Re: [NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

[Max Herman via NetBehaviour]

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 
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2019 6:30 PM
To: Max Herman 
Cc: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity 

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 thou

Re: [NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

[Ana Valdés via NetBehaviour]

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  on
> behalf of Ana Valdés via NetBehaviour  >
> *Sent:* Thursday, October 10, 2019 2:08 PM
> *To:* NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <
> netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
> *Cc:* Ana Valdés 
> *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@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.
>
> ___
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> NetBehavi

Re: [NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

[Max Herman via NetBehaviour]

, 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  on behalf of 
Ana Valdés via NetBehaviour 
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2019 2:08 PM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity 

Cc: Ana Valdés 
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 
mailto:netbehaviour@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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Re: [NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

[Ana Valdés via NetBehaviour]

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@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.
>
> ___
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>


-- 
https://anavaldes.wordpress.com/
www.twitter.com/caravia158
http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0






cell Sweden +4670-3213370
cell Uruguay +598-99470758


"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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[NetBehaviour] Nobel prize for Handke

[Max Herman via NetBehaviour]

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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NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
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