<nettime> post to nowhere

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

+++

If the first klepto-demagogue US presidential administration rang the death-knell of the progressive internet ideal, the second one is the final nail in the coffin.

It's beyond obvious now that having an internet, by itself, means very little for progressive causes and values in the real world.  Yes we have our echo chambers, and even some very fine finery in some of them, but the Same Old Powers That Always Be -- big money, big business, big government, big military -- not to mention the many Entrepreneurs of Great Selfishness and Malice are at least as strong as progressives on the cyber plane and arguably superdominant, overpowering, and asymmetrically untouchable.  That's why all the long faces.

Which is to say, that if there is anything brittle or confused about today's progressives it might be their infatuation with gadgets.  Maybe one time long ago they thought "gosh now that we have pamphlets there can be no more tyranny!"  Then it was newspapers, then radio.  No one thought TV would liberate anyone, but email might and web pages seemed guaranteed to.  Now we have only the grinning gallows-optimism of corruptocurrency and computer sunglasses which is to say an all you can eat buffet of manure sandwiches.

Progressives, idealists, people of conscience, and decent human beings in general need to spit out the fish hook of electronic connection gadgetry, hypnosoftware, and platformania.  It means nothing.  Your pens and paper, brushes and easels, mean far more.  Your voices and brains mean even more more.  Are you using them?  Quit looking to hit the lottery with some clickable pocket rocket.  Use your mind and your own two hands for a change!  Progress was never made by inventing a machine; it's been made by how we use or don't use the opportunities, gifts, and yes tools we have.  Regressives after all can field swarms of every gadget and certainly every form of tech for their own nefarity, at scale, just by writing a check and scrapping a law.  Did you really think they wouldn't?

Ideas are the place to focus hope and effort, not techforms.  If not the war for men's minds, call it the effort of inter-human understanding.  No decoder ring and no magic wand will save you, O progressives.  It's ideas where you need to do better.

And as far as ideas go, the only path you have out of your present quagmire is the Esperienza allegory hypothesis.  Say what again?

Communism is a cruel joke caked in trench dirt, trench-foot, and trench-mouth.  It's a no-such-thing that beguiles the angry and hungry sure but wastes almost every penny spent on it, same as orthodox capitalism.  Every economy is hybrid and always has been.  Public and private, me and you, individual and group, market and government working hand in hand.  Abolish religion?  Nothing could be more religious than to attempt such a chauvinistic canard.  Live and let art and culture live.  Find a cure for human ignorance, cruelty, error, and incontinence?  Take a tylenol and call your mother in the morning.  There is no cure for poor choices.

No, none of these rank fantasies of the twentieth century -- perhaps humanity's worst ever -- will suffice at all.

Maybe we can hope progressives will learn, and quick, now that they are routed politically everywhere, that culture is where progress goes to hibernate during political winter.  That's where they find space and time to heal their sprains and bruises and blisters, catch up on their sleep, and change their views to something more adaptive.  It is also by way of culture, which is to say, not church and state alone in the sense of orthodox monarchy, nor a pure aestheto-scientific polity devoid of religion and government, but somewhat free peer sciences and arts working in a world where they don't control everything but can influence much, that true progress happens anyway.

How to rescue culture, art and science, all the sciences and all the arts, from the ditch they are now in, and restore their efficacy to lead progress?  The idols of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche are all worn out, but your professors, bless their meagre hearts, can't bring themselves to say so.  You're on your own.

What then?  Nothing?  Maybe; but that was also tried in the terrible twentieth.  Invented by, say, Machiavelli, the idea that there is no right but what might makes, that is, the complete self-rejection of all Western and non-Western world-historical progress -- the golden rule traditions first and foremost -- in hopes of breeding an emperor-golem redeemer in the true Romanist mold, partly by apotheosis and the rest by mesmerism, well that was also tried to the fullest about a hundred years ago exactly, turned up, if you will, to eleven.  No, nothing won't do either.

What about something?  Who proposed anything ever which wasn't nothing?  Well, Dante did, if we are talking Machiavelli; and it was Machiavelli's stark patricide that sent Dante to the boneyard, no more ethics, no more imagination, and certainly no more ethical imagination, in favor of Il Principe.  But Dante wasn't made to stand much longer, Machiavelli or no; cathedrals are no match for radio, police brutality, and Animal Farm rallies with beer, tobacco, and Caesar-salutes.

Lucky for us there was a witness to the wreck of the first major reform ever: Leonardo from Vinci, Machiavelli's old long-bearded gay co-worker, puffy hat and robe and all, with his roomful of pile upon pile of very scrutable notebooks and crazy like a fox.  He saw Machiavelli close up while he trashed the whole aspiration, the entire idea of right making might by which Europe dreamt and hoped to solve its fatal dysfunctions of endless war through infinite empire and get back, one could dream, to decency; to regain what had been demonized in service of war and lucre: humanity itself, its very nature, and indeed the interwoven nature of all life on earth.  Leonardo witnessed the assassination.

Then what?  Leonardo saw the next arrow flying fast at the true prince, the prince of the imagination, at its very breast, and he like every good body man whisked his employer to safety and we are very lucky he did.

He named the orphan heir to the throne Experience — Esperienza, from the Latin experientia immortalized by both Roger (1267) and Francis (1620) Bacon, unrelated British bookends of the Supersize Renaissance — which everyone has and is capable of loving.  He portraited its own maternal care, without weakness not even a hint of it, and its endurance even unto immortality.  He taught us the name, simple and truthful, the very same year his neighbor and fellow son-of-a-notary Vespucci named the Novus Mundus which was in return named for him.  All resonated with all; and it resonated not just for Europeans but all the continents (for example by comparison with the 1978 Truth Criterion Controversy aka The Two Whatevers).

Experience and experiment, the one true maestra, common mother of all the arts and all the sciences, means the culture in which progress can be truly born and live to see a future that is better.  Leonardo painted the portrait which we may use as a mirror for our better being.

There is no other mirror, not this time around, for Europe and its offspring and their neighbors, but this one will do.

But yes, benighted third millennium, gobble your gadgets a while longer if you think they still taste good.  When you wise up enough to spit out the electronic bit look in the mirror -- the real one -- and progress.  In every city, town, nation, and country, wherever you can read or translate this email and look at Leonardo's portrait of the woman on the balcony, you must, because there will be no other guide to lead you across the bridge you must traverse except this very one, experience, your own and others' as well.  There will be no other bridge.

For more details and to find travel companions search the internet for "is everyone a Leonardo," or go to Leonardo.info/is-everyone-a-leonardo and scroll down, or check @KenBurns microblog feed here<https://x.com/KenBurns/status/1882501532677284042?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet>.

Then discuss the Esperienza allegory hypothesis, which has never been discussed before: even if you hate it just be willing to talk a little about why, and listen a little to someone else even if they like it or hate it less or more than you do.  Realize too that Leonardo understood networks very well indeed, was an active part of many, and that his achievements must be viewed from a network perspective to make sense and to yield their full contribution to today's society, which is a network society, and to managing its crises, which are network crises.

If permission is what you seek, remember what Calvino wrote about "the novel as a net" and our age of computerized writing machines: "Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature....Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function."  Understand too that Il Principe's imprisonment and torture of human imagination applies to us today in equal measure and to the same extent, by nonlinear network dynamic, that we allow it to be imposed on Leonardo and all past history of dissent, reform, or checks and balances to power.  Does your institution, if you have one, permit the Esperienza allegory hypothesis?  Or if you use AI/GPT (something I do not), try asking it if the hypothesis is valid and if valid how significant, potentially, to the gathering Anthropocene web of crises.  Then rephrase and ask it again.  Compare its responses to a living human's.

Or as Leonardo himself advised both himself and us:  "Any one who spends one ducat may take the instrument; and he will not pay more than half a ducat as a premium to the inventor of the instrument and one grosso to the workman every year. I do not want sub-officials."  (He also wrote, incidentally, "Every instrument requires to be made by experience.")

And as Stephen Campbell, whose new "anti-biography" of Leonardo is due out next month, wrote of Giorgione's La Tempesta, that other unknowable masterpiece of pre-Inquisition European progress:

"The Tempest, then, is a work which originates not just within a 'learned' source, but within a broader social ideal of intellectual and personal cultivation centered on the act of contemplation, whether of books or of things, and on the ideal of secluded study which humanists often chose to represent as an experience of voluptas. One way of giving voluptas a moral foundation was by turning to the sober version of Epicureanism found in the poetry of Lucretius [de Rerum Natura], a text which was avidly studied by Pontano, Scala, Poliziano, Celio Calcagnini, Ermolao Barbaro, and Giambattista Pio - the leading lights of Italian humanism, in other words. Contemplative voluptas is the main thematic accent of the image, and also points to its original function: an image of contemplation to shape and direct the meditations of its owner [and by association his studiolo or intellectual salon]...."

Campbell's 2003 essay closes with an observation that may apply even more acutely to Leonardo's La Joconde, painted at practically the exact same moment circa 1506 as Giorgione's mystery-bridge landscape of the approaching change in weather:

"Already in 1516 the Synod of Florence had specifically condemned the reading of Lucretius on these very grounds. It was perhaps such scruples which, within a short time, would place the readability of Giorgione's painting in oblivion."

Therefore happy<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEO-LH2AFiY> new year, and may the devil take the hindmost!  :)

+++








-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org