Ten Thousand Mistakes

“The stranger, remarks the sociologist Georg Simmel, learns the art
of adaptation more searchingly, if more painfully, than people who feel
entitled to belong, at peace with their surrounding. In Simmel’s view,
the foreigner also holds up a mirror to the society into which he or she
enters, since the foreigner cannot take for granted ways of life that
seem to natives just natural. So great are the changes required to alter
humankind’s dealings with the physical world that only this sense of
self-displacement and estrangement can drive the actual practices of
change and reduce our consuming desires; the dream of dwelling in
equilibrium and at peace with the world risks, in my view, leading us to
seek escape in an idealized Nature, rather than confronting the selfdestructive
territory we have actually made.”
Richard Sennet

“Most of the scholars who have written seriously on the subject of the origin of language agree that the sentence-forming, or syntactic, capacity of human language is what separates it from all other animal communication systems. Chimpanzees are clearly capable of learning and using appropriately a large number of signs, whether indexic, iconic, or symbolic; but there seems to be a severe limitation on their ability to combine these signs, in novel ways, in strings that are more than two or three items long. This problem seems especially intractable from the Chomskyan perspective, so much so that Derek Bickerton suggests that a special mutation is required to allow human beings to create syntactic systems. In his view, a communication system either has syntax or it doesn’t there are no intermediate stages.”
David F. Armstrong

“[These] groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and
cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over
what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is
true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.”
Freud

When my wife and I got a cabin up in central north Norway, the entire place had to be renovated. I mostly spent my energy (in a fixated sort of way) on details such as door handles. I knew Wittgenstein had designed handles for the house he worked on for his sister and I did manage to find a place that manufactured exactly those handles. Advertised, in fact, as Wittgenstein’s handles. It was a manufacturer specializing in mostly Bauhaus designs. In the current NYRB there is a short sort of lovely piece by Christopher Benfey on those very handles. This is my way of segueing into the idea of craft and art.

The above quote is from Richard Sennet’s book and I found it interesting that he quoted Simmel, for Simmel was one of that first generation of sociologists in Germany that is associated with Max Weber and who, more than any other, deeply influenced Frankfurt School thinkers, and others such as Erving Goffman.

“
Reality and value as mutually independent categories
through which our conceptions become images of the
world.”
George Simmel

And there is something inherently radical in Simmel, as there was in almost all those sociologists and psychoanalysts of the fin de siecle. To read Simmel today it is striking how altered the idea behind sociology from what it was at its inception. In The Philosophy of Money (a hugely negelected work, still) Simmel focuses on the quantification of social life. That kinship and the guild system, and values such as loyalty are displaced by money. In other words exchange value replaces honor and loyalty. For Simmel, money encourages even in ideal situations, a tendency toward manipulation. And Simmel, who was acutely aware of ideas of social distance (as in his short essay The Stranger) sees in *money* a necessary distancing mechanism for human emotions.

“As a group member, rather, he is near and far at the
same time, as is characteristic of relations founded only
on generally human commonness. But between
nearness and distance, there arises a specific tension
when the consciousness that only the quite general is
common, stresses that which is not common. In the case
of the person who is a stranger to the country, the city,
the race, etc., however, this non-common element is
once more nothing individual, but merely the
strangeness of origin, which is or could be common to
many strangers. For this reason, strangers are not really
conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular
type: the element of distance is no less general in regard
to them than the element of nearness.”
George Simmel (The Stranger)

It is interesting that Simmel wrote The Philosophy of Money in 1900 but it wasn’t translated into English until the late 70s. Simmel was influenced by Marx, but was also shaped by an atmosphere of Psychoanalytic discovery. He saw in money the medium that would empty emotional and social content from life, even if it also afforded a certain development of bourgeois individuality. Money was alienating. And impersonal. And that impersonalizing dimension came out of the inherent absence of qualities in money. “Money is the reification of the general form of existence according to which things derive their significance from their relationship to each other” (Simmel) Modernity then, was a process of abstracting and impersonalizing, or alienation from community history and tradition.

“The abstraction of social life in the modern era resolves the two dominant constraints of pre-modern times. The intensity of social obligation and the narrow range of available consumption objects. Simmel (like Marx) viewed modernity as a period in which tradition-bound social obligations rapidly dissolved. Freedom of action increased due to the impersonal relations between people that resulted from the abstract character of money exchange. In a monetarized society, persons may be under obligation to many more people than was previously possible, but these obligations are almost entirely anonymous.”
Holt & Searles 

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the Sennet book is one in which he compares approaches to writing *instructions* (denotative language) as part of teaching creative writing. And I have used exercises not unlike some he suggests. And it interesting to link the increasingly abstract lives of post modernity with the internalizing of denotative language (the rise in the reading of instruction manuals, etc). Here he talks of three writers of cookbooks…

“We might compare the three chefs as follows. Julia Child has identified with the cook, Madame Benshaw with the food. The scene narratives employed by Elizabeth David are meant to decenter the reader, while the story Madame Benshaw tells is meant to induct him or her into a sacred performance. Julia Child’s language makes instructive use of moments of difficulty; these she is able to foresee. The scene narratives devised by Elizabeth David make productive use of lateral data; she brings in facts, anecdotes, and observations that have nothing directly to do with cooking. Madame Benshaw’s language sticks strictly to metaphor, in order to give each physical action heavy symbolic weight.”

This is really a very good chapter on aesthetics, in fact. There are concrete examples that have the effect of dismantling the MFA fiction workshop blue book of technical bromides and cliches. I used to tell students to read mortuary manuals. Or find periodicals for one or another profession the better to grasp occupation jargon and the hidden beauty of it. The discovery of new words and, more, the natural employment of metaphor.

There are opposing trends then, in the abstracting of everyday life. At least aesthetically speaking. The draining away of metaphor and sub text and the ascension of hyper specialization and instrumental thinking is not in absolutely impoverishing in terms of artworks, nor even of language. There can be an appropriating of these very mechanisms and their repurposing as heterogeneous narratives or images. But to do that one has to be find a way to listen and see the process happening; in other words to step away and observe. And this observing is itself, of course, compromised, too. At its inception. So the aesthetic project is then to observe the failing observation. And I suspect this is a bit of what Adorno was suggesting in an earlier stage of technological mediation. It is here that the negation of negation arises. Julia Childs is probably a much better study for young artists than Zadie Smith or Updike. This is the language of work but it is also an utterly artificial language akin to some kind of almost Comedia. And yet, caution has to be voiced because there is the spectre of irony substituting for sincere engagement. Julie Childs is also kitsch. And this is where, again, mimesis becomes a topic. But to be able to hear the artistry (even if largely accidental) of a Childs is worth noting. And the performative quality. That this is perhaps not quite Bartok’s late quartets, but it does provide a certain simple aesthetic pleasure.

Watching Mexican telenovas or vampire films, sans subtitles (for English speakers) or watching American films without the sound turned on (the only way to watch on an airplane) is to find some crack or fissure in the presentation of the presentation; some small way to later notice the Mexican vampire in the eyes of Lena Dunham, or the chubacabra in Jay Z, or the flatulent melodrama of almost all U.S. TV. Now as something of a digression (though not entirely) it is worth noting just how bad is the writing for Game of Thrones. I mean not just banal and pedestrian, but flagrantly cringe worthy bad. And I think it passes unremarked upon because the broader context or backdrop of that show is so painfully colonial. And colonial is a trope much desired in the white West today. Exotic lands are where they ride horses and pray to the *great stallion* and put widows in virtual monasteries and where magic occurs daily and strange diseases get picked up (the stone men contagion is actually so breathtakingly an auto critique of the entire series I wonder that nobody noticed this).

My show is turning to fucking stone!

The entire fantasy genre is, of course, feudal and in a time of empires. It is the normalizing of feudal values and a kind of valorizing and romanticizing of aristocracy and social hierarchy. But it is increasingly, also, in terms of Hollywood, one of very striking colonialist aesthetics and content. There is nothing *equal* about the various kingdoms in Game of Thrones, for example. There is a kind of *west* and then there is the periphery. And the periphery is where dragons roam and slavery is accepted and armies of castrati defend blond often naked Queens and ice demons ride horses across the arctic wastelands. In other words the periphery is savage and uncivilized. Now, it is easy to make too much of this for such structural archetypes reflect a template for narrative that might even be, partially, outside of history. That said, it is also all rather glaringly obvious on such shows, and I suspect the producers and show runner, directors, writers, all of them have zero comprehension of anything of the sort. It’s not how the Entertainment business thinks. But it *is* how they tacitly see the world. These notions of an uncivilized ‘outside’ are deeply ingrained in Western thinking. Fundamental metaphors and allegory such as journeys are enclosed within a white supremacist rhetorical container. For there is a deep primordial link to exile and journey, to being a stranger. And there is both a collective memory trace but also personal psychic development, and it is exactly because of this that the appropriating of these concepts is so insidious. But I digress.

What Sennet touches on in this chapter on cooking programs is really how gestures (hand gestures primarily) work to enhance communication. There are fascinating asides about sufferers of aphasia and apraxia and the relationship of learning a language and reading instructions.

“…ten thousand hours is a common touchstone for how long it takes to become an expert. In studies of ‘‘composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, . . . and master criminals,’’ the psychologist Daniel Levitin remarks, ‘‘this number comes up again and again.’”This seemingly huge time span represents how long researchers estimate it takes for complex skills to become so deeply ingrained that these become readily available, tacit knowledge. Putting the master criminal aside, this number is not really an enormity. The ten-thousand-hour rule translates into practicing three hours a day for ten years, which is indeed a common training span for young people in sports. The seven years of apprentice work in a medieval goldsmithy represents just under five hours of bench work each day, which accords with what is known of the workshops.”
Richard Sennet

This is a hugely fascinating subject, but for the purposes of this posting, the idea of craft and skill relates to contemporary society in ways that have changed over the last fifty or sixty years. Sennet points out that verbs such as pulling, or cutting are really just naming acts rather than explaining what those acts mean. Or, how to begin such actions. In writing workshops the admonition is to show, don’t tell. I remember hearing this all the time when I began writing plays. Instinctively I knew this was not only wrong, but wrong in a way that mystified the entire theatrical experience. And the idea of practice is really the point, though. Repetition has a progressive (and crucial) aspect and a regressive and destructive aspect. Skills are always more than they seem.

The industrial revolution shifted crafts and skilled labor into roles that where detailed work was repeated. The machinery often hadn’t even changed, only the social organization. Where the pre modern craftsman became expert in a kind of vision of the totality of what they made, the division of labor forced them toward mind numbing kinds of repetition. Overseeing things became the job of the capitalist. Technology did create new kinds of jobs, and it eliminated a good deal of mindless heavy lifting. But the sense of metaphysical presence, if you like, that existed in contemplation of the object for the truly skilled artisan was wiped out with the tyranny of the machine.

“Freud held in his ‘Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy’ (1909) and ‘From the history of an infantile neurosis’ (1918), that
adult psychopathology is merely an extension of an infantile neurosis that had, perhaps, in the meantime become temporarily submerged by an appearance of normality. He was
not suggesting that adults who are ill have regressed to a normal primitive mental state, but that they are older versions of children whose mental states were abnormal. Illness in
the adult is not a regression or a fixation to a normal primitive mental state, but a nonprogression from an abnormal one.”
Robert Caper

Walter Benjamin saw storytelling as a kind of craft communication. And he saw it in light of the craftsman’s skilled gestures and the sedimented knowledge that was transmitted in narrative divorced from the page. Esther Leslie writes (in an essay on Benjamin)…“Storytelling is no simple form of time-passing. It mirrors a mode of processing and reconstituting experience. It intimates how experiences pass into and out of memory. For Benjamin, to reflect on the operations of storytelling, or craft communication and experience, is to ponder the arabesque of labour,experience and selfhood.”

The storyteller is linked to the craftsman. The early era of trade featured many traveling tradespeople and this worldliness shaped the sense of story, as did the practical hands on nature of most of these tales. There was literally, for Benjamin anyway, a physical grasp of the story. And if Armstrong and others are right about the nature of language and gesture, then this all comes together as ritual learning of some sort. It also established a sort of default storyteller-as-stranger (or exile at times) setting.

Here is Esther Leslie again…

“Recurrent in Benjamin’s delineations
of experience are the words tactile, tactics,
the tactical, entering German, as it enters
English via the Latin tangere, touch. To touch the
world is to know the world. Pottery features
here—as model and as metaphor—naturally
enough as it is a form of Handwerk, hand work
or artisan labour. Benjamin describes storytelling,
the transmission of experience and wisdom, thus:
It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in
order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the
storyteller cling to the story the way the handprint
of the potter clings to the clay vessel.”

I know from experience that writing by hand is different from writing on typewriters and certainly different than writing on a computer. And I miss, personally, the sense of the paper and my old notebooks and the doodles and coffee stains and folds in the paper. I wrote for theatre on notebooks and that empty space of the page somehow called forth the empty stage. I am not sure something irretrievable wasn’t lost when the world came to tell stories by computer.

Now the idea put forth, sort of, by Benjamin is that crafts such as pottery suggest certain kinds of awareness that are linked to the hand. And the hand is linked to originary language and learning and by extension ritual. The hand as a metaphor with ever expanding implications. But one has to be careful in discussing this idea both not to be reductive, but also to follow the expansive logic in the correct way. See what a metaphor this is even before I begin trying to articulate it. The ideas embedded in metaphors of the hand are numerous; grasping the truth, seizing the day, making a fist, clutching, and so forth. But there is a subtle sort of romanticizing of the rustic here that almost smacks of Heidegger. For the potter, the pastoral shaman of arts and crafts, is, at his or her best, doing honorable work. And yes it sits in opposition to mass produced junk, but even the most extraordinary ceramics or clay vases are not not mystical recepticals. Or, rather, they are not so in the way usually discussed. And I think not in the way, exactly, that Benjamin imagined. I remember hearing Gary Snyder discuss learning to write poetry. And someone had asked him (I wasn’t there) about what he should do to become a poet. And Snyder said, go study something, anything, with someone who knows what they are doing. He meant carpentry or the like. And I think it’s an excellent answer but it has to be understood properly. For what one is learning is a kind of integrity. A respect for doing things as well as you can. And as well as you can means repetition. Those thousands of hours of mistakes. For at the end of that, if you have a great clay pot, terrific, or a bookcase, fine, but for writers there is a kind of prism through which such repetition must pass. And this has to do with Western goal orientation.

There is today, often, a kind of hubris in craftspeople. The skilled woodworker is too often a kind of self congratulatory high priest. Crafts are not art. They are not necessarily inferior, for that is the stuff of a hierarchical culture. But art is reaching toward the impossible. The radical gesture, if we use theatre, is that which fails. Perfection means you are making a bookcase. Or, are you? See, I think there is no perfection. There are varying degrees and qualities of not quite perfection.

The industrial revolution altered the sense of time, replaced the earlier rhythms of labor, of work not tied to the soulless factory and the anonymous conformity of wages. All that is true, even if it is romanticized to a degree. Time shifted, and space shifted. And memory was wounded and crippled. For the hand became the tool of capital, the repetition was one of coercion. And coerced, it is the Death instinct. And that is the danger, here. The social relations alter the spiritual aspect of learning skills. And perhaps that sounds obvious. But I think it is not obvious, really.

“The division of labour
compels a mechanical measure of labour time, the
voided, homogeneous time of manufacture. The
work process, especially the factory drill, de-skills
operators. Industrial work processes are an ‘automatic
operation’, wherein each act is an exact
repetition of the last.”
Esther Leslie

If the artisan or pre-industrial worker envisioned the object of his craft from a perspective of totality, then that totality was abstracted and laid out in fragemented and partial form on the assembly line. So the storyteller would of necessity internalize a reified and homogeneous predictability to the story he tells. And more, that story seeks nothing transcendent. The assembly line contains thought as well as limiting the skills of the worker. The story becomes fixed in a sense, at least structurally. The traveling worker no longer travels. His stories no longer reflect Nature or the world. The imagination disconnects from experience. Esther Leslie, in that same very fine essay on Benjamin, points to Benjamin’s love of Kafka and how the repetitions found in his novels suggest the recurrence of the same that one finds in industrial Capitalism. The language of the machine age is dead reiteration. Storytelling becomes an instruction manuel (per Sennet) for how to de-bone a chicken.

In one sense Benjamin’s revival of pre-industrial trades and attendant storytelling is the progressive version of Heidegger’s reactionary nostalgic adoration of volkish countrified and homely village feudal aesthetics. The hand, the naive fetishized simplicity of village worker was for Heidegger a kind of reclamation of authenticity. An anti metaphysics. For Benjamin it was a reaction to the industrial anonymous slaughter of the first World War. Now, the loss of authenticity for Benjamin came out of mass reproducibility. But I think now, there was a slight confusion in this regards technical copies and it is best revealed by cinema. Looked at one way the movie is already a copy. The technology is one OF copying. And yet, a Bresson or a Fassbinder film cannot be seen as mass produced. Not in terms of aesthetics. For it seems the one place that Benjamin and other Frankfurt School thinkers were misreading the technological changes. For mass culture, mass electronic culture certainly fostered an industry of kitsch reproductions. But it also created those auteur filmmakers who looked to dissect that very mass culture. The disdain for film art by Benjamin all the way to Debord seems a regressive, or at least one dimensional reading of the age of digital simulacra and its relationship to narrative and language and image.

In other words, there are new kinds of fingerprints on art objects, from the potter’s hand to the director’s eye. But this is more complex if one returns to narrative. The storyteller was taken from the village fairs or roadsides and placed at the assembly line. And then put behind a console looking at CCTV footage or writing code for corporate telecoms. Still, there is a story, and that story encouraged by a system of controls to be one of formulaic melodrama, or kitsch. So the storyteller, those writers today who traverse the roadkill on the information highway (I think I stole that from Ducks Breath Mystery Theatre) are ones who resist the comfortable and vetted *experimental* narratives of post modernism and who refashion the detritus of mass culture in anti narratives. And that is highly elusive category. But not an impossible one.

I think Benjamin was prescient in ways he was unaware of when he focused so much on collectors. For the storyteller today is a collector of the immaterial impermanent cyber world. The best writing today, fiction writing anyway, is both parsing the idea of what fiction is (the way Vollman does with Imperial) or is commenting on the commentary of authenticity, and at the same time evoking memory (as maybe McCarthy does). The authenticity quotient of artworks today is mediated by factors not previously part of the aesthetic vocabulary.

“The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”
Walter Benjamin

And that conformism (per Benjamin in the quote above) is less identifiable in conventional terms. For the culture industry today have created their own agent provocateurs — the phony avant garde one sees in countless empty performance artists, or vague laughable installations or the cottage industries of post Warhol fine artists like Jeff Koons. Tools of the ruling class. And the image, in the best new photography, and there is a lot of good photography, is that which interrogates the memory rather than manufacture fake fantasy worlds (Sugimoto not Crewdson)

The neatest people I know are often ex-cons. But neatness is also redolent of fascism. Of anal sadistic camp guards and fastidious repressed Nazi surgeons. There is neat and there is neat. The storyteller today, the writer of fables who has no hands to use for gesture, but only CCTV, is chronicling something less from the perspective of the author, and more from the perspective of a nation becoming zombies. The loss of autonomous thinking is seen in the US election season. Trump’s optics say fascist. Hillary’s optics says professional class lawyer and corporate insider. So who do people protest against? Trump. Why? Because of his racist rhetoric on immigration. But Hillary organized a coup of Honduras which actually DID murder countless humans in their native country. But its optics. Bernie Sanders is a white late middle aged Washington insider who manufactured some image that is suggestive of socialism. Except its not, in the least, socialist. The point is that tools of the ruling class are those who perpetuate the optics of Empire’s goodness.

But the idea of expertise has not changed, only migrated. For that is my point, really. The regressive rustic nostalgia (perfected by Heidegger) is the raw material from which the new feudal narratives of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones are made. Nostalgia for Romanovs and Louis the Sun King, the presentation always identifies with the ruling class.

Esther Leslie, in another essay touches on something of this ambivalence. When Benjamin saw a human scale and clarity in Bauhaus designs, and Constructivists, he also saw, as did Bloch and Adorno, the shadow of something authoritarian and sadistic. Adorno said…“Thought through to the bitter end, objectivity turns into the barbaric, pre-artistic. The rigorous aesthetic allergy to kitsch, ornament, the superfluous, anything approaching the luxurious, contains an element of barbarism, to be understood in the sense of Freud’s theory of a destructive cultural unease.” It is that inner cop voice, and I see it a lot in left circles today. The policing of ideology. And in the U.S. this is partly the residue of Puritanism and Calvinism. But it stretches to Europe, as well. The reductive elegance of the Bauhaus can quickly become the reduction of races and unwanted surplus populations. The new eugenics is social engineering from their point of view. A plan for healthier living. Streamline society. Food fetishizing in the West today is all too reminiscent of self flagellation. The dietary hair shirt worn by those post modernists who see in Julia Childs only a kitsch bit of nostalgia. And yet, who are caught in the same agro-biz hegemonic food system as the rest of us.

The learning of crafts or trade skills, even of fine arts training in Renaissance workshops has disappeared. The society has been de-skilling for forty to fifty years now, but it accelerated over the last twenty five, certainly. Alongside this loss of hand’s on training has come these various collaborations with the system, as in the pre-vetted opposition of fake avant gardes, and in those actively trying to form strategies of resistance. In the middle of all this is the sense of Capitalist time. And everything seeming to be able to be its opposite in a flick of an eye.

The loss of storytelling as it existed in pre-Industrial societies paved the way for an easier accommodation to conformity. As far back as the 1930s Benjamin wrote of his disappointment in many on the left were content to carry on as usual. They had found their niche in a system of controls and were allowed to voice mild dissent. Class struggle atrophies. And today, in the techno sciences, the transhuman movement and post post modern is a new reformulating of Italian futurism. Cyber prophets increasingly sound like Marinetti. And this is fueled by various intellectual tributaries that divorce material reality and more, history, from the world of technology. It is as if the computer/internet expansion has erased the idea of a history of exploitation and oppression. And this new cyber Marinetti-ism is decidedly linked to and imbued with the idea of and belief in *progress*. Instead of mechanical speed and velocity, there is hyper speed processing.

“Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as ‘the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.’ But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.”
Foucault

When the Nazis rose to power their mythology consisted of both nostalgic pastoral landscapes filled with healthy rosy cheeked Aryan youth, and a futurist forward look toward a 1000 year Reich. As I’ve said before, both these visions were cartoons. They were the stuff of pimple faced boys seeking power and conquest (not least sexual). The loss of skilled labor, and artisan culture was felt across the classes. Felt in different ways, but still felt. And the need for practice and the integrity of work well done, by hand, by the individual, found very imperfect substitute gratification in learning the workings of machines. Learning mostly by reading the instruction manuals. Education has come to resemble a kind of warehousing. Elite schools cater to their students elite interests while schools for the rest of the population are mostly preparation for obedience and mind numbing service labor. Social relationships are always relegated to secondary status. Learning is instruction in instruction. And gradually today’s public cannot read narrative with any grasp of the social history behind the story. And aesthetics reflects this. Artworks that are validated are often those without subtext. Or, worse in a way, is the way great work is taught. The complexities of a Shakespeare are reduced to simple messages, or, from those critical of the canon, are described in terms better suited to comic books. Othello is discussed as if he were Capt. America.

Craft is no longer something one apprenticed (except in those rare outposts of radical learning) and even there the taint of Capitalism tends to encroach eventually and raise issues of business models and profit. Capitalist society controls the critique. One either manages the commodity form, or the commodity form manages you. This was largely one of Adorno’s messages. The vast numbers of addicts and alcoholics in Western society, and those on prescription psychotropic drugs is testimony to the massive failure of post modern consciousness. The decline of the bourgeoisie and the ruling class sense of managing their own inquest, is only tolerable because so much of daily life is lived abstractly on screens. The hand that once learned pottery is now one that develops adroit texting skills. Keyboard strokes can conjure up images of pottery, but at some point there is a collective insanity attached to believing, inevitably that representation IS reality. Ten thousand hours at a keyboard only develops, finally, good typing skills. No matter how fast that keyboard stroke is transformed into image, or data, the epistemological dimension is faced with a certain untenable solipsistic event horizon.

Depreciated aesthetic experience is one of the bedrock qualities on which Fascism is built. And technology, and the seductive allure of technological promise, only, finally, is depreciating experience. For the control of that technology is in the hands of an ownership elite, and it was developed under their aegis, and always in the spirit of disenchantment. Always to deny ritual space for learning. The loss of heterogeneous space, especially that associated with institutions, is among the most damaging factors in the contemporary West. And the daily banality of life for the working poor finds relief, if it does, often in the most violent and humiliating activities. Self harm is rampant in western society and it can hardly be seen as surprising. Described by The Refuge, a clinical treatment facility….“Self-injury may serve as a way to express emotions unable to be put into words, feel a sense of control in the person’s environment, as a means of self-soothing or decreasing anxiety, as a way of releasing pain and tension, as a means of relieving guilt, or helping the person to feel alive.”

The West no longer needs to manufacture enemies. War is its own justification. War is fine even without an enemy. And if you told most young soldiers that nobody knew who was being targeted, they wouldn’t blink. And victims are fungible fragments in the depreciated syntax of constant aggression.

Manuel Cruz writes…

“Victims are usually presented, by those who make them the centerpiece of their discourse, as nothing more than victims, living testimonies of pain, injustice or arbitrary acts, outside of any ideological considerations even though, we must note right away, they are actually victims who belong to a cause (hence, in the most extreme cases, we repeat the formula “those who gave their lives for…” fill in the blank as applies). For this same reason, not all victims are regarded equally: those who suffered in the name of causes that have fallen from grace, which have unanimously come to be considered obsolete, either merit little attention or don’t receive the same treatment. And so, faced with the deserved respect with which the media normally presents survivors of Nazi barbarism, the mocking tone they reserve for the survivors of, say, the siege of Stalingrad, who are shown as ridiculous communist fanatics tied to completely outdated symbolism, liturgy and convictions, is striking.”

Both Adorno and Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch, too, wrote in differing ways about the intoxication of war for a degraded and culturally depreciated population. In the U.S. today the war cult is growing even as a reaction to it has set in, but that reaction is relatively muted. And the fact that it is muted comes from a failure to articulate the problem. When I read on social media the nearly hysterical fear of Trump and the pleading hand wringing that *we* must vote for Hillary, even if *we* don’t like her, my impression is that the angst has less to do with Trump and more to do an existential crisis.

Esther Leslie writes of Benjamin, in a rather beautiful paragraph….

“At the close of the essay on German fascism, Benjamin speaks
of ‘sober children’, defined in opposition to the mystic protofascists
with their hocus-pocus of war. This rational epistemological
subject is only newly born. The language echoes The Communist
Manifesto of Marx and Engels: ‘all that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and finally people are
compelled to face with sober eyes their conditions of life and their
mutual relations’. The sober proletariat will not see the next war
as magical, but as the everyday, normal emergency state of capital’s
rule, and will convert that war into civil war.{ } In Benjamin’s
writings, from now on, the proletariat is discussed as the only force
that is in the process of sobering up, quite unlike other sections of
society. The sobriety of the proletariat comes from its special,
elective affinity to the technology with which it is in daily contact
– machinery’s shocks and demands keep it alert. And the other
classes are condemned to dream the nightmare that they sustain:
in the Passagenwerk it is the petits bourgeois (regarded by Benjamin
as the electoral base of Nazism) and grands bourgeois (seen as the
economic executors of Nazism) who are intoxicated with
commodity capitalism and its promising seductions.”

Today the working class has little daily contact with machinery. Their intoxication is greater, their delusions more intractable. And the delusions prevent the ‘sobering up’ for the disenchantment is more severe. The emotional deadness more complete. And there really is no Bacchanal, but only the threadbare representations of it on TV. Richard Sennet at the end of the craftsman book, touches on something important with regard to culture and labor.

“It is sometimes said that pragmatism makes a shrine out of experience,
but craft experience cannot be blindly worshipped. From their
origins in Western history, technical labors have aroused ambivalence,
represented by the two deities Hephaestus and Pandora. The contrast
in classical mythology between their personae helps make sense of the
cultural value accorded to the craftsman.”

Hephaestus is the master builder, the builder of the houses and temples of Olympus. But he is crippled with a club foot. A physical deformity that symbolizes his homely qualities. Pandora is described as ‘the beautiful evil’, a temptress, the Greek version of the femme fatale. And it is Pandora who is associated with the destructive forces born of all temptation. And Sennet makes a cogent observation regards National Socialism, and points out the mistaken (and itself banal) critique of Eichman by Hannah Arendt. For Eichmann may have been a boring little man but he did not dream boring dreams. He imagined that 1000 year Reich, and Götterdämmerung. And like all the leading figures of the Nazi Party, his emotional regression fueled his irrationality and sadism.

So, there is an ambivalence about craft, finally. Wittgenstein called his desire for perfection in designing his sister’s house “a sickness”. And yet, it is a house for Gods. Though maybe not for living. And this is partly related to John Ruskin, who Sennet quotes frequently, who was so taken with medieval guilds and the learning process involved. Modesty and integrity and honor. And ten thousand mistakes. But shared mistakes.

“It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”
Wallace Stevens (The Idea of Order at Key West)