Dope

Headline in the NYT today Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds begs the question: what are changeable cosmic laws? The very application of law to physis has been a hot philosophical topic since Hume - well, okay, since before Hume, but Hume is the modern touchstone. The modernity of Hume is, to some extent, his full acceptance of the law of non-contradiction - that P can't be both a and non-a. The mystic instinct has always been to protest against the straitjacket of that logic, but the objection, since Hume, has moved from statements about states to statements about events - since events bring up the question of possibility and necessity.

This, of course, is a vast subject. And it touches on today's dope, which will be about the Romanian - French philosopher Stephane Lopasco.

Stephane Lopasco was born in Romania, but came to France, like his friend Cioran, and like so many other Romanian intellectuals, did, because of the wonderful myth of France as the home of the free intelligence. He was the companion in the thirties of Lacan, the student of Bachelard (or was the relationship the other way around?), and in the sixties palled around with the veritable pope of the French intelligentsia, Edgar Morin. To get a sense of the man you can read this memoir by the painter Georges Matthieu. It is terribly funny � both of them addressing each other as maitre and expressing themselves in peremptory tones that tend towards the epigrammatic, mixing insincere adulatory exclamation with the dismissive diktat. I love the way Lupasco casually claims that Bachelard plagiarized him � evidemment! This conversational style, born out of the aristocratic cenacle of the seventeenth century, acquires a slightly ludicrous theatrical color in the absence of aristocracy � Matthieu and Lupasco could be characters in a Moliere play, servants playing the masters. The typical stance of the 20th century intellectual, huh?
Lupasco tried to develop a logic that would absorb the discoveries of quantum physics. My first reaction to that kind of project is that it mistakes the domain of logic, which is embedded in language rather than in objects. It is, in other words, a move back to the spurious Naturphilosophie of the 19th century, where even very smart people like Engels could talk of the flower �contradicting� the bud. But this reaction, conditioned into me by the logical positivists, presupposes a that language is autonomous. This supposition has become harder to argue for in 2001 than in 1935.
In any case, Lupasco�s big idea was what he called the tiers inclu � the included middle. I don�t know a lot about Buddhism, but I do know that there is a term in Zen � mu � which means neither yes nor no. These are ideas that my friend, Mary Beth Mader, who teaches in the philosophy department in Memphis, is working with. I think I should tell her about Lupasco.
Here�s a quote from le maitre:
"A tout ph�nom�ne ou �l�ment ou �v�nement logique quelconque, et donc au jugement qui le pense, � la proposition qui l'exprime, au signe qui le symbolise : e, par exemple, doit toujours �tre associ�, structuralement et fonctionnellement, un anti-ph�nom�ne ou anti-�l�ment ou anti-�v�nement logique, et donc un jugement, une proposition,un signe contradictoire : non-e ; et de telle sorte que e ou non-e ne peut jamais qu'�tre potentialis� par l'actualisation de non-e ou e, mais non pas dispara�tre afin que soit non-e soit e puisse se suffire � lui-m�me dans une ind�pendance et donc une non-contradiction rigoureuse (comme dans toute logique, classique ou autre, qui se fonde sur l'absoluit� du principe de non-contradiction)."

"To every phenomenon or element or logical event whatsoever, and thus to the judgment which thinks it, to the proposition which expresses it and the sign that symbolizes it, for example e, there must always be associated, structurally and fundamentally, an anti-phenomenon, an anti-element, an anti- logical event, thus a judment, a proposition and a sign non-e, in such a way that e or non-e can only be the potentialization or actualization of non-e or e, but not their disappearance, which would entail that non-e or e can suffice in itself in an independence and thus in a rigorous non-contradiction (as in all logic, classic or otherwise, founded upon the absoluteness of the principle of non-contradiction)."
I started this post by talking about law and whether law is the best term to use to describe the observed regularities of nature. The philosophy of science makes the ritualistic move to necessity at this point. But perhaps we should also consider what law is, itself, as a social phenomena. Philosophers of science usually casually think, well, law is what the government makes, just like a gene makes a protein. But there is a lot more controversy about the nature of law than that � for someone like Holmes, for instance, laws are about expectations � in other words, law, as a social phenomenon, also plugs into probability.
Well, I�ve written about this in a review of the Menand�s excellent book, The Metaphysical Club � link to the Austin Chronicle, look up the author archives, plug in Gathman and you will see the title of the piece.
To check out a Lupacian view of Marcel Mauss, click here.
Okay, I�ll stop now.

Fusee.

For those readers casting about for a different career, here's an article by John Roselli about castrati I think it is a little too late for me to consider castration - but it does seem to have boomed in tough times in 17th century Italy. No service industry back then, you see, to take up the slack - so nothing to do with your younger and more useless children than plop them in nunneries and monasteries. And once in the monastery, well, castration just might be your key to the good life. Here's a graf to consider - the Burney referred to is an English traveller who was apparently the man to go to if you wanted the news about castrati in 1750.

"Other characteristics are as unclear now as they were in Burney's day. Writers of the time were content to repeat a farrago of notions drawn from ancient authors such as Hippocrates: castration cured or prevented gout, elephantiasis, leprosy, and hernia; castrati tended to have weak eyes and a weak pulse, lacked fortitude and strength of mind, and had difficulty in pronouncing the letter R. Burney, from personal knowledge, denied that castrati were cowards or lazy, but could not supply a full alternative account. Males castrated before puberty clearly cannot father children; but the question was often raised: can they none the less experience the sexual drive and engage in sexual intercourse? The only 'authority' available then or now on the practice of castration is outstandingly muddled: its implied answer is at one point 'yes', at another 'no'. The answer 'yes' was current in the ancient world and in early modern Europe; twentieth-century medical opinion, for what it is worth, tends to say 'no'."

Dope

Wow. I love the New York Times Business section. The echt biz columnists are always sharp. But they opinion columnists, people like Virginia Postrel, are the red meat type - the kind that want to contractualize every pee. Today it is somebody named Daniel Akst - In Genoa's Noise, a Trumpet for Capitalism - who resurrects a trope last heard during the Vietnam war - that the protests against the G8 are staged by the spoiled children of the G8 who have just benefitted immensely from it all. Much like the protesters against the Vietnam war who a. didn't understand it and b. benefitted from America's robust, Bomber backed committment to freedom, longhaired punks that they were, and were trying to block the good fight with a lot of weepy-washy malarky about napalming children. Look, those children were dangerous! the Aksts of the world point out, being rational souls.

Well, there is one telling difference. Akst avoids saying that the protestors are smelly - among conservatives, the realization has slowly set in that the weapon of fashion is probably not the best stick in the house. It turned out that the hippies were fashionable - and lived to profit from it. So who knows - globo-protest chic might have some bucks in it. So don't knock it. Akst takes another tact - he claims they are beautiful but oh so, like, stupid - while the G8, the WTO, and others are working day and night to put "food on the tables in houses from Bolivia to Bangladesh," the young and restless out on the barricades are pretending like they have a right to have a say in it all. Ignorant ragamuffins! My god, the unmitigated gall. And hey, pay no attention to those pesky statistics that suggest that the share of wealth going to Bolivia and Bangladesh, since the advent of more robust freetradin', has gone down - although it has. Pay no attention to the difference between the economic behavior of a country like the US - which found it convenient, in the 80s, to finance its growth with massive deficit financing - and, say, Argentina, which is being poleaxed because of its deficit financing. Yes, to minds that aren't as, well, subtle as Akst (genius that he appears to be in this article) that might suggest economic policies in less wealthy countries have to encounter different international restraints, and thus might follow different internal courses, such as finding a more interventionist role for the state in supporting enterprises. And to minds less attuned to democratic theory than Akst, it might appear a little suspicious to have these multi-national organizations unilaterally changing domestic law in various countries, according corporations a more than equal legal status.

But heck - who said anything about democracy? Here's the killer graf from Akst's vile little column:
"That is why, young and handsome and idealistic as these protesters so often are, it is important to crush them � figuratively, of course � if they won't go home and find other means of exorcising their great guilt at their own good fortune. You may not like the collection of aging white men who, thanks in part to the power of corporations, lead the world's richest nations. But for all their flaws, the economic vision they represent is infinitely more plausible and more humane than the one their critics appear unable even to articulate."
Ah, figuratively crush them - like the cops were doing all over Genoa! Isn't that precious? The wording is so... well, it is so reminiscent of certain, shall we say, authoritarian regimes - Pinochet's comes to mind, as well as the dirty little junta in Argentina. The crushing metaphor is really what is behind the smiley face of the G8 leaders . Meanwhile we can liquidate those "subsistence farmers" in the third world that lead such crushingly poor lives, as Akst suggests, and send them off happily into cities, where they can die of various diseases for which cures have been found but, alas, patented beyond the pocketbooks of the third world (and by the way - crush those Thai companies that infringe on our godgiven patent law, too!), or drink the wonderfully unfiltered water, or live in wonderfully deconstructed kin patterns in wonderful brick and mortar burnouts in, say, Kampala. It is all to the greater glory of private initiative! And a lot of those poor, too, can be properly inducted into the sweatshop ethos, a much better way to take up 14 hours of their day than futile village pranks. This is civilization, after all. The rest can become what Thomas Friedman, another globo-advocate, calls "turtles" - you know, losers in the race for wealth. They can always steal.
Akst might be happy to know that in Brazilian cities, police are often hired to crush the "young and handsome and idealistic" - well, not so idealistic, and often rather scabby - by simply massacring them.
I am suprised that the headline writer for Akst piece didn't take advantage of his opportunity, though - given the tough love nature of the article. He should have headlined it: Exterminate the brutes.

Fus�e


Smoke Signals is an interesting little Village Zine - apparently rooted in the old 50s to 70s boho scene. Scroll to the end of the page to read Barney Rossett's account of how Grove Press was taken over - as in sit in taken over, as in seventies activism - by a contingent of protesting women's libbers - that is the language used in the article. Yes, a whiff of the archaic. It is a sad story for Rosset - but I am conflicted about it, ultimately. One of the great things feminism did for American culture was sweep away that schlocky male adolescent view of women in the Great American Novel (which I take it is that Novel consisting of all the aspirant novels). From Miller to Pynchon, this did a lot of damage to American lit, reducing female characters to a photo spread thinness. Compare, say, Henry James. There was nothing pleasant about seeing women thrown about like so many blow up sex dolls by male writers in the throes of temper tantrums better thrown when they were, say, thirteen.
On the other hand - Grove Press. One of the great publishers...

Fusee.
Alan - who is on my tail about this issue - makes the reasonable comment that, if I am competing with arts and letters, my macro commentary might be excessive load for good link. I hope my "fusee/dope" categories solve this problem. For those who want to be pointed to an interesting link without excessive interference by my interpretation, there are the fusee; and for those who don't mind me hopping around like some combination of Rumpelstiltskin and Karl Marx frothing about some possibly esoteric issue, there is the dope.

Yesterday, I was finishing up - for review - a copy of William Vollman's next novel, which relies heavily on John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, and I decided to look up the Generall Historie on the web. Shockingly, there is no complete text on-line. I found a fragment here. Even that fragment reveals that Smith was a admirable writer - and, even more, he eerily presages American humor. Apparently laconic exaggeration - the "whoppers" of Mark Twain, which are half initiatory test (do you get it? do you care?), half comedy routine - came with the country.

Fusee

A link to a nice essay on noir writer Jim Thompson (Jim Thompson's Lost Hollywood Years). Although the attempt at noir metaphor in the piece is a little silly ("Wielding words like a baby with a chainsaw" - a sentence that could only have been written by a man with a very unclear idea of what the conjunction of a baby and a chainsaw would actually look like - hint: it isn't very much like deathless prose), the fate dealt Thompson by Hollywood's studios reminds me of a bracing little essay by Joan Didion about the place in the pecking order accorded screenwriters by the sybaritic semi-literates that own the studios and act in the movies. Oh, well - why should Hollywood be any different from the rest of the country?

Now that I am starting to get technically sound and sassy on this site, I've been thinking about tightening up the writing.
From now on, I'm dividing up the posts between "fusees" - little fireworks - and dope. Dope will be elaborate, fusees will be one to two grafs.

This, for example, is dope:

The NYT report on water this morning -Near Vast Bodies of Water, Land Lies Parched - reminds me of a large piece I wanted to do on water last year. It is going to be one of the fascinating fights of the future. Very simply, the problem goes like this.

In the twentieth century an elegant technical solution was found to the problem of the land surface to crop ratio. This was synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases - fertilizer. It is a sign of how accustomed we are to our present food system that fertilizer, as a technical advance, doesn't even register in the popular imagination. Fritz Haber's name is generally not known - Time magazine did not include him among the worthies of 20th century civilization, even though they included Elvis Presley. Haber and Bosch's work is probably the most important technical innovation of the 20th century, even if it is not difficult to see, in hindsight, that it was technically inevitable, given the state of the German Dye industry. It's estimated, by the historian William McNeil, that without synthetic fertilizers the present population of the earth would require an addition of farmland equivalent to all of South America to feed it.

Now, however, we are just on the limits of a problem that is technically more intractable. Because the effect of water can't, so far, be synthesized - in fact, it is difficult to see what that would mean. Water is a very strange liquid - it has properties, notably those when it is heated or cooled, that seem different from other liquids in ways that aren't clearly understood.

Okay. Now, who do we meet at the crossroads of want and necessity but this decade's candidate for the anti-Christ - Enron corporation!

Graf from the Times story that should scare us:

"Already, bottled water costs more than gasoline in most stores, but nearly 90 percent of all municipal water systems are publicly owned. Enron, the nation's No. 1 marketer of natural gas and electricity, saw water as a commodity that would eventually be deregulated, just as electric power was in California. If that happened, Enron would be free to buy and sell water to the highest bidders � no different from oil or megawatts.
The company set up a Web site to trade water, and went prospecting for liquid gold. The people at Enron followed a trail already blazed by a fellow oilman, T. Boone Pickens, who has been buying underground water from farmers in hopes of selling it to parched cities in Texas, and the Bass brothers, who bought 46,000 acres in the desert of Southern California, only to be stymied by legal and technical problems over underground water rights."

Enron, it appears, has not yet prospered in the water trade - but that was before the Corporation owned a president. Look to see the Republicans in the House try to strip states and localities of rights to their water. The principle of local control, remember, is always subservient, among business conservatives, to the principle of profit.