Sunday, July 28, 2019
ETHICS OF THE REAL, and Monty Python - Live Organ Transplants
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the
Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000)
pp. 150-152:
Let us turn to two very interesting
and significant passages where Kant discusses the feeling of the sublime. The
first comes at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, shortly
before Kant’s hymn to ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’:
The
former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my
importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere
speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a
little time provided with vital force, we know not how.2
The second passage is from the
Critique of Judgement.
Hence
if in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because
nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength (which does not
belong to nature [within us ]), to regard as small the [objects] of our [natural]
concerns: property, health, and life . . . . 2 4
These two passages call to
mind an episode in Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life, where the
contrast between the magnificence of the starry heavens and the insignificance
of our ordinary lives also plays a major role. Of course, this episode is a caricature,
but this does not prevent it from helping us to define the logic of the sublime
more sharply.
The
scene takes place in the apartment of a married couple. Someone rings the bell.
Th e husband opens the door, and two men make their entry. They are in the ‘live
organ transplants’ business, and they demand his liver, which he had made the mistake
of donating in his will. The poor man defends himself by saying that they have
the right to take his liver only in the event of his death, to which objection
the two men reply that in any case he is not likely to survive the removal of
his liver. In what follows we witness a gory scene: blood splashes everywhere, one
of the two ‘butchers’ drags bloody organs out of the victim’s viscera and waves
them in front of the camera . . . . But what really interests us here is the
second part of the story, which could be regarded as a veritable ‘analytic of
the sublime’. While one of the men continues to chop up the defenceless husband,
the other accompanies the wife to the kitchen. He asks her what she is going to
do now, if she intends to stay on her own, if there is somebody else waiting in
the wings. He makes it sound as if he is courting her and she replies that no,
there is no one else. Satisfied with her answer, he asks her to donate her
liver as well. Of course she has no inclination to do so, and shrinks back in
fear. However, she changes her mind after she is brought to the edge of the
sublime - that is to say, when she ‘realizes’ how insignificant her position
appears from a more ‘elevated’ point of view. A tuxedo-clad man emerges from
the refrigerator and proceeds to escort her out of the kitchen of her everyday
life, on a promenade across the universe. While they are strolling across the
starry heavens, he sings about the ‘millions of billions’ of stars and planets,
about their ‘intelligent’ arrangement, etc., etc. Thanks to this cosmic (and
for her undoubtedly sublime) experience, the woman comes, of course, to the
desired conclusion: how small and insignificant I am in this amazing and
unthinkable space! As a result, when she is asked once again to donate her
liver, she no longer hesitates.
As we
have already said, this is a caricature. Nevertheless, the logic of this story
is precisely the same as the logic pointed out by Kant regarding the sublime.
There are moments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to
forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated
with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something
only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it. There is no need to stress,
of course, that the whole thing seems ridiculous only to the ‘disinterested
observer’ who is not overwhelmed and challenged by the same feeling of the
sublime. This specific mode of challenge is, as we shall see, quite important
for the logic of the sublime, which we are attempting to define here.
The
two essential points in the passages cited above describing
the experience of the sublime
are therefore:
1. The feeling of our
insignificance as far as the ‘whole of the
universe’ is concerned (we are
but a speck in the immense
universe).
2. The fact that what functions
as the centre of gravity of our existence in our ordinary life suddenly strikes
us as trivial and unimportant.
The
moment we ‘resolve’ the feeling of anxiety into the feeling of the sublime (of
the elevated, das Erhabene) we are dealing with a sublimity (elevation )
relating to ourselves as well as to the world outside us. In other words, the
feeling of the sublime, the reverse side of which is always a kind of anxiety,
requires the subject to regard a part of herself as a foreign body, as
something that belongs not to her but to the ‘outer world’. We are dealing here
with what we might designate as ‘the disjunction of the body and the soul’,
that is to say, with the metaphor of death. We become aware of our ‘smallness’
and insignificance, but at the same time our consciousness has already been ‘evacuated’
- it is already situated in a place of safety, from which we can enunciate this
kind of elevated judgement and even renounce the part of ourselves that we find
small and insignificant. Thus we can enjoy the narcissistic satisfaction that
results from our consciousness of being able to ‘elevate’ ourselves above our
everyday needs. That is to say, the feeling of the sublime is linked, as Kant
puts it, with a self-estimation [Selbstschätzung].25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp-pU8TFsg0
MSNBC’s Anti-Sanders Bias Makes It Forget How to Do Math
JULY 26, 2019
When MSNBC legal
analyst Mimi Rocah (7/21/19)
said that Bernie Sanders “made [her] skin crawl,” though she “can’t even
identify for you what exactly it is,” she was just expressing more overtly
the anti-Sanders
bias that pervades the network.
MSNBC‘s Mimi Rocah (7/21/19) explaining how
Bernie Sanders makes her “skin crawl.”
The hostility is so
entrenched, in fact, it seems to have corrupted MSNBC’s mathematical
reasoning and created a new system of arithmetic. The cable news network has
repeatedly made on-air and online mistakes about Sanders’ polling and other
numbers—always to his detriment, and never with any official correction.
Here are some new rules MSNBC seems
to follow when it comes to math and Bernie Sanders.
1. 49 <
48
Result: Sanders goes from
second to “fourth” place.
MSNBC made
a handy graphic for a poll on July 7 that showed 2020 match-ups against Trump
among Democratic voters. The list was in descending order of candidates’
polling numbers—except for Bernie Sanders, whose name is placed under Warren’s
and Harris’s, though he polls higher than both of them. (If the list is ordered
by the margin between the candidate and Trump, Sanders would be in third place,
behind Harris.)
MSNBC (7/7/19)
2. 5 >7
Result: Sanders goes from
second to “third” place.
Lest you think this was an
isolated incident, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki placed Sanders’ name below
Warren’s on July 15, when he was “reporting” on a poll put out by the Washington
Postand NBC (MSNBC’s parent company.) Once again, the order of the
names is descending by poll numbers—except for Bernie Sanders’, which is, once
again, placed below where it should be. This time, Sanders is placed below
Warren, though he polls higher than she does (both in the percentage who say
they would vote for each candidate and the spread over Trump). This same order
is used in the online story’s headline (7/14/19),
which says, “Trump Trails Biden, Warren and Sanders in New NBC News/Wall
Street Journal Poll.”
MSNBC (7/15/19)
But it gets worse. It was
misleading to have Sanders’ name after Warren’s in the graphic, but an absolute
error or lie to say Warren was second, which Kornacki, who was talking about a
poll conducted by his own company, did. I had to re-watch the video to
make sure I wasn’t missing something, but Kornacki does indeed say (at 1:09):
“Elizabeth Warren, she’s been running second place, she is running second place
on the Democratic side. She leads Trump by 5 points.” Then Kornacki shows the
person who is actually in second place and says, “Bernie Sanders, he leads by 7
points.”
3. +5 = -5.
Result: Sanders “loses” ten
points.
Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd (5/24/19)
showed a graphic claiming that Sanders had gone down 5 points in a Quinnipiac
poll. Todd got the absolute value right, he just got the value sign wrong:
Sanders didn’t go down by 5 in the poll, he went up by 5 — a 10-point
difference.
MSNBC (5/24/19)
Quinnipiac (4/30/19)
Quinnipiac (5/21/19)
4. 25 = 28
Result: Sanders goes from
first to “second” place.
After an April Monmouth poll
showed Sanders polling at 27 percent among non-white voters and Biden polling
at 25 percent, Velshe and Ruhle (4/29/19) showed
a graphic which somehow added three points to Biden’s numbers, putting him in
“first” place.
MSNBC (4/29/19)
[IMAGE 7]
Monmouth (4/23/19)
5. Less than $200 = 0
Result: Sanders goes from a
candidate with one of the best records with female donors to one of the
“worst.”
Rachel Maddow on April 29 did
a segment (and tweeted)
about a study on the gender of campaign donors. Unfortunately,
she forgot to say the study she cited only looked at donors who gave $200 or
more. After praising Gillibrand for “doing the best in terms of targeting
female donors,” Maddow urged her viewers to
look at the other end of the
spectrum! Just strikes me as unsustainable. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg….
Look at them! Both of them are raising twice as much money from male donors as
they are from female donors. 66 and 67 percent of your donations are from
dudes? Dude!
MSNBC (4/29/19)
The same Open Secrets report Maddow
was citing explained that its results were skewed: Since
Sanders has the highest
amount of money coming from small donors…at 74 percent…[and] generally only
donations above $200 are itemized…the gender landscape of small donations are
absent.
In fact, according to Sanders’ communications
director, 46 percent of the 525,000 people who contributed to Sanders’
campaign during the first quarter were women. “It is virtually certain,” she
tweeted, “that more women have donated to our campaign than any other.”
Rachel Maddow: You’re a Rhodes
scholar, have a nightly news show, earn $7 million a year, and missed or failed
to disclose that the study only looked at wealthier dudes and dudettes? Dude!
6. 23 minutes = 5 minutes
Result: Sanders goes from
highlighting his opposition to racism and sexism to “not mentioning”
them.
In March, MSNBC’s Alex
Whit hosted a panel to discuss Bernie Sanders’ May 2 campaign kickoff
speech. Panelist and MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell
said: “I clocked it. He [Bernie Sanders] did not mention race or gender until
23 minutes into the speech.”
As Sanders surrogates, journalists,
organizers, activists and people on Twitter pointed out, Sanders most
definitely mentioned race and gender five minutes into his speech, when
he said “the underlying principles of our government” will “not be racism,
sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and religious bigotry.” Sanders starts his
speech 31 seconds after he gets on stage so, to be charitable to his critics,
he doesn’t mention gender or race until 5:31.
Maxwell, a former Hillary
Clinton staffer, though MSNBC didn’t mention that when they
introduced her, did delete a tweet which had said, “OK 23 minutes in Bernie
finally mentions race and gender.” But she was far
from contrite:
I’ve rewatched since yesterday
and while I can acknowledge that I missed the passing line at 6 minutes I stand
by my point since talking about criminal justice is not the same thing as
talking about race and gender and if you don’t get why Bernie won’t win….again.
Sanders spoke about race and
gender outside of the context of criminal justice, which anyone who watched or
rewatched the speech would know. But accuracy seems not seem not to be the
point so much as it is putting down a candidate who makes your “skin crawl,”
for reasons that you can’t quite explain. Citizens, including the ones MSNBC claims
to speak for, deserve better.
You can contact MSNBC by
calling 212-664-4444, or via Twitter: @MSNBC. Please remember that respectful
communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message
in the comments thread of this post.
You can listen to Halper talk
to pollster and Sanders advisor Jim Zogby about the misuse of polls on her
podcast here:
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