In This Way I Was Saved by DeLeeuw (2009)

“I enter the lobby of Claire Nightingale’s apartment building, here to tell her I have murdered her only son.”

There was a certain part of this book, less than halfway through, just a few pages long: a short story within a novel within the novel, which, while I was reading it, made me feel that I could forgive anything else the writer did from that point on. The book did become more ordinary after that, and also at times extraordinary in ordinary ways. But there was redemption in that one passage.

I’m On A Boat!

“Vous êtes embarqué.” Pascal

Following this evocative frontispiece quotation, Hans Blumenberg begins his extended essay Shipwreck and Spectator (1979) — recommended to me by Alexei — thusly:

“Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of a perilous sea voyage.” (p. 7)

Blumenberg then marshals plenty of great examples, dating back to the Greeks, in support of his thesis. As someone who never saw the sea until I was ten years old, I wonder what metaphor spoke to the landlocked peoples of the world down through history. Probably the road. But a road is there because others have already gone before. Biblically it’s the wilderness: that’s probably the canonical terranean analog to the sea.

“In this field of representation, shipwreck is something like the ‘legitimate’ result of seafaring, and a happily reached harbor or serene calm on the sea is only the deceptive face of something that is deeply problematic.” (p. 10)

Why is the safe harbor problematic? Because it’s too comfortable. Those who stay ashore remain uninvolved and dispassionate spectators of life. The embarked find themselves too involved in sheer survival to reflect on the experience. Only the shipwrecked, temporarily stranded in the midst of the perilous voyage, can speak from experience about what seafaring is really like.

“The next metaphorical step is that not only are we always already embarked and on the high seas butalso, as if this were inevitable, we are shipwrecked… It is the almost ‘natural’ permanent condition of life.” (p. 19)

Each of us is by turns at sea and shipwrecked, living and reflecting on life, simultaneously a member of the cast and a member of the audience (to invoke a related metaphor that Blumenberg also elucidates). Back to the landlocked: if wilderness corresponds to sea, then what corresponds to shipwreck? Turning again to the Biblical archetype, I’d say it’s captivity: the captive, forced to stay for an indefinite interval in a heterotopia, reflects on the voyage. Denizens of veld and prairie, of forest and mountains, of steppe and tundra: we are always wandering through the wilderness and always held captive.

“In the reception histories of metaphors, the more sharply defined and differentiated the imaginative stock becomes, the sooner the point is reached where there seems to be an extreme inducement to veer around, with the existing model, in the most decisive way and to try out the unsurpassable procedure of reversing it… A reversal in the strict sense would be present only if the helpless man borne along on his plank at sea were the initial situation, that is, if the construction of a ship were only the result of self-assertion proceeding from this situation.” (p. 75)

Is such a metaphoric reversal possible, where the always-already of both embarkation and shipwreck no longer serve as the starting point? Science and technology and commerce have continually made the ship more seaworthy, more comfortable for the privileged voyager — almost as if the ship were itself the safe harbor. But somebody must have made a start of it, at least once in history. Blumenberg cites Paul Lorenzen:

“‘If there is no attainable solid ground, then the ship must already have been built on the high seas; not by us, but by our ancestors. Our ancestors, then, were able to swim, and no doubt — using the scraps of wood floating around — they somehow initially put together a raft, and then continually improved it, until today it has become such a comfortable ship that we do not have the courage any more to jump into the water and start all over again from the beginning.’” (p. 77-78)

To make a fresh start — abandon ship, jump into the sea, grab hold of a plank — seems increasingly foolhardy. Even those who do plunge in keep the ship within hailing distance, waiting to be hauled back aboard when the seas get rough. Blumenberg concludes:

“Thus to think the beginning means, in the context of the comparison, to imagine the situation without the mother ship of natural language and, apart from its buoyancy, to ‘reperform,’ in a thought experiment, ‘the actions by means of which we — swimming in the middle of the sea of life — could build ourselves a raft or even a ship.’… But the sea evidently contains material other than what has already been used. Where can it come from, in order to give courage to the ones who are beginning anew? Perhaps from earlier shipwrecks?” (pp. 78-79)

[Tomorrow or the next day I'll indulge myself in some self-quotation relevant to Blumenberg's book, as I try to psych myself up for NaNoWRiMo.]

Wading Out of the Shallow End

“How vividly I remember the first moments of my vocation as a clown!”

- Michel Huellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, 2005

Because my grounding in philosophy is shallow, I’m subject to being blown by the shifting winds of philosophical popularity. When the winds die down, so does my enthusiasm. Is it just my limited attention span, or is the whole object-oriented thing starting to run out of gas? I’m not militantly dysphoric about it: it doesn’t piss me off sufficiently to debunk it, even if I had the skills to do so. Instead, it’s just starting to leave me cold. My sagging passion for the objects isn’t, I don’t believe, reducible to a waning attraction/repulsion exerted by the main practitioners — though I don’t deny that’s part of it. Also, I’ve not become a convert to eliminative materialism or antiphilosophy, in part because I don’t really know enough about these alternative visions of speculative realism or have enough depth to evaluate them critically.

I think it’s my respect for depth that’s dampening my enthusiasm.

The object-oriented approach has introduced me to ontological and metaphysical topics about which there is a long history of speculation and critique. I’d never been strongly attracted to these investigations before: why now? Partly it was the blogging buzz: the flurry of posts and counter-posts, the personalities, the alliances, the feuds. These psychosocial impetuses have about run their course, at least for me. Do I have what it takes intellectually to dig a deeper foundation? Do I have the desire? The commitment? The sense of calling?

When I started paying attention to the speculative realism discussions they struck me as good material for fiction. One theorist projects himself into an arche-world before the evolution of humanity; another theorist goes the other direction, into a world from which man has fallen extinct; a third imagines a world populated by autonomous objects bumping into each other. Then there are the accelerationists and the singularity enthusiasts and the anti-speciesists and the apocalyptists, who appear from time to time on the periphery of my attention. It wasn’t the ideas of these people that captivated me but the posthuman metaphyical scenarios they conjured, with their resolute realism veering into otherworldly weirdness.

I just finished reading Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. Clearly he’s been captivated by these ontological speculations:

“Their aim, of course, was first to do away with money and sex, two pernicious factors of which they had been able to recognize the importance through the collective human life stories. It was equally a question of casting aside any notion of political choice, the source, they write, of ‘false but violent’ passions. These preconditions for a negative order, indispensable as they were, were not, however, sufficient in their eyes to enable neohumanity to rejoin ‘the obvious neutrality of the real,’ to use their frequently cited expression; it was also necessary to provide a concrete catalog of positive prescriptions. Individual behavior, they note in Prolegomena to the Construction of the Central City (significantly, the first neohuman work not to have a named author), was to become ‘as predictable as the functioning of a refrigerator.’ Indeed, while writing down their instructions, they acknowledged as a main source of stylistic inspiration, indeed more than any other human literary production, ‘the manual for electrical appliances of medium size and complexity, in particular the video player JVC HR-DV 3S/MS.’” (pp. 312-313)

The ontological speculation worked for him too, at least to an extent: he’s able, by the end of the book, to bring the prehuman and the posthuman, the raw biological instincts and the sheer technological efficiency, into stark contrast. He’s a novelist: he doesn’t have to choose sides in the philosophical debates; he can run thought experiments and see where they lead, letting the ambivalence run its course. And he doesn’t have to be a full-on philosopher to do it either. But he does have to be a full-on fiction writer. He had to devote himself to writing that novel, immersing himself in that fictional world long enough to bring something coherent and compelling out with him. As I said, to an extent he succeeded.  And he did remind me of something in the way he treated these ideas. Or maybe he reminded me of someone. Is being a novelist no different from being a clown, a shallow and cheap entertainer who jumps haphazardly from one schtick to another? Is it possible to regard clowning as a vocation?

Nuclear physics and astrophysics and evolutionary biology captivate me from time to time, but I know I’ll never sustain enough passion, enough intellectual commitment, to become a pro. It’s the same with philosophy for me: stimulating, challenging, even captivating for awhile, but then it drifts into the background, its call on my attention receding into background noise.

Right now it’s the noise itself that I hear. When it recedes like that, noise becomes nearly indistinguishable from silence. If I listen carefully enough, or maybe if I stop listening too carefully, something distinct will begin to emerge. Hopefully.

Who Is She Really?

“When Mrs. Dervain reached her hand out to me I thought she was extending a common kindness.”

That’s the first line of a novel I wrote. Mrs. Dervain is a central character, but I purposely revealed very little about her. I wanted to see what sort of person readers inferred her to be — likable or not, physical characteristics, and so on — based on the minimal information provided in her words, gestures, and actions. Those few people who have read the book seem to find Mrs. Dervain fascinating, even though they tend to ascribe very different characteristics to her.

I began writing this novel, abandoned it for maybe a year and a half, then came back to it. The other two main characters had prominent roles in the earlier fragment; Mrs. Dervain I introduced as a new character. I had passed the halfway point in the writing when I read again part of the older manuscript. It included an extended section featuring another woman character. I wondered: what if I turn this other woman character into Mrs. Dervain? With only the slightest forethought or planning I created a big piece of Mrs. Dervain’s back story simply by assigning her name to this earlier character.

Immediately I began seeing Mrs. Dervain in a different light. Now that she had been merged with this earlier character her gestures and remarks seemed to resonate more deeply, revealing greater complexity in motivation and attitude. But her deepened character resulted from an arbitrary, even capricious move on my part. Had this earlier textual fragment involved a very different story line, merging the woman character into Mrs. Dervain would have turned her into a quite different person.

Awhile back I wrote a post about “cyranoids,” — people who, in conversation, speak words fed to them via earpiece from someone else. The cyranoids’ interlocutors invariably ascribe a whole and integrated personality to a flesh-and-blood individual who is voicing the thoughts of two, three, even ten different people.

A reader could decide that I, the writer, should have last say in asserting what Mrs. Dervain is really like. But I was just writing the words, making it up as I went along. Editing tidied up some loose ends and eliminated some inconsistencies, but this was just surface polishing. I don’t know Mrs. Dervain any better than any other reader of the book.

Fictional Objects

Discussions of fiction typically begin with whether or not we must postulate fictional objects, with the defender of fiction attempting to establish that we absolutely cannot do without them, and the opponent attempting to show how we can manage to avoid postulating them through paraphrasing our apparent discourse about them and reconceiving our apparent experience of them.

- from Fiction and Metaphysics by Amie Thomasson, 1999, p. 5

Thomasson begins by observing that fictional characters are best thought of not as imaginary people but as abstract human artifacts, the result of human intentionality not dependent on a specific material manifestation, similar in this regard to scientific theories and laws of state and melodies. Even the clock is an abstract artifact: it can take a variety of physical forms while performing the same function.

In the first half of the book Thomasson explores what sort of entity a fictional character might be. Neither real (in the sense of having a spatiotemporal location)  nor ideal, neither material nor purely mental, the fictional character presents a challenge to traditional ontological categories. Does Sherlock Holmes exist in the world because the texts of books make reference to him? No: he would continue to exist as long as people remembered him. If there were no readers left in the universe who could make sense of Doyle’s books, would Holmes still exist in the texts? No, says Thomasson: the existence of a fictional character described in a book depends on there being readers who understand the text.

What is a fictional character’s identity? Is it the sum of all descriptions in all books written about him? Or are the words just a partial description of a character that’s more fully formed in the writer’s imagination? What if a writer other than Doyle were to import Sherlock Holmes into his own work and provide additional or even conflicting descriptions of him — is this the same Holmes, or a different one? If an author presents a character who shares all the key character traits identified in other literary appearances by Holmes, should the reader assume that this character is in fact Holmes even if the author doesn’t name him or assigns him a different name?  Thomasson acknowledges:

The prospects seem dim for drawing out a definitive set of necessary and sufficient conditions for character identity. But that does not place us in any worse a position than we already face in the case of formulating identity conditions for actual humans. (p. 67)

What counts as an entity? Tomasson proposes to accept all spatiotemporal entities and mental states, as well as anything that depends on them in any way. The first clause accounts for physical entities and intentionality; the latter for abstracta, intentional mental events, imaginary objects, and entities dependent on joint intentionality of multiple individuals or collectives such as governments and theories and fictional charcters. The everyday world is populated largely by entities that are neither purely physical nor mental but are dependent in part on both.

Surging Into the Inhuman

I have always unconsciously sought out that which will beat me down to the ground, but the floor is also a wall.

- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, 1992

The attraction for me is remote: letting go of all craft and judgment, all reason and restraint, casting aside the distinctly human, in order to ride the primal forces surging up through the organism. For Land there’s no liberation here other than the liberation of the zero, of death. Going posthuman doesn’t mean achieving some sort of superhuman freedom and power: it’s posthumanity in the rawest sense of death and extinction. Humanity is a blight on the planet and an excruciating burden on the individual: the sooner it’s gotten rid of the better. Worldwide warfare might be the ultimate solution if it could just shake itself loose from controlled rational discipline and just let it rip. For Land only an orgy of slaughter will do.

Presumably people who assert this sort of “virulent nihilism” never gain access to the levers of destruction, and one wonders whether they’re having too much fun talking about self-immolation actually to plunge in the knife. Surely there’s a puerile rhetorical thrill in writing and reading about the horror and the mayhem, the psychosis and the putrefaction, the collapse. Maybe Land’s book should be admired strictly as a worthy exemplar of a particular genre of philosophical writing instead of being given serious consideration as a way of living — or of dying.

If someone came to my practice wanting to “get different” in this particular way, would I help him? Would I encourage my client to cultivate full commitment to this particular form of extreme difference? Or would I try to dissuade and distract him? Again, maybe if I could reduce this posthuman impulse to an intellectual exercise, maybe even a personal lifestyle experiment: nothing serious, nothing he won’t grow out of eventually. Ride it hard, get some mileage out of it, have some fun, write a book about it while the energy lasts. After the surge exhausts itself maybe we can move on to something else…

Harman’s Carnival of Objects

The carnival tent rustles in the evening breeze, disturbing the moods of those who approach. Inside the tent are swarms of humans and trained animals; there are jarring sounds, strange ethnic foods, and shadows. For a few moments the music of a concealed organ is countered by the rumble of thunder, as emaciated dogs begin to whine. A small fight breaks out, soon to be halted by a sneering, scar-faced man. Suddenly, hailstones strike the roof of the tent like bullets, frightening everyone: the visitors, the fortunetellers, the unkempt and corrupted security guards, the monkeys sparkling with costume jewelry. At long last, the organ player’s morbid inner anger takes command, and he begins an atonal dirge that will last throughout the storm.

It’s not just the beginning: Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics reads like a work of philosophy written inside an alternative steampunk world, its streets teeming with mongrels and halfbreeds, its shops chock-full of mismatched collections of things both mundane and fantastic, both tangible and imaginary. This is a wonderful book. Is it wonderful philosophy? I couldn’t say; I have no reliable basis for rendering such a judgment. I regard metaphysics as a genre of fictional nonfiction in which the writer elaborates an alternate reality, a vast mise-en-scene on which any number of actors might later take the stage and multiple plots might unfold. In constructing such a reality it’s the scope and clarity and even the audacity of the thinker’s imaginative vision that prevail. Did I find Harman’s reality stimulating, thought-provoking, engaging? Absolutely. Is it true? I have no idea.

In his prior book Tool Being (which I haven’t read), Harman describes a world populated by countless separate objects that overlap one another in a multi-layered and crowded space. Though objects can encounter and even use one another, they are also permanently withdrawn from one another in vacuum-sealed isolation. In Guerrilla Metaphysics Harman explores how these essentially insular objects can possibly interact with one another.

I think the gist is this: Objects never interact directly; they do so only vicariously. An object possesses various properties or features or notes — eventually Harman says that the object is its notes. But it’s possible for one object to encounter another object’s notes as if these notes had been cut loose from the object itself. These loose notes float through a sort of plasm or charged medium that extends itself within the empty space separating discrete objects from each other. The objects don’t interact directly; rather, their separate notes encounter each other in the mediatory plasm. There the split-off notes from different objects might combine with each other, and it’s through this combination of notes that new objects are created. And in this creation it becomes clear that the notes never really disconnected themselves from their original objects. Rather, these objects have become components of the new composite object, linked to the whole through those specific notes that encountered each other in the plasm.

Now it might seem that this sort of creative encounter between discrete objects violates Harman’s basic premise that objects never encounter each other directly, especially since an object never really cuts its notes loose from itself and since an object is ultimately the same as its notes. Harmon says that what seems to be an external encounter between different objects is really taking place inside the “molten core” of an emerging new composite object. The original objects retain their integrity as separate objects, but as soon as their notes reach across the plasm to each other they’re already occupying a newly-formed inner space opening up inside the composite object that’s in the process of forming itself. The component objects remain essentially isolated from each other even inside the new composite object, however: their mutuality is limited to those particular qualities or features or notes that the composite object uses in holding itself together as a separate thing. So, for example, a bridge might use the structural strength of the steel of which it’s made yet fail to encounter the steel’s shine or color or molecular structure or ability to inspire football players. Or the phrase “a cedar is a flame” conjures up a composite metaphorical object that blends certain notes from the cedar and the flame (shape, jagged edges, etc.) while disregarding others (color, temporal persistence, destructiveness, etc.). The steel bridge and the metaphorical cedar-flame possess their own distinct essences that aren’t reducible to the notes of their component parts. And the component objects are never “used up” in the composites into which they’ve been absorbed: they always retain their own discrete objecthood, sealed away from those specific notes that are used in assembling the composite object.

One consequence of Harman’s object-based reality is that the relationship between people and objects becomes a subset of the more general relationships among objects. So the relationship between a human thinker and the object of his/her contemplation isn’t categorically different from the gravitational relationship between a star and a meteor in some remote galaxy that’s never been detected by humans. In Harman’s universe, the meteor-star relationship is always vicarious: the two objects never encounter each other directly, never expose one another’s hidden essences. And the relationship between meteor and star always occurs inside of a composite meteor-star object. By extension, the human thinker never encounters the essence of that which s/he contemplates — the essence of things always recedes from human scrutiny. Further, human thinking about a thing never takes place from an outside, “objective” point of view — it always occurs on the inside of a merged thinker-thing composite object. I’m not sure how this thinker-thing composite object differs from Heidegger’s being-there or Meillassoux’s Correlation. Thinking-about, being similar to any other inter-object relation, encounters only those notes of the thought-about object that are useful in assembling the composite object called a “thought.” It seems to me that Harman’s realism doesn’t overcome epistemological uncertainty and relativism; rather, Harman just makes it less remarkable, less privileged, more similar to all other uncertain and relative relationships among the objects populating the universe.

Harman’s realism doesn’t privilege tangible material objects over imaginary objects. A metaphorical tree-flame and a centaur have essences and notes and can enter into vicarious relationships with other objects in ways are not fundamentally different from objects like horses and table lamps and movie theaters. If that’s so, and if the essence of every object withdraws from direct contact from any other object, then how can the object called “my mind” ever distinguish between a tangible material object and an imaginary object? In constituting an object, sensory notes encountered phenomenologically don’t seem privileged over other kinds of notes that manifest themselves in thought and imagination and words. On another post recently Sam asked me whether “God” counts as an object in Harman’s scheme. I said that it does, but I’m not sure how to determine whether the God-object is more like a horse or a centaur.

The other thing that struck me while reading Harman’s book is that I’m not sure how he accounts for the destruction of objects. I can see how the interrelationship of my mouth and a candy bar exploits only certain notes of the candy bar — taste, mouthfeel, nutrition — while disregarding the true essence of the candy bar. But as I eat, digest, and metabolize it, does the candy bar persist, along with its notes and its essence? Or does it eventually cease being a candy bar altogether? If so — if by eating it I destroy the candy bar — then hasn’t the candy bar entered into a direct encounter with my digestive system? Harman acknowledges in his book that he doesn’t talk about death and destruction. Still, I wonder how he accounts for these events that seem to remove objects from existence altogether rather than just incorporating them into composite objects.

I think that’s enough for now. Obviously I’ve skipped over vast tracts of Harman’s text and ideas by focusing on the parts that come to mind as I sit here writing this post. I’m also trying to think about the book from the inside, exploring the contours of the reality Harman has laid out for me. I generally resonate with the ideas, and I’m eager to think about implications for an “object-oriented psychology.” If readers would like clarifications I’ll do my best. I’m also open to correction if I’ve misconstrued or caricatured overmuch.

God the Strange Attractor

Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet labored and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed: “in the beginning.” But if such talk — talk of the beginning and the end — has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if “the beginning” has blocked the disruptive infinities of beginning, then theology had better get out of its own way.

So Catherine Keller begins her extended midrash on Genesis 1:1-2. I’d read her ideas before as summarized by John Caputo in his The Weakness of God, and since I’ve written extensively on the Biblical creation narrative I find this sort of thing more interesting than I might otherwise. I don’t read much contemporary theology, but based on these two books it seems that paradox seems to rule the day. Keller and Caputo apply the strategies of Lacan, Derrida, and Zizek to religion; by exposing the irresolvable contradictions that reveal themselves texts and ideas about God, new truths — or rather new interpretations — bubble up through the gaps. Keller is better at it than Caputo, at least based on what I’ve read. As Adam Kotsko observes in his thumbs-down response to Caputo’s book, “The chapter on Genesis is admittedly somewhat interesting, but that is probably because the whole thing is cribbed from Catherine Keller.”

The general idea driving Keller’s thesis is that the first two verses of the Bible describe not the manly exercise of might to create a universe ex nihilo, but rather the evolution, emergence, and self-organization of a creatio cooperationis. The key textual moves are these:

• “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void,” is how most translators render the first verse of Genesis. Keller follows the eleventh century Jewish commentator Rashi by reading it thusly: “When, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void.” This way the formless void already exists when God the creator arrives on the scene, making the story correspond more closely to Greek and other Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies.

• The formless void, or tohu vabohu, isn’t a vacuum, but rather a hodgepodge, a farrago, a blooming buzzing confusion. It’s the immanent flux, the primal source of inchoate and protean difference from which all things form themselves.

• The word for God in Genesis 1 is elohim. It’s a plural noun that usually takes a singular verb conjugation. Commentators often construe the plural as an indicator of plenitude or intensity, as if this one god is so far above all other gods as to merit the all-inclusivity of a plural ending. Keller suggests that the plural be regarded as an indicator of an “originary multiple without individuation,” a “swarm” a “differential unity,” a “co-creative collective.” Interpreted in this way elohim is not unlike the tohu vabohu of the pre-creation universe.

• I’ve heard Christian preachers reduce the Bible’s message to its first four words: “In the beginning, God.” In Hebrew, however, the verb precedes the noun: “In the beginning created…” Keller follows the Kabbalistic Zohar in exploring this translation: “With the beginning __ created God.” The empty space between “beginning” and “created” is an unnameable creative process of creativity that is itself divine and that gives form to itself along with the rest of the universe. Per Keller: The creativity itself does not become; it makes a becoming possible… In other words, our responses become us. (p. 181)

I respect the effort that Keller puts into these related moves to immanentize the transcendence of the Biblical creation story. In my view, while each of these textual moves is clever and could possibly represent what some earlier version of the text might have said before it got “theosized,” the Hebrew text as written doesn’t really support these alternative wordings. Still, if you’re looking for a way to reconcile the Judeo-Christian texts with the way the universe really did come into existence, then Keller offers a coherent and only mildly distorted rereading. I make similar small moves to tell my own version of the Genesis 1 story, so I can relate.

If she really believes that this is what the Bible narrative is saying, then she must accept that those early anonymous writers really were inspired beyond any possible human knowledge. And to regard the process of emergence itself as divine is not without precedent in the history of ideas. But why not just go all the way and assert that the writer of Genesis 1 is describing a materialistic process of creation where the gods don’t have any role whatsoever?

I’ll conclude with a particularly evocative passage from Keller’s book:

The Jewish delinearization of the time of creation opens up space for a biblical theology of creation, in which the chaos is neither nothing nor evil; in which to create is not to master the formless but to solicit its virtual forms. Such solicitation, when expressed as divine speech, may sound less like a command than a seduction… If this divine speech no longer blasts royally into a vacuum, how would we then interpret the iterative utterances of the “let there be”? Less, perhaps, in the monotone of command than in the whisper of desire? (pp. 115-116)

History is Whose Story?

Yesterday on the steps of the US Capitol the evangelical leader Rick Warren stirred a bit of controversy by concluding his inaugural invocation with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer — a distinctly Christian prayer of course. I was surprised more by how he began:

Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you, it all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory. History is your story. The Scripture tells us “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our god; the Lord is one.”

“Hear, oh Israel” — this is the beginning of the Shema from Deuteronomy 6. Having wandered through the wilderness for forty years after fleeing Egypt, the Jewish people stand on the east bank of the Jordan, ready to cross over into the land of Canaan, also called Palestine. Moses has just delivered the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, and now he’s giving the people a set of final instructions and warnings before they surge across the river to take what God says is rightfully theirs. It’s at the beginning of the very next chapter that we read Moses’ instructions regarding what should be done with the current occupants of the land:

“when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.” (Deuteronomy 7:2)

Is it mere coincidence that Warren chose of all things the Shema as the opening theme for his invocation at this particular juncture in history? I don’t think so.

NaNoWriMo Win!

The hallway was surprisingly silent. Glaring but ineffective lights lined the ceiling above the corridor where the footsteps of a slight, uniformed figure hurried to reach the end. The nurse could not see far enough into each cell to distinguish the drugged and sleeping patients. She was quite sure that she did not want to be there.

Thus begins Progress to Grey, a new novel written this month by Kenzie Doyle. This is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The challenge is to write an entire novel of 50,000 words or more, from start to finish, during November. Kenzie finished this afternoon, with 4 days to spare: word count = 50,055. That’s 2,000 words a day. Plus she continued to get all her homework done and, best of all, she didn’t whine about it.

Here’s the info on the email announcement sent by the author to the first invited readers:

Tagline: Instability is the only path away from self-delusion

Rating: PG-13 to R

Warnings: Violence, depictions of insanity, weird messages, etc.

Dedications: Rachel and Kerry, for also participating and letting me blab about my word count to them.

Sophie and Alexandra, for supporting me and just being great friends who are more objective, since you weren’t panicking about your own stories.

My parents, for actually thinking that this is an interesting project and putting up with flurries of self-loathing and bragging.

And to various authors, actors, musicians, and directors, for creating worlds and characters that I could steal and change, and for providing a soundtrack for my writing.

Apologies: I’m sorry if I suck at talking to you enough, especially during November, and for bragging SO MUCH. Also, I’m sorry that this isn’t edited and probably has a lot of sentences and scenes that make no sense. (I’m also sorry that I’m making so much of a bit deal about this for no reason…uh…yeah.)

And now…Here it is!!

The Creativity of the Multitude

The possibility of democracy is emerging for the very first time.

Always a bit slow on the uptake, I just read Hardt & Negri’s Multitude, their 2004 follow-up to Empire, a book on which I previously engaged in a series of tumultuous post-and-parry sessions. H&N argue that in late capitalism the knowledge worker has replaced the factory worker as the hegemonic form of labor, not through numerical domination but by signaling a change in how all work can “work.” Manual labor produces material goods, characterized by limitation and hence by scarcity. Knowledge work, by contrast, produces immaterial goods that can be distributed to everyone without natural limit, its spread restrained only artificially constructed barriers like intellectual property laws. Not only that, but through dissemination the products of knowledge work actually burgeon and multiply rather than being dissipated. This is the power of the “multitude” – the singular and collective ability of people, working individually and in collaboration with one another, to create an ever-expanding congeries of immaterial cultural products which collectively H&N call “the common.”

I skip to the last thirty pages of Multitude, where the authors present as close as they get to a proposal on how democracy is going to emerge as both a political and an economic force from within the existing world order. What restrains the expansion of the common, say H&N, is the sovereign power which capital exercises over the means of production. According to the tradition of sovereignty, as elaborated by fascist social theorist Carl Schmitt, only the One can rule, whether that One be the king, the aristocracy, or the people. Without the dominance of the One, society descends into chaos.

Schmitt insists that in all cases the sovereign stands above society, transcendent, and thus politics is always founded on theology: power is sacred. The sovereign is defined, in other words, positively as the one above whom there is no power and who is thus free to decide and, negatively, as the one potentially excepted from every social norm and rule. (pp. 330-1)

According to H&N, this theory of political sovereignty applies to economic management as well:

The capitalist is the one who brings the workers together in productive cooperation. The capitalist is a modern Lycurgus, sovereign over the private domain of the factory, but pressed always to go beyond the steady state and innovate… To sovereign exceptionalism corresponds economic innovation as the form of industrial government. A large number of workers are engaged in the material practices of production, but the capitalist is the one responsible for innovation. Just as only the one can decide in politics, we are told, only the one can innovate in economics. (p. 331)

For H&N, the unrestrained expansion of the common depends on the intrinsic creative force of the multitude being released from the ideology of sovereignty. It’s not that the knowledge workers must form themselves into a manifestation of the One, whereby they can then exert the sovereignty of Labor; rather, the multitude succeeds by remaining true to its multiplicity, its limitless burgeoning channeled only by mutual collaboration among its singular constituents. What’s needed to achieve this infinite expansion of the common isn’t a unitary executive chain of command driving down through the hierarchy but rather a flat organizational architecture fueled by “common resources, open access, and free interaction” (p. 337). H&N see in the growth of the internet and cybernetics industries exemplars of this sort of “open source” development of an electronic commons.

Perhaps we can understand the decision making of the multitude as a form of expression. Indeed the multitude is organized something like a language. All of the elements of a language are defined by their differences one from the other, and yet they all function together. A language is a flexible web of meanings that combine according to accepted rules in an infinite number of possible ways. A specific expression, then, is not only the combination of linguistic elements but the production of real meanings: expression gives a name to an event. Just as expression emerges from language, then, a decision emerges from the multitude in such a way as to give meaning to the whole and name an event. For linguistic expression, however, there must be a separate subject that employs the language in expression. This is the limit of our analogy because unlike language the multitude is itself an active subject – something like a language that can express itself. (p. 339)

It’s this ability of the multitude to arrive at emergent decisions that fuels both economic innovation and democracy. Sovereignty, based on the myth of the One Who Rules, has in fact always depended on the consent of the ruled. If the ruled withhold this consent they don’t descend into chaos; rather, they achieve the absolute democracy and self-rule of the multitude.

People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude… We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. (p. 352)

I’m all for the multitude of knowledge workers being freed to control their own work and to generate their own innovations in love for one another and for the commons. But aren’t the limitations to H&N’s proposal fairly obvious? First, the workers suddenly becoming aware that the emperor has no clothes isn’t going to topple the reigning sovereign. Capital controls the work because capital pays the workers. It’s money, not ideology, that gives the owners their power over the workers.

Second, money isn’t just a controller of workers; it’s also a motivator. Knowledge workers may grind out the work through fear of losing their jobs, but most also attempt to excel in hopes of getting a raise in pay. The vaunted explosion of worker creativity in information systems and biotechnology was fueled by nerds who hope to get rich off of their cleverness, to invent their way into the plutocracy. There’s no question that the already-rich investors get more than their fair share from entrepreneurial ventures, but some knowledge workers really do make a lot of money from their ingenuity. The most visibly successful techie entrepreneurs are propelled less by the freedom to create something intrinsically excellent than by the possibility of accruing enormous financial rewards far exceeding what they could earn in decades working a regular job.

Third, the capitalists’ sovereignty over innovation doesn’t operate by executive fiat and exception. In the contemporary capitalist firm Innovation is a core corporate objective, part of the work at nearly every level of the organizational structure. For decades so-called intrapreneurship has been incorporated into business practice, providing even line-level ops workers with opportunities to collaborate and to put forward clever new ideas for consideration by management, ideas that might earn the innovative worker at least a small sliver of the pie if the idea goes into production and distribution. Certainly it’s capital that calls the shots: the financial projections attached to the proposed innovations, the expected reductions in costs or increases in revenues, the anticipated return on investment — these are the criteria by which management selects some ideas for development while rejecting others of equal or even superior intrinsic merit.

Fourth, I guess I’m just not persuaded about the incipient potential creativity of the multitude waiting to be unleashed. Certainly there are workers whose ingenuity is thwarted or diverted by the power of money. Productive and inventive workers often find themselves forced either to accede or to resist pressures from finance and marketing, pressures that would have them relax their standards in order to generate more revenue. Resistance to economic innovation often tends toward resistance to innovation generally and a guildlike protectionism among workers. Often the most innovative and energetic workers find themselves lured by jobs in management and marketing, jobs that offer both more control and more pay, jobs that drain creative passion away from innovations that benefit the common and toward those that benefit capital. However, management and marketing people aren’t particularly innovative either. If workers owned the means of production, if knowledge workers reaped the financial benefits of their innovations without having to pay off the investors, would passionate creativity begin to explode through the multitude? I doubt it, but I’d like to give it a try anyway.

It’s possible that H&N have gotten things backward, that instead of leeching away the creative energy of the multitude, capital is really the motivator, the engine, and the agent of innovation. That’s what neoliberalism asserts. Maybe without the propulsive force of capital, humanity would sink entirely into routine and repetitive contentment. The financial markets create money out of nothing through investment and lending; so too perhaps does the entrepreneur and the CEO create creativity out of nothing in order to make those investments and loans pay off for themselves and their companies as well as the capitalists. Only through a continually renewed stream of products does the economy keep growing, do share values go up among speculators, do existing loans get rewritten for ever bigger amounts. This sense that capital rather than biopower is the engine of innovation has been the subject of recent speculation among bloggers about accelerationism and capital unbound. Perhaps, instead of inhibiting the creativity of the multitude, capital is creating that very creativity, the current crisis actually hastening the move toward the singularity of a fully recursive, self-creative posthumanity.

In counterpoint, here’s an excerpt from an essay by Mario Tronti:

What’s missing? A political interpretation: serious, lucid, realistic, non-ideological, non-conventional, non-electoralist. The famous transformations of work are like the equally famous transformations of capitalism: when everything has been said, nothing has changed. The storytellers of the social come and describe the state of affairs: the liquid instead of the solid, what melts into air rather than what sediments on the ground, the whole that must become flexible, the production that becomes molecular, the power that is everywhere and nowhere like the holy spirit, because it is micro and no longer macro, and then the immaterial, the cognitive, the politics that is bios, made to measure for the asocial individual – forget about women and men of flesh and bone who organise themselves for the struggle. With limitless patience we read and listen, careful not to let what we don’t know slip through our fingers.

Winnicott’s Transitional Object

In order to follow along with Psychoanalytic Field’s latest project (which now seems indefinitely delayed), I read D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971). As Winnicott states in the first sentence,

This book is a development of my paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ (1951).

Positioned between inner subjective reality and the objective outside world there is an intermediate space in which we play and work, discover and create, interact with others. Winnicott says that this space opens up in infancy, when the child first comes to realize both that his mother isn’t merely an extension of himself and that the temporarily absent mother will return. At first the space between infant and mother is occupied solely by the “transitional object” — the teddy bear, the security blanket, le doudou in French — that for the child represents the absent mother, or more specifically, the mother’s breast. Winnicott summarizes the “special qualities” of the infant’s relationship with the transitional object:

1. The infant assumes rights over the object, and we [i.e., the mother and other adults] agree to this assumption. Nevertheless, some abrogation of omnipotence is a feature from the start.

2. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated.

3. It must never change, unless changed by the infant.

4. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression.

5. Yet it must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something to show it has vitality or reality of its own.

6. It comes from without from our point of view, but not so from the point of view of the baby. Neither does it come from within; it is not a hallucination.

7. Its fate is to gradually be allowed to be cathected, so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. By this I mean that in health the transitional object does not ‘go inside’ nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’, that is to say, over the whole cultural field.

In interacting with this object, the child makes the transition from regarding it as something subject to his omnipotent control, to being destroyed or banished, to surviving this destruction and coming into its own existence as a distinct entity. The child’s interaction with the transitional object symbolizes his relationship with the “good enough” mother who , in allowing herself to be engaged by the infant while gradually establishing herself as a separate person, enables the child to move gradually into his own subjective agency. Instead of alternately controlling, being controlled by, and destroying the things and people that occupy the space around him, the child learns how to play with them, to use them, and to create with them.

So now I’m thinking about how Winnicott’s ideas jibe with Lacan’s. For Lacan too the separation of the infant from the mother is a crucial developmental phase. In Lacan, however, this separation seems invariably traumatic. Rather than the mother easing the separation process as in Winnicott’s formulation, for Lacan it’s the father who enforces the infant-mother separation. In Winnicott, the transitional object, on which the child lavishes both its affection and its destructive cruelty, represents the mother’s breast. For Lacan, le petit objet a represents that which the child has lost from itself in being separated from the mother and that which the mother seeks to complete herself; namely, the phallus. For Winnicott the transitional object serves a temporary function in ushering the child into appropriate relationships with real people and objects in his surroundings. For Lacan the object persists forever in sublimated form, either as the external object of desire or as oneself embodying the other’s desire.

If the narcissistic infant perceives the mother, and specifically the mother’s breast, as part of himself, then it’s conceivable that he would regard the transitional object as representing that part of himself which has been cut off, or castrated. Is it conceivable that the (Lacanian) phallus = the (Winnicottian) breast? This equation would work, except for Lacan’s insistence that objet a isn’t what the mother has but that which she desires. The infant perceives that his mother has lost her desire for him because of something he has lost. In Winnicott, the lost object isn’t what the mother desires and searches for, but what the infant desires and has now been detached from him.

There’s a reasonably coherent body of empirical evidence supporting Winnicott’s position: children with secure attachments to their mothers are more comfortable exploring strange situations — what Winnicott might call unfamiliar intermediate territories — than are children with insecure or ambivalent maternal attachments. I don’t know what empirical research has been done on transitional objects.

I’ll probably write a second post about Winnicott’s book, focusing specifically on the intermediate territory between subjective and objective realities.

Doubting Lacan’s Imaginary-Symbolic Split

“What will you do with all that I say? Will you record it on a little thing and organize soirées by invitation only? — Hey, I’ve got a tape by Lacan!”

Lorenzo Chieza begins his 2007 book Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan with this funny little remark from Lacan’s Seminar XVII. Even the act of numbering the seminars with Roman numerals reveals a kind of reverence reserved in America for only the most momentous of events, like the Oscars and the Super Bowl. Lacan would seemingly have been in an excellent position to acknowledge the importance of the other’s gaze in establishing self-image. I want to write maybe two or three posts about this book before sending it back to the library along with whatever memories I might have retained of it.

Though Lacan’s description of the etiology of self-image diverges from empirical evidence (1), his contention that self-image begins as a reflection of others’ image of the self is well-supported by the research (2). What I have a hard time grasping is Lacan’s radical distinction and split between the Imaginary and the Symbolic in the formation of the self. Recognizing one’s image in a mirror depends on the very same sort of identification with the perspective of the other that’s foundational to language acquisition. Adopting others’ perspective on how they see you is of a kind with adopting how others talk about you. Visual images may affect the viewer in ways that may elude conscious awareness or verbal description. But the same could be said for mood or body language or tone and volume of speech. For that matter, it’s possible to listen to speech, to understand its meaning, and to respond with intelligible verbalization of one’s own, and still the personal impact of the other’s words may resonate at a level beneath the threshold of conscious awareness.

The difference, presumably, is this: the Imaginary presentation of self-as-reflection creates the illusion of one’s wholeness and completeness, whereas the Symbolic representation of self-as-description cuts the self up into a multitude of separate verbal signifiers. Also presumably, the creation of the Imaginary whole self precedes the symbolic castration that resolves the Oedipus complex and embeds the self in the social and linguistic order dominated by the name-of-the-Father. Language separates the self from its idealized self-image and shatters its unity into a multiplicity of words. At the same time, the self attempts to restore its lost wholeness in part by assembling an ego-ideal: a collection of features, and the words for describing these features, that project (to oneself and to others) the semblance of wholeness within the Symbolic order. Of course there’s always something missing, not least because language itself is a radical divider of wholeness, and so the self continually strives to restore this lost and irretrievable ideal self-image through a variety of futile efforts.

As I noted in the prior post, children typically don’t recognize their own reflection until after they’ve already begun both understanding and speaking language. And as shown in a recent experiment, magpies demonstrate their ability to recognize themselves in the mirror not by preening proudly before an idealized self-image, but by trying to remove the splotch of paint that makes the image less than perfect. I would expect that a child or a magpie would first recognize herself not by seeing in the glass an Imaginary ideal and applying it to herself, but by noting how performing discrete physical movements of individual body parts result in the same movements being performed by the reflection’s corresponding body parts. In other words, recognizing one’s reflection depends on discriminating parts from whole.

Now of course it wasn’t mine to experience, but I observed no evidence of trauma associated with my daughter’s learning to use language. She seemed quite eager to demonstrate her understanding of others’ words and especially her newfound ability to make herself understood verbally. Like other infants she added words rapidly to her vocabulary. It’s true that her first spoken word was “Da,” by which she firmly and forever established herself in my personal Symbolic order. But her second word was “green,” from which I’m unable to derive any sort of general psychological insight. Much of this early language facility seemed unrelated to her issuing demands for getting her needs met. Of course language acquisition followed hot on the heels of her ability to crawl/walk/run, her increasing adeptness at manipulating physical objects, her imitative ability, her ability to perform increasingly complex tasks, and so on. Language emerged in her repertoire, on developmental schedule, as one of the many skills every normal human acquires at an early age. And she seemed very pleased indeed with her ever-increasing competence.

At the same time, each of these skills didn’t arise fully formed: a lot of repetition was involved, a lot of trial and error. Learning to walk means falling down again and again. It’s sometimes painful, more often frustrating — a consistent source of negative feedback debunking one’s perfect and complete self-image even before language acquisition begins. But little kids seem to exhibit surprisingly little frustration in learning to speak. Our daughter demonstrated admirable tolerance of her parents’ persistent inability to understand what she was telling us. Patiently she would repeat herself again and again until at last we got it; then she seemed just as pleased with our learning as we were with hers.

In short, the Ideal-Symbolic split, the Oedipal castration, the loss of completeness — none of our daughter’s supposed early trauma made itself manifest to us, none of it seemed to make her unhappy. Instead, she seemed quite pleased with herself and her ever-expanding human competency. I don’t recall her spending much of her early childhood developing self-discourses intended either to describe or to repair her shattered Ideal ego. That didn’t happen until, oh, about ten years later.

Prop O’Gandhi by Doyle

At quarter to nine in the morning Prop O’Gandhi went into his Laboratory and turned on the lamp. Prop liked to crank the 3-way bulb all the way up to 200 watts. Sometimes he’d stop at 150 watts, especially when he was worried about the electric bill. Sometimes one of the filaments would burn out in the 3-way bulb, marooning him in a world of 50 watts. Then he would go to the utility closet, once again find that he had no spare 3-ways in there anyplace, and once again wonder what happened to the extra one he’d bought the last time he went to the superstore. Prop O’Gandhi would return to his Lab and think in embittered darkness. He could never stand it for more than two or three days, though. Annoyed but resigned, he’d get in the car and head to the superstore for a replacement 3-way bulb, plus the spare that never seemed to be in the closet when he needed it.

This is the first paragraph of my unpublished novel Prop O’Gandhi. Patrick Mullins is now reading it, and he suggested that we discuss his reactions to it here at Ktismatics. Though no one other than Patrick will have read the book, perhaps the conversation will pique the casual reader’s curiosity. Patrick’s commentary begins thusly:

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“I started ‘PROP O’GANDHI’, and now realize why it took me so long to get started: Once you find out why Ulrich Daley chooses this alternate name, it makes sense within the text, and becomes very charming and funny. But as a TITLE–use it if you feel that strongly about it, but it does not come across there as ‘charmingly eccentric’, but rather tacky, like a kind of entry name into a contest for a new name for peanut butter or something. I can’t say much more now, because it’s going to develop, and I’ve just gotten to the coffee break part. But the character’s ‘loser-identified’ status thus far will be all the clearer with a number of words and sentences and phrases that are sleeker, smarter and sharper–these are somewhat related to what I’ve described about the title, so that we finally have one thing to thank Michel Houellebecq for, who is good about writing about depression and dingy places of torpor and dark intertia, but in a style where it lasts at least for the duration of while you’re reading it. These are not extensive revisions I’m talking about, and think it flows along very nicely. I’m going to be interested to see how it moves INTO something portalic or not. Thus far, it is talking about doing that but not quite getting there, unless Prop O’Gandhi in itself is already the beginning of the portal. An example of what I meant to make it sharper is that there is one false sentence even within the matter of its being fiction: that about the patronage system and Mozart being dead. This does not render it ‘neither here nor there’, but rather was once the answer and now maybe there is another answer, these alternatives of going in to choose from musical objects, some of which were not usable (this was very clever), but the word ’songs’ is not, for example, good after using a sophisticated term like ‘musical object’. Until you find the right one, even just ‘piece’ would do. Otherwise, it is like when I played the first of the Bach 3-Part Inventions at an offertory at church when I was visiting once when I was about 22, and my beautiful but half-educated cousin Mary Helen, of honeyed Southern belle tones, came up to me and said ‘Pay-att, I liked your song…’ You know, things like that. It becomes funnier when the wife and daughter come into it, and the fact of the LAB’s haphazard structure within your house is hilarious. You are an interesting kind of weird-oh, and all I can do for it is suggest ways to ’spiff it up’ if you happen to want to. What you do to make it public after that I am not sure. You may have to find some sort of hand-in-glove situation such as I have with Christian. While I did send a few things out in the ‘pavenment-pounding’ way early on, the very idea of what I think you meant by ‘portalic’ precludes expecting that to be much more likely to succeed in terms of targeting markets than just driving on the freeways endlessly and getting a narcosis from it.

“But this is already one movement, and you can mention whether others have read it and what suggestiong they have made if they have made them. I’m apparently the first that demanded a printed copy, and this already ‘publishes’ it–from the moment you printed it out–beyond what it was just sitting here in all the grease of the internet. Another step was taken by me when I intuited that I must read the autobiography of Edith Evans in order to read your book with ME reading it. That turns out to have been right. It also helped me get over the dread of reading something with a title like that. This title made me think the book would not be very good. Where it goes I don’t know, but there is already much that is good in it. The Mozart concerto probably needs a fuller traditional description–just a few extra pieces of informantion, like the key, not just Kochel numbers, characters of the different movements, why it stands out somehow from the others that the character would have also heard, etc. And things like ‘the world’s coffee’ don’t have quite the right sound, but those are the kind of details that take only the smallest alteration to make sparkle. Again, like Houellebecq, whom I do not otherwise like, you want to get a sharp picture of the shabby (when it is) as well as a sharp picture of the sharp (if it becomes more so, although there may be a subtext of non-publication that afflicts you and/or the character), rather than a shabby picture of either. But most of it is not shabby, and I was able to see the connection between your blog-writing and this more formal writing–it’s often very silvery, and so therefore especially here, it all needs to be that way.

“You could possibly use ‘prop o’gandhi’ in a subtitle, or ‘the story of Mr. Prop O’Gandhi’, etc., which is better than without the ‘Mr.’, because it is the pun status of the invented name by itself that is going to annoy with its identification with ‘propaganda’, unless you want people to be wondering when the propaganda comes in at some point, or if that is, in fact, all of what the text is.”

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Patrick’s ongoing commentary and related conversation about the book continue in the comments…

Normalcy and Deviation

The most decisive conceptual event of twentieth century physics has been the discovery that the world is not deterministic. Causality, long the bastion of metaphysics, was toppled, or at least tilted: the past does not determine exactly what happens next… A space was cleared for chance.

- Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 1990

In doing empirical psychology, the researcher attempts either to extend the applicability of a new or existing theory to a new range of phenomena. The researcher proposes a concrete hypothesis by adapting the abstract general theory to the specific empirical situation under study. Does the researcher’s hypothesis provide a better explanation of the data than the generally-accepted alternative explanation? This question is usually evaluated statistically, by investigating whether the pattern of empirical results varies significantly from what would be expected if the hypothesis were not true.

It’s often the case that the psychological researcher is exploring new territory: the kind of data s/he collects hasn’t previously been investigated scientifically. In that case the generally-accepted alternative is known as the “null hypothesis.” Usually the null hypothesis doesn’t take the form of a precise prediction about how the results will turn out; rather, it states that the results will not deviate from what one might expect to find by chance alone, unaffected by the theoretical forces which the researcher claims will affect the results in some predicted way. But “by chance alone” doesn’t mean unalloyed randomness; rather, it means that the results are expected to conform to the statistical distribution typically found in similar kinds of data sets. This is the normal distribution, better known as the bell curve, in which most subjects cluster around the arithmetic mean while the rest tail away toward the right and left of the mean. So if the mean for one group of subjects differs significantly from that of another group as predicted by the researcher’s hypothesis, taking into account the observed amount of random variation in the bell curve, then the null hypothesis is rejected: statistically it’s very likely that something other than randomness is affecting the results.

Why is it that, for so many measures of measurable human performance, randomness takes the shape of the normal distribution? In grad school and in subsequent practice I don’t recall that anyone ever really asked this question, let alone answered it satisfactorily. Here are some quotes from famous statisticians related to the issue, as cited by Ian Hacking in his fascinating book on the history of statistical thinking.

In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law; and the special question as to who shall commit the crime depends of course upon special laws; which, however, in their total action, must obey the large social law to which they are all subordinate. And the power of the larger law is so irresistible, that neither the love of life nor the fear of another world can avail anything towards even checking its operation. (T.H. Buckle, 1857)

The irrational approval given to the so-called Calculus of Chances is enough to convince all men of sense how injurious to science has been this absence of control. Strange indeed would be the degeneration if the science of Calculation, the field in which the fundamental dogma of the invariability of Law first took its rise, were it to end its long course of progress in speculations that involve the hypotheses of the entire absence of Law. (August Comte, 1851)

‘By chance’ — that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under purpose. (Friedrich Nietzsche in Zarathustra, 1884)

Collective tendencies have a reality of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces, though of another sort; they, likewise, affect the individual from without, though through other channels. The proof that the reality of collective tendencies is no less than that of cosmic forces is that this reality is demonstrated in the same way, by the uniformity of effects. (Emile Durkheim, 1897)

I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by ‘the law of error.’ A savage, if he could understand it, would worship it as a god. It reigns with severity in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob the greater the anarchy the more perfect is its sway. Let a large sample of chaotic elements be taken and marshalled in order of their magnitudes, and then, however wildly irregular they appeared, an unexpected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been present all along. (Francis Galton, 1886)

Galton turning over two different problems in his mind reached the conception of correlation: A is not the sole cause of B, but it contributes to the production of B; there may be other, many or few, causes at work, some of which we do not know and may never know… This measure of partial correlation was the germ of the broad category — that of correlation, which was to replace not only in the minds of many of us the old categories of causation, but deeply to influence our outlook on the universe. The concept of causation — unlimitedly profitable to the physicist — began to crumble to pieces. In no case was B simply and wholly caused by A, nor indeed by C, D, E, and F as well! It was really impossible to go on increasing the number of contributory causes until they might involve all the factors of the universe… Henceforward the philosophical view of the universe was to be that of a correlated system of variates, approaching but by no means reaching perfect correlation, i.e. absolute causality. (Karl Pearson, 1914)

Chance itself pours in at every avenue of sense: it is of all things the most obtrusive. That it is absolute is the most manifest of all intellectual perceptions. That it is a being, living and conscious, is what all the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self can self can scarce muster the hardihood to deny. (C.S. Peirce, 1893)

Contacting the Real

The theory of primary and secondary qualities seems to belong to an irremediably obsolete past. It is time it was rehabilitated.

So Quentin Meillassoux begins his extended essay After Finitude (2006, English translation 2008). Briefly, a primary quality is a property of the world (e.g., the shape and size of an object); a secondary quality is the way a person subjectively experiences a property of the world (e.g., the color of an object). It’s become almost axiomatic to deny the very possibility of detecting primary qualities because all our awareness of the world is mediated by our sensations of these properties: we can detect the world only in the way we detect its presentation to us. This isn’t to say that the world doesn’t exist outside of our awareness of it: it’s just that we have no direct access to the world.

Meillassoux finds it ironic that, at the very moment in history when science began developing methods for decentring knowledge of the world from human subjectivity, philosophy began insisting that no such absolute knowledge could be attained. In its persistent linguistic turn, continental philosophy asserts that truth is a property not of the world but of statements, and that the words we use to describe the world gain their meaning not from the world but from the structural interconnections between the words. Language came to be understood as an interconnected system of meanings detached from the features of the world the words purport to signify. So the word “hot,” as well as the concept to which the applies, gains its meaning not from the features of the world but from its contrast with the word “cold” in ordinary social discourse. Meillassoux observes that this disconnect between signifiers and signifieds is dogmatically asserted by philosophers even as scientists refine the measurement systems intended to disconnect the words “hot” and “cold” from their manifestation to our senses.

[T]he Copernico-Galilean decentring carried out by modern science gave rise to a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy… While modern science discovered for the first time thought’s capacity to accede to knowledge of a world indifferent to thought’s relation to the world, philosophy reacted to this discovery by discovering the naivety of its own previous ‘dogmatism’, seeing in the ‘realism’ of pre-Critical metaphysics the paradigm of a decidedly outmoded conceptual naivety… [S]cience’s decentring of thought relative to the world led philosophy to conceive of this decentring in terms of thought’s unprecedented centrality relative to the same world. Since 1781 (the date of the 1st edition of [Kant's] Critique of Pure Reason), to think science philosophically has been to maintain that philosophical Ptolemaism harbors the deeper meaning of scientific Copernicanism. Ultimately, philosophy maintains that the patently realist meaning of the claims of modern science is merely apparent, secondary, and derivative; the symptom of an attitude that is ‘naive’ or ‘natural. (p. 118f.)

Meillassoux regards the Ptolemaic counter-revolution in continental philosophy as a big mistake. He maintains as philosophically sound one of the fundamental premises of empirical science:

all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object itself. (p. 3)

He’s not very thorough in justifying mathematics’ unique status in achieving direct and absolute contact with the Real; rather, he tends toward proclamation:

it is meaningful to think (even if only on a hypothetical register) that all those aspects of the given that are mathematically describable can continue to exist regardless of whether or not we are there to convert the latter into something that is given-to or manifested-for. (p. 117)

In reading along with Meillassoux my first reaction was to minimize the distinction Meillassoux makes between language and mathematics. Isn’t mathematics, like language if not more so, a structured system of signifiers decoupled from the things in the world they signify? Doesn’t any single number or operation derive its meaning from the others in the larger system? Doesn’t advancement in scientific understanding depend in part on the human invention of new kinds of mathematics; e.g., the number zero in the 2nd century or so, the contemporary situation in physics where future advances in N-dimensional string theory depend on mathematical theory that hasn’t yet been completely thought through and formalized? Perhaps most importantly, aren’t the mathematics of scientific formulae and hypotheses mapped onto theoretical constructs that must be stated linguistically?

While I still think all that’s true, I think it’s fruitful to follow Meillassoux’s lead and extend the recision of the philosophical Ptolemaic counter-revolution from mathematics to language. Like mathematics, language is a tool for separating the world from our direct experience of it. When something “goes without saying,” it’s inextricable from subjective and intersubjective experience — this is how infants and other animals experience the world. To say something about the world is to call someone else’s attention to a particular feature of the world. To arrive at interpersonal understanding of meaning is at least in part contingent on arriving at an agreement about what the words refer to in the world. Science formalizes the process of linguistic precision by continually refining the “operational” definitions of terms. Operationalization is an intersubjective process, but the agreement refers specifically and precisely to the way in which a term describes a feature of the world that’s not dependent on the perceptions of any particular scientist. Operationalization entails a formalization of language that veers toward mathematics, further blurring the distinction between these two registers of thought.

It’s not necessary to assert that mathematics or language represent the real world, or that mathematico-linguistic structure mirrors the structure of the world. It’s also not necessary to assert a raw materialism, in which scientific knowledge entails the direct apprehension of the world as it presents itself to us. Meillassoux observes that

very few truths can be attained through immediate experience and that generally speaking, science is not based upon simple observations, but rather upon data that have already been processed and quantified by ever more elaborate measuring instruments. (p. 114)

Scientific assertions about the world aren’t just refined observations; they are, says Meillassoux, “part of a cognitive process.” It’s “only” necessary to claim that empirically-grounded cognitive processes, of which science is a particularly refined version, make it possible to describe the world in a way that’s at least partially separable from our subjective and intersubjective experiences of it.

Meillassoux acknowledges that he’s not able — yet — to demonstrate the ability of mathematics to give us access to the primary qualities of the world. Rather, he’s making an argument for pursuing a line of philosophical investigation broadly construed as “speculative realism.” He wants to reopen to serious inquiry “the most urgent question which science poses to philosophy;” namely, the possibility of arriving at true thoughts about the world that don’t depend entirely on human subjective thought processes. Meillassoux wants to answer this question through mathematical realism; I think he should extend this exploration also to linguistic realism.

Why Saint Paul?

Strange enterprise.

That’s how Alain Badiou introduces his short 2003 book Saint Paul. Badiou is an atheist; Paul was a self-appointed Christian apostle. But, Badiou avers,

I never really connected Paul with religion… For me, Paul is a poet-thinker of the event, as well as one who practices and states the invariant traits of what can be called the militant figure. He brings forth the entirely human connection, whose destiny fascinates me, between the general idea of rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-practice that is this rupture’s subjective materiality. (pp. 1-2)

But Badiou doesn’t focus on whatever Paul reveals of his own personality in the letters he writes. In fact, Badiou observes that Paul rarely talks about himself, his blinding vision of Christ on the road to Damascus that converted him from persecutor to leader of the nascent Church, his mystical communion with God, the signs and wonders that Luke attributes to him in the Acts of the Apostles. Instead, Paul talks about the nature and consequences of the “Christ event”: the death and resurrection that opens up the possibility of a new life.

The subtitle of Badiou’s book is The Foundation of Universalism. Badiou identifies parallels between Paul’s circumstances as a Jew living in the Roman Empire and our own situation. Israel was an exclusionary culture, separated from the surrounding nations by geographic boundaries, ethnic purity, and distinctive laws and traditions and cultic practices. In contrast, Rome was the great assimilator, absorbing little countries like Israel into itself. Rome didn’t care about local traditions as long as everybody paid their tribute to Rome and submitted to its overarching political and military authority. Greece provided a theoretical rationale for Rome’s pragmatic universalism: every local difference constitutes an imperfect manifestation of the one ideal — hence local variations aren’t really important.

Badiou regards the contemporary scene as a bland synthesis of exclusivity and universalism, in which tolerant multi-culti “communitarianism” becomes the universal solvent.

What, in effect, does our contemporary situation consist of? The progressive reduction of the question of truth (and hence, of thought) to a linguistic form, judgment… ends up in a cultural and historical relativism that today constitutes at once a topic of public opinion, a “political” motivation, and a framework for research in the human sciences. The extreme forms of this relativism, already at work, claim to relegate mathematics itself to an “Occidental” setup, to which any number of obscurantist or symbolically trivial apparatuses could be rendered equivalent, provided one is able to name the subset of humanity that supports this apparatus, and, better still, that one has reasons for believing this subset to be made up of victims. All access to the universal, which neither tolerates assignation to the particular, nor maintains any direct relation with the status — whether it be that of dominator or victim — of the sites from which its propagation emerges, collapses when confronted with this intersection between culturalist ideology and the “victimist” conception of man.

What is the real unifying factor behind this attempt to promote the cultural virtue of oppressed subjects, this invocation of language in order to extol communitarian particularisms (which, besides language, always ultimately refer back to race, religion, or gender)? It is, evidently, monetary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty accommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms. (pp. 6-7)

Badiou seeks a better way for the individual subject to participate in the universal. As far as Badiou is concerned, the only new political phenomenon of any import in France is LePen’s ultrarightist “France for the French” exclusivism. In contrast, the national government struggles with the issue of whether Islamic schoolgirls should be able to wear the headscarf as an expression of cultural distinction, or whether this subjective expression of identity constitutes a fundamental right of the universal citizen.

What is being constructed before our very eyes is the communitarization of the public sphere, the renunciation of the law’s neutrality. The State is supposed to assure itself primarily and permanently of the genealogically, religiously, and racially verifiable identity of those for whom it is responsible… The law thereby falls under the control of a “national” model devoid of any real principle… Abandoning all universal principle, identitarian verification — which is never anything but police monitoring — comes to take precedence over the definition or application of the law…

How clearly Paul’s statement rings out under these conditions! A genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient world: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28)! (p. 9)

As in the days of the Roman Empire, the contemporary scene is composed of a loose agglomeration of communitarian entitities subsumed under a universal economic system that not only tolerates but profits from these distinct identity groupings. As a consequence, the multiple identitarian communities never join forces in pursuit of more important universals like truth and beauty, justice and love. Badiou wants to investigate Paul’s praxis of shifting subjectivity from identitarian communitarianism to participation in the universalizing event.

Le Fin Absolue du Monde

Film is magic and, in the right hands, a weapon.

The other day, at Dejan’s behest, I watched an episode of the TV series “Masters of Horror” directed by John Carpenter. Entitled “Cigarette Burns,” the episode focuses on the quest for a long-lost film that allegedly induces profoundly disturbing, perhaps even fatal effects in anyone who views it. The whole episode can be seen in six YouTube installments, the first of which is HERE. The setup would make a good assignment for screenwriters or short story writers…

* * *

The butler ushers Mr. Sweetman into the office of Mr. Ballinger. After some small talk Sweetman contemplates a movie poster hanging on the wall and says to Ballinger: “Le Fin Absolue du Monde. The Absolute End of the World.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know it played once: opening night premiere of the Festival International du Cinema Fantastique de Sitges. Violence erupted in the theater. When Hans Backovic the director tried to get the film out of the country, the government seized it and destroyed it, not realizing it was a work in progress and his only print. He quit the business, and the film’s only been seen by that one audience.”

“You’ve done your homework, but the government didn’t destroy the film.”

Sweetman observes another wall decoration. “What’s this?”

“A prop from the film. I’m a bit obsessive about Le Fin Absolue du Monde. I have a collection of over eight thousand films, The most extreme images, created by some of the most obscure filmmakers from around the world. I’m not about to drag you up here in the middle of the night for something that made a school girl dizzy. I’m talking about real power.”

“Were you at the festival when this played?”

“Yes. I even had tickets for the screening, but I’d seen Backovic’s previous work and I wasn’t impressed, so I went to see the first Dr. Phibes instead, hoping to meet Vincent Price. In ‘83, the Rotterdam Festival announced a screening. By the time I’d flown there they had cancelled it, saying it was an error. The fact that the venue burned down must have had something to do with it.” Ballinger opens a desk drawer and pulls out an old file filled with papers. He hands it to Sweetman. “Every mention of the film since ‘71, every rumor about underground screenings, the official report from Citges. Mr. Sweetman.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I want you to find the print for me.”

“Finding a rare print can be costly, even under the best circumstances. Le Fin Absolue du Monde is… it’s infamous, it’s rarer than rare. If there was a print of that out there I’d know it.”

“It is out there, believe me. My sources are unimpeachable.”

* * *

You can readily track down the other 5 installments of Carpenter’s version of this story, but here’s how I think it should turn out: Sweetman finds the film but is afraid to watch it himself. He brings it back to Ballinger. Ballinger watches it: nothing, no impact. He’s stunned, crestfallen, outraged, desperate. This isn’t Le Fin Absolue Du Monde, Ballinger declares. But, Sweetman protests, I’ve been assured by the director’s wife, the projectionist at the ‘71 showing, a reviewer from that showing — this is the one. No, insists Ballinger: it’s a replacement, perhaps a remake, even a copy, but it isn’t the real Le Fin Absolue Du Monde. You must continue searching, Mr. Sweetman, I’ll pay anything you ask, anything…

In the Mood for Love by Wong, 2000

It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns, and walks away.

He remembers those vanished years as though looking through a dusty window pane. The past is something he could see, but not touch, and everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

Bestiary by Christopher, 2007

The first beast I laid eyes on was my father.

Rarely do I come across a contemporary American novel that I want to read or, after having read it, that I like. My tastes run toward the fictions of foreign writers or dead Americans. Maybe I don’t look hard enough; maybe I don’t give some of these American books enough of a chance; maybe my tastes are too quirky or old-fashioned. But I think a lot of it has to do with conservatism in the publishing industry, which produces plenty of variations on only a relatively few themes. As with other areas of the economy, it’s hard to know whether the industry shapes popular tastes or responds to them — probably it’s both. Either way, you don’t realize the lack of variety until you start looking for a particular kind of book and realize there aren’t any on the shelves.

When I saw The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher at the library I thought I’d found something. “Borges with emotional weight,” a reviewer is quoted as saying about the author on the inside front flap. To a degree it’s Borges’s precise resistance to emotion that distinguishes his stories, but then again he’d never written a novel. The flap goes on to say that the book concerns “the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah’s Ark.” The rest of the description assured me that this wasn’t going to be either a fundamentalist screed or a DaVinci Code knockoff. “A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense,” promises the flap — good. “Ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption” — not so good, but worth a try.

Like the hero of The Bestiary, I’m on a quest for a long-lost book too — a book written by an American, similar enough to one of my two novels that I’d entertain some hope of either the agent or the editor for that book wanting to take a look at my stuff. So far I’ve had only one actual agent go beyond form-letter dismissal or no reply to an actual response: “intriguing, but too experimental,” was the gist of the one-sentence reason he gave me for rejecting my manuscripts. I don’t regard what I do as particularly experimental. While writing my first novel I was aware of certain influences on what and how I wrote: Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, a little Henry Miller, Elie Wiesel for one chapter in particular, Borges certainly — these aren’t experimentalists; they’re canonical. I don’t deny experimenting with characters and situations and ideas, but that’s what fiction is about, isn’t it? I also wrote one letter to an editor at a publishing house, who said merely that she didn’t think she was the right person to work on my book. That’s probably the case, since shortly after I sent my inquiry I noticed that she’d paid big bucks to woo Jhumpa Lahiri away from a competing publisher, and based on her one attempt so far I don’t think Lahiri is capable of writing long fiction. But hey, her novel was a hit, Hollywood made a movie out of it, and her newest book (short stories, which is probably what she should be doing) is a best-seller.

Like The Bestiary, my first novel is a quest during which the narrator finds out about a mysterious manuscript that points back to the Biblical creation narrative. “Borges with emotional weight” — I’m prepared to see what that looks like. Though I’d never read anything by Nicholas Christopher before, he’s got several published novels and books of poetry under his belt, so somebody in the publishing industry must think this guy’s stuff is worth the time of day.

As I got close to the end of The Bestiary I encountered a scene that’s uncannily similar to one at the end of my book. The pilgrimage trail leads the hero through Europe to an isolated spot near the eastern Mediterranean coast, populated mostly by goats. There’s an ancient church, seldom visited by tourists, unimpressive both outside and in. Once inside he finds a stairway leading down to a grotto… At first I was dismayed by these parallels — I wrote mine first, but Chirstopher got his published first. But what struck me more forcefully was that, to the extent that I’m a passable judge of writing, my descriptions of this place at the end of the quest are more evocative and mysterious than Christopher’s. Maybe he consciously tries to distinguish his prose style from his poetry, but in comparing these two books I think mine is more poetic without being too precious.

Christopher has the reach for writing full-length fiction without losing coherence or momentum. A reviewer said that this is Christopher’s “most ambitious” to date. On page 229 he pretty much tells us straight out what he’s up to here:

I was reminded of my grandmother’s most important gift to me: her belief that we must pursue the beasts of this life, rather than allowing them to pursue us. If they consumed us in the end… at least we could confront them first on their own terms. This knowledge enabled me to survive my childhood without embracing the corrosive elements — cruelty, dishonesty, envy — that ate away at so many people I knew. Eventually it translated into my quest for the bestiary, which I had come to realize was all about seeking the beasts outside myself in order to understand those within.

It’s at this level that my book, despite certain similarities in the plot and setting, deviates significantly from The Bestiary. Maybe Christopher delivers the sort of personal redemption that betokens emotional weight in literary fiction, the sort of thing that readers are looking for when they pull a book randomly off the shelf, the thing that agents want to represent and that publishers want to buy. It’s a pretty good book, as good as the last couple by Paul Auster that I read in hopes of finding another contemporary American author to like. And I’ll write a letter to Christopher’s editor, maybe even telling her what I think: my book is better than this one, more worth your while. But I doubt my letter will set in motion the sorts of events that would bring to a satisfactory end my personal quest for authorial redemption.