I saw one of the most beautiful films of the year this past week, Wes Anderson's masterful The Grand Budapest Hotel. It includes his usual fanciful flourishes and is utterly imbued with nostalgia. Unlike his past films which were more focused on inner family dramas, the main characters in this film are without family. Instead, Anderson steps out to convey the life of a hotel concierge Gustav H. (R. Feines), and his young lobby boy Zero (T. Revolori), who  are caught in the throws of a verisimilar early twentieth century. The story is told from the perspective of the elder Zero, known as Mr. Mustafa (M. Abraham). The drama arises not simply from the contrast between a fading occidental civilization and new modern barbarism, but between Gustav H. and himself. One of Gustav's early pedagogical overtures to the young Zero, expresses the tension:

“You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed, that’s what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant – (Sighs deeply.) Oh, fuck it.”

— Gustav H.

Anderson is sometimes referred to as a postmodern director. It's a term that focuses upon his aforementioned penchant for fanciful nostalgia and introverted insularity. It strikes me that this attribution misses the deeper sense of pain that drove his earlier work. The various philosophical and theological movements variously called postmodern did, in some cases, lose sight of this pain. However, the idea that postmodernity ends in today's austere times, overlooks the deeper exteriority at work in the "post," in these movements. It explains the return of metaphysics, not as an alter ego of philosophical absolutism, but a more profound "after" physics, and the sense in which meta always implies a deeper dissatisfaction with reductive physical accounts of reality. Moral, ethical and political dimensions can no longer be reduced to physics after the holocaust. Rather, we are more directly returned to a fragile notion of civilization laid bare in the twentieth century's darkest moments. As Gianni Vattimo argued in a compendium on religion, it too returns in these gaping unhealed wounds.

Anderson's recent film shows the twilight between a long gone past and the new barbarisms we live with today. He does so not with an historical farce, as such, but a personal story of one man who took responsibility for maintaining the highest expression of civility in the fantastical experience of a luxury hotel. Of course, it shows how civilization did not exist as a stable established "thing" in the first place. But it also shows what a beautiful dream it was, a whisper that the people of that era once believed in. As Mr. Mustafa (the elder Zero) explains at the end of the film:

“To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it – but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace!”

— Mr. Moustafa

It seems to me that we go to movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel fully alert to today's public cruelties, the threat of global catastrophe and social injustice. The dark fantasy, however, is no more honest because of its darkness. Wes Anderson's recent film depicts, not unlike the work of the best postmodern theorists, both the fragility of civil societies as well as the painful work that goes into breathing civility to life in our social and political conditions. It is a nostalgic lost world, but its core is not an abstraction as such. Rather, it beats within the flawed heart of Mr. Gustav H. and makes you wish there were more of them today. 

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.... He was one of them. What more is there to say?
”

— Mr. Mustafa

Errol Morris somehow made an interview style documentary about Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known. Toward's the end of the film Rumsfeld himself isn't quite sure why he agreed to do it. The title comes from the missing combination of terms in a 12 February 2002 news briefing. There, Rumsfeld responded to questions about the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, quipping that "there are known knowns... known unknowns... [and] unknown unknowns" (defense.gov). Morris focuses in on the statement's missing combination of terms, the unknown knowns. As it turns out, Rumsfeld was a meticulous recorder of memoranda, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of memos so numerous they were nicknamed "snowflakes." In a snowflake later in 2004, he reflected briefly on the fourth combination. There, he provided a rather odd interpretation, which he retracts towards the end of the film. I've included the film's transcript below not only because it is one of the most powerful scenes, but because it is as close to anything I've seen that Rumsfeld actually agrees there were things he did not know that he knew, or, more to the point, that he refused to face and accept:

“February 4, 2004
Subject: What you know.

Rumsfeld (reading): There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are unknown unknowns. But there are also unknown knowns. That is to say things that you think you know that it turns out you did not.

Rumsfeld: If you take those words and try to connect them in each way that is possible, there was at least one more combination that wasn’t there, the unknown knowns. Things that you possibly may know that you don’t know you know.

Morris: But the memo doesn’t say that. It says that we know less not more than we think we do.

Rumsfeld: Is that right? I reversed it? Put it up again. Let me see.

Rumsfeld (reading): There are also unknown knowns. That is to say things that you think you know that it turns out you did not.

Rumsfeld: Yeah, I think that memo is backwards. I think it is closer to what I said here, than that. Unknown knowns. I think you are probably, Errol, chasing the wrong rabbit here.”

— The Unknown Known - 1.32.47-1.34.50

It is interesting that even in repeatedly reading the memo and correcting his own 2004 definition of "unknown knowns," Rumsfeld does not draw the conclusions that these are the more significant dangers. I can't find any evidence that Morrris read any of Slavoj Zizek's various repetitions of Rumsfeld's omission of "unknown knowns" in the 2002 news briefing. However, I am expecting Zizek to provide some comment in this regard insofar as Morris has actually sat down with Rumsfeld and had him repeatedly read his own memo on "unknown knowns." The surreal result is that, even the film interview, Rumsfeld doesn't seem to know what he knows. In any case, it makes Zizek's assessment all the more interesting: "If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the 'unknown unknowns,' the threats from Saddam the nature of which we did not even suspect, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the 'unknown knowns,' the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves... the situation is like that of a blind spot in our visual field: we do not see the gap, the picture appears continuous" (In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 457).

“Professors didn’t sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. Academic writing is the way it is because it’s part of a system. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. But every now and then, someone from outside the system swoops in to blame professors for the writing style that they’ve inherited. This week, it was Nicholas Kristof, who set off a rancorous debate about academic writing with a column, in the Times, called ‘Professors, We Need You!’ The academic world, Kristof argued, is in thrall to a ‘culture of exclusivity’ that ‘glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience’... As a one-time academic, I spent most of the week rooting for the profs. But I have a lot of sympathy for Kristof, too. I think his heart’s in the right place. (His column ended on a wistful note: “I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career.”) My own theory is that he got the situation backward. The problem with academia isn’t that professors are, as Kristof wrote, ‘marginalizing themselves.’ It’s that the system that produces and consumes academic knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic work more marginal.”

"Why is Academic Writing So Academic?" The New Yorker - http://nyr.kr/1mGzE3P

“But then you realize that a ‘book’ back then wasn’t what we think of as a ‘book’ now. Back then, there were a plurality of book-sized formats that were, like octavo or the slightly-smaller duodecimo, pretty compact, so these ‘books’ were only a couple of thousand words long. (Like the totally fun The Art of Memory by Marius D’assigny, from 1706.) Authors who cranked out 40 ‘books’ were actually writing pieces that are closer to a long magazine article.It wasn’t until the 20th century arrived that nonfiction books started to congeal into the 300-page quantum, for a host of economic and cultural and industrial reasons.”

"Why 18th Century Books Looked Like Smartphone Screens" - http://bit.ly/1e3x4uv

“...the struggle between secular critique and religious sentiments—the very same conflict we had in the Danish cartoon crisis and other freedom of speech versus moral harm-cases (see Saba Mahmood’s ‘Is critique secular?’)—is only on one level a struggle between secular and religious worldviews; on a second level, it is a conflict among religious actors. The same is true for all other possible secular-religious conflict situations. My thrust is that it is really this second level that is the most instructive in terms of empirical insights for further theory-building. In order to get access to this second level, however, social sciences have to overcome the theology blind spot and have to open up to the empirical study of theological debates. In the remainder of this post I quickly want to outline what this opening-up could look like in the three approaches to the study of religion identified by Cécile Laborde in her post: Where is theology in the critical, upholding, and disaggregating perspectives?”

Kristina Stoeckl, "The Theology Blindspot" The Immanent Frame - http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=40240

Stoeckl provides an interesting summary of the problem of looking at religion and secularity without care and attention for theological discourse. It's a mistake rightly pointed out by this author in much of the literature, and one we are also trying to redress with Newcastle's Religion in Political Life in Australia volume forthcoming in 2015.

Crucially, however, it should be noted that this is an evidence based, empirical and forensic interest in theology with the sole purpose of understanding religious thought and action.

“So what is it about Beckett’s weird, apocalyptic clown show that gives it such remarkable resonance, soulfulness—even, dare I say, flat-out entertainment value?... How could it not? For ‘Godot’ remains—there’s no use denying it—a profoundly atheist work, though we must not overlook the profundity for the godlessness. Beckett’s is not the blithe, hyperconfident, 21st-century atheism of Richard Dawkins, or the bland, self-satisfied scientism that constitutes a kind of default worldview in the educated West. It is instead the 20th century’s wounded, elegiac brand of letting-go-of-God—the entirely comprehensible incomprehension of intellectuals who felt poised between the Stygian maw of the Holocaust and the real probability of nuclear annihilation. For all its impish gallows humor, ‘Waiting for Godot’ has, to my ears at least, an unmistakeably valedictory timbre; it sounds like the lament of a one-time believer who once took the promise of faith seriously, or at the very least understood its high stakes. Put another way: Beckett’s is a voice that anyone conversant with the stark desert landscape of the Bible—anyone who has, so to speak, sat picking scabs with Job or eaten locusts with John the Baptist—will recognize in a heartbeat.”

"A God-Shaped Hole," America Magazine - http://www.americamagazine.org/node/157753

I had the pleasure of seeing the opening night performance of this rendition of the play with Patrick Steward and Ian McKellen in the lead roles at the Haymarket Theatre in Edinburgh.

“When I first started teaching in my current institution, a decade or so ago, I was impressed by the diversity of students in lectures. Lots were believers of one sort or another, but many others would describe themselves as atheists and agnostics. Whatever they thought about religion, they shared an intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness that made teaching the best part of my job: they enjoyed being challenged in their assumptions, and they loved exploring the ways religions have shaped and been shaped by cultural, social and political shifts. Most noticeable of all, students rarely expressed a need to proclaim or defend their own faith perspectives in lectures. But things are so different now... Recently, a group of students in a lecture refused to undertake the work set because they didn’t want to apply postmodern perspectives to what for them was a sacred text. A female colleague was accused of being ‘stupid’ and ‘lacking authority’ by those who believe a woman has no right to teach others about religious texts. Other colleagues have been marked out as heretics in lectures. ”

Anonymous Academic, "Teaching Religion: My Students Are Trying to Run My Course," The Guardian - http://gu.com/p/3mhhf

I remember teaching religion and theology at a Russell Group University in the UK some years ago in a similar way to this academic's experience, i.e. open-minded, diverse, curious. It is sad to think that this is being eroded.

“Dr. Bronowski insisted that the principle of uncertainty was a misnomer, because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty... For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call ‘a play of tolerance,’ whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, ‘Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.’”

Simon Critchley, "Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson from Auswitz," The New York Times - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty

“But also [Ingmar Bergman] was an extremely disciplined artist. He had no discipline in his personal life—I do—but he had extreme discipline when it came to his art and the way he ran his life around it. For the last 25 years of his life, he was married to the same woman, and the chaos of his life had settled. He lived on a small island called Faro, north of Gotland, where he would plan his films, write the scripts, make the screenboards, and everything. He limited his activities: Besides working and thinking, he might go for a stroll. He would only drink buttered skim milk, and have one cookie in the afternoon—his ailing stomach couldn’t take more than that. In the late afternoon or evening, he would have visitors over to go and look at a movie in his cinema. And that was his routine, every day. He didn’t try to do more.”

"What Great Artists Need: Solitude," The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/1b3gDDQ

“Surveillance is sometimes spoken of as a God’s eye view of the world. This idea is explored in relation to the ‘objective gaze’ of disengaged reason in the Enlightenment and its technologically-reinforced modes in the twenty-first century. The rise of the eye-centred viewpoint is coincident with the ‘great disembedding’ of individuals from the social. This in turn also prompted the self-disciplines of modernity, which are now key aspects of the power-base of modern institutions. A crucial moment in this shift was Bentham’s panopticon proposal, in which the knowledge regime of secularism started to shape social imaginaries in relation to surveillance. While secular omniscience was sought through the surveillance gaze, and explored later in the work of Foucault, Debord and others, the eye-centred view is not without critics. We draw upon some biblical resources, notably, the story of Hagar, that query the centrality of ‘objective vision’. Instead, an ethic of care is proposed, based in part on a fresh understanding of the ‘eye of God’. It is argued that the implications of the care ethic go far deeper than current appeals to privacy, data protection, civil liberties or human rights.”

David Lyon, "Surveillance and the Eye of God" Studies in Christian Ethics 27, 1, 2014 - http://sce.sagepub.com/content/27/1/21.abstract?rss=1 

I wrote about this some years ago and will return to it at some point.