Map the intellectual territory

Barthes repeatedly compared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it; his intellectual art more openly a performance, like that of the other great antisystematizers. For Barthes, as for Nietzsche, the point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached.

Writing is Barthe's perennial subject — indeed, perhaps no one since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly, as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is.

Writing itself

Barthe’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.

Barthes was endeavor was the quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind.

Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay — he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world wars in the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise — a perfected version of the NRFs house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes's less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings — most of them from the 1960s — are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes's work extracting superb bits — epigrams, maxims — to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes's strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas — their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.

Continent, city, country

American women are very cultured and extremely intelligent.

The Poor and the Proletariat

Charlie Chaplin's latest gag has been to transfer half of his Soviet prize into the funds of the Abbé Pierre. At bottom, this amounts to establishing an identity between the nature of the poor man and that of the proletarian. Chaplin has always seen the proletarian under the guise of the poor man: hence the broadly human force of his representations but also their political ambiguity. This is quite evident in this admirable film, Modern Times, in which he repeatedly approaches the proletarian theme, but never endorses it politically. What he presents us with is the proletarian still blind and mystified, defined by the immediate character of his needs, and his total alienation at the hands of his masters (the employers and the police).

For Chaplin, the proletarian is still the man who is hungry; the representations of hunger are always epic with him: excessive size of the sandwiches, rivers of milk, fruit which one tosses aside hardly touched. Ironically, the food-dispensing machine (which is part of the employers' world) delivers only fragmented and obviously flavourless nutriment. Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-Man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police. Historically, Man according to Chaplin roughly corresponds to the worker of the French Restoration, rebelling against the machines, at a loss before strikes, fascinated by the problem of bread-winning (in the literal sense of the word), but as yet unable to reach a knowledge of political causes and an insistence on a collective strategy.

But it is precisely because Chaplin portrays a kind of primitive proletarian, still outside Revolution, that the representative force of the latter is immense. No socialist work has yet succeeded in expressing the humiliated condition of the worker with so much violence and generosity. Brecht alone, perhaps, has glimpsed the necessity, for socialist art, of always taking Man on the eve of Revolution, that is to say, alone, still blind, on the point of having his eyes opened to the revolutionary light by the "natural" excess of his wretchedness. Other works, in showing the worker already engaged in a conscious fight, subsumed under the Cause and the Party, give an account of a political reality which is necessary, but lacks aesthetic force.

Now Chaplin, in conformity with Brecht's idea, shows the public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what is in front of him. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see: thus, at a Punch and Judy show, it is the children who announce to Punch what he pretends not to see. For instance, Charlie Chaplin is in a cell, pampered by the warders, and lives there according to the ideal of the American petit-bourgeois: with legs crossed, he reads the paper under a portrait of Lincoln; but his delightfully selfsatisfied posture discredits this ideal completely, so that it is no longer possible for anyone to take refuge in it without noticing the new alienation which it contains. The slightest ensnarements are thus made harmless, and the man who is poor is repeatedly cut off from temptation. All told, it is perhaps because of this that Chaplin-Man triumphs over everything: because he escapes from everything, eschews any kind of sleeping partner, and never invests in man anything but man himself. His anarchy, politically open to discussion, perhaps represents the most efficient form of revolution in the realm of art.

Roland Barthes

1915 - 1980

The delinquents

The delinquents
To me are horrible creatures

Standing on street corners 

And carrying knives 

And inspiring terror in the heart of the casual passerby. 

We are not at all friendly 

And I avoid Such illiterate confrères 

Feeling that my gift for language 

Entitles me to other rewards 

Than are theirs 

For which I thank my teachers 

And my early editors

Carl Solomon

1928 - 1993

A country of illiterates

Scientific-philosophical discourse is not part of the lives of the of the Brazilian people. People shout; they don't know how to converse. They were not taught to be polite.

A country of illiterates

What kind of experience does the underdeveloped person have in their ugly and dirty cities other than drinking and doing drugs? Gossip? Bullshit? Yell? Lie?

A mind in mourning

Is literary greatness still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now?

Fiction and factuality are not opposed. One of the founding claims for the novel in English is that it is a true history. What makes a work fiction is not that the story is untrue — it may well be true, in part or in whole — but its use, or extension, of a variety of devices (including false or forged documents) which produce what literary theorists call "the effect of the real".

Questions of travel

Continent, city, country, society:
The choice is never wide and never free. 

And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home, 

wherever that may be?

Elizabeth Bishop 

1911 - 1979

Porque não me ufano

O peso neonazista está sendo subestimado. A extrema direita não é insignificante. Assaltou São Paulo e vai continuar no poder. E vai assaltar o sul por completo. Uma província marcada pelo desemprego, pobreza e uma educação limitada, os partidos xenófobos e populistas conseguem votações consideráveis entre os cristãos. Ainda há na estrutura pública nacional uma nostalgia que valoriza as "realizações positivas" do nazismo. O miliciano fundamentalista foi a sua maior expressão e deixou sucessores por todos os poros da periferia do capitalismo.

Mein Kampf está entre nós. A bíblia nazista representa a negação da sociedade democrática, das liberdades fundamentais, do Iluminismo, do progressismo, da igualdade entre os indivíduos. Mein Kampf ainda percorre o submundo do inconsciente coletivo dos subdesenvolvidos.

A barbárie ainda convive facilmente com a plutocracia nacional. O nazismo aninhou-se nas falhas da democracia e conseguiu assentos nas estruturas públicas. 

Um futuro ditador está em gestação. E será endeusado por milhões de pobres e ignorantes do terceiro mundo.

A country of illiterates

Scientific-philosophical discourse is not part of the lives of the representatives of the Brazilian people.

The Window

you are my bread

and the hairline 

noise 

of my bones 

you are almost 

the sea

you are not stone 

or molten sound 

I think 

you have no hands

this kind of bird flies backward 

and this love 

breaks on a windowpane 

where no light talks

this is not time 

for crossing tongues 

(the sand here 

never shifts)

I think 

tomorrow 

turned you with his toe 

and you will 

shine 

and shine 

unspent and underground

Diane di Prima

1934 - 2020

A critic at large

Nietzsche to have said that his favorite novel was Tristam Shandy is not quite as original a judgment as it may seem. Sterne has been an especially potent presence in the literatures of the Slavic languages as is reflected in the centrly of the example of Tristam Shandy in the theories of Shklovsky and other Russian formalists, from the nineteen-twenties foward. Perhaps the reason so much commanding prose literature has been issuing for decades from Central and Eastern Europe is not only that writers there have been suffering under monstrous tyrannies and therefore have had importance, seriousness, subjects, relevant irony bestowed on them (as many writers in Western Europe and the United States have half-enviously concluded) but also that these are the parts of the world where for over a century the author of Tristam Shandy has been the most admired.

A critic at large

The novel as an exercise in anticipating old age is a venture to which writers of a melancholy temperament continue to be drawn.

Surely Machado de Assis would be better know if he hadn't been brazilian and hadn't spent his whole life in Rio de Janeiro - if he were, say, Italian or Russian, or even Portuguese.

Being dead may stand for a point of view that cannot be accused of being provincial. Surely Epitah of a small winner is one of the most entertainingly unprovincial books ever written. And to love his book is to become a little less provincial about literature oneself.

A tour of the inside of someone's head

A marvellous book by Xavier de Maistre, a french expatriate aristocrat (he lived mos of his long life in Russia), who invented the literary micro-journey with his Journey around my room, which was written in 1794, when he was in prison for duelling, and which recounts his diagonal and zig zag visits to such diverting sites as the armchair, the desk, and the bed. A confinement, mental or physical, that is not acknowledged as such can make a very funny story as well as one charged with pathos.

Beauty no accident

Greeks remain the first event in culture — they knew and they did what was needful. Christianity with its contempt of the body is the greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.

A country of illiterates

You can't garner votes without a gospel jingle. You have to keep the people in the medieval era.

A country of illiterates

Without the development of an education grounded in scientific-philosophical knowledge, society will not produce responsible individuals.

A city of illiterates

Children deprived of literary stimuli suffer the effects - mentally. It's well known that neural development simply is reduced by low levels. It has permanent effects on them, it has a permanent effect on their minds - they never get over it.

Child neglect in rich nations

Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote a study about treatment of children in the rich countries. She identifies two basic patterns of treatment, a "Continental-European/Japanese" model and an "Anglo-American". Her conclusion is, the Continental European/Japanese pattern has improved the status of children and families; the Anglo-American pattern has been what she calls "a war" against children and families.

No alternative

What would have to happen for people to be able to do more of the real work of society - like supporting each other and educating children - instead of just spending our whole lives working at lame jobs for corporations?

There's tremendous disillusionment all across the country

The point is to try to get to a situation where the society and all its institutions and arrangements are set up so as to maximize the options for people to pursue the healthier alternatives. And I really don't think there's been a better period in modern history for organizing towards that than there is right now, actually. In the United States, for example, about three-quarters of the population thinks that the future is going to be "objectively worse" than the pastin other words, that their children won't live like they do. About half the American population thinks that both political parties just ought to be disbanded, they're useless. The disaffection from institutions is always high, and it's been going up very consistently in past years. These are conditions under which organizing for social change ought to be very much possible-if we're not doing it, it's our own fault: these factors have not been true in the past.

But at the same time, it's also true that people feel hopeless. I mean, part of the disillusionment is that they just don't see anything else-they don't see a solution, or any alternatives. Even at the depths of the 1930s Depression, which was objectively much worse than today, people were never hopeless the way they are today. Most people felt it's going to get better, we can do something about it, we can organize, we can work. I mean, they had illusions too, like there were a lot of illusions about Roosevelt, for examplebut the illusions were combined with something real going on. Today what people mainly feel is, it's going to get worse, and there's nothing we can do about it.

So what we're faced with is a combination of a very high degree of disillusionment, and a very low degree of hope and perception of alternatives. And that's exactly where serious organizers ought to be able to step in.

Moral values

Take an issue on which people were really split, take slavery. It wasn't just an intellectual debate, obviously - there was a huge amount of struggle involved - but insofar as there was an intellectual debate, it had a certain shared moral ground to it. In fact, the slave owners' arguments are not so simple to answer-some of them are valid, and have a lot of implications. They were taken very seriously by American workers in the late nineteenth century, for example.

For instance, the slave owners argued, "You take better care of a slave if you own it than if you rent it." Like, you take better care of your car if you own it than if you rent it, so you take better care of your worker if you own it than if you rent it - so slavery's benevolent and "free market" is morally atrocious. And the slave owners in fact said, "Look, we're a lot more benevolent than you guys with your capitalist wage-slave system." And if you look back at the literature by workers who organized into, say, the Knights of Labor and other working-class organizations of the late nineteenth century, you'll also see a strain running through their position which said: "We fought to end slavery, not to impose it" [i.e. the industrial wagelabor system became dominant after the Civil War]. So the point is, on all sides of debates like these, people understand that they have to appeal to the same basic moral principles, even if what they're doing is totally venal.

I mean, it's extremely rare even for an S.S. guard or a torturer to say, "I'm doing this because I like to be a son of a bitch." We all do bad things in our lives, and if you think back, it's very rare that you've said, "I'm doing this just because I feel like it" - people reinterpret things in order to fit them into a basic framework of moral values, which in fact we all share.

Discovering Morality

It's a very good thing that people are asking questions these days about, say, animal rights. I think there are serious questions there. Like, to what extent do we have a right to experiment on and torture animals? I mean, yes, you want to do animal experimentation for the prevention of diseases. But what's the balance, where's the tradeoff? There's obviously got to be some. Like, we'd all agree that too much torture of animals for treating a disease would not be permissible. But what are the principles on which we draw such conclusions? That's not a trivial question.

You don't have to go back very far in history to find gratuitous torture of animals. So in Cartesian philosophy, they thought they'd proven that humans had minds and everything else in the world was a machine - so there's no difference between a cat and a watch, let's say, just the cat's a little more complicated.

Human nature

If you saw someone beating a child to death, should you say, "Well, you know how it is — that’s just the human nature of the underdeveloped" — which, in fact, it is?

The decision

The effort to overcome "wage slavery" - that's been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we haven't advanced an inch. In fact, we're worse off than we were a hundred years ago.

Understanding power

You look at the "Fortune 500" every year and you figure out pretty well who owns the country. The country is basically owned by a network of conglomerates that control production and investment and banking and so on, and are tightly inter-linked and very highly concentrated-they own the country. And the principle of American democracy is that they also ought to govern it. And to a very large extent, they do. Now, whenever you have a concentration of power like that, you can be certain that the people who have the power are going to try to maximize it-and they're going to maximize it at the expense of others, both in their own country and abroad.

Noam Chomsky

A city of illiterates

 

In Porto Alegre, people don't study. And it makes no sense to promote national literature. The more one defends literature, the more aggressive the southerner becomes.

Universal education in Porto Alegre is deteriorating. Worse every day.

Education in Porto Alegre serves to perpetuate misery and vulgarization. Don't even cultivate readers. And it is urgent to privatize schools.

I want to see the elderly of Porto Alegre educated in terms of philosophical knowledge. Unachievable, impossible.

The poor person living trapped in the chains of deprivation does not seek to hear words of wisdom.

AfD

The Nazis are coming back. It will be much worse in Brazil.

New brazilian ghetto archive

Of the cities I visited, Porto Alegre was the dirtiest.

A country of illiterates

Observe the French reading on the metro and southerners on the train. The cultural difference is immense.

Brazil possesses no noble qualities

To write about beauty in the brazilian context, the writer must write fantasy. Only in this way. Brazilian cities are extremely ugly places to look for charm.

Waiting for new insults

Why do brazilians keep using drugs? Their cities are ugly and lack quality, and besides, they use drugs. Suicide would be better.

A country of illiterates

Brazil still faces immense challenges in educating its youth and adults in terms of scientific and philosophical knowledge.

A city of illiterates

Anti-intellectualism is a cultural characteristic of Porto Alegre. The province of noise and bullshit. The most disorganized society on the periphery of capitalism.

The perversity in power

Which brazilian state will officially be Nazi-Fascist?

Paraná
Santa Catarina
Rio Grande do Sul

A country of illiterates

The Portuguese language has become a vulgar language.

A country of illiterates

Which southern state has the worst public education? 

Paraná 

Santa Catarina 

Rio Grande do Sul

A city of illiterates

In Porto Alegre's educational system, there is an appearance of teaching and an appearance of learning. It is intellectual laziness.

The young boys and girls of the south have no contact with brazilian or world literature. What a disaster universal education is.

Intellectual laziness

The young teacher walked into the secondhand bookstore and asked the bookseller for Zibia Gaspareto. Nothing more.

A country of illiterates

Brazilians cannot find an appropriate distance to exist intelligently.

Porto Alegre is dead

Tenements and slum everywhere.
Noise pollution everywhere. 

Poverty, misery, homeless people

Miseducation, rivers-sewage,
etc.

Wildfire

The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.

Joan Didion was writing about the fires that had swept through Malibu in 1956, Bel Air in 1961, Santa Barbara in 1964, and Watts in 1965; she updated her list in 1989 with “Fire Season”, in which she described the fires of 1968, 1970, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1982: “Since 1919, when the county began keeping records of its fires, some areas have burned eight times”.

Drowning

Every year, the average americans emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets - enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.

Capitalism

There aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

Aphorism of underdevelopment

Brazil is the second-largest absolute market for cocaine on the planet.

A country of illiterates

Alexandra Kollontai's texts hold no value in the periphery of capitalism. Pornography is more important.

Drowning

In The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell runs through just a few of the monuments — indeed, in some cases, whole cultures — that will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited; Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States’ largest naval base, in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nations of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh, including all of the mangrove forests that have been the kingdom of Bengal tigers for millennia; all of Miami Beach and much of the South Florida paradise engineered out of marsh and swamp and sandbar by rabid real-estate speculators less than a century ago; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, today nearly a thousand years old; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well as Trump’s “Winter White House” at Mara-Lago, Richard Nixon’s in Key Biscayne, and the original, Harry Truman’s, in Key West. 

Drowning

The sea will become a killer is a given.

That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we’d already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war — because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 311,000 homes in the United States would be at risk of chronic inundation by 2045 — a timespan, as they pointed out, no longer than a mortgage. By 2100, the number would be more than 2.4 million properties, or $1 trillion worth of American real estate — underwater. Climate change may not only make the miles along the American coast uninsurable, it could render obsolete the very idea of disaster insurance.

Flooding has quadrupled since 1980.

The great nutrient collapse

Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow — protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four — has declined by as much as one-third. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

More carbon dioxide in the air produces nutritional declines across the board — drops in protein content, as well as in iron, zinc, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9.

Climate change promises an empire of hunger erected among the world’s poor.

Voprosy literatury i estetiki

Was Dostoevsky a reactionary and an obscurantist?

Hunger

Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising”, Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse”. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history — an injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply”.

Today gene modification has been used mostly to make plants more resistant to pesticides, pesticides manufactured and sold by the same companies engineering the crops.

A state of illiterates

The brazilian south lacks the conditions to produce a Carl Sagan.

Hunger

Even with the remarkable gains of the last decades, we do not presently live in a world without hunger. Far from it: most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally, with as many as 100 million hungry because of climate shocks. What is called “hidden hunger” — micronutrient and dietary deficiencies — is considerably higher, affecting well over 1 billion people.

A country of illiterates

An unimaginable portrait in southern Brazil

Poor education (anti-intellectualism) 

is also a form of fascism.

A city of illiterates

Universal education in Porto Alegre is deteriorating. Worse every day. Education in Porto Alegre serves to perpetuate misery and vulgarization.

Education for the poor: vulgarization, destruction of subjectivity.
Education for the rich: knowledge, development of consciousness.

Listen to the southerner's linguistic experience. It says it all.

Don't even cultivate readers. And it is urgent to privatize schools.

Bibliography

Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all. Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say. We all livedfor money, and that is what we died for.

The Malthusian tragic

Inability to see any remaining innocence in the quotidian life of the well-to-do West, given the devastation that wealth has imposed on the world of natural wonder it conquered and the suffering of those, elsewhere on the planet, left behind in the race to endless material comforts. And asked, functionally, to pay for them.

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more persuasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

Climate change

Global food production accounts for about a third of all emissions. To avoid dangerous climate change, Greenpeace has estimated that the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050.

Hunger

Norman Borlaug with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed a new collection of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that are now credited with saving the lives of a billion people worldwide.