Filozofski fragmenti

To je uvak opcija, ja samo mislim da se ona može izbeći jedinu "iznutra", odnosno kroz kulturu, kroz civilizaciju, kroz filozoiju, kroz politiku, pa i kroz tehnologiju. Moguće je da nam nema spasa, ali ako ima, on ne leži izvan svih ovih stvari, to je ono što hoću da kažem.

Indy wrote:Pa, mozda preostane neki Mad Max svet. U zadnje vreme mnogi pricaju u tom smislu, recimo na temu toga zasto nikad nismo sreli aliene - ne zato sto ne postoji vanzemaljska civlizacija, vec zato sto se tehnoloski razvijene civilizacije samouniste. Meni na zalost to ima i suvise smisla.

Npr. Tainter pisao o tome - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

Energetski troškovi rešavanja problema kako društva postaju složenija i opadajući prinosi na investicije u tu kompleksnost su srž pada civilizacija po njemu.

Evo nešto što će se Indiju svideti.

Izbori, Lao Cu, čaša vode

Ursula K. Le Guin
Izbori 2016. su bili jedna od bitaka u neprekidnom američkom građanskom ratu. Trampovi glasači su toga bili svesniji od nas i pobedili su. Njihova pobeda mi pomaže da uočim naše greške.

Evo nešto što sumnjam da će se ostapu svideti.

Milanovič, kataklizma komunizma (naslov moj tj. amadeus rambov )

William Murderface wrote:Evo nešto što će se Indiju svideti.

Ah, kome Ursula može da se ne svidi!

Eto. Biće i knjiga, kaže...

Indy wrote:Evo nešto što sumnjam da će se ostapu svideti.

Milanovič, kataklizma komunizma (naslov moj tj. amadeus rambov )

ovo se ne sviđa ni meni. pod jedan zato što sadrži gomilu netačnosti. Na primer

Communism could not innovate in practically anything that required for success acquiescence of consumers.  It thus provided tanks but no ball-point pens, spacecraft but no toilet paper.

Jebo hemijske, dali su ljudima stanove i kuće od solidnog materijala. Ili za to niko nije bio zainteresovan? Enlightenment  je razum i vladavina prava. Sloboda i vlasništvo je protestantizam tacnije (pre svega) kalvinizam. Takvih stvari/gresaka ima deset u ovom kratkom tekstu. "Mogao bi da uradi daleko gore" od uzdržavanja da napiše tu knjigu.

Što reko Moma Rajin  (  ) rok postavlja pitanja, a pop nudi odgovore. Clearly, pobedio je pop (in more ways than one   ), ali kako stoje stvari - it will eat itself.

Ja nisam neki stručnjak za komunizam, ali začudilo me dosta pohvala ovom vrlo površnom tekstu Milanovića (koji ume znatno bolje da piše, a i misli), barem koje sam video po twitteru (koliko god da to vredi, a ne vredi.)

Ali jeste u pravu da je to (barem u ova vremena) dosta marginal(izov)an pogled na stvari (makar bio i pitanje), doduše ne na ovom forumu.

Ume bolje, naravno. Ovo mi baš deluje onako "došlo mi da napišem", pa što na um to na drum, a nema čoveka na svetu koji kad tako nešto uradi neće izneti dosta u najmanju ruku diskutabilnih gledišta.

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL KNEW TRUMP WAS COMING

Shortly after the Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over the wire: the Thomas Mann villa in Los Angeles has been saved. The house, which was built to Mann’s specifications, in the nineteen-forties, went on the market earlier this year, and it seemed likely to be demolished, because the structure was deemed less valuable than the land beneath it. After prolonged negotiations, the German government bought the property, with the idea of establishing it as a cultural center.

The house deserves to stand not only because a great writer lived there but because it brings to mind a tragic moment in American cultural history. The author of “Death in Venice” and “The Magic Mountain” settled in this country in 1938, a grateful refugee from Nazism. He became a citizen and extolled American ideals. By 1952, though, he had become convinced that McCarthyism was a prelude to fascism, and felt compelled to emigrate again. At the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communism in Hollywood, Mann said, “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in Germany.” The tearing down of Mann’s “magic villa” would have been a cold epilogue to a melancholy tale.

Mann was hardly the only Central European émigré who experienced uneasy feelings of déjà vu in the fearful years after the end of the Second World War. Members of the intellectual enclave known as the Frankfurt School—originally based at the Institute for Social Research, in Frankfurt—felt a similar alarm. In 1950, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno helped to assemble a volume titled “The Authoritarian Personality,” which constructed a psychological and sociological profile of the “potentially fascistic individual.” The work was based on interviews with American subjects, and the steady accumulation of racist, antidemocratic, paranoid, and irrational sentiments in the case studies gave the German-speakers pause. Likewise, Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book, “Prophets of Deceit,” studied the Father Coughlin type of rabble-rouser, contemplating the “possibility that a situation will arise in which large numbers of people would be susceptible to his psychological manipulation.”

Adorno believed that the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus of film, radio, and television. Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought. Nazi Germany was merely the most extreme case of a late-capitalist condition in which people surrender real intellectual freedom in favor of a sham paradise of personal liberation and comfort. Watching wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the “culture industry,” as he and Horkheimer called it, was replicating fascist methods of mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw a blurring of the line between reality and fiction. In his 1951 book, “Minima Moralia,” he wrote:

Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no one can say whether he died or escaped, survives.

Mann, who had consulted Adorno while writing his musical novel “Doctor Faustus,” was reading “Minima Moralia” as he contemplated his departure from America. He compared the book’s aphoristic style to the “enormously strong gravitational force-field” of a super-compact celestial body. Possibly, it exerted a pull on his decision to go into exile again. A few months later, on the eve of leaving, Mann wrote to Adorno, “The way things are developing is already clear. And we have rather gone beyond Brüning.” Heinrich Brüning was the Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932.

The fears of Mann, Adorno, and other émigrés came to naught—or so it seemed. The McCarthyite danger passed; civil rights advanced; free speech triumphed; liberal democracy spread around the world. By the end of the century, the Frankfurt School was seen in many quarters as an artifact of intellectual kitsch. In recent years, though, its stock has risen once again. As Stuart Jeffries points out in his recent book, “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School,” the ongoing international crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy has prompted a resurgence of interest in the body of work known as critical theory. The combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural frivolity is precisely the scenario Adorno and others had in mind: mass distraction masking élite domination. Two years ago, in an essay on the persistence of the Frankfurt School, I wrote, “If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized.”

I spoke too soon. His moment of vindication is arriving now. With the election of Donald Trump, the latent threat of American authoritarianism is on the verge of being realized, its characteristics already mapped by latter-day sociologists who have updated Adorno’s “F-scale” for fascist tendencies. To read “Prophets of Deceit” is to see clear anticipations of Trump’s bigoted harangues. (The script in 1949: “We are coming to the crossroads where we must decide whether we are going to preserve law and order and decency or whether we are going to be sold down the river to these Red traitors who are undermining America.”) As early as the forties, Adorno saw American life as a kind of reality show: “Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.” Now a businessman turned reality-show star has been elected President. Like it or not, Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one.

What Adorno identified as the erasure of the “borderline between culture and empirical reality” is endemic on social media. The failure of Facebook to halt the proliferation of fake news during the campaign season should have surprised no one; the local hirelings of logic are too enamored of their algorithms—and of the revenue they generate—to intervene. From the start, Silicon Valley monopolies have taken a hands-off, ideologically vacant attitude toward the upwelling of ugliness on the Internet. A defining moment was the turn-of-the-century wave of music piracy, which did lasting damage to the idea of intellectual property. Fake news is an extension of the same phenomenon, and, as in the Napster era, no one is taking responsibility. Traffic trumps ethics.

Traditional media outlets exhibited the same value-free mentality, pumping out Trump stories and airing his rallies because they got hits and high ratings. At some point over the summer, it struck me that the greater part of the media wanted Trump to be elected, consciously or unconsciously. He would be more “interesting” than Hillary Clinton; he would “pop.” That suspicion was confirmed the other day, when a CNN executive, boasting of his network’s billion-dollar profit in 2016, spoke of “a general fascination that wouldn’t be the same as under a Clinton Administration.” Of the clouds and shadows that hung over Clinton in the press, the darkest, perhaps, was the prospect of boredom. Among voters, a kind of nihilistic glee may have been as much a factor in Trump’s election as economic dissatisfaction or racial resentment. The mechanism by which people support a political program “largely incompatible with their own rational self-interest,” as Adorno wrote, requires many kinds of deception.

So here we are, living in what feels like an excessively on-the-nose novel by Don DeLillo, in which a President-elect tweets of his cabinet-selection process, “I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” One all-too-schematic plot twist is the revelation that Richard Spencer—the white supremacist whose phrase “alt-right” was adopted by Trump’s strategist, Steve Bannon—wrote a master’s thesis on the topic of none other than Theodor W. Adorno, arguing that Wagner’s anti-Semitism prevented Adorno from coming to terms with his love for Wagner’s music. The Department of Hitler Studies, from DeLillo’s “White Noise,” is moving to D.C.

When the purchase of the Mann house was announced, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister and likely its next President, declared, “In stormy times like these, we need more than ever cultural anchor points with our most important partner outside of Europe.” Steinmeier was implying that the villa could become an outpost of cosmopolitan thinking as nativism overtakes both America and Europe.

The ironic reversal of roles hardly needs to be noted. However the Trump Presidency turns out—whether it veers toward autocracy, devolves into kleptocracy, or takes some unheard-of new form—America has, for the time being, abdicated the role of the world’s moral leader, to the extent that it ever played that part convincingly. “Make America Great Again” is one of Trump’s many linguistic contortions: in fact, one of his core messages is that America should no longer bother with being great, that it should retreat from international commitments, that it should make itself small and mean.

Germany, on the other hand, increasingly appears to be the strongest remaining bastion of liberal democracy. With the United Kingdom mired in the aftermath of Brexit, France facing a possible hard-right swerve, and Italy in disarray, the country that long stood as a synonym for nationalist insanity has so far resisted political and cultural regression. Tellingly, it has rejected the libertarian code of the big Silicon Valley companies, with their disdain for privacy, copyright, and limitations on hate speech. On the day after the American election, which happened to be the seventy-eighth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a neo-Nazi group posted a map of Jewish businesses in Berlin, titled “Jews Among Us.” Facebook initially refused to take down the post, but an outcry in the media and among lawmakers prompted its deletion. Such episodes suggest that Germans are less likely to acquiesce to the forces that have ravaged the American public sphere.

The defeat of the Freedom Party candidate in the Austrian Presidential election is a hopeful sign: perhaps the German-speaking countries can remind the rest of the world of the darkness of their former path. Still, the far right is creeping forward in Germany, as it is all over Europe. No coming political race will be as tensely watched as Angela Merkel’s run next year for reëlection as Chancellor. The ultimate fear isn’t of the second coming of Hitler: history never repeats itself so obviously, and a sense of shame over the Nazi past remains pervasive in all corners of German life. No, the fear is that the present antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes.

s tim u vezi, adorno:

Cultural marxism!

Sad nađoh i ceo tekst

Educated people in general found it hard to understand the effect of Hitler's speeches because they sounded so insincere, ungenuine, or, as the German word goes, verlogen. But it is a deceptive idea, that the so-called common people have an unfailing flair for the genuine and sincere, and disparage fake. Hitler was liked, not in spite of his cheap antics, but just because of them, because of his false tones and his clowning. They are observed as such, and appreciated. Real folk artists, such as Girardi with his Fiakerlied, were truly in touch with their audiences and they always employed what strikes us as false tones’. We find similar manifestations regularly in drunkards who have lost their inhibitions. The sentimentality of the common people is by no means primitive, unreflecting emotion. On the contrary, it is pretense, a fictitious, shabby imitation of real feeling, often self-conscious and slightly contemptuous of itself. This fictitiousness is the life element of the fascist propagandist performances.
The situation created by this exhibition may be called a ritual one. The fictitiousness of the propagandist oratory, the gap between the speaker's personality and the content and character of his utterances are ascribable to the ceremonial role assumed by and expected of him. This ceremony, however, is merely a symbolic revelation of the identity that he verbalizes, an identity the listeners feel and think, but cannot express. This is what they actually want him to do, neither being convinced nor, essentially, being whipped into a frenzy, but having their own minds expressed to them. The gratification they get out of propaganda consists most likely in the demonstration of this identity, no matter how far it actually goes, for it is a kind of institutionalized redemption of their own inarticulateness through the speaker's verbosity. This act of revelation, and the temporary abandonment of responsible, self-contained seriousness is the decisive pattern of the propagandist ritual. To be sure, we may call this act of identification a phenomenon of collective retrogression. It is not simply a reversion to older, primitive emotions but rather the reversion toward a ritualistic attitude in which the expression of emotions is sanctioned by an agency of social control. In this context it is interesting to note that one of the most successful and dangerous West Coast agitators again and again encouraged his listeners to indulge in all sorts of emotions, to give way to their feelings, to shout and to shed tears, persistently attacking the behavior pattern of rigid self-control brought about by the established religious denominations and by the whole Puritan tradition.
This loosening of self-control, the merging of one's impulses with a ritual scheme is closely related to the universal psychological weakening of the self-contained individual.

Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda

William Murderface wrote:Cultural marxism!

da je bar tako. adorno cak nije ni marksista. neko bi reko pre-marksista.

FN, Vesela Nauka

In favor of criticism.— Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error: you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person — you are always a different person —, as are all your present "truths", being a skin, as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event, — it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm, something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet! — This is said in favor of criticism.

Where to start reading philosophy?

(Premda bi pravo filozofsko pitanje trebalo da počne sa "Why...")

If Eno were to be a god he would be a benevolent one, it seems, as we move onto talking about politics and the future of art and its role and impact on society. It’s something he touched upon in his 2015 John Peel Lecture as he criticised the then Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan. “It’s just exactly the wrong time to be taking art out of the mix, isn’t it?” he says in reference to the recent proposals of removing Art History A-Level from schools. “Because we’re now looking towards a future where there will be less and less employment, inevitably automation is going to make it so there simply aren’t jobs. But that’s alright as long as we accept the productivity that the automatons are producing feeds back to people, so we don’t end up in this situation where we’re heading to at the moment where you have this huge underclass and a few really really wealthy individuals because they own all the robots and control all the systems. So we have to change that so people are simply paid. I believe in universal basic income, which is basically saying we pay people to be alive – it makes perfect sense to me. We don’t object to the idea that people don’t pay to go into parks or to experience the sea. There’s lot of things we’re happy to accept as being givens, but of course what are people going to be doing? People don’t want to feel irrelevant; that is the worst feeling. Have you seen the new Ken Loach film [I, Daniel Blake]? Oh Christ, what an amazing film. Absolutely heart-breaking. You have to take a man-sized box of tissues, it really is, oh my god, it’s harrowing, but so to the point. What you see is it’s people that have become irrelevant and it’s the most painful thing that can happen, to suddenly be meaningless, to be of no value to anybody. There can be no bigger source of depression, so what do you want art for? So that people can start to make things. It works.

*

For instance, in prisons, if you give people the chance to actually make something instead of just sitting in a cell watching fucking shit on television all day – you say to them ‘make a picture, try it out, do whatever’ – and the thrill that somebody gets to find that they can actually do something autonomously, not do something that somebody else told them to do, well, in the future we’re all going to be able to need those kind of skills. Apart from the fact that simply rehearsing yourself in creativity is a good idea, remaining creative and being able to go to a situation where you’re not told what to do and to find out how to deal with it, this should be the basic human skill that we are educating people towards and what we’re doing is constantly stopping them from learning. It makes me so angry. Sorry. I get in a bad mood when I start to think about it.

...Gloria Steinem, who worked with the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s, “was happy to find some liberals in government in those days,” arguing that the agency was “nonviolent and honorable.” [Czeslaw] Milosz, too, agreed that the “liberal conspiracy,” as he called it, “was necessary and justified.” It was, he allowed, “the sole counterweight to the propaganda on which the Soviets expended astronomical sums.”

Literary Agents Rethinking the legacy of writers who worked with the CIA.

Today’s intellectuals approach their labors in a very different set of circumstances. The struggle for academic patronage and the strained conditions of nearly all media properties have led to fewer jobs and fewer venues for substantial writing; the possibility of leading a public-facing life of the mind now seems vanishingly small, which only heightens nostalgia for the golden age of the 1950s. Yet the shadow of the CIA lurks behind the achievements of that time. The free play of ideas—the very thing that was supposed to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union in the first place—turned out to be, at least in part, a carefully constructed illusion. What if the prominence of midcentury intellectuals, the sense that they were engaged in important political and artistic projects, is inseparable from the fact that they were useful to America’s Cold War empire?

(Bold moj)

Znam da će barem nekima ovde ovo biti "otkrio si toplu vodu", ali meni ove stvari, ipak, pomeraju pamet...

...government “weaponized” culture and helped create a compromised media that still serves, “in part, to encourage support for our interventions...

Ta ueponajzd kultura je (barem neke od) nas zadojila... A glavni posao joj je, izgleda, bio da osigura udoban rad Imperije i učini svet sigurnim za biznis.

Keanu sumira kako se osećam...

Spoiler: