Steiner's second threat is some supposed change concerning the possibility of 'mass death' which he links to 'aleatory' or transitory Art. Ludicrously, he connects this with the internet revolution-
The saturation of daily lives by electronic means of communication, of information storage and retrieval and learning methods, will inevitably comport increasing familiarity with the near mathematical and logically formal languages and sensibility. Never forget that your computer, wherever it is in the world, is speaking Victorian English; its structure is that of Boolean algebra, which is not the only algebra available. It could have been based on Indian algebraic thought, which is very different. It is speaking a kind of Esperanto with deep roots in the nineteenth-century English confidence in logic.Of course, this is nonsense. Perhaps Steiner had come across Mary Everest Boole's notion that her husband had been influenced by Indian algebra. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing- even if the only thing endangered is one's amour propre.
The third threat Steiner identifies has to do with Grammar which, for some reason, he calls the music of the mind. Apparently, knowing a gerund from a hole in the ground is vital to classical literacy. Sadly, Steiner destroys his own claim by quoting I.A Richards- "The two most complex processes on this planet are the mathematics of a string quartet and the translation of a Chinese philosophic sentence". The truth is both are increasingly within the scope of your smartphone. Grammar, like music, has a relatively simple form. It is the content of music, or of language, which makes it compelling. But that content is extensional. Art, like everything else, defies death by not dying. By contrast, aspiring to some higher condition than the ephemeral won't stop your nose falling off coz of the pox.
Steiner and other post war 'rock-star' Professors of shite subjects sought to make themselves the equals of Plato while paying lip service to Marx or Freud or, more ludicrously yet, Godel & Einstein. They failed miserably not because they couldn't write intelligibly but because they could not think coherently. What made this inevitable? I think it was because they saw 1968 as a repetition of 1848- when 'History reached a turning point but failed to turn'. They believed there was something good about 1848 which ought to have come to pass in the right way, rather than by default or in a top down fashion. Thus, 1968 was a personal challenge to each of these careerists. Sadly, every single one of them jumped on the wrong bandwagon and, troubling their own house, inherited the wind. This wasn't entirely their own fault. Many of the 'subaltern' class whom they were meeting in their Lecture halls were clamoring to be fed paranoid fantasies so as to reject the path of rectitude and enrich themselves unconscionably.
George Steiner had peculiar, highly Eurocentric, perhaps unconsciously, racist views. But, it may be, there were Black people as stupid as himself. In a speech given around 2002, Steiner depicts one such man-
One night in the very grim moments of Apartheid, when I was among my South African students, Nadine Gordimer did me the honour of inviting me to her house, along with ANC leaders – really militant ANC leaders. The police cars were lined up in front of Nadine’s house. They knew exactly who was coming, but they didn’t move. It was a peculiar twilight of permitted exceptions to the rule and Nadine’s home was, in a sense, taboo. As my main virtue in life is a lack of tact, I decided to ask one of the great leaders, one of Slovo’s lieutenants, “Look, help me. Even among the worst moments of occupation under the Waffen SS – and they were very good at occupying, believe me –why should we? Steiner was in New York during the War.
from time to time, someone killed one of the bastards.but this proved counter-productive. Nazi retaliation was disproportionate. Moreover, they could recruit unlimited numbers of local auxiliaries from the dregs of society.
You are thirteen to one in Johannesburg. Thirteen-to one!The Germans in occupied France were outnumbered four hundred to one.
It’s a demographic balance. Without weapons, all you need to do is close in on the street around a white person. What is it that keeps you from acting?” The answer was one of the turning points in my life: the ANC leader said, “You Jews, you have your Talmud, your Midrash, your Mishnah.Yet six million Jews were killed by the Nazis.
Communists among us, who are few, have Das Kapital.So what? Steiner was saying this a decade after the thing had collapsed in Eurasia.
Christians have their Gospel. Muslims among us have their Koran. We have nothing. Africa has not produced a book.”Take that Nadine! This dude is saying you are a shit writer! But Steiner was shittier yet.
It is an enormous answer. Think of it. We do not have a single foundational classic by which we could come to rally around an image of ourselves. It needs a lot of thinking to grasp the full power, depth, and scruple of that answer. “We have no book.”It takes none at all to see that books don't matter. Superior military technology and economic power is what determines who rules over who.
The complex dialectic of letter via spirit, which underlies our tradition, even at its most secular, of the cleric, of the scholar, derives from the traditions of Scripture and inscription.A religious man may well subscribe to some such view because he believes that God himself revealed a certain Scripture so as to give certain chosen people immortal felicity. But Steiner was not a man of religion.
The two words, of course, are cognate.But have different meanings.
May I remind you what the word underwritten means?Underwriting is a service offered for a fee. It is quite useless if the underwriter goes bankrupt. A few years after Steiner gave this talk, the whole world woke up to the fact that a lot of re-insurance 'underwriting' the Global Financial system was not worth the paper it was written on. Governments had to take over the 'downside risk'. So, in the end, it was the coercive power of Governments to raise revenue through taxation which was doing the 'underwriting'. Any pretence to the contrary was mere theology of an absurd type.
Underwritten is re-insured by the theological: what Wittgenstein says on completing his investigations, “If I could, I would dedicate this book to God.”Wittgenstein never completed his Philosophical Investigations. He did complete the 'Tractatus'. But, it was hopelessly wrong- indeed silly, as young Frank Ramsey quickly saw.
Theology does not 're-insure' anything. Christ drove the money-changers out of the Temple. He did not arrange a bail-out for the arbitrageurs.
That’s Wittgenstein. The magnum opus in the Western traditions, “Le livre qui est le but de l’univers” of Mallarmé; or in Borges, a simulacrum of the book that simply calls itself the Book, the Bible.What is this shite? Neither, Mallarme nor Borges wrote a complete book. Muslims do speak of 'the Book'. It is the Quran. Christians speak of 'the Holy Book', to distinguish the Bible. But it isn't 'the simulacrum of a Book'. It is an actual Book which is believed to have existed from Eternity.
In certain traditions, Judaism for example, the notion of secular authorship, of reading for pleasure, comes very late.2 Maccabees was written in Koine Greek over two thousand years ago. The Jews had been thoroughly Hellenized by the successors of Alexander. The literary quality of many portions of the Bible suggests that reading for pleasure was not a late development at all. The thing goes back at least two thousand years. Look at the works of Josephus. His literary talent shines on every page.
It arrives only with modernity and it leaves the greatest of all Jewish writers, Franz Kafka, radically uncomfortable.Rubbish! Consider the following parable of Kafka's - They were given the choice of becoming kings or the kings’ messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless. They would gladly put an end to their miserable life, but they do not dare to do so because of their oath of loyalty.
It is reminiscent of the story about the King of India in the Kuzari. Halevi's compositions are sung in every Synagogue. If he had no difficulty assimilating the high literary culture of the Arabs 900 years ago, then- clearly- the notion of secular authorship and of reading for pleasure was present among Jews long before the Modern Age.
Why is Steiner pretending that Kafka lived in a Hassidic shtetl? He was a middle class, Gymnasium educated, Doctor of Law. He may have been uncomfortable with lower class Yiddish speaking Jews from the provinces. But he wasn't uncomfortable at all with mainstream European high culture.
The arts of memory are correlative with those of all higher literacy.Rubbish! The mnemonic arts have a place in formal rhetoric. But the perfection of rhetoric is orthogonal to literary culture. What works on the page sounds stilted on the lips. What is effective in oratory is muddled nonsense when written down.
They constitute the bridge between the oral and the written.Clearly Steiner has never heard of stenography.
Plato fears writing precisely because it will enfeeble the muscles of memory; hence, the central, crucial, irreplaceable role of learning by heart.Everybody fears putting things down in writing because they may be exposed as liars, fools or swindlers. As for 'the muscles of memory', they have the convenient quality of being whatever one wants them to be. If it comes to how much money you owe me, my memory muscles are of Schwarzenegger type proportions. But, if you bring up that time I tried to snake your boo, they are paltry and Gandhian.
What you love, you start learning by heart.If teacher will slap you silly if you don't, then you learn things by heart. There is little pleasure in turning into a wingless parrot.
We started in the French Lyceé, tiny children in those ridiculous blue Smocks: five lines and ten lines and twenty; learning by heart.Learning what by heart? Anything kids actually loved or boring shite their teachers were paid to teach?
For what you love, you will want to have inside you.Nonsense! Self sodomy is not something men yearn for.
We learned Pope’s Iliad by rote. We learned Lear’s nonsense rhymes by heart. Those children learned to tell the two apart and never say, "that ought I wrote in love I wrote only for love of art."Steiner is paraphrasing Robert Graves-
You learned Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes by heart, not rote;
You learned Pope’s Iliad by rote, not heart;
These terms should be distinguished if you quote
My verses, children – keep them poles apart –
And call the man a liar who says I wrote
All that I wrote in love, for love of art
These lines of Robert Graves accompany me day and night.Yet, he mangles them. Clearly he is wrong about people wanting to properly memorize poems they like. I get much pleasure quoting Hamlet's poignant in articulo mortis cry 'Hello Horatio. Gimme Fellatio' even though it has been suggested to me that what Shakespeare actually wrote was somewhat different.
The truth is that kids don't learn Lear's nonsense by heart. They do take care to learn the words to milk, milk, lemonade because it annoys the fuck out of parents.
But there are so many others. What you have by heart, no one can touch.This isn't true at all. If the other kids laugh at you when you stand up in Assembly to declaim in ringing tones 'Our Father who does Art in Heaven, Hello by thy Name', then the piety in your heart is utterly destroyed. You try to retrieve your reputation by chanting milk, milk, lemonade but, alas!, discover you have made chocolate in your underwear. Everybody laughs even more loudly. You decide to give up teaching even though that's the only job you could get with your lower second class degree and proclivity for pooping your pants. I'm not saying that's what happened to me. It's the sort of thing which could happen to anyone.
They cannot take it from you. Consider the example of a Russian woman who was a teacher of English Romantic literature in the University in Kazakhstan. It was the Brezhnev years, relatively less hellish than Stalin, but still hell. She was imprisoned, with no light, on some trumped up charge, for three years, in solitary. Now, in Russia, for reasons I am not wholly competent to judge, Byron’s Don Juan has canonic presence. It’s regarded, maybe justly, as one of the transcendent achievements. This young woman knew it, thirty or thirty-four thousand lines by heart. And in the dark she dictated to herself a Russian verse translation. She lost her sight. But when she emerged, she dictated her translation, which is now the classic one in Russian. There is nothing you can do to a human being who is like that.Yes you can. You can shoot her.
Steiner is referring to Tatiana Gnedisch who was imprisoned under Stalin for 9 years. Her skill at translating Byron got her special treatment- two years in solitary with some basic Dictionaries and plenty of paper and ink. After her release from a Siberian Gulag, where she was able to continue to work on her manuscript- which occurred because of Kruschev's de-Stalinization- it took three years of expert scholarly work to clean up her translation which became a best-seller on publication in 1959.
Steiner imagines that Gnedisch- a descendant of a famous Nineteenth Century translator- had memorized both Byron as well as her translation of Don Juan and that, like blind Homer, she was able to dictate the entire thing on her release from prison.
This is fantasy. Gnedisch may have had a good memory. But she didn't know Don Juan by heart- in truth, it is dreary stuff. Nor was her translation something incised, lapidary fashion, upon Memory's leaves of hammered gold. It was painstaking and scholarly, but not painstaking and scholarly enough because of lack of access to the Academy's resources. What was finally published represented three years of collaborative effort on the part of Gnedisch and her fellow Academicians.
No state can touch this.They can eradicate it.
No despair can touch it. What you don’t know by heart, you really haven’t loved deeply enough.So Steiner didn't really love a poem by Robert Graves which he claims to have carried with him for many years.
The poetry of Mandelstam, you remember, survived when Nadezhda, after the death of the poet, had ten people, no more, learning one of the poems. That was enough. There were no copies, and the KGB could do nothing.They could kill a hundred thousand people of suspect 'class origins' or 'literary ideology' and be sure to have also dealt with those ten.
As long as ten people know a poem, it will live.Nonsense! Even if I pay ten people a lot of money to memorize a poem of mine, it won't live at all. Why? Because I write like shit.
Ben Johnson had the wonderful word for it, which we have lost: to ingest the text, to internalize it in the viscera of your spirit.What was that 'wonderful word' old Ben had? Steiner won't tell us. Apparently it got lost because 10 people did not internalize it in the viscera of their spirit.
The culture decays in precise proportion to its neglect, or suppression of memorization.No. Culture decays when those who claim to possess it talk worthless bollocks.
Again, in the Russian Writers’ Congress of ’37, in the blackness of the blackness, Boris Pasternak was told, "If you speak, we arrest you. If you don’t, we arrest you, as a sign of contempt" Pasternak was tall, very handsome; he stood out in a crowd fantastically. On the third morning his friends said, "Boris, say something. They are going to arrest you, but say something. Give us something to remember, to live by." When the moment came, Boris got up and spoke a number. It took twenty seconds, maybe thirty, before two thousand people rose, holding hands, and began to recite Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number, of which Pasternak’s translation is a Russian classic, like Pushkin. He spoke out loud, "When I summon up remembrance of things past," and they didn’t dare touch him. That culture was never in ultimate danger. Ours is every day.The truth is quite different. Pasternak told Mandelstam that he hadn't heard his epigram on Stalin. Forget about remembering it, the thing could not even be heard! In 1934, Stalin phoned Pasternak who grovelled to him shamelessly. Stalin contemptuously noted his refusal to stand up for his fellow poet. In 1937, Pasternak phoned Stalin to plead that he was a 'Tolstoyan'. Stalin spared that 'cloud dweller' or 'holy fool' because Tolstoyans were collaborating with the regime. Incidentally, the NKVD found him a voluble, if self-serving, informant. Steiner's story about Shakespeare's sonnet is pure fiction. Russian Culture faced an 'ultimate danger'. If Hitler had won, the Russian language would have been displaced by a Teutonic pidgin suitable for a servile case of broken men and raped women. What prevailed against the Nazi beast was matchless courage and military skill. Guns and tanks saved Russian culture. Its craven poets made no difference whatsoever.
There is an immense difference. “When I summon up remembrance of things past.” The classic act of reading, of literacy, presumes three possibilities. Silence: the availability of silence, when today silence has become the most expensive luxury, when even in the new expensive apartments, the walls are thin.This is nonsense. The great pleasure of reading is that it insulates one from the incessant din raised by one's beloved family. Steiner himself must have read many a tome in a noisy British Rail carriage. Now, of course, we have noise cancelling headphones and audio-books and vast libraries on our Kindle or Smartphone.
When the fear of silence is such that you cannot even step into an elevator in New York without the muzak oozing on.Muzak is expensive. Only posh elevators had them so as to suggest luxury and justify a higher service charge. Meanwhile, in the Projects, people trudged up ten flights of stairs because the lifts were permanently on the blink or had been rendered unusable by reason of the accumulation of feces.
They explain that people are frightened of silence, frightened to be alone.Yet Bose was making a lot of money selling noise cancelling earphones to the jetset. Sound-proofing was a lucrative business in tony neighbourhoods. The poor may be afraid of silence and isolation. The Rich prefer it. You don't see Wall Street bankers jive walking around with massive boom boxes on their shoulders.
Silence has become almost unattainable. Children are afraid of it. We are enveloped by constant noise. Privacy, which is related to silence, requires being unafraid to be alone.Which is cool if you live in a Penthouse or a McMansion in a gated community.
On the contrary, one covets it, seeks it out; one does not know that nonsense phrase, “peer pressure.” There is no pressure except that of one’s own integrity and concentration.But one's integrity and concentration may be directed towards a foul end.
Malebranche, as quoted by Heidegger over and over again, said, "Concentration is the natural piety of the soul."But Heidegger's integrity and concentration caused him to become too Nazi for even the Nazis.
To be able to concentrate totally. You cannot read a difficult text without total concentration.Yes you can. I started reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in a desultory manner when I was 16. But, because of Science programs on TV which I hoped would drown out the noise of my masturbation, I knew that 'synthetic a priori judgments' don't exist. Once you know why a 'difficult text' is shite, you can read it with very little concentration so as to get a comprehensive idea of how and why pointy headed armchair punits fuck up so badly.
America – and this is not an anti-American comment (I hate that sort of cheapness)though incessantly indulging in it
– is more honest of its disasters than we are in Europe. The latest statistic is that over eighty percent of American adolescents cannot read in silence without some kind of music in the background.This is foolish. American adolescents who can read, can also do so in silence. They may prefer to do it while music plays on the radio. It may be that this alters brain waves, for some people, in some manner such that study becomes more productive. Having a soundscape of a certain type may increase concentration. Furthermore, those adolescents may have noisy siblings whom they wish to drown out.
Also quite terrifying is the flicker effect at the edge of their vision, the television.Steiner is easily terrified.
What this does to the cortex we haven’t begun to understand.Is Steiner claiming he is a brain surgeon in his spare time?
It would need extensive psychological and social examination of the current experience of solitude as punitive and traumatic, of the shortening of the attention span among the young and adults.Then why talk ultracrepidarian shite about stuff you know nothing about?
It would be sentimental nonsense to think that we can officially recreate the foundations of the classic act of literacy.And nonsense pure and simple to advert to this fact.The foundations of literacy were laid by merchants and lawyers and bureaucrats and priests.
Pythagoras and Plato intuited, and Galileo demonstrated that, to quote his famous saying, “Nature speaks mathematics.”Sadly, this isn't true at all. Structural Causal Models of Natural and Economic processes which are expressed in Mathematical terms can be very useful. But, they can also be wholly useless.
Since Galileo and Newton, that speech has become the ever-expanding idiom of a scientific and technological handling of the world.No it hasn't. The idiom of science and technology is in natural language. Entities which appear in mathematical formalizations may gain an idiomatic expression- e.g. the word 'quark'- but experimental verification is required before any change occurs in 'scientific and technological handling' of anything at all.
It is the lingua franca of the reality principle.Sadly, reality is not a chatty Kathy. Anyway, Freud was a charlatan.
Verbal and written languages cover less and less of verifiable, evolving experience.Nonsense! Quarks are now part of verifiable, evolving experience precisely because they entered verbal and written language at the moment when a particular mathematical equation received a scientific interpretation.
No aspect, no single facet of our lives, inward and outward, will be unchanged by the three horizons now looming.If Life evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape then it can't have any unchanging facets.
I owe this, of course, not to any competence on my part but I have had the privilege of living among the great scientists.I have had the privilege of living among who aren't shitheads. This hasn't helped me at all.
Heidegger used to say if you are really stupid, you tell a story. I confess to that guilt. Recently we had a truly delightful American guest at the high table of my college. He had been for a holiday in Scandinavia and, in the nicest way, he was saying to us, "I hope all of you do that. It is the nicest, friendliest place on earth." And he turns to a very shy, gray-haired colleague sitting next to him. “Have you been to Stockholm?” My colleague, keeping his head down, said, "Once." The guest didn’t understand, and we were so shy for the guest that we rapidly covered it with conversation. We didn’t want him to be embarrassed. My colleague had not meant to be clever or arrogant, God knows. He was simply being accurate. Of course, when you say “once” in Cambridge to the question “have you been to Stockholm,” you have gone for the Nobel.There's no Nobel for Maths. There is one for Econ and another for Peace. Both are only awarded to mischievous cretins. As for the Literature prize, when was the last time anyone worth reading got one?
That is what I call the aristocracy of the mind; that is what I want to live among, and have been lucky to be able to do.Progress in STEM subjects arises not from the daring sorties of dashing Cavaliers. It represents the ant-like industry of a vast infantry. There are some outstanding people- like Von Neumann or Frank Ramsey or the late Freeman Dyson- of whom we might say, proximity to that mind might have altered my trajectory. But we often find people with no very great accomplishment to their credit who somehow catalyze greatness in others. It may be that such people can be found in the Humanities. But its 'linguistic turn' destroyed its literacy. Either savants were univocal with Language or it wasn't their fault if it had departed to some other dwelling. No matter how badly they wrote, either they had said everything or nothing could, as yet, be said. The mind had its aristocracy and they deserved a place, if only as placeholders, at that High Table.
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