Amor Mundi 10/12/14
10-13-2014Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded this week to French novelist Patrick Modiano, whose work is more or less unavailable in English. Alexandra Schwartz offers an introduction: "[Modiano's first novel] La Place de l'Étoile appeared at a moment when the core tenet of French postwar identity-'the myth of France as a nation of resisters,' as the French writer Clémence Boulouque put it to me when I called her to discuss Modiano's win-was beginning to crumble. (The book was published in May, 1968, the same month that the famous student protests in Paris began; General de Gaulle, the President of the Republic and the living symbol of French heroism during the war, fled to a military base in Germany to wait it all out.) Modiano knew the soiled truth firsthand. His father had refused to wear the star and did not turn himself in when Paris's Jews were rounded up for deportation to concentration camps; he spent the war doing business on the black market and hanging around with the Gestapo stationed on the Rue Lauriston. Boulouque, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that in his three dozen or so novels Modiano has returned again and again to the same themes: the pull of the past, the threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, 'the dark side of the soul.' Modiano, she told me, believes that 'the novelist has an ethical duty to record the traces of the people who have vanished, the people who were made to disappear.' It will not have escaped the attention of the Nobel committee that Modiano's win comes at a time when anti-Semitism in France is on the rise, as is the rate of French Jews' emigration to Israel. The fear that French Jews are not safe in their own land, that French Jewish culture may vanish, is once again palpable, and real."
Brian Castner asks why with so much fiction and poetry coming from veterans of the war in Iraq, almost no fiction has emerged from the war in Afghanistan. His best answer: "Afghanistan was always a Task Force war. It began with CIA officers and special forces soldiers on horseback, 'Just a couple guys dressed up like Afghans giving the middle finger to the camera,' according to Maurer. Eventually larger units arrived, but still Rangers and paratroopers and the air assets to support them. That culture survived as the war grew: every aspect of the mission was executed by a Task Force with a name like Odin and Paladin or, for the more secret elite units, a numerical designation alone. Regional commands were given greater autonomy, special forces teams blanketed the country and had freedom to operate, and small outposts were left to survive on their own. Contrast this experience with Iraq, a centrally controlled war where every armor division and artillery regiment took a turn; in military-speak, Big Army was in charge. 'Iraq was televised,' Maurer says. 'It was a big invasion, it was a lot of guys, and it was a combined arms wet dream. They got a chance to use all the stuff.' The long occupation of Iraq then required many average soldiers, many cogs of the war machine, to patrol streets, sweep highways, and simply be in the neighborhoods, on the forward operating bases (FOBs), in country. To use a term from military doctrine, Iraq became a war of mass. 'I think special operations is the overarching narrative of the Afghan War,' says Maurer, 'and those guys love their jobs. To get to that level, it isn't a part-time job, it is your life, it's how you define yourself. So it makes sense they want to do memoirs to recount their stories. I don't see a lot of those guys sitting quietly at the firebase with an existential crisis, some sort of deep journaling. Meanwhile, you go to any platoon in the major conventional units, and you have a cross section of the country.' 'Who's even drawn to write novels?' Molin asks me, not entirely rhetorically. Not only did the average soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan have vastly different experiences, they had different backgrounds, skill sets, and relationship with their chosen occupation. 'If you think of a young guy in an unconventional unit, a SEAL team or special forces, out at a fire base, they have a vote,' says Maurer. 'Even the newest guy on the team, they are going to look at him for his specialty, they will ask his input on certain parts of a mission. An 18-year-old assistant machine gunner in the infantry, you're not being asked to do anything other than pick up your machine gun and walk.'"
Nathan Jurgenson suggests that Big Data is the new positivism, but with a perverse twist: "The positivist fiction has always relied on unequal access: science could sell itself as morally and politically disinterested for so long because the requisite skills were so unevenly distributed. As scientific practice is increasingly conducted from different cultural standpoints, the inherited political biases of previous science become more obvious. As access to education and advanced research methodologies became more widespread, they could no longer support the positivist myth. The cultural ideology of Big Data attempts to reverse this by shifting authority away from (slightly more) democratized research expertise toward unequal access to proprietary, gated data. (Molly Osberg points out in her review of Dataclysm for the Verge how Rudder explains in the notes how he gathered most of his information through personal interactions with other tech company executives.) When data is said to be so good that it tells its own truths and researchers downplay their own methodological skills, that should be understood as an effort to make access to that data more valuable, more rarefied. And the same people positioning this data as so valuable and authoritative are typically the ones who own it and routinely sell access to it."
In an interview about the creation and teaching of a class on Landscape Artists at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Karen Russell talks revisiting the much-read: "In class, we take a sort of field trip of the mind together, and it's fun to see some of the places we've all been to before with fresh eyes-Nathaniel Hawthorne territory, Faulkner's county, Shirley Jackson's terrifying 'Lottery' village. The spots on the literary tram tour. I assumed Hemingway was on that itinerary, so I handed out the story without his name, but half the class wasn't familiar with it. It reads totally differently if you remove it from the context of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and the war, so it became an accidental experiment to learn how much context informs your experience of a place in story. The students still loved it, but what they loved about it seemed more experiential-the animal happiness of being safe in a tent, for instance."
Eula Biss compares the crisis in education to the crisis in health care. At the root of it all, she says, is a consumer mentality: "Yes, we may be consumers, of health care as well as many other things, but that doesn't mean that it always serves us best to think like consumers. Health care is one of those areas, like art-making or community-building or education, where the consumerist approach of trying to get as much as you can for as little as possible can be counterproductive. As a teacher, I've had ample opportunity to observe what consumerism does to education. Students who approach their education as consumers may be passive, may want a product not a process, and may expect learning to feel like entertainment. Learning tends to hurt more than entertainment, and the inevitable disappointment felt by the consumerist learner is often interpreted as a defect in the product. The loss there is twofold-the learner loses the opportunity to learn, but also loses the awareness that she is responsible for that loss. This is not to say that we shouldn't be looking hard at the high cost of education, and the low returns some students get for that cost. We should absolutely interrogate the economy of education and its corruptions, just as we should interrogate the economy of health care and its corruptions. But we aren't served any better, within these troubled systems, by failing to understand our personal role and responsibilities."
Suddenly comics are everywhere. Best sellers are reissued in graphic editions and graphic books are best sellers. For the under 15 set, graphic novels are now a mainstay. Asked whether "Words Limit Art?" Art Spiegelman offers a theory about why comics have had trouble gaining cultural footing: "I would say that as words rose in our cultural firmament, pictures got smashed down to make room for them. And ever since, pictures have been more suspect. We're living in this Protestant country that doesn't respect imagery the same way it respects the word. And all of a sudden something like comics comes along that mixes the two together, and it's viewed as contraband. We're getting into a place where we're barraged with words and images all the time, and we have to get rid of our prejudices against one or the other, and this (tour) is like a controlled science experiment where you've got the pictures without the language."
Reading: Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler
Two of Germany's most distinguished contemporary playwrights read from Discovery of America and other works.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Olin Room 102, 7:30 pm
One Day University Film School Presents: "Robot and Frank" and a Discussion with Roger Berkowitz
Robot and Frank explores the depths of friendship and even love between a robot and a man. Though the film is a comedy, the underlying questions it raises are both timely and serious. What is friendship? Can a machine love? More importantly, what happens when humans fall in love with machines?
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Ian Storey invokes two pieces by E. B. White to speculate about the United States' fear for the world it must confront today in the Quote of the Week. And Plato provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking.
On Thursday and Friday, we held our seventh annual fall conference "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Ideals Worth Fighting For?" It was a busy two days full of talks and discussions, made all the more stimulating by audience members' insightful comments and questions. We hope you were able to make it, and if not, hopefully you were able to watch the conference using our live webcast.
We at the Hannah Arendt Center pride ourselves on our ability to host engaging, thought-provoking events for the Bard community and the greater public at large. We look forward to continuing this tradition well into the future.
Thank you for supporting the Hannah Arendt Center and for helping to make this past week's conference our best conference yet!