Conversation and argument

Philosophers present arguments; other people, lower in the pecking order, just argue.

 

Among the meanings of the Latin verb, arguere, is blame a person for a crime. In Roman law, this is the initial moment in the process of bringing the defendant to trial. James Ayto, in his book Word Origins, takes the arg back to its putative Indo-European origins, where it means white or bright – silvery, as in the French l’argent. How one hop skips and jumps from the silvery moon to “presenting a thesis” is one of those moments in which etymology most slavishly follows an enlightenment ideology, even though it means reasoning by wild analogies. Another etymological school holds that the Hittites, my fave mystery civilization, were at the bottom of the word, with arkuuae – to make a plea. In this history, the quarreling and blaming emotion hidden in argument came out, in English, long after the legal use of the term.

Perhaps: or perhaps, because etymology depends so much on written texts, the legal sense of argument was followed or even proceeded by the ordinary sense of blame. Of course, even on the high cultural plane, argument has a passive aggressive social significance. Anybody who has been in a lounge in a philosophy department and heard “arguments” in favor of, say, realism can testify that blaming is a large part of philosophical reasoning.  Yet it is rare to hear anybody speak in favor of blaming as a guide to practical reasoning, much less reasoning.

In the twentieth century, argument has seemed to some philosophers to be too legal, too formal, to encompass what philosophy does. That last silvery glimmer of “wisdom” is drowned in the arg-ument, according to this view. So there are other candidates to take argument’s place: conversation, dialogue, discourse, deliberation. Martin Buber in the 1920s was proposing dialogue, or, really, conversation. Mikhel Bakhtin, who was the great proponent of plurivocity, claimed that Buber was the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century ... “and perhaps in this puny century, perhaps the sole philosopher on the scene.” Bakhtin was obviously impressed with the book Buber published after I and Thou – Zweisprache, translated as “Dialogue” and included in a collection in English with the very pipesmokin’ title of Between Man and Man.

Richard Rorty ended up, as well, advocating for “conversation” and even dissolving philosophy into conversation. In the Consequences of Pragmatism, he wrote that his conception of pragmatism “...is the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones — no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.” This seems to give inquiry over to its circumstances without a thought for how those circumstances came to be or how conversation influences and changes them, and maybe Rorty would say that since we have the sciences, which do inquire into and make our social circumstances, then philosophical inquiry just goes on in reference to this greater circumstance.

Or maybe he would not. Myself, I think that democracy produces a difficult mixed mode of discourse, in which argument – the presentation of a thesis – and arguing – the fixing of blame – compete and mate with each other. One of the sociologically interesting things to me about the vids showing the Capitol rioters is that so many of them are so prompt to make speeches. The speeches are, very often, very badly argued, because argument has become almost completely a quick finding of blame – blame for a crime that these people feel has been committed against them. I don’t think that crime is the stealing of the election, which is the surface prompt for the violence. But stealing is definitely at the core of it, the sensation of being the victims of a steal even as they steal. And this poses some interesting questions about how arguing and argument work within an ethos framed by the Atlantic revolutions in the 18^th century.

I’d like it to be the case that Buber has discovered the magic key to lead us out of this moronic inferno. Notoriously, the I and Thou was shattered in the Germany he lived in. And Buber was not happy with the Israel he helped to found, since the conversation there turned exclusionary.

If it isn’t a magic key, though, it is certainly suggestive as to how the current political situation not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the old democracies, can be understood.

 I’m big on the understanding front, since I suck on the persuasion front. Perhaps there is no politics of the “thou” – the kingdom of the you is inside you. It is from the lack of politics that we can work towards politics, maybe. Maybe.

Rilke on the 10

 

Surely, giving the finger

to the man tailgating you on Highway 10

is poetry too, and should be counted

 

where they count such things

in Rilke’s heaven.

Among my tropes and ruses

 

and the CD playing today’s road music

and the ominous signage for Pasadena

looming ahead of me like the SAT

 

there’s room for my own version

of “you must change your life”:

You must change your lane.

- Karen Chamisso

Policy trolls: the Larry Summers edition

There's one thing I really about the meanstesting neolibs, who claim to be so compassionate towards the poors that they wanna means test any relief package so it doesn't benefit the nasty riches - that is, people who make btw 80- 100 thou. Many of these means testers come from Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or Chicago. Schools with amazingly high endowments, to which rich peeps give and get accordingly tax deductions. Many of them even teach there, or, in the case of Larry Summers, used to be the president there -of Harvard, in his case.

Oddly, none of the means testers seem to notice that a small, poor college, Wabash College or something, and a multibillion dollar endowed university, Harvard, get - horrors! - the same tax exemption!

Surely, these neolib centrists, who know all about that there economics, should be on the forefront of trying to get their alma maters taxed, and taking away tax exemption from those rich dudes with their "philanthropy". Means testing, if it means anything, means not only testing the positive recipients of government funding, but also the recipients of what Milton Friedman called negative taxation.

But I've never yet read anything about this from the meanstestin' dudes. And I don't expect I will. It is one thing when you pretend to be all concerned that low income people receive the sole benefit from government funding, in order to block that funding at all - and quite another thing when you attack the mother ship for real. Larry Summers was booted from Harvard for being a sexist pig, but he woulda been booted much sooner if he made a big deal about shutting down Harvard's tax exempt status.

What we can conclude about this is that these neolibs form a group that thinks of itself as wonky, but in reality, they are policy trolls. And their trolling has been a disaster.

hatewatching our minor apocalypse

“The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”

Hatewatching was not invented in the clickbait age – as Socrates’ story in The Republic proves. A sensationalist culture has, however, radically increased its reach ever since the newspapers discovered that pics of a lovenest and a corpse – if it bleeds, it ledes – could be a wicked mealticket. Now if it bleeds, it is killed endlessly in zombie movies, action movies, and so on, John Wick without end, amen. Any observer downloading American popular entertainment could predict, I think, that the culture that made it would host beaucoup mass shootings, just as this observer would predict, looking at the impossibly skinny models and pornucopia of ads for burgers, beer and sweets, that the culture would host both obesity and anorexia, locked in struggle. Sensationalism is about dizziness – loosing balance. And so the eyes take over, the appetite is hijacked, and ... we do our bourgeois best to navigate the breaks.

This is an exculpatory opening for my confession: since the Capitol riots, I have been binge hatewatching. The videos, the videos, as endless as the peeps searching to kill journalists, libtards and various and sundry and livestreaming on their handy cells for their friends.

In the aftermath, I’m all on the vigilante, the snitch side. I’m with the sedition hunters, the capitol riot trackers, the people who have slowed down the vids to bring into focus face after face, clue after clue, and turn their guesses into the FBI. I have gone into the circuit of watchers of the proud boys, those who’ve hacked their messaging, their pathetic Parler pics. The announcement that Ethan Nordean was arrested, today, as one of the ringleaders of the riot was no surprise to me- I’ve read the hacked messages about Nordean doing lines in the Capitol.

However, unlike Leontius, I have read me some social theory, so I justify my hatewatching with a quasi-academic purpose – to understand political/criminal groupings. I’ve been writing about 1930s extreme right groups in France, lately, and I am gobsmacked by the continuities. Now is the time for some good publisher to fork over the bucks for my translation of the diary of “Dagore” – a mook who was part of the extreme right Cagoulard group that murdered several people in the attempt to overthrow the Popular Front government – because the similarity of thinking between these groups is amazing, down to sexual attitudes and the anti-semitism.

There was a nineteenth century tradition, on the left, that “politicals” would be separated from the rest of the criminal population in the various prisons in which they ended up; one of the themes of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag is the breakdown of this noble tradition, a mark of the evil of Stalinism. I’m wondering, myself, whether that separation was ever as ontological as all that. I look at the vids the Proud Boys took of themselves and I don’t think of terrorists – I think of gangs. Specifically, prison gangs. Not enough has been made of the political creativity of jail. The Sunni paramilitaries in Iraq, which eventually formed Daech, started out with a jailbird – and probably more than one jailbird. Jail, which is harshly racially and sexually segregated, is the factory that has produced the avant garde of today’s American petit bourgeoisie. This is a fact I refused to believe all during the Trump regnum – rectum regnum. And it has mostly been avoided by the “resistance”, which much prefers the story that mini Russkies crawled through the facebook cracks and corrupted our neighbors. Conspiracy against conspiracy in this lightweight championship round, which deflects from the deep culture of despair in which our minds are being liquidated.

Philosophy and the crossword puzzle

 

Apollinaire started writing his typographically complex poems, the Calligrammes, in Paris in 1913 -14. By that point, the cubists were pasting bits of printed matter into their paintings, and Marinetti and the futurists were trying to develop a poetry of pure punctuation.

On the other side of the Atlantic, an English immigrant named Arthur Wynne, working at the New York World, unveiled his own adventure in art in the “Fun” pages, the World’s way of creating a family demographic for the paper. The word cross, as Wynne called it, debuted on December 21, 1913. "Wynne’s puzzle was a peculiar, diamond shaped grid, with no black squares... Rather than being divided into the Across and Down clue columns that we know today, the clues were designated by the first numbered square in the answer and the last.” (Stanley Newman and Mark Lasswell) It was soon called the cross word – although whether this was Wynne’s decision or a typesetter’s error is not known. What is know is that it is a Smith graduate, Margaret Petherbridge, who worked as a secretary at the World, who really gave the puzzle its shape. “She threw out Wynne’s double numbering of clues, decreed that puzzles would be a symmetrical grid with no lonely patches of isolated answer squared, and laid down plenty of other rules. But her biggest contribution might have been the fact that she made ingenuity a hallmark of the crossword puzzle. She jettisoned obvious cluing, introduced the idea of theme puzzles, and generally created an atmosphere that sent the message: Crosswords were smart entertainment.”

It was in the 20s that the fad for the puzzles hit. Petheridge wrote the first book of them, which sold out, and crossword puzzles, like bridge, dancing and bootleg whiskey became part of the decade’s nature.

The twenties also saw the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , with its strangely numbered “clue”-propositions. Wittgenstein was a devourer of certain sorts of popular culture – Westerns, detective novels. I can find no mention of crossword puzzles in Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, and perhaps he viewed them as a waste of time. But as an odd language game, where language is indeed on a holiday, they might have interested him.

In a very fine article, The “Puzzle of Scientific Method”, Susan Haack used the crossword puzzle as a governing analogy for how we should feel about scientific explanations and extends her analogy to the scientific method. Her intention was to “give a model of the structure of evidence which would (like foundationalism) acknowledge the relevance of experience to empirical justification, and (like coherentism) allow pervasive mutual support among beliefs without vicious circularity. The difference between clues and intersecting entries mirrors the difference between experiential evidence and reasons for a belief; the interdependence of entries, the mutual support among beliefs. Apropos of the latter desideratum, I was encouraged both by Peirce’s robust insistence that only an ignorance of logic could lead anyone to confuse mutual support and vicious circularity, and by Quine’s observation that “there can be mutual reinforcement between an explanation and what it explains.”

The analogy is rather convincing to me. Haack does not think that science has a privilege in its evidentiary procedure over ordinary life, but that science is distinguished, mostly, by its care for those procedures – what I would call its ability to routinize them, its habitus.

Haack goes further, though, and uses the way crossword puzzles are solved as a way of understanding the scientific method.

“... that, as there is no mechanical procedure for arriving at a plausible entry, there is no mechanical procedure for arriving at good conjectures: and that, as there are no strict rules about when an entry is secure enough to be inked-in, or when it is insecure enough to be rubbed out, there can’t be rules, but only guidelines requiring discretion in their application, for deciding when a conjecture should be accepted and when rejected. “

I like the spirit of this: I think it has a Wittgensteinian cast. Although I think that it misses something about the relationship of the clues, their numbering, and the inscribing of erasing of entries. Or rather, I would like to know more about the clue formation, which is quasi-dependent on the squares to be filled in.

Has Haack’s crossword puzzle analogy traveled through the philosophy sphere? I don't know. I like it though, since it has a quality that is also true of great crossword puzzles: it is very very pretty.

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Analerotik and Q

 

“The fantasy idea that a “child is being beaten” is confessed with surprising frequency by persons who have sought out psychoanalytic treatment either for hysteria or compulsive neurosis”.

Freud’s essay, “ A child is being beaten: contribution to research on the development of sexual  perversion” is from 1919, the metapsychoanalytic years. It has not received the love that, say, the essay on narcissism has, but it seems relevant to the current moment. From the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the nineties to the Q panic of the 2020s, the frequency of a fantasized vision of child abuse at the center of a theory of a vast conspiracy is striking. It is a theory that has become a means of identification in the United States. The child abuse image has a long history in the cycle of moral panics that have modulated American history. Mostly, it is classed with a certain grassroots anxiety not shared by the higher social echelon – but that echelon is certainly capable of being moved by fabricated images of child abuse. In 1990, a public relations firm closely tied to George HW Bush placed a 15 year old named Nayira (who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, although that was kept secret during her testimony) who claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers tossing newborns out of incubators in order to carry them back to Iraq. The story was a huge fabrication, but the NYT credulously reported it and Amnesty endorsed it (and later, shamefacedly, unendorsed it). This was the same time period in which trials were emerging all over the country of day care owners and  low level police officers, among others, accused of practicing ritual Satanic abuse and slaughtering children in gruesome rituals. The Q variation on this story – of thousands of abused children being used for sex by prominent Democrats and hidden, I believe it is, in caves – is connected to some of the same people – notably, Geraldo Rivera.

What’s up with this recurring fantasy?

This isn’t to say pedophilia is a fantasy. We’ve been through the stories of the Catholic church, we’ve been through Jeffrey Epstein, and here in France we’ve been through a number of individuals who have raped girls or boys and still been in positions of power and influence. But the fantasies are curiously indifferent to this reality. It was Satanists, and not the good fathers of the Christian Brothers, who were supposedly raping six year olds. It was the Democrats, and not the President who had the well publicized habit of popping into the dressing room of Miss Teen World to have a look around, who were the pedophiles operating through pizza parlors. Jeffrey Epstein figures much less in the Q fantasy than Hilary Clinton.

Freud’s essay uses the term Schlag and schlagen, which translates as beat or hit, instead of Klaps, or spank – but I think this is due to the regime of punishment in 1919, where paddling was more extensive. In the end, the central image is of spanking. Freud, as is his wont, begins with certain more social suspects in the development of the fantasy, and then traces it back to the family – as Deleuze and Guattari acidly note, it is always a family scene, always theater with Freud. In the case of this fantasy, the patients usually link it, themselves, to school – for D & G, it is always a collective scene, a school a factory, a place where things are produced. Freud writes something interesting:  that his patients report hearing that “countless children” are being beaten in the school. The children come in multitudes, in the fantasy.  “The influence of school was so clear that the patients in question initially tried to link the beating fantasies exclusively to the school period, after the sixth year.”  That is, first grade.

I think Freud did not linger long enough on what he took to be a screen memory. Freud does not link the beating fantasy to the particular punitive regime undergone by the patients in their infancy – many seem to think that their parents were not spankers, and were, in fact, lenient. We don’t have to go all the way back to the Analerotik to see that school itself operates as a sexual factor- in fact, is pervaded by sexual discipline. And this factor comes into play not as “one child” being beaten, but in countless ones, masses of children. It is a mass symbol that demands a correlate mass. Freud suggests we ask” Who was the beaten child? The fantasized self or the other? Was it always the same child or arbitrarily often another? Who hit the child? An adult?” and so on.

These questions seem eminently pertinent to the psychoanalysis of the extreme right, especially as that right is operating as an identity – a subgroup identity of people who are in the know. The victim/redeemer binary that structures this identity seems, to my mind, a key to the way fantasy is sublimated into extreme right ideology.

In the beginning was the pun

 

“I was visiting Kyoto's Fushimi Inari shrine with a friend, who told me that the Japanese word for pun is oyajigyagu, or "old guy gag". Puns are the jokes older men tell. Wordplay does not float free from culture.”

This is a quotation from Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft article on puns in the TLS, which manages to avoid both Joyce and Lewis Carroll, but does stroll a bit with Lacan and Hegel. Wurgaft  begins with the audacious hint that the logos itself might have been a pun: in the beginning was the pun. And the theological paradox, here, is that a pun is inconceivable without a language, as well as the world. If the world begins as a pun, then it begins, as Nietzsche claimed, as a point in the eternal return of the same. Its beginning is as fictitious as its ending, and its puns are literal – the literal being  a pun that hasn’t found out about itself yet.  Perhaps we are living in a Finnegans Wake world, as Joyce-ians have long suspected, and causality is just the universe punning.

Myself, I am not, like Wurgaft, one for the old guy gag. I like jokes that aren’t quite funny, but that, in the telling, move towards funny – that is, that build up ridiculously towards a punch line, Aristocrats-style. The whole point of the Aristocrats joke is to make a joke of creating a verbal edifice that results in a punchline. It is an avalanche event – determinate chaos, the sorites paradox that determines the events in the story – rather like the end of Portnoy’s Complaint.

A high five to Wurgaft for this short essay in the joke asphilosophy.