stegosaurus vs. human

I was just looking for a specific photo, related to the previous post, but couldn’t find it. So I’ll post this instead, though I can’t remember where it came from. We normally don’t think of dinosaurs in physical comparison with ourselves, which is what makes this so interesting.

another writing tip/anecdote

I had planned to write another 12 pages overnight, but felt myself running out of energy after 5 pages at 2 AM– a good 5 pages in terms of content, but still the same bland, spotty prose as found in the first 12 pages. Yet rough prose is easy and fun to fix, and moreover (for me at least) it’s easier to fix prose when away from home base than it is to write new material away from the usual work space (which for me is home, not office). This gives me the flexibility of fixing the weak prose in a public area such as a café or hotel terrace, whereas I generally need fewer distractions when doing the initial writing. Also, sometimes when writing new material you want your books nearby to look things up, which for me once again means staying at home.

But none of this touches on the point I wanted to make. The point I wanted to make is that if you tire and can’t finish all the pages you planned to finish, you can make up for it by outlining the remaining pages in greater detail.

I could have just called it a night and crashed as soon as I grew tired. But in that case I would have gone to sleep a little bit frustrated and self-critical. Instead, I stayed awake just long enough to produce an extremely detailed outline of the next 8-10 pages of the lecture, so detailed that it will pretty much write itself as soon as I wake up in the morning, or as soon as I’ve had breakfast and a walk, or whatever tomorrow’s mood suggests as the proper order of activities.

In case I haven’t told the story recently, I was initially (i.e., high school years) a typical bohemian, an anti-authority rebel who thought school was just an oppressive brainwashing conspiracy, and so of course I mocked banal devices such as outlines. (Grow up in a hippie household with a long-haired rock musician father, and you’ll find yourself not fond of authority of any sort, including that of a long-haired rock musician father.)

What first converted me to the Religion of Outline was the experience with my Sophomore Essay on Dante at St. John’s. The college is normally quite relaxed about assignments and deadlines, and in fact has very few official hoops that one must jump through. But the annual essays are the one huge exception… You get a week off of classes to write them in the first three years, and in senior year it’s a whole month off, almost like a mini-dissertation. (And if you don’t bring a legitimate senior essay to the Dean’s house by midnight on the due date, you simply don’t graduate on time with your class. Happens to a couple of people per year.) You get the point: it’s a relatively high-pressure exercise, especially at that age.

Well, I was still a very bad procrastinator in those days. The Sophomore Essay was expected to be around thirty pages, which would make it the longest thing I had ever written. I kept wasting time during the week, mostly out of stress, and about 24 hours before the essay was due, I only had around 12 pages of it written. I remember panicking and thinking I’d need to pull an all-nighter. But I was limping through the evening, and by the time I arrived at page 17, it was about 10 PM and I was exhausted.

So I told myself the following: “Why not just make a very complete outline of the remaining pages before sleeping, and wake up very early tomorrow and finish it off before Seminar?” (The essays were due at the start of Seminar, which I believe was always from 6-8 P.M., though I no longer remember exactly.)

So that’s what I did. I made a very detailed outline before going to sleep. And keep in mind, I didn’t really believe my own story. In the back of my mind, I thought I was about to self-destruct the next day and get in trouble for being late on the essay.

But it worked! I woke up early and sat at my desk and finished the essay. I wrote, I believe, 13 or 14 pages on that final day before 6 PM. And though I can do that in a couple of hours now without difficulty, it was a near-miracle at the time– by far the fastest writing I had ever done in my life by age 19. The essay just barely finished printing out before class (the old dot-matrix printers were very slow), and I arrived with a completed essay. It even won a prize, and in retrospect it was certainly the first thing I ever wrote that still has some genuine philosophical merit. Some of my present ideas are really contained in that essay, no joke.

This didn’t solve my problems, of course. I still had a decade of severe procrastination problems ahead, followed by another half-decade of moderate-descending-to-mild problems. In fact, the only thing that eventually solved the problem was reaching a state where there were so many requests for written work that it was impossible to be intimidated by any one of them in particular. Even now, once in awhile, I’ll find myself avoiding a specific article for invisible reasons, and sometimes need a few days to talk myself into it.

But that memorable day with the Sophomore Essay and the detailed outline showed me how things could and should be done. (If memory serves, it was March 28, 1988.) It just took a number of years to learn to do it consistently.

p.s. remember…

p.s. Remember, despite what some people said at the time, the reason I detonated the first blog in March was not only because of “the trolls,” it was also because I was getting 5 or 6 good comments per night, and responding to them was taking me away from everything else. So, I want to apologize in advance if the number of interesting posts such as Planomenology’s start to proliferate again and I seem like I’m ignoring some of them.

I’m not like Levi, for whom the act of critical swordplay seems to be inherently energizing (I can’t figure out how he responds with such precision to so many comments on each post). It’s the sort of thing I Iike to come to intermittently, when there’s a pause elsewhere.

Planomenology weighs in

There’s a fresh post up at Planomenology that I can only address quickly, since I feel the second third of the Croatia paper coming on and want to get to it.

It’s an interesting post, but I have two problems with it:

1. Planomenology grossly overstates my similarities with Badiou. That in itself is not so important. What’s important is that he overstates those similarities for a bad reason– his failure to recognize the harmfully human-centric aspects that belong to the very core of Badiou’s philosophy. (Levi has been addressing this wonderfully in recent posts.)

2. He also claims that I de-humanize humans by turning them into objects. That’s not really true. I think my books exude respect for the dignity and sincerity and importance of humans. What I refuse to do is build humans, and especially human politics, into the very foundation of ontology. And I see no reason not to persist in that refusal.

“Let’s be clear: object-oriented philosophy may champion the ontological equality of objects with human beings, but this equality comes at the price of the dehumanization of man, of his destitution and defacing, his reduction to (almost) nothing. And it seems that, rather than bear the horrors of confronting oneself – as a man, as a philosopher – in such a hideous state, object-oriented philosophy, as quickly as it grants liberty to objects, must imprison man: he must be punished before he can commit his crime of becoming a thing. Far from leveling the playing field, of granting the same rights to objects that we enjoy, object-oriented philosophy is rather more interested in an exchange of prisoners. This is evidenced in the reluctance, even refusal, to talk about human beings as embodied abysses, and the rapid condemnation of any philosopher who foolishly invokes man if not to ridicule and denounce him.”

It’s an eloquent passage, but I don’t see the merit in viewing humans uniquely as “embodied abysses.” We’re certainly embodied, but so is everything else. And as for “abysses,” this requires the assumption that humans are a special tear in the fabric of reality, as one finds in both Heidegger and (for different reasons) in Zizek, and in both cases unjustifiably so… I would argue (and have argued) that Heideggerian Angst as transcendence of the world does not exist, and none of Zizek’s defenses of the central role of the subject in the cosmos have convinced me. He’s too attached to German Idealism.

Humans are not “reduced to almost nothing” in my writings. They simply aren’t the center of the universe any more. Planomenology sounds here a bit like a conservative clergyman assaulting the Copernican system. (But I do find the paragraph fun and rhetorically skilled.)

“Graham Harman also voices his strange antipathy with Badiou, usually on the basis of Badiou’s invocation of the count-as-one in Being and Event. Graham insists that, if entities are counted into existence, then there must be a human being who is presupposed as doing the counting. Yet this is not at all evident. When Badiou says entities are counted, he does not mean individuals are cut from a preindividual cloth. Quite the contrary, he simply means that there is one, that they happen to be given as one, as individuated. He gives no more and no less of an explanation for why there are individual entities than Graham does. Moreover, in Logics of Worlds, Badiou gives Graham good reason to be threatened, as he exploits an insight that Graham refuses to draw from his own theory of objects.”

Badiouians always play this card on me (especially Dominic Fox), but it misses the point. My point has never been that human beings walk along and find a whole-cloth reality and then subjectively carve it up into bits. My point is that whenever Badiou speaks of objects “given as one, as individuated,” this always means given for humans. To depersonalize the count does not take away the human bias of the philosophical position, and really amounts to nothing better than Heidegger’s “es gibt”, which is equally biased in favor of givenness to humans.

I must confess that I don’t understand why people can’t follow a simple litmus test: either a philosophy treats inanimate-inanimate relations in the same way as human-world relations, or it doesn’t.

Planomenology is trying to have it both ways here. On the one hand he claims there is no difference between me and Badiou when it comes to the role of humans in ontology. But on the other hand he claims that I am taking humans out of ontology altogether, leading to a “destitution and defacement” of humans. (Just because I won’t let human politics be the foundation for all philosophy.)

As for the “threat” posed by Badiou to my position, it is not specified in the post as far as I can see (but again, I’m reading fairly quickly).

“This point in Badiou, while breaking the homology with Graham, nonetheless touches upon an insight Graham fails to draw from his own theory of the withdrawn interior of objects: if the ’substance’ of an object is infinitely withdrawn from every possible expression or manifestation, every quality and relation, every possible predication, then what right do we have to claim that it is the substance of this given object? How can we localize it for this given bundle of properties if it is as identical to those properties as to those of another object (which is to say, not identical at all)? In other words, if the substantial identity of an object cannot be identified with that object, even when that object identifies with it, what right do we have to claim it belongs to that object?”

First of all, I don’t believe in the “bundle of properties” theory of intentional objects, as my writings show. Everyone likes to pretend that Husserl doesn’t exist anymore, which is a shame because it is precisely Husserl who demonstrated an object/quality tension within the phenomenal realm.

But as for the main part of this paragraph, “if the ’substance’ of an object is infinitely withdrawn from every possible expression or manifestation, every quality and relation, every possible predication, then what right do we have to claim that it is the substance of this given object?”, the answer is– no right at all, except for practical purposes. The intentional umbrella does not “belong” to the genuine, subterranean umbrella, but is produced by the indirect interaction of me as a real object with the umbrella as a real object, if indeed it is one. To use the word “umbrella” for the two different things is obviously just a loose, pedagogical way of speaking, meant to show that intentional objects have some sort of connection with a sub-intentional realm.

He then has some fleeting kind words for me and Reza, before exhibiting our embeddedness in a horrible blindness:

“This is why Reza and Graham are correct that the spontaneous anger experienced by philosophers upon reading another’s work are legitimate. However, the ‘appropriate’ response to this anger is not to carefully construct an argument, a refutation, out of which one poses one’s own system as a solution. This is dialectical negativity at its most obvious. Rather, the goal should be to recognize the source of this anger in the illegitimate form of philosophical decision itself, insofar as philosophy is coextensive with its claim to sufficiently give the real. The ‘appropriate’ response, which cannot be appear inappropriate for philosophy, is to use this anger to suspend the sufficiency of philosophical discourse in general.”

This seems like an awfully apocalyptic conclusion to draw from disappointment with a philosopher’s latest book.

“Graham is at his best when, suspending the systematic sufficiency of a philosophy like Heidegger or Husserl, he pilfers and reassemble their concepts into new, monstrous configurations. But putting these monsters in the service of expressing the ‘True form of the real’ is horribly vain, and of course, makes him guilty of the same thing he used against his forbears. I don’t mean to single Graham out, because all philosophers are ‘guilty’ in this respect. Yet they need not feel guilty, they need not submit to the ‘higher law’ of non-philosophy. They need only suspend the sufficiency of the philosophical law to leave their guilt amongst the ruins of its kingdom. Realism that ceases to pretend that thought can adequately or sufficiently give us the real itself is a non-philosophical realism, a Real which we already are, in the flesh. This is the true problem: not how do we bypass being human, or bypass thinking, and get to the Real, but rather, how do we deal with the fact that we are the Real, everything is, and yet that the Real is not itself ever given? How do we deal with our non-reciprocal or unilateral identity with the Real?”

I think the last couple of sentences are poppycock– the usual gesture of being an idealist while pretending to be beyond the realism/idealism dispute.

There’s nothing inherently vain about trying to discuss “the true form of the real.” The vanity, I think, would come from a dogmatism about one’s results, or from a lack of historical awareness about the fragility of all systems over time– neither of which characterizes me, I don’t believe. I think Planomenology is conflating modesty (which is good) with the hyper-reflexive withholding of oneself from all claims about the real (which is bad).

I wish I had more time to give to this very committed post with its fine literary flourishes, but duty calls from Zagreb and MS Word.

how long it takes to rebuild blog traffic

As some of you will recall, this blog was briefly shut down (or rather, detonated) for half a day in mid-March. It was quickly relaunched under a slightly different address.

What I wasn’t expecting was that it would take until almost the middle of June to reach the same levels of reader traffic as found from January-March. If I had known that, I would have handled things differently.

Where did the readers go? It’s always possible that a few of them said “screw this” rather than come visit the new address. But anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of people simply didn’t know I had restarted it, including a number of pretty good friends. This, in turn, suggests that blog traffic depends on a fairly fragile system of links and habits that are easy to disrupt and difficult to restore.

In any case, we’re back to early-March levels of traffic, finally.

agreed with this too

No objections to any of this either. I post this here mostly so that I don’t lose or forget it.

“larvalsubjects Says:

June 11, 2009 at 2:03 am
Actually, I do think there are some points at which Graham and Badiou converge. Where Graham’s objects are withdrawn and enjoy a subterranian existence, Badiou’s being is pure multiplicity qua multiplicity withdrawn from all representation. Where Graham’s objects aren’t a function of their relations, Badiou’s elements in sets (the pure multiplicities) are completely independent of their relations. A major difference, I think, is that Badiou’s multiplicities are multiplicities without one, whereas Graham’s objects do have an essence or defining unity that intrinsically belongs to them. Moreover, Graham does not assert the identity of being and thought in the way declared by Badiou. Moreover, the suture of being to mathematics– Badiou argues ontology belongs to maths not philosophy –erases the singularity of objects, placing them under a representational criteria that is not that of objects themselves.”

yes, read Zubiri

Read Xavier Zubiri as Levi is doing, and you’ll end up as more of a realist than you ever were before. He went through the Heideggerian crucible as Heidegger’s personal student, and this gives his work an extremely up-to-date feel despite the Scholastic-sounding terminology. He succeeds in making Aristotelian realism cutting-edge like no one else I know. [ADDENDUM: No one has e-mailed me about this yet, but for the record, I didn’t mean to imply that Zubiri’s position is simply Aristotle’s. He is quite clear about where he thinks Aristotle is wrong. But there is a general flavor of Aristotelian realism in Zubiri’s thinking; that flavor has long been so out of fashion that few even openly confront it in continental circles anymore, but Zubiri’s more contemporary and more uncannily unusual feel make it harder to dismiss him out of hand than the long-pigeonholed Aristotle.]

“larvalsubjects Says:

June 11, 2009 at 1:21 am
Jon,

I’m still working on these issues. Based on Graham’s recommendations I’ve been reading Zubiri’s– one of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s students –On Essence, which is really a first rate work. Zubiri– and if I recall Graham develops this point as well at the end of Tool-Being –argues that Heidegger gets things backwards when he famously claims that “higher than actuality is possibility”. For Zubiri possibilities are always posterior to reality or actuality. It is because there is physicality (which Zubiri uses in a highly specific sense harking back to the Greek connotations of the term as phusis) that possibility can emerge. In my view reality is both relational and non-relational. That is, there is an identity or essence of objects that is not simply a function of the objects relation to other objects. On the other hand, objects are evoked or drawn forth in and through their relations to other objects. I don’t know that I would follow Lewis in his claims.”

another reason for *occasional* writing

In numerous advice posts, I’ve emphasized how important it is to respond to the specific, contingent details of the writing assignment at hand. (For instance, I chose to focus on Iain Grant’s work for the s.r. workshop in Bristol, partly because he was the host of the event, and partly because I’ve already written on Meillassoux and have a deal to write on Brassier.)

In other posts I have stressed that this is a way to energize yourself to do the writing by linking it up with a compelling real-life situation. But another reason is simply the avoidance of repetition.

In one sense, repetition is an occupational hazard of philosophy. Instead of covering a myriad of different topics, we are supposed to be identifying certain core principles that unfold across a number of different areas of reality. Therefore, every time you try to do a new piece of work, you might find yourself compelled to repeat some of those core principles over and over again. (Zizek correctly identifies Fichte and Hegel as two good examples of philosophers who continually rewrite the same introductory text to their philosophy. In Fichte’s case, variations of the same title, Wissenschaftslehre, are often reused.)

In another sense, and for the same reason, repetition is a badge of honor in philosophy, more than in other fields.

Nonetheless, it can be depressing for both authors and readers to continue to encounter the same ideas and formulations over and over again. The more we are locked in our own heads, the more we are trapped in what the novelist Raymond Chandler called “the deadly rhythm of our own private thoughts.”

But if you are asked to produce a piece of writing governed by highly specific rules, then suddenly you have an external stimulus for variation. In the case of wanting to focus on Grant while speaking in Bristol, I asked myself: “What does Grant’s book force me to confront that I have never confronted in print before?”

The answer, of course, is the “pre-individual” model of reality that subverts objects from beneath; in the past I have dealt mostly with the opposite tendency that treats objects as a useless fictional bundle for more evident realities. This led me to bring Giordano Bruno into the paper, and also gave me the idea for a long list of “undermining” and “overmining” tendencies toward objects. And once it was clear that there are “realisms” in both categories, I was led to see for the first time that realism isn’t the key point for me at all, but that objects are.

But that’s just one example. The point is that special occasions always have a certain tendency to force us to think new things, just as encounters with new people are mild or moderate or major shocks that force us to look at things a bit differently.

fate can be cruel, Part 2

A reader remarks:

“The story you have on your blog today about the woman who missed the doomed air flight only to be killed in a car accident parallels the on-going story of the rescue heliocopter crash in New Mexico. They found and picked up a lost hiker….and then crashed. One survivor but it wasn’t the hiker. So tragic.”

Yeah, I read about that one too but for some reason didn’t put it together with the story of the Italian woman.

You get lost while hiking, you get rescued, then you get killed when the rescue copter crashes. Terrible:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/06/11/new.mexico.chopper.crash/

Levi on s.r.

LEVI RESPONDS to Alex G.’s critically-minded colleagues.