lietosurvive

The woman is Lilya Brik photographed by Aleksander Rodczenko in 1924 for a poster used in a Soviet book and literacy campaign. Lilya here calls to the future, warning of disasters to come under Stalinism. Watching for their chance to intervene are Donald Trump in his military academy uniform; Roy Cohn, mentor to Trump, shown here as aide to Senator Joe McCarthy during America’s notorious age of suspicion; and Vladimir Putin in KGB uniform. Cohn’s slogan was ‘Deflect, Distract, Deny’. Billboard: Berkeley, California September 2018 and Chinatown, New York City September 2019.

No moral system or political philosophy is immune from perverse interpretations justifying its opposite. The slogan is due to Georg Lukács, who comments from within 1950s Stalinist Hungary on the marxist legacy. Lukács, famous for discovering the hidden and considerable Hegelian influence in Marx’s work, subverted Stalinist oppression in Hungary through dissembled writing and sub rosa historical allusions.

McCarthyism, Stalinism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, belief in witchcraft – all enable cultures of fear, blame, suspicion and paranoia. Catharsis occurs when a society rejects its life of lies and falsehoods. Slogan is due to János Kádár following the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, still a time of hyper-surveillance and paranoia. Image: Doris Day with Rock Hudson, one of the first celebrities to publicly identify as a person with AIDS.

The slogan has recurred as sympathy for children’s lives waxes and wanes, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century to the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the 20th. Contemporary philosophy and cognitive science often marginalize the existence of children and their formative development, particularly regarding language acquisition. Surrounded by others, children become who they are, which is us.

Computation weds physical devices to our symbolic skills. Their marriage contracts are written in programming languages. In 1936 Alan Turing formulated a mathematical conception of digital computation using machine metaphors. Slogan is due to John Searle for whom computation is a social and symbolic reality, hence not ‘discovered in nature’. We are surrounded by computation and it is us.

Discrete patterns of isolated words and language sounds correspond to no fixed physical signature in the speech stream. Once language is seen as having a segmented structure it is almost impossible to recognize it in any other way. Wendy Hiller is Eliza Dolittle and Leslie Howard is phonetician Henry Higgins in G.B. Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’. Slogan: Steven Pinker. Billboard: Berkeley, California October 2018.

Metaphor is the most divisive concept in linguistics, seen alternately as central, or marginal, to the creation of of meaning and concepts implicit in a language’s grammar. The signs /* and */ are used in computer programming languages to mark text to be ignored by the machine. The meaning inside is taken by us as comments on the program code. Slogan: Donald Davidson.

All languages enable unbounded linguistic capabilities via patterned rules. In the 1950s Noam Chomsky saw this ‘generative’ capability as the source of much human creativity. That linguistic power enables a symbolic platform for social realities including marriage, the law, games, currencies and institutions of all kinds.

Linguists were revered scientists of ancient India, with the goddess Vāc language incarnate. Around 350 BC Pāṇini constructed a Sanskrit grammar using symbolic methods rediscovered by 1950s designers of computing languages. Panini’s Sanskrit grammar is the earliest such symbolic formalism, designed to generate correct Sanskrit words and sentences.  The Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan looks back at the remarkable legacy of ancient Indian linguistics. Slogan: Frits Staal.

Languages are always in flux, with no language the same from moment to moment, person to person, self to self. Opportunities for language change are perennial. Jasper Johns converts the grammars of targets, flags and numbers through an art of painterly surfaces. Slogan is due to the American linguist Edward Sapir.

Who is in danger? What pollutes? Which risks to accept? Which experts to believe? Which skeptics to silence? Which messages to send? Which regulations to enforce? Which fears to amplify? Who benefits? Who pays? What is risk, but uncertain choices about valued outcomes? Anxious woman: Roy Lichtenstein. Diana statue: Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Every culture is a risk culture, maintaining order through its portfolio of dangers. The bandit (Toshiro Mifune) in Kurosowa's 'Rashomon' is disorder personified, the film an ultimate in uncertainty and faces of truth. The slogan is due to William James and was popularized by Mary Douglas in her ‘Purity & Danger’ on the historical antecedents for modern notions of pollution and risk.

The slogan is the ‘first law of toxicology’. It says anything is dangerous in the right amount: enough water to drown in, not enough air to breathe. Nothing is dangerous nor safe in itself, because risk is always a relation among multiple causes and uncertain outcomes. Images of Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon by Andy Warhol.