http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Sartwell

Crispin Gallegher Sartwell (born 1958) is an American philosophy professor, individualist anarchist[1] and journalist. He received his B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, his M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia – where his dissertation supervisor was Richard Rorty – and is currently a member of the faculty of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Born in Washington, D.C., he is the son of the late Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, a reporter, editor, and photographer with the Washington Star and several magazines. His grandfather, also Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, was a columnist and editorial page editor at the Washington Times-Herald. His great-grandfather, Herman Bernstein broke the story of a secret correspondence between Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas during World War I in The New York Times[2]. Sartwell himself worked as a copy boy at the Washington Star and later as a freelance rock critic for many publications, including Record Magazine and Melody Maker. He has taught philosophy, communication and political science at a number of schools, including Vanderbilt University, The University of Alabama, Penn State, Millersville, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and Dickinson College.

His mother, Joyce Abell, and step-father, Richard Abell, were schoolteachers in Montgomery County, Maryland and organic vegetable farmers in Rappahannock County, Virginia. Richard Abell was a conscientious objector during World War 2. Sartwell’s first wife was artist Rachael K. Pats, with whom he has two children, Emma and Samuel Sartwell.

Sartwell’s syndicated column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appeared in numerous newspapers through the 1990s and 2000s, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times. Among the most idiosyncratic newspaper columnists of the period, he is a self-described adherent of anarchism. He is the author of such books as Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality and Six Names of Beauty. In 2008 SUNY Press published his book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory, which is an “irreverent and incisive critique of liberal theories of the state.”

You have worked at a newspaper and as a music critic. Was this helpful to you in your philosophical writings?

Definitely. For one thing, I think I learned a lot about writing as a journalist, and I guess I think that my writing is clearer and maybe has somewhat more flair than that of some other philosophy profs. This has been my particular advantage in an academic career. When the editor says ‘I need 700 words by 3,’ there’s no sense in having writer’s block or feeling tortured. You give him the 700. For a lot of professors is laborious, a burden. I actually enjoy it.

Also the pop music stuff is everywhere in my writing. I’ve done academic work on country, blues, hip hop, etc. My next book is called “Political Aesthetics.” It has a long chapter on Black Nationalism, Rastafarianism, hip hop, and reggae. I actually think pop music is one of the best, most direct, and coolest windows on the culture. Plus you’re doing your research by listening to Wu-Tang Clan or whatever it may be. Beats reading Hegel.

Speaking of hip-hop culture, Rasterferian Culture etc. do you think that the black man in history, has had to look at himself from our view of him-from a white person’s point of view?

I wrote a book about this, called “Act Like You Know.” This is what Dubois called “double consciousness.” Probably it is an important factor in some black experience, but in a way I’m not comfortable, as a white guy, making pronouncements about that. What I think is more interesting is that black people have, historically, seen white people more clearly than we see ourselves. If you look at Frederick Douglass on the hypocrisy of slave-owning Christians, or Dubois on the racism inherent in social sciences, you see this very clearly. For white people, there’s no such thing as white identity, but for the people that identity excludes, the content of it perfectly clear.

In your writings you question the existence of language. If I have this right. Does language create a false reality, if you will? Does language and text fail to communicate our day to day existence, or moment by moment existence?

Well, no I don’t question the existence of language, though that’s a remarkably perverse and provocative idea. In my book “End of Story” I attack the obsession with language characteristic of twentieth-century philosophy (as in: Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty etc). Language is a great and immensely difficult topic, but it’s not the only topic, and all questions can’t be resolved into questions about language. And I’m concerned to pay some respect to the ways reality exceeds or collapses language: the inarticulate moment of pain or ecstasy, or the indescribable richness of even the most ordinary experience.

I don’t think language creates a false reality. But the idea that we create reality through our language is false, though not without some bite in some situations. Like perception, language is something forced on us by the world; it’s going to end up more or less responding to the real, or else it’s going to simply lead us to extinction. I like language, though at times I feel tortured by too much of it, in my world and in my head. But the idea that “there’s nothing outside the text” (Derrida) or that we should forget “the world” and deal with descriptions (Rorty) is a dead end. It would make language itself impossible.

What would you say is the function of art? Is art for enjoyment only?

No. I think art is a more or less essential condition of human life, or even in a certain way its meaning. I think the formalist view of art, which is that it’s something that provides pleasure in virtue of a pure arrangement of lines and colors, or tones and rhythms, and that it is above the practical needs of human beings, is an aberration.

Through most of human history, and in most cultures, art has not been distinguished from craft or skilled making. This is the meaning of techne in Greek, for example, which is often translated into English as ‘art.’ Obviously, craft is practical, and excellent craft enhances the practical tasks of life. A beautiful cup enhances the act of drinking. Skill is practically valuable and also life-enhancing in a completely earthy and earthly sense.

The distinction between the fine arts and crafts dates from the 18th century or at earliest from the Renaissance, and though it exalts painting, sculpture, and art music almost above the human, it also devalues the crafts, and for that matter practical life in its entirety. It corresponds to the idea of the museum, and to the modern discipline of art history. The question for me is how to re-integrate art into human life, a process which I think the fine arts themselves have been obsessed with in post-modernism. Or perhaps: just don’t worry about this separation – just forget the fine arts, or at least the question of what they are – and make things that help people live intrinsically satisfying lives. What I mean by saying that art is the meaning of life is that the point for me is to let go of some pie-in-the-sky goal where we are headed to ecstasy – political ecstasy, or religious ecstasy, for example – and get more committed to being inside our experience. We need to commit ourselves to what and where we actually are. Art for me is about immersion in the everyday processes of living.

Speaking of Bataille’s works-you also see beauty in things that most spectators would, or may not see, in what is being viewed. Could you tell us about this?

Well, I find beauty in the most obvious places: flowers and birds and stars and things. But I think it’s kind of sad what’s happened to beauty. It was once one of the ultimate values, along with truth, goodness, justice. Now it’s been kicked downstairs to the department of hairstyling. I think that in the intellectual tradition, this devaluation corresponds to the idea that beauty is subjective, basically a matter of pleasure. That arises in the eighteenth century, which for one thing kicked out beauty as unscientific. The only way to empirically detect beauty is by looking in people’s heads: you can’t dissect a flower and find the beauty deep inside.

So first of all, I want to think of beauty not as subjective, and not as objective, exactly, but as a feature of situations in which subjects and objects are embedded. I define ‘beauty’ as ‘the object of longing’: it arises in situations where longing is called out. But people have dark longings, strange longings, perverse longings, as well as completely light, happy, healthy longings. Even things like power plants, factories, weaponry: these are expressions of human longing: for things, or perhaps for sheer destruction. And so at their heart is beauty. I wrote about the beauty of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, for example. I used to work right near it. I could see it out my office window. At first I kept thinking “how repulsive.”

Then I started seeing the amazing clouds of steam in different weathers, the gigantic hourglass-shaped stacks, in a different way. When I got a new job, I missed Three Mile Island.