If Ray Manzarek has just died at 74, that would have made him a sprightly 40 when he produced and played organ on X’s Los Angeles thirty-odd years ago. Remarkable.
The May 1 worker’s rights march in Portland was a resounding success (I have to admit it was, for all my purported radicalism, the first one I ever attended: people seemed to think I was an undercover cop or conservative.) A multicultural crowd “occupied” the streets of downtown Portland for a full hour, without incident — though the Black Bloc’ers became most strident as the march ended. Some mood music:
Exciting news for readers with some Italian: the whole of the Quaderni del Carcere and prison letters by Antonio Gramsci have been put online by the International Gramsci Society at GramsciSource. For those unaware of Gramsci, he was (with Lukacs and Lenin himself) one of the brightest intellectuals in the Communist camp; imprisoned by Mussolini for a decade or so, he wrote — using very interesting euphemisms for Marxist topics — “prison notebooks” that deal with every aspect of historical science, sociology, and Marxism. Famous for his adaptation of Romain Rolland’s dictum “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” and his concept of “hegemony”, Gramsci is one Red whose importance can hardly be said to have faded.
The interface is nifty and will certainly aid new Marxist thought around the world; hopefully we will see similar “intellectual portals” open up for other important thinkers. (For those — like me — who are not Italianate: people may yet be unaware that the Joseph Buttigieg translation of the Prison Notebooks in their entirety has been completed, and is available as a paperback three-volume set. No way around it, comrades.)
A useful album a decade ago:
Margaret Thatcher funeral set for next week
The funeral of Baroness Thatcher will take place on Wednesday, 17 April, Downing Street has announced.
The 87-year-old former prime minister died on Monday, after suffering a series of strokes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22079749
Penis size a marker of male attractiveness, study suggests
A new study of women suggests size truly does matter when it comes to choosing a man.
Australian researchers showed female university students images of naked men, and determined that penis size is a predictor of male attractiveness. The researchers explained the attractiveness might be rooted in evolution.
Coincidence? I think not. Granted, the study didn’t cover rigid members…
Let us say North Korea is an example of leftism gone awry.
Though they were once the prosperous Korea — thanks to the largesse of the Soviet Union — the state of the country since Kim Il Sung died has been horrific, and their status in the world community atrocious. Though there is an element of hypocrisy in the international “nuclear club” going after smaller, angrier countries trying to develop nuclear weapons, I think most people can agree that nuking Seoul (or Washington, for that matter) is not an intelligible protest against global capital. Shame on the DRPK.
I hope it all ends well.
I imagine everybody in the world has heard by now that Hugo Chavez has died from cancer at age 58. The extent of the analysis has been gratifying — we saw very little discussion when Lula left office, for example. Although not every facet of the Chavez phenomenon was salutary, I think a consensus is emerging that Chavez was indeed a great man, who challenged the ingrate W. on everything North Atlantic consensus was ready to let slide. Chavez’ career and the simultaneous one of the chavistas required not a little courage, for the example of Allende and the Argentine desaparecidos would put a chill on any socialist movement not motivated by an immanent understanding of the people’s needs (and a dynamism inspired by Cuba’s long and largely successful experiment with popular democracy).
Instead of opting for “smart” austerity or curling up in a little ball, the Venezuelan left rekindled Latin American populism and made an example for the whole world; though violence in Venezuela is endemic, the crushing poverty of the old Venezuela and the devil-may-care insouciance of its elites are gone forever — and there would certainly never have been an Evo Morales, and possibly no Rafael Correa, without Chavez. The era of “banana republics” has definitively drawn to a close.
With a character as colorful and forceful as him in charge of a country, everyone is bound to find fault. I personally do not view the Iranian Islamic Republic as a “Bolivarian” riposte to the New World Order, and Chavez did not spend very much time institutionalizing his revolution — we shall see how hard the pushback is. But a charismatic leader of the people finally did “demand the impossible”, and we have seen just how “impossible” it really is. RIP, Presidente Chavez; when will we have a North American leader to show the way like you?
This business about section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is sickening. In their quest to prove that Founders hagiography constitutes the Absolutely Correct View on Everything, the Republican-appointed justices seem willing to engage in a breathtaking act of judicial activism by striking down portions of the landmark 1965 law that first provided effective tools for challenging “literacy tests” and other segregationist dodges intended to keep blacks “down on the farm”. The Bizarro Warren Court finds the cudgel of disenfranchisement charges aesthetically displeasing, as it proves a reminder that not every social ill is solved by faith-based charity and freely willed contract; but Barack Obama is not the only black person in America, and race prejudice is alive and well (at least here in the North — perhaps Bubba Sparxxx put an end to it in Dixie). More proof that “originalism” is a failed philosophy of law that merely embodies a certain, blinkered political perspective. Say no to stoned Republicans, OK?
Obama is on the warpath about equality; this ultimately may be something like a mid-life crisis, as Barry O. tries to prove to his early supporters that he’s still “cool” after years of drone warfare — but it is at least leftoid, and worth considering a little bit. Verso had a book from Negri out a couple of years ago called Political Descartes, a hatchet job on “possessive individualism” as a result of the familiar externalist litanies. But what if there really was more to political equality than meets the philosophical eye?
“I have never understood the passion for equality”, said Peirce’s friend Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yet waves upon waves of metaphysical anti-individualism have done little to disturb the importance of droits de l’homme, even if Simon Blackburn takes it as ‘obvious’ that some people have the worth of others many times over. Perhaps pragmatism was a first inkling of something that appeared full-blown in Chomsky’s theoretical writings, the idea that the equality of abilities among human beings is, roughly, empirically verified by enlightened measures.
In a surprisingly comic line, Adorno doubted that running a trust was ultimately more complicated than reading a meter; and perhaps once the still-existing left gets over a Deleuzist fascination with flows and flesh and all that rhizomatic jazz the early-modern era will appear like something more than a time when “the rich were so mean” — the structures of capitalism yield political equality as a matter of something more than ‘onto-theology’, more than denatured Christianity, but rather as a corollary of modern praxis.
It’s been a while since I’ve been attending to the blog. In the meantime, I’ve seen that there are a number of much-needed translation projects that have come to fruition — things I had dreamed about translating myself. There is a “vernacular” translation of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy and a more careful and accurate translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. But what I want to talk about is the initial volume of Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft out in English. The title alone must have given people nightmares: “The Society of Society” says less in English than it does in German due to our diminished genitive, and following the format of the other “—- der Gesellschaft” translations and making it Society as a Social System would mangle the point of the book. So, instead we have Theory of Society, vol. 1, from one Rhodes Barrett.
Luhmann’s world stature as a sociologist has only continued to grow since his death in 1999, shortly after the publication of this 1200-page behemoth. But people who have dipped into Love as Passion or Observations on Modernity and fear a brain-melting stew of second-order cybernetics and Parsonsonian structural-functionalism can relax. Luhmann learned much since the hauteur of Social Systems, and the explication of the concept of society — the boundary our communications cannot transgress, since to adapt Derrida there is nothing outside society — is more genial and concrete. Especially valuable is Luhmann’s discussion of “symbolically generalized communications media”, otherwise known as ideology; his analyses of truth, money, love and power as structuring forces in our social interaction is far more “materialist” than the common run of Marxists. A must-have for the socially minded.
