Tolkien on Technology as the Actualization of Desire

"The ultimate aim of the Elves is art and not power."

Obedience, Ideality and Institution

"him who disobeyes/ Mee disobeyes"
Milton

Institutions are normally studied as part of "social reality" and should, indeed, be approached as constitutive of that "reality". It is in our institutions that power is experienced immediately; they are that through which subjects of power are immediately taken with stuff. (Intuition, we will recall, is that through which objects of knowledge are immediately given to us.)

But, as I've suggested before, the idea that social life is "real" is an illusion. Society is not an objective reality; it's a subjective ideality. It is not independent of the material reality that is given to us through intuition, to be sure. But society is simply not real.

We understand the material reality. We obey the social ideality. We should not try to understand "the social". We should learn to obey it.

(Kafka would back me up on this.)

This is why I think poetry is so important. It is as important to politics as philosophy is to science. It is the art of imagining the ideality, just as philosophy is the art of imagining the reality. After all, it's one thing to know what is real; it is quite another to imagine it. In imagination we become aware of the possibilities within the real and the necessities within the ideal. That's why the pangrammatical supplement of "understanding reality" is "obeying ideality". The ideal is simply not something one understands. Or rather, to understand an ideal is simply to obey. There's nothing more to see. Likewise, to "obey reality" is, simply, to understand. That's all it's asking you to do.

Institutions, I will agree with you, are in a lousy state these days. (There's something rotten in the State, as ever.) But we break our hearts trying to understand them. We have only our obedience to work with.

This does not mean that we should do as we are told. Institutions do not "tell us what to do". They determine the immediate rightness of actions. And there are always greater and lesser institutions. Civil disobedience, we must remember, is based on the idea that an act of dissent obeys a higher law.

Imagination and Population

"Though shalt not sit with statisticians." (W. H. Auden)

A stray thought:

When statisticians like Andrew Gelman and Nate Silver write about politics we consider it the most natural thing in the world. After all, they know about populations, i.e., "the people". But when poets like Ezra Pound or Peter Dale Scott write about politics, we're just as likely to dismiss them as cranks. After all, they are only experts of the imagination.

The comparison isn't perfect. Pound is long dead. Scott is 84 years old this week. Gelman and Silver are much younger men. But is there a poet their age today that is writing seriously about politics (I don't mean that they might be writing political poetry), and being taken as seriously as a statistician?

None comes to mind as I write this. But it's one of those questions that you put out there and then someone immediately gives you two or three names that makes everything okay again.

I don't begrudge the statisticians their fame, by the way. But I am saddened by the irrelevance of imagination in political life. The status and function of poetry is a symptom of this.

Emotion and Society

"...the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel..." (Hemingway)

Emotions are to poetry what concepts are to philosophy. Concepts bring precision to theories (the precision of our theories depends on our concepts) and emotions, likewise, bring precision to practices.

That is, emotions are entirely practical entities. They are the "units" of practical mastery. They constitute the texture of our precision in action. They allow us to pass immediately from feeling something in an encounter to acting appropriately.

When I speak of the "appropriate" action, I don't simply mean doing something that is "acceptable" in a social situation. Many of our emotions do have the virtue of such respectability, but not all. Our ability to deal socially with grief, for example, is conditional on the emotions we have available to us to manage in situations where the feeling of loss is present. The mourner and the friend, both, have to draw on their emotional resources to act appropriately. As does the mere acquaintance and the complete stranger when addressing the bereaved.

Everyone feels something when they are around others. Emotions convert those feelings into workable behavior. In some cases, we lack the necessary emotions. The results are familiar.

Some feelings, however, actually require socially inappropriate behavior, and here we require especially precise emotions, which will support very intense experiences.

In any case, our emotional apparatus conditions how feelings are experienced immediately; perhaps more precisely, they make actions immediately meaningful. (Just as a concepts make perceptions immediately meaningful.) Some behavior is not immediately meaningful, and that's simply because we lack the emotions required to attribute a motive to them. (In the case of concepts the problem here is the attribution of sense, not motive.)

The arts keep our emotions working properly, keep them precise. Poetry in particular is the art of refining our emotions in order to keep our experience of social life precise, i.e., intense. The marginalization of poetry (it has been crowded out by sociology and psychology) tells us something important, and distressing, about our culture.

We no longer approach our social relationships through our emotional lives. Most of our actual feelings have become pathologies, or have been outright criminalized. (As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the state now wants to control how we express our feelings of, say, hatred.) We have a narrow emotional range. A small set of scientifically constructed emotions. Here "science" does not connote precision; our feelings have been construed as brute "facts" to be expressed in a series of familiar, caricatured gestures. We have become incapable of nuance.

Price and Image

Sometimes it distresses me how old a post at this blog is. That it was over three years ago that I suggested that "some arch bank" put usury between our selves and our crafts, and so little has come of that insight is hard to bear. The fact that Ezra Pound has been "on the case" for years is little consolation (see also, and also).

It occurs to me what has really happened is that the price of a thing has displaced our image of it in our assessment of its value. Thus, it no longer matters very much what a thing looks like or what we imagine we can do with it. What matters is what it will cost, and how it will depreciate. Will it gain or lose in monetary value? Not: how will it age? Craftsmanship now has only an incidental relation to the problem. There are no houses of good stone.