Monday, September 07, 2020

From the manuscript. I've posted most of it before, in one form or another.
My parents didn’t give their children credit for much, including anything resembling an understanding of what Eliot called “the objective correlative” or the relation of communicative form to ideas or emotion, but I’m not sure still they themselves even when they were younger acted on anything more than a highly tuned sense of reflex. I’ve never had a problem seeing Eliot’s work both as brilliantly complex craftsmanship and as a desperate defensive mechanism propelled by fears of political, social, and sexual failure: impotence of every sort.  To separate one from the other -form from subject- would be like separating sadness from the blues. But that separation is something Modernism demanded, either in terms of “pure” form, or of subject matter reformulated as “ideas”, “content” and reducible to ideology.


Aesthetics was an invention of the eighteenth century and the age of reason, a theory of art in the shadow of production, as something to be taken or left, optional, superfluous, “parasitic”. But military uniforms are the outward manifestation of a military ethos, and they serve a purpose. The outward signs of regimentation reinforce the fact of it. Max Weber’s manners are Germanic and bourgeois. He didn’t analyze the way he dressed, walked, talked and parted his hair, but these aesthetic choices are documents of his relation to a culture, and his ideal of value-free science is as much the product of an age as he was. The fantasy of objectivity is the fantasy of the universal through the elision of the particular, beginning with the elision of the particular self. All you have to do to undermine Weber’s moralizing pedantry is to imagine him mumbling the words to himself while adjusting his tie in the mirror. It’s fascinating that although military orders don’t always conflate the authoritarian and the universal it’s one thing you can count on philosophers to do.  And Weber’s goal of course was to replace one form of aristocracy with another. 

Compare Weber with the art historian, Panofsky.  



“…but this sensitivity is still part of my practical experience, that is, of my everyday familiarity with objects and events.”  Weber simply bypasses this as if it were irrelevant. He imagines an impersonal relation to the world. It’s a common trope of the literature of the period, but the impersonal in art and technocracy, though the product of the same events are very different things. 

[i] Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”, in From Max Weber: Studies in Sociology,  H.H. Gerth, C. Wright Mills, Routledge.
[ii]  Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography And Iconology: An Introduction To The Study Of Renaissance Art”, in, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1955, Univ. Chicago Press, 1983

"And Weber’s goal of course was to replace one form of aristocracy with another."
That sentence seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people (academics).
And yet they make jokes like this:

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