Biennale tomorrow

Won’t do anything related to it tonight, but things will get busy starting tomorrow.

a line I always found dumb

“stupid is as stupid does”

This was always completely nonsensical to me, until I searched on Google for help, and found the following explanations.

“Stupid is as stupid does indicates that a person is judged stupid by the stupid acts they commit.”

“It means that an intelligent person who does stupid things is still stupid. You are what you do.”

All right, so now an incomprehensibility has been replaced by an utter banality: “You are what you do.”

Actually, you’re not identical with what you do, though behaving as if this were true can be a useful method for not falling prey to the verbal smokescreens of others. Focus solely on someone’s actions and you will, of course, end up with a truer picture of who they are than if you take all their words literally.

That’s exactly what a method is, in my opinion: a fruitful exaggeration. But this is also why philosophy is counter-method, or it is nothing.

agreed with this point by Levi

“Concepts are not representations, nor are they ideas in minds. Rather, they are lenses and tools. They are apparatuses, every bit as tangible and real as hammers. It makes as much sense to ask ‘is this concept true?’ as it does to ask ‘is a hammer true?’ Drawing a concept from Ryle, this question constitutes a category mistake. And it is a category mistake that constitutes some of the most tiresome and fascistically terrifying attitudes in all of philosophy. Everywhere with this question of whether a concept is true, whether it represents the world, we encounter the desire to police, dominate, subordinate, and render subservient. Like Kafka’s Court or Castle, these philosophical technologies everywhere seek to trap, ensnare, halt, and limit. They create the illusion of free movement and autonomy, while everywhere weaving a semantic web about engagement seeking to fix it. The question ‘is it true?’ is the insecure and narcissitic fantasy of academic philosophy wishing to redeem itself by functioning as master discipline, legislator, and judge of all other disciplines, practices, and experiences. The artist, physicist, ethnographer, and activist get along just fine without this type of ‘philosopher’ to examine their papers.”

Nothing is more boring to me than epistemological police work. There’s a reason why this sort of thing is never read outside narrow insider technical cadres.

Stated differently, it is nothing to be proud of when a philosophy is read only by professional philosophers. The pride some take in this outcome is based on a false analogy with the exact natural sciences, where it can possibly be a good sign if only 5 or 6 people in the world read your articles. In philosophy, by contrast, it’s probably the sign that you’re a pompous and over-professionalized bore who doesn’t realize that everyone at the table is bored and no longer listening.

Tom Sparrow’s follow-up

On the dissertation-to-book question. HERE.

And in fact, I agree with the comment there from reader dmf:

“this would be ideal but rarely matches up with the expectations of many diss readers/examiners who often have their own agendas such that one is lucky to have a work that holds together rather than sections for each reader, all depends on the politics of the dept i suppose.”

Exactly. That’s the main possible obstacle.

It was either Kant or Schopenhauer who said that the problem with parents is that all they really care about is that their kids are able to make their own way in the world. Spiritual development, adventure, passion, all the other things humans need for a fulfilling life… parents care less about those things than that some disaster doesn’t happen to you and that you’re able to support yourself financially by a reasonably early age.

Parallel to this, we could say that the problem with dissertation advisors is that all they really care about is that you not be incompetent. Spiritual development, adventure, passion, all the things that make the life of the mind worth living… dissertation advisors often don’t care about these things, because they are primarily worried that you might embarrass yourself and them with incompetence. So they encourage you to get bogged down in footnotes, tell you to qualify and hedge all of your boldest statements, and so forth.

The best option, very rare, is to have a dissertation advisor with whom you click extremely well. I’ve only heard of a few such cases in my life, and I suspect a few of the stories are exaggerated.

The second best option (which was my own case) is to have an advisor who, even if mildly hostile to your project, leaves you alone and lets you do it your own way anyhow. (And in my case, some of the criticism that rained down at the last minute was actually useful, so at times you can benefit even from this.)

More often people end up with case three, just as dmf implies. (Which is not as bad as case four: the arbitrary sadist.) In case three, you have a very hands-on advisor who is trying to make extra-sure that you prove your competence to the world, and thereby pushes you towards something too boring and technical to be a book quite yet.

Garcia prospectus

I’ve only glanced at his summary on that page I cited yesterday, and haven’t had time to watch the video yet. I’m worried that he’s leading himself into a jam by repeating the usual critique of stale autonomous individuals. As you all know, I think that’s yesterday’s war and isn’t capable of bearing fruit anymore. But Garcia seems sharp and resourceful, and I wouldn’t count him out as someone who might come up with an unforeseen new option. Eagerly awaiting the book.

finale on the Gilot book

That was one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read: interesting subject (Picasso), interesting observer (Gilot).

Most of the prominent anecdotes center on Picasso’s terrible behavior towards pretty much everyone. But what will really stick with me from the book is how surprisingly articulate Picasso was about his own art. He speaks quite often like a world-class critic. Some of the lines attributed to him in this book are some of the sharpest remarks about art I’ve ever heard.

Gilot’s thesis, perhaps too ungenerous, is that Picasso learned all these words about his own work through his many literary friendships. I wouldn’t go that far. He was clearly capable of spontaneous reactions as well. I wouldn’t have expected him to be quite this articulate about his craft. It’s fairly breathtaking sometimes.

Future Thing

One of the artists coming to Venice is Isabel Nolan from Dublin. Here is her sculpture “Future Thing.” She reports that the title is taken from the oil rig chapter of Circus Philosophicus. I couldn’t be happier.

Actually, there is quite a lot of resonance between Isabel’s work and mine, in particular her SCULPTURES, which are also wonderfully titled in my opinion.

Lovecraft/Poe

Really looking forward to Venice, but also to post-Venice so I can get to work on the Lovecraft project (had hoped to do so right after Oxford, but too many smaller-scale commitments appeared and had to be dealt with).

Poe will play some role in my Lovecraft book, though Poe deserves a book of his own. Lovecraft and Poe do have a lot in common, but it has less to do with scary content than with their rhetorical craft, and their manner of equipping first-person narrators to experience shock and surprise on behalf of all of us.

I agree with Houellebecq that it’s foolish to call Lovecraft a bad stylist. He was an amateur and so there are unpolished moments where an editor should have helped (for example, I think the whole first paragraph of “The Whisperer in Darkness” damages the story, which should have begun with the second paragraph).

At the moment I’m toying with the idea of using parody as a method more extensively in this book. I did write the one short piece of parody in my Lovecraft/Husserl article, but parody may be deserving of becoming a more mainstream philosophical method.

But once this book is done, I doubt there will be any further questions as to why Lovecraft is of any relevance to philosophy. It should be easy to close the case on that point.

Incongruously enough, Venice is the place where I first read “At the Mountains of Madness.” There could hardly be a less appropriate place to read that horrific Antarctic tale (which for its part, is damaged by being about 40 pages too long).

my sense of Istanbul Airport

It’s a visually pleasing airport, clean and harmonious. But user services are somewhat feeble. There are no good places to sit unless you want to buy something and eat it, and the wifi options are disappointing. Even worse, none of the people at the Information desks seem even to know what the wifi options are. Ask 3 or 4 times and you’ll get 3 or 4 different answers. I finally figured it out, but it took awhile. (The same thing happened in 2009, and I simply forgot the answers learned by experience back then.)

Another plus is the direct airport-city center connection via Metro, which didn’t exist the first time I came here.

June 6 protest in Alexandria to commemorate the death of Khaled Said

You can read HERE about the plans to protest at Sidi Gaber station in Alexandria, place of employment of the police who openly beat the young man to death last June 6.

If Tunisia was the spark for January 25 in Egypt, Said’s death was what put the firewood on the pile. I noticed a definite change in the mood in Egypt at the time. It was so beyond the pale, so shameless compared to previous standards. It was one thing to hear that this or that is happening in the State Security dungeons, but quite another to have the government brazenly say: “Even though we beat him to death before the eyes of numerous witnesses on the streets of a major city, our two autopsies show that he died from swallowing marijuana while attempting to hide the evidence. We admit that there was blunt force trauma to the head, but this had nothing to do with the cause of death. What a naughty young man.”

What happened after that was that the protestors on the streets were no longer just the professional activists. All kinds of people were on the street to protest what happened to Said, and this is what set the table for January 25, demographically speaking. It wasn’t just a bridge too far, but about five bridges too far. Finally the government decided to throw the two police to the dogs, but it was too late.

If somehow you still haven’t seen the before and after photos, click HERE to see what terrible injuries can be inflicted by “swallowing marijuana.” (Warning: graphic images.)