Redlegs Masticate

On the Recent Supreme Court Decision on 2nd Amendment Rights

This is one of theose junctures where the liberals lose me.  Another confirmation that the Section 3 guys have taken over the country.  Digression:  When I was in high school, the classes were configured according to class rank. Section 1 was the top guys (the student body was all-male and Catholic, to my eternal chagrin). I started out in section 1, but I knew it couldn't last, with my work ethic.  The arrangement was by odds and evens for some reason. Section 3 was the next class, say, numbers 38 through 75 or so. Then you have 5 and 7 and 2, 4, 6, and 8 in that order.  Of course the Section 8 guys, the boys with the lowest grade-point averages, were the butt of many jokes due to this term also being employed in the US military for people with serious mental problems. Section 3 was the Avis brigade, they tried harder, the bulk being made up of apple polishers and other assorted wusses with a smattering of less neurotic types of course.  But to return to my subject here, I can't help but take note of a bunch of commentary which seems to confuse the status of dubious statistics on public safety with that of the Constitution.  All the "liberal" interpretation I have seen proceeds from a position that does violence to the actual wording in the second amendment.  To my mind, the wording about a "well-regulated militia" is meant as an umbrella term meant to cover other uses of firearms. This, in other words, is merely the most important reason the right to bear arms must not be infringed. The framers of the Constitution no doubt took into account the possibilities of hazard when they formulated the wording in the Second Amendment.  Judging by the commentary made by interested parties at the time, it would seem that these men believed that any hazard was trumped by the advantages of keeping arms.  No less a personalge than George Washington made his position known with admirable clarity:  "A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." The Founding Fathers were saying, then, that there is a clear right to own guns.  Maybe they were wrong in this stipulation.  But that is what the constitution is saying.  One of the correctable problems her it seems to me is that we have very loose gun control laws in this country. There is nothing in the constitutional wording that prohibits certain controls on gun ownership. Acknowledging the right to own guns could be seen as enouraging the view that more gun control is indicated, not less.  One could say, for example, that as long as one can own a gun, we should make every effort to see that this right is not abused.  The legal apparatus could make it a lot more difficult for anyone with a history of the misuse of firearms to procure such weapons.  Certain classes of weapons could be prohibited altogether.  It seems that what is really being argued is whether paternalism (in this case with a capital P) is justified in this instance or not.  This paternailsm is masked by a concern expressed in terms of public safety, and by straining the meaning, apparent with the slightest bit of digging into the historical record, that the framers intended.  Upon examining this record, it is implausible to maintain that the wording of the second amendment insists on a strict linkage between gun ownership and participation in a "militia", for example.  This wording is included in large part to buttress the basic Early American belief in the evils of a standing army.  From Elbridge Gerry, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the fifth Vice President of the United States:  "What, sir, is the use of a militia?  It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army."  Well, we left that conviction by the boards definitively 147 years ago. Nevertheless, the Constitution also stipulates that in the event of egregious government abuses of power, "it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it [the government]." "Altering" the government seems entirely feasible through the already constituted legislative process. "Abolishing" it is another matter entirely.  How could the people abolish a government without recourse to the right to bear arms? Answer me that one. Might that not also figure into the thinking of the writers of the Constitution?  The historical record is unequivocal on this point.  The framers knew that those who hold power are corruptible and strongly inclined to resist any attempt to reliquish this power. "Those who make reform impossible make revolution inevitable."  Look back, America, to our beginnings, where boldness was not looked at as a character flaw. I am one who really abhors any kind of violence.  I have never fired a gun.  But it is hard to imagine another way to provide the safeguards against tyranny necessary for individual autonomy.  The individual right to bear arms is the clearly intended meaning of the Second Amendment.

A Stirnerean Critique of Music

Looking at some writings on the psychology of music recently I managed to make some interesting new connections.  The text in question is by Leonard Meyer, whose Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) still seems eminently relevant today.  This text is referenced and evaluated by David Huron, a faculty member of Ohio State University, and who published some critical notes via the internet as part of his postgraduate class Music 829.  I want to focus on Meyer's notion of expectation or, seen from the opposite point of view, unpredictability.  From Huron's notes referencing Meyer:  "Uncertainty can be regarded as a type of 'ignorance' which brings about feelings of 'impotence' which, in turn, leads to 'apprehension and anxiety'. This in itself does not seem to be a promising avenue of exploration in music or any other of the seven arts in and of itself, but Meyer has something interesting to say concerning this state of affairs: "The inclusion of suspense arising out of uncertainty may, at first sight, appear to be an extension and amplification of the concept of arrest and inhibition of a tendency.  But when the matter is considered more carefully, it will be seen that every inhibition or delay creates uncertainty or suspense, if only briefly, because in the moment of delay we become aware of the possibility of alternative modes of communication [italics mine].  The difference is one of scale and duration, not of kind. Both arouse uncertainties and anxieties as to coming events."  One quickly recalls the attitude of Stirner as to the fixed idea and fixity as a general operative force in the human psyche which allows itself to be dominated by the old hierarchies.  Speaking of Bruno Bauer's philosophy of critique, he commends this focus on "criticizing and dissolving", but adds that such a critique can itself become reified and defeat its own purpose of freeing the individual from dogma:  "Let us therefore accept criticism's lesson to let no part of our property become stable, and to feel comfortable only in--dissolving it.  So if criticism says: You are man only when you are restlessly criticizing and dissolving! Then we say: Man I am without that, and I am I likewise; therefore I want only to be careful to secure my property to myself; and in order to secure it, I continually take it back into myself, annihilate in it every movement toward independence, and swallow it before it can fix itself and become a 'fixed idea' or a 'mania'."  Seen from this perspective, the yearning for certainty and completion Meyer attributes to the typical listener, who abhors "gapping" (hesitations or breaking-off of the flow of melody and/or rhythm) and ambiguity in a more general sense appears as a sign of what Stirner would call possessedness or enslavement to the strictures of the fixed idea.  We have now arrived at the crux of the matter, the issue of predictability.  In the course of his commentary on Meyer's ideas, Huron ventures into the daunting world of information theory:  "Information theory defines the quantity of information conveyed by a particular message as inversely proportional to the predictability of that message:  when a message is entirely certain (that is, its probability is 1) then the quantity of information conveyed is zero.  When a message is totally improbable (that is, its probability is zero), then to receive such a message would be to receive an infinite quantity of information."  Let us acknowledge at this point, in agreement with Meyer, that any message with a probability of exactly zero would be unintelligible and therefore without meaning.  But I wish to stress that any message which would approach a value of 1 would be stupendously uninteresting.  Meyer goes on to speak of the concept of organization:  "The better the psychological organization, the less likely is it that expectation will be aroused."  This seems to me to be a little off the mark.  One could perhaps better say, that the more standardized, the more familiar the psychological organization, as seen from within the system of cultural expectations in question, the less likely is it that expectation will be aroused.  

Religion and music have been intimately intertwined since the dawn of humankind.  One can, through such perspectives as I outline briefly here, perhaps gain insight into the true function of music, one which seems to be analogous to the function of the dream, that which keeps us asleep.  Even though it is alien to us, or perhaps because of this, predictability as marker for the infinite as evoked though art has given us comfort down through the ages.  When one beat follows another as one tick follows another on a clock, a set of expectations are put in place that transforms time as experienced as dynamic flux and replaces this with a notion of time as static and infinite.   We are taken far away from the here and now and elevated to the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus, Nirvana, cloud-cookoo-land.  We pay a high price for entertaining this comforting illusion--real, dynamic life begins to seem less real.  What if life as it is lived is the only thing we have?  

Can there be a resurgence of the political left?

We are seeing now the last stages of exhaustion of the neoconservative initiative of the last 14 year period. Their failure has been nothing short of spectacular, and large sections of the population are now in a position to understand Thomas Franks' thesis of a few years ago, articulated in his book What's the Matter with Kansas? wherein he postulated that the American people were diverted from their real affinities in the ideology of the Democratic party by a neoconservative movement that succeeded in fooling them as to their true intentions.  The real countenance is apparent to so many now; just as the conservative movement of the Puritan era overplayed its hand, so does this one and the result in both cases is its collapse.  The old project initiated by the stalwarts of the French Revolution is still waiting to be fulfilled; we have arrayed ourselves to militate unstintingly against arbitrary privilege, as they did.  How is this to be done?  Nowadays there are those who look to a neo-Marxist approach.  One is not looking forward to discussing Paolo Virno's "A Grammar of the Multitude" tomorrow night as an "Autonomedia" event takes place here in the neighborhood.  Virno is still looking to a stage supposedly behind and beneath the individual to ground his concept of "the multitude" which he differentiates from "the people", but it strikes me that what he is doing here is not much more than splitting hairs.  In his view, what we are generatim--that we are organisms which are based in the same mechanism of sight, hearing, tactile capability, etc.--takes precedence over individual experience.  At this juncture I am reminded of Alfred Kinsey's work with the gall wasp. The celebrated sexologist began his career as an entymologist, who collected close to one million specimens of this insect.  What stood out for him was that no two specimens were exactly alike, just like snowflakes.  It's the same mechanism, but the variations on its use and function are innumerable and significant. The old beliefs in the Platonic Forms die hard. What takes real courage is to leave abstraction behind, as those who broke from the hegemonic conceptual domination of the ideology of the Catholic Church in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, led by Abelard and Ockham, did. The old world of the corporeality of the Universal as embodied in Anselm's Proof of the Existence of God was in due course exposed as the utter sophistry that it is, and the implications were and are nothing short of staggering.  We, the human race, have yet to complete this project on a broad scale.  I reiterate my belief that the true revolution is at bottom a personal one; it's not economics, but psychology that drives my concept of transformation.  Reading: Realists and Nominalists by Meyrick H. Carré (1946).  

Now that the worst excesses of arbitrary Authority are in the process of being discredited in the minds of a larger and larger percentage of the population, one can only hope that the time is more propitious for alternative viewpoints to emerge.  It seems clear to me that it will take more than a rehashing of the old tenets of socialism to get the ball rolling.  Please join me, you have nothing to lose but your sanity.  

American Airlines' Return to Normalcy

Shades of Warren G. Harding, we are now confronted with the spectacle of the airlines' latest debacle, the one million MD-80s have been grounded for over 23 minutes now, and the populace's right to cheap and plentiful air travel is compromised. Over 2500 flights were cancelled Tuesday through Thursday this week, as 300 MD-80s turned out to be duds. You never know what that 1/4-inch extra gap in the plastic cinctures on those wiring harnesses can lead to, maybe the end of civilization as we know it or at least extra creaking in the cargo bay. "Normalcy", or normality as it was known before the most corrupt president in US history changed our precious lexicon forever, is definitely on the horizon, namely, the prospect of thousands, or is it millions, of flights daily between all those cities around the world. Normalcy, where the air traffic is so thick that near-misses are the rule rather than the exception, guided by the intrepid but incredibly overworked staff that was gutted way back in 1981 in the worst labor debacle since the passage of the Taft-Hartley labor laws in 1947, where untold quantities of high-octane fuel are consumed in a veritable frenzy of 600 mph travel. The new normal, the old normal, you can get used to anything if it goes on long enough, said Andy Warhol when Billy Name moved into the bathroom at the Factory and stayed there for a year. Frank Borman has moved into the bathroom of the American psyche and has stayed there for 37 years now. Eastern Airlines is gone, but Frank's spirit lives on.

Specifications for Boeing MD-80 (service incept 1980; ceased production 1999)

The Great Divide

The focus really came together in 1863 with Manet's Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe. Certainly before that artists had used approaches in which the desire to unsettle rather than salve was a major component, but in this picture the impulse reached a new level of intensity and the art world and the world has never been the same. At this juncture the question of hostility comes to the fore. "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the mind of man." "Surrealism has no intention of attracting or pleasing the spectator; on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which it is at war." The well-defended card-carrying member of society will at this point make recourse to attitudes which call into question the dispositional dynamics of any person who might hew to such a theory. These people are just expressing their general hositlity to the human race, it would be said. They are mere malcontents of the most petty variety, they are, in short, misanthropes. What's so bad about feeling good? This is not unconditional positive regard, is it? But doesn't it depend on just what one is attacking? No doubt there are ambiguities here. One can honestly believe that one is merely attacking the personality structures which one has definitively identified as evidence of sickness, of unnecessary limitation, while in reality one is just being negative in a more general and base sense. One could then be led to ask: Is hostility ever justified? To ask the early modernists of the Dada persuasion, one gets the impression from the voluminous writings by these intemperate souls that the rejoinder would be along the lines of "Is lack of hostility ever justified?" For the hostility they expressed did not exclude their own selves as objects. "What is the world? What am I? Don't know, don't know. don't know..."

Long ago I found a place in my psyche where I could embrace life without the spectre of negativity coming into the picture even the slightest bit. But eventually the incessant dialectic of thought led me to reconsider the virtues of hostility. Such human phenomena as National Socialism or the Chinese Cultural Revolution cannot be accepted, much less embraced. These phenomena have individual proveniences. This fact alone leads me to believe that hostility to tyranny and madness, individual and colliective, is not only justified, but indispensable. There are forces in the the human psyche that throught the ages have been grossly misapprehended, we justify them as something radically different from their real meaning. The capacity for self-delusion is almost impossible to overestimate. And so the great divide persists. For those who can't find a way to embrace the Critique, the challenge of artistic modernism is ultimately a burden. They can't find the underlying message of liberation under the seemingly forbidding exterior. At least one is able to identify who is potientially receptive to change and who isn't by recourse to an examination of one's attitudes on this question. And in the final analysis, one moves beyond antipathy to a third state, where the hated object disappears and where the real triumph over tyranny is located. As the surrealists understood, the Great Unmasking is the most important task of our time. But I insist the ultimate goal is affirmative; affirmative of Eros, of the life force without the nightmare of history overshadowing our fragile dreams of delight.

Grease Melancholy for Ruffle Navy

The landing gear genotype was full. Parallel regress won't excise a single gunner ditty bag; Geneva fingering is nevertheless prohibited. My patriarch grew howdy but extraneous cool candy, not confirmatory despite shale droppings irrespective of any hard-shell Kremlin paddle. Fifty schoolmasters can't poke a rotative, spurious lobe, but goat childbearing breeches aren't rendered hectic in any lay figure. Monk right dominance builds ruffle rival on the remaining expressway, across the prong which signifies seduction. International rheumatic eczema prosecutes cross-legged schoomen, jelly grounding being diuretic in these circumstances. Independent empathy wrinkes the beaver that watches from afar, a veritable lowboy hypodermic enigma. Moonshine, playful curlew of skywriting stroboscopes, spews lentil epithets in performance of diurnal ideals. But microphotographs wax idiotic while gawky emblems palatalize promiscuous humor.

The Establishment

London nightclub, which opened Oct 5, 1961. It was here that Peter Cook, the redoubtable wit and all-around social gadfly who loved to destroy upper-class twits and other unfortunate individuals with incomparable verbal barbs, held court through the swinging sixties. I just found an old LP that documents some of the material performed on stage there, "London's first comedy satire club". Included in the performing cast is Eleanor Bron, who went on, two years after appearing on this record, to star in the Beatles movie Help!. Cook himself does not appear as a performer, but does receive writing credit. Selections include The Queen, Window on the World, The Balloon, Crime Report, Potatoes-Potatoes, Consent and Advise, Lodgings, He and She, and Sports Report. Suffice it to say that the humor falls into the irreverent category and then some. I have to admit I'm an Eleanor Bron fanatic. "I find her...fantastically attractive...", as George Spigott, A.K.A. The Devil, says to her husband, played by the cuddly Dudley Moore, in the cult classic Bedazzled (1967), made into an appallingly wretched remake by Harold Ramis around eight years ago, I think it was. Half an hour later Moore's character finds her in the bathtub with Spigott, and it was time to blow the raspberry. But I am making a miniscule digression, the subject isn't Bedazzled, but The Establishment, which of course meant "Anti-Establishment" in Cookese. It wouldn't be antidisestablishmentarianism, now would it? Merely disestablishmentarianism, I would venture to assert. The selections on this disc I alluded to above, the aforementioned "Peter Cook Presents The Establishment", are, in fact, funny. I think my favorite is "He and She", strongly reminiscent of the episode in Bedazzled in which hapless Dudley Moore attempts to seduce Eleanor Bron in his bohemian intellectual's lodgings. "Just let the music wash over you..." "Yes, Yes! Why must everyone be so afraid to open up to the possibilities of life? I want to live!" and when he tries to kiss her, immediately after she utters these highly suggestive words, she begins to shout "Rape! Rape!" and it's time to blow the raspberry again. Spigott: "Stanley, I have therse words of advice for you. If you can listen to her till four o'clock in the morning, no matter what rubbish she's spouting, you're in." Except they never get even that far in the sketch on the record. It's really rather sad, ultimately. That famous English reserve more obstacle than boon.

Unfortunately, Cook peaked early in his career, and by 1973 he was blowing performances left and right by being too stewed to remember his lines. Maybe it was too much exposure to Brenda Vaccaro. Maybe it was his inherent contradictions, as Jonathan Miller believed. A clue to some of these might be found in his portrayal of the rock star in Bedazzled where he takes the spotlight only to intone, "Go away...you fill me with intertia."

"Peter Cook Presents The Establishment with the Original London Company" (1963), Riverside Records RM 850, produced by Bill Grauer Productions, 235 West 46th St., New York 36, New York.

What Is Music?

Certain reactions to my..."sonic art"? shall I call it?...move me to reexamine this basic question in a public forum. Recently I came across a quote written about an electronic music composer who is still active, as far as I know; his name is Akos Rozmann. The quote is as follows: "These works [the 'Impulsioni'] show Rozmann to have a srong sense of structure and narrative fantasy where conventional musical criteria are almost beside the point." What are these "conventional musical criteria"? This question is answered by framing music theory in a form friendly to its psychological dimension, it seems to me. Music as stimulus for psychological motion, music as a creator of expectancies; if I do a one four five progression in a blues framework, you can bet your bottom dollar one comes after five as five comes after four. Music soothes the savage breast, it humanizes us, it takes us out of our immediate environment to place us in a world of dreams and reverie. All this is rather vague. Such tendencies in the consideration of music make me think of the more unfortunate side of conventional musical experience, which is illustrated, for example, by the phenomenon of eremiophobia, the fear of stillness, of quiet. To combat this dreaded vacuum we have "music to watch girls by", "music for meditation", "music to convince you everything is OK", etc. So: "conventional musical criteria" seen from this perspective encompass a sense of reassurance that God is in his heaven and everything is in order in each of our little private universes. Is this really what you want? I smell the cachet of illusion in this formulation. I feel I am doing the listener a disservice if I create sound that carries out such a function. Conventional musical critieria must almost be beside the point in order to open up the windows that might let some fresh air into our habit-frozen experiences. Music and habituation theory, music as both cause and symptom of dread habituation, getting used to regarding things in a certain way. No doubt some habituation is necessary, but it can't be true that it all is. What aspect of habituation can we fruitfully jettison? I have been choosing a musical way to address this question this last year especially.

More Utter Madness

A new collection of organizized sound. (Organized?) The title? Instead Melt Feedback in Drip-Coffee Merger. Available through CD Baby. The link is in the sidebar.

There's a lot I could say about the "music" I'm making now. Some of it is already here, in posts to Redlegs Masticate I've put up recently. But sometimes it's better to say little and stop trying to explain everything all the time. I will say this much. Music becomes a habit like so many others. Syntax--the arrangement of the army. The Modernist preoccupation with habit and how to get underneath it, I mean really underneath it, of course in order to explode it for everyone for all time, but most of all for oneself, was never something one could call a popular pursuit. And now it's even in disrepute among the artist class. That seems wrong to me. [Echo on] So come now with us...where we can take a spiritual flight--and reach that plateau of ecstasy where we can take off our clothes

The Outsider

Lee Siegel, the notorious former blogger and literary critic, has written a review of Peter Gay's Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond. Siegel, in his Dec 30, 2007 New York Times Book Review article, takes a postmodern position in mounting his case in critiquing this book. "He writes in his introductory chapter that the idea of modernists as 'scofflaws or mavericks massed against the solid verities of time-honored high culture and, usually, Christian faith' is one of the avant-garde's 'cherished fairy tales'. The Impressionists, for instance, didn't care a whit about outraging official culture, or Christianity. But because Gay needs the 'lure of heresy' to thematically structure his book, he often ends up not just reinforcing the caricature of modernists as unhappy outsiders and elitist malcontents, but inflating it."

This passage, above all else, demonstrates just how deep the misconceptions still are about the modernist impulse. To begin with, I believe it is helpful to keep in mind that modernism was necessarily imperfectly embodied in those who seek its treasures. Consequently, its practitioners were often the occupiers of a sort of nether zone between bourgeois culture and that transcendent object they pursued. Isn't it always like this? The obvious parallel is with religion. Precepts are formulated, but it's a Herculean task to really embody them. To get to a place where one isn't really trying any more to embody such system of bloodless precepts is part of the attainment of wisdom. But the precept remains to entice us.

Siegel accuses Gay of myriad factual misstatements. But even in the small space of the quotation I cited above, Siegel makes a rather serious factual error himself. He stated that "the Impressionists didn't care a whit about outraging official culture"; there are many Impressionist painters that this could be said to be true for, but there is one glaring exception: Edouard Manet, especially in his early maturity. His Dejeuner sur L'Herbe was the scandal of Paris in 1863, rejected by the official salon for its frank sexuality, as was its successor, the equally infamous Olympia. The Dejeuner sur l'Herbe is nothing less than the opening salvo of Modernism itself, the Modernism that became the Surrealist impulse and not that of Le Corbusier or van der Rohe. This is part of the problem--that there are many modernisms, as both Siegel and Gay acknowledge. I see only two main streams of it, the Futurist and the Surrealist. It is my self-appointed task to argue that it is possible to separate the wheat from the chaff in regard to the elucidation of this thorny problem, a difficult but highly rewarding task.

I wish to speak a little more about the Dejeuner sur L'Herbe. If it is the veritable origin of Modernism, as the painter Max Ernst and so many others believed, one would do well to examine its characteristics. What was it that shocked the bourgeoisie so? A nude, one that was taken out of its usual context, the lofty realms of the myth of the bird in her gilded cage, to be placed on a grass lawn, having a picnic. But above all it is her regard of the imagined spectator that so unsettled the staid art patrons of Paris. The same thing happened with Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase fifty years later. "A nude is to be respected", Duchamp said in an interview decades after the scandal that rocked the Armory Show in 1913, and one descending a staircase was still, in those rarified days, a sign of disrespect. He had her "coming down", an act which would surely bring about her fall from grace. Manet and Duchamp did not respect the Nude. Of course this amounted to disrespecting the Academy, and the ideals they defended, above all.

Siegel criticizes Gay for maintaining that the Modernists wished to maintain a distinction between high and low art, by insisting that many of these painters incorporated lowly elements such as newspaper clippings into their paintings. But it was just that, after all--incorporation of lowly elements into high art. Later, there were the readymades, which are still mostly misunderstood today. These objects were not art, high or low. Despite what feeble-minded commentators such as Rhonda Roland Shearer maintain, Duchamp intended these objects to stick in the craw of the onlooker, to confound his ability to incorporate them into the accepted canons of taste. And it succeeded spectacularly. He cites Gay for asserting that Dada was negative. While it's true that there was another branch of Dada that one could better describe as whimsical than explosively negative, it was its negativity that precipitated the crisis that was to find partial resolution in Surrealism. The modernists were not so much interested in democratizing art as using this plebeian material as a weapon to demoralize the upper bourgeoisie, while remaining "occult" and esoteric in their sensibilities. Postmodernism has a far different agenda, more radical in a sense, in that they refuse to grant legitimacy to this esoteric way of regarding living as such. There is really no such thing as a separation from the hoi polloi according to this viewpoint. And this is why modernism is getting a second look, forty-five years after its apparent death at the hands of Fluxus and Pop. There is something fundamentally wrong with the bourgeois outlook that cannot be reformed or adjusted to allow for a less rigid interpretation. "Everything tells us a break is needed" as the Inventor of Gratuitous Time so memorably puts it.

Siegel is more on target when he writes of Gay's "bewildering" advocacy for the compatibility of Modernism and political liberalism. Gay goes so far as to assert that liberalism is a "fundamental principle" of modernism. Once again we are at the mercy of a definition so elastic that discussion almost necessarily degenerates into incoherence, but it really is possible to get a handle on even this elusive facet of modernism. Back in 1900 it was still possible to think in terms of an individualism that could not brook the dilution that liberalism demanded of it. Earlier in his essay Siegel, in writing about misconceptions surrounding Gauguin's fleeing to Tahiti, he writes of a society "that had sacrificed Gauguin to the bottom line running just underneath bourgeois rhetoric about compassion and decency." That this feature is bound up with the attitudes which inform those inflicted with the delusion of political liberalism is at best dimly appreciated by its practitioners. There is the Sunday side of liberalism, which champions the individual and his prerogatives, and there is the underlying reality, where, through the State, it relegates the individual to a mold that Modernists like Manet must have found intolerable. You are free, just so long as you behave and are made of the right stuff. It was this that the purest strain of Modernism was rebelling against, and not for the thrill of it. It was an existential necessity, without which attainment of liberation was impossible.

Siegel finishes his essay with a meditation on subjectivity. Indeed, this is the hallmark of Modernism, and Siegel is right to call for a distinction between the less nuanced, "unchecked" attitude of the Romantics and the "unselfish inwardness" which, I believe it could be argued, was a defining feature of the Modern experience. But now we are in the territory of 19th century German philosophy, specifically, that of the Young Hegelians, whose leader, Bruno Bauer, was interested in just this evolutionary problem. The Ego is Hegel's true Absolute, he thought, but only after it purged itself of all the petty particularisms it so easily slips into. More specifically, Bauer advocated a liberated form of individuality which subordinates the accumulation of wealth and other forms of petty power in favor of a freely chosen identification with the progressive and revolutionary thrust of the historical process as a whole. Of course, such a transformation is not limited to politics but suffuses all social relations. The shortcomings of this model became apparent in the years immediately following Bauer's formulation of this docrtrine, but a less restrictive, less "religious" formulation was achieved soon afterward, in which identification was to come not with the historical process, which inevitably leads to the profoundly anti-individualist spectre of instrumentalism, but with something more elusive, a "creative Nothing" that dissolved infantile attachments to self-aggrandizement in the name of personal betterment. Be a better person, not primarily for your brothers, but for yourself, and your brothers will be better off as a result. This is the essence of modernism as I see it.