The Brooklyn Rail

“When you invent the ship, you must also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you must also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
–Paul Virilio

“The human spirit must prevail over technology.”
–Albert Einstein

Democracy, unlike other political ideologies across the world, is not static—it never has been and hopefully never will be either. And because every fluid and dynamic invention offers equal opportunity to all, it can be used both by those who explore it for the greater common good, and those who exploit it for selfish reasons. This is to say, if indeed democracy is to be perceived as an ongoing experiment, then we must be content with its occasional failures, as it has recently with the election of Donald J. Trump. Who, in addition to being the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes, knew how to deploy “speed” through Twitter in an unrivaled way. In that realm, Trump was king, and there was no one who could challenge him with the same technological speed.

This leads us to think again about what brought us to the extreme rancorous polarization that we see in our civic life, for which the reelection of Trump was symptomatic. One of the things we learned, as Elon Musk referred to himself as a “dark, gothic MAGA” at a Trump rally, was that our meritocratic principles have a dark side, and can be used to corrode the common good. It’s true that we’ve not seen such an extreme division between winners and losers since Jacksonian America in the 1830s. On the side of the winners, their displays of narcissism are unapologetically loud, while the sense of humiliation on the side of losers is intensely resentful.

In other words, what matters in our civic life matters in our politics. We’ve seen how economic globalization had gradually deepened economic inequality since the end of the Cold War in 1991, how the value of hard labor among the working class has been disdained, disrespected by the meritocratic elites. The so-called vocational practices, such as carpentry, auto mechanics, welding, electrical work, and the service trades, ranging from practitioners of culinary art to medical assistance, have come to be treated as inferior occupations. For many working class Americans the assumption grew that having a college education would mean you can compete and win in the global economy. Here, we remember what had propelled Americans out of the worst crises in the past, for example the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant creation, which consisted of domestic programs, public work projects, and financial reforms and regulations, which was the most effective solution to the Great Depression. We should also remind ourselves of John Dewey’s educational philosophy, which was centered on the very idea that learning is a result of real-life experiences, from which both vocational practice and scholarly pursuit—often characterized as vocational education and liberal education— can have similar transformative power if they’re impartially nurtured.

Light has always been born out of darkness. We need to rethink at this moment the three essential aspects of our civic life: the role of college, the dignity of work, and the meaning of success. We all need to activate our participatory democracy with the “art of joining” and the “slowness of culture” against “social distancing” and “technological speed.”

At the Rail, we have just celebrated our twenty-fourth anniversary in October by launching a brand new and dynamic website, through which we want to deploy the imminent slowness and warmth of our made thoughts, made objects, among other acts of creation, as counterfrictions against technology’s speed and algorithmic coldness. As we’ve learned from our mentors and friends, including artists, writers, poets, philosophers, playwrights, filmmakers, composers, and dancers, among other creatives, all of whom are masters of their own “inner” freedom without any fear of conformity, our new website is an immersive platform from which their respective voices are featured prominently. Never before has the vastness of our twenty-four year archives been so readily available. These archives include in-depth interviews and articles, in addition to the nearly five-year archive of our ever popular daily NSE (New Social Environment) lunchtime conversation video series, film footages, related documentations, and all sorts of materials related to our generous and ambitious public programming, including curatorial projects, which feature all the contents of the seven arts that appear—and have in the past appeared in our print issue. They have been made easy to access, to navigate through, with the search engine that were created in this new website. Never before has everything we publish every month, including our one hundred original articles, and twenty NSE episodes, been made available for iPhone reading and viewing pleasure, as it has in this new website. In effect, in addition to each monthly print edition there is also now a beautifully formatted digital edition. This also applies to our past issues, going back to the very first one that was created in October 2000.

As we’ve mirrored all that we do in accordance with what our creative friends do in their works, we’re therefore committed more than ever to cultivating and nurturing the arts and humanities, all for free without any kind of ideological mission statement or a specific demo graphic of readership. The Rail has only one philosophy—one that reflects the artists’ arduous journeys. In thinking about the process of transforming information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom that can be shared among our fellow human beings, we continue with our goal of perpetually maintaining the balance between the “rigorous routine and absolute spontaneity” of the crosspollination among the disciplines—as a matter of both urgency and pleasure. Lastly, as our new website was built from the ground up, we consider it as the Rail’s new source of light that will forefront the importance of works of art as products of hard-won unity that can be shared among our diverse communities of readership here in the US and across the world.

Happy holidays to you all, without whom the Rail does not exist.

With gratitude, love, courage, and cosmic optimism as ever,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is dedicated to the remark able lives of works of our friends and mentors Frank Auerbach (1931–2024), Walter Dahn (1954–2024) Paul Morrissey (1938–2024), Jane Rohrer (1928–2024), and Daniel Spoerri (1930–2024), all of whom have significantly contributed to our world of art, film, and poetry. We’d like to welcome Theo Donen as our in-house photographer, and Charlie Medeiros as a new production assistant. We’re thrilled to extend our welcomes to Corina Larkin and Nigel Dawn, Paul Gray, the Bill Jensen and Margrit Lewczuk Foundation, and David Totah to the Patrons’ Council; and YZ Kami and David Reed to the Artists Advisory Board. Lastly, we thank Maisy Card for her luminous work as co-Fiction editor and we send our huge congratulations to Joan Jonas as the winner of the 2024 Nam June Paik Prize for her formative work across sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and video art.