Levi on design ontology

And in an epic prose poem, LEVI SPINS OUT SOME MORE THOUGHTS ON HIS PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION.

Over and out, I had a long day.

more on the metaphysics videogame

From the videogame metaphysician himself, IAN BOGOST.

“The Fall of the House of Oakley”

That’s what I’ve always called it… July 28, 1999, 10 years ago today, I lost the best graduate school roommate of all time (Dr. Paul Schafer) from our Oakley Avenue place to his new job in New Orleans. I still had another year to go in Chicago, this time as a faculty member, but it would be in a smaller place by myself. (Oddly, there were almost as many parties there as we’d had at Oakley Avenue, though I am most definitely not the party-throwing “type.” It was an anomalous year.)

None of the details mean a thing to most of you, of course, but perhaps you can catch the tone of what I’m thinking– a lot happens in 10 years! On July 28, 1999, I was still more than a year away from setting foot in Egypt for the first time, and by now Egypt feels like infinity.

The cross-street for the Oakley Avenue place was called Shakespeare. Can’t beat that.

How fun was the Oakley place? I once calculated that I’d crashed on the couch there 45 times before ever moving in. Paul was the stalwart as several different roommates rotated through, and of course I jumped at the chance to move in. It’s also the only place I’ve ever had where I was the subject rather than the initiator of noise complaints. Perhaps that was the needed attitude of revelry for two housemates to finish off their dissertations simultaneously after an ungodly number of years. (No wait, I was the target of a few noise complaints the following year as well. But that is most out of character.) [ADDENDUM: And of course, there is no such thing as a “noise complaint” in Egypt. Most people and objects are noisy here. You have to toughen up. The bedrooms in my current place may as well be located in a carnival midway.]

Missed opportunity: the music collection between the two of us was so vast that we could have started up a d.j. operation quite easily, and we even discussed it at one point.

a quick thought on the Wolcott/Oates phrase

Incidentally, even if Wolcott were right that Oates is ultra-productive due to some sort of psychological disorder (and unless that’s deliberate comedy, it sounds to me like pure ressentiment) he could hardly have misfired more than calling it an “obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

Obsessive-compulsives are the ones who establish endless preparatory rituals that prevent anything from getting done. They’re not the ones who write truckloads of novels and story collections like Oates. If you wanted to give it a disorder-type name, I believe “hysteria” would be the word, but I don’t see the point of diagnosing Nobel-level work as a disorder, unless you want to make the usual sort of “all artists are struck by madness” claim. But that wouldn’t bear on Oates any more than it would on someone who earned a reputation based on very little writing, such as Cavafy. (He wrote a lot of poems, but destroyed all but the best of them.)

Anyway… I posted earlier that I’ve written a final version of the first 51 pages of the book in less than 20 hours.

It just occurred to me while walking home from a trip to the store that it took not 20 hours, but three years, to rewrite and revise the first 50 pages of my dissertation. Now that’s more deserving of the tag “obsessive-compulsive.” If I’d kept it up, I would be miserable today, and would surely have needed to find a different profession.

If you’re the same way, and you’re still a student, don’t worry– there’s time to fix it. But do start fixing it. Don’t lapse into some defensive myth about how, unlike others, you’re too committed to quality to speed up a bit. This attitude will not only slow down your progress, it will also encourage you to admire the wrong people, the ones whose behavior supports the myth. If there was one healthy thing about my mostly unhealthy graduate school psyche, it was that I always admired the producers, and never admired the stiff-arming big talkers who never delivered the goods. Loving and admiring the right people is at least half the secret to life. You’ll eventually become more like them.

Blue M&Ms and spine injuries

This is the weirdest CNN main story in quite some time: blue M&M dye apparently helps spinal injuries in mice.

“The same blue food dye found in M&Ms and Gatorade could be used to reduce damage caused by spine injuries, offering a better chance of recovery, according to new research…

The only side effect was that the treated mice temporarily turned blue.”

And there’s a photo of the blue mouse to prove it.

readers on boasts

Here is one of several reader responses I received about the Badiou/McLuhan boasts:

“I appreciate your post on Eric McLuhan, Badiou, and boasts. Neitzsche’s Ecce Homo would be a fine case to add to the ones you mention, and I’ve read the latter fruitfully as an effort to enact a subversion of what he would call Christian morality. Muhammad Ali too. ‘Why Am I so Wise’ and ‘I’m the greatest.’ Nietzsche and Ali as you would say, have a lot to lose, but I also think they played against the reigning ethoi (plural?) of their moments. Do you think Badiou and McLuhan do the same?”

Nietzsche is a great example, of course, and to some extent Giordano Bruno. In Nietzsche’s case it seems pretty obvious that a humble tone would ruin his works, and in Bruno’s case as well. But there are other cases where I would hate to see boasting– try to imagine a cocky Aquinas, for instance. (“Why I am Such a Great Theologian”; “Why I Deserve to Go to Heaven”.) That would be ridiculous.

As for Muhammad Ali, I was young enough during his heyday that I simply took him for granted and didn’t realize what a special figure he was. I suppose many readers of this blog enjoyed the film “When We Were Kings” as I did. That film made me appreciate not only Muhammad Ali, but even Howard Cosell, who was mildly obnoxious but also one of a kind. (And of course the weirdest part of the film was the sinister personality of George Foreman, since by the time the film was released we were already long familiar with Foreman as the re-invented cheerful pitchman of George Foreman grills, one of the most uproarious success stories in the history of commerce.)

I’m not normally an admirer of boasting hip-hop stars and their endless liner notes thanking 300 friends.

As for Badiou, he’s given his own justification for why modesty is not a valid philosophical attitude. And he has a point… There’s a certain inherent boastfulness in claiming to have a philosophical system that explains the whole of reality, and sometimes false modesty hides the deepest arrogance, because what it really means is that self-love is being held in reserve behind the public success or failure of any given claim. At least Badiou is coming right out and risking his self-assessment before the eyes of millions. Don’t get me wrong, I do think his statement is in mildly bad taste, just as Nietzsche’s chapter titles in Ecce Homo are in bad taste. But in Nietzsche’s case a bit of bad taste is a small price to pay for his dazzling literary-philosophical persona, and in Badiou’s case that will await the judgment of history. I tend to think he won’t win the bet, but who knows? At least I can keep a straight face while reading his claim to have written a great work of philosophy. (He used scare-quotes around “great,” and really shouldn’t have. If you’re going to make that big a boast, scare-quotes are no protection.)

As for Eric McLuhan’s statement, I think it was less self-conscious than that… He thinks, even now, that the tetrad really is the greatest intellectual discovery in several centuries, and has stated so rather matter-of-factly. Whether it’s the “greatest”… well, that’s obviously a huge claim to make for a concept that is not often discussed even among McLuhan fans (who are usually more familiar with the earlier books). But I don’t think it’s a ridiculous claim to make. You can keep a straight face while doing the thought experiment of “what if the tetrad were the greatest intellectual discovery of the past several centuries? What would be the consequences? And why do so few people currently think of it as a great discovery?” Whereas if you say, for instance, “Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche book is the greatest philosophical book of at least the past several centuries,” then of course this is clearly absurd– even Kaufmann wouldn’t say that. It’s just a secondary source on Nietzsche, though a fairly successful one.

I won’t give any invidious examples, but it’s a useful thought experiment to try out on all the recent high-profile thinkers. Ask yourself: “What if X were the greatest philosopher of the century?” Most of them are not, of course, but it’s a useful tool to sort out relative magnitudes among famous authors. Some pass the straight-face test with this method, others don’t.

Then you can up the ante a bit by asking about greatest of all time. For instance: “What if Heidegger were the greatest philosopher of all time? How would our picture of philosophy and its history need to change?” Now, I don’t think for a second that Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of all time; last time I did a list, a few months ago, I had him at #7 or #8. But you can ask “what if Heidegger were the greatest?” without bursting into uncontrollable laughter, and that’s a tribute to his true magnitude, which is surely a bit below the Plato/Aristotle level. (I can’t decide which to put first, but am pretty sure they deserve #1/#2 in some order, and pretty sure that Kant deserves #3. After that it becomes trickier in my opinion. I’ve been flipping Hegel and my serious sleeper Leibniz around #4/#5 for awhile, but other cases can be made. Leibniz is so good, it’s sometimes hard to believe, but I also happen to love Leibniz and merely deeply respect Hegel, and don’t want my biases to affect the decision too much. I’m also worried about the too heavily Greek/German top five, and want to think about that some more.)

Incidentally, this method was suggested to me by the great baseball writer Bill James. On his list of criteria for considering whether a retired baseball player deserves admission to the Hall of Fame, one of the questions to be asked is: “Did anyone ever claim that he was the best player in baseball?” Not that the answer needs to be “yes” for admission to the Hall of Fame, but the straight face test works very well here too.

Did anyone ever read Derek Pell’s hilarious Semiotext(e) book Assassination Rhapsody? My youngest brother and I had hours of fun with that book in the early 1990’s. I think of it now because, in the section where it parodies the Warren Report, it plays with some flagrant violations of the Straight Face Principle. A few examples, just from memory…

“Speculation: The Texas School Book Depository is the tallest building in the world.

Commission Finding: The Texas School Book Depository is five stories tall. A tall building, but certainly not the tallest.”

“Speculation: Lee Harvey Oswald invented the alphabet.

Commission finding: If one man invented the alphabet, he would be the greatest man in human history. However, Lee Harvey Oswald did not invent the alphabet. Rather, the alphabet evolved gradually from primitive picture-drawings.”

But I’m starting to digress, which means that it’s time to bring this post to a close.

an example of REAL productivity

If you want to see an example of real productivity, as opposed to my own pale academic shadow thereof, just scroll to the bottom of the Wikipedia page of JOYCE CAROL OATES, and let the jaws drop.

Although one reviewer accused Oates of “an obsessive-compulsive disorder” for writing that much (James Wolcott: “Stop me before I write again: Six hundred more pages by Joyce Carol Oates”), the Nobel Prize nominators do not seem to have noticed any problems with quality; she’s been rumored on the short list for the Prize for some years now.

Wolcott’s review title is obviously very funny. I haven’t read the review itself, and so have no idea whether it was merely humorous or actually spiteful. But “spiteful” is always possible, and that’s the one bad thing about greatly magnified productivity– it creates bad feelings in some people, and you will find them suddenly insisting (or more likely, merely insinuating) that your “quality” has dropped off. You’ll hear a lot of vague hints about the supposed inverse ration between quantity or quality. No doubt this inverse ratio exists in the case of some people, but I strongly doubt it’s the rule; more often its’ the case that “the more you write, the better you write.”

It might be thought that the only way to deal with such criticisms is to ignore them. But there’s actually a better way– namely, start reading and associating with those who are doing even more. There’s always someone doing even more, and it’s better to expose yourself mentally to the imagined exhortations of those people than to the genuine digs of the others.

As for Oates, I also have an automatic soft spot for anyone who appreciates Lovecraft as much as she does.

another Derrida anecdote

Critical Animal repeats a Derrida story that I’ve heard as well:

“A telling (if apocryphal) Kansas appearance: An audience member stood up and recounted the scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and her friends finally meet the wizard, who is powerful and overwhelming until Toto pulls away the curtain to reveal a very small man. ‘Professor Derrida, are you like that?’ the audience member asked. Derrida paused before replying, ‘You mean like the dog?'”

But I actually heard a bit more to the story than this.

This Derrida lecture was given at the University of Nebraska. The questioner from the audience didn’t just recount “one scene” from the Wizard of Oz, but spent 10 minutes summarizing the entire plot of the film before asking the question to which Derrida so pithily responded.

But my favorite part of the story, hopefully not apocryphal, is this…

Remember, the lecture was held in Nebraska. The questioner had begun the whole lengthy plot summary by saying: “The film is supposedly about Kansas, but I would argue that it’s really more relevant to Nebraska.”

What I heard is that a couple of Kansas graduate students had the wit to corner the questioner afterwards and pretend to be outraged that the claim about Nebraska had insulted Kansas state mythology.

I really hope it happened. Should have happened.

Composition of Philosophy. July 28, 2009.

I’m now finished revising through Chapter 4, Section C. That leaves only Section D to go before Chapter 4 is completed.

Statistics So Far (on completed sections only)

Total time elapsed= 19 hours, 26 minutes
Length= 15,773 words (51 double-spaced pages)

So far I had been disappointed at my speed on this project, but now it’s looking like the actual writing time has been reasonably efficient. 50 finished-and-revised pages in less than 20 hours is pretty good– no speed record for me, but solid and respectable. I certainly couldn’t have done it at any time prior to a couple of years ago. A more just criticism would be that I’m not writing enough hours per day. That’s certainly true, but I simply haven’t been in the mood much of this time, and have had to force myself sometimes to work on the project.

The cause for this is starting to seem more and more like travel fatigue. Now that I’ve begun to readjust to Cairo rhythms, it has become much more enjoyable to sit at the computer and write. Moreover, these first 50 pages are close enough to their finished state that the book now has a reality and a personality. The initial zero and infinity that haunt the outset of any project are long gone in the present case. On July 15 I had nothing but outlines, but now, on July 28, I have a book-like mass that is starting to feel like the real thing. Once you have that, motivation skyrockets.

It’s only 6:30 in the evening in Cairo, but I have decided not to revise 4D tonight. That’s partly because I’m supposed to read and comment on an administrative report, but also because 4D is important enough that it deserves a full day’s work, despite its short length of 3-4 pages. This is the one section where I can’t yet decide between two options on a specific question, though a decision is very close.

I have to hang out at home tomorrow and supervise a quick painting job… The upstairs neighbor seems to have had a leak of some sort, and both bedrooms have had paint crumble away and fall to the floor in recent weeks. It will be nice to have 4D to chew on while stranded at home.

Assuming 4D is finished tomorrow, that gives me July 30 and 31 to finish Chapter 5. One day should be enough, but I have two if I need it, to meet my new goal of having the first half of the book written by the end of July.

What then?

Well, first I need to proofread three old article drafts so that I can send them out to journals to be refereed. These have been on my plate since May, and I haven’t had the time to get to them. Where do all these articles come from? Usually they are invited lectures that I revise to fit the print format. And how do you get invited to give lectures? By publishing things that people enjoy reading. This is one of those examples of Levi’s principle that “the more you write, the more you will write.” It’s a lot harder to go from zero published articles to five than it is to go from five to thirty, strange though it may sound. People have journal issues to edit. They have anthologies to fill. If you’ve published a few good things, complete strangers will start to contact you from the blue, asking you to contribute to their journal or their edited volume. I was deep into my thirties before I had published a single legitimate article (two books had come first) but now I’m somewhere above 30 if you count published, in press, and pending articles and book chapters.

Why would I want to write so many? Because, each one expands my mind in some way. Did I mention the Gore Vidal line before? Supposedly he said: “never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.” Without commenting specifically on that piece of advice, I definitely subscribe to the maxim of “never pass up a chance to give a lecture or write an article or book.” These are the best ways to force yourself to think. The notion of thinking as being a private dialogue of the soul with itself is not, in my opinion, a correct notion. Situations are your co-authors. If you turn down an invitation to write something or speak somewhere, it’s like jilting a unique co-author who will never come calling again.

I have some ideas about how I will handle the endgame of the book in August, but will leave those thoughts until later in the week.

a bit more on the tetrad

Earlier this afternoon I was reading a draft article by Ian Bogost that uses the McLuhan “tetrad” to analyze Facebook. It reminded me (though I seldom need reminding about this point) of just how interesting, useful, important, and fun the tetrad is. I’m not sure why I haven’t used it as a classroom teaching technique, because it is so well-suited, pedagogically, to get students thinking about the unseen dimensions of any medium or any intellectual breakthrough.

I went back to Eric McLuhan’s preface to Laws of Media, written impishly on “8.8.88”. The story behind the book has never left my memory banks since I first read the book in 1993, but it’s always a pleasure to reread.

The project was begun shortly before Marshall McLuhan’s stroke, followed by his death a year or so later. Initially, he was supposed to be preparing a new edition of Understanding Media, the 1960’s classic that made him a pop culture icon. His leading idea was to make the study of media into a “science,” and while pondering how to do so he reflected on Popper’s familiar principle that scientific statements must be falsifiable statements.

“What sorts of statements,” Marshall and Eric asked themselves, “can be made or falsified about any medium?” And by this they meant any human-produced artifact at all. They expected to find a dozen or more such statements.

Enhancement and obsolescence were the two that came immediately to mind. Any medium is an extension of some existing medium, and to enhance something always means “closure” or obsolescence for anything else. (Only a few years ago, when writing the first of my two articles on the tetrad, did I fully realize that to enhance something paradoxically means to make it less visible, and to obsolesce something makes it more visible. I had instinctively assumed the opposite on my first readings of the book, without ever stating it as a proposition.)

“A few hours later,” said Eric, they added “reversal” or “flip” to the list. Any medium, when overheated by excessive information, will eventually flip into its opposite.

He then says it took about three weeks for the fourth media law to appear: retrieval. Any medium contains a former medium as its content. We pay attention to that content, ignorant of the effects of the deeper medium that is actually shaping our perception. For instance, criticizing or enjoying the content of a television program overlooks the revolutionary effects of the television medium itself. “The medium is the message.” The resonance with Heidegger here should be obvious.

After that, Eric says, they found no others. They were unable to find a fifth media law, and were eventually convinced that it had to be only these four. This led to a very elegant schematic representation of these four, with beautiful equal ratios between each of the four zones.

They found further that tetrads came in several groupings. Some were synchronic chains, where media would successively reverse into new ones ad infinitum. Others were clusters, with one central tetrad reversing into or retrieving multiple others, all of them dependent on the central one. Still others were loops, where a small handful of tetrads would reverse into each other in a circle, leading eventually back to the original starting point. This “topological” aspect of the book is mentioned only in a few brief passages, and neither I (nor others, as far as I know) have made enough of this idea.

Another aspect to Eric’s preface is his extremely bold claim that the tetrad “is the most important intellectual discovery of at least the last few centuries.” It remains extremely bold even if we exclude the natural sciences and pit McLuhan only against the likes of Kant and Freud, and for many people Marx, not to mention other names that are slipping my mind at the moment.

However, I have a different reaction to these sorts of statements than many people do. For instance, when Badiou made his infamous claim in the foreword to the English version of Being and Event that he knew it was a great work of philosophy that would be studied throughout the centuries, many people found this to be in very bad taste.

My reaction to it was different. The usual assumption is that boasting is bad, and a certain degree of genteel modesty in intellectual work is more pleasant and tolerable. But while I would agree with this as a general everyday rule, I think the rule should be suspended for people who have something to lose by saying it.

In other words, boasts are very common in locker rooms and among fishermen. But they are surprisingly rare among the top thinkers of any era. It’s not uncommon to meet cranks who have a weird system that supposedly explains the entire universe, but these are generally marginal people not taken seriously by anyone. Moving away from wild cranks toward competent academic professionals, boasts to have made world-historic discoveries are of course highly rare, since they would amount to career and social suicide due to their immediate appearance of ridiculousness. If you apply for a job with a cover letter saying “I am surely the greatest philosopher of the past fifty years,” you will have exactly zero chance of getting the job, and will also guarantee being mocked behind your back for years to come. No one would do such a thing even if they were secretly that arrogant.

But the case is a bit different, I think, when we’re talking about someone like Badiou. He’s reached a level where he is guaranteed at least a minor place in the history of 20th century philosophy. He has international fame and respect, and though he may have enemies and detractors, so does everyone of that stature. The safe option would be for Badiou simply to refrain from ranking himself among the greats, and hope that history will view him as kindly as he wishes. But for someone of his prominence to say “this book belongs among the great works of all ages” is extremely risky. I see it less as a moment of bad taste than as pedagogical moment: “the principles in this book are so important that I invite you to read the book, take what I am saying very seriously, and see if you don’t agree that I’ve laid down a new path for the near future of philosophy.” And I see that as taking courage– for someone of Badiou’s already prominent international stature. Obviously it would be quite annoying coming form a third-year undergraduate, because then it would just sound like youthful cockiness and a failure to study past models with sufficient seriousness.

In other words… Badiou doesn’t need to claim to have written a great book of philosophy in order to gain international attention. He already has that attention. And if 100 years from now he looks like a less major figure than he hopes to be, historians are going to have a field day ridiculing that passage from his preface. That’s why I admire his gamble rather than finding it offensive. He’s put a lot of pressure on himself now, and on his reputation later.

But I find that it focuses the mind of the reader very nicely. When Badiou claims to have written a great work of philosophy, it invites me as a reader to try one of my “hyperbolic” thought experiments… Imagine that Being and Event really is one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written. What would have to change about our conception of the history of philosophy? And how would we still feel limited or even imprisoned by his way of thinking? Can we submit the book to such a test without bursting into laughter? Yes, I think. You might laugh if a crank on the web claims to have written a world-historic masterpiece, but Badiou has enough stature that you probably won’t laugh out loud, even if you disagree. (And I must say, I do disagree. But I’ve never laughed at that passage. It’s worth taking seriously.)

That was a long detour through Badiou to get to Eric McLuhan’s statement. He’s the co-author of the book, and the guardian of his father’s legacy, and to that extent it is pretty risky for him to claim to be the co-discoverer of the most important idea of “at least the past couple of centuries.” And many readers will disagree. But the important thing is that it focuses your mind as a reader very nicely… Is it really possible that the tetradic structure of media is as important as that? If so, then what intellectual revolutions still lie ahead?

It also raises questions such as: assuming that the McLuhan tetrad really is such a precious jewel as Eric claims, then why is it barely on anyone’s radar at the moment? Is there some distinctive blindness of the age that prevents the tetrad from becoming one of the major philosophemes of our time?

Of course, you could always conclude that he’s just blowing smoke, like a drunken fisherman down at the wharf, telling tales of a non-existent gigantic swordfish that he almost caught. But I think there’s a lot more to it than that; I think the swordfish might really be there.