On Deracialization

 

https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/deracialization-now

The author, Greg Thomas, claims we conflate race and culture and they’re entirely or at least functionally or practically separable from each other and that for all of us deracialization is in order. What’s wanted is a rooted cosmopolitanism. Thomas says he is rooted in the culture, traditions and history of his people but he proceeds now in self identification as a citizen or the world but with roots in the culture of his “milieu,” his “idiomatic group”:

—————-

“Deracialization can be achieved while maintaining allegiance to specific idioms and practices that derive from cultural, ethnic, religious, and ancestral identifications. I know this is true because I myself have enacted this perspective by remaining rooted in an Afro-American cultural milieu via my family, close friends, and associates as well as the blues, jazz, gospel, and other forms and artifacts of expression distinctive to my idiomatic group. Yet I’m also a citizen of the wider world, as cosmopolitan as jazz itself has become. I’m willing to venture that there are many others in the U.S. and elsewhere who would take to heart a stance of “rooted cosmopolitanism” and discard the idea of race, the practice of racialization (as it exists on the census form for eg.) 

————

My first thought is that as things now stand self consciousness of race or ethnicity is ineradicable nor need it be eradicated in our private spaces even as I think “race and state” should be separated. 

And my thought is also that Afro-American cultural milieu” is inextricably bound up with the self consciousness of race and it’s not conflating culture and race to think so. They’re inextricable if one seeks self meaning from his heritage. Instead of deracialization or de-ethnicizing oneself, the better view, I’d think, is simply (or not so simply) not to be reductive or essentialist about it. Thomas, I think, is having it both ways, clinging to what he professes to be jettisoning from his sense of  himself.

Sent from my iPad

Analysis Of The Gambler (With James Caan)

1. I haven’t done this in a while. 

So here goes. 

I watched the last half of (James Caan) The Gambler. 

My estimation of it increased as I watched it to its end.

2. It’s ultimately a dark, upsetting film relentlessly tracing the descending arc of an emotionally crippled, neurotically driven, perverse man, Axel Freed.

3. It shows his addicted gambling to be an unreal abstraction informed by a bullshit sophomoric psychology/philosophy.

4. His idea is that picking winners is too easy. 

He picks losers because that has him dancing with loss and (somehow) testing his ability to will impending loss into victory.

5. The utter incoherence of this way of him seeing his gambling finds its equivalent in the sophomoric lectures Freed gives to his NYC literature class in big part on the theme that we can will two and two into being other than four.

6. Freed is a literature professor teaching at a New York City university. But this is so unrealistically depicted as to be but an unreal prop as meaningless as his addiction, as what drives it and as foolish as the content of his lectures.

7. We never see him preparing for a class or anything else that evidences what goes into teaching. 

He simply drops what he’s doing when it’s time and goes to teach his class. 

It’s artificially done and is a flaw in the film.

8. Caan’s acting is good. 

He effectively conveys the full repulsiveness and diseased impulsivity of Freed. 

Lauren Hutton, his girl friend, by contrast, is wooden.

She fails to make her character come alive.

9. Caan’s character is coherent as is his progression through the movie. 

It lays naked his bullshit personal credo by depicting his degenerating self destruction, which involves him repudiating that credo and becoming corrupt and corrupting.

10. He gets deeper into debt and, so, into trouble with the mobsters tied to his incessant gambling.

This even when he has means to absolve himself.

He loses the money he coerces his mother, a doctor, to give him, $44,000.00.

And he loses his hot streak Las Vegas winnings.

11. In the end Freed fails to live up to his jousting with loss and to will loss into victory. 

Near physical danger by the mobster he’s indebted to, Freed betrays any pretence of honour.

He agrees to corrupt a basketball player in his class by getting him to shave points.

12. In fact, that he really can’t live up to his own code is foreshadowed by coercing his mother to bail him out of debt and is after-shadowed by whining in disappointment to his wealthy grandfather for refusing to bail him out of subsequent debt.

13. When Lauren Hutton stands statue stiff as he tries sexually to coax her into responding to him, two and two stay adding to four despite what Freed wills.

He’s left mired in utter humiliating futility, as if embracing and kissing a fencepost. 

Finally, he just walks away.

14. In a near to final scene, Freed doesn’t know till the last minute whether the bought basketball player will shave the points.

He does.

But Freed then learns it’s not one and done.

He and the player will have to do more on pain of pain.

The mob has its hooks into them.

15. In a culmination of Freed’s perverse self loathing and degenerate self destruction, he gets into a vicious fight with a pimp, whose whore has dissatisfied Freed. 

While he’s beating the shit out of the pimp, taking his self hatred out on him, she slashes Freed across his face.

16. In the last scene, after staunching  the bleeding, Freed staggers to a mirror.

He smiles in perverse satisfaction at his bloody scarred face.

It’s the apotheosis of his sick self destruction, a perverse anti redemption of triumphant self punishment at his own putrid emptiness.

17. Freed temporarily expiates his fury with himself, sprung from finally seeing clearly what a scum he actually is.

18. My judgment is that The Gambler isn’t about a gambler or gambling. 

It’s more centrally about a mentally-diseased, intellectual-type man who acts out his pathetic neuroses and self-destructiveness through the medium of gambling.

19. Finally, Freed repudiates gambling by complicity in fixing games. 

His credo has shattered like a thin glass pane. 

His anti redemption is his perverse pleasure in the evidentiary visibility of being severely facially slashed, desirable punishment expiating self hatred.

20/20. And in the end, no one lives happily ever after.

The End

Notes On 2022 Film, Causeway

 I haven’t done this in a while. So here goes. 

Just saw 2022’s Causeway. 

Spoilers alert. 

Mixed feelings. 

Wonderful acting in an engaging, never boring, small movie. 

Theme, most broadly, is finding a bit of human meaning amidst pervasive personal tragedy and chaos. 1

But film punks out in many places that makes it seem contrived. Some of them: 

Glides through too slickly, ie contrives, Jennifer Lawrence’s recovery from severe Afghanistan war injuries. 

Can’t resist, while not wanting to glamorize her, showing off her body in scenes of her 2

…in bra and skimpy panties. 

Uses her lesbianism to simplify and make less vexing her relationship with car mechanic Brian Tyree Henry. 

We never find out exactly what JL’s mother has done to disappoint her yet once more. 3

How is that BTH, running an auto repair business, always has time to come running anytime JL needs some help or company?

I get why he’s traumatized by having been in a car accident that cost his young nephew, Antoine, his life and has forever estranged BTH from his sister, 4

Antoine’s mother, also in the car. But the locus of his guilt over this is that he let Antoine, just a kid, sit in the front passenger seat over his mother’s objection. This as the basis for perpetual moral self flagellation makes little sense and is of a peace with the movie 5

not wanting to confront searing wrong doing, like, say, if he’d driven drunk. We’re told he’d had but two beers. 

Of course, we have the anticipated scene we know is inevitable —the acrimonious, enraged shouting match between JL and BTH, when they bore into each other’s 6

weaknesses, self deceptions and self evasions. It’s a contrived set piece that comes across as something scripted rather than what JL and BTH are genuinely saying. 

The culmination of all this contrivance is BTH telling JL that she speaks as if her brother is dead, 7

always in the past tense. This comes as shock to her. “He’s not dead,” she exclaims. “He’s a druggie and dealer in prison,” she explains. 

A problem with with all this is that nothing in the movie supports this. It’s just imposed on us by it being said. 8

In violation of rules for fiction writing 101, we’re told this, not shown it. So in the penultimate scene, JL shocked into self revelation, sees her brother in jail. Naturally, he’s mute. They sign lovingly. He’s beatific, smilingly happy to see her, sorry for her travails, and 9

topper, at peace with himself, happy in jail, the best place for him, he signs, given his drug habit. 

It’s so unrealistic as to be self parodic to the point of silliness.

Over-egging the release from unflagging personal misery pudding is what this scene and film come to. 10

I give the film 5.5/10.

My Defence of Liberal Democracy And Liberalism On Twitter

 

The Böckenförde Dilemma” is a little out of my price range. But thanks for your responses. I’ll try my best to offer a few thoughts at a better moment.

I approached this issue differently. Not to say, liberalism—and to be more precise liberal democracy—is founded on science, not to consider origins. Rather to say, when looking at all types of regimes empirically, how they have fared socially, 1

…how they have fared materially, both collectively and individually within them, which are most conducive to individual flourishing, liberal democracy on the *evidence* has produced the best results, however fraught, imperfect and problematic. 2

This is Frances Fukuyama’s argument in The End Of History And The Last Man, as he distinguishes between History and history. Liberal democracy accommodates all the variations on it within its fundamental markers. And it is, he argues, the culmination of History as History. 

The “Böckenförde Dilemma,” as you’ve defined it, doesn’t seem to the point. It makes the admitted fragilities and imperfections of liberal democracy the enemy of it—as in the perfect being the enemy of the good—as a good regime, as in the idea of “two cheers for it, but what’s the alternative?” 4

5/5 

Finally, I like this characterization of the ethos of liberalism by Alexander Meiklejohn:

Where does liberalism claim to be founded on science as opposed to being in its ideal or principled workings analogous to science in trying in policy to see what works, discarding what doesn’t and keeping what evidence tells us does, till it doesn’t? 1

I don’t know what it means to say science is grounded on a mechanical philosophy, save that its province is the way things are, what effects issue from which causes as a matter or falsifiable evidence. You may be conflating science with scientism. 2

When you fly in a plane, take an effective vaccine—two of infinite examples—you have examples of science, as opposed to scientism, proving itself. 3

Respectfully, your view, if I have it correctly, that Fukuyama erred from the jump may rest on a misconception of his work that I alluded to. He never claimed history ends. 4

Of course it goes on. His argument is that History understood as an overarching view of human development resolves itself in Liberalism. That can be argued with but he’s not saying history ends. 5

.

You quite misread me. My stance is neither utilitarian or metaphysical. Liberalism as opposed to utilitarianism seeks to balance in policy what is thought good for all with the value of individual liberty. 6

In its airier analysis, utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, what conduces most to collective happiness, becomes so abstract as to be impossible strictly to apply. 7

8. There is nothing metaphysical in, as did Fukuyama, assessing all polities throughout history and concluding liberal democracy is superior when judged by the criteria I’ve mentioned. Nor have you told me what political vision is superior to it, again for all its imperfections.

9. Science’s success in materially improving our lives, reducing dread diseases, reducing poverty, eliminating or shrinking the vectors of human immiseration is a profound excellence. Not to be gainsaid. Morality and spirituality are not science’s prerogatives.

10/10 Material improvement in our lives offers us the best basis for individual flourishing, fulfilling our best capacities as we see them. There is no utopia here, no discounting of our perils and flaws. But of everything going, on the evidence, liberal democracy is our best shot. 

I’ll stop so not to re-repeat myself. In sum, people are “happiest” in liberal democracies, where others wish to be. We’re not talking past each other. I’ve made an evidenced-based case for their relative superiority. Noting our ills is no answer. Thanks for the civil exchange.

Ok 1 more. “Failed miserably” compared to what? If the best places to be are liberal democracies, then that ends the argument. You offer no better place or polity and may be too quick to dismiss, as noted, progress in reducing immiseration. Truly now, my last words. Thanks again.

More On Wrong Answers In Art And Related Matters

 Me:

I try to get out and they pull me back in: :-)

 …art is a subjective communication between the artist, the artwork and the observer…

I guess everything is a subjective communication when communication occurs. It’s among, in your terms, the communicator, the communicatee and the content of the communication.

But isn’t it more than that? The content if coherent has discrete meaning. The meaning may in its coherence be purposefully ambiguous or clear. What you say to me, in or out of school, isn’t just reducible to how I take it, my subjectivity in relation to what you say. I may in all my subjectivity simply mistake what you’re saying. 

It’s similar when the triad is literary artist, his work and the reader. The work isn’t reducible, in or out of school, to what the reader thinks of it. The reader, in and out of school, can be wrong, Who’s to say? Objective reality is to say. A proficient consensus in the art can say even as that consensus a little like the scientific understanding of something may be provisional, as new insights come along. Still, for all that provisionality in literary criticism, what’s wrong in the reading of a text is indeed falsifiable by the evidence of the text. The crude example I originally gave of Lear as kind of fatalistic comedy as in, “O well, shit happens. Let’s move on.” is objectively wrong. Anyone who thinks that of Lear is wrong. In school or out.

I say this particularly in relation to literature because it’s made up of words. There are different things to be said about the other arts.

If you disagree with all this, then that’s where we substantively disagree.

And Me:

You can restrict yourself to this threesome. But why do that when the issue, subjectivity’s trump outside of school grading, reaches beyond that triad, as I’ve argued?

In theory, and I stress in theory, the author’s intention is just another opinion about his work. Once it’s released, his creation has an autonomous existence and belongs to the world. Another may understand the work better than its creator, see elements and relations among the parts, see more deeply into the characters and their conflicts, see the poetry of the language, the imagery, symbolism, and mythic patterns and resonances and so on, better than the author. As a practical matter what the author says he intended of course counts, but it’s not determinative. 

A friend once sent me a poem he’d written and I made a point about it that arose concretely from the poem, ie, it wasn’t fanciful, and he said that that simply hadn’t occurred to him.

A nice analogy here is the legal theory of originalism. In its early modern conception, it held that constitutional and statutory language had to be understood in light of what the drafters intended. Most of this involved getting into dead peoples’ heads. The potent refinement involved replacing that surmising exercise with the communicative content or the language in question, the exploration of which has roots deep in historical usage and linguistic analysis. There’s a lot more to be said about originalism but for the point I’m making about literary works and authorial intention, this will suffice.

In the innovation in academic literary criticism in mid twentieth century called the New Criticism, which was the critical doctrine I studied literature under, the argument at its extreme was precisely that you don’t need historical context to get the work. In its autonomous existence, you need to attend to its aesthetic properties to get it, needing scholarship only to explain language and historical archaisms where necessary, like the explanatory footnotes in an edition of a Shakespeare play. There’s a lot to this idea but taken too far it becomes reductive because it crowds out contexts that facilitate and enrich understanding. But it’s my position that they’re usually secondary, however helpful, to the analysis of the work by means of its own aesthetic properties. I’ll agree that exceptions exist. Guernica may well be one. I don’t think For Whom the Bell Tolls is. Portraits that are now part of the visual art canon aren’t either, I’d argue.

So, I’m of two minds about your saying without context we can’t fully access the work and what the artist was trying to communicate. Appreciating the Mona Lisa is helped I agree by knowing the circumstances of its creation and how da Vinci’s life may form part of those circumstances. But, on my view of intention, all  those circumstances bow to looking hard and knowingly at the work and thereby seeing what’s in it and how and what it projects. So while history and biography help, the truly indispensable context is the larger aesthetic tradition, its principles and techniques, within which da Vinci worked.

T.S. Eliot in his famous seminal essay Tradition and the Individual Talent argues for and explores the tradition in which the literary artist works and the reciprocal relation between it and his individual work both, if you will, dialectically affecting each other and finding synthesis in what the new work brings to the tradition. Harold Bloom overdoes and romanticizes this point in his argument that great literary artists create under an anxiety of influence.

So I disagree that one can’t understand the examples you cite without knowing the history that gives them particular moment. If great art is universal, as I think it is, then one without the historical understanding of your examples, may understand the works better than someone who has it but has a lesser aesthetic appreciation of what’s comprising the work. And one without the historical understanding and without the refined critical eye may yet still feel the emotional power of the works more fully than the former two. Ideally, that’s how artistic criticism of a kind ought go, the engaged experience compelling the individual and then the individual, if he wants to, thinking about and analyzing the work to get at its meaning and its means.

So all this said, I’ll just restate my point, a work will be best understood by the best understanding and apprehension of its content, in or out of school. School translates engaging art into a discipline. And in or out of school, a work’s content demands to be respected, demands to be adhered to, and in its particularity, ie, its parts adding up to its coherent fullness, it provides the ground for judging what is right and what is wrong in the engaged’s articulation of his subjective response.

On Wrong Answers In Art

S:

I’m trying to make a much simpler point.  It’s a test of knowledge.  The student is entitled to his own subjective opinion but not to his own subjective ‘knowledge’ if his interpretation of the key thereof Lear say is different from the curriculum being tested (and surely the key theme of Lear would be on the course curriculum) he fails the question whatever his interpretation.  That’s different than art.

So maybe I’m hung up on the particular exam example.  

The saying went about the notoriously difficult CFA examination, that there’s a right answer, there’s a wrong answer, and there’s the CFA Institute answer.  Even if you thought you had the right answer, you only got credit for the CFA Institute answer

Me:

Not clear on your simpler point.

In the domains I know best, law and literature, what counts as knowledge and what’s being “tested” qua grading—for literature probably starting in the senior high school grades and then up—is not so much knowledge in the sense of answering fact based questions. What’s wanted is the ability to interpret the taught texts, ie, interpretive ability. 

Now you could argue that since in the study of cases or works you’re taught what the cases stand for and what works may mean so that all that then becomes knowledge. So on exams to be able to give that information/knowledge back in a workmanlike way will get you a workmanlike grade. 

There’s something to that.

But in neither discipline is it quite that straightforward. 

In law school exams, you’re typically given fact situations that you analyze with what the cases says. You show your ability pretty quickly to apply the cases. Competent students will spot the issues that then provide them with a means of showing they understand the cases. A better student’s analysis will be sharper, subtler and more incisive. A superior student might have fresh insights or will be able to put the principles together in very creative ways.

Literature exams I are more on point to the point I’m trying to argue, which is that in art, interpretation can be distinguished from factual knowledge and can be erroneous.

Typically, English exams ask students to discuss work(s) given a certain general proposition or to compare works from a certain point of view. Classroom discussion will hopefully help students understand the works well enough to meet the challenge of discussing them from new perspectives on the spot. 

When English students are graded on essays, they will have to—among other things—at a minimum offer a supported view of work(s) coming with a plausible range of what they might mean. It’s entirely possible and not uncommon that As might be given to opposing interpretations of a work. 

To make a long story shorter, in both disciplines students will do poorly or fail if what they say about the material, the cases or the literary works, is so off base, so insupportable, that it’s WRONG—with emphasis on wrong—and not only wrong but I argue objectively wrong. 

So I don’t think schools testing and grading about taught works is different from apprehending art. This testing and grading in is, in my opinion, a more rigorous, focussed example of what people do when they informally discuss art.

 For behind those discussions is texts’ demand that they be respected by being adhered to and, so, not distorted. In such discussions typically no arbiters, expert in the work, tell the discussants the way it is. To be clear, the way it is can accommodate a wide variety of views, but in principle will oust views that are plain wrong.

If English professors are worth their salt, there will be no one right answer as to the meaning of a work, but there can be plenty of wrong answers.

An Argument For The Excellence Of Neneh Cherry’s Singing Trouble Man

 Trouble Man 

Marvin Gaye

I come up hard baby, but now I'm cool

I didn't make it sugar, playin' by the rules

I come up hard baby, but now I'm fine

I'm checkin' trouble sugar, movin' down the line

I come up hard baby, but that's okay

'Cause Trouble Man, don't get in my way

I come up hard baby, I've been for real, baby

Gonna keep movin', gonna go to town

I come up hard, I come up gettin' down

There's only three things that's for sure

Taxes, death and trouble, oh

This I know, baby, this I know, sugar

Girl, ain't gon' let it sweat me, babe

Got me singin', yeah, yeah

Woo

Come up hard, baby, I had to fight

Took care my business with all my might

I come off har- come-off-hard, I had to win

Then start all over and win again

I come up hard but that's okay

'Cause Trouble Man don't get in my way, hey, hey

I know some places and I've seen some faces

I got good connections, they take my directions

What people say, that's okay, they don't bother me, no

I'm ready to make it, don't care what the weather

Don't care 'bout no trouble, got myself together

I feel the kind of protection that's all around me

I come up hard, baby, I've been for real, baby

With the trouble mind, I'm movin', goin' to town

I come up hard, I come up gettin' down

There's only three things for sure

Taxes, death and trouble, oh

This I know, baby, ooh, this I've known, baby

Ain't gon' let it sweat me, baby 

Woo

Oh Lord, baby

Ooh, I've come up hard, but now I'm cool

I didn't make it, baby, playin' by the rules

Come up hard, baby, now I'm fine

I'm checkin' trouble, sugar, hey, movin' down the line, oh

Two different versions:

Trouble Man, Marvin Gaye, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kduvcqx-BU

by Neneh Cherry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PufNx9X-lsc

8/1/22

“My argument to someone for Neneh Cherry’s version as able to stand on the same level of excellence as Marvin Gaye’s:

“ I’m making a different point, if I’m understanding you.

Job cries out in anguish.

This song is also about anguish, Trouble Man, and about dealing with it and struggling to get past it. It’s about the struggle against it, which is rooted in the recognition of what that trouble has been, will be again and always will be. And in that recognition there is pain. 

… I come up hard baby, but that's okay

'Cause Trouble Man, don't get in my way…

…I come up hard, baby, I've been for real, baby

With the trouble mind, I'm movin', goin' to town…

What Neneh Cherry uniquely conveys in her reading is what that anguish is like, that coming up hard, for real, that “trouble mind.”

And she captures effectively too the complicated hope tinged with desperation that troubled man can stay ahead, stay out, of trouble in the sped up part of the song

…I know some places and I've seen some faces

I got good connections, they take my directions

What people say, that's okay, they don't bother me, no

I'm ready to make it, don't care what the weather

Don't care 'bout no trouble, got myself together

I feel the kind of protection that's all around me…

You can hear the hope, hustle, jive and desperation in these lines, which in being sped up quite dramatically convey the need to move quickly to stay ahead of everything that’s trouble and troubling, which will always be chasing him. These lines can’t be seen as separate from the pain of the trouble and its constant potential to inflict itself.

He’s reassuring himself as much as he’s reassuring “baby,” “sugar.”

The tentativeness and impermanence  of his now being cool is evident in his need to keep “movin' down the line, oh.”

So, in sum, it’s the coming up hard, the trouble, what’s been for real, the certainty and inescapable constancy of death, taxes and trouble, the need each time to start all over and fight to win again, his trouble mind, it’s all of that aspect of the song, in tension with his determination to keep beating it all time after time, that she uniquely conveys in her singing with, as I originally said, a Job like resonance.

Or so I argue.”