another Comp. of Phil. note

Quick note… After taking the whole day off from the book project due to mental exhaustion and a general feeling of indifference, I was surprised to find myself, after midnight, in a rare writing mood.

What to do in that case? Opinions vary. Philip Glass apparently only allows himself to compose music in the morning, and ignores even good ideas that come to him in the afternoon or evening. He compares it to “training the Muse to come calling at my hours,” which is a nice line, and is a good way to have a sane life along with being productive in one’s field.

My own approach is different… To me, these moods of really wanting to write are precious, and to kill them off would be an act of cruelty. There are obviously cases where you must do so. For instance, if I were teaching tomorrow morning, or if I had some other obligation, then I would just regretfully ignore the Muse and go to sleep now that it’s 1:15 AM.

However, this is a situation that calls for seizing every productive mood and exploiting it… Just coming off a lethargic day today, summertime with no obligations, and a built-in rest period of several days planned for whenever I finish drafting these next two chapters.

So, this is one all-night horse I’m definitely going to ride. Back to work…

brief note on Bachelard’s popularity

Every now and then I check Amazon to see how Prince of Networks is doing. On good days it’s fairly high on the metaphysics list, with mostly New Age and popular physics books ahead of it. But here’s the interesting thing… Sometimes it’ll jump ahead even of Descartes, but the one philosophy book on the list that is impossible to outsell is Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Obviously there is a wide potential readership for that book in many different fields, but it’s a nice surprise to see Bachelard continuing to do so well after so many years. We don’t speak too much about him anymore.

the dog incident revisited

One year ago tomorrow, on July 21, 2008, I had my stomach fairly badly mauled by a dog that looked more or less like this:

I had just moved to my new neighborhood, near the new campus, two hours earlier. Tired of unpacking, I went out for a walk just before dusk.

I noticed this dog right away. It was walking off to my left, in a parallel path to mine. It walked straight past the open door of a mosque without even looking in. It seemed agitated. After it passed the mosque it made the first of several weirdly abrupt right-angled turns, taking it on a circuit around the mosque’s large parking lot.

As I approached the driveway into the parking lot, I noticed the dog heading right for me, very incautiously, at a speed that would have put it straight into the path of onrushing traffic. No one wants to see a dog get hit by a car. So I bent over in the dog’s path and started encouraging it, in baby talk, to slow down or it was going to get hurt.

It must have still been 20 meters away at that point. To my surprise, it slowed down not at all. It came straight up to me at a constant speed. Then, to my shock, the dog bit right into the left side of my stomach with a ferocious-sounding growl. It kept on growling as we wrestled for about 5 to 10 seconds. That dog weighed a lot! I’m not a small person either. It was quite a wrestling match, if a short one. Then the dog let go and walked off across the street as though nothing at all had happened.

A group of children across the street had witnessed this incident from the balcony, and began screaming to their friends on the ground to run away. I looked down and my shirt was torn to bloody shreds.

Eventually, I flagged down a local bus, which took me to the neighborhood hospital. The doctor there literally gave me the shirt off his back… Well, it wasn’t on his back at the time, since he was in his doctor’s uniform, but he gave me his civilian shirt to replace the nice shirt that had been torn apart by the dog.

A child had been bitten just before me, presumably by the same dog. Later I learned of two other children who had been bitten, including, by a strange coincidence, the nephew of AUC Vice Provost Ali Hadi, with whom I work closely.

The dog was not foaming at the mouth, but I researched rabies fairly diligently in the days following the incident, and it seems that foaming at the mouth is a final-stage symptom that appears when the animal is no longer able to swallow.

A few days later there was news that the dog had been killed, though I don’t know when. No one ever asked me for a description of it, but it was behaving so erratically that it would have been hard for the police to miss. Egypt is awash with rabies, and it is said that Cairo alone has 17 strains of canine rabies. Dogs here are not usually beloved pets as they are in most Western countries. They are usually more like semi-feral street animals, and treated as such. It’s generally a good idea to stay away from loose dogs in this country, and this incident was a stark reminder of that fact.

And yes, of course I went to get the rabies shots. The dog was so obviously rabid that I didn’t bother inquiring if tests had been done on its corpse. (I wouldn’t have trusted a negative verdict anyway. Better safe than sorry.)

The shots are not as bad as many of my generation might assume. We all grew up horrified of rabies shots, because back then it was 20-some shots in the abdomen with a giant needle. Now, it’s nothing but harmless pricks in the shoulder; things have changed. The real problem with rabies shots is what a pain they are for your schedule. You have to get them on days 0, 3, 7, 14, and 28 after the bite.

Also, not every place in Cairo had the vaccine. My neighborhood hospital did not. I had to go to a hospital in Heliopolis to get the one on Day 0, a few hours after the incident. After a brief and confusing wait, I did receive the first shot, and it was free of charge. The problem was that two nurses (woefully underpaid here) then grabbed my shirt, begging for a tip. I gave tips to both of them, but they immediately called in all their nurse friends, even ones who’d had nothing to do with my case, and I had to tip them all not to cause a mini-riot. Then the guy at the gate wanted a big tip, and so forth.

I decided I didn’t want to go through that again. So, it was arranged for one particular pharmacy in Garden City, near the AUC old campus, to have my vaccine on each appropriate day. It was about $15 per shot, which is cheap anyway, and certainly cheaper than all the tips I had to give to make it out of the hospital uninjured or at least unhated.

And here’s the fun part, completely unknown in the West… The pharmacy handed me the vaccine along with an ice pack, put them both in a plastic bag, and allowed me to walk it myself to the AUC medical clinic, where an AUC nurse would inject me each time.

I wondered if the vaccine would work against all future bites as well, but was told that it would only last for a year. So, any further bites will send me through the process again, now that a year is up.

Our then-Provost heard my story, and told an even better one of his own. When his children were young, they attended a birthday party in the southern suburb of Ma’adi. There was a cute little puppy at this party, but the cute puppy happened to have rabies. It bit every child at the party, which I think was a dozen or more. And this was back in the bad old days of really terrible, painful rabies shots.

For some months there was a fairly interesting, scary-looking scar on my stomach that was a hit at parties. But now it’s so well-healed that I have to look very closely to find it. It looks almost like slits from a razor blade rather than the scars of tooth-points.

A toast to Louis Pasteur, for keeping me alive!

“As a known murderer…”

Great line from the Wikipedia article on poet François Villon:

“As a known murderer Villon could not continue his privileged life as a teacher at the Collège de Navarre or get reputable employment; thus, he was forced to sing in inns to survive.”

I try to imagine myself telling my life story to a stranger someday and uttering the line: “thus, I was forced to sing in inns to survive.”

Unfortunately, I have no ability to put people on like that even for a few seconds (with the sole exception of April Fool’s jokes), since it makes me feel like a liar. Simply put, I have no talent for creative teasing. But there are people I know who might want to try this.

I once had an acquaintance who would end every one of his complaints about present-day society with the line: “And that’s why we need National Socialism.” Just to see how people would react. I’m afraid I don’t have the stomach for this technique, but it’s occasionally funny.

Composition of Philosophy. July 20.

Yesterday’s draft, Chapter 3, ended up being the only draft shorter than it should have been. It was 11 pages rather than 13 or 14.

Whenever that happens, I know that my tank is empty, and I need to take a day off and relearn the joy of it. So, no work on the manuscript at all today. Either I will double up tomorrow, or I will fall one day behind– no matter either way, because I’ve left plenty of room in the schedule for blow-off days.

However… not complete blow-offs. There are two things worth doing on those sorts of days. One is to spend time with other people, which is always a good way to refuel. Or, if you’re spending the day alone, you can make a better outline for the next day. That’s a fairly low-stress thing to do, and one that is guaranteed to make things go faster the next day.

Zizek on Iran

I think it’s been out for at least a week, but I just ran across it now:

“First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the ayatollahs.”

Another good line:

“Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’”

Ennis interviews Lee Braver

READ THE INTERVIEW HERE.

Though Braver and I have a number of disagreements, his A Thing of This World is among the most helpful books to appear in the last couple of decades in Anglophone continental philosophy, and he’s someone who is going to be an important participant in the conversation for many years to come. He’s also a very friendly and unpretentious guy.

He makes a good point that it’s not a bad idea to drop a line to any author if you enjoy a book that they wrote. You would be surprised at how little feedback book authors receive, especially in the first couple of years.

Actually, I just decided to click this as an “advice” post, because a few more recollections come to mind.

*First, the only reason I knew about Braver’s book, and ended up reviewing it, is because John Protevi mentioned it favorably on his blog. So, we bloggers do a good thing when we mention books that we find important. It can have a chain reaction on readers of the blog.

*Another amusing tale… Tool-Being, my first book, was published in August 2002. In early December I received an email from an old friend not seen in about 8 years, but much missed. She said she was reluctant to write to me, because I must already be getting hundreds of e-mails about the book. *LAUGH OUT LOUD*. I think hers was about the fifth e-mail, and only three of those were from strangers. It takes quite awhile for new books to read by a critical mass of people. I think Braver is starting to see this, since only now is some momentum finally building up for his book.

*Another tale I’ve told here before is how/why I got to know Latour. Some people at DePaul knew I was reading him, and asked me to give a talk on his work. I did so, and afterward Bill Martin said something like: “You ought to send the paper to Latour. You’d be surprised how little useful feedback these top people get.” So, I looked up Latour’s address and mailed the paper to him. Within a week he sent the warmest possible email in reply, and of course I’ve benefitted incalculably from my conversations with him over the past decade. And I’ve had similar experiences in much briefer exchanges with Habermas, Rorty, DeLanda, and Zizek. As a general rule, the bigger they are, the warmer they are. (Just last week I received a glowing report from a student friend about how well she was treated by Noam Chomsky.) It’s the people one tier below that level who have often told me they’re too busy to work me into 10 minutes of their schedule, or who make me wait outside their office until 40 minutes after I was supposed to be there, or who lean back in their chairs with arms folded behind their heads and dismiss everything I say and tell me I need to read such-and-such a book. The really good people have no time to waste on that sort of crap, and after a certain career stage they have nothing left to prove.

These top people are busy, so don’t pester them. But a nice brief note of appreciation might mean more to an author than you think. It is never really clear how many people are reading a book, or how they are reacting to it.

one citation, for Bogost’s sake

Not only does this passage from my article contain one of those lists that Bogost is slowly learning to love, it even footnotes his book Unit Operations as a source:

“But in many ways, the present and future of battle is presaged less by Virilio or Heidegger’s fear of ubiquitous speed than by videogames– with their small and lightly armed commando units adrift in a world of walls, pylons, windmills, warehouses, canals, civilians, and other small-scale obstacles.”

Virilio article

The article is a lot more interesting than I remembered. It’s always a good sign if you reread one of your own pieces of writing (which I do only rarely) and it makes you think rather than cringe at changes you should have made. This one made me think.

Virilio’s only a part of it. I wanted to write about warfare, because this was the Hiroshima conference, and it would have felt cowardly to go as an American to Hiroshima and talk about Husserl’s reductions or something like that. There is a lot to chew on for one who visits Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as I did on that very moving trip.

At the same time, I think it’s important to avoid falling into “beautiful soul” dismissals of the military profession as nothing but a bunch of bumbling killers and torturers. Same goes for the police. There are real dangers in the world, and real protection is often needed from those dangers. If we confine ourselves to “critique” as our only political gesture, it’s easy to point fingers but much harder to make responsible decisions. That’s why I admire politicians, as Latour does. It’s easy to criticize them from the ether of pure thought, but not always easy to do better than they did.

At any rate, the article goes something like this:

1. Virilio did show remarkable foresight in anticipating a number of trends.

2. Nonetheless, like Heidegger, he has a monolithic vision of history in which a single sinister force (“speed” in Virilio’s case, “presence” in Heidegger’s) is on the increase, and it is basically not in our human capacity to stop it.

3. McLuhan was much sharper in seeing reversals as a key force in history. It is too robotic to extrapolate from past trends and assume that they will become only more pronounced as time goes by. McLuhan showed that any medium can take only so much “heating” before collapsing and reversing into its opposite. It’s a simple but profound idea that I think is not sufficiently widespread yet.

4. Along the same lines, a less monolithic view of the history of warfare than Virilio’s can be found in a masterful and famous little 1989 article from the Marine Corps Gazette. Many readers of this blog may not be aware that the Marine Corps is a pretty theoretically savvy organization. I first became aware of this due to my fascination with the works of the late Colonel John Boyd (he was from the Air Force, but it was the Marines who took his ideas the most seriously). Boyd is sometimes called “the American Sun-Tzu,” and along with being a fine fighter pilot, he was a heroic opponent of waste, corruption, and careerism in the Pentagon, a criticism he performed from the inside. Most of his writing is still available only in the form of PowerPoint shows on the web. His work contains many surprises, such as his glowing admiration for the military genius of Mao, and his favoring of Grant over Lee and Napoleon. (Note: I have no military background myself, just a deep intellectual respect for the fact that the military has to take realities into account, such as physical geography. This makes them strong in the area in which most of the philosophy of recent centuries has been weak. I can also say that I’ve had the chance to meet a number of top retired officers from the Egyptian military, and have been universally impressed by their balance, moderation, wisdom, and intellectual integrity. This included one of the chief planners of the Egyptian side of the 1973 war, who lacked even the tiniest drop of vitriol against Israel– not at all what I expected, which was a moralistic diatribe.)

In any case, the Marine Corps Gazette authors trace modern warfare through three generations. Writing way back in 1989, with the Cold War still going, they miraculously foresaw a fourth-generation warfare, which looked an awful lot like post-9/11 asymmetrical war.

Using the principles they identified in the transition from first-generation war up through fourth-generation, I tried a bit of idle futurology and imagined a possible fifth- and sixth-generation warfare that could emerge over the next 200 years.

And then, I tried to establish parallels between their evolution of warfare since Napoleon’s time, and the evolution of philosophy since Kant’s time. I ran out of space before speculating what 4th, 5th, and 6th generation philosophy might look like, but did link the first three generations with (a) Kant, (b) German Idealism, and (c) some of the major non-Kantian philosophies of the 20th century, such as Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze.

I’m more convinced by the parallel upon rereading the article than I was the last time I read the draft.

an obvious problem with traditional publishing

I’m taking a quick break from the book project so that I can go out to a café and quickly look over the proofs of my Virilio article. A few minutes ago, the thought hit me of how absurd (and completely typical) the facts of this case are… This article was written as a conference paper in 2006, read at the conference in 2007, and here we are now in 2009, just getting around to publication. And that’s more or less normal in this business.

No one in particular is to blame. The editor has gone as fast as he can in landing a publisher and reviewing all the essays carefully (he’s done an unusually diligent job). The publisher seems to be going pretty quickly, for all I can tell. But obviously, the system is broken if it takes that long for an article to move from completion to appearance.

Open access can help solve much of this problem. So can streamlining various procedures as both re.press and zerO are doing, each in its own way.

The analogy that keeps coming to mind is that of early recording companies, which with their relatively low costs could afford to take lots of risks on local talent knowing that they’d occasionally turn up gems that would keep the whole business going: Stax, Sun, Chess, etc. What we’ve had instead until now is a situation dominated by a few university presses, and the amount of overhead required to produce every book raised the barrier for entry and put too much power in the hands of the people making the yes-or-no decisions on whether to publish.

If it becomes easier to get a book published, as is obviously becoming the case for all kinds of different reasons, it will certainly be true that more utterly half-baked material gets past the sentries, but it will also shift the focus from the mere fact of having had the manuscript accepted to the inherent quality or interest of the work itself. It won’t be as important anymore to say things like: “Yale University Press is publishing my dissertation.” Some books will capture the interest of the public that would never have had a chance to be accepted under the old system.

And ultimately, this is going to be one of the big threats to the academic world as we have known it, because a surprising amount of academic hierarchy is closely tied to the prestige pecking-order of various publishers. Carefully controlled admission to book publishing, with manuscripts often vetted by the same handful of experts in every field, led to much homogeneity of discourse.

Things will also change once the major market for academic books is no longer academics, as I think is starting to happen… There are so many highly educated people these days working well outside academia who want to read philosophy books. Once philosophy publishing isn’t dominated by and for professors, it will also start to be written less with professors in mind, which presumably means a clearer and more provocative style will be in the offing, less dominated by the technical language and professional caution that is a natural feature of the academy. Philosophy books will start to look more like philosophy blogs, or at least the successful books will.