Violence and the Exploitation of Counter-Violence

Reading about the KKK in the South I just came upon their strategy of "violence and the subsequent exploitation of counter-violence". It strikes me that hate and the exploitation of counter-hate is equally important in human affairs. While the Klan may not be bright enough to have this as a conscious strategy, in studying sexism and racism the last few weeks for Ethics and Social & Political Philosophy it is common for a reactionary group to be labeled as the very problem they oppose. Feminists are seen as "man-hating" sexists and black and Latino groups are seen as white-hating racists. While nations such as the UK and US brutalize other countries, the reaction against it is seen as the hate and the terrorism.

It is true that everyone hates and everyone is capable of violence, so those who fight fire with fire are indeed engaged in the problematic and all-too-human. However, the real issue is the hypocrisy, the inability of human beings to see in themselves what they see clearly in others. Thus, after Klan members killed four middle aged black women with shotguns drive-by style in Chattanooga, Tennessee (1980), the black riots that followed the light jail sentence were used by the Klan as clear evidence that they stood for justice and defense of the white population. The counter-violence was used as a recruiting tool.

There is no easy solution to this problem. It may be that we will always swim upstream, but as it is with so many things in life, transparency, the ability to see all sides of what is going on, is a worthy goal and sometimes is the difference between life and death.

John Cleese of Monty Python vs. Extremism

I thought this would be appropriate as a post for Social & Political Philosophy. Why do we not have TV this good? Enjoy!

http://youtu.be/HLNhPMQnWu4

Social & Political Philosophy: 4th Response Essay Topic

The fourth response essay can go either of two directions. We have studied fascism, anarchism, post-colonialism and feminism since the third response essay. Fascism is a heavy top-down authoritarian system, while the other three are bottom-up struggles for common power. You can either compare fascism to capitalism, communism or socialism, OR you can write on anarchism, post-colonialism and feminism as responses to top-down power.

Social & Political Philosophy: Final Review

Hegel & Revolution
Teen during French Revolution, reason as revolution, Marx inverting theism to materialism, historical process & explanations, dialectic as back & forth, positive-negative-synthesis, dogmatism vs. skepticism, understanding vs. reason, history as Orientals-Greeks-Germans/Europeans, master/slave dialectic, judgment as one-sided acid, oppositions as everything, being is non-being as becoming, freedom is necessity as one, Marx points to final stage of workers vs. owners, business class as latest stage, reason as critique of Rousseau’s romantic will

Socialism
Along with Capitalism and industrialization comes problems, inequality & criticism, equality vs. freedom, social use vs. individual interest, redistribution of wealth, social welfare, planned vs. free economies, most are mixed economies, gradual vs. radical revolution, democratic vs. tyrannical businesses, unions, co-ops, communes, Mazdak the Zoroastrian/Socialist, Saint-Simon’s Socialisme & meritocracy with “thieves” removed from above and below, co-operation vs. competition as productive, hand of greed vs. invisible hand, voting for workers, Marcuse the “father of the new left”, Frankfurt School & Critical Theory, attack on positivism, critique of corporate capitalism, consumerism & marketing, criticism of communism, compared both to fascism, One Dimensional Man, consumer’s fear of revolution, the Establishment, revolutionizing the “obscene”

Communism
Radical socialism & nationalization, capitalism as anarchism, the new French Revolution vs. the capitalists, Saint-Simon’s “each according to contribution” eventually “each according to need”, assumes surplus allows for this, imposing dictatorship evolving toward democracy, Lenin vs. Trotsky’s theory of continuous revolution, problem with failure of reluctant dictatorship, post-Marxists, problem of top-down and bottom-up viewpoints, internationalism, Communist Manifesto, all history is class struggle, problem of the necessary but revolutionary middle class, modern individuality made impossible, abolition of the family & nationality, Lenin & vanguard party dictatorship, Stalin’s socialism in one country, Gramsci & society as more complex than workers vs. owners, hegemony & hegemonic discourse, “counter-revolutionary” as mask of complex problems, Mao & paying attention to farmers vs. industrial city, Zizek and new struggle of first vs. third world

Anarchism
Radical bottom-up vs. previous top-down systems, feasibility of anarchy given technological society, government and power as inherently abusive, problem of central vs. decentralized power (private armies), Proudhon first to call himself an anarchist, “property is theft”, “anarchy is order”, anarchy symbol, free association of co-ops & communes, no need for nationalization, possession through mutual & voluntary use, Bakunin & break with Marx, the propaganda of the deed, criticism of communist dictatorship as self-perpetuating like fascism, Spanish Civil War, Franco, fascist & capitalist support, Squatter’s rights, Free Love & Women’s rights, Emma Goldman, Chomsky vs. Foucault, oppression as monstrous vs. all too human, true human nature vs. fluid human nature, Chomsky argues authority must continuously justify its existence, Foucault argues that institutions create binary dichotomies to maintain power, knowledge always serves power, criticism of psychiatry

Fascism
Fasces as bundle of sticks with ax, fascism as industrialization, nationalism & traditionalism, left & right wing elements, religious & anti-religious elements, anti-communism & anti-anarchism triangle, Mussolini in Italy, hoped for African empire, great depression and rising tides of communism, paramilitary resistance protecting family, religion & nationalism, vicious pacification of Africa, blaming own people in failure, Hitler in Germany, scientific legitimacy, Western ideal origins of Athens, Sparta & Rome, Heidegger and use of Nietzsche & existentialism hoping for radical new beginning, anti-technology & anti-modernity, romantic phenomenology vs. Husserl’s psychological phenomenology, intentionality, thrownness, technology boxing up the miraculous, with and against the “them” as an “I”, every revealing is a concealing, time as horizon of being, all thought as denial of death & meaninglessness, freedom is transparency of becoming, Heidegger as Nazi Trotsky, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, antisemetic view of both capitalism & communism, social-Darwinism even in local Nazi leadership, Reichstag Fire & emergency powers, “job creation” through anti-Semitism, admiration of UK & US

Postcolonialism
Islam as last contiguous empire & height of civilization, Europe gets wealth & gains colonial empire, today we live in post-colonial empire, Fanon as existentialist & Marxist, fighting for French & bleaching of his unit, colonialism destructive to oppressed body & mind, debate with Sartre over independence of the black community, gaze of the other as marginalization, interiorized racism, racism as key to class struggle, getting beyond Manichean categorical dualisms of black/white & irrational/rational, some revolutions (US) violence is justified, Said argues Orientalism is how “West” views the Other/Orient, argues against the “Clash of Civilizations”

Feminism
Myths vs. Realities of gender difference, seeking power through isolation vs. socialization, women as conscious of being watched, potential objectification, early civilization & growth of size as source of sexism, cultures offer women’s rights yet maintain oppression, 66% of work & 1% of property, first wave & Susan B. Anthony voting rights & consensual sex, second wave 60s anti-establishment, Simon de Beauvoir argues women Hegelian Other w/ master/slave dialectic, Friedan argues women need individual identity beyond the home, third wave criticisms, bell hooks criticism of white upper/middle class college movement marginalizing racism & poverty, Judith Butler argues gender is a social construct, gender as performance, issue of display of women’s sexuality as oppressive or liberating

Social & Political Philosophy: bell hooks & Judith Butler

bell hooks (1952 – present)

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks (yes, spelled lower case on purpose) is a feminist and social philosopher who argues that class, gender and race are complexly connected. Critical of second wave 60s feminism focusing on sexism to the neglect of racism and the gap between the rich and the poor, she labeled herself a womanist (not in spell check, but now added to my dictionary) and argued much like Foucault did with Chomsky that power, even resistance movements, reinscribes itself and thus feminism can itself be a marginalizing force. This is also similar to Judith Butler, who views culture and feminism as a complex and not as a simple struggle between the forces of good and evil. While feminism made gains in the 60s and continues to do so today, bell hooks was critical of the movement as it was populated mostly by white college women who are upper and middle class, live in first world countries such as the US and UK, and disconnected from the lives of many women who are impoverished, are unable to attend college or a good career, and who are overwhelmingly of European descent. Consider the shows criticized by feminists today, such as Ali McBeal, Sex and the City, and Bridget Jones’ Diary.

One of the most frequently cited sources of the third wave of feminism, bell hooks argues that feminism is for everyone, not just middle and upper class college girls and career minded women. Growing up first in segregated schools and then in predominantly white schools, she saw firsthand that progressives and educators can support prejudice while fighting for change. She studied at UC Santa Cruz and began teaching in 1976 at USC, then later at Santa Cruz, Yale and SF State. She first wrote poetry under her grandmother’s name, Bell Hooks, later keeping the name as she wrote nonfictional essays and books. One of her early and most famous books is Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981), which examines the dual marginalization of black women in a patriarchal and racist society. The title is inspired by Sojourner Truth, a black abolitionist and feminist living in the late 1800s whose speech Ain't I a Woman is a celebrated work of women’s rights. She is critical of black men’s sexism towards black women, the marginalization of the poor by the powerful, and white racism and white supremacism in culture and media.

While some are critical of her work, like Foucault she is suspicious of any side that calls itself the true and the objective, including feminist and black consciousness movements. For this, many call her, as they do Foucault and Butler, a post-modernist, a skeptic of conceptions of absolute truth and a believer in perspectivism and historicism, that truth is always in a particular perspective situated in a particular time and place. This is similar to Trotsky and Heidegger in so far as power and knowledge must continuously transform themselves. A movement such as feminism must thus be continuously critical of itself and understand itself as a diverse group of various strategies and perspectives. I am particularly inspired by her view of education and teaching. She argues that schools can operate as mind control centers that breed conformity and complacency with injustice such as institutional racism and sexism, but they should operate as open spaces where individuals are invited to question their culture, assumptions and ideas.


Judith Butler (1956 – present)

Another celebrated source of feminist philosophy, particularly post-structuralist and post-modernist third wave feminism which is critical of power like Foucault, is Judith Butler, a professor at UCB and one of the most famous feminist thinkers today. She wrote her thesis at Yale on Hegel and understanding individuality in French history. Like bell hooks, she began to question feminism and its assumptions, particularly the monolithic “us vs. them” mentality that is unreflective and untransparent not only in its assumptions but in its masking the diversity of the feminist movement.

A political philosopher beyond the focus on feminism, I myself saw her give a recent talk (in jeans and a black t-shirt in front of a well dressed audience) on Palestinians and how their suffering is perceived and framed in the US and UK, particularly on how suicide bombers understand themselves and their actions and how they are understood by outsiders. This is very similar to her work on gender in locating truth in a human body as a performance in time and space. As she is Jewish, she has been praised for this, her most recent work by pro-Palestinian groups and opposed by pro-Israel groups and authors as a traitor and fool. I particularly admire thinkers who stand up against what they believe are injustices of their own culture and people.

Butler’s famous feminist idea is performative gender, that gender, and all identity, is a performance. Wearing a dress, applying make-up and watching certain types of TV shows are obvious examples of how traditional women’s gender is performed. In her most famous book, Gender Trouble, she particularly uses Foucault as inspiration to critically examine gender and how it is prescribed and reinscribed through the actions of people as they identify themselves with a particular gender. Like Hegel and Foucault, this is a historical view of truth that suggests that gender and identity are cultural constructs. Like Foucault and Fanon, Butler is critical of binary divisions and how they limit our understandings of ourselves and others. Like bell hooks, Butler argues that supporting feminism means criticizing binary distinctions such as women vs. men rather than supporting them. Given a diverse population and the complexity of politics and history, human beings limit themselves through their understanding of identity and its complexity.

For example, men come to see certain actions as macho, and they identify these with masculinity and heterosexuality as individuals in a cultural coherence such that their performance of their own identities and individualities are stylized and polarized. Thus, crying becomes something feminine or homosexual, in opposition to the masculine and heterosexual. A male individual, inauthentically as Heidegger might say, would believe that he is doing what he naturally wants without critically reflecting on the fact that he has helped participate in his own enclosure in an identity that limits his individuality and possibilities.

Ethics: Review for the Final Exam

The Final Exam will consist of 20 Multiple Choice questions (2 points each) and 2 Short Essays (30 points each) at least two pages each in length. The Multiple Choice questions will cover points in the lectures and readings. The Short Essays are personal responses to and comparisons of the concepts that demonstrate your own thinking. The essay topics are listed at the end of this review. If you wish to write another sort of essay, please tell me and I will likely let you write it.

Theft, Possession & Zinn
We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance. There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use: First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense.

The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified? We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. Kant, of course, would say NEVER. According to the concept of virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm (like Robin Hood). The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. We watched the first half of the corporation in class, showing us that the corporation is an “externalizing machine” which puts the stock price before all else, and that this device has allowed America to become very rich but at great social costs.

Lies, Propaganda & Chomsky
Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. We focused on the historical background of American propaganda and censorship. Recalling the story of the baboon giving the false leopard call, apes have been seen lying to their fellow apes. The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, using the OLD propaganda model: “This is the king/state, we know best”. We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, Propaganda is something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of British/American propaganda.

Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’.

Violence, War & Grossman
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent. However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence? Absolution by Distance, Absolution by Authority, and Group Absolution. Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. Stages of Killing: Combat High, Remorse, Rationalization (wrestling with the contradiction of positive/negative, self/other).

Environment, Consumption & Carson
We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature. While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact. Wilderness: Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term. Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse. Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources.

Class, Power & Karp
Class is a very important issue for Americans today. From propaganda week, we know that A, we are systematically taught that ‘there is no class in America because it is a freedom place’, and B, ‘class is something that OTHER cultures are brutal with, but we are free of that problem’. This was what we said about the Soviets, and they said about us. There are two types of class status, ascribed (born with it) and achieved (gained in time). The common indicators of ascribed class status are ethnicity (race and tribe), family (royal lineage), gender (male, female or other), and culture (religion, language). The common indicators of achieved class status are position (job or role in society), wealth (property which includes money), ability (skills, education and experience), and fame (honor, success, celebrity). The two positions are privileged on the top and marginalized on the bottom. On top in society are those who have enough that if they hold on to it they do not need to work. On the bottom are those who have so little that if they do not work then they have nothing at all. In the middle are those who are using all sorts of strategies to get employed and gain property. In America today, in spite of ditching the British noble heraldry, the top 1% are ‘super-rich’ upper class (who earn over $350,000 a year or get that in returns on investments), the next 5% are ‘rich’ upper class (over $100,000 a year), the 44% are middle class (over $40,000), and the remaining 50% are ‘working-class’ and lower class (under $40,000). This means that the lowest upper class members earn just under 9 times what the lowest middle class members earn.

In the first short article I gave you from the Race, Class & Gender reader, Class & Inequality, Sklar puts together interesting statistics on wealth and poverty in America. All gains in household income since 1975 essentially went to the top 20%. Since 2000, the US has gained 76 billionaires (putting the number at 374) and 5 million additional people below the poverty line (to make 37 million, the population of the East Coast). Our infant mortality rates, especially for inner city impoverished people, rival rates in Malaysia and India.

In the second article, Media Magic, Mantsios argues that the media (TV and movies in particular) make class disappear from America. Poverty is increasing at twice the population growth rate, yet less than 1 in 500 articles in the NY Times is on poverty (and ask Chomsky, they set the nations news). Welfare cheats and aggressive pan handlers take up a sizable portion of the space given to the impoverished in print.

In Indispensable Enemies Karp starts by noting that in American politics there is always a powerful ‘other’ to blame for not getting what one’s group wants, but no group seems to be able to get what it wants for itself. Karp argues that the basic assumption that parties are trying to win elections needs to be questioned. We need to rather ask what the two parties have done in the last 150 years (the time in which America has risen to be the wealthiest nation). When you look at it this way, we see that the two parties have controlled 50% of the country split down the middle since the civil war polarized the country. A landslide in American elections is 60-40, and neither party seems to push lasting popular legislation. Most states stay blue or red for decades, if they ever change at all. This means that, through all of the changes that Zinn, Grossman, Chomsky, Carson and the Corporation have been talking about, the two political parties have remained exactly the same. Karp argues that, when we realize that the two parties are trying to maintain control over their 50%, we can see many things. This is the thesis of the book. We can see that anyone too left or right of center is sabotaged by the party. A party would rather see the other side win a district for a while then see someone who is intent on pushing forward real change. You must prove your loyalty and centrality to be big and get elected. If you show any independence or disloyalty the party will kill your campaign with the help of the other party and wait for the next election, concentrating on keeping a tight and simple lock on the 50%, not on pushing forward a program. Thus Karp charges that we have one party, with two wings, not two parties at all. The upper class pay and play for both sides and further the interests of American power (which is held in particular American hands). The common people are set against each other and told that because the other side is as free as they are nothing can get done. In other words, it is all a game of good cop, bad cop, similar also to Operation Margerine.

Sexism, Gender & De Beauvoir
Distinction of overt vs. covert prejudice: explicit vs. hidden.
The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet. Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men. There are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men. First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others. Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched. In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase. When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off. Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property. Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.

Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too”. The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain. The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’. Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic. The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family. The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal. The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed? (anti-pornography feminism vs. ‘pro-sex’ feminism)

Racism, Ethnicity & Hannaford
If you are marginalized and you point out covert racism, you are often accused of overt racism by privileged people. Great evidence against Racism: Piaget’s studies of Child development stages, and African kids using laptops experiment and the surprise that there is no lag time compared to Western kids. Race seems obvious today, a ‘fact’ of biology. There seem to be distinct ethnic groups that are easily divisible into recognizable races. Hannaford argues that in fact racism rose with science and modernity in the rise of Europe since the 1600s. There was, of course, always ethnocentrism (my tribe is familiar, your tribe over the hill is scary) that correspond to self-centered thinking on an individual level, but ‘black’ and ‘white’ people did not always exist. ‘Race’ comes into European languages by the 1500s. In English, ‘ras’ meant a course or current. The word did not mean a fully separate category of people until after 1700, as Europeans got wealthy beyond everyone and very successful with sciences (phrenology in India example). Today, however, research on genetics shows that there is no definable or divisible races that can be fully separated. Rather, there is a tangle of genetic material that is mostly common to a people.





ESSAY TOPICS:

The short essays are personal responses to and comparisons of the concepts that demonstrate your own thinking. Make sure to write clearly, stick to the subject and use examples from the lectures and readings or your own to support your point. For each of the two essays, write a two page reflection on a topic of your choice. If you prefer, you can select a topic from the options below, but you are also welcome to write on any matter that interests you as long as you focus on the issue, argue well and use good examples. When you are done, it is a good idea to go back over your answer to make sure you have answered the question.

Option 1: What is the ethical conception you think best prevents theft, and why?

Option 2: Must all societies lie? Is the American and British style of propaganda better or worse than the older methods of the past?

Option 3: Are Grossman’s findings on human violence comforting or disturbing? Why?

Option 4: How is environmental sustainability possible in the shadow of the corporation?

Option 5: Karp argues that American two party politics is a deceptive device.
Does he make a good case?

Option 6: Is covert prejudice more or less difficult to fight than overt prejudice?

Option 7: Against some ‘second wave’ feminists, third wave ‘pro-sex’ feminists say that women can be sexy without helping to oppress themselves. What is your thinking?

Option 8: Is racism a permanent condition, or can it be dismantled? How?

Social & Political Philosophy: Feminism

Myths and Realities of Gender Differences

The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional. Grossman already has told us that there is no difference between men and women in combat physically or psychologically. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet (Melody’s lesbian serial rapist story, female gang members story, female serial murderers as poisoning, girls style of picking on people vs. boys). Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men. Consider that it has been said women have a emotional-sexual cycle that lasts 28 days, men’s lasts 6 minutes.

What, then, are the differences between men and women?
Most obviously, there are physiological differences that relate to sex and procreation. In addition, there are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men.

First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others. The two best examples are 1) classic women ‘let’s talk’ vs. men ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ that becomes strained in many heterosexual relationships (choosing a restaurant, where women wants to discuss and man wants her to just pick), and 2) male boss ‘don’t bring it to me until it’s done and done right’ vs. female boss ‘let’s go over the details so we are on the same page’ difference of support offered.

Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched. Women want to be desired, whereas men want to get what they desire. BOTH OF THESE differences are relative and to a degree, a leaning apart as I like to say. Thus, men like being watched and desired, and women don’t want to talk about everything.

Other than these RELATIVE oppositions, there is no good evidence to suggest that men and women are very much different at all. The work of Piaget suggests that men and women undergo the same mental development in the same set of stages at roughly the same ages.


History of Sexism and Feminism

In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. Women were shamans, leaders, and there were often central female mother gods. As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase.

Why did this happen? The best explanation so far, one that does not rely on any inability of women, is the increased size of the community. When people lived in small communities, women could raise children at the center of the village, as the political center. As city states increased in size, it made it increasingly difficult to raise one’s children at the public center. Thus, women retreated into the home, and men, who had to be the go-for before now were the ones who could venture out of the home and into the centers of political activity. Today, devices allow women to raise children while fully participating in public life, but women are still confined in a way to the home in balancing life between home and career.

When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off. Consider that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam (the three largest cultures yet) all had to offer women better status and rights than they had previously (Naga princess story of Buddhism, stories of Jesus involving women and men cheating equally bad, Islamic law and divorce and consensual sex), but all three oppressed women (nuns can only teach kids).

Modern society has continued the trend, such that today women have equal legal status in many nations but covert sexism and a lack of women owning property persists. A united Nations 2004 report claims that women work 20% more a day on job and home together than men do (10 ½ hours to men 8 ¾ hours). Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property. Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.
(Performance art piece with empty area of museum with card that says women who clean are the artists who have performed in this space).

Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too” (Kate Weber from high school assembly asks crowd ‘Who thinks women are equal to men?’ most everyone raised hands, ‘Then you are all feminists!’, impressed me much). It is a shame that people, men but ALSO women, are afraid of calling themselves feminists, largely from the backlash of the 80s between the second wave and third wave of feminism which said that “militant feminists” “hate men”.

There are three waves, each building on the last and addressing new issues from the last wave.

The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain.
The most famous figure is Susan B. Anthony. She argued that the abortion issue should be set aside to concentrate on women’s right to vote as an adult citizen and women’s right to refuse sex to their husbands (note Mohammed in the Ahadith says this in 600 CE, with problems today).
The first wave, not of course known as that till the second wave, ended in 1919 with 19th amendment to the constitution.

The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’. Defined by Carol Hanisch’s phrase “The personal is political”, took off in early 60s and culminated in the civil rights act of 1966 (backed by both NOW and NAACP, the biggest US anti-sexism and racism groups together). While the first wave said ‘this is America so we deserve to vote’, the second wave was part of anti-establishment left movement that said that America was a corrupt institution that needed to be changed.

Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic (my German Hegel professor ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ speaking of feminists using Hegel).
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The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family (valium in the 50s, TV’s Madmen).

The major criticism of the movement, which only fully rose in the third wave:
Gloria Jean Watkins, known as ‘bell hooks’, early critic of 2nd wave as white middle class women empowerment that ignores all else in the name of ‘feminism’, thus hooks’ ‘womanism’.

The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal.

The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed? I was talking with a co-worker the other day, and she said her son and his friends in high school think that feminists are hippie women who don’t shave their arm pits, hate men and think that the oppression of women is a thing of the past. Notice that this deals with these two issues: the kids misunderstand feminists as both anti-sex and not recognizing the battle is over.

First Issue: Structuralism of 50s & 60s vs. Post-Structuralism after 60s. De Beauvoir says that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’. Judith Butler (I saw speak on Wed) says that gender identity is performative. Both of these figures thus back the poststructuralist conception, that identity is created and performed.

Second Issue: If a woman puts on makeup and wears a short skirt, is she being oppressed or is she actively expressing her individual sexuality? Second wave came under fire from the third wave because feminists often told women that if they tried to be sexy they were being deceived and made into property (vs. my friend from Berkeley at the Lusty Lady, working for prostitute’s rights here and in the third world). This drew a fight between anti-pornography and prostitution feminists and younger pro-sex feminism. Pro-sex feminists ask, even if we are talking of abusive male style porn (vs. porn FOR lesbians), do you want to make porn illegal? Should we try to deny men watching women and lust, or should we empower the individual woman to live as freely and equally as men in a complex and messy world?

This is still a big issue, as many feminist authors have argued that TV and movies today SEEM to be pro-feminist (Sex and the City, Ali McBeal, Brigit Jones’ Diary) but in fact they are stories where a working white woman (and her friends) try to find the perfect man to find happiness.

Ethics: Racism & Multiculturalism

As we discussed last time, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 there was a shift in American culture powered by movements against sexism and racism. Today there remains much prejudice but it is covert, not overt. This means that the majority of prejudice is invisible to the privileged while a constant uphill battle to the marginalized. If you are marginalized and you point out covert racism, you are often accused of overt racism by privileged people. If you are privileged, you are accused

The best evidence against both sexism and racism is the French psychologist Piaget’s studies of Child developmental stages. Children of both genders and all ethnicities go through the same four stages of development at the same ages (1, 3, 7 and 11). Another great piece of evidence against racism in particular is an experiment where they gave urban American and rural African kids laptops and found that there was no difference in the learning times for basic games.

One of my favorite subjects is teaching against eurocentrism in academics. While the laptop experiment suggests that we all learn and think similarly regardless of culture, one of the central messages in education in America and Europe is that we belong to a special culture called “the West” which is superior to other civilizations, particularly in regards to reason and freedom. Often examples from ancient Greece are used to illustrate this superiority, and then the focus becomes modern Europe (ignoring all other cultures and the thousands of years in between the cultures of ancient Greece and modern Europe). This situation, which many like myself call eurocentric (and thus ignorant), is very recent. It came about in the last three hundred years in the wake of European success and dominance of the world. Before that time, Greeks, Romans and Europeans did not describe themselves as “the West”, nor did they claim to be superior in terms of reason or freedom relative to all other civilizations.

Greek civilization is indebted to Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian and Indian thought. Rome has been the ‘father’ of Christian Europe since the Roman Empire conquered much of Western Europe and converted them to Roman Catholic Christianity. How did the Greeks come to be the Grandfathers of civilization? How did the myth of “the West” happen?

The Italians, though lighter than the Romans from constant invasions from the north (the Fall of Rome and afterward), were convinced in each city state that they were the Romans, and so they depicted the Romans like themselves. They also read Greek to read the Christian bible (written in Latin and Greek) and so they depicted the Greeks as looking like the Romans. However, it was not until the late 1700s early 1800s that the Greeks were conceived as the origin of European civilization and the birthplace of rationality and modern politics. This coincides with what Hannaford tells us about the formation of racism.

This is the theory that we can disprove but we still believe, and enshrine in museums, textbooks and most importantly, fictional and nonfictional TV and movies. The last has the greatest effect. What you see your culture present is much more important than an academic argument. The eyes are much harder to doubt than the ears or the structure of an argument. (Consider: Mel Gibson having an all white cast speak Aramaic for “historical accuracy” in The Passion).

It surprises many to learn that the term “the West” came largely into use in the years following WWII, after the Holocaust showed terrible anti-Semitism. Before WWII, academics freely used the term ‘European Race’ to describe the ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, and modern Europeans equally. After the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, the term became an eyesore. Academics began increasingly referring to this “race” as “The West.

All sorts of ridiculous statements in the first paragraphs of philosophy and history books show us this, where the Greeks are ‘the birthplace of reason’ without context. One of my favorite examples is the British historian who stated in the 50s that the most important event in British history was the battle at Marathon (holding out the Persian ‘Orientals’, who as Wolf points out were paying Greeks to fight the Athenians and Spartans, as they had done with the Athenians and Spartans in the past). Marathon is often cast as the birth of “the West”, even though no one, including the ancient Greeks, used the term until after WWII.


Hannaford’s Race: The History of an Idea in the West

Race seems obvious today, a fact of biology. There seem to be distinct ethnic groups that are easily divisible into recognizable races. Hannaford argues that in fact racism rose with science and modernity in the rise of Europe since the 1600s. There was, of course, always ethnocentrism (my tribe is familiar, your tribe over the hill is scary) that correspond to self-centered thinking on an individual level, but ‘black’ and ‘white’ people did not always exist. In English, ‘ras’ meant a course or current (show branching tree form, trace one branching as a ‘race’). The word did not mean a fully separate category of people until after 1700, as Europeans got wealthy beyond everyone and very successful with sciences. Today research on genetics shows that there is no definable or divisible races that can be fully separated. Rather, there is a tangle of genetic material that is mostly common to a people.

The Greeks hated Barbarians (like the Slavs, Germans and even the Romans at first) but considered the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Persians to be civilized and were trying to imitate them and consider themselves thus civilized. Plato and Herodotus loved Egypt and considered it the root of all civilization (Timaeus) and Aristotle thought Mesopotamia was the first civilization and the birthplace of science and philosophy. Greece, like ancient Israel, was caught between these two great empires. Plato argued against ethnocentrism to give the Greeks credit as a civilized people. Aristotle argued that the Germans could never be civilized because they were an inferior race.

There is evidence that the Chinese may have been the first to consider certain women ‘white people’ (think Geishas of Japan). Soon after this the Persians were the first to consider themselves ‘white people’ in these words (‘Whites vs. the Blacks’ play by Persian playwright). Just as European civilization got most everything from Islamic civilization, including most of the texts of Plato and Aristotle, Europe could have easily gotten it’s ‘white race’ from Islam (many of whom, like top-caste Indians, still call themselves ‘white’).

Ethnic conflict was originally between Religions, not races. Thus, Europeans were not white, but ‘Christians’, and they were prejudiced and afraid of Jews and Muslims (1492, the re-conquest of Spain, the Inquisition, and Columbus, and BLUE BLOOD). As Europe developed, race came to be a solidified concept, backed by Science & History (as Barthes calls them, the two great myths). This is when historians made the Greeks and Romans part of ‘the European Race’, as opposed to the Jewish race, the Mohamedian race, the African race, and others. Often, these were paired with colors in common speak but not always. Eventually, German historians and anthropologists centered their study on Nordic and Aryan race as origin of Greek civilization, ancient Israel, and thus the civilizing force of mankind. Kant’s On the Different Races of Men (1775, one year before the Declaration of Independence), says that there are fully separable races and mixing is bad as it degrades the quality of a race.

This thinking has dominated European thought until only recently, and it remains covert within academic understandings today. After the Holocaust, white Christians and Ashkenaz Jews could no longer speak of ‘European Race’ comfortably, so Europe became ‘The West’ over a period of time. We still speak this way today, thought we all know ‘West’ means ‘white’.

Famous joke about European nations’ strengths and faults:
In Heaven, the police are British, the chefs are Italian, the mechanics are German, the lovers are French and everything is organized by the Swiss.
In Hell, the police are German, the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.
This old joke shows us that Europeans did not consider themselves to be a single race with a single character until very recently. In America, where European peoples blended together to make “white” people, these differences disappeared while color based racism remains today.

Great Moments in American Racism:
The Jews and Muslims are best shown in the 1492 example (killing Jews upside-down, lending).
The Treatment of the Native Americans (reservations today).
The African Slave trade, jim crow and black marginalized communities today.
The taking of Latin America by America, Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, and domination today.
The Chinese exclusion act and post WWII ‘Asian Problem’ (dragon lady syndrome).

Bill O’Reilly went to a restraint with Al Sharpton, and said on the radio that black people have gotten very civilized in the last year or so. Roland Marin, correspondent for CNN says: obviously (bill O’Reilly) doesn’t hang out with many black people.

Racism in America Today:

Black and Latino people are 3 times likelier to be poor, on average earn 40% less that the average white person and have ONE TENTH the net worth.

Racial profiling by police criminalizes the marginalized, keeping them marginal (DWB).

Redlining is the practice of not lending to particular people or selling new homes to let people get out of certain areas based on the area from which they apply.

In the 1940s most white people supported segregation. In 1970, one fourth did. Now, it is estimated that 20-50% of white people agree with racist stereotypes openly, and often do not think of this as racist but rather simple observation of culture and reality (like O’Reilly).

Racism has real costs: study in the American Journal of Health estimated that “over 886,00 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had the same health care as white Americans”, stemming from lack of sufficient insurance, poor services, and reluctance to seek care (that is almost a million man march in itself).

In the last article in your reader, called White Privilege, there is a great list that spells out what privileged vs. marginalized means in terms of racism in America today. White people can be in the company of other white people in most environments, can move and travel without fear, can shop without being harassed, can hear about their people’s achievements and how it makes the world a better place while being educated and entertained, can swear and dress in old clothes without people thinking white people are stupid or evil, do not have to speak for their race in particular (remember the Myth of the Model Minority article), can criticize the government and our way of life without fear of becoming an alien, can get pulled over or audited without fear of discrimination, and can get medical and legal help without fear of discrimination.

The media does not cover racism or talk about it as a problem at all, just like the Democratic party (including Obama if you listen to his campaign speeches). Just days ago, there was a study published by Brandeis University in Boston that got coverage by the British newspaper the Guardian and many left leaning websites (many who quoted the Guardian article) but got NO COVERAGE by CNN, the Chronicle, The LA Times, or the Chicago Tribune. The NY Times mentioned the study in the economics blog, which is in the opinion section and not considered an official article. The study shows that even as class differences have widened, white people have made five times the economic gains that black people have made across all economic groups. The study shows that not only have the economic policies of the last 25 years favored the rich and privileged, but that racism is a real economic barrier to black and latino people.

On a final note, we must consider the legislation in Arizona right now. Many are now aware of the “breathing while latino” law that would require police to question latino people they suspect of being illegal immigrants. There is another law, however, that was signed by the Arizona governor making it illegal for any course in a public school to “advocate ethnic solidarity”. The law is aimed at teachers who teach their students about latino cultural heritage and the brutality that latinos endure in America. The governor says that these teachers are racist and are telling their latino students, falsely, that latinos are an oppressed minority. The bill starts off saying it is illegal for teachers to “promote the overthrow of the United States government”, and then shifts to saying that it is equally illegal to teach classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people”.

Intro Philosophy: Lewis Carroll, Humor & Art

Normally, we have one week for Lewis Carroll and a week for Humor, Art and Philosophy, but the holiday next Thursday means we have one less week for Thursday classes this semester. I will therefore cut down on the Lewis Carroll content to make room for the Humor, Art, Final Review, and the final response for those who want to do it in class. The full notes for the Lewis Carroll lecture are below for you to enjoy, but we will not have time to cover it all in class. The content below will not be on the Final Exam.

LEWIS CARROLL AND THE ALICE BOOKS

Born 1832, taught at Christ Church College at Oxford from college there (1851) to his death (1898). He lectured on logic and math. He wrote the Alice books for Alice and her sisters as well as other children who he enjoyed playing with and having conversations. He liked to try to teach kids, especially girls, math and chess. He hated children growing up, because they stopped being innocent and started being deceitful and hypocritical like the adults they imitated.

He was especially fond of children, particularly little girls (which doesn’t come out right no matter how you say it). This became an issue in the 1930s, where in America in anti-pornography by mail conservative moral craze he was labeled a pedophile. Freudian readings of the texts had flourished by this time, and Carroll did not help himself with his photography of children or his relationship to the real Alice, Alice Liddell (the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College). It is thought today by scholars that the family broke contact because Carroll asked for Alice’s hand but he was not noble enough.

Many have tried to crack his books for their symbolism, trying to find the essential meaning underneath. Some have said that his books are merely political commentary, some say it is making fun of the history of mathematics and logic. Others say that there is no meaning at all, but it is simply nonsense. There are things there that are still hiding, and today we look for logic and its puzzles in his nonsensical humor, but listening to late Wittgenstein we likely will not find some particular rule or essential symbolism underneath that solves the text.

There are repeated themes of nonsense, dream, and parody in the Alice books. Carroll took Logic, Nursery Rhymes, Lessons, Hierarchies and he warped and reversed them in conversations between Alice and her dream companions with hilarious consequences. Alice is constantly reciting her rhymes she is taught, hands folded, but strange tales come out. This is paralleled by having ideals and rules but living in the all too human world. It mocks the way that we are hypocritical and irrational while following rules, standards and ideals while we are in conversation and games of life with others.

Carroll was fascinated by reversals, playing music boxes backwards to hear “music standing on its head”. Scholars have noted that he was fascinated not by what worked but the puzzle cases, the problems and mysteries. The best political example: Carroll fascinated by elite kids speaking to servants as kids. An example from Looking Glass: Tweedledee tells Alice she is just a dream character, then stop crying as those tears aren’t real…but then he is a dream and his being upset with her is not real either. Alice in beginning of LG says that she could only tell if lg world has a fire if there is smoke, but it could be deceptive set up. If we are kind to someone else who we get something from, we see it as genuine, but if that person is nice to us before getting something we could see it as a smoke screen, as not genuine but deception. Is this real or not? Likely it is both mixed together, seen from two different and opposite perspectives.

In many ways, the imagination is the same as yet opposite to reality. For example, consider the horse, unicorn example we had with Avicenna, marking the turn to modern thought considering mental objects and consciousness. The being of a unicorn is the same as the being of a real horse in the sense that each is one thing, really so. However, one can always have a unicorn whenever one wants. One starts thinking, an activity, and there is a unicorn, whereas if there is not a horse you have to go find one so you can passively just have it whether you are thinking about it or not. (Consider the red queen, who Alice has to approach going backward and running as fast as they can just to stay in place). Mental objects are ideal, just what they are, while real objects are always imperfect and temporary. Remember that in ancient world cosmology, the real world is often the fake and temporary world compared to the hidden world, and in modern science and logic the things themselves are imperfect compared to the rules and patterns of behavior.

There are many quotes from the books on Logic that Lewis Carroll wrote that support a cynical view of logic, philosophy and science as little more than a dream, a dream which makes life itself less than the ideal:

Studying Logic, “will give you clearness of thought – the ability to see your way through a puzzle – the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form – and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art”. (p xvii)

“And so you think, do you, that the chief use of Logic in real life is to deduce Conclusions from workable Premises, and to satisfy yourself that the Conclusions deduced by other people are correct? I only wish it were! Society would be much less liable to panics and other delusions and political life especially would be a totally different thing, if even a majority of the arguments that are scattered broadcast over the world were correct! But it is all the other way , I fear. For one workable pair of premises (I mean a pair that lead to a logical conclusion) that you meet with in reading your newspaper or magazine, you will probably find five that lead to no Conclusion at all; and, even when the Premisses are workable, for one instance, where the writer draws a correct conclusion, there are probably ten where he draws an incorrect one.” (p 32)

“The Logicians…speak of the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it…If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall always mean ‘white’ and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’, I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.” (p 165-166)

“You will find these seven words – proposition, attribute, term, subject, predicate, particular, universal – charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have ever studied Logic. Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and your friend will go away deeply impressed – ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.”

If you go through the answers to his syllogism puzzles, you find strange final answers:
“No riddles that interest me can be solved”…“No lobsters are unreasonable”…”No Act of Parliament is amusing”…”Some caterpillars are not eloquent”…”Generals do not write poetry”…”Some savage animals do not drink coffee”…and, the only genuine drug reference I have found in spite of the 60s and 70s counter-cultural claims, “Opium eaters do not wear white kid gloves”.


Sylvie and Bruno Limerick (note the many types of non-being)

He thought he saw a rattlesnake that spoke to him in Greek.
He looked again and found it was the middle of next week.
What a pity it is, he sighed and said, that it can hardly speak.


THE ALICE BOOKS

Alice travels to wonderland and through the looking glass by dreaming. In both places she encounters characters that are trapped in their own perspectives/reasoning such that they are nonsensical to Alice and Alice is nonsensical to them. The Cheshire cat explains this with his comparison of cats and dogs. We have to focus on particular parts due to time, but we will go in order that they appear in the two books.


Alice in Wonderland

This was first called Alice’s Adventures Underground, but Carroll changed the title. In this book Alice falls into a dream and believes she is going underground. In the second book she falls into a dream and thinks she is going through the mirror. Both these are metaphors for going into the mind, logical reasoning and imagination together as thought.
Alice is thinking about whether or not to make a daisy chain when she (unknown to her or the reader until the end) falls asleep. She then sees the white rabbit, fascinating because he is both animal and human, like the human being as both animal body and human mind with reason, imagination, and memory. She follows the white rabbit until she falls down the rabbit hole, just like she followed her thought until she fell asleep and into a dream world.

Alice passes all sorts of empty shelves with jars and labels, passing pictures and maps on the walls. All of these things are containers and images, the abstractions of reason and memory but not real things that they hold and represent. Alice thinks that she will fall through the earth and meet people called Antipathies who walk on their hands upside-down. Notice the reversal of the real by reason and imagination.

She falls into an underground place that becomes a formal banquet hall. Here we have the small door to the garden, and the golden key on the glass table. This is somewhat like the square of opposition, the relationship between universal and particular. When Alice is big, she can reach the key on the table. When we are in the mind universalizing things and saying ‘All xs are ys’ we have the key to judging things and thinking about them in the abstract, but when we are faced with the particular things of the real world, and we only have x is some y and some not y, we no longer can reach the golden key on the slippery glass table (like Early Witt’s truth tables and Later criticism of these as slippery ice). When we think about someone or ourselves, it is easy to say totally bad or good, but when we are faced with the person or being ourselves it is hard to have total ‘All or None’ judgments . Alice will get to this garden later, but she will find it is filled with the Queen who keeps screaming for executions and a bunch of animals being used in a court game of croquet.

Throughout this, Alice is questioning whether or not she is Mabel because she no longer knows the things she does. This is the classic paradox of identity that philosophers today in American Analytics argue about. Remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment and Descartes’ deceiving demon thought experiment. Both said that all the qualities and limbs can be denied, but self-consciousness, the oneness of the presence of the self and whole, can’t be denied. While we think it is absurd that Alice could suspect she is Mabel now, soon after this she is called ‘Mary Ann’ by the white Rabbit, who thinks that she is her servant (Mary Ann was a common name for maids in Victorian England), and Alice responds as if she is Mary Ann. When she enters the house on the white rabbit’s orders, she is worried that she will meet the real Mary Ann. So maybe she was not so crazy in wondering if she was Mabel.

When she encounters the Pigeon, the Pigeon says that if Alice has a long neck, and has eaten eggs, then she must be a serpent and therefore a threat to the eggs in her nest. Alice replies, ‘I am not a serpent, I am a little girl’ (sic) to which the Pigeon replies that if little girls eat eggs like serpents, then they must be some kind of serpent. Notice that the Pigeon is using syllogistic, deductive reasoning here. The problem is that the world is complex and simple rules like ‘if it eats eggs (x) then it is a serpent (y)’ both make sense to the pigeon, and we can understand how and follow the reasoning, but at the same time are nonsense and simply wrong to Alice and the reader.

Meeting the Duchess in her house, Alice is horrified to see the baby she is holding crying and sneezing while the Duchess calls it ‘pig’ and beats it. Then Alice takes the baby and flees with it outside, where it transforms into a pig and Alice says ‘if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with you’, sets it down and it runs off into the woods.


Alice at the Mad Tea Party

There is an interesting bridge between Carroll and Wittgenstein in the figure of Bertrand Russell, a bridge which serves as a perfect illustration for our analysis of the Mad Tea Party. Carroll, Russell and Wittgenstein were all logicians who did their teaching and publishing in England. Russell met Wittgenstein in 1911, and for a while believed that Wittgenstein would be his successor. Wittgenstein however came to disprove of Russell’s theory of types in moving to his later views. Russell’s close circle of Trinity college at Cambridge was in fact dubbed “the Mad Tea Party of Trinity” in fun by many contemporaries. In his autobiography, Norbert Wiener wrote that it was impossible to describe Russell’s likeness except by identifying him with the classic illustration of the Mad Hatter by Tenniel. Wiener also pointed out G.E. Moore’s likeness to the March Hare and J.M.E. Taggart’s likeness to the Dormouse. Thus, many in Russell’s heyday thought his trio resembled Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in more ways than one.

Russell famously stated: “Mathematics is that science in which we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”. There is no better statement to illustrate the Hatter’s confusion of particular case with abstract form. The number three can designate three mountains, zebras, or logicians, but it does not refer in itself to any particular situation of three things. Wittgenstein, in rebelling against Russell and abstract analysis, in advocating analysis of particular use in situations, indeed came to take a position similar to that of Alice with respect to the Hatter in our dialogue. The Hatter’s argument does seem at first to make logical sense, but a close look at the uses of the character’s expressions reveals a confusion that lurks between abstraction and the events of the Mad Tea Party.

Among scholars there is consensus that Wittgenstein had a great appreciation of Carroll, but there is a debate as to how much Wittgenstein’s philosophy was indebted to Carroll’s nonsense play. Carroll’s name appears in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Discussing the difficulty of comprehending reversed writing, Wittgenstein notes: “Compare a remark of Lewis Carroll’s” (II xi). Unfortunately there is no citation to locate this remark in Carroll’s work, but it seems clearly related to the reverse writing of Jabberwocky. Leila S. May states “we know Alice in Wonderland was one of (Wittgenstein’s) favorite books in English”. Warren Shibles includes a philosophical analysis of Alice in Wonderland in his collection of essays, Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy (1969). In Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, George Pitcher argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll investigate nonsensical situations to use nonsense as a vaccine against itself, as an exercise for the strengthening of reason and the development of insight. In his essay Pitcher sets out to show the “remarkable extent and depth of the affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense”, adding:

I shall try to show that the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charges philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect. Second, I want to show that some quite specific philosophical doctrines that the later Wittgenstein attacks are ridiculed also by Carroll.

Pitcher presents several points of contact between Carroll and Wittgenstein: Both authors are preoccupied with the phenomena of games and rules (for example, both make use of chess and chess pieces). Both make use of utterances that “sound like English” but do not have a use and thus do not make sense. Both discuss giving gifts to one’s own limbs as a type of absurdity. Both repeatedly demonstrate that definitions and rules can be variously interpreted. Both play with the boundary between quality and identity. Both show the incomprehensibility of private language and definitions. Both pose alternate situations, imaginary worlds, that are bound by different rules than our own to show the particular difficulties we have in using language.

Now a forgotten psychiatric practice, mock tea parties were used to teach rules and manners to inmates of insane asylums in Victorian England. In Alice and Wonderland, Carroll uses a ‘mad tea party’ to make fun of the way we learn and follow rules of behavior and language. When Alice arrives at the Mad Tea Party of Wonderland, she decides to join the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse even though she is explicitly not invited. In response to Alice’s intrusion, the Hatter and Hare become combative. When Alice responds in turn by calling the Hatter rude, he presents Alice with a riddle, a riddle which we later learn has no answer: Why is a raven like a writing desk? The passage we analyze begins here, with Alice considering the Hatter’s riddle.

“…I believe I can guess that,” (Alice) added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing to you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

This dialogue is short, but it is quite complex. Let us divide it into its seven stages, and then show how one stage leads to another. Each stage signifies a character’s turn in the dialogue, a move they make in the game of the Tea Party. The dialogue consists of an initial assertion, followed by several plays of substitution.

Alice guesses that she can guess “that”. Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to the riddle itself but to the answer to the riddle. We learn later that this answer does not exist, so Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to any actual thing. Wittgenstein notes that we can look for someone who is not there but we cannot hang him when he is not there (§462). Alice’s ‘that’ is used correctly, even if it is a signifier that does not specify an existent object.

Substituting his own expression for Alice’s, The March Hare makes three verbal substitutions. He substitutes ‘think’ for ‘believe’, ‘find out’ for ‘guess’, and ‘the answer to the riddle’ for ‘that’. The March Hare does not say exactly what Alice said, but the only significant difference is exchanging Alice’s ‘that’ for the object it designates. Based on this change, the March Hare acts as if Alice has misspoken and he is offering a correction, a more detailed expression. Alice takes the March Hare’s substitution as an equivalence, such that Alice meant something by her expression and the March Hare meant the same thing, grasping her meaning and also expressing it, thus putting two expressions to work for the same meaning. Violating Alice’s perception, the March Hare replies to Alice as if she has accepted a correction to her expression, not an equivalent substitution.

This reveals something interesting about a bifurcation in our use of ‘you mean’ in conversation with others. We use the expression ‘you mean’ together with a substitution in both a positive and negative way: positively as equivalences, negatively as corrections. We say ‘you mean x’ to translate other’s thoughts into our own words, seeking their approval in doing so (as Alice takes the March Hare to be doing by substituting his own expression for hers), but we also say ‘you mean x’ to correct the expressions of others, attempting to express what we believe they mean but they have failed to express (as the March Hare takes his substitution for Alice’s expression). Wittgenstein speaks of a fuzzy picture, and how often a fuzzy picture is just what we mean by our expression. Alice’s ‘that’ was correct even if it was fuzzy. This view supports Alice’s side, that Alice did not misspeak and the March Hare did not correct Alice’s ‘that’.

It is important to note for what follows that the March Hare has brought the word ‘should’ into the conversation. In replacing Alice’s ‘that’ with ‘the answer’ he is still discussing the particular expression of Alice, but in moralizing he is abstracting meaning from the situation and presenting Alice with a normative substitute for what he perceives as her behavior in this particular instance. The March Hare is subtly leading away from the situation towards generalization.

Now Alice becomes the one making a substitution for the March Hare’s speech. Alice insists that, ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know’. What does Alice mean by ‘same’ here? How does Alice use the word ‘same’ in this instance? When Alice agrees that she ‘means what she says’ and also asserts that she ‘says what she means’, she is not moralizing or providing us with a general rule that applies to all of her expressions. She is not indicating that she always means what she says or says what she means, but rather that she meant what she said and said what she meant in the particular instance when she said “I believe that I can guess that”. Because Alice is only discussing one instance, and because in this instance Alice meant and expressed one thing, the two propositions ‘I meant the thing I said’ and ‘I said the thing I meant’ can have the same use in this case. Thus Alice substitutes one for the other, and pronounces the two to be ‘the same’. Wittgenstein writes:

The use of the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of “proposition” and the use of “true”. (§225)

If we agree with Wittgenstein that the March Hare did not significantly correct Alice, we can agree with Alice that the coincidence of meaning and saying are mutually supportive when she equates the two expressions.

These two expressions do not always coincide. There are cases which we call misspeaking, when one fails to say what one means. There are also cases which we call lying, when one fails to mean what one says. Typically, but not always, it is up to others to tell when we misspeak, and up to us to tell when we are lying. Alice’s substitution is aimed at deferring to the March Hare his typically right as a listener to correct Alice when she does not say what she means, but she insists that “at least, I mean what I say”, which is her typical right as a speaker to confirm.

The Mad Hatter disagrees with Alice, but he does not do several things. He does not argue against Alice having meant what she said, does not argue against Alice having said what she meant like the Hare, nor does the Hatter argue against the idea that ‘meaning what one says’ and ‘saying what one means’ can be ‘the same thing’ in Alice’s case or in any case. What does the Hatter attack? The Mad Hatter attacks the general form of Alice’s expression. He is arguing that ‘If x then y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘If y then x’. He does this by offering a counter example to this general form: ‘I see what I eat’ is not the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’. This is generally true, but we can construct cases in which the set of things one eats is exactly the set of things one sees and vice versa.

Alice started towards generality and abstraction with her guess that she could guess, and the Hare lead the dialogue in this direction with his moralizing about what Alice should do based on her particular case. Thus when Alice defends herself in her particular case she is already speaking in terms that have been generalized by the Hare. The Hatter slips in at this point with a valid formal argument that is not in fact talking about Alice’s particular case. Because our expressions refer to both generalities and particularities with the same terms, it is easy to miss the Hatter’s confusion of the subject.

The Hatter gives us an excellent and subtle example of confusing the subject of conversation by generalizing with abstractions. He does not realize that he has failed to argue against the possibility of Alice’s case, but is rather arguing that many things do not share the relationship that meaning and saying do when we express ourselves adequately.

Regardless of this confusion, The March Hare backs the Hatter’s attack and produces another counter example: ‘I like what I get’ is not (in most cases) the same as ‘I get what I like’. The Hare does for the Hatter what he refused to do for Alice: he substitutes his expression as an equivalent expression. The Dormouse, following the Hatter and Hare adds a further counter example of the same general form: ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is not the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’. The three of them are in agreement against the universal validity of the general form of Alice’s substitution. The three argue by presenting cases where ‘I x what I y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘I y what I x’.

If we wanted to attack Alice’s substitution, we would have to show that ‘I mean what I say’ and ‘I say what I mean’ have different uses and are thus not the same. The Hatter does not attempt to do this, and neither he nor his two cohorts use examples that include either meaning or saying. Instead, they provide disparate examples that show there are many cases when ‘I x what I y’ is not the same as ‘I y what I x’. The Mad Tea Party trio seems to be performing a formal analysis of Alice’s expression, but they are in fact confusing an abstracted form for the situation of the case present at hand. We can ourselves witness this sort of confusion in everyday arguments.

The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse all form a chord of replies (a very small school of thought) that is in agreement amongst its members in disagreement with Alice, but the Hatter violates this accord. He disrupts the agreement of the series by turning on the Dormouse. The Hatter here reverses his position against Alice, arguing that since the Dormouse sleeps all the time, ‘sleeping when breathing’ and ‘breathing when sleeping’ are ‘the same thing’ in its case. Thus the Hatter has provided a particular case where ‘I x what I y’ and ‘I y what I x’ have the same use and he uses the word ‘same’ the way that Alice does. The Hatter not only has failed to lock Alice in the room, but he himself walks right out the door he unknowingly left open as if he knew it was open all the while.

The dialogue presents us with both a convergence of meaning and saying (Alice’s defense) and a contradiction of meaning and saying (the Hatter’s attack of Alice and then the Dormouse). This mirrors the divergence of supplementation and correction found earlier. In argument, one says things that both agree and disagree with one’s opponent. In the course of an argument, one can find oneself getting into contradictions the farther one gets from particular cases, but one can only examine particular cases by drawing similarities across groups of cases by generalizing. The Hatter is unknowingly demonstrating to Alice that while she may be correct that meaning and saying converge in her expression, meaning and saying can also diverge to the point of contradiction through the course of an argument.

Alice leaves the Tea Party and finds a door in a tree that leads to the garden she wanted to get to from the banquet hall she fell into through the rabbit hole, but now she finds that the garden is inhabited by the angry and vengeful Queen of Hearts playing a game of croquet with animals (flamingoes and groundhogs) as the game pieces (like Looking Glass game of chess involving characters, Witt and life as games).

Cheshire cat shows up, causes a commotion. King and executioner get into an argument about whether the head of the Cheshire cat can be beheaded. This parallels the ‘grin without the cat’ earlier (Math and Logic as head/mind without body, effect without substance). The executioner argues that the cat can’t be beheaded without a body to separate from the head, and the king argues that anything with a head can be beheaded.

The Duchess is now nice to Alice, angry in her own house the way Queen is angry in her garden. This is like the pig switch earlier. Alice is delighted, and decides that pepper made the Duchess angry. She begins to devise (too) simple rules for causes of emotions (Witt and oven vs. simple essences and causes), ex: sugar makes people sweet. The Duchess now approaches Alice and begins coming up with an absurd moral for everything Alice says, which annoys Alice (notice that the Duchess is showing Alice her own absurdity).

Now, Alice attends the trial where the King is prosecuting the Jack for eating tarts (notice rhyme setting up the scene). Alice begins to grow into a giant at the trial, which no one notices until she is called as a witness which is her final act in the dream of Wonderland. Alice accidentally knocks over the jury box, and puts a lizard back upside down, reasoning that a lizard is just as good a juror either way up (this is similar to some/some not vs. All or None). Alice tells the king she knows nothing about the case, and the king says this is very important to the jury. Alice says it is not important at all, and the king goes ‘important, unimportant’, like he is trying to decide which sounds best. Some of the jury write down important, some unimportant. Giant Alice finds all of this absurd. She declares that the evidence is meaningless, the jurors write down that she thinks this as if it is thus true, and she ‘pack of cards’ destroys trial and dream.


Through the Looking Glass

In the beginning, Alice is playing with her cat and cat’s kittens, blaming the black kitten for trying to take milk from the white kitten. Alice says she should put the kitten out in the snow as a punishment for its mischief, then forgets this as she thinks of how horrible her punishment for all of her mischief would be. Later, we find the black kitten is the Red Queen, who takes on Alice’s vindictive and judgmental side while the White Queen takes on her forgetful and forgiving side. Alice is a pawn, making her way across the chessboard to be queen, and at the ending banquet the two queens still are confusing her but they are sitting at her sides.

Alice passes through the mirror and into the Looking Glass world (again, like rabbit hole, falling into a dream). She finds herself in a garden with flowers that interpret her to be a flower (like pigeon thinking she must be a serpent or duck saying ‘it’ is most often a rock or a worm). They tell her about the Red Queen, who they also assume to be a flower, one very much like Alice. The Red Queen now meets Alice, who says she has lost her way, to which the RQ replies ‘all these ways are mine’ (like Humpty Dumpty thinking he can mean what he wants regardless of what others think AND tell Alice what she should mean).

Alice points to a hill, and RQ says, ‘I could show you hills compared to which that is a valley’. Alice replies that a hill can’t be a valley, no matter how small, for this is nonsense. RQ replies, ‘I have heard nonsense compared to which that is as sensible as a dictionary’.

RQ tells Alice she is a pawn in a chess game being played all over the world. To get going, they both run, but end up not moving. RQ: here, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in place.

Much later, Alice meets the White Queen, who lives and remembers backwards and finds this best (mind vs. world). She tells Alice she is 101, and Alice replies that she can’t believe that. WQ says close your eyes and try very hard. Alice says this won’t work, as one can’t believe impossible things. WQ replies, ‘You need practice…when I was your age, I sometimes believed 6 impossible things before breakfast’ (Logic as imaginary abstraction, thus impossible ideals). The WQ turns into a sheep knitting with seven pairs of needles (sheep is wooly, knitting wool). They are now in a shop, and Alice is told to take something. She tries, but reaching for things they seem to slide out of reach and up into the ceiling (abstractions again). Then they are suddenly in a boat, and Alice is reaching for the prettiest rushes but they are always out of reach, the one’s she can get wilting in her hands.

Humpty Dumpty – Read pg 168-169, ‘knockdown’ (straw man), who is master of meaning? Many have noted that Humpty Dumpty is the perfect illustration of Wittgenstein’s argument for the impossibility of a private language. Meaning is not simply what the individual wants it to be. Humpty Dumpty gives himself the right to mean whatever he wants, but he is critical of Alice and gives himself the right to tell her what she should have meant. There are two privileged positions in communication: sender and receiver. Which one has the true right to say what something meant? The answer seems to be that both have overlapping rights that can eclipse each other.

White Knight, stuff from whole book on horse, falls off on either side (reason, understanding). He invents things when he is upside down. Read his song.


HUMOR AND MODERN ART

Philosophy can and is used for creativity, using the doubts and insights to create, playing with the boundaries and tensions of the most important things. Humor and Art are two ways of using one’s insights from Philosophy to do this. Humor and art are of course ancient, but modern art and humor are very advanced. Last time, we saw Lewis Carroll was reacting against society and Victorian strict discipline of children, showing the contradictions of authority and the assumptions we make in reasoning that are dependent upon our position in the situation.


HUMOR AS SKEPTICISM

Two early American masters of humor are Ambrose Bierce and Groucho Marx, both of whom were reacting to the horror and absurdity of the times (Bierce to the Civil War, and the Marx Brothers to WWI).

Ambrose Bierce: (1842-1914?) His Devil’s Dictionary was an early rebellious attack on society.
A San Franciscan (since 1866), he wrote bitterly about the Civil War and the corruption on both sides (Union and Confederacy) then disappeared in Mexico seeking the revolution. He had a brilliant gift with pointing out how we are all selfish and ignorant (one-sided judgments) with humor, attacking the politicians, the military, the rich, slavery, and American society.
Some Entries from his Devil’s Dictionary (1906 ‘Cynic’s Word Book’):

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Conservative - a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Egotist: a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hashish: there is no definition of this word. No one knows what this word means.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

The Marx Brothers (comedians of the 20s and 30s) were early absurdists, formative for US comedy. Groucho Marx was amazing with one liners that show a beautifully complex understanding of contradictions involving human pride and judgment, very much like Bierce:

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.
Why a four-year old child could understand this. Somebody find a four-year old child.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? …And east is east and west is west… and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.


MODERN ART AS SKEPTICISM

With WWI and modern warfare, there were new human horrors on previously unseen levels. Similar to the German Pessimism that influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the horrors of WWI brought great disillusionment with reason, science and society to European intellectuals, particularly for German and French youth who would have a huge impact on modern culture. Here in the Bay Area, a very similar movement happened in reaction to the Vietnam War. WWI used more machines and propaganda than ever before, and for this is often called the first modern war. Oil became the fuel of war and vehicles, planes, jeeps (and after WWI, the Middle East was carved up by European powers as the source of oil). This was the beginning of machine guns and air warfare, bombing runs, tanks.

Newspapers all became mouthpieces of the government in times of war. To European intellectuals who conversed across national lines, this showed logic and language being used for authority and empire in the name of reason. The dominant scholars often sang nationalistic praise, particularly in Philosophy departments. The students and others came together to doubt and be skeptical of the powers that be on a level that had a new intensity (fueled on Nietzsche, Marx and others).
Modern art and humor start from this point. They shatter and destroy, ‘ripping’ on the powers that be and the truths we are told by authorities. Modern art and humor put things out of joint, not resolving contradictions but bringing them explicitly out, possibly more than any culture yet. They help to simplify and focus work which is abstract and disconnected on purpose as a revolt against the positive collective power of the traditional.


DADA: “guerilla warfare against the Establishment”

During WWI (1915-1917) young intellectuals from all over Europe converged in Zurich, Switzerland. They shared an opposition to the war and traditional values. To these thinkers, the stupidity and brutality of the modern age was clearly being sold to the masses through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘order’, ‘logic’, and ‘spirit’. They found these terms to be hypocritical on a societal level, and declared a crisis of meaning: European civilization, and human reason, the new modern values, are a farce. Thus, use absurdity to bring out the contradictions in the ‘reason’ and the ‘reasonable’.

Some of these similarly minded youth converged on the Cabaret Voltaire, a beer parlor run by Hugo Ball. Jazz music was the new rage, violating old traditional standards. Ball and his friend Huelsenbeck were looking for a fake French name for a dancer in a French dictionary when they found the word dada: ‘baby talk for horse, a child’s rocking horse’. They decided that this word fit the movement that they felt was going on in Zurich. The parlor became the first home and center. Much art that was brutal and bizarre appeared here, a new turn that is critical for modern art and humor.

Dada’s two celebrated themes are brutalism and simultaneity. Their brutalism, being obscene (sex, swearing, being intoxicated, making no sense on purpose) spoke against society, violating cultural norms using absurdity and obscenity (much like later Hunter S. Thompson, South Park).

Simultaneity is the occurrence of many disconnected elements within a work, a resistance polarized against making the whole coherent. Collage involves using many different types of media blended together to create (the Dadaists were famous for using newspaper type and pictures in collage, unseen before their time). Simultaneity and collage in the hands of the Dadaists were used to portray disconnected life, impossible to know as a complete and finished system. This is both a celebration and a protest, loving yet fearing the contradictions of the world. The Dadaists invented an impressive set of ‘new’ art forms, including abstract sound poems, abstract (mechanical) music, found art (garbage collage), simultaneous poetry (the reading of many poems at once), and abstract painting.

Out of Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, the Dada movement began and quickly spread to Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and across the whole world. Our modern culture, which is not simply Western but global, includes the deep and playful skepticism of DADA. The Beatniks and Hippies of the Bay picked up the Motherwell anthology as a major source.


Great DADA Moments & Quotes:

In one of the first shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, Schwitters showed the audience a one letter poem, a card with a large ‘W’. He then started to recite the poem, starting with a whisper and ending in a loud wailing siren.

In April of 1920, Orp, Baargeld and Ernst put on an infamous Dada show in Cologne, France. Sitting next to a tank of red tinted water with an alarm clock submerged at the bottom, Ernst had created a wooden sculpture with an axe chained to it. A sign invited anyone who wished to use the axe to help destroy the sculpture. In a Paris exhibit of Ernst’s work, invitations read: “at 22 o’clock the kangaroo, at 22:30 high frequency, at 23 o’clock distribution of surprises, after 23:30 intimacies.” The exhibit itself was a Dada performance. Breton munched matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes kept shouting, ‘It is raining on a skull’, Soupault and Tzara played a game of hide and seek, while Peret and Charchoune continuously shook hands. These performances are early precursors to performance art (which culminated in Situationalism and Fluxus, of which Yoko Ono was a prominent figure).


Huelsenbeck

“It’s a fucked-up foolish world. You walk aimlessly along, fixing up a philosophy for supper. But before you have it ready, the mailman brings you the first telegram, announcing that all your pigs have died of rabies, your dinner jacket has been thrown off the Eiffel Tower, your housekeeper has come down with the epizootic. You give a startled look at the moon, which seems to you like a good investment, and the same postman brings you a telegram announcing that all your chickens have died of hoof and mouth disease, your father has fallen on a pitchfork and frozen to death, your mother has burst with sorrow on the occasion of her silver wedding (maybe the frying pan stuck to her ears, how do I know?). That’s life, dear fellow.”

“The Germans are the masters of dissembling, they are unquestionably the magicians (in the vaudeville sense) among nations, in every moment of their life they conjure up a culture, a spirit, a superiority which they can hold as a shield in front of their endangered bellies.”

“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand-fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”


Tristan Tzara

The foremost Dada manifesto writer, Tzara was famous for reading his manifestoes interspersed in Dada performances. He was a leader of the movement in Zurich, and then later in Paris, where the European scene is considered to have migrated with him.


From Tzara’s Dada Manifestos:

“Dada remains within the European frame of weakness it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate.”

“Dada exists for no one and we want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.”

“I love you so I swear I do adore you.”

“If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,” I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs…”

“I am against all systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own littleness, to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies…”

“Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth.
I still consider myself very charming.”

“A great Canadian philosopher has said: thought and the past are also very charming.”
(Here, the genders on ‘thought’ and ‘past’ are reversed, a common way of mocking Americans speaking French.)


From Tzara’s Lecture on Dada (1922)

“I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven’t the faintest idea…You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life.”

“Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference….Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions…But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.”

“Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people…The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog…If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be shaken… Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.”

We are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi (Zhuang Zi, Second Patriarch of Daoism) was just as Dada as we are.”

Tzara’s invention of the Automism method of Surrealism painters and art long after.

To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”


Surrealism:

Gets its heritage from DADA, but had to develop beyond Nonsense as target. Still hazy in complexity, many things coming together strangely, but now with subtle underlying tensions, often of sex, danger, power, and death underlie the work. Today pop-surrealism is thriving in the Bay, LA & NY.

The surrealist poem Fable of Jarry:

A can of corned beef, on a chain like opera glasses,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside,
like the can of corned beef,
it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.

Conceptual Art is a development from Duchamp and other Dada & Surreal artists. It hit its heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. Now, one cannot go through a museum without seeing much of its influence. Following pieces are from Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art.

Dada Duchamp’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity:
A sparkplug that reads ‘for-ever’

Later, after joining the Surrealists, Duchamp wound string through the gallery of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit, connecting everything such that no one could get through the gallery.

Rauschenberg’s contribution to Iris Clert Gallery’s exhibit of Readymades: postcard that says, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.

Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning Drawing, framed and exhibited as a new work.

Manzoni drew lines of certain lengths, rolled up the paper strips, put them in boxes labeled with date and line length, sold as artwork. Also sold balloons of ‘artist’s breath’, and his own shit in cans for their weight in gold. He signed people as if they were his art.

Warhol Soup Cans & Marilyn silk screen prints: “a hundred Marilyns are better than one”, soup cans put on shelves like canned goods. Movies ‘Empire’ and ‘Sleep’, as critic Koch said, better to hear about than see.

La Monte Young composed a poem for tables, a performance piece of dragging furniture around on stage to make noises. He was one of the early performance artists who created ‘happenings’, often including audience members to take down the “fourth wall”.

Simone Forti Fluxus performance: one man try to lie down, the other try to tie first to the wall.

Morris’ Box with sound of own making: wooden box containing a tape recorder w/ loop.

Nauman read Wittgenstein passage from PI reasoning that ‘A Rose Has no Teeth” can make sense if you include the thorns or a cow in the process of rose regeneration or something else, and so he made a plaque for a tree knowing that the tree slowly grows over the plaque.

Baldessari (1971) has students cover an exhibit room with “I will not make any boring art” like students writing as punishment over and over (is this boring?).

Arnatt’s mirror boxes: positive mirror out box next to box-like hole lined with inward mirrors.

Ruppersberg’s Homage to Houdini: set of photographs documenting sinking brick chained in a suitcase of a NY pier (as Godfrey says, ‘Surprisingly, the brick did not escape’).

Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water on a glass shelf installed. In a dialogue posted next to the work, the artist claims that the glass of water is, in fact, now an oak tree.

The Nest Group (1978) had a piece called Let’s Come One Meter Closer, where several of the group’s artists in various places around world each dug a meter deep hole and stood in it.

Mendieta’s Rape performance: after a woman was raped and killed on campus, she recreated the scene in her apartment with herself as victim and invited friends and associates over (hopefully giving them some kind of warning, though this is not said).

Wilke’s What does this represent? What do YOU represent? A photo of a naked woman surrounded by toy guns, with two phrases above and below.

Almeida’s Inhabited painting: several photos of artist obscuring self with blue paint, then final shot takes glass she has painted and shifts it to peek out from behind it at the viewer.

For great short surreal films, watch Svankmajer