[NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

[Max Herman]

Perhaps the Nobel Prize exemplifies some of the problems with "individual genius."  What if individual genius cannot provide the advancements in human arts and sciences that is required to best address our present crises?  If it has a role in achieving the best outcomes, what kind of a role is it?

If genius is a network, comprising individuals but not reducible to them (just as music is not reducible to the instruments being played), then the tension between individual genius and the general properties of the system is perhaps a permanent feature (if you remove either, you get neither).  The selection of two writers, one who has the pro-nationalist approach and one who critiques nationalism, is maybe a suggestion by the Nobel committee that the world and literature itself face a problem.

I've been reading Calvino for a good part of 2018 and 2019, specifically Six Memos, and in Six Memos he praises Borges as the best writer or something like it.  He also discusses about 175 male writers and scientists with only one or two women.  There are other examples of misogyny too, arguably.  However, he does mention networks, defining the novel as a network, and this may be a way of proving that even a fascist-leaning conception of culture knows that networks are crucial.  I then believe that if you add neuroscience, meditation, and grass-roots culture (which conservatism ironically claims to be defending!) you can have a counterbalance to the current shift toward nationalism and democracy reduction.  Art and informal, unofficial culture may be required, as has often occurred in history, if formal structures of power are incapable of learning these things or embodying them in the world.  I think that both meditation (as a universal value in all cultures) and neuroscience (also universal) can add a lot to the role of objective science (a la Thunberg) and actual embodiment of change and new adaptive behaviors.

Market-based economies do not have to be based on maximization of individual profit to the destruction of common value.  Adam Smith himself stated this very bluntly -- capitalism cannot succeed without moral judgment (of which one very old and perhaps neurological rooted definition is truth and beauty).  Value can also be understood as goods of common value, like environmental protection, democracy, human rights, and the like.  This kind of evolution of value is already a great driver of the new economic revolution, the Green revolution.  However, economy of course occurs within a fabric of power and conflict which often pits ethnonationalist capitalism against traditional values centered on the golden rule, enlightenment conceptions of rights, compassion for humanity and the natural world, etc.

Anyway I ramble horribly.  If any of these ideas have validity I have to remember to meditate and embody them the best I can in the real world rather than just rambling.  My own art and writing are of course massively guilty of individual ego too.

Best hopes and wishes to all,

Max

________________________________
From: Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2019 6:30 PM
To: Max Herman <maxnmherman at hotmail.com>
Cc: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

Difficult discussion and a eternal question are the intellectual measured with other tools and rules that other people?
If we demand of others coherence and balance between thoughts and deeds why are we willing to allow the intellectuals to think and act as they were separate entities?
The Norwegian Nobel prize Knut Hamsun was a enthusiastic admirer of Adolf Hitler, the French Louis Ferdinand Celine and the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound were deeply anti Semite. In modern times the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges accepted a medal from Pinochet and was never given a Nobel prize for it.
Jean Paul Sartre, himself admirer of Fidel Castro and Mao Tse Tung, wrote about “l’intelectuel engage”, it means the engaged intellectual and he demanded all intellectual should be engaged in their times social struggles and fought against injustice and social inequality. By the way Sartre refused to accept the Nobel prize arguing among other arguments that a prize given in the name of the inventor of dynamite was an aberration.
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobelprize, evolved from a deep leftist writing and a clear social commitment to a political partisan of far right and a staunch defender of Israel.
The film maker Emir Kusturica is a fervent defensor of Milosevic too and when I was in Tuzla, in Bosnian, marching with Women in Black from Serbia, supporting the women survivors of the Srebrenicas massacre, many Bosnian and Serbian women wanted him judged by his vitriolic attacks against Muslim.
The choice of Handke can sees as a world wide tendency where Fascism is being “ normalized” or tolerated or a, again, another way to measure the intellectuals behavior and thoughts.
Ana

tors 10 okt. 2019 kl. 18:54 skrev Max Herman <maxnmherman at hotmail.com<mailto:maxnmherman at hotmail.com>>:
Hi Ana,

It did strike me as odd that he was politically criticized yet honored so highly for writing.  It points to something of a disconnect perhaps.  Is writing separate from politics, or separable?  Which is to say, is Handke's art political?  Is the answer sometimes, i.e., on a case by case basis?  Certainly humans are full of contradictions and can do both good and evil in the same lifetime, year, or even hour.

Full disclosure I don't know anything at all about Handke except the news today and that he worked on Wings of Desire and wrote a play called "Kaspar." That was about a person who grew to age 17 with no exposure to society, or language, then emerged.  Handke said it was about "speech torture," perhaps how language itself controls and deforms us.  Perhaps like an internal framework of control, a moving network machine perhaps?  An articulated network i.e. with joints and movement but still a machine, perhaps he is saying.

I also recall from Wings of Desire the line "Ich weiss was keine Engel weiss," or I know what no angel knows.  Perhaps this suggests that consciousness requires a body, and mortality, to be real.  Angelic, abstract, rationalized knowledge would in this view perhaps be non-human or even de-humanizing, like speech torture.  The desires of fleshly mortality -- physical, aesthetic, emotional, experiential -- are the wings or pathway to freedom and fulfillment.

These ideas can easily veer into the ideas about blood and soil, lines of DNA and place, flesh and geography.  But it seems to me that they do not necessarily need to.

Not having read any Handke at all, I'm interested to see if he omits ideas of networks or what he says about networks.  Handke was writing at the same time as Calvino, and Calvino wrote about the novel as a network.  Perhaps Handke viewed language and hence literature as a mechanized, networked system of control and mechanization of the human genius.  Or as potentially such, a network capable of evil.

I could be totally wrong about what Handke is saying, it is pure speculation on my part which I will need to verify by research.  There may be no way possible, ultimately, to know how or why the writer of "Kaspar" also wrote positively about Milosevic.  However, if there is something to it, then the idea of language as a network and the brain as a network might relate.

Think of each (language and the brain) as a complex dynamic system operating in time.  Perhaps Handke is suggesting there can be or must be some intangible, organic quality to each in order for human consciousness to exist.  This would agree properly with the "network neuroscience model of consciousness" which is getting more popular.  Our physical fleshly brains have a certain need for a certain sort of organic communication, expression, consciousness, etc., and can't just have something technical "downloaded" for the purposes of control without adverse consequences.  Perhaps he saw problems with both eastern-bloc intellectual systems and western-bloc, almost twin sides of the same structure of control.  I do know a bit of Bernhard and like his take on many things; I'm not sure of his relation to Handke or whether Bernhard had an evil side.  I did like Bernhard's Old Masters a lot, and appreciated his antipathy toward nationalism.  Kafka in "Metamorphosis" also illustrated how social, linguistic, and cultural systems of conformity and control can erase humanity.

It is possible that meditation or mindfulness, as a physically manifested neurological process-state, is the true source of a positive symbiosis between language and humanity i.e. between the organic realities of the brain/body and language systems which can be infused with technology.  The language network should respect and value the human consciousness, not try to control and reduce it to a machine part, and meditation is a necessary part of that "respect" which has dialectical and organic characteristics.

I would differ from the argument that flesh and geography are necessarily the source (which can be inferred incorrectly from the truth that humans are embodied and located in space-time, and that sometimes flesh and geography can coincide with the source to a granularity which makes the two indistinguishable).  We do form meaningful connections to other people, objects, architecture, the natural world.  However, I believe that the meditation element that infuses every culture is the primary source of the harmony, and the physical/spatial connections emanate from the meditational element.

One reason for this I believe is the necessity of self-regulation, of re-set, and their corollary of healing or repair.  If a consciousness-body is out of sync, disrupted, and lacking in physical/locational conditions which have changed or disappeared or perhaps never were, how could it possibly adapt and remain resilient?  If the "source" of proper balance and calibration is the fleeting changeable body-plus-land, how could there be any survival?  There must be something else that "survives," and one possibility could be the network potentiality and capabilities of the brain via mindfulness plus language in the broadest sense (representation, expression, etc.).  These two would be the key to surviving and adapting to change, but would also need to be seriously considered as a core framework of the "adapted" or thriving state which connects as a complex system with the body-in-geography but is not identical to it.

I could be totally wrong here on everything: my interpretation of Handke, the role of flesh and geography in the humanization of language and symbolic systems, and the role of meditation in the brain and art or truth and beauty.  However, I just wanted to write a bit about it.  It does seem to me that unless the blood and soil theories are incorrect or incomplete, we will have a lot of trouble getting through the current era of nationalist populism, and arguably no chance at all.  If there are alternative or additional methods of resilience and adaptation we could use but choose not to that might be an unnecessary loss, one potentially leading to additional unnecessary losses.  The risk of attempting them seems minimal, but that could also be a wrong perception on my part.

Apologies for errors in this email, I'm certain there are very many.

Best regards,

Max

________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org>> on behalf of Ana Valdés via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>>
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2019 2:08 PM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>>
Cc: Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com<mailto:agora158 at gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

Handke is one of the most interesting writers in post war Germanspeaking world. He worked with Wim Wenders in the fillm Himmel over Berlin. But in the latest years he has developed to a controversial writer, supporting the Serb warcriminal Slovobodan Milosevic and writing books and articles describing Serbia as an offer in the war.
A brilliant writer but a political idiot.
Ana

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 2:10 PM Max Herman via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>> wrote:

Does anyone have thoughts on this?

I had never heard of Handke but am interested to read some now.

His play "Kaspar" has some interesting themes it appears.

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