Fellow Creatures

In his review essay of Christine M. Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals (“What We Owe a Rabbit,” The New York Review of Books, 3/21/19), Thomas Nagel offers the following précis of the author’s philosophy: “Humans, with their capacity for language, historical record-keeping, long-term memory, and panning for the future, have a strong consciousness of their lives as extended in time. But because the other animals are capable of learning and remembering, we know that they also have temporally extended conscious lives, not just successions of momentary experiences; what happens to an animal at one time changes its point of view at later times, so that it acquires an ‘ongoing character that makes it a more unified self over time.’” The occasion of the piece is attempt to discuss Korsgaard’s Kantian argument that's being offered to supplant the utilitarian view famously postulated by Peter Singer in his landmark l975 Animal Liberation. Parenthetically this poses an interesting epistemological question in and of itself. Can one maintain two separate but equal philosophical arguments that yield the same conclusion? Indeed the English philosopher Derek Parfit has attempted to unite consequentialism (of which utilitarianism is a subset) with Kantian deontology. That conclusion, however, will hit you right between the eyes at the end of this brilliant essay when Nagel remarks “when cultured meat (also called clean meat synthetic meat, or in vitro meat) becomes less expensive to produce…I suspect that our present practices, being no longer gastronomically necessary, will suddenly become morally unimaginable.” The experience of reading Nagel’s essay might remind some readers of the feeling they had emerging from the expose Food, Inc. back in 2006. Few viewers were likely to go for a hamburger after witnessing the horrific abuses perpetrated on animals in that movie.

Social Capital

photo of  Via Monte Napoleoni in Milan: MaryG90

New York, Paris and maybe Milan (during fashion season) may be the social capitals of the world, but then there's social capital, an asset that an individual can possess literally everywhere.The term is used in social sciences. However, it's literal meaning can be usefully applied in everyday circumstances. What constitutes this form of wealth? Is it merely the ability to be lionized the moment that one walks into a room? Is it the result of the “aphrodisiac” nature of power that Henry Kissinger once referred to? If it derived merely from wealth, then all-important considerations of class would have to be cast aside? A very wealthy Russian Oligarch who has made his money from potash like Dimitry Rybolovlev and has paid record breaking money for his daughter’s Manhattan penthouse will find that his currency is not fungible to the extent that it doesn’t translate into the kind of respectability that’s earned in a meritocracy. A poet like the recently deceased John Ashbery will have much more social capital than an industrialist or manufacturer especially if their wealth derives from carbon-based fuels which add to the greenhouse effect. Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice, who had so little money that his widow was left destitute would have had more social capital than robber barons of another era like John D. Rockefeller, Vincent Astor or Henry Clay Frick, even though he was Jew at a time when the establishment was still anti-Semitic. Americans sometimes worship the qualities that produce affluence, like knowledge, more than they reward its attainment—which often fails to level the playing field.

The Big Fix

Depression is an affect and many people treat depression with medications—which helps. It’s a little like treating a fever with Tylenol or Advil. The fever may be reduced, but if the cause is a severe infection, other treatments might be necessary. The same is true of sexual dysfunction. Lots of people have problems with sex, but treating the symptom can be difficult due to repressed fantasies. Viagra may produce erections, but a requisite is sexual excitation. There are physical impediments in men and women that prevent sex and which drugs like Viagra help, but when a drug doesn’t work you essentially have to treat the fantasies, just the way you would a systemic malady. Easier said than done, of course. Patients dig for years on the psychoanalytic couch, trying to make their unconscious wishes conscious—sometimes with little success. Many people take Benzodiazepines like Xanax and Klonopin for another symptom, anxiety, but such drugs can be addictive. This is the culture of hooking up and the quick fix. Shortcutting nature is the name of the game. In addition, many regimens are reflective of a technocratic society in which information is found and dispensed at increasingly expeditious rates with patience being tantamount to something like cursive writing—an ability whose pleasures have been lost by attrition due to the prevalence of the keyboard. Allen Ginsberg's words in "Howl" (1954-5) were prophetic, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix..." The title of the latest novel by the always prescient Michel Houellebecq is, by the way, Serotonine, en francais bien sur. 

The Final Solution: Sound and Fury

CNN has been promoting their Nixon documentary with the following quote from the 37th President, “Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." It’s a locution that might be more expected from Kierkegaard than the disgraced politician who’d resigned in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Nixon had no monopoly on unscrupulousness, but this was venality of an almost Shakespearean proportion and sounds like something more likely to be described by a poetic construction like Iago than a real person. They don’t make villains the way they used to. The recent Twitter storms from Trump just don’t hack it. Here is what the President had to say at 8:23AM on March 17. “Report: Christopher Steele backed up his Democrat & Crooked Hillary paid for Fake & Unverified Dossier with information he got from 'send in watchers' of low rating CNN. This is the info that got us the Witch Hunt!” Of course Twitter only allows 280 characters. Perhaps it’s unfair to be harsh on these flourishes. Imagine Jaques famed “Seven Ages” speech from As You Like It formatted for social media: “World’s a stage, men women players, exits entrances, last scene oblivion, no eyes, teeth, etc.” What’s missing of course is the eloquence. It’s venom and vitriol without soul. Imagine Macbeth’s “it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing,” in Trump’s hands. Can’t you just hear him saying about the Democrats, “they’re all idiots who make no sense.”

Never Look Away

It’s extremely difficult to create movies about artists or their sensibilities. The grisled persona of William Dafoe has been used for instance to play both Pasolini and Van Gogh and let’s not forget Kirk Douglas portrayal of the artist in Lust for Life (1956). The tendency to romanticize and/or resort to oversimplifications of an outsized artistic personality and the era out of which his or her art evolved are the pitfalls. Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s Never Look Away based up on the life of Gerhard Richter falls into both these traps. The degenerate art exhibits of the Nazi era become facilely conflated Communist era socialist realism. The advent of abstraction in a liberated Germany fares no better, becoming a parody of itself under a curiously similar socialist realist lens. The result in the case of Never Look Away is that a film about a major modernist artist ends up looking like the one-dimensional party line art it initially takes to task. Donnersmark directed The Lives of Others (2006), a complex study of voyeurism and spying under the East German regime and the lack of nuance in respect to creative process in his latest outing is disconcerting. This along with the fact that the film appears to offer autobiographical interpretations of an artist who claimed a certain degree of impersonality (at least as he is portrayed in the film) may explain the estrangement that has occurred between the director and the artist (who had initially cooperated with the project). For instance Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), the Richter character is depicted as having an early childhood attachment to an aunt (Saskia Rosendahl) who brazenly exhibits herself to him. The film’s title derives from these early experiences. But it’s all a bit contrived with the trauma of a child’s overstimulation becoming overlaid with that of war under the rubric “everything that is true holds beauty in it.” Ironically a film marquee advertising Hitchcock’s Psycho does more to establish time and place and a body of concerns than all the psychohistory the film strains to assert.

Concerning the Inexplicable in Art

Understanding what people like is an art. Market researchers create focus groups in order to gain insights into what's going to pass muster with the public and what’ll flop. Of course this is where Facebook went afoul. They were letting Cambridge Analytica get the dope on millions of members ("Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens,"NYT, 3/19/18).Taking the reverse tact, art requires a certain degree understanding to find an audience. Yet the waters can become murky. Is an artist, a pied piper, leading his potential viewer or reader to something new or is he or she actually touching on a vein or pre-existing inclination? Few lovers of art, could probably have imagined the advent of The New York School, which produced images, in the work of Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning that questioned the very nature of what image-making entailed. No advertising firm was going to be able to offer the kind of market research which would have guided the purchaser of American paintings in the early l950’s. It was uncharted territory. Critics like Clement Greenberg argued for a certain necessity in the evolution of art, but that's like post hoc ergo propter hoc--because something follows it's the cause. Yes Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a primer on abstraction, came out in l910, but few non-artists were likely to have seen the writing on the wall as it were. Neither Duchamp, Picasso, Braque, or Matisse were a prediction of the radical changes that would emanate on American soil decades later. Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary The Price of Everything attempts to look at art as a tangible asset that has become monetized. It gives the illusion that one could assess a work of art much like one does the spreadsheet of a company manufacturing product, but it’s a little like phone tag. You may think you'e looking for an answer when you’re just waiting to reject the call. 

Calling All Podiatrists and Ornithologists

Are you by chance a lay podiatrist? Are you the kind of person who is constantly putting your foot in your mouth? Or an ornithologist who’s always giving someone the bird? The two may be intertwined. Have you been fickle in your swearing and then ended up getting a comeuppance? It’s always fun to yell at Uber drivers who will stop anywhere for a ride or at the slow moving biker on a narrow path, but then one day you suddenly find that you’re not so impregnable and that the object of your justifiable outrage doesn’t just smile stupidly and take it. You may even find someone powerfully determined and built grabbing you by the scruff of your neck. You may have spent years, even decades studying submissions and releases, punches and kicks in your martial arts class at the Y, but you might as well be back in the elementary school yard where the local bully has you in a headlock or simply refuses to let you go on your merry way until you bow in obedience and admit him as the winner. No adult wants to start crying in the shadows of darkness under a Hopper street lamp, pleading to be let go because their wife will be worried. However, that's where you may very well end up, if you're not careful. If you’ve never been street smart, it’s probably not in the cards no matter how many boxing classes and jujitsu classes you take. There's a huge difference between theory and practice, between a controlled environment and the call of the wild. There are some people who nobody is going to run over and others who are accidents waiting to happen.