alluring desktop

This is Michael Flower’s desktop in Portland, and the one in the center remains a taunt. But I’m probably only 7-18 hours away from finally having my own copy. 7 hours if it’s really in my mailbox on the new campus, 18 hours if Bogost’s flight shows up on time. (Just finished his Atari book, incidentally, and it’s really a kick. Atari VCS play is one of the strongest generational bonds there is, at least as big as Michael Jackson in that respect. And I had forgotten how great the Yar’s Revenge cartridge was until Montfort and Bogost’s book reminded me of how unique it was. Am I the only admirer of the “Superman” cartridge? I loved it.)

and to complete the trilogy

One other Onion classic on avant garde theater, though I can no longer find the original Onion page, but ONLY A PASTING OF IT ON THIS GUY’S BLOG.

The best line from the article may be the following, and it fits perfectly with my recent points about the overuse of “critique”:

“This play will not only savagely attack the class system, organized religion, and sexual mores, but also, by subverting the conventions of mainstream theater, it will draw attention to its stale artificiality!”

and while we’re at it…

A vastly underrated Onion piece on a joint Republican/Dadaist press conference denouncing the National Endowment for the Arts. Features a great photo of Jesse Helms at the podium with Tristan Tzara.

Click the sample to read the whole thing:

“Homosexuals and depraved people of every stripe are receiving federal monies at taxpayer expense for the worst kind of filth imaginable,” said U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), a longtime NEA critic.

Dadaist Jean Arp agreed. “Dada is, like nature, without meaning. Dada is for nature and against art,” he said.

Added nonsense-poet Hugo Ball, founder of Zurich’s famed Cabaret Voltaire: “…’dada’ (‘Dada’). Adad Dada Dada Dada.” Donning an elaborate, primitivist painted paper mask, he then engaged reporters in a tragico-absurd dance, contorting wildly while bellowing inanities.

another good Onion piece

with a hat-tip to Michelle…

Tibetan Teen Getting Into Western Philosophy
OCTOBER 20, 2004 | ISSUE 40•42

LHASA, TIBET—Deng Hsu, 14, said Monday that he is “totally getting into Western philosophy.” “I’ve been reading a lot of Kant, Descartes, and Hegel, and it’s blowing my mind,” Hsu said. “It’s so exotic and exciting, not like all that Buddhist ‘being is desire and desire is suffering’ shit my parents have been cramming down my throat all my life. Most of the kids in my school have never even heard of Hume’s views on objectivity or Locke’s tabula rasa.” Hsu said he hopes to one day make an exodus to north London to visit the birthplace of John Stuart Mill.

scenes from Cairo nights

For some reason, the summer bus schedule from Zamalek to the new campus is insanely generous, much more so than during the school year itself. For this reason, I am able when I wish to travel to the new campus with the 8 PM bus, arrive there anywhere between 8:45 and 9:00, spend an hour in my office after checking my snail mail (or wandering around the beautiful, ghostly campus itself) and then return to Zamalek with the final 10 PM bus, arriving usually around 11 PM.

I did that again tonight, still hoping to find Prince of Networks out there. Problem: I absentmindedly left my ID card at home. In principle you need the card to get onto campus, but in the dark I walked right on through, and they know who I am anyway.

The bigger problem was that those ID cards double as the office key and as the library access ticket. I peered in the glass window of the philosophy mail room, and was pretty sure I could see a package-sized item in my mail slot, though it’s only a 50-50 guarantee, given the lighting conditions in the mail room and in the outside corridor.

After about 10 minutes I got a couple of security guards there, but after making a phone call to their bus, they had to refuse me access both to the mailroom and even to my own office. Policies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building have apparently grown stricter for unknown reasons. Perhaps thefts, for all I know. But I had to go out there tomorrow morning anyway, and now I have a potential package to look forward to.

I made the snap decision on the way home to take the Tahrir (downtown) bus rather than the Zamalek bus, partly because I was hungry for some good koshary, and partly because it’s good to disrupt your route home in arbitrary ways now and then, just to keep life feeling fresh. I have always believed this.

Unfortunately, the downtown bus takes the Ring Road, an expressway out to the eastern suburbs that many refer to as “The Highway of Death.” Driving is always bad in Cairo, but it’s ridiculously bad on the Ring Road, and I am thankful that the Zamalek bus takes the much safer Heliopolis route (Heliopolis is the neighborhood, close to the airport, where Plato is said to have studied geometry for some time following the death of Socrates).

And I’m afraid we did come upon a very bad accident. There was a dead body in the middle of the road, thankfully already covered with a colorful carpet. Whether man or woman I could not tell, but the body seemed adult-sized. There was an agitated crowd and an ambulance on the scene. Since the ambulance was already there it couldn’t have just happened, but the emotional state of the crowd suggested some fairly shocked recent eyewitnesses. Most likely someone made the mistake of trying to run across the road there in the dark, unwise given that many drivers here like to keep their headlights off for no evident good reason. In all my years I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a thing, so this obviously provoked a train of thoughts about fragility and also about not postponing the things that we want to do most– a perpetual human struggle, that. There are always new alibis for postponement.

Incidentally, none other than T.E. Lawrence said that “the Arabs are the least morbid of peoples,” and I believe he was right. I have seen highly dramatic outpourings of grief in this city over deaths, but people tend to go through the mourning process in a seemingly quick fashion, and then move on. In the West we tend more often to wallow in deaths a bit more, reflecting on them from numerous subtle angles over the course of months or years. It can be enlightening, but it can also be purely morbid, as Lawrence saw. In general it is safe to say that this culture has a very strong sense of fate that allows people to deal with crushing tragedies in reasonably resilient fashion, and if this has its downsides no less than its upsides, then so too does our own preference for emphasizing the elements of free will and contingency in the things that happen.

I never take the Tahrir bus all the way downtown. Once it turns north and heads parallel to the Nile, it always gets caught in traffic and moves at a speed approximating that of a pub crawl. So, I get off whenever we pass the El Zahraa metro stop. It’s only 5 or 6 stops south of central Cairo, and anyway metro trains are always a shot in the arm for me, in no matter what city.

The stop I always use is Saad Zaghloul, rather than the more central Sadat stop. Saad Zaghloul is one stop prior to that. I like it because it exits onto a dark side street with a huge and spooky political monument across the lot next door (Zaghloul was a key anti-British nationalist in Egypt).

Turning east, it takes about 4 or 5 blocks to reach my former office building on the old campus, New Falaki. The decrepit Old Falaki next door, my initial office building, as well as one of the worst university classroom buildings in human history in purely acoustic terms, and its elevators as small and as reassuring as coffins, has recently been razed and the rubble entirely cleared away. Good riddance. I hated that piece of junk, even though it was home for my first semester in Egypt. The only good thing about it was the nice view of the Citadel of Saladin from some of the upper-floor classrooms. That was admittedly hard to beat, though it could only be seen by the professor, not the students.

The koshary was worth it, as always. The stuff in Zamalek always verges on soggy pasta and slightly old sauce, but Koshary El-Tahrir next to the old campus does a huge volume and always serves up a fresh bowl.

From there, it’s less than 1 US Dollar to take a taxi back to Zamalek. Most rides are routine. On about 1 in 5,000 rides I get a rude driver who lambasts me over American foreign policy. On about 1 in 7,000 I get a driver who actually seems drunk and does crazy and dangerous things. Most rides are unmemorable, but about 1 in 100 are memorable in some good sense. Tonight was one of those.

This driver was a quiet and healthy elderly many. When I first got in and asked for Zamalek, he smiled and nodded, and mumbled something under his breath that I assumed was a Qur’anic invocation for a safe ride, since this is often done. But then I realized that was just his manner of speaking. Like a character in a Shakespearean comedy, he had the tendency to speak in what sounded like rhymed couplets! He would point to a brewing traffic jam, for instance, and mumble something softly that again sounded rhythmically like a Qur’anic passage, but his faintly comic facial expression and flippant gestures made clear that this was not the case. He simply spoke in the way that a wizard chants.

I should also add, regretfully, that all of these incidents took place in an atmosphere of stifling, crippling heat.

a few more thoughts on arguments and the like

My latest attempt at a fruitless trip to the new campus in search of Prince of Networks was foiled by an apparently demagnetized ATM card. None of the machines will take it. What a pain.

In the meantime, I want to expand briefly on my earlier remarks about the status of “arguments” in philosophy. I’ve dealt with this fairly extensively in the final chapter of Prince of Networks, less in response to analytic philosophy than in response to Meillassoux’s claim that there needs to be an argument against correlationism rather than a mere attempt to dismissively psychologize it. (I think the picture is a lot more complicated than those two options, as explained in the book.) However, I think I can do an even better job explaining my point than I managed to do in the latest book. Not in a single blog post, necessarily, but perhaps in a series of them.

According to a particular usual view, on one side we have argument, clarity, reason, rationality, and democracy. This army of virtues opposes, on the other side, the grim forces of poetry, rhetoric, sophistry, and authority. But in fact, such oppositions badly oversimplify the true situation. I’ve often discussed some of these themes on the blog, but not all of them.

*For one thing, clarity is not enough. Vividness is needed. To be clear, all you need to do is avoid ambiguity and state the facts of the case as known. This is certainly a virtue, and the ability to do it fluently and consistently should be prized. However, it is not the only virtue.

The main problem with clarity is that it is normally a result of thinking, not a starting-point of it. In the initial stages of attacking any problem, the state of things may not be clear at all, and the “clarifying” type of mind may actually have a tin ear for the new ambiguities at play in the new situation. There are plenty of examples from intellectual history, even in the hard sciences, of people having strange intuitions that flouted scientific orthodoxy, but they went with them anyway, and they were justified by later results.

Looking empirically at my own life, the ideas of which I am now proudest generally took around 2-4 years to advance from “weird and vague surprise” stage to “can be cogently argued against hostile interlocutors” stage. Perhaps the timetable differs for others. But unless someone is thinking exclusively in words (a bad idea, in my opinion, since it suggests that such thinking occurs with the primary aim of beating others in arguments) then there is going to be some sort of time lag where you are struggling for just the right words to say something. And that lag might easily be several years or more. One should simply be moving toward a precise verbal formulation, and at a certain point if that proves impossible then maybe the idea wasn’t as good as you thought it was.

However, I still think emotion is the most powerful cognitive tool we have, precisely because it is so difficult to express or communicate. I find it important to pay attention to our slightest emotional reactions as we think, because this is generally the best road map to where the true insights lie. When we are in channels of thought that move smoothly and easily, sometimes this is because we or our predecessors have done a lot of hard work to build an expressway step-by-step through the underbrush. But at other times it’s because we’re not seeing with our own eyes, but using one side of an existing dichotomy to bludgeon the other side, or using a word as a convenient weapon to exterminate something else that we happen not to like.

What is important, while thinking, is to pay attention to the surprises across which we stumble, and these will rarely be immediately expressible in verbal form. Say that you’re running through something in your mind, aligning certain terms on one side of a divide and other terms on another side. And suddenly you realize that it doesn’t work. Or suddenly, a thought-experiment doesn’t turn out quite the way you expected. And it might not even be clear at first exactly why this is, and it may take a dozen or more diagrams in a notebook, or twenty or more visualizations, to figure out what went wrong. And you start trying to communicate it to others, and something about how you’re saying it isn’t quite right so far. Keep working on it, though, and in a couple of years you will have the moral authority of an insight gained from complete sincerity followed up by months or years of hard work.

This is why what Cameron called a “philosophical position” is worth more than thousands of isolated “arguments.” It is so easy to walk into a room and topple somebody’s domino-fortress. The hard thing is to follow up on an idea over many ears, pursuing its ramifications, and following the twists and often reversals into which it leads you. Simply do this genuinely, and what you do will automatically be appreciated. At the end of the day, people have a pretty good nose for the difference between facile bullshit artists and people who really care about what they are saying.

*I’ve spoken before about rhetoric. This is often interpreted as meaning “verbal trickery, as opposed to cogent argument.” But that is not what it meant classically, or what it means in reality. For Aristotle, rhetoric deals in enthymemes, which are unstated syllogisms, or tacit forms of knowing. Following Heidegger, tacit forms of knowing have gained a renewed importance. An “argument” is an attempt to sideline rhetoric by putting syllogisms in clear form, accessible on the surface of consciousness. Good work. Except that this can never be done completely. There is always a mass of unstated assumptions lying beneath any explicit proposition, and a good writer will manage to hint at this underbrush in ways that link it with one’s more accessible, tangible statements. My own view, as readers of my books know, is that reality itself is never accessible, and that for this reason we hint obliquely at real things rather than modelling them in the form of palpable traits. This makes rhetoric very important to me, for philosophical reasons, and I think it is a real problem with analytic philosophy as a paradigm of human thought that it sees the sole problem of writing style as consisting in “how to be as clear as possible.” The school as a whole lacks stylistic elegance and, to repeat, any hint of suggestive power. But is Nietzsche really a worse philosopher than Quine? Is Bergson? Do you really want to make these claims?

*As far as authority… In one scenario earlier today, I imagined Leibniz or Bergson appearing in a question period and being cut to shreds by some super-arguer grad student who pokes holes in their arguments. I added that I would want this student to shut up so that I could listen to Leibniz and Bergson.

“Aha!”, someone will say. “The argument form authority! This is undemocratic.”

No. Authority can mean a number of different things. If the grad student in question were cutting apart Dr. James T. Pompous, Higginbotham Professor of Epistemology, then of course I would love to see that happen. I’d be laughing as much as anyone if that occurred.

But I would also love it if some unknown new philosopher showed up and outgunned Leibniz or Bergson. Indeed, it would be the treat of a lifetime to see such a thing occur.

In other words, the point is not that higher-ranking people should not be challenged by lower-ranking people. Such ranks are always fluid. The point is that genuine philosophical endeavor should not be gratuitously hassled by pettifogging, insincere objections whose primary aim is to make all positive statement impossible. The people to whom we should listen are the people who habitually put their own necks on the line.

For now I just want to add that there is nothing especially democratic about “argument” either. It almost always favors the more aggressive and intransigent party, and also almost always favor the party whose ideas are closest to currently plausible mainstream opinion, since many of their assumptions will be allowed to pass without argument, as seemingly obvious. For instance, scientific naturalism will always get way too many breaks in any dispute just because it seems so extremely plausible in the year 2009 compared with more metaphysical-sounding doctrines. But there are many other examples.

This is far from an end to the topic. I will have much more to say about it in the years to come.

Viva la Barca

The coolest thing I’ve seen on Wikipedia lately is probably the article on Meillassoux… IN CATALAN.

My favorite-looking sentence is probably the final one:

“Diu que el món és una classe de hiper-caos en el que el principi de raó suficient és abandonat pel principi de no-contradicció.”

cyber-Zubiri

Cameron also asked me if I had noticed the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” section for Zubiri on Amazon. I just checked, and indeed, it does not resemble the former Zubiri readership. Yes, I can probably take credit for this. But let’s keep it rolling:

On Essence, Xavier Zubiri

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, by Lee Braver

Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, by Graham Harman

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Cotingency, by Quentin Meillassoux

Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, by Ray Brassier

“in defense of Amazon”

Cameron, one of the closest things to a living encyclopedia you’ll ever meet, writes with this practical information as well:

“You posted last week that people should take Amazon’s claims of having PoN in stock with a grain of salt. But I ordered it last Thursday in the afternoon, and got notice that it had shipped the following morning. I ordered it together with James Elkins’s The Object Stares Back: On The Nature Of Seeing (getting the total order over $25 and thereby qualifying for free shipping). The latter didn’t ship until yesterday.”

I ordered three copies from Amazon to be delivered by FedEx, and am still being told they will not be delivered until July 16-30. Not sure why Cairo should be last priority like that, given that I paid a hefty price for the shipping.

My reason for not ordering from re.press in this case is that I have no experience ordering from them, and so had no idea at all how quickly their distributors could get something to Egypt. But I’ve had abundant experience getting emergency FedEx shipments from Amazon to Cairo, and that generally works very well. Not sure what the problem is this time.

a reader’s thoughts on analytic philosophy

These remarks were actually sent in early June, but I’m still catching up with the past month’s worth of e-mail.

The author is Cameron, who has much experience in both philosophy and the hard sciences. (And no, he is not the same person as the Caemeron who sometimes comments at the Larval Subjects blog.)

“You’ve brought up a couple of interesting points lately. You just mentioned the attitude of analytic philosophers to the issue of style. And some time last week or the week before, you mentioned the fact that a philosophy isn’t reducible to its arguments. I think these two points together get at what’s distinctive about the analytic approach to reading philosophy. This is most obvious in their approach to the history of philosophy, but I imagine it also pertains to how they read works by their contemporaries.

Analytics seem to think that a philosophy is nothing but the arguments in which it is expressed. That is, they deny that there is such a thing as a philosophical position. They are anti-realists with regard to philosophy itself.

When I think about these issues, I’m always reminded of the passage in Bergson where he discusses his view that each philosopher has one or two main ideas, which are expressed over and over again in their work. You stress a pretty similar notion in your expositions of Heidegger. In Bergson’s case, that view of philosophy is also connected to his view of the relationship between intuition and language. His view is that the philosophical position, that the philosopher holds, can never be adequately captured in language, and that the task of putting philosophical thought into writing involves a basic violence to the inherent unity of the intuition – the violence of its analysis into discrete conceptual terms.

The analytics seem to take away from the stories about Socrates and the sophists the idea that anything that isn’t strictly logical is mere sophistry. But of course, logical argumentation, with whatever level of rigor, is merely one rhetorical or explanatory strategy that a writer can use to facilitate the expression of a philosophical position. Ironically, by focusing only on argumentation, and ignoring the philosophical positions that underlie the arguments, analytics tend to read texts only at a superficial rhetorical level. Basically, they start from the assumption that everyone is a sophist, because they don’t think it’s possible to be a philosopher.

Thus even analytics who claim to be realists tend to be anti-realists when it comes to their hermeneutic strategy in reading works of philosophy. They deny, in effect, that there’s a position-in-itself beyond the arguments – let alone beyond the non-logical (dramatic, poetic, stylistic, etc) textual phenomena.”

One other disturbing trait about analytic philosophy (which, to repeat, I do not generally dislike as much as most continentally trained people of my generation) is that not only does it see philosophy as a matter of arguments… it tends to push things a step further and identify “arguments” with “arguments expressed orally during verbal duels.”

For instance, I recently saw that video clip of Timothy Williamson (Chair at Oxford) being interviewed in Peru, or wherever it was. I should say that I like Williamson quite a bit and find him a kindred spirit on many issues.

However, one thing I disliked about the interview was the usual trope of how he went to some meetings of Derrida/Foucault people and found that they couldn’t answer his questions. By contrast, he said, analytic philosophy is more democratic, because in principle an unknown person can come and make an objection to a famous person, whereas continental philosophy runs on the authority principle. But there were a number of different points mixed together here by Williamson…

1. It’s quite possible that these particular Derrida/Foucault people didn’t know what they were talking about, sure. We’ve all met plenty of those. But I don’t see why inability to rapidly answer Timothy Williamson’s oral objections on their feet is proof that they don’t know what they are talking about. Analytic philosophy, as a culture, tends to place a very high value on rapid oral dispute, and this is in fact a very specific human talent. Even some great philosophers and scientists have lacked it. Hegel comes to mind, as does Niels Bohr. These people were indisputably geniuses, yet floundered quite a bit if they had to engage in debate. In politics this may be an understandably deadly flaw– but in philosophy, which is in fact largely a written medium, it wouldn’t seem lethal to me even if Williamson had stumped Derrida himself in a debate.

Philosophy is not a court of law. If I compare the list of the most formidable debaters I know and the most gifted and productive thinkers I know, the list has some overlap, but it’s far from total, and a few of the best debaters I’ve known have been outright intellectual hacks with little of interest to say at all.

Analytic philosophy as a profession seems to think not only that there is an entity called an “argument” that can exist in near-perfect abstraction, but that the medium in which this argument is expressed is fairly indifferent. One should be able to express it “clearly,” whether in speech or in a written article, and any faltering in oral debate must indicate that the desired “clarity” has not yet been achieved. This explains both the strength and weakness of analytic prose… It is very good at getting to the point and being very honest about what is known and unknown in the topic at hand, and also very good at organizing problems and drawing distinctions. It is also wretchedly lacking in suggestive and rhetorical power. The value of the latter is defined out of existence by describing it as “fuzziness” or the like.

But this is actually an intellectual error, and not just a stylistic disaster. For Whitehead is right– a verbal statement really is an inadequate statement of any proposition. There is too little respect in analytic philosophy for vague intuitions, a respect that incidentally is not generally lacking in the hard sciences. The history of modern physics is riddled with gut hunches and half-cooked ideas that were tried out before their precise verbal formulation had been found.

No doubt the weirdest aspect of my career so far is that I have been accused several times of being “an analytic philosopher,” a club to which few analytics are likely to be willing to admit me. Why this designation? Just because I try to be clear about the claims I am making? But this is one of the salutary features of analytic philosophy, as is the self-confidence found in the discipline vis-à-vis the history of philosophy, which many continentals face with a crippling insecurity.

2. As for Williamson’s claim that analytic philosophy is more democratic, I suspect there is some truth to this charge. One of the advantages of viewing philosophy as pieced together from arguments is that, in principle, even an unknown 16-year-old might come up with the best argument in the room. This seems healthy to me. By contrast, the star system in continental thought exists not only at the very top levels. Just go to a conference like SPEP, and you will find an extremely rigid social-academic hierarchy that is nearly impossible to penetrate in short order no matter how good your work is. Everyone used to (and perhaps still does) speak of “the SPEP mafia,” and that is indeed what it feels like to outsiders, and it is most unhealthy.

My only objection to this part of Williamson’s interview was, again, his assumption that “arguments” should be the ticket to democracy. For it is far too easy to nitpick any philosophical position with “arguments.” I can easily imagine some slick analytic grad student picking apart Leibniz or Bergson in a question period by needling them about hair-splitting difficulties. But that’s not my idea of democracy, and I’m sure I would want them to shut up so that I could hear what Leibniz and Bergson had to say. Democracy should mean free house-building licenses for everyone who wants them, to try what they want to try. It shouldn’t mean a universal spitwad fight. That just slows everything down in the construction zone. As Whitehead observed, philosophies are not refuted, but abandoned. Only peripherally do philosophies fail because of “arguments,” since there are arguments available to counter every theory that has ever been developed. Philosophies are generally abandoned due to shallowness, implausibility, insufficient scope, excessive abstraction, and so forth, far more than due to logical blunders.

To take just one example, I teach Plato every semester, and my often 16-year-old freshmen are ceaselessly finding new problems with the arguments made by Socrates. Literally every semester they find new fallacies uttered by Socrates. Fair enough; I’m proud of them for doing so. But why are my 16-year-old students not greater philosophers than Plato? No one would claim that they are, obviously. This should be sufficient to indicate that there is a lot more at issue than correct and incorrect arguments. Incorrect arguments should be avoided, but this is the merest skin of the philosophical thought-process.