Levi on memes

In case you haven’t seen it, Levi has posted A FANTASTIC ANALYSIS OF HOW CERTAIN PHILOSOPHICAL MEMES IMMUNIZE THEMSELVES.

Note to Levi: trolls and grey vampires aren’t refuted, they’re simply abandoned.

on “which/that” police

In the English language, of course, we have nothing resembling the French Academy– no official body that votes on instituting or abolishing grammar rules. It’s more of a Wild West for speakers of English, proceeding by way of rough consensus.

However, if something is stated by the people at the Oxford English Dictionary, we all tend to listen. And to the extent to which I’ve been following their proclamations (only loosely, I must admit) they seem to have been softening up and allowing things that used to be considered appalling. I happen to have been in favor of most of the changes.

But one grammatical point that’s always annoyed me is “which/that” fascism. Reading a fine stylist like Gibbon, it is clear that he uses those words pretty much as he pleases. During my first year in graduate school, however, a worried professor told us that we needed to be careful to use those two words correctly, though he admitted to not knowing the rule, except for the memorized formula: “when in doubt, use ‘that’.” Over my remaining student years, I continued to encounter red ink directed against my generally loose use of the words as almost interchangeable. So I looked it up in Fowler’s classic book on English usage, and the usually witty and convincing Fowler let me down in this case– he simply made fun of those who use the words interchangeably, but obviously without having an ironclad reason or even rule.

I learned the current rule years ago, and try observe it, but only in order to avoid the hassle of red ink. The result is as follows: the uglier word “that” is now used disproportionately in comparison with the more pleasant-sounding “which.” But until the police calm down (help us, OED, if you haven’t already) I will keep obeying the traffic laws as they have evolved.

But I hate writing these sorts of posts, in case they sound even remotely like those “purist” columns on language written by pedantic older ex-Ivy league journalists for Sunday newspapers.

However, I do have a general point of interest to make here. There is too much concern with precision in language, and not enough concern with versatility. Why on earth does there need to be one specific case where “which” is appropriate and another where “that” is correct? Aren’t we better off having two different-sounding words filling the same function, so that we can choose the one that sounds nicer in each case?

I feel the same way about philosophical terminology. Sometimes there is too much concern with specifically defining each word with utter precision and differentiating it from its neighboring words. This fails to notice that having a palette of synonyms allows for freshness and variety each time we return to a theme.

And this leads me again to remember one of my all-time annoyances: sarcastic remarks about redundancy. If you call someone a “stupid idiot,” you can always be sure that someone else nearby will sardonically ask: “as opposed to a smart idiot?”

No, as opposed simply to an “idiot.”

To say “stupid idiot” is obviously to intensify the noun, not to qualify or specify it.

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound like the Gen-X version of William Safire.

another good reason to make cuts

Despite my earlier plans, I stayed awake to revise section 5C, just because I felt like it. Though the section was initially too short, once I worked on it a bit it ended up far too long.

I dealt with the problem partly by moving some of the material to 5D (a better fit for it anyway) and partly by cuts.

One of the things I noticed while doing so is that a great deal of cuts can be made simply by removing timid qualifying phrases from sentences. Even though I have a conscious dislike for such phrases, it was surprising how many of them were still present in my sub-final draft of this section.

It’s generally a good rule that you should either say something or not say it– a rule that affects not just qualifying phrases, but also scare-quotes and parenthetical phrases, as well as many footnotes. (I have to admit to usually ignoring footnotes in books: if the author can’t see fit to work a point into the main text, then how vital can it be? It breaks up the flow of reading to keep looking away at footnotes. I’ll usually scan the footnotes lazily unless I have a specific interest in the topic at issue.)

In any case, the straitjacket of my word limit on this project forced me to dump such garbage phrases as: “Now it might seem to some readers that…” I might have kept those in place if not forced to remove them by the word-count, but the style is now much improved by dumping them.

However, I am not a fan of ironclad stylistic rules such as “never use the passive voice.” Rules need to be broken in special cases.

Current Book Statistics:

Just two sections remaining.

*completed so far: 61 pages

*time elapsed: 23 hours, 17 minutes

I’m estimating 68 pages and 26 hours as the final statistics for this first half of the project.

for those who read modern Greek

You can read THIS ARTICLE BY PETER HALLWARD.

Even if you can’t read modern Greek, as I cannot, it’s fun to look at, and there’s a photo of Hallward as well.

Bloody Road, Kandahar

I recommend that you read Wood’s short, fascinating Kandahar article. But since some people aren’t inclined to click links to additional reading, I’ll embed the video from the article right here.

Raw footage without distracting voice-overs always gives a strong taste of a place, and the same is true here. It feels like you’re in Kandahar yourself:

report from Kandahar

Apparently finished with the traces of Bormann in South America, the unfrightenable Graeme Wood (one of the few people I know who makes my own life feel utterly boring) is now in Kandahar with Canadian forces:

“It is extremely difficult to convey this persistence of commerce and everyday life without sounding naive, like the visitors to 2003 Baghdad who pronounced the city recovery-bound because shops were open and selling name-brand sodas. Kandahar has a good claim to be the worst big city in the world (if you have other candidates — Mogadishu? Pyongyang? — please propose them in the comments), but it is a place where in the course of a single rather uncomplicated afternoon you could buy aspirin, eat a nice sit-down meal of pilaf and Fanta, try on a stylish red dress, and reserve a round-trip ticket to Manchester, England. Not many war zones resemble Stalingrad anymore, certainly not this one.”

I doubt the red dress was for himself; his clothing tends to be a bit more conventional than that.

Composition of Philosophy. July 30.

A few days ago I broke my usual rule of “no reading philosophy while writing philosophy” to dig into Suárez a bit more. Today I’ve been breaking it to read Whitehead, and am glad I did so. Process and Reality is really one of the great books of recent philosophy. One of the things Whitehead does better than Heidegger is to interrupt his argument occasionally to offer general reflections on the nature of philosophy, and I’m always sympathetic to what he has to say.

Today was a bit slow on writing again. I revised two sections only, which means that 4D, 5C, and 5D all remain to be done. 5C and 5D aren’t too difficult, so I may be able to polish them off first thing in the morning and still have time to finalize the more difficult 4D.

The difficulty with 4D, in a nutshell, is that it’s a smaller piece of the puzzle than I realized a month or so ago… Instead of four key topics to discuss, there are exactly ten, and I need to figure out how to localize the four I had isolated previously (they do belong apart from the others, but now seem to be a variant of a more general problem rather than a fundamental solution in themselves). At points like this, one often lacks even the right terminology, and so you end up having to choose a few new terms.

There are a couple of possible dangers with that exercise. One is that terms are never entirely innocent, and the ones you choose suggest all sorts of resonances with other topics that might not actually be related to the one on which you want to focus.

Another problem is that you don’t want to proliferate terms past a certain point, because philosophy is about simplifying, and you don’t want the reader to see nothing but a laundry list in any given chapter; you want to show the simple elegance of a problem, and proliferating terms can sometimes be just a stopgap measure when you haven’t quite grasped a problem in its simple elegance yet.

I often think about the situation in particle physics before the Standard Model was finalized in the early 1970’s. There were hundreds of particles discovered by the end of the 1950’s, and physicists reportedly had to carry laminated cards to remember what all of them were. It’s certainly better than pretending that all those particles don’t exist, but it’s also not the sort of situation where any branch of human knowledge wants to remain for long. (The cataloguing of diversity is only a first step, it seems to me. Even if you are identifying thousands of new flowers in the mountains, you’ll want to group them into families to help manage the data. In philosophy that’s even more evident.)

There’s the additional danger that a small set of terms can feel like oversimplification for the sake of rigid manageability.

For all of these reasons, I often feel myself pausing a bit whenever confronted by diversity in need of organization. Organizing a chaotic diversity is one of the things I most enjoy doing, but you want to make sure you’re doing it the right way.

more interview fallout

Not to pile on Chris Anderson, who was barely even a name to me before the other day, but the following link was just sent to me, and I’m still offended by the way in which that interview played out. If an interviewer goes after you aggressively and you want to fight back, fine, that’s a calculated practical decision on your part. But to start an interview by belittling every word-choice the person makes, and to include the phrase “this is going to be an annoying interview” in your very first line is obviously appalling behavior.

But the reason I post this link is due to a stunning fact: Anderson was speaking to Der Spiegel in the first place only to promote his new book, so the public relations move here is every bit as sparkling as the manners.

http://adage.com/adages/post?article_id=138176

Someone also gave me the link to Anderson’s Twitter account (tweets are public unless blocked, and even show up on Google). He not only claimed that he was quoted out of context (possible, but hard to see how that would have made a difference given the flagrant rudeness of his responses), he also blamed “Twitterati” for making a big deal out of nothing– and remember, he said this on his Twitter account!

the new U.S. passports

I got my new one quickly and easily this morning, waiting only about 40 minutes for my number to be called, as opposed to the usual lengthier period of limbo with no metallic time-killing devices. It’s already at the Egyptian Ministry of Immigration getting the new residence visa put in, which should take another 10 days or so. Then, if all goes well, I’m clear on this front for the next 10 years.

But I don’t like the new U.S. passport design. For two reasons:

1. There aren’t very many pages in it, so it won’t be long before I have to go through the “please put extra pages in it” routine. Not such a big deal, except that I’d rather not set foot in the Embassy for another 10 years if possible. It raises my blood pressure to be inside that minor, temporary prison, cut off from the outside world until business is done.

2. The photo is no longer on the backside of the cover. It’s now on the backside of the first piece of paper. The only reason that bothers me is because not all passport control people around the world are used to that new design yet. My emergency passport had the same feature, and in Istanbul in particular it caused serious suspicion and prolonged questioning from an official. But I suppose this will go away quickly once the design becomes more familiar around the world.

a link to very many lectures

Just got this from a tweet by “zizekspeaks” (I can never decide whether Zizek himself is doing these tweets or not; many people tell me “no way,” but if it’s not, then you certainly could have fooled me).

In any case, IT IS A LINK TO MANY LECTURES, both audio and video. Including: Kristeva, Badiou, Zizek, Derrida, Virilio, Stiegler, DeLanda, etc. etc.