The subject matter of the discussion, besides being of deep interest, is timely. True to the Marxian observation that, contrary to the law of bourgeois revolutions, the law, obedient to which the revolutionary movement of the proletariat acts, is to "criticize itself constantly; constantly to interrupt itself in its own course; to come back to what seems to have been accomplished in order to start over anew; to scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of its first attempts; to seem to throw down its adversary only in order to enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again to rise up against it in more gigantic stature; to constantly recoil in fear before the undefined monster magnitude of its own objects - until, finally, that situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, until the conditions themselves cry out: Hic rhodus, hic salta ! - true to that Marxian observation, the Labor Movement of America is today thoroughly criticizing itself.
Daniel DeLeon, As To Politics, 1907
As perhaps befits a totemic figure for the US Army, James Brown’s dancing was Italianate: that is to say scientific. When you see someone make themselves into a whirling contraption – they are becoming less than they were and less noticeable, and they know this; JB moved so well you didn’t notice he was “stepping”, not participating in genuine modernist gyrations; how can he, how can he, how can he conduct the Orchester while moving so precisely from place to place and snapping his fingers? Ultimately many try, but those moves were “of a piece” and of a time – there is no “Maceo Parker of Attica” and nothing to do but watch and learn and try.
“Chrysler believes there is no reason for withholding complete riding comfort from those who desire the utmost in motoring. Naturally, the basic changes that so definitely influence complete riding comfort are not made at low cost. They cannot be included in all cars in all price groups. But, for you who prefer motor cars that are wholly apart from the commonplace, Chrysler offers for 1934, the utterly distinctive, Floating Ride Airflow Chrysler.”
“There will be nothing to disturb the smoothness of its tear-drop silhouette as it cuts through the air”
Raymond Loewy, “The Evolution of the Motor Car”, Advertising Arts, March 1934, p.39 (quoted in Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939)
Joseph P. Kamp, Join the CIO and Help Build a Soviet America: A Factual Narrative, Consitutional Education League: New Haven, CT, 1937
Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve managed to keep the blog regularly updated: this last week has been a nadir, as the long-term problem — no regular access to the Internet except through library Wi-Fi I have to travel some distance to use – has been compounded by what is hopefully a short-term problem (an illness with a kaleidoscope of symptoms). Some of the older posts are still drawing people in from search engines, which is nice, but I’m not quite grasping what the point of continuing to update is from either a personal or political standpoint.
Personally, I have somewhat less than a month and a half to go on my six-month commitment. A couple of shoes have finally dropped, and the fact that certain things I thought might be true but was previously too scared to conjecture openly are both nonbizzare (i.e., involve no ’spooky’ violations of physical, biological, or sociological laws) and exceedingly improbable has been conceded. This is a good point to leave a lot of “open questions” that don’t fundamentally pertain to me at, and concentrate on increased and recognizable awareness of my current circumstances and life chances. These last will be hard enough to deal with, I think.
Politically: I think Obama’s election will transform the “blogosphere”, possibly by rendering it rather redundant. Most bloggers were united in their opposition to Bush, but the new president is perhaps somewhat less annoyed by, or interested in, signifying monkeys and so a big “percentage” in sharing yourself with your anonymous ‘friends’ has disappeared. I personally found the depths of folly to which the Bush administration sunk unspeakable, but now that we’re “at liberty” to wonder whether locking people up without trial was a winner (I say no) or NSA wiretaps on everybody were a good idea (you’re naive if you think that level of information awareness, relative to the technology available, didn’t always exist) I feel compelled to say slightly less about my love of post-punk.
So, consider this an announcement of hiatus from regular blogging. I reserve the right to return Just When You Least Expect it and set the intellectual world on fire, but since I’m not really into making a stand on my rights don’t count on it.
Well, the maximum leader-to-be explained today how tax cuts and infrastructural improvements will help solve the “recession”: color me unimpressed by this nuevo-Chicago approach to the economic crisis. Although a “personalistic” approach to the causes of recession (investors were scared of Obama) may not fall too wide of the mark, surely the solution requires a massive and impersonal readjustment of the American economy: it’s perfectly all right if some American company happens to be a “global innovator”, but playing that particular language-game (part of the Democratic dream of a Euro-Canadian “prestige economy” for the US) is not necessarily going to produce the necessary “jobs here now”.
However, since the votes are in my position as informal advisor to the ticket has been replaced by a status as threat to the forthcoming trust between “the taxpayer” and the government, so I’m going to switch over to what I did, if not best, at least first: formalized social theory. I was embarassed by the state of the “Logic and Politics” essays from half a decade ago, so I removed them from the blog; now they’re back. I haven’t rewritten them from top to bottom: I would certainly not take certain flights of fancy today (trying to get a verstehende grasp of Gentzen’s SA worldview as expressed in his presentation of logical formalisms, e.g.) but the idea of actually tethering the infamous “double hermeneutic” – explaining the social in terms of the individual and the individual in terms of the social — to “games of truth” with precise boundaries and rules still seems like a good one to me.
Along those lines, I have a few new conjectures (an equivalence between forcing and the Gentzen proof of consistency for PA rendering Tarski’s distrust of the latter “deprecated”, the game-theoretical character of truth theories containing their own truth predicate and the accompanying covert “aletheism” of nonzero-sum games) that I’d like to fold into the usual considerations of the usual suspects; but on occasion I do think before speaking, or writing, so it may be a while before I lay those out. I also will be finishing the Montague Grammar exposition, although the tree diagrams necessary to explain disambiguated sentences may necessitate making the finished product a PDF or DJVU rather than individual posts; furthermore, I plan to do some selective translation of Nietzsche and Luhmann. (If this all strikes you as ludicrous, let me say I’m glad to be one of your best entertainment values.)
Compounding the commitment, the Portland area is unusually experiencing something like normal North American winter weather and consequently everything is all messed up. I walked uphill through the snow to tell you that there won’t be any featurettes this week: as regards approximations to contemporary relevance in art and music, you’re on your own. Otherwise, I guess I’ll leave this as an “open post” for people to write in requests for topics they want to see Mr. Rubard address; if there are no recommendations, I’m going to assume that my status as “blogger’s blogger” is secure and I should continue to write in the same inimitable style.
I don’t normally write “straight” analytic philosophy. My usual inspirations are the “logic of semblance” of critical social theory, which shows us how distortions inherent in the way contemporary society treats topics make eminently sensible choices look bad and fraudulent swindles look good, and the theoretical logic analytic philosophers claim to esteem without always reading much of it, or reading it carefully. But for a short time at the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 I did write “squibs” which essentially gave my positive Doctrine of Being for a few choice issues.
The circumstances were not auspicious: rolling off a grueling one-month hospitalization, I was heavily medicated and lacking much in the way of means of support. However, reading over the pieces (which engendered lively Usenet conversations) I think I like them okay today: so, in the interest of reaching out to the analytic world I’ve collected them under the heading “Ontology” (“Metaphysics” is usually construed more narrowly than the topics addressed, although I was interested specifically in what literature, nececessity, mental states, etc. are).
Highlight: ”Practical Rationality: Going Sane” — practical rationality treated through treatment of a colorful and colorfully heteroglossic Pepys quotation.
