and secondly that this very 'aristotelian tradition' is not only his own, but that of a particular, dishonest and opportunistic brand of conservatism, running from the classicist reaction of the Action Française (Maurras & co.) through British-American modernism (T.S. Eliot) down to our own days. The comic-book turns into a theodicy. Maurras and his acolytes, caught in the fin-de-siècle revival of romanticism, proceeded to rewrite the intellectual history of the West as a manichean struggle between their own classicism (homogeneous, rational, realist, orthodox Catholic, royalist, traditional...) and their enemies' romanticism (eccentric, emotional, escapist, mystical, protestant, liberal, modern...). Romanticism, as is still often rightly noted, is a difficult concept to outline, because it seems premised on the twin concepts of the coincidence of the opposites, and the excluded middle. This seems to me, in good part at least, due to its being a reaction against just 'moderate' Enlightenment celebrated by Herman. By that point, it is pretty clear that Herman's relatively sympathetic account of platonism was an elaborate lubricant to introduce his manichean reading of the XIXth and XXth centuries: one that owes maybe more to Irving Babbitt than to Maurras himself (the first perceptively dismissed the second as 'romantically anti-romantic', but otherwise shared much of his black-and-white historical analysis), but which eschews the relatively neutral binary of platonic thymos and aristotelian moderation, in favour of a charge against blind romantic hubris in the name of a high-minded, magically self-regulating free-market. Herman, who seems so concerned with totalitarianism, should have recognised that it is precisely the kind of manichean worldviews which he cunningly constructs (even when the good is 'moderation,' and evil is 'excess') that are instrumental to mass-mobilisations, rather than romantic platonisms... but as reveals the plasticity of his 'ordinary people' (threatening mob when he disagrees with them, righteous voice of the nation when he doesn't), that never was the point. To add insult to injury, Herman's scholarship, and his bibliography in particular, which was never brilliant (not something I'd normally hold against a work of popular history) sinks ever closer to rock-bottom, as we progress toward the XXth century: the worse is probably chapter 27, 'Triumph of the Will: Nietzsche and the Death of Reason.' After a piss-poor caricature of Nietzsche, we move on to Bergson first, of whom Herman demonstrates swiftly how little he understands, and then Sorel, whom I had to conclude he has not even read. The only secondary source he mentions (Hughes' 'Consciousness and Society', dated but accurate and balanced) he either misunderstood or skimmed through. The whole chapter is littered with factual errors and disingenuous short-cuts. I write down a few of the more blaring ones: - Herman claims that Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' (1909) was an attack on Logical Positivism (the Vienna Circle started in the mid-20s) when in truth it's an attack on Bogdanov, whose 'godbuilding' would have sounded too 'platonic' to fit in Herman's scheme. - After completely misunderstanding Sorel's doctrine, claiming that his idea of myth has to do with propaganda, he tells us Sorel dreamed of a world of 'avant-garde books, films and paintings' (509) despite the fact that Sorel remained a dedicated classicist throughout his life. - Last but not least, Herman make a list of modernists who sympathised with nazism, probably in a clumsy attempt at enlisting the ignorance of his provincial audience in the good fight: some in the mix, like the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin or the jurist Carl Schmitt (great adversary of 'political romanticism') seem out of place, others, like László Moholy-Nagy, who fled nazism not once but twice, I simply can't fathom. Maybe I am being too harsh? You know the feeling, when you see an alluring link on social media, you click on it just to find that there's a paywall behind? That's just how I feel about this book. I bought Herman's story, it's engaging, fun, well written. But then you reach the paywall of the XVIIIth c., and he punishes pay with a barrage of cheap propaganda. I resent him for wasting a neat idea. Who should read this, then? Well, for starters, not its intended audience: Although the first two thirds are a great introduction to the history of philosophy, as others have noted in their reviews, it is also cunningly manipulative, and likely to mislead anyone who does not have some pre-existing knowledge of modern thinkers. If you do have that knowledge, you probably won't learn all that much new: I did, there was plenty of anecdotes and asides I was happy to discover, but mostly because I know so little about the ancient and medieval periods. So you might want to read this if, like me, you are looking to expand your knowledge of pre-modern thought and you don't mind shaking your head in disbelief for the last third of the book. Another type it might suit is the convinced conservative: after all, if you are already convinced of the existence of a perennial human nature, and of the fact that liberal conservatives are an embattled minority seeking to liberate common-sense from the shackles of political-correctness, then this book will probably confirm you in your views, and give you a sense of what makes up that tradition you stands for. ...more |
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Apr 30, 2018
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| 0385721668
| 9780385721660
| 0385721668
| 4.16
| 325
| Nov 12, 2002
| Nov 11, 2003
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liked it
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I feel that we are living through the nadir of Western conservatism: in the past five years, we have heard more from and about alleged consevative int
I feel that we are living through the nadir of Western conservatism: in the past five years, we have heard more from and about alleged consevative intellectuals than we ever did in my life-time, but most of those—from the increasingly shrill tone and mediocre content of the Salisbury or the Criterion, to the exotic non-sense of the alt-right, or the conspiracy rhetoric which permeates more and more of the critics of academic 'liberalism'—seems inchoate and opportunistic, bent on making the most of their new-found visibility, at the expense of precisely those virtues of precision and discipline on which conservatism has tended to rest its case. I am sure there are many conservatives who find this landslide betrays their tradition's principled reflections on means and ends, but I am nowhere near knowledgeable (or patient) enough to go and unearth them from the repetitious morass of mainstream conservative discourse. Jerry Muller could act as a figurehead for those dissatisfied—if conservative leaders and followers had much interest in restoring their dignity: as it stands, it seems more likely that he will find his readership among the liberals, and the occasional leftist, seeking a nuanced understanding of the 'other side'. Muller presents his project as a history of Western Thought about capitalism, understood in the broadest possible terms: less about the particulars or the varieties, than about the concept itself, its emergence and transformation. This would be very interesting, but Muller's book falls well short from providing it: it starts with XVIIIth century, and in fact look as much at the thought of economists themselves, as to that of modern critics of capitalism left and right. The result is a highly selective picture, quite biased toward Muller's own brand of unorthodox conservatism (see his article 'Capitalism and Inequality' in Foreign Affairs of March 2013, for a primer.) After a short introduction, we discover the opinion of and interactions with the market of a list of famous and less famous thinkers: Voltaire, Adam Smith, Justus Möser, Edmund Burke, Hegel, Marx, Mathew Arnold, Weber, Simmel, Sombart, Lukács, Hans Freyer, Schumpeter, Keynes, Marcuse and Hayek. Germans and Anglosaxons dominate the debate, but this focus allows a few less known names, like Freyer and Möser, to slip into the fold, and the books' main strength is probably to be sought in this insistence on including critics of the market from both the Left and the (far) right: the rightwing critique of capitalism is rarely examined in its own right, to the point that modern conservatism is so entrenched in free market fundamentalism that no-one (save a few Catholics) seems to remember this tradition. As a result, Muller emphasises the overlap between Left and Right critics of capitalism, not in pursuit of some oxy-moronic reduction (i.e. Jonah Goldberg), not to subsume both under the evasive umbrella of 'romanticism' (i.e. Isaiah Berlin), but rather to show that the critics of capitalism spring from the same source as capitalism itself – in other words, that the market's own constitutive contradictions make their emergence and re-emergence inevitable. While most of Muller's leftists seem to practice a blanket rejection of capitalism, Muller's conservatism also acknowledge the necessity of State intervention to curb and manage the inbuilt excesses of the market economy, and might offer tradition as a suitable counterpower to unbounded individualism. To the question of 'Why the Left?' which young conservatives (hopefully!) sometimes ask themselves, Muller offers little of the usual canards of resentment, conformism and middle-class opportunism, but rather emphasise that those thinkers have something to offer, even to conservatives. Muller wrote a book on 'Capitalism and the Jews', so that he offers in his introduction a nuanced and interesting genealogy of the Jew's centrality to the critique of capitalism, both as author and as scape-goat. Unfortunately, this also warrants some of Muller's more dishonest asides, on Marx's jewish self-hatred, or on Keynes' alleged antisemitism. On the whole the book falls short of delivering a convincing history of the concept of market or capitalism—instead, it offers a mosaic thinkers, from disparate political orientation, whose ideas are in themselves quite fascinating. Muller's prose in clear and concise, and I think does a great job of introducing and illustrating complex concepts for the lay person. It is a book with an agenda but in its scope and balanced approach it might prove useful even to those who disagree. ...more |
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| 0335201091
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| 0335201091
| 3.80
| 2,125
| 1976
| Feb 1999
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liked it
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Chalmers endeavoured to write an introduction to the philosophy of science that could be read by anyone: you don't need any command of philosophy, and
Chalmers endeavoured to write an introduction to the philosophy of science that could be read by anyone: you don't need any command of philosophy, and you don't need to know much about science (although some knowledge of its history would probably make the book more valuable, but then again I can't tell you that, as I myself have none!) - 'naive' inductivism, falsificationism, incommensurability, epistemological anarchism, new experimentalism, general laws and in potentia, it's all there, and it's all explained with great patience, and abundantly illustrated with examples from daily-life and the history of science. If anything, I regret Chalmers dismissed a bit too summarily the 'social history of science' angle (he does not even mention Schaffer/Shapin) whose relevance he apparently tackles in another book, but finds obfuscatory when applied to philosophy rather than history. With that said, the book does what it propose to do very well, starts a bit slow but become rapidly engrossing, even for an ignoramus like me. ...more |
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Nov 20, 2017
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Nov 20, 2017
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Nov 20, 2017
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| 0691086621
| 9780691086620
| 0691086621
| 4.31
| 1,380
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really liked it
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Isaiah Berlin is probably still the world's most famous historian of ideas, and made his mark in history with his 'two concepts of freedom', as well a
Isaiah Berlin is probably still the world's most famous historian of ideas, and made his mark in history with his 'two concepts of freedom', as well as by retrieving, for the benefit of lay and academic audience alike, what is now called the 'counter-enlightenment'. After his retirement, we are told by Henry Hardy, the editor of the present book, he was planning on writing a large book on the closely related subject of romanticism, but passed before the project came to fruition. The present volume is instead a collection of six Mellon lectures he gave in the mid-sixties. Given its origin, the book is atypical, and although carefully pruned by the editor, the reader can still sense a certain orality. This makes it both a very flowing and enjoyable read, but also, pushes the references at the back of the volume, making it maybe less useful for research, as Hardy traced many but not all of the quotes and references, and it is sometimes unclear what is an actual quotation, and what is mere paraphrase. This slight drawback however pales in comparison to the oratory qualities of the author, and the book reads very much like a novel, full, in good romantic fashion, of thunder, anguish and ideals. Berlin's definition of romanticism, when he eventually ennunciates it, is simple and concise (maybe too much so): it consists of "two principles, the necessity of the will and the absence of a structure of things" (134). As his approach is largely chronological, I will sum up his narrative as it appears in the book: The first lecture deals with the ever thorny question of the definition of romanticism, both pastoral and artificial, spartan and decadent, introspective and revolutionary. The diagnosis, advanced famously by Lovejoy, reminds me quite a bit of Jeffrey Schnapp's reading of fascism as 'oxymoronic', as striving to contrast or unite seemingly polar opposites. Berlin finds in radical, all-encompassing rebellion an overlap between romanticism's many strands. He proceeds in the second lecture to analyse Romanticism's reaction and attack against the ideals of Enlightenment, namely the belief in the knowability, universality and unity of knowledge, itself the only form of virtue. Neoclassicism, for Berlin the artistic correlate of the Enlightenment, strives to represent, but to represent not the real itself, rather the perfected and purified ideal toward which nature itself strives – to prefigure, in a sense, what progress will bring about. The first, German, romantics reacts against both the largely French cult of mimesis and the naive belief in continuous progress, preferring bitterly "a kind of retreat in depth" (37). He goes on to explore the specific reaction offered by J. G. Hamann, that 'magus of the North' to whom he elsewhere dedicated a whole book. For Berlin, Hamann starts with a radicalisation of empiricism, which leads him to reduce all knowledge to faith. Emphasising unmediated experience, he rejects classifications as deadening, and claim that the ultimate human aspiration is for a tumultuous and violent experience, in which creation plays the central part. In the following lecture, we move onto 'the true fathers of romanticism'. Those share with Hamann, and Vico before him, a particular awareness of the power of myth to capture aspects of human experience that seemed timeless, precisely those that the deadening classificatory mania of the Englightenment could not but denigrate. The first of those true fathers we examine, is not German but British, and it is Blake. For him "Art is the Tree of Life" and "Science the Tree of Death." (50). Diderot is another, a kind of double-agent who admires the near-criminal hubris of the genial artist. Rousseau, however, does not really qualifies, because 'his doctrines still appealed to reason' (54). More to the point is Lenz, to whom "Action, action is the soul of the world, not pleasure, not abandonment to feeling, not abandonment to reasoning, only action" (55). With Herder (and Hamann) the work of art moves from being a craft object produced by a relatively anonymous specialist, into being an organic extension of its author, "the expression of the attitude to life, conscious or unconscious, of its maker" (59). This leads on the one hand, to Herder's demand that the work of art be analysed in its original context, and thus to historicism. On the other, it fuels the cult of sincerity, and paves the way for expressionism. Of the mixture of those two aspects also arises nationalism, the idea of a cultural community within which a given work 'makes sense' spontaneously, while, lacking the universal qualities claimed by the Englightenment, it remains 'foreign' to another. Moving on to the 'restrained romantics' in the fourth lecture, we encounter Kant, who fit even less the romantic mould than Rousseau, but contributed all the same to their rise. From his insistence on ethical decision, and concomitant emphasis on human dignity and autonomy, derived a new conception of nature as prima materia ready to be shaped by human will. This was picked up by Schiller, who places man's moral will in opposition to nature, titanic in its ambition and often tragic in its dénouement. He then propose art as a model for politics, for an autotelic society. Next is 'unbridled romanticism', where we find Fichte, in whom the will, moral or else, become the organising principle of reality itself – yet this will is still a largely impersonal striving, because the self itself only appear when the real, the not-self, resists its transformation. Thus, in Berlin's words, 'volo ergo sum'. Since the will is not exclusively individual, the same process goes for collectives, in which a schmittian Other must be excluded to produce identity. Schelling takes up much of this vision but rejects the opposition between creative man and inert nature: the impersonal will participates, or is identical, with nature and its perpetual process of creative renewal, and then the artist's own authentic creative activity is but the expression of nature's general movement, manifested, we are told, through his unconscious. Follows a strange excursus that collapses allegories into symbols, the later taken to connect will and unconscious by capturing in images the deeper truths that must elude language. Berlin then covers rapidly the German writers we would more precisely associate with romanticism: Schlegel (whose irony is, in de Gaultier's famous words, 'a weapon in the war against reality'), Hoffmann (whose fantastic, somewhat naively, he finds to echo the paranoid gnosticism of Schopenhauer) and Tieck (whose metafictive elements are reduced to solipsism). As you can probably tell, as Berlin moves from philosophy proper to literature, he looses some credibility, not least because there is no consideration of the demands made by the medium itself: he only takes literature as an expression of philosophy and politics, something which it certainly is, but within the given context of form and its history. The problems only grow with the final chapter, with which I take issue, 'The lasting effects' - which reveals the underlying objectives of the previous narrative and somewhat discredit Berlin's interpretation. The book was never about 'The roots of romanticism' but rather about its alleged legacy: Erly on Berlin claimed that romaticism is born from the pietistic inwardness of the German XVIIth century, which is itself but a consequence of Germany's 'delayed modernisation' (my term not his) – and in particular of its intelligentsia's resentment against french domination, both political and cultural. Here we already have, at the beginning of the book, an element that will return in his concluding assessment, namely that romanticism is resentment: resentment of men whose station in life does not match their expectations, resentment of a (German) culture which feels smothered by the claims to universality of French neoclassicism. Romanticism, Berlin writes, "was a very grand form of sour grapes" (37). Resentment and late-modernisation: you probably can see already where this is going. Fascism, for Berlin, is but a genus of romanticism, and Voltaire's influence on Frederick acts as an early dolchstoss myth. This leaves out, of course, (as indeed most accounts of fascism did, until quite recently) the mussolinesque claims to universalism and 'humanism', as well as the polemics of Carl Schmitt, for example, against 'political romanticism'. Certainly however, the notion of organic state did derive from romanticism, and Berlin introduce Adam Heinrich Mueller, whom I'd never heard of, but who gives clear romantic credentials to political theology – but here Berlin overstates his case, limiting organic society to an oppositional notion, without taking into account for example, the influence that an empirical knowledge of pre-modern societies (as later visible in Ferdinand Toennies for example) might have brought to the table: his view of romanticism is, somewhat predictably for 1965, exclusively eurocentric. Although he claimed to focus on "what occurred in the second third of the eighteenth century" (6) Berlin goes out of his way to unearth many conservative 'commentaries' of the 1900s on romanticism, from the likes of Brunetière or Babbitt, although somehow he must have forgotten to invite Chesterton to his party. One of Berlin's recurrent sources, which I'd have thought by the mid-60s to have been duly forgotten, is Ernest Seillère: a Belle Epoque French literary scholar, often rambling but celebrated in his day, who made it his life-work to tie Nietzsche, Gobineau and romanticism together in a neat little bundle of nefarious teutonism. With the First World War, many patriots in the allied countries would take up the mantle, from Santayana (Egotism in German Philosophy, 1916) to G. A. Borgese (La Guerra delle Idee, 1916, too), but in France, the defeat of 1871 meant that germanophobia flared much earlier. Seillère himself was close to the Action Francaise, whose thuggish royalist politics have been shown to prefigure and inspire the italian squadristi and the SA. However, the Action Française was vehemently anti-romantic, tracing much like Seillère—and like Berlin—romanticism to the Germans, and, orleanists that they were, to Rousseau. In a much puzzling turn of events (which shows how prevalent in the postwar climate the equation of fascism/romanticism/germanism still was) when the Académie Française was purged of collaborators after the liberation, none other than Ernest Seillère, the Action Française sympathiser, was elected to fill one of the seats! Such self-serving 'germanic' theory of fascism is mind-boggling given the evident origins of the word 'fascism' itself, and scholars like Sternhell or Ernst Nolte have since grounded the emerging field of fascism studies in the recognition of its Latin elements. This brings us to what I think is the core issue of the Berlin thesis – an issue that has often been noted of course, and one I should add, that for most of the book does not distract from the author's in-depth understanding of European thought, nor of his outstanding skills as a story-teller. The problem, in fact, might even participates in his story being so clear and readily understandable, but I'll leave the issue of narratives and liberalism for another time. In his conclusion, Berlin traces to romanticism not only fascism, but also existentialism, and if we read between the lines, to Marxism too: the deadening conformity of rationality must be overcome by 'going to the past, or by going within oneself' (138)—two categories which for Berlin intersect in the notion of myth, which he takes as the organic outlook of 'class or nation or Church' (138). There's already a problem here, because he had told us not long before that the romantic myth is a modern one, created by the artist for the purpose of capturing what in essence is the existential stalemate of his experience. Indeed the relationship of romanticism to tradition remain unclear, inasmuch as the shift from individual and artistic sovereignty, which Berlin makes a great job to show in his sources, to the collective and political form of romanticism he proposes, implies the surrender of at least part of the artist's authority. Hence, existentialism, with its rejection of tradition qua tradition, already does not fit the picture. A myth, say, that of Sisiphus, might capture the alienated condition of the free man, but it is an uprooted one, it ties no-one in a community. Furthermore, Berlin comes back, when discussing existentialism, to a point he made earlier: the essence of the romantic mindset is ultimately a form of relativism, inasmuch as it is not the ideas held by someone, but the strength with which he or she hold onto them, which is worthy of admiration. Berlin writes: 'I do not believe that in the seventeenth century, if you had a religious conflict between a Protestant and a Catholic, it would have been possible for the Catholic to say, "the Protestant is a damnable heretic and leads souls to perdition, but the fact that he is sincere raises him in my estimation. The fact that he is sincere, that he's prepared to lay down his life for the nonsense in which he believes, is a morally noble fact"' (139, see also 10). Having just read some Dante, I must first ask, what about Saladin, whom even Dante, none to keen on 'schismatic' Islam, placed in Limbo (Inferno IV, 129)? Is not in fact the very notion of Limbo, rising to orthodoxy as it does to accommodate the virtuous pagans, the Catholic recognition of faith as such, aside from dogmatic considerations? Berlin would probably answer he never claimed that romanticism was free from the pervasive influence of Christianity: in fact according to Aidan Day, the very word 'romanticism' appears first to describe, at the dawn of the XVIIth century, the influence of the literary 'romance' trickling down history from Dante or Chretien de Troyes via Spenser or Cervantes. Yet I should point out that Limbo and its virtuous pagans were much defended by Aquinas, as a way to support his own Aristotelian influences. Then we are left with the puzzle of an Aristotelian 'realist' worldview, which ascribes specific values to specific objects, rather than in their relation to the subject, but one grounded in the encounter of a geographical (Islam) and historical (Aristotle) Other, with the burden of relativism needed to accommodate them as such carried by universal Reason. This limited, 'bounded' relativism, I am sure, Berlin would find quite agreeable, whether we call it romantic or classicist: Vico, whom Berlin finds peripherally romantic, says nothing else. The real problem however would arise when the romantics extrapolate, from the existence of geographical or historical difference, into full-blown, metaphysical relativism (or so he claims) and retreat into solipsism. The core issue then, is not so much romanticism, as it is idealism: but because Berlin presents the whole movement as arising from the 'resentful' and aestheticised movements of the German XVIIIth century, rather than trace its philosophical genealogy, we hear not of Berkeley, for example, who was more in line with Pope than with Swift, and as such might have undermined the picture of romanticism as the return of the repressed. But to return to the 'romantic roots' of existentialism, and Marxism, what all this shows us is that the tradition of engagement and authenticity runs deep within European (and, I would assume, global) history, as does the idealist tradition. The two had met before (I might suggest courtly love as a precursor) and when they did once more in the XVIIIth century, I'd wager it is rather particular economic conditions—namely the rise of bourgeois individualism—which allowed it to achieve unprecedented autonomy and authority. But Berlin is a historian of ideas of the old-school, and social factors play no major role in his narrative: for him, romantics rebel against natural laws or those perceived as such, among which he seems to count that of supply and demand. Here again his focus on Europe fails to account for the western encounter with hunter-gatherers: 'Burke believed . . . that the laws of of commerce are the laws of nature, and therefore the laws of God, and deduced from this that nothing could be done about passing any radical reform, and the poor would have to starve . . . . Romantic economics is the precise opposite of this. All economic institutions must be bent towards some kind of ideal of living together in a spiritually progressive manner. Above all you must not make the mistake of supposing that there are external laws, that there are objective, given laws of economics which are beyond human control' (126). I actually think there is a point to be made in recognising a religious element or structure in actual communist regimes (or for that matter, in most regimes) but tracing it back to Marx I find more difficult. Leaving aside the apocalyptic teleology of progress, which Berlin leaves aside because his idea of romanticism is 'autotelic', an end in itself, Marx, whom I should say I know little of, does I think emphasise the 'relational' character of facts over their 'substance', as do the existential romantics in Berlin's thesis, but it is a relation between objects, rather than between object and a subject. The recognition of the constructed and historical character of political economy, for Berlin, seems a romantic flight from objectivity—and yet he has also argued that the French revolution was the result of Enlightenment ideals rather than romantic one... Given that at the start of his book, the prevalence of action over contemplation was also given as foundational mistake of romanticism, it is easy to see what he is getting at: science should rather be the contemplation of the laws of nature, supply and demand included, than the tool for its transformation. This of courses leave out the instrumental drive of enlightenment science, and the question of why should one trust in supply and demand rather than in the Great Chain of Being, neither of which are strictly empirically testable. ...more |
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| 0812970063
| 9780812970067
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| 4.02
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How do you rate something like that? How do you rate the Bible? Those books are so foundational to our culture, that it feels just like trying to disc
How do you rate something like that? How do you rate the Bible? Those books are so foundational to our culture, that it feels just like trying to discuss the value of language: much as, without language, we probably wouldn't be capable to form the thoughts necessary to criticize it, imagining a culture or even a world without the Bible, or without the Divine Comedy seems preposterous. The filaments of interpretation spread throughout western culture, and everywhere it is easy to find echoes and references. I've read the book on the occasion of a series of reading and commentary organised at the Warburg Institute by Alessandro Scaffi and John Took, whose enthusiasm was no doubt communicative. I read the text online, at the Princeton Dante Project - one of the several digitised variora available, possibly the best one in terms of interface, and at any rate I think a very necessary tool for such ancient epics, tightly woven with references bound to appear obscure but to the specialist. This wealth of reference makes for the joys of interpretations: even for those like me ignorant of the period and its intricacies, allegories and symbol take a life of their own, and many canto called for my own interpretation, many of them unlikely or fantastical, but very much my own; This is the kind of imaginative investment that builds affective bonds with a text, and much like Bible, the Pound Cantos, or Edda, I see how one can 'fall into the rabbit-hole' and spend a life-time investigating the text itself as if it were a world (which in the present case, it pretty much is!) ; I will most definitely return to it, armed this time maybe with a better knowledge of theology, of the classics or of rhetoric, but all the same this first reading felt not wasted at all. The sheer visual force of the story in fact make it strikingly suitable as 'light entertainment' - as attested by the manga-style anime that was made out of it (which I am yet to watch lol). ...more |
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Girard's is a hugely ambitious project: a sort of grand-theory-of-everything, a prodigal son to psychoanalysis, bent on criticising mercilessly the Fr
Girard's is a hugely ambitious project: a sort of grand-theory-of-everything, a prodigal son to psychoanalysis, bent on criticising mercilessly the Freudian project, while pursuing an essentially similar goal with, according to the author, a much more rigorous analysis. Despite such scope, the book stands out by its clarity and its careful (and elegant) avoidance of unnecessary jargon – the paperback in fact became my companion in the public transport, a place generally reserved to works of fiction. Girard develops his theory slowly, illustrating it profusely with many examples drawn from his extensive knowledge of anthropology, of Greek tragedies, and to a much lesser extent, of history and political theory. He is at times a little bumptious in his attacks on the grand dinosaurs of Xxth century culture, but it is easy to forgive him in light of the simple, even humble style of his prose. Girard's most famous concept is that of mimetic desire: the reason why we desire an object is not in the object itself, but because another appear to us as desiring the said object. Desire, then, is always mediated by the presence of someone else, thus escaping for example psychoanalysis' tendency to ascribe an essential value in the object of desire. What this mimetic desire means is that it is not the differences between the various members of a community that brings about violence, but rather the erosion of those differences: what he calls the 'sacrificial crisis' is the theoretical and historical event in which the cultural order, warrant of social differentiation, looses its authority. The result is the spread of violence, as one crime calls for a vengeance, and the vengeance in turn calls for another crime, and so on, in what he terms a deadly reciprocity. Spontaneously a seemingly inbuilt mechanism can however thwart this apocalyptic prospect: the highly emotional and irrational nature of violence means that its object can be displaced, and in extreme situations the group members tend naturally to displace their violence on a single individual, the scapegoat, in actual fact no more no less guilty than the others, but identified as the source and the reason of violence itself. A highly ambiguous figure, Girard identifies him with the Greek sparagmos and pharmakos, Bushong and other African sacrificed kings, with Oedipus, and with many other examples taken from myths and rites across the world. The scapegoat somehow 'absorbs' the crimes and the violence itself, and is either cast-out of the community or sacrificed. His pivotal position between the chaotic crisis and the re-established order is the source of his fundamental ambiguity, which makes him both a criminal and a founding father. The event is then commemorated ritually throughout the existence of the culture it created. At the light of this theory, Girard then explore a lot particular cases, showing how his model can explain the seemingly more intractable debates in theory. He eventually turns it against psychoanalysis and use it to move beyond structuralist anthropology. He eventually opens it up to make all sorts of bold claims, starting with the continued relevance of his model to our contemporary societies, and going all the way to claiming that all sacred and all divinities are merely transcendent violence. So is it any good? Well it is a very enjoyable read, not least because Girard is found of those ever entertaining anthropological limit-cases, which to the western eyes seems so intriguing and mysterious. It is, as I mentioned, easy to read, and remarkably clear. Certainly the theory resonates, with its emphasis on the Machiavellian 'criminal virtue' (although Girard does not mention it by name) and its inbuilt irrationality, with the puzzles of Xxth century radical politics, those of Sorel or those Carl Schmitt for example. However, maybe because Girard himself fails to connect it too explicitly (save for small passage on Kantorowicz) to politics, we are left to do the guess-work. Another, more important issue is Girard's rather nebulous hyspostasis of violence, which is a bit of everything, the omnitool of his post-structuralist project: it is the 'other', that which lives outside the boundaries of the recognised order, it is the archaic and haunting memory of primordial violence, but it is also the constant (unconscious) threat which maintain social cohesion when the law's more concrete hazard is absent or weak. It is the irrational ground from which the binaries of language emerge, as well as the meeting point of opposites and the sacred itself. We can agree with Girard that violence is universal and an intrinsic component of any social form – but in order to assimilate violence to the sacred or the divine, violence need to be absolutely transcendent: there are two modes for experiencing violence, as perpetrator or as victim. For a victim the locus of transcendence would probably not be a nebulous and abstract notion of violence, but rather the oppressor himself. For the perpetrator, violence become synonymous with an acute form of agency, with, precisely, the ability to shape or distort the order of things – in which case violence is no longer perceived as 'other'. Girard would probably argue, as he does about many other things in the book, that the separation between the two 'faces' of violence (perpetrator and victim) is a modern distortion. Yet the social dynamics of the great apes or a wolf pack seem to me to prove just the opposite. I completely understand Girard's (and Bataille's) fascination with the inbuilt ambivalence of the sacred, both positive and negative until the rise of Christianity, but he does use it way too often as a 'get out jail free' card. ...more |
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Poche
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I am only in the earliest stages of my encounter with the sociology and the history of science. From what I can so far gather, opinions seems often pr
I am only in the earliest stages of my encounter with the sociology and the history of science. From what I can so far gather, opinions seems often predictably polarised between two visions. The one is an understanding of 'science' as permanently true and independent from social and cultural conditions in which it was produced, this body of knowledge being created/discovered through methods strictly grounded in universal reason, rigour and impersonality. This vision I will call the 'heroic' view of science, heroic inasmuch as it tends to negate the influence of institutions and present instead stories of solitary geniuses. The social view of science instead insists on studying the necessarily imperfect and self-interested institutions and conditions in which each scientific discovery is achieved, and the unavoidable influence that those structures will have both on orienting the research and in formulating the discoveries. As often the debate takes the form of attacks on the one or the other, while the actual position of scientists and historians alike stand somewhere in between. I know too little about 'reason', about logic and mathematics, about the links between those and the evolving scientific methodologies, about said methodologies (although I am working on that) to have much of an opinion on the first 'heroic' pole, that insisting on science as disconnected, neutral and objective in the strongest sense. At best I see it in its popular form, as it is peddled by popular science and eulogised by our gadgeto-innovation complex, the Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins of the world. What I do see, however, is that commentators on science throughout the XXth century seem to conduct a concerted effort to deflate the totalizing claims of Victorian science, and that many actual discoveries appear to vouch for their efforts. Shapin's work is a history of XVIIth century science written from the sociological perspective, meaning it takes the second road mentioned above, focusing on the inescapable biases and conditions embedded in the institutions necessary to the production of scientific knowledge. It is very much toward the 'social' pole, then, and I reckon it might belong to the orbit of what is called the 'strong program' in the sociology of science (he often quotes Bloor), although his reflections are mostly historical in nature and largely skirt around the issue of science as it is practiced today. Nonetheless, Shapin's work constitutes an attack on the 'heroic' narrative of science because he takes to task one of its sacred cows, namely the Scientific Revolution, or more precisely its later British phase in the second half of the XVIIth century. This period, according to the heroic narrative, saw the birth of modern science, generally depicted as a skeptical rejection of the long established Aristotelian models endorsed by the Church (and by the universities). This skepticism toward tradition opened two paths, the rationalist one of Descartes or Hobbes, and the empiricist one of Bacon, Boyle and others, on whom Shapin focuses in this book. Specifically he looks at what was then called 'experimental philosophy', the baconian road to knowledge which distinguished itself by rejecting speculation, the dominant Aristotelian method, in favour of collecting knowledge through experiment (induction) and establishing likely laws on the basis of those observations. By first submitting all inherited knowledge to organised skepticism, and then by limiting the validity of their provisional claims and restricting the bases of their generalisations to 'pure' observed facts, the empiricists claimed their comparatively 'modest' doctrine to give a truthful image of the world. There are, of course, many problems with this narrative – not least the fact that observation, in the first place, is conducted by people who bring their own presuppositions to the experiment – however Shapin focuses here on another issue, one particularly suitable to his sociological approach, the question of trust. His contention is that "Skepticism is always a possible move, but its possibility derives from a system in which we take other relevant knowledge on trust . . . Distrust is something which takes place on the margins of trusting systems" (18). Shapin, himself originally trained in molecular biology, recalls the process by which he once applied skepticism to the statement "DNA contains cytosine" (17): he "extracted DNA from mammalian cells and subjected it to chemical analysis" by mincing rat liver and freezing it in liquid nitrogen, grounded, extracted, centrifuged the sample, and after a number of other processes was satisfied that the resulting, observable substance attested to the presence of cytosine. "A moment's reflection about this experience gives grounds for skepticism about the 'firsthand' character of my knowledge. I knew that a certain outcome of a chemical test stood for the presence of cytosine, just as I knew that the dried precipitate which I held in my hand was DNA. I do not recall that I, or any other worker in that laboratory, expressed skepticism about the nature of the precipitate or the adequacy of the test for cytosine, but of course, I could have . . . It would have been very time-consuming and I would have made myself a nuisance by requiring the appropriate verification, but there was no reason in principle why I could not have done so" (18). The point of this parabole, in Shapin's argument, is to show how much in scientific practice is actually taken on trust. In his anecdote, the nature and quality of the rat liver, the function and accuracy of the technological tools he uses, the provenance and composition of the chemicals he uses in the process, or the non-interference of his colleagues, are all taken on trust. Complete, systematic skepticism, if it were even possible, would make scientific practice fundamentally impossible: in his conclusion he goes on to make the bold claim that what distinguishes scientific practice is how much, rather than how little, it is based on trust. Shapin unfortunately spares little thought on the subject of the management of trust prior to the scientific revolution, a subject which would have been very interesting: to what extent was it distributed through the Church(es) and how did it circulate from there to the university and political institutions, for example. We can however conjecture that in the European pre-modern paradigm, the religious monopoly on culture, including science, meant that practical knowledge and theological doctrine were intricately intertwined, to the point that the acceptation of the one entailed the acceptation of the other (a particular case of what Gellner calls 'multi-stranded knowledge', if I remember well). In that case, the doctrine was simultaneously naturalised and super-naturalised: revelation, and its trickling down through the initiatory conduits of the Church, was in theory the bountiful source of both knowledge of nature and the divine world. Trust in the Revelation, in the Church's ability to convey it, in the truthfulness of its representatives, was presuposed by any and all knowledge. In contrast, Shapin tells us that in the early-modern context, "'moderns' celebrate proper science as a culture which has indeed rectified knowledge by rejecting what others tell us and seeking direct individual experience" (xxv). In other words, whereas the ground of knowledge in the pre-modern christian setting was in revelation, in the early-modern context it becomes in individual skepticism. Shapin, however, argues that "no practice has accomplished the rejection of testimony and authority and that no cultural practice recognizable as such could do so." Throughout the book he will be "showing the ineradicable role of what others tell us and of saying how reliance upon testimony achieves invisibility in certain intellectual practices" (xxv). To this end, he opens the book with a meaty chapter on methodology and conceptual foundations, the main of which is that of trust. He looks at analyses and history of the notion, calling upon a number of social theorists and philosophers, with maybe an emphasis on Niklas Luhmann. His main contention is that the giving or withholding of trust has a moral character, and that it participates in crucial ways in establishing and maintaining the social order: he carefully qualifies his statement in order to avoid the pervasive accusations of relativism levelled against his kith, writing that "the identification of trustworthy agents is necessary to the constitution of any body of knowledge. I do not thereby claim that this is all there is to knowledge-making . . . What we recognize as people-knowledge is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the making of thing-knowledge" – in fact, "what we know as 'social knowledge' and 'natural knowledge' are hybrid entities"(xxvi). The following two chapters concerns themselves with the mechanics of trust in the specific context of the British XVIIth century, and more particularly of its entanglement with gentlemanly culture. Shapin argues that the truthfulness of various actors, from the standpoint of the English gentry, was assessed in terms of their ability for "free action": being of independent means, and thus not having to subordinate oneself to another by means of salaried work, was taken to the be the crucial pre-condition to being able to speak the truth. Being dependant on anyone, conversely, tended to subsume the opinion of the dependant (worker, woman, child, etc.) into the opinion of the master. The author thus recall for example, how in the 1640s, even the 'left' Levellers, while advocating the extension of the franchise, to include "all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright." He adds: on those grounds, "servants–all those who sold their labor to another–were excluded" (405). In other words, trust was indexed on liberty, and liberty was the condition of the self-reliant man. The system of honour Shapin convincingly show to police and incentivise the maintaining of a functional community of trust within the gentry, inasmuch as 'giving the lye' (accusing someone of lying) was the highest insult and was likely to bring about a duel. Concerning the milieu of experimental philosophers, he adds that "this new culture emerged partly through purposeful relocation of the conventions, codes, and values of gentlemanly conversation into the domain of natural philosophy" (xvii). The high level of trusts needed for the collegial practice of science was thus based on the English gentry's system of honour, which itself promoted consensus around probablistic claims rather than absolute truth. Chapter four looks at a specific case of scientific and gentlemanly self-fashioning, that of Robert Boyle. Shapin has written elsewhere on the man and is clearly an authority on the subject. He ties Boyle's writings on ethics, conduct and religion, with his commitment to and development of the new scientific methodology. Chapter five deals with skepticism proper in that period, evidence its limits and the process through which the remaining trust was made 'invisible': in other words, how endemic skepticism was disciplined and directed outward of the scientific community. Chapter six examines a number of specific instances, or limit-cases, in which trust within the community was given or withheld, and what were the consequences. Chapter seven focuses on the role of mathematics – exact, non-empirical and apparently necessary to the practice of early-modern, unceasingly mechanistic science. Here Shapin shows that Boyle was not the fore-runner of Newton he is sometimes made out to be, but rather kept his distance of the rationalist claims of mathematicians. Finally chapter is a very interesting and measured analysis of the role of staff and servants in the experimental process, which goes some way to show that the empirical notion of 'observer' and thus of 'observed fact' was fairly more flexible in practice than it is made often made out to be. All in all this is a long, and sometimes rather dry book, but also a very rewarding read. I would not recommend it as an entry-point into the subject, yet neither is it particularly obscure, and anyone with as vague a knowledge of the period, of the history of science, and of the sociology of knowledge as mine, should be able to read it through. A knowledge of the debates to which Shapin contributes, however, will make the book a lot more enjoyable and engaging, and this can be had I'd imagine with any introduction to the philosophy of science, 'What Is This Thing Called Science?' for example. ...more |
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| 0520201094
| 9780520201095
| 0520201094
| 3.88
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| 2001
| Dec 03, 2001
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it was amazing
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Mar 05, 2017
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Nov 18, 2016
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| 0701186585
| 9780701186586
| 0701186585
| 4.24
| 17,387
| Mar 03, 2016
| Mar 03, 2016
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really liked it
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What horrifies me lately is the trend for French life-style advice: from “How to be a Parisian” (2014), "Why French Women Don't Get Fat" (2006) to "Al
What horrifies me lately is the trend for French life-style advice: from “How to be a Parisian” (2014), "Why French Women Don't Get Fat" (2006) to "Almost French: A New Life in Paris" (2005) there is a multitude of those horrible, vicious little books, which like much of the rest of women-targeted self-help books prey on ambivalent feelings and insecurities: french feminity is sol as a kind of nouvelle-vague-inspired perfume-ad, simultaneously distinguished (meaning, artificial) and yet spontaneous and hedonistic, free from the bad eating habits of their american readership, and of the tortuous British concerns with class identity. This is of course a whole load'a bunkum: French women (and men) look like shit when they get up, they also eat at McDonald, and they, too, piss between cars when walking home drunk after a night out. But somehow, the dream of French feminity, that of spontaneous and effortless distinction, with a hint of transgression (enough to give you basic intellectual legitimacy but not enough to imperil said distinction), has endured: Paris capital of boheme elegance jumps at any French expatriate to shame him or her for failing to live up to this grotesque cliché. Anyway - all this to say that I don't drink cocktails and I don't like apricots. I thus approached this book with much caution, suspecting (rightly) it would try hard to sandwich it's slice of intellectual history (that, you guessed it, of existentialism) between two slices of celebrity-culture and rive-gauche nostalgia. Café culture was never something I admired much about France: it essentially means sitting around a table and talking, something you could do just as well at home, but doing it in public so that you might be seen, and even paying for the privilege. Not exactly the high point of authenticity if you ask me. But Bakewell actually keeps the gimmick to its minimum! I was waiting for her to stumble at every turn but on the whole (save maybe for her relatively superficial treatment of Simone de Beauvoir) she does a great job and paint a honest portrait, one as she tells us from the onset, that excludes the religious strand of existentialism (my main interest in that field), but one that is lively and especially does a great job of articulating phenomenology and existentialism. It is lively, and it is powered by the eventful lives of its characters, but there is also very good introductions to the basic concepts of the various strands, and despite Bakewell's own individualism coming through here and there, she shows well the novelty of the approach, the drama of its unfolding and its relevance to every day experience. One wishes she had covered a bit more its downfall, but on the whole it is a more than decent introduction aimed for the general public. ...more |
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| 0816612838
| 4.28
| 1,126
| 1985
| Jun 20, 1985
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it was amazing
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Reading reviews from other GR readers I am surprised to see many find him contradictory, when what maybe struck me most in those texts written over ne
Reading reviews from other GR readers I am surprised to see many find him contradictory, when what maybe struck me most in those texts written over nearly fifteen years was the rigour, the cohesion of his diverse strands of thought, and its distinctly systematic character: more than contradictions it is perhaps the cherished paradoxes on which he builds an otherwise meticulous edifice that leave people uneasy, a turn of mind that testify to his avowed roots in avantgarde culture, and which I have encountered often enough not to mind the leap of faith it demands: At the beginning -of existence, of social life, of individual psychology- was expenditure. Here might be both the most simple, but also the more difficult and the more fascinating of Bataille's argument. In his strictly materialist view the fundamental impulse of man is consumption, in French 'dépense', a wasting of energy, resources or health (of anything that separate us from the crushing submission to nature in death) which crucially must be understood as an absolute end in itself and an existential imperative. Expenditure takes many forms in many different contexts, from the gift economy of Marcel Mauss to the ritual sacrifice of the Aztecs, and carries, in proportion to its purity (to its standing as its own end, escaping instrumentalisation), a sense of the sacred. This sacred was visible in ancient civilisations, relegated to heterodoxy during the christian age, but is still driving to this day the most authentic cultural forms, because all of human culture, being fundamentally contingent, is, at heart, expenditure. When function or instrumentality creeps into it, it becomes debased and looses its timeless existential value. The existential value of expenditure is expressed in largely nietzschean terms, maybe the most visible and durable influence on Bataille's thought: expenditure constitute the concrete and practical form of 'Bejahung', that 'saying yes to life' which constitute both the essence of tragedy and the existential imperative of worldliness. In Bataille this takes a potentially even more radical turn, given the aesthetic fascination that drive his thought and his fiction, for all the sights rejected by the tidy, functional and superficial spectacle of bourgeois society: Bejahung becomes 'the practice of joy before death', and the nietzschean suspicion of contemplation is overcome in a pervasive but fundamentally materialist and immanent mystique of death. Facing death and contemplating its imminence and inevitability ties Bataille's Nietzsche back with a christian mystique tradition that provides, in the age preceding the death of God, the missing link between XXth century philosophy and ancient tragic thought. Much like death (the cadavers, severed body parts and gushing blood are the best remembered elements of his erotica) is granted a special ontological status on the basis of its absolute uselessness, so are bodily fluids, shit, piss or sperm, which become, in virtue of their being expenditure in the most literal sense, the fundamental units of culture. Delivering poetry, improvising music or speaking in tongues, in that system, are on a par with taking a shit or vomiting in the gutter. This presupposition grounds what Bataille (and his followers) call base materialism, around which is woven his art criticism and engagement with surrealism. Breton, figure-head of that movement, for all his luciferian posturing was, all in all, prim and stuffy, carefully policing the borders of his movements through grandiloquent pronouncements and vociferous anathema that only reach us today daubed in ridicule and megalomania. Beyond those frontiers lay, for him, dissipation, pathology or idealism. This is where -off-centre, many would say today- Bataille starts his sabotage. Recognising the surreal (the visceral, 'convulsive' otherness sometimes surfacing in the polished surface of everyday life) in elements the surrealist orthodoxy had carefully disavowed, he seeks their shared ground, their lowest (basest) common denominator, which he find in some kind consuming frenzy, consuming both in terms of absorption and in terms of self-destruction. The apex of his thought, although only outlined in the present volume, seems to be his conceptions of communication and community, which I have seen credited as an important source of the 'communautarian' debates of Nancy, Taylor, Bellah, Bell and others. It seems crucial in redeeming Bataille's political thught (when it comes close verge on the messianic navel-gazing), by providing a sturdy link between expenditure, his central concept of existential consumerism, and his other, more overtly political marxism. The wedding of the two, in his early thought, is not a peaceful one and the expected contradiction often arise. In the later period covered by this book (later Bataille would, after WW2, turn debatably 'apolitical') – that of the College of Sociology, attended by a number of luminaries orbiting around Bataille and his endeavours, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Lacan – Bataille developed an interesting analogy between love – not understood (only) in its platonic sense – and society in general: to cut to the chase, the expenditure of love comes both tears apart the individual and produce a new stable being, from the material (s)he and his or her partner expended. This only last an instant but must form the basis of community in general, one that can only be founded in the expenditure-sacrifice of its members, at the sole condition that the community be not utilitarian but that the expenditure and the community it produces become an end in itself. I am no puritan – but I find I often see with much suspicion thinkers who give sexuality too central a place in their systems: this might come from living in an age where sex has become the conveniently delimited arena in which transgressions can be safely re-enacted, or maybe from too many writers applying a thin veneer of psychoanalysis to grant their thought, in a single blow, both the glitz of decadence and the sheen of scientific accuracy. The joy I felt in reading Bataille, then, despite the omnipresence of sex as the privileged locus authenticity (a kind of atavism testifying to the permanence of human condition) testifies to both the quality of his writing style (sex never feels lavished or utilised to give banal ideas undue privileges) and the absence of a rhetoric of 'nature' or normalcy (sex, and its more elaborate manifestation, culture, is intrinsically perverse and self-destructive – thus as much as all culture is sexual, we can also say that all sex is cultural). There are obvious issues with such a view: first and foremost is the messianic character of his marxism, that like his pairs make maybe for a great cultural critique but permanently displace action -and thus justice- in a vaguely defined future. The revolution, or communism, become in this perspective little more than a myth, one useful maybe to shape and discipline individual consciousness, but ultimately only useful, a term I would imagine Bataille was none to keen on. His rejection of the strictures of political parties (avowed marxist he opposed stalinism but was never affiliated with any other currents, save maybe that of Souvarine for a time) and his related rejection of all instrumentality can only lead to some kind of Hakim-Bey-style spontaneism, where free culture magically provide free political organisation (his friend Kojeve would scold him for trying 'to make something out of nothing') – a common enough trait in those circles, but one which in his case, in light of biography, tarnish his commitment, leave us only an armchair (or bedroom, or kitchen table) philosopher. Can I say I 'believe' Bataille? Probably not: I have probably not yet read enough philosophy to feel the same sense of explanation I can have more spontaneously toward sociology for example (not that I have read much sociology, however). Bataille, like much of pre-WW2 philosophy, I appreciate just as I appreciate the avantgarde: less for the more or less coherent living systems they propose, than for 'baring the device', the criticism through parody those same system conduct on modernity - 'alternative modernities' as the saying goes. None of those alternatives move me enough to accept or believe the kind of radical break in the continuity of time (revolutions) or in that of personal experience (mystique and/or existentialism) they posit. Bataille is no different: although his system is, from what I have read so far, possibly the most coherent and original one I know (the fact he has graduated from the 'avantgarde' department into the 'philosophy' one reflect I think the quality of his thought) it remains an object of curiosity, an object of contemplation, and ultimately one that is not really 'base' in the sense of 'base materialism'. In other words it is an idea, a highly fascinating one, but because of its overly theoretical character and its sometimes indulgent use of notions of unconscious, it is 'just' an idea. The structural inversion he operates, in line with what was then already a tradition, effectively turns functionalism on its head, but simultaneously his commitment to mass materialism makes him a real man of his time. ...more |
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Nov 28, 2016
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Sep 18, 2016
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| 0252075722
| 9780252075728
| 0252075722
| 4.00
| 7
| Jan 01, 2008
| Jan 07, 2009
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really liked it
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Spanos catered to my most secret and shameful vice: he deploys a bulky, exotic and intimidating terminology, push it on his unsuspecting reader thanks
Spanos catered to my most secret and shameful vice: he deploys a bulky, exotic and intimidating terminology, push it on his unsuspecting reader thanks to his gifts and his dedication, as well as, in the last instance, to the relative simplicity of his argument, and once you are hooked, high on jargon and your new-found ability to grasp it effortlessly, you find yourself following him wherever he goes. Luckily, he seems like a relatively stand-up chap, so you wont come down to any nasty STDs. Said, the central figure of his narrative, despite stretching his roots in the post-structuralist soil (Foucault in particular), famously rejected that school and its antihumanism, in favour of a somewhat nebulous alternative I have had difficulties reconciling with the sweeping, genealogical statements he is known for. Spanos, a Heideggerian literary scholar, Saidian in mood but "de-(con)strukt(ion)ist" in practice, sets out to argue against the words of Said himself in his last book, that his decolonial project can only be fulfilled with a critique of the onto-theological tradition, and proposes a corrective. I should say I, myself, harbour some doubts as to the methodological consistency of Said's approach in Orientalism (many of which are expressed better than I ever could put them in James Clifford's article 'On Orientalism') - in particular when it comes to the tension between the historicity and ontological character of the East-West relation as depicted by Said. As such I was probably a favourable terrain for Spanos' thesis: Spanos attempts to link Said's critique of Western knowledge and taxonomies, by way of (genealogical) Foucault and (pre-black notebooks...) Heidegger, with the post-structuralist critique of presence, of "identity as the condition of difference". This he does first by "re-constellating" (one of his absolute favs, along with "de-structing" and "over-dertermination") Heidegger's elusive critique of imperialism, which he does thanks to a little known (at least, to me) text of his, the Parmenides lectures he gave during WW2: Spanos makes a compelling case, out of a few quotes, for reading Heidegger's thought as concerned with the (substantial, self-same) humanism having emerged from the Roman recycling and systematising of Greek post-socratic philosophy - with the transition from aletheia (truth, literally "unveiled") to veritas (truth, not as a lack but as presence). He then proceeds to tie it all to Foucault's panopticism, via various philogical reflections, evidencing the fact that both Said's "taxonomic" orientalism and Heidegger's "ontologic" tradition, relie on visuality, as much as does Foucault's critique of the power/knowledge relation. At this point if you have not read Foucault or Heidegger, all this might sound a bit forbidding, so let me stress that neither have I: Foucault I never got around, despite some indirect knowledge of his concepts, while Heidegger's linguistic fortifications have so far thwarted all my attempts at entering Being and Time. So fear not, Spanos' thesis could have fitted in a journal article: he takes such pains for making it accessible, if not to the lay reader, then at least to the non-specialist, that I think anyone who has read Orientalism will find it all understandable enough - and even enjoyable, if you are as vain and insecure as me. After introducing this Heidegger (ontology) / Foucault (institution) / Said (imperialism) axis, Spanos reads three books of Said, namely Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism and his posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism, before concluding with a separate chapter, by recollecting his youthful experiences and his encounters with Said, musing somewhat surprisingly (for a vocally "secular" thinker in a book concerned with a radically "secular" one) on the impact of the Christian existentialist movement (Union Theological Seminary, mainly) on the protest movements of the sixties. All in all, beyond the guilty pleasure of reading and understanding effortlessly something that looks very complicated (but which is actually quite simple) the book is quite good: I am not much familiar with any of the thinkers or movements at its core, but I feel Spanos' thesis, if it wouldn't have pleased any of them, none the less makes much sense, and in a way shed some light on my own reservations as to Said: in that regard, by bringing to the surface the relationship between Said's idea of Orientalism and the "ontological tradition", Spanos makes apparent (but does not mention) one obvious paradox: the Greek -Aristotelian in particular- tradition, that which privileges identity over difference, was by no means exclusively occidental... The "occultation" or internalisation of the disciplinary, which seems ascribed to modernity, was in fact already at play in religions and culture all over the world. The book also makes (this I will have to confirm) a good introduction to Foucault, and might well also contribute to making Heidegger less unreadable. Spanos himself seems like a lovely chap, with an interesting, unusual career, and a gifted pedagogue. I shall try and get hold of his textbooks on existentialism. ...more |
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Jun 13, 2016
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Jun 26, 2016
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Jun 13, 2016
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| 0812690176
| 9780812690170
| 0812690176
| 3.47
| 17
| Mar 1986
| Jan 01, 1986
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it was ok
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A very broad overview of the endless controversy over man's agency in history - meaning, whether and how much do we 'chose' to act, instead of merely,
A very broad overview of the endless controversy over man's agency in history - meaning, whether and how much do we 'chose' to act, instead of merely, mechanically reacting to our surroundings, material or otherwise. It stretches from Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx to structural Marxism, and though every stage is treated quite rapidly, the book also presupposes some knowledge of each philosopher. I had to make some research, and I am uncertain this is the 'introduction' it is claimed to be. This aside, it is written clearly and competently, though the book is a little dated (1986) and as such misses out on many more recent developments in this field.
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Jan 05, 2020
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Feb 18, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0140433392
| 9780140433395
| 0140433392
| 3.98
| 19,020
| 1871
| Nov 27, 2003
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really liked it
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A young, bookish moustachioed professor, newly appointed to a provincial chair of philology, falls under the spell of a mysterious, scheming and possi
A young, bookish moustachioed professor, newly appointed to a provincial chair of philology, falls under the spell of a mysterious, scheming and possibly malevolent composer, whose unholy music break all the boundaries of taste or custom. Our hero soon suspects a dark secret at the heart of his mesmerizing arrangements – but enamored of the composer's innocent wife, the professor descends further and further into the primal madness of music, exploring ancient nameless wisdom so terrible mankind had to be sheltered from its sight by salutary delusions. How far will our young hero follow the mad sorcerer of music-drama down the road to madness? Will he attempt to face the unspeakable horror of the Ur-Eine, that Dark God in each of us whose sight alone is enough to rob us from reason and self-hood? Or will he succumb, like many before him, to the philistine impulse of negating all that cannot be mastered? Find out in the new installment of the Nietzsche Mythos, “The Call of Wagner” in kiosk for 5c!
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Jan 06, 2015
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| 8879282395
| 9788879282390
| 8879282395
| 4.10
| 1,960
| 1913
| 1994
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it was amazing
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Boris Groys has defined avant-garde art as striving towards a “demiurgic” total control: there are too few analyses to take authority as the crucial i
Boris Groys has defined avant-garde art as striving towards a “demiurgic” total control: there are too few analyses to take authority as the crucial issue in modernism, but Papini’s Un Uomo Finito would make an excellent place to start: Few authors display such unabashed level of hubris as Papini does, and those who did never expressed it with his heartfelt, naive grandiloquence. Papini grew up into dedicated nihilism, thanks, he says, to a solitude he owed to his ugliness and his poverty. Probably the same disconnection led him to pursue a large number of grandiose if completely unrealistic goals (ex: compiling all the encyclopedias in the world into a single one, aged 15) which gave him a taste for rhetorical excess and a tolerance for failure. As he finds at last a welcoming home in the Florentine boheme of the early XXth century, he sets out with a few friends to build Leonardo, a (mainly) philosophical magazine that was to leave a worldwide mark. But of course Papini wants more: at first he wants to die, not alone, but to convince the whole of humanity to follow him in a total suicide. He also doubt humanity exists at all, extending Stirnerian individualism into fully-fledged solipsism. Later still he comes to combine William James with a kind of luciferian delerium, coining it “magical pragmatism” and promising (to James’ acclaim) his hotel corridor will lead to godmanhood. Leonardo folds, then comes La Voce, another staple of the European intellectual scene, and as his friends for the most part seem to outgrow their promethean wet-dreams Papini finds himself, I think, more and more isolated. Armed with only his unflinching conviction of the superiority of the mind (actually, his mind) over matter, he leaves for a retreat in the mountains, deciding not to come back until his will can outweigh the burden of the real. It is upon his return he sets out to write, at thirty, his autobiography: Un Uomo Finito. Sometimes I experience what has be called vertigo, for wants of a better term, in front of the sheer outsized megalomania of a project: think of Alexander Scriabin for example. This outrageousness, this blasphemous disregard for both the real and the human, is probably what most appeal to me in the modernist project. Here we have a limit case, treading the narrow path between egotic insanity and prophetic grandeur, surviving only thanks to his sharp wit and unforgiving introspection. Papini later encountered international success with his Life of Christ, but he largely, and unduly slid into oblivion, despite the best efforts of the likes Borges or Eliade to resurrect his early, odd and unique writing. It is a quick read and if you have any interest in XXth century art or culture, or any interest in the extremes of thought, you owe to give it a try! ...more |
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Oct 23, 2014
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Oct 30, 2014
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| 067405525X
| 9780674055254
| 067405525X
| 4.60
| 5
| Feb 05, 1993
| Dec 28, 1993
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it was amazing
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Adamson has won several prizes for his scholarship in the field of avant-garde studies and interwar culture (and maybe also for his might mustache, I
Adamson has won several prizes for his scholarship in the field of avant-garde studies and interwar culture (and maybe also for his might mustache, I suspect) and I must concur. He isn’t exactly churning them out (four books since his first one in 1983) but boy, when he does get at it, it’s quite something: I’ve been on a bit of a Papini binge as of lately, but he wins the prize hands down. Adamson, following his habit, starts with a solid grounding in the existing historiography (the book is from 93, which means he had little of the superabundent litterature on the fascist/modernist connection at his disposal) and follows with an introduction to Florence, situated in the larger context of Italy and its belated modernity. Cultural, political, economic and, importantly, social, conditions are brilliantly elucidated, with some unusual positions at time (the acerbic portrayal of Giolittian administration) which I am particularly grateful for. If anything one might have wished the author had put the same effort in depicting the precedents in art as he did in litterature, but then again politics might not have had the same bearing on them. The case of Italy is an appealing one because the binary decadent/modernist is relatively clear, thanks in no small measure to those two larger-than-life characters, the Florentine Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Milanese Fillipo Marinetti. The one a libidinous crafter of treacly, refined odes and laments, the other, no less bumptious, a vehement agitator against peace, women and tradition. All they have in common (nationalism aside) is the barrenness of their scalp… Two cities, two movements, two generations. Unlike Paris, the break here between the XIXth and XXth centuriy seems fairly clean. Enters Giovanni Papini, a headful of curly hair, a single crease on the forehead like the mark of the beast, and the fearless gaze of the myopic nerd. I wont go into details on this colourful character, if you want some, you should turn to my review of “Un Homme Fini” or the Lovreglio biography. And behind him, Adamson ushers the rest of the florentine avant-garde. I might be a bit unfair to Adamson actually: I am slightly obsessed with Papini himself, but the present book promise us “a group portrait” of the Florentine avant-garde, and that’s just what he does: along with the polemist Papini we meet the more moderate Prezzolini, and shortly, the painter and poet Ardengo Soffici. We follow them through their various ventures, publications mainly, such as the early philosophy journal Leonardo, that will elicit the enthusiasm of Bergson and William James, to La Voce, where Prezzolini’s Crocean sympathies will bring about a lasting rift between him and his best friend Papini, or the later’s Lacerba, apex of incendiary rhetoric that will for a time, allign itself to Marinetti’s movement. Where the book is unbeatable is first of all, in the author’s disciplined study of those and lesser magazines, but also in his interest in more discreet figures nesting around that trinity. Isolated (to me at least!) figures of the Italian litterary world, like Sibilla Aleramo, Palazeschi, Amendola or Slataper come into focus, revealing how small a world cultural activism at the time must have been, since the same group of friends could house future fascists, and future victims of the regime. Adamson seems to understand modernism primarily as an ideology: a demand for “a fresh start” which would allow intellectuals rather than sclerotic aristocracies or mindless masses to take the role that rightfully belongs to them, namely that of theoreticians and designers of world institutions. Demands for tabula rasa necessarily implies wholesale condemnation of the statu quo and a pronounced pessimism, something of which Leonardo or Lacerba where never short of. Until that Kingdom Come, the social goal, or at least the purpose, of the Italian avant-garde seems to be “to create a greater sense of public space in the Giolittian era” (33), that was sorely lacking or monopolised by a corrupt leisure-class. Among the traits which depart from the expected fascoid rhetoric, and give this scene its particular flavour, is regionalist federalism, quite distant from the later mussolinian statism, which seems in good part rooted in Papini’s pet-hate, monism, and his answer of radical, pragmatic pluralism. How did he, or his colleagues, managed to reconcile those laudable notions with the state policies some eventually came to support, remain a mystery outside of the scope of the present work. Yet let me add that Papini’s own “magical” (understand: “egotic”) pragmatism, might help us understand Mussolini’s puzzling claims to pragmatism. Another trait Adamson is careful to highlight is the obsession with political religion: the need, for the new era to come, to be cimented by a secular religion likely to give society the cohesion and the movement that in liberal democracies they found lacking. They for the most part welcomed and even demanded the Great War, agitating relentlessly for Italy to side with France. Albeit most agreed the conflict had fail to coalesce Italian society around a singular ideal, they had varied reactions to it, from Papini’s conversion to catholicism, to Amendola socialist martyrdom. The story ends with the rise of fascism proper, which seem to the reader so close to what those men demanded, and to them so far from what they hoped. Adamson goes on to venture what exactly fascist rhetoric (or ideology imho) might have herited from those “experiments”. You might be aware of the unending debates on proto-fascism, the sources of fascism, whether Action Francaise was fascist and so. Those sometimes feel like coué rehashing or like academic feuds. Here instead we have a commited work of focused case study which in my eyes, do more to elucidate the relationship between fascism and fin-de-sciècle culture than most of Sternhell’s indictements. ...more |
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Oct 02, 2014
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Oct 22, 2014
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Oct 02, 2014
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0816610681
| 9780816610686
| 0816610681
| 3.76
| 470
| 1974
| Sep 18, 1984
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really liked it
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Well that was very slow start; Actually a very slow, painful and dull start: those like me, unfamiliar with the contorted lexicon of marxist critical
Well that was very slow start; Actually a very slow, painful and dull start: those like me, unfamiliar with the contorted lexicon of marxist critical theory, might be tempted to re-shuffle their "to read" pile every time they face this one, which would definitely be a mistake since after the first chapter it turns out to be very much readable! So if you browse the reviews looking for a guiding hand that could encourage you from the other shore, take note: by the end of the second chapter at the latest you will be past the strictest discussions of historicizing and ideology critique, and enter the more welcoming homeland of art theory proper. What of the book itself then? Chances are, if you have any interest in the avant-gardes, you are already indirectly familiar with Burger's theory: in fact, although he does not feel the need trace it, there is within the avant-garde corpus itself many an example of art turning into life. The crux of the argument goes something like this: Art is not a perennial category, but what qualifies as art, and a forteriori as good art, is defined and conditioned by the world at large. Whereas in the middle-ages, art was subservient of other fields, in particular religion, it has subsequently evolved towards autonomy, that is it has ceased to be limited in the contents considered worthy of representation: from being restricted to religious themes, it evolves towards the representation of political power during the Renaissance, and with the rise of the bourgeois societies and the revolutions, it reaches an autonomous status proper. What this means is that rather than being restricted in its subjects and methods, art, left to its own devices, becomes increasingly concerned with itself; Art about art, art for art's sake. Burger's original contention is that the apex of this process, the "turning point", he situate not with Baudelaire or the impressionists, but with aestheticism, in which art's autonomy and self-interest comes full circle, leaving the artists with a bitter taste of oblivion and pointlessness in the face of an art entirely withdrawn from the world, yes, fully independent, but also fully disconnected. Enters the avant-garde: the only thing to do from the standpoint of aestheticism is to start a critique of this autonomy, a critique of art itself, as a concept (in Burger's lingo, as an institution) - process which will take the form of a systematic collapsing of the frontiers between art and life itself. Think of the futurist serata, of Duchamp's ready-mades, of all the manifestos, of the narrowing divide between noise and music, of Russian productionism, of the obsession with architecture, and so on. All those quite clearly aim to either bring us to look at the real and see art (Duchamp) or to look at art and lead us to see the real (abolition of the footlights) - if others have seen contradictory tendancies in those two directions, it seems that to Burger both converge in the destruction of art as a category. Art was meant to become indistinguishable from life. In terms of methodology, there is a consistent return to three categories taken to be constitutive of the art institution: function, production and reception, and sometimes a return to form and content. On the whole the "theory of art" Burger takes great pain to justify, constitutes a relatively small section of the 100 pages, and is scarcely illustrated. On the other hand there is plentiful discussion of marxist and hegelian aesthetics, with short but gratifying (at least to the philistines of my ilk!) outlines of the thought of Adorno, Benjamin or Lukacs (despite the regretted absence of such a discussion of Bloch); Those seems to bring little to the argument, set aside I suppose an increased credibility in the marxoid circles, but I found them in a sense to offer a welcome background. At any rate this might well explain the accusation of Burger's being a "theory of the theory of art"... All in all: should you read it? Well if you've read my review so far, probably! Its a bit tough for the first third of the book but gets much easier, and although you might be familiar with many of the concepts here developed, there is a good reason this book is so influential. Beyond the scope of marxist theory (and within too, I suppose!) it does a great job of outlining how much of a break the AG constituted, and offer a very credible explanation of what might have motivated such a shift. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 20, 2014
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Aug 13, 2014
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Jul 20, 2014
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my rating |
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| 4.26
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really liked it
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not set
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Aug 13, 2022
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| 3.95
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it was ok
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not set
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Jun 20, 2020
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| 4.07
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really liked it
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Jan 12, 2019
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Jan 12, 2019
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| 3.48
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it was ok
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not set
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Aug 14, 2018
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| 4.17
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it was ok
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not set
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Apr 30, 2018
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| 4.16
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liked it
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not set
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Apr 30, 2018
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| 3.80
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liked it
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Nov 20, 2017
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Nov 20, 2017
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| 4.31
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really liked it
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May 09, 2017
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May 09, 2017
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| 4.02
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really liked it
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not set
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Mar 18, 2017
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| 4.15
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really liked it
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Feb 11, 2017
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Dec 06, 2016
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| 4.12
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liked it
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Jan 14, 2018
not set
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Nov 20, 2016
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| 3.88
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it was amazing
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Mar 05, 2017
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Nov 18, 2016
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| 4.24
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really liked it
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not set
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Oct 18, 2016
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| 4.28
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it was amazing
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Nov 28, 2016
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Sep 18, 2016
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Jun 26, 2016
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Jun 13, 2016
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| 3.47
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it was ok
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Jan 05, 2020
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Feb 18, 2016
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| 3.98
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really liked it
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not set
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Jan 06, 2015
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| 4.10
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it was amazing
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Oct 30, 2014
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Oct 23, 2014
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| 4.60
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it was amazing
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Oct 22, 2014
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Oct 02, 2014
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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Aug 13, 2014
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Jul 20, 2014
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