<nettime> The problem with politics and war

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

As another major war begins in the Middle East many are asking how to limit the damage and destruction, the horror.

It's not so very foolish to look backward five hundred years for the roots.

Europe's survival mentality goes back more to 1500 than to ancient Greece and Rome, which were largely forgotten ruins before being resuscitated for the purposes of the 1500 agenda.  That agenda was the Cold War with Islam, punctuated by lots of hot wars (a situation similar in some ways to today).

In 1452, the year Leonardo of Vinci was born, the European church issued a proclamation "Dum Diversas," Latin for "until otherwise," permitting the enslavement of non-Christians.  (It was still forbidden for Christians to enslave other Christians; and, because all slavery was known to be evil, and was the obvious villain of both Testaments, the enslavement of non-Christians was only being allowed on a temporary basis.)  The main reason for allowing slavery was war.  Winning war required resources, and that sometimes meant cheap labor.  

The church was, in a sense, by Dum Diversas granting its approval and support to the war effort, while at the same time knowingly placing its own eternal legitimacy at grave risk.  "Until otherwise," went the rationale, because by absolving slavery's perpetrators of eternal perdition any institution which does so risks its own.  And they knew it.

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Not so very long after that proclamation we see the first birth of modern philosophy, many say, in the form of Machiavelli's Il Principe: The Prince.  Its first publication was a few years after Leonardo's death (1519), and Machiavelli's (1527) for that matter, in 1532.  Wikipedia says there was a version, perhaps circulating, as early as 1513 (three years before Leonardo fled for France).  The Florentine Republic fell to the restored Medici prince circa 1512, which created risk for both Leonardo (who fled) and Machiavelli (who was imprisoned and tortured, disbarred, then eventually partly rehabilitated and allowed to write).  

Leonardo and Machiavelli had collaborated on various projects, as fellow employees of the government of Florence, in 1502-04 including a mission to consult with and assist Cesare Borgia in the Romagna and, closer to home, dig a giant trench to divert the Arno and defeat Pisa by depriving it of water.

Leonardo started painting his famous untitled portrait, which in English is called Mona Lisa, in 1503.

What if this smiling portrait is also on one level a "mirror for princes," a work of political instruction both visual and verbal, scientific and imaginative, not so very unlike that of the younger Florentine intellectual?  

Since the portrait is unlabeled, and having no essay by Leonardo's hand to accompany and explain it outright, some call this question unanswerable and thus verboten.  However that might be a mistake.  Maybe Leonardo left it unlabeled out of cautious intent, since books and people talking about the unalienable rights of art and science (like a proto-First Amendment) were often burnt in his day, as well as before and after his day including now, indeed going all the way back to the first living cell on the planet.  Divulging one's location or intention can mean being eaten; or as Leonardo wrote it, the crab sits and waits for the clam to open its mouth then throws in debris to prop its shell open, sabotaging its defenses to eat it.  And, as Leonardo also wrote, the lion covers its foot-tracks (a ridiculous satirical comment to any attentive ear) so that its enemies will not know the path it has taken, after it has roared in the morning to awaken its cubs, three days after they were bor
 n, to the value of study, and thus inspired their acquisition of virtue through art and science.  Like all lions do, clearly.

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To what, then, can we boil Machiavelli down?  

Well, "might makes right" is close enough.  Yet to be subtler, we should notice how he advised every prince to think only of war, and never of the virtues of "an imaginary prince" who never really existed, a philosopher-monarch or poet-saint who rules by justice and peace not violence and lies.  This is, flatly put, the rejection by Machiavelli, with outrageous profanity, of Dante, the first great Florentine political poet, reformer, and modernizer, and moreover a rejection of poetry itself, it being one of the core attributes, or "cosi un principe immaginate," "the things of an imaginary prince."  Shakespeare opposed this rejection of Dante and modern imagination in both art and science, which was a wrongful rejection, through the personage of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who did use his imagination to try his best to discern right from wrong, did use poetry, and did practice ethical conscience, to the benefit, albeit tragically, of the commons even though his own bank account and bod
 ily form were risked and lost thereby.  

Attentive readers can fill in the blanks and follow up on whatever tangents they think best.  The bottom line is, Leonardo was modernizing Dante, from two centuries earlier, by way of a painted allegory engineered (not too strong a word) to defend right makes might in the new world of art and science, as an alternative to Machiavelli who rhetorically modernized the Roman Empire into a new logic of control by domination sans constraint of any kind.  Every tyrant since then has worshipped Machiavelli, might making right, and this has kept right makes might on its back foot all too often.  While the planet burns.

As for those of us who oppose tyrants, and abhor the credo that might makes right, we have too often bought into Machiavelli's horribly flawed reasoning and deprived ourselves of the support we need most: the smile, gaze, and gesture of La Joconde, who is the work of the third great European poet, overlooked even by the Euro-American T.S. Eliot, author of the Waste Land, providing a gravitational center of necessary power between Dante and Shakespeare, or if you will, Europe and its biggest offshoot.  Because as Leonardo wrote, "painting and poetry are the same art by different names which reach the imagination by different senses," adding for good measure "no one will understand my work for five hundred years."  

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The Mona Lisa in fact may be an allegory of Esperienza, who Leonardo called "the one true maestra" of all art and science of which he was the "disciple."  The unveiled smile and gaze of the sitter mirror those of Beatrice, the personified ideal whose respect has been earned through katabasis, and who is beheld after escape from Inferno and chastening by Purgatorio.  The bridge is the transit out of primordial time and place by which all art and science has emerged, and the garment into which the line of the bridge transforms itself is their present day, a fabric simultaneously woven by the hand (as Leonardo wrote every art and science is formed).  Said garment of inhabited science and art must be woven lightly, and harmoniously with both inner and outer environments, if the whole is to achieve a sustainable living state and avert monstrous tragedy.  That's it.  A rather elegant but simple literary layer, in which Leonardo was being aesthetically innovative in some ways while citing t
 radition deeply in others, it integrates and refines elements already found elsewhere in Leonardo's visual art (and writing) and parallels allegorically modern aspects of diverse contemporaries including Giorgione, Durer, Bosch, Michelangelo, and others.  Eminently plausible and even, now, probable.

This suggests moreover that La Gioconda is an allegory, both written and painted, of a mirror for princes in the service of right makes might.  It is the true counter-Machiavellian image, preceding its adversary by sensing the writing on the wall.  It shares the message of Hamlet: every agent, person, and citizen must practice imagination, conscience, and discretion even to the point of camouflage and service to the global commons.  Where Machiavelli advised that Fortune was a woman to be beaten and bullied, since experience shows how aggression is rewarded, Leonardo argues the reverse: to respect Experience and the role of Fortune (or chance) in how we learn, in both aesthetic and scientific realms, repudiating the vice of domination and pathological control, so that we can love and value virtue and thereby deserve esteem and success.  This is Dante modernized to refute Machiavelli's neo-deification of Caesar.  (And in Hamlet, all of Claudius' words and deeds are taken straight from
  Il Principe.)

How could Leonardo not have painted this personification, his own teacher, acknowledged source, last defense, and highest aspiration, after having written it?  How could none of us living after him, shockingly not one of us for five centuries, ever ask whether he did or did not paint his written allegory, not even in a single article or online chat comment, not once in the millions of books on the subject?  

History is how.  It fails a lot of the time, sometimes badly, and maybe even someday bad enough to destroy all life on earth.  Yet one can at least hope that maybe sometimes it doesn't.

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In any case, the time for never mentioning the true title of Leonardo's greatest work, the most famous artwork by any human, which he designed to end the war between Europe and Islam and all similar wars, by uniting humanity around what we all have in common and what we moreover share with all life even plants and other animals, that is, Esperienza, well that time of never mentioning it not even once is over now.  It's irrevocably in the text.

Encouragingly, despite all war, maybe the idea got into the text in time, early enough to help life on earth, and to help before life gets completely destroyed by machine power and the deluded souls who worship it, those for whom, as Joyce said, warning us so long ago, "machines is their cry."

No one has ever published this yet, this hypothesis that Mona Lisa is Esperienza; therefore it may be partly your responsibility too, dear reader, now that you have heard it, to oppose war sustainably by giving this new idea a hearing and a good one.  At least it might be.  It cannot be ruled out.

This shared responsibility, perhaps, applies because as of today, Reason (algorithm) and Authority (power), the two principles which have dominated the world since the dawn of cities, are between the two of them destroying the life itself of the planet (which Leonardo called its "vegetative soul" i.e. something about it that was not eternal or abstract but, like every living thing, could die).  Their rightful equal and sometime superior, which is certainly the origin and creator of both, Experience, as cited by Hamilton to conclude the Federalist No. 85 (as well as Blake that same year in his first chemical etching of word and image), must guide the third millennium, not absolutely but as first among equals, in order to prevent tragedy.  This means building not AI that experiences, which is impossible, but rather AI that respects, reveres, and complements human respect and reverence for experience.  Information machines, or to be precise the information machine system layer, must be 
 created in accordance with Leonardean ethical principles rather than Machiavellian ones if we are to avoid a global tragedy of the commons.

A key corollary worth noting here is the connection between Esperienza and mindfulness, the latter being often described as "conscious non-judging awareness of present-moment experience" (and of which the former arguably knew something by way of Sufism, Al-Khwarizmi, Rumi, Avicenna, and Averroes, all of whom were read by Dante and woven into the Italian vernacular of his Commedia alongside esperienza cf. Paradiso I&II).  Mindfulness and Esperienza are of joint importance in preserving and restoring global individual health and sustainable wellbeing.  In fact they are a bit like bookends, one which sought to reform early modernization in its primary form of institutional tradition, by restoring experiential awareness as such to its lost and proper place, and the later, second bookend working, unknowingly of the first strictly speaking, to similarly reform and balance technological power.  The two can even be seen and understood to be acting as twin or mirror allegories with multiple f
 eatures in parallel: the smiling vita contemplativa, at once incarnate of the vita activa, gesturing to every person the sustainable way and its experiential path, once in 500 BCE and again in 1500 CE.  

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To understand what has been written above another way, you may wish to try reading Walter Pater's paragraph about La Joconde, a paragraph which Yeats called the first modern poem and hence the common source of all later work by Joyce, Eliot, Wilde, Proust, and others.  Notice how he (Pater) uses the word "experience" twice, and consider these two usages alongside his earlier essay Diaphaneite.  Then reassess, informally, all writing done after early 20th c. European poetry, be it prose or verse, theory or practice, continental or non-continental, in terms of how it addresses or ignores the word, theme, and concept of "experience" in whatever language.  Feel free to use Martin Jay's "Songs of Experience" (2005) and "Magical Nominalism" (2025) for added context and myriad helpful references.

Because the horror of war is too great for us to pass up any plausible means of avoiding it.

All best, &c.


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