Kind of the same with me: I’ve only read about it and read bits of it before. So far it’s quite angry and declamatory.

I kept on reading for three reasons: (1) the absurd perversity was quite funny and I was curious how far it would go, (2) I wanted to write something about it and couldn’t do that in good conscience without reading the whole thing, and (3) I suppose it was compelling or mesmerizing enough to draw me back in (I did actually abandon it one evening, but returned to it the next day).

Thanks for the recommendation, I’d never heard of it. Looks good, so it’s now on my list :up:

And do you think this a reasonable argument? — Banno

No, it’s an imaginative leap. I’d call it an insight, but that would imply it’s right. As you said, and unlike Kant, he “invents a thing-in-itself about which nothing can be said, then proceeds to tell us all about it.”

Yes, I agree.

I don't know if I agree that this is entailed by Schopenhauer's argument — Wayfarer

Yeah, Schopenhauer is not arguing that objects have subjectivity, only that they have an inner aspect, the inaccessible object-in-itself. He calls it will or will-like on the basis that the thing-in-itself is undivided, so what is inmost in us, being part of the wider thing-in-itself, is what is inmost in everything.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.

:grin:

Well, I finished it. I didn’t like it much, but often it’s the books I dislike that I want to talk about…

Crash by J. G. Ballard: a novel about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes.

It’s very good in some ways. It’s bleak, alienating, repugnant and joyless, and that’s what Ballard was going for—he described it once as a “psychopathic hymn”. Occasionally the images and the similes are extraordinarily good. The psychogeography of highways, transit hotels, and multi-storey car parks is nicely done, and quite haunting. The writing is tonally flat and stylistically unshowy, but it’s strong, and it sometimes surprises you with an unusual but perfect word.

Academics like to write about this novel, and it’s easy to see why. I’m tempted to say it’s all content, no style. That would be putting it too strongly, but what seems to matter is the shock, the message, the social commentary. Thematically it’s a warning about where we’re going, or even where we are already (rubbing our faces in it).

A writer of fiction according to Nabokov can do three things: tell a story, teach, and enchant. Crash is concerned with teaching us about the evils of postmodernity, and is mostly unconcerned with storytelling and enchantment (by the way, enchantment in Nabokov’s scheme is what the greatest writers do, and it includes formal innovation, language play, and unique imagery, not only great ideas and worlds of wonder).

But that’s not quite fair. It does more than an essay could do, and it has an enchanting style of its own. The clinical descriptions of technofetishism, of sexual gratification at the “junction” (a word Ballard uses a lot) of bodies and machines—a junction marked out by injuries, wounds and scars—wouldn’t be as powerful were they rendered as non-fictional speculation and meditation. And I do admire the way that it defamiliarizes the everyday world—this again is the job of fiction.

But the fascination begins to wear off after the first couple of chapters, and it gets numbingly repetitive and pretentious, an interminable gimmick. I think that as a conceptual piece or cautionary tale it would have worked better as a short story or novella.

Although I said the book was joyless, it’s sometimes delightfully bizarre and funny. It’s not clear if any of the humour was intended, though it did feel like a satire on post-sixties sexual freedom and violence in the media, or else a parody of transgressive fiction or pornography. But judging by what the author himself has said about it, I think it’s meant to be taken very seriously indeed.

A quotation from the book can serve as a nutshell summary:

A blend of semen and engine coolant.

Crash by J. G. Ballard.

So absurdly perverted that it’s often quite funny:

The elegant aluminized air-vents in the walls of the X-ray department beckoned as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice.

Marx seems to have seen the expansion of new needs in a positive light. — Jamal

The notion of false needs has been popular among Marxists since the Frankfurt School, and their analysis has moved on from Marx to suit the times, as it should. All the same, I still find myself more sympathetic to Marx himself:

It is characteristic of the economists that Storch expresses this thusly: the material of money should should ‘have direct value but on the basis of an artificial need‘. Artificial need is what the economist calls, firstly, the needs which arise out of the social existence of the individual; secondly, those which do not flow from its naked existence as a natural object. This shows the inner, desperate poverty which forms the basis of bourgeois wealth and of its science. — Marx, Grundrisse

Even if I'm comparing apples and oranges, because Marx and Marcuse were writing about different things, I still tend to think that the comparison reflects the way that theoretical Marxism moved from the staunch advocacy of the ambitions of the working class to a basic disappointment in and suspicion of that class.

I won't take this digression any further.

The focus on consumerism is likely a holdover from the Protestant Work Ethic's idea that work, even in atomized, meaningless form is best and sacred. Consumption must be the problem then, not production. — schopenhauer1

I agree that there's a Protestant aspect to the critique of consumerism and I'm really not on board with it either. Socialism has always had a puritan stream, but Marx seems to have seen the expansion of new needs in a positive light.

seems only to establish will as the "inner side" of representations — KantDane21

Yes, but it does at least help answer the question in the OP. I’m not going to attempt to set out the overarching argument that the thing in itself is will, mainly because I can’t remember it and I don’t want to read Schopenhauer again. :smile:

From §19:

The double knowledge which we have of the nature and action of our own body, and which is given in two completely different ways, has now been clearly brought out. Accordingly, we shall use it further as a key to the inner being of every phenomenon in nature. We shall judge all objects which are not our own body, and therefore are given to our consciousness not in the double way, but only as representations, according to the analogy of this body. We shall therefore assume that as, on the one hand, they are representation, just like our body, and are in this respect homogeneous with it, so on the other hand, if we set aside their existence as the subject's representation, what still remains over must be, according to its inner nature, the same as what in ourselves we call will. For what other kind of existence or reality could we attribute to the rest of the material world? From what source could we take the elements out of which we construct such a world? Besides the will and the representation, there is absolutely nothing known or conceivable for us. If we wish to attribute the greatest known reality to the material world, which immediately exists only in our representation, then we give it that reality which our own body has for each of us, for to each of us this is the most real of things. But if now we analyse the reality of this body and its actions, then, beyond the fact that it is our representation, we find nothing in it but the will; with this even its reality is exhausted. Therefore we can nowhere find another kind of reality to attribute to the material world. If, therefore, the material world is to be something more than our mere representation, we must say that, besides being the representation, and hence in itself and of its inmost nature, it is what we find immediately in ourselves as will. I say 'of its inmost nature,' but we have first of all to get to know more intimately this inner nature of the will, so that we may know how to distinguish from it what belongs not to it itself, but to its phenomenon, which has many grades. Such, for example, is the circumstance of its being accompanied by knowledge, and the determination by motives which is conditioned by this knowledge. As we proceed, we shall see that this belongs not to the inner nature of the will, but merely to its most distinct phenomenon as animal and human being. Therefore, if I say that the force which attracts a stone to the earth is of its nature, in itself, and apart from all representation, will, then no one will attach to this proposition the absurd meaning that the stone moves itself according to a known motive, because it is thus that the will appears in man.

Here he seems to admit that it's an assumption and an analogy. However, he does want the conclusion to be taken seriously, that the world in itself is will. It's a long time since I read it but I remember finding it too much of a leap.

I can't recall specifically how the argument here is related to fourfold root, other than that this leads to the two-aspect view of self as object and self as consciousness or will, which when applied to objects leads to the characterization of their own inner aspect as will-like too. On the basis that the thing-in-itself is a unity, whatever is inmost in us is what is also inmost in objects, though taking different forms.

It seems that we have become so preoccupied with practicalities that we have lost touch with the abstract and speculative. Religion, while perhaps no longer a productive avenue for speculation, at least offered a framework for considering the world in a more imaginative way. The monotony of our daily tasks - from crunching numbers and programming data to constructing material objects - may be necessary for the functioning of society, but it leaves little room for speculation. Even drug experiences, or escapist entertainment such as movies, have become our go-to for exploring the non-mundane. Unfortunately, speculation about the nature of existence and metaphysics, is not popular and remains a niche pursuit. — schopenhauer1

In other words, the pleasure of hard tasks is rooted in the accomplishment of a specific, concrete goal, while the pleasure of speculation is rooted in the stimulation of abstract and imaginative thinking. Both can be enjoyable and rewarding, but they offer different types of satisfaction and involve different types of thinking. — schopenhauer1

Let me reframe this. I really mean to get at, that in our daily lives, there seems to be lack of "meaningfulness in the mundane", whereby the meaningful informs the mundane. Again, religion tried to inject that (but usually one day a week in Western culture, and in a poorly delivered way to the masses). However, there is something about the minutia-mongering aspect of the post-industrial that does its best to take this away. The "workplace" (a social construct just like any other, but one whereby the majority of people garner their subsistence to maintain their material comforts and very survival), is often a killing floor for connecting what one does to anything broader, "mysteries of the universe" or otherwise. It is soul-crushing, demoralizing, and indeed leads to things like "End Stage Capitalism" and "Boring Dystopia". But it's more than just your token memes of ridiculous societal behavior, but the very connection of one's actions with the cosmos. — schopenhauer1

I think these are different questions. One is about the dying art of abstract speculation, and the other is about the lack of meaning.

The end of abstract speculation: Kant signalled the end of speculative metaphysics. Thereafter, abstract speculation was replaced by science and mathematics.

The lack of meaning: Weber, and Horkheimer and Adorno, described the disenchantment, desacralization, and intrumental rationality of the Enlightenment and of capitalism.

Both of these came out of the Enlightenment, so how do they go together?

In the enchanted world of religiously-dominated, pre-Enlightenment society, most people were not in the habit of engaging in abstract speculation--the so-called enchantment of the world amounted in the field and the marketplace to a set of hard socio-economic limits to freedom and thought. But the meaning inherent in the world according to religion--your "meaning in the mundane"--made it reasonable for educated elites to subject it to rational speculation, rather than leaving the world to experimental scientist-technicians as would happen later. (Of course, religion imposed limits on the content of this speculation, but the very idea of abstract speculation was legitimate).

In the disenchanted world of the Enlightenment, even the educated elites found there were limits on their ability to speculate--intellectual and ideological ones, imposed respectively by the increasing success of science and the instrumental rationality of capitalism. Abstract speculation didn't cut it any more, and nothing had to be meaningful anyway. (On the other hand one could equally say that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were part of one of the most fertile periods in philosophy, almost as if this transient crossover between philosophy and science stimulated speculation in a way that religion could not do--and from that point of view I'm tempted to view it, very vaguely, as a crucial lost opportunity, as the period may have ultimately been in politics also).

How have things changed in our postmodern world? On the face of it, all of the above has merely accelerated. In the post-industrial, consumer society, the last vestiges of meaning have been eroded too: social institutions, civic life, and the very idea that society can be changed through collective action, leaving us with "capitalist realism".

I don't know if I'm terribly concerned about the lack of abstract speculation in ordinary life, unless this is taken to mean that most people remain excluded from the world of ideas and do not have the leisure or education to take part in intellectual discussion. What would be nice are two things: (1) a non-religious re-enchantment of the world, and (2) a re-organization of society to make this possible.

That's extremely simplistic and cartoonish, but there it is.

Looks good.

That’s the spirit.

@Noble Dust An update:

I’m more than half way through The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and I’m revising my estimation in an upward direction. It’s really great.

Didn't impress me, but it was a long time ago.

I haven’t read any detective novels except for Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Conan Doyle, and Georges Simenon.

It might seem odd but I can’t remember. It was many years ago and I read several in a short span of time, and in my mind they meld into one. The outsider for me is the Long Goodbye. I think Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, and The Little Sister were great.

Elliot Gould was great and the rest of the cast was very good — T Clark

Including an uncredited early performance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I see the book and the film as two entirely different things, both good, but hard to compare. I don’t find the book’s prose to be distracting at all, maybe because I’ve read a lot of Chandler and find it very natural and comfortable. It might be his best, but it’s not my favourite, I think because it’s heavier than his other work, more emotionally revealing, tragic, and dispirited in tone.

Looks fun.

Maybe a bit like that, but it’s better, and as far as I can tell it isn’t just a philosophical parable like Candide.

This is one of the reasons I love reading on Kindle. When I forget exactly who a character is, I can just search for the first instance in the book where the person's role is usually specified. Kindle has really improved the quality of my reading. — T Clark

Yes, I do that a lot.

This looks fascinating. Recommended? Based on what you know of my taste — Noble Dust

It’s 600 pages and I’m 200 pages in. I’m finding it mostly fascinating and enjoyable, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it unreservedly. It’s made up of innumerable nested stories told by different characters one after the other with little in the way of interior reflection from anyone, even the main character, who doesn’t seem to be a normal main character at all, more of an absent centre around which the various stories revolve. Generally it’s not concerned with character so much as diverting and odd events and dramas, like a picaresque novel.

On the other hand it involves zombies, demons and vampires that may or may not be real (I’m not sure yet); bandits and outlaws; encounters and tensions between Christians, Muslims, and Jews (including a couple of Kabbalists); plenty of sex, though never described in detail; and all things Andalusian, Spanish and Southern European.

I’m half expecting it to feel too long in the end. One of the stories I found boring and almost gave up, but I’m glad I didn’t. So far it’s hard to tell if there’s much of an overarching plot and how much the individual stories are contributing to that or whether they’ll just keep on coming and not add up to much. I’ve seen suggestions by critics that it does tie up in the end.

It reminds me a little of Don Quixote, partly because it’s set around the Sierra Morena, and also because of the multiple stories told by different characters, but Don Quixote has a character dynamic at the centre of everything, which is missing from this book.

But it’s too early to tell.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki.

Weird fiction from 1805 by a Polish count who thought he was a werewolf and killed himself with a silver bullet. As one reviewer says on Goodreads, "When there’s lesbian incest demon sex on page 11, you know you’re in for a ride."

Probably Bowie, Tom Waits and Nick Cave too — Tom Storm

Indubitably.

With the amount of data being provided by apps like Spotify and iTunes, along with the development of auto tune, it seems these days that song writing has become ever more of a formula/algorithm and singers are more often selected based on their physical attraction/charm or social standing rather than their raw singing ability.

Does this erode the natural basis for musical talent and authenticity? If anyone can now sing like a professional die to technology, and highly likeable songs are being mass produced like a high volume factory output, do we not see a diminishing impact for those that write songs from the soul, and sing because it's what they were born to do?

Is musical originality dying? Artists certainly are not as rare as they used to be. — Benj96

To me the problem here is that "raw singing ability" is overvalued, such that the unique voices of people who are technically not very good singers become less acceptable to the mainstream. The technology reinforces this. I'm thinking Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed.

So there's more to being a good singer than being a good singer. On top of that, there's more to music than the mainstream. I've noticed that when people say music isn't as good as it used to be (including knowledgeable curmudgeons like Rick Beato), they often mean the music in the pop charts. But as @Banno and @Noble Dust implied, music is more than the music industry. The industry, starting with recordings, was built on three-minute songs and, in the seventies and eighties, on albums. That's all more or less moribund, but music will continue. It doesn't make much sense to me to say that music in general gets better or worse.

That said, having been born in the early seventies I sympathize with those who lament the album's decline. Vinyl albums, along with the lore and the mystery (because no internet) were special and wonderful things, and they stimulated many great creative achievements.

But I don't know if we ought to want to get that back again. Things like YouTube seem to have enabled the growth or re-growth of musical community, where there is less distance between performer and audience. In that context, it's good that artists are not as rare as they used to be. So long as they're not slaves to industry, the more musicians the better.

How all these musicians can dedicate themselves to music and still make a living, and whether they should expect to, is another matter.

On the other hand, it is interesting how your wife showed you "Soviet films". I mean, movies which represents how that era looked like. Here in Spain we had something similar in a cinema called "NO-DO". The films were about family topics about Franco's era and most of them were even so far from reality. If one day you watch one (I wish not) you would see they are so eccentric on the reality about middle-class families. Most of them are even available nowadays in a program called "cine de barrio" (it is special and is only available in Saturday) and only older people see them. I remember watching one with my grandmother and laughed at the actors and plot because everything was so forced. — javi2541997

Interesting. From what you say, it seems like those films are not as popular in Spain as Soviet films still are in the ex-Soviet sphere, where they are familiar to all ages, though obviously the nostalgia is a big part of it.

Yep, that was in my list.

Well, I personally think that the quality is not good enough. You mentioned Almodovar's films but even their films are weird and wacky. The problem is not about the availability outside Spain, because if ours films were acceptable, many translators would pay for them. I guess that some cultures are more interesting than others. For example: I see that some users put a lot of films of Kurosawa and Ōzu in this thread and they are "so Japanese" and despite this fact, their movies are over the world and translated in different languages.
I must accept (and this is true) that Japanese culture is more interesting than Spanish one, it is a fact. I understand that for a foreigner could be boring our dramas about politics and territories. — javi2541997

So, the Spanish film industry is small because of a lack of global demand (perhaps even domestic and Hispanic demand in general), and this is because Spanish stuff is less attractive, interesting, or fashionable than, e.g., Japanese stuff.

You might be right, but it doesn’t follow that the proportion of Spanish films that are high quality is lower, only that there will be fewer high quality films coming out of Spain than e.g., Japan, because there are far fewer films being made there.

Personally, I have no real preference when it comes to Spain vs Japan. Feels like I’m as likely to be interested in a Spanish film as a Japanese one.

On the other hand, I do enjoy films from unfamiliar cultures, partly for the novelty. When I met my wife she introduced me to Soviet movies, most of which I hadn’t heard of but which are massively popular in Russia and the other ex-Soviet countries.

Highlights were Kin-dza-dza and Office Romance, the latter partly because there were no subtitles and my wife had to translate, which was fun, but also because it was fascinating to see everyday office life in late 1970s Moscow, in the context of a romantic comedy.

I notice that nobody mentioned a film from Spain. I understand it because our film makers and industry are not good enough compared to America or Asia. — javi2541997

Rather than a lack of quality, it's probably because they're less available to watch outside Spain. A long time ago, the films of Almodovar used to be shown on TV in the UK. More recently, I watched a lot of the Spanish films on Netflix when I was in Spain, if they had English subtitles.

I liked these:

El hoyo
Tiempo compartido
Tarde para la ira
Handia
Errementari

I've included those last two because they were only on Spanish Netflix, though I'm aware they're Basque.

I haven't seen Vacas though.

Blow-Up — Joshs

Have you seen Blow Out from 1980, which Brian De Palma modelled on Blow Up? Another of my favourites.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.- I'm surprised no one has mentioned this — T Clark

One of my favourites too. On another day it might make my top ten.

I've enjoyed these eleven films the most (that I can bring to mind right now):

The Wicker Man
The Truman Show
Pulp Fiction
2001...
Mulholland Drive
Andrei Rublev
12 Angry Men
Taxi Driver
Stalker
Blade Runner
The Long Goodbye

Pleasant enough aye

Then I think there are two ways to look at ownership.

The more general way you seem to want to go is a question about any kind of society, because people will always have personal possessions and at the same time live with other people.

The other way is to look at the distinction I made between personal possessions and private property in the kind of societies we now have. It’s only in capitalist ideology that these are conflated, as if ownership of land and capital is just another form of personal possession.

For the first, more general question, anthropology might shed some light on it. What about this: do what you want with your own stuff (and here this only includes stuff you’re using for yourself) so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.

What about land? — Mikie

I think it’s important to distinguish between personal possessions and ownership for profit. Everyone should have their own private, spacious shelter, but private ownership of land and buildings to generate rent, or profits from sale, is something else. The latter shouldn’t be possible, the former should be guaranteed for everyone.

EDIT: When Proudhon said that property is theft, he wasn’t talking about your toothbrush.

:up:

Nearing the end of Pynchon’s Against the Day. — Jamal

Finished it. A big fat mess. Recommended.

Next: Stephen Gregory, The Cormorant.

Nearing the end of Pynchon’s Against the Day. The mining tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, at the climax of the Colorado Coalfield War in 1914, gives a speech about workers:

“So of course we use them,” Scarsdale well into what by now was his customary stemwinder, “we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their absurd fate in plain sight. Their foolish music is about to stop, and it is they who will be caught out, awkwardly, most of them tone-deaf and never to be fully aware, few if any with the sense to leave the game early and seek refuge before it is too late. Perhaps there will not, even by then, be refuge.

“We will buy it all up,” making the expected arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horsethief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunch-grass and wildflowers, and the coming of the snows is no longer the year’s curse but its promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the tears freezing on a woman’s face worn to dark Indian stupor before its time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch between us and those who would intrude or question?” He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore. “Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.” — Thomas Pynchon

This is the final flourish reminding us that Vibe is the arch-villain, and it’s also a concentrated outpouring of Pynchon’s anger towards capitalism. I’ve found the stuff on US labour conflicts in the book really interesting, because I didn’t know much about it. I’m guessing this history is covered in Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, a book I haven’t read.

As always, we're open to suggestions, but I don't see a reason to change things at the moment. We introduced the Suspended status last year, but we don't have standard criteria for its use.

However, I think it is quite unjust to permanently ban a long-term poster who has contributed well and evenly for most of their TPF travels. — Amity

It has happened many times over the years, both on the old PF and on TPF. It normally doesn't happen without a lot of discussion first, as Hanover has described. But occasionally it does.

I know that this discussion was prompted by the recent banning of Olivier5. In that case I didn't take it to the rest of the staff for discussion. The refusal of moderation, the attitude it was received with, and his suggestion that he be banned for all he cared, are what led directly to the ban. Refusal of moderation has been a reason for such bannings before, e.g., The Great Whatever, who was a high-quality poster who refused to make a small change to his spelling habits.

What 'status' other than 'Banned' would be appropriate?
Suspended account? — Amity

As others have said, we do now have a Suspended user role, but it hasn't been used much.

That is a valid point, I think. It would be better to find a neutral term - "account closed" or some such. Not sure if the software can be tweaked? — unenlightened

I had a look and it seems that we can't change the word. We could assign the user to a custom user role that would prevent them from posting, but I don't think that would be equal to banning, since I think they'd still be able to log in, as I assume they can't do if they've been banned. Alternatively, we could delete the member, while retaining their posts.