low point of the Manhattan Project

The low point of the Project had to be when Fermi, backed by Teller and eventually Oppenheimer, considered using radioactive materials to poison the German food supply. Oppenheimer wanted to make sure that this not be done until they were sure that at least 500,000 deaths would result.

It’s good evidence of the barbarizing influence of wars for survival, especially given Oppenheimer’s usual fondness for conceptions of non-violence drawn from Eastern philosophy.

The background to considering this possibility was the desperate reaction to intelligence reports that the Nazis were about to put a “secret weapon” to use. That weapon turned out to be the V-1 and V-2 rockets, though it was not yet clear that the German atomic bomb project had gone off the rails… partly due to resource crises after Stalingrad, partly due to heavy water shortages after three Allied attacks at or near the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway– a British-backed Norwegian commando strike on the plant, a later American bombing raid there, and finally a British-backed Norwegian bomb planted in the ferry meant to take the remaining heavy water to Germany.

Kant’s noir period

Michael A.:

“While I would probably want to read [the noir period of] someone like Deleuze (imagine a
break in his affirmative attitude!) I think we might have something
close to a noir period in Kant. As is well known, Kant began as a
Wolffian and an optimist before the birth of critical philosophy. But
it seems like there might be something approaching a noir period in
between his Wolffianism and Critique. I’ve been reading the early Kant
lately, and his comogony is pretty dark stuff, even if the ultimate
conclusion is “God does what’s best.” In his General History of Nature
and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des
Himmels) (1755), he’ll say that the human beings relationship to the
cosmos is like that of a bug to us, and that there is no remorse when
a bug is squashed. The universe is just this drive for order from
chaos and if God decides to wipe us out in this infinite ordering then
so be it, etc. It’s almost Lovecraftian in the anti-humanist tone,
that ultimately, reason doesn’t prevail, that really the human being
is small and weak and our survival is entirely out of our hands. God
doesn’t appear in this book as a personal being, but a force for
perfection, and perhaps we are (too) imperfect. It’s very odd to read,
and being someone who has never really liked Kant (the Kant of the
three Critiques that everyone reads), it’s also strangely refreshing.”

a bit more on “getting the point”

Recently I made a post speaking about how getting the point has more to do with truth than being right does. I have a bit more to say about that now, and it’s closely connected to other things I’ve said about truth in different contexts.

One area where I’ve often heard people miss the point is on the topic of humor. People will give definitions: “humor is a sudden incongruity,” “humor is absurdity,” etc. These sorts of definitions are only only seldom false. There is usually some merit to them. But they miss the point precisely by being overdeterminations in terms of palpable qualities. Humor is clearly not the same thing as sudden incongruity, because many sudden incongruities (such as finding your diary on the boss’s desk, a Taliban rebel hiding in your closet, or your lover in the arms of your mortal enemy) are not funny in the least. The same holds a fortiori for “absurdity”: a Lovecraft denigrator might scoff at Great Cthulhu as a juvenile figure, but would hardly laugh if Cthulhu swam after his cruise ship in reality. Nor would we find it funny to wake up one morning to the absurdity of seeing seven spatial dimensions, or finding ourselves transformed into cockroaches.

In general, to define things in terms of their palpable qualities, though it is currently considered a mark of supreme intellectual rigor devoid of spooky substances, is to repeat the work of Meno against Socrates. To know a thing is to have a certain sense for it, not to be able to list all of its valid knowable properties.

This has numerous applications in everyday life. It is now common to say of individual people that they “get it” or “don’t get it”. One might work for one employer who makes a series of statements that are difficult to falsify, but which somehow miss the main point at issue, or one might be lucky and work for someone who does get the point even while applying certain faulty measures to that end.

I see a lot of this on committees. Certain statements are made about salary inequities, needs for certain reforms, and the like, and though it is rare that these statements are utterly idiotic, it is equally rare to hear genuine wisdom in selection of priorities, and in a balanced assessment of strengths and weaknesses of different possible options.

This is why I don’t take inconsistencies and hypocrisies and mistakes to be especially major human flaws. The real flaws are shallowness and a lack of sense for the real stakes at issue in any situation.

The same holds true in philosophy. It is pretty rare that I find outright incompetent mistakes in published books. (It’s a different story when teaching Intro to Philosophy, of course, but that’s a different arena.) But it’s quite common to find boring or unimaginative books that get us sidetracked on minor issues while ignoring the dragons loose in the fields nearby.

from the gallery of jerks

I’ll adopt the word “jerks” to replace the earlier word, which required semi-censored spelling. Some members of my audience are less profane in speech than others, and I want to keep things comfortable for everyone.

Here’s an entry for the gallery of jerks, without a name of course.

Jerk trait #1: He would often criticize books while holding them. There was usually a sneer on his lips. He would turn the book over, sarcastically reading the blurbs, asking how they could be so ridiculous as to heap such abundant praise on a book this mediocre. He would then toss the book contemptuously toward the center of the table with a thump, like a mafia don rejecting the $200,000 cash offer for a piece of the garbage contract.

Jerk trait #2: When I was then invited to his home, he made a point of dragging one of my own books off the shelf, and giving it the same little petty toss onto the center of a wooden table. He then raised his voice aggressively and kept it at that level for 5 or 6 minutes for no evident reason, except to continue the “I am boss here” theme. But in fact he’s just a fairly dull, mainstream, utterly replaceable Heidegger/phenomenology person, and if you ever hear of him it will be miraculous.

He then also criticized one of my prefaces, not because he dislikes it, but because “certain people” might dislike it. In other words, make a criticism, but saddle anonymous others with the responsibility for it.

——

Another entry from the gallery of jerks…

Jerk trait: He must always control every conversation in which he participates. Generally this entails physical control. One thing he does is make provocative statements while leaving the room, meaning that you can’t respond without jogging after him to do so, which would look ridiculous. Another thing he does is that if you say something that surprises him, he immediately gets up and moves for no reason, thereby forcing you to follow him to the next room and restoring control of the conversation to himself. Yet another thing he does is repeats negative things that others said about you (a classic trick from the gallery of jerks) thereby getting himself off the hook while still delivering the payload. Unfortunately, he smirks while doing this, thereby showing his true colors.

Trakl simulations

Speaking of Trakl, I once knew a clever guy by the name of Michael Herrick. A number of us were living in Santa Fe in the early 1990’s, scraping by and not doing much, so one day Herrick and I designed a Trakl poetry simulator to run on his PowerBook.

I don’t think the program still exists (it was posted on the web for awhile). But I did save a number of the best products. I swear that these are simulations, not unknown Trakl poems.

One feature we left out, but which we seriously toyed with, was to have 5% of all poems automatically end with the sentence: “Wolves broke through the gate.”

For those who don’t know Trakl, he was a beautifully lurid Austrian poet from Salzburg, rumored to have had an incestuous affair with his sister (they were unnaturally fond of each other, at any rate). He embarked upon a pharmacy career in order to have easy access to drugs. His father was a major hardware merchant in Salzburg, if memory serves. He was forced into medical duty on the Eastern Front in WWI under grim conditions, and a patient’s suicide followed by rushing outside to see the corpses of deserters hanging form a tree led to his final breakdown, and death by cocaine at the age of 27 or 28.

Though Trakl is a bit limited in subject matter, I still think he’s one of the handful of greatest poets of the century.

Bon appetit…

**********

The burning gate poisons the rotting poppy.
The rotted monk murders the monk-girl.

Glisten, oh ebbing guitar.

The waxen voice or the moon trembles if
a silver sister streams.
The moldy voice embitters the extinguished snow.

Moulder, oh weeping bloom.

**********

The trembling chestnut wounds the stunted moon.
The stunted star signals. And worse,
the hissing star forgets the raging temple.

Grow, you rotten gate.

A boat wastes the Easterbell.

**********

The darkening birch deflowers a sister.
The falling Easterbell crumbles the shattered whore.

Friend,
the trembling lover deflowers the sister
without the singing snow.

The glowing star petrifies a waking man with a
woman.

Tremble, you broken boat.

**********

The candle.
O man!
A devouring river wastes a lover.
Despair!

The star murders a broken angel or the waking
youth as the
pure sister forgets an island.

**********

Friend:
a smoky moon.

Whisper, you wild child.
Flame, you hearkening man.

A smoky man crosses the solemn child.

**********

The pallid bloom poisons the storm.
O man!

Beautiful:
the gate mixes a darkling wood
as a despairing man shudders.

A black wind glistens.

**********

The mother with the burning gong
seeks the poppy or the wolf.

The burning temple
wastes a smoky guitar
or a candle.

**********

The darkening island wounds the whore.
The crimson rain rustles.
The crumbling heart burns a lightening birch.
The shimmering wind shudders.

While the smoky decay or
a murderous chestnut wounds the darkling sister,
a drinking decay rages
while the fiery birch rages.

The dark tree deflowers a brazen bloom.
The drunken Fate with a wolf
speaks the dark laughter or the woman.

**********

A weeping youth calms
the smoking poppy.

Die, oh wild guitar.

**********

(My personal favorite, for its stark minimalism:)

Uproar.
The child bears a bloom.

O man!

**********

Dwell, oh smoky gong.
The lover seeks a shepherd.

The crimson race wounds the smoky angel.

The gate:
the naked monk glistens whenever
the island rustles.

The golden voice mourns the trembling child.

**********

The shattering boat burns the evil sea.
The whispering boat drinks ebbing rain.
The golden candle.

**********

A waxing child signals. And worse,
a golden wood violates the pond.

The flaming lover breaks through
the guitar or the chestnut.
O man!

The boat awaits the glistening storm.
A ruinous city cowers.

A wolf devours a golden rain.

A flaming bloom arises after
the smoky star sings.

on noir periods

I was just reading a reference to “Frank Sinatra’s noir period.” It was not specified which period this was, though it’s so obviously an accurate term that I think I know exactly what songs were meant. And perhaps the phrase is already well-known to musicologists specializing in popular genres.

But then something else occurred to me… Philosophers ought to have noir periods as well. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were already a few quirky treatises that gave us the “noir” Kant or Hegel?

The closest we have to this, of course, is probably the later Heidegger. “Die Sprache im Gedicht” on Trakl is fairly noir (and you can’t even really touch Trakl without being in a noir mood to begin with). “The Question Concerning Technology” is noir enough. Actually, most of Heidegger’s stuff in the 1950’s is even blacker than Sinatra at his most bleak.

The problem is that Heidegger never really escaped this period. If he’d bounced back with something a little more straightforward in the vein of the Marburg Lecture Courses, then we could speak of a noir “period” in Heidegger. But it was more than a period, and the seeds for it were obviously there.

Whose noir period would you most like to read? I think Aristotle would be my choice.

the Dublin website

I didn’t know this existed until I saw it on the ANTHEM blog. (Same information as below, but with a more official UCD look to it.)

http://mis.ucd.ie/cito/seminars/20090417_Substance_Seminar

article advice follow-up

It didn’t feel like such a productive night, though actually it was. This is a follow-up post for those who like writing advice.

I used today’s bus rides to and from campus to think through the introduction to my Bristol paper. On the way in I jotted down a lot of notes about the various ways in which objects are belittled by all “radical” philosophies in our time. I was only mildly worried at the time that it was a mere list without a central organizing principle, since I figured that would come soon enough once I had an actual list.

On the bus ride home (which took much longer, as usual), I realized that for all the diverse approaches of banishing objects from a starring role in philosophy, all boil down to two basic possible strategies. I started to type that out here, but prefer to save the point for Bristol.

Upon returning home at around 5:30, I slowly started work on the introduction to the paper. It’s now not quite 5 hours later, and I even had time for dinner and a brief nap and a little bit of web-surfing. Yet I was able to write the first full 7 pages of the lecture.

The key to writing 7 workable pages in a couple of hours is not to care at all about the style. Just follow the outline and get the words on paper. I love crisp, polished style as much as anyone, but this is not the stage at which to do it. I learned this the hard way during dissertation years by doing unwise things like polishing my first paragraph for three weeks before moving on. It’s extremely inefficient. It doesn’t matter if the style in your initial draft is junk, as long as everything is approximately in the right order. (And it will be, provided you move quickly enough, because your unconscious mind has remarkable organizational skills, and whatever you feel the urge to type next probably belongs there, even if the connection seems tenuous at first.)

Translating books helped me learn this quick-drafting skill as well (which several of my fellow graduate students had already mastered by age 23, though it was a long and difficult lesson for me). When you translate, it’s almost impossible to make any progress unless you try to get a more or less accurate translation on the first draft and go for style only on the second and succeeding drafts.

There are two great advantages of having 7 pages already under my belt on this paper, even though the style is atrocious.

(1) Nothingness is the source of all anxiety. 0 pages is highly anxiety-inducing. With 7 pages, there is no anxiety at all. There’s something to work with now.

(2) I now have two options for tomorrow’s work. Either I can press onward from page 8 and new material, or I can polish the first 7 pages for style. The two tasks require different moods, and now I know that whatever tomorrow’s mood may be, it will be well-suited for one of the two options. In other words, there will be no moody procrastination tomorrow (God knows there was plenty of it on the dissertation). Progress will occur on this paper. Even if I’m not in the mood for either of those two options tomorrow, I’ll surely be in the mood for further reading. That should always be the last resort once you get this close to a deadline, since reading is the ultimate procrastination technique for writers, but in the present case it may actually help my cause.

Furthermore, having 7 pages means that the lecture now has a distinguishable “voice”. Before you actually start writing something, it’s hard to know what the tone of it will be. That tone emerges to a large degree from the contingencies that link one sentence to the next, but you have to get things rolling to discover what those contingencies might be.

two talks in Dublin

This just arrived.

****************************

1. SEMINAR
The Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO), in association with the MIS Subject Area and the UCD School of Philosophy, will host a seminar on Friday 17th of April at 2pm (venue in UCD to be confirmed.) The seminar isentitled A New Theory of Substance, and the speaker is Professor Graham Harman from the American University in Cairo. Professor Dermot Moran from the UCD School of Philosophy will be the discussant.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a body of interdisciplinary research which attempts to address perceived limitations in how we conceptualise information and communication technologies (ICT) and their role in the (re)configuration ofsocial/organisational life. This eclectic scholarship directs attention to the material nature of technology as it is experienced by embodied actors, thus offering the promise of more sophisticated analyses of how technologies mediate human action inorganisational settings.

It is within this context, that Professor Harman’s work has gained widespread attention and acclaim for its attempts to develop an ‘object-orientated philosophy’. Much of Professor Harman’s focus is on an interpretation of the tool-analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, developed in his book Guerrilla Metaphysics—Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. In reviewing this book, Bruno Latour observes: “This [book] fully deserves the title of guerrilla warfare, though Harman, instead of brandishing Che Guevara’s Kalashnikov, in another futile enterprise of deconstruction, has adopted William James’s splendid style to bring us back to the buzzing, blooming world”.

Professor Harman has engaged, with Bruno Latour, in a number of recent management debates at the London School of Economics on the subject of Actor-Network Theory (http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/newsAndEvents/2008events/HarmanLatour.htm), and he co-edits, with Latour, the ‘New Metaphysics’ series. In May of this year Professor Harman will publish his latest book, Prince of Networks—Bruno Latour and Metaphysics.

Abstract
The concept of substance has relatively few defenders in present-day philosophy. I happen to be one of them, though I also believe that several features of the classical concept of substance (simplicity, naturalness, and eternity) must be discarded. For me, the necessity of a new concept of substance (or “objects,” as I prefer) comes from Heidegger’s tool-analysis. With this analysis Heidegger does not just show that invisible human practices come before conscious human awareness. Instead, the analysis shows that objects exist as something over and above all their relations to other things (the exact opposite of Bruno Latour’s relational model of actors). Most contemporary philosophies are simply variant “radical” attempts to deny the existence of objects. Objects are reduced either to their relations, or to how they are manifested in human consciousness, or to tiny material particles, or to “pre-individual singularities,” or to a shapeless, formless rumbling of inarticulate being. I oppose all such radical models, and insist on a “polarized” model of philosophy in which objects can never be reduced to any of their specific incarnations in the world.

Please Note
To help us choose the venue, we would be obliged if those interested could signal their intention to attend by emailing peadar.oscolai@ucd.ie

2. WORKSHOP
The seminar will be followed on Monday 20th of April with a half-day workshop entitled ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’. The workshop will provide an opportunity to discuss the relevance and contribution of this perspective to our conceptualisations of information systems and technology in organisational contexts. Topics of discussion will include attempts to position Professor Harman’s contribution within the current debates in management/ organisation studies that revolve around materiality, practice theory, neo-institutionalist theory and elements of Actor Network Theory.

During this workshop PhD students will discuss a number of ongoing projects, including healthcare innovations and reconfigurations associated with the introduction of telemedicine systems, knowledge work and technologies involved in Ireland’s new Deep Brain Stimulation programme, and software development as distributed, collective work.

Please Note
Contact peadar.oscolai@ucd.ie if you have an interest in attending.

it’s not enough to be right

This may sound strange, but it’s relatively rare when reading intellectual work that I encounter outright errors. (I think Deleuze said this too, probably at the beginning of Difference and Repetition, and Whitehead said something similar as well.) Mistakes actually aren’t that big a deal. In most cases they are easily fixed (which is why I loathe people who get all aggressive about typographical mistakes, since they can be fixed in a matter of seconds).

What happens more often is that a piece of writing is boring.

What happens even more often, and to all of us, is that we write something that’s not boring, but that somehow misses the point. This is what I lose sleep over whenever writing… not making mistakes (that’s inevitable within certain limits), not boring readers (I never do), but missing the larger point at issue.

The great philosophers are not the ones who made the fewest mistakes, but the ones who missed the point less than anyone else. Of all debates currently underway in philosophy, 98% will turn out to be wastepaper of no relevance 50 years from now; it is focused on transient, inadequate formulations of philosophical problems and missing a deeper framing of the problem that would be worth chewing on for decades.

It’s very difficult not to miss the point, but that should be our aim in everything we write. But even the best philosophers sometimes only got right to the point in 10 or 20 pages over the course of a career. Many misfires may be needed.

Truth does not mean accurate content. But neither does truth mean “originality,” assuming that originality is defined in the usual manner as “unheard-of content”. Truth is, quite simply, not a content of any sort. You cannot put truth in a proposition (as Whitehead saw), not because there is no truth and everything is a language game, but because propositions are too abstract to do justice to the truth.

Truth means: getting the point. It means focusing on what is decisive.

One of the most repellent strategies, in my mind, is to debunk exisiting philosophical problems as “false problems.” If many people have done batttle for centuries over a specific problem, then there is probably something to it. False dissolution of problems is a far bigger danger than false problems. We need ways to maximize or “nectarize” traditional problems to make them even more cutting, rather than looking for facile ways to dissolve them altogether.