signoff

Part of me wants to stay up later (it’s nearly 1 AM now) and finish off this draft. But the experience of recent days has reminded me of the virtues of a sane sleep schedule, so I’m going to do the normally unthinkable and kill off a good writing mood with sleep. Usually I do that only if there are obligations the next day involving other people, but I’m making an exception this time, simply because I felt much better today once back on a normal person’s schedule.

today’s best Wikipedia find

I hope this is true:

“Medical anomaly. Anatole France had a brain just two-thirds the normal size, but this had no recorded effect on his life in any way.”

My opinion is that Wikipedia often gets a bum rap. It obviously shouldn’t be a source for serious research, but it’s unmatched as a quick look-up reference on basic biographical facts, and is always the first place I go for that sort of thing.

interview link, again

Lots of people seem to be coming here looking for the link to my interchange with Paul Ennis. Since the original link is now buried far down on this blog, HERE IT IS AGAIN.

As I read the interview for the first time on Ennis’s blog, for some reason the page kept refreshing every 2 seconds. If everyone’s browser is doing that, Paul might have the mistaken impression that I’m getting a Zizekian 10,000 or more hits.

Cameron digs up another gem

It’s been ages since I read RABELAIS, unfortunately.

“Hi Graham,

You commented:

‘If you’re writing alone as if in a monastery, especially in the middle of the night, a certain fundamental insanity begins to creep into any project.’

This for some reason reminded me of a passage from Rabelais that has long been a favorite of mine (and a good example of a literary list, which is another topic you’ve brought up recently). Some quick groveling in google books came up with the quotation. Here it is, in the inimitable Urquhart translation, in its original spelling (which is into a distinctly Scottish variety of 17th century English):

He [Gargantua] gave us also the Example of the Philosopher, who, when he thought most seriously to have withdrawn himself unto a solitary Privacy, far from the rusling clutterments of the tumultuous and confused World, the better to improve his Theory, to contrive, comment and ratiocinate, was, notwithstanding his uttermost endeavours to free himself from all untoward Noises, surrounded and environd about so with the barking of Currs, bawling of Mastiffs, bleating of Sheep, prating of Parrots, tattling of Jackdaws, grunting of Swine, girning of Boars, yelping of Foxes, mewing of Cats, cheeping of Mice, squeaking of Weasils, croaking of Frogs, crowing of Cocks, kekling of Hens, calling of Partridges, chanting of Swans, chattering of Jays, peeping of Chickens, singing of Larks, creaking of Geese, chirping of Swallows, clucking of Moorfowls, cucking of Cuckows, bumbling of Bees, rammage of Hawks, chirming of Linets, croaking of Ravens, screeching of Owls, wicking of Pigs, gushing of Hogs, curring of Pigeons, grumbling of Cushet-doves, howling of Panthers, curkling of Quails, chirping of Sparrows, crackling of Crows, nuzzing of Camels, wheening of Whelps, buzzing of Dromedaries, mumbling of Rabets, cricking of Ferrets, humming of Wasps, mioling of Tygers, bruzzing of Bears, sussing of Kitnings, clamring of Scarfes, whimpring of Fullmarts, boing of Buffalos, warbling of Nightingales, quavering of Meavises, drintling of Turkies, coniating of Storks, frantling of Peacocks, clattering of Magpies, murmuring of Stock-doves, crouting of Cormorants, cigling of Locusts, charming of Beagles, guarring of Puppies, snarling of Messens, rantling of Rats, guerieting of Apes, snuttering of Monkies, pioling of Pelicans, quecking of Ducks, yelling of Wolves, roaring of Lions, neighing of Horses, crying of Elephants, hissing of Serpents, and wailing of Turtles; that he was much more troubled than if he had been in the middle of the Crowd at the Fair of Fontenoy or Niort.

Beware the wailing of turtles . . .

–cameron.”

the one major difference

Incidentally, I should add a word about my one major point of disagreement with the McLuhans… They read the tetrad structure as applying only to human artifacts, and they read all human artifacts as forms of language.

In short, they are “correlationists” in Meillassoux’s sense. But that disagreement is no more important than the graffiti on the atomic bomb. 😉

Another point of orientation… They see themselves as continuing the work of Bacon and Vico. Dialectic (meaning all discursive reason, not just Hegelian dialectic) is seen as a mere playing out of surface figures, while the real work happens at the level of rhetoric and grammar (the latter two terms are not as cleanly distinguished from each other by the McLuhans as they are from dialectic).

It was Eric McLuhan who first pointed out to me how terribly misunderstood Francis Bacon is, and what a great philosopher he was.

The textbook Bacon says little more than this: “do as many experiments as possible, and use the results to try to dominate nature.” But as Eric pointed out to me, if you focus on the second half of the Novum Organum, you find something completely unexpected: Bacon is interested entirely in formal causation. There are cryptic and concealed forms, such as heat, lying broken and crushed and compressed in the heart of every entity, and it is these forms that the sciences are meant to unlock.

Normal efficient or physical causation is viewed, by Bacon, as laughable. Bacon isn’t a naturalism fascist, he’s a Platonizing object-oriented philosopher.

Bogost, Levi, McLuhan

Here’s the best of many good lines in Bogost’s response:

“But generally, ‘interdisciplinarity’ in the humanities has meant ‘French and German.'”

I’m glad he agrees with me about the importance of McLuhan, though of course I already knew he did, based on our past correspondence.

For some reason, the “McLuhan is a technological determinist” meme seems to be especially strong in the UK. As I argued in my essay “The McLuhans and Metaphysics” in the collection New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, that notion is simply false, if somewhat understandable.

The understandable part of this notion is that McLuhan does think that the background medium is what counts. In Bristol this spring, Iain Hamilton Grant reminded me of McLuhan’s provocative remark that the content of any medium is about as important as the graffiti placed on the first atomic bomb. (And admittedly, that’s going a bit far. Content isn’t that unimportant.)

So, the background of any medium is the important thing for McLuhan, and forms the environment in which we live. But that’s not “technological determinism,” and for a simple reason. Here’s how it works, for McLuhan…

Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media was the book they were working on together when Marshall had the stroke that sadly put an end to his career, though he lived for another year or so after that. (Eric is still alive and well, fortunately, and living in Toronto. We correspond occasionally.) This book develops a “tetrad” or fourfold structure of all media. Every medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves, and reverses (or “flips,” they sometimes say).

To take a somewhat banal example, the automobile:

*The car enhances speed, privacy, the oil industry, and countless other things we might think up. But ironically, to enhance something really means to make it invisible, because it becomes the dominant background medium. We start to take the enhancements for granted.

*The car obsolesces trains, trolleys, dirt roads, and so forth. And again ironically, it makes these things more visible precisely by turning them into obsolete pieces of junk. When the train station closed in my hometown in the 1970’s, nobody saw any use for it. I believe someone bought it for a token $1, and it was later torn down when plans to refurbish it came to nothing. Obsolete media of the past are reduced, effectively, to clichés.

*But there is also the moment of retrieval. This means that every medium has a former medium as its content. In the case of the car, what is retrieved? One of the things it retrieves is a long-dead “knight in shining armor” culture. There are duels and jousts and chivalry while driving. There is heraldry in the form of hood ornaments and bumper stickers and “baby on board” signs. In this case, what was once an obsolete cliché has now become an archetype.

Archetypes are “ye olde cliché writ large,” as the McLuhans put it. They are clichés that have been reinvigorated by an actual new medium.

And the point is– this takes work. There are countless dead clichés adrift in the environment at any moment. Which ones come back to life, and which are doomed to be permanent clichés? The decision is not made by some impersonal Ereignis or even by “social forces.” For the McLuhans, that decision is made primarily by artists, taken in the widest sense so that engineers and generals can also be “artists”– people who know how to extract the nectar from clichés and re-adapt them to our present environment.

If anything, one might argue that this makes the McLuhans the very opposite of technological determinists. In fact, they grant an extreme power to the vision of individual creators– perhaps too extreme for the tastes of most sociologists (though not for my tastes).

*The fourth moment of the tetrad is reversal. Extrapolation is not the way to go when imagining future trends, because every current trend will reach a saturation point, and eventually flip into its opposite.

No one has ever done a better job of exploring the dynamics that cause figure and background to flip into another. Heidegger is painfully abstract by comparison.

Composition of Philosophy. July 22.

I’ll do this one early tonight.

One scheduling fallacy of which many authors are regularly guilty, including me, is the assumption that you need a big block of uninterrupted time in which to write. Quite often, the opposite is the case.

Remember, the feeling of infinity is usually a hindrance rather than a help to any writing project. And the feeling of a vast block of free time can also be a hindrance. I was reminded of that earlier this week, when my total lack of obligations made me waste too much time on breaks between section, and eventually even ruined my sleep schedule.

Today, I had obligations that took me to campus early in the morning, which also involved forced sleep last night before I was ready to sleep, meaning that almost nothing got done yesterday. But the effect has been wonderful. Having only a half-day at my disposal rather than a full day has been a tonic in terms of productivity, energy, and enthusiasm.

Also, my phone talk tonight with Paris, while unnecessary and based on the false worry that I had been given incorrect information, also helped re-create a link to reality for this project. If you’re writing alone as if in a monastery, especially in the middle of the night, a certain fundamental insanity begins to creep into any project. The more the project stays linked to constraints of any kind (and interactions with other people are always a mild form of constraint on the seemingly infinite thoughts within) the more real the project becomes, and the happier you will feel about it.

What’s my new plan, after a few days of falling behind? I’ll have the draft done tomorrow. Then it seems reasonable to have it all polished up by July 31. The original plan was to have it all polished up by today or tomorrow, and the next plan was to have the polished first 65 or 70 pages done by the end of the coming weekend. So there has already been slippage from the ideal schedule– but, it doesn’t matter. There will still be a full month to write and polish the second 65 or 70 pages.

Once that’s all done, I’ll need to think about the “possible” second half of the book. Remember, the length of the book can be doubled if the matching grant is received from France, but that will not be known until at least late 2009, it seems.

The way I think I’ll handle that problem is to just go ahead and write the second half, throughout Fall Semester. This book will appear in English as well, after all, and there is no constraint on length with the English publisher. That way, the second half will be ready to go for the French version as well, if funding is obtained.

Atari review

Here’s a REVIEW OF THE MONTFORT/BOGOST BOOK ON THE ATARI, Racing the Beam.

The highlight for me was the YouTube video of 10 minutes of a game of Pitfall. I’d sort of forgotten what that game was like.

contingencies

This evening I received a wonderfully (because harmlessly) urgent call from the people on the French end of this book project.

For some reason they thought, to their horror, that they had misinformed me about the length of the book and had accidentally requested something much much shorter than they wanted. It was actually quite charming, because they hadn’t misinformed me at all.

Well… the original estimate was just a tiny bit off the mark. It’ll need to be about 5% shorter than I originally thought.

But at least I now understand the French terminology for these things:

signes includes blank spaces

caractères does not include blank spaces

I’m now told that I’m working in signes, not caractères, and that clears up the final remaining ambiguities.

It was a fun call, patched from a mobile phone in the Paris metro to my flat in Cairo by way of the AUC switchboard. And we got cut off once, just as the familiar Paris Metro “doors closing” sound went off in the background.

if the moon landing were now

A hilarious montage of what moon landing coverage might have looked like in 2009. Hat-tip to Professor Bogost: