The Onion on Twitter

This is pretty funny…

Twitter Creator On Iran: ‘I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful’
June 24, 2009 | Issue 45•26

SAN FRANCISCO—Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. “Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them,” said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation. “When I heard how Iranians were using my beloved creation for their own means—such as organizing a political movement and informing the outside world of the actions of a repressive regime—I couldn’t believe they’d ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless.” Dorsey said he is already working on a new website that will be so mind-numbingly useless that Iranians will not even be able to figure out how to operate it.

some Belgrade geography

The very center of Belgrade is on a ridge, culminating at the fortress on the bluff high above the convergence of the two rivers. This spine of the ridge is for pedestrians only, no cars.

It`s downhill on both sides of the ridge. To the west, you eventually hit the river. To the east, however, there is a nice leafy little district of street cafes and actual restaurants. It is a lot more dark and quiet over there, whereas the western foot of the hill is more jammed with infrastructure such as bus and train stations, a tunnel for cars underneath the central district, government buildings, and bridges across the river.

Most of the government buildings struck by NATO in 1999 lie to the southwest of the central spine on the ridge.

I am becoming quite fond of this city in a hurry, and will be sorry to leave it a few days from now.

responding to Doyle

Since Doyle seems like a basically decent person from our past e-mailings, I`ll respond to this…

“I don’t want to start no blog war or nothing, but the topic is psychologically interesting to me. Dr. Zamalek’s latest post on projects and energy suckage is entitled The Banality of the Troll. It seems that what I’ve been interpreting, per k-punk, as grey vampirism Dr. Z has demoted all the way down to troll. (I wonder if we can infer that he’s been subjected to considerable negative criticism in his Belgrade presentations.) He says this:

`The sneer from nowhere is not just rude, it is also shallow and insufficiently aware of what it is doing. It lives in a world made solely of people, not of realities more generally. Sneering is not a project, it is an anti project. Projects are in touch with realities, not just with people…`

Dr. Z seems to contend here that the interpersonal sneer precedes and probably produces the intellectual critique. For many sneering critiquers this is no doubt the case: one hopes to gain relative status by publicly taking the axe to someone better known than oneself. But projects created by people are also often motivated at least in part by all-too-human egoistic considerations. Project producers tend to get pissed off when a “hermeneutic of suspicion” is applied to their work, suggesting that their project masks the creator’s “real” agenda of defending neoliberalism or paternalism or imperialism or whatever. I think the same goes for the recipient of intellectual critique: exposing unsavory psychological motivations for the sneer isn’t the same thing as dealing with the substance of the critique.

[A personal note: To find yourself subject to sneering critique is to have already achieved sufficient status that you’ve attracted the iconoclasts. Good on you. Most projects and their creators are ignored and would welcome the opportunity to discuss their work under practically any terms dictated by the discussant.]”

I`ll number a few separate points…

1. Mr. Doyle seems to have K-Punk`s terms a bit wrong. What I am speaking of is definitely trolling, not grey vampirism.

2. There are no presentations in Belgrade. This is pure vacation.

3. There was only one presentation on this trip, in Zagreb. You can listen to my talk and, I presume, the questions asked afterward, at the website cited here a few days ago. Too hard for me to look it up right now.

4. There were no trolls in Zagreb. Just good, high-quality questioners who were putting their necks on the line with their questions just as I did with my talk. Indeed, one of the reasons I am unable to refuse any lecture invitation, no matter how busy I am, is precisely because people always ask tough questions, many of which never occurred to me before. These are the sorts of objections worth facing. I don`t see why ignoring mouthy punks in the blogosphere amounts to avoiding criticism. Punks like the trolls I complain about would throw up if they had to argue with tough people like Peden or Brassier or the crowd at the Ecole normale superieure.

5. To call someone a troll is not the same thing as to claim that they have hidden ideological motivations. To call someone a troll is to say that they are sneering from nowhere, lodging charges without adopting a stance of their own. The troll is not the same phenomenon as the ideologue with hidden motivations. We are all ideologues to some degree without knowing it. We are not all trolls.

6. The claim that one should ignore the tone of the troll and only address the content is nonsense. One might find it useful to read the content and see if there is anything of value in it. But this does not entail an obligation to respond. To take an extreme example, assume that someone walked up to you on the street and gave a devastating objection to your position, but spiced up with unprintable swear words and sexual innuendoes about your family members. In that case you would either tell them to shut up, punch them in the face, or walk away. There would obviously be no obligation to ignore the tone and calmly address the content. A troll is simply a less extreme version thereof. Do you think Zizek responds to what must be a tsunami of bullshit communications as though they were valuable critiques?

7. Nothing was said about being “better known.” Trolls often take shots at anonymous people as well.

8. As for the claim that I should be happy about all the attacks, as a sign of success, how do you know that I`m not happy about it? 😉

“untranslatability”

Reading Houellebecq in French for the first time, and seeing the French renditions of some of the original story passages, it is clear that many of the best little quirks of Lovecraft`s prose, the things that make him who he really is as a writer, are regularly elided or oversimplified by whatever French translator of Lovecraft is being cited in Houellebecq`s book. Now, I detest pedantic remarks on translation as much as anyone, but in this case I really do care, and really think that there are consequences.

One thing that would be interesting to test is whether Baudelaire gets it with the similar moments of Poe. I`ve only looked at passages of Baudelaire`s Poe translations, and have never read a complete story such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” in French (not my favorite Poe story, but does contain some of his best fictional prose.)

I`m thinking of hilarious phrases such as “only certain sounds, and those from stringed instruments, were such as not to inspire him with horror”… My guess is that even Baudelaire would miss the stylistic point here, because you`d pretty much need to be a native speaker of English to catch the oddness of it. I`ll have to check the French, but even Baudelaire probably softens it badly into something like “the sounds of stringed instruments were the only ones that did not inspire him with horror.” That would be a case where the content is retained, but the deliberate grammatical hesitations and circumlocutions that typify both Poe nad Lovecraft are irretrievably lost.

more composition of philosophy

A few minutes to kill while waiting for somebody, and since I happened to have been outlining L`objet quadruple a bit more this afternoon, I thought I`d record a few thoughts about the experience. This will be a dominant blog theme in late July and most of August as the book itself gets written.

As mentioned, I am (fortunately) faced with several external constraints on this manuscript.

1. It can only be 43,000 words, unless the matching grant is received. And even if the additional grant is received, it will be later in the fall, so these first 43,000 words have to be conceived as a capable piece of standalone thinking.

2. The French philosophy readership has little to no familiarity with my ideas yet, so everything from Square One onward needs to be included in the manuscript.

As stated previously, 43,000 words is about the length of the first third of Tool-Being. Since that first third has nine sections, I decided to shoot for 9 sections of approximately equal length. This can always be changed under the pressures of the subject matter, but a somewhat arbitrary numerical structure is a good thing to start with.

Remember, you have two major enemies when approaching a writing project: zero, and infinity. The zero is the anxiety of the blank piece of paper. The infinity is the gigantic expanse of reality that you cannot possibly exhaust in any piece of writing. Your initial goal is to make the project finite, and hence manageable. That is why I like the initial 43,000-word limit, sort of like an architect`s budget for a building, or perhaps more like the dimensions of a physical site (the budget and the size happen to be connected for me in the present case).

To fight the specter of infinity, the outline is the best remedy. You can always change it later. I generally like to project a book in such a way that the first third is materially thoroughly known to me, the second third is known but not entirely mastered, and the third is unfamiliar and strange. What usually happens is that you end up unable to tame all of the final third, so you prune it during the process and stick with material that you can present coherently and convincingly. If you try to project a book solely about topics that you have completely mastered in advance, you miss a great chance to push yourself toward new thoughts, and also the tone of quest disappears from your authorial voice. The one exception for me, of course, was Heidegger Explained, which aimed at a friendly pedagogical voice rather than a questing one, since it was an introductory book about topics that I did already completely understand– Heideggre`s own books.

To fight the specter of zero, it is best to begin the book wit things that are already on your mind. Do not try to invent some heroic or ultra-clever literary starting point, because it will only sound artificial. I once knew a smart but lazy guy who thought he wanted to be a novelist. His e-mails were actually snappy and brilliant, with a really original voice. But as soon as he tried a piece of fiction, it was always some horribly overwrought and artificial phony voice that was not a natural outgrowth of this guy`s normal way of communicating. So, writing the first chapter as though it were a letter to your best friend is one possibility, just to avoid phoniness.

Also, the overmining and undermining approaches to objects (I hate both) have been creeping into all of my writing this spring, so that is obviously what is most on my mind these days, and hence I have decided to use it as the first chapter.

(Undermining is when people say that objects are not fundamental– there is some deeper apeiron or pre-individual realm or flux or primordial difference making up the ultimate layer of the world, and hence objects are not fundamental. “Overmining,” a term I coined myself, is the more common opposite technique– objects do not really exist, but are an empty je ne sais quoi posited as a needless substratum for something more evident, such as bundles of qualities, or ideas in the mind, or –the Whitehead/Latour problem– relational effects on other things. As I argued in Zagreb, materialism tries to do both simultaneously, and is thus my biggest enemy in some respects.)

There was a long period when I was unable to begin any piece of philosophical writing without referring to Heidegger`s tool-analysis. I was consciously aware of this, of course, and it made sense. Anything of value that I have to say in philosophy derives ultimately from my rather offbeat reading of that analysis, and moreover I am perfectly willing to bet my entire career on the hypothesis that there is no more fundamental moment in all of 20th century philosophy than that simple but profound thought experiment given to us by Heidegger. However, I have since found other paths into my subject matter, and also I am simply somewhat tired of always beginning with it. So that will show up in Section 2 of this book, not Section 1.

First part of the book (the utterly understood part)… the reason objects are an important theme for philosophy, how there are exactly two kinds of objects, and how this touches on the twin and merely inverse approaches to philosophy in the 17th century (not rationalism and empiricism, but occasionalism and empiricism, which share the error of granting a monopoly on relations to a single pampered entity whether God or human experience; this has the added virtue of allowing some fresh “non-Western” air into the building given the Islamic origins of occasionalism– I use scare quotes only because Islamic philosophy actually is part of Western philosophy, unlike Chinese, Indian, etc.; Islamic thought has the same Greek philosophical roots and roughly the same corpus of prophetic writings at its base, and thus is not really non-Western at all).

Second part of the book (the mostly understood part, with a few questions that I have never answered to my own satisfaction)… The fourfold structure of objects. How the parts interact. How this solves the problem that causal relations ought to be impossible under the “withdrawn” objects model. You wouldn`t want to approach this second third without having at least some notion of how to attack the previously intractable problems, and in fact I have spent the first part of 2009 filling up a notebook or two with thoughts about this. Suarez was also a great stimulus, though not of direct relevance on most of the points, just because he handles several problems in a highly classical manner that I had previously had thought to be horrifying sci-fi deadlocks of my own. It is good to discover that some of one`s own weirdest conclusions are in fact the subecjt of a venerable tradition.

Third part of the book (the barely understood part, which can always be trimmed or even vacated entirely in favor of expansions of the third part if solutions to these final problems are not forthcoming)… Certain fascinating practical applications of this ontology to different fields. Aesthetic and ethical ideas are currently the most prominent in my notes, but unforeseen things often happen.

I hope some of this is helpful to those who are putting together projects right now. The main point is not to procrastinate in the name of some perfect magnum opus. That`s probably not how a magnum opus is written; many have been written by accident under practical constraints, and luck is needed just as much as talent.

Also, remember that it`s good to have a model, especially one that you know personally. Even to this day I sometimes ask myself “What would Lingis do?”, simply because he remains the most effective and stylistically powerful writer I know.

And sometimes I remember a few of his maxims… One of them is that you need to write with a certain speed. He used to talk about how students who had trouble finishing dissertations were almost always the ones who took too long and fell into a sort of staleness with respect to the project. He said that by contrast he would always write first drafts very quickly, and despite many later improvements he would always find that his best material was always in the first draft.

He made an additional claim that all of the great ideas books in philosophy were written quickly. I`m no longer sure that this is literally true without exception… Locke`s Essay (a truly great book, which I never appreciated enough until Whitehead sang its praises and I went back for another look) seems to have been written rather slowly, if I am interpreting the biography correctly. But certainly very many of the best philosophy books are written with extreme speed under practical pressure.

This, in fact, is why I am one of the few people around who greatly enjoys the “publish or perish” system of academia. The drawbacks are obvious, I realize. But too little has been said about the virtues of the system, which are there as well… it unmasks pretenders fairly well. One of the worst grey vampires I know comes off at first as the most incredibly erudite person you`ve ever met, but then you realize he`s been at work on the same ms. for the past 23 years, and suddenly you realize that he`s mostly just blowing smoke. There are exceptions, of course, and Locke again comes to mind. He may have looked like a grey vampire, philosophy-wise, but he actually wasn`t. He was actually a productive philosopher who seems to have worked very slowly on his major work.

But more often than not, quantity and quality are not nearly as at odds as many like to pretend. The more you can increase your quantity, the more likely you are to find your quality increasing as well. The exceptions to this rule are really just exceptions, at least from what I`ve seen of the landscape. (For instance, there are certain state universities that assign salaries based on sheer quantity of articles, and I know of cases where people churn out pure junk in those cases just to get a raise. It does happen.)

This issue is too often looked at the wrong way. The point is not that somebody who has written 10 articles is automatically a better thinker than someone who has written 2. We all know that`s false, and that isn`t my claim; people have different work speeds. My claim is this… If you triple your own personal output, you will not find that your work is only a third of the quality as before. Most likely it will be much better, because you will be getting more practice at refining your ideas into communicable form.

Also, you will then receive more useful criticism. There is an idiotic idea afoot right now that somehow shutting down comments on a blog means insulating oneself from criticism. What a crock! The way to receive valuable criticism is to receive it when publishing, lecturing, etc. That`s real courage. Trading shots in the dog-fighting pen of the blogosphere is not of much value, I have found.

All right, big rainstorm just hit Belgrade. Exciting! If you live in Egypt, big rainstorms are fairly rare events.

the speed of domesticity

It is remarkable how quickly you can come to feel relatively at home in a place. By last night, after a mere 24 hours and perhaps six in and out trips, that studio apartment in central Belgrade already feels like home.

Somewhere, Lingis writes about the process by which we establish main and lateral routes in any new place, and I suppose it has been studied more thoroughly by sociologists at some point, I just dont know by whom.

Also, it only took about 36 hours to figure out lots of little quirks about the apartment, such as what times various neighbors and construction workers are noisiest, what the main problem with the shower is, and so forth. I think this is fairly typical, that you can get fairly rooted in a place after a short time and establish daily routines with astonishing speed.

on the banality of the troll

It is remarkable how many people are bothered by the categories of troll and grey vampire, and I think this is a sign of how prevalent these types are.

The grey vampire is probably less abundant. Only recently have I become convinced of the existence of the category, and hence have mentally probed it a bit less. But it is undeniably real. I had simply failed to connect several people in my mind under the single identical type that they all embody.

The troll, however, is extremely abundant, and is a direct byproduct of the model of critique that dominates most modern conceptions of what it means to be an intellectual. If we were to choose one global intellectual bias whose overturning would do the most good, it would be the primacy of critique… the assumption that the real problem in the world is our superfluity of gullible, overly sincere people, and that the way to be a thinker is to invert this attitude by taking a sarcastic, cynical, sneering distance at everything that is stated or even implied by anyone else. So many crippling cultural as well as social phenomena follow directly from this cliche.

I have been commissioned to write an essay for a German anthology on Latour`s Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam, and will explore the issue in more detail there.

One thing to remember is that trolling is not just an unpleasant social phenomenon, but also an INTELLECTUAL ERROR. The sneer from nowhere is not just rude, it is also shallow and insufficiently aware of what it is doing. It lives in a world made solely of people, not of realities more generally. Sneering is not a project, it is an anti project. Projects are in touch with realities, not just with people… People are also realities, but only a small subset thereof.

There are still many hours left today before bedtime. Find a productive thought and develop it. Dont just run across the vacant lot and give somebody the middle finger and run back and chuckle with your friends about it while drinking bottles of soda pop on the corner.

Latour says make things more real, not less real. This is an important principle whose working out may be worth a century or two.

thanks, Levi, for the grant money

YES, I DO NEED IT!