. . . You’re talking about the dissidents of eastern Europe in the sixties, seventies. Um, is the whole question of exile, of Russian exile right now, is it closer to the Russian exile of the Revolution, of the Bolshevik Revolution, where you had a bunch of people who left, and finally it’s their children who went back to Russia . . . . So is the comparison better with the exiled of Russia of the twenties?
Well, actually, I don’t think it’s a great comparison, because I think that the huge difference between people who left Russia in 2022 and the people who left a hundred years earlier is that the people who left in 2022 had the experience of the people who left a hundred years earlier to look at, and to learn from. And I think that — I mean, this is anecdotally, but I think that one of the biggest lessons that they learned from it was that, Don’t hold out hope that you’re going to go back in a few years because the Bolshevik regime is going to collapse. Um, I think, you know — and I, you know, and Andrei may be different in this, but I’m not making an argument for believing in a wonderful Russia of the future. Um, and that’s really not what the whole, sort of, this idea of political hope, is about. Uh, because that is, that is an exercise in faith, right? And I’m not kind of interested in exercising faith, I’m interested in the idea that you build something in the present. And you measure it by the criteria of the present. And if you haven’t — you know, if the regime doesn’t collapse: you at least have had the political experience of living in an actual, you know, situation of cooperation and doing good in the world. Um, and that’s all that any of us can ask for.
(Part of) an audience member’s question and Masha Gessen’s reply, from a conversation held in Tbilisi earlier this month on the subject of a book Gessen has had in the works for a little while now, apparently to be titled ‘The Certainty of the Reality of the Possibility.’ The video embed below is set to jump to the Q & A bit quoted above, but you can scrub back to its opening for some intro on the book project. You can also listen to earlier talks about it I’ve given links to here, from 2019 and 2021.
If you’re looking to read Václav Benda’s original 1978 essay ‘The Parallel Polis’ and having trouble finding it, send me an email.
The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity is work I’m getting to a couple of years delayed from when it was doing the rounds online. Lewis Wallace, the author-activist behind it, I’m only newly acquainted with moreover. I haven’t yet had a look at the book.
I have, however, started in now on the 16-episode podcast that attended publication in 2019 and ’20. For me it isn’t easy listening, at least at the outset. It is something I’m ready to recommend even so.
I’m wondering if you can talk to us about why this book, and why now, and also what you think that feminists can or should learn from this about politics today.
Well, the reason I wanted to write this book was — as I was saying earlier — when I wrote Inferior I had a chapter in there on male domination. And, you know, anthropologists would repeatedly say We haven’t always been male-dominated like this, there are matrilineal societies, there is more variation. And the question that readers kept asking me in 2017 was, Well how did we come to this then? If we weren’t always male-dominated, then why are we male-dominated now? And I did not have a good answer to that question. Because, remarkably, the literature isn’t very big on this question. You know, the last big historical text looking at the creation of patriarchy was Gerda Lerner’s, um, The Creation of Patriarchy, which was about 40 years ago. And we know a lot more since then, we’ve learnt so much more, especially through archaeology. And also through genetics — we have some really good evidence from ancient DNA. So this is a kind of holistic question on so many fronts; so it wasn’t the political moment that wanted me to write it, it was just that I was so bothered by that question — that I didn’t have a good answer to it, that even when I googled it, it was so little that, we have these piecemeal, you know, we have Engels and we have feminist literature on capital, on the state, on, you know, bits of it, little bits of it, but not bringing it together. And I’m not pretending that I’ve brought everything together, I haven’t. But I just wanted to at least start to answer that question for myself, and start to get a handle on it. And it really has changed how I think about power now.
An audience member’s question to Angela Saini, visiting the London School of Economics last month to talk about The Patriarchs, her book released in February, with Saini’s reply relating consciousness of her participation in historiographical shift that seems to be under way in our time. Her book is billed as a sort of companion to 2021’s The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow.
H/T Annalee Newitz — whose post is a couple of weeks old, but I’m just catching up.
The treatment of animals in 19th century romantic painting was already an acknowledgement of their impending disappearance. The images are of animals receding into a wildness that existed only in the imagination. There was, however, one 19th century artist who was obsessed by the transformation about to take place, and whose work was an uncanny illustration of it. Grandville published his Public and Private Life of Animals in instalments between 1840 and 1842.
At first sight, Grandville’s animals, dressed up and performing as men and women, appear to belong to the old tradition whereby a person is portrayed as an animal so as to reveal more clearly an aspect of his or her character. The device was like putting on a mask, but its function was to unmask. The animal represents the apogee of the character trait in question: the lion, absolute courage; the hare, lechery. The animal once lived near the origin of the quality. It was through the animal that the quality first became recognisable. And so the animal lends it his name.
But as one goes on looking at Grandville’s engravings, one becomes aware that the shock which they convey derives, in fact, from the opposite movement to that which one first assumed. These animals are not being ‘borrowed’ to explain people, nothing is being unmasked; on the contrary. These animals have become prisoners of a human / social situation into which they have been pressganged. The vulture as landlord is more dreadfully rapacious than he is as a bird. The crocodiles at dinner are greedier at the table than they are in the river.
Here animals are not being used as reminders of origin, or as moral metaphors, they are being used en masse to ‘people’ situations. The movement that ends with the banality of Disney began as a disturbing, prophetic dream in the work of Grandville.
From John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’ — published first, it seems, in 1977 as several short pieces in the UK’s New Society and then in combined form as opening of the 1980 collection About Looking, which PRH still has in print 40+ years later.
You know, some of these centers indeed emerged in the 1970s, like at Columbia and Notre Dame. But many others, like this one, came when human rights were the morality of the End of History in the 1990s, and they have been defined by the realities of the last 25 years — of that moment when there was an open acceptance of unipolarity and an implicit acceptance of neoliberalism. And human rights were about global justice within the terms of those two facts. Uh, but they’re not facts for long!
Uh you know, in the haze of insanity that has marked many of his statements, Vladimir Putin remarked the other day that the Ukraine war is about whether the West accepts that the unipolar reality is passing. And I think he’s right about that.
And when it comes to neoliberalism, it’s under unprecedented challenge — Liz Truss fell from power today because she tried to restore it in its pure Thatcherite form. And it’s not by any means dead. But we don’t know what the terms of struggle over its succession will be like. And what’s the relation of the human rights idea to these changes? Well I’m not sure that it’s going to have a major role . . . .
Sam Moyn speaking as member of the large stage panel assembled for an evening of celebration of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the University of Chicago’s human rights center last year — held the same day Liz Truss’ brief tenure at 10 Downing ended, in a coincidence of perhaps no great significance.
‘Do I have an opinion on Tim Snyder’s analysis.’
I’m going to be sharing an opinion because — Tim is very beautiful, but Tim is doing a fascinating balance between being a public intellectual and historian and being an activist. And we’ll be exploring that balance of his.
He is getting — what you’re not seeing, ’cause everybody loves Tim in the public sphere — but he’s being eviscerated in the academy. A lot of people are very mean about him at the moment for over-generalizing, for jumping too quickly to conclusions.
So we’ll try to parse that out, actually, by clarifying, always, What hat is someone wearing, right? ’Cause you don’t want to criticize somebody, right, for not cooking good mashed potatoes when they’re trying instead to do a parsnip purée.
That’s Vlad Vexler replying to a livestream attendee’s question this week and promising, in a video to come one of these days, to give Tim Snyder a closer critical look.
(To follow Snyder’s every word would be a full time job. I do think his whole fall Yale Open Courses series on Ukraine a solid recommendation and also, at the same time, am taking interest in cautions about his material as I have opportunity to consider them.)
[UPDATE: Vexler delivers at some length, about 45 min. It’s a pretty good listen, a thoughtful analytical performance. He, too, encourages you to give Snyder’s Ukraine lectures a try, I want to note.]
From (about the last third of) a not-very-long conversation between Jonathan Capehart and Ned Blackhawk on Capehart’s Washington Post show, which I confess I’m only listening to for the first time here. Occasioned by a thread by High Country News writer B. Oaster this week.[Capehart] I can’t help but think of Nikole Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project when reading your book The Rediscovery of America. You and she not only argue for, and present, a fuller telling of our history, in the process, you’re challenging how we as a nation view ourselves. This is just my view. I’m wondering, is that a stretch for me to say?
[Blackhawk] Well, I really was intrigued by your kind of general thematic emphasis on race in America. We do kind of live in a historical environment in which multi-racial paradigms have yet to fully dislodge the kind of binaries of black-white racial formation or studies that are at the heart of much recent American historical inquiry. So, I’d like to think that The 1619 Project and The Rediscovery of America are both moving us towards a point where we can have more interrelated, rather than segmented, multi-racial histories. And I was insufficiently able to fully engage some of the classic and really recent kind of canonical works in African-American history, some of which have really helped expose things like the hybridity of Native-American communities in the American South, who incorporated generations of African-American runaways, slaves and later freedmen. And we hopefully can reach a point in the not-too-distant future where we’re not talking about racial histories in isolation but in relationship. . . .
[Capehart] I think we might be around the same age. I’m old enough to remember, you know, those encyclopedias or biology books where you’ve got the main page and then you’ve got those plastic overlays, that — you lay one down, you see one set of organs, you lay another one down, you see more, but you see them all together. And looking at The Rediscovery of America and having looked at 1619 Project, that’s what it felt like to me. . . .
[Blackhawk] You know, that’s a great kind of visual and even pedagogical metaphor to think about . . . .
Not all the media-biz news out there is terrible. (Most of it by far is, yeah, okay.)
This I’m a bit slow to learn of — partly perhaps because my own audio consumption doesn’t lean so much to entertainment-style general-audiences podcast fare. But if you’ve followed me here for a while, chances are that you’ll have a sense already of my interests in cooperative organization and in smaller-scale media and publishing.
Useful comparisons with the reorganized Maximum Fun are Defector, more text- than audio-content and entirely employee-owned, and Nebula, video / audio only and creator- (rather than employee) owned in significant part.
I’ve listened several times to the Anne Conway episode, below, of Justin Sledge’s Esoterica series. My education from youth well into adulthood (owing heavily to church community I chose for myself), no doubt conventionally like that of many North Americans in the broad strokes at least, established an idea of the British 17th century dominated by Puritans. (Who did, after all, literally dominate for a good stretch there.) That’s had by extension lasting implications for my picture of N.-Atlantic-world modernity and, really, of the whole course of western-Christian cultural evolution. Certain aspects of the wider historical reality that tend to be obscured in such a picture are captured nicely in a snapshot way, it seems to me, in Sledge’s short presentation here.
Especially would like to be more tuned in on connections between the secondary-stream, theology-inclining (and more or less heterodox) strands of early modern turns in Christian-society intellectual culture and what’s going on in the 19th century rolling over into the 20th with figures like Bergson. I’d also like to be more attuned to the knock-on effects of Inquisition and Iberian expulsions of Jewish populace around turn of the 16th century, with impacts in e.g. Amsterdam, on those early modern currents in northern Europe & Britain.
Spanish comics artist Gabriel Hernández Walta, who last year joined the roster of Mignola collaborators, notices for us in two Instagram posts this month that the three-decade mark from publication of the first Hellboy story, Seed of Destruction, approaches fast.
