“the fact that it was particular, reduced to a happy few, whereas it should have been universal, for everybody.”
“We realized through all this that was singled out was the classic intellectual. Part of the revolt centered around the classic intellectual.”
https://youtu.be/_g8JVK4Fppw?t=243
Introduction
Jean-Paul Sartre’s influence on political philosophy shaped much of post-war France and the tenuous power sharing relationship between De Gaulle and the PCF coalition government. Some say there are two Sartres- one of his early year up to the conclusion of WWII, and a post-war Sartre. Analysis will show a running thread of three Sartres, one of a philosopher, a critic of dialectic materialism, and an anarchist.
https://jacobin.com/2021/08/jean-paul-sartre-anti-imperialism-colonialism-france-politics
https://theinterestingtimes.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-virtue-signaling (parallels of virtue signalling and bad faith )
“Here I am referring to the notion of authenticity which forms a central axis in the works of existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus. From the existentialist perspective life’s ‘purpose’ is to live and express oneself authentically. Though I would hazard that most people bandying about the term virtue signaler are not conscientiously channeling the ideas of Sartre, I do think this notion of authenticity lies at the heart of such accusations.”
https://www.thecollector.com/jean-paul-sartre-hell-is-other-people/
An earlier pre-cursor to bad faith could be traced to John Galt (the Scottish writer, not the fictional Atlas Shrugged character) in his 1821 Annals of the Parish :
“Micah Balwhidder, considered to be the finest character created by Galt, reveals himself in the fictional first-person account to have human failings including conceit and vanity, as well as a keen interest in how the economy prospers. The book provides a humorous and realistic account of a typical parish minister of the late 18th and early 19th century, the way of life in rural Scotland, and the social changes of the Industrial Revolution.[1]
…“In 1794 people of the parish favouring radical Jacobins emulating the reforms of the French Revolution become insolent and divided from the gentry, whose pride prevented them from showing any affability to these democrats. Concerned by this division, Balwhidder noted “a bruit and a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the other disguises with which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself the charity, brotherly love, and welldoing inculcated by our holy religion”. He preached to his congregation that he “thought they had more sense than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians; for that it would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserved, seeing that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all in morals and manners to which the newfangled doctrine of utility pretended."[3]” (Chapter 35 )
https://jacobin.com/2023/05/jean-paul-sartre-existential-marxism-history-political-philosophy :
“For Sartre, the practico-inert tends to imply the alienation of subjective freedom, whereas praxis is the moment at which agency — even agency that can lead to greater political emancipation or a socialist revolution — becomes possible. Any such agency begins at an individual level and can then extend to groups. Sartre gives the example of a spontaneously forming group in the streets of Paris at the time of the storming of the Bastille in 1789. This type of group, which Sartre calls the “group in fusion,” is a moment of unalienated, intersubjective solidarity.
However, Sartre believes that on many other occasions when individuals exist in groups, the relations between them and others around them are alienated ones. They find themselves ensnared in “serial praxis,” in which the other is an obstacle rather than an aid to their freedom. Sartre gives another example of people standing in a bus queue: the presence of others further up the queue implicitly pits my freedom against that of others, as opposed to encouraging relations of reciprocity and solidarity between us.”
These writings reveal Sartre’s conditional leanings away from Marxism and towards the indidividual philosophy in the abstract and the praxis of anarchism.
In my own interpretation, acting as the political scientist, his words examine individuals and groups as if they are chemicals in a beaker. Inert, non-bonding noble gases, represent the anarchist individual who does not readily undergo chemical bonding with other atoms (persons). In soluble chemistry, “a suspension is a heterogeneous mixture in which the solid particles do not dissolve, but get suspended throughout the bulk of the solvent, left floating” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_(chemistry)
The solution represents a fused-group, one that is more or less a single entity (e.g. a political party, and organization, a coordinated government, or any other group acting in unison). The suspended mixture and the precipitation both depict individual solids, the same way individual freedoms are inalienable- existence precedes essence (interpellation/objectivization/subjectivization). In practice, a bus stop might represent a precipitation, where individual freedoms are not exercised due to shared interests, but in a passively waiting state. This changes when the realization that a bus arrival is delayed and/or cancelled, causing some of the individuals to disperse/make other plans.
An additional examination will compare Le Mur (1939) “The Wall” to a time-dependent game theory. The Prisoner’s dilemma, represents a similar example of decision making, but one with prescribed outcomes. As will be later described, the absurdist survival of Pablo represents Deus ex machina-like fluke of the prisoner’s dilemma quadrant, one that adds multivariable to the integral f(x)= t-20(8AM), where t represents the 20 seconds prior to the deadline that the Pablo needed to wait before playing the clown, as, confessing any earlier than 20 seconds (e.g. 40 seconds), would prompt the dispatchers to arrive too early to spot Ramon arriving at the cemetery to hide, and believing they were fooled, return to carry out the sentence before Ramon hypothetically arrives at the cemetery. In that sense, the prisoners dilemma is time-sensitive.
An indoor scenario could also be true. If both Pablo and Ramon were captured as suspects to a capital crime (e.g. being the anonymous leader of an illegal political party) that only Ramon committed, but the authorities do not yet know the perpetrator, and, not having time to coordinate their responses, they would have no way to protect the interests of the other (except listening and speaking in code through walls and plumbing). Pablo, rather than stay silent (which could result in a lesser sentence or even freedom), decides to take the blame for Ramon by confessing to an act he didn’t commit, in effect, attempting to sacrifice himself as in Le Mur. Assume Pablo also had a deadline of a morning. In the act of waiting til the last minute, he gestures falsely that he is the leader of the illegal group, and in the procedure of carrying out the sentence, a number of journalists arrive just in time to witness and document the execution, but the added weight of the all the members - guards, press, and Pablo- in a narrow corridor exceeding maximum weight capacity on the way to an execution chamber at that precise time causes the prison, located directly above a fault line, to rupture wide open, leading to a prison riot and an escape of thousands of inmates. Ramon, who does not escape, discovers that all the guards have died from a floor collapse. The prisoners who do escape also end up causing a coup (e.g. present day Haiti), Ramon becomes a high ranking official, who pardons/commutes the sentence of Pablo. In the traditional sense, “Deus ex machina” usually represents an abrupt solution to an unsolvable problem. But for the sake of a simpler argument, assume that it only represents an event that causes an unexpected and unlikely occurrence, not an unsolvable one, and not necessarily a problem that has no other prescribed outcomes. I will call this “half-Deux”, (an act of a Demi-God) for short.
https://jacobin.com/2020/04/jean-paul-sartre-communism-algeria-oppression :
“In fact, Sartre’s relations with Communism and the PCF were a lot stormier than his critics would have us believe. In the period after 1945, the intellectuals of the PCF subjected him to repeated and violent attacks, afraid that his ideas were attracting support from students and other young people whom they hoped to draw towards their own ranks. Sartre suffered far more virulent attacks from this quarter than Camus did. One book by the PCF intellectual Roger Garaudy, in which Sartre figures prominently, was called Gravediggers of Literature”
“In an article written in 1948, Sartre proclaimed his ambition to “write for his own time.” His aim was not to pursue universal truths, but to confront the reality of the world in which he lived. Its problems were too urgent to be neglected in favor of more long-term considerations.”
It is certainly true that over the next few years, Sartre made some very unwise statements in defense of the Soviet Union. But the alliance was short-lived. In 1956, when the Soviet leadership sent tanks into Hungary to crush a working-class rising, Sartre’s opposition was forthright and public, insisting that socialism “is not brought at bayonet point.” Thereafter, his criticism of the USSR became ever sharper: he condemned “Soviet imperialism,” and argued that the Soviet working classes should “take the power which has been stolen from them” by the country’s rulers.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20110930090518/http://raforum.info/spip.php?article92 : “In Astruc’s opinion, Sartre was essentially an anarchist. Sartre admits (and says in the film), “We were, if you like anarchists, but it was a special kind of anarchy.” https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/jean-paul-sartres-anarchist-philosophy/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rene-berthier-the-supposed-anarchism-of-jean-paul-sartre
“What is anarchism? The first thing that comes to mind when considering whether a person is anarchist is to define what anarchism is, and then to see how the person’s words and actions are consistent with the definition. In particular, one must be very careful about self-proclamation of anarchism. Anyone can believe themselves to have been an anarchist at one time or another, and such proclamations Sartre made must be taken with caution: “I was always more of an anarchist than a Marxist” or “You have to understand that my anarchism, as you call it, was really an expression of freedom, the freedom I described earlier, the freedom of a writer”.[14] In many interviews Sartre calls himself an anarchist and commentators have been careful not to contradict him, probably because it gave them copy to publish, but also because they had no competence to judge. Especially since, if one takes as a yardstick extremely eocumene and vague definitions found in dictionaries, one has no trouble fitting Sartre into the right boxes.
Most of these definitions see anarchism only as an opposition to power and the state, such as William Remley’s definition of anarchism as “a system that both opposes such things as government, authority, the state or domination, but also positively advocates voluntarism, mutuality, decentralized authority, and, most significantly, human freedom”.[15]”
“To trace anarchism back to Taoism, to the Greek philosophers of antiquity, or to the Christian sects of the Middle Ages, makes no sense. It is all very well to fight against oppression and to demand a strong power to secure oneself against it. One can fight against oppression in order to establish another form of oppression.
It is obvious that whenever men and women suffered oppression, they fought against it, but that is not enough to make them anarchists. However, among these fighters, there were undeniable precursors, such as William Godwin. To define anarchism, as Marshall does, “as one who rejects all forms of external government and the State and believes that society and individuals would function well without them” is quite inadequate. Marshall is wrong when he says that “anarchism did not suddenly appear in the nineteenth century only when someone decided to call himself an anarchist”: indeed, Proudhon once declared himself an “anarchist” (he wrote “an-archist”) and the word was later taken up by workers who identified with his thinking. That said, I don’t think it’s the best thing Proudhon did, because using the term “anarchist” to designate a political movement with a constructive project is a bit like shooting yourself in the foot. Gaston Leval said that in his time many young people unfortunately joined the anarchist movement not with reference to its political project but with the idea of “sowing anarchy” in its most vulgar sense.”
“The Critique of Dialectical Reason, usually considered as an attempt to clarify the theory of Marxism, is however largely a challenge to Marxism. “In my view, the Critique must be considered rather as an anti-Marxist opus than as a great Marxist treatise as Aronson claims”[226], Betschart says again, and adds:
“Whereas in Marxist theory, classes are the prime agents of history, they are reduced to what Sartre calls ‘series’ in the Critique. Classes do not act in Sartre’s eyes; at best they form milieus. In this way, Sartre implicitly contests the Marxist idea of a revolution by the proletariat.”[227]”
Sierpiński Triangle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpi%C5%84ski_triangle
Power Critique as Logarithmic and Multi-level/Hierarchical
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” -1984
The Sierpiński triangle represents a way of visualizing the fused-group as existing on multiple levels, in both autonomous and inter-related levels. If one were to criticize the largest triangle in the set, it would be analogous to critiquing all civilizations and human societies across the globe, along with its individuals on the fringe of society dependency (the uncontacted or mythical lone wolf). Sartre’s position, in this sense, could be siding with the second largest triangle within the main triangle, of which there are only three. From 1945-1949, the United States was the sole nuclear power, until the Soviet Union acquired and developed their first nuclear test. While the status of a nuclear power need not be equated with a superpower, this more or less defined the Cold War. Sartre’s defense of the USSR could be seen in this regard up until the Hungarian Uprising, where, even though he supported Marxism in principle, could point out the flaws (the gulag and the bayonet). Thus Sartres’ ability to critique a entity as oppressive was independent and orthogonal to its size, for personal responsibility applied to both individuals acting within organizations and outside of them. This appears to be one of the only ways to explain Sartre’s mixed defense and critique of Marxism. He was interested in a geopolitical balance of power, as a means to allow oppression in any system to have a significant contender. In the Orwellian sense, it is to allow Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia to avoid totalitarianism or consolidation. Even though 1984 suggests a routine cycle of enemies, it presumes a hierarchy above all three states and is fundamentally against solipsism. Anarchy, in the purely “the object of power is power” sense, is to lyse any unjust organization as if it were a cell so that its components can reconsitute itself, therefore the anarchist metamorphs between anarchist, to socialist, and even a lesser force that cycles to a sovereign to counteract a larger sovereign power, if the goal is to deconsolidate all oppressive states. Replacing one form of oppression with another could hardly be considered a recognition of personal or individual freedom. Thus supporting a cause could be considered a means to that end, although if the means or ends infringe on another’s freedom, it cannot be considered a worthy cause. In the Orwellian sense, Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania would be broken up into an infinite number of states, equating in number to the population.
“But as a prelude to the review, have a look at the October 1948 letter above, posted originally at Letters of Note. In it, Orwell writes to his publisher Frederic Warburg, keeping him posted on the state of the manuscript of 1984. Then, at the very end, he adds that “I have just had Sartre’s book on antisemitism, which you published, to review. I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot.”
Furthermore, from https://philosophynow.org/issues/16/Orwell_and_Philosophy
“A few months on and Orwell found Bertrand Russell’s Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits no more impressive; it made him feel that philosophy should be made illegal. Orwell wrote a great deal in a relatively short space of time, and on a great many subjects, but little else that he wrote referred directly to philosophy. I suspect that he saw it as a kind of gratuitous cleverness and he had no appetite for that. In Orwell’s writings, fiction or non-fiction, there are few good intellectuals. Where they appear, then it is usually only to spin words without meaning. At best, they are inadvertently confusing; at worst, deliberately so: Marxists, for example, or nationalists or Anglo or Roman Catholics. Or Jean-Paul Sartre.
Although Orwell made few direct references to philosophy, much of his later and better writing amounts to an attempt at working out the political consequences of what are essentially philosophical questions. When and what should we doubt? When and what should we believe? Questions like these are particularly important in Nineteen Eighty-four. In that novel, the official philosophy of the fictitious Oceanian regime is a sort of global scepticism while everyday common sense has been made a heresy. It is common sense that triggers off Winston Smith’s illfated rebellion, a rebellion against the kinds of thing that put Orwell off philosophy.
“They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold onto that! The solid world exists. Its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.”
Later, therefore, when the novel describes the State’s attempts at ending Smith’s dissent, it details a process whereby common sense is undermined by sophistry and scepticism. The operation is supervised and, in its later stages, performed by O’Brien, the ruling Party’s agent provocateur. Re-educating Winston, he remarks:
“You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind which can make mistakes and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is the truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
Sartre’s Most Interesting Gesture
While Orwell critiqued Stalinism in its totalitarian sense, Sartre, who did not represent a life-long committment to communism, would later see his successors, the Situationists , in May of 1968 , the spirit of Absurdity- bags of wind that floated the streets of Paris in their dérive . Their participation , was both performative and in bad faith, unwittingly, as hyperrealism had already engulfed the essence of Modernity, the classic intellectual , in the twilight hours of the 1960s.
From Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture (1992):
“This position was reinforced by the Situationists’ conception of the ‘situation’ itself. ‘So far philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations’, they declared, paraphrasing Marx and taking a swipe at Sartre: ‘the point now is to transform them. Since man is the product of the situations he goes through, it is essential to create human situations. Since the individual is defined by his situation, he wants the power to create situations worthy of his desires.’43 Great importance had been attached to the way in which one is situated in the world by Sartre and those philosophers, including Heidegger and Kierkegaard, who exerted some influence on existentialist philosophy. For Sartre, ‘there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom’.44” (p.20)
Indeed, this connection /analysis has been made before by two other writers: Peter Wollen in “Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of the Situationist International ” (1989) and by Claire Gillman in “Asger Jorn’s Avant-Garde Archives: Guy Debord and the Situationist International ”:
“Sartre’s concept of Situation was reprised by Guy Debord at least since the times of the Letterist International.[6][7][8] In January 1954, the Letterist International declared: “The new beauty will be that of THE SITUATION, that is to say, provisional and lived."[9][10]
Claire Gilman called Sartre a “father figure” for the Situationist International, and wrote that “Sartre and his philosophy of the situation are fundamental to the SI’s notion of everyday life authentically experienced”.[11] The relationship between Sartre’s philosophy of the situation and the Situationist International is clarified by Peter Wollen in his essay Bitter victory.[12]”
In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, the imprisonment of even a single disabled child cannot be considered a free society, because anarchy defines all individuals as free from oppression:
“She explored alternative political structures in many stories, such as in the philosophical short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) and the anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed (1974).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin
This concept can also be extended to the idea of open individualism (the idea that “there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future.")
from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ :
“In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophical significance of the relationship between imagination and freedom, which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world. Imagination, Sartre writes, “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imaging consciousness posits its object as “out of reach” in relation to the world understood as the synthetic totality within which consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginary creation is only possible if consciousness is not placed “in-the-midst-of-the-world” as one existent among others.
For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 184])
“We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like Sartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, with the benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre’s interventions are prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century (à la Foucault). They certainly presage issues that are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. That doesn’t mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whatever that might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-political life. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the major socio-political issues of one’s time, as Sartre did, it is inevitable that history will not look kindly on them all. Sartre’s life and writings hence present a complex and difficult interpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thought and action today.”_
Situationism’s foundation is built on imagination, or rather, invention .
“l’art pour l’art” (Art for Art’s Sake)
“The phrase “l’art pour l’art ” (‘art for art’s sake’) had been floating around the intellectual circles of Paris since the beginning of the 19th century, but it was Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) who first fully articulated its metaphysical meaning (as we now understand it) in the prefaces of his 1832 poetry volume Albertus, and 1835 novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin.[3] Gautier was not the first nor the only one to use that phrase: it appeared in the lectures and writings of Victor Cousin[1] and Benjamin Constant. In his essay “The Poetic Principle” (1850) Edgar Allan Poe argues:”
“By Nietzsche
“Friedrich Nietzsche argued that there is ’no art for art’s sake’, the arts always expresses human values, communicate core beliefs:
When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless—in short, l’art pour l’art, a worm chewing its own tail. “Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!"—that is the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the other hand, asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify? choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. Is this merely a “moreover”? an accident? something in which the artist’s instinct had no share? Or is it not the very presupposition of the artist’s ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is the great stimulus to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as l’art pour l’art?[9]
By Marxists and socialists Marxists have argued that art should be politicised for the sake of transmitting the socialist message.[10]
George Sand, who was not a Marxist but a socialist writer,[11][12] wrote in 1872 that L’art pour l’art was an empty phrase, an idle sentence. She asserted that artists had a “duty to find an adequate expression to convey it to as many souls as possible,” ensuring that their works were accessible enough to be appreciated.[13]
Senegalese president, head of the Socialist Party of Senegal, and co-founder of Negritude Leopold Sedar Senghor and anti-colonial Africanist writer Chinua Achebe have both criticised the slogan as being a limited and Eurocentric view on art and creation. Senghor argued that, in “black African aesthetics,” art is “functional” and that in “black Africa, ‘art for art’s sake’ does not exist."[14] Achebe is more scathing in his collection of essays and criticism entitled Morning Yet on Creation Day, in which he asserts that “art for the sake of art is just another piece of deodorised dog shit [sic]."[15]
Walter Benjamin, one of the developers of Marxist hermeneutics,[16] discusses the slogan in his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. He first mentions it in regard to the reaction within the realm of traditional art to innovations in reproduction, in particular photography. He even terms the “L’art pour l’art” slogan as part of a “theology of art” in bracketing off social aspects. In the Epilogue to his essay, Benjamin discusses the links between fascism and art. His main example is that of Futurism and the thinking of its mentor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. One of the slogans of the Futurists was “Fiat ars – pereat mundus” (‘Let art be created, though the world perish’). Provocatively, Benjamin concludes that as long as fascism expects war “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense of perception that has been changed by technology,” then this is the “consummation,” the realization, of “L’art pour l’art."[17]”
In Peter Wollen’s analysis, he suggests that Debord essentially uses art as a political praxis:
(p.8/48 of the pdf) page 25 This would be in line with Walter Benjamin’s interpretation.
In Guy Davenport’s Every Force Evolves a Form, three chapters have stuck out to me ever since reading it 15 years ago:
Despite being only 171 pages, reading this book made me realize that every word of his sentences are written like a speed bump. They are intended to be read carefully, as if he requests each word or sentence cross-examined with every back alley of the psychogeography of the mind before continuing on to the next semantic structure.
It took me several months to read it, and I realize that the mental storage of ideas is no less practical than whatever chronological forms of logic there exist out there.
The concepts I took away from those three chapter (not to overlook other ones, such as table manners and the height of sitting, and his wish to get a driver’s license at a local DMV, being told that he should leave the country, only to quip- “I can’t do that without an ID”), are that being a critic is as useful to art and scholarship as the latter. However, the critic as artist is probably the most difficult and inaccessible. To start with The Artist as Critic, one could say that DeBord accomplished this Marxist Mission with visual détournement and Situationist theatre (streetside or otherwise). Dada too, but more overtly political after Debord’s 1962 purge.
Scholars as Critics have existed since time immemorial. “De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio ” by Lorenzo Valla could be considered the father of modern philology :
““Valla grasped the important insight—which was not unknown to medieval philosophers and theologians—that the meaning of a text can be understood only when it is seen as the product of its original historical and cultural context. Yet his attempt to reform or transform the scholastic study of language and argumentation—and, indeed, their entire mode of doing philosophy—is likely to be met with skepticism or even hostility by the historian of medieval philosophy who is dedicated to the argumentative rigor and conceptual analysis which are the hallmarks of scholastic thought. Nevertheless, while it may be true that Valla’s individual arguments are sometimes weak, superficial, and unfair, his critique as a whole does have an important philosophical and historical significance.”
Which leaves the third chapter of the trilogy, The Critic As Artist as the least explored occupation. Recent podcasts have suggested that Roger Ebert is one of the first modern critics, in that his methods were not conventional or widespread at the time in the 1970s. That criticism is widespread today as either a TikTok video, or a book review is not actually new. It is merely adapting to the medium- in these cases, technological. The main difference is that the internet (and to a lesser extent, TV and radio), has created isolated bubbles where community or more frequent social interaction previously existed and would be experienced with less filter. Thus a decade from now, when VR/AR glasses might be lighter than a can of soda, culture jamming might happen with a tinted blue screen of “meh.”
A Hybrid Approach
Political science can be exercised as a thought experiment, whether in a fictional novel, or in a dialectic. Hegel’s dialectic is abstract. Marx attempted to bring that abstract to the material. Kierkegaard’s existentialism was adopted by Sartre, who exercised both thought experiments (addressing the practico-inert) and praxis: https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/critique1313/maximilian-ringleb-existentialist-praxis-beyond-idealist-marxism-or-how-can-sartre-help-us-today/ :
“Sartre’s interpretation of Marx as the synthesis of Kierkegaard and Hegel, of existentialism and objective reality, sheds further light on his overarching project in Critique of Dialectical Reason. Rather than attempting to unite Marxism and existentialism as two previously isolated philosophies, Sartre aims to reclaim an existentialist Marxism that he sees first expressed in Marx himself. In the conclusion of his Search for a Method, Sartre reiterates unambiguously: “Marx’s own Marxism, while indicating the dialectical opposition between knowing and being, contained implicitly the demand for an existential foundation for the theory.”[6] In our discussion, Noreen Khawaja presented an illustrative methodological analogy of Sartre’s project as an attempt to unite dialectic thought and phenomenology. Indeed, one might argue that such an approach was first introduced by Hegel, which further supports the interpretation of Sartre’s project as a reclamation rather than an original claim.”
“Realistic existentialist praxis can and should therefore do without the guidance of idealistic Marxist principles (which does not include Marx’s early works). Sartre’s notion of seriality—a rather individualist, i.e. existentialist, rather than idealist Marxist idea of organization and praxis—might be the key to an effective existentialist praxis. Sartre shows how a common situation can serially connect individuals, create a group-in-fusion, and result in an effective surpassing of the situation. These groups can then form standing organizations that use the momentum to call for broader change, or they can dissolve again into forms of seriality. Guenther rightfully notes that “in the absence of an external threat, the standing organization may produce and exacerbate internal divisions among its members … [and] become an institution that constrains and eventually undermines … agency.”[21] As long as the formation of groups and standing organizations is connected to clearly defined goals, however, Sartre’s conception of existentialist praxis seems to provide an effective basis for change while providing a maximum sphere of freedom to the individual.”
“This article focuses on Sartre’s concept of the practico-inert in his major work A Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1 (CDR). I first show the progression from Sartre’s previous conception of in-itself to his concept of practico-inert. I identify five different layers of the practico-inert: human-made objects, language, ideas, social objects and class being. I show how these practico-inert layers form the possibilities for our subjectivity and how this represents a change from Sartre’s view of in-itself in Being and Nothingness. I then explore the relationship of freedom to the practico-inert and how Sartre argues that the practico-inert places limits on our freedom. Lastly, I argue that despite the pessimistic picture Sartre paints in CDR, the practico-inert has the potential to both limit and enhance our freedom. I appeal to Sartre’s post-CDR essay ‘A Plea for Intellectuals’ to argue that a Sartrean account of progress requires the utilisation of the practico-inert.”
Camus may have agreed more with Sartre, or Sartre may have agreed with Camus, had the former not died at an early age. They shared an interest in anarchic philosophy (Camus openly and incomprehensibly to the European press, before it became popular patchwork in the 90s), in at least that it pertained to individual freedom. But they may have differed most in their views on Algeria, in that Sartre believed more in praxis than Camus’ practico-inert opposition to ending colonialism. Nonetheless, as the above CDR critique essay suggests, some mixture of the two may reflect the maximum sphere of freedom for the individual.
In a 2012 lecture, Wes Cecil describes Sartre in an instructional role when a teacher in a high school in the early 30s, and, recommending the students attend (the new at the time) cinema, was viewed by his school’s administration as equivalent to the activities with the devil. https://youtu.be/UzcPpJXkPLQ?t=569 (Note: this autotranslate is not always accurate )
“but it is a very it’s sort of a classically Bruges huazi high school it would be I came and think of an 8:49 equivalent be sort of going to redden being assigned to a high school in Redmond right your your now this sort of 8:56 upper middle class school or the teeth as parents have pretensions and have these big plans for their student and 9:02 enroll Sartre and he’s like me yeah I’m not part of this program and he’s become 9:09 sort of an anti-establishment professor the professor the first lecture of the 9:15 graduation every year the newest professor always gives the sort of convocation and traditionally has become 9:22 themes of Education and whatnot and start walks up and says movies you should all go watch a lot of films 9:29 because elders are great I love film it’s the new medium is the art form for 9:34 the 20th century this is where our ideas are going to come for this is the greatest art form that’s been invented 9:40 in two hundred years and he just goes on and on at a time when going to the cinema base whether 9:45 the devil lived in the cinema right he was going to corrupt your morals and of course the students are like you love 9:51 this guy great and and but but the parents they were a little dicey plus”
Note at this time, cinema was not yet popular as it was in the later French Wave- the most celebrity parents and the establishment were willing to tolerate were authors, and in this sense, Camus was almost like a French James Dean- who also died young.
“Camus was rejecting existentialism as a philosophy, but his critique was mostly focused on Sartrean existentialism, and to a lesser extent on religious existentialism. He thought that the importance of history held by Marx and Sartre was incompatible with his belief in human freedom.[87] David Sherman and others also suggest the rivalry between Sartre and Camus also played a part in his rejection of existentialism.[88] David Simpson argues further that his humanism and belief in human nature set him apart from the existentialist doctrine that existence precedes essence.[89]”
An exercise that might reconcile the differences in human freedom might be able to analogize “humanism” to Sartre’s definition of “fused groups” within a labor union, and the existence of “wild cat strikes.” Both Sartre and Camus understood that freedom is incompatible with any level of injustice formed by a group. For example, suggesting someone storm the Bastille to prevent further injustice, regardless of the form of the coup), says nothing about a hypothetical stampede that results in loss of fruit vendor’s (innocent bystander’s) life from a queue outside the Bastille’s gates prior to entering the prison. Would this be considered “collateral damage,” negligience, or an injustice of the fused group?
https://danieltutt.com/2016/06/14/badious-revision-of-sartres-fused-group/
https://guava.physics.ucsd.edu/projects/FIBR_overview.html
“Put a big enough group of ostensibly sensible, rational people together, and stir: what do you get? The all-too-common answer is: “the madness of crowds”. Observed in financial market crashes, riots, political systems, music fashions, perhaps even academic fads, cooperative phenomena arise when ever there are sufficient communication channels open for the behavior of individuals to be subsumed by collective effects. The madness of crowds doesn’t just apply to people: we see its effects in animals (think “herd mentality”) and even at the microbial level, as we shall see below. All of this is an example of the burgeoning science of biocomplexity, the collision between traditional biology and modern dynamical systems theory.”
According to Cognitive Dissonance scholars, cognitive dissonance arises when external observations do not match the internal models of the world, and cause a conflict in navigating the world as believed.
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/the-cognitive-dissonance-crisis
Therefore, while “ostensibly rational” people in a room or crowd, may, in their shared goal believe in a just cause “overthrowing the French monarchy,” the observation of localized violence carries a degree of premeditation- the knowledge that assembling a crowd can cause a stampede cannot be ruled out, but since skeptics, as Orwell points out, ““One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”_ -1984 The fused group can plausibly claim that the apple cart vendor’s loss of life was an “acceptable loss,” but they also cannot deny the probability was increased in planning the Bastille siege. Furthermore, once the monarchy was overthrown, the divisions between the Montagnards and Girondins can be analogized to the differences between the rural and urban U.S. states in 2016- under the questionable platform of winding down external intervention in Afghanistan and later, Ukraine:
“The Mountain was the left-leaning radical group and opposed the more right-leaning Girondins. Despite the fact that both groups of the Jacobin Club had no virtual difference with regard to the establishment of the French Republic, the aggressive military intentions of the rich merchant class-backed Girondins such as conquering the Rhineland, Poland and the Netherlands with a goal of creating a protective ring of satellite republics in Great Britain, Spain and Italy [11] and a potential war with Austria,[12] enabled the Montagnards to take over the administrative power of the National Convention under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre who openly advocated for a more peaceful external policy and rather focusing on the issues within the newly-founded First French Republic.[13]”
Of course, the Democratic party today isn’t considered imperial in the same sense, other than a higher support for defense spending https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/26/democrats-defense-spending-military-00048041 https://fedmanager.com/news/congress-passes-2024-ndaa-as-more-house-democrats-than-republicans-back-bill
Also, replacing one monarch with 10 Girondin merchant oligarchs is not necessarily a more just government- thus the mountain represented somewhat a more anarcho-syndicalist branch of government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain As PJ O’Rourke wrote on Adam Smith https://www.npr.org/2007/01/08/6743689/p-j-orourke-takes-on-the-wealth-of-nations he did not believe the free markets were simply good, but a means to “decentralize evil”, as he stated on a Daily Show interview: https://www.cc.com/video/m74rmw/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-p-j-o-rourke If political Absurdists appear nihilists, it is perhaps because juggling 1000x or 10,000x local governments is much more “chaotic” than political organization around a few combination of beliefs. In practice though, effective anarchist agents do exist individually more inert than when compromised.
Anarchist government may be best analogized to the most unstable of atoms in the extended periodic table:
“Elements in this region are likely to be highly unstable with respect to radioactive decay and undergo alpha decay or spontaneous fission with extremely short half-lives, though element 126 is hypothesized to be within an island of stability that is resistant to fission but not to alpha decay. Other islands of stability beyond the known elements may also be possible, including one theorised around element 164, though the extent of stabilizing effects from closed nuclear shells is uncertain. It is not clear how many elements beyond the expected island of stability are physically possible, whether period 8 is complete, or if there is a period 9. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) defines an element to exist if its lifetime is longer than 10−14 seconds (0.01 picoseconds, or 10 femtoseconds), which is the time it takes for the nucleus to form an electron cloud.[5]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table#Superactinides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APeriodic_table_%28extended%29
Situationism as a Fountain: Nihilist act or Subversive Resource?
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness emphasizes the non-negation of nothingness , and that the individual can still choose to make something out of the absence of something. Deleuze was deathly afraid of the other’s dream . As he describes Minelli’s concept, it is as if the French left excommunicated the absurdists such as Camus and Sartre for daring to invent and dream (A confused Hoover was on their tail as early as the 40s ). The Situationists’ precipitation of late-stage capitalism in May of 1968 merely highlighted the role that the hyperreal individual played (and no longer played, when subjugated to the crowd ), but did not limit their activity to bad faith. Dramatizing bad faith melodramatically was necessary to demonstrate many gestures’ hollowness in post-modern society. France’s Enlightenment and America’s Modernists ’ was being replaced by post-modernism, and Situationism’s “disappearing act” (which evaporated no sooner than it appeared) was explained by its sublation into classic but largely shelved or commercialized scholarship . Inasmuch Situationism philology serves as a reminder of postmodernism’s sublimation into Capitalism , Sartre’s disciples fallow reflexively while accelerationist industry re-attempts its Sisyphean climb.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23511087
https://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_3/mancenido_june2008.pdf
https://libcom.org/article/why-art-cant-kill-situationist-international
Absurdity as a Futures Market: Clinical and Applied Absurdity
Examining the value of absurdist existentialism is a way of appraising declining interest in neo-liberal coalitions. The surge in Bernie Sanders voters in 2016 in a remarkable short time did not materialize out of nowhere, but represented a latent and subterranean anxiety of the disaffected left. Rather than exploit these uncertainties with partisan talking points that are lobbed not with Hegelian dialectics, but argumentum ad infinitum. Sartre attempted to create a logical framework to decommission the fused group whenever it malfunctioned beyond repair. As many in the early 50s continued to row towards the Soviet fleet, Sartre was disembarking the sub and weaving his own lifeboat by 1956, after discovering some of the crates aboard the vessel were armaments destined for Budapest.
Absurdism as Science*
Sartre, who worked as a meterologist after being drafted in WWII, made observations about the direction a balloon made. When watching cinema, he observed that the scripted lines differed from that of people on the streets. In the 1999 BBC Documentary, The Road to Freedom, Sartre’s contemporaries are interviewed and describe him as the embodiment of free thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ttT1eZO6s
Philosophers and humanists that view irrationality, or “unreasonableness” as an illogical aspect of human nature is similar to overlooking rounding errors of irrational numbers to a fixed decimal point. Stochastic necessity in natural algorithms is set apart from intentional stochasticity of artificial technology. In the irrationally fused approach, the natural world is irrational inasmuch pi’s decimals are never ending.
“In mathematics, the irrational numbers (in- + rational) are all the real numbers that are not rational numbers. That is, irrational numbers cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers.”
Using this concept, one can view absurdism as human nature that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two logical ideas or praxes. That, however, does not disprove the absence of logical ideas within those two ideas. One can act rationally within an irrational set of numbers, because there is no defined instruction or law as to how one should act in every situation.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre makes the distiction between Being In Itself and Being for-itself:
“A contrast heralded in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, and central to Sartre’s work Being and Nothingness. Being for-itself (pour-soi) is the mode of existence of consciousness, consisting in its own activity and purposive nature; being in-itself (en-soi) is the self-sufficient, lumpy, contingent being of ordinary things. The contrast bears some affinity to Kant’s distinction between the perspective of agency or freedom and that of awareness of the ordinary phenomenal world.” https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095456283
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_in_itself#Being-in-itself_for_Sartre
“Sartre depicted a man in a café who has applied himself to a portrayal of his role as a waiter. The waiter thinks of himself as being a waiter (as in being-in-itself), which Sartre says is impossible since he cannot be a waiter in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell. He is primarily a man (being-for-itself), just one who happens to be functioning as a waiter – with no fixed nature or essence, who is constantly recreating himself. He is guilty of focusing on himself as being-in-itself and not being-for-itself. Sartre would say that as a human, a being-for-itself by nature, the waiter is “a being that is not what it is and it is what it is not.” Therefore, the waiter who acts as if he is at his very core a waiter “is not what [he] is”- which is to say, he is not solely a waiter- and “is what [he] is not”- meaning that he is many things other than a waiter. In simply playing the part of a waiter, the man in this example is reducing himself to a “being-in-itself” and is therefore in bad faith.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecopedagogy#Discussion_of_term_in_literature
A similar contrast can be observed in Ecopedagogy:
“Ironically, at the same time it was coined by Freire’s friend-cum-critic Ivan Illich (1988) to describe an educational process in which educators and educands become inscribed in abstract pedagogical systems, resulting in pedagogy as an end and not a means.[16] As used by Illich, ecopedagogy is represented by forms of education that seek the total administration of life through mandatory pedagogical experiences of systemization. As such, he believed that the movements for lifelong education and the creation of global classrooms (Illich & Verne, 1981) by bureaucratic educational institutions exemplified such approaches.”
Therefore, cross-examining Ilyich-Freire’s ideological contrasts can be analogized to that of Husserl’s for-itself and Heidegger ’s Dasain (being in itself), using one Sartrean lazy eye, the irrational lens (being-for-itself), and one normal eye, the rational lens (being in-itself), one can see view the waiter’s need to serve the position to an ends, (being for itself), but does not have a pre-defined definition of what being in-itself must be. The essence of his role is determined wholly by society and their expectations.
Rhizomatic Learning: Fundamental Rhizomatica or Situational Rhizomatica?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizomatic_learning
“George Siemens, one of the inventors of massive open online courses, has questioned the usefulness of the rhizomatic metaphor when compared to traditional network analysis:
I don’t see rhizomes as possessing a similar capacity (to networks) to generate insight into learning, innovation, and complexity … Rhizomes then, are effective for describing the structure and form of knowledge and learning … [h]owever, beyond the value of describing the form of curriculum as decentralized, adaptive, and organic, I’m unsure what rhizomes contribute to knowledge and learning.[16]”
Three Ecologies Analysis:
“And according to Newton, Guattari’s use of the triad (mental, social and environmental ecology) as an analytic structure is almost as reductive of complexity as that of a binary opposition.”
“I am familiar with Bateson’s steps to an ecology of mind and understand why Guattari would claim there are three ecologies. [Actually, Bateson came and visited my crab farm in 1973 as his most effective student, the Freudian anthropologist Robert Levi, was one of my best friends and brought Bateson to see the work. Bateson didn’t like it, looked at it for 30 seconds, walked around the tanks, spoke to no one and left. So, I ended up not liking him either, Bateson or no Bateson.…I am an ecologist. I assert that there is either one ecology or an infinity of microecologies that combine to make this one ecology.” [6]
So, what Bateson does, and what Guatarri does after him, appropriates the word ecology and applies it to things that are not living and therefore not ecological. Now a multitude have appropriated the term. I am not entirely sure what to do. Maybe stop using the term ecology and start using the term web of life.”
Pedadogy of the Oppressed or Pedagogy for the Oppressed?
Applying the Sartrean analysis to the broader role of Critical Pedagogy in influencing Global North instruction, alternative definitions have been used:
“10-2003 Pedagogy for the Economically Privileged: “Tuning In” to the Privileged Learner Ann Curry-Stevens” https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=socwork_fac
“Pedagogy of the Privileged Tracey Nicholls” The CLR James Journal Vol. 17, No. 1, Special Issue: On the Emancipatory Thought of bell hooks (FALL 2011), pp. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26758832
“Pedagogy of the Privileged: Globalization, Identity, Belonging, and Empowerment Jamie Frueh, Ph.D.” January 2020 https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/api-gateway/apsa/assets/orp/resource/item/5e337c0d0238e40018302a47/original/pedagogy-of-the-privileged-globalization-identity-belonging-and-empowerment.pdf
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address “[…] that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom[7]—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.[8][9]” (also see this 1889 comic: )
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7307473/ Harpreet Singh Grover “doi: 10.4103/jisp.jisp_149_20 J Indian Soc Periodontol. 2020 May-Jun; 24(3): 190. PMCID: PMC7307473 PMID: 32773968 “…Of the people, by the people, for the people”” “Freedom and democracy are often deemed interchangeable but the two are certainly not synonymous and it can safely be premised that democracy is the institutionalization of freedom and constitution is the bulwark of democracy.”
Perhaps Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed should be adapted to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Oppressed, for the Oppressed.
Left As Is, “Of the Oppressed” represents a sentence fragment- a non-statement as to by who or what pedagogy should be taught by. While most book titles are not written as a sentence, nor need to, the more a sentence is structured, the more it paints a frame of reference**. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is more “In-itself” that “for itself” - it describes essence but not being. It omits what it counts as oppressive, while being oppressive in its own pedagogical agenda:
“In a 2009 article for the conservative City Journal, Sol Stern wrote that Pedagogy of the Oppressed ignores the traditional touchstones of Western education (e.g. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, or Maria Montessori) and contains virtually none of the information typically found in traditional teacher education (e.g., no discussion of curriculum, testing, or age-appropriate learning). On the contrary, Freire rejects traditional education as “official knowledge” that intends to oppress.[19] Stern also wrote in 2006 that heirs to Freire’s ideas have taken them to mean that since all education is political: “leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Freire’s words, ‘does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own political character’”.[20]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed#Reception
This returns to the Orwellian novel, 1984, where newspeak omits all concepts. Advanced concepts are banned to and beyond the secondary education. A tertiary education becomes an “unlearning” policy-making board for all interested parties, banning many types of words in the name of safe spaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_space This promotes a new challenge for academic instruction- Meta-pedagogy for and by the pedadgogists.
“In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person’s ability for critical thinking. The Newspeak language thus limits the person’s ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will,[1][2] which are thoughtcrimes, acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of Ingsoc collectivism.[3][4]”
“Historically, a truly liberal education has been reserved for elites, and even with the expansion of tertiary education, most Americans still receive an education designed to empower them in only very limited ways (Pfnister 1984, Scheider 2008). While in theory, democracy depends on empowering rational, independently thoughtful and creative individuals, in practice we tend to compartmentalize deliberation, reserving it for particular types of situations and particular people. The result is that students are often surprised by assessment systems and evaluation criteria that demand they think for themselves. Advocates for liberal education often find they must convince potential students, their families, legislators, and society at large of the value of such an agency-laden education.” Frueh, 2020***
““Despite strict prescriptions about allowing understanding of oppression to come up from the oppressed themselves, Freire already knows the conclusions to which they should come. His anecdotes about oppressed being liberated are about people articulating ideas that agree with Freire’s own interpretation of the system. This same level of certainty about class oppression is evident in the works of Antonio Gramsci, who also claimed to have a firm understanding of the causes and dynamics of oppression. Gramsci, however, has more faith in the liberating power of empowering education for all.” Frueh, 2020
“In the book, Freire calls traditional pedagogy the “banking model of education” because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.[1]”
He also believes those who hold on to the past knowledge to build new things as necrophilous:
““Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls “biophily,” but instead produces its opposite: “necrophily.” While life is characterized by growth in a structured functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. . . . Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts.’ The necrophilous person can relate to an object – a flower or a person – only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself, if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. . . . He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.4 Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.””
http://puente2014.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/87465079/freire_banking_concept.pdf
The irony, of course, is that the volume of political representation in mechanical reproduced art as first observed by Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay is that today’s hardcoded AI Chromebooks and smartphones are less learning aids than political tools of manipulation.
What is the difference between art, instruction, and the prestige of expertise in tertiary education? As economic factors become more pressing, differentiating between the three becomes increasing focus as to ascertain the value of higher education when it becomes a highly subjectified arena? While it is true that some artful innovation created a boon for academic consultants to re-educate the educators, historical parallels can be observed that become a blind spot to those who have discarded such “necrophilious knowledge”, and are likely to appear more wasteful of traditional ways of recycling and modifying that ostentatious evangelists preaching to express guilt with vicarious narratives of oppression.
Being For-Itself does not imply ignorance of oppression. The waiter works as a means, rather than in-itself. Inasmuch the system does not allow an equitable opportunity for all individuals, he cannot be compared to Eichmann’s Banality of Evil for earning a wage, even owning property, for he must control his destiny inasmuch as he can promote a greater good. That so much pedagogy is programmed to discard knowledge is exothermic and contributes to global warming. One cannot support capitalism in a way that supports daily book burnings, only to advise students to download a revised ebook of Pedagogy of the Oppressed saying that Oceania is now at War with Eastasia. 1984’s memory hole represents the collective manifestation of academia’s incinerators’ global greenhouse emissions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QSaJji6kQ8
Theatre of the Absurd accosts Theater of the Oppressed
Ionesco, Beckett , Adamov, Camus, and Sartre were the foremost existential and absurdist playwrights who rallied against fascism and Stalinism (and also daily struggles). Notable works are Rhinoceros, Waiting for Godot, Professor Taranne, Caligula, and No Exit.
Theatre of the Oppressed was formulated by Augosto Boal, who:
“studied at Columbia University in New York with the critic John Gassner. Gassner introduced Boal to the techniques of both Bertolt Brecht and Konstantin Stanislavski, and encouraged Boal to form links with theatre groups like the Black Experimental Theatre.”
“Boal’s teachings were controversial, and as a cultural activist he was seen as a threat by the Brazilian military regime. In 1971, Boal was kidnapped off the street, arrested, tortured, and eventually exiled to Argentina,[1] where he stayed for five years. During those five years, Boal published two books: Torquemada (1971) and his much acclaimed Theatre of the Oppressed (1973). Torquemada is about the Brazilian military regime’s systematic use of torture in prison.[8] Boal takes the name of the leading figure of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada, as an example of historical forms of systematic torture.”
“Boal was also known to quote William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Hamlet argues that theatre is like a mirror that reflects our virtues and defects equally. Although Boal found this quote beautiful, he liked to think of theatre as a mirror in which one can reach in to change reality and to transform it.[15]”
Notice how the wording uses “Although.” According to the source:
“Brasil de Fato – What is the Legislative Theater?
https://josekuller.wordpress.com/38-entrevista-com-augusto-boal/ (via Google Translate)
“Augusto Boal – The Legislative Theater was the need we felt, before I became a councilor, to transform into law what was a desire expressed by the population of Teatro Fórum. In this, you present the problem, not the possible solutions. For example, Shakespeare has a play, Hamlet, in which he says that the text should be a mirror, and this mirror should reflect reality as it is: with our vices and our virtues. That’s his opinion, the theater is a mirror. I think it’s cute and all. But at the same time, I think we don’t just have to think about understanding reality. You have to try to transform reality. This must always be capable of transformation and will always require transformation. So, I would like the theater to be a magic mirror, which you penetrate and, not liking the image it reflects, you go inside and modify that image. We felt like we were having really good ideas and all that, but in reality we needed some law. Even if we know that the laws are not respected in Brazil, it is better to have them on our side than against us. So we started thinking about the idea of turning it into law, joining the City Council. And I was a candidate, I was elected, for four years.”
Theater can cover politics, but it doesn’t need to become politics. In the same sense, Julian Benda believed academia should be separate from politics. https://newcriterion.com/issues/1992/12/the-treason-of-the-intellectuals-ldquothe-undoing-of-thoughtrdquo There is no shortage of politicians. The actors on stage represent characters in society. Academics represent subjects, but they too do not need to embody the ideology to teach a concept.
Boal continues, “In Argentina, I started to develop forms of theater, such as, for example, Invisible Theater, in which we go out into the street and perform a scene, and don’t reveal that it is theater, so that everyone can participate. Then, in Peru, I started with Teatro Fórum, where we present the problem, the spectator enters the scene and shows alternatives.”
By that logic, anyone could be an actor, But I think it’s fine when someone says they’re acting. It’s better when there is a disclosure. Guerilla theater was only necessary during their dictatorship. In the United States, there is no dictatorship. https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/what-happens-when-activists-take (A crowd that mistakes a show by a cop with oppression). https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/social-justice-activists-are-dismantling
“BF – Why are you and Teatro do Oprimido excluded from the mainstream media?
Boal – I think that all those artists who do something that is extremely useful for the population and everything, but that don’t have a hook, like for example a well-known television actor, or some other event that individualizes people, these are excluded . It’s not the Theater of the Oppressed, nor me. It’s any artist who doesn’t do it like this. It’s excluded. In general, the media is only interested in individuality. And what we are trying to do is make the Theater of the Oppressed used throughout the social fabric. It’s not seeing, for example, where the talents in the Maré favela are. We don’t want to turn them into television actors, that’s not it. Now we are launching a new project, which is Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Our objective is not to discover who is the best poet in Jacarepaguá, or who is the best painter in that place.
BF – So, what you want is not the final product, but the elaboration process.
Boal – Yes, the aesthetic process is more important than the artistic product. Now, why do we want this, it’s not a whim, is it? We are living in the Third World War, of course, and we are losing. And this world war that we are losing is the information war. Turn on the television today and you will only see American films, and only violent ones. You notice whether the film is American or not, Hollywood-inspired or not, whether every five minutes there is a punch, a gunshot, or an explosion. That’s American. European film rarely has this.”
True, European films do not show this every 5 minutes- such as the French New Wave, but his thinkings do not represent a particularly progressive ideal:
“Influences
Most of Augusto Boal’s techniques were created after he realized the limitations of didactic, politically motivated theatre in the poor areas where he worked. He found that his attempts to inspire the people living in poor or “slum” areas to rise up against racial and class inequality were inhibited by his own racial and class background, since he was white and comparatively financially comfortable, as well as his and his colleagues’ inhibitions to perform violence themselves. His new techniques allowed the idea of rebellion and the impetus for change to come from within the target group. Much of his early work and teaching was inspired by Marxist philosophy, although much of his work now falls within the boundaries of a center-left ideology.” (Emphasis added)
A main element of Theatre of the Oppressed is “Spect-actor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal#Exile"
“Boal’s method (which has been implemented in various communities around the world) seeks to transform audiences into active participants in the theatrical experience. Boal argues that traditional theatre is oppressive since spectators usually do not get a chance to express themselves and that a collaboration between both parties, in contrast, allows spectators to perform actions that are socially liberating. The method, as Boal liked to explain, seeks to transform spectators into “spect-actors."[10]”
“Boal’s work in Peru with the ALFIN project, a movement which sought to use a range of languages including “artistic languages” to eradicate illiteracy, developed his ideas and methodology away from the agit-prop of his Brazilian Arena Theatre days and sought to engage theatre as a pedagogical tool. Crucial to this time was Boal’s attempts to break down the divisions between spectator and actor. It is around this time that invented the term “spect-actor”, a term that he saw as establishing the frameworks within which he wished to work.[2] He saw that the passivity of the spectator could be broken down by the following steps by which the spectator becomes the spect-actor:
Knowing the body (by body he means both the individual “body” and the collective “body” in a Marxist sense) Making the body expressive Using theatre as a language Using theatre as discourse”
In other words, he wants to replace the Greek Tragedy storytelling medium with a participative activity, because not everyone who attends is expected to enjoy their experience, and that is oppressive.
While no one knows how the Greek tragedy originated, it certainly has a lasting appeal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_tragedy#The_evolution_of_tragedy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Tragedy : “Nietzsche found in classical Athenian tragedy an art form that transcended the pessimism and nihilism of a fundamentally meaningless world. The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering and affirming it, passionately and joyously affirmed the meaning of their own existence. They knew themselves to be infinitely more than petty individuals, finding self-affirmation not in another life, not in a world to come, but in the terror and ecstasy alike celebrated in the performance of tragedies.
“Nietzsche argues that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Dionysian element was to be found in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was found in the dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysian revelry. Basically, the Apollonian abstract forms were able to give shape to the passionate Dionysian experience.
”…After the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles, there was an age where tragedy died. Nietzsche ties this to the influence of writers like Euripides and the coming of rationality, represented by Socrates. Euripides reduced the use of the chorus and was more naturalistic in his representation of human drama, making it more reflective of the realities of daily life. Socrates emphasized reason to such a degree that he diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. For Nietzsche, these two intellectuals helped drain the ability of the individual to participate in forms of art, because they saw things too soberly and rationally. The participation mystique aspect of art and myth was lost, and along with it, much of man’s ability to live creatively in optimistic harmony with the sufferings of life. Nietzsche concludes that it may be possible to reattain the balance of Dionysian and Apollonian in modern art through the operas of Richard Wagner, in a rebirth of tragedy.
“In contrast to the typical Enlightenment view of ancient Greek culture as noble, simple, elegant and grandiose, Nietzsche believed the Greeks were grappling with pessimism. The universe in which we live is the product of great interacting forces; but we neither observe nor know these as such. What we put together as our conceptions of the world, Nietzsche thought, never actually addresses the underlying realities. It is human destiny to be controlled by the darkest universal realities and, at the same time, to live life in a human-dreamt world of illusions.
The issue, then, or so Nietzsche thought, is how to experience and understand the Dionysian side of life without destroying the obvious values of the Apollonian side. It is not healthy for an individual, or for a whole society, to become entirely absorbed in the rule of one or the other. The soundest (healthiest) foothold is in both. Nietzsche’s theory of Athenian tragic drama suggests exactly how, before Euripides and Socrates, the Dionysian and Apollonian elements of life were artistically woven together. The Greek spectator became healthy through direct experience of the Dionysian within the protective spirit-of-tragedy on the Apollonian stage.”
Thus in the classic Athenian tragedy, the spectator can and does experience the suffering of the tragedy on stage. One does not need to participate in the play in order to obtain value or meaning from it.
It is unclear what parts of Hamlet Boal quoted most, but the most “spect-actor” moment in the play is actually the play within the play:
“Hamlet then asks the actors to stage ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, a play featuring a death in the style of his father’s murder. Hamlet intends to study Claudius’s reaction to the play, and thereby determine the truth of the ghost’s story of Claudius’s guilt.”
Focusing the audience’s attention on more than one spectator at a time is not just bad theatre direction, it denies the auteur the ability to narrate, and, the theater was designed for that purpose. Not only that, the play within the play implies there is a player who can serve as the Spectactor, who represents the Oppressed or the Target of the ire. One does not need a tour guide to explain what a Lion is at a zoo. In improvisational theater, the initiator of a scene can play represent the audience or the variable. The dynamics of a stage do not require the audience to participate (but can provide reactions), because one of the members on stage is conscious of the oppressed stage member’s “normal” responses. In fact, one of my improv teachers taught us to split the roles, and one actor who reacts to the edgy or avant guarde” by becoming “us” (the audience). In that sense, theater is already a form of a legislature. It does should not represent an exlusionary bloc of actors. Traditional theater is not, nor never needed to be exclusionary- unless one is referring to the Elizabethan era where it was customary to have only male actors.
The only thing Theater of the Oppressed has accomplished is that he has taken the narrative to the outside world, in both guerilla and institutional setttings. Which is why today Academia is more Hollywood, and Hollywood is a greater Custodian of Universal truth, paradoxically. Politics, however, has always been a mix of the two. Thus in order for academia to return to its classical roots, it needs outside actors to narrate the story of academia turned politics. Christopher Nolan would surely take an interest to directing such a film. But one doesn’t need Nolan to direct a new movie. The 1981 movie Red 1992 film Citizen Cohn already describes what is taking place in Academia (Actually, I am not able to recall the movie- there was a scene where a under the auspices of a formal local town hall or labor meeting, devolved into a chant for anti-communism, and the only attendant who did not join in the fervor was suspected of being a sympathizer, who was seated beside another friend of the sympathizer). One only needs to replace Stalinism with pedagogical tyranny to see that there is a slippery slope potential.
A play that is transformed into a question and answer session is hardly entertainment. But 2 hours of silence, even when afforded one to two 15 minute intermissions with concessions and restrooms, is an injustice and a crime against humanity.
Today, pedagogical ideologies are institutionalized in ways that can divide as much as they can unite. But equitable access to basic needs are a precondition to the dialogic types of learning exercises that do not help in gaining basic literacy, whether via an “artistic language” or otherwise.
I would rather watch an American Idol audience watch a group of Theater of the Oppressed compete against a cast of Theatre of the Absurd. Both groups could use a Play within a Play. The question is, would an audience applaud more acting from No Exit or Theatre of the Oppressed? The closest example to this type of competition is in the 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World.
“Often, to be sure, her performed representation seems to speak directly from the heart in a confessional mode, exposing her neuroses, dishing the family dirt, and puncturing her own pretensions. No episode is too humiliating to relate, no impulse too embarrassing to confess. Or so it seems. For AR slyly draws on the ancient figure of speech called parabasis, employed in Greek drama, in which the chorus addresses the audience, giving the appearance of breaking the aesthetic frame and revealing some unmediated truth. But as we know from our training in deconstruction, the theory for which she appears to be so ardently fighting, parabasis too is a ruse of dramatic rhetoric, a simulacrum of unmasked directness that is no less an artifice than is apparent authenticity. To put it in more modern terms, “baring the device,” which supposedly shatters the illusion of aesthetic appearance and reveals the mechanisms that produce it, itself turns out to be just another literary device.
What, then, is being performed in Fighting Theory? What scene, in the jargon of performance studies, is being “staged”? The answer is the “so-called life” of AR, heroine of a story of adversity and its overcoming, of warring theoretical tribes, and of constant vigilance against the cultural police who want to silence the voices of the oppressed.” Martin Jay, 2010 in Artforum
The legislative mechanism of the Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed differs from parabasis in that the audience TotO is an amateur interlocutor - it’s as if they are pro se , whereas the chorus provides an (often) informed representation of many of the audience’s impression, at least in highly experienced Broadway and classicist productions.
**In improvisational theatre, specifically absurdist improv, the scene begins in the “middle.” The format of skits are that they should not introduce the scene or setting outside dialogue and character expression. This is to abstract away the existential “in itself” and strip away the assumptions that make a theater a milieu. The actor is the story- no props are used in improv at the Annoyance Theater. The classrooms were empty rooms, -no props, no furniture, save for basic chairs, with empty walls. By suggesting knowledge and the history of knowledge is oppressive, it is like prohibiting reading in Gilead (The Handmaid’s Tale), or burning books because they cause emotional pain (Farenheit 451). An extreme interpretation of the idea that knowledge is oppressive is irredentism, the idea and practice of arbitrarily selecting one event in history as the origin of imperialism/oppression and returning a diaspora to that.
*In non-philosophy (e.g. Laruelle), a priori decision-making is not assumed nor exercised. It could be considered more fundamental if it is applied always in practice, as it has been defined as a science of philosophy. Absurdist philosophy, while considered an “off-shoot” of existentialism, resembles this transcendental exit from hermeneutics and phenomenology, but is not required to, nor is a one-way street. In that regard, Absurdist philosophy could be considered a science of a priori philosophies, among others, such as meta-philosophy.
Imitators and Me
Sartre wrote of the Other in Being and Nothingness in the mannequin analogy. A false positive, in neuroscientific terms, is indistinguishable without some other cross-referencing system of identity:
“This transformation is most clear when one sees a mannequin that one confuses for a real person for a moment.
While they believe it is a person, their world is transformed. Objects now partly escape them; they have aspects that belong to the other person, and that are thus unknowable to them. During this time one can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now the other person’s world, a foreign world that no longer comes from the self, but from the other. The other person is a “threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world…Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other’s values, over which you have no control”.[9] When they realise it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they are again in the center of a universe. This is back to the pre-reflective mode of being, it is “the eye of the camera that is always present but is never seen”.[9] The person is occupied and too busy for self-reflection.[10] This process is continual, unavoidable, and ineluctable.[9]”
" A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an organism acts and when the organism observes the same action performed by another.[1][2][3] Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Mirror neurons are not always physiologically distinct from other types of neurons in the brain; their main differentiating factor is their response patterns.[4] By this definition, such neurons have been directly observed in humans[5] and primate species,[6] and in birds.[7]”
“Not surprisingly, these brain regions include those found in the macaque monkey.[1] However, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can examine the entire brain at once and suggests that a much wider network of brain areas shows mirror properties in humans than previously thought. These additional areas include the somatosensory cortex and are thought to make the observer feel what it feels like to move in the observed way.[26][27]”
Rebaudrillization
The era of deconstructionism and postmodernism certainly was inevitable by the late 60s, but approaches to understanding the new territory continue to be fraught with uncertainty. The New Sincerity (post-postmodernism), and Stuckism (Remodernism) are attempts to reconstruct the Modernist era or at least reject post-modernism. These movements certainly offer pathways outside of post-modernism, but also can appear discordant in different milieus where post-modernism is still practiced. It is very likely that post-modernism will also need its own Re-postmodernism (similar to Modernism’s “Make it New ”, but for the opposite effect), which can appear ironic, since it is an era that is somewhat still stuck in it. Re-postmodernism, or what I call, Rebaudrillization, will find utility once the traditional concept of post-modernism is no longer the territory. As film production has more remakes than original IP, the Marvel Franchise era is already recycling tropes in full steam and using microtargeted ads that appeal to various demographics. As Beckett has been described as the last Modernist poet, his liminality into existentialism and nihilist plays are a precedent for future eras transitions. Many eras that appeared too short, were reflected in the speed of industrial progress, and became a victim of their own success. The Lost Generation writers, resembled this “squished” period, between WWI and WWII, where much of the idealism of Modernism was closed and the era that succeeded it could not be defined, requiring new ways of thinking.
Rebaudrillization is a salvage project- an ecologically focused movement of creating meaning out of largely obsoleted concepts. Ideas that were arbitrarily designated as meaningless, but new meaning was found or created. All of evolution is based on gain or loss of function- even functions that were not designed for something occasionally select for a new function. Devolution can be seen as both a backwards and a forward event, but in the displacement of ideas, can represent a simplification of an overly complex or obsoleted trait. In other ways, it is a form of vestigiality studies and digital archeology. Knowledge itself is being produced in greater volumes than it can be preserved, thus the medium of storage and delivery is integral to examining the value, especially in an era where changing norms on artificial intelligence is being used as a currency (e.g. tokenization). If artifacts become valuable items of trade, their medium of transfer is critical to the stable progress through the current era of the Internet Age.
An example of postmodernist cinema is the modern adaptation of the 1995 movie Romeo and Juliet by Baz Luhrmann. An example of Rebaudrillization might be a remake of [Alice in Wonderland] to a more innocent (and less dark) remake, but set in a modern or past era, despite the 19th century original setting. Each generation shapes the story, but storytelling is sometimes timeless, and that which is unavoidably anachronistic (due to studio props revealing some unairbrushed parachronistic or prochronistic artifact in post-production or CG) is not necessarily meaningful to the plot or narrative set in a single era or period piece.
“Paint it red”, because a software may require a selection to run a program. (e.g When 0=undefined or when refactoring legacy code )
(not Orson Welles)
‘Pataphysics (French: ‘pataphysique) is a “philosophy” of science invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907)[2] intended to be a parody of science.[3] Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the “science of imaginary solutions”.[4]
Anachronistic works can appear to allow for pataphysical solutions, even ones that do not require them. Absurdism is a form of imaginary or inventive solutionism, or Rebaudrillization , in a Re-postmodern era.
There is no indication that Baudrillard and Sartre were connected (although it is likely at least one was aware of the other). I have just begun this examination, and while they researched adjacent eras, appear to have similarities, even if they had diametrically opposed views, when seen from the lens of science- displacement in physics, specifically, which states that all change in delta is positive. The frame of reference, according to post-modernism, cannot be proven or universalized, and therefore, all perspective is, relative in relation to another, and cannot be explained by equating positive with negative if also claiming positive is not negative. (i.e. if A=B, B cannot not equal A).
“III. Subjects Without Others How does the theory of objects chez Baudrillard connect to the theory of simulation? I believe that ‘taking the side of objects’ is the crucial way out of the culture of simulation. Simulation is about the rule of models and codes, the way that models and codes precede, determine, instantiate and hold sway over our everyday life existence. Simulation is a sort of reversal of the Sartrean existentialist formula “existence precedes essence.” In the society of simulation: ‘essence precedes existence’. Additionally, Baudrillard often talks about the ‘subjective’ side of simulation – the fact that we are living in a narcissistic culture of ‘subjects without others’ – leading to the disappearance or parodying of the human subject. This solipsistic self-referencing system of ‘otherless’ subjects obsessed with technologically and semiotically manufacturing their own clones is what in effect enables simulation.”
“Baudrillard and Existentialism : Taking the Side of Objects ISSN: 1705-6411 Volume 13, Number 2 (July 2016) Author: Alan N. Shapiro”
The only connection that can be made so far is that Jarry influenced both Baudrillard and Theater of the Absurd, which Sartre was an early founder. Baudrillard described post-modernism without living inside it. Perhaps the framework of scholarship was retained, in the same way a CD Player plays CDs , in a vaguely similar concept (also uses a rotating disc to ease human interpretation) of playing vinyl records, but technically distinct interface (e.g. a record needle instead of an optical laser), which also evolved from phonographs (side note: this skit is based on a Simpsons episode (S8:E11) or shortly preceded it around 1997)) and other musical recording devices in the 1800s.
“Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929. His grandparents were farm workers and his father a gendarme. During high school (at the Lycée at Reims), he became aware of ‘pataphysics via philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet, which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard’s later thought.[25]: 317”
“Alfred Jarry (French: [al.fʁɛd ʒa.ʁi]; 8 September 1873 – 1 November 1907) was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), often cited as a forerunner of the Dada, Surrealist, and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s and later the Theatre of the absurd In the 1950s and 1960s [1][2] He also coined the term and philosophical concept of ‘pataphysics.[3]”
While it’s a stretch to suggest that Baudrillard picked up the baton that Sartre left behind, if even such an idea has been suggested before, my belief is that a radically different era (post-modernism) had to be interpreted impartially, and, Baudrillard in many ways, while not necessarily liminal to absurdity/existentialism/Modernism, was still a classical scholar in the same definition/light. Thus, the era that one studies need not be defined by influences in disparate or similar eras that have continuity to an adjacent era, but by orthogonal definitions of classical scholarship.
*** “Individuals who deliberate, however, also produce short-term inefficiencies and resistances to existing systems. From the perspective of those with power, goals are usually met most efficiently if individuals reflexively follow established rules and patterns. So the bulk of the American educational system was designed around memorization and repetition. Education has been reduced to a subsector of the economy, designed to create cybercitizens within a teledemocracy of fast-moving images, representations, and lifestyle choices. … The new hidden curriculum, or “pedagogical unsaid,” is the attempt to de-form knowledge into a discreet and decontextualized set of technical skills packaged to serve big business interest, cheap labor, and ideological conformity. (McLaren 2000: 16)”
The term “short-term inefficiencies” has broad interpretability. In a position of instruction (e.g. a class of 10-300), deliberation has limited opportunities for dialectic. The Substack article by Erik Hoel, suggests, that traditionally, tutoring allowed a higher focus on individual learning, but this is a historical acknowledgement of aristocratic tutoring . Much of the post-truth era (both left and right), refuses to take a comprehensively historical perspective on this, and overlooks the important contrast of student:teacher ratio . It is no surprise that, last week, the Washington Post reported that Harvard and CalTech began requiring the SAT again: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/11/harvard-reinstates-sat-act-admissions-requirement/
Hoel refers to the SAT as the IQ’s “cousin .” Those who took English as a Second Language (ESL), or Speech, like me, (due to using my molar teeth to pronounce “s’s”, instead of my front teeth, because my native Italian parents did not know nor think important to nudge me towards or emphasize the proper American way to pronounce “s” as Sir Hiss did in Robin Hood (1973) at an early age.
Diaspora On the Defensive
Speech and ethnic background may appear to be irrelevant to half-precision point (FP16) scanning activists. There is at least one book on anthropologists visiting Italy and describing Italians as “natives” before :
The term diaspora is often correlated with the plural migration of a people, but there is not a word that emphasizes the singular emigration of an indidividual for highly specific reasons. The word “emigre” is: “a person who has left their own country in order to settle in another, typically for political reasons.” The word immigrant is “a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.” “While both terms imply removal from one’s native country, Diaspora gives more the sense of being driven out, and expatriate lends itself more to a self-motivated migration.”
Thus diaspora and emigre can refer to departure for political/religious reasons, but also economic. These hardships are not always weighed on the same level of reasons granted for contemporary immigration , because most refugees today are given preference due to religious political persecution, rather than economic (e.g. post-war WWII economy in war-destroyed, or Irish fleeing the Potato Famine, and “cheaper” labor)
It is an incongruity, perhaps, to refer to the unique emigration of an individual, who technically part of a cohort otherwise referred to as a “diaspora”, as a singular diaspora. Sartre’s homeland was and always was, France. Camus, on the other hand, was shaped as much by Algerian exile as France was from the hegemonic wars of WWII-era**** powers. The existential questions that Sartre raised from the 1939-44 era can be compared today, arguably, to the anthropocene era, and the anxiety that climate change, or at least climate policy/discourse elicits. The role of the diasporic***** in a post-Holocene era cannot be dismissed or downplayed as mutally exclusive.
Situationism Today
Situationism is present in everything, and is not restricted to political theater . Although often, that is the case. Recreating protests of 1968 should not be done in vain. Comparisons should also not always be made.
****A correction was found to this largely accurate article:
“In 1944, Guingouin and his maquis fought the German DAS REICH Panzer division and killed their general, Heinz Lammerding. This defeat delayed the Das Reich division’s arrival at Normandy and was instrumental in the Allied victory over Germany in June of ’44.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Lammerding (27 August 1905 – 13 January 1971)
While the author was notified and was thankful for the correction, Vice magazine has since closed down and was unable to make corrections.
***** “This era excels in a certain situation of the grotesque that seems to escape it every time. The truth is that the plaintive, indignant tones of the news media are unable to stifle the burst of laughter that welcomes these headlines.
“A burst of laughter is the only appropriate response to all the serious “questions” posed by news analysts. To take the most banal: There is no “immigration question.” Who still grows up where they were born? Who lives where they grew up? Who works where they live? Who lives where their ancestors did? And to whom do the children of this era belong, to television or their parents? The truth is that we have been completely torn from any belonging, we are no longer from anywhere, and the result, in addition to a new disposition to tourism, is an undeniable suffering. Our history is one of colonizations, of migrations, of wars, of exiles, of the destruction of all roots. It’s the story of everything that has made us foreigners in this world, guests in our own family.” -Ibid