Niklas's thoughts

On 10 July, Will Sheff—who fronts Okkervil River—releases his second solo album, Extra Mile.

'Funny Feeling' is the first single. This is a dreamy, flowy track. An amalgam of Will's project named Lovestreams...highlighting lovely song. The percussion and synths bring a kind of 1970s Donny Hathaway feeling to the track, that turns different four minutes in. Will got his groove in! This track carries a bunch of components, all nice.

I've not seen Will in years. I know his and Beth's companion, Larry, recently died. That is harrowing. I remember when my wife's and my little love, Blixa, died. I suddenly remember Blixa Bargeld—yes he's the source of our Blixa's name—writing 'How Did I Die?', a song that is part of the Einstürzende Neubauten project and album LAMENT is infused with World War I. Does anything ever end? Does war ever end?

Lyrics from 'How Did I Die?'

Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature. It seems to belong to another world. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a board; of the villages nothing remains but gray smears where stone walls have tumbled together. A confused mass of troubled earth. Columns of muddy smoke spurt up continually as high explosives tear deeper into this ulcered area.

How did I die? I fell from the sky or didn’t I?

I filled my mouth with water so the bullet could secede

How did I die? How did I die? Did I die by my own hand? Or didn’t I? How did I die? Or didn’t I die at all?

How did we die? Or didn’t we? Didn’t we die at all? We didn’t die We didn’t die We are back with a different song

We didn’t die We didn’t die We’re just singing a different song We are back with a change of weather Ein anderer Wind, ein neues Lied

In Ferneaux is my favourite Blanck Mass album. It may be his most intangible, the most musique-concrète-meets-electronic-procession album he's made, and it's a monumental ride.

When David Holmes released Let's Get Killed in 1997, it wasn't just sample-looped boogaloo like what Propellerheads were doing at the time for the dancefloor, it was street recordings in New York City, drums picked up by a cheap recorder, deeply-felt synths into the darkness, viciously-beautifully engineered paths to something that mixed Sly Stone with Kraftwerk; the album now seems, to me, like a sort of stepping stone to In Ferneaux.

'Phase I', the first out of two ~20-minute tracks on In Ferneaux, starts with an electronic tingle of face-on scramble, not unlike how Blanck Mass starts his album World Eater. On this album though, after eight minutes, time blurs into a hypnotic drone: imagine SUNN O))) set loose on a bunch of tibetan bowls.

One could argue that it's simple to set up some sweeping synths and then have them harp on, but I think it's even harder to do that – which follows after the SUNN O))) moment – and then have a song go into something that sounds like Einstürzende Neubauten on valium.

I joke, of course; there's nothing funny about the album, even though Blanck Mass rarely takes his music seriously enough not to set it up for a piss-take.

The music is beautiful.

Then, 'Phase II' starts. The beginning of the track astounds me every time I hear it: a man talks about recognising misery:

how you handle the bitch-ass misery. Do I stay the same? I dunno! [...] I'm over here being powerful, not knowing your shit. Look at me, 55 and no drugs.

This kind of reminds me of the song 'Rodney Yates' by David Holmes, where a poet raps his stuff into a mic on the street. Or, so it sounds.

Direct human connection.

'Phase II' quickly contains flowing, beautiful synth overlays, the type of sounds that the wonderful artist Florian Fricke, aka Popol Vuh, may have loved. It's absolutely lovely to hear the human voice over these sounds.

To create this, to do this, demands a lot of humanism. I truly believe so, This is beauty.

Three minutes and forty seconds into the song, there is only wondrous composition. Ligeti couldn't have made this (in a good way). Then, flourishing sinus-wave stuff, gurgly synths —– absolute distortion.

Noise.

It's like being cleansed.

It's clear that this album followed World Eater as it's filled with some of the same sounds, the type of sounds that Blanck Mass used before getting into making soundtracks; in a way, In Ferneaux is the arc between his older self and what turned into the soundtrack to Ted K.

In Ferneaux is a singular project. There are others like it, but none that I know of that in modern time evokes what Blanck Mass did with the album. As it stands, it's therapeutic, beautiful in its wonders.

This is the final scene of Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's filmed version of Irvine Welsh's book of the same name.

We see Renton, a young man who might be at the end of a long heroin-addiction journey. He experienced the death of friends, he stole everything he could steal and sell to get heroin, he hung out with friends who acted like enemies, he wanted, he had no sex drive, he had sex drive. The book and the film are very much products of the 1990s.

You did not see William Burroughs depict heroin use like that in Junkie. I think Burroughs wrote in a more fluent way.

The way Renton looks as he's walking over a bridge, a smile on his worn-out face, a smile that grows bigger as it blurs over the screen, and then lights-out, what does it say?

In fact, as we see Renton walking away, it's the result of something we've seen throughout the film: he always looks completely turned off, as though he's most often unavailable to the viewer. On the other hand, because of Danny Boyle's want to turn most of his lead characters into comic-book characters, there are a lot of scenes where Renton pulls faces and appears to live, but these are comic elements, like the start of the film, when Renton is chased by police to Iggy Pop's 'Lust for Life', is hit by a car, and is tackled to the ground.

Renton's face might change at any second. Nobody can smile forever. Perhaps nobody should smile forever. I don't know.

Somehow I remember Michel de Montaigne. I think of Sarah Bakewell's brilliant book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, and especially this part where Sarah speaks of an experience that Montaigne had when thrown off a horse:

Here's the transcript:

So Montaigne started out in life as just your average French young nobleman with an estate to inherit, and he worked as a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux. He went along like that for 13 years, but one day towards the end of that, he had an experience which, I think, changed his life.

He was riding one day with his friends, and he was another rider slammed into his horse from behind, and Montaigne was thrown violently from his horse. He landed with such a bang on his head that he was knocked out. Also, he had a blow to his chest, which made him vomit blood, and his friends carried him back to the house, and according to what they told him afterward, he was tearing at his clothes, and he was very distressed, and looks as if he was suffering. He came around afterward and started remembering the experience, and it changed his attitude to death. Until that moment, he'd been terrified of dying; he'd tormented himself with the thought that you had to somehow rehearse death, and study it; to philosophise was to learn how to die, which was an idea that he'd got from Cicero, but afterwards, he completely changed his mind about that, and began to think that actually, when death comes, you’re [...] not even there, because you’re drifting in this pleasurable state. So, it was like falling asleep, but very pleasurable, voluptuous, as he said, and it was as if life was just, just touching him by the tip of the lips, and he was drifting away.

And therefore, there's no point in preparing for it, and you should just sort of, you know, not worry, basically. 'Don't bother your head about death'; it became his his new philosophy, but it did change his attitude to life and, rather than to death, and after that, he started to seem to think slightly differently.

And very shortly after that, he resigned his job as magistrate, and he retired to look after his estate full-time because he did inherit his estate, but also he began to write [...] these little narratives of his, of his reading, things that he picked up, things that interested him, and as he went on, he became more interested in his own experience of the world. And he began to write [...] about that that near-death experience. A couple of years later, he traced it as it had unfolded from the inside, and as it had felt to him. He reflected on how it had made him think about death differently, writing very personally, writing about consciousness, the stream of consciousness from within. And it was that, that made him, that the extraordinary writer that he became.

In the face of death, in the face of life, we change. When do we not change? Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, may have said, 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.' It's profound and it's obvious. We all change. Or do we?

When do we not change? What is change?

Some people believe we are the same as adults as we are children, padded with experience, but, essentially we are the same persons. We don't change.

I think that's hogwash, because I've seen enough people change during my existence to know it is untrue. I've seen people to go hell and back and to hell again. Most of us have, I think, even though we might not realise it right now.

So, what is happiness?

Bodil Malmsten, the Swedish writer, said happiness is extremely fleeting. It's there, it's gone. Mostly, it's not here nor there. It's not a field into which one steps and frolicks. You can't turn it on and off at will.

I saw a TV series yesterday. A character said romantic love fades and becomes something deeper. Other characters baulked at the definition and rejected it, perhaps because they were afraid that that the statement could be true or perhaps because it seemed dire.

Bodil came back to the notion of happiness as fleeting and wonderful if you could get it. If you could get it.

But, what is happiness?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word:

1 a : a state of well-being and contentment : joy b : a pleasurable or satisfying experience

States and experiences pass.

And that's fine.

As long as we aim for happiness and to realise it is fleeting, that's fine, at least speaking for myself.

I want everyone I love to be happy. I want them to never suffer. I want them to all have good health and feel loved, to know they are loved.

Did Renton have real friends while he was addicted to heavy drugs? What is a real friend? Did Renton feel happy? What is heroin-incited feelings that are very similar to happiness? Can heroin abuse be happiness? What is happiness?

These are faint questions that pop into my head.

Pleasure or well-being or both, I wish all of it on people. Weird thing: my mind says, without feeling badly or poorly, can we ever experience happiness? Can happiness only exist if bad sides exist? Can God exist if the Devil would not exist? Hello protestant Swedish state school, for making me think that black-and-white way.

On to work. I've got to go to work.

#life #SarahBakewell

It was a sound bath, alright.

I felt that he started out with a simple idea and built on that; Simon, my friend who I saw the gig with, said it was 'all harmonics' and I think he nailed the description.

For some recorded Alessandro, check this out.

It felt like Alessandro Cortini was similar to Sunn O))).

#music #live #instrumental #drone

If you've not yet heard Sunn O))), you're in for a treat.

They've just released SUNN O))), a new album. Get ready for droned-out fuzz:

MRRRROOOOMMSSHHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZ

I'm transported to the core of the Earth from listening to this music for long. It's a vast, vast ride.

#music #drone

Criterion do a thing called Criterion Closet where celebs come in, pick films from the Criterion collection, and talk about the films. Criterion recently posted the list of the twenty films/boxes that most often are picked from their closet. Here's the list on Letterboxd.

These films on the list represent their respective box sets:

• Opening Night — John Cassavetes: Five Films
• Cléo from 5 to 7 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda
• Playtime — The Complete Jacques Tati
• Nights of Cabiria — Essential Fellini
• Journey to Italy — 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman
• Sans Soleil — La jetée/Sans Soleil: Two Films by Chris Marker

All That Jazz (1979)

Bob Fosse's semi-autobiographical musical drama about a self-destructive choreographer balancing filmmaking, women, and mortality.

8½ (1963)

Fellini's surreal masterpiece about a director suffering creative block, blending fantasy and reality in dazzling fashion.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Cassavetes' intense portrait of a working-class housewife's mental unraveling and her family's struggle to cope.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Varda's real-time journey of a pop singer awaiting medical results, wandering Paris in existential reflection.

PlayTime (1967)

Tati's visually inventive comedy following Monsieur Hulot through a surreal, modernist Paris of glass and steel.

Blue Velvet (1986)

Lynch's dark descent beneath suburban normalcy, where a college student uncovers a nightmarish underworld.

Wanda (1970)

Barbara Loden's rare gem about a drifting woman who falls in with a petty criminal, a study in aimless survival.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Kubrick's painterly epic tracking an Irish rogue's rise and fall through 18th-century European aristocracy.

Naked (1993)

Mike Leigh's bleakly comic odyssey of a charismatic misanthrope wandering Manchester's underbelly.

La Strada (1954)

Fellini's tender tragedy of a simple young woman sold to a brutish street performer, exploring innocence and redemption.

The Red Shoes (1948)

Powell & Pressburger's ravishing ballet melodrama about art, obsession, and the price of greatness.

Dekalog (1989)

Kieślowski's ten-hour masterpiece, each film exploring one of the Ten Commandments in a Warsaw housing complex.

Yi Yi (2000)

Edward Yang's tender, expansive portrait of a Taipei family navigating love, disappointment, and everyday life.

Down by Law (1986)

Jarmusch's deadpan black-and-white tale of three mismatched convicts escaping a Louisiana bayou prison.

Sans Soleil (1983)

Marker's experimental documentary-essay weaving memory, time, and image across Japan, Africa, and Iceland.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

De Sica's neorealist classic about a father and son searching postwar Rome for a stolen bicycle essential to their survival.

Journey to Italy (1954)

Rossellini's intimate study of a marriage fraying amid Neapolitan ruins, starring Ingrid Bergman.

Being There (1979)

Peter Sellers' brilliant final role as a simple gardener whose platitudes are mistaken for profound wisdom.

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Fellini's poignant tale of a Rome streetwalker dreaming of love, showcasing Giulietta Masina's luminous performance.

Opening Night (1977)

Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands explore aging, identity, and theatrical truth in this emotionally raw backstage drama.

Tidö ministers to the left: Ebba Busch, Ulf Kristersson, Jimmie Åkesson. Gellert Tamas to the right.

From Gellert Tamas's great newspaper article that was published yesterday; translation errors are all mine:

The prohibition against retroactive legislation is considered so fundamental that it is enshrined in the constitution through the Instrument of Government 2:10, in the same way that it is included as Article 11:2 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 in New York.

“Stricter and clearer requirements regarding conduct for residence permits” is the latest example of the Tidö government's complete indifference to these fundamental legal principles. What they are proposing is, in fact, to turn the entire legal system upside down. Previously, certain carefully defined criminal acts could result in a deportation order; now, they instead want to focus on individual people's “conduct,” in other words their “behavior and way of life,” to quote the definition of the word in the Swedish Academy Glossary.

According to the referral to the Council on Legislation, now not only criminal acts, including “less serious, for example, isolated offenses punishable by fines,” will be able to lead to deportation, but also an individual's opinions and personal contacts; “for example, support for international terrorism, extremist sympathies, or connections to a violent extremist organization.” All of this is based on the concept of “otherwise flawed conduct,” which is defined as a person, for example, “incurring debt without any intention or effort to pay back the debts” or as “violations of rules, statutes, and authority decisions, for example, welfare fraud, undeclared work, or failing to pay fines.”

Furthermore, retroactive legislation is permitted; or as the government puts it: “In each individual case, a comprehensive assessment is made that also takes into account any previous flawed character.” What the government is doing is simply turning the concepts upside down: From the fundamental idea of the principle of legality that everything that is not forbidden, at least purely legally, is permitted, to that everything the individual does or has done, regardless of the wording of the law, can be considered forbidden – if the Swedish Migration Agency's character assessment finds it to be so.

The Tidö government has simply drafted a catch-all clause that most of all resembles the legislation in the former communist one-party states. There, they admittedly did not use the concept of “character” but rather “antisocial lifestyle” and the legislation was not primarily directed at “immigrants” but at domestic dissidents, but the goal is and was the same: To give the state and its institutions as far-reaching tools as possible to harass and ultimately get rid of unwanted individuals.

To illustrate the almost Kafkaesque structure of the proposed legislation, we can do the thought experiment that it had also applied to Swedish citizens. How would the government's character assessment, for example, have affected the responsible persons behind the proposal?

Johan Forsell, Minister for Migration, has obvious “connections to a violent extremist organization” through his son's previous membership in the openly Nazi Aktivklubb Sverige. Members of the organization, which Säpo assesses as one of the country's most prone to violence, carried out several brutal assaults on so-called “immigrants” exactly during the time that the son was a member. Forsell's defense; that it is about “a deeply remorseful 15-year-old, who just turned 16” would hardly have impressed in a character investigation. The assessment, based on the wording in his own legislative proposal, could only have been one: Out he goes!

The same would have happened to Jimmie Åkesson. If he had defended the invitation of a leader of a criminal motorcycle gang to his wedding, with the justification that he was only a plus one, the Character Investigation's decision could only have been one, especially if it emerged that Åkesson's association with the motorcycle gang leader extended several years back in time: Deportation!

Ebba Busch has previously been convicted of a serious crime; gross defamation. Thus, it would hardly have mattered how many falukorv sausages she waved around to show her Swedishness; the decision would still have been the same: Out she goes!

Even Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's character assessment would probably have gone very quickly. The man who acquires a large apartment in central Stockholm, despite the fact that according to the owning foundation it is solely intended for threatened women, should not be long-lasting in Sweden.

The Conduct Investigation decision on immediate deportation would not have been difficult to make – with the justification that Kristersson had shown evidence of “behaviors that society on an overarching level counteracts”.

The examples above may seem absurd, but this is exactly how bizarrely the government's referral to the Council on Legislation is formulated. According to some calculations, up to 100,000 people with residence permits could be covered by the law, many of them having lived in Sweden for years, with an income and steady job, with children born and raised here.

The Tidö government's proposal is the latest in a bombardment of laws and legislative proposals – from the billion-kronor investment in repatriation grants to the teenage deportations – with the stated or unstated goal of not only reducing immigration but also getting out as many of those who are already here. And the government seems to completely ignore the criticism, which is as recurring as it is devastating. The Chancellor of Justice noted, for example, that previous proposals to revoke granted residence permits violate international law, while the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University summarized its criticism with the words: “[T]he inquiry's proposal [is] in conflict with the principles that make up Swedish administrative law and Swedish legal certainty. Opening up to make such a departure from the foundations of Swedish administrative law to achieve a political goal is dangerous and damages the Swedish rule of law.”

In the Middle Ages, banishment was considered one of the severest punishments the state authorities could mete out, intended only for the most heinous of crimes; such as murder or treason.

#Tidö #Sweden #politics #xenophobia #JimmieÅkesson #UlfKristersson #EbbaBusch #GellertTamas

From Scott Meslow's brilliant new book A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks, here is a wonderfully told story about Denise Bryson, the trans person played by David Duchovny in Twin Peaks.

Note: the passages below contain certain spoilers.

Denise Bryson’s reputation precedes her. When Cooper learns that Bryson, his former partner in an Oakland drug bust, has been brought in as the DEA’s point person on the missing cocaine he’s accused of stealing, he’s delighted. Denise is “one of the finest minds in the DEA,” says Cooper. “Harry, we’re in very good hands.” But when Denise walks into the room, Cooper hardly recognizes her. When they’d worked together in Oakland, Denise—a trans woman—had not yet transitioned. Cooper, caught off-guard, calls her by her deadname. “It’s a long story, but actually, I prefer Denise, if you don’t mind,” says Denise, smiling. And to Twin Peaks’ eternal credit, Cooper’s response is, “Okay.” It would be inaccurate to say that Twin Peaks nailed trans representation when Denise was introduced in 1990, though its small-town characters are believably awkward in what you must assume is their first encounter with a trans person. In the scene that follows, Hawk declines to shake Denise’s outstretched hand, and Truman makes a crack under his breath about how the Great Northern, where Denise is staying, is in for a real surprise. But Cooper—recognized by then, by the audience, as the show’s paragon of moral rightness—is unquestioningly accepting of Denise’s identity. She hasn’t been in the room for thirty seconds before they’ve moved on to more important business: the particulars of Cooper’s drug case and the high quality of breakfast at the Great Northern.

To hear Duchovny tell it, he only landed the role because another, more famous actor turned it down. “I believe that my part was inspired by James Spader and written for him,” said Duchovny. “He wasn’t able to do it, and I was looking for any job I could get. It wasn’t like, ‘Gee, I’m a fan of Twin Peaks.’” Casting director Johanna Ray recalls multiple men arriving in drag for their audition to play Denise. Duchovny didn’t go that far, but he acknowledges his first attempt to play Denise was more over-the-top. “I must have auditioned much more stereotypically effeminate, and then when I put on the makeup and everything, it became clear to me that less was more,” he said.

After that initial introduction at the Sheriff’s Department, Twin Peaks largely does right by Denise. She explains that she realized she was a woman during an undercover investigation, when she discovered she felt more at home in women’s clothing. There’s a quick, heartfelt moment when Cooper—in the midst of a heated conversation about the investigation—accidentally deadnames her. Denise quickly corrects him; he apologizes, she says it’s okay, and they both move on. But even as the show acknowledges her transness, Denise is equally defined, as Cooper told Harry and Hawk, by her intelligence as a law enforcement agent. She sees through the unconvincing attempt to frame Cooper immediately, and masterminds the sting that leads to the downfall of Jean Renault. This leads to a sequence in which Denise appears in drag as a man. “You can call me Dennis,” she says, walking into the room dressed as a stereotypical businessman—not because of any social pressure, but because it’s a role she thinks might be useful in infiltrating Renault’s camp. Still, it’s Denise being a woman that saves the day; wearing the uniform of a Double R Diner waitress, Denise holds Renault’s attention just long enough to pass a gun to Cooper.

Denise appears for just one scene in Twin Peaks: The Return, but it’s one of the show’s most memorable—so much so that it’s routinely quoted by people who haven’t seen a frame of Twin Peaks. When Gordon Cole announces his intention to launch an investigation in Buckhorn, South Dakota, he needs to clear it with his superior officer: Denise Bryson, who has climbed the ladder to become the FBI’s chief of staff. It’s in this scene that Gordon Cole, played by Lynch himself, gets the last word on Denise—one that was almost instantly adopted as a rallying cry by the LGBTQ+ community and its supporters. “When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” says Gordon. “I said, ‘We’ve got to bring [Denise] back. And I think she’s the head of the FBI,’” says Mark Frost. “But I’ll give David the credit. He came up with ‘Fix your hearts or die.’ I’ve seen people carrying that poster at protests over the last few months. There are probably hundreds of tattoos.”

#TwinPeaks #TV #video #DavidLynch #MarkFrost #ScottMeslow

I'm reading a coming biography about Elliott Smith, named Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith.

So far, I've only read the introduction. It bears the hallmarks of a great fucking book.

Twenty-three years after his death, Elliott still isn’t particularly well known, or well understood, but he is terribly loved. The task of understanding and preserving his legacy has become a collective project. There are YouTube accounts like I Remember Elliott; his old fan site Sweet Adeline, defiantly mired in Web 1.0; oral-history blogs like so flawed and drunk and perfect still; Smiling at Confusion, a site for posting guitar tabs, guidance on fingerings and chords. Fans share bootleg recordings and unreleased songs, reflections on his lyrics or entreaties for help understanding them, and they speculate darkly on his death. Below videos you’ll find hundreds of comments, people gushing over Elliott’s fingerpicking, arguing about whether he’s on something at this concert or just tired but clean, thanking him for accompanying them through depression or addiction, for making them feel less alone.

What is immediate, what is human, that is love.

Recently, a friend asked me to run some of their works through AI to see what it would create. Instantly it generated some seemingly worthwhile stuff but in actuality, AI is autocorrect on steroids. My friend isn't very knowledgeable around AI but they produce stuff that's, frankly, some of the best I've ever read and heard in their 'fields'.

Three recent articles about AI:

• AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
• Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
• The AI Industry Is Lying To You

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein is one of my favourite modern philosophers. I highly recommend Ray Monk's beautiful Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.

A recently-published article on large language models (LLMs) as they relate to Wittgenstein's views on language, semantics, and mathematics is very interesting indeed.

When Wittgenstein referred to the “beginning of the end of humanity,” he was not envisioning sci-fi cataclysms on the order of The Matrix or The Terminator or even Dr. Strangelove. He was referring to the end of humanity not primarily in terms of its biological survival, but in terms of what he called the “form of life” we inhabit. That form of life is threatened not so much by industrialization, nukes, robots, or AI agents as by a way of thinking that lowers human life to the plane of science and technology. Wittgenstein’s attempt to draw attention to that way of thinking—and dissuade us from it—is of the utmost importance in an era where the developing AI ideology threatens to further distort our understanding of how we use language and how we live.

A more in-depth excerpt from the wondrously and sharply written article:

The parts of the Investigations where Wittgenstein probes our concepts of thinking and understanding can help us escape the conceptual muddles that plague discussions and debates over AI and so-called “artificial general intelligence.”

“One of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment,” according to Wittgenstein, arises when a noun like “meaning” or “number” “makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.” We assume that our language works principally by way of reference, so that where there is a noun there must be a thing it points to. But referring to objects is just one of language’s many functions or games. Instead of looking for the things behind our words, Wittgenstein proposes studying the grammar of the language game: the role words play—and don’t play—in these activities.

When we reflect on words like “meaning,” “thinking,” “understanding,” and “reasoning,” Wittgenstein argues, a certain picture immediately enters our heads: an internal process existing in the brain or mind that enables or somehow gives life to outwardly meaningful expressions. But, Wittgenstein asks, “What really comes before our mind when we understand a word?” Is it a kind of picture, so that I see an image of a pen in my mind’s eye when I hear the word “pen”? Do I then compare my inner picture to my experience of the outer world in order to determine whether it would be appropriate to use the word “pen”? Does some correspondence between this internal process and my expression “pen” somehow constitute the meaning?

The idea of meaning as an internal process seems unproblematic at first, even unavoidable, but, as Wittgenstein shows, it’s not clear what role such a process would actually be playing. He asks his reader, for example, to “say: ‘Yes, this pen is blunt. Oh well, it’ll do.’ First, with thought; then without thought; then just think the thought without the words.” Having conducted these absurd self-examinations, Wittgenstein asks us to reflect, “What did the thought, as it existed before its expression, consist in?”

His point is that our intuitive idea of meaning as an inner correlate of our outward expressions breaks down when it is taken as something like a scientific theory for what’s really going on when we use language. This failure shouldn’t surprise us. Our language did not evolve for scientific or metaphysical purposes, but just to help us make do and get along in the real world.

The picture of thought as an internal process accompanying our use of language is just that: a picture. It is unproblematic insofar as it arises in everyday language, as when I clarify a misunderstanding by telling you, after you’ve mistakenly handed me a red pen on the desk, “No, I meant that blue pen on the bookshelf.” But that sentence is not a claim about the state of my brain a moment ago; it could not be confirmed or disconfirmed by some kind of retroactive brain scan. It’s merely a way to advance a practical project that has gone off the rails. If it’s anywhere, meaning is in that project, not in my brain.

Of course, we might imagine that some industrious cognitive scientist equipped with the latest in brain-imaging technology might actually try to establish a causal connection between a particular brain state and the correct usage of the word “pen.” But even in that case, would it be correct to say that with a coordinated set of brain images we’ve in some sense located the meaning of the word “pen”? In what sense would the internal state that shows up on the scan explain the use or understanding of the word? Would it be analogous to the way the properties of an internal combustion engine can help explain the forward motion of a car?

This example shows how strange it is to use an examination of brain states instead of actual behavior as a criterion for ascribing understanding. If we’re looking for understanding and meaning, Wittgenstein thinks, we will find them in the various things we do with language and not in some internal process that accompanies our use of language.

This is just one of the strategies Wittgenstein uses to try to dissuade his readers from a mechanical, pseudoscientific understanding of language as it is embedded in human practices. The Investigations doesn’t attempt to refute this false understanding by formal, analytic argumentation the way a scientist or science-imitating philosopher might. Wittgenstein instead tries to show its limitations. His makeshift strategies—describing language games, imagining dialogues, conducting thought experiments, and drawing analogies—show how the scientific worldview has strayed from narrowly defined areas where it actually has purchase and started to distort our understanding of domains where it doesn’t belong.

It all reminds me of Noam Chomsky's discussion with Michel Gondry in the documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?. The documentary is packed with discussion on matters like universal grammar, but I remember Chomsky talking about how a small child can see a tall man who's happy; the child immediately knows that man is happy, and can draw parallels that allow the child to equally immediately know that not every man who is tall is happy, nor that every man is happy. The two-year-old Watumull/Roberts/Chomsky article The False Promise of ChatGPT says much about this.

It's not hard to know where happiness is found. To experience happiness is another thing, and AI won't help us there.

#ArtificialIntelligence #music #ElliottSmith #NoamChomsky #LudwigWittgenstein

David Stubbs tells the following words which are culled from his brilliant book Future Days. This passage mostly tells us about an action courtesy of Nikel Pallat, the manager for music group Ton Steine Scherben.

There were others, however, including Nikel Pallat, manager of hard-leftist polemical rockers Ton Steine Scherben, who regarded Kaiser as a typical have-it-both-ways liberal bullshitter. This schism came to a head in a televised debate involving the pair on a WDR talkshow in 1971, whose discussion went under the heading ‘Pop & Co – Die “andere” Musik zwischen Protest und Markt’ (‘Pop & Co. – The “Other” Music between Protest and Marketplace’), which can be viewed on YouTube. Its period quaintness lies not just in the length of the hair of the participants, the studio smoking or the orangeness of Kaiser’s jumper, which merely to look at is to overdose on Vitamin C. It’s in the admirably earnest accommodation of those discussing the feasibility and possibility of the overthrow of capitalism through rock music. As Kaiser seeks to dampen this far-left yearning, the debate begins to heat up. Translated, the action runs as follows.

‘Societal change will come in an evolutionary process,’ says Kaiser. ‘That isn’t something that’ll happen tomorrow, but a development that will take probably a hundred years.’ He points out that immediate change was the illusion of the people who marched in the 1960s, important though these protests were. Pallat angrily dismisses this Fabian talk of slow, evolutionary progress, suggesting that it amounts to support for continued oppression.

‘You are working for the oppressor, not against the oppressor. Do you realise that?’ Kaiser defends himself, saying that one has to understand how the media work. ‘Who are you working for?’ retorts Pallat, sharply.

‘You cannot dispute that you are working for the capitalist.’ ‘Who do you represent here?’ comes back Kaiser, with equal sharpness. ‘Don’t you think the TV isn’t also a capitalist organ?’ (Here the moderator intervenes to point out that Kaiser isn’t speaking on behalf of TV.)

It’s all too much for Pallat. ‘Here we have TV making this shit-liberal programme we’re having an opportunity to go on about anti-materialism – socialism … we shouldn’t speak about evolution but revolution, yeah? And objectively nothing is changing about oppression. TV is a tool of oppression by general society. And that’s why it is completely obvious that if something should still happen, then one has to stand against the oppressor and not be neutral … and that’s why I am going to destroy this table now.’

Whereupon, true to his word, he produces from his inside jacket pocket an axe and, snarling and swearing, commences to bash the table as the rest of the panellists edge away in consternation. It is not so much the table towards which he bears a grudge but its symbolic role as polite vortex of sedentary, liberal consensus. Once he has completed his attempted assault on the offending piece of furniture, which proves remarkably resistant to his ferocious efforts, he says, ‘So, let’s continue our discussion.’ No one else, however, is inclined to do so.

Taking full advantage of the freedom temporarily afforded him by his axe to do as he pleases, he gathers up the microphones abandoned on what’s left of the table and stuffs them into his pockets, announcing that he is commandeering them for the oppressed. ‘I need the microphones for the young people who are sitting in jail.’

The resilience of the table is a metaphor of sorts for the resilience of a certain leftist strain of German tolerance and liberality at that time, whose broadmindedness and reasonableness was capable of withstanding even axe attack. The very fact that Pallat had an axe about his person in the studio suggests to the cynical an element of premeditation to his outburst. Nonetheless, as insurrectionary television goes, it rather puts the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy in the shade.

Alongside Can and Faust, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld also listed Ton Steine Scherben as one of the seventies German groups he most admired. On the strength of this performance, it’s not hard to see why. It shows also the depth of feeling and revolutionary commitment that had seized the hearts and minds of the more radical young Germans, as well as Kaiser’s ability to put people’s backs up.

#music #destruction #Germany #video #politics #BlixaBargeld #EinsturzendeNeubauten