- [Audience Man] I'm curious if any
of the writers or artists
address issues of overload.
And I think about facts, and I think about
our current news cycle, the idea that
we see so much ...
- [Deborah] Yeah, yeah.
- [Audience Member] We
see and hear, so much,
that, maybe ...
Well, you actually touched
upon a word, anesthetics,
but I'm guessing you actually meant
the opposite of aesthetics,
as opposed to being anesthetized.
- No, I actually meant anesthetized.
- [Audience Member] Oh, you did? Okay.
- Yes, I did mean anesthetized.
- [Audience Member] What about the ...
- I'm not sure I spelled that word right,
but I mean it as a
little bit of pun on ...
- [Audience Member] Yeah,
okay, I didn't know where
you're going with it.
- Get it? Okay.
- What about the idea of...
- I have to do that, I'm
in English department.
- Too much exposure?
- Well, um...
- Creates loss of, loss of awareness.
- So, two answers to that.
Number one
Susan Sontag was very much a student of
the German philosophers of
the early part of the century,
of the early part of the century.
Like Georg Simmel, for instance,
who understood precisely that modern life
was extremely overstimulating.
And that it produced actually
affectless and numbness.
And there's a much bigger
thing in Susan Buck-Morss'
article that I referenced
about that as well.
Susan Sontag talked about it.
The overproduction, overstimulation
of, of late capitalism.
Although she wouldn't have said late.
But that capitalist regime
of production of sensation
overloaded, constantly
overloaded our senses.
This is one of the reasons, for her,
that she wants to slow you down
and get back to the
touching, tasting, feeling
and not have it A) all be visual
so her whole book on photography
ends with an ecology of photographs,
where she basically says
we have to cut back on the photograph,
we have too many photographs.
Which is, you know, more
or less a silly idea.
Because that's not really gonna happen.
But she was very concerned
about the overloading
of the senses.
The numbness that got produced by that.
And retraining the senses through,
I mean, at least in the
60s, I think this is true,
it's probably true all the way along,
through a more vigorous engagement with
with a more high art.
Now she's known for flipping that,
turning the high-art,
low-art thing upside-down
and over again.
But she really thought
art and arts practice
was a way to reawaken
and retrain the senses.
And reshape consciousness.
So, Hannah Arendt in the Life of the Mind
has really no answer.
But she, her answer's really time.
It's like you have to let things,
you have to let painful feelings subside.
So she's not really talking
about overstimulation
in the way that Susan Sontag has.
But Sontag certainly saw
what we experience now
as already on the horizon in the 1960s.
- [Audience Member]
Sounds like the idea that
of food and restaurants...
Friday's gives you huge portions
and the criticism is, is
that's what capital...
it's fulfilling in a
market, for profitability,
for them to supply you a lot of food.
And if you go to super fancy,
highly expensive restaurants,
you have these tasting menus..
(laughter)
little bits...
- Well, it is, there is,
there is, right, yeah.
You know Sontag in the 60s
was very determined not to let the...
So there's a quite loud argument
about mass culture from the war,
really from the pre-war era,
pre-World War II, interwar
years up through the 60s
about the deadliness of mass culture.
And how it deadens the senses
and pre-programs you to having
certain kinds of relations.
You see this in the
New York intellectuals,
or among the Frankfurt school.
And Sontag was, is much more skeptical,
that we experienced,
let's say popular culture,
mass culture as such
unthinking manipulable drones.
But she did see that
the massive production
of sensation in our life as having
a very dangerous effect on our
capacity to engage the world
and think about the world.
So it's not just large portions,
it's lots of large portions, right?
It's, that's it's a kinda
never ending sensorium.
Um, the cities are like that.
- [Woman in Audience] I kinda
wanna, I wanna hear more
about morality, which I
feel like was touched upon
and how to do ethics without empathy.
And so we're saying these
ladies were very illuminating
about how to get at the truth
and look at facts that are disruptive.
Okay, then what?
Like, if we say we want to look at facts
and aim towards what's right, what's good,
or, I don't know, a little... yeah.
How do you do ethics without empathy?
I feel like I don't get that.
- Well, for, let's say, for, um...
For all of them, I would say,
but in greater degrees or lesser degrees,
certainly very pronounced
in Hannah Arendt,
this is the foundation of politics.
We cannot make decisions
together about a just world
without having this capacity to endure
the discomfort of what
our world really is.
Like this is the foundation,
you're not going to go one step without...
You don't even have a world to share
unless you can begin to produce this.
But then, of course, they
have, they have different ideas
and often quite contrary ideas
about what that just world
would be like.
But their point, is
they're not, they're not,
So Sontag might be willing
to declare what that is.
Certainly than Hannah Arendt,
but they're trying to figure
out what the foundations
of a political and
aesthetic world would be.
But they're not prescribing it.
They're very anti-utopian.
To every single one of
them is anti-utopian.
For a lots of reasons.
Not the least of which is
you can't actually know
what's going to happen.
Um, that your actions
in the world are just,
the world is too complex to know.
But so the morality in that case would be,
So Arendt frequently used the
metaphor of eggs and omelets.
That you have to break a lot
of eggs to make an omelet.
Arendt would not at all be
interested in breaking the eggs.
Now that doesn't mean
she doesn't want to eat.
But she didn't like this metaphor
because it meant you
could do unlimited damage
in the service of the omelet, right?
So she saw this as what happened
with totalitarian states.
That Nazi Germany, the
promise was the master race.
You could do anything.
And she thought the same was
true for the Soviet Union,
in the name of the Workers Paradise.
That you would, those were the omelet.
You could break any eggs
at all because the goal
at the end justified it, that.
So she wants to get rid
of that utopian thinking,
because it justifies tremendous violence.
And it doesn't necessarily lead anywhere.
But that's not the point.
The point for her is, actually,
you couldn't possibly know
that this is gonna lead anywhere.
And in the meantime,
you can visit any disaster you want,
in the service of the goal.
So all of them share,
in some ways, that idea,
that, that the first half of the century
were utopian projects gone bad.
Utopian projects that lead to terror,
that lead to mass murder,
because anything could be
justified in light of the goal.
So there's a lot of slowing down
of those kinds of decisions.
And sharing them, not
among a bureaucratic elite,
but in a more democratic way, too.
Yes, sir?
Does that answer your
question, a little bit?
Alright, so there's not
a moral program though.
- [Male audience Member]
I think I might have
a tangential question.
Were they writing in a
sense, they have any altruism
or purpose to their writing?
In other words, I mean, yes,
you can disconnect ethics
from empathy and you can objectify ethics.
But is there a purpose?
I mean, you say they don't,
they're anti-utopian,
but are they trying to improve humanity?
- Oh, absolutely.
Simone Weil's entire life is spent
trying to improve the world.
So she starts as writer.
She she was at the École
Normale Supérieure,
which is, pardon my really bad French,
but is the, one of the most
elite schools in France.
She graduated first in her class.
There are very, very few women there.
It's gonna take me a while
to answer this but I'll get there.
She was in the same class
with Simone de Beauvoir.
But she left school, when she graduated,
there were, obviously,
professorships for her.
She taught in high schools in Leseilles.
But she spent all of her time as a leftist
who was working on behalf,
of the work, of workers.
She went to a Renault factory.
One of her most beautiful
and most famous essays
is called Factory Work.
And it comes from her years
spent working in a Renault factory.
She had migraine, she had very bad health,
she had migraine headaches,
she was actually very clumsy.
And so, factory work was all
the more inhospitable to her.
But she really wanted to understand
what it was like for
workers in the factory
to devise a better political
argument for what they needed.
She was very certain that
it was not just wages.
That the work itself was
damaging and dispiriting.
I mean, people were injured all the time,
but just the routine.
So she writes a very
eloquent essay of sort of the
phenomenology of work.
How, what does it feel
like to go through the day.
And she wrote all the
time in leftist journals,
and was really around work
and the place of work.
She also wrote about,
uh, farmers, laborers.
Um, in French, in France you
would use the word peasants,
but like the sort of
local ordinary laborers.
And she was perpetually
working on their behalf.
Her most famous essay is an anti-war essay
called the Iliad or the Poem of Force,
which is a magnificent essay,
it's still in print today.
And still in McCarthy's translation today,
because they're stylistically similar,
it worked really well.
But she spent, her whole
life was dedicated to, um,
to what she thought was justice.
So she didn't think that
our job was to get rid of affliction,
but it was never to be a party to it.
That we had an obligation
to make the world
just and hospitable to others.
But, her entire career is about that.
Certainly Hannah Arendt, I
think, thought she was always
writing with the purpose of intervening
in world and U.S. politics.
Every, her project, to
do the Eichmann trial
is based on a kind of
new thing in the world,
which is a term called genocide.
And the idea of collective guilt
and collective responsibility.
Um, so Eichmann was, for
her, an historic moment
in the history of
justice and adjudication.
Because this was something novel.
Now his exact practices and duties
were more definitively
tied to, but you know,
I was just following
orders, kind of thing.
She wanted to, she was
really interested in
what happens to guilt in the
space of a totalitarian state.
How do we even register guilt?
And she was trying to
give us the thinking tools
to work out something like that.
And in fact, uh, sadly enough,
those are really useful
tools to have for the
rest of the 20th century.
Because this isn't going to
be the first or last time
that you have to use them.
So Mary McCarthy, um, I
mean, you know, it's funny.
In the 40s or the 50s and even
maybe to some degree the 60s,
you don't have to make an
argument that an intellectual
is trying to make a
contribution to society.
That activism wasn't the
only way of trying to shape
the political conversation around you.
Or intervene in those kinds of things.
I mean, McCarthy went to Vietnam
and wrote about Vietnam.
Certainly Sontag did,
quite, um, spectacularly.
A Trip from Hanoi is one of
her most notorious essays.
Sontag was a huge part
of the anti-war movement.
Um, I could go on.
Didion, less so.
Um, certainly.
Arbus, uh, Arbus was pretty apolitical.
Yeah, I mean, I think
more of a moral project,
an ethical project than
a political project.
- [Audience Member] Going back
to Hannah Arendt and Eichmann.
When I work my way through
there, or thought I had,
what I understood was
that she had defined evil
in a different way.
- That's very true. That's right.
- [Audience Member] In fact,
Eichmann before he went
to trial had already been judged
because of the position he held.
He was responsible, that was his job.
That's what he did.
- Right, you remember the
phrase she used for that?
Do you remember the phrase?
- [Audience Member] I
don't right now, no, what?
- The banality of evil.
- [Audience Member] Oh, yes, of course.
- Right so, the point was
evil didn't need to have
a monstrous face, right?
It could be a bureaucrat, right?
- [Audience Member]
But already, the story,
the ethical story had been written.
Had been written,
or had been thought in
the minds of the Jews,
and particularly the Israeli's,
who had already stamped
Eichmann with the evilest,
one of the great evils.
I mean he was...
- But they were, they were putting him,
but you said they were
putting him on trial, right?
They didn't just execute him for instance.
- [Audience Member] Well, right.
- Right?
So why draw in the apparatus of the state.
There was never big
juridical questions at stake
in Eichmann's trial.
- [Audience Member] Right.
- Um, and so, she's interested in those.
I mean, she's interested in many things.
It's a very complex book.
But you're right to point out
that how we understand what evil is.
So she says evil is not radical.
- [Audience Member] Exactly.
- Right?
- [Audience Member] It's not
a big big, this big big thing
you're making it.
And he's not that monster.
- Right.
- [Audience Member]
After she left the trial,
that is like she, I don't
remember, she went somewhere
else to maybe listen to it.
But she didn't want to watch it.
- But she was there for quite a bit of it.
- [Audience Member] For
quite a bit of the time,
but she didn't watch the whole thing
because she thought she
got who Eichmann was.
- And she also thought that
it had become a show trial for
- [Audience Member]
...already proving a point.
- Right.
- Decided.
- Um, the hours and hours
of testimony on the camps.
- [Audience Member] I just
thought that was so interesting.
The way that that judgment,
it's a profound judgment,
is made whether you think of
the person as an individual
who's too weak in a way,
to carry the weight you want load on him.
- Right, right, that's right.
- [Audience Member] But it
took them a long, long time to
come to that.
- Right.
- [Audience Member] If they did.
- Yeah, and she is very, she said, um,
that in some ways, she felt
a sense of exhilaration
after the Eichmann trial,
because it freed her
from some way she had of
thinking about the camps.
But she spent really much
of the rest of her career
trying to think about judgment.
That came in the last work of her life is
remind me of the title,
I'm getting very tired.
Um, no, no, no, no.
Um, the Life of the Mind,
which is on judging,
willing and thinking, right?
So, but it's the thinking part that comes,
really, it really comes
from the Eichmann trial.
Right?
It really comes from that.
How did he, what had got,
she said, it was not...
The other thing people
objected to was not,
she was not saying it's his
problem with his feelings.
She didn't care about his feelings.
She said the problem
was with his thinking.
What happened to his
thinking that he could,
that that kind of moral
blankness could take hold.
And so then she's spending
quite a lot of time
trying to figure out
what's wrong with thinking.
What happens to thinking under duress?
Sort of as the way you
were talking about it.
Um, in your earlier question,
like what happens to our thinking
and how do we, how do we get past,
how do we retain our capacity
to think and make judgments.
And this, she spends
really another decade,
really to the end of her life,
trying to answer that question.
- So as homework for this,
I watched the Joan Didion documentary.
A couple nights ago, it's on Netflix.
It's quite interesting.
It's made by her husband
John Gregory Dunne's nephew,
called Griffin Dunne.
- Who's an actor.
- Who is himself is an
actor and a director.
And if you know Martin
Scorsese's After Hours?
He's the, he's the main
actor in After Hours.
The one who's roaming
around New York City.
Um, and he does a good job,
he's not a boy anymore.
He's 53 or something.
(laughs)
But it's a good film.
But what struck me about it
was the involvement of Joan
Didion and John Gregory Dunne
in kind of celebrity culture.
And kind of, we were talking
about Frankfurt School Media,
but they're...
- They're in Hollywood,
writing film scripts.
- They're in Hollywood, they're on Malibu.
- And that's how they're
making money, actually.
- Warren Beatty has a
crush on Joan Didion,
always wants to sit next to her
at the dinner parties and so on.
So that's a way, it seems to me,
of differentiating your folks.
Because Mary McCarthy is
sort of a part of that.
But Hannah Arendt definitely not.
- No, I mean, you have
to think that from so...
- Sontag a little.
- Sontag is, but she, well,
I have lot of things to say about this.
So, Sontag is, but she's
a media star in France.
Like if you want to see,
like hours and hours,
of Susan Sontag on television,
it's in France, not here.
They thought she was amazing.
So I did a little bit of collaboration,
or I was a kind of,
sounding board or something,
for Nancy Kates who did
the Sontag documentary,
which is also, I think, really good.
Um, but she turned up tons of...
Because Sontag said she hated television,
but she actually was turned
out to have been on television
quite a bit, just not
in the United States.
So, so but she's more involved in the arts
and media world of Europe than
she is of the United States.
So that she's photographed a lot.
And McCarthy spends from
really the late 50s, early 60s in Paris,
'cause she's married to someone
in the diplomatic corps.
So she's in Paris basically
until she comes back
in the early 70s.
So she's back and forth.
So she's a little bit
out that of that sphere.
She's even out of the New York sphere
because she's with her husband.
But, so Didion is, is
really unlike, I mean,
her intimacy with the
world of film and Hollywood
and mass media is really is
not comparable to anybody else.
So, yeah, I think it is a distinction.
And, you know, of course, she writes,
she's always writing, you know,
she's going to the Doors, watch
the Doors record something
and the White Album.
- [Man On Stage] Big fan of Jim Morrison.
- He has huge entree into those worlds.
But she also started
her career in New York.
So I mean it's you know.
- [Man On Stage] Alright, so
you know, I'm gonna, okay,
one more question.
- [Audience Man] Confused...
I have an underlying feeling
that one can not divorce
ethics from empathy.
In the sense of the more
modern use of the word.
And you mentioned the
French writers, Simone...
- Simone Weil, yeah.
- [Audience Man] She
certainly practiced empathy,
by actually putting herself
in the role of those workers.
And I think Eichmann lacked empathy
and that's basically what a sociopath is.
He has no feeling for the other person.
- Well, it's interesting.
Simone Weil is really
an interesting person.
She, um, she has a very, you're right.
It is an empathic act.
But she was not,
like she didn't do it through,
let's say, an ethnography.
She didn't ask them how
do you feel about this?
What do you experience?
She went and she said
it's like reporting from,
you know, an island of misery.
Once you leave you never look back.
You can't report on it.
So she went to the Isle of Misery herself.
Because she didn't think
the reports could be made.
I mean, this is a little
part of, of that essay.
But she never advocates, she's
very very wary of the hubris
of empathy, right?
That I'm empathizing with you...
I mean, again, this
sounds more like sympathy
with assymetry of it,
but you empathize with
people who are in pain.
That doesn't mean you're in pain, right?
There is that assymetry, is there.
She was extremely wary of, um,
She really, it's very interesting,
she felt that only Christ
had the supernatural grace
that could allow that kind of attention.
That humans were not capable of that.
And that her goal was more to
have them tell their stories,
than to empathize with them.
I mean, Arbus says outright
that she doesn't believe in empathy.
Everyone else's tragedy is their own.
Is what she says, something like that.
So I think it in a more conventional way,
or it may be a more conventional
understanding of empathy,
Simone Weil's gonna pretty
much outright reject that
as a kind of sop to your feelings
of being able to care for someone else
as opposed to enabling
them to have the voice
and the care of themselves.
Like making a world that is just for that.
So she writes a book
called The Need for Roots
at the end of her life,
which is before the war ends.
And it's about, it's a plan
that was commissioned by
de Gaulle and his people,
she wasn't the only writer who did this,
to prepare for France after the war.
And so she says, right at the beginning,
this is a really
interesting moment for her
to make this comment, you know.
She's not interested in
rights; rights was the...
France went the wrong way
when they went with the rights of man.
That we should be talking
about obligations.
And what are our obligations to the world
that it would be criminal not to fulfill.
So, it's about building
a world that allows that,
I don't even go so far
as to say flourishing,
but it's about building
that, sharing the project
of building the world that does that.
Rather than being connected intimately
or in some face-to-face way with laborers.
- And that in a moment with
the human rights declaration,
pretty much.
- Uh, it's just before then,
so it's quite interesting
that rights were then coming to the fore.
I mean, it's only, say
four years after that book
that the United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights
will be signed by everybody, so.
- In 19-
- Nobody was listening to Simone Weil.
- In 1948.
- Debbie is also the editor of a brilliant
volume of essays called Around 1948,
which I also commend your attention.
A hearty thanks to Debbie
for a wonderful presentation.
- Thank you, Thank you.
