#max nordau

[sheliach]

Debate, Sábado 10 de Agosto de 2024.

[lakesbian]

Hey, I just saw your post about dumbass DNIs, can you clarify something for me? Is there a specific history with the word 'degens'? Your reaction was not what I expected given my own cultural context. (I'm a rural Canadian queer). Degens is a very lighthearted insult here, and not associated with any particular group and it's also not particularly common these days. So if there's context I'm missing i'd appreciate the info (Google was not helpful and started talking about crypto). Thanks!

The term Entartung (or "degeneracy") had gained currency in Germany by the late 19th century when the critic and author Max Nordau devised the theory presented in his 1892 book Degeneration. [3] Nordau drew upon the writings of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose The Criminal Man, published in 1876, attempted to prove that there were "born criminals" whose atavistic personality traits could be detected by scientifically measuring abnormal physical characteristics.

calling people or things degenerate is utilizing fascist terminology. 'degenerate' as in 'degenerated from human.' degenerate as in 'less than a person, because they do not fit my model for what a person is.' its normalization as an insult is bad, there's no removing or decontextualizing its obvious meaning and the horrible connotations it carries. the idea of degeneracy is a tool of dehumanization and genocide and should not be used as a casual insult by anyone

[transmutationisms]

the same way it drives me batshit when people think francis galton invented eugenics and adolphe quetelet started anthropometry i also feel about the idea of max nordau or anybody else 19th century as the progenitor of degeneracy theory... like it's better than when people straight up don't know it's a whole theory and act like it's a silly little insult but god i don't know. i think it's not great actually to act like these things sprang de novo from the head of like one evil dude in the 1800s like what if i told you this was always the flipside of enlightenment era meliorist discourses and the logical outgrowth of breeding horses and wheat and potatoes was buffon breeding the peasants who lived on his estates in the 18th century to see if he could create a superior human population to regenerate france by like crossbreeding cantons and stuff. i think it kind of matters actually to track this back past one cartoonish racist and place it in context. adorno and horkheimer be upon ye

[cannibalisticdespair]

Sees a post from a known anti upset about people reinventing phrenology and then when those people are called out for endorsing a concept believed by the Nazis they go "oh so I just gotta make sure it's not racist!" and it's like... you get soooo mad when people point out that you've just reinvented Max Nordau's social degeneration theory, which is a cornerstone of eugenics and was sponsored by the Nazis with their crusade against "degenerate art".

[grandhotelabyss]

Have any of these (probably white) men larping as classicist defenders of “culture” as an excuse to hate on Katherine Dee ever been to an opera or a ballet? Or is it just the next Tarantino film they feel is threatened by online culture?

Gioia has probably been to an opera, but it is funny that a jazz scholar has such a reaction. As your cinema reference shows, there seems to be a reliable modern trend by which pop culture (opera, the novel, jazz, rock, films, graphic novels, etc.) is assimilated into high culture after enough time goes by. I like how KD argued that TikTok was continuous with earlier forms of pop culture like vaudeville, but, to head off the classicist objection, I would have framed the online persona as continuous with earlier forms of elite culture, e.g., BAP deliberately modeling himself on Nietzsche, with Wilde and Emerson and other thinkers and belletrists also serving as precedents and inspirations. Similar to my cautious defense of Honor Levy as neo-modernist, in other words. Meanwhile, go back to the 1890s and see what Max Nordau was saying about Wilde and Nietzsche.

[rubynyoro-n]

Fun tip for complimenting trans women:

Don't talk about her bone structure. Why would you do that. What the fuck

[sheliach]

[dailyanarchistposts]

Are there any critiques of capital that emphasize the individual?

It would be nice to have more familiarity with such critiques to be able to easily dispense with anti-capitalism = collectivism arguments.

ict

European individualist anarchism tends to be highly influenced by semi-aristocratic libertarian thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner. One of the most important causes that those thinkers are for is individual authenticity and sincerity. So this is why for example Nietzsche has been influential in something like the marxist Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School might base some of its economics in marxism (mainly the critique of the commodity form) but it is not hard to find in it highly individualistic citations relevant to our consumer society such as this:

The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant´s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him...There is nothing left for the consumer to classify.

And another:

In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standarization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. [ibid]

My thought is that as commercialism advances, the mediocrity and the homogenizing grows. Even in small non-capitalist markets such as artisan markets one has the constraint on personality and real emotions that entails having to sell in order to make enough for survival. The famous phrase “the customer is allways right” shows this. Now as we enter the capitalist market space the prospective employee has to sell herself/himself, dress a certain way in order to sell an image. At the top of all this we have the marketing technologues who have to learn some form of psychology in order to learn the art of selling things no matter if they like something or agree with something as long as the pay is good.

As far as anarchism specifically a good essay on these themes is “The Soul of Man in Socialism” by Oscar Wilde. In it he puts forward this kind of view:

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Italian Individualist insurrectionist Renzo Novatore admired Wilde highly and so went as far as to put him in his personal list of great individuals:

Individualism is its own end. Minds atrophied by (Herbert) Spencer’s positivism still go on believing that they are individualists without noticing that their venerated teacher is the ultimate anti-individualist, since he is nothing more than a radical monist, and, as such, the passionate lover of unity and the sworn enemy of particularity...But not because he has understood the anti-collectivist, anti-social singularities capable of higher activities of the spirit, of emotion and of heroic and uninhibited strength. He hates the state, but does not penetrate or understand the mysterious, aristocratic, vagabond, rebel individual! And from this point of view, I don’t know why that flabby charlatan, that failed anthropologist, bloated more and more with the sociology of Darwin, Comte, Spencer and Marx, who has spread filth over the giants of Art and Thought like Nietzsche, Stirner, Ibsen, Wilde, Zola, Huysman, Verlaine, Mallarmé, etc., that charlatan called Max Nordau; I repeat, I cannot explain to myself why he hasn’t also been called an Individualist... since, like Spencer, Nordau also fights the state.

So it is clear there are strong reasons why individualists have been againts markets and of course their more totalitarian form, capitalism. I think also the Situationist International delved in an important way in all of this. In a book of Michel Onfray called “La sculpture de soi: la morale esthétique” (the sculpture of oneself) briefly in some part he finds a relationship with some important aspects of Stirner philosophy with what the Situationist International spoke about.

[zerogate]

It was 1893 when Max Nordau published Degeneration. England’s Great Depression had been dragging on for twenty years. The island kingdom that had led the world into brave new technologies at the turn of the nineteenth century was becoming a technological and industrial backwater. The English knew they were in trouble, but they didn’t know why. Then Max Nordau uncovered the real cause.

The culprits behind Britain’s fall were modern philosophy, modern art, and modern novels. As historian Barbara Tuchman puts it in The Proud Tower,

Through six hundred pages of mounting hysteria, he [Max Nordau] traced the decay lurking impartially in the realism of Zola, the symbolism of Mallarmé, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, in Wagner’s music, Ibsen’s dramas, Manet’s pictures, Tolstoy’s novels, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Dr. Jaeger’s woolen clothing, in Anarchism, Socialism, women’s dress, madness, suicide, nervous diseases, drug addiction, dancing, sexual license, all of which were combining to produce a society without self-control, discipline or shame which was “marching to its certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks.”

-- Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle

[alephskoteinos]

The only thing with the word "degenerate" is what if you described yourself as one in an affirmative sense? I mean in the sense that Stanislaw Przybyszewski used the term in a positive sense with reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, his favorite philosopher, in contrast to Max Nordau, who he referred to as "normal" and also loathed.

[vernalloy]

Lenses to Modern Art

Mirror - I didn’t realize she had a rose behind her back. The plaques give context, the paintings a question. I was mad at the time.

Technique - Newman, Barnett. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III. 1967. 224 x 544 cm. Completely smooth oil on canvas, save for the knife.

Aesthetic - Must I justify my love of the tactile?

Materials - Photographs of children from the Caribbean, rendered on black paper with sugar.

Accident - The sculpture was behind me. I assumed Eurydice was the blank wall.

Outsider - I want to draw like a kid again.

Degenerate - Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party to describe modern art. It was first described by Zionist leader Max Nordau in his 1892 book “Entartung,” in which he asserted that modern life corrupted artists into incoherence.

[fierceawakening]

This is definitely not in as much depth as I want, but... this is what I always thought Zionism was, and why it strikes me as odd when I read posts that phrase it in terms of indigenous sovereignty. Was that how Herzl phrased it back then, or is that a tumblr/progressive/hard left spin on the thing?

I've definitely read some things purportedly by Herzl that have given me pause, that really did sound colonialist, which no one defending that Zionism is super common and profoundly traditional seem to address or refute, and now hearing that Max Nordau, the guy who coined the whole idea of "degenerate art" that the Nazis later adopted (!!!!!), was one of Herzl's close followers in the movement leadership...

...I know people say a goy's doubts are worthless, but I still have them.

(Disclaimer, because I think some people will go wildly galloping off with what I said here and say stuff I don't think:

Some people think that "Zionist" means "anyone who does not think Israel should be forcibly conquered." I do not think Israel should be forcibly conquered or disbanded, so by THAT SPECIFIC and expansive definition, I guess I'd be a Zionist.

Regardless of Israel's history, it's a country NOW, and destroying a country would affect people who had nothing to do with its founding in horrific ways. When I say I question Israel's founding and why investment in it as founded is not thought of in the same way as other brands of nationalism, this does not mean "go kill people." That shouldn't need to be said but it does seem to be what some people read.

If I ever did come to the conclusion "Israel shouldn't exist now because its founding was problematic then," which I seriously doubt I would ever come to because that would mean the US shouldn't currently exist either and I have even less idea how people could possibly bring that about, I would mean something like "I hope over time that government peacefully dissolves itself in a way that facilitates and plans for a transition in a minimally disruptive way to anyone who was a citizen or legal resident of that country."

Which again, I don't think is a conclusion I ever WOULD come to anyway, for a whole host of reasons.)

[unpopularfanopinion]

I feel like it's time to remind everyone about Max Nordau(worst art critic in history) https://zaksmith.tumblr.com/post/107546756753/the-worst-critic-in-the-history-of-the-world and his Degenerate Art Theory

Simply because when you break down both antis and conservatives arguments against XYZ fiction/media/art they both rely on Max Nordau's Degenerate art theory of art criticism. Being a conservative in many ways has less to do with what opinions and viewpoints you have, and more with how you approach and get to those opinions. (Didn't scientists run CT scans and found that conservatives have bigger fear/disgust reactions to things than liberals did?)

But the Max Nordau approch to art criticism is as a follows(quoting from the essay I linked to)

A. Stuff I don’t like is probably made by people who have something wrong with them. B. Stuff I don’t like probably mostly appeals to people who have something wrong with them. C. There are no possible good reasons to like or make what I don’t like. D. The stakes are incredibly high. E. I refuse to check any of this.

And how it looks in practice(again quoting Zak Smith's essay)

A. Identify a societal ill. B. Claim a work is contributing to it. C. Dare the audience not to see the connection, scaring them into thinking they lose the intellectual high ground if they don’t see it and the moral high ground if they don’t believe it. D. Ignore the counterargument and call anyone making it names.

Sounds pretty familiar to how anti's approach to any ship or even entire genre of fanfic they don't like. Some-one writing NSFW RPF including non-con, incest, age-gaps, of real teenagers. It MUST be gross predatory adults who are just drooling at the thought of doing those things in real life. It CAN"T possibly be other horny teenagers being attracted to other teens, or teens being trolls/edgelords by writing the grossest thing they can think of. You know normal(even if seldom discussed) teen stuff.

Antis are conservatives and you really can't change my mind about that. Because just like conservatives they refuse to try to see or understand any opinion, perspective, or position but their own(I won't say facts, or information, because we know conservatives don't care about those)

[rubynyoro-n]

Incorporating Max Nordau's theory of degeneration into my everyday vocabulary but shaking my head the entire time so people know I don't agree with it

[hazardous-waste-containment]

Im thoroughly aware of "degenerate" being a fascist thing, but i didnt know that "decadent" was too. What up with that

AFAIK ‘degeneration’ as a concept grew out of Darwinism and the idea of (d)evolutionary backsliding down the rungs of a biological hierarchy (especially but not always bc of race-mixing), was closely identified with literal mental and physical illness, and became cemented in the European popular consciousness particularly by Max Nordau’s Entartung which psychiatrically pathologized basically all the artistic and cultural trends he personally found objectionable, and gave us the idea of ‘degenerate art’ (though tbc Nordau was Jewish and for his part thought antisemitism was a reflection of degeneration); whereas ‘decadence’ is the much broader idea, which need not have specifically biological/medical/racial connotations, of a society growing old, tired, decayed, losing its vigor etc.

The panic over decadence, that the West was vaguely on the decline and needed to culturally rejuvenate if it was to survive, was even more widespread and diffuse in late nineteenth-century Europe than the specific panic over degeneration and affected pretty much all the new philosophical, political, spiritual, etc developments of the era in a wave of civilizational soul-searching (the fin-de-siècle), from Nietzsche to Sorel to Blavatsky. The two concepts have definitely always been intertwined but at least from what I’ve seen of interwar fascist movements, which were obviously products of that fin-de-siècle cultural crisis, it was actually much more common for them to attribute the ills of liberal society in the 1920s–30s to decadence than to degeneration. Fascism in Italy (for example) wasn’t primarily racist at first (at least no more than most Europeans at the time) and saw Italy’s crisis mostly as one of materialism, rationalism, individualism, class conflict, a lack of moral values, a weak state, etc etc etc, all symptoms of a general cultural decadence but never of the sort of biological regression implied by degeneration. The Nazis made use of both concepts, probably more often of ‘degeneration’ for obvious reasons, which I guess is why we contemporarily associate it more strongly with fascism.

Tbh today you’re more likely to hear from fascists about ‘degeneracy’ (basically meaning anything I don’t like but with the particular connotation of sexual/gender deviance, also used this way by Christian rightists) and ‘subversion’ (generalized conspiratorial attacks against the nation/race).

[xkat-holstaur]

this is true but these same people do also use the word "degenerate"

whenever i see it in the wild i just say "welcome back max nordau" and move on for my own sake

anyway I'm extremely tired of this newer generation and late gen z disguising their disgust for sexuality and expression of sex through words like "gooner/gooner-bait", etc! basically spouting tradcath puritanical nonsense

it is in truth a new way of calling someone a "degenerate"