v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Recent experiments with reflections and abstract space.

Vallejo Nocturno 2024-Flood Series

Fredric Jameson Gone

 

Fredric Jameson left us this last week at the ripe old age of 90. A towering intellectual of the Left in the USA. Terry Eagleton writes about his work at the London review of Books:

Fredric Jameson’s sentences could be of Proustian length, great intricate chains of syntax that pursue their stately course in no hurry to arrive at a full stop; but his prose was never deliberately obscure, as it is with those theorists who make their arguments irrefutable by rendering them unintelligible. Obscurantism is as much the product of anxiety as it is of arrogance. In fact, The Years of Theory, his final book, is one of the most accessible Jameson ever produced. It is the transcript of a series of seminars he gave in the US three years ago and instead of his usual burnished rhetoric, magisterial if somewhat monotone, we have the speaking voice of a more unbuttoned, self-deprecating Jameson, a man who was clearly at ease with his audience and attentive to them (‘Don’t worry about that right now’; ‘I think you’re probably not going to ... read through that, and I don’t think it’s even necessary’; ‘I would like you to feel the excitement of the stuff’). The tone is democratic American, very different from that of the French divas of both genders whose thought he expounds. There are touches of wry humour: Lévi-Strauss ‘is obviously an enormously brilliant figure who, like a lot of such people, is absolutely untrustworthy’. Unlike the gurus of the Left Bank, he didn’t regard it as beneath his dignity to explain some basic ideas: patriarchy, for example, or the fact that Freud has no real concept of the mother. When it comes to affairs of the mind, at least in the cultural domain, the United States is a colony of Europe, and the style of this book reflects the fact. There are even some snatches of gossip and odd bits of biography. The young Lacan met James Joyce and may have psychoanalysed Picasso. He was also consulted by Sartre, who happened to be having hallucinations at the time. We learn that Foucault and Derrida couldn’t stand each other, rather as one imagines Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver don’t get on too well. Derrida was the only member of the intelligentsia to visit his fellow Algerian Louis Althusser when he was locked up for killing his wife. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, doyens of the Frankfurt School, were avid consumers of Marx Brothers movies. There is even a reference to Sartre’s squint, as well as to the fact that Jameson himself had a tendency to put on weight. This is not the kind of stuff one would have heard at Lacan’s renowned seminars in Paris, voguish as well as highbrow affairs, like a cross between academia and Ascot.

The book pushes the years of French theory back to the aftermath of the Second World War (Sartre, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty) and in doing so weaves a personal biography into its intellectual history. Jameson’s first book was on Sartre; he regarded himself as a ‘more-than-former-Sartrean’ and was inclined to overrate Being and Nothingness, which along with The Age of Reason was Jameson’s first introduction to the theory business. In fact, he tells us that he always tried to remain faithful to existentialism, which is almost as surprising as being told that he always remained loyal to the Buddha. It is hard to see any evidence of this commitment in his voluminous writings. . . .

Jameson’s knowledge wasn’t confined to a single nation. One suspects that nobody alive today has read as many books as he had, from Heraclitus and Parmenides to obscure texts and tracts only he had heard of. This urge for totality has its drawbacks. Jameson was always too generous-spirited a thinker, holding with the Hegel he admired that the truth lies in the whole, and that one must judge ideas in this context rather than dismissing them out of hand. There may be an American impulse to affirm at work here, in contrast to the negativity which marks French thought from Mallarmé’s aesthetics and Sartre’s nothingness to Derrida’s différance and Alain Badiou’s ineffable Event. Jameson tells us that he adheres provisionally to all the theoretical cases he outlines, which ignores not only the flagrant contradictions between them but the incompatibility of some of them with his own Marxist politics. It is an approach more typical of the lecture room than the political rally. For Marx, by contrast, not to mention the ferociously partisan Jesus, the truth is not a totality but one-sided. It is a scandal and stumbling block, a cutting sword which seeks to lay bare falsehood and deceit in the name of human emancipation.

Jameson praises Deleuze as ‘one of the most marvellous thinkers of the 20th century’, while going on to claim that he turns all the thinkers he deals with into himself. That doesn’t seem all that marvellous to me, any more than there’s much to admire about the squalid idealising of schizophrenia to which his work gave rise. It isn’t really possible to derive an ethics from Deleuze’s grandiose philosophy of desire, or for that matter a feasible politics. Jameson was silent on these questions, seeking as usual to understand rather than censure. One mustn’t lapse into a simplistic opposition between good and evil, which would be ripe for deconstruction. But you don’t need to wax metaphysical to denounce Donald Trump. It’s rather that denunciation wasn’t his style, any more than satire or parody was. He was one of the least polemical of left-wing writers.

Cultural theorists like Jameson are a reinvention of the classical intellectual. Intellectuals differ from academics in ranging across a number of disciplines, but also in bringing ideas to bear on society as a whole. They are typically both polymaths and polyglots. Jameson was fluent in several languages and had a voracious appetite for knowledge. He was as learned in Czech science fiction as he was in Taiwanese cinema. He continued to produce major works until his death last month at the age of ninety. His exceptional range of interests pointed to the way an otherwise socially pointless literary criticism might manage to justify its existence. By becoming a form of cultural critique, it can play a modest role in changing the world as well as interpreting it.

The Snake Story

 

One of the things you can do to understand how moronic Donald Trump is and how deluded his followers are is to read the transcripts (everything below is from a recent Trump Rant) from his stream of consciousness rants-here is this week's story from Las Vegas. I actually interpret this as Trump being the snake, and he tells this story to his cult:

 

On her way to work, one morning down the path along the lake, a tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.

His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew.

“Poor thing,” she cried. “I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you.”

“Take me in, oh, tender woman. Take me in, for heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh, tender woman,” cried the vicious snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy in a comforter of silk and laid him by her fireside with some honey and some milk.

She hugged and kissed him brightly. The work that night had gone. She found the pretty snake she had taken in had been revived.

“Take me in, oh, tender woman. Take me in, for heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh, tender woman,” cried that vicious snake.

She clutched him to her bosom. “You’re so beautiful,” she sighed.

“But if I hadn’t taken you in by now, you truly would have died.” She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed and held him tight.

But instead of saying, “Thank you, ma’am,” the snake gave her a vicious bite.

“Take me in oh, tender woman. Take me in, for heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh, tender woman,” sighed the vicious snake.

“I saved you,” cried the woman, “And you’ve bitten me. But why? You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.”

“Shut up, silly woman,” sighed the reptile with a grin.

“You know damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

And that’s the end of the story.

And I had to do that sucker by memory because there’s no light up here. As much light, I’m dark. It’s like dark. I had two problems. It’s dark and the print on that thing is so light you couldn’t read it. So I did the best I could, but not bad, right? I couldn’t see. Michael, I couldn’t see a fricking word. I said, “I have an idea. Let’s do this snake.” And then I take it out. I say, “Oh, my God. That’s a very light print. Oh, my God. There’s no light.” Between the light and the print. I’m saying, “What the hell am I doing this for?” But it wasn’t bad. And you get the point. When I’m a president and when I become your president, when we all — we’re going to all work together. We’re going to make it happen. We will get the illegal alien, murderers, rapists, and child predators the hell out of our country, and we will not ever, ever, ever let them back in. So Nevada, get out and vote. We win this state. We’re going to win the whole thing. We win this, we’re going to win the whole thing.

They are Eating the Dogs

 

From NYT's Jamelle Bouie:

Where once Donald Trump attracted only the right-wing fringe of American politics, now he leads it. Where once he kept some distance from agitators and provocateurs like Laura Loomer, now they’re at the center of his campaign. And where once he merely inspired extremists to act, now he points them directly at the objects of his rage.

Take Springfield, Ohio, where schools, colleges and municipal buildings have been shut down and community events canceled owing to bomb threats targeting the city’s Haitian community. Those threats come as Trump — and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — smear the Haitians of Springfield with the lie that they’re stealing and eating the pets of presumably native-born Americans. Vance, who was ostensibly elected to represent and aid the people of towns like Springfield, has been even more vicious than his boss, spreading the additional lie that Haitians have carried disease and disorder to Ohio.

Despite pleas from both the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, who called the story of the attacks on pets “a piece of garbage that was simply not true,” neither Trump nor Vance is willing to end the rhetorical assault on the city’s Haitian immigrants. If anything, they’re unapologetic.

During a rally in Tucson, Ariz., on Thursday, for example, Trump expanded the lie even further. “Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” Trump said. “Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are, in the park. And even walking off with their pets.”

When asked about the bomb threats, he dodged the question. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” Trump said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants and that’s a terrible thing that happened. Springfield was this beautiful town and now they’re going through hell.”

The hell, of course, is of his own making.

As for Vance, who spearheaded this smear campaign when he amplified the claim on social media, he confessed to elevating rumors and lies to prove a political point. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said on Sunday, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”

A more self-aware person would see that “the suffering of the American people” includes all of the people of Springfield, who are facing the ugly consequences of Trump’s decision to make them a prop for his campaign. To him, their day-to-day lives are worth less than their symbolic value. This is why Trump wants to visit — it’s his chance to fan the flames, as well as fuel the fire for his own purposes.

There’s something familiar in the spectacle of a caravan of far-right agitators descending on a small city to weaponize the tensions that surround inclusion, belonging and identity.

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She Went Nuts: Prose Poem by Trump

From transcript in Arizona this last week. Surrealist poetry from a broken mind.

SHE WENT NUTS

Do you remember that?

It was the weirdest thing. Am I wrong? They were saying, JD and I are weird.

No, we’re very solid people. She’s weird. That vice president of hers is really weird. He’s really… That was a soundbite.

They said, oh, he’s weird.

In other words, they gave it to their friends in the fake news. Weird. It’s something I’ve never called.

I’ve been called a lot of bad things, but not weird.

But she went out and the people were applauding herself and she goes, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” I think she went nuts.

There was something wrong with her, but I was very happy because I got the endorsement of the vice president’s family and I got the endorsement of the vice president’s brother and even sent me a contribution, and I was very happy because Barack Hussein Obama, his brother, as you know, endorsed me, so his brother endorsed me.

Bloodbash by the "Stable Genius"

A poem by Donald Trump from his debate last week (actual transcript):

BLOODBASH

I have said “blood bash—bath.”

It was a different term, and it was a term that related to energy, because they have destroyed our energy business.

That was where bloodbath was.

Also, on Charlottesville, that story has been, as you would say, debunked.

Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse—all of these people, they covered it.

If they go an extra sentence, they will see it was perfect.

It was debunked in almost every newspaper. But they still bring it up, just like they bring 2025 up.

They bring all of this stuff up. I ask you this: You talk about the Capitol.

Why are we allowing these millions of people to come through on the southern border?

How come she’s not doing anything—and I’ll tell you what I would do.

And I would be very proud to do it.

Gibberish

I have always thought the filtering effect of our media prevents us from understanding who are candidates are. Even in situations where we have seen the candidate frequently over the years. Perhaps its because of our fractured attention existence that prevents 98% of the population from paying the necessary attention. Here is what Trump answered last week when he appeared in front of a New York group to question about monetary response to childcare. Here is the Joycian answer:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.

But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.

Important Investigative Reporting on Ecuador at Substack

 

An important investigative piece by Ryan Grim and José Olivares on the recent activities in Ecuador at Dropsite:

Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.

The brazen killing rocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the nation’s election. Villavicencio's supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s assassination, without evidence.

Then, the U.S. government got involved: First, the State Department announced a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to those who planned the killing, and later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the assassination.

Now, leaked private messages said to be sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to the messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was in close contact with  the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state's staggering descent.

The sensitive revelation is one of many that comes from the series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian assemblymember and an account he says was Salazar.

Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to obtain complete access to the explosive chat records that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated  attack on the leading leftist political party, all with the blessing of the U.S. 

Some of the messages have been reported on by the Ecuadorian media, which has buried the story. The foreign press has largely ignored the leaks, which provide a rare and intimate look into an example of the underhanded, U.S.-backed right-wing playbook. This playbook has, over the last decade, duped much of the media, promoted reactionary movements and anti-political sentiments, rolled back social gains, and wreaked political havoc in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, and beyond. Former president Donald Trump has also flirted with it, by attempting to use the U.S. Justice Department to go after political adversaries.

The Salazar messages are now the subject of an investigation by Salazar's colleagues and she is currently facing impeachment for “breach of duties” within the National Assembly, a process primarily led by the left-wing political party. In May, a Florida-based criminal attorney, representing an Ecuadorian man implicated in one of Salazar’s investigations, wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department, claiming that the messages “violate several federal laws” in the U.S. The attorney recommended the U.S. blacklist Salazar for revealing “highly sensitive and confidential information” from U.S. law enforcement agencies.

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Interview with Albarrán Cabrera

 

From Global Voices, an interview with this duo photographers who fashion unique images via photography:

Omid Memarian: Notions of memory and identity figure prominently in your photography. What's your personal connection with these themes and how are they reflected in your work?

Anna: Everything we are is memory. When dealing with anything related to science, you draw on what scientists have already discovered to understand the world. Regarding identity, you are who you are because of your memories. You are your first anniversary, you are your mother’s memories, you are the memories of your school days. You are all this. Even the way we conceptualize time to understand reality is based on memory. This is more evident in people who suffer from memory loss. For them, time does not exist.

We hope that our photographs trigger subconscious associations in viewers based on their memories. We even prefer that the viewer interpret the photograph in a way totally different from what we had originally imagined. Thus, they will create a new set of ideas for themselves.

Memory is the thread that weaves all of our series. “The Mouth of Krishna” is the core series. It is the result of all our learnings so far. It is related to how our memories keep our reality consistent, how we categorize what we perceive and how we interlink it.

From time to time, we realize that some concepts gain more importance and then this generates a new portfolio. Thus, “This is you here” studies the concept of identity and how it is created based on our memories.

“Kairos” revolves around the idea of how humans perceive time. Time is not something tangible, it’s just a property of the universe. We create the concept of time with the help of our memories, and we divide it into past, present and future.

OM: You have spent a lot of time in Japan. How does this particular geography connect to your worldview of art and culture?

Angel: Japanese culture is very important for us and our work. This culture, as many others, is subject to many stereotypes and enormous misconceptions. At the beginning, you can fall into the trap of its aesthetics and philosophy. But once you study the language, its people and history, you discover the reality about this country: the good, bad and horrible things that any country has. And yet, there is still something fascinating: Japan offers us a completely different interpretation of reality compared to our Western conception. We all live in the same world, but it is interpreted from many, and totally diverse, points of view.

The Western world is obsessed with symmetry and perfection. We understand beauty shaped by universal laws, granting great importance to the perfect and the eternal. Japanese aesthetics are, however, very different. They see beauty in the impermanent, the imperfect, the rustic and the melancholy. They long for what is not eternal, slightly broken, modest and fragile.

OM: The aesthetic aspect of your work is very bold. In a world in which classical depictions of beauty have been pushed aside, how is your work being received in the art world?

Anna: Beauty is a very complex topic. It is not only difficult to define what beauty is, but also to deal with it. Prettiness worries serious people a lot. They are afraid that beauty will make you forget what life is really like. But as the philosopher Alain de Botton stated: “We need pretty things close to us not because we are in danger of forgetting the bad stuff, but because terrible problems weigh so heavily on us, that we’re in danger of slipping into despair and depression…The art a country or a person calls ‘beautiful’ gives you vital clues as to what is missing.”

We do not consciously look for beauty in our work. We search through the mystery of the unknown to experiment with the beauty of discovering.

OM: You have done nature photography in both Europe and Japan. What differences do you see in these two series of works?

Angel: As Westerners, we are surprised and amazed by the aesthetic and philosophical interpretation that the East has developed about the world. It seems very different from ours and yet, both Western and Eastern schools of thought have a simultaneous origin. Reviewing the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers of the Miletus school, we can find in their line of thought a common motivation with the Oriental culture: nature.

Oriental thought, and even more specifically, Japanese thought has not lost this ancestral contact with nature, maintaining it throughout the evolution of its culture. The ideals and concepts of Japanese aesthetics are mainly influenced by religion. In both Shintoism and Buddhism, the Gods are not the creators of nature, but nature is an individual entity. In our Western tradition, the Judeo-Christian concept of a creator or God broke this link and made us separate ourselves from the traditional aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece. The meaning of terms such as Wabi-sabi, Miyabi, Shibui or Yuugen originally existed in our Western culture but they did not evolve as in the Japanese case. We are gladdened by the fact that this common root is present in our work: usually viewers cannot differentiate between the images taken in Japan from those taken in other places.

Shutaro Matsui's Music

A young trumpet player I discovered on Spotify by accident. Mature and technically gifted.