London Review of Books

I doubt that I have competence to understand that page, but I agree, it looks like substantial evidence (of whatever the case may be). I had never seen it or heard of it before.

I literally did not know that such public information about companies existed online, though I had an idea that one could go and request it somewhere.

read the perry anderson bolsonaro/brazilian politics piece. very useful for me, who knows nothing about brazilian politics, which of course also makes it difficult for me to comment on its analysis. for me it was at its strongest - sitting up and saying 'this is the stuff' - on the classification of bolsonaro, where he attacks a lazy identification with fascism, and the subsequent analysis of the political structures of the left, and their future, *somewhat* optimistic, with a body slam of a conclusion:

One must hope these judgments hold good. But memories can fade, and elsewhere, social exclusion has proved only too cruelly viable. The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences. It would be an error to count on defeat self-correcting itself with time.

I'm afraid I almost diametrically disagree.

The attack on Bolsonaro's critics / classifiers is typical of PA as I described above: yes, some analytical value, but he's keener to score points against 'bien pensants' than to recognize actual dangers and admit that certain things may be very bad. We may be able to prove that Bolsonaro isn't a 'fascist' - fine. When we've done that, maybe we should recognize the great fear expressed by thousands of Brazilians and take it more seriously, whatever the label may be.

As for those last lines, they amount to saying: 'Some people may say things will get better, but they could be wrong'. It is very easy for anyone to say this about anything, and often be proved correct. It's like me saying Tottenham won't win the Champions' League. Probably accurate, but it doesn't demonstrate or require much perspicacity.

And the statement that 'The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences' is simply false. Any instance of someone on 'the left' being pessimistic about the outcome of an election disproves it. And most of us can think of hundreds of instances of that.

i think the point you make about the latter statement is fair, or at least it needs more exploration than it can give itself as a concluding sentence.

for context

Fascism was a reaction to the danger of social revolution in a time of economic dislocation or depression. It commanded dedicated cadres, organised mass movements and possessed an articulated ideology. Brazil had its version in the 1930s, the green-shirt Integralistas, who at their height numbered over a million members, with an articulate leader, Plínio Salgado, an extensive press, publishing programme and set of cultural organisations, and who came close to seizing power in 1938, after the failure of a communist insurrection in 1935. Nothing remotely comparable either in terms of a danger to the established order from the left, or of a disciplined mass force on the right, exists in Brazil today.

on the fascism, i appreciate Anderson's desire to categorise and define the word and the political state in Brazil. The word fascism is used a lot at the moment, which is understandable, but the lines of force it implies seem to me to centre very much round the second world war, where the US and UK were fighting definitive 'baddies'. It's an easy bucket, somewhat forgivable. Its asking the word to do too much today, and asks too little of us to define and fight on their own terms, not because they are fascism, the racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and generalised ravenous capitalism assault on the lower-income classes that we see in the US and many European countries at the moment. I guess a shortcut to what i am saying is that fighting 'fascism' allows a sort of centrist position - the liberal response, but that a proper analysis of this assault upon progressive society produces a more rigorous form of leftism.

Not to categorise correctly now, runs the risk of not configuring the response effectively. Your method ends up producing strategy and tactics designed to fight the fascism of the past, rather than the poison of today, its paraphernalia and methods. Specific to Brazil, Anderson is saying I think Bolsonaro represents more of a continuity with military rule, its preferences and brutalities) than it does the fascist organisations of Brazil's past.

It's also part of Anderson/Singer's contention that Lula did not do enough to enable the poor to become class-conscious via education and empowerment, so that the PT maintained a 'populist opposition between rich and poor' which Bolsonaro was able to exploit, due to that lack of class-consciousness.

This seems to me a structured way to apporach the problem, which as I say, I appreciate, not least because it enables that structure to be examined and discussed or argued over.

(i am on my second pass thru this piece and have not made my mind up except to say this: i find the acronyms of brazilian political parties unreasonably muddling -- as every single one of them begins with P, why not drop the P?)

Fizzles: I agree that if Bolsonaro is not 'fascist' then he shouldn't be called that. I agree that it possible that categorizing things correctly is politically useful (or just the correct thing to do anyway). I also agree that fascist is largely a word with 1920s-1940s connotations and applying it to particular cases now, much later, is often questionable.

So what do I disagree about?

I think it's that I find it irritating that PA is more interested in scoring points against (I must reuse his phrase yet again) 'bien pensants' than he is in saying what is bad about what is, as I understand it, a radical right political movement in Brazil.

This is all part of PA's contrarianism. He probably prefers Nigel Farage to Gordon Brown.

When Bolsonaro was elected, a lot of people (for instance, gay people in Brazil) expressed a lot of fear. Some, I think, fled the country. I don't know enough about the reality to say if the fears have proved justified yet. But I would rather give these seemingly real dangers credence, than spend time scoring points against well-meaning liberals who may not have used quite the right word to describe them.

The one thing that PA allows is that native people in the Amazon, as I recall, are under threat. It's good that he points that out. Maybe he should also admit that other people and things may also be under threat.

It is strange for such a political thinker to be so uninterested in the actual real-life perils and disasters that politics often brings. PA's President is Donald Trump, but he doesn't seem bothered about it.

right, yes. one of the things i was uncertain about, when i posted above, was whether it really mattered whether 'crypto-military rule' plus homophobia wasn't the dictionary definition of fascism or not. you don't want to be the sort of person who goes well actually the fasces is a bunch of sticks and strictly refers to the italian variety what i think you mean is nazism a very different animal let me tell you &c.

you want to say 'well what does it matter?' in such circumstances. i come down on PA's side, because he identifies where it does matter – the slowness of the Brazilian left to comprehend social media for instance, and the aforementioned difficulty in translating popular support of the poor into class consciousness, enabling an educated, self-aware bulwark against Bolsonaro.*

also what you characterise as a complacency, i see more as an attempt at a dispassionate analysis of his character. PA identifies the homophobia, and warns that no one should expect him to be less brutal, for all the brittleness of his personality and circumstance, albeit in different paragraphs. the implication seemed to me to be reasonably clear and worrying. just that it would be specific to identifiable groups, rather than 'wholesale' oppression. i'm not sure he needs to add 'this is of course no less unwelcome', and i don't get the impression from his tone that he thinks otherwise.

However...

*I originally wrote 'self-aware bulwark against Bolsonaro's...' what? not populism, which PA seems slightly weak on, identifying it with its symptomatic expressions in many countries: immigration & sovereignty. my preferred emphasis and definition is here: politicisation of the state, rejection of constraint. sovereignty is an expression of that, but doesn't need to be the only one. military rule, and Bolsonaro's clear statements in his political career about that being a preferred option for government, mean i think the question of populism deserves more exploration.

the point remains - PA has defined Bolsonaro's success as being almost entirely a function of the collapse in legitimacy of the other parties. his absence from the hustings other than on twitter is seen as a part of his success. further, PA constantly describes the looseness of Bolsonaro's constituency, the brittleness of his position. If the essay has a failing for me, it's in its suggestion that Bolsonaro is only a collection of negative qualities, and not an assertion of something new and something dangerous in politics. (He's clearly dangerous in his position as President). PA's real subject is the failure of the left, and in an essay on Bolsonaro that would definitely be a charge of complacency.

I wouldn't call it complacent, rather something else -- I think as a contrarian he cultivates a cool toughness, which combines with his natural Olympian stance. He wants to imply that eg: only pathetic bien-pensants would worry about Donald Trump, whereas PA is way beyond such things.

rereading again, with PF's and F's comments in mind, i am *still* hitting speed bumps every time PA mentions either the PSDB or the PMDB -- the acronyms only differ by one letter and PA never spells which either acroynm stands for (see below) (and actually even their politics he seriously skims over in favour of structural shorthand: "centre right, fig-leaf asocial democratic" vs "centre, sprawling network of clientelism"

the latter is the one the PT (lula's party, the worke'rs party) went into coalitions with = basically the root of most of the corruption scandals that began blowing up all over the place abt five years ago…

anyway i shouldn't be having to write out a list to check back against each time: this is more "star writers don't need subbing" nonsense from MKW i fear :(

PSDB = Brazilian Social Democracy Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira)
PMDB = Brazilian Democratic Movement (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro)

I like this post.

I did not notice that PA actually wrote 'asocial democratic'.

haha no he didn't that is my bad typing -- but he did put 'social democratic' in scare quotes

I've yet to read the article and don't want to pass myself off as an expert on Brazil, but what I *can* say is that the military dictatorship that Bolsonaro is in clearer continuity with was on very good terms with Salazar back in Portugal (who I don't think you can make an argument for as anything but a fascist), and that ppl on the Brazilian and Portuguese left definitley saw the fight against their dictatorships as a common struggle back then. So fascism-adjacent at the very least.

OK so here goes:

One of things that pulled me up short rereading this was his cliffhanger sentence at the end of the Lula/Dilma section: “Yet this muted interim had, all the same, cleared the way for a high-pitched obbligato to come.” By which he means that the PT’s normal opponents (in particular the PDMB) had tumbled into same the morass of corruption and anti-corruption at the PT, and completely collapsed politically — but look, something nasty is coming down the pike!

Except “obbligato” doesn’t mean something nasty, even when it’s high-pitched: it means and I quote (the internet) “an instrumental part, typically distinctive in effect, which is integral to a piece of music and should not be omitted in performance”. So either PA is wildly misusing an unusual word, which can surely never be the case — or what exactly is he saying here?

I think he’s rather obscurely admitting that actually he doesn’t really want to write about Bolsonaro, who he doesn’t find especially interesting — but he realises he has to. The entire essay is named for JB, as is is second part — and yet it’s mainly not directly about him. It’s about Lula and the PT, and how and why its project failed. Which he goes into in a detail that suggests a tremendous sad affection: this was something PA wished had worked out, and he wants — earnestly, urgently — to set out why it didn’t.

Here’s some of what he’s juggling: the personalities, the manoeuvre of parties, the shifting nature of the legal context, the ideological make-up of the courts, the complex transformations (and non-transformations) of the layering of class, in a HUGE and very diverse country, the apparent deliquescence of the social background into insecurity and violence (tho I need to say more on this), and (if only gestured at) the sense that this should not be just shuffled into the general (“bien pensant”) sense that “populism is back and it’s very bad”. He also includes a very favourable drive-by review of André Singer’s examination of the same material, which I assume is his main source for this essay — while not omitting some interesting and pertinent criticism of same, in particular about the valency (as opposed to the morality) of the PT’s enwebment in corruption and how its drive against same took them down hardest. (I enjoy the ambivalence of PA’s anti-moralism here without at all knowing who’s correct: also useful to have the old meaning of the word ‘republicanism’ restated, with its problematics at least hinted at… )

(There’s an argument I sometimes see made that the extreme reaction in the UK in the 90s against “sleaze” has had many more bad effects than good

And I have to say that I think his organisation of this extremely complex multifold material is — if only for clarity, given its complexity — superb. It’s a triumph of his particular brand of structural marxism: setting out the byzantine social forces in full effect, and at the very least indicating the cultural vectors that help establish the hegemonic terrain. Is it an accurate portrait? Don’t ask me — I am seriously embarrassed by how little I know about Brazil (I got briefly excited when Caetano Veloso were mentioned in passing).

So anyway, this is the upside: a serious and deep exploration of why Lula fell and the mountain -range the PT now have to climb. It is NOT — despite title — much of an examination of Bolsonaro, except to faff around comparing him to and distinguishing him from Trump. And I think there’s a reason for this, which is hidden in and perhaps obscured by his flipping off the “left”, for (as he seems to see it) their chaotic unhelpful panic in the present moment, and concomitant bad analysis and English-speaking parochialism.

Basically — I guess it’s the entire root of his structuralism — he thinks the flamboyant and contradictory personalities in each case are a distraction for the social forces that have adopted these figureheads and are moving fast behind the scenes to reconfigure the battleground behind the noise and the absurdism (often in ways unrelated to the loud declarations of intent from the personalities). Don’t look at this, look at that! And a distraction, also, from the broader collapse of the centre left project of the 90s and 00s, which I think he is just by now bored of reiterating: this entire teratological efflorescence as an unavoidable outgrowth of the catastrophe of the Third Way etc etc, which correct or not as analysis is old ground for us all. The elaboration of how Lulaism — which for a time stood apart — fell foul of this collapse is I think primarily what he thinks it important to set out here (and indeed primarily what engages his enormous brain).

Part of this old-ground analysis has consistently been that what seems awful right now and incoming in fact merely continues what’s been becoming awful since c.2008, and plus a masked but desedimenting awfulness from well before that. The social rot that the Third Way failed to turn around; plus its very naive belief that — now at least arm in arm with the forces of capitalism — it could continue to direct policy where it chose in times of downturn.

He never steps back to say any of this: it’s implicit, possibly because he so strongly feels that contextualisation in respect of the US (let alone the UK) is always a move back towards cultural and political parochialism. And that the merely parochial hoohah directed at Trump or Brexit — especially from the centre left so-called — is actually strangely easily recuperable, by these deeper masked forces. At least until these force are better unmasked, and a politics of their demolition is more widely in place.

Of course from its olympian perspective — “just the structure, ma’am” — the NLR has never been good at the practical outlay of this politics of demolition, how and where to start it, what to do (except sometimes to scoff at its woollier manifestations: recalling a briefly snippy exchange between Anderson and Alex Cockburn re the anti-war marches of 2003, which PA had rather sneered at and Cockburn, always better at this kind of stuff, cogently defended). There’s a slightly self-parodic moment where PA seems to be arguing that the PT’s doom was sealed when they failed to pay attention to the intellectual layer (“the party essentially ignored them, in a myopic philistinism for which all that mattered were electoral calculations”). A serious question here might be, How could these intellectuals better have presented themselves and their critique, to ensure that self-critical analysis was seen as something that mattered? But it’s a question that the NLR would also struggle to answer with any vigour, I feel.

And that’s really what’s missing. PF laments the absence of greater response to e.g. Trumpism or the actual immediate effects (already realised, soon possible) of Bolsonaro in the driving seat. Anderson is arguing that we should actually be responding to something beyond this — but yes, he never says how and so it all ends up strangely apolitical.

(Note on PA’s treatment of the “apparent deliquescence of the social background into insecurity and violence” — left till later lol. This will surely do for now.)

PART ONE^^^ :^D

(part two if ever attempted will be a critique of PA's approach to "cultural vectors")

btw PA has written about Lula in the past

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/perry-anderson/lulas-brazil

So this latest dispatch being more concerned with Lula's project rather than Bolsanaro feels right.

xp, brilliant Mark, looking froward to pt 2!

skimming that earlier piece -- i will read it properly later -- PA could profitably have titled this new one "LULA: how very wrong i was, eh"

ty neil, tho FP'd obviously for putting pressure on me to write something i've actually said i might

I believe in you!

i certainly hope you do. that was a very stimulating summary, which I'm still digesting a bit.

realised while pootling round in the bus earlier that PF's position re PA on bolsonaro is exactly ep thompon's on PA re older monsters

another funny PA story: when he published a series of critical essays in the LRB in the early 70s [edit: mistyped this, s/b 80s] on key conservative thinkers -- oakeshott, hayek i think, forget the others -- e.p.thompson sent him a note saying "these are rascals! please stiffen your tone"

― mark s, Friday, September 9, 2011 2:43 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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just looked it up -- it's from pel's obit for thompson, in 93:

"‘What’s Perry up to these days?’ he enquired. Tariq mentioned something I’d written on conservatism in this paper. ‘Yes, I know,’ Edward replied. ‘Oakeshott was a scoundrel. Tell him to stiffen his tone.’"

― a hurrrr hurrrr (history mayne), Friday, September 9, 2011 2:47 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finished reading this piece both yesterday and now. There happens to be an interesting letter about it on the LRB which provides further analysis on the role of television and the evangelical movement and seems to almost be addressing Mark's point on the lack of interest in Bolsanaro by filling in more gaps.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n03/perry-anderson/bolsonaros-brazil

(bottom of the page)

As for the piece I am not sure how good its analysis is at times. Too much is perhaps made of Bolsanaro's shooting for one, and it only mentions in passing the polls showing that Lula was apparently favourite to win the election against Bolsanaro were he allowed to contest. So much for all the obstacles facing the PT -- the economy, corruption, etc. -- but it actually took the judiciary (via threats from the military) to deliver the victory for Bolsanaro. Feels like he just runs around this?

(Incidentally Lula's project seems similar to the one in Venezuela at times -- a similar level of social programs combined with a lack of class warfare -- although there is a lot more mobilisation in Venezuela. I think he is good on the shortcomings of these pacts, which is the core of the piece)

i i would honestly like to see a perry-length LRB piece (not by him!) on these parallel evolutions of TV in italy, brazil and of course the murdoch network in the US (and inc. the effects of his newspapers on TV in the UK, esp.the degradation of political coverage on the BBC) -- the letter is useful (and witty) but it still feels to me that lots is going unexplored

(of course if it's not by perry we probably won't spend all our free time picking it to bits on this thread so swings and roundabouts for the proposed mystery writer of this piece)

The only English language writer I can think of who looked like he was interested in lots of foreign TV is Clive James :-(

ok yes i don't want him to write it either

I'm sure he can find time in between rewriting Dante and Proust and giving interviews about the surprising mystery of still being alive!

if CJ also rewrites powell then maybe we can distract perry for as long as it takes for mysteryman to get a-scribblin

Surely an LRB article on the significance of changes in UK TV would only be written by ... Lanchester.

TBF I would read that, as long as it wasn't fiction

i keep thinking about the only paragraph i’ve read of The Wall and how bad it was and wondering how he achieves such consistency.

I’ve grown a bit weary of the lrb house style*, esp Lanchester, even Meek’s one on media recently i thought was weak, so was pleased to see the recent Patricia Lockwood piece on twitter and was thinking how much more i’d enjoy the current house style if they had more pieces clearly not in it.

*that feeling that everything is set out and you nod along with it and... then nothing. (mark you summed part of this up well somewhere possibly itt, but i can’t quite remember how you put it.) it all feels a bit pre the legitimacy crisis of the cultural/political world. one style option is for things need to go in a bit harder - i’ve got empson’s voice in my head. there need to be suggested options, modelled outcomes. a willingness to get things measurably wrong rather than the ineluctable structural rightness many pieces aim for. another style i like is practiced by maggie nelson or kate briggs, rivka galchen too (tho not so much in the lrb) - the avoidance of that sort of structural ex cathedra dogmatism, with the creation of looser non dogmatic conversational spaces within the text. briggs associates this with barthes late lectures and i find it immensely refreshing whenever i read it. wry, personal, associational. at the moment it’s lockwood who practices a version of this best.

maybe where i was talking abt why i am unimpressed by lanchester the reporter (it's on the ferrante thread lol): Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels)?

i got into a mild beef w/flopson there bcz i said JL knows "nothing" abt economics meaning "nothing i didn't already know -- he never NEVER digs into anything i find unexpected", which i guess is largely what i feel i pay for w/the LRB. not so much deep thought as counter-intuitive elements that help me pin down some larger phenom. cf the petrarch piece, which was full of these :)

meek tbf does provide these, even if largely anecdotal-empirical (i.e. he goes out and talks to farmers, which i have not really done since i was a kid and moved to the hateful city)

absolutely and meek is usually v good. i just found his newspaper one a bit weak by his standards. and yes that was the post I was thinking of, thx.

probably i’m asking of the lrb something it’s not intending to do but the explanatory-analytical framework stands back from its judgments other than in the small book review bit of each essay - the treatment of rusbridger in the meek piece was a good example - and i could sometimes wish for a bit more interrogation. less passivity in the face of their subject. if they’ve gone to the trouble of reaching deep in to a subject (and i totally agree on the usefulness of counter-intuitive points) then i’d like to hear their thoughts on the future direction and possible ways which the situation might be improved or changed for the better.

i'm thinking about this bcz i'm right now writing something abt another august and stately journal, and it suddenly occurred to me that -- when "augustness and stateliness" are a key part of yr brand (and thus get all in among yr politics -- it's actualy quite hard to do the other bit of journalism, which is someone running in waving some bit of paper or a photo or a recording or whatever yelling "OMG HAVE YR HEARD/READ/SEEN THIS! we need to do something on it/about it PDQ, this CHANGES EVERYTHING"

where there's a sense that the urgency can for a week or so be offset against the (august and stately) accuracy, the omg the PRESENT and the FUTURE depend on it etc. It's a mode that LRB is entirely set against, at least since it stopped employing Cockburn and Hitchens and Paul Foot. There's good reason to turn yr nose up at it in its present form, it's actually very extrmnely corroded and degraded in media at large currently*! But it's a mode journalism needs also to deal with and here and there to exhibit -- and I think a dimension that Meek piece on media did not really look at at all.

*the alt-listings model was killed by (a) the internet very effectively unbundling a good cross-subsidy model and (b) all kinds of parasitic hedge-fund orgs buying up titles and asset stripping them for short-term profit. the gawker-model ran full tilt into the problem of its own contradictions -- "let's tell ALL the gossip that journalists know but keep to themselves!" -- which is that what was needed as a strong renegotation of the acceptable limits of which stories journalists shd not in fact pass on. in the UK the alt-tabloid model (skwawkbox/the canary) has entirely failed to decorrode or dedegrade the latent value of yellow journalism (which is NOT NOTHING: speed may nopt be a virtue but it *is* an existent quality and therefore has to be tackled and managed).

that's v interesting.

and immediately and btw i totally agree that speed is a virtue and in the respects you outline both in the 1st para and in yr note *is* journalism (bcos of my lol Front Page view of it - the ability to write at short notice high impact copy that conveys the sense of a thing happening to people who aren't experiencing it).

i'm trying to tease out some thoughts, but I'm going to put down the unwinnowed version here to see if it helps:

Is the problem not speed per se, but in fact speed combined with a massive increase in volume?* our ability to generate and distribute/transmit data has massively increased, and urgency is often confused with 'this thing is happening now'. Our ability (in terms of industry and also in terms of individual journalists and readers) to editorially make a decision about newsworthiness is completely swamped). The notion of story angle has vanished in this process, and going begging for a master, 'angle' has been hijacked by the politics and motives of power <- this feels as good a definition of that unhelpfully inclusive term 'fake news' as any.

in this model, you will get a natural convergence of the wide range of news between gossip and Big Important Things (i consider gossip important and entertaining, but it's useful to be able to maintain a separation), and a flattening out of the moral, editorial and lifespan perspective.

if we look elsewhere, for instance at places generating massive amounts of data - Candy Crush for instance - the process of sifting and finding meaning in that is algorithmic. And as we all know, the same logic is being applied by Facebook etc to make editorial decisions. of course the editorial principles at play are entirely alien to the traditional notion of editorial policy. Although rule-based heuristics and algorithms are very close, the idea of heuristics as 'good-enough' judgment based on certain environmentally useful principles, and data crunching as processing massive data and generating 'insight' based on useful patterns, that are close to specific business requirements (flagging a criminal transaction eg) they have different consequences.

i feel in some way the conditions for the urgent speed/august accuracy styles or methods to contribute to each other and be successful and useful have entirely liquidated. This I think is yr corrosion. Stately/August accuracy can seem irrelevant, urgent speed, a froth of time-expiring info, whose mayfly life-span is shorter than the ability to place it into a structure of verifying/truth-testing etc (twitter is the overridingly obvious example, but i would expand it to include the general aspect of news-without-import which has been characteristic of the brexit period, and the churning through of publicity via press releases via the wires). The two methods can in no way communicate. This seems to me to be a very bad thing, without a solution currently. I guess 'Long Reads' as they've emerged in the press (rather than having been always present in other ah organs and periodicals etc) are a fairly obvious example of this problem being perceived and an attempt to solve it being put in place (I'm not sneering - the long reads can often be very good - i'm more interested that they have appeared and have this name, but i don't think they are in any way a solution).

point being the processors of this and validators of this information in the Stately August mode are detached, and their function moribund, other than as the useful and necessary explanatory force, but this detachment probably produces the sad nodding along, at its worst represented by Lanchester's boilerplate takes, the articles produce. not quite history, not quite news, yes you're right, but kind of so what? Telling us accurately that we're all going down the shitter has limitd appeal. and lol let's face it the lrb's turnaround times mean that they're often giving their verdict well after everyone's forgotten what prompted it. I'm being harsh. James Meek's extraordinary piece on Afghanistan of a few years ago, had the ability to reconfigure, with detail, historical narrative in a way that gave insight both into and beyond its subject. Same with his chocolate factory piece. But i do feel there is a sort of ex cathedra decadence to being *right* here – it needs an edge of judgment bringing it back to the current conjuncture, back into the froth and frenzy from which it is detached, rather than 'and this is why we are where we are today' FIN.

more generally i feel the crisis of legitimacy which i hook on to the post global financial crash world, but which in terms of distal causes can be assigned to the end of the cold war and the establishment of the neoliberal end of history consensus, is in represented here in this split, and via that is seeping into actual questions of style.

*I was at a localisation (dubbing and subtitle translation, regional video conforming) conference the other day. A model which had been stable has now been entirely destabilised by the huge increase in volume of video assets driven by the OTT (over-the-top internet rather than broadcast/networks/cable) platforms like Netflix. What broke? There's too much to translate, not enough translators. Why isn't that stimulating demand? Because translators and voice talent aren't getting paid more. Why not? Because the per-asset price agreement with the customer was not linked to volume, and so was a promise to pay no matter what the volume. The supply of people able to process the material is fundamentally out of whack with the amount of material that needs to be processed and no one's got the capability to generate more money out of the procurement system. I found this interesting because in an area I understand, you have a model of both the secular stagnation problem (high employment, but inflation not going up, wages only going up slightly, the breaking of the Philips Curve), and the consequent problem of growth fucking an industry, which sounds ridiculous.

The death of the Phillips curve in one chart: While unemployment rate in the Eurozone has dropped to 7.8% in Jan, the lowest since Sep2008, core inflation has also fallen, contrary to the theory of the Phillips curve. pic.twitter.com/fCmXuZCdsp

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) March 1, 2019

as elsewhere the expected solution is from AI//macbhine learning/algorithmic approaches - ie the knowledge industry being automated in the way manufacturing was in the 19th C - in this case via machine translation. this has a place, but it fundamentally changes the process and in ways that are quite difficult to define the end output, in fact the fabric of our intellectual perception gets rewoven but such production changes. algorithmic processing is not in itself bad, but produces a subtly different sausage. i'll give a very basic example bcos that's probably a little abstract. in order to get through higher volumes of media translation, machine translation (MT) is used to generate an initial transcript 500 times quicker than it will take a translator to do so. A subsequent human QC process will take much longer than a QC process on a human translation, but only by about half. So the overall productivity is massively increased. However translators doing the QC have to be told to avoid correcting things like 'house' to 'home', ie re-translating, as this will massively reduce productivity. They are asked to – division of labour time – split out the process of *editing* from the process of *translating*. The output is subtly different. In a sense dehumanised. Interestingly, it may be more effective to get domain specialists to correct the machine translation (which will often get domain specific stuff wrong - medicine, IT, fly fishing - unless specifically trained on it). These domain specialists will get the mechanics of the content right, but the translation will be left as is, apart from where it is evidently garbage.

Does it matter? I'm not sure it makes any difference whether it matters, but i do think it changes the cultural fabric of the world, and again, in ways that are difficult for us to perceive or articulate.

machine-learning does human faces: thispersondoesnotexist

the faces are (mostly) ok but their relationship to their surroundings (hats) is unsettling if largely antic, and their relationship to other ppl in the picture (and sometimes just to their own ears or skin) quickly gets lovecraftian

in general i think our culture *is* processing and responding to this, but our cultural institutions are trapped in a kind of double deathspiral of required models: (A) of how to frame these changes in time to reconnect the stable archive to the frothing moment, and (of course) (B) how to pay for themselves :(

yes, that seems the problem in a nutshell. i would expect to see more a more protean set of styles as the channels of the printed word tried to find new ways to reconnect, which in part is why i've been so pleased with some of the LRB's more unusual forays, and the effort they've made at the very least to increase the number of women writing after that disastrous issue of a couple of years ago.

i have to say as well, that buried on the page under the mountain of Perry Anderson, the At the Ashmolean piece about Hadrian's infatuation with Antinous, and Hadrian's power to disseminate his image everywhere and erect cities in his name, and attach constellations to his eternal existence, felt like a wonderful example of how substantial and strange-seeming the reconfigurations of culture and power can be throughout history.

I still mostly think that the LRB is quite well written, and better written than most other publications that I see. So I wouldn't want to be too critical of its house style if there is one.

On the other hand I could agree that there could be something in Fizzles' criticism and his wish for other styles - eg: more polemical, opinionated or uncompromising? Unsure if that's what he means; I am reading Empson again at the moment - he's opinionated but frankly not very clear most of the time, so I'm not sure he counts as 'going in hard'. I now recall that Empson used to write for the LRB!

Unfortunately the other mode that Fizzles wants to see more of, in the kind of examples he cites, eg Lockwood, I tend to think is dreadful.

I have still not received the current - is it current? - issue. This is fairly typical.

I don't know whether this reflects anything broader about the LRB.

Yes, “Empson” in his “I think x is wrong because” mode, imitating the texture of his thought, which seems so often to produce a logic so opaque as to have to be taken on faith (enjoyable as it is) is probably a v bad idea.

Do you dislike Lockwood specifically? Or is it the wider set of what I consider new strategies in say Maggie Nelson for uncovering meaning or allowing it to emerge from adjecancies rather than more structured or linear argument? (That in itself may be opaque so I can expand if necessary)

i like empson. i also like that he loathed derrida -- who i also like and feel often took his stands on quite similar ground (inc.style viz " a logic so opaque as to have to be taken on faith (enjoyable as it is)")

I think 'everybody likes Empson' - literally there are dozens of different people who have written very favourably about him and I can't think of anyone who has done the opposite. I have read Michael Wood's whole (naturally hugely favourable) book on Empson.

So I like him also. And I keep reading SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. But it is very slow going, very clotted. While I can see things to admire, I can't say it's usually saying something very clear.

If there is a simpler or more straightforward Empson, maybe it can be found in his LRB contributions?

Derrida, a few years ago I realized I did not really understand, so stopped.

Lockwood, I have found dreadful.

Not sure I have read Nelson but what I read about one of her books gave me the impression I would think the same about her.

Fizzles presented two ways forward for the LRB - more self-indulgence and more straightforward strong opinions. I guess I am saying the latter sounds better.

empson is an all-time favourite. forceful. strong. funny (cf the famous portrait of shakespeare which gives him the impression shakespeare has just come from a large banquet where he has had several rounds of wine, but is keeping his assurance such that he might say “I’ll be all right if I’m not joggled” to an anxious lady). almost magical at times (that opacity). his dismissals are almost thrilling. he’s constantly *at it* - pushing it, looking visibly using his considerable intellectual tools - argufying is a good term for him.

i think both would be good. i think the times call for more strategies and methods being used. naturally i wouldn’t call their style self-indulgent. tho i would note that certainly nelson, briggs, galchen and to a degree in the last samurai dewitt have all written about the need to have a writing structure and approach that can accommodate having a child, the interruptions of the world, of other needs, into the main focus of work. this obviously contra the pram in the hallway. that i would agree could be called indulgent, even self indulgent but not of course with any of the moral judgment of rules not being adhered to the phrase normally implies.

xxp

"more self-indulgence": lol this is a highly contentious and loaded interpretation of what fizzles in fact suggested, given the context of his and my discussion!

(caveat: i haven't read the lockwood piece, probably bcz it touches on things i have possibly non-straightforward strong opinions on -- viz how to engage with newly emergent models of information exchange, and what they night be doing to us -- so i don't to leave it till i'm sleepily in bed as per usual)

semi-related disgression: does the LRB still run poems? i have got so used to never ever reading them in all the time i've been reading it (since 1983 i think) that i didn't spot if/when it stopped -- there seem to be none in the most recent issues to hand?

fwiw i should say i don't think the internet piece fully worked. she herself points out it was a lecture and it's clear it would be better suited to that format, but i was pleased to see it there.

it does. but perhaps less frequently (and the lockwood piece also triggered a similar thought - what space is this occupying in the editor's mind?). iirc there was one bloody seidel poem in the grenfell issue, can that be right?

actually it had four poems in, including a Seidel.

and the latest one also does, tho like the pinefox i have not yet received mine.