Trakl flashback

Written by the Trakl simulator, not TRAKL HIMSELF:

***

The mother with the burning gong
seeks the poppy or the wolf.

The burning temple
wastes a smoky guitar
or a candle.

***

Uproar.
The child bears a bloom.

O man!

***

The mouldering heart.
The mother trembles.

The nocturnal whore poisons the sick whore.
A child beckons the smoky sister.
The pond signals whenever
the gong crosses the sea.

***

Friend,
the seething monk-girl signals.

The raging laughter destines the
moldy monk-girl. And worse,
a waxing wolf humbles a child.

The ruinous sister embitters the brooding angel.
The broken river petrifies the blue sister.

The gentle mask.
Cower, you trembling poppy.

A rotten whore or a raging wolf
violates the darkling snow.

***

Weep, you evil poppy.
The pure silence violates a child.
The harp.

***

The seething poppy moulders.
A falling wood drinks the monk.
A lonely storm petrifies a moon.
The trembling guitar hisses.

Signal, you whispering moon.

A brooding rain cowers.
O man!

***

The gate:
a barren poppy dwells.

Wake, you weeping lover:
the moon.

***

Dwell, oh smoky gong.
The lover seeks a shepherd.

The crimson race wounds the smoky angel.

The gate:
the naked monk glistens whenever
the island rustles.

The golden voice mourns the trembling child.

***

Friend:
the evil guitar with
the weeping gong.
Beautiful.

The corrupt poppy or
a drinking wood dies.
Beautiful.

***

A wind.
The solemn pond or the guitar
mourns the darkening woman
or the fiery mother.

***

A waxing child signals. And worse,
a golden wood violates the pond.

The flaming lover breaks through
the guitar or the chestnut.
O man!

The boat awaits the glistening storm.
A ruinous city cowers.

A wolf devours a golden rain.

A flaming bloom arises after
the smoky star sings.

another quick note to Camels With Hammers

Camel has already responded to my response. I’ve been trying to avoid ongoing back-and-forth exchanges on one conversation, but will make two quick points here:

After the last post I thought Camels was urging a democratic free-for-all of debate to replace the current licensing and hierarchizing arrangements of academia. But in the current post Camels seems in favor of the opposite extreme:

“I have long speculated that what would be most ideal would be a philosophy-worldwide, academic messageboard, readable by all but accepting posts only from philosophy professors and philosophy PhDs. Only philosophy departments could grant and maintain access for professors and their unemployed PhDs. Maybe provisions would be made for graduate students under sponsorship of departments.”

I wouldn’t be in favor of this, since I don’t think the dominance of Philosophy Ph.D.’s in philosophy has been a good thing for philosophy. For my generation there still wasn’t a very good practical alternative, except for studying a neighboring discipline and writing philosophical books from out of that discipline– Latour would be a good example (or Nietzsche, further back). But for the coming generations, I think there’s a real chance that having a Ph.D. in philosophy, and perhaps in anything else, will sink to near-irrelevance in determining who is or is not treated as a philosopher. This feeling is based on the suspicion that universities, largely for financial reasons, are about to enter a long, cold winter with many fatalities. But perhaps I’m underestimating the ability of universities to reinvent themselves on the fly. Professionalizing disciplines does increase organization and filter out the real kooks, but it doesn’t always increase the overall quality of a discipline. Sometimes it stifles or crushes those with the most independent minds, and creates legitimized careerists. It all depends on the extent to which it’s done.

In response to my worry that it might be a bad thing to lose specific, articulated, finished projects to a ceaseless flux of real-time intellectual discussion, Camels says this:

“One of the things that I have started to wrestle with is the illusion of the great thinker or the settled position. I wonder if our present view of writing and publishing encourages us too much to harden positions.”

I’m not in favor of hardened positions. I’m in favor of discrete projects that are finished and then left behind, to be replaced by new projects that are outgrowths of the later ones. There is plenty of room for ad libbing discussion and back-and-forth discussion on topics that arise from the flow of the conversation. But at a certain point it’s important to back away from such interaction and say: “OK, here is the complete version of what I currently think.” That’s not a hardened position, because you can always change it over time, and in fact it should evolve over time if you’re doing honest work.

All right, calling it a night. Morning at the Embassy looms.

and one other

If I’m not careful I’ll end up quoting the whole thing, which is not allowed, but maybe one more passage will convince you to look up the whole interview:

“Lingis: There are imperatives in things. To see things is to see how we have to stand and to approach them, and to see what they require to subsist. It is to see how they have to be preserved, protected, repaired, or restored. Even to make a meal is to see how foodstuffs have to be preserved, prepared, and cooked. Even to move on the earth and in the light is to see how we have to move. The objectives of our real actions are not simply posited by a fiat of our free will or by our arbitrary imagination. The layout about us may offer a number of possible objectives, which we may or may not pursue. And of course we may long for and imagine other layouts where other objectives would be possible.”

“I Am A Dancer”

Here’s a classic passage from a Lingis interview by John Armitage, “Towards An Ontology of Fetishes.” In Cultural Politics. Volume 5, Issue 1 (2009), pp. 98-117.

In academic terminology, the “I” for Lingis is a realist “I,” not a “performative” one. We are not just what we do and not just what we say.

“Lingis: I came back from a summer trip and the first person I came upon on campus was a student I had known for three years. Her parents were poor, and she had been working as a waitress to pay her way through the university. She loved to dance, was in the university dance company, but her parents wanted to be sure she could survive and urged her to take courses in something where she could get a job. She had majored in special education, a generous profession, and one where she could always find work. I asked her what her semester looked like. She said she had dropped her major and was taking five courses of dance. I vividly remember the shining, giddy eyes with which she told me she had realized she was made for dance, that it was on the dance floor that she belonged, that her body knew it belonged. Exultant, she turned a dance step in the sunlight, embracing the future that summoned her. A future of risk, where physical injuries could terminate her dancing existence, where she may prove to not have what it takes to really dance, dance her own dance, and where of course moments of realization are short-lived and ill-paid.

I found myself thinking again and again of this ‘I’ – ‘I am a dancer’ – both a discovery and a commitment. She is to be sure not yet a dancer, but without saying, first, in the secrecy of her own heart, ‘I am a dancer,’ she will never become a dancer. I soon realized that this ‘I’ -a power and an exultation -is absent from the contemporary philosophical discourse on subjectivity. This ‘I’ – ‘I am a dancer’ – is the first word of thought, the thought that set out to understand dance, the needs of the body, the necessity of great teachers, a whole cross-section of urban society. It also generates a fantasy space, which is not simply filled with reflections of the passing scene and media images. It begins a story of one’s own, though it seemed to me that subjectivity is not constituted by narration, since much of our lives are untold even to ourselves, and indeed the most momentous moments may be harbored in
silence.

I set out to contrast the power and exultation that sets forth this ‘I’ from the categories and obligations with which others recognize us. This ‘I’ is set forth with sometimes simple words, sometimes the most commonplace words of language – ‘I am a mother,’ ‘I am an outdoorsperson,’ ‘I am a wanderer’- and sometimes only with words put on one’s own heart. They are only very secondarily words of a language game played with others.”

Composition of Philosophy. July 29.

While supervising the work of the painters (who did an excellent job, though it took much longer than expected) I was thinking about section 4D. And I’m still thinking about it, so today was a light revision day. All I revised was the brief introduction to Chapter 5. That’s only 1 page, and took a total of 20 minutes from zero to final draft.

That means that it’s taken 19 hours and 56 46 minutes to get to page 53 of the final draft.

Another statistic: each minute of writing has yielded 13.5 words on average, which isn’t bad. That means that each sentence of the book is taking about 1 minute to create ex nihilo.

What now remains to be revised are the following sections: 4D, 5A, 5B, 5C, and 5D.

Tomorrow I again need to be at the Embassy at 8 AM to pick up (I hope) the new passport and walk it over to the old AUC campus to start processing the new Egyptian residence visa for it. This means that I can’t make it a late night tonight, so all I plan to do before sleeping is make a very thorough list of all the things that need to be fixed in the Chapter 5 rough draft, which will greatly speed up the process of finalizing that whole chapter.

4D is the hardest section of the whole first half of the book, so it may be the one that is revised last, out of order.

quick response to a response

CAMELS WITH HAMMERS has an appreciative post up in response to my previous post, though I want to raise a couple of quick points of concern.

Camels sees many virtues in moving away from the glacial pace of academic publishing to a more feisty, rapid bloggish sort of intellectual dialogue. And there are certainly some obvious virtues: it’s possible to make lots of progress on issues very quickly in the blogosphere, with a speed that is foreign to academic life.

However, most of you are familiar with some of my disappointments with the medium as well. It’s not always good to be subjected to immediate feedback. This holds for positive and neutral feedback as much as for negative feedback. During the original incarnation of this blog, I was foolishly committing myself to answering every question that came in. Simply put, no one has enough time to do that, at least not with the number of questions I was getting. One virtue of the slower pace of traditional intellectual life is the time to reflect, to pick one’s moments to respond, to choose an appropriate pace for dialogue. And that’s why I have given no serious reconsideration to re-opening comments on this blog.

Second, there was my quick realization after just a few weeks in this space that much critical dialogue is not at all open, free interchange. Much of it is just rubbish– procrastinators lurking around the fringes of conversations listening for gaffes or for chances to barge in and make a rude remark, often concealed behind a false identity, that sort of thing.

More concretely, Camels With Hammers sees much good in the notion of books circulating along with critical commentary on them by readers, whereas now we get no such comments with the book at all. But I don’t see why it’s an all-or-nothing choice. The classic example usually given of an author willing to publish criticisms of books along with the books themselves is Descartes, who included and answered critical objections to the Meditations along with the book. Admirable, and quite interesting for the reader.

However, I strongly doubt that Descartes would have included an open blog comment thread along with the Meditations. The objections he printed were from a fairly elite crew of worthy critics. Personally, I’d be happy to publish objections to one of my books along with the book, but only if the critic were staking as much as I were on the exchange, and was actually taking a stand rather than just playing clever devil’s advocate games.

And no way would I allow a bunch of snot-nosed trolls to spray graffiti on my house at no risk to themselves. Authors will want and need some control over which comments to allow to be attached to their works. In case anyone fears that authors will merely choose the softball criticisms for responses, well, there’s a social control on that already– no one wants to gain a reputation for dodging hard critique. But ignoring jerks is not the same thing as dodging hard critique. If someone were rude to you in a pub, you wouldn’t keep drinking with them, and the same standard applies here. The fact that a jerkish comment might contain a couple of intellectual points does not absolve the comment from scrutiny.

One other good feature of the current publishing system, a system I otherwise generally condemn, is that the slow pace and high hurdles of the process forced people to articulate their intellectual life into significant chunks: “OK, I guess this book is Badiou’s statement of his position as of mid-decade. How has it changed from 4 years ago?” But if everything dissolves instead into a flow of real-time internet discussion, then the difference between one’s significant pieces of intellectual work and one’s fleeting remarks on the topic of the moment starts to get a bit lost.

I’ve often wondered that when posting blog entries here… Am I held to my words here as much as I am when putting them in print? Probably most of us would say no, this is a more informal medium. If you put something in print and then feel the need to retract it later, it’s an arduous mental process and may even feel embarrassing. But we all say things casually in conversation, or on blogs, that we probably feel are more modifiable than words set down in cold print on paper.

In any case, I don’t think this needs to be consciously engineered. A new ethos of intellectual exchange will start to condense from the mists once we’ve all started to figure out what the new publishing landscape means for thinking.

quick thoughts on what might happen

Last night or this morning (I no longer remember which) I linked to an article by a Harvard Law professor who recommends abolishing academic copyright– meaning that academic books won’t cost anything, not that everyone will be free to plagiarize.

Let’s move to some more general reflections about this. Traditional publishing is already in trouble, and before long we will see that traditional universities are living in a bubble perhaps as bad as the housing bubble. The decision of left-leaning Reed College to end their need-blind admission policy, and the frightening predicament of the California state universities, are only two warning signs of what could go wrong next. Outrageous tuition rates, affordable only by way of monstrous student loan debt (or fabulously wealthy parents, which most people do not have) will not be able to keep on inflating forever. Even the tenure system is in crisis between Scylla and Charybdis– do you abolish tenure and turn universities into “flexible” businesses with the resulting risk of lost academic freedom? Or do you keep tenure and thus let a handful of stick-in-the-mud veterans exploit and bully more innovative newcomers? There is no obvious solution to this paradox.

If you’re a graduate student right now, I both envy and abhor your predicament. On the one hand you ought to have a much easier time publishing what you write and quickly building up a readership. But on the other hand, it’s not clear to me that the traditional career path of the college/university professor is going to be with us indefinitely (that may sound alarmist now, but just wait a couple of years). Nonetheless, you’re paying for your education as if that career will still be available.

The following thoughts are mostly off the top of my head, and I reserve the right to revisit them later…

Publishing: Here I am optimistic. What we had until recently was a system where it was relatively difficult to publish a book in fields like philosophy. By “difficult” I don’t mean that chances of success were low, I mean that the process involved all sorts of time-consuming hurdles. Certain credentials were generally needed to publish a book in philosophy– without a Ph.D., or in some cases even an academic position, your chances would have been slim indeed.

Given the scarcity of publishing options, you also couldn’t depart too far from mainstream views in your field, since the pool of potential referees was never very large. I sent out many inquiry letters for Tool-Being, and in the end three separate publishers asked to consider the manuscript. (Three in a row, that is. It’s not nice to submit book manuscripts to more than one place at a time, and I never did so.) In all three cases, I had to tell the publishers “please do not choose Heideggerians as your referees,” since obviously that would have killed my chances, as you’ll understand if you’re familiar with the book. (And I eventually had to do the same thing when applying for tenure: “Please do not choose any Heideggerians as my outside referees. Get people who know Heidegger but are not Heideggerians.” Luckily, there are many such people.) In the end, the book was accepted due to a positive review from a well-known analytic philosopher of mind (!), one with a reputation for harshness in his reviews of the work of others. If it had been up to the Heidegger fraternity, the book might never have been published, or at least not until many years later.

Until very recently, the mere act of getting a book published was difficult enough that it carried a certain automatic prestige, provided that you weren’t publishing with some obvious fly-by-night sort of firm or a known vanity press. But of course there was and is still a certain hierarchy among the academic publishers– to open certain doors, you have needed to go with one of the “blue blood” university presses.

All of these factors are now being swept away. I know a few people who haven’t even started graduate school yet who have just landed book deals in philosophy. This is made possible by the sudden emergence of guerrilla-type presses that can afford to gamble in the way that low-budget early recording companies like Sun and Stax were able to gamble. That isn’t possible for publishers who still have gigantic physical overhead costs; they need to be a bit more cautious. If you’re an academic publisher who has a nice big office with 15 employees, it’s simply too financially risky to publish books by high-risk newcomers who haven’t earned their academic driver’s licenses yet. But if the name of your game is risk, then that’s precisely your strategy– find promising youngsters with great ideas and take a gamble on them.

The inevitable dissemination, decrease in price, and increase in quality of Kindle-type devices will also further erode the uniqueness of books and the achievement of having published books. In not too many years we will have reached the point where literally anyone can publish a philosophy book in electronic form in a matter of minutes, even without the least trace of official academic credentials. I don’t bemoan this at all– the great era of 17th century philosophy was dominated by non-professors, and the same thing could easily happen again. As far as publishing is concerned, what it means is that all publishing is destined to become vanity publishing. (Alberto Toscano recently pointed this out to me.) You’ll just post a homemade book on line, and maybe people will download it and read it, and maybe you’ll pick up some influence.

But this means that it will no longer be publishers who vet submissions to make sure that no half-baked work hits the shelves. In the future, the half-baked, crankish, or sloppy stuff will be published just as easily as the good stuff. It will be a consensus of the community of readers that decides what is good and what is not, and the blogosphere is perhaps pioneering this new form of social quality control.

What we’re going to see is an explosion in the number and rapidity of books being published. The mere fact of being published will no longer be impressive, as it was when the presses were often stern gatekeepers. It will all boil down to how much reputation and readership you have, again similar to the blogosphere today. If you have an especial liking for a particular blogger, not only won’t you care about their c.v., in many cases you might not even think about it, whereas it always comes to mind immediately when assessing someone’s status in the university system.

If there really is a university bubble resembling the housing bubble, as I fear, then the “professor” career track that most of us in Gen-X still took for granted as the best and possibly only option for a philosopher is going to become a lot less appealing, and for many different reasons. But it won’t matter, because simultaneously there will be a lot more chance to find your niche as a philosopher outside the university system, as long as you’re coming up with good and well-presented ideas. Chances are high that this could invigorate philosophy. Times of transition from one medium to another are always times of possible ingenuity.

Another implication that comes to mind… I’ve already said that, once every book is a vanity press book published on line with the touch of a button, the mere act of publication will mean nothing– after all, almost everyone will be a published author at that point. It will be a matter not just of publishing, but of acquiring and maintaining the interest of a readership. And this requires punchier, more engaged writing than today’s academia usually encourages. Not all academic books are boring, of course, but today it is still possible to forge a career as a respected intellectual even if you write nothing but deadly dull books– as long as the right “gatekeeper” press gives these works their prestigious imprimatur. But if we enter an age where the gatekeepers are crumbling and it’s all about keeping the readers interested, then the ultra-footnoted style and plodding pace of much academic writing will naturally become extinct.

There have been transitions like this before. Just from reading Biagioli’s Galileo book, you can see the contrast between a fading generation of Aristotelian professors and the emerging mathematical physicists of the aristocratic courts and later the scientific academies. You can also sense how rapid the pace of book publication was in those day, compared to now– Galileo was constantly writing quick treatises as real-time interventions in live controversies, whereas now (at least in the USA) you’re probably looking at a couple of years for your completed book to reach the shelf.

Levi attacks his own book

This has got to be THE HARSHEST SELF-ASSESSMENT I HAVE EVER SEEN by an author about his own book. And this not from an old man rolling his eyes at the intellectual follies of his youth, but from a guy in his thirties talking about a book published just last year.

C’mon Levi, it’s a really good book!

not a nice guy to interview

I hope Chris Anderson of Wired isn’t always as rude as he was to Der Spiegel. Check out the beginning of this interview. What’s the point of treating another person like dirt without provocation?

SPIEGEL: Mr. Anderson, let’s talk about the future of journalism.

Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don’t use the word journalism.

SPIEGEL: Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide.

Anderson: Sorry, I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.

SPIEGEL: Which other words would you use?

Anderson: There are no other words. We’re in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don’t have meaning.

Gibbon on Paris

The future Emperor Julian, having fended off barbarian invasions in Gaul, spends the winter in Paris. It’s interesting to imagine Paris in this state:

“A mind like that of Julian must have felt the general happiness of which he was the author; but he viewed with peculiar satisfaction and complacency the city of Paris, the seat of his winter residence, and the object even of his partial affection. That splendid capital, which now embraces an ample territory on both sides of the Seine, was originally confined to the small island in the midst of the river, from whence the inhabitants derived a supply of pure and salubrious water. The river bathed the foot of the walls; and the town was accessible only by two wooden bridges. A forest overspread the northern side of the Seine; but on the south, the ground, which now bears the name of the university, was insensibly covered with houses, and adorned with a palace and amphitheatre, baths, an aqueduct, and a field of Mars for the exercise for the Roman troops.”

My favorite line is “a forest overspread the northern side of the Seine.” It’s refreshing to think of all of northern Paris as a forest.