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Since his general anarchism was predicated on the immediate realization of socialist projects, rather than waiting for the Revolution-with-a-capital-R to break out as the inevitable result of the march of history, Landauer saw the defense of marriage as a socialist project. If one really imagines the relationship between spouses as an egalitarian, loving phenomenon within which each member constantly strives to improve his or her consideration for the flourishing of the other, in word and in deed, then that relationship is a test case for social relations more generally: if you can't create a miniature utopian society with one other person, you can't expect to do it with millions of other people.
To be sure, such solidarity is difficult -- but this is exactly why it is essential. The constant negotiation necessary for a successful egalitarian marriage is a school for democratic decision-making. One cannot build one's personal life around relationships that founder as soon as they encounter difficulties and at the same time hope to create a lasting social structure that encourages solidarity rather than selfishness and brutality. A community of people who know how to be married, Landauer thought, is a community of people who know how to negotiate across difference.
cool
If I could go back in time and meet my younger self that night (let me at this point acknowledge that we may be on this digression in part to resolve some stuff), perhaps when I’m just getting off my bike, and put my hand on this vole’s shoulder, and tell him that I’ve come with some words of wisdom so that he won’t fumble The Glory of My Youth, I would say something like: “Look, it matters whether or not Mary has had, is having, feelings for you; it matters how she’s disposed. Of course it does. But you need to get out of your head this notion that that’s, like, the matter, the material. Some scene in which your disposition and her disposition take up positions, and you come forth and beam at each other officially over the pine needles, and someone offers ambassadorially: ‘Well how felicitous. Now we can get on with acting on said feelings, eh?’—that’s not how these things go. What you need now is exposure. Mary, I think, is actually a big girl and unconsciously understands this. You need to say something like: ‘Mary, I’ve been too shy to tell you: I think you’re so beautiful.’”
I do acknowledge that a mini-lecture is probably not the best way to advise the anxious fourteen-year-old. Probably just insisting on the last part would do. But do you begin to see what I mean? Romance has its romantic way of being, where the rule is that arousal awakens arousal.
I’m not just talking about a kind of contagiousness—that lust leads to lust in the same way that yawning spreads from person to person, without anyone meaning for this to happen. Actually that contagiousness is something that Mary and I presumably did fall into, as we basically knew—all but knew—how the other was disposed. What I’m talking about has to do fundamentally with will and enaction and, peculiarly, a sort of work. If we think of a caress or a kiss for example—aargh … sorry this is so embarrassing—the particular sensation on our cheek or lips might matter quite a bit, but it matters much more in self-consciously embodying what this person thinks they are up to. It is this enacted idea, this intention, that is excited body-to-body; and this is itself the idea of this very reciprocal erotic escalation. With romance we climb up out of mere dispositions and into that self-swallowing, seductive consciousness of arousal at arousal itself, which is emphatically what the kissers are implying and infecting each other with. Eventually she may be turned on by the fact that the fact that she wants him to be turned on turns him on. The latter sounds like a geeky philosopher’s paradox, but it is integral to the way a kiss works.
But although my devotion drives me to do this—my sense that I am a husband and husbands do this—my devotion is also something I want her to feel. It is, in fact, something to be returned in kind, erotically, devotion for devotion. And the real sense of satisfaction of this work is to do it not for her sake, but for her eyes. Not literally; not that she beholds my virile act and swoons. She is upstairs. She is unlikely later to be impressed by the resulting aesthetically questionable pile of sticks. But being married, devotion belongs between us, and spousal acts bear the stamp of the living, active, commitment-at-commitment, trust-at-trust; a project that invites, implies, calls out and unfolds each of its parts.
Imagine for a moment that I really didn’t care how she received and responded to my help. Imagine that she got the sense that I was indifferent to her reception of it. Whatever else this might make her feel, that I was either an angel or a self-involved douche—either way, I posit, it would make her feel like something less than a lover.
I went inside and made breakfast for the family: eggs, bacon, blueberries, leftover beet salad. If breakfast didn’t have a cook, server and served, and a real need for nourishment, it would be nothing. But like the glass of wine, it is the idea of a relationship that is eaten.
As I say, it was a relief to my sister and me that my parents still loved each other. But one way of seeing the problem is that their loves no longer had to do with each other in the right way. My dad didn’t have the strength to conceal from us for long that he hadn’t wanted the divorce. One morning, I don’t remember exactly when, on his bed, with, again, his now baggy arm draped over his eyes, he told me he was still in love with her. Meanwhile he plunged precipitously into needing help. When he got this help from her, he did not have his own love’s homecoming, an answered appeal and arousal. Instead he just had her real compassion. He just had her heartfelt care and commitment, forthcomingly.
This is one way in which two people can be unwed. His love was meant for hers, and hers was merely meant for his well-being; and all his red blood leaked out of that asymmetry.
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Enlightened was billed by HBO as a comedy, and at times it can be very funny—especially in the scenes set at Abaddonn, which unspool in the deadpan register of The Office or Office Space. But White has ultimately lit his world with a different kind of light. Consistent with the show’s emphasis on transformation, the camera itself proves capable of converting suburban driveways, office parking lots and chain-restaurant dining rooms into sites for reflection no less provoking than the Pyramids or Walden Pond. (“People drive by here and they see a school and a field,” Levi observes in Season Two, as he and Amy sit in the bleachers of a familiar baseball field near their homes, “I see heaven … and hell.”) Meanwhile, the voiceovers magnetize the episodes up out of the realm of easy sarcasm and into the vicinity of hard and pertinent questions: What is the relation between personal betterment and the betterment of society? Is self-improvement really separable from narcissism? And what anyway is enlightenment?
That last question is addressed, famously, in a short essay by Kant (“An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”). As usual, and with liberal use of italics, Kant gets right to the point:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere Aude! Have courage to use your own understanding.
The journalist Mark Ames explains how apparently disparate political interests, especially in the context of Silicon Valley, can be seen to work together. Reflecting on some surprising alliances between today’s technology giants and the lobbying groups and of the world’s major extractive resource companies, Ames (2015) writes that
even if we still give Google and Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and allow that their investments in the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute weren’t directly motivated by killing Obamacare and throwing millions of struggling Americans back into the ranks of the uninsured and prematurely dying—nevertheless, they are accessories, and very consciously so. Big Tech’s larger political goals are in alignment with the old extraction industry’s: undermining the countervailing power of government and public politics to weaken its ability to impede their growing dominance over their portions of the economy, and to tax their obscene stores of cash.
Google—like Facebook, like Koch Industries—wants a government that’s strong enough to enforce its dominant private power over the economy and citizens and protect its wealth, but too broken and too alienated from the public to adequately represent the public interest against their domineering monopolistic power.
In practice, opposition to “government regulation of the internet” is best understood as a core (and in important ways vague) tenet, around which circulate greater and greater claims for the “freedom” created by digital technology. At its most expansive, cyberlibertarianism can be thought of as something like a belief according to which freedom will emerge inherently from the increasing development of digital technology, and therefore entails that efforts to interfere with or regulate that development must be antithetical to freedom—although what “freedom” means in this context is much less clear than it may seem. As Winner (1997, 14–15) puts it, to be a cyberlibertarian is to believe that “the dynamism of digital technology is our true destiny. There is no time to pause, reflect or ask for more influence in shaping these developments. . . . In the writings of cyberlibertarians those able to rise to the challenge are the champions of the coming millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the dust.”
[...] Reading is, of course, a major motif in the book, which is appropriate in a story about interpretation and misinterpretation — about Isabel Archer’s failure to ‘read’ her situation correctly; but that is no excuse for us to imitate Isabel’s attempt to re-write reality to her liking. And if the novel is taken to be about reading as one or two commentators have strangely suggested, the heroine’s fate stands as a dire warning to critics. As if to underline this point, James quotes Turgenev to the effect that it is pointless arguing with a writer’s choice of material, which is as personal to him as his own character. Anyone who quarrels with the novelist’s subjects must ‘point out' what they should have been. Better still, according to James, if they learn to read properly and concentrate on their proper critical function, which is not to argue with the choice of subject but to discuss its treatment. For this is what ‘pointing out’ amounts to: the study of how, not what.
James’s invocation of Turgenev’s authority in all these matters is significant. The two men knew one another in their Paris years, and while the American novelist owed a greater technical debt to other writers, Turgenev’s artistic example was vital to him as a novelist who put art above polemics without falling into the opposite trap of what James saw as sterile Flaubertian artifice. The trick was to maintain the balance between realism and formalism. Turgenev does this with consummate art, and James achieves it in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, which followed The Portrait of a Lady in 1885 and 1886. In all these novels we are aware of the writer’s passionate detachment: his determination to see the case from all sides which produces the typically Jamesian sense of luminous sympathy.
[...] James, like Turgenev, was attacked in his time for thematic triviality and moral indifference, especially when compared with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Zola. These writers, it was argued, were concerned with the major themes of politics, ethics and religion. ‘They discussed social reform, involving themselves and their work in the great issues of the day, while Turgenev and James merely trifled wittily with the private lives of the upper classes in the Wildean manner. The accusation of triviality is palpable nonsense, and On The Eve, Fathers and Children, The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians are there to prove it — as is The Importance of Being Earnest for that matter. The charge of moral indifference is equally absurd, but James’s discussion of just this topic in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady is worth recalling, given its bearing on the story. The novelist, he tells us, is primarily an artist, not a moralist. This is no abnegation of his ethical responsibility. On the contrary, what James calls ‘the moral sense’ of a work of art therefore depends not upon the ‘dull dispute’ about subjects or the crude taking of sides which inevitably leads to melodrama or sentimentality, but on the artist’s ability to render life as faithfully as possible in all its subtlety and complexity. Art is indeed about life, but in order to appreciate that we must first grasp the fact that it is art and approach it accordingly. For as this novel’s title suggests, the relationship between art and life, and the ways in which art is a part of life and a medium through which we can understand and misunderstand it, appropriate and misappropriate it: these themes are of supreme importance for James, and nowhere more so than in The Portrait of a Lady, where we might argue that the heroine’s disastrous confusion of the aesthetic and the ethical constitutes the very basis of the plot when she mistakes Gilbert Osmond’s narcissistic aloofness for moral virtue.