Thanks for our bracket-maker Paul Davidson, here’s what we have so far (as of a few days ago):
OK, yesterday‘s winner: what can you say? Leonardo da Vinci vs. The guy who did Piss Christ. The funniest argument in all the comments came from Anonymous, who wrote:
Serrano. Any schmuck can paint the Mona Lisa, but good luck finding someone who can piss in a jar.
After reading that, I really wanted to give it to the pisser, but ultimately I was swayed by Mark’s rational argument: “I suspect that Da Vinci would have appreciated Piss Christ himself, and, in fact, I think that Da Vinci might have created such a work of art himself… had they (or he), of course, invented either photography or plastic by then. So, Da Vinci could have done Piss Christ, had he only had the tools, plus all of the other cool stuff that he actually did, so . . . Da Vinci.”
And now, for today we have another contest between two modern French intellectuals. No, Claude Levi-Strauss is not the blue jeans guy. And, no, Raymond Aron is not Stanislaw Ulam’s brother-in-law.
As a political scientist, I’d rather see Aron, but it may be that Levi-Strauss would be the better speaker. Aron was great, but his big shtick was anti-Communism and that’s pretty much a dead issue today, whereas Levi-Strauss’s work continues to be relevant to social science. Either one would have a tough slog against Leonardo or the guy who did Piss Christ.
P.S. As always, here’s the background, and here are the rules.
Claude Lévi-Strauss .
I don’t know how anyone could give a talk on anti-communism. I would think the two sayings: “better dead than Red” and “kill a commie for mommie” cover all the bases. How do you stretch that out for an hour? Plus “Lévi-Strauss” is a cool name and easy to read if you’re scanning a book page. It reminds me a bit of the name of my best friend: “Bernard Gucci-Elvis”.
According to wikipedia, Aron’s full name was Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron. So they are at par with each other as far as the coolness factor of their christian names.
Maybe I’m not getting the joke, but such blatantly hateful and violent sayings about communists is surely not anything this blog wants to support?
Relax commie, just reliving some classic cold war humor. Nobody’s going to bother the faculty of Madison Wisconsin Community College’s Sociology department in any way whatsoever.
Commies never seem to get the joke. While Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Pol-pot, Mao, Kim Il-sung and Che, were known for everything from rabid antisemitism, to killing their own people by the 10’s of millions, to purposefully starving millions, to mass extermination of people wearing glasses, working people to death in prison camps on an industrial scale, and describing at length in their diaries how much they loooove killing people who don’t think like them; none of them were ever accused of having a sense of humor.
I wonder if that’s a coincidence?
That’s hardly fair to Aron’s body of work. At the time, being an anticommunist intellectual was quite remarkable, but Aron wrote on nearly every aspect of 20th century society and politics. He wrote brilliant memoirs, great books about industrial society, and an exegesis of Clausewitz’s On War that is actually understandable, reversing mid century practice, which generally involved rendering elegant French ideas into Germanic opacity. In that respect, he was the Madame de Staël of our time, mine anyway.
I meant to say anticommunist French intellectual.
Levi-Strauss’s signature book was The Raw and the Cooked. Everyone know everything is cooked now, so there is (was) no there there. Aron helped win the Cold War – was neither Cold nor War, but was a WIN.
So, Aron by a bus stop.
You are clearly not an anthropologist haha.
As a scientist, I would vote for Claude Levy-Strauss especially due to his original contributions to the knowledge of kinship structures in man (his thesis)with the help of the mathematician André Weil he met in the US by the time of WW2 and who showed the role of group theory in such structures.
Yes! I really liked Lévi-Strauss attempts at formalizing his claims. He’s always been a well known anthropologist and ethnologist, whose early works encouraged the use of mathematics in ethnology and hence probably had some impact on the usage of social network analysis for ethnological research.
Levy-Strauss inspired Foucault, my favorite French intellectual (I’m disappointed he isn’t included in the bracket). So, Claude, for sure.
Levi*
Autocorrected…
I’m (honestly) curious about how you think Levy-Strauss has made good contributions. I always had a hard time making sense of anything he says.
His contribution were in a sense reproducible, in that Jean-Claude Gardin wrote a computer program that wrote an essay that Levi-Strauss claimed was something he wrote (see below).
But then rather than pay Levi-Strauss maybe Andrew could just obtain a copy of that program?
I do remember Gardin offering a postdoc position to do the same for Jacques Derrida at the International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structuralist Studies, University of Toronto 1982 and perhaps others. Not sure if Foucalt was in his future plans, but my sense was Foucalt was sort of in between the two groups with opposite views at that meeting (one trying be science like the other not being interested in constraining interpretation in any way).
The computer program enabled a trained graduate student to create papers like papers previously written by a chosen author. Gardin took one one these (likely the best) to Levi-Strauss and asked him to read it. After going into his office to read the paper he later emerged – “This is definitely one of my papers, but I can’t find a copy anywhere in my office. Can I keep this copy?” Now this happened or Gardin, lied to me repeatedly and convincingly (which I doubt).
This made me laugh.
Raymond Aron would be much better seminar speaker imho.