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

Interview with Daniel Dennett

Dennett Gone

 

The  important and impactful thinker Daniel Dennet passed away today on the same day my father did in 1979-April 19. Dennett gave a lot of thought on what consciousness is among the many things that concerned him, but it was through those deliberations that I became aware of his books and thoughts.

Here is what the New York Times had to say:

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:

“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

Already with the 1991 publication of his book, “Consciousness Explained,” Mr. Dennett had expounded his belief that consciousness could be explained only by an understanding of the physiology of the brain, which he viewed as a kind of supercomputer.

“All varieties of perception — indeed all varieties of thought or mental activity — are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs,” he wrote. “Information entering the nervous system is under continuous ‘editorial revision.’”

By the 1990s, Mr. Dennett had increasingly sought to explain the development of the brain — and illusions of a separate consciousness and free will — in terms of the evolution of human beings from other animal life.

He believed that natural selection was the overwhelming factor in this evolution. And he insisted that physical and behavioral traits of organisms evolved primarily through their beneficial effects on survival or reproduction, thus enhancing an organism’s fitness in its environment.

Critics, like Mr. Gould, cautioned that while natural selection was important, evolution would also have to be explained by random genetic mutations that were neutral or even somewhat damaging to organisms, but that had become fixed in a population. In Mr. Gould’s view, evolution is marked by long periods of little or no change punctuated by short, rapid bursts of significant change, while Mr. Dennett defended a more gradualist view.

Underlying the increasingly acrimonious debate between the scholars was a natural friction in the scientific and philosophical communities over which side merited more credibility on the subject of evolution.

Mr. Dennett also plunged into controversy with his strident views on atheism. He and a colleague, Linda LaScola, researched and published a book in 2013, “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” based on interviews with clerics of various denominations who were secret atheists. They defended their decision to continue preaching because it provided comfort and needed ritual to their congregations.

More

No Master Plan

From an article in The Atlantic on what is going on across corporations since the early 2000's-I saw this and worse during my last years in business and the rush to monetize the savings from ill-informed automations and efficiencies has created, finally, what we are witnessing at Boeing today. I can remember in the early 2000's as we were rolling out "improvements' with bad consequences a co-exec telling me we aren't running a hospital here. . .:

Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone. Ten years from now, the Deloitte consultant Erica Volini projects, 70 to 90 percent of workers will be in so-called hybrid jobs or superjobs—that is, positions combining tasks once performed by people in two or more traditional roles. Visit SkyWest Airlines’ careers site, and you’ll see that the company is looking for “cross utilized agents” capable of ticketing, marshaling and servicing aircraft, and handling luggage. At the online shoe company Zappos, which famously did away with job titles a few years back, employees are encouraged to take on multiple roles by joining “circles” that tackle different responsibilities. If you ask Laszlo Bock, Google’s former culture chief and now the head of the HR start-up Humu, what he looks for in a new hire, he’ll tell you “mental agility.” “What companies are looking for,” says Mary Jo King, the president of the National Résumé Writers’ Association, “is someone who can be all, do all, and pivot on a dime to solve any problem.”

The phenomenon is sped by automation, which usurps routine tasks, leaving employees to handle the nonroutine and unanticipated—and the continued advance of which throws the skills employers value into flux. It would be supremely ironic if the advance of the knowledge economy had the effect of devaluing knowledge. But that’s what I heard, recurrently, while reporting this story. “The half-life of skills is getting shorter,” I was told by IBM’s Joanna Daly, who oversaw an apprenticeship program that trained tech employees for new jobs within the company in as few as six months. By 2020, a 2016 World Economic Forum report predicted, “more than one-third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations” will not have been seen as crucial to the job when the report was published. If that’s the case, I asked John Sullivan, a prominent Silicon Valley talent adviser, why should anyone take the time to master anything at all? “You shouldn’t!” he replied.

As a rule of thumb, statements out of Silicon Valley should be deflated by half to control for hyperbole. Still, the ramifications of Sullivan’s comment unfurl quickly. Minimal manning—and the evolution of the economy more generally—requires a different kind of worker, with not only different acquired skills but different inherent abilities. It has implications for the nature and utility of a college education, for the path of careers, for inequality and employability—even for the generational divide. And that’s to say nothing of its potential impact on product quality and worker safety, or on the nature of the satisfactions one might derive from work. Or, for that matter, on the relevance of the question What do you want to be when you grow up?

How deep these implications go depends, ultimately, on how closely employers embrace the concepts behind minimal manning. The Navy, curiously, has pushed the idea forward with an abandon unseen anywhere on land. Within a few years, 35 littoral combat ships will be afloat, along with three minimally manned destroyers of the new Zumwalt class. The effort seemed to me a good test case for the broader questions bedeviling the economy: Can a few brilliant, quick-thinking generalists really replace a fleet of specialists? Is the value of true expertise in serious decline?

Vernacular Social Club

 

The manifesto from the Vernacular Social Club, a website online celebrating the existence and proliferation of one and all photographs. They also have a very informative podcast The Photo Vault. It focuses on the collection of photos but not in the traditional sense. I'm sure I'm infected with the virus but by a relative strain.

Here is what they say:

From the summit of the vernacular, we send out a rallying call to unite. All of us, champions of domestic, utilitarian, and local photographs that, over time, shed light on our society of the 20th and 21st centuries. Together, bringing the Vernacular Social Club to life means giving visibility to these undocumented archives, “de-conforming” the field to give cachet to the realm of the anonymous, to those “out of order” images.

1. We want to create an international club, inclusive both geographically and socially, as a place to share thoughts and ideas, open to everyone.
2. We want to propagate the vernacular document as expressions of social, societal, political, and artistic themes.
3. Our objective is to make the club a visually-rich sanctum by pooling the technical and artistic expertise of its members, as well as their archival, documentary, and financial resources.
4. Members can contribute directly to the club’s artistic and editorial production. They can also become benefactors and patrons.
5. Our underlying line of action is to promote the image in all its forms, without excluding texts and exegeses dealing with all types of subjects.
6. The club’s mission is to realize editorial projects, organize conferences, exhibitions, etc., and support its members’ initiatives and projects.
7. To promote the vernacular document, several mediums have been put in place: the magazine “REVU” with three annual issues and the creation and distribution of audio and video content.
8. The Vernacular Social Club is a cultural and non-profit association. An annual membership fee is required for those wishing to be members. Special financial or administrative support is provided to members who are economically disadvantaged or in need of specific aid.

Visual Evidence

 

From an interview with Dr. Jennifer Good at Interloper, a Substack account on photography by Alice Zoo:

AZ: Is it accurate to say that news is more visual now than it ever has been? And if so, what does that mean? Does it make it more immediate, more accessible? And what are some of the issues with consuming news via an image-led platform like Instagram, whose algorithm prioritises visual (as opposed to text-based) content?

JG: Actually, there is precedent for this. Life magazine, for a long time many people’s main source of news, was highly unusual when it began, as a distinctly image-led platform in which words took second place, not only in terms of the amount of space they took up, but in the sense that photographers and their images led the stories and dictated the balance of news values. And in a further parallel with Instagram, words became relegated to the status of captions and description. Opinion differs, of course, as to whether that was a good or a bad thing, but in my view it makes sense that this kind of news consumption exists in an ecosystem, alongside other platforms that give words the prominence and space that they need. 

To me, the biggest shift characterising Instagram and other social media platforms is not the prevalence of images over words, but the increasing prevalence of moving images over still ones. This shift, psychically speaking for viewers, is profound. In my current work, I’m preoccupied with still photography’s ‘fixity’; its inherent propensity to distance and to master, which is potentially disrupted by the moving image. But I also know that moving images have a greater power to traumatise, especially when they come to us unbidden, confronting us with horror that we cannot hold metaphorically at arms in length in the way we can with a frozen, stilled image.  

For previous generations of news consumers, photographs tended to reach us after a time lag, presenting a stilled version of a past moment, and so offering a much more stable form of engagement with violence. Now, they come immediately or even in real time, unfiltered, unedited, often with video first and stills afterwards. Crucially, when images come before the words that explain them, we have no frame of reference, no warning. The key question is not which historical period was the more visual, but rather this temporal dislocation: how time works in each. This is a difference that photography theory — even psychoanalytic theory — is not well equipped to understand. 

AZ: Obviously another major difference is the proportion of footage that comes to us from civilians on the ground, filming on their phones, as opposed to images that come to us from professional photojournalists with backing from press organisations, conflict training, and professional equipment. What kinds of new advantages and/or problems does this pose? 

I feel that in some ways the immediacy and rawness of citizen journalism seems ‘truer’ — not least because there isn’t a team of people deciding whether to go ahead and publish it or not, so it’s less mediated by multiple voices and agendas — but what do professional photojournalists provide that civilian images don’t? And how do ethical questions around images of war change given the far shorter distance between photographer and subject?

JG: For some time now, the only photographs coming to us out of Gaza have been from those already living in or based there, including professional Palestinian photographers. As in any war zone there is a mix of professional and amateur, but considering how compromised the area is in terms of internet connection and electricity, and the conditions under which these local photographers are working, many of the images are really striking in their compositional effectiveness. As a teacher, I spend a lot of time talking about the aestheticisation-of-suffering critique: the idea (originating in the 1980s, with some quite ferocious critics like Martha Rosler) that there is a disingenuousness to photography that creates visually pleasing depictions of war and suffering, flattening its complexity into an arrangement that serves to soothe rather than challenge the viewer. But in the past few weeks I’ve noticed in my own media consumption a softening of this view. I’ve found myself avoiding certain social media feeds where I know I’m likely to encounter a lot of citizen photojournalism — vital as it is — and instead kept to more mainstream sites carrying professional imagery, because in general I know that these images will convey the horror in a form that is literally easier to look at. It’s my way of ensuring that I’m able to stay informed, to not look away. But this is an ethical compromise: it’s a great privilege to choose to see ‘easier’ images of war.

I also know that, although not perfect, information from mainstream sources is more likely to have been factchecked. If my priority was getting news immediately, as quickly as possible, I’d be looking to different feeds and platforms. But personally, I would rather wait a beat, and know that the reporter had waited a beat; to get my news at a two-hour or even a two-day remove.

Ginzburg's Allure

 

Alexander Chee writes about Natalia Ginzburg, Italian novelist and essayist from the the 30's and 40's, also a favorite of mine:

I began reading Natalia Ginzburg in translation in 2015, and as a result have read many introductions to her works by now. With each one I came to learn at least one new detail about her. She was born Natalia Levi in Palermo on July 14, 1916, and published her first short story at the age of seventeen.

She was raised in an anti-fascist family in Turin, and in her author’s note to Family Lexicon, she describes the relief of being able to write it as a Turinesi. She had left Turin only after the exile of her family due to the same fascist Racial Laws that had her publish her 1942 debut novel, The Road to the City, under the pen name Alessandra Tornimparte: Italian Jews were forbidden from publishing. By the time her second novel, The Dry Heart, appeared in 1947, she was able to publish as Natalia Ginzburg as she would for the rest of her life, until her death in the fall of 1991.

I have heard it said of Natalia Ginzburg that she is easier to translate than some other Italian writers because her style is simple. My Italian isn’t good enough for me to judge the original texts, though it is true that in general one does not find the baroque descriptions one might encounter elsewhere, such as in the work of Alessandro Manzoni, the famous Italian novelist she took as the subject of her novel The Manzoni Family. I think instead there is an extraordinary precision, which you might experience as austerity if it wasn’t itself so satisfying.

Can you fall in love with a writer just from her author’s note? Maybe so, if it is her. Her distilled directness is disarming and even tender to encounter, and perhaps instructive too on the question of her style and whether it is simple or not. For her essay collection, The Little Virtues, she tells us every essay in the book is directed to a friend she will not name but who is also not in the essays, either. She adds that she did not revise the essays because she is no longer the person who wrote them.

For her novel Voices in the Evening she says, “The places and characters in this story are imaginary. The first are not found on any map, the others are not alive, nor have they ever lived, in any part of the world. I am sorry to say this having loved them as if they were real.” In both we see Ginzburg anticipate the questions a reader might ask and answer them, creating and then speaking to a subtext, which has the feeling of a clairvoyant making your fortune in front of you before you can ask any questions at all. She constructs a game around the reader, anticipating questions and reactions, and playing off of them as she constructs the next ones. If she is droll or spare or laconic, it is the eyeroll of a magician as she pulls your nickel from your ear.

I am sorry to say that Valentino has no such magical author’s note from her. I first discovered it in Open City, William Weaver’s 1999 anthology of seven post-war Italian writers that he’d known in Rome. Valentino is included there in its entirety, as translated by him—all of the translations are his—and each selection is prefaced by a photo of the author. In hers, her face looks carved out of stone, her hair cut short.

Weaver begins the anthology with a memoir of his own, of how he came to Italy first as an ambulance driver during World War II with literary ambitions and gradually became a literary translator, an American expat deeply immersed in the literary culture of Rome. He tells the story of how he met all of the writers, in turn. Ginzburg he meets at a dinner party in the home of Elena Croce, the writer and translator credited with having helped rescue Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard from obscurity.

The young Ginzburg is with a professor of English literature at the University of Rome, Gabriele Baldini, who will become her second husband. She has just begun dating him (and will marry soon after this dinner party). He introduces her to Weaver, who describes himself as made shy by her—she is already formidable to Weaver for her heroism, but also because of his knowledge of a letter that makes him feel as if he has intruded on her intimate life.

More

Morton Feldman Interview-In art, we must pursue anxiety.

Last night I had difficulties entering sleep so I put on Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus hoping that its infrequent and sparse pacing would help me reach the waters. But the opposite happened as I tried to deduce the structure of the pieces which seem to litter the darkness of the room. This morning I said I'd want to learn more about how this guy thought. Here he is in a 1983 interview:

TM: What new or emerging trends or composers do you feel have been important for the ’70s and ’80s?

MF: Nothing, we had nothing in the ’70s. We had —

TM: Or even the ’60s?

MF: We had popular music, like Steve Reich or Philip Glass, but they’re show business. Serious stuff, if I may use that word, experimental stuff, if I may use that word, nothing, nothing. Cage and myself are still doing the most interesting work. The young people are a disaster.

TM: Why is this?

MF: They shouldn’t be in the field. It’s a field that requires immense talent. They have no ideas. What the hell they’re doing there, I have no idea. I taught a seminar on my own—I mean I loved the kids, I suppose. They’re not kids anymore, they’re your age, doctorate program. I said, “You like those crazy Arabs that tie yourself up with dynamite and you crash into a building?” I said, “My God, you’re not going to crash in here.” I said, “We have it fixed — it happens about ten years after your doctorate degree.” I want everybody to get out of music. It’s too difficult. It requires immense talent for ideas, when not to use ideas. And a feeling for instruments, and a feeling for sound, and a natural feeling for proportion, not a didactic feeling for proportion, all these things. It’s very, very difficult. It’s very, very difficult. Music is very, very difficult. I don’t even think it should be taught in universities anymore.

TM: Well, what should happen to it?

MF: I think it should disappear from academic life, because the tendency is to be very academic even without academic life.

TM: You yourself teach!

MF: I teach … I don’t know what I do. I don’t know what I do. What is teaching? Teaching is in a sense what happened with Hindemith. This is the story about Hindemith and Yale: He says to somebody, “You know, I invented a system where you can be stupid and get good results?” That was the whole idea—finding ways to make it democratic. It’s not democratic. I mean, composition is not democratic.

TM: You don’t teach that way, I hope.

MF: No, I don’t teach like that, but I let them hang. I teach by not teaching. In a way, I would play things, and I would be a devil’s advocate. I would ask a question, “What do you think about it?” I teach one thing, actually. I don’t teach composition per se, but I go at composition by way of its acoustical reality. That is, I teach orchestration.

More

Progress

 

Manuel Astur in an interview:

I mean this habit we have where we constantly think of, for example, how foolish 20^th century Europeans were because they let the Nazis in. We are convinced that we are immune to such things, because we are smarter, because we are alive. It is as if there is some merit to being alive, or as if it is a punishment to have died. We are just specks of dust. Grains of sand on an endless beach, right? 30,000 years ago, give or take, even the man who was covered in furs and shit, who hunted mammoths—he was already like us: he already had the same intelligence, ten fingers and gripping hands, and he had the same eyes; he saw reality just like us. The only thing that has changed is the narration, how that reality is told. Other than that, there is no difference. So why do we think we are better? It has to do with the religion of progress, this religion in which we live where we are always ‘improving’. In the word ‘progress’, this cultural evolution or the evolution of the human race, as if we are always a renewed and better version of humanity. The 2.0 version or the 3.0. It’s nonsense. Today, with covid and climate change, maybe we’re starting to realise that. We are beginning to suspect that we are not as cool and special as we thought. We are as dumb as we have always been as a society, and we make the same mistakes. But it also has to do with the fact that the dead are not here to protect themselves, we can say what we want about them, and we can reduce them to a stereotype.

Beyond Capitalism Towards Modern Enlightenment

From a lively response to several reviews of his recent book, Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, he writes at LARB a confirmation that life as we know it is far from our control in the current ways society is organized and even among those in agreement there is disagreement on what a truly free existence would actually look like:

By contrast, This Life seeks to challenge the very measure of value that shapes the production of wealth under capitalism. There is no shortage of rhetorical indictments of capitalism, but what we need is a profound definition and analysis of capitalism that can illuminate the historical conditions under which we live, as well as the principles for an economic form of life beyond capitalism. That is what I set out to provide.

Given the stakes of the project, I am deeply grateful to Los Angeles Review of Books for organizing this symposium and for the critical engagement of the six distinguished respondents, all of whose work I have learned from and admire. In responding to them, my aim is not only to defend the arguments of This Life but also to elaborate the emancipatory vision of democratic socialism at the heart of the book. Democratic socialism in my sense would be a post-capitalist form of life, which cannot be achieved merely through redistributive reforms. Rather, democratic socialism requires a revolutionary revaluation of our collective measure of value, which would abolish wage labor and transform how we reproduce our lives, all the way from our production of goods to our forms of education and other social institutions.

To grasp the meaning of such a revaluation, it is helpful to begin with Benjamin Kunkel’s response to the book. Kunkel generously emphasizes that This Life makes a “magnificent case for democratic socialism” by “wresting the indispensable slogan of freedom away from the publicists for liberal capitalism.” To this end, I argue that Marx should be understood as the most important inheritor of the modern, Enlightenment commitment to freedom. Marx has no nostalgia for the premodern world. Rather, he makes clear that both capitalism and liberalism are historical conditions of possibility for the collective emancipation that he espouses. While consistent with Marx’s vision of communism, I choose to describe the post-capitalist form of life in terms of a novel conception of democratic socialism, in order to underline that the commitment to democracy is indispensable for Marx’s critique of capitalism. Through a critique of capitalism and liberalism on their own terms, I specify the general principles of democratic socialism and elaborate their concrete implications. What I call democratic socialism is neither an imposed blueprint nor an abstract utopia. Rather, I derive the principles of democratic socialism from the commitment to universal freedom and equality that is a historical achievement of modernity.

In developing the vision of democratic socialism, I have two main aims, which are perceptively highlighted by Kunkel. At stake is both a recuperation of “the cause of freedom for the radical left” and a demonstration “through the existential register of This Life, that democratic socialism is properly the cause of everyone.” As Kunkel rightly underlines, the case for democratic socialism requires that we can explain why capitalism is a source of unfreedom not only for the working class but also for the ruling classes themselves. In short, we must be able to explain why “an ordinary citizen under democratic socialism” would have greater possibilities of leading a free life “than even an exceptionally rich person today.”

To establish my argument, I must therefore demonstrate “the existential bankruptcy of capitalist wealth,” as Kunkel vividly expresses it. He recognizes that I show the unfreedom of those “whose mortal schedule and daily priorities take shape as capital demands,” including “the comparatively well paid, the ‘privileged,’ even the working rich.” Yet Kunkel thinks my argument “could easily be appropriated by the idle rich,” since he misconstrues the notion of free time that is at the center of This Life. On Kunkel’s account, my notion of free time is an empty quantitative category: “the sheer number of free hours” in which “we might do as we please,” since we supposedly do not have to answer to any demands placed on us by others. The same conception of free time informs Michael W. Clune’s response. According to Clune, I subscribe to a notion of freedom and equality “that says you can do anything you want to do, that all desires are equally legitimate, that society plays no role in judging what form of life you should adopt, so long as you don’t harm anyone else in certain carefully delimited ways.” Indeed, Clune claims that I do not “distinguish between better and worse ways of spending one’s free time,” since my notion of free time merely amounts to “the freedom to do whatever we want.”

I am truly surprised by these assertions, since the conception of freedom they ascribe to me is one that I argue against throughout the entire book. To be free is not to be free from obligations and follow any inclination one happens to have, released from the normative question of what is the right thing to do. On the contrary, I argue that we are free precisely because the normative question of what we ought to do is always at issue for us. Being free is not a matter of being unconstrained but of being responsive to the question of what is worth doing and which ends are worthy of our devotion. From your first-person standpoint, there is always such a question at work, if only implicitly. By virtue of doing anything at all, you are in practice taking a stand on the question of what is worth doing. If there were no such question involved — if it were immediately given what to do, without any possible hesitation, deliberation, or alteration on your part — you could not even understand yourself as an agent, since there would be nothing for you to do; it would all be automatic.

By the same token, the distinction between better and worse ways of spending your time is always at stake implicitly and can become explicit. You must be able to recognize that what you are doing is not worth doing and that what you have done is not worthy of who you are trying to be. The ability to make such negative judgments is an essential part of leading a free life. That is why Clune can judge that, by his own lights, he has wasted much of his life on doing heroin, buying worthless consumer goods, and playing the computer game Slay the Spire. It is also why the free time of the idle rich can be spoiled by a sense of “guilt and futility,” as Kunkel notes, with the attendant “suicides, addictions, mortal frivolities, and terminal bad faith that plague the rich today.”

Kunkel admits that he does not know how to “articulate philosophically” why the free time of the idle rich is pervaded by pathologies, but that is because he does not grasp the notion of freedom that is at stake. In a revealing example, Kunkel assumes that “loafing” on a lawn is an inherently free activity, whereas maintaining lawns on which people can loaf is an inherently unfree activity. Socially necessary labor (e.g., “seeding, fertilizing, and mowing lawns”) would then be an external constraint on our freedom — a necessary evil that we should try to reduce as much as possible — since freedom supposedly consists in freedom from socially necessary labor. If that were my notion of free time, the idle rich would indeed be paragons of freedom, since their abundant monetary wealth apparently releases them from the pressure of obligations and leaves them open to indulge any inclination that emerges as they are loafing through their lives.

As I underscore, however, free time is not reducible to leisure time and it does not designate a merely quantitative category of time. Rather, I coin the term socially available free time to make clear that our freedom can exist only in a social form and that it always depends on the quality of our social activities. For the same reason, there is no inherent opposition between socially available free time and socially necessary labor. To have socially available free time is to be engaged in activities that we recognize as ends in themselves — which can include many forms of socially necessary labor — as distinct from activities that we recognize as mere means to an end. This is a formal distinction, in the sense that it is not given which activities should count as ends in themselves and which activities should count as mere means to an end. If you are mowing a lawn because you are cheap labor for a capitalist enterprise, your labor time is unfree and alienated, since what you are doing is merely a means to the end of earning a wage. However, if you are mowing a lawn because you are committed to the flourishing of green spaces in the society of which you are a part, your socially necessary labor can itself be an expression of your freedom, since your labor is a way of participating in and contributing to a social good that you recognize as an end in itself. Inversely, there is no positive form of freedom in being “free” from obligations. Loafing on a lawn is itself a form of unfreedom if you cannot see your leisure time as part of a life that is good in itself.

More

A Very Good Documentary

 

It is enlightening to see a documentary that addresses the issue of protest and violence from a different perspective than American News television. We have dumbed down to a primitive level where thinking is not allowed. Here in this productive documentary you begin to understand the complexity of the issues but also who holds most of the cards in this game. Here is a review from J. Hoberman at Artforum:

This metadocumentary, an annotated assemblage of mainly first-person smartphone videos made during the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrations of 2018 and 2019 by the mixed-media journalist-artist-provocateur David Dufresne sans help from French ministry of culture, is as significant in its way as the founding film of cinema verité, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s 1961 Chronicle of Summer, in which Parisians of all types were asked about their personal lives and then in some cases, having seen themselves on-screen, were interviewed again provide the film’s coda.

Monopoly creates a similar feedback loop. Simply described, the film features images of urban mayhem—Robocopoid police battling scraggly yellow vests. Produced largely by the demonstrators, these videos are presented on the screen as subjects for analysis by actual participants, among other commentators (truck drivers, plumbers, lawyers, police-union officials, academics, social workers, journalists, stay-at-home moms): talking heads whose identities are withheld until the end of the movie, the better to sharpen the viewer’s appreciation of body language and vocal tone.

Dufresne employs a radical method of directing. Subjects respond to stimuli, in some cases reliving an experience. The movie’s first words are “C’est moi,” uttered by a demonstrator who has lost an eye as he watches himself wounded and crawling on the ground. This is immediately followed by a stern rebuke from Emmanuel Macron, who, shown alone amid an obedient audience, scolds an unseen gilet jaune sympathizer: “Your words repression and state violence are unacceptable in a constitutional state.” Dufresne inserts an opinion by the wounded man’s mother, followed by some truly atrocious examples of “unacceptable” state violence, including footage in which, in their apparent eagerness to confiscate a camera, cops smash their way into a car.

Visceral as it is, Monopoly is a montage film in the Soviet tradition. Dialectics abound. Brutality is juxtaposed with theory. The same streets are shown during and before chaotic manifs. Violence perpetrated by the police is set beside violence perpetrated against the police—the latter most elaborately in some multiscreen security-cam footage watched, in real time, by an outraged group of cops. The idea that the state is defined by its monopoly on violence is derived from Max Weber’s 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation”: hence the movie’s American title. More sarcastic, the original French title refers to a cop’s gloating comment on footage showing perhaps forty young Arabs being taught to “behave” by spending hours on their knees, hands clasped behind their heads. Dufresne, born a month before May ’68, attributes his interest in police brutality to his teenage enthusiasm for punk rock. Monopoly has universal relevance even while it is specifically French, dealing as it does with the indigenous gilets jaunes movement—a leaderless, mostly working-class revolt sparked by rising fuel prices and unified largely by a populist loathing of Macron—while advancing a variety of analyses that deploy semiotics and critical theory with infectious gusto. There is thought amid the clobbering. Academics parse symbols; sociologists dissect crowd behavior and “ritualized” or symbolic acts of aggression. Philosophers suggest that demonstrations serve to make establishment power manifest, while smashing the windows of the high-end Champs-Elysées brasserie Fouquet’s enables demonstrators to physically possess the shards of that power.

More