Back at you. Stalker is my all-time favorite film (your avatar was my work-desktop background for a long time)

The second thing - being looked at by someone who truly knows your flaws, but still cares for you, but is prepared to withstand your bullshit - would be the ideal glance meeting me. — csalisbury

I want to talk about this a little, even though it doesn't really fit the thread. It's where I'm at tonight. There's a book of short stories, Redeployment, by Phil Klay that I had to read it for a class. I would never have read it otherwise. The marketing is this: 'Book about the Iraq War written by a real life Iraq Veteran, who came back and did a writing workshop, and then found the human element in all of it'. That's the type of thing that makes me immediately uninterested. It fits way too neatly with a certain liberal fantasy about soldiers and war. It seems like a book fitting this description would have happened no matter what, and people would have loved it no matter what, because of that description.

The thing about it is it's really good. And what it's really about is the need to be seen, and how easy it is to manipulate how people see you, and, further, how much people want you to manipulate your story. And then how you grow to hate - or feel contempt for - the people that believe you.

If you think about it, it's wild, as a soldier coming back from Iraq to write a book about these themes for an audience looking for a book to humanize Iraq. The book is basically about how the book they want is bullshit. But the reception of the book largely bulldozed over any of that and turned it into The Award Winning Book About Iraq We Were Waiting For. He hasn't written any fiction since.

A word of caution - the ideal of needing to be truly seen by someone often accompanies narcissism. Everyone is bullshitting, everyone is being bullshitted. Only the narcissist thinks that they are a true, real, individual in a fallen world of phonies. The truth is that almost everyone understands that, and goes on to play the game with a heavy heart. There's something bordering on cruelty when you sanctimoniously call out someone for being fake, when they know they're being fake, and just really don't know what else to do.

I think Klay gets this, and the nuances of his book work this in, but then it doesn't really matter. Whatever he believes, his book does a good job of expressing the human need to be seen through at the same time one is cared for. I think most of us learn, over-time, that the two can't coexist. But that's what we're really after.

Existentialism evolved - at least in the mind of one man: Colin Wilson (made famous and fashionable by his first book, The Outsider, in the 1950s, when he was 25 years old) - into The New Existentialism; a philosophy rooted in, and foil to, the Sartrean Nausea: centered on the notion of peak and plateau experiences as documented (later in the century) by Abraham Maslow.

This is one path out of existential darkness and still an existentialism. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I've never read Colin Wilson, but I did read a good article on him one time. He's fascinating. This is is the image of him I took away from it (which is sure to align with the perspective of the author who wrote the article, since that's my one window.) It seems like in the crucible of his youth he ingeniously brought a whole stew of ingredients together to express the things he was going through. After that, it seems like he continued, cyclically, to look for an outside answer explaining everything. I want to emphasize that I'm not throwing shade at mysticism, because I think mysticism is a rich and wonderful thing. But his approach to mysticism (and science and everything else) was to re-establish a connection with the world, such that his own chaotic feelings would be sanctified and codified by an authoritative para-mainstream summation. So again and again, there are these earnest grasps at some Truer explanation of things. My sense, as someone who is prone to the same kind of thing, is that he seemed to think that if he found an explanation that accorded with his own sense of the world, he would be brought back into the fold. I think that is one instance of the general structure of addiction (peaks and plateaus, even elevated outside of the peak of a drug-high, get drawn easily into the magnetic field of addict-thought). I think addiction is usually concomitant with a pathological egoism (which, while a vice that one must take responsibility for, I also see as a kind of affliction that besets a soul trying to survive). This seems to characterize Wilson.

You're right. Bad arguments start with bad assumptions.

You are, now I realize, a cross-dressing, lesbian, post-op transvestite space alien necrophiliac hunchback robot.(*_*)

I know I erred. But please believe me, for me this is not the first, and not the worst of instances of wrongly recognizing gender identitty.

Furthermore, (*_*) it takes one to know one. — god must be atheist

You're good. I am male (tho with a hypertrophied anima), but I do identify with something in the avatar. It's a still from a Russian movie called Mirror. The actress's name is Alisa Freyndlikh. I really like the image. I guess I'll sieze this opportunity to talk about the image, because I haven't on here before.

There's something in her face that suggests equal measures of longing and mistrust. or affection with a proportional amount of knowingness. Maybe the way you would look at someone who you know to be profoundly flawed and masking it, but for whom you nevertheless care deeply. You're going to put up a guard, and not give in to their bullshit, but behind it, you still care.

The first thing - longing + mistrust- is what makes me identify with her. The second thing - being looked at by someone who truly knows your flaws, but still cares for you, but is prepared to withstand your bullshit - would be the ideal glance meeting me.

I guess the closest thing to finding a home in words is Google's empty search bar. — fdrake

I remember in high school one time my mom, as some kind of punishment, disconnected the internet for a week. For most of that week, at night I would have this totally disproportionate feeling of fear, of being absolutely alone and in danger. I imagine its probably similar to what a bird would feel if it couldn't find materials to make a nest.

And so from the social view, we arrive at the vice of pride and the virtue of humility. From this, as the Ginzburg piece suggests, one can arrive at other virtues and vices quite easily. The social image of virtue is conveyed by social myths and parental approval, so one learns for instance to be ashamed of one's fear, and hides it with a performance of bravery. And so on. — unenlightened

Yes, I think that's the positive face of shame. I think the problem comes, like with most of our vices, when a source of virtue malfunctions (which it sounds like you also agree with). Vanity, for instance, seems like a secondary reaction to too-strong shame. If the shame of disapproval, meted out moderately, leads to corrections of behavior, then an overwhelming, shaking level of shame can produce, as a defense, an overly perfect fake self. It's like a statue you hide inside of that deflects any scary disapproval rays. Your shame hides inside it with you, but now everything is frozen. Your shame has hit a critical limit, and overflowed, so it remains with you, but it no longer truly interfaces with external feedback, which is what it does when its working well. To get into psychological jargon, what you have, vis-a-vis the real world, is dissociation.

There's something of the protective statue to fascism, and something of the too-much-shame origin story to the economic and military humiliations of 1910s-1920s Germany.

(The other thing is shame which doesn't lead to a change of behaviors, but to identification with the shamers. That's when you develop a self-deprecating identity which makes you part of the in-group by laughing at the outsider, even though that outsider is you. Once that locks into place, the brain/mind/soul links it to survival (since the individual needs to be part of the group), and thinking well of yourself, or doing things that people who think well of themselves do, can begin to feel as dangerous as much more serious offenses.)

All of what you say makes a great deal of sense to me. I think part of my stumbling block is that over the years I've related to many of the terms you use as abstractions. I mean, like concepts whose discursive functions I understand, but may not have the immediate resonance they may have for others. I feel like you may understand a whole world of things when you talk about integrity, patience, self-awareness. While I could probably talk persusaively for a long time about those things, and seem to demonstrate an awareness, it's difficult for me to figure out how to bring those virtues into my life. As an analogy : If we were talking about music instead, and you were a talented musician, you could describe various virtues of a good piece, and I could probably carry on a conversation. But the difference is, when you sit down at the Piano you allow these concepts and ideas to guide you. They have a resonance that reaches beyond their concepts, and reaches out and into your musical skill. But when I sit down, while I can imagine what I would like, I don't even know how to play a chord. (Now this is an exaggeration, I'm not that entirely out to sea when it comes to spiritual development, but close!)

Another way to say this, from the lens of overcoming ego, is that the driving force of my ego is something like 'demonstrating I understand something, by talking about it' (I think this is a common problem for ex-precocious-kids, you spend a lot of time being paraded in front of adults, so that the performance of understanding becomes more important than understanding, even the main goal. My hunch is that many (most?) philosophers were ex-precocious kids.) My ego tries to hoodwink me, as much as others. I feel that it's important for me to focus on the 'chop wood, carry water' aspect of things, if that makes sense?

I think you may be building me up into an ideal and it may have something to do with

I assume she's a woman — god must be atheist

And out over the ocean
The wish persisted to be a dream at home
Cloud or bird asleep in the trough
Of discursive waters.

In some vague hotel room
The linear blotches when dusk
Lifted them up were days and nights

My first principle is: don’t be too hard on yourself.
Principle #2: don’t be too hard on the people you love.
Principle #3: Try to forgive those who have done you harm in life. (This one’s the hardest, but if you can’t do it yet, then first principle.) — Noah Te Stroete

Those are good. 1 & 3 are the most difficult for me.

It’s quite common for people to view this technique as an end goal, or as something imposed on our actions from without. My view is that it’s an underlying impetus for all existence, and that we unlock its potential in the rest of the universe insofar as we realise it in ourselves. In other words, we reduce ignorant and exclusive behaviour such as racism by our capacity to increase our own awareness of why they act this way, increase our connection to them through this understanding, and increase our collaboration with them in ways that then increase their awareness, connection and collaboration with diversity. It takes longer and is risky, but it contributes far less to suffering than isolating or excluding racism, in my view. — Possibility

Ah, I think I should clarify here. When I say 'end goal' that does suggest something imposed from without. A better way to say what I mean is: I'm searching for techniques to cultivate the 'underlying impetus'. That can look like removing blocks, or also ways of attending more attentively to our own awareness. The difficulty I've run into is: It's very easy to get separated from this underlying impetus, or to naturally decrease in awareness. Certain methods of trying to undo this can exacerbate the problem. My feeling, these days, is the more concrete you get, the closer you get to the spiritual.

For those who see particles, the world seems more solid and easy to navigate - except that they can be battered or blindsided by change. For those who perceive the wave, it’s more blurry and uncertain, marked by indecision and too many options - except that they’re less surprised by the world when it changes, because for them this change is pervasive. The former despairs at a world that refuses to behave as expected, while the latter despairs at the amorphous uncertainty of how to live in a world without expectations. — Possibility

I think this is a perceptive and accurate way of looking at how people think. I think most of us are woven together with threads from both parts. @god must be atheist sees a fluid aspect in how I think about ideas, but there are a lot of ways in which I'm very particle-y. I'm flattered to be seen as blurry, but that probably derives in part from a particle-y distinction between waves and particles, where the former appeals more to me.

I think how we approach life will always be relative to where we are in our journey, so any techniques should be considered in that context. It helps to have a tether of some kind - at least at the outset. A concept that inspires your imagination as much as it informs your life, regardless of how the world changes. Then, like Descartes, you can question or dismantle everything else and rebuild a conceptualisation of reality from scratch.

My own tether began as a ‘spiritual’ connection to the world, but has since been distilled many times over. I am now absolutely certain only that something exists, and that something relates to that existence. That’s enough for me, now. Even god must be atheist’s expression that he cannot relate to your post is a relation in itself, and informs a more accurate understanding of reality that transcends your subjective position within it: that it’s inclusive of both particles and waves, as it were.

I guess what I’m saying is, your inner instinct to buck any established techniques on how to live is a recognition of this pervasiveness of change, but it needn’t stop you from structuring how you approach your life and then continually restructuring as new information comes to light. The idea that we have to be consistent in life is bollocks - we are a work in progress, after all.

If it helps, my own technique for how to approach life is to strive to increase awareness, connection and collaboration, despite the risks, recognising that the majority of the universe (including myself) will act instead to ignore, isolate and exclude. — Possibility

I very much agree with all that (I too am certain of something, and think it best to leave in abeyance what that is, as it seems you do). I'm definitely looking to slowly build a structure. Regarding the last paragraph: what you describe as a technique strikes me as something closer to a goal (or a guiding value, or a theme etc). I share these values, but how to realize them?

Schop was a grandiose writer. That was the habit of philosophers in the 19th century. They forgot how to write with self-referential wit. That is what we do all day nowadays. You can probably capture the man's real daily life philosophy better in his personal letters. However, if anything, DESPITE Schop's grandiosity of theory, his theory well conforms to the naive psychology of everyday living- the textured one you are writing about here (or I believe you are getting at). His reality is the one of constant restless change, but change of mental states between really very basic things (what I further label as survival, comfort/maintenance-seeking, entertainment-to-avoid-boredom-seeking). That is it. Other than that we deal with contingencies that we face. I see the airy clouds of philosophy touching reality right there in his description of human nature, and the contingency of the universal cause-effect that we experience. What else do you want in a philosophy?

Nietzsche is a blowhard pompous ass. He wants you to embrace the suffering. Camus wants you to embrace the absurd. Schopenhauer isn't so forgiving. He complains and laments and says there's no real way out. He does dabble in ideas of Enlightenment through asceticism, but he probably knows that only a few can even get to that very rarified mental state (if it exists at all). Thus we are left in his schema with compassion and complaint-of-situation. That is what we have. — schopenhauer1

I want to tread delicately here, because I don't want us to get too into Schopenhauer. I disagree with him on almost everything, though I think his philosophy is ingeniously put together, and perfectly consistent. It is probably impossible to better convey the certain stance toward the world it takes (maybe Beckett?) Anyway, this isn't an argument or anything. Take it as axiomatic for this thread: Schopenhauer's philosophy is off the table here. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but it's just not what I want to focus conversation on.

I think the only other thing I want to say here is that, again, I strongly recommend Joyce's A Painful Case It's from his collection of short stories, Dubliners, and not too long.

New Poem (and heads up, this poem is made up of very short stanzas, will probably take around two weeks.) The poem is called 'Absolute Clearance' and it begins with a quote.

"Voila, Messieurs, les spectacles que Dieu donne a l'univers..."
-Bossuet

Stanza I

He sees pictures on the walls.
A sample of the truth only.
But one never has enough.
The truth doesn't satisfy.

Martial arts? They emphasize "no mind." — frank

That's a good idea. I'd have to overcome a few things (1) bad experiences with martial arts as a kid (karate & jiujitsu in dusty spaces) (2) Irrational stigma that lumps martial arts with things like owning snakes, being into knives and so forth (which, at its core, is the idea that martial arts is part of a class of things that people use to compensate for a feeling of leaky masculinity. That's true sometimes, but is wildly reductionistic. I blame the media. (3) Social anxiety blended with actual physical contact.

Which is to say : that'd have to be something I work toward. Presently, I'm dipping my toes in meditation. It's working a little better than it has in the past, but it's hard to find the discipline to regularly do it.

So you have not said (perhaps you are too ashamed) what you were ashamed of, what puts you out of place. Perhaps it was of being a philosopher amongst plebeians - then here is the place to strip off - but you express rather well the personal yet impersonal, social yet antisocial nature of the beast. — unenlightened

Well once upon a time it was shame at being unpresentable or unincludable, and that took any number of guises (poor, ugly, awkward etc depending on my age). Now, it feels like the habits of interacting with others I developed in my childhood-to my 20s are 'locked in'. It feels like I never learned the nuances of social interaction through the long delicate process of trial and error that most do & that I instinctively, in a hard to override way, tend toward a certain kind of self-concealment. So I am ashamed at being ashamed But I also learned that you can't literally hide when, as an adult without a specific skillset, you have to work with others or die. So, overtime, I learned that an effective way to hide in the open is to just let people talk to you about what they want to while you smile and nod and ask occasional clarifying questions- people don't see you when they're talking about themselves, or if they do, its a weird transferential way where they see the you they need you to be to hear what they're saying. This brings its own level of shame, because I'm selfishly allowing an asymmetric bond to develop in order to hide. (It's probably also why I talk so much about myself on here, or about other things bombastically - I spend most of my irl time either listening to others, or speaking with quiet self-effacement)

(I'm not ashamed about 'being a philosopher among plebians', but my social difficulties do tend to draw into stark relief the fact that at least half of my interest in philosophy is compensatory, and then I feel dumb about feeling smart.)

In any case, all of the above is a certain kind of shame that is solitary and narcissistic (or at least self-centered.) On the other hand :

I feel shame when I pass by a homeless person. I am ashamed of being a member of a society so rich and so uncaring that it can let people sit in the snow outside an empty building and die of cold. Now I think this is almost universal, and in particular, I want to draw attention to those who actively persecute and further humiliate the homeless - you will have seen the stories. Why do they care so much as to set people on fire in their sleeping bags or urinate on them or whatever? It is surely their own shame that they cannot bear, and project as hatred onto the immediate cause. And thus perhaps Primo Levi was wrong about the perpetrators - they felt the shame but projected it back as hatred and anger, shaming the cause of their shame. — unenlightened

I'm trying as accurately as I can to think about my reaction to passing by homeless people. There's definitely shame, but I don't know for sure if, for me, its about being a member of a society so rich and uncaring etc. I rarely give money, but about half of the time I give cigarettes. One weird day, I split a sixpack of heinekens with a guy, sitting on a stoop outside a bar, and we talked about whatever he wanted to. I felt good about myself for doing that, but I was also quick to message a couple of friends about this experience afterward, so what's that about. I think the closest thing I can come to is I don't feel enough distance between myself and the homeless to feel guilt on behalf of society for leaving them out(was homeless briefly, in NYC -a few weeks, sleeping on benches, parks etc. But was I really homeless? Not really. I could have gone home. It feels to me like I still learned some very very small inkling of what it's like, but I'm sure someone in severe straits would laugh me out of the room. That said, I've spent a lot of time around the very desperate, as one of the desperate, and my social safety net has dwindled. Whether I'm deluding myself or not, I do feel like I 'get' in some way that experience of helplessness)

I think for me the passing-by-homeless shame is as simple and stupid as not wanting them not to like me, which is shallow, but that's what it is.

Now active persecution. I think I agree with you that it's rage-reaction to their own shame and impotence, because fucking with someone helpless makes you feel powerful. I think there's a strong case to be made that a huge aspect of the appeal of fascism for Germans was the military and economic humiliations of WW1 and its aftermath, and I think you're right that it seems off to say the nazis couldn't feel shame. But maybe it is correct to say that they failed to feel shame about what they most should have felt shame about?

It is not just the strangeness, but the different strangeness. I have seen religious posts, and I can't identify, but I see perfectly where they are coming from and where they are headed to.

AHA! I got it. I can comment on ANY post. There is something in every post that touches me, even if tangentially, and lightly, but touches me.

None of that in your post. I am not saying the writing is foreign or nonsensical. Nonsensical, I can deal with. But yours has sense, and yet I can't deal with it. — god must be atheist

That's good - I'm on brand in the OP.

Hey, if it's not you, it's not you. But (he added) people who see nothing of themselves in an OP usually don't post about how that OP is definitely not about them. There's surely a lot of posts not about you. What about this post made it especially important to register that it didn't apply to you?

Yeah, I think most artists instinctively feel that the post-conceptualist artists' statement is a hoodwink. I have no talent, visual-arts wise, so I defer to my friends. But the vibe I get, as a graciously included outsider, is that everyone knows what the score is.

I also get this impression: visual artists who need to create, need to create in the same way philosophically inclined ppl need to argue and do philosophy. They're following something. Its instinct filtering into whatever medium they work in. They're doing what they do and then checking the boxes it seems to them they have to check.

It seems plausible to me that the critical complex, for reasons I can't put my finger on, needs to wrap up artworks in a discursive web shot through with ethical considerations. I'm no innocent here, I do it too, but it does seem like a certain kind of smoothing out.

Cool essay, short & meandering. It has academic elements, and a loose structure, but it feels most to me like listening to someone who's comfortable enough not to have to prove anything, allowing himself to wander with whatever comes to mind.

"Shame is definitely not a matter of choice: it falls upon us, invading us – our bodies,
our feelings, our thoughts – as a sudden illness. "

A weird coincidence (maybe?) I had a thought like this today, at work, feeling a little guarded and out of place, thinking : my shame feels a little like a flu right now, or a viral infection. It's not totally separate from me, but it still feels like something alien that I have to contend with. And I'd like not to pass it onto others.

But that's my shame, and that makes it different from the collective shame he's talking about. Maybe what I'm talking about is what he would describe as guilt? I'm not sure.

I've definitely read something, somewhere, about sacrifice functioning as a dark emotional glue bonding the sacrificers together - but that reading is horrible in this context. But, then, he's not really talking about the shame of the 'sacrificers' but the shame of those who couldn't prevent it.

Thinking about the Anscombe piece. I still have to finish reading it, I got up right to the end so far. Certainly, her characterization of fallen ethicists bracketing the immediate moral valence of any given act to focus on extrapolated consequences seems like one ingredient in the dehumanization and rationalization that leads to mass atrocity. I can't get all the ingredients here to coalesce into one idea though.

Catching back up : 3rd & final stanza:

Some stories survived the dynasty of the builder
But their echo was itself locked in, became
Anticipation that was only memory after all,
For the possibilities are limited. It is seen
At the end that the kid and good are rewarded,
That the unjust one is doomed to burn forever
Around his error, sadder and wiser anyway.
Between these extremes the others muddle through
Like us, uncertain but wearing artlessly
Their function of minor characters who must
Be kept in mind. It is we who make this
Jungle and call it space, naming each root,
Each serpent, for the sound of the name
As it clinks dully against our pleasure,
Indifference that is pleasure. And what would they be
Without an audience to restrict the innumerable
Passes and sipes, restored to good humor as it issues
Into the impervious evening air? So in some way
Although the arithmetic is incorrect
The balance is restored because it
Balances, knowing it prevails,
And the man who made the same mistake twice is exonerated.

:up: I think we're converging on a mostly shared middleground.

I think I mostly agree with this, but here's the case I want to make: in gallery conditions, where the artwork is already so alienated and displaced from the lifeworld - where its aura is already diminished - the statement can function in a compensatory register; it is a reactive effort to give something of what has already been lost.

The other option - call it the revolutionary option to my reformist one - is to refuse to play the game and say: here's the artwork, in this cold space, take or it leave it: if its aura is missing, thats your(?) problem, these are the conditions under which art is exhibited now, so this is what you get. A kind of identification with alienation ('accelerationist'?). And yeah sure, you can do this, but how effective is this going to be, really?

So I am trying to be historical-empirical here: this isn't just some abstract-theoretical argument in favour of multimedia experience, but really looking at how the artist statement functions in the conditions of alienated art. I see it as potentially offering a small window into an outside that no longer exists, a tiny effort at reclamation. The artist statement as the union and the dole, if I can make that comparison. — StreetlightX

But that seems even less likely to be effective then the 'accelerationist' option to which you oppose it (and there are definitely more options then lifeworld-accelerationist gallery warehouse - artists statement!)

So, I understand your argument, like I think it's conceptually well-formed. I just don't think it seems to reflect what's actually going on? If the artist's statement is primarily a marketing tool - something most artists experience and approach the way the rest of us approach putting together a CV -but a pecuilar marketing tool in that, for it function, it has to pretend to be something it's not - then what I think you've produced is a an artist's statement about artist statements. It fits in with an extra-artistic discourse, but in a way that seems aimed at satisfying the demands of that discourse, so everything fits in to place. It reminds me a bit of Zizek's anecdote about being on some kind of panel show and talking about the frame of the frame (or something) and becoming despirited (he claims) when the other panelists didn't realize he was handwaving.

The question isn't: Can we conceptualize the artist's statement as a stopgap which seeks to compensate, however meagerly, for the artwork's alienation from its lifeworld? Because we can, of course.

I think a better question would be : how do artists understand the artist's statement? How do they approach it? What use do artists put it to? How do dealers understand the artist's statement. What use do they put it to. How do curators? Critics? and so forth.

Anecdotally : Almost without exception, all the professional artists I've known do not like the artist's statement - they see it as something like a CV - and it's the type of thing they mock endlessly when 'off the clock.'

So I am trying to be historical-empirical here: this isn't just some abstract-theoretical argument in favour of multimedia experience, but really looking at how the artist statement functions in the conditions of alienated art. — streetlight

When you say 'really looking at how they function', what do you mean by really looking?

Stanza II

So each found himself caught in a net
As a fashion, and all efforts to wriggle free
Involved him further, inexorably, since all
Existed there to be told, shot through
From border to border. Here were stones
That read as patches of sunlight, there was the story
Of the grandparents, of the vigorous young champion
(The lines once given to another, now
Restored to the new speaker), dinners and assemblies,
The light in the old house, the secret way
The rooms fed into each other, but all
Was wariness of time watching itself
For nothing in the complex story grew outside
The greatness in the moment of telling stayed unresolved
Until its wealth of incident, pain mixed with pleasure,
Faded in the precise moment of bursting
Into bloom, its growth a static lament.

New poem
'Scheherazade'

Stanza I:

Unsupported by reason's enigma
Water collects in squared stone catch basins.
The land is dry. Under it moves
The water. Fish live in the wells. The leaves,
A concerned green, are scrawled on the light. Bad
Bindweed and rank ragweed somehow forget to flourish here.
An inexhaustible wardrobe has been placed at the disposal
Of each new occurrence. It can be itself now.
Day is almost reluctant to decline
And slowing down opens out new avenues
That don't infringe on space but are living here with us.
Other dreams came and left while the bank
Of colored verbs and adjectives was shrinking from the light
To nurse in shade their want of method
But most of all she loved the particles
That transform objects of the same category
Into particular ones, each distinct
Within and apart from its own class.
In all of this springing up was not hint
Of a tide, only a pleasant wavering of the air
In which all things seemed present, whether
Just past or soon to come. It was all invitation.
So much the flowers outlined along the night
Alleys when few were visible, yet
Their story sounded louder than the hum
Of bug and stick noises that brought up the rear,
Trundling it along into a new fact of day.
These were meant to be read as any
Salutation before getting down to business,
But they stuck to their guns, and so much
Was their obstinacy in keeping with the rest
(Like long flashes of white birds that refuse to die
When day does) that none knew the warp
Which presented this major movement as a firm
Digression, a plain that slowly becomes a mountain.

Second, final, stanza:

Those tangled versions of the truth are
Combed out, the snarls ripped out
And spread around. Behind the mask
Is still a continental appreciation
Of what is fine, rarely appears and when it does is already
Dying on the breeze that brought it to the threshold
Of speech. The story worn out from telling.
All diaries are alike, clear and cold, with
The outlook for continued cold. They are placed
Horizontal, parallel to the earth,
Like the unencumbering dead. Just time to reread this
And the past slips through your fingers, wishing you were there.

Ok, so I am on board with an artist saying , if they want : 'I was thinking about this, and this, and here's what I made.' If they want to do that, that's fine. But I think a charitable reading of the OP suggests they're probably talking about how, with physical art, it's become de rigeur. One is expected to have an artist's statement. The response in the op is a response to that state of affairs. (for the sake of discussion, tho, lets pretend the op is suggesting banning artist statements; let's both agree we disagree with that; and then tackle things from there.)

Presumably, all of the points you've made throughout this thread would apply just as well to poetry or film. But those don't usualy have artist statements. Why? If it boils down to excess upon excess, then why aren't poets explaining their works through image, or film-makers through poetry?

Of course, I'm ok with them doing that if they want. In fact there's even a word for this kind of thing : multimedia art. But it would be disingenuous not to notice that the above examples feel intuitively different then artwork + artist statement. Most artworks are not considered multimedia projects because they have a prose artist-statement attached. Again, why is that? (But that's the point - we all already know why. We already know that the artist statement isn't the same sort of thing as an artist adding another layer in another medium)

If we ingenuously follow this thread, we're lead to the fact that the artist statement is not simply an additional multimedia aspect, but something essentially gallery and market-facing. Again, we need to be empirical here. Are we talking about artist statements as they actually function, or are we talking about an abstract idea of 'the artist statement' as it can be slotted into a pre-existing complex of thought involving identity, purity etc.

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I adore Benjamin (the guy who attempted the Arcade Project, who was meticulously devoted to seeing things precisely, as they're situated in their precise historical setting) but I think his concept of Aura is decidedly the wrong way into this. That's a confusion of levels. I can expand, if you like

Would it be over-interpretation to say that this is neoliberalism at the level of art? 'An artwork should pull itself up by its own bootstraps!'. Eugh. Reagan as art curator. — StreetlightX

Or the artwork, due to neoliberal precarity, is forced to market itself through the artist statement, like a worker made to forge their way in a gig economy, seeking the right conceptual hashtags to render itself employable. Again, political reframings are so easy to do, one way or the other, once one learns a few rhetorical tricks (do you recall Schopenhauer's chart showing how you can link anything to anything else through gradual conceptual slippage?) Better to drop that approach. It's suasive flash and fury, maybe, for those unversed - but for those who are, its very clearly what it is!

Anyway, if the artwork doesn't speak for itself, but requires a statement, then we can as easily say the statement doesn't speak for itself (what, is this a statement in a warehouse?) and so needs an additional statement and so forth. As though some final explanation would settle things, funneling the whole thing into explanatory purity. But if we aren't saying this, if we admit that any explanation is itself in need of explanation, and so forth, then we can say that the artwork itself already enters as its own thing in a turbulent space of reception, to stand on its own, as something complexly composed, in polyvalent dialogue. It already contains, as part of itself (developed through the artist's education/experience, the process of creation, the audience and so forth) a self-explaining complexity that goes beyond simple paint on canvas. Or doesn't it? If it doesn't, then doesn't it just simply display itself? But, as you say, this isn't the case, because ... You can see how easy it is to turn these arguments back on themselves. Brought to their limit, they snake around to bite their own tail.

That's the thing with these kind of arguments - they're free-floating and mercenary. plunk them down in any context, and they can do whatever you want, either way, as long as you don't follow them too far. If you do, you realize they're not talking about anything but themselves, using this or that content for fuel, and always have to wend, strategically, at certain junctures in order to forestall their self-negation.

It's better to focus, empirically, on how artist statements, artists, and the artworld interact. (Unless that smacks too much of [concept degree one, concept degree two] --> [bad political thing] )

At the contemporary art museum in town, they sometimes have two statements. Your standard one, along with one for kids. I adore the ones for kids. It's usually something like: "The blue in this makes us feel sad, and the patterns show how we all have different kinds of sadness. Have you noticed how you can feel different kinds of sadness sometimes? Which patterns do you think you have felt before?". It's simple, it picks out an obvious theme, and it usually tries to relate the artwork to the child in some manner. It's not altogether different from - as the OP put it - a kindergarten show and tell. And it is the very paradigm of how I think all artist statements should be written.

The kids' statements really bring out that childish wonder which I think is sometimes the best way to experience art. Obviously not all statements do this - a great deal are nonsense - but I like the principle of elaboration on an artwork. Give me context, give me themes, append some intellectual spark along with the sensory, let them mesh, clash, extend, contradict one another. "An artwork should stand on it's own" - but nothing stands on its own, even without the statement. I simply have no time for 'purity' of art. Art isolated, put on a pedestal in the middle of a warehouse with a single lonely light on it. That's art for the collector, who wants to admire pretty things without being disturbed by anything else. Can I say that's bougie bullshit? I'm not sure if we're allowed to use bougie as an insult anymore. — StreetlightX

I like that kindergarten idea as well. It's charming and I think it's a great idea.

But there's a clean and quick way to deal with second point - 'nothing stands on its own, even without the statement." If nothing can stand on its own, then the artwork, from its inception, already carries with it all the things it can't stand alone from. 'A work of art isolated, on a pedestal in a warehouse with a single lonely light' already carries all sorts of conceptual meaning - otherwise that particular assemblage wouldn't have come to you as a way of imparting some sort of meaning. It doesn't need a secondary prose statement to put it all together.

[as a rhetorical exercise, let's say the artist's statement does do some necessary work of orienting the viewer. You say that the art in a blank warehouse is art for the bourgeois consumer. Maybe? ( I think definitely not, artists statements tend to be very gallery- agent-consumer directed, on an empricial level) But we can just as easily bourgeois-ify the artist statement by comparing it to the way in which Ikea contextualizes furniture by displaying it in a well-appointed room, where everything fits just right. The artists statement, in the same way, fits the art into the conceptual/mental 'living room' of the bourgeois art collector and so forth --- you can do this back and forth, for each side, forever. It's just rhetoric.]

What the OP seems to be objecting to the artists' statements as the social artifact they are And that thing is, for sure, silly. Most artists, if you warm up and have a few drinks, agree. (It's like saying Butler's 'giving an account of oneself' is self-contradictory because it asks those who ask us to give an account of ourselves to give an account of their asking us to give an account. And, maybe? but how far do we go down that route.)

The simpler thing is : mandatory artist statements are stupid.

Well "Art should speak for itself" certainly seems like an ideological/philosophical position that an artist might take or might not take. Your post could be made by an artist as a statement of their position, even if as it happens, you are not an artist, whatever one of those is. "Shut up and look" is a perfectly reasonable attitude to take when your contemplation is being interrupted, but as an op is smacks of performative contradiction, because you are yourself breaking the silence. — unenlightened

But the 'artist's statement' has to be understood as the specific thing it is. To make this concrete: Imagine jamalrob makes it mandatory that every post here is supplemented in a specific way. You hover your cursor above the post and it brings up a box with your 'post statement.' After a while, these post statements develop their own particular language and terminology. Soon everyone is - through social pressure - expected to adhere to this language. (Some imagination is required here. We're not posting for our livelihood. Artists are.)

At some point you say - this whole post-statement thing is dumb. Then someone else says: That's just an avant-garde post statement!

But Is it? Isn't it just literally what it is? Someone saying that post-statements aren't that helpful? & note that the person saying this, isn't saying this as part of their 'post statement'. They're objecting to the form itself. 'Artist Statements' are not, very much not, the same thing as artists making statements.

Ah. Policing art in the name of not letting art be policed. Very good. — StreetlightX

?

I understand the by-the-books dialectical reversal being applied, but I'm surprised this is your take. The easy dialectical reversal breaks down quickly under minimal pushback - & I can supply that if you want - but either way, why this stance? We disagree on a lot, but I feel like I usually can anticipate what we'll disagree about. Didn't expect the love for the artists' statement.

Yeah, I think that's a good way to sum it up. There's a book I really like called Seeing Like a State, that analyzes rationalist projects (like forestry in post-enlightenment Europe, resettlement of extra-state tribes, planned cities in South America etc) and tries to show how the human mind doesn't have the bandwidth to reconstruct stuff from ground up. Human Heuristics have, baked into them, centuries (if not millennia) of trial and error. It's a deep-social scope that exceeds any rational reconfiguring by one mind (or committee). (It's a cool book because on the one hand this accords nicely with Burke's defense of conservatism or Chesterton's Fence. But the author is a likely left-leaning anarchist. The book extrapolitically straddles a line that most books can't (say The Road to Serfdom vs Capital)

Jumping the gun a little, I think there is a way to recapture the thing that Anscombe thinks was lost with the death of god. Maybe there's no longer obligation to a law-giving God. But the patterns of human attachment subsist. Outside of sociopathy, all humans seek to please some authority (but a better word than 'please' is needed here.) & not just any authority - an authority that is legitimate. This fuzzy idea of legitimacy (which begins in childhood) brings with it all kind of ideas of what makes someone legitimate. In other words, from the beginning, there is a blurry blend of Authority & extra-authoritative virtues. The two poles nurture one another. I don't think it's the case that the Absolute Ought vanished with God. She's right that an era of ethics orbited around that vanished god, and its ethical echoes. But that obligation to something/someone else it still alive and well - it's just distributed in another way. (Again, I'm running ahead, but - & I hope further reading of the essay bears this out - she's laying the ground for understanding what's actually going on with God/Law/Oughts in a way that retains its gold, while getting rid of the dross.)

Ah, I did the inexcusable & mistranscribed. The first line should say 'only in the gap of today filling itself.' Still pleasantly brain-breaking.

New Poem :
'A Man of Words'

Stanza I:


His case inspires interest
But little sympathy; it is smaller
Than at first appeared. Does the first nettle
Make any difference as what grows
Becomes a skit? Three sides enclosed,
The fourth open to a wash of the weather,
Exits and entrances, gestures theatrically meant
To punctuate like doubled-over weeds as
The garden fills up with snow?
Ah, but this would have been another, quite other
Entertainment, not the metallic taste
In my mouth as I look away, density black as gunpowder
In the angles where the grass writing goes on,
Rose-red in unexpected places like the pressure
Of fingers on a book suddenly snapped shut.

I'm doing mostly exegesis right now.

I think there's a really important point she's making that doesn't immediately shine through.
It's something like Goodhart's law : "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Once you make the backbone of morality the idea that you're culpable for any consequence of your actions that could be foreseen, you set up, perhaps despite yourself, a moral situation where people develop a system of calculating consequences in advance. What may have started as possibly reasonable (taking into account consequences) metastasizes into something like insurance companies predicting risk. It turns morality into something totally different, something approaching plausible deniability (to your conscience, but the same principle: youre your own pr guy to yourself)

(I really want to keep all the many moving pieces in mind, because I have a hunch that (1) Anscombe has a deceptively good argument but also (2) if we steelman Anscombe's argument,and take it seriously, it undercuts much of her own thrust (not just to dunk on Anscombe, but to show her argument takes us beyond what she is trying to do.)

Continued Summary:

Do you smell a rat between Mill and Moore? Anscombe does - his name is Sidgwick. She thinks he's wrong about everything and wrong in an egregiously vulgar way.

What's the heart of Sidgwick's error? Intention.

Sidgwick thinks that any intention must involve any foreseen consequences of one's actions. Anscombe thinks this is a bona fide howler. This howler rephrased : It doesn't matter that you didn't intend some outcome, if you could foresee that your action would lead to that outcome.

Anscombe uses an example to show this is no good:

Take a guy who is responsible for a little boy (gendering for ease of pronouns). It would be bad for him to withdraw his support, because he didn't want to support him anymore.In classic morality, It would also be bad for him to withdraw support because, in doing so, he would compel someone else to do something, even if that something were good.

But now take the case, where has to choose between two actions - one disgraceful, and one not. What if the latter leads him to go to prison? In that case, he wouldn't be able to offer support for the kid, either.

Anscombe says Sidgwick's doctrine makes the two cases equal. So this guy has to weigh the consequences: better to abandon my kid or to do the disgraceful thing and avoid prison? He won't weigh the intrinsic badness of an action, but focus on the consequences. If he chooses wrong, and does the bad thing, as long as did his due diligence in sussing out the objective moral calculus, he can't be held accountable (or so says Sidgwick.)

If I understand Anscombe's further turn of the screw, she's saying that this type of moral view makes the ultimate moral culpability of a person rest on how well he performed his duties in weighing consequences & acting accordingly so that moral accountability takes on a whiff of the ledger.

Summary post:

Anscombe describes Moore & his ilk - for them, 'right action' is the action that produces the best consequences. Anscombe admits there's a great deal of subtlety to many of the post-mooreans. But, in the end, it's all the same. (I want to come back to this point of the essay after finally summarizing.)

For post-mooreans, consequences always ultimately override the ethical valence of an act in-and-of-itself. This means they're offering an ethics that, in its essence, is very different than hebraic-christian morality.

Anscombe then says this, and I think this is key "The strictness of the prohibition [of e.g. murder] has as its point that you are not to be tempted by fear or hope of consequences [italics hers]. I think this is important because, going forth, she is going to contextualize ends-based morality (whether deontological or consequential) as a kind of 'temptation' allowing one to rationalize bad moral action (showing my cards: I think this is a brilliant move, and partially right)

Internet's back up!

Allegorically, plants need water and sunlight because of what plants are. If moral philosophy was done by plants, maybe a Hume plant would have written that: "Whenever I have occasioned to find a treatise regarding our affairs, I have observed a transition from the usual copulations of propositions like "is a water requiring organism" and "does not survive without water" to "ought to absorb water " and "ought not station themselves in an arid landscape" which express a new affirmation of a different sort. Wherefrom this new type of affirmations are deduced from their precedents despite this difference in character I cannot conceive".

Such a plant could be alleged to engender a discourse about plant morality that concerned the operation of the word "ought" severed from the context of how plants behave and develop; more concerned with an abstract rule of application of these words to statements of fact regarding plant behaviour and development. Anscombe would want the plants to talk about how they need water because of their metabolic requirements than about a moral logic operating on statements of facts concerning plants.

So part of the appeal to moral psychology is to explain why such a move appears to make sense; and Anscombe finds this in divine law and legalist accounts of moral obligation, in historical context. But, Anscombe suggests, such motivating contexts have long since lost their ability to furnish our understanding of morality, and that moral philosophers simply have not kept up with the times. More specifically, legalistic/contractual and divine law conceptions of morality stymie the formation of any conception of morality which is tethered to real life rather than dead metaphors; and moral philosophy in the criticised senses has replaced these dead metaphors with philosophical principles that function to fill void left by this death. — fdrake

I both agree & disagree. In both agreeing & disagreeing, I might ultimately be agreeing, but let me smooth some creases, for my own sake. And then ask if I've missed your already smoothing the same.

At this moment (I can't remember what I said about this in past posts) I take Anscombe to be identifying both similarities and differences between people and plants. The is-needss unites men & plants. But the is-wants and is-oughts of men still drive a wedge.

We can re-vegetate these is-wants and is-oughts by imagining man in a relationship with a law-giving god, similar to the relationship of a plant to sunlight and water. In this circumstance, it's not all that different.

But Anscombe does admit a difference between wanting and needing. And it's exactly in this place where she can talk about wanting against your needs, or something retaining 'mesmeric force.' We can still want something that's now an outmoded need & that opens up a new ethical dimenstion. I don't know to what extent this plays a conscious role in Anscombe, but she's for sure identified the role of desire to rupture a life-form from a smooth intercourse with the world (as the plant has with water and sunlight, or the moral man with paying the butcher.) A plant, presumably, can't become bewitched by a 'mesmeric force' (though, thinking about it, maybe it can? But can it reflect on that force as a 'mesmeric force'?)

I believe @unenlightened has touched on some of this as well, but I haven't had a good chance to read his posts through thoroughly. Same to you. But I do think it's important that this Wandering Want erupts at this specific place in the text, right in the middle, between the two major argumentative blocks.

tldr: an 'ought' can go against need. And the 'mesmeric force' of these oughts seems to lie in exactly that. Anscombe seems not simply to deny those oughts in favor of an immanent moral field, but to cautiously give them some latitude. The obligation to, e.g., a Yahweh, might vanish, but the 'want' larva that falls out of its chrysalis is still there and pulsing - just needs to be rethought outside the law-relationship, rethought after sloughing the dead-skin 'ought' structure that characterizes both deontology and consequentialism - or something like that.