<nettime> second June post (early): Jay's "Magical Nominalism; " R. Mitter on reform; "Automated Intelligence" and rackets; Auerbach's Mimesis, Federalist 85

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Martin Jay, 2025:
"Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment and the Photograph."
University of Chicago.

Like a book review?

Explain to list serv the key concept of "experience"
Explains the failure of Foucault, Schmitt, and even Benjamin
Cases of magical nominalism
Blake (e.g. Tokarczuk)
Montaigne
Leonardo

Mention "The Downward Gaze", "Songs of Experience," "Immanent Critiques," and "Magical Nominalism"

Example of Prospero defeating Machiavelli
Giorgione's La Tempesta
Leonardo's Esperienza

The fundamental nature of addressing a person by their true name.
The new wing at the Louvre.

A heuristic for peace prevailing over war, to the greatest possible extent.


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Rana Mitter on reform in China
(Note:  this will hinge much more fundamentally on culture than technology or economics.)

Liang Shuming, Yogachara, academic.oup dot com/book/11855/chapter-abstract/160972007?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Liang Qichao citylights dot com/asia/thoughts-from-the-ice-drinkers-studio/
Gao Xingjian en.wikipedia dot org/wiki/Soul_Mountain

Will discuss Soul Mountain in July:
"Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience." (Chapter 2)

foreignaffairs dot com/podcasts/another-china-possible

Liang Shuming

en.wikipedia dot org/wiki/Yogachara

Yogācārins made use of ideas from previous traditions, such as Prajñāpāramitā and the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma tradition, to develop a novel analysis of conscious experience and a corresponding schema for Mahāyāna spiritual practice.
Yogācāra gives a detailed explanation of the workings of the mind and the way it constructs the reality we experience. The central Yogācāra theory of mind is that of the eight consciousnesses.

Liang Qichao -- Notes from the Ice Drinker's Studio

When the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from
1644 to 1912, had to grapple with European imperial powers in the late nineteenth
century, prominent ocrafted two slogans that de
rich country strong army
Chinese essence Western usage


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Why is automated intelligence (AI-GPT) pulling in religion?

--It involves ethics
--It involves imagination
--It involves uncertainty, the nature of knowledge
--It involves history and conflict
--It involves aesthetics
--It involves money
--It involves propaganda
--It involves environmental protection

The eternal law of nature: when something pulls in something else, it also gets pulled in by it.

E.g., Jay, Martin, 2023, "The Age of Rackets," in "Immanent Critiques," Verso:

"How does the racket society model help us understand our own current political situation?  The United States remains, of course, a long way from being a failed state or a kleptocracy of oligarchs.  And yet there are sufficient warning signs to be concerned by tendencies moving in an ominous direction....  We may not live in a full-blown racket society, or at least not yet, but we are perhaps even closer to it than we were when a group of exiles from [1930's] Germany were trying to make sense of the dark times in which they were immersed.  For a long while, they seem to have been on the wrong track, as even they themselves concluded.  Today, when a second term for an impeached but exonerated racketeer-in-chief seems a distinct possibility, we cannot, alas, be so sure."


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Erich Auerbach wrote, in 1953, Mimesis, pp. 549-550:

“Here we have returned once again to the reflection of multiple consciousnesses.  It is easy to understand that such a technique had to develop gradually and that it did so precisely during the decades of the first World War period and after.  The widening of man’s horizon, and the increase of his experiences, knowledge, ideas, and possible forms of existence, which began in the sixteenth century, continued through the nineteenth at an ever faster tempo –-with such a tremendous acceleration since the beginning of the twentieth that synthetic and objective attempts at interpretation are produced and demolished every instant.  The tremendous tempo of the changes proved the more confusing because they could not be surveyed as a whole.  They occurred simultaneously in many separate departments of science, technology, and economics, with the result that no one—not even those who were leaders in the separate departments—could foresee or evaluate the overall resulting situations.  Furthermore, the changes did not produce the same effects in all places, so that the differences of attainment between the various social strata of one and the same people and between different peoples came to be—if not greater—at least more noticeable.  The spread of publicity and the crowding of mankind on a shrinking globe sharpened awareness of the differences in ways of life and attitudes, and mobilized the interests and forms of existence which the new changes either furthered or threatened.  In all parts of the world crises of adjustment arose; they increased in number and coalesced.  They led to the upheavals which we have not weathered yet.  In Europe this violent clash of the most heterogeneous ways of life and kinds of endeavor undermined not only those religious, philosophical, ethical, and economic principles which were part of the traditional heritage and which, despite many earlier shocks, had maintained their position of authority through slow adaptation and transformation; nor yet only the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ideas of democracy and liberalism which had been revolutionary in the eighteenth century and were still so during the first half of the nineteenth; it undermined even the new revolutionary forces of socialism, whose origins did not go back beyond the heyday of the capitalist system.  These forces threatened to split up and disintegrate.  They lost their unity and clear definition through the formation of numerous mutually hostile groups, through strange alliances which some of these groups effected with non-socialist ideologies, through the capitulation of most of them during the first World War, and finally through the propensity on the part of many of their most radical advocates for changing over into the camp of their most extreme enemies.  Otherwise too there was an increasingly strong factionalism—at times crystallizing around important poets, philosophers, and scholars, but in the majority of cases pseudo-scientific, syncretistic, and primitive.  The temptation to entrust oneself to a sect which solved all problems with a single formula, whose power of suggestion imposed solidarity, and which ostracized everything which would not fit in and submit—this temptation was so great that, with many people, fascism hardly had to employ force when the time came for it to spread through the countries of old European culture, absorbing the smaller sects.”


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The closing paragraph of the Federalist Papers, No. 85, by Alexander Hamilton, 1788:

"The zeal for attempts to amend, prior to the establishment of the Constitution, must abate in every man who is ready to accede to the truth of the following observations of a writer equally solid and ingenious: 'To balance a large state or society says hee, whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it. The judgments of many must unite in the work; EXPERIENCE must guide their labor; TIME must bring it to perfection, and the FEELING of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they INEVITABLY fall into in their first trials and experiments.' These judicious reflections contain a lesson of moderation to all the sincere lovers of the Union, and ought to put them upon their guard against hazarding anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the States from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of a victorious demagogue, in the pursuit of what they are not likely to obtain, but from TIME and EXPERIENCE. It may be in me a defect of political fortitude, but I acknowledge that I cannot entertain an equal tranquillity with those who affect to treat the dangers of a longer continuance in our present situation as imaginary. A NATION, without a NATIONAL GOVERNMENT, is, in my view, an awful spectacle. The establishment of a Constitution, in time of profound peace, by the voluntary consent of a whole people, is a PRODIGY, to the completion of which I look forward with trembling anxiety. I can reconcile it to no rules of prudence to let go the hold we now have, in so arduous an enterprise, upon seven out of the thirteen States, and after having passed over so considerable a part of the ground, to recommence the course. I dread the more the consequences of new attempts, because I KNOW THAT POWERFUL INDIVIDUALS, in this and in other States, are enemies to a general national government in every possible shape.

PUBLIUS.

[All caps from original 1788 printing]

experiencedemocracy2024 dot org/experience-democracy-is/

www.youtube dot com/watch?v=sEO-LH2AFiY

Conversation with Ken Burns about "Esperienza" at x dot com/KenBurns/status/1882501532677284042


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