Issue 04 - Sheep

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Spring 2020 Columbia University Undergraduate Philosophy Magazine

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EDITORS EDITORS-IN-CHIEF CECILIA BELL ALICE McCRUM MANAGING EDITOR SAM WILCOX DESIGN EDITOR RACHEL SHERR CHIEF ASSOCIATE EDITOR NICHOLAS ALLEN ASSOCIATE ARTICLE EDITORS NICK GAUTHIER LUCIANO NAON ISAAC SCHOTT-ROSENFIELD EMMA JAMES ASSOCIATE INTERVIEW EDITORS NICK ERICHSON TZAR TARAPORVALA REPRESENTATIVES PEDRO SIEMSEN JONATHAN TANAKA EDITOR-AT-LARGE EMILIE BIGGS

CONTENTS A LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

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BONFIRE OF THE BOTTICELLIS SAM WILCOX

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BORROWED WEEDS ALICE McCRUM

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MOVIE TRAILERS AND THE MASS ORNAMENT ETAN WEISFOGEL

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INTERVIEW: LONG -TERM GREED TZAR TARAPORVALA

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CYNICAL THEOLOGY GEORGE MENZ

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DIAGNOSIS OF A CONTAGION GUS O’CONNOR

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LUCKY ACCIDENTS CECILIA BELL

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COGNOSCENTI AND IGNORANTI NICK GAUTHIER

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ARTWORK

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A LETTER FROM THE

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ed tape marks the pavement outside the supermarket. There is a person for each mark, a mask for each person. Though the queue to enter the supermarket wraps around the block from Broadway to Amsterdam, the line itself is sparse. The government recommends ten feet apart, but the tape enforces only six.

Outside, the atmosphere is edgy and exasperated; inside, it’s clinical and compassionate. We are protected by our masks and gloves, yet our protection makes us only all the more aware of our own vulnerability, as well as the vulnerability of others. Later, penned in by the grid of a Zoom call, we discuss the layout of our magazine. In gallery view, we are small, pixelated avatars. And every now and again, a message informs us that our Internet is unstable, that, as the Wi-Fi fades in-and-out, our document is “Trying to connect.” Most of the time, though, we just kick around in the purgatory of the web, waiting for the “meeting host to let [us] in.”

When we selected “Sheep” as our theme back in December, Gadfly could not have imagined all the ways in which we would, this spring, feel like sheep in a massive flock.

Yet somehow, in this return to our private life, our experiences are all the more singular. Social distancing might be illusory. How much privacy do we have when someone can enter our childhood bedroom with one click? But physical distance, if we’re lucky, provides us with mental space. Restricting freedom of movement encourages freedom of thought. But those are the good days. Mostly, this “brave new world” feels lonely and wanting. It is as though we’ve been, like the sheep whose wool will be spun into yarn come spring, shorn.

Talk of a spring awakening, though, might be far-fetched. The promise of a new world, seems, as we stew in digital limbo, unduly optimistic. Surely we are living through the crucible of the early 21st century. But will this moment, as the economist Simon Mair suggests, “pave the way for a humane economy”? Will this juncture, as the sociologist Eric Klinenburg insists, dismantle America’s “romance with hyper individualism”?

Will we, as the pop star Britney Spears wrote in what many perceived as a call to revolution on her Instagram account, “RE-DISTRIBUTE WEALTH” and “STRIKE”?

The world is going to drastically change, that much is clear; but can we dream of a shiny tomorrow? Can we trust Spears’s all caps promise, rendered in an art nouveau typeface, that “COMMUNION MOVES BEYOND WALLS”?

Faced with a grim reality, George Menz offers us the pessimist’s outlook. But, in his “Cynical Theology,” he ultimately warns against losing hope in the face of suffering.

Hopelessness, for Menz, creates political chaos and the rise of despots. We see this despotism in Savonarola, the star of Sam Wilcox’s “Bonfire of the Botticellis.” Situating us in late 15th century Florence, a world on fire, Wilcox argues that there is pleasure to be found in the act of art’s destruction. Art is restored, however, in Alice McCrum’s “Borrowed Weeds.” As she directs us to the Elizabethan stage, McCrum, drawing on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, calls for poetry’s return to Plato’s Kallipolis.

The fragility of art’s status is explored by Etan Weisfogel, too. In his piece “The Movie Trailer and the Mass Ornament,” Weisfogel wonders whether the trailer, often ne-

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glected by film criticism, tells us more about the film industry and its ailing power than the movie itself. Perhaps it is precisely the trailer’s unconsciousness, like that of Kracauer’s “mass ornament,” that allows us a view into “the fundamental substance of things”—here, a capitalist reality where our libidinal desires are commodified. Gus O’Connor, on the other hand, is worried not about the commodification of our desires, but of our bodies. In “Diagnosis of a Contagion,” he explores the way Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, an otherwise compelling critique of capitalism and American individualism, objectifies the female body.

And what does the sheepish capitalist have to say about all this? While our interview with Anonymous Trader in “Long-Term Greed” provides some answers, we might not like to hear that “it’s all related ultimately to cash flow.” Where art, under capitalism, is crafted to sate the masses, or else (in the words of Wall Street financiers) to “win,” McCrum and O’Connor consider how art stirs change. O’Connor, for his part, points to the possibilities of alternative logics, logics of redemption, logics that eschew the circularity of Menz’s pessimism. We are challenged not to resist change, to sour in the face of fortune, but to embrace it. Perhaps we can’t ever really plan for chance, as Cecilia Bell suggests in “Lucky Accident.” Questioning how luck threatens notions of both authorship and responsibility, Bell reconsiders our aesthetic and moral practices, one that recognizes our lack of control.

A LETTER

Sometimes, though, it’s not easy to see how we lack control, the ways we are controlled. In Gadfly’s first work of fiction, “Cognoscenti and Ignoranti,” Nick Gauthier allows us a view into the curious mind of Elsa, whose life is planned to the minute.

Satirizing the fragile Ivory Tower, Gauthier crafts a world much like Plato’s Kallipolis, Perdita’s garden, and Savonarola’s kingdom—a seemingly ideal bubble, where the walls are transparent and the logic is circular. But what may lie beyond this bubble— alternative logics, privacy, collectivism—is never considered by Gauthier’s characters, though we know that things could be different.

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At the end of our time together, we, on behalf of Gadfly, want to express a moment of support—it is not lost to us that many in our Columbia community, and beyond, are struggling. In the midst of this adversity, we are all the more grateful for the opportunity to publish, for the first time in one academic year, two issues. Specifically, we thank Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy for its continued support over the years. We also thank the Arts Initiative for the generous backing. Most of all we thank our wonderful contributors and board.

THE EDITORS

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BONFIR OF SAM WILCOX

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hat might have compelled Sandro Botticelli to throw his paintings into the flames? How might it have felt to see the hours of his labor devoured by the fire?

Why did Botticelli destroy the works of his creation—paintings undoubtedly received as masterpieces—along with the other luxury objects and art pieces in the bonfires of the vanities?

BONFIRE OF THE BOTTICELLIS

Under the thumb of the friar Girolamo Savonarola, Botticelli and the citizens of 15th century Florence participated in these bonfires, the most famous of which erupted in the Piazza della Signoria on Shrove Tuesday, 1497. Religious fervor, collective agitation, and the rule of a Dominican despot, no doubt, helped create the swarms of passion and destructive agency that culminated in this quintes-

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sential moment of iconoclasm. The individual bonfires offered a ritual of cleansing: absolution of material goods, mass devotion to God, and ash in advance of Ash Wednesday. As the flames devoured the paintings, beauty became enmeshed in its own destruction. Yet, to witness the paintings aflame, to see the demolition of irreligious idols, the sacrifice of texts (including Ovid, Boccaccio, and Dante) during this period of carnival, was to also witness a transfer of power. Beauty was sublimated to ash. Art was purged for devotion. The emotionally compelling, bewitching aesthetic power of the image was transferred to the physical power of the material world. Botticelli’s paintings, those spared from destruction now immortalized in museums and art history textbooks, were laid to waste by the hand of their own creator. What remained was

seemingly nothing, piles of lost matter, grey, and inert.

The sight of iconoclasm in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria, however, did shock. The burning of Renaissance art, at the height of the Renaissance, presents a jarring internal contradiction: a period of alleged artistic rebirth suddenly cannibalizes itself in the public square of a major Italian city. The extraordinary sight of the artist, amidst a throng of devout Florentines, destroying the objects of his labor has been accompanied with years of other iterations of iconoclasm, both before and after 1497. From the spolia in Rome and the whitewashed cathedrals in the Protestant Reformation, to the dissolution of Catholic monasteries in England, the course of history is filled with moments of artistic destruction. Even more recently, iconoclasm was seen in the Cultural Revolution in

The icon and the power of its destruction, or lack thereof, demands historical context. There are some places and cultural moments, Taussig suggests, where icons accumulate enough veneration and symbolic power, their importance must be challenged; they ask to be destroyed.

Yet it seems, according to Taussig, in the places and moments where the iconoclastic power remains intact, where the icon has accumulated this venerated and symbolic power, the art often avoids erasure; where the opposite is true, where the power of destruction is diffused through centuries, nothing is worth destroying. The symbolic power of certain images (for example, the American flag) is so unrelated and untethered to the individual experiences and values of those connected to the object, that no one would really care if the flag were burned.

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n his essay “Iconoclasm Dictionary,” the anthropologist Michael Taussig wonders why “iconoclasm seem[s] so dated,” why the destruction of art objects feels like a relic of the past.

Taussig does not deny iconoclastic fervor in the present. Indeed, he offers the “Stars and Stripes flying proudly over every secondhand car lot, gas station, and fast food outlet,” as a prime (and, dare I say, deserving) outlet for an iconoclast’s rage. The flag, and other symbols of the iconoclast’s revulsion towards the systems or powers it represents, begs to be destroyed. The “stars and stripes,” incinerated, signifies the iconclast’s desire to also see the institutions of the country that oppresses her, razed. For Taussig, iconoclasm of today is “antiquated” not because it no longer exists, but because it fails to shock.

China, the crumbling Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, and the torched mosques in Timbuktu. Taussig claims that after a past of such destruction, iconoclasm has become passé. To burn the American flag, then, is not to elicit the shock or religious apotheosis of the bonfires of the vanities, but to be seen as one of many mildly provocative protestors, or to be ignored entirely.

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ut five-hundred years earlier, in Renaissance Italy, the act of iconoclasm had not yet been exhausted. Instead, the destruction of art was leveraged as a penitent, sanctified act.

To be a Florentine amidst the destructive urges of Savonarola was to embody a collective effervescence; it was to have been a part of a larger whole. To take part in the destruction of art––to burn the Botticellis––was to be at once part of a large mass movement, and part of a

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fringe, rebellious sect. For the audiences watching the bonfires, the images destroyed (the paintings of exuberant richness, gorgeous figures, colors, and light) were sinful. With the charge to purge the city of its vanities, Savonarola presented the Catholic distinction between the sacred (ascetic, divinely ordained) and the profane (material splendor). Mirrors, card games, and garments, as distractions from religious worship, were the targets of destruction. Using these same objects, the Renaissance vanitas still life paintings functioned much in the same way.

There, a skull sitting among a table of wilting flowers and musical instruments, and other objects of desire, served as a memento mori. The skull reminded the viewer that one shouldn’t be too infatuated with the material pleasures of life.

Life itself was ephemeral. Damnation, however, was eternal.

Savonarola promised the Florentines salvation; by setting fire to the vanities, they would secure their place in heaven and restore goodness and order to the city.

Indeed, Savonarola’s project was a quest to bring out a city united in its adoration

of Christ—a harmonious mortal urban landscape that anticipated the immortal kingdom to come. To attain such an afterlife, to forge a relationship with Christ himself, meant the paltry objects of one’s corporeal life had to be turned over as offerings in a performance of piety. Which is to say: Savonarola was all about performance. The demand that the streets be turned to pyres, that the wigs, dolls, and paintings of the city be subsumed in fire—a mirror to the fires of Hell—was an order for acts worthy of attention.

Commanding the scene, directing the destruction, Savonarola was the star of the show. It was for his central role in the bonfires that Savonarola himself was later excommunicated from the Catholic Church and condemned to death. In an execution fitting the religious figure bent on burning away a city’s sins, he was hung at the gallows and set ablaze in the Piazza della Signoria. Like the vanities, Savonarola was purged for the sake of religious devotion.

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xisting accounts of the bonfires of the vanities, however, speak not of the terror and zealousness

SAM WILCOX

that these religious, ritualistic acts of destruction might have caused. Rather, they speak to the pleasure (not unlike the pleasure Taussig finds) in the destruction of objects. One observer, the poet Girolamo Benivieni, described the Piazza della Signoria scene as one of “festivity, delight, and joy.” The iconoclasm was an attempt to create a moment that was religiously and culturally the opposite of its setting: carnival. Where carnival is characterized by the revelry in material excess and the pleasures of the body—the carnal of the carnival—Savonarola proposed an experience of sacrifice. To burn the vanities was to burn the objects normally tolerated by the Catholic calendar at that time of year. Yet, the experience of carnival persisted intact. Transgression against staid Catholic dogma and obsession with material objects became transposed to the opposite extreme: pleasure in the renunciation of these objects.

Benivieni, as well as onlookers Piero Parenti and Iacopo Nardi, described the construction of elaborate sets, effigies of Satan, and the singing processions of children. Celebratory feasts and mas-

querade parties were replaced by a new spectacle: a spectacle of destruction.

Time and care went into the organization of the art objects, vanities, and devil effigies. The pyres and sets ready to be burned were admired for their attractiveness, just before immolation. Over the sight of smoke billowing from the city was the sound of chanting. The people of Florence luxuriated in the demolition of their own luxuries. Benivieni, in a prayer inspired by the destruction, wrote “inflame our hearts now with your love.” The flames became not hellish, but passionate. It was a scene of ecstasy, of excitement, of happiness.

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n her essay “Negativity: Rejection,” the philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva writes about the excitement bound in destruction, extending Jacques Lacan’s jouissance to a Hegelian notion of negativity. Already connected to a form of self-destruction, jouissance is the almost paradoxical pleasure in the destruction of the self. It is, for Lacan, a sexual pleasure, linked to the abdication of self through a loss of control. Lacan writes in the shadow of

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BONFIRE OF THE BOTTICELLIS

Sigmund Freud, whose death drive is inextricable from orgasmic pleasure, or in French, la petite morte. For Lacan the loss of consciousness and self-control in moments of extreme pleasure is, as the phrase is translated to English suggests, “a little death,” a self-destruction, a suicide. Just as jouissance is not mere pleasure (as jouissance is the pleasure and excitement in self-destruction), so too Kristeva’s negativity is not mere nothingness. Negativity moves beyond nothingness, conferring negative value, yet value all the same. Nothingness, on the other hand, is valueless, empty of both positive and negative value. Rejection is a type of negativity. The force of rejection is not merely denial, it is a repulsive force. It sends the rejected backward; it is a vector that runs in an opposing direction.

The value of negativity—of rejection, of demolition—then, gives rise to pleasure.

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Kristeva thinks of “negativity” as a structuralist semiotic concept. In a tradition that defines concepts in relief of their opposites, the destructive “negativity” is, paradoxically, a building block of construction. In other words, “negativity” becomes “life affirming.” Such is the jouissance. In the face of destruction, of negativity, one suddenly understands what it means to exist (in a positive sense). Thus, the flames that devoured the vanities in the Piazza della Signoria, nourished the souls of the Florentines. Surrounded by fiery destruction, these Florentines knew not what it meant to be destroyed; they knew what it meant to be alive.

The dichotomy of pleasure and pain becomes unstable. Kristeva, borrowing Hegel and Lacan’s terms, imagines pleasure and pain as both antagonistic and complementary forces. Thus the “negativity” of jouissance is erotic; the sexual escasty

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he vanities were destroyed because they were too powerful.

They symbolized corruption of the flesh, persistence of the carnivalesque beyond carnival season, and the eventual damnation of the soul. These vanities were trivial objects, meaningless in the face of divinity. Better they be burned. It was a salvation of avoidance, a salvation of reducing the corrupting force to a pile of nothing in the city square. This was the logic behind the bonfires of the vanities; this was how to maintain (religious) control of the city.

This logic, too, was what compelled the artist to forgo his paintings. Botticelli, under the intoxicating lure of Savonarola and caught in the performance of piety, was seduced by the mass movement of destruction. The bonfires of the vanities took on a greater meaning for Botticelli: the self-destruction of jouissance became the literal destruction of his own work.

His art, his livelihood, was denounced as a manifestation of corruption and turned to ash. To be Botticelli, then, abandoning his art with the crowds on Shrove Tuesday, was to find pleasure in the rejection of a past self. Botticelli, along with the other followers of Savonarola, placed the corrupting objects, among them Botticelli’s paintings, in an organized pyre and watched them burn.

The corrupting force of these objects could not be reduced to nothing, however. The jouissance of the iconoclasts spoke to a negative force, not a neutralizing one. It was the idea that these objects were sinful which required their destruction. A day was reversed in the calendar year to address the temptation of these objects. As the Florentines lined the streets with their beautiful, artful belongings, they created a performance of destruction. Not merely an avoidance of sinful objects, it was public performance of rejection. Reduced to ashes, the objects of the bonfire still had the sinful significance and power that Savonarola and his followers believed them to carry. Simply put, the meaningless became meaningful. Power was held in the hands of fire, yes, but power, too—a negative, destructive power—was imbued in the objects inflamed. The burning objects captured attention; they inspired wrath.

SAM WILCOX

is a combination of pleasure and pain— pleasure defined in relation to pain. The “inflamed heart” of Benivieni is a heart that knows itself, knows that it’s beating, if only because it’s swallowed by fire. This combination of pleasure and pain, for Kristeva, informs Freud’s “death drive.”

This combination informs sado-masochism. And five centuries ago, this combination informed Savonarola.

“There is so much joy in destroying the icon,” Taussig writes, “and even more, it seems, in destroying the joy the iconoclast enjoys.” Taussig speaks to the contradiction of iconoclasm: by destroying something, the object destroyed is not nothing, not empty of meaning, but meaningful in the need for its destruction. This contradiction creates a spiralling of iconoclasm. To revel in undermining the iconoclast, to point out that “iconoclasm actually boosts the iconic power of the icon,” is to be an iconoclast oneself, an iconoclast against iconoclasm.

The “negativity” of destruction showcases its power as it pulls the iconoclast deeper in its spiral, as it ends with Savonarola in flames. ◆

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ALICE MCCRUM

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ould Homer, packing up his belongings, have described eternal expulsion from Plato’s Republic as an “old quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, nothing more than a quibble between “old” friends?

What about Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, dragging their suitcases in tow? How these poets felt we cannot know (they’re either dead by the time Plato expels them from his utopian citystate or indifferent to the expulsion when he does). We can know, however, what others have argued in their stead. Over the years, many––from Roman poet Horace in his Ars Poetica to Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney in his The Defence of Poesy––have tried to recuperate poetry by observing Plato’s conditions of its return: poetry must be pleasant, yes, but it must also be beneficial.

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Notably absent among these famous defenders is William Shakespeare, the “Bard of Avon.” Though he most likely would have shrugged off the title of “poet” (he preferred “dramatist”), Shakespeare did, after all, write 154 sonnets.

He also wrote several narrative poems, including Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and, his most popular at the time, A Lover’s Complaint. Poet or not, to investigate Plato’s expulsion of poetry we first must define poetry not as we do today, nor even as Shakespeare did in the early 17th century. Poetry in 375 BCE, the classicist M. F. Burnyeat writes in “Art and Mimesis in Plato’s Republic,” was the most popular form of entertainment. Indeed, at the time Plato was writing, crowds of 14,000 people attended performances of tragedy and comedy at the Great Dionysia and other festivals. And larger groups still, sometimes reaching 20,000 theater-goers, attended

recitals of Homer. By contrast, even at the height of Shakespeare’s career in the early 17th century, no more than 3,000 playgoers attended performances at the Globe Theater.

Nevertheless, according to Burnyeat’s definition (as well as Plato’s understanding) of poetry as “the most popular form of entertainment,” Shakespeare’s plays, filled with poetry, would surely also be banned from the Kallipolis. Yet Shakespeare, for his part, was too busy hawking tickets, negotiating the censorship laws of King James VI, or else working in the shadow of the bubonic plague, to care.

And even if he did care, he never cared enough to sit down and write a formal defense of poetry. But, instead of lamenting the lack of a Shakespearean defense, we can look to his work—The Winter’s Tale in particular––as an argument for poetry’s triumphant return.

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n this strange late play, Shakespeare shows how theater transforms people. “[T]his robe of mine does change my disposition,” Perdita, a young shepherdess dressed as the queen of a midsummer festival, observes. And to this “change,” curiously, Plato agrees.

“Haven’t you noticed,” Socrates, Plato’s interlocutor, remarks to Adeimantus, “that imitations…become part of nature and settle into habits of gesture, voice, and thought?” Both playwright and philosopher agree that to act, no different from imitating or dressing up, is to change human nature. But as outer changes––speech, clothing and body language––permeate inner dispositions, where Plato banishes this transformation, along with poetry its creator, from the Kallipolis, Shakespeare places it on the London stage.

Plato’s extended discussion of a wouldbe city in the Republic, Polixenes and Perdita’s exchange turns on a hypothetical discussion, as both go on to spurn the views in real life, about another utopia.

Though far briefer than the Republic, though under the thinly veiled language of gardening, the conversation is a testament to how, under the auspices of theater, radical opinions, once protected by disguise, are free to flourish.

Perdita (as queen) tells Polixenes (as peasant) she will not grow hybrid flowers in her garden (read: society). Though she observes that “streaked gillyvors” are among the “fairest flowers,” she refuses to grow them. “Of that kind,” she says,

ALICE M CRUM

“Seest thou not the air of the court in these enfoldings?” asks Autolycus, an in The Winter’s Tale. “Hath not my gait in it the measure of the court?” he continues, as the nobility of his clothes somehow extends into his stride. For Shakespeare, acting offers us, whether real-life actors or fictional characters, the opportunity to escape from the burdens of class, gender, and family––the burdens, in other words, of life. In the guise of another, we are free not only to try on new robes, but to see through the worldviews stitched into them. When, for instance, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, casts aside his scepter to play a peasant, and Perdita dispenses with her sheep-hook to play a queen, their minds are free to stir. Much like

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n Perdita’s terms, then, Polixenes, outside the gilded walls of the palace, also bears a “part.” He is also “in disguise.” Shakespeare does not describe the costume, but Polixenes’s deference to Perdita’s nobility suggests that he has cautiously recast himself as a peasant.

Though seemingly superficial, the re-

spective costumes, along with the freedom of thought they afford, are crucial to understanding this conversation. As the exchange continues to unfold under the guise of gardening, Perdita answers that she rejects gillyvors on account of their multicolored-ness, in her view an artificial mixture of “art” and “great creating nature.” And in this garden, or else society, Perdita privileges nature. Children of socially-mixed parentage born out of wedlock (bastards) are seen as unnatural, and are therefore excluded.

Polixenes (as peasant) disagrees. “Over that art which you say adds to nature,” he replies, “is an art that nature makes.”

For him, art’s relationship to nature is itself natural. To illustrate this loaded claim, he too reaches for the language of greenery. “You see, sweet maid,” he sighs, spreading his legs a little wider, embarking on an extended mansplain, we “marry a gentle scion to the wildest stock and make conceive a bark of baser kind by bud of nobler race.” Here, “marry” and “conceive” nod to Perdita’s reproductive language of “bastards” and “barren.” And like Perdita, he is also interested in class.

For Polixenes (at this moment) “marriage” between “base” classes and “gentle” classes produces “nobler” children and a more civilized society. In other words, while Perdita dismisses bastards, he welcomes them.

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referring to the so-called “nature’s bastards,” her “garden’s barren.” As “bastard,” “barren,” and their reproductive overtones suggest, Perdita is not only talking about flowers; she is also talking about (and rejecting) the position of illegitimate children in Bohemia.1 Polixenes, in reply, understands the implication.

“Wherefore, gentle maiden, do you neglect them?” he asks, riffing on “neglect,” a verb better suited to children than to plants. Calling her a “gentle maiden,” he riffs, too, on Perdita’s noble status (as well as her virginity). On the page, “gentle maiden” reminds us that she is “most goddesslike” dressed up in the “borrowed” “weeds” (clothes) of a queen. Perdita understands her position in theatrical terms; to dress in “borrowed” “weeds” is to act in a role. “Methinks,” she says of her royal garb, “I play as I have seen them do in Whitsun pastorals.” Here, connotations of “play” as frolicking in summer festivals are overpowered by “play” as acting on the stage. Later, when she prepares to dress up yet again (this time as an inconspicuous traveler in a hat) she observes: “I see the play so lies / That I must bear a part.”

“This is an art,” itself natural, Polixenes says of social mixing, “which does mend

1. This is not the first time Shakespeare has characters turn to the language of gardening to tell us what they really mean. Years before Perdita reflects on the social fabric of her “rustic garden,” Shakespeare likens the “whole land” of England to a “sea-wallèd garden” in Richard II. “Cut off the heads of too-fast-growing sprays,” the gardener says of burgeoning sprigs (or else of political rebels) that “look too lofty in our commonwealth.” Whether in the commonwealth of England, or in the kingdom of Bohemia, the language of gardens provides rich refuge for veiled opinions.

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nature, change it rather.” Though he agrees to Perdita’s definition of “art” as human skill, Polixenes’s understanding of nature expands to include human nature: the artificial falls within the natural.

For him, noble characters “mend” wild ones. This seemingly throwaway line only suffers from Perdita’s terse reply: “so it is.”

At once deflating Polixenes’s philosophical meditation and steering the conversation back to its initial levity, her cool tone reminds us that however impassioned, this peasant’s opinion does not at all bear on the reality of her life—a life, we are once again reminded, from which she has momentarily stepped away.

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s he envisions his idyllic metropolis in meticulous detail, Plato is profoundly disturbed by the idea that we can step away from our lives to play different roles, that we can “dabble in many things.” “Is a person of one mind in all these circumstances?” he asks of an actor who mimics the “cries of dogs, sheep, and birds.” Was Polixenes, he might have added, “of one mind” when he affected the egalitarian opinions of a peasant? Was Perdita when she tried on the haughty airs of a queen? Plato is so disturbed by these questions that he likens imitation––shaping and molding oneself to another’s voice and appearance––to a kind of internal war. To hold “opposite beliefs about the same thing at the same time,” he declares, is to “engage in civil war.” In his vision of the Kallipolis, in which “each individual would do a fine job of one occupation,” fractured minds and curious souls are––much like unnatural bastards before them––excluded.

But it is only through these internal civil wars, Shakespeare replies, that people

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and societies transform. Without the freedom to experiment in the role of someone else (to empathize), as part of an ostensibly light-hearted theatrical production, we are fixed selves. And just as his characters use the language of gardening to try out new views, so Shakespeare uses Perdita, Polixenes, and a bed of streaked gillyvors to explore how theater relates to nature. “This is an art,” he writes, “which does mend nature, change it rather.” Indeed, looking to Shakespeare’s work over the years, art does mend human nature. Or as Plato would have it: art, not only pleasing, also improves human lives. King Lear, for example, in his eponymous play, is moved for the better by the prospect of playing a new role. But unlike Perdita and Polixenes, who put on costumes, Lear takes his off. “Off, off, you lendings!” he shouts in an attempt to follow Edgar who (disguised as Tom O’Bedlam) wears “no silk,” “no hide,” and “no wool.” “Come on, be true,” the King cries as he strips off his clothes and their royal pretenses. The irony, of course, is that Edgar, rather than being the “thing itself,” plays the role of the “thing itself.”

But it doesn’t matter for Lear; he knows that to empathize with the mind of an “unaccommodated man,” to understand the perspective of “the thing itself,” is to join Tom on the “stage” of life. “All the world” is, after all, a “stage.”

Interestingly, other artforms––literature, painting, sculpture––cannot accommodate the transformation facilitated by theater. In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare has Lucrece, the poem’s protagonist, ponder the limits of visual art. “On this sad shadow,” he writes of Helen’s image in a painting of Troy, “Lucrece spends her eyes / And shapes her sorrow to the bedlam’s woe.” But Helen, who

ALICE M CRUM

wants nothing but to utter “bitter words to ban her cruel foes,” cannot speak. “The painter,” Lucrece remarks, was “no god to lend her those.” In other words, Lucrece believes that though this painter might have lent Helen “bitter words,” he was constrained by the form, the fixity of painting. “Therefore,” Shakespeare continues, Lucrece “swears [the painter] did [Helen] wrong/ To give her so much grief, and not a tongue.” Though painting “easeth some,” Lucrece concludes, without the power of language, “none it ever cured.”

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eturning, at last, to The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare might have observed the same powerlessness of sculpture, another fixed form of art. In the play, the sculptor Julio Romano is said to “beguile Nature of her custom so perfectly he is her ape.” Transformation by way of art, however, does not happen by “beguiling,” or else “aping” nature. Transformation happens when art can “mend” and “change,” when people have “bitter words” and tongues. And

after directing Demetrius and Chiron to remove Lavinia’s tongue (as well as her hands) in his first play Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare not only gives his characters tongues, but he gives them life. The moment in which the statue of Hermione, who has been dead for sixteen years, comes back to life at the end of The Winter’s Tale, at the end of Shakespeare’s long career, then, is the playwright’s final meditation on the power of theater.

Because it is only through tongues and speech and breath–– only through life–– that art can go some way to “mend” human nature. Surely, as Leontes feels the force of this life coursing through his wife Hermione’s body, poetry returns to the Kallipolis. Surely, as Leontes feels the rush of opportunity that accompanies resurrection, poetry––as pleasurable as it is beneficial––walks through Plato’s now open gates once and for all. “O,” Leontes whispers, “she’s warm.” ◆

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MOVIE T ETAN WEISFOGEL

MASS OR

TRAILERS & THE RNAMENT

“The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself … The surface-level expressions … by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.”

Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”

MOVIE TRAILERS & THE MASS ORNAMENT

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he movie trailer is an unusually unconscious object. It is at once unconscious of itself and aimed at the unconscious. What does it mean for an object to be unconscious of itself ?

The trailer is an object built out of another object—the film—and it always reflexively points back at its source. Unlike its source object, it seems to lack a clearly identified creator—the “end credits” of a trailer list those who worked on the film rather than those who worked on the trailer. Whereas the film can be reclaimed from its role as a product built for consumption and profit through a reading of it as the personal expression of a particular artist (i.e., auteur theory), the trailer is cut off from its potential ability to function as personal expression through the carefully maintained anonymity of its creators. The intent of a film can be multi-faceted, complicated, contradictory; the intent of a trailer is always and only to sell. If consciousness suggests a level of self-awareness, an ability to self-reflect, the trailer does not involve it consciousness. Further, if the film is conscious, and the trailer unconscious, we might say that the trailer is the film’s unconscious—not only is the trailer selling the film, but it is also a presentation of what the film is selling, separated from its loftier intentions.

How, though, is the trailer aimed at the unconscious? What unconscious desires does the movie trailer seek to fulfill? To answer these questions, we must first understand the history of how movie trailers developed, with a specific focus on trailers in the American context. This overview owes much to Keith M. Johnston’s Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Film Technology, an essential work on the aesthetic history of the trailer.

The word “trailer” comes from its initial placement after the feature presentation—trailers trailed the film.Though it soon became clear that audiences would not stay for these advertisements unless they preceded the feature, the term stuck.

The first trailers, made in the 1910s, simply presented a series of excerpted scenes from the film. New editing technologies in the 1920s facilitated the creation of a kind of trailer-specific montage. This montage was defined by screen wipes and other graphic transitions, as well as the superimposition of titles and taglines over images from the film, in order to lend a flow to the succession of excerpts.

The introduction of synced sound techniques in the late twenties precipitated the use of narration, which contextualized the onscreen text. This style, though

ETAN WEISFOGEL

slightly modified along the way, remained the primary mode of trailer-making for the rest of the old Hollywood studio era, until roughly the mid sixties.

With the creation of public relations as a profession, and its role in bolstering and promoting the star system, trailers began to focus on stars as the central figures through which to market the product of the film. At this time, the trailer served a dual purpose: it sold the film through the star, but it also sold the star through the film. The star image was an economic force that extended beyond the confines of the cinema, selling magazines, brands, and styles of dress, all of which acted interdependently to boost profits across each cooperating industry. The trailer, a key aspect of this interdependent economy, used onscreen text and narration to attach epithets to the stars’ names, highlighting attractive aspects of their personalities. These aspects were often rooted in base and easily sellable desires, such as the sex appeal of a Rita Hayworth, or

the macho dominance of a Humphrey Bogart.

In the 1950s, in reaction to the rise of television, the film industry searched for ways to combat the power of the smallscreen experience as a mass medium.

Technologies like CinemaScope, Cinerama, and the 3D stereoscopic process resized and redimensionalized the screen to create visual experiences unique to the theatrical space. Trailers thus began to forefront these technologies, promoting them as they had once promoted movie stars. Though the stars still played a role in selling the film, there was a greater focus on the visual splendor of the cinematic experience, as indicated by title cards that encouraged audiences to “SEE!” “WATCH!” and “IMAGINE!” The most spectacular images in the film were brought to bear as visual evidence for the continued superiority of the big screen over the small screen, capitalizing on immediate sensory impressions rather than on the desires aroused by the movie star.

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MOVIE TRAILERS & THE MASS ORNAMENT

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hallenged only by the rise of the Internet, yet another new medium through which to distribute and present film advertisements, these two approaches—the focus on the star and the display of technological advancement—remained central to how films were advertised for the rest of the 20th century. The Internet, when it did emerge, did not suffer from the same issues as previous non-theatrical mediums for trailer presentation, like the TV spot and the home video trailer, however. Trailers on the Internet neither had to limit themselves to a commercial break-sized runtime, nor advertise for a separate home video distribution market.

Further, the Internet made possible the simultaneous release of a single trailer across two different platforms: the theater and the web. The first film trailer to be distributed in this way was Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Often called “the most anticipated two minutes

of film ever,” the ad was the first footage to come out of the official Star Wars franchise since 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

When the trailer was released theatrically on 17th November 1998, fans formed lines around the block just to see it. There were reports of people leaving without even watching the feature presentation, though some returned to those theaters which presented encores of the trailer after the film’s end. By midday, many fans had posted recorded bootlegs of the trailer online. Attempting to counter these actions, George Lucas made the trailer available to download as an MP4 on the official Star Wars website later that evening. The ability to download the trailer meant the ability to replay it, rewind it, pause it; in other words, to possess it.

If The Phantom Menace is the origin story for the Star Wars trilogy, then its trailer, and the myth surrounding its dissemination, acts as something of an origin story

Consumed only in the theater, trailers pre-Internet had to be careful about the way they delivered relevant information to viewers—all the film’s selling points had to be made clear to the consumer.

With the ability to perpetually re-view the trailer, in addition to pausing and screenshotting, post-Internet trailers benefitted from presenting information in a way that was intentionally obscuring, forcing the consumer to pore over each and every image for potential clues about the film’s narrative. This method, still in place today, demands an obsessive investment in the film which must exist before the trailer is even released, an investment made possible by fan culture and Hollywood’s increasing commitment to producing mostly franchises and pre-existing properties. Both of these phenomena, not coincidentally, were precipitated by the unprecedented triumph of Star Wars and its sequels.

ETAN WEISFOGEL

for the aesthetic of the modern trailer.

The stylistic conventions in The Phantom Menace ad are different from those established in the old Hollywood studio era. Though the trailer is still largely made up of various key moments from the film strung together, these moments are less extended and more isolated. Instead of the outdated wipe transitions, simple cutting is used; these cuts are quicker, inserting brief glimpses of establishing shots or moments of action into the longer, more revealing bits of dialogue. Instead of narration or text superimposed on the images, white text on a black screen appears every so often to offer various aphorisms. The phrases––“Every saga has its beginning…” for example––do not describe the plot or the characteristics of the main actors in the film, rather they provide an overarching mythological basis for the film’s existence. Many of these differences were consistent with the aesthetic developments of the trailer after the fall of the studio system. Though many trailers still used narration and, in certain cases, superimposed text, others had already begun to buck convention. The faster cutting rhythms, often attributed to the influence of MTV, reflected a change that had occurred within the films themselves. But if the quick editing in the trailer for The Phantom Menace, for instance, arose naturally from the pace of contemporary cinema, the advent of trailers on the Internet would spur an even greater increase in the speed of their cutting rhythms.

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hile Old Hollywood trailers centered around either the symbol of the movie star or the novelty of state-of-the-art technology as their main selling points, that is no longer the case in the contemporary film trailer. While Avatar, which repopularized 3D technology, was perhaps the last film to truly market itself solely on the basis of technological advancement, the power of the movie star as an economic force has largely been replaced by the power of characters and franchises. However, if these particular selling points have disappeared, the underlying affective responses which they caused—the immediate sensory impression and the arousal of libidinal desire— have remained.

The form of today’s trailer, one for the franchise film (the main product that Hollywood studios produce), has changed significantly, even since the age of The Phantom Menace. Even trailers for non-franchise films have adopted its lan-

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MOVIE TRAILERS & THE MASS ORNAMENT

guage in one way or another. This form no longer makes much of an attempt to construct a sense of the film’s general narrative. Rather, vague, New Age-y excerpts, usually focused on mythological journeys, fate, destiny, and the essence of one’s being, have been chosen from the most general snippets of dialogue in the film. In some sense, following the literary critic Joseph Campbell, these elements make up the skeletal nature of narrative.

Yet, by that same logic, these elements are largely interchangeable from one trailer to another, highlighting a perpetually reproduced narrative.

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These dialogue excerpts tend to be separated from their onscreen sources, instead playing over a rapid succession of largely contextless imagery. Underneath it all is often an initially ominous but ultimately inspiring musical score, which denies resolution until the very end of the trailer. The only attachment which these images have to anything outside the continuous flow of the trailer itself are those elements recognizable as symbols and emblems of the franchise’s mythology. If these vague, generalized, context-free trailers are comprehensible at all, it is only by virtue of the audience’s assumed familiarity with the original texts on which these franchises are based, or the previous films in the franchise.

Thus, the immediate sensory impression and the libidinal desire, cut off from their origins in the appreciation of technology and the lust for the star, are now channeled through the fetish objects associated with the franchise and from which the trailer draws its meaning. These objects are meant to inspire the same awe once inspired by a widescreen landscape shot or a special effect, and the same level of

sexual excitement once achieved by the presentation of attractive movie stars. If the latter claim seems like a stretch, the trailer’s form suggests otherwise. These trailers are especially obsessed with delaying resolution, and thus gratification, until the explosive climax that occurs when the title of the film is revealed. The film’s title is its ultimate fetish object, the name evoking the whole spirit of the franchise: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Though movie stars retain primacy in new trailers, they are no longer fetish objects by virtue of their sex appeal (as they were in Old Hollywood), but by virtue of their symbolic connection to the franchise. When Mark Hamill appears in The Rise of Skywalker trailer, for instance, his presence does not inspire awe because of his physical beauty or his paradigmatic manliness, but because his face signifies Luke Skywalker. Carrie Fisher’s appearance in the trailer is even more telling— she died before the film was made, and her presence in the film is only possible due to unused footage from an earlier film in the franchise. Thus, even the bodies of the dead are turned into fetish objects, signifying the work they produced while alive.

Offering no meaningful or specific content beyond the presentation of the franchise’s fetish objects, and an immediate, unconscious kind of gratification, these trailers are entirely surface-level, lending themselves to a Kracauerian reading.

“Surface-level expressions” of an epoch, Kracauer contends, paradoxically provides us with a window into the “fundamental substance of the state of things.”

The perfectly uniform dance routines of the Tiller Girls, whom Kracauer dubbed

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o if the trailer acts as the unconscious to its source object’s consciousness, somehow it is more

valuable than the film itself. Whereas the film obscures its function as a consumer product through the complicating factors of artistic expression, the trailer lays bare the film’s function within the production process, and the way it is meant to be perceived and consumed. Trailers are often dismissed by critics and film scholars as superfluous and irrelevant to the work of art itself; perhaps it is the work of art which is superfluous and irrelevant to the trailer. Just as, to Kracauer, the mass ornament was of interest precisely because it was spiritual without reason, a cult without explicit meaning, so it is for the trailer, with its presentation of mass fetish objects. Separated from its source object––estranged and incomprehensible––the trailer is the husk of a desperate film industry clinging on to the remains of its most popular products as its power, the power of the industrial system which it represents, wanes. ◆

ETAN WEISFOGEL

“The Mass Ornament,” were representative of how modern capitalism organized the masses into a completely deindividualized, alienated horde—both as workers in the factory and as consumers. Though the trailer is also connected to this horde, there is no direct parallel between the content of the trailer and its consumer base. Instead, the trailer’s utter lack of content speaks to the empty nature of the systems which the horde are still meant to uphold, perpetuate, and, on some level, love. In the trailer, the commodity of the artwork exists only for its own existence. The audience continues to buy the product not because it fills a pre-existing need, whether libidinal or sensorial, but because the product creates, and fills, its own need, the need for itself.

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LONG-

TZAR TARAPORVALA

-TERM

The following is the transcript of an interview with Anonymous Trader, conducted by Tzar Taraporvala. Anonymous Trader has worked in corporate finance for over twenty-five years at large institutions, among them Fortune 500 companies, in the United States and India. Anonymous Trader specializes in trading equities and management. This interview has been transcribed and edited for brevity and clarity by Taraporvala.

GADFLY: Could you give us a bit of background about what kind of roles you’ve had over the years?

INTERVIEW: LONG -TERM GREED

ANONYMOUS TRADER: My background is in finance. I have, primarily for twenty-two years, and then again for the last six years, found myself in financial markets in trading, specializing in the field of equities. With regards to where I’ve worked, it’s been pretty much the same kind of folks I’ve been dealing with the whole time. I spent eight years at Goldman Sachs, which I would say is a company that is really par excellence in the field of finance. They’re at the cutting edge of everything— they think about the right questions well in advance. Also, from a trading perspective, it’s a firm that understands the risk of how you might have to be wrong for a short period of time to be right for a long period of time [...].

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Having worked at a lot of companies over the years, I learned about dealing with questions like: “How do you build an organization?” There are things you need to think about: not just immediate profits, but stability, because it’s long-term greed (which was one of the three key phrases they used at Goldman Sachs). You can see they’ve done pretty well following that mantra for themselves. How do you set up an organization, how is it successful, immaterial of the people who come and go? The whole idea is that everybody works hard, works intelligently, not just “donkey-ish” work, and then you’re able to synthesize and move your career up from there. There’s always the soft-touches, that’s just human behaviour. You learn how to interact with your peers, juniors and seniors: it all just has to mesh.

On that note, could you describe the environment that you worked in with respect to the attitude and outlook of your peers. How did this differ to wider group dynamics in a corporate culture?

I’ll sort of break it up, because my career has been in two places: in America from 1995-2007, and then from 2007 onwards here in India. The first part, as a younger person on a trading desk, I was exposed to a high-pressure environment. What I did specifically is market making and proprietary trading at the NASDAQ desk, largely

As technology has changed over time, there’s just that much less interaction because it’s become that much more of a tech-driven business than a people-driven business.

In the early part of my career, it was definitely a people-driven business. Not only did you deal with your own folks and seniors in the firm, but you also dealt a lot with your competition. Having relationships across the board in the industry, where, as I said, you need help one way or another—you build the relationships that help you out.

I keep alluding to the most important fact, that whatever business you do, across the board, it’s all related ultimately to cash flow [...] In larger companies, if people want to grow fast, they take on too much debt, then you get something similar to what we’re going through now, and then you’re trapped out around that point in time. Then you have no way to move, so you’re kind of stuck. This is key in any business: think about your strategy, your plan, and how you manage your cash flow, even for contingencies.

In terms of dealing with people, it’s the standard thing: put your head down and do the work. Are there politics in every organization? Of course there are. Every organization screams meritocracy from the top of the roof, but again it’s people management skills.

You have to understand different people’s personalities, and interact with them in the apt way, and that’s all part of the psychology component I was talking about.

ANONYMOUS TRADER

to do with the technology industry, and trading the public equities of these technology companies. There are large sums of money going back and forth; it’s an environment that’s driven by making money. On a trading desk, you have to be thick-skinned.

When you come in, you might think, oh my god! There’s a lot of action and emotion and sentiments on a trading floor. People are screaming. Eventually you just learn to take it.

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INTERVIEW: LONG -TERM GREED

You talked about the move toward technology. I wonder if you could speak to some of the things you noticed when this change started to happen.

ANONYMOUS TRADER

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I came in toward the latter part of the human stage, when it started moving to machines. So just to give you an example of things I had to do—when you had to buy and sell shares, or relay bid an offer, and in doing so call up competitors [...]. You had to call up the guy on the other side, speak to him, bid an offer to him. He would either buy or sell, and you know, if you had a relationship with the guy, he would facilitate it––if you needed. This relationship was built on the fact that you would do the same. Then, there was the advent of the electronic trading platform, where there were these anonymous bids and offers. Obviously the human psychology was that humans will run against you based on the opportunities, as in, if they see you short, they might want to buy it in front of you, or if they feel that they can read from the tape––that they can see how the market is moving [...] a lot of that was more transparent when it was the old system of calling up folks. Then it went to a system where, slowly, the metamorphosis came into the electronics, undercutting the commissions of those using them, allowing people to hide. It became a proliferation of those kinds of trading systems. Today, what you see is very few human-people on the trading floor. The day-to-day business is virtually done by machines [...]. You don’t have all that stuff to do with the human element: the people, their well-being, insurance, health, and so on and so forth like that. You have fewer people now, and an industry that is totally technology-driven. You now manage risk on a larger scale.

Seeing this change completely from 1995 to what it is now, it’s crazy.

We see modern portrayals of madness in the finance industry. Take, for example, the portrayal in The Wolf of Wall Street. Is there a general corporate cut-throat culture across these financial industries?

You mentioned The Wolf of Wall Street. I didn’t know him personally, but there are two quite separate kinds of institutions that existed here. What we had largely was an institutional business—larger broker dealers, bigger investment banks: Goldman, Stanley. Most of the business done at these firms was institutional business dealing with large mutual funds, pension funds, the government organizations, insurance companies, etc. On the other side of buying and selling shares was the retail side, which you alluded to with The Wolf of Wall Street. These people talked to the momand-pop places across America, this was pretty much the same world-round. A place like Goldman Sachs was extremely different from the kind of, this is extremely condescending I guess, the kind of boilermaker shop, where you get a bunch of people to cold call folks. And these people would get a large commission for doing so. On a money basis alone, some of these guys were very successful, but if you look at it, a lot of those places don’t exist anymore! It goes back to what we were talking about, you know the long-term rate perspective, because the idea was to scalp as much as you can in the short-term, and then face the consequences if you, for lack of a better word, get caught [...].

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Regarding the relationships with your peers and bosses, was there a power dynamic, a hierarchy?

Of course! [...] Most certainly there was. Trading desks were certainly a lot more open, just the nature of how it’s set up. Everyone is in the same place, even the boss would be in the seat throughout the day, and would only move to an office at the end of the day.

There was still an open-door policy. There were no doors! There is a hierarchy in terms of how you deal with people: who likes you. That’s just the nature of Wall Street. They can say what they want, especially an investment bank, because a large portion of your final pay is based on your performance. A large part of it is a who-likes-you thing. At a trading desk, your boss will like you more if you make them more money! It’s just corporate America; trading desks certainly have more meritocracy than other places.

You can certainly say that that human element will never leave.

INTERVIEW: LONG -TERM GREED

You talk about the idea of a meritocracy, that your boss likes you more if you make more money. What does winning mean to you when you’re in this environment?

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Definitely, especially at a trading desk. This also came out a lot in the way that they would hire people. They would love hiring people who were on sports teams. There was this great emphasis on winning, and on the team winning, and on your being a part of a team [...]. On your pad was a set of stocks you traded, and someone else was trading a basket of different stocks. You might have to take a hit on the stocks you personally traded, because the company was going to make a larger profit at the end. Now that’s, again, a people element. You have to make sure people remember that later on, when it comes to your reviewal: “Well, okay, why didn’t you make so much?” All of these things have to be managed effectively.

Did you ever feel, for lack of a better phrase, brain-washed, or forced into a corner that you didn’t like––either professionally or morally? Did it feel necessary to partake in this culture?

There’s no question. There’s certainly a lot of brainwashing that’s done. Everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s also a question of people moving around. It’s an industry where you work with people. And let’s say you’re a winner, and you show a track record, then your competitor will want to hire you. A lot of brainwashing gets done in that way. Remain with the firm, and carrots are dangled to keep you moving up in the chain. Where I worked, I have never had to do anything particularly illegal. I haven’t been put in that spot. Have I been put in a spot–– across my careers––where I had to do business? Where I knew I was gonna get killed? Yes, it’s happened to me. A guy once told me that you’re not a real trader until you lose a million dollars. A million dollars was a lot back then. I’m not trying to say it’s not a lot of money now, but it was a lot of money in the ‘90s, inflation adjusted. There were times when, you know, you just had to do it, and you didn’t want to, but you just had to keep your cool and manage [...]. ◆

ANONYMOUS TRADER

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CYNICA

GEORGE MENZ

AL

CYNICAL THEOLOGY

I invite you to think about the binding of Isaac. Why did God command Abraham to slaughter his only son, the son whom he had promised would inherit the covenant and the promised land? And why, just as Abraham held the knife aloft, did God send an angel to stay the patriarch’s hand? These questions have confounded philosophers and theologians alike for millennia. But rather than to the knife, about to plunge into the son, my attention goes to the ram—caught in a thornbush—who replaces Isaac in Abraham’s sacrifice. You could, in this image, see the foreshadowing of Christ: the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, given up to suffer in the place of humanity. Or it could be that the ram was born only to suffer and

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die for an end he could never understand, in the name of a God who never smiled for him. I can only say, to borrow from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience: “that thing am I.”

I. Do I believe in God? Do I believe in an ordered world? Yes, but I believe that this order is built on suffering and decay. This belief is not nihilism, which admits of no order. My belief is pessimism. Nihilism identifies a contradictory impulse in the heart of man: he is a meaning-dependent creature in a world without meaning.

(Nihilists appear as pessimists only be-

What, then, of God? I can only imagine God. But what I see when I imagine him is a kind of deformed fool––too simple and feeble to even be cruel. Nevertheless, this God is formed in such a way that the rest of the universe must suffer for his pleasure. The Demiurge works his art, constructing the cosmos as an engine for his own base self pleasure; yet the mechanisms which enable his enjoyment work in reverse on everything else, ensuring misery, frustration, and despair. Do I believe in God? I believe in this creature: the blind gibbering idiot at the heart of everything, tickled by the flames of hellfire.

II. The subject of this essay is pessimism. I will not argue for or against pessimism as a philosophical conclusion. I, for one, believe that even in the case that the world is utterly hopeless, we ought to behave as if it were not. For the sake of those brief, occasional ruptures of happiness in the midst of misery, many would be willing to go on living, and there’s no

GEORGE MENZ

cause they believe that meaning is itself happiness. This equating of nihilism and pessimism seems naïve.) I don’t believe man is contradictory. Humans seek their own happiness, but the order of the universe conspires to ensure they will never reach it. Whether they are cruel or kind, all roads lead to the same end. Even accepting, seeking to further the cruelty of the universe offers no escape. There is no escape from suffering. If you think you have escaped, like the merchant who flees Baghdad for Samarra on seeing Death in the marketplace, you will arrive only to find that Death has an appointment with you in Samarra. sense in trying to convince them that they shouldn’t. But just as I don’t think it’s possible to convince a non-pessimist of pessimism’s veracity, it’s equally impossible to convince a pessimist that his theory is unsound. The difference may ultimately be one of temperament, neurobiology, or inextricable circumstance.

In any case, a dispute between pessimists and their interlocutors would never be possible. Their foundational assumptions are simply too different to reconcile.

These aphorisms have presented the pessimistic train of thought and illustrated the degree to which this mind functions in a mode utterly at odds with normal human existence. After all, for a blind, idiot god, what is reason?

III. Nihilism and pessimism are often conflated in the popular imagination. Indeed, for individuals yearning only for meaning, nihilism and pessimism are identical. Yet arguably the most fa-

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CYNICAL THEOLOGY

mous philosophical pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer, was not a nihilist (by my definition) and many “nihilists” in philosophy were not necessarily pessimistic.

Absurdism, exemplified by the philosophy of Albert Camus, takes nihilism as its starting point, and seeks to overcome it, hence the famous line from The Myth of Sisyphus: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Nihilism, then, must be understood as distinct from pessimism.

The fundamental pillar of pessimism is futility. However strong, all efforts are in vain. “To hope is to contradict the future,” the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, author of twenty books reiterating the futility of life, wrote in All Gall is Divided. The nihilist may argue that the search for meaning—one classical, teleological mission of philosophy—is futile, as there is no meaning or human essence to be found. But beyond this, the nihilist must admit of man’s freedom, the freedom to choose a form of life, to shape oneself in a new image, unbound by any natural laws or divine ordinance. For the nihilist, the meaninglessness of life is found in the absence of any hand to save the individual from falling into despair.

Yet the individual can still avoid despair on his own terms. For the pessimist, the freedom of the individual is only the freedom to fail. Man cannot even achieve happiness, let alone certainty; he is condemned to vexation, to be a witness against himself, to betray himself, and to bring an end to himself.

As Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, “the programme of the pleasure principle...is at loggerheads with the whole world...What we call happiness in the strictest sense...is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenome-

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non.” There is, naturally, something of an essentialist undercurrent in pessimistic thought. Schopenhauer, to whom this essay owes much, wrote as a successor to Immanuel Kant, and his World as Will and Representation can be understood as a response to the transcendental idealism of the Critique of Pure Reason. Following Kant, we have access not to “things in themselves,” but only to our perceptions, subjected to the constructive schema of logical necessity and the forms of spacetime: that everything must have some number, some extension, all the disguised characteristics of what we can refer to as a “thing.” Schopenhauer takes this schema to its logical conclusion, and posits that there are no multiple “things in themselves,” but only a single “thing in itself.” The true, undifferentiated form of the thing in itself is the grotesque Will, which exists in all life and propagates itself by urging the creation of more life.

In humanity, this Will manifests most obviously as sexual desire.

The Schopenhauerian pessimism satisfies a darker urge, not for reason but for revelation. Pessimism claims to present the grotesque horror of the noumenal, as a shambling mass of decaying matter.

Pessimism contends with the deeper order of the universe, revealed in moments of agony or ecstasy, as a force ultimately antithetical to human happiness. This is a unique solution to theodicy, restricting neither omnipotence nor omniscience and discarding omnibenevolence altogether, suggesting that God is simply a monstrous tyrant who cannot be opposed or overthrown.

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IV.

CYNICAL THEOLOGY

While nihilism, then, lends itself to Epicureanism—“If nothing matters, if all this is only a cosmic mishap, why should I take it so seriously?”—pessimism offers no such consolation. The pursuit of pleasure is as futile as the quest for meaning: both will find themselves ultimately at a dead end. Pleasure is always finite, after all. One develops a tolerance. Eventually, as the well of pleasure simply runs dry, hedonism fails.

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As for the happiness of others, why should that matter, if it’s unachievable?

Pessimism often manifests as total contempt for the world and humanity— hence why pessimists have often been political reactionaries, even fascists. This is not out of any deep love of tradition or authority. Rather, their horror at life is so great that they see the regimes that are against life as the best of a bad lot.

By contrast, most left-wing political movements—in their ideals, if not always in practice—are driven by a radical reaffirmation of life, a hope that the future is somehow better than the past.

Conservatism, however, is fundamentally hopeless: history is on a constant downward slope, and the most that society can wish for is to hold on to the last vestiges of former glories before succumbing to decadence. To demonstrate this view, of which Oswald Spengler is the most famous proponent, I will present three other case studies.

The first: for horror and science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, famous for his weird stories, life and existence was a senseless horror. The only respite for him was cold intellectualism. He saw the uprightness and repressed sexuality of the Anglo-Saxons as the only fitting response to such a predicament. Other cultures, particularly those which seemed to revel in life and the body, were symptomatic of the opposite tendency and therefore aligned with the horror of existence itself.

The second: the aforementioned Cioran, who, in his youth, supported the Iron Guard, an ultranationalist organization which led Romania’s slide into fascism under Ion Antonescu. Cioran also celebrated the Night of Long Knives, the

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purge of the left-leaning elements of the Nazi Party and other political opponents to Hitler’s regime in 1934 Germany. Resistance, for Cioran, is futile, because in the end, nothing matters.

The third (and final): the French literary provocateur Michel Houellebecq, whose first published book was a lengthy analysis of the works of Lovecraft. Houellebecq, mixing Lovecraft’s contempt for the unwashed with Cioran’s masochism, is perhaps best known among an Anglophone audience for writing a novel entitled Submission. In the novel, Islamists take over France and left-wing intellectuals become eager enforcers of Sharia law. Ironically, as Houellebecq expresses a contempt for pity and intellectualism, he engages in highly intellectual activities—writing literary criticism and fiction himself.

These three men, it should be noted, are not philosophers in the strictest sense— Cioran comes the closest; he had an academic background in philosophy, but his writing is hardly rigorous. It may be that, for the reasons stated in § II, a non-philosophical style best expresses philosoph-

ical pessimism. The fundamental question—“Is life worth living?”—simply cannot be resolved using the traditional tools of philosophy. A similar frustration with the tools of rationality drives political reactionaries to the point of fascism.

But, as initially stated, cruelty does nothing to make the world less cruel. Fascism does not extend life; it annihilates it. Indeed, fascists are guilty of the worst logical fallacy: circular reasoning. Their actions are driven by a metanarrative that the world is propelled by conflict and destruction, and therefore they are justified in engaging in conflict and causing destruction. If an escape from misery exists, it can be found neither in fascism, nor in any movement that seeks to hold onto or resurrect the past. If everything in existence is antithetical to humanity, then humanity must attempt the refutation of everything. ◆

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DIAG O

GUS O’CONNOR

GNOSIS OF A

A

DIAGNOSIS OF A CONTAGION

n inescapable decay looms over Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a portrait of a post-nuclear war Earth left to rot and die of disease. The wealthy and able have flown in spaceships to colonize Mars, where they use hyper-realistic human androids as slave laborers. An unlucky minority, however, has stayed on Earth. With apartment buildings falling into horrible disrepair and streets strewn with dead animals, everything is threatened by “greater entropic ruin,” known as kipple. These are the results of World War Terminus, a war that “no one today remember[s],” yet a war trailing a poisonous dust in its wake. Though not an actual virus, we are told that the dust is a plague that has “descended from above.” The novel is a fable of contagion, using the language of disease, as well as a warped vocabulary of

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capitalism and American individualism, to describe the planet’s demise.

In the aftermath of this catastrophe, and indeed any catastrophe, there is an opportunity to change the logic of the system that created the crisis in the first place. But, in the wake of blood and violence and destruction, compounded only by the contamination of the planet, we find that a river of indifference flows through the country of forgetfulness.

History cannot bear on a society that does not care for it. The irony––both on and off the pages of the novel––is that, if we forget history, we’re bound to repeat it. New logic cannot emerge in a society that cares only about the pursuit of the dollar, in a society where the logic is embodied by the pursuit of the dollar. Our protagonist, Rick Deckard, is one such pursuer. His job as a bounty hunter, to

The possibility that a new logic––connecting with others in a moment of global catastrophe––is shattered towards the end of the novel. A device called the Empathy Box is designed to connect people around the world, allowing them to show solidarity with one another to reinforce that they are not alone. Upon grabbing the box, users’ minds are transported and fused with those of every other active user across the globe. Users then enter the body of Wilbur Mercer, an elderly man who must eternally climb a hill while bombarded by stones.

This reimagined image of Sisyphus, who in Greek antiquity was alone in his arduous and endless task of rolling a boulder up a hill, offers the potential for collective solidarity. Yet the desire for connection in a disjointed society ravaged by war turns out to be a hoax––a television personality announces that “Wilbur Mercer is not human, does not in fact exist.” We learn that Mercer’s world is a cheap Hollywood, a “commonplace sound stage which vanished into kipple years ago.” So Marx’s adage that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as a farce, proves true. In the face of a shattered illusion of connectivity, rather than looking for other ways of connection, Rick turns inward, deciding that he is the only thing that counts:“I still have

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“retire” (read: kill) any android that has escaped from Mars in his San Francisco precinct, is wholly motivated by the promise of wealth. He dreams of making enough money to afford a live animal, the symbol of this America’s upward mobility. All of his actions are informed by this motivation; our protagonist pursues his American dream by hunting fugitive slaves.

my electric sheep and I still have my job.

There’ll be more andys to retire; my career isn’t over.” Though he realizes that he participated in the small farce of Mercer and interconnectivity, Rick neglects to realize that he continues to participate in the larger farce of American individualism. So, Rick peddles on just as before.

F

ollowing Marx, Dick’s post-apocalyptic world is not plagued so much by new challenges as by the pesky old ones. Most striking among them are the plantation politics of the antebellum South. The parallels between Dick’s dystopia and America’s historical reality are made explicit when Rick watches a television advert that boasts of a return to the “halcyon days of the pre-Civil-War Southern states.” This advert promises the purchase of a “body servant” or “tireless field hand.” That the tagline accompanying the slaves guarantees to fit “YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE” only accentuates the body-turned-commodity even more. The advert blends nostalgia for the antebellum South with the perhaps more contemporary American no-

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tion of individualism. In this world, the only thing that matters is you, and if you must buy, sell, or murder fugitive slaves to succeed, then all the better.

T

hough the novel critiques the capitalization of the body, even Dick himself at times slips into the logic of capitalistic objectification. In a particularly grim moment for women, Dick’s objectifying tendency is best seen at the denouement of the novel. Rick phones an android, Rachel, who has offered to help him kill the last androids in his precinct. But Rick does not call

GUS O’CONNOR

This irreconcilable logic of individualism is internalized even by the victims of the novel. Pris, a central fugitive in the work, reads about historical colonialism on Earth before the nuclear war and declares that that is the gold standard, “really successful colonization...It’s what Mars ought to be like. Canals.” The image of the canal, itself a symbol of global capital and trade, obfuscates, through murky water, the shovel marks on the soil and the labor of thousands. Is Pris thinking of the Panama Canal, the paragon of Franco-American imperialism and extractive capitalism? Is she thinking of a project where over twenty-five thousand laborers died in the process of digging, and nine-tenths of the labor force were Afro-Caribbean? Though she is a victim of colonialism, she nevertheless still longs for it. No one in the novel questions the foundational logic of this society. They can participate in the logic, like Rick, or chafe against it, like Pris and her fellow fugitives, but no one questions whether that logic should exist in the first place.

The regenerative moment that arises in the wake of catastrophe is refused by everyone, victim and oppressor.

for help. Rick propositions Rachel for sex. “Come down here,” he says, “and we’ll rent a hotel room.” Though here we might give our novelist the benefit of the doubt, hoping that he’ll take this opportunity to critique sexism, that, unfortunately, is not what we get. Rachel arrives and we hear Rick’s lewd thoughts.

He lists off her various body parts, noting that she has “no excess flesh, a flat belly, small behind and smaller bosom.” We can hear the cold precision of an automobile technician as he notes her model is the “Celtic type of build, anachronistic and attractive.” The total impression is good, he assures himself, except for her “neutral, nonsexual quality, not much rounded off in nubile curves.” If Rick relentlessly catalogues Rachel’s body, so too does Dick in his construction of this scene. Rachel is turned into an object, dismembered and parceled out again and again into separate body parts. We imagine the technician giving a similar analysis. This 2004 Chevy? Anachronistic, sure. But the total impression is good.

After they (inevitably) have sex, we discover that Rachel slept with Rick to make him empathize with her, an android, to ultimately discourage him from killing other androids. She’s done it seven (or was it eight?) times to other bounty hunters. No wait, she’s done it nine times.

She can’t quite remember how many careers she has ruined. Rick, enraged, tries to kill her, and finds that he cannot. “You really look down on me,” Rachel says, “for what I did.” But what exactly did she do? Rick, a married man, calls her to the hotel room and propositions her for sex, but somehow he’s the victim of manipulation. In this novel, what matters is what she’s done to him. Look how she’s ruined his career, his livelihood. She’s prevent-

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ing Rick from upward mobility, from a settled marriage and a happy life. At its best, this is a failed moment of the novel, and at its worst, Dick lays bare his own latent misogyny.

DIAGNOSIS OF A CONTAGION

Worse still, Dick writes his novel during a period of real political and social turmoil in 1968, the MLK assassination, the Tet Offensive, the escalation of the Cold War. Just as the world of the novel is given an opportunity to change in the wake of global nuclear war, 1968 offered a regenerative moment for Americans to change the logic of the system. Rather than critique how women, mere narrative devices, often figure as obstacles to a happy marriage and a better life in society, Dick simply repurposes this device.

It’s a disappointing moment in a novel that thus far had done a satisfactory job of showing us the scars we were too busy to see.

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s a whole, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a diagnosis of a society unable to learn from its mistakes. And though Dick attacks the institutions of capitalism, colonialism, and education, he does not suggest any replacements. He takes for granted that these institutions exist, and will probably always exist, even following global catastrophe. What is clear after the encounter between Rachel and Rick, during the climax of the novel, is that the blindness of characters is due to a certain blindness of their author. Who could expect a character of a novel to have the bravery to change the logic of a system when its author lacks sufficient imagination to do so?

While it is not necessarily the novelist’s job to propose concrete societal changes,

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there still must be room to critique the novelist for perpetuating regressive institutions that we know to be obsolete well before he put pen to paper. In other words, Dick does not give us what we are desperate to know: how the hell do we change? Every character in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? believes that, in a world racked by global turmoil, selfishness is the key to success. The titular question of the novel, then, should not be one of actuality, but rather permissibility. All androids who escape their slave labor camps in search of better lives are punished brutally. Forbidden to dream, androids and women––playthings to be used and cast aside––exist only in the dreams of white men.

Dick’s diagnostic of contagion has proven right: as we sit alone in houses and apartments (if we’re lucky), as we are struck by wave after wave of the insurmountable COVID-19, not to mention the millions unemployed, thousands dead and economies tanked. Put simply, the world of 2020 looks bleak. The precarity caused by the last thirty years of neoliberalism holds up a mirror to those of us paying attention, revealing the selfish desire to return to “normal.”

After all, reputations must be preserved, dollars must be pursued, and “lives” must be led. Egoism has failed us in the face of crisis. And these profiteers have learned precious little from their years of selfishness. But the mirror held up to us shows us the crisis that already (and always existed) before COVID-19. This mirror, a gateway, is also a threshold over which we must walk, or else face the consequences. Either we can stand still while the world rots under our feet, or we can step through the mirror, finally deciding that old habits must be broken. ◆

GUS O’CONNOR

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LUCKY

CECILIA BELL

The Threat of Luck

LUCKY ACCIDENTS

Photography has a peculiar relationship to luck. A scene, hastily captured by an amateur photographer, can turn out to be as formally interesting as one by 20th century artists Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson. The haphazard movement of a sitter, a blink or a scratch, can ruin even the most well-planned shot. For every publishable photograph, a professional photographer has usually taken countless more; they have, as Susan Sontag notes in On Photography, “an almost superstitious confidence in the lucky accident,” produced by the scattershot method.

Though there is no question of photography’s status as an art form today— photographs abound in galleries and museums—in the mid-19th century, it was tenuous. According to the French poet Charles Baudelaire, photography was no less than “art’s most mortal enemy,” contributing only to “the impoverishment of the French artistic genius.”

The role of chance, in particular, posed a threat to early practitioners wanting to establish their work as art. If taking or making photographs depends, to some extent, on luck, how should photographs be judged? What creative authority does the photographer have? Prior to the development of the daguerreotype in 1839, every detail of a picture was attributable to the human hand. This new mechanical process called into question the relationship between picture and maker.

Among other critics, the writer Lady Elizabeth Eastlake articulated a definition of photography that denied it the status of art.1 In the Quarterly Review of March 1857, she claimed that while photography provided pictorial truth, it was not a suitable medium for the creation of art for two reasons. First, it was prone to “accidental blurs and botches.”

Unable to capture subjects at a distance, the early camera produced unexpected defects in photographs, often rendering unimportant features in more detail than important ones. Photography, unlike painting, disobeyed the main “principle of art… that the most important part of a picture should be done best.” Secondly, photography lacked artistic intention.

While art “appertains to the free-will of the intelligent being,” under the purview of creative genius, photography relied on the whims of an “unreasoning machine.” These capricious machines were thoughtless; there was something of “the gambler’s excitement in the frequent disappointments and possible prize’s of the photographer’s luck”––all of this inconsistent with high art.

Just as luck can undermine claims to authorship in photography, it can also limit judgments of praise and blame in ethics.

Underlying our intuitive understanding of morality is the idea that a person is only morally responsible for actions that depend on factors within their control.

For instance, if a person accidentally trips, falls, and hurts another, we would unlikely blame the tripper for the other’s pain. In other words: morality, at a glance, seems immune from luck. Im-

1. Eastlake’s husband, Sir Charles Eastlake, was a neoclassical painter and president of the Royal Academy of Arts. This connection gave her an even firmer foothold in the 19th century world of art and its categorical boundaries.

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In his 1979 essay “Moral Luck,” Thomas Nagel disputes this inclination in ethics. He contends that people are often judged based on actions that depend, in part, on factors outside of their control. He calls this paradoxical idea moral luck: “Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck.”

While we typically think that a lack of control, or luck, bears only on unintentional movements or physical force, Nagel argues that a person’s capacities, character, and circumstances are also affected by luck. And though these factors, often beyond their control, influence a person’s behaviour, they do not seem to exempt a person from moral judgment.

CECILIA BELL

manuel Kant presupposes this idea in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: “A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition.” The “good will,” the only thing that Kant claims is “good without limitation,” is not affected by luck. External factors, even a “provision of a stepmotherly nature,” cannot devalue it. So long as the good will freely aims to do its moral duty, even if unfortunate circumstances prevent it from accomplishing this duty, it is good. Presumably, the same can be said of a bad will: so long as it freely aims to do bad deeds, even if fortunate circumstances prevent it from accomplishing those deeds, it is bad. For Kant, morality, or at least a significant portion of it, is independent of chance. In ethics as in photography, then, there is a tendency to think that moral judgments of praise or blame, or aesthetics judgments of beauty, only hold up if the object of judgment is not the product of luck.

Denying Luck If luck pervades both photography and morality, threatening our conceptions of authorship and responsibility, what is to

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be done? How do we resolve the problem of luck in photography and morality? Is it really a problem? And how does the literature on moral luck speak to the problem of luck in photography?

Adams’s view was also prevalent in photography books and exhibition catalogues. In Photography and the Art of Seeing, Marcel Natkin maintains that luck does not play a part in the successful shot: the operator’s success largely depends upon his taking his shot at the moment when the interest of the scene culminates. This is not a matter of lucky chance, but of artistic skill which is the outcome of synthetic effort. The most convincing proof of the foregoing assertion is to be found in certain remarkable photographs.

CECILIA BELL

One response to these questions, proposed in both photography and morality, is to deny the existence of luck. In photography, the denial is often weaker: rather than deny its existence entirely, photographers tend to downplay the importance of luck in their practice.

In the early 20th century, for example, many photographers professed that what seemed like luck was actually the result of skill, effort, or a special mode of seeing. “A photograph is not an accident— it is a concept,” Ansel Adams declared, adding that “The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography—by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good—is fatal to serious results.”

This claim was characteristic of the widespread belief that the photographer must envision, or “see,” the final shot before they capture it. Thus photographs, or at least good photographs, were the product of some kind of forethought or “rigorous… permissive visualizing,” not luck.

Natkin’s perspective is perhaps even narrower than Adams’s. His suggestion that good photographs are captured at a specific moment, one that requires appropriate mental groundwork, seems far-fetched. But it plays into his crucial final claim. That a photographer’s skill is immediately discernible from a good photograph bolsters the argument that photography is a museum-worthy project and commodity. It is no surprise that photography books and exhibition catalogues championed such a view; it was in the interest of art institutions to preserve the myth of the creative genius, immune from the caprice of chance. As the historian of luck Robin Kelsey notes, chance “valorizes neither the photograph nor the photographer.” Nor does it valorize––or pay––the art institutions exhibiting and selling photographs.

Similarly, moral philosophers who deny the existence of moral luck also try to preserve something—the centrality of morality. Norvin Richards, for example, argues that what someone does is sometimes the best evidence of what they would’ve done. It is very difficult to judge a person’s intentions based on their actions, but the success or failure of those actions offers some evidence. To judge a driver who drove negligently and killed a child as blameworthy, and to judge a driver who drove negligently but did not kill a child without blame, then, does not commit us to the existence of moral luck; the apparently asymmetrical judgments instead reflects the limitations of our epistemic practices. While the child’s death offers evidence of the driver’s negligence in the first case, nothing offers evidence of the driver’s negligence in the second. And to treat the drivers the same way, Richards insists, is to assume a “pre-

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tended omniscience.” Our moral practices might then be imperfect, but they are not paradoxical, as Nagel supposed.

The assumption that the success of a person’s actions offers evidence of their intentions echoes Natkin’s claim regarding photography—that the successful photograph offers “the most convincing proof ” of artistic skill, which is “not a matter of lucky chance.” But while moral philosophers such as Richards acknowledge that successful action only offers fallible evidence for a person’s intentions due to our limited epistemic viewpoint, Natkin dubiously suggests that the successful photograph is unquestionable evidence of the photographer’s mastery.

In any case, both camps of deniers don’t seem able to comprehensively explain away luck. It might be true that a person’s actions provide some evidence for their intentions, as Richards argues, but this is certainly not always the case. And Natkin is probably right when he claims that great photographers don’t just rely on the gifts of chance (and perhaps we can sometimes perceive their masterful efforts in good photographs), but the role of luck in photography is undeniable. Robin Kelsey even suggests that it is photography’s unique relationship to luck that distinguishes it from other art forms: “The conspicuous role of chance in photography sets it apart from arts such as painting or literature.” Mediated by a machine and sometimes a chemical process, photography is peculiarly predisposed to the effects of luck.

Accepting Luck An alternative solution to the problem of luck, both in photography and moral-

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ity, is to simply accept it. In photography, acceptance means embracing luck’s expressive potential; in morality, acceptance involves acknowledging the uncomfortable existence of moral luck, as Nagel described. Since the existence of moral luck imperils our notions of agency and moral judgment with a paradox, accepting it calls for further solutions.

Should we revise our moral practices?

Some moral philosophers argue that we need not revise them significantly; others argue that they require radical revision.

Brynmore Browne, for instance, suggests that to avoid treating people unfairly in blaming them for actions beyond their control, we must be “prepared to abandon certain attitudes to wrongdoing and certain related practices.” In other words, we must abandon the anger we hold towards wrongdoers, whether or not their actions were affected by luck.

Accepting, or rather embracing, the importance of luck became a popular trend among photographers. Using old cameras that were more liable to the effects of chance became popular as photography technology advanced, Sontag explains: as cameras get ever more sophisticated, more automated, more acute, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are really not armed, and prefer to submit themselves to the limits imposed by a pre-modern camera technology—a cruder, less high-powered machine being thought to give more interesting or expressive results, to leave more room for the creative accident. Not using fancy equipment has been a point of honor for many photographers—including Weston, Brandt, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Frank.

In his meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes also identi-

fies a photographic inclination toward spontaneity. He posits that “the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone,” and identifies five modes of surprise: the “rare,” the “decisive instant,” “prowess,” “contortions of technique,” and the “lucky find.” While Barthes finds surprise a ubiquitous ingredient in photography, his assessment of it is scathing. The surprise of prowess, where the photograph exhibits great technical skill, “neither touches nor even interests me,” and the surprise of contortions of technique, where the photographer has deliberately exploited certain photographic defects such as blurring, does not “convince me.” Surprise is an “an alibi,” an excuse, and surprising photographs, such as “a woman’s buttocks at a farmhouse window,” are the kind of “photographs awarded prizes at a contest for amateurs.”2

CECILIA BELL

Such photographers rejected the old view of writers like Eastlake, who thought that accidental distortions inhibited photography’s artistic potential. Far from an impediment to creativity, lucky accidents allowed some photographers greater self-expression. Just as accepting moral luck might require a revision of our moral practices, embracing luck in photography called for a change to our aesthetic standards. “For photography to compete with painting means invoking originality as an important standard for appraising a photographer’s work, originality being equated with the stamp of a unique, forceful sensibility,” the photographer Edward Weston suggested.

Likewise, Cartier-Bresson declared that “the thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived.” Spontaneity, no longer synonymous with the absence of creative agency, became crucial to good photography.

Though Barthes had no taste for studied spontaneity, the contrived appearance of chance, he considered the accidental

2. It is worth noting that the French word, surprise, is synonymous with catching someone in the act of something—a wife is “surprised” when she is caught cheating on her husband. And Barthes’ disapproval of the photographer’s tricks can be read as playing into the moralistic aspect of the word’s usage. The photographer who surprises, like the adulterous wife who surprises, is lousy. Instead of truth, artistic or otherwise, all they’ve got is crummy alibis.

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detail, unknowingly captured by the photographer, to be the most poignant element of a photograph. While studium is the element of a photograph that creates general interest, allowing for cultural or political interpretation, and revealing the photographer’s intentions, punctum is the element of a photograph that personally touches the spectator. Synonymous with a “sting, speck, cut, little hole and also a cast of the dice,” punctum is “that accident which pricks me.” Barthes’ mention of dice is notable—luck is a vital ingredient of the punctum. Precise details—a necklace, a collar, the bend of an arm— might prick the spectator, but if they do not “it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally.”

Punctum, then, is beyond the control of the photographer; it is, like the roll of dice, by chance that it moves the spectator.

Around the time Barthes was writing, some photographers began to embrace chance in a reflexive way, acknowledging the history of photography’s uneasy relationship to luck. In 1973, John Baldessari produced Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), a series of twelve photographs depicting three orange balls against a bright blue sky in various arrangements.

None of the arrangements, of course, are perfect straight lines. Baldessari’s childish experiment inevitably failed. But what emerges in the series is a critique.

As Robin Kelsey points out, the series “invites us to consider how much more meaningful than his simple ‘straight line’ rule our aesthetic demands on everyday photographs really are.” And crucially, the series also directly confronts the critical role of luck in photography, which art authorities previously preferred to disregard.3

3. By including the number of attempts he made at his game in the title, which correspond with the number of exposures in a typical roll of film, Baldessari also foregrounds his use of the scattershot method, a method to which photographers usually prefer not to draw attention.

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But while the suggestion of chance can be commodified, chance itself cannot be.

Performances that promise to surprise aren’t ever really surprising—we enter knowing we are going to be surprised.

Chance cannot be planned. For photography, this means that while embracing luck is more or less unavoidable, since luck is essential to the medium, deliberately embracing luck paradoxically confines the influence of luck. When we think we can recognize the effects of chance in photographs, it is likely that the effects are contrived. The incidental details that prick us and truly catch us off guard, Barthes’ punctum, are beyond the photographer’s control.

Accommodating Luck Perhaps our actions are like photographs. Perhaps Richards is wrong and our actions offer a poor indication of our intentions, just as photographs offer a misleading, or at least incomplete, picture of a photographer’s process and design. Moral luck might then be even more pervasive than we could imagine.

And to salvage our common conception of morality, we might need to radically rewrite our moral practices, as Brynmore Brown suggests. We might need to take luck egalitarianism seriously—theories of distributive justice that aim to offset the arbitrary distributive effects of luck.

Yet I am not sure that the analogy between morality and photography is entirely appropriate; there should be an asymmetry between our assessment of actions and photographs since obscurity is much more of a burden for moral than aesthetic judgments. Sometimes, obscurity is even taken as an aesthetic value.

But I think a compelling parallel can be drawn between the two disciplines.

CECILIA BELL

Curiously, both Barthes’ and Baldessari’s works suggest, contrary to Natkin’s view, that luck can be commodified. Of course, Baldessari’s work does not fall under the unfortunate label of Barthes’ surprise.

Unlike photographers of Barthes’ surprise, Baldessari does not try to deceive us into thinking a meticulously planned shot is candid; he deliberately foregrounds the effects of luck. But in both cases—where chance is contrived but hopes to look natural, and where chance is presented as deliberately contrived—it seems that the suggestion of chance, the apparent residue of a creative accident, has market value. It’s unsurprising; as much as we try to resist accidents, we love surprises. We love surprise birthday parties and surprise proposals, chance encounters and impromptu gatherings.

Luck is charming and, trapped in a nice frame, worth something too.

It seems undeniable that the effects of luck, however imperceptible, pervade both actions and photographs. And while luck egalitarianism offers us one approach to correcting the disconcerting paradox of moral luck, perhaps, in order to sincerely acknowledge the role of luck in photography, we need to invoke some kind of aesthetic egalitarianism. If the layman can take a photograph that is no less formally interesting than one by Ansel Adams, then photography is the paragon medium for the democratization of the arts. ◆

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NICK GAUTHIER

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rs. Ritchasse is somewhat bulbous, although you get the impression she is prim, proper, and fit by the way she glides around the room, the way she breaks down complex, differential equations like an experienced chef might skin artificially designed meat substitute. But of course, she’s just making subtle use of her meGlides. All of the older folks seem to have them nowadays.

They’re like Heelys, but instead of wheels, they make use of hover-tech: thin, adhesive strips that are attached to the soles of your shoes. You are practically in awe of her grace, until you notice the absence of the faint hum and her scowl, as she whirs to a stop by a desk.

Fisk happens to be the culprit. He often thinks that he doesn’t have to bow in deference to the teachers because his mother founded the school. Mrs. Sequence, however, clearly has more appreciation for form and function than her son. There is such attention to detail in every minor piece of technology, the carefully chosen shapes of our classrooms, and the particular configuration of our curriculum down to who is entrusted to teach it. Fisk Sequence takes no notice of its mastery, he apparently is into the “old-fashioned.” Most of us younger people only know a little about that; but his mother has all these architecture books at their place, so I hear.

He sketches Victorian homes—horrendous sketches at that—rather than keeping his chin up as Mrs. Ritchasse lectures.

But as she whirs to a stop, he pulls his chin up, forcing himself to breathe in her conspicuous contempt. The rest of the classroom eagerly awaits her blow to his ego. The lights are dimmed to maintain the integrity of the hologram, but with a snap of her fingers, bright lights sterilize the room. Fisk’s meek frame juxtaposed with her bulbous one is fully illuminated for the rest of us. She doesn’t say a word to him. She doesn’t need to. The snap and our stares are punishment enough.

The classroom, like the rest of the school, is circular. Our desks face the hologram board at the center of the classroom, which is engineered such that from every angle, from every desk, you have a perfect vantage point. It’s the sort of object you have to see to believe. The lack of corners in the school is meant to symbolize the non-existent limit to our education—the “boundlessness of our intellect.” The architecture of the whole place is hard to imagine, but Mrs. Sequence, a true prodigy, managed to build the school as a cylinder. A few components of its architecture are noteworthy, if you can even call a mirror-lined cylindrical box noteworthy?

From outside the building, you can see in: the building is entirely transparent.

But we can’t see out because there are “no distractions while learning.” An endless, spiraled ramp encircles each floor. And every other floor is a classroom. Each classroom, of course, has one-way mirrors for walls, ceilings, and floors, so that we are constantly aware of our presence—never forgetful of who we are and who we have to live up to be. The floors in between the classrooms are dubbed “Productivity Zones.” These zones are engineered for studying. They quash sound waves with mute-tech to encircle you with nothing but your thoughts. And from these floors, you can see below and above. The idea, I guess, is that if you are constantly aware of your fellow students hard at work, you will be “encouraged to follow suit.”

Although ostensibly enraptured by her gliding around and pointing to the hologram, I’ve forgotten Mrs. Ritchasse for a moment. She is feeding me snippets of

I

wake up at 7:24 a.m. everyday in the four stories of glass, which is our home, in the Triangular Estate Building. Yes, “weekends are for the others,” they say. “Elsa, it’s always a day to exercise the mind,” they remind me. And this is all without mention of the strangeness of the precise time that I must flutter my eyelids. The exactness of 7:24 a.m. is intentional, of course. By 8 a.m. we—my father, my mother, and I—are eating downstairs in the parlor. The first 6 minutes of the morning are dedicated to reminding myself that I am unique. So, I am instructed to look in the mirror and take note of all of the qualities that make me special: my luscious blonde hair, the birthmark on my left cheek, my bright, blue, ocean-like eyes. And everyone else does this too; it’s procedure.

In the next 6 minutes, we must read the daily news, which comes out at 7 a.m.—and father is in charge of that: he’s head editor. So, I go through the morning briefing, which will have headlines like “Our Bubble is the Most Beautiful Place in the World,” or “The Number of Ph.D.s is Greater Than Ever, but it Seems Like We’re Already Omniscient: What Will They Research?” The 6 minutes after that are devoted to getting dressed. All of our clothes are sent in—from outside the bubble, that is. We design it here, of course. They say we have the most talented, creative and brilliant designers here, but no one bothers to actually make it. That’s for the “others” to do.

Once I’m dressed in this season’s trends, which, for the record, happen to be pseudo-tawdry this fall, I prepare my things for school, and if not for school, for tutor-time. Today, at school, I have three classes: Manifold Calculus, Contemporary History of Modern Culture and Thought in Post-Global Societies—for short, we call it CHMCTPGS—and Economics: Market Theory in Vacuum Societies. That takes about 6 minutes, too—to gather all my books and put together my homework. Oh, and if I’m preparing for tutor-time, I just bring my laptop because we go over novel content. For some reason, I like to take tutor notes on my laptop and class notes in notebooks, but, alas, I digress.

Next, I go down to help prepare breakfast. It too takes under 6 minutes, so I have time to spare in case of any culinary difficulties. You would expect us to be served upon here, wouldn’t you? Well, you’re wrong: “self-sufficiency” is one of our foremost values. We “fend for ourselves” and “build everything from the ground-up.” We take nothing for granted. I usually make vegan eggs and oat-based yogurt. Mother usually handles the beverages, and father handles the pontification preparation—that’s the next activity. We engage in 6 minutes of pre-meal intellectual discourse, which is supposed to warm up our brains for the many challenges we’ll

NICK GAUTHIER

knowledge and those snippets just flow back out, into sound bite, bullet-form, onto my notebook. I’m one of the rare ones. I don’t use a neural-enhancer to allow me to make notes that stick in my head like fastidious memories. Father and mother are “old-fashioned” like that; they think it’s unnecessary to use those invasive devices as long as I perform as well or better than all the rest of them, which I do, consistently.

I do tend to—but not always—do as father and mother say. It’s probably because they are wise.

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face throughout the day and, generally, foster cognitive agility. Today, for instance, we speak about the specialness of our people—bubble people, I like to call us—and what makes our intelligence so valuable.

And, yeah, then we eat.

NICK GAUTHIER

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n the walk to school, I get to appreciate the beauty of a small world. We do, really, know everyone here. Dad used to say it was a self-selected group from the time before I was born. But now research is showing that we were actually genetically distinct—somehow superior, I guess—but that’s probably a stretch. (We’re taught to be careful with our words, here; I just feel like it’s my duty to help spread the word.) If I had to guess, the population is about 1 million people.

I guess we don’t really know everyone, but it certainly feels like that. For instance, when mother and I pop over to the store for more oat-based yogurt, everyone seems to say “hi”; I never quite get a moment alone with her.

We’ll be wandering down the aisles of the organic imports shop and I’ll hear, “Elsa Cognos? How tall you’ve grown, my dear! My son tells me you’re sharper than the economics teacher.”

And whoever says this, or something like it, pauses to laugh here: at the punch line.

“Apparently he stumbles over his words when responding to your questions.

Isn’t that charming, Mrs. Cognos?”

Then there are the people we run into on the way back: “Mrs. Cognos, that healthcare speech you gave at the convention for Maximized Life-Extension with Bubble Pollution Eradication was mesmerizing. I, too, think we need to minimize pollution utterly, to go completely eco-friendly and keep pollution ‘out there.’ Like you said, we really need to be thinking about fortifying our force fields.”

As I was saying, though, these moments of solitude, on the way to school, are when I stray a bit from the routine. I’m supposed to take the most efficient route to school, which putatively takes 18 minutes by foot, but I do like to give myself room for human error. Some of the others think we can eradicate that completely. The thing is, I once had to bring my mother’s gown to the cleaner’s before school. And on the walk I realized that I could get to school in 16 minutes and 24 seconds (walking briskly) and 18 minutes (walking leisurely), if I went along the bank and didn’t have to take my mother’s gown to the cleaner’s. The bank is where the edge of the bubble is, if you can even call it that: an edge.

The bubble was a project spearheaded by western civilization in the late 2080s.

The Coastal Liberal Elites and some select British public intellectuals from the likes of Oxbridge developed the concept as a joint dissertation project. It’s officially called The Conservatory of Intellectual Freedom (unofficially, COIF) and colloquially, the bubble. But the latter is definitely not approved of by the higher-ups—they’d probably say, “it’s derogatory,” and make it a point to cough when they did. So, at the edge of the bubble, I usually let my imagination wander. It’s hard to describe what the edge looks like because it really isn’t edge-like. It’s not like the edge of a square, for which you’re aware when you’re suddenly walking 90 degrees in another direction. The best

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way to think about it is to imagine being at the edge of a cliff: From a young age, you understand that you don’t get too close. You don’t want to fall off and have it all come to a disappointing end. That just so happens to make our stomachs churn. Instead, you understand, without needing to experience falling off, that you shouldn’t get too close.

Anyway, today I opt to walk leisurely, and, so, I’m doing the 18-minute walk.

In the first 6 minutes, I can’t help but notice the lilies along the bank. Despite being so “green” in here, there isn’t much vegetation. The lillies—alongside the towering geometric figures for buildings, which are contorted in the most unseemly, yet functional, of ways—are simple. They smell like a season I’ve never known and form without utilitarian value. The streets, at this hour, are busy. But not this one.

It’s not thought to be efficient, to walk along the edge. You ought to walk the “shortest distance between two points.” Nonetheless, they failed to account for your acceleration and uninterrupted pace, presuming no congestion. Regardless, since most people walk, or air-tram, it’s relatively quiet here. It’s calm in our bubble. I just find that sort of calm—where everyone is walking together, as one mass, to limited (quite literally, limited) destinations—all too disquieting for my tastes. In fact, I find it to be bitter.

In the next 6 minutes, I try to imagine everything I do like about this place, seeing as though I’m never going to be able to leave and explore what “the others” live like—which, for all I know, could be ten times better than this vacuum-packed, chamber of “methods.” They want you to think ignorance is bliss. If there is sunshine and people and no physical suffering, I am supposed to smile. To me, ignorance is pleasure for the ignoranti, although they do say, “we’re the cognoscenti.” The list of things I like about the place is sizable (depending on how you guys, out there, define sizable, but, in here, size is a function of our minimalistic taste): (1) I exist; and (2) I get to question things while no one has to know that I do, so they aren’t really bothered by it. That last point is sort of two points. But, again, we’re minimalistic.

But once I’m finished going through my list, I notice the way that the rows of pebbles, which flank the sidewalk along the bank, don’t seem to ever scatter onto the sidewalk. Not a single pebble strays. I crouch to the ground and pick up a single pebble; I place it three centimeters in, onto the sidewalk. I feel quite content with myself because I chose to do something, so I enjoy those last 6 minutes.

That’s the other thing. We tout this fundamental value of “individualism over blind collectivism,” but you’re really hard-pressed to find anyone ever doing anything besides what’s recommended by the Chamber of the Organization of Tried and True Methods to Personal Success—COTTMPS, unofficially. I just call it bureaucratic procedure. But mother doesn’t like that and tells me, it’s all “informed” recommendation and if I find a better way of doing things, I might as well try it. So, I’m not really breaking the rules by not taking the Tried and True path to school, but it does feel like that. No one really likes to think for themselves, here, if they don’t have to. But I’m still wondering where these “informed” recommendations come from, and, like, where does our food supply come from? There aren’t even any animals here, or nature for that matter. Walking along the bank is about the closest thing to feeling like I’m connected to something.

NICK GAUTHIER

W

e don’t explore any of this in school, though, and if we do, there is never any indication as to the Why of things—just the How, Who, Where, When, and What, which is supremely unsatisfying. But they do remind us that we have this intellectual “freedom” and that we’re supposedly at the center of the world. So, I must give them credit there. In Manifold Calculus with Mrs. Ritchasse and Fisk Sequence, we just learn about the artificially designed force fields that maintain the structure of COIF, protecting us from having to look at the others, the animals, and the atmosphere pollution outside of the bubble. But they’re protecting us, in short, from pity.

Pity is thought to be the most disdainful of the emotions, not to mention most disdainful of all things, period. It tops the list of That Which We Ought to Avoid.

A close second is all physical pain. Such things are thought to be hindrances— just hampering our progress. There are reminders in every home of what those hindrances are. We have them hologrammed on our refrigerators and typically discuss one of them during pontification just before breakfast. But that last part, about speaking about them during pontification, may just be something idiosyncratic that’s done in my home. Pity, it is said, is the “single greatest threat to the fortitude of our bubble.” I haven’t quite put my finger on why, though.

Nonetheless, intellectual pain is welcomed, when formatted correctly. As I was saying, this is a seminal unit in Manifold Calculus for all of us in Year 11 of our first-round education. The curriculum harps on about how important it is that our engineers actively maintain its integrity. There are threats about how key the infrastructure is for maintaining the planet, and how key it is to keep us healthy because, in here, “we discover how to advance the world, not just us.” I don’t even know exactly what that means. I don’t even know what you guys out there are like.

But I know that it kind of makes me nauseous to think about it, even if I can’t help it.

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My stomach continues to churn as I think about Mrs. Ritchasse. Sliding down in my seat, defeating the purpose of its ergonomic structure, I exhale and decide to ask a question.“What’s the point of this force field,” and, I add, “what is this ‘advancing’ thing really all about?” She looks at me, and then at the holographic board, then back at me, and she says, “I have an idea, Ms. Elsa.” First, I’m appalled by my impertinence. But by the time I appreciate that she has an idea, I’m at the edge of my seat because having ideas is exciting to me seeing as I’m rarely convinced that anyone else in the classroom really has them at all. She goes, “You should ask your teacher that very same question in Contemporary History of Modern Culture and Thought in Post-Global Societies.” I’m mildly disappointed but it’s not a terrible idea because she did, in fact, respect the fact that it is a question that does merit an answer. Not an answer that just tells me how it all works, but an answer about why we’re attempting to do it in the first place. As she turns away, I hear her mumble something about “nationalism” and question something about “education failing.”

But I don’t know what the first term means and it wasn’t meant for my ears. She is hard to understand, anyway: so bulbous that it sometimes gets in the way.

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NICK GAUTHIER

r. Privilegetti is handing back our papers in CHMCTPS. He doesn’t make use of hover-tech. He’s “old-fashioned” like that, and has a sort of gangly gait. He stops by my desk, looks through the glasses at the edge of his nose that are too big for his slight face and smiles, almost imperceptibly, to himself, before he lays my paper face down on my desk. Mr. Privilegetti says, “Ms. Elsa, this paper is first-rate,” and that I have “quite the mind in my skull, thinking about echo chambers and such, one that might be very useful for the projects undertaken by the COTTMPS.” I was going to ask him the question, the one from earlier, but he caught me off-guard. I decide I’ll talk to him after class about my paper, one-on-one, and that maybe then, I’ll get a satisfying answer.

While twiddling my thumbs—which is pretty uncharacteristic of me because I usually like to take notes and wonder about the kids who twiddle their thumbs, I glance at my own reflection in the would-be window. I look calm but I’m not.

I’m sitting there with him after class. He is droning on about how my paper is truly insightful. He hasn’t had such wondrous thoughts about echo chambers and the overall states of affairs since he was not much older than myself, when there was talk of forming the bubble. I’m getting bored, though, so I interject. “Excuse me, Mr. Privilegetti, I do truly want to discuss all of this at length with you, another time, but I do have a sort of nagging question—a gadfly, maybe—that is pestering me, and I also might be late to VS at this point.”

“VS?” he questions.

“Oh, sorry, I meant Market Theory in Vacuum Societies.”

He nods his head and slides his glasses up his nose. “And this question you have?”

“Well, in Manifold Calculus today, we were talking about the force fields that keep up the echo chamber—I mean COIF. Sorry! It’s just that we were just talking about the echo chamber. In Manifold Calculus we were talking about how integral the force fields are to our mission. And I start thinking to myself, what is this mission we are always speaking of—to advance the world, not just us? What are we trying to advance to, I guess, is my question, and why?”

Mr. Privilegetti rolls his wrist and steals a glance at his watch. “This is a rather complicated one, Elsa. It has something to do with happiness––I suppose.”

That wasn’t the sort of answer I was expecting. But before I get a chance to ask him what he means by happiness, the reflective windows for walls turn transparent, which means I’ll be late for VS if I don’t start to pack up my things.

By the time I’ve climbed the spiral ramp two flights up and entered the next classroom, the windows within are just transitioning back to their one-way mirror state. This means the teachers really ought to be teaching at this point if they want to make it through the curriculum before the end of the trimester. And it means they should begin promptly if they want to make the most of the two hours they have with us—to impart knowledge of the Hows, the Whats, the Whos, the Wheres, the Whens, and leave out the Whys. ◆

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ARTWORK AMANDA BA 33, 37 DENVER BLEVINS 43 KEA DE BURETEL 58 ARA HAO 12, 18 CHLOÉ MONTGOLFIER 34 ISABELLA NORRIS 05 MATT ROTHMAN 08 RYAN RUSIECKI 48, 49, 50, 53 RACHEL SHERR 17, 18, 21, 71 DANIELLE STOLZ 10, 11, 25, 26, 29, 57, 61, 62, 68, 72 SAM WILCOX 40, 41, 44, 45

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THE FLOCK

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