A real hero of authentic, human, and humble attempts to figure out how to live and think: Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Update: Jügen Habermas writes the eulogy:

...philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the holy, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

Update 2: More great Rorty quotes from past interviews being published...

If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigour from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. I am often cited by conservative culture warriors as one of the relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fibre of the young. Neal Kozody, writing in the monthly bulletin of the Committee for the Free World, an organization known for its vigilance against symptoms of moral weakness, denounces my 'cynical and nihilistic view' and says 'it is not enough for him [Rorty] that American students should be merely mindless; he would have them positively mobilized for mindlessness'. Richard Neuhaus, a theologian who doubts that atheists can be good American citizens, says that the 'ironist vocabulary' I advocate 'can neither provide a public language for the citizens of a democracy, nor contend intellectually against the enemies of democracy, nor transmit the reasons for democracy to the next generation'. My criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind led Harvey Mansfield - recently appointed by President Bush to the National Council for the Humanities - to say that I have 'given up on America' and that I 'manage to diminish even Dewey'. (Mansfield recently described Dewey as a 'medium-sized malefactor'.) His colleague on the council, my fellow philosopher John Searle, thinks that standards can only be restored to American higher education if people abandon the views on truth, knowledge and objectivity that I do my best to inculcate.

technorati tags:rorty, pragmatism, philosophy

Posted by ben at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

An excellent article in the New Yorker recounts that in the U.K., in the thirties, there was a mini-movement called the "Mass-Observation" experiment. Members gathered as much detail about the lives of everyday people as they could, and synthesized it into a series of books (sample details: when a train goes through a tunnel at least one person per car will make loud animal noises in the darkness, most people tap the filter end of a cigarette before lighting it, many women had fantasies of torturing Hitler to death, and in Blackpool on a given night there were an average of four outdoor copulations). The catalyst came from the concurrent Surrealist trope in art; Surrealism attempted to give access to the hidden and primitive sides of ourselves (normally hidden away by our need to adhere to socialized reality) through accident, automatic writing, and exploring the unconscious. Beneath the polite exterior of social niceties there is a chthonic underworld that contains our real fears, dreams, and needs. For the Mass-Observers, this world could be accessed by simply recording what people actually did in their lives and gathering the details together into a "people's poetry."

This historical quirk was a direct prequel to the phenomenon of authentic media (or participatory media, or [shudder] user generated content), the realization of what could only be hinted at back then. It's goal and value, to know ourselves better through the aggregated stuff of our everyday needs and desires, is the best rationale for blogs and sites like MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, etc. Despite the headlong rush to treat these applications exclusively as a business model, it's worth remembering that as they become part of people's lives they will be creating a more and more authentic picture of what people are really like, in all their neediness, beauty, nastiness, ingenuity, anxiety, stupidity, sweetness, laziness, and practicality. It's not happening yet (and probably won't happen in this mini-boom), but it will happen, and it is the best reason for the Internet.

Posted by ben at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

So Agency.com wants to be agency of record for Subway sandwiches, and they decide to make a video for Subway about their team, as a 'viral video' that they will upload to YouTube, etc. They make the video, and it's really sort of sad to watch probably smart and talented people try to graft something human and quirky (stupid videos on the internet) on to the desperate anxiety of lucrative business relationships. The video is not funny and does not take any risks (it even has two people on camera saying that the video has to be funny and that it shows they take risks). Glass-house-dweller Coudal Partners takes them down easily.

But I feel bad for the Agency.com folks, and some solidarity. The fact that they made this video shows that they haven't given up, they still have that desire and ambition to make something that anyone would want to see, even within the special confines of corporate ad hell. It's poignant to see them get lost in their own self-consciousness and idea that their business is somehow teh funny. It makes me think of the elaborate graffiti scratched into the paint-proof subway car, the Western adventure novel written in while on unemployment assistance, the rheumy old man sending flowers to the comely young mail carrier.

From the depths of my own corporate design cubicle, I woozily tip some Wild Turkey Green Vibrance into my coffee. I raise my cup, silently. The fluorescent lights beat down. Pan left. Cut to wide shot. Fade out.

Posted by ben at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In my art history classes in graduate school there was a generalization made by a famous historian, Erwin Panofsky:

When a society is out of balance and disorganized, art tends toward the abstract. When the society is balanced and stable, art tends toward naturalism." -- Studies in Iconology, Humanistic Themes in the Art

This idea seems like it expresses the relationship between people and technology as well; in times of stability technology closely matches our needs and behavior, and in these times of instability technology is increasingly abstract to those needs, and instead the Web and all these devices offer the vision of a perfect future of ease and connectedness (one that barely works, actually, on a good day). I feel it when the battery dies, the email goes unresponded-to, I forget my phone, etc.

The sense of longing for technical solutions to spiritual problems reaches an intense level in one of the more tortured reflection of technological capitalism: social networking Web sites like MySpace. Here, the lack of offline connectedness creates a new online connectedness (this time, it's not hidden from parents or adults however, and thus the same dangers and brutality that have always come with young people hanging out together are there for everyone to see and be shocked by). The Web sites, the cell phones, the messaging services reflect the trouble that a large society and culture has in providing for the spiritual needs of people: they are a reflection of our collective frustrated desires, not the cause of them.

In the times that Panofsky was talking about (5c-16c Europe), the changes happened slowly. The Dark Ages lasted a long, long time, and whatever took their place lasted awhile too. Now, the world changes very fast and the cycles overlap, and there is no single relationship that pervades an entire society or culture. In this world, there are two basic choices: more connections (the Western vision of technology-fueled markets) or more ideology (the chosen group, the fundamentalists, the belief in burning ideas). We have to hope that ideology loses for all our sakes, but connectedness in its current form isn't satisfying very well.

Technorati Tags: art, desire, social, technology

Posted by ben at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Barnard College Emily Gregory Award 2006, acceptance speech by (my aunt) Amy Trompetter

"You were born with your authentic self and your ethical integrity intact. You are moving from innocence to sophistication and deciding what are the realistic compromises that you must make in order to live in this imperfect world that you have inherited from past generations. My advice is to do puppetry, or something similar, which offers infinite possibilities to you.

"To recommend itself, puppetry offers no prestige and certainly no monetary gain. It is as labor intensive as the work of medieval artisans. As a puppeteer, you are assured of hard work and obscurity, which is very freeing as long as your passions are fully engaged in what you are doing. There is nothing to lose. The beauty of the work is its own reward and it will sustain you. Of course you do not have to be a puppeteer, but you must follow your heart. Do the life’s work that you are meant to do.

"Theater and puppetry demand not only the most labor-intensive and time- consuming dedication. Theatre workers must also study and know everything about history, art, music, movement, psychology, religion, languages, writing, dramaturgy, and so on. Theatre is by nature multi-disciplinary, and demands a life-long quest for knowledge. Every new production opens a whole new field of study. Idea drives good theater and the distillation of precise and profound idea enacted onstage is one of mankind’s most powerful means of communal expression.

"On the one hand, there is your well-developed intelligence, and on the other, the intelligence of the people and things around you. You can impose your own intelligence on your creative work, but when you begin to respond to the intelligence outside of your self, then your work will take off. There is an intelligence that is inherent in the universe, in nature, in each living being that you meet, in the materials that you work with. Puppetry has its own intelligence, which is almost too simple, and then on the flip side, it is the most mysterious and profound. It is easily missed, but not by Barnard students and not tonight. I interpret tonight’s award as an honor to a discipline called puppetry.

"These final words were left by a friend, on my answering machine as a horoscope reading before leaving for Russia. They may be the words of Gandhi. 'Every moment of your life is infinitely creative and the universe is endlessly bountiful. Everything your heart desires will come to you, but only if you are a brave rebel who relentlessly resists the conventional wisdom.'

Posted by ben at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments ()