The day after the previous post, thanks to a long barefoot walk and run along the North Sea coast, I tore a muscle and tendon in my left calf.  "It will get better in about two months," the Dutch physiotherapist accurately predicted. "Just one thing: don't get fat.  Your calf has enough to worry about."
Sadly, a season of immobility -- even when one writes at a standing desk, as I must now do, by doctor's orders -- means gaining a couple of pounds is inevitable.  On the benefits side, I didn't have the gym or the prospect of climbing my beloved White Mountains peaks to distract me from writing and reading, so while I've been working hard I've also indulged myself without stint in novels, poetry, and one or two works of non-fiction.

In the last category falls C. V. Wedgwood's epic monograph The Thirty Years War.  In a few months I may not remember the particulars.  I'm already grabbing futilely at fading memories -- who ended up with the Palatine Electorate, which margraviates and landgraviates were Calvinist and which Lutheran, why exactly the Swedes didn't return to Sweden after the death of Gustavus Adophus.  What will stay with me are the characters who willfully mis-ran the war year after year, an all too believable assembly in our age of outright conflicts and simmering unofficial hatreds, from Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, the two Sudans, Congo, Mali, the southwestern United States and Mexico.  The vacillations of John George of Saxony, the uncertain leadership and self-destructive greed of Maximilian of Bavaria, the emperor Frederick's self-deceptive vision of a wholly Catholic Germany, the stubbornness that led to the Czech warlord Wallenstein's assassination by order of his own imperial patron, the mercenaries who sold their armies from prince to prince, Richelieu's devious diplomacy -- so devious it blew back on him, and on France, more than once.  Below all these lie the peasants whose misery can only be guessed at.
Wedgwood has an eye for the awful unforgettable detail -- the burgher who, when seeking justice for his daughter, raped and murdered by occupying forces, was informed by the local commander that had she not been so niggardly with her virginity, she might still be alive; the city councilman who scrawled a desperate prayer on the back of an imperial command to feed and quarter troops, "Lord Jesus and Mary help us."  
It was a war so obscure that even the treaty conference at Westphalia asked for a special meeting to decide on the reasons it was being fought -- over a year after the conference began, and four long years before the fighting finally ended.  Recommended reading for anyone insisting that Islam is a specially murderous religion or that only Muslims try to convert people at swordpoint.  

In sum: I'm gradually recalling the world and my obligations to it.  More soon on why my passion for genre fiction might be related to my love of classical texts, and my fortuitous encounter with a Carl Andre sculpture in a Franconia vacant lot.
 

Surprised by Ernst

I dislike Max Ernst's works more often than not, but Ernst surprised me the other day at what has become my favorite museum in the Netherlands, and one of my favorite museums in the world, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, or the Municipal Museum of the Hague.   More on the building later.   The picture is called "The Entire City," and its technique (frottage) involves scraping away layers to reveal color beneath.  It is as good a representation of any I've seen of the plural feel of city life and the historical layers of urban history.  The thorny growths outside the city bristle threateningly but they also twirl with awkward delight, especially at the margins.  (Here the technique as it's practiced today affects my reaction to the picture, because I remember doing frottage with crayons from grade school art classes.)    

Some days I believe with Simon Critchley that philosophy begins from disappointment rather than wonder.  This is why looking at art has become so crucially important to me: it is an experience of wonder, especially when an artist surprises me, as Rembrandt did earlier this year.  Wonder matters.  

Retromania!

Today my colleague here at the NIAS, Mitja Velikonja, lent me a new book by Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past.  Its first footnote (really a marginal comment at the bottom of the page -- the NIAS' writer-in-residence has alerted me to the nuances here) is making me wonder if I could write something similar about Augustan culture, circa the year zero (a great title, by the way).   Here's the marginal comment, with my rewrite below:

THE RETROSCAPE
2000/April: The Smithsonian Institution's Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum opens >>>> 2000/May: Julien Temple's Sex Pistols doc The Film and the Fury is released, kicking off a decade-spanning trilogy of punk documentaries... >>>> 2000/June: The Experience Music Project, a huge rock 'n' pop museum founded by billionaire infotech mogul Paul Allen, opens in Seattle >>>>> 2001/July: Garage-rock revivalists The White Stripes release their commercial breakthrough album White Blood Cells to huge acclaim >>>>  etc etc
The note runs along the bottom of the book's first fifteen pages.  

So:
THE RETROSCAPE:
39/April (let me make up the months): Gaius Asinius Pollio's Great Writers of the Past public library opens >>>>> 37/October: Vergil's ten Eclogues, adaptations of Theocritus' third century Bucolica are released, kicking off a short-term fashion of ten-poem poetry collections and a longer trend in bucolic songs... >>>>> 24/May: The Experience Hellenistic-Persian Gardens Project, a huge music 'n' art complex founded by billionaire banker Maecenas, opens in Rome >>>>>>  23/November: Lyric-elegy revivalist Horace releases his commercial breakthrough collection Odes to huge acclaim >>>>>> etc etc
Classicist readers may supply their own notes on Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Valerius Maximus, Livy (perhaps the Retromaniac par excellence) and others as they please.  

Happily at work:

Back

Delays in posting happen.  Why?  In my case, I agreed to serve as dean of humanities at NYU starting in September, which has already led to a surprise extra trip back to New York and a good deal of time on skype, phone and email learning the ropes.  I've experienced the rapture of art by Mondrian, Calder (heart-lifting wire sculptures and miniature-circus films), and Sol LeWitt at the marvelously refreshing Gemeentemuseum in the Hague.   LeWitt's slabs of bright color on the wall slammed me back into my body after a couple of days I'd spent floating in thought -- the best path back to the world after burying yourself in writing that I know of.  Then after those blasts of color, Mondrian's wonderfully meticulous designs that somehow give the impression of being both careful and carefree.  I'm participating in a series of conferences, most recently on Dionysius of Halicarnassus at Leiden University, admirably organized by Casper de Jonge.  My nights and a few very early mornings have been absorbed in novel-reading -- Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, H. F. M. Prescott's Man on a Donkey, and now Laurent Binet's brilliant HHhH (the perfect book to read while you're writing your own: hardworking authors take note!).  And drawn by provocative parallel lines of thinking in Axel Honneth, David Velleman, Cicero, Horace, Paul Allen Miller, Judith Butler and Simon Critchley -- the kind of crazily heterogeneous yet utterly sensible reading list I most love to build up -- I've dipped into Levinas.  From there it's impossible to resist following a few smoke-puffs of thought that relate to my next hoped-for project on ethics and literature:

The proximity of things is poetry; in themselves the things are revealed before being approached. In stroking an animal already the hide hardens in the skin. But over the hands that have touched things, places trampled by beings, the things they have held, the images of those things, the fragments of those things, the contexts in which those fragments enter, the inflexions of the voice and the words that are articulated in them, the ever sensible signs of language, the letters traced, the vestiges, the relics—over all things, beginning with the human face and skin, tenderness spreads. Cognition turns into proximity, into the purely sensible (Collected Philosophical Papers, 118-119).

Strange new design

Just wrote a long post that somehow disappeared into the ether!  Blogger has a new posting design that, clearly, I need to spend some time figuring out.  Alas.

Short version: 1) I gave a bunch of lectures this month, and had the privilege of hearing thought-provoking presentations by Ineke Sluiter (rumor, gossip, and theory of mind in Greek epic and tragedy) and Tazuko van Berkel (how economic concepts like exchange colonize and trouble representations of friendship and other human relations in classical Athenian drama and philosophy) here at the NIAS on Friday.

2) Go read John Williams' Butcher's Crossing, a mid-20th century Western about an 1870s Harvard student who heads to western Kansas to join a buffalo hunt.   I was turned on to Williams by Michèle Lowrie, who recommended his epistolary novel Augustus.  That was perfectly good, but the Western is more to my taste these days (I've been hoovering up Elmore Leonard short stories late at night lately, e.g., "The 3.10 to Yuma").  I'll save Williams' semi-autobiographical novel Stoner for another day: college novels (with the striking exception of Amis' brilliant and hilarious Lucky Jim) rarely hold my attention for long -- or if they do, I can't escape the feeling that the pleasure is just omphaloskepsis.

At a recent dinner a fellow classicist/hiker made me reconsider the joys of bushwhacking.  I tend to aim for a telos when I hit the countryside, evidence of which is that my partner and I are gradually knocking off all 48 of New Hampshire's 4000-footers.  But his inspired Thoreauian descriptions of what it's possible to see, hear, and smell while off-trail -- animals, animal sounds and traces, tiny flowers, mushroom patches, the deepest of mosses, trickles of water too small to call a stream -- resonate with the rich descriptions of the Kansas plains and Colorado mountains in Butcher's Crossing.  You can read the novel as a psychological study of postbellum (and contemporary) youthful malaise, and it surely is that, but its pictures of nature also tap into the woe of the taming of the American West.

 

O tempora, o mores!

The Republican presidential candidates' rhetoric reminds me of Frederick Dolan's insights in his Allegories of America, where he represents American politics as "entirely given over to phantasms and simulacra but whose actors are driven by the need to reduce the interpretive ambiguity of their world to the reassuring forms of a metaphysical allegory." 


It also recalls Bonnie Honig's dry comment in her brilliant book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics: "The perpetuity of contest is not easy to celebrate." 


No wonder I'm finding it easier these days to read political theory, novels, poetry, and art criticism: all grist for the mental mill -- to quote Pierre Rosanvallon in Democracy Past and Future, literature and poetry open us up the the presence of the world by the devices of language; art surveys the ambiguity and clears the silence of language; it remains open to the contradictions of the world and never allows concepts to exhaust the density of the real.  


Now back to figuring out Nadia Urbinati's concept of representativity.  

Aesthetic judgment and moral judgment

Anyway, the sheer pleasure I take in art is only part of its fascination for me.  I am also intrigued by the connections between aesthetic judgment, or taste, and moral and political judgment (for me these latter two are closely aligned: like John Dewey, I divide up judgments into private and public ones, and the latter are political).  Hannah Arendt makes a move that never ceases to shock me, first because it's so radical as a way to think about Kantian thought, but second because it's so familiar: it's a classical move.  (I want to specify "Roman," because the automatic connection might appear to be a Greek one, since "to kalon" means "good, noble, beautiful"; I do think it is a move associated more profoundly with Roman than Greek concerns, but that's a separate point, so I'll go with "classical.")

Arendt notes in her lecture series "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" that Kant analyzed aesthetic experience in terms of judgment -- and only aesthetics, as opposed to morality, because "it seems to him that only in this field [aesthetics] do we judge without having general rules which are either demonstrably true or self-evident to go by."  Then the kicker, in the next sentence: "If therefore I shall now use his results for the field of morality, I assume that the field of human intercourse and conduct and the phenomena we confront in it are somehow of the same nature."

How does Arendt justify her application of Kant's work on taste to moral judgment?  Because she believes the fundamental element of the human condition is plurality.  You are not I, I am not you, I am not the person down the hall, but we co-exist.  And only in the case of aesthetic judgment, she points out, did Kant "consider men in the plural, as living in a community."  It follows that it will be worthwhile to reflect on the experience of why we find a particular painting beautiful, because it turns out that this kind of judgment is a common-sense one, in that it occurs not strictly within the self alone, but in the imagined company of others, starting with the internal conversations we hold with ourselves.  So with moral judgment.  The people who refused to go along with the Nazis explained their choice as deriving not from any sense of moral law, but from their sense of intense internal disharmony at the prospect of giving in and going along.  They had the ingrained habit of living with themselves, that is, they had the habit of judging and testing their judgments within themselves (and perhaps some friends or family members).  When they found they faced acting in a way that they couldn't account for in the common-sense company of themselves, they had to resist.

The promise that her writing holds out is reflected, for me, in the best writing about paintings (and perhaps music, though I don't know that field at all).  This writing draws my attention to the way the world (even in the form of abstract drips or blotches) presents itself to me, how I experience what I call "harmony" and "balance" and "inconcinnity" and "chaos."  The experience of close looking drives me into myself and also to the person next to me in the gallery, whose reactions I'm curious about.  It focuses me on the grain of the everyday, and from time to time, I feel deep down in my gut that I am seeing the everyday in a different way than before -- because of that Sanraedam, that Motherwell, that Bronzino.  Am I better?  No.  More thoughtful?  Yes.  More open to the lived experience of the world?  Yes.  Alive to the judgment of others experiencing the same?  Yes.  More attuned to injustice?  Well...perhaps.  

Obviously the habit of aesthetic judgment as Arendt describes it isn't the whole picture (no pun intended).  Hang out with a bunch of artists or art historians, it's no moral utopia.  But I think of her reference to Cicero's comment that at the end of the day, put Protagoras against Plato, and he would rather be wrong with Plato, the question is, whom we wish to be together with: "our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company."  The problem is what to do with those people who'd rather have a beer with George W. -- or these days, a glass of milk with Rick Santorum.    

Art, taste, pleasure

I've mentioned my interest in aesthetic judgment before.  Part of it arises from pure pleasure in looking at art.  I've met perhaps ten people in as many years who tell me that they just don't understand art, or they don't like it (one of them, as I will never forget, in the middle of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, steps away from Titians and a Bronzino that take your breath away).  It's difficult to know what to say to these people, except "why?" but to that question I've rarely got a good answer.  The man in the Pitti was depressingly typical in his struggle to reply.  "It's boring," he stammered, "I feel like there's too much to know...really, the paintings all look the same."

As someone who, until well into her twenties, had virtually no knowledge of classical music except the few pieces I practiced on the piano or that my mother played on records when I was young (Smetana's "Moldau" stands out in my memory: why that piece, I wonder?), I can easily remember the bewilderment and boredom I felt in my first few classical concerts.  Even Verdi's "Otello," my first opera, which I attended at the age of seventeen because my residential college was giving out free tickets, left me impressed by its Zeffirelli grandiosity but mostly unmoved by the music.  The few moments that struck me as genuinely beautiful, where I glimpsed a flash of how a person might come to love this artform, were drowned out by long stretches where singers sang, sets moved, and I waited for the show to end.  But it never crossed my mind to say "I don't like music," or "Music is boring."  So the experience of ignorant confusion doesn't help me understand the people who dislike art, and if anything, since I've long moved on, it makes me more impatient with them -- though I suppose it's inappropriate to feel impatience with people suffering from what I can't help calling a disability.

Art criticism and its surprising delights

One of my deep if unsecret vices is reading art history and art criticism, especially of a philosophical bent -- Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Yve-Alain Bois, Arthur Danto, Timothy Clark.  It's a true vice, because what fascinates me about it has just enough of a connection to my professional interests that I can all too easily convince myself that a day spent reading this stuff is essentially a day spent working.

The best critics have a way of working from close descriptions of paint and canvas, line and color, that causes you to see things in paintings and to think thoughts about paintings that you would never otherwise have done.  This may sound like a banal thing to say, but their capacities of detailed description need to be read to be believed: from the thick impasto of details arise audacious insights.  They inspire me to read the Roman authors I'm working with now, mainly Sallust and Horace, with greater care for small effects and the larger trains of thought that these effects generate.

Take Clark on Cézanne's Bathers at Rest: "Never, for a start, has a picture declared itself so openly -- so awkwardly -- as made out of separate, overdetermined parts coexisting only on sufferance.  The paint is piled up and up around the contours of the bather in the center, or the one lying on the ground, or the smaller one at rear staring off into the landscape, and the build-up in each case seems intended to effect some final disengagement of figure from ground -- some absolute, and no doubt absurd, isolation of the body not just from the others next to it but from anything else.  Even from light (which snaps at the heels of the figure in the background like an ineffectual shark).  The picture is paratactic... Even the clouds seem to participate in the general dementia.  They peer down on the poor bathers' doings with shocked solicitude, inquisitive despite themselves, like the gods in Homer."

Having read Clark -- clouds peering down like Homeric divinities! -- I can't help but see this picture as a time-lapse portrait of Odysseus cleaning up on Phaeacia, Nausicaa's island.  More seriously, I see a personalization of nature that gives the painting a manic tone, both anthropocentric (the trees and clouds bend themselves around man) and alienating (as in a de Chirico cityscape, man seems fundamentally out of place).  I find Cézanne difficult to think about and Clark's close-to-offhand comment brightens and energizes my thoughts, like the triangle of sunlight nipping at the heels of the bather in the back.

Another more surprising pleasure involved in reading about art is the sheer delight the writers take in reading, not the work of other art critics but poetry, film criticism, novels, philosophy, musicology, histories, you name it.  If you have to guess the academic field where you're most likely to meet Pollock, Gramsci, Pound, Levi, Beckett, and Pasolini on the same page, it's this kind of writing.  These names appear on p 407 of Timothy Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.  And here's the real point of this post, with apologies for the delay and the awkward translation.  It's a poem about the poor, the left-wing dream or fantasy of the masses' possession of political power, the terror of the knowledge that history in the progressive sense has vanished and along with it, perhaps, the hopes of the left.  

from Pasolini's The Ashes of Gramsci (1954)

eccoli, miseri, la sera: e potente
in essi, inermi, per essi, il mito
rinasce... Ma io, con il cuore cosciente

di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita,
potrò mai più con pura passione operare,
se so che la nostra storia è finita?

(Look, the wretched ones, at dusk. And powerful
in them, defenseless as they are, through them, the myth
is reborn.  But I, with the knowing heart

of one who can live only in history,
shall I ever again be able to work with pure passion,
when I know that history is finished?)