by Monica Westin

The Way of the Shovel, an ambitious group show focused on artistic production as a mode of “history, archaeology, and archival research” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last month. Much of the work in the show takes the form of documentary photographs and films that attempt to create alternative historical narratives, filling out our everyday understandings of the world and its pasts. In my interview with him last month, curator Dieter Roelstraete noted that the show, based on his previous e-flux essay of the same name, grew out of his observation that

“in the last ten to fifteen years the rhetoric of art has been rephrased in broad terms using the language of research…I really appreciate the ambition of artists to think of themselves as not just working with forms and ornaments, but also with information…. But while I'm interested in the critical charge of art's claim to be some kind of research, the whole discussion of artistic research is a huge one that is also based in the academization of art in recent years. There's increasing pressure on students to present what they do as some kind of intellectual enterprise, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.”

Roelstraete's salient point is that artists are encouraged to frame their work as research at a time when discourses surrounding art are increasingly influenced by science and other academic disciplines. But what practices should “count” as research, and which are just part of the process of art-making?

Mark Dion, Concerning the Dig, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Installation view, The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, MCA Chicago November 9, 2013 – March 9, 2014.

In the western tradition, we have historically understood artists' contributions to social consciousness as generally either representing/preserving images of the world as it is, or imagining ways it might be otherwise. For the ancient Greeks, art was exclusively concerned with mimesis, or the direct copying of nature, and ancient art criticism judged successful art as that which depicted its subject with the most realism. It wasn't until the second century AD that the sophist Philostratus first argued, in his biography of the mystic Apollonius, that phantasia, or creative imagination, was a more important quality in the artist than mimesis. (And it arguably took centuries after that before western artists themselves began to make this argument for their work and to break from imitation in their practices.) The western history of art can often largely be read as a tension between changing technologies of mimetic representative realism (increasing understanding of perspective in the Renaissance, the invention of the photograph) and intellectual movements towards new modes of phantasia or reaching for that which is beyond the skills of technological reproduction (Mannerism as a reaction to the Renaissance, Impressionism as a reaction to photography).

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by Dave Maier

Most philosophical chestnuts leave me cold. Their standard formulations usually have some confusion or preconception or equivocation in there somewhere, so that even when the original puzzle makes sense, the real philosophical action has moved on, often to places unrecognizable to the layman (for good or ill). Take the one about whether, when a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear, it makes a sound. (According to a recent TV ad, yes, to wit: “Aaaagh! [*wham*] … little help? Anyone? Hello?”) My answer: it depends on what you mean by “sound”; in one sense, yes, in another, no. Both uses of the term are perfectly well established – you just can't use them interchangeably. There are of course some live philosophical questions about perception and reality to keep us busy; this just isn't one of them.

Naturally this isn't enough for some people. The answer is “merely semantic,” and doesn't engage the real mystery of subjects in an objective world. The other questions about perception I mentioned – where for my money the “real action” is – don't give us that same buzz. They're boring, technical, overly analytic. Worse, their focus is disappointingly narrow. Whatever the fate of, say, the doctrine of epistemological disjunctivism, we're a long way from the wonder in which philosophy supposedly begins. Whatever happened, these people ask, to the quest for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful?

My own response to this is that if we just keep our eyes on the true (in inquiry), the good (in action), and the beautiful (in lots of places), then the all-caps TGB (whatever, if anything, they turn out to be) can take care of themselves. But other philosophers – let's call them “naturalists” – take a more actively deflationary line against what they see as mystical obscurantism. If there are any mysteries here, they are scientific mysteries, best answered with the no-nonsense tools of empiricial science; and philosophy's task is not to try to deal with these questions itself, but just to clear the way for science. To do otherwise, according to naturalists, leads to metaphysics – or worse, theology.

If we get all that from just the tree in the forest, imagine what happens when our question is the greatest chestnut of them all: why is there anything at all, instead of nothing? Here a theological answer is so close you can taste it – and whether that taste be yummy or foul, that tends to be what underlies the more contentious answers to our question. To the main combatants, who think it of such monumental importance, there doesn't seem to be any room between naturalism and metaphysics.

I bring this up today not because I have suddenly developed a philosophical interest in this question (that is, the chestnut itself), but instead because I have just begun physicist Lawrence Krauss's 2012 book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, which comes down firmly on the naturalist side, and I'm already not appreciating the characteristic naturalist tendency to run together resistance to naturalism, on the one hand, with creationism/theology/metaphysics (along with right-wing politics and who knows what else) on the other. (Nor do I accept the converse identification, made by the TGB brigade, of resistance to their metaphysical project, on the one hand, with a nihilistic “scientism” on the other.) My kind of philosopher tends to ignore this particular chestnut completely, so it's not surprising that our sensibility is not well represented in these discussions, but I'd like to get a couple of cents in if I may.

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by Ben Schreckinger

At the end of the week, in the predawn hours that most of us will spend sleeping off turkey and pumpkin pie, millions of Americans will gather in the dark to kick off Black Friday, the annual day-long frenzy of bargain-hunting that marks the beginning of the holiday season. Many economists wish they wouldn't.

Not because Black Friday, in which shoppers literally climb over each other to get at plastic toys and electronic gadgets, is an affront to human dignity. Not because it perpetuates crass materialism. But because, according to an influential strain of economic thinking, the act of gift-giving creates a dead-weight loss.

The seminal paper in this vein is Joel Waldfogel's “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” which goes so far as to estimate — based on interviews of Yale undergrads — that Christmas gifts represent a waste of many billions of dollars annually. Waldfogel's indictment of Christmas presents reads like a wonkier cousin of Jonathan Swift's modest proposal that the Irish eat their own babies — but it's totally sincere.

It was published just in time for Christmas in 1993. The Soviet Union had dissolved on Boxing Day only two years earlier. The market had kicked central planning's butt, which was great news for Americans, and especially great news for American economists. But it turned out to be bad news for Santa, because according to the logic of the market, Christmas is an obstacle to maximum efficiency.

That logic is straightforward: A person has a very good idea of her own needs, and given $100 to spend on herself, she'll spend that money on the things she wants most. But someone else spending $100 on a gift for that person probably has inferior knowledge of that person's preferences, and will buy them something they value less. The better option, then, is to give the recipient $100 and let her spend it for herself.

In 2001, The Economist reexamined the case against gifts and came up with a somewhat more nuanced conclusion. Their analysis elaborates on special cases where a giver might be able to make more efficient use of the money — by giving the recipient what he really wants but won't buy for himself, for example — a possibility that Waldfogel acknowledges. It also stumbles upon the insight that gift-giving itself can give an item sentimental value. In the way that it can sometimes read like The Alien's Guide to Being Human, the magazine advises readers to “Try hard to guess the preferences of each person on your list and then choose a gift that will have a high sentimental value.”

On this line of thinking, indifference curves still offer a useful tool for understanding gift-giving: If we add sentimental value to our model and run the figures again, we might be able to save Christmas after all. But in reality, dead-weight loss and Christmas just don't belong in the same sentence. To understand why, it's helpful to look to the work of UCLA anthropologist Alan Fiske, who's observed that human relationships follow four basic models that correspond to four sets of values: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing.

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by Helane Levine-Keating

“When a foreign classic is retranslated, furthermore, we expect the translator to do something new to justify yet another version. And in raising the bar we might also expect the translator to be capable of describing this newness.” – Lawrence Venuti

Lydia Davis, 2013 winner of the Man Booker International Prize, Photo by David Ignaszewski

As Umberto Eco has written in his essay “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence,” “books talk to each other.” And if indeed “books talk to each other,” there is also a conversation—often unspoken—that goes on between fiction writers critics, and translators.

The fiction writer who also translates listens very carefully to the words that are written on the page. They are familiar words—they have influenced her writing for years. Throughout the process, she discusses each choice with the long-deceased writer whom she’s translating.

After the words have been strung into sentences, perhaps she dreams of meeting him in his cork-lined bedroom in Paris late at night when he is often wide awake and longing to talk. In the dream she asks him if he likes her translation, if he thinks she’s captured his humor, his particular point of view, his tone of voice. She asks him if she’s nailed the words with the same nails he’s used, more or less, and then she eagerly awaits his answer. A small smile plays on his lips. He coughs for a while, long enough for her foot to fall asleep as she sits cross-legged on the chaise longue near his bed. Finally she asks him again, this time in French, “Est-ce que ma traduction vous plaît ou non?” But in the dream there is no equivalent for “Yes” or “No.”

What does it mean, then, to be both a writer and a translator, who in each role is affected by the whims of the marketplace, the need to make a living, and, by extension, the critics who deem a text worthy or unworthy of being bought and read?

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by Paul Braterman

I am browsing school science textbooks published and marketed by an influential and nationally accredited US university. Here is what I find.[1] Satan wants people to believe in evolution. This is probably the main reason that evolution is so popular. Evolution relies on processes that cannot be observed, therefore it isn’t a scientific theory but depends on faith. The theory of biological evolution is not true because it contradicts the Bible. Many people believe in the evolutionary theory because they feel it eliminates God and lets them do what they want. Evolutionists are constantly finding evidence that runs counter to their claims, but discard it because of bias. The Flood is a better explanation of the fossil record than evolution. Missing links and common ancestors are absent from the fossil record because these organisms never existed. Radiometric dating involves so much guesswork that it is unreliable. Earth Day is the Festival of a false god; but a Christian must be confident that the God who made the world is able to maintain it. And much more in the same vein.

I came across all this rather indirectly. I recently saw a reference to someone, teaching at a non-accredited University in Albuquerque, who described himself as a Fellow of Oxford Graduate School. Having myself, many years ago, tried to become a Fellow of an Oxford college, and dismally failed, I was ready to be impressed. But then it occurred to me that Fellowships are not awarded by Oxford University, but by each of its component colleges. Moreover, despite six years at Oxford and two graduate degrees, I had never heard of the Graduate School as a separate entity. So I decided this was worth looking into. And so it proved. Oxford Graduate School may be of little importance in itself, but it pointed me to a world of absurdities, where a university can only win accreditation by denying scientific reality, where such accreditation is recognised by the US government, and where those at institutions accredited in this way have exerted influence out of all proportion to their numbers.

Oxford Graduate School (OGS), like that place in England where they have been teaching since 1096, has the name “Oxford” in its title, and according to its web site it also calls its doctorate degree D.Phil. rather than Ph.D. And there the resemblance ends.

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by Brooks Riley

At particularly difficult periods in my life, I study my cat. I’m not a biologist or an anthropomorphologist (okay, maybe I am), but I do occasionally like to read about animal behavior and its human interpreters and interpretations. Much research work examines the intelligence of animals based on tool-usage or communication skills: the New Caledonian crow fashioning hooks out of stiff leaves or twigs to dig up a tasty worm from a hole in a tree stump, chimpanzees doing math, gorillas like Koko using sign language, etc.

One word which suprisingly fails to appear in the scientific literature is ‘intent’. And it is exactly this word which ennables me to decipher the mysteries of my cat.

In the animal world intent can mean the carrying out of instinctive behavior. A squirrel intends to store a nut, a lion intends to attack an antelope, a robin intends to dig up a worm. All of these intentions are hardwired into the ongoing survival apparatus of that animal. In the more intelligent animals, intent consists of more than one level: The New Caledonian crow intends to get that worm, yes, but before he can do so, he has to intend to fashion a tool out of a leaf to facilitate his first intention. This latter intention is intrinsically linked to the first intention, but it is not part of the instinctive level of intent. It is a learned behavior whose origins lie in an exquisite act of deductive reasoning: Some ancestral New Caledonian crow actually thought about the problem of how to reach an out-of-reach worm. And to find a solution, he had to imagine something outside of his own corporeal construction that might facilitate his goal. He put 1 (twig) and 1 (hole) together and came up with 2 (the worm). Then he taught his kids. That his descendents were able to repeat his invention and possibly even incorporate it into their own instinctive behavior doesn’t mitigate the fact that catching a worm in New Caledonia involves two intentions, both based on need, but only one based on original instinct.

But back to my cat. A domestic housebound cat doesn’t use its instinct anymore to hunt for food. If it’s hungry, it has to find another way to get food. And that other way also involves a bifurcation of intent: First it has to get your attention—by yowling, scratching the pristine upholstery, or jumping on you from a great height as you sleep. A different cat might utilize gentler means, such as butting it’s head against your leg or laying a paw on your arm. Whatever the means, she intends to annoy you in order to carry out her first intention, which is to get fed. Her tool, like that of the crow, is a secondary intention meant to ennable the first intention. In Pavlovian terms, you are the dog, she is the bell. Instead of salivating, you rise up zombie-like from your bed and feed the cat.

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by James McGirk

James McGirk works as a literary journalist and is a contributing analyst to an online think tank. The following is an imagined itinerary for a tourist vacation twenty years in the future.

Seven days in the PRINTERZONE

June 20, 2033-June 28, 2033

A quick suborbital hop to Iceland courtesy of Virgin Galactic and then it’s all aboard the ScholarShip, a luxurious three-mast schooner powered by that most ecologically palatable of sources: the wind.

Weather-permitting you and twenty of your fellow alumni will set sail for the Printerzone. (The North and Norwegian Seas can be temperamental: in the event of heavy weather we revert to backup biodiesel power.) Our destination has been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site: it is both a glimpse at what our future might become should government regulation of printers come to an end, and a fantasy of life free from credit and ubiquitous surveillance. Together we’ll spend a week immersed in this unique community, on board an oilrig in international waters, using three-dimensional additive printing to meet our every need.

Joining us on this adventure will be Prof. Orianna Braum, an associate professor of Maker Culture at Stanford University; Alan Reasor, a forty-year veteran of the additive printing industry; and a young man who prefers to refer to himself by displaying a small silver plastic snowflake in his palm.

ITINERARY – DAY ONE

Depart Reykjavik.

A colorful day spent traversing the Norwegian and North Seas… sublime marine grays and blues stirred by the bracing sea breeze. Keep your eyes peeled for pods of chirping Minke whales! Many are 100 percent natural.

Breakfast and lunch will be served onboard The ScholarShip by our chef Matthias Spork. Selections include: printed cereals and pastas, catch-of-the-day and a refreshing sorbet spatter-printed by his wife, renowned pastry chef Rebecca Spork.

Prof. Braum and Mr. Reasor will debate: Has Three-Dimensional Printing failed its Promise? Reasor will argue that in most instances economies of scale and the cost of raw materials make conventional manufacturing a more cost-effective solution than 3D printing. Prof. Braum will counter, describing industries that have been radically reshaped by printing—prosthetics and dentistry, bespoke suiting and fashion, at-home robotics and auto-repair—and suggest instead that government safety regulation and restrictive intellectual property licenses have done more to stifle innovation than costs. There will be time for questions afterwards. And then a brief demonstration of piezoelectric substrates: printed materials that respond to the human touch.

Following a hearty and delicious dinner prepared by the Sporks, we invite you for hot toddy and outdoor stargazing with our First Mate. The Arctic winds can be fierce at night, so you have the option of lighting the hearth in your cabin, and viewing a very special Skype broadcast—The Pink Printer’s Naughty Apprentice—which outlines in a most whimsical and titillating way some of the more adult uses of the three-dimensional printer.

(Please note that cabins containing occupants below the age of consent in their country of residence will not receive this broadcast.)

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by Michael Lopresto

Philosophy is one of the great sciences of reality, as Galen Strawson has said. To this I would add that philosophy is one of the most general of sciences, with the remarkable ability to cross between domains and incorporate both logical and hermeneutical methods. Mathematics and physics have incredible generality, for example, but philosophers will investigate the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of physics. But what does it mean to say that something is a science?

Science is a distinctive strategy whose aim is to uncover truths about the world. This strategy can be distinguished from other human endeavours, such as sophistry, with the pernicious aim of deceiving and manipulating, and art and criticism, with the honourable aim of facilitating aesthetic experience and communication. We distinguish good art from bad art on the grounds that bad art is deceitful and manipulative, and good art that it is, say, honest and morally serious. Equally, we distinguish between good science and bad science. Good science tends to have good philosophical foundations; scientists strive to build theories that are naturalistic, falsifiable, parsimonious, and have continuity with other theories. Bad science tends to be driven by ulterior motives; to confirm or vindicate what is already believed in a particular culture.

Admittedly, this is a slightly unusual way of talking about science and philosophy. There are social and political reasons for supposing a sharp cleavage between science and philosophy, and especially between science and the humanities. It is often said that science is inherently empirical, employing its distinctive quantitative methods; whereas the humanities are inherently perspectival and hermeneutical, employing its distinctive qualitative methods. Of course, the humanities are the most important part of a university education, as Brian Leiter has said, we all leave university to be full human beings, and the humanities are indispensible for this. This is especially important to emphasise in our pernicious culture of economic rationalism, where depressingly, the worth of the humanities needs to be constantly defended. But from another perspective, however, there are very few principled distinctions between the sciences and the humanities. Many of the sciences use rigorous formal methods, but philosophical logic and formal linguistics, for example, are equally rigorous and formal. Applied mathematics engages in abstract reasoning about the world, but equally does analytic metaphysics. Biology and Psychology build theories in their respective domains, but so do the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of psychology.

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by Gerald Dworkin

I recently watched the latest Claude Lanzmann documentary on the Holocaust called the Last of the Unjust. It is a four hour interview with Benjamin Murmelstein who was the last of the Judenrat in Theresienstadt. These were Jews who were selected to act as advisors to the Nazi administrators who ran the camp. Murmelstein has been the subject of much dispute in terms of the role he played. It is fascinating to listen to Murmelstein, a former rabbi in Vienna and a scholar of mythology, as he details his interactions with Eichmann, his denial that he was aware that camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor were death camps (although he admits there were clues that he should have taken more seriously), and the many moral dilemmas that someone in his role faced. At one point, when pressed by Lanzmann, he says that people in his position should be “condemned but not judged.” I leave it to the reader as an exercise to figure out whether this can be understood in a way that makes sense.

Having watched this film I was led to reflect upon the magnificent Lanzmann documentary Shoah and the questions it raises about the ethics of lying. Kant is notorious for denying that it is ever legitimate to lie –even to the murderous man who comes to your door and demands to know whether a particular person is hiding in your house, whom the man wishes to kill. Alan Wood has recent given the most plausible attempt to defend the Kantian view by arguing that Kant distinguishes between a declaration, which only takes place when one warrants that one is telling the truth, and a falsification which takes place in a context where there is no such warrant. Wood claims that Kant’s theory should say that if our false statement is not a declaration then it is permissible because not a lie. If it is a declaration, but extorted from us, i.e. we are forced to say something as opposed to keeping silent, then that should be permissible. In effect, says Wood, Kant misunderstood his own theory.

I turn away from the thickets of Kant interpretation to the question of what exceptions to the general prohibition against lying we ought to accept, in particular how to respond to Nazis–at the door, or as we shall see, otherwise.

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Show Moon

look out your window the moon is huge
but not bigger-than-life, smaller than that
though big enough to make life take a look,
to admire its yellow flatness with hint of rouge
upheld in a mosh-pit of trees, their naked limbs
a dark mesh across a field upon a sky of blue-grey steel
which, as long as nights last and days begin,
will be the place this moon plays, stage rear,
then up and front as it climbs a starry scrim
and down again —and life applauds
before it disappears
.

by Jim Culleny
11/16/13

by Leanne Ogasawara

The other day, my beloved and I were wandering around Best Buy looking for refill cartridges for his scanner pen.

Walking in vain up and down the aisles, I thought how we are indeed living in an age when consumerism has replaced citizenship. It was somehow really disheartening seeing all the “stuff.”

But then, just as I was going to lodge a complaint, something amazing caught my eye…A McIntosh sound system with exposed tubes on display right in front of my eyes!! Is it possible, I wondered, that McIntosh somehow stayed in business and are still putting old-style systems out? Not surprisingly given the ecstatic look on our faces a sales staff member invited us to try out the system in their special sound room. And there as we sat in the sweet spot listening to Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes felt the soundwaves washing over us.

Nostalgically, I recalled how music used to be something you could feel in your tummy–something that traveled on the air making its way to your ears… My beloved probably would have preferred listening to Mozart on that sound system –but for me, I was transported back to Southern Africa, when a neighbor in Mafeteng used to listen at night to that album on an old record. It was in the early 90s and the sound really traveled…Music was such a part of everyday life there and what was not live singing and playing was on records and old casette tapes.

Uncompressed and amplified.

This all reminded me of a great show Robert Harrison did for entitled opinions with fellow Stanford professor Gabriella Safron on the history of listening.“Generalizations are always problematic,” he said, “but there is one generalization you can make about western civilization that won't get you into any trouble. And that is that Western civilization is one that thorougly philoscopic.” That is to say that Western culture from very ancient times has priledged vision over the other senses. There is no question about this; from Plato's Ideal forms (eidos: visible aspect) to a Proustian vision, it was spiritual vision (and rational in-sights) that were thought to be the means to knowledge.

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by Matt McKenna

Sometimes careening space debris is simply careening space debris, but other times it is a metaphor for something nearly as catastrophic back on Earth. The debris in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is, of course, the latter. Cuaron is Mexican, but he clearly takes an interest in American politics because never before has the complexities of a government shutdown been so succinctly dissected via a 3D science-fiction suspense-thriller. It is no surprise then that Gravity's U.S. release date was moved to coincide with the federal government shutdown this past October. Warner Bros. and Cuaron must have strongly felt that the struggles incurred by the characters in the film would inform the political struggle over funding the United States federal government.

The film begins with light banter amongst astronauts performing repairs on the Hubble telescope until–and this isn't a spoiler if you've seen the trailer that plays out the film's inciting incident sans editing–a cloud of debris crashes into the venerable space structure to which the film's protagonists are unfortunately attached.

And so begins the ninety-one minute exploration of the United States' broken government by way of a floating Sandra Bullock and a jetpack-strapped George Clooney. While it is certainly possible to dismiss Gravity as nothing more than an interesting filmic experiment mixing a minimal cast into a vat of computer generated graphics, this interpretation misses Cuaron's carefully placed parallels (presciently laid out years ago) between Gravity's fictional reality up in space and our actual reality down on Earth.

Most obviously, the hurtling debris that serves the role of Gravity's antagonist-with-impeccable-timing represents the legion of discretionary appropriations that Congress failed to handle in a timely fashion. As the speeding space junk threatens every structure and person in the film, so too does America's unfunded discretionary programs threaten the integrity of the United States federal government and the welfare of the people subject to that government. Indeed, just as a solar panel traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour will do irreparable damage the human body it slams into, so too will irreparable damage done to the human body that is unable to acquire adequate nourishment due to a lack of funding provided for discretionary programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

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