our expectations for Congress are too low

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Peter

According to the New York Times‘ Peter Baker, “White House aides argue that the string of congressional victories—capped by the package of climate, health and tax provisions that finally cleared the Senate over the weekend—compares favorably to the two-year legislative record of most any other modern president, even perhaps F.D.R. and L.B.J.” In Politico, Ryan Lizza and Eugene Daniels also compare Biden to LBJ, citing the American Recovery Act ($1.9 trillion), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($550 billion), the Chips and Science Act ($280 billion), and the Inflation Reduction Act: ($700 billion), for a nearly $3.5 trillion agenda. They also mention the votes that expanded NATO and addressed gun safety and toxic burn pits.

I think these recent accomplishments are noteworthy. I am not writing to dampen excitement about the story (Biden’s momentum) that dominated the political news before it was eclipsed by the search of Mar-a-Lago. However, comparing recent legislation to the 1930s or 1960s is ridiculous.

In 1964 alone, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, launched the War on Poverty with a blizzard of programs, created Food Stamps, and authorized war in Vietnam. In 1965 alone, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act (still the frameworks for K-16 federal education policy); Medicare and Medicaid; the Voting Rights Act, the legislation that established HUD plus the Public Works and Economic Development Act; the laws creating the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts; the Hart-Celler Act, which transformed the demographics of the United States by allowing mass immigration; the Vocational Rehabilitation Act; and the Highway Beautification Act; plus major legislation against heart disease, cancer, stroke and automotive emissions.

One indicator of the significance of the Biden laws is their cost, but one must adjust the sticker price for inflation, GDP, and/or population growth. Since the annual federal budget is usually about $4 trillion, $3.5 trillion over ten years (the Biden laws have various timeframes) equals roughly 10 percent of the annual federal budget, or two percent of GDP per year. Concentrating that much money on chosen priorities, such as climate, matters. But federal spending has often increased by more than two percent of GDP from one year to the next. In 2020, it grew by 10.5 percent due to spending that Trump signed and the economy’s contraction. A ten-year budget authorization can easily be changed before the decade is up.

In any case, cost is not the only relevant measure. The laws that FDR and LBJ signed created new institutions (such as Social Security or HUD) and new rights under federal law and revised the social contract, e.g., by getting the federal government involved in K-12 schools. These institutions, rights, and structures are mostly still in place today.

I do not believe that all the laws of the 1930s and 1960s were good–in fact, some were disastrous. I do not assume that the pace of change should typically match 1964-5. I certainly do not credit LBJ’s legislative successes to his personal skills. However, the public should be able to change the society (whether I happen to agree with the changes or not), and then we should be able to revisit our decisions. Elections should have regular and substantial consequences. Then democracy matters, leaders are held accountable, voters are empowered, and the public can learn from experience.

The election of 2020 certainly made a difference, as will those of 2022 and 2024. The Democratic victory blocked Republican goals and shifted federal spending priorities by up to $3.5 trillion over 10 years. This spending may enlarge constituencies that then reshape political power in the longer run. For example, the companies that produce subsidized renewable energy may prove as durable–for better and for worse–as the hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that have been federally subsidized since the 1960s.

However, the recent regulatory bills on guns and burn pits are ridiculously modest, and the spending is not as durable or significant as basic statutes are. Biden has not yet signed a statute comparable to the elements of the New Deal or Great Society–but then, neither have his predecessors for decades. For all his bluster, Trump signed basically no consequential laws other than big temporary spending increases that had Democratic support. Obama fought for and won some modest amendments to 1960s laws on health insurance. Bush II signed painstakingly negotiated amendments to the 1964 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and expanded domestic surveillance with the USA Patriot Act. Clinton signed the abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and some related programs. Bush I signed no major statutes. This is a slim record for 30 years.

Overall, we expect too much of new presidents–who have limited power within a broken political system–but we expect too little of the system as a whole. Imagining that Biden’s legislative agenda rivals LBJ’s reveals how low are expectations have become.

Velazquez, The Spinners

Posted on August 8, 2022 by Peter

One story

Minerva, goddess of weavers,
Had heard too much of Arachne.
She had heard
That the weaving of Arachne
Equalled her own, or surpassed it.

Arachne was just a poor girl, but her artistry had brought her fame.

The nymphs came down from the vines on Tmolus
As butterflies to a garden, to flock stunned
Around what flowered out of the warp and the weft
Under her fingers.

They did not merely admire Arachne’s creations but also loved to watch her working. The process moved them as much as the outcome.

A grace like Minerva’s, unearthly,
Moved her hands whether she bundled the fleeces
Or teased out the wool, like cirrus,
Or spun the yarn, or finally
Conjured her images into their places ...

Surely Minerva (a.k.a. Athena) had taught or inspired her. Arachne scoffed at this idea, claiming that she deserved sole credit for her own art. She openly challenged Minerva to a weaving competition. Minerva duly arrived, disguised as an old mortal woman, and lectured Arachne about giving proper credit to the gods. This speech threw Arachne into a rage.

As she spat at her: “Your brain totters
Like your decrepit body.
You have lived too long.
If you possess daughters or granddaughters
Waste your babble on them.
I am not such a fool
To be frightened by an owl-face and a few screeches.
I make up my own mind,
And I think as I always did.
If the goddess dare practise what she preaches
Why doesn’t she take up my challenge?
Why doesn’t she come for a contest?”

Hearing these words, Minerva abandoned her costume and seemed to grow twice as tall. Everyone was terrified except Arachne, who set about weaving. The competitors worked intently, each hardly aware of the other. Minerva wove an illustration of her own authority, depicting herself as the founder of the city of Athens and the just punisher of various mortals. Arachne vividly and sympathetically depicted a series of women raped by male gods–examples of domination rather than authority.

Arachne’s tapestry was perfect. Minerva could find no fault in it, which enraged her. The goddess tore it to shreds and began beating Arachne with her spindle. Unable to stand the pain, Arachne tried to hang herself. “Pity touched Minerva” and she chose to spare Arachne from her rightful fate. Minerva transformed the girl into a spider, working this magic of transformation skillfully, one stage at a time. From then on, Arachne spun and wove perpetually and (I assume) compulsively, “her touches / Deft and swift and light as when they were human.”

Another story

In 1560-62, Titian painted The Rape of Europa, which now hangs in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. Like the first scene in the tapestry that Arachne wove to defeat Minerva,

It showed Europa crying from out at sea
stride the bull that had deceived her.
The high god Jupiter, in his bull form,
Carrying her off—
And glistening with effort.
You could see her feet recoiling
From the swipe of the waves through which he heaved.

Titian added plump winged babies and an Adriatic coast in the background. By the 17th century, this work was in the royal collection in Madrid, where Peter Paul Rubens copied it while Diego Velazquez watched him.

Perhaps Velazquez thought: I am better than Titian and I don’t have to copy his works like Rubens does. My genius is my own. Perhaps that thought struck him with irony or even self-mockery, because he knew what he owed to his predecessors.

Velazquez owned translations of Ovid’s text in which the stories of Arachne and Europa were told. Perhaps he sympathized with Arachne, the artist who had sympathetically portrayed Europa. Or perhaps he recognized her arrogance in himself.

The painting

Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) by Velazquez (1655-1660, Museo Nacional del Prado) shows five women in contemporary clothes, plus a cat. They are weaving, spinning, collecting textile fragments, or watching others at these activities. As A.S. Byatt (1999) notes, the painting depicts light playing on many kinds of fabric, including fine filaments that behave like spiderwebs.

Behind these women, and two steps above them, is what first appears to be a single scene populated by noblewomen or mythological figures, including two flying putti and one woman in a resplendent helmet. Closer inspection distinguishes the background, which is a portion of Titian’s Rape of Europa (mainly the sky, with Europa herself hardly visible to the right), from a stage-like area that supports five women in fancy clothes who are boldly illuminated by sunlight from the left.

Like Las Meninas (painted at about the same time and now shown in a neighboring room), this is an enigmatic picture that may have been contrived to support several literal interpretations. One possibility is that the scene on the stage is the story of Arachne, with Athena in the helmet and Arachne standing before her own tapestry, which looks just like Titian’s Rape of Europa. Paintings were sometimes reproduced as tapestries by artisans who had less prestige and were seen as less creative than the original painters. In this case, Velazquez would have pretended to copy an imaginary woven copy of a real painting that he had watched Rubens actually copy in oil. (Today, that copy is displayed in the same room as The Spinners.)

The women in the foreground could just be ordinary workers, shown for contrast. Or they, too, could be figures from the Arachne story. Minerva could be the older lady on the left, shown before she sheds her costume. The steps might separate two episodes from the same story.

The working spinners are arranged in a way that resembles the goddesses and nymphs in Titian’s Diana and Callisto, another painting that Velazquez had watched Rubens copy in Spain (Alpers 2005). One possibility is that Velazquez’ depiction of the spinners is sexually suggestive (Bird 2007), alluding to Titian’s naked nymphs. Or perhaps the main suggestion is that one character is a goddess in disguise.

Evidently, this is a painting about art, coming after the apex of straightforward narrative painting represented by Titian. It is about whether artists are original or derivative–an explicit question in Ovid’s presentation of the Arachne myth. It is about sympathy or empathy for women confronted by unlimited power: male gods who commit rape and a goddess who tortures her victims. It may also be a demonstration of Velazquez’ superiority–as a male court painter–over female artisans. It is about the ability to represent the current physical world, imaginary pasts, and previous representations. It is about the relationship between written stories that unfold in time and three-dimensional space as captured on a flat plane. It is about comparison, assessment, and competition. It is about Velazquez–in a way that would be hard to imagine happening a century earlier.

Selections from Ovid as loosely (but brilliantly) translated by Ted Hughes. Secondary sources: Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others *New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) Wendy Bird, “The Bobbin & The Distaff: Erotic Imagery and the Meaning of Velazquez’s ‘Las Hilanderas’,” Apollo, vol. 166, no. 548, Nov. 2007, pp. 58; A.S. Byatt, “Arachne,” The Threepenny Review, no. 78 (1999): 20–23. See also: Las Meninas and mirrors, was Velazquez left-handed?, Goya’s Familia del infante Don Luis; an accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto); etc.

A Husserlian meditation

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Peter

This is a breath: in and out.

I experience it without noticing it. Then I decide to think about it. Given my cultural milieu, my first thoughts sound scientific: my lungs must be absorbing oxygen from the air. My nervous system responds positively to that sensation.

Then I realize that I am not sure whether these statements are well-founded or what their underlying concepts (such as causality and consciousness) mean. I resolve to focus on what I actually experience.

The phenomenon of my breath has certain features. It is a breath for me. I feel it and feel grateful for it. It belongs to the sequence of events that unfold in my inner time, occupying a short but not instantaneous period. It is located in my body, which occupies a specific place. It is an intentional act, yet it could have happened without my conscious attention. It has a purpose that I can know.

I can imagine a breath that lasts twice as long or sounds twice as loud, but a breath that is ceaseless is no longer a breath.

Soon that breath is gone. But another one comes; and even while I was experiencing the earlier breath, I implicitly knew that it was one in a series. Future breaths were phenomena that I could anticipate and even count on. Past breaths were phenomena that I could recollect if I chose to, or could imagine if I had forgotten them. All these breaths have a temporal rhythm that I can know in any one moment, meaning that they coexist in my present, albeit as different kinds of phenomena–memories, hopes, unnoticed experiences.

When I form a thought about my breathing, I know that I may return to that thought at will.

I can envision my body breathing one of the breaths of my own past. I can experience myself as then and there instead of now and here. This is very much like envisioning you and your experience, for you are there just as I am here.

My experience of you is mine; it belongs to the flow of my inner life. But my experience of you is not like my experience of myself, or my breath, or my past, or a number. It has peculiar features, such as the possibility of empathy. Once I know you, I know that you are real rather than imaginary and that we inhabit a shared world, because these are features of my own experience, which is an experience of you by and for me.

In truth, I may not know you, the reader of these words, but I can know what it’s like to breathe while one reads these words and imagines my experience.

My breath unfolds in the time of the world, which is jointly constituted by you and me and all other sentient beings. I cannot be a self that experiences this world without being in communion with others like me.

Each self is its own whole world. Everything that it experiences is its own experience. Yet every self is also a potential phenomenon for the other selves and needs the others to constitute and inhabit a world.

Each of my breaths reveals elaborate complexity when I examine it closely. One of the things I learn is that your breath is the same.

See also: a Hegelian meditation; Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot); freedom of the will or freedom from the will? etc. I have benefitted from and recommend: Li, Jingjing. Same Road, Different Tracks a Comparative Study of Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara Philosophy. McGill University (Canada), 2019; and an article derived from that dissertation: Li, Jingjing. “Buddhist phenomenology and the problem of essence.” Comparative Philosophy 7.1 (2016): 7. Most of my own recent and direct knowledge of Husserl comes from his Cartesian Meditations (1929) as translated by Dorian Cairns.

Ruangrupa Introduces the Spirit of ‘Lumbung’ to International Art

Posted on August 1, 2022 by David Bollier

It's exciting to see how an Indonesian artists collective, ruangrupa, is attempting to elevate the ideas of commoning in the international art world. A few years ago, ruangrupa, based in Jakarta, was selected to curate one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world, documenta. The event is a showcase for cutting-edge artistic work, held in Kassel, Germany every five years for only 100 days. This 15th edition of documenta ("documenta 15") confirms that commoning is surging as a way to re-imagine the political economy of art-making.

Any artist knows that making a livelihood from one's creativity means coming to terms with the brutal realities of markets. The economics of painting, music, photography, and performance are each different, of course, but they generally privilege individual artists over groups, require that artworks be converted into commodities, and tend to splinter and transform coherent artistic communities as market players buy artworks they regard as prestigious, fashionable, or lucrative investments.

Ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul)

This process can be necessary and benign, and at least help secure artists' livelihoods. But it can also end up corroding the ethic of collaboration and sharing that are indispensable to any creative genre. Whether it's jazz, hip-hop, painting, conceptual art, or sculpture, artists need each other to flourish. They need a community of caring colleagues who can mentor, criticize, inspire, imitate, and mutually support each other, especially when livelihoods are precarious.

Thanks to ruangrupa, documenta 15, which opened in June and will run through September, is not just an art exhibition. It's an attempt to re-imagine the political economy of art and artistic cultures.

My latest episode of Frontier of Commoning (Episode #29), I speak with Farid Rakun, a member of ruangrupa, who discusses how his collective used their documenta curation to convene a global assembly of artists to develop new ways to organize and support art-making.

Documenta 15 breaks new ground because this is the first time that an Indonesian or even Asian artist or group has been invited to curate the exhibition. Historically, documenta has featured European and Western artists, so the choice of ruangrupa as curators was clearly meant to give non-Western artistic sensibilities greater visibility and validation.

What may be more significant, however, is how ruangrupa has chosen to produce the event. It decided to abandon the traditional curation process by launching a massive experiment in artistic collaboration.

Over the past three years, the collective brought dozens of artists from around the world to discuss, deliberate, and collaborate in producing the exhibition. Through large and small democratic assemblies with a flavor of Occupy, artists decided whom to invite to exhibit, how to allocate funds, and how to develop new nonmarket infrastructures and processes to support artistic solidarity.

For example, ruangrupa decided that funds given to artists groups would not be treated as commissions to produce art. They see the funds, instead, as general support for artists' livelihoods. So the social meaning of the money is changed. It is not a market transaction; it is a recognition of the collective relationships that have enabled artists to exist as artists. The money is meant to recognize the ongoing struggles that artists overcome to produce their work, and a tribute to the ecosystems of artistic support. In this sense, artists' commissions were reimagined as a kind of universal income for a limited period, rather than transactional payment for services.

Farid Rakun of ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul)

The animating spirit of runagrupa's bold experiment is called lumbung -- an Indonesian word for a shared rice barn in which surplus is stored and later allocated for collective benefit. Lumbung is an apt metaphor for the cultural sharing that ruangrupa is trying to bring to a higher level in the art world.

International art exhibitions have traditionally been discreetly aligned with art markets and all of their competitive greed and capitalist priorities. An artist featured in a major exhibition typically causes their reputation to soar, along with the future prices of their artworks. Everyone in the commercial ecosystem then scrambles to get a piece of the action.

But what if artists could develop relations of trust, cooperation, and social solidarity – not just in producing exhibitions, but in managing follow-on collaborations? What if artists could bypass the commercial feeding frenzy by developing their own collective vehicles of mutual support and sharing, outside of commercial markets?

After all, introducing money into artistic process often interferes with the sharing and collaboration that an artistic community needs. When markets enter the picture, talented artists often decide to leave their friends and colleagues behind to pursue (more lucrative) solo careers. Other artists may skew their works to pander to market trends. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but why should that be the only option for developing an artistic career?

Ruangrupa's brave experiment at documenta has been marred by one troubling incident. A German blogger accused an artwork by a Palestinian artist of containing antisemitic imagery, which became a major controversy in the German media. How that artwork relates to ruangrupa's curation or not remains a subject of debate.

The more enduring legacy of documenta 15 is likely to be that ruangrupa developed some exciting new structures of artistic curation and solidarity on an international scale. The exhibition has prototyped some impressive new forms of commoning at scale, in the spirit of lumbung, which may inspire other artistic communities to further develop and institutionalize these models after documenta 15 concludes in September.

You can listen to my interview with Farid Rakun here.