tonight’s real location

In case anyone in Beirut was planning to drop by tonight, my talk is not at the American University of Science and Technology, as I was led to believe. The real sponsor is as follows:

Beirut Studio 2010 of the School of Architecture of the University of Technology, Sydney.

It’s in an apartment that’s been converted into a studio for this multi-week program, arranged by a local “fixer'” by the name of Mansour. Looks like a great group of faculty and students, and it is certainly the most informal setting to which I have ever been flown in to talk.

A bit of a dark note already, however… Some of the students in this group were working on the Beirut Corniche, and were being helped by several local people. One of them was a kindly man, said to be somewhat autistic, or something of the sort. The students bade farewell to him last night, and when they passed back again 20 minutes later, he was dead on the sidewalk: apparently a homicide. The police and ambulance had not yet arrived, so it must have just happened minutes earlier. No word yet on any motive for the killing.

Infrastructure

Tonight I will speak about infrastructure, since that is what interests these architects in their current project: a Mediterranean rail network.

In our recent correspondence, Meillassoux insisted that truth must be interesting; this is the reason, he said, that he reworks his writings so carefully before publication. He wants to make sure that each step of his argument is interesting no less than true.

I have a similar conception. It seems to me that avoidance of error is less important than avoidance of banality. Avoidance of error seems to me to based on the notion that truth means accurate propositional-discursive content, and error is the inaccurate version of the same.

But if you hold as I do that propositional content is always a translation and hence always inaccurate in the strict sense, then a new approach is needed. Contact with the real is not made through accurate propositions, but through some other means, and for me that is surprise. We make contact with the real precisely when we encounter surprises. Aristotle was already onto this when he defined substance as that which can have opposite qualities in opposite respects. You know you are dealing with something real when you are dealing with something that is precisely not a bundle of properties that can be assembled in discursive propositions, but something that undercuts such efforts in turbulent fashion.

Plato was onto this too, in fact, in the repeated claims of Socrates that we must know what something is before we know its qualities. The fact that he never attains such definitions does not mean that his dialectic is merely anoretic, so that the true Platonic doctrine would be an esoteric content sneakily eithheld from the dialogues. Instead, it means that the real is something that withdraws from all dialectic, and all propositional content. Truth is approached obliquely, and it is a failure of imagination to think this causes truth to degenerate into arbitrary poetic utterance. There is a difference, after all, between effective and ineffective poetry, just as there is a difference between scientific revolutions and the painstaking assembly of scientific facts. The latter is useful and needs its place in nany theory of truth, but it is neither the exhaustive nor even the exemplary case of truth.

The problem with systems of philosophy is that, in their demand that we include in them everything that exists in the world, they condemn us to offering much filler, much banality. No one has good ideas about everything, after all, nor does any philosophy ever destroy all possible ibjections to it.

Just as a rail infrastructure links pre-existent population centers rather than laying an exhaustive geometrical grid over the world, a philosophical infrastructure should link whatever surprises and paradoxes an individual thinker may have uncovered. Over time, the infrastructure can spread, bringing new topics into itself. But some topics may never be reached, and if we should seek to reach them, the effort should never be forced.

On slightly different topic, in my Latour book I said that his philosophy contains the four key concepts of actors, irreductions, translation, and alliance. All are crucial, but in a sense OOO departs from Latour on all four, at least in my version of OOO. Namely,

Actors are not all equal. There is a difference between real and sensual objects, and it is absolute, they are radically different in kind.

Latour holds that nothing is either reducible nor irreducible to anything else. My position, contrary to false assertions that I think spaghetti monsters are as real as atoms, is that real objects are never reducible and sensual objectsalways are. There is, however, some difficulty in nknowing which objects are real. We can never be sure of tis, in fact. No intellectual intuition allows us to make this determination; the belief in a given real object is always falsifiable.

As for translation, Latour holds that all relations are mediated. I counter that this leads to a Zeno-like paradox, and that there is in fact a kind of direct contact: a real-sensual link is always direct, whereas real-real is always linked by the sensual and sensual- sensual is always linked by real.

As for alliances, whereas for Latour a thing is determined by it’s aliens, i hold that it is determined only in isolation from its alliances.

I hope this is helpful, and i apologize in advance for any weird iPad spelling corrections that may have inserted some comical unintended vocabulary into the foregoing paragraphs. It will be some hours before I can edit this post on the slightly more reliable laptop.

what Yeltsin became in the public mind

This is a little harsh given the image in the previous post, but here was THE ONION’S TAKE ON YELTSIN in 1998.

Yanayev dies

Obituary for GENNADI YANAYEV. The 1991 Soviet coup attempt is one of those almost completely forgotten stories that was really huge for a brief period of time. It seemed quite feasible for those few days that Soviet hardliners would take control and roll back the Gorbachev era, two years after most of Eastern Europe had fallen out of the Soviet orbit.

Instead, the coup was thwarted a few days later, the Soviet Union was dissolved at the end of the year, and for various reasons Boris Yeltsin seems to be remembered as a vodka-swilling used car salesman rather than as a man who showed genuine bravery at the time (that’s the Yeltsin I tend to remember, and that’s why I find it hard to laugh at his memory as many do). That bravery is nicely captured in the unbelievably dramatic (prize-winning) photo below, which show as much composition as an oil painting. They were expecting to be assaulted by the army at any moment, though it never happened.

I realize it’s not fashionable to attack anything other than capitalist neo-liberalism these days. But I have a number of friends who lived and suffered in Eastern Europe under Soviet domination, and their experience has given them some seriousness and some moral authority about these things. One of the really remarkable academic events I’ve witnessed was a joint American-Polish gathering at which the Americans were all denouncing America and the Poles were all praising America.

Ecology Without Nature After Finitude

Morton channels the English Meillassoux cover in his NEW BLOG DESIGN.

headed for the printer

The reason I’m up this late is because zerO Books wanted me to give the final OK to send Towards Speculative Realism to the printer. I asked for a few minor changes on the back cover, and also scrolled through the text itself one last time. The editing was all finished many months ago, but it’s never a bad idea to scroll through the text and make sure that some disastrous formatting error hasn’t crept in. But the text looked to be in fine shape.

As for having it sent to the printer, I’m not sure exactly what that means for the release date. Will there be a long queue at the printer’s? Will they print the book immediately but then steadfastly hold it in a warehouse until the mid-November release date? Or will they make it immediately available for sale a few weeks from now?

I just don’t know. I’ve never made it this far with zerO before and don’t know how they do business at this stage. In the case of Open Court, which published my first three books, I was always FedExed a copy of the book a few weeks before anyone in the public knew it was available. In fact, Tool-Being was FedExed to me in Dublin after being printed several weeks earlier than I was told would be the case. I already had train tickets for Galway that day and started reading the book en route, after it reached me just minutes before departing Dublin.

It’s a nice memory, but it wasn’t especially nice at the time… I have a now well-established pattern of loathing each of my books on the first reading, which I find about as awkward as it would be to stare into the mirror for three hours straight. It now takes me about 2-3 years to appreciate reading any of my own books. And after enjoying it once at that stage, I tend not to look at it again for many years, if ever. I’ll reread them all when I’m 60 or so, just as Roland Barthes enjoyed doing.

This suggests a new method of simply not reading them when they first come out. The problem with that is that you feel impelled to read them immediately. If there was some grotesque printing error, you need to know about it so as to be able to report it.

Beirut livelier than ever

My previous trips to Beirut were in December 2001 and April-May 2002. I like it here so much, and it’s so close to Cairo (the flight is just 1 hour, unless they land in Alexandria to pick up and let off passengers as sometimes happens) that it’s strange that I went more than 8 years without returning.

However, one advantage of my long absence was the chance to be impressed tonight by how much the city has developed in 8 years, despite a war occurring midway during that period.

The airport is much more elaborate than before. The guy at the visa stamp window looked at me as if I were a fool to ask for a visa with a U.S. passport; not sure when the visa requirement was lifted, but in 2001-02 I had to buy them upon arrival. The Hamra neighborhood is really developed now, with formerly dark and sleepy streets that I remember clearly from last time now absolutely hopping with nightlife.

But some things never change: the taxis from the airport are still a hellacious ripoff. You can take a bus if you know where to find it, but it’s apparently complicated (I never tried) and at that hour of night it’s not worth it.

Tomorrow’s event is in the evening, and informal, the way architects often like to do it.

reader tip on gmail ads

This is funny, though I won’t follow the tip myself (the gmail ads have often been very useful for me, and they are pretty unintrusive as ads go).

“Since gmail uses the content of your e-mails to automatically generate ads you can add content that disables it. Someone figured out that if you use George Carlin’s 7 dirty words Google won’t give you ads because they would all be dirty ads. With a few more experiments they found that if you were sending an e-mail about particularly gruesome content like a massacre or a crime Google won’t give you adds.

So in white text beneath my signature I’ve added this line of text (If you highlight my whole signature and the white space beneath it you can see it):

‘I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.’

Ever since doing that I haven’t gotten the ads in the sidebar. I’m sure this fix is only temporary, Google will find a workaround soon enough.”

essay on authors, readers, reviewers, editors, correspondents

I’m referring to Edmund Wilson’s excellent essay “The Literary Worker’s Polonius: A Brief Guide for Authors and Editors.” It’s all about the various sorts of conflicts and misunderstandings that can arise between people of the categories listed above. My only complaint is that the essay is 13 pages long rather than 300. He left out some topics; I can’t see any where he’s off the mark.

I was going to quote some of the essay’s best passages here, but some of them remain so to the point for us today that they would look like underhanded digs about past blog wars, and that would detract from the innate value of the essay itself. Instead, I’ll just send any interested person to read it directly.

One place you can find the essay is on pages 482-495 of the Library of America’s first Edmund Wilson volume, which is entitled “Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s.”

Cairo airline terminals

I hate the kind of airline tickets that don’t tell you which terminal you’re leaving from. In Cairo that’s an especial pain, because Terminal 1 is fairly far from Terminals 2 and 3.

No problem this time, however; it’s Terminal 1.

The Cairo Airport has a more inconsistent level of terminal quality than I have ever seen anywhere else. The three terminals are three completely different travel experiences, and to some extent they even have different sets of rules.

When I first moved to Egypt, Terminal 2 was considered the blue ribbon portion of the airport. I’m not sure how old it is, but not that old. It was always a bit boring at the departure gates, with one boring, mediocre in-house café that has recently been augmented by a few new mediocre chain cafés. But given what has happened with the other two terminals, Terminal 2 is now the obvious armpit of Cairo Airport facilities. I feel a mild depression come over me whenever my tickets say “Terminal 2.”

As for Terminal 1… It is so far from Terminal 2 that at first I didn’t even know it existed. This led to an embarrassing disaster: my father came to visit me in Egypt at Christmas of my first year, and he was waiting for several hours at Terminal 1 without my knowing that there was such a thing. (I had never yet left Egypt, only arrived.) In those days, Terminal 1 was frankly a bit scary: really a low-class operation three tiers below the merely boring (but competent) Terminal 2. That changed several years ago with the beautifully executed overhaul of Terminal 1.

Terminal 3 opened recently: just last year, I guess. It’s a wonderful place, and a perfectly relaxing way to spend a few hours… a shiny new facility, excellently organized. Finally, Cairo doesn’t have to have a worse airport than Amman or Beirut or Damascus. Terminal 3 is also the only terminal where taxi drivers aren’t allowed to come in and hassle you when you arrive. That may sound like a good idea, but in many ways it’s disconcerting. None of us Cairo veterans were sure what to do at first, and it was actually fairly difficult to find a taxi at Terminal 3, until I learned the new tricks of where to find them.

But it’s Terminal 1 this evening.