Michael Jamison: enigmatic

Venture Capital Model

Sat, 12 Apr 2003 18:00:28 GMT

When we see presentations (needless to say, a daily occurence), we are looking for a many things:

a good idea and
a team that can convince us of its ability to execute on the idea;
an interestingly big market;
a hard technical problem and the right engineers to solve it;
a nice revenue model with a defendable sales channel.

We are not looking for brilliance in PowerPoint design.

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 21:48:20 GMT

In the Western view, the conferring of "grace" is an act of God, granted to individual human beings either because the merit it (Pelagius) or because God in His inscrutable wisdom has so ordained (Augustine). In the Eastern view, however, "grace" is a permanent state, implied in the act of creation itself and potentially available to any human being merely by virtue of having been created. In this view, the way the believer approaches God is through the consciousness of his own spiritual personality and by studying the example of Christ in order to cope better with the dangers that await him on his journey through life. (Figes)

Fri, 24 May 2002 18:59:43 GMT

"The events of 1989 mark a decisive shift in the Zeitgeist: History has zigged or zagged. No simple lesson follows, but it is clear that radicalism and the utopian spirit that sustains it have ceased to be major political or even intellectual forces." --Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia

In Praise of Balance

Sat, 18 May 2002 21:37:52 GMT

by Peter Berkowitz, Contributing Editor, The New Republic Online

Review of The Ship of State: Statecraft and Politics from Ancient Greece to Democratic America, Norma Thompson, Yale University Press

"Since our opinions, even under the best circumstances, tend to embrace only a portion of the truth, and because opposing opinions rarely turn out to be entirely wrong, it is crucial to supplement our opinions with alternative points of view."

" In politics (as Mill maintains in Considerations on Representative Government), the liberal way requires an appreciation of the need to accommodate both the party of permanence and order and the party of progress and freedom, though the liberal argument for balance in politics prizes permanence and order for the contribution that they make to progress and freedom, and not for themselves or for the sake of any other human goods that they might promote."

" . . . liberalism, in the guise of reason and fairness, tilts us in our undertakings toward its favored good, freedom, so democracy, under the same guise, inclines us to embrace its highest ideal, which is equality, not only in those spheres where justice demands it but also in those where justice does not and perhaps should not."

" . . . [Thompson's] central substantive claim that ancients and moderns are impressively united in agreement that success for a political regime as well as for an individual depends upon a weaving of masculine and feminine propensities . . . "

" [Aristotle's] understanding of moral virtue--according to which the mean or standard for right conduct is the 'mean relative to us,' the standard relative to the concrete individual and the particular circumstances in which he must act . . . by expounding the idea of an objective standard that is nevertheless highly sensitive to context, by providing a kind of anti-formula formula for moral virtue--excellence consists in doing the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reason--Aristotle provides an understanding of ethics that surpasses in insight and suitability the childish relativism and the arid rationalism into which today's democratic theorists constantly slip."

"When a certain feminine modesty is abandoned as a guiding moral and political principle, when "all the decent drapery of life is to be torn off," the complexities and the depths of human nature are not revealed but obscured, for it is part of our nature to make laws, to observe social conventions, and to embody wise restraints in tradition."

"Mary Shelley depicts in Frankenstein the knowledge-seeking and world- mastering impulses, inimical to every harmonization, embedded in the spirit of Enlightenment. Victor Frankenstein's exploitation of science to play God not only produces a monster cut off from human ties and touch, but also leads to the destruction of his own domestic tranquillity."

"According to Tocqueville, the powerful social force that modern democracy brings to the fore, in the name of equality, is a relentless drive to uniformity in thought and conduct. . . . While men were governed by the calculating principle of 'self-interest rightly understood,' women's education revolved around virtue and self-discipline. Women, who stayed at home out of the public sphere, were the guardians of mores, of the habits of heart and mind on which decent conduct, in private life as well as in public life, depended."

"The instability or contradiction in domestic relations that Tocqueville's analysis brought to light--democracy in America called upon women to play a role that was inconsistent with the equality and openness to which democracy was devoted . . . "

" . . . it is by no means obvious that we have found an alternative way to ensure the preservation and the transmission of the habits of heart on which democracy depends."

" . . . the essence of statecraft is not rhetoric but judgment or prudence, which Burke called "the god of this lower world." Judgment is grounded in experience of human affairs and knowledge of human nature. To get things done requires judgment, including judgments about rhetoric, about what must be said and how it must be said in order to get things done. For the sake of democracy and for the sake of justice, rhetoric, which is as useful to the vicious despot and conniving demagogue as it is to the enlightened statesman, must remain judgment's handmaiden."

" [Thompson:] 'What aspects of human nature, when recognized and kept in some basic form of balance, provide the strongest foundations for the agreements and arrangements that a flourishing political community needs?' To pursue such an investigation would force into the open important issues . . . "

" . . . manly or assertive qualities--those propensities that cluster around courage, including hard- headedness and hard-heartedness--and those that have been traditionally thought of as female or caregiving qualities--those that cluster around gentleness, including compassion and the tender sentiments."

"Balance in the human spirit, which must not be mistaken for ambivalence or splitting the difference or playing both sides against the middle, is neither bland nor bourgeois nor boring. It is not a resigned concession to partiality, but a bold gamble on wholeness. It is not the midway point between virtue and vice, but an artful arrangement of virtues that enables them to supplement and to strengthen rather than to subvert each other. Since it involves an openness to the variety of human passions and possibilities, balance is a liberal imperative. Since courage without gentleness is destructive and gentleness without courage is defenseless, balance is a human good. Since balance is, for men and for women, not only an extreme but also a perfection, it is genuinely a thing of beauty to behold."

All That You Know Not to Be Is Utterly Real, Part I

Wed, 08 May 2002 22:28:11 GMT

by Curtis White

[Review and Criticism of The Western Canon by Harold Bloom]

" . . . the question 'of what does the greatness of the great works consist?' is exactly the right question . . . we all should try, to understand what it is that makes for the greatness of the great . . ."

[re The Western Canon]

"Bloom has taken far less care than he ought to make important discriminations about the thought of deconstruction or of feminism or postmodernism. Rather, he lumps them into one monstrous and threatening whole. . . called variously the School of Resentment or simply . . . cheerleaders. He also strongly implies. . . that we are in a moment of crisis and theorists, feminists, and multiculturalists are to blame. He also simplifies and misrepresents crucial ideas, like the Death of the Author [which] was a way of showing, what any artist knows, that the sublimely unified self of Romantic genius was always contaminated by that which was not-self . . . "

"[Derrida's] deconstructive criticism 'had no other motive than discovering and eliciting the incoherences of a text." . . . Anyone who has taken the trouble to understand Derrida will tell you that this putative incoherence was the discovery that the possibility for the Western metaphysics of presence was dependent on its impossibility, an insight that Derrida shared with Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Buddhist philosopher of sunyata, Nagarjuna, who wrote that being was emptiness and that emptiness was empty too."

"Bloom . . . does make a good faith effort to account for the greatness of the great . . . I would like to follow his logic on two principle concepts that form the bedrock of his defense of the canon: the 'anxiety of influence' and the 'uncanny.'"

" . . . influence of the work of the past becomes . . . a competition, for the writers of the present.

For the would-be canonical writers experience anxiety not only about their relationship to the talents and the works of the past but also about their own mortality. Thus, to join the canon means to compete not only with the past but also with the present in a drive for the qualified immortality of joining the canon and thereby joining communal memory.

The principal means through which writers win their . . . struggle with the past and win out over the fear of their own mortality is through 'originality,' what the reader experiences as the 'uncanny.'"

"On the other side, the reader's side, reading, for Bloom, is the 'proper use of one's solitude,' a 'solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's mortality.' In How to Read and Why, Bloom writes,

Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

" . . . Bloom's aesthetic of loneliness allows very little for art's 'truth' function."

[Discussion and Criticism]

" . . . Adorno in particular liked to point out, art needs criticism (which was really, for him, another word for philosophy) in order to complete the fullness of its social as well as its artistic intentions. (Adorno: 'Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy.')"

"Shklovsky wrote, 'If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. . . . Automization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.' [Shklovsky and Heidegger]sought to oppose poetry to prose for the purpose of the return of perception, for the refreshing of the language that captures perception, and ultimately for the clarifying of our very humanity."

"Shklovsky wrote, 'And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.'"

"This restoration of those capacities that are most innately human is accomplished through "enstrangement" [which] seeks to emancipate the work from the leaden forms of the past by describing things as if seen for the first time, by telling stories from unusual points of view, or by placing things out of context. Most broadly, enstrangement is at work whenever an image leads us 'to a 'vision' of this object rather than a mere 'recognition.' ' "

" . . . unlike Harold Bloom's account, the artistic, social and human motivations for artist and audience are shared and consequential. We are not talking about [a competition]whose triumph over tradition is its own hollow thrill of victory, but a triumph whose purpose is the generalization for both reader and writer of the aesthetic experience understood as the quintessence of human experience. As for the proponents of criticism on the race-class-gender axis . . . Shklovsky's lesson is simple: the art of enstrangement itself is the most consequential social act. It is what art has to give, without apology, to the social."

"Shklovsky also calls forcefully to our attention the importance of 'complexity' and 'difficulty.' Why, one might ask, is the greatness of a work often tied to its complexity? . . . The difference is that a Beethoven will test the limits of the diatonic, or work against the expectations of the diatonic for dramatic effect, or even leave that confine for brief and startling moments. . . . it seems to be telling us something both truer and more complete about the world in which we live. It is more adequate to a sophisticated sense of the real . . . "

"Shklovsky pushes this understanding of complexity by introducing the aesthetic force of 'difficulty.' . . . difficulty is also about the risk of moving outside of the familiar . . . outside of what Derrida likes to call our 'closure.' The virtue of the difficult, or what we often call the "experimental," is that it keeps the necessary stability of our "closure" (which we surely need in order to share a common culture and live together in it), but it keeps that closure from becoming something deadening. The problem that art helps us face, and great art helps us face best, is the problem of creating social stability without creating a state of administered conformity. In other words, art helps us to think what it would mean to live together as a whole and yet be fully human as individuals. In art, we speak of this dialectic as the relationship between tradition and innovation."

Japan’s Gross National Cool

Fri, 03 May 2002 21:27:59 GMT

. . . Japan’s global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one.

" . . . Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan’s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower."

"Its cultural sway is not quite like that of American culture abroad, which, even in its basest forms, tends to reflect certain common values—at the very least, American-style capitalism and individualism. Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with 'Super Flat' art, 'devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.' 'We don’t have any religion,' painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. 'We just need the big power of entertainment.'"

But gradually, over the course of an otherwise dismal decade, Japan has been perfecting the art of transmitting certain kinds of mass culture—a technique that has contributed mightily to U.S. hegemony around the world. If Japan sorts out its economic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanese become secure in asserting their own values and traditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumed at the turn of the 19th century, when it simultaneously sought to engage the West and to become a military and cultural power on its own terms."

"Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in a global era that has many countries nervous about cultural erosion."

" . . . a constellation of factors distinct from the economy and its woes has kept yen flowing to the pop industries and other cultural media that Japan projects around the world so effectively: demographics that favor youth and their whims, a reliable demand for luxury goods, and a reputation for cutting-edge technology."

"A generation of declining birthrates has filled Tokyo with one-child families. In scarcity, there is power. Not political power, not yet anyway, but consumer power, lots of it."

"Japan’s history of remarkable revivals suggests that the outcome of that transformation is more likely to be rebirth than ruin. Standing astride channels of communication, Japan already possesses a vast reserve of potential soft power. And with the cultural reach of a superpower already in place, it’s hard to imagine that Japan will be content to remain so much medium and so little message."

Re: Postmodern Criticism

Tue, 30 Apr 2002 17:29:01 GMT

"But an appeal to the "reasonable" ignores what's most important about POMO analysis. POMO tells us that all understanding is interpretive, that other interpretations are possible, and that our interpretation seems right not because it is right but because it's our interpretation. "

"It seems like we have two choices: we fall into an indecisive relativism that says that all views are equally valid or we sprain our brains trying to see how there could be a way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. To say that there's a "reasonable way" to do so seems to me to miss the point because it assumes the very thing that we should be stubbing our toes trying to think through."

"On the other foot (er, hand), I personally think it's a mistake to assume that we have to choose among fundamental interpretations. We don't get to fly above all interpretations, including our own, picking and choosing among them. We are our stance in the world, a stance given to us by history, culture, language and accident. So, the lesson I take from POMO is that absolutism is a mistake, that humility is warranted, and that we always have to decide among uncertain choices that are themselves delivered by the accident of history."

"So, how do we decide whether the post-feminist-meta- Marx-pre-Freudian interpretation of the Book of Job is worth our time? I don't think POMO actually helps us. It's better at freeing up creative interpretations that challenge the status quo than at enabling us to choose among those interpretations. My guess is that such decisions actually come after the fact: we're inspired/energized/heartened by the critique we just read and only afterwards do we try to "justify" why that critique is worthy of belief. Belief is the last in the series. And it's the least interesting. More important: Does it excite you? Does it reveal the world in a way that matters? Does it set the hairs on your neck on edge? Does it give you a chill? "

"Could any lesson of the Web be clearer? Belief is nice, but it's not why 500 million of us are here dishing the dirt" [via JOHO]

Trust is the first casualty of the cult of transparency

Sat, 27 Apr 2002 21:04:50 GMT

"SOCRATES did not want his words to go fatherless into the world, transcribed on to tablets or books that could circulate without their author's authentication. So he talked with others on the streets of Athens, but wrote and published nothing. The problems to which Socrates pointed are acute in an age of recirculated "news", public relations, global gossip and internet publication. How can we tell which claims and counter-claims are trustworthy when so much information swirls around us?"

"It seems that openness and transparency are set to replace traditions of secrecy and deference. Yet this enthusiasm for more openness has done little to build public trust. If anything, trust has receded as transparency has advanced."

"So it is not surprising that public distrust has grown in the very years in which openness and transparency have been so avidly pursued. Transparency destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception and deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust. If we want to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies, rather than secrecy."

"Furthermore, transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed. It may add to uncertainty rather than to trust. Transparency can even encourage people to be less honest, so increasing deception and reducing reasons for trust."

"Global transparency and complete openness are not the best ways to build or restore trust. We place and refuse trust not because we have torrents of information, but because we can trace specific information to particular sources we can check."

"Socrates's misgivings are not obsolete today. It is very easy to imagine that, in a world where information travels like quicksilver, trust can do the same. It cannot. Placing trust is as demanding today as it was in Athens."

The Angry People

Wed, 24 Apr 2002 22:35:53 GMT

"What are the angry people angry about? . . . it seems to be about traditional values. . . . what really seems to bother them is the loss of certainty; they want to return to a simpler time, one without that disturbing modern mix of people and ideas."

" . . . there turns out to be a lot of irrational anger lurking just below the surface of politics as usual. The difference is that here the angry people are already running the country."

Reading and Revelation

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 22:30:17 GMT

" . . . the journey begins to matter more than the arrival . . . there are always additional choices to be made, if one's life is to remain interesting."

"The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading struck me with the force of a revelation. . . . It offered an escape route, however temporary, from . . . the speeded- up, mechanized, money-obsessed existence that had somehow become our collective daily life."

" . . . I had purposely constructed for myself a life that was marginal to and therefore shielded from the clamoring demands of the marketplace. Well, 'purposely' may not be the right word . . . "

"Rereading is certainly both, as I was to discover. You cannot reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other things, a mirror. Wherever you look in that novel or poem or essay, you will find a little reflected face peering out at you -- the face of your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when you first read the book. So the material that wells up out of this rereading feels very private, very specific to you. But as you engage in this rereading, you can sense that there are at least two readers, the older one and the younger one. You know there are two of you because you can feel them responding differently to the book. Differently, but not entirely differently: There is a core of experience shared by your two selves (perhaps there are even more than two, if you include all the people you were in the years between the two readings). And this awareness of the separate readers within you makes you appreciate the essential constancy of the literary work, even in the face of your own alterations over time, so that you begin to realize how all the different readings by different people might nonetheless have a great deal in common."

Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don't Go There!

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 22:04:03 GMT

"That familiar interjection 'whatever' says a lot about the state of mind of college students today. So do the catch phrases 'no problem,' 'not even' and 'don't go there.'"

"Indeed, the reluctance of today's students to engage in impassioned debate can be seen as a byproduct of a philosophical relativism, fostered by theories that gained ascendance in academia in the last two decades and that have seeped into the broader culture. While deconstruction promoted the indeterminacy of texts, the broader principle of subjectivity has been embraced by everyone from biographers (like Edmund Morris, whose biography of President Ronald Reagan mixed fact and fiction) to scholars (who have inserted personal testimony in their work to underscore their own biases). Because subjectivity enshrines ideas that are partial and fragmentary by definition, it tends to preclude searches for larger, overarching truths, thereby undermining a strong culture of contestation."

"At the same time, multiculturalism and identity politics were questioning the very existence of objective truths and a single historical reality. As the historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob observed in their book, 'Telling the Truth About History,' radical multiculturalists celebrated 'the virtues of fragmentation,' arguing that 'since all history has a political — often a propaganda — function, it is time for each group to rewrite history from its own perspective and thereby reaffirm its own past.'"

" . . . the legacy of multiculturalism and identity politics remains potent on college campuses. On one hand, it has made students more accepting of individuals different from themselves, more tolerant of other races, religions and sexual orientations. But this tolerance of other people also seems to have resulted in a reluctance to engage in the sort of impassioned argumentation that many baby boomers remember from their college days. 'It's as though there's no distinction between the person and the argument, as though to criticize an argument would be injurious to the person'"

"Outside the classroom, it's a mindset ratified by the PLUR ('Peace, Love, Unity and Respect') T-shirts worn by ravers (whose drug of choice is Ecstasy, which induces warm, fuzzy feelings of communion)."

"At the same time, the diminished debate syndrome mirrors the irony-suffused sensibility of many millennial-era students. Irony, after all, represents a form of detachment; like the knee-jerk acceptance of the positions of others, it's a defensive mode that enables one to avoid commitment and stand above the fray."

"What are the consequences of students' growing reluctance to debate? Though it represents a welcome departure from the polarized mudslinging of the 90's culture wars, it also represents a failure to fully engage with the world, a failure to test one's convictions against the logic and passions of others. It suggests a closing off of the possibilities of growth and transformation and a repudiation of the process of consensus building. 'It doesn't bode well for democratic practice in this country . . . To keep democracy vital, it's important that students learn to integrate debate into their lives and see it modeled for them, in a productive way, when they're in school.'"

US Political History

Fri, 12 Apr 2002 22:22:04 GMT

The New Left of the '60's was replaced after the dream was dead by 1989 by Identity politics. Assimilation was the enemy now, the domestic version of US imperialism. [The Irish] are shown by the author to be jockeying for a place in the charts of victimhood. ... [more]