Defending a dirty word: Harper Review contributor Emma Schmidt recounts a time when she walked into a bar and encountered a sign encouraging patrons to abstain from all talk of politics. The sign was laden with a special irony given her company—students and professors of political theory. The upcoming holiday of Thanksgiving is when many of us will treat the words on that sign as gospel. But Schmidt cautions that deliberation serves a crucial function. Citing the work of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, she reminds us that prohibiting discussion of politics in an effort to stave off potential conflict goes hand in hand with authoritarianism. Political disagreement tends more toward chaos than a ruthlessly imposed order. Schmidt proposes that we consider a third attitude towards political discussion, one put forth by Hannah Arendt and inspired by the local forms of governance that sprang up during the American Revolution. Perhaps these structures could guide us to maintain both freedom and authority, preserving both disagreement and our republic.
Declan Rexer, managing editor
Electronic angel: The Renaissance Society’s student committee tip-toed into Bond Chapel on Saturday night. Instead of joining the downstairs audience in folding chairs that replaced the usual pews, we climbed to the choral balcony, adorned by organ shoes, hymn books, and mahogany wood. Standing in the narrow organ enclave that bridged the two sides of the balcony, I felt the tremors birthed from Lyra Pramuk’s digital altar below us: a computer centerpiece snaked and circled by wires and cables, pedals, and bells.
In a trance, Pramuk’s long, vampiric fingers caressed the walls of the chapel with their shadow. Her voice rose, bellowing like a gothic foghorn. Pramuk’s one-woman show felt like somewhere between the Cocteau Twins and Caroline Polacheck, yet nothing like either, her computer-woven orchestral lines interlacing with her repeating, microphone voice. The result is a sound that is incredibly dimensional, holy.
Pramuk’s performance reminded me of Émile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence.” When we momentarily leave our profane lives and come together, our energy creates a unified, sacred space, often amplified by music and dance. I felt the electric energy around me, the need to writhe on the floor in dance, the need to spin and crash into bodies melodically, the need to cry, scream, laugh with strangers.
As the performance ceased, I felt pure, birthed from the cage of mahogany wood and digital hymns into the cold night air.
Mimi Mikhailov, contributing editor
Found in translation: In a recent article published in The Guardian, Iceland’s former prime minister and current up-and-coming Icelandic-language crime novelist Katrín Jakobsdóttir deplored the potential disappearance of her country’s official language. The menace behind this decline: artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of English. More specifically, internet English, that peculiar register of American vernacular now encountered in a globally dominant and emotionally vacuous popular culture. Whether in social media posts, digitally available music, or streamable television series, this artificial yet viral syncretism of minority expressions and digital colloquialisms has crept out from our devices and into our mouths—and not only the mouths of us in the Anglophone world. With more than half of all websites being in English and some seventy percent of the world having internet access, understanding English is no longer impressive but necessary for basic prestige in the digital age.
Throughout my time in Western Europe, English à la américaine has been omnipresent. Whether in Brussels, communicating between an Iranian coastal engineer from Oman and a Russian leaving Latvia in dodgy circumstances, whether on rural trains, providing an innocuous alternative in linguistically fraught and divided countries, whether in French classrooms, where American research is presented in the original English, whether upon passing a student bar in Ghent, where a garage band spoke to each other in a fascinating Dutch-English argot, “the American language” is a colorless through current that most would prefer not to use, yet cannot live without. European attitudes toward America lie somewhere between reverence, horror, and indifference. It is thus rather surprising to encounter American language and culture treated as something substantial, even honorable.
One such surprising situation befell me out in the provinces in the Netherlands, in the railroad town of Amersfoort. Continue reading here.
Brady Santoro, senior editor
Image: Peder Balke, The North Cape by Moonlight, oil on canvas, 1848 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).