+++ July 15 follow ups: --Federalist 1 (which begins "After an unequivocal experience...") and 85, context by Martin Jay. See his "Building New Rafts" in Salmagundi spring/summer 2025; also his Songs of Experience (2005) and Magical Nominalism (2025), as well as Genesis and Validity (2022), Downcast Eyes (1993), and Immanent Critiques (2023) especially "The Age of Rackets," for central historical role of the concept of experience in all eras and disciplines. Hume is quoted by Hamilton about experience to close the Federalist Papers' case for the US Constitution, in No. 85, carrying forward F.Bacon's Novum Organum, Book I Section 97, with some variance, parallels to Blake in "All Religions Are One" (1788) and elsewhere. Ken Burns' next film is on the American Rev, which significantly derived from Leonardo's Florence (b.1452) and Vespucci its namesake, plus Dum Diversas (also 1452) so they are connected. See Ken's interview about Esperienza at Leonardo dot info slash is-everyone-a-leonardo for democratic implications and emotional depth. Quote end of No. 85 "These judicious reflections contain a lesson of moderation to all the sincere lovers of the union, and ought to put them upon their guard against hazarding anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the states from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of a victorious demagogue, in the pursuit of what they are not likely to obtain, but from TIME and EXPERIENCE" (all caps his). (See ExperienceDemocracy2024 dot org slash experience-democracy-is for first edition facsimile of Federalist 1 and 85.) --Caveat: No one can much influence anyone's opinion about staying involved with democracy and reform. Few care about The Federalist or Hamilton. Jay's 2005 and 2025 books are extremely helpful in this regard, not least by elucidating Schmitt and Benjamin, Badiou and Bataille, Adorno, Agamben, Ankersmit, and Duchamp et. al. re the value of peaceful means and the aesthetic event. Most relevant to list serv perhaps is Jay's 2025 Salmagundi piece "Building New Rafts." --Current "reset" as hostile US govt takeover, corp raid style liquidation, for democracy reduction, plus assorted expediencies. Underway since '68 or so to rebalance after various successful rights movements, thus unsurprising in aspects. Predictably this requires a resilient coalition to oppose the far right, esp. after the false security of stare decisis was bypassed and significant reduction implemented. Participation and reform are not mutually exclusive, not even in times of great adversity (think aforementioned civil rights era), and midterms do matter. Non-peaceful protest, now as in the sixties, is on balance most helpful to the far right and has often been encouraged or engineered by them historically. --Caveat: See above. There is no magic formula or universal rationale to encourage voting or use of the public sphere of communication. Yet abandoning democracy to the right because postmodernism makes no sense. --The reset or Great Regression's immediate deliverable is a new international geopolitic of high propaganda, untransparency, and top-down horse-trading minus the pomp of peace summits and victory parades (see Jay's 2023 "Age of Rackets"). An attempt to skip another long Cold War, or failing that retool, or both, its precedent is part 1950 (HUAC) and part 1980 (Star Wars). May or may not succeed. Success at skipping the war could reduce many harms to climate, refugees, democracy and biodiversity, but would likely require a baldly transactional Nobel Peace Prize for the millennium's first global demagogue, an inveterate kleptocrat and Machiavellian Hobbesite. Failure paradoxically would bring a Second multi-generational Cold War with even worse collateral misery and more wasted time and energy than the First, perhaps even wasting all the time and energy there is left. --Caveat: This verges on being trivially obvious. I'd like to help the focus on sustainable global peace plans but others are doing that and no one needs more redundancy. --FA quote: "Today, there is nothing—internationally or domestically—that would suggest this is a propitious moment for China and the United States to transcend their differences in either the security or economic realm. Both countries are currently governed by strident nationalist coalitions, with an antiglobalization backlash dominating domestic politics. There is also no common security threat drawing the two countries together. Indeed, they are more likely to find themselves on opposite sides (or at least at orthogonal purposes) regarding international conflicts, such as those between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Iran. Only once in the past hundred years, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, did China and the United States find themselves completely at loggerheads on both dimensions of statecraft. With today’s environment becoming more like that one, it is hard to imagine either leader meaningfully resetting relations or addressing any of the major issues dividing them." (See ForeignAffairs dot com, "Fantasy of a Grand Bargain.") --Caveat: Banter about punditry is generally fruitless. Yet if climate and tech change count as security (they do), and culture can mend fences (Esperienza/Jingyan), then skipping the Second Cold war is win-win-win. We may only need one politician on each side to get the gist, see the big picture, and find the skillful continuation. --My Commedia Leonardi Vici book is still available free in PDF form on request. The World Novel will be available January 1, 2026. Unacknowledged legislators of the world, requite! The regular politicians lack imagination and need everyone's help. Of this we can be certain, hypotheses or no. Plus the Esperienza hypothesis has never been proposed or tested, so why not discuss? What if it might be the missing link in the golden chain between earth and heaven which none of us really wants to be forever broken? --Caveat: Precedents for skipping supremely wasteful wars do not abound, on the contrary. Therefore Leonardo drew us a map. Free excerpt from The World Novel, by Max Herman: --Caveat: Out of context this may not make much sense at all so apologies in advance. On July 8, 2032, a.alpha and a.digamma posted the following to their daily web page. Simplicity is indispensable, yet we humbly confess is not our strong point as we choose words for this page. Our gratitude for your time and effort compels us to strive nonetheless. In this spirit we offer the Nine Refinements. Simplicity appears in very pure form through the ancient Egyptian deity Maat, whose feather must be weighed against your soul to achieve reward in the afterlife. That feather is also the feather of writing, like in Zeppelin IV, if you desire a pop culture correlative. (Those aren’t always harmful but sometimes are so use caution.) To reach our own goal for this web page we must accomplish the Nine Refinements. We ask your patience and your help since we cannot accomplish them alone. They have three parts. The Three Hybrids are for Government (participation with reform), Economics (public and private), and Religion (traditional and modern). If we smash any of these three bipartite spokes the wheel of evolution shall falter. The Three Resolves move the wheel of this planet forward, if with turns. They are Peace, Healing, and Sustainability. None can be removed without breaking the wheel of progress. They bear heavy weight and often need repair so never neglect them even in your hearts. The Three Givens are the most painful yet powerful of the Three Spheres of Refinement, aligning the Greater Two in space and time. They are: Leonardo first, USA second, China third. We offer the Nine Refinements in honor of hope and its transcendent worth. .... On July 12 of 2032, these were the words of a.alpha and a.digamma. Why not celebrate July twelfth? In 1505 on this day Leonardo of Vinci, five hundred and twenty-seven years ago, began a book, that we might finish, called “’Of Transformation,’ that is, of one body into another without diminution or increase of substance.” Might this have been the moment of a decision to transform himself and our world, along better lines than the work he had just done for Borgia (alongside Machiavel) and the Signoria, through the simple yet excellent vehicle of his portrait of a woman on a balcony? Two thousand years before that day in 1505, perhaps also in July, the Buddha created the Heart Sutra which some say embodies the full truth of Buddhism in one short dialogue. It also concerns transformation, and reaching – through meditation and awareness – the “other shore” and departing from the place of all “ill-being.” The act of traversal, transformation, and departure is to realize that all phenomena, inner and outer, are in motion and interconnected not fixed in space or time. To celebrate something we must give ourselves to it, as fully as we are able, especially on its day of commemoration. What is it to give ourselves to the hypothesis that the balcony portrait is Experience? It is to address with our full being the image as if it is in fact experience, that is, to test the hypothesis through embodied real action, and if necessary follow the map to new places. The July 1 topics were: --The World Novel page 1 --Soul Mountain (Reality derives from experience and it must be personal experience) chapter 2, Gao Xingjian 1990 +++ -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: https://www.nettime.org # contact: [email protected]
