1. “Exotic” / “fascinating” / “mysterious” — these are words often used to describe Morocco by American or European visitors.
2. Yet about Morocco they say nothing. Rather, they name only the condition of being in Morocco, of being a foreigner in Morocco, of seeing and not seeing, of hearing and not hearing — the condition of, simply, wanting.
3. They say “I’m in Morocco, bro.”
4. And that, incidentally, is also what Feuerbach said about religion.
I.
“Thy Life, as alone the finite mind can conceive it, is self-forming, self-manifesting Will; this Life, clothed to the eye of the mortal with manifold sensible forms, flows through me and throughout the immeasurable universe of Nature. Here it streams as self-creating and self-forming matter through my veins and muscles and pours out its abundance into the tree, the plant, the grass. Creative life flows forth in one continuous stream, drop on drop, through all forms and into all places where my eye can follow it; it reveals itself to me, in a different shape in each various corner of the universe, as the same power by which in secret darkness my own frame was formed. There, in free play, it leaps and dances as spontaneous activity in the animal and manifest itself in each new form as a new, peculiar, self-subsisting world: the same power which, invisibly to me, moves and animates my own frame. Everything that lives and moves follows this universal impulse, this one principle of all motion, which guides the harmonious convulsion from one end of the universe to other.”
-Fichte, “Faith,” The Vocation of Man (1799)
II.
“Then with his torrents of sharp arrows the wearer of the diadem set a dreadful river flowing on that battlefield: its water was blood from the wounds of weapons on men’s bodies, its foam human fat; broad in current, it flowed very swiftly, terrible to see and to hear. Corpses of elephants and horses formed its banks, the entrails, marrow and flesh of men its mud. Ghosts and great throngs of demons lined its banks. Its waterweed was hair attached to human skulls, its billows severed pieces of armor, as it bore along thousands of bodies in heaps. Fragments of the bones of men, horses, and elephants formed the gravel of that fearful, destructive, hellish river; crows, jackals, vultures and storks, and throngs of carrion beasts and hyenas were approaching its banks from every direction.”
-The Mahabharata, 6.55:120-125
The venerable Bede:
“Thus seems to me, O King, this present life of man on earth in comparison with the time which is unknown to us. It is as if you sat at supper with your ealdormen and thanes in wintertime, and the fire were kindled and the hall warm, and it rained and snowed and stormed without. Then came a sparrow and swiftly flew through the house, and entered through one door and went out by the other. In truth, while he is inside, he is not struck by the winter storm; yet this is but a glancing of an eye and the briefest moment of time; and soon he comes again from winter to winter. So also this life of man appears but for a little while; what goes or or what follows after, we know not.”
1. AccuWeather RealFeel is an equation-based measure of temperature intended to describe the “actual” feeling of temperature in the presence of exacerbating factors which may make it “seem” colder than the real temperature. RealFeel, then, is like windchill, except RealFeel also takes into account other factors such as humidity, cloud cover, the angle of the sun, etc. In essence, it’s a fancier — and AccuWeather-branded — version of windchill.
2. There is absolutely nothing subjective or “unscientific” about either RealFeel or windchill. Consider windchill, for instance.
(a) In normal conditions, you are enclosed as you move in a pocket of warm air insulating your skin from the brunt of the cold air (your “epiclimate”).
(b) Wind, however, has the power of reducing or destroying this epiclimate, thereby allowing for more rapid heat-loss from your body into the air.
(c ) Since the rate of heat-transfer between two bodies is proportional to their difference in temperature, an increased rate of heat-loss due to wind (via advection) corresponds to a larger difference in temperature between your body and the environment than actually exists.
(d) RealFeel works similarly, except that it takes into account other modes of heat-transfer besides air-based advection due to the wind.
(e) Thus, in summary neither RealFeel nor windchill incorporate anything whatsoever that is truly subjective or beyond objective measurement: they are models of heat-transfer which, while they might not take into account every relevant aspect of our physical organism, nonetheless *are* perfectly accurate at modeling what they model — viz., the relationship between temperature and heat-transfer for certain bodies in certain environments.
3. (a) And yet I claim they are a lie. But in what sense? They lie, I contend, to the extent that both windchill and RealFeel make a subjective claim regarding what the weather “really” feels like. Judged by this standard, they both fail — at least in my own experience.
(b) The subjective claim of windchill and RealFeel reliably fails, I suspect, because they are based on bad — or incomplete, to be less judgmental about it — phenomenology. Even if such measures *could* accurately model every relevant aspect of our physical organism in the physical environment we occupy, they still could not tell reliably tell us how cold it will feel for the simple reason that we are a psychological as well as a physical organism.
(c ) The psychological, like the physical, has its own dynamic which must be taken into account by any measure that purports to make a subjective claim about how temperature feels. To that end, here are three semi-speculative critiques of pseudo-subjective measures of temperature.
4. The epiclimate of time. In addition to a literal, physical epiclimate which encloses us — i.e., the gradient of warm or warmer air between our bodies and the environment — we also possess a figurative, psychological epiclimate. Whereas the physical epiclimate is extended through space, the psychological epiclimate is extended through time via memory and anticipation. I *was* warm a few minutes ago, and I *will be* warm in a few more. To the extent I am “still” dwelling in the past and have “already” arrived in the future, I am not cold. I am cold, to be sure, but I am also not yet cold and no longer cold. RealFeel assumes a pure and instantaneous experience of the present, but the present is never fully present for anyone in this way.
5. The homogeneity of the subject. Each spring when the temperatures creep up into the 40s, we bask in what, six months from now, will chill us to the bone. Our springtime selves feel what our falltime selves do not. What terrorizes our cousins in Florida lulls to sleep our penpals in Minnesota. RealFeel presupposes a generic, homogeneous, and history-less subject, but each of us perceives temperature only against the background of his or her particular history of previous experiences of temperature.
6. The inconstancy of temperature as sign. (a) On the one hand, temperature is a thermodynamic measure of some region of the universe. On the other hand, it is a sign for “how cold” something feels. With regard to the first, temperature has a fixed definition and reference, but with regard to the second, it has a meaning that could vary according to what different specific temperatures people happen to associate with different levels of coldness.
(b) To see how the two can come apart, let RealFeel remain the familiar equation-based measure from (1)-(2), but let RealRealFeel by contrast be the the subjective claim of temperature — i.e, what some temperature T under conditions C actually feels like.
(c ) Thus, RealFeel tracks temperature as thermodynamic measure or as theory, whereas RealRealFeel tracks temperature as phenomenological claim or as sign.
(d) Now, let us assume weather conditions are such that RealFeel is below the actual temperature — for instance, it’s windy. However, let us also suppose that conditions are typical (it’s a windy place in the winter).
(f) Yet if those conditions are truly typical (in a certain locale at a time of year, etc.), then RealRealFeel will not be lower than T, but rather exactly T. This is because under those circumstances T will feel like it always and typically feels like.
(g) Likewise, we would get the same result if we assume people are only moved to look up temperature T under some especially notable set of conditions (for instance, say nobody looks up the temperature except when it’s windy). If that is the case, then they will have no reference point for how T “feels” other than the present windy circumstances. Therefore, the RealRealFeel will be T even though the RealFeel is less than T.
The Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1609) relates the history of the Incas from their legendary founding through the arrival of the first Europeans. Its author, Garcilaso de la Vega, was perfectly prepared to produce this history. The child of a Spanish conquistador and a woman from the Incan elite, de la Vega — a sometime soldier, littérateur, and ecclesiastic known as “El Inca” by his contemporaries in Europe — could draw upon both European historiography and the oral tradition of his relatives to write the Royal Commentaries. The resulting text can be appreciated on at least four dimensions.
1. First of all, for its presentation of Incan history and culture “in its own right,” so to speak: that is to say, as a topic intrinsically interesting in itself that need not be pegged to anything external. Coca leaves, golden chains, talking knots, and the Blood of the Sun — these are some memorable details of their civilization. On the level of events, the tragedy of Atahualpa and Huáscar epitomizes the interior history of the Incas.
Viewed from without, the material emblems and particular rituals that stamp any complex civilization appear as brutally random facts born of panic, as haphazard streaks of paint and lines drawn in the sand. Yet viewed from within, these details repose in native splendor, like a drama in its amphitheater. To read the Royal Commentaries is in part to experience the sliding sensation of alternating between two contrary viewpoints, an aesthetic pleasure gained from watching chaos resolve into a world and vice-versa.
2. Second, in addition to the Incan element in its own right, there is visible in de la Vega’s narrative — and here is where it becomes interesting “as a synthesis” — a clear attempt to analogize the spread and growth of the Incan empire over the coastal or other Andean peoples to the Spanish conquest and resulting rule of the Incas themselves. Thus, the Incans are repeatedly represented as enjoying success due to their superior civilization, ethos, and laws. De la Vega legitimates the Incas according to a European standard, even going so far as portray them as disinterested missionaries for a rationalized, sun-based religion out to convert the heathen idol-worshipers around them.
3. Third, to the extent that de la Vega seeks to assimilate the Incas to a European standard, he also puts forward an immanent critique of actually existing European conduct which fell so woefully short of that standard. On the one hand, the Incas represent a kind of civilizing mission, but on the other hand, they carry out that mission largely without violence, winning adherents and subjects through persuasion and diplomacy. They resort to violence with discretion and only when legitimately provoked.
In the Incan mirror polished by de la Vega, the dirty hands of the Spaniards are all too visible. Nestled into the Andean cordillera, de la Vega elaborates an alternative to the savagery and brutality of the Spanish conquest: in the time of the past pluperfect, he hints at a past forgone that is yet also a challenge for the future. Perhaps to this end, de la Vega emphasizes certain practices of Incan government vis-à-vis their own subjects — for instance, appropriating select customs of the subjugated rather than eradicating them outright — in order to influence contemporary Spanish rule.
4. Fourth and finally, there is the synthesis of two cultures in which neither is reconciled to the other, but instead both are suspended in an immiscible solution. This perspective, which centers upon the initial encounters between the Incas and the Spanish, is available to the omniscient reader, though not to the actors themselves. Within it, the events that transpire do so according to an uncanny logic of horror; each of them links up with the next, in harmony and disharmony, both intelligible and unintelligible, a series of terrifying coincidences which only a god could have arranged.
Thus, the Spanish grimly benefit from various Incan prophecies that facilitate their invasion; Huayna Capac’s well-intentioned dying request proves disastrous for his descendants; and, in what must be among the most horrific details of world-history, the residents of Cuzco, inspired by seeing a priest with a cross, decide to brandish crosses en masse before the march of the Spaniards into the city: as if to ward off the Spaniards with the very symbol of their coming, to invoke upon themselves an image of transcendent suffering, and to hoist the flag of complete revolution in a last-ditch attempt at preservation.
“He had shod his horses with silver and gold; he had fought and won, a thousand to one; he had seen with his own eyes and weighed with his own hands the fabulous ransom of Atahualpa, richer than all the treasures of the old world. He knew that masses of white clouds scatter every morning over the crests of the cordillera; but he also knew that they form again every evening. How could he admit that an implacable present had won for all time over his fabulous past? Did he realize even that he himself had been an assassin of grandeur?”
-Introduction by Alain Gheerbrant to the Royal Commentaries of the Incas by Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), regarding Gonzalo Pizarro
1. In connection with the recent murder of twelve people associated with the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the slogan “Je suis Charlie” has circulated over the Internet, as well as over print and social media. For many, it is especially reminiscent of the post-911 sentiment, “nous sommes tous Américains,” which appeared on the front page of Le Monde. The slogan is meant to express solidarity with the victims as well as to signal one’s upholding of the principle of free speech in general. It can be viewed as a latter-day instance of Voltairism: i.e., in the words of the philosophe, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
2. In other words, Je suis Charlie is both an identification and a disidentification. On the one hand, whoever affirms it does not necessarily affirm or endorse as worthwhile the offensive and “blasphemous” content for the publication of which Stéphane Charbonnier and the others were ultimately assassinated. On the other hand, they do affirm as worthwhile the abstract right to publish that content — indeed, the right to publish any such content one pleases. Furthermore, to some extent the magazine Charlie Hebdo itself can be seen as already embodying this contradiction — if we buy into its own self-conception as a satirical organ willing to lash out at any target whatsoever. Thus, to declare Je suis Charlie is meant to signify — no matter how odious or reprehensible “Charlie’s” speech may have been — the sacredness of “his” right to speak and the constitutive role of this right in the society we take ourselves to inhabit. The limit-event at which Charlie Hebdo is violently suppressed marks the point at which he, in normal times so far from salonfähig, becomes everyone’s semblable.
3. Many have critiqued this slogan or proposed alternative slogans in its stead. All of these efforts are valuable and interesting. However, what has gone mostly unnoticed, I think — and what I would like to draw attention to — is its essential vacuity . For the majority who utter it, Je suis Charlie was already and non-controversially true. Contemporary liberalism — in America and in France — is premised on the formal granting of a set of symbolic freedoms, a condition of official multiculturalism, nominal freedom of opportunity, etc., all of which operate in parallel with the material reality of white supremacy, capitalist domination, sexism, and so on. The archetypal liberal subject does not endorse any of these latter “dismal” phenomena; he doesn’t have to. He can simply let spin the whirligig of time and laissez aller: the Ivy League, Grosse Pointe, and East New York are all just things that happened. Indeed, this is the very genius of contemporary liberalism: the way it allows the empty affiliation with what is universal and formal to serve as an alibi for the perpetuation of what is particular and material.
4. The declaration Je suis Charlie, then, declares nothing because it only reiterates the fundamental structure of the contemporary liberal state — a formal universality and official multiculturalism joined at the hip with de facto white supremacy and economic domination, all backed by the police. The dual identification and disidentification contained in the slogan are already those of the liberal subject, who distances himself from the disreputable material processes at work in society even while he upholds the formal structure within which they operate. The sentimental exuberance with which the slogan has been embraced bears witness to its all-too-truthful character. It articulates nothing new and — what is much worse — nothing false. For if it is unnecessary and redundant for most to actually assert Je suis Charlie Hebdo, it is also not wrong. To be a liberal subject is already to be Charlie Hebdo ex officio.
In honor of the New Year, I present this list of “anti-prophecies” – prophecies that won’t come true. Prepare for disappointment.
A Western-led consortium of technologists, capitalists, and statesmen will collaborate in a series of market-friendly policies that will curb environmental damage and begin to reverse Global Warming.
Gentrification will occur in a way that improves depressed neighborhoods without displacing their original residents or altering their character.
MOOC’s offer a convenient and effective mode of education whose adoption will revolutionize education for the better, expanding access to education-consumers and empowering education-providers.
The Israel-Palestine conflict will come to a just, equitable, and lasting conclusion thanks to the heroic efforts of visionary statesmen and diplomats, many of them educated by the Ivy League.
Occupy Wall Street will have profound effects upon the economic policies of the United States, spurring real reforms that will diminish the power of corporations in politics, promote a more just distribution of wealth, and rekindle a spirit of political activism in all walks of life.
The Internet will provide permanent solutions to a host of social and economic problems, promoting happiness and creating value by means of innovative technology and visionary sharing-based solutions.
The American drone-base in Niamey, Niger, will be a beacon of peace and security which will improve the lives of those living in the region.
Attention from social media as well as a clutch of think pieces from far-sighted journalists in major American publications will lead to a serious decline in police brutality and the gradual dismantling of the prison-industrial complex.
Thomas Piketty’s proposal of a global wealth-tax — having convinced a sufficient number of statesmen and concerned citizens from around the world — will be enacted by democratic means, thereby lessening inequality and forestalling social and civilizational unrest.
Silicon Valley’s culture of entrepreneurship, innovation, and disruption will continue to inspire Americans and contribute to the life and vigor of the nation.
A visionary package of legislative tweaks to existing immigration law will safeguard our borders, protect immigrants, and bolster the economy.
Small behavioral modifications and positive thinking on the part of the oppressed will effect structural change in non-violent, yet sweeping, ways.
We will win the War on Terror.
We will win the War on Drugs.
We will win the War on Poverty.
The universe will last forever and is full of nice things and people.
“For children have come to the birthstool, and there is no strength to give birth.” (2 Kings 19:5)
1. This blog post summarizes and extends some thoughts I had after watching Salò (1975) for the first time, a couple months ago. As I began to reflect on the remarks I would make on the film Sweet Movie (1974) — screened as part of the Philosophy and Film Series at the University of Pennsylvania — they once again seemed relevant. This is because both films, Salò and Sweet Movie, are alike in their presentation of extreme content as part of an explicitly artistic agenda. This agenda, in turn, might be viewed as placing certain demands on the “conscientious” viewer — namely, to fully experience the extreme content of the film regardless of how disgusted or uncomfortable it makes him or her. Finally, the thoughts contained in this post are also closely connected with some ideas I’ve long nurtured about a theory of the “scene” (as opposed to the shot or frame) as the essential unit of film.
2. A salient aspect of my viewing experience of Salò was that I didn’t actually watch all of it. When I felt like it, I would close my eyes or look away. Maybe once or twice I left the room to get a drink. Thus, I “missed” — or at the very least received an incomplete experience of — some of the more hyper-violent or copraphiliac sequences in the film. At first, I considered my behavior a form of copping out. Was I not depriving myself of the “full” experience of the film, or “failing” to meet the work on its own terms, in favor of my own in-the-moment feelings of comfort? Would it not have been more “virtuous” to have spared myself nothing? On reflection, however, I approve of what I did. In fact, I would like to defend the larger viewing practice of which it is a part, which I will call “closed-eye aesthetics.” To the question, “Are you still watching a film if your eyes are closed?” — closed-eye aesthetics responds, “Yes!” — or better yet, “They were never open.”
3. Closed-eye aesthetics permits a regime of partial self-censorship according to self-determined criteria. However, such a viewing practice arguably recapitulates the immanent principles of editing and montage already at work in Salò. On Pasolini’s part, this “self-censorship” is most apparent during the hyper-violent sequence that closes the film. While the four friends take turns watching the violence at a distance through a telescope, the camera alternates back and forth between the telescope-POV and and the scene at the mansion. Thus, our view — the view of the viewer — alternates between viewing the voyeurs and viewing the view of the voyeurs.
4. This voyeur-contrivance mediates the incredibly shocking violence administered by the four friends. We are continually reminded of the fact of our own spectatorship rather than being allowed simply and self-forgetfully to remain in that condition. In addition, all sound from the scene of violence has been muted: we see, but cannot hear, the Laocoon-like screams of the victims. Likewise, Pasolini arranges the cuts and jerks of the camera in such a way as to “elide” many of the more gruesome moments, which are implied but not exhibited. The shots that remain feature a “beautiful,” painterly composition, enframed by the telescope and overlaid with a distinctive visual “tone” — in sum, the violence cannot help but be “aestheticized” in the very course of its depiction.
5. In this way Pasolini withdraws from view the same violence he puts on view, and for the viewer to comport himself or herself likewise is in every way faithful to the spirit of Salò. Closed-eye aesthetics, therefore, is neither dismissive nor censorious of the content of a film: it respects it without, however, ceding to the director an imaginary and tyrannical right to dictate every detail of the film’s reception.
6. The opposite of closed-eye aesthetics is clockwork-orange aesthetics: this view of film demands the complete and total absorption of the viewer in the film. Clockwork-orange aesthetics rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of film-viewing. It presupposes for a model that of imbibing with one’s eyes an absolute presence of film, but this is inherently impossible.
(a) The distance between viewer and image is a requirement of the technology of projection and the biology of vision. This form of mediation, like the distance between the camera and its object, cannot be abolished.
(b) Most films are projected at 24 frames-per-second; thus, they are filled with discontinuous gaps that mar the dream of film as absolute presence. Even could this limitation be objectively overcome, our eyes and brain would be unable to keep up. We see almost nothing and conjecture the rest.
© The focus of our gaze is unevenly distributed at all times, shifting back and forth from one part of the frame to another. Our attention, like all our involvements, is necessarily partial and particular — as Aristotle claims of all perception and action. The world as we know it is a tissue of surmise and guesswork cobbled together from partialities.
(d) The totalizing ambitions of clockwork-orange aesthetics that would make film into an absolute presence founder on the basic facts of our situatedness in the world. Thus, there will always be stray looks away from the screen and trips to the kitchen to fix oneself a drink.
7. If not absolute presence, then what? Proximity. To watch a film is to be in proximity to it. To close your eyes does not nullify the condition of proximity, but only satisfies it in a different way. It is as ultimately impossible to transcend one’s proximity to art in favor of its complete, Cronus-like, ingestion as it is to escape from art entirely into a pure and untroubled life.
1. What’s key about Godard’s use of 3D is that it makes no claim whatsoever to have resolved the world into a pristine clarity; there is no “really real” that suddenly comes into focus, vibrant and fresh, such that we can take an ocular relief in its pure legibility and transparency.
2. Rather, the intervening space between viewer and viewed returns with a vengeance. The world as we encounter it is now stranger than it was before, more opaque and differently so, richer and yet less trustworthy. The visual properties of opacity and clarity trade their symbolic valuations. What is opaque becomes clear, and what is clear becomes a mystery.
3. Godard’s use of 3D — estranging, bewildering — may be called “realist” to the extent that it accurately captures our experience of being-in-the-world. However, this is far from the naive realism commonly associated with 3D. Godard captures the world in its confusingness and ambiguity — the latter a value Bazin once thought essential both to the experience of the world and, in a different way, the film-form itself.
4. What was the movie about? No idea. I feel pretty confident I didn’t understand it. I’m not enough of a Godardian to properly situate it against his preceding films, except to say that it seems to be participating in a series or tradition of Godardian “romances” in which the romance is a vehicle — an intimate, supercharged forum where subjects may speak out their being — for the exploration of other topics closer to Godard’s heart.
5. What was the movie about? All I can do is convey the general sense I had after watching it. The movie was about: Can two free beings be together? — and for how long? Under what conditions can language exist? — and for how long?
