Joyce as the master

There’s an anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that I really love:

“… one day he dined with Vanderpyl and another writer, Edmond Jaloux, at a restaurant in the rue St. Honore. As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert's Trois Contes, began to praise the faultlessness of its style and language. Joyce, in spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, 'Pas si bien que ga. II commence avec une faute.' And taking the book he showed them that in the first sentence of'Un Cceur simple,' 'Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l'Eveque envierent d Mme Aubain sa servante Felicite,' envierent should be enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the last sentence of the final story, 'Herodias,' 'Comme elle etait tres lourde, Us la portaient altemativement.' 'Altemativement is wrong,' he announced, 'since there

are three bearers.”

Oh that High modernism! So elegant, so intelligent.  What Joyce does to Flaubert here is what Flaubert, in his letters, did to Balzac – he trumps the master.

The implication is that a literary text is something made with precision. It is like a ship, where every plank must be tongue-and-grooved closely with every other plank to resist the elements.

Yet put this way, it seems wrong. Shouldn’t the novel seek, instead, to be penetrated by the elements? Or at least to reflect them – as per Stendhal’s image of the mirror walking down the road. Isn’t the mistake in Herodias, in fact, related to the fact that the description – the mirroring – involves three bearers?

Of course, Stendhal’s mirror shows up in Ulysses as the cracked looking glass of a serving girl. The crack is not simply a matter of distortion, but a reminder that the mirror’s smooth surface doesn’t really model what is happening in writing. Writing has parts and dimensions – words and sentences and paragrahs and chapters, among the parts, and denotation,  sound, connotation and history, among the dimensions. I look at the page and see a smooth surface that I recognize as the printed page, but when I read, when I am initiated into what is going on, the surface breaks up.  Joyce, that Jesuit, saw the old Latin alter in alternativement.  It was the kind of second hearing that Flaubert had, too.

Still: the ship metaphor that I used seems not to capture what is going on here, although it does suggest that the text resists – it resists first. It doesn’t show, although part of it is certainly evoking images.

But I don’t want to discard the ship image just yet, because it leads me to one of my favorite passages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.   Here, too, the story becomes an image for a view of language and its effects:

“Le vaisseau Argo ~ The ship Argo

A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its

name or its form. This ship Argo is highly useful: it affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions (which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): substitu-

tion (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.”

I think Joyce would have been intrigued by this passage, but I don’t think he would have quite agreed with it. And yet, couldn’t one say that the infinite circularity of Finnegan’s wake leads us to Barthes conclusion?

for strict constructionism

In the sixties, during a brief and singular moment in Supreme court history when the court leaned left rather than right, the right massively adopted the idea of strict constructionism. As the court has veered to the far right again - its usual place - the furor has abated. 
Myself, I am with the original right position: the supreme court should go back to what it was originally intended to be, a court, not a forum for deciding whether legislation or executive action is constitutional. I believe that might be a good idea, a forum for deciding whether legislation is constitutional or not, and perhaps there should be an independent office to vet legislation, as there is in France. But the Supreme court is certainly not it. 

We are far adrift from what Alexander Hamilton wrote in the federalist 78: "Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments."

Today liberals are celebrating the fact that the supreme court is "allowing" the EPA to regulate coal plant emissions. The Court, in my opinions, is displaying will and force here, as it has done for decades. It has become a truly malign force in the American democracy. The strict constructionists have no problem expanding judicial power when it comes to pursuing the plutocratic agenda, because it is a sham school of thought. 

Lepore and the smarmmasters at slate!

I've been loving Jill Lepore's  takedown of the new business snakeoil, disruptive innovation and the responses to it. I especially love how Slate's Will Oremus replied. This is a man who has inherited the humorous stylings of Mickey Kaus and the ignorance of subject matter of Will Saletan. Those are big shoes to fill - in fact, I think size 24s - the bozo class. Of course, he trips all over himself trying to find an angle. His angle is, wait for it, that this being the internet, he, Oremus, is able to paraphrase Lepore's article, which is apparently behind a pay wall, and thus you, the reader, get it for free. Sakes alive! Lepore has been disrupted. Why is it like this is 1996 - or maybe 1936, since Readers Digest did the same thing. 
But the freebie you get from Oremus is worth what you pay for it. He evidently never met an argument with more than one variable in it that he could understand, and he severely misunderstands, and thus misparaphrases, Lepore's article. In the toady style that Slate has perfected, he didn't seem to high himself to one book or article to write his refutation - why should he? I mean, when you are a genius, anything you draw out of your ass must be high class. This was always Will Saletan's motto - used especially when he embraced white supremecy as science in an infamous series in 2007 - so Oremus is following in the footsteps of the masters.  Oremus might be interested in the fact that I can go to the library here in Santa Monica and read the whole issue for free - I mean, isn't that a portent of the singularity! 
Frankly, save for their book and movie reviews, Slate has been a must-laugh-at ever since they put a stick in Bush and saw he was done in 2000. For years, their schtick has  been to find clever ways to wrap rightwing conventional wisdom in neo-liberal wrapping and claim that the resulting product is some brand new thing nobody had ever thought of before, rather than yesterday's dog poop.  It is like the monster child of the New Republic and the Third Way. 
So I was happy to see them smarm attack Lepore's article. It shows that she must have tapped a vein. 

Absence one

Anyone who reads continental philosophy or the philosophical essayists will soon be impressed by the almost obsessive mooning over the concept of absence.

This has no parallel in Anglophone philosophy – absence is at most treated as a simple description of a physical phenomenon. Jack doesn’t show up for the exam – he is absent.  There is nothing here  for the analytics (or post-analytics) to get moony about.

Nevertheless, there is something strange about the absence of absence in Anglophone philosophy. The unexamined master-trope of that philosophy is substitution.  Surely it if were examined, understanding substitution should encourage us to look at absence more closely.

Substitution implies that a place is preserved – in logical or physical or social space – that is filled with one or another variable. In a sense, the presence of the variable isn’t total, since it isn’t identical to the place. One can find another variable to put in that place.

The latest metaphor in the analytic tradition to designate this is “candidate”. A candidate – whether as an explanation or as a particular – is always being considered as the solution to some problem. Whether it is materialist accounts of cognitive states, theories of the reduction of the biological to the physical, etc., etc., the papers I edit in philosophy are built upon comparing one ‘candidate’ with another.

Although analytic philosophers go about closely peering at language with the fervor of a myopic seamstress threading a needle, they are curiously indifferent to their own use of language – so I have not read any account of how suddenly the candidate metaphor appeared in all the right journals. It is easy to see, though, that it is a metaphor that tells us something about how absence is thought of here. The implication is that the “place” where substitution takes or can take place is like an office. It is a position created by a political system. The politics may only be bureaucratic – it may be a position in a firm, in which the candidates compete against each other without seeing each other, before a hiring person or board. Or it may be a political system in which they compete against each other consciously, before a voting constituency. The main thing is that the competition is about filling the position. The binary in place is between the filled place and the empty place – or potentially empty place. These are pre-eminently relative states – the dialectic between them is deflected onto the system which determines them, and which has the power to simply get rid of the place – or multiply it. 

the material life

We call it a sucette. Our babysitter calls it a binky, and a couple of days ago the clerk at the grocery store, teasing Adam by asking for it, called it a nuk-nuk – I think. Nuk nuk sounded vaguely disturbing to me, and the surprisingly popular game of leaning over Adam and asking for something – can you give me your shoe? Your fruitpack? Or whatever, which many people seem to think is just the way to tease a baby, was played by that clerk just a tiny bit too roughly. This went with nuk nuk, I thought.

Such are the various titles of what is more neutrally called a pacifier. It is an article that, for the last year and a half, has been essential in our house. When Adam was very young – around three months, I believe – we bought our first one and he rejected it, and I thought that we wouldn’t need a pacifier. However, it turned out that this rejection was more in the nature of a misunderstanding. Or rather, it was more in the nature of how a sucette is used – for the calm that comes with putting it in his mouth and shifting it around and laying back and playing with its little handle (that handle that has a certain unpleasant visual association for me – I am always reminded of the ring they put on a bull’s nose, and I sometimes think it gives Adam too painfully the air of an animal we have domesticated, even if that is, really, the truth), it also seems to be comforting to throw it away. There’s some ceremony in it – in the same way that a baseball player tears his cap from his head and throws it down and stomps on it to theatricalize some fault in the umpire’s judgment, Adam likes to definitively toss the pacifier to signify that he’s about to run around yelling or play chase or hide. He also likes to lay it aside, with a graceful, judgmental gesture when he has decided to eat. This is always interesting to watch, because it means that he is going to be serious, now, about his turkey, or his yoghurt, or his bread. And just as taking the sucette out of his mouth prefaces his decision to grab the little strips of turkey and stuff as many of them as possible in his mouth, or take the plastic spoon and see how much Nature’s Own Turkey and Rice glop he can get on it and then, in a perilous trajectory towards his face, in his mouth (the glop often leaving a trail of drops on his pants and shirt on the way to its slide down the digestive tract.), so, too, the resumption of the pacifier is a final punctuation, a full stop that means this meal is over. Surely, this is manners on the infant scale.

The sucette is slowly losing its necessity as Adam pressses onward to that magic 2 year old mark. It used to be part of the standard kit for going out. I’d make sure I had water, crackers, maybe a fruit or a fruit pack, and the sucette before I lifted our boy up and strapped him into his stroller. The stroller did pose the problem that, often, Adam would decide that it was time to toss the sucette, and if I wasn’t paying attention, we’d lose it. Even if I was paying attention, I hesitated about taking a pacifier that had been tossed onto a sidewalk traversed by man and beast and tucking it back into Adam’s mouth. In truth, one loses a lot of squeamishness when raising a baby, but I had some left. Besides of course the mortification of somebody seeing me giving a pacifier to my baby after I’d picked it off the sidewalk or grass or floor. We found our solution one day in Atlanta in a Walmart, where they sold these handy ribbon clips, which allowed us to clip the band to Adam’s shirt and attach the sucette to the band. This didn’t entirely solve the problem, however, as Adam developed a way of unclipping the pacifier and tossing it, with the ribbon attached. Also, in the pandaemonium that takes the place of housekeeping when you have a baby, those ribbons would crawl under beds or dressers or insinuate themselve among the socks or somehow get in the bathtub – which meant that, added to the hunt for the pacifier was the hunt for the ribbon so that the pacifier wouldn’t get lost. Such is the treadmill of consumerism, ladies and gents.

replay: the trouble with thought experiments

In 1877, John Tyndall gave an address in Belfast that was emblematic of the high and confident positivism of the time. In one passage, he violates one of the canons of Victorian gentility – the Oxford variety – by aligning himself with the gloriously vulgar tradition, going back to Francis Bacon, of using Aristotle, conceived of as the father of  a lot of a priori nonsense, as an all purpose punching bag:   
  
“…in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst attributes of a modern physical investigator: indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language, which led to the delusive notion that he had really mastered his subject, while he had as yet failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put words in the place of things, subject in the place of object. He preached Induction without practising it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing from the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to the general. He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the centre of which he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his own satisfaction and to that of the world for near 2,000 years, that no other universe was possible. His notions of motion were entirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, better or worse, calm or violentóno real mechanical conception regarding it lying at the bottom of his mind. He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, and proved that if it did exist motion in it would be impossible. He determined a priori how many species of animals must exist, and shows on general principles why animals must have such and such parts. When an eminent contemporary philosopher, who is far removed from errors of this kind, remembers these abuses of the a priori method, he will be able to make allowance for the jealousy of physicists as to the acceptance of so-called a priori truths. Aristotle's errors of detail, as shown by Eucken and Lange, were grave and numerous. He affirmed that only in man we had the beating of the heart, that the left side of the body was colder than the right, that men have more teeth than women, and that there is an empty space at the back of every man's head. 
There is one essential quality in physical conceptions which was entirely wanting in those of Aristotle and his followers. I wish it could be expressed by a word untainted by its associations; it signifies a capability of being placed as a coherent picture before the mind. The Germans express the act of picturing by the word vorstellen, and the picture they call a Vorstellung. We have no word in English which comes nearer to our requirements than Imagination, and, taken with its proper limitations, the word answers very well; but, as just intimated, it is tainted by its associations, and therefore objectionable to some minds.” 

Tyndall’s groping attempt to put his chemical stained fingers around a term to distinguish a distinct, yet under-conceptualized  mental act  – and can’t one feel him almost painfully balance just on the edge of the unknown word, like Watson trying to follow one of Holmes’ points – eerily points to the need that was met ten years later, when just the thing emerged under the pen of a German physicist, Ernst Mach. The Gedanken-experiment was born. 

Ever since, it has been retrospectively accorded to other times and conceptual schemes. I have always found this a rather uncomfortable anachronism. But what I’d like to consider is how, exactly, the thought experiment is an experiment. 

We don’t kid ourselves that our objections will squelch the word. We don’t want to. The relation between the thought experiment and the experiment is like the relation between the red breasted American thrush and the English robin: they look enough alike that English settlers in the New World called the thrush a robin. Lexically, only a pedant would object to that – taxonomically, it is a disaster.  

A common defense of thought experiments, among philosophers, is that thought experiments are a common element of science. In fact,  we have read claims that in certain scientific discourses, they have an essential function. I don’t doubt it. However, the move from saying that that class of things that we call “thought experiments” play a role in science to saying that they are indeed a type of experiment is not dependent on a clear view of experiments, but on the prestige of science, which is considered to be ultimately experimental. In other words, we are eye to eye with a vicious circle. Prestige, here, underwrites this logical leap. What it tells us is two things: we are dealing, first of all, with myth; and secondly, we are dealing with myth in terms of a the archaic system of legitimation that consists in referring to authority, rather than rationality. 

Our protest against the prestige of thought experiments in philosophy stems from our sense of what experiment meant in the first place. Tyndall’s cool evaluation of Aristotle might not be textually correct re the man himself, but it is certainly correct about the spirit of Aristotelianism. The introduction of the experimental method in Europe in the seventeenth century was about one thing: the art of discovery. The point was to get outside of your head. That the world outside could be discovered was a tremendously exciting and hazardous thing. 

The mania for thought experiments cruelly inverts this moment. Reflection, instead of being forced to confront the obdurant outlines of some irrepressible piece of exteriority, contents itself with the soft and pleasing task of creating bad fictions in the image of its desires. The movement from Bacon, whose death as a ‘martyr to experimentation’ is well described by Macaulay to  the spectacle of a Chalmers, doing “consciousness science’ by means of infantile fantasies of zombies, is a painful indicator that civilization ain’t what it used to be. 

In  a conference on thought experiments that was published in the 1992 PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Ian Hacking, one of my favorite philosophers (who has gained this coveted status by being interested in what is going on outside of his head and studying it – a rare thing), commented on the papers presented that defended the validity of the thought experiment. He conceded the force of many of the arguments for thought experiments, but his emphasis was on the fact that he felt, in the presence of the thought experiment, unmoved. That is, he felt that the experiment was not explicative. Experiments, in Hacking’s account, have a life – thought experiments exist frozen in their pictorial essence. Referring to Thomas Kuhn’s essay on thought experiments, Hacking points to the character of good thought experiments: 
  
“… thought experiments are rather fixed, largely immutable. That is yet another respect that thye are like mathematical  proofs, but good proofs have proof ideas that can be used over and over in new contexts – which is not, in general the case with thought experiments. They have just one tension to expose. Of course there are false starts, and the exposition gets neater over time. And here the prescience of Kuhn’s paper comes to the fore. The reason that people wrestle with thought experiments, use them for exposition and put-down argument, is that they can reveal tensions between one vision of the world and another. They can dislodge a person from a certain way of describing the worlds. They can replace one picture by another. That is their job, their once and future job.” 
    
Note: Since I began this number in Victorian prose, let me end it the same way. Here is Macaulay’s great description of Bacon’s death: 
„It had occurred to him that snow might be used with advantage for the purpose of preventing animal substances from putrefying. On a very cold day, early in the spring of the year 1626, he alighted from his coach near Highgate, in order to try the experiment. He went into a cottage, bought a fowl, and with his own hands stuffed it with snow. While thus engaged he felt a sudden chill, and was soon so much indisposed that it was impossible for him to return to Gray's Inn. The Earl of Arundel, with whom he was well acquainted, had a house at Highgate. To that house Bacon was carried. The Earl was absent; but the servants who were in charge of the place showed great respect and attention to the illustrious guest. Here, after an illness of about a week, he expired early on the morning of Easter-day, 1626. His mind appears to have retained its strength and liveliness to the end. He did not forget the fowl which had caused his death. In the last letter that he ever wrote, with fingers which, as he said, could not steadily hold a pen, he did not omit to mention that the experiment of the snow had succeeded "excellently well"    

Iraq: more fruits from the criminal American occupation

By any real standard of international conduct, the American invasion of Iraq was a crime, which the occupation compounded a thousand fold – or should I say 450,000 thousand fold, as that is the latest concensus figure as to how many people died in the post-invasion violence? It is one of the signs of the cretinous influence of the same journalistic clique that got us into the war that the newspapers, when writing about the war, still use “around 100,000 dead” as their standard cliché. Casualties are tedious, but I am sure that an article about 9.11 that understated the number of the dead by about 5 times (dozens of people were killed at the WTC) would receive condemnation from the chorus of the defenders of our grievances.  It would be the height of fifth column lefty anti-Americanism, and probably anti-semitic too! No such problems cross the mind when underplaying the Iraqi massacre.

It looks like Maliki’s government is crumbling, and we are going into another stage of the disaster. In this one, too, the US’s heavy hand has played a role. Instead of condemning the totalitarianism in Saudi Arabia for arming and encouraging the rebels in Syria – and in the process exuding its own Islamicists – the US has colluded at it. The Americans did this before in the 1980s, when the CIA and the Reagan administration generously designed a global jihadist network. Great times! This time, the Obama administration – which seeminly can’t shake off Bush’s shadow – is getting its blowback early.

Where, however, will we – we Americans, looking around in our boredom for some rip and rotten piece of instant history to amuse us  – get our information about ISIS, the Kurdish forces, the no doubt looming Shi’ite militia response? Unfortunately, the villains in the press the last time – the Dexter FIlkinses, the Jeff Goldbergs, all the previous unindicted co-conspirators with the White House – are still their, still seiving the flow of data, still conveying whispers from the Pentagon, the Weekly Standard keyboard warriors, and all the rest of it. Having learned nothing, they have nothing in their heads to impede the grave nonsense that they will perpetrate in the weeklies and the op ed pages.

My one consolation is that they write for a dying industry. The liberal media was no myth – media was born out of partisanship, not science or the law, not truthseeking that takes place in the lab or the courtroom,  and it flourished through its fidelity to its audience. But establishment media has long forgotten its strappy beginnings and rubs elbows with all other establishments – and in so doing has lost its readership and viewership. Nobody grieves that the Washington Post is a charity operation at present, and will no doubt be dumped by Bezos when the time comes.

Partisanship means developing to an acute degree one’s capacity to criticize, to investigate one’s enemies, to expose, to muckrake. But the establishment media of the Bush era was an overpaid, overstuffed lot of “insiders” and they  jumped onto the Iraq bandwagon gratefully, wagging their tails, basking in the proximity to the “rebel in chief”, as he was named by one of the sycophants. It is this group that still wails when the US misses a chance for a war, or at least a good stiff bombing campaign. Unfortunately, the mindset is bipartisan – as bipartisan as the mindset that takes “partisan” to be a dirty word.  

Iraq could never be won, so it could never be lost. The question really is: who is responsible for a policy spreading death and destruction on a 450,000 casualty scale in the Middle East. The answer is the Americans. I am sure the discussion in the next couple of weeks will be about how Americans can add more bodies to their tally.

This is sad beyond bearing.