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Reverse Modernism

  Reverse Modernism  At a recent art event - a live video performance by Debora and Jason Bernagozzi of Signal Culture, at Visual Studies Workshop, using the software tools that they developed - renowned video artist Peer Bode (who had been their teacher) stood and spoke about how contemporary artists were not only making art, but also creating instruments for making art.  He also reminisced about a conversation with Nam June Paik in the 90s, in which Paik had said that he felt bad for painters, because painting was no longer the vanguard of art.   But what this leaves out is that nowadays, people are not only making art, and they are not only making instruments for making art - they are making artists.  The production of artificial artists - coupled with the rapid adoption and permeation of the new artificial culture into both the highest strata of commercial society and the broader public - undebatably signals a new moment in the history of art,...
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    I don't see myself as in favor of capitalism, or opposed to capitalism.  I have a very realistic view of capitalism. I aspire to have a scientific understanding of capitalism.   My realistic perspective on capitalism leads me to 3 major observations about it: 1. Capitalism has powered the development of institutions that have made human life the most prosperous, healthy, safe, and free it has ever been. 2. Capitalism has issues.  3. Capitalism will not last forever. 
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  One of the greatest tactical mistakes of Karl Marx and Marxists generally was the failure to join forces with potential religious allies.  Imagine if the Democratic Party in the United States said that if you're religious, you're not allowed to be a democrat.  They'd be finished in a week.  Likewise, imagine if the Republicans said the same thing.  It would be automatic death for any political movement, but especially for a movement like Marxism, which claimed that "The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves," and thus sought to build a mass movement of the industrial proletariat.  Perhaps the prohibition of religion might be a more achievable tactic in a movement composed of highly educated elites - either professionals, aristocrats, or the bourgeoisie themselves.  But a purely secular workers' movement is doomed from the start.
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    Intellectual Tier List S: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Euclid, Plato, William Shakespeare, author(s) of Genesis, Franz Kafka A+: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Henri Poincare, Joseph Fourier, William Blake, Hafez, Archimedes, Edith Massey A: James Clark Maxwell, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, Dante Alighieri, Georg Cantor, Gottfried Leibniz, Siddhartha Gautama, author of proto-Isaiah, Rumi, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mileva Marić A-: Erwin Schrödinger, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Hendrik Lorentz, Johann Sebastian Bach, John von Neumann, Edward Witten, John Coltrane, Michelangelo, Leonhard Euler, Guy Debord, Aristarchus of Samos B+: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Milton, Charles Darwin, author of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, author of John, author of Matthew, Galileo Galilei, Pythagoras, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Harry Partch, Philolaus of Croton, Orlando Gibbons, Kip Thorne B: Ernst Mach, Kurt Gödel, Claude Shannon, Ni...
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The Mood of Art

  At the moment, art is a deep disquiet.  It is a meditation, but not for the purpose of discovering an inner peace, but rather for eliminating distractions and focusing on this fundamental disquietude.  It's also a little drunk. 
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Liberalism, no less than socialism, -indeed, perhaps much more so than socialism- is defined by praxis.  And liberalism might be considered dialectical, in that it offers no positive doctrine, but proceeds by a kind of via negativa .  The practice of liberalism is tolerance; the positive program of liberalism is the establishment of social institutions that promote and defend tolerance.  Liberalism does not tell you what to believe.  At most, it tells you what not to believe - that is, not to believe any belief that would cause you to be intolerant towards other people and their beliefs - presumably, "absolute," "dogmatic," "totalitarian" beliefs.  It may not even tell you that much.  It may allow you to believe intolerant beliefs (that is, it may tolerate intolerant beliefs) so long as you do not act on those intolerant beliefs.  Indeed, liberalism developed within the context of the wars between and among Catholics and Protestants.  The p...
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    I've asserted before that Lenin's theory of imperialism is outdated (there were also problems with it even in his own time, but that's a topic for another time).  I was once asked (online), what has really changed between Lenin's time, and our own?  Of course, there are many answers to this question.  But perhaps the most important shift is the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, which utterly changed the game board of geopolitics, in multiple ways.  As Marx once said, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist."  But not only did nuclear weaponry change the world directly, but also indirectly by solidifying American hegemony, allowing for the creation of an international culture. Understanding this historical shift allows us to break down our analysis in a more granular way.  A regime that was established entirely before the development of nuclear weaponry (like t...
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