Coincidence 4: information

E.T. Jaynes was a mathematician and philosopher who, in the twentieth century, did perhaps the most to counter and wrongfoot the frequentist tradition in possibility theory. Jaynes tried to prove that the possibility calculus is rooted in logic – that it is, indeed, as Laplace said, “the calculus of inductive reasoning” – of which random experiments are merely a subset. In other words, Jayne tried to harden the hearts of all who were interested in probability against the idea that probability represented some objective property of objects – or a Popper put it, a propension. To Jayne’s mind, at the same time that the frequentist line attempted to demonstrate that probabilty was something objective, instead of subjective, it also abstracted, absurdly, from the laws of physics. His central case for this was the discourse around coin tossing. Coins, as Jayne points out, are physical objects, and their rise and fall is completely described by the physics of ballistics. (I take this example from Jayne’s book, Probability theory: the logic of the sciences). Thus, to say that a coin with heads and tails has a fairly equal chance of landing on either side, with a lean a bit to heads over a long series of tosses, is to speak nonsense. Rather, everything depends on how a coin is tossed, as a physical object.

The laws of mechanics now tell us the following. The ellipsoid of inertia of a thin disc is

an oblate spheroid of eccentricity 1/√2. The displacement x does not affect the symmetry of this ellipsoid, and, so according to the Poinsot construction, as found in textbooks on rigid dynamics (such as Routh, 1905, or Goldstein, 1980, Chap. 5), the polhodes remain circles concentric with the axis of the coin. In consequence, the character of the tumbling motion of the coin while in flight is exactly the same for a biased as an unbiased coin, except

that for the biased one it is the center of gravity, rather than the geometrical center, which describes the parabolic ‘free particle’ trajectory.”

Given these physical facts, this is what Jayne suggests:

Therefore, in order to know which face will be uppermost in your hand, you have only

to carry out the following procedure. Denote by k a unit vector passing through the coin

along its axis, with its point on the ‘heads’ side. Now toss the coin with a twist so that k and

n make an acute angle, then catch it with your palm held flat, in a plane normal to n. On

successive tosses, you can let the direction of n, the magnitude of the angular momentum,

and the angle between n and k, vary widely; the tumbling motion will then appear entirely

different to the eye on different tosses, and it would require almost superhuman powers of

observation to discover your strategy.

Thus, anyone familiar with the law of conservation of angular momentum can, after some

practice, cheat at the usual coin-toss game and call his shots with 100% accuracy.”

Jayne’s point is that probability is not a spooky physical property connected with the two sidedness of the coin, but is a logical abstraction describing the physical event, including in its reference set the manner of the tossing.

Jayne goes on to demolish other examples from the frequentist literature. Here’s his conclusion:

“… those who assert the existence of physical probabilities do so in the belief that this establishes for their position an ‘objectivity’ that those who speak only of a ‘state of knowledge’ lack. Yet to assert as fact something which cannot be either proved or disproved by observation of facts is the opposite of objectivity; it is to assert something that one could not possibly know to be true. Such an assertion is not even entitled to be called a description of a ‘state of knowledge’.”

This conclusion led Jaynes to some radical and unorthodox positions. In particular, it led him to stress lack of knowledge, rather than physicalism, when accounting for quantum mechanics. He is famous for applying this, as well, to thermodyamics:  “entropy is an anthropomorphic concept, not only in the well known statistical sense that it measures the extent of human ignorance as to the microstate. Even at the purely phenomenological level entropy is an anthropomorphic concept. For it is a property not of the physical system but of the particular experiments you or I choose to perform on it.”

Often, while following a philosophical train of thought, one encounters a moment when the values one has been using strangely seem to inverse themselves. It is like the child's game of closing your eyes and spinning around and around: at the moment you stop and open your eyes, it seems that it is the world that is spinning around and around and you are standing still in the eye of it. The argument about probability partakes of that vertigo. The classical school inherits from Laplace the confidence that the world is a totally determined system, in which all phenomena can eventually traced back to material causes. And yet, to get to this argument, the school has to advance the thesis that probability is simply a measure of knowledge - or, to use the modern term, information. This means that, in classical terms, possibility is subjective. On the other side is the world picture that rejects crude determinism and accords chance a very real place. This school, then, takes possibility as as a real property, or in Popper's terminology, propensity, of events. This is, ultimately, an argument that makes possible an ontologically distinct thing called subjectivity. But, in grounding subjectivity in chance, in making possibility objective, this school entangles itself in all the logical problems adduced by Jaynes. And so, as the first group bases its determinism, which ultimately dissolves subjectivity, on the subjectivity of the probability calculus, the other group bases its indeterminism on the reification of a spooky non-cause. As I've pointed out, what goes for chance goes for coincidence. Perhaps here a Kantian probabilist could claim that we have reached the limit of our reason - the antinomies of chance are undecidable. But I'm pretty sure Jaynes would question whether, ultimately, we are not just making undecidable a case of our lack of knowledge, thus forcing us back towards his school.

coincidence 3: the naive and the sophisticated novelist

In 1850, Dickens began a novel with an exemplary sentence: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station shall be held by someone else, these pages will tell.”  It was, in fact, obviously the nature of these pages – the novel – to tell this story. It went without saying that for Dickens, as well as for other Victorian novelists, the interest of the novel was tied to interest in the individual. If there was an anxiety here, it was about heroism in Carlyle’s key, a heroism that passes the moral tests of life – but there was no doubt that a life was definitely not a matter determined within a larger social pattern, and only of interest insofar as it could be grouped with a subpopulation in order to display certain tendencies. In this sense, the novel bet everything on the ideology of heroism.

Even so, at the same time, in mid nineteenth century, there were indications that a radically different point of view, the statistical mindset, was winning minds outside the circle of literature.  Quetelet, for instance, in 1835 had already tried to show that crime should not be understood through its individual instances, but through statistics demonstrating its likelihood of incidence. From this, Quetelet inferred that it was society, and not the criminal, which produced crime, just as an orange tree produced oranges. We would not hold an orange responsible being an orange, although we might pluck it and squeeze it to death for its juice – just as we might take down a criminal and cut off his head to satisfy the principles of social hygiene.

Dicken’s notion of the novel and the individual produced what Robert Musil called a naïve, or old fashioned story form, which was very difficult to break with. In his view –a view, it must be admitted, conditioned by Musil’s envy of the fame of the great modernists – Ulysses and A la recherche are still footed in the archaic world of certainty and heroism, instead of the world in which that ground had disappeared and criminals could be considered the fruit of society, rather than bad actors making bad decisions, while characters could be considered as hybrids of the interior thoughts that, they delusively believe, guide them, and the administrative purposes for which they employed by exterior forces.

It is in this context that Musil thought a lot about coincidence – Zufall. Chance, after all, is felt as coincidence in a story, especially when science shatters our confidence that a life and a life story are one and the same thing.  In his diaries,  Musil piled up references to popular work on probability and chance in the field of math and physics. One of his sources was Erwin Schroedinger’s essay on the Gesetz der Zufall – the Law of Chance – in Koralle, a popular science magazine, which appeared in 1928.

It is a small, lucid essay, with two themes. One is that our understanding of the physical world is based not on certainty, but on probability. The other theme is that the second law of thermodynamics, which posits that systems advance from order to larger degrees of disorder, doesn’t free us from the link of determinism, if by determinism we mean unpredictability. Rather, entropy is highly predictable.

To make this point, Schroedinger uses an example that would have struck a writer like Musil – the example of the library.

He asks us to imagine a library that has been organized so that all the books in it are numbered and put in their proper places. And then he imagines a horde coming in on Monday – surely, students right before exam time – and going through the library and taking out books and putting them back with no regard for their proper place:

 Now the astonishing feature is that this process proves to be subject to very definite laws, especially if we suppose that the valumes are taken from the shelves in the same haphazard way as they are put back…. If we suppose that there were eighty volumes of Goethe’s works, for instance, neatly arranged in one section of the library when the casual mob entered, and if we find that only sixty volumes are now in their places while the other twenty are scattered about here and there, then we can expect during the second week about fifteen volumes will disappear from the row, and about eleven volumes will vanish during the third week, etc. For since we have supposed that the books are taken out quite at random, the probability that one of the remaining volumes will meet with this misfortune decreases as their number decreases.”

Schroedinger concedes that his example is stylized – really, for the predictions to be more exact, the numbers must be bigger. If the collected works amounted to 80,000 among millions of volumes, the deviations from the predicted number of remaining books would be smaller.

Schroedinger’s library example is interesting to follow through. If this were a real library, then some of the Goethe volumes would be checked out, and some of the books that were scattered around would be discovered by library assistants and put back in their place. In terms of the second law, what this would mean is that the system had feedbacks – which means that it is not entirely closed.

“ We do not wish to asseert anything more than that the total balance of disorder in nature is steadily on  the increase. In individual sections of the universe, or in definite material systems, the movement may  cvery well be towards a higher degree of order, which is made possible because an adequate compensation  occurs in some other systems.”

The notion of feedbacks gives us a new way of thinking about the game played between the novel and the author, in as much as the author keeps adding and subtracting from the novel, as well as that played between the reader and the novel, in that the reader keeps decoding the novel. But the question Musil was gnawing on was whether the novel as a system could accommodate the character as a point determined by the irreversible progress from order to disorder inherent in the other administrative systems within the social world that give the character a content. 

On Coincidence 2

The ever resourceful, ever peculiar Arthur Koestler devoted two books to a minor figure in the history of science: Paul Kammerer. One book, The case of the Midwife Toad, detailed Kammerer’s search for proof that Lamarkian evolution – the inheritance of acquired traits – actually exists. The other book, The Roots of Coincidence, explored Kammerer’s fascination with what he called seriality, which found its way into Kammerer’s 1919, Das Gesetz der Serie. As I pointed out, if we take Cournot’s reasoning to be correct, there shouldn’t be a “law” of coincidence, since coincidence is, by definition, a byproduct of the fact that the laws of physics are both plural and independent one from the other. Thus, a law of coincidence would simply create another kind of coincidence that it couldn’t encompass, and thus would not be a law of all coincidences at all – eliminating it from consideration as a law of physics.

Nevertheless, while 20^th century physicists did follow, reluctantly, the probabilistic path scouted out by Cournot, there were intellectuals – sometimes including physicists of note, such as Wolfgang Pauli – who couldn’t resist the impulse of trying to discover some law to explain the interstices of chance.

Mostly, these intellectuals were not physicists, however. Rather, they were, many of them, concerned that the geometric spirit was strangling the poetry of the world, and sought places at the spiritual front where they could fight back. Often, however, they ended up fighting back using the methods of their opponents – that is, instead of claiming poetry as a power in its own right, they claimed that they were making scientific discoveries.

Kammerer, according to Koestler, made notebooks in which he recorded coincidences. He was on the lookout for them. A coincidence notebook is something to dream about – what a wonderful form for a novel!  Here’s what it looks like, in an extract from Koestler:

Kammerer's book contains a hundred samples of

coincidences. For instance:

(7) On September 18, 1916, my wife, while waiting for her turn in the consulting rooms of Prof. Dr.j.

v. H., reads the magazine Die Kunst; she is impressed by some reproductions of pictures by a painter named Schwalbach, and makes a mental note to remember his name because she would like to see the originals. At that moment the door opens and the receptionist calls out to the patients: "Is Frau Schwalbach here? She is wanted on the telephone."

(22) On July 28, 1915, I experienced the following progressive series: (a) my wife was reading about

"Mrs. Rohan", a character in the novel Michael by Hermann Bang; in the tramway she saw a man who

looked like her friend, Prince Rohan; in the evening Prince Rohan dropped in on us. (b) In the

tram she overheard somebody askirig the pseudo-Rohan whether he knew the village of Weissenbach

on Lake Attersee, and whether it would be a pleasant place for a holiday. When she got out of the tram,

she went to a delicatessen shop on the Naschmarkt, where the attendant asked her whether she happened

to know Weissenbach on Lake Attersee-he had to make a delivery by mail and did not know the correct

postal address.”

Those who have the ear for these things will be impressed by the similarity (the coincidence?) of this kind of prose with Freud’s cases from ordinary life in the Psychopathology, which contains the famous (and much disputed) analysis of a “Freudian slip”. The coincidence, in fact, seems to be a sort of slip by fate itself – as though some secret law governing human events slips quickly into and out of view. Kammerer, like Freud, was concerned with repetition. He defined the series as "a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things and events -a recurrence, or clustering, in time or space whereby the individual members in the sequence-as far as can be ascertained by careful analysis-are not connected by the same active cause".

What they are connected by is the same person, depending on the case.

Six years before Kammerer’s book, Freud had published one of his more adventurous works: Totem and Taboo. In this book, he develops the idea of projection as a process by which the ambiguity of feelings one has about a person are relieved – in the case of “primitives”, by imputing hostility to the spirits of the dead, a hostility that has its real origin in the hostility one felt about them living. This idea has had a long career, and merged into the ordinary way of thinking about how we negotiate feeling and interactions with others so that it no longer seems or is even recognized, much of the time, as Freudian. Of course, it is a word that coincided with a technology – the projection of images on a screen – that also characterized one of the long events in the cultural life of the twentieth century. Freud sees, in a sense, the false divide that separates the “primitive” from the modern, even if the only moderns that he compares to primitives are neurotics. As to neurotics – in essence, you have successful ones, who sublimate their neuroses, and unsuccessful ones, who exibit it, and that is the psychopathology of everyday life. Mental illness is  a matter of degree, not a difference in kind.

Which is why projection is fundamentally based, according to Freud, on the human setup:

“But projection exists not only as a defense mechanism, but it also arises where there are no conflicts. The projection of inner perceptions to the outside is a primitive mechanism which underlies, for instance, our sense perceptions, which thus have the greatest share in shaping our outer world. Under not sufficiently fixed conditions, our inner perceptions will also project outward our feeling and thought processes as well as our sense perceptions, applying them to the forming of the outer world while they should remain bound to the inner world. This is connected genetically, perhaps, to the fact that the function of attention is not originally directed to the inner world, but instead to stimuli streaming in from the outer world, receiving from the endopsychic processes only reports of the development of pleasure or pain. Only with the construction of an abstract thought language, through the conjunction of sense-related remnants of verbal representations with inner processes, does this become gradually perceptible. Up to this point the primitive person through projection of inner perceptions on the outside develops a picture of the outer world that we only now, with a heightened sense of consciousness in psychology, are forced to retranslate.”  

Projection and coincidence seem, intuitively, to have something to do with each other in the Freudian schema. 

on coincidence: 1

In Mill’s Logic, that grand old lumber room, in Chapter 18 of Book three,  a principle is spelled out that, in our day, has been shorthanded into the sometimes tendentious phrase,  correlation does not prove causation:

“Although two or more cases in which the phenomenon a has been met with may have no common antecedent except A, this does not prove that there is any connection between a and A, since a may have many causes, and may have been produced, in these different instances, not by any thing which the instances had in common, but by some of those elements in them which were different.”

Mill, in keeping with his practical bent, distills from this a question: “After how many and what sort of instances may it be concluded that an observed coincidence between two phenomena is not the effect of chance?”

Another way of putting this question is: when is a coincidence really a coincidence?

As Francois Mentre has pointed out, the French mathematician and scientist, Cournot, was also intested in this question, or at least in one of its guises: the reality of probability. Cournot worked in the shadow of Laplace; but where Laplace, finally, came down on the side of a universal determinism, Cournot was sure that this move was not justified by Laplace’s mathematics.  “He could not admit that chance was nothing  but a “vain sound, flatus vocis, which we use, as Laplace said, to disguise our ignorance of true causes.” For him [Cournot], chance had an objective reality independent of our knowledge.” (144) Cournot spelled out his ontological conviction by way of a critique of Laplace. Laplace wrote that Nature obeys “a small number of immutable laws.” Cournot’s disprove of Laplace’s determinism moves from this idea: “it suffices, said Cournot, that there be only two, perfectly independent one from the other, in order that we must make a place for the fortuitous in the government of the world. Whether or not  we do or do not know the literal law for each of the independent two series, as soon as they intersect, there is chance. Chance thus does not derive from our ignorance of the laws of the universe, no more than it diminishes as the measure of our knowledge extends. It subsists in the eyes of the expert as well as those of the ignoramus. It is necessary to accept it as an irreducible, sui generis fact that has a notable part in the government of the world.” (209)

This, though, is hard to accept, either for the expert or the ignoramus or that hybrid of the two, the modern mystic..

One can see that Cournot’s observation blocks two popular explanations of coincidence (or chance – in fact, I am using coincidence here as a proxy for a semantic family that includes the French hasard and the German Zufall). True coincidence can neither be purely the effect of human ignorance of the causes in place, nor can itself be characteristic of some autonomous law – a law of synchronicity or seriality. The same reasoning Cournot applies to other laws would apply in this case, so that any law of synchronicity would inevitably generate coincidences that would fall outside its domain as it intersected with other universal laws, creating, if you will, hypercoincidences.

One way of looking at physics in the 20^th century is that the physicists were both moved by the fact that the world given by a structure that was governed by two or more irreducible laws would have to accord a large place to chance – such that probability was no longer a way of mathematically stylizing elements that were, to an all powerful intelligence, always certain – and a movement to unify the laws of physics, to reduce them to some grand single principle, which would drive out coincidence.

However, there was also a tradition, a fringe tradition, that rejected the whole idea that coincidence wasn’t subject to its own proper law. Instead, it sought that law. This was an especially popular theme in Germany in the 20s, coexisting with a faddish interest in psychoanalysis, physiognomics, graphology, paranormal psychology, etc. Psychoanalysis had a tentative relationship with these things, which fascinated Freud, but which, finally, he diagnosed as cultural symptoms of a mass psychopathology. 

  

the slow life

One of my favorite sequences inone of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor.  The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

Well, at the moment, I have fallen out of the speedy cohort. Get it now? I can barely keep up with the drunken doctor in the flick. My little monster wound, as I affectionately refer to it, keeps me limited to a stately, or if you like, arthritic pace. Of course, I’m supposed to sit around the house, or lie around, and mostly I’m obedient, but it drives me a bit nuts not to be able to go the four blocks up Wilshire to my usual coffee shop. Of course, I do go a bit – I pick up Adam from his school, a trip which, in all, is about eight blocks. And I go those blocks slowly.

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. I live in Santa Monica, which, as in all American cities, cars are the primary entities. Humans are down on the scale. I take a grim, slow person’s satisfaction, now, in crossing the street, holding back that anxious car driver who wants that three seconds – gotta have that three seconds! And is probably cursing me in his or her driver’s seat. Good. I’ve discovered that with slowness comes no spiritual insight, but a certain bitterness, a fuck you attitude. This is evidently not good from the point of view of the Mahatma and Jesus Christ. But let the Mahatma and Jesus Christ walk across the street while a black BMW inhabited by somehow who has never missed a lunch or not gotten what they wanted in their entire fucking life glowers at them. It is … trying.

On David Fucking Foster Wallace

Jesus Christ, God, Florence Nightingale, Moses, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Buddha have all been filmed –or, rather, actors playing these people have all been on film. I thought that only one mortal man was immune from the gaze of the camera – Mohammed – and that because the Saudis tend to crowd source adverse audience reaction, in terms of car burning and rioting, whenever Mohammed’s visage shows up. It’s a serious thumbs down situation.
But I was wrong!
It turns out that David Foster Wallace – or David fucking Foster Wallace, as I will call him here, since I am being all into that desacralizing thing – should also be immune from the movies. Who knew? His fans normally don’t overturn and burn buses in Islamabad, however, but quietly weep in the pages of the Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. 
A new film is out that adopts a book of interviews with D(f)FW to the screen. I am not myself a fan of the genre of films about writers, since they tend to portray writers as solitary folks, agonizing out the daily word limit, typing (oh, the typing scenes, which are a whole variety of cringe by themselves!) – basically, the whole reactionary fantasy of the individual creator, and I find that boring, and a little surprising, since writing could be a highly dramatizable subject. However, what interests me is the reaction to the film by people who have known or feel they have some claim on D(f)FW.
F’rinstance, this piece in the New Republic, which does a header in piety in the first graf and never looks back:
Why I am not watching the David Foster Wallace Movie: he taught me not to by Jason Guriel. It is probably not Guriel’s fault, the title. However, the “he taught me not to” clause has a music to it, does it not? Much like “Jesus loves the little children/all the children of the world”, it has a sort of hymnal for simps feel.
This – I kid you not! – is the first graf:
“There’s a certain irony in making a feature film about David Foster Wallace: funneling the most voluminous of writers, he of the endnotes with their own gravitational pull, into a work of entertainment. The market, of course, is primed for a multiplex-filling movie. DFW’s fans have already consumed every available DFW product—not just his terrific short stories, or his 900-plus page dystopian novel on TV, tennis, and addiction, Infinite Jest; but also his critical essays, his Kenyon College commencement address, and his gonzo forays into reporting and travel writing. For the completist, there are also hisinterviews with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky from the Infinite Jestbook tour of 1996—which have now been adapted as The End of the Tour, with Jason Segel playing DFW. But what emerges from those interviews and Wallace’s critical essays is his deep aversion to entertainment.”

To entertainment no less! Such a shame, too, since the multiplexes will surely be filled to the bursting to see a film about a publicity touring writer who wrote a best seller in the 90s. The kids can't get enough of that kind of thing!

Of course, the Hollywood ridiculousness of the intro is there for a reason. After all, there’s no virtue and gold stars in being immune to a temptation that hasn’t been offered to you – the Devil doesn’t ask everybody to bow down and worship him in return for supreme domination of the earth. He knows well enough that most putz’s are willing to bow down to make the fucking next month's auto insurance payment. Only the superhuman are selected by the devil for special visits.

Hence, of course, Wallace.

We know that Guriel is in fantasy land with this vision – if there is box office here, it is strictly due to some celeb comedy actor taking on the role. Period. Surely the editors at TNR know this, as well as knowing that a little name dropping when a movie is coming along can't do any harm.

But that's show business. What bugs me is the jawdropping idea that D(f)FW was somehow “averse” to entertainment, and taught his disciples such. This tickles. This makes me break out into deep braying sounds, like a donkey going down.

Averse to entertainment? I wonder what the secret teachings are about masturbation and dental hygiene?

In fact, D(f)FW was in the entertainment business, which is a business that thrives on the kind of logrolling that makes for articles about the “controversy” concerning this or that bit of pop flotsam. He wrote his books to have them published, and he was more than willing to flog them. Which puts him up there with everybody else in the industry.

Now, it is true that entertainment has very often been treated as something other than art. Baseball and comic strips are the entertainment, Ulysses and the Rothko Chapel are the art, or so goes this dogtired move in a game that started when the grand old patrons were guillotined in the 18th century and their land was confiscated, and the new patrons of the nineteenth century, tycoons all, contented themselves mostly with collecting what the older patrons of the Church and Nobility used to commission. Bastards. Since that time, the academics have gotten in on the act too; until, some time in the 1970s or 80s, they pressed the division until it collapsed. However, it was always an ad hoc structure, which pressed guild like pretensions upon a recalcitrant capitalist reality.

I don’t think Wallace was a stupid man, so he knew the deal as well as anybody else. He might well have had an aversion to a lot of entertainment – he might not have liked bowling, he might have found gross out comedy stupid, he might not have appreciated the Simpsons in their prime – but I can’t believe he was so deluded as to think that “entertainment” was Verboten.

One of the terrible things about the D(F)FW cult is that it makes me sympathetic to Brett Easton Ellis. Surely, I like to think, I can’t sink so low! And yet B(f)EE’s bitchery about the Wallace cult seems more and more accurate. At some point, the pap has to stop.

the mystery of the NYRB's article, the mystery of ISIS

These are times that try men’s ribcages – due to the laughter the bigwig journals provoke. Case in point is an “analysis” of Isis that was published by “Anonymous”, in the NYRB. We are assured by the editors that Anonymous is a very serious person. In fact, so serious that the editors seem to have blithely given him carte blanche to say things and give references that have the same relation to fact as, say, the figures of monsters on medieval maps have to zoology. At least the medieval cartographers were cute.

But where to begin? Reading the hopeless mess of the article, I was struck by one passage.

“The movement’s behavior, however, has not become less reckless or tactically bizarre since Zarqawi’s death. One US estimate by Larry Schweikart suggested that 40,000 insurgents had been killed, about 200,000 wounded, and 20,000 captured before the US even launched the surge in 2006.” 

I asked myself why such a toll hadn’t attracted much more world wide attention. Then I looked up the “u.s.” analyst, Larry Schweikart. There’s no reference for Schweikart’s article, but going to Schweikart's author page, I learned all about his expertise in Iraqi history, which is, it appears, considerably less than his knowledge of the electric guitar, which he once played in a minor rock bank. His cv is unimpressive even by the low standards of second rate institutions of higher education. It consists most impressively of the fact that he co-wrote a book entitle Patriot’s History of the US and a bestseller entitled 48 Liberal Lies About American History.  So, basically, under the highminded pretence that we are reading about anonymous' very informed views about the Middle East, where he served in some kind of diplomatic capacity, heaven help us, we are served up retreads from Fox and Friends, which often interviews Mr. Schweikart. NYRB, meet Daily Caller. At least the rightwing site makes no pretences. 

.

It is interesting that in the period of time since 2002, when the media hysteria about Iraq was at its height, to now, when the media hysteria about ISIS is at its height, the major journals have learned absolutely nothing about reporting. The NYR should profusely apologize to its readers for thrusting anonymous on their attention. I doubt they will.

jim holt's review: witches, slaves

I’ve been pondering Jim Holt’s review of a biography of Sir Thomas Browne. You don’t often see Browne, who is a mandarin’s mandarin writer, given space in the NYT. The review was evidently launched from the side that does not appreciate Browne as a writer.  So be it. Yet there was an emphasis on Browne’s belief in witchcraft that I found troubling – notably this paragraph:

:Browne harbored some foolish beliefs himself, even by the standards of his time. Notably, he believed in witches. Worse, he acted on this belief. In 1662, the supposed savant offered expert testimony at a trial in which two elderly widows were convicted of practicing witchcraft and hanged. The trial at which Browne testified cast a long shadow, serving as an exemplar for the infamous Salem witch trials in America 30 years later.”

Foolish belief it may have been, but Holt’s paragraph has a certain positivist peremptoryness that is unfair and distorting. Sir Robert Boyle, Browne’s contemporary and certainly one of the heros in the creation of early modern science, wrote a preface to Glanvill’s book defending the belief in witchcraft. One could round up a number of worthies whose beliefs, if parsed through the lens of foolish belief, might not be spared the condenscension of the popular science writer, including Newton, who of course spent a good number of years working out the numerology of the apocalypse. Newton is actually a case in point of the use of foolish beliefs, since it has long been known that the action at a distance that he ratified against the Cartesian insistance on the naïve material world picture that depended on vortices was borrowed from the alchemists.

Browne’s testimony against the hapless defendents in the Bury St. Edmond’s trial. Browne testified that the accounts given by the bewitched could be evidence of a satanic power devised against them. He didn’t give his opinion as to the guilt, however, of the accused. As has been noted by one of Browne’s biographers, his testimony was an odd amalgam of naturalizing description – “that the devil in such cases did work upon a natural foundation” - and orthodox witch belief. However, one must grant that Browne’s opinion, which was considered expert, may well have converted the jury to condemning the two women, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender.

Their deaths should stain Browne’s reputation, just as Locke’s investments in the slave trade and arguments for slavery as head of the Board of Trade in response to various laws in Virginia should forever stain his. Let all the ghosts be heard. But I don’t think this should serve the idea of some few “modern” scientific men advancing our consciousness. Because it is never like that. 

me and my goomba

The dermatofibrosarcoma of Darier Ferrand is one of the million and one goombas that seem to lurk about in the world, just waiting to fuck with us. According to one french entry about it, the sarcoma evolves “indolently”. That was certainly true about mine. In return, my response to the thing evolved indolently too, until last year I finally saw a dermatologist in Santa Monica and had him do a biopsy of this welt like thing on my thigh. The biopsy came back with the conclusion that the lab hadn’t had enough material to make a definitive identification. Two weeks ago, I went to a French doctor who, without much ado, took a much bigger chunk of my thigh and sent it to the laboratory, where they ID’ed it. And so it was that I was advised by a surgeon that it was the kind of thing which, though benign, would produce troubles for me later on. His advise was to take it out.

Yesterday morning, A. and I advanced to the Clinique St. Jean, which is just around the corner here in Montpellier. I promised that I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything the previous night or morning. I showered in this chemical substance that I think was designed to kill my lice, if I had them, and that apparently rendered me medically neutral as far as germs go. And then I was off, which meant the dreams of my childhood were fullfilled and I was wheeled on a gurney through the halls of a hospital. And then I went under general anaesthesia.

General anaesthesia my be the most disturbing thing I have ever undergone. There was little ceremony. First, I was hooked up to a drip, and then the triangular shaped plastic bit was fitted over my mouth and nose and I smelled anti-life. Whatever it is that composes that anaesthetic, the smell went through me like death. In fact, it is surely one of the smells of death. I don’t have a group on my tongue that corresponds to its taste. It was the taste of Anti-Roger.

Then it was two hours later and I was waked up. I was in a room with a bunch of other patients and some jolly doctors and nurses. The personnel at Clinique St. Jean are invariably nice and sweet. The hospital services a lot of children, and perhaps that is one of the reasons. In comparison, American hospitals are pits of doom. But at the time I woke up, the jolliness was viscerally revolting. I was asked if ca va, and I answered oui, but all the while I was having the wierdest reaction, a sort of full body panic. I felt somehow that I’d been turned wrong in my skin. In fact, the divot taken out of my thigh and the skin grafts taken out of my lower stomach didn’t even register, at that moment. Now they do, of course, and I’m enjoying the idea that I can now describe, with some authenticity, the feeling of being shot in some future novel – or maybe the novel I am writing now. But the full body panic was very different. I could barely stand the room, and then, fortunately, it was decided to wheel me elsewhere. The childish pleasure of being pushed on the gurney was, to say the least, attenuated. Finally, though, I saw A.

There have been countless times in the past when A. has saved my sanity. This was one of those times, a big one. I felt finally that I was anchored, that the panic would pass, that I’d be out of here, and that I would do this and we’d be all right.

Now I sit here with my two cannes anglaises next to me, wondering how it was I thought this was going to be easy. Of course, that’s my narcissism. Soon enough, the skin grafts will attach themselves and I’ll be a new man, sans goomba. At the moment, though, I am definitely on Jimmy Stewart’s frequency in Rear Window. Save for the fact that I have no neighbors to peer at in this heat wave. 

Idleness

I’ve been extremely and disgustingly idle this vacation. I blame the heat. I blame old age, the slowing down of my cerebral processes, and George W. Bush – because anything bad that happens in the world has to be blamed on George W. Bush. That’s my philosophy and I’m stickin’ with it.

However, my brain ain’t so slow that I’m going to take “idleness” as a self-evident description.

It strikes me, at least, that this idleness is connected with simultaneity, the temporal mode that characterizes modernity. Simultaneity is of industrial manufacture – it was produced as an effect of the steam driven printing press, the railroad, and the system of manufacture that came about in the nineteenth century, which has resulted in the fact that you can get strawberries all the year round in your local grocery store and that you can, if you want, breathlessly follow the crisis in Greece on computer and tv screens in ‘real time”.

Idleness is falling out of the zone of the simultaneousness. Well, up to a point. I don’t breathlessly follow the news – I don’t even summon the usual indignation when reading about the plutocrats and crooks that lead the Western world, among others, and lead it badly while picking its pocket. And I tend to not miss the strawberries, instead indulging in the fruits of summer where I can find them at the corner marche. This, admittedly, is easier to do in Montpellier France, where I am writing this, than in Los Angeles, California.

Outside of the zone of the simultaneous, to which all our tasks and habits seem to attach themselves, I have to move forward in a dreamier space-time, the older, slower modes of past, present and future. Now, this should be ideal for writing a chapter in a novel – the chapter in my novel that I have been working on for the past three weeks – since after all, when we are idle, we reach for novels. Summer reading is, for many people, the only reading they ever do – that is, of the novelistic kind. Magazines of a certain type, too, tend to pile up on the picnic table – Paris Match, Vanity Fair, Elle, Healthy Living – as if now is the time to plunge into them. Of course, this isn’t entirely removed from the simultaneous world, as we often speaking of “catching up” with our reading – and “catching up” is the central imperative of the world of simultaneity, the glue that keeps it together.

The paradox is that I want my novel, I want my chapter, I want my characters to be fully charged with the “catching up” imperative, and even become something to be published and caught up with.  Fond hope!

Which is where my idleness has hit me broadsides. I can’t be bothered to catch up. And he who is  not busy catching up is surely not busy at all, and can only be tolerated in small increments.

In other words: all vacations have to end, my situationist friends. Sorry about that.  

Henry James as supermike

This summer I decided, once again, to go the eight rounds with James’ The Ambassadors, a novel I have never been able to finish. This is weird to me, since I am a great admirer of the late James, and in particular the two novels associated with The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, which preceded it, and The Golden Bowl, which came after it – speaking strictly in terms of order of publication.

Of course, the late style is either damned for its obscurity or praised for its epistemological complexity – but it is always there as a fact, one of the stranger facts in American literature, to put besides Melville’s style, and Faulkner’s.  James managed, in these late novels that were dictated to his secretary, to combine the diffuse and the dense, and by their opposition and entanglement create those great sentence-enigmas.  James, by this point, knew what he stood for ethically, aesthetically, and even, one might say, ontologically – he stood for discrimination. By this, he meant a fidelity to the adventure of perception, to the adventure of not missing things. The problem is that too much perception seems to fatallly thwart the larger narrative movement – or so say the haters. But to me, and to other Jamesians, the effect is really to only that of making it necessary to subdue oneself to the peculiar pulse and pattern of James’ telling. As Aubrey Beardsley supposedly said on his deathbed, beauty is difficult – an ethos which, in Henry James, sometimes seems to have been overused, as though the difficult were always beautiful. Still, once you have the sound down, the novels go at a good clip. In fact, the lentissimo introduced by certain curling and recursive passages becomes something to look forward to, much as a kayaker looks forward to white water downstream. The enigmatic sentences are sport.

Of course, this is not the whole story. The structures wouldn’t work without their vicious little human interest at the base. What is Wings of the Dove, in the end, but the story of a grift – Kate Croy’s beautiful vision for all of Milly Theale’s gorgeous money? And what is The Golden Bowl but a page six gossip item, quasi incest and full on adultery among the wealthy? Intimacy, in James, is the prelude to betrayal. Treason is in the blood – the close connections woven by family, old friendship, sex, and the inescapable proximities of the house hold. For this reason, its turned out that James’s works are really easy to turn into great television – they have a surprising affinity to the soap opera. Although soap operas are teased for their grand production of coincidences, those coincidences, too, are subordinate to the violence visited by nearest and dearest one upon the other.

Unfortunately, this tabloid spirit is absent, or nearly absent, as far as I can tell, from The Ambassadors. James was proud of this novel, his last novel to be serialized in a major magazine – The Atlantic. I can just  imagine the editorial conferences as the novel wended its incomprehensible way through the issues. In this novel, James finally exhausted his Racinian jones, his desire to create a piece of work that left as many things as possible out. Discrimination is, after all, the art of getting as much as possible out of a hint. And I can see the fun in that!

But still – the novel tends to defeat me by page one hundred. It is a curious thing – ordinarily, novels that defeat readers defeat themselves. James is right, though, that this rule is not universal. All of his novels in one way or another press on the initiatory expectation that the reader is never a passive recipient of the novel, never a mere consumer, a like/don’t like automaton. Rather, the reader’s reflexes, his or her skills, must be tested, must be ritually hazed, before he or she can be granted the full force of the whole, impossible vision of life the novel delivers. Impossible, in as much as it is fiction, and a whole vision, in as much as it is art.

Sign me up! I usually think.

Well, this time around, I think I’ve finally figured out the thing about the Ambassadors. Other novels of its cohort were written to maximize the obliqueness of the prospect – but in this novel, James lets himself go to the extent that he dispenses with “good” writing altogether – or if not altogether, at least for large stretches.  I noticed this early on – there’s a scene in which Lambert Strether, our percipient in this book, meets Maria Gostrey, another percipient. Percipients, in James’ novels, tend to associate in order to conspire – and so these two do, almost immediately. Strether is on a mission for the woman to whom, as we are not exactly told, he is betrothed, or at least whom he is confident of marrying if he carries his mission out. This woman, Mrs. Newsome, is a formidable widow, rich and rectitudinous, whose son Chad lives in Paris with his mistress. Chad, so far, has preferred this life to a position in the Newsome business. Strether’s mission is to separate Chad from Paris and his mistress and pack him back to America. He is relying on help from Waymarsh, a New England lawyer of the grand American type, who finds Europe uppity and corrupt.

There’s the making of a good plot here. Patricia Highsmith saw that and, with suitable alterations, made her first Ripley novel out of a similar mission from America to Europe. But James’ adage, always dramatize, seems to fail him here, partly because of what he does leave out.

But I am not going to go in that direction. Rather, this is the passage where I got hooked on a different reading of this novel.   The she here is Maria Gostrey, the he Lambert Strether:

“She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his face…”

Say what? I said to myself here. You could have plucked out his eyes and their absense might almost have gone unnoticed?

Which makes me want to cry out: Everybody go, hotel motel holiday inn/ if your girl starts acting up, then you take her friend. Or something. Because the hip has definitely gotten the hop on me, here. And then it dawned on me that James, sly dog, was laying down a mandarin appearance that really disguises a letting go of all the highly structured shit that went into Victorian and Edwardian prose. As soon as it occurred to me that the Ambassadors might be badly written, I began to see more possibilities in the thing. More humor, more hidden intention, more self mockery.

Now I’m past the dangerous 100 page point, and so far the awfulness of the writing, under the beautiful pretense, has called out to me again and again. I’m not sure what is up, but I am beginning to think that James, for a change, is playing Supermike and committing a long crime against his own style of art for the very hell of it.  

All I'm here to do ladies is hypnotize
Singing on and on and on on and on
The beat don't stop until the break of dawn
Singing on and on and on on and on
Like a hot buttered a pop da pop da pop dibbie dibbie
Pop da pop pop ya don't dare stop

poetic opportunity

I define poetic opportunity as the moment in which the regular course of the world, that mechanism of objects and words, grinds to a sudden halt before an abyss of meaning, which it jumps over so quickly that you might not even think the ground had opened at your feet and you had almost drowned on dry land. This brief, symbolic crack in the order of things is, normally, normalized, shaken off, forgotten or explained. The idea that the world is working behind our back – a figure of speech that doesn’t quite logically work, as the world includes our back, brain and breath, but I will let it go for now – can lead to ecstasy, paranoia or breakdown, but mostly it just leads to irritation and a passing moodiness.

Sometimes it even leads to poetry. But not very often.

For instance – I’ve been mulling over some material presented to me by Adam. We’ve made it a habit, Adam and I, to walk up the street here in Montpellier, past the roadwork and, after a brief stop at the boulanger to buy a croissant, all the way up to the old College of Medicine. The portal to the College of Medicine is guarded on either side by two statues of eminent members of the Montpellier school of physiognomy from the 18^th century. The statues are bronze, and look like they were created in the 19^th century. Certainly they are more than a century old. During the time the two doctors – Lapeyronie and Barthez – have sat there, generations of pigeons have shit on them. In consequence, their faces are marked by traces of oxidation. Adam recognized those traces as tears, and decided that the statues are crying.  When Adam cries, people around him say, calm down. So Adam’s response to these two statues – which he likes, he sometimes asks me when we are going to see the statues – is to tell them to calm down.

I surely should be able to make something out of this scene – this pint sized Californian with the blond hair looking up at the statues, each of which are around ten feet high, and telling them to calm down.

But it is hot. The cicadas in the trees are incessant. The mosquitos are a nuisance. I want a gin and tonic. With a lot of ice. And the occasion escapes me. 

burning Greece

One would need the heart of an economist not to find the ECB’s dealings with Greece cruel and irrational beyond measure. And one would need the eye of an anthropologist to see how this outburst of elite irrationality connects up with other such outbursts that run in a series through Europe’s history. The troika reminds me, in its infinite causuistry, its moral outrage, and the endless punishments that it metes out, of the various commissions to investigate witchcraft that darken the pages of the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. One of the most famous was lead by Pierre de Lancre, Montaigne’s relative – he married the granddaughter of Montaigne’s uncle and the president of the parliament of Bordeaux, who in 1608 ventured with other grave worthies into the land of Satan which, according to credible report, had been conquering the women of Labourd in Southern France. The expedition was accompanied, it was once thought, by a holocaust of thousands of burnings. Historians now think that these moderates, these 17^th century centrists, did things the way centrists do: they only burned a few dozen women, and then wrote laborious screeds justifying their actions.  What distinguishes Lancre is that he was justly proud of his relation to Montaigne and was a pure product of the humanist culture of Southwest France. Montaigne’s own opinions on witchcraft are, like all his opinions, an involved and dialogical affair, but he certainly comes out against the persecution of witches on the ground that the witch itself is a figure invented by the theorists of witchcraft: “C’est mettre ces conjectures a bien haut pris que d’en faire cuire un homme tout vif.”

A phrase that should haunt Europe now, while we watch a whole country being put to the stake in support of economic conjectures that were first proposed before there was any grasp of the business cycle, and are now being forced down the throats of entire populations because their elites are either complicit or afraid to act.

Vox EU, which is usually a site devoted to the reactionary maunderings of economists in thrall to neoliberalism, published an unusually blistering analysis of the ECB’s usurpation of state power and its expulsion of Greece from the European Union – which is, beneath the rhetoric, what is happening here.Written by Charles Wyplosz,   the heart of the article is in this to my mind unanswerable graf:

Why did the ECB freeze its Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) to Greece? The ECB will undoubtedly come up with all sorts of legal justifications. Whether true or not, this will not change the outcome.

If the ECB is truly legally bound to stop ELA, this means that the Eurozone architecture is deeply flawed.

·        If not, the ECB will have made a political decision of historical importance.

Either way, this is a disastrous step.

Whether it likes it or not, every central bank is a lender of last resort to commercial banks.

·        By not keeping the Greek banking system afloat, the ECB is failing on a core responsibility.

Surely the EU will never be the same. Either the strong European states – such as France - will reign in the ECB, or the EU will become a shell – and the quicker that happens, given the superstitions of the elites running Europe, the better. 

inverted envy

In 1973, A.O. Hirschman, with his characteristic, concealing modesty (it covered up the fact that he was touching on big themes that economists liked to avoid), wrote an essay about envy and the egalitarian impulse in developing economies. For two decades, Hirschman had been at work as an economist and policy maker dealing with foreign aid and plans to elevate the poorer national economies into the league of the developed nations, as they were called back then. This was the era of multi-year plans and the fad for shrinking agriculture and favoring export industries, which often, paradoxically, called for putting barriers on imports. All of this, by now, has been swept away by the Washington Consensus and the aggressive syndicate of international institutions, multinationals, and neo-liberals.

In Hirschman’s time, third world countries were experiencing unprecedented growth. He observed that the profit from that growth largely accrued to the wealthy. What puzzled him was that this did not stimulate the kind of envy that was feared by the anti-communist establishment everywhere. Instead of revolution, for the most part, third world populations seemed patiently to be waiting. Hirschman devised a model to capture what one might call the dynamics of social envy. In this model, growth and the enrichment of the richest was tolerable as long as the larger population believed that the growth would eventually make themselves and their children richer. In other words, Hirschman believed that there was a larger tolerance for inequality than was reckoned with by the leftist agitator. This was puzzling if one took into account the work of George Foster, whose studies of peasant society in Mexico convinced him that traditional society is penetrated by what he called the “image of the limited good”. This means that the peasant views goods in terms of a zero-sum game, in which x’s possessions are viewed by y from the standpoint of scarcity – what x possesses, y does not possess. Like people in a lifeboat with limited rations, a careful watch is placed on the village populaton to make visible who has what. This is a situation in which savings is hidden, rather than invested.

What Foster calls the limited good, I would call nemesis. In my opinion, the great effect of the enlightenment and of the growing economies of the 19^th century was to suppress nemesis – the social and human limit which demands respect in societies in which growth is sporadic and subject to decay. In such societies, time is cyclical; the myth of progress has no footing here.

I think Hirschman was right to tackle the theme of envy, but his model, it seems to me, lacks an important feature that one finds in success societies – societies, that is, where an ethos of success replaces the ethos of sacrifice. In the former, envy inevitably increases as the success of the wealthiest creates a larger and larger positional gap between the top and the rest. Here, however, an interesting, unconscious mechanism intervenes to protect the wealthiest. This mechanism inverts the direction of envy, the direction of the evil eye. Instead of the wealthiest being subject to the violence of envy, the poorest are subject to it.

This inversion of envy at first seems incredible. How could the poorest be an object of envy? However, anyone with ears to hear in America’s dining and living rooms, or in American work places, will here the tale of the high living poor. The poor don’t work. They luxuriate on welfare payments. The government only works for the poor. The Great slump was caused by the poor cheating the naïve banks who were forced by the government to give them mortgages they couldn’t pay. This story and variations of it are told over and over. We sometimes wonder over some savage custom, thinking, how could it be believed that, say, a woman who has a miscarriage causes drought – one of the thousands of such beliefs recorded in the Golden Bough? But the inversion of envy in success societies, the most pure of which is the US, should teach us that the unlikelihood of a belief, its grossly ridiculous nature when laid out in cold logic, is no bar to its being held true. Although newspaper sociologists like to insist on the hopeful, aspirational beliefs of Americans as the sort of national glue that keeps down radicalism, I would say that, more powerfully, it is the inverted envy, its manipulation and thousand and one uses (inverted envy is deeply associated with racism in America, for instance) that makes it very hard to achieve any kind of lasting social justice in the US 

Adam versus Derrida

In a bout of dubious scientific romanticism, Quine, in Word and Object, conjures up the beginning of language learning by positing an extra-linguistic anchor, a physical stimulus, to get us over the bridge from babble to the noun. Quine’s piece on the baby learning the word Mama takes the then fashionable behavioralism of Skinner and embeds it into theory of the onto-genesis of language:

“The operant act may be the random babbling of some thing like 'Mama' at some moment when, by coincidence, the mother's face is looming. The mother, pleased at being named, rewards this random act, and so in the future the ap­proach of the mother's face suc­ceeds as a stimulus for further utterances of 'Mama'. The child has learned an occasion sen­tence.”

Coincidence plays a hinge role here. The presentation of Mama’s face –its looming – makes this a bit more primitive than Mama pointing at her face, but the logic is the same: there is the extra-linguistic world, the presentation, the coincidence with utterance, and the occasion sentence. The set up here has been remarkably consistent in Western philosophy of language since Augustine’s De Magistro, in which Augustine instructs his illegitimate son on the semiotic constitution of language – words as signs – by reference to charades, the language of gesture of the deaf, mime, and mostly, the pointing finger. Adeodatus accepts the significance of signs, but then gets stuck on what we would call the social construction of reality: how does one ever get out of the world of signs?

Adeodatus: But even a wall, as our reasoning shoedd, cannot be shown without a pointing finger. The holding out of the finger is not the wall but the sign by means of which the wall is pointed out. So far as I can see there is nothing which can be shown without signs/

Augustine: Suppose I were to ask you what walking is, and you were to get up and do it, wouldn’t you be using the thing itself to show me, not words or any other signs?

Adeodatus:  Yes, of course. I am ashamed that I did not notice so obvious a fact.”

Adeodatus concedes, of course, too quickly, since it is not clear why you can’t use the thing in itself as a sign, just as it is unclear why Mama’s face is the thing in itself, and not already the sign, this is Mama.

Signs are a labyrinth. We are continually promised that the labyrinth has an exit, but we are continually deflected from its discovery once we’ve made our fatal entrance.

However, though the metaphysical divide between the word and the object in Quine is definitely arguable, Quine does, properly, take up the issue of divided reference as an issue that cannot be delayed until language is learned.

Another word for divided reference is wise-assery. The smart aleck, the wise ass, the joker – from my earliest memories, I was always like that. And I am amazed and pleased, most of the time, that Adam is also a mocker.

A couple of nights ago, Adam made up his first pun, when we showed him how to roll spagetti on a fork and he pronounced it a pasta-fier.

As well, he has found out how much fun it is to imitate himself. Sometimes, he will pretend cry and pretend tantrum for the fun of it. To, as Quine would put it, stress the context of stimulation in which he has been placed. Or, as I would put it, to both entertain and tease his parental units.

Teasing stretches a long way. It is rooted in the animal world – not only among humans, but among other social animals – and it goes all the way into literature, which is, at base, simply a long form of teasing. There are writers who must have been aggressive teasers when they were young – like Nabokov – and others who were, perhaps, more ambiguous about the phenomenon – like Kafka. Teasing isn’t a necessary derivative of sign using – I’m not sure anyone has ever caught an ant or a bee teasing, although perhaps we have just not looked hard enough – but sign using is certainly a prerequisite of teasing. I’m learning to enjoy this all over again with Adam.

Although … to give Augustine and Quine their due, when it comes to  distinguishing the sign from the thing, Adam seems more in their camp. Thus, when I ask Adam, once he has jumped up and down and laughed while seeing a superhero, if Adam is a superhero, he will invariably reply, no, Adam is Adam. Adam is always Adam. At least for now, he’s having no truck with deconstruction.

tpp - die! die!

The TPP is this year's Iraq "liberation",  pressed in the press with pure bullshit and a patronizing tone for those who, inexplcably, oppose it. For an almost perfect example, look no further than the business section of the NYT, where the TPP is presented as an orthodox free trade pact about lowering tarrifs - which we know, by now, is a lie, pure and simple. Itt's all 1850 in the way the NYT has tailored their presentation of the deal. 

“I’m still hopeful,” said Gary Hufbauer, a senior researcher with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who characterized the vote on Friday as a vehicle for Democrats to show their displeasure with aspects of the pact. “This was a way of them stomping their feet, but in the end I think the president will get his way.”

Bill Lane, director of global government affairs for Caterpillar, echoed Mr. Hufbauer’s view that the door was not completely shut. “Even though the process is temporarily stalled, we are optimistic,” he said.

Mark Grayson, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, said that the group was hopeful “that the House will pass the bill so it can get to the president’s desk.”

Notice how the press rolls. These quotes are unaccompanied by questions. There's no sense that there are any questions to ask Caterpillar, or Silicon Valley, or the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Rather, we first get a cascade of quotations which all push a p.o.v., and then at the bottom of the article we get a few opposing quotations, which are treated much as though their locutors were advocating man boy love. That is how it goes at the NYT. 

The headline for the political analysis by the ever rebarbative Peter Baker (whose reporting back in the heady days of the Bush era showed how sycophancy can be a real career upper) calls the vote against the TPP political dysfunction - so much for thinking that the anti-TPP side has any reason behind it. I mean, in Baker's world, a bill to fasttrack a pact that is highly classfied except for its makers among the plutocracy is an obvious slam dunk! Oh those slam dunks. We all have to swallow them over and over. 

In fact, using the method of mirror reading that helps one see through the bullshit, the vote Friday was a rare instance of Washington functioning - functioning as it was set up to function. Only in the ruinous 21st century would a poisonous secret tractate like the TPP be considered the kind of no-brainer deal that we should all let ourselves be yoked with.  

I hope the Dems reading the holy NYT don't get the shakes. They are doing the right thing. 

a realistic ellipses in Edith Wharton's The Reef

The Reef  is not  I think one of Edith Wharton’s more popular novels. It is the one everyone calls Jamesian. I think part of the problem, popularity-wise, is that it sets out by putting us in the consciousness of a man, George Darrow, who is incorrigibly snobby. There’s the snobbiness of having a standard of taste that reveals broad experience and reading, and the snobbiness that comes with having a social position and assuming that one has broad experience and reading. Darrow’s is the latter snobbiness. He’s no Swann. At the beginning of the book he meets a young American in Paris, a Daisy Miller cast-away without Miller’s family money given the name Sophy Viner – an almost insurmountable moniker as far as readerly sympathy goes. However, Viner is sympathetic, young, and unbearably patronized by Darrow, who escorts her around Paris due to circumstances I don’t really want to get into.

No, what is important here is that Darrow, who is hunting for bigger social game, in effect makes Viner his girlfriend, or, as they would say at the time, his mistress. Here, Wharton does a wonderfully subtle thing, something that James must have loved. Her problem is how to make us know that after Darrow spent some time escorting Viner around Paris, they became sexual. How to do this without becoming vulgar. This isn’t just a matter of censorship because American publishers would freak if one described the beast with two backs too narrowly – it was more a matter of tone. There has to be a certain tone to this affair if the book is going to work.

Thus, the wonderfully subtle thing. Darrow’s hotel room in Paris is right next to Viner’s. On his last morning of this visit to Paris, Wharton gives us, first, a post-coital shower, blotting out the Parisian landscape, then a look around Darrow’s room, which he perceives, for the first time, is in need of some cleaning, and then this great melodic invocation of a knowledge that, by indirection, seeks direction out:

“A different noise aroused him. It was the opening and closing of the door leading from the corridor into the adjoining room. He sat motionless, without opening his eyes; but now another sight forced itself under his lowered lids. It was the precise photographic picture of that other room. Everything in it rose before him and pressed itself upon his vision with the same acuity of distinctness as the objects surrounding him. A step sounded on the floor, and he knew which way the step was directed, what pieces of furniture it had to skirt, where it would probably pause, and what was likely to arrest it. He heard another sound, and recognized it as that of a wet umbrella placed in the black marble jamb of the chimney-piece, against the hearth. He caught the creak of a hinge, and instantly differentiated it as that of the wardrobe against the opposite wall. Then he heard the mouse-like squeal of a reluctant drawer, and knew it was the upper one in the chest of drawers beside the bed: the clatter which followed was caused by the mahogany toilet-glass jumping on its loosened pivots...”

Those squeaks and creaks and jingles = Joyce, in Ullyses, will have Bloom imagine the jingling of his bed, the bed Molly lies on with Blazes Boylan. Consciousness is more repressed, or at least, represses itself, in Wharton’s world. What I love is the realisitic ellipse. All of those things, and their sensual properties, mark what isn’t being said. And that gap accrues a force – the umbrella and the wardrobe, here, are moral witnesses. For a snob such as Darrow, incredibly harsh witnesses – since in this story, the fall is not so much Sophy’s, but that of the male snob.

I love how Wharton accomplishes this.