Gedankenversuchen

Entrainment in Two Worlds

2012-01-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

I have a copy of Mathieu's Harmonic Experience on loan from N., and turned to the following passage this morning:

Now for a more musical experiment. Set a metronome (an electronic one is preferable) at sixty beats per minute and try to synchronize the tapping of one pencil to it. Partly because of the clean sound of the metronome, the discrepancy between you and it will now be more clear. If you experiment at faster tempi you may notice that you can become entrained in a metric "groove" for a few beats; but soon you will stray to the early or the late side, then come to dead center again. This gradual, barely perceptible straying on either side of the tempo is often desirable in music, and good musicians can control it. In jazz it is a factor in groove aesthetics; in classical music it is one of the conditions of phrasing called rubato, which means "robbed"--in this context, continually robbing and paying back. [...]

The object of our pencil-and-metronome research is to examine more closely the experience of the groove of metric entrainment. It can be a frustrating experience, but it can also be compelling an uplifting. The word yoga is from Sanskrit; it mean "to join," as a yoke joins and unifies the energies of two oxen. A little bit of metronome yoga is good for us; it allows us to experience in the measurable, countable realm of metric time what happens in the tonal world when we try to sing in unison with a string. A musical union is nothing less than a metric groove, but faster--too fast to count, but not too fast for the ear to register as pitch. If our voices vibrate too slowly, our pitch is flat; too quickly, then we are sharp; just right, and we say, "Ah!"

What is this ah? What energies join in union? Maybe it is the will of the singer with the energy of matter. You will yourself in tune with the string. Your intention drives your voice, and as the union becomes real you say ah. When your unison with a string is true, you seem to merge into it, to disappear, and all your fantasies and financial statements disappear too, at least for a breath.

To learn how musical harmony behaves, it is crucial to clarify and retain this image of one vibration of a something per one vibration of something else, and to associate that image with your experience of singing the unison. The "one to one" of two things vibrating in unison is written 1:1. The difficulty at this point in the discussion is that the concept seems too simple. You nod and say, "Sure, of course." But the more complex ratios, like 3:2 and 16:9 (which will soon be introduced) all derive from the same basic process: x of these per y of those. So your internal picture of 1:1 can never be too vivid, nor your experience of it too deep.

-W. A. Mathieu, "Singing Unison with a Drone," in Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from its Natural Origins to its Modern Expression (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1997), 16-7.

The Stage of Generalization

2012-01-13T12:00:00.000-08:00

Title post, time, and date, apropos:

The final stage of generalisation is Hegel's synthesis. It is a return to romanticism with added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique. It is the fruition which has been the goal of precise training. It is the final success.

-Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1949), 30-31.

The Stage of Precision

2012-01-08T00:02:00.000-08:00

The stage of precision also represents an addition to knowledge. In this stage, width of relationship is subordinated to exactness of formulation. It is the stage of grammar, the grammar of language and the grammar of science. It proceeds by forcing on the students' acceptance a given way of analysing the facts, bit by bit. New facts are added, by they are the facts which fit into the analysis.

It is evident that a stage of precision is barren without a previous stage of romance: unless there are facts which have already been vaguely apprehended in their broad generality, the previous analysis is an analysis of nothing. It is simply a series of meaningless statements about bare facts, produced artificially and without any further relevance. I repeat that in this stage we do not merely remain within the circle of the facts elicited in the romantic epoch. The facts of romance have disclosed ideas with possibilities of wide significance, and in the stage of precise progress we acquire other facts in a systematic order, which thereby form both a disclosure and an analysis of the general subject-matter of the romance.

-Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1949), 30.

Many thanks to N. for the uncannily felicitous gift.

En Passant

2011-12-20T01:00:00.000-08:00

Losing one's faith in professional philosophy is not tantamount to losing one's faith in philosophy.

Fragment XIX: Final

2011-10-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Believed when I sent, submitted.

Fragment XVIII: Note to Self

2011-10-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

We make a good team.

Fragment XVII: Home Stretch

2011-10-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

Sprint.

Fragment XVI: Simplicity

2011-10-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

Feel your environment.

Fragment XV: Meditations

2011-10-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

The nature of the Whole had an impulse to create the universe; now either all that comes to birth arises as a consequence of this, or even the most important ends, toward which the ruling mind of the universe directs its own impulse, are irrational. Remembering this will make you face many things more calmly.

-Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 73.

Fragment XIV: Circles

2011-10-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance, as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles," in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 404-5.

Fragment XIII: Educators

2011-10-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralysed; your educators can be only your liberators.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator," in Ultimately Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129.

Fragment XII: Of Body and Earth

2011-10-14T02:17:00.000-07:00

Listen rather, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body: that is a more honest and purer voice. More honestly and purely speaks the healthy body that is perfect and perpendicular: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth.

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do--back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1966), 33, 76.

--a qualification of secular faith, in brief.

Fragment XI: Unity

2011-10-13T15:34:00.000-07:00

Now I can give one answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events? If I do nothing because I am distracted by the pleasures of witnessing this folly, or out of my knowledge of the proprieties of the place I am in, or because I feel helpless to un-do events of such proportion, then I continue my sponsorship of evil in the world, its sway upon these forms of inaction. I exit running. But if I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition.

-Stanley Cavell, "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," in Must we mean what we say? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 339.

Fragment X: Compulsion to Repeat

2011-10-12T23:59:00.000-07:00

"'Oscillations are oscillations' is not ethically tautologous."

Fragment IX: Virtues

2011-10-11T23:51:00.000-07:00

Simplicity, confidence, trust (faith).

Fragment VIII: Secular Advisement

2011-10-10T23:59:00.000-07:00

"Keep the faith."

Fragment VII: Time

2011-10-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

Eleven remain. What matters is not what they say, but what they show.

One may extend Wittgenstein's distinction this far. The notions of saying and showing, or depicting and displaying, are formal-ontological, in the Husserlian sense: they apply within and govern over all material-ontological regions.

Fragment VI: Flux

2011-10-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

Ideal, lovely.

Fragment V: Oscillations

2011-10-07T04:12:00.000-07:00

'Concealment' requires qualification: vis-à-vis professionals (if you catch my drift).

'Oscillations are oscillations' is not ethically tautologous.

Fragment IV: Concealment

2011-10-06T04:01:00.000-07:00

Beware the smell of your blood, your fear, your life, your love, your "soul."

Fragment III: Camel, Lion, Child

2011-10-05T01:50:00.000-07:00

One must go under to overcome. "You've got to get up to get down."

The way out, in (an)other('s) words, is through.

Fragment II: Love Letters

2011-10-04T00:15:00.000-07:00

All my love letters are Lacanian. They always arrive at their destination, but invariably return to their sender, their subject, in an inverted form.

The present post, for instance.

Fragment I: Speech Patterns

2011-10-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

Some speak to cut. You feel it before you know it.

I would speak to contour.

Reflexivity

2011-05-09T01:48:00.000-07:00

What follows is highly speculative, and derives from recent engagements with Kai Wehmeier.

Despite misleading appearances generated by features of linguistic phenomena, the prima facie reflexive "relation,"

aRa,

does not stand for a relation. (Following Timothy Williamson, I take 'stand for' to apply to relations analogously to the way in which 'denotes' applies to singular terms.) 'aRa' does not stand for the kind of ontologically primary metaphysical entity on which ontologically derivative entities, including linguistic phenomena such as relational expressions, supervene (that is, non-reductively ontologically depend). Correlatively, because expressions such as 'aRa' do not stand for relations, they are not, strictly speaking, relational expressions. Expressions such as 'aRa' differ from relational expressions regarding both their mode of presentation and their object of reference. Indeed, they denote unary predicates of one entity, not a relation that holds between two entities or one entity and itself.

Allow me to put the point somewhat differently. When one substitutes the same entity, a, for both of the argument places in the relational expression, 'xRy', the resultant expression, 'aRa', does not stand for a relation and is not a relational expression. Rather, 'aRa' shows something about the entity, a: it predicates a property to one entity, a. Consider the following example:

a is at least as tall as a.

This expression does not stand for a relation that holds between two objects. Nor does it stand for a relation that one object, a, bears to itself. On the contrary, the expression shows something about a: namely, that a has (the property of) height, that a is a height-type kind of entity.

This seemingly trivial observation elicits subtle but important metaphysical points. Formal-ontologically speaking, 'aRa' says nothing. It shows, however, a distinctive mode of being instantiated and exemplified by a: in our example, that a is the formal-ontological kind of entity for which height is a constitutive property. 'a is at least as tall as a' both presupposes and shows that a is a height-type kind of entity. This is important. For if a is a height-type kind of entity, we can ascertain several other formal-ontological features of a: that a is concrete, spatiotemporally unique, individual, possibly countable, and so on.

A complete list of such formal-ontological features would effectively classify a as a specific formal-ontological kind. Such kinds include processes, events, things, masses, stuffs, phenomenal qualities, and so on.

To be clear: all n-ary relations both presuppose and show specific formal-ontological features of the entities that they relate. For two entities, a and b, to stand in the relation, ... is at least as tall as ---, both entities must be height-type entities. Put differently, both entities must be concrete, spatiotemporally unique, individual, possibly countable, etc.

Unlike unary predicates, however, n-ary relations not only show, but also say something about the entities that they relate: for instance, that a is at least as tall as b. Although prima facie reflexive "relations" say nothing, they show part(s) of the formal-ontological structure of the entity or entities in question. 'a is at least as tall as a' says nothing, but shows something about the formal-ontological constitution of a. Similarly, 'a is at least as tall as b' shows something about the formal-ontological constitution of its relata, a and b. But the binary relation, 'a is at least as tall as b', also says something about a and b: that the former is at least as tall as, hence possibly taller than the latter.

Two more general points deserve consideration.

First, one might think that the number of possible substitution instances for any n-ary relation is accurately rendered by the formula, n^n (read: 'n to the nth power'). A ternary relation, on this reading, would have twenty-seven possible substitution instances. But if we rule out cases in which one substitutes the same object in more than one argument place, then the number of possible substitution instances is reduced to n! (read: 'n factorial'). A ternary relation, on this revised reading, has only six possible substitution instances. All other substitutions, such as 'Raab', 'Racc', 'Rbbb', etc., result either in a relations of lower type ('Raab', for instance, represents a binary relation), or a unary predicate applicable to one entity alone, as in 'aRa'.

Second, we should not be misled into thinking that features of the mode of presentation of metaphysical entities represent features of those entities per se.

In my next post, I will attempt to ramify these considerations for the prima facie "relation" of identity. The (Wittgensteinian) thesis I intend to consider is whether statements of identity say or show anything. For it seems as if statements of identity, on the present account, would neither say nor show anything--other than, perhaps, (the fact) that an entity exists, that there is something rather than nothing, that there is some entity which enjoys an as-yet unspecified mode of being.

Asylum (Update)

2011-03-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

In response to my last post, I received several requests: first, for more material; second, for an MP3 version of The Final Iteration: Live at The Chateau; third, for files compressed in ZIP format, as opposed to RAR. The following set of links should fulfill those requests. Please note that none of the links requires you to register with RapidShare to download the files.

You may click here to download a lossless version of The Final Iteration: Live at The Chateau in ZIP format. You may click here to download a LAME-encoded MP3 version. I strongly encourage those who can to download the lossless version, since it yields the best possible sound quality. Further information about the recording may be found here.

You may click here to download a lossless, twelve-minute snippet from Asylum's final public performance, which took place on August 21, 2009 at Cal's in Chicago. You may click here to download an MP3 version.

Finally, you may click here to download a lossless version of Asylum's first album, Dispossession, which Brennan Connors and I recorded as a duo on August 28, 2006. You may click here for an MP3 version. To my biased ears, the aesthetic quality of Dispossession differs significantly from that of the more recent album. Our playing on Dispossession is more simple, sophomoric, and raw. Dispossession was recorded, mixed, edited, and mastered by our friend Brian J. Sulpizio at The Chateau.

Thank you for reading and listening. Please let me know if you have further questions, comments, or requests.

Asylum: The Final Iteration

2011-03-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

[Update (3/27/2011): By request, you may click here to download the album in ZIP format.]

And now for something completely different.

You may--and please do!--click here to obtain a studio-quality, lossless recording of The Final Iteration: Live at the Chateau. The album captures my (heretofore) final performance with Asylum, a Chicago-based free-improvisational project with which I was involved from early 2006 to late 2009. On the RapidShare page, click the 'Slow Download' button underneath the 'Free account' heading. There's no need to register with RapidShare to download the file. Once you've download the RAR file, you'll need to decompress it with a free expander such as RAR Expander for OS X or Free RAR Extract Frog for Windows XP/Vista/7. That will yield uncompressed, sorted, and tagged WAV files for your listening pleasure.

The Final Iteration: Live at Chateau features the following musicians, with apologies for the dated links: Brennan Connors on woodwinds and percussion; Todd Hill on bass and effects; Gregg Prickett on guitar and effects; Daniel Robert Siakel on drums and percussion. The album was recorded, mixed, edited, and mastered by our friend Brian J. Sulpizio at The Chateau.

I met Brennan Connors at The Velvet Lounge through Vincent Davis, a Chicago-based avant-garde percussionist most renown for his work with Roscoe Mitchell and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Brennan and I played together for the first time a week later at a party I held for my twenty-third birthday. Click.

Brennan's dexterity in exploring abstract, free-improvisatory structures resonated with the aesthetic ideals that I aimed to cultivate in my own playing. We spent months honing our aesthetic as a duo, which culminated in a short album, Dispossession, also recorded, mixed, edited, and mastered by Brian J. Sulpizio. We continued to practice together and played a few small gigs in and around Chicago. Eventually we sought to augment our sound with other voices and textures. The admixture of contributions from Todd Hill, most renown for his work with Madison-based Cougar, and Gregg Prickett enabled Asylum to evolve into the pulsating-doom-drone-free-jazz-energy-music that it became. The evolution of the project took form under the general heading of free improvisation, with as much emphasis on consonantly iterated rhythmic cycles as on dissonantly angular, arhythmic patterns.

Then, in mid-2009, I decided to pursue further graduate study at the University of California, Irvine. This would effectively end my involvement with Asylum.

The four of us decided to play a farewell performance and record a final session before I left town. The tracks on The Final Iteration are culled from two long-form improvisations from that final session, which we performed live without preconception on September 2, 2009, two days before I left for California. The collective awareness and sadness that we were participating in what would likely be our last performance together pervades the album, and makes for some reflective interaction. I'm happy with the result, especially given the complicated circumstances that structured its production. I hope you enjoy it too.

Quoth sunn 0))): "Maximum volume yields maximum results."

Special thanks to A. S. and J. D. S. for making this possible, in more ways than one.

Ideal Reader

2011-03-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

My ideal reader would pretend to have taken a drug.

Non-Sensuous Perception

2011-02-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

Those familiar with Hume's or the later Russell's sense-datum theory of perception or Husserl's theory of time-consciousness may find the following passage from Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas particularly fascinating. Those unfamiliar with those references may still appreciate the passage's beauty, precision, and sensitivity. To facilitate that appreciation, one must, I think, read the second paragraph very slowly and deliberately.

This wider definition of perception can be of no importance unless we can detect occasions of experience exhibiting modes of functioning which fall within its wider scope. If we discover such instances of non-sensuous perception, then the tacit identification of perception with sense-perception must be a fatal error barring the advance of systematic metaphysics. [...]

In human experience, the most compelling example of non-sensuous perception is our knowledge of our own immediate past. I am not referring to our memories of a day past, or of an hour past, or of a minute past. Such memories are blurred and confused by the intervening occasions of our personal existence. But our immediate past is constituted by that occasion, or by that group of fused occasions, which enters into experience devoid of any perceptible medium intervening between it and the present immediate fact. Roughly speaking, it is that portion of our past lying between a tenth of a second and half a second ago. It is gone, and yet it is here. It is our indubitable self, the foundation of our present existence. Yet the present occasion while claiming self-identity, while sharing the very nature of the bygone occasion in all its living activities, nevertheless is engaged in modifying it, in adjusting it to other influences, in completing it with other values, in deflecting it to other purposes. The present moment is constituted by the influx of the other into that self-identity which is the continued life of the immediate past within the immediacy of the present.

-Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967 [original publication, 1933]), 180-81.

Whitehead took this constitutive aspect of human experience, pace Hume, to provide decisive evidence in favor of causal perception. Indeed, Whitehead took causal perception--in his terminology, perception in the mode of casual efficacy--to effectively ground perception in the derivative mode of presentational immediacy: that is, conscious (ap)prehension of the contemporary world as a continuum of extensive relations.

Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy provides information about the extensive relationships between actual entities, as immanent in the various sensible or spatio-temporal fields of conscious perception. But perception in the mode of presentational immediacy imparts no information about the causal-ontological role of past occasions--which is to say, the causal objectification of certain aspects of past occasions for the novel ontological constitution of present occasions. For evidence of that, Whitehead was content to refer to the processual nature of bodily experience, and the more properly "mental" modes of becoming of living personalities, which he took to be constitutive of human experience as such. Whitehead contends, furthermore, that the fundamental data presented to metaphysics for analysis are feelings or prehensions, not the sense-data or objects that depend on the formal-ontological, primary process of prehension.

The resonance of this doctrine with Husserl's theory of time-consciousness--specifically, the complex relations that obtain between the retentions, primal impressions, and protentions of absolute consciousness--are undeniable. All the more unfortunate, then, that these two monumental thinkers never corresponded or seriously considered the other's work. And all the more reason to jettison the obsolescent, predominantly sociological distinction between so-called analytic and continental philosophy.

Panera Bread

2011-02-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

What the scream of an infant suffering from raw need shares with the silence of the elderly breaking bread betrays the (res)sentiment circumscribed around the heart of things: that silence is both the question that drives us and the answer to which we eternally return; that when one sends love, one gives breath; that, as a friend put it,

...by your dying day / if you've had more to say / than "I love you," / it was something that nobody heard.

A proposition both is and is not what it means. We both must and must not mean what we say. But there is nothing to say when there is nothing to be understood. You might call it the unbearable lightness of being. I might call it the unendurable gravity of death.

And yet, there is solace for the forsaken in dark matters, in dark times. To say what one means is not so much to exert control over and regiment language, but rather to give oneself over to one's condition by way of felt expression--with all the ambiguity, transparency, and vulnerability that that implies.

Exactitude

2011-02-18T11:55:00.000-08:00

Recent study of the writings of Gottlob Frege occasioned memory of the following passage from Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a text introduced to me by Arnold Ira Davidson during my tenure as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago:

From the moment I wrote that page it became clear to me that my search for exactitude was branching out in two directions: on the one side, the reduction of secondary events to abstract patterns according to which one can carry out operations and demonstrate theorems; and on the other, the effort made by words to present the tangible aspect of things as precisely as possible.

The fact is, my writing has always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of knowledge. One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. These are two different drives toward exactitude that will never attain complete fulfillment, one because "natural" languages always say something more than formalized languages can--natural languages always involve a certain amount of noise that impinges upon the essentiality of the information--and the other because, in representing the density and continuity of the world around us, language is revealed as defective and fragmentary, always saying something less with respect to the sum of what can be experienced. [...]

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

-Italo Calvino, "Exactitude," in Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1985-86, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 74-75, 77.

Metaphysical Presuppositions

2011-02-02T11:31:00.000-08:00

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something--because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.--And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001 [third edition]), §129.

Many of you will grasp my intention in referencing Wittgenstein in this context (of utterance and evaluation): namely, the principles and presuppositions of substance metaphysics. Those principles and presuppositions have effectively structured every domain of philosophical inquiry.

On this point, I find myself in full agreement with Johanna Seibt; that

the paradigm of substance ontology consists primarily of a set of principles which governs the construction of ontological theories. Since these principles are located within the ‘presupposition depth-structure’ of [“most topics of present-date ontological”] debate, they have hardly received any attention so far. […] Substance-ontological presuppositions enter into the very formations of ontological problems and restrict the space of possible solutions.

-Johanna Seibt, “Existence in Time: From Substance to Process,” in Perspectives on Time: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Vol. 189), eds. Jan Faye, Uwe Scheffler, and Max Urchs (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 143.

Such presuppositions, moreover, establish and maintain what we take to be natural formulations of, hence potential solutions to, purportedly perennial philosophical problems. Whitehead expresses this point as follows:

An old established metaphysical system gains a false air of adequate precision from the fact that its words and phrases have passed into current literature. Thus propositions expressed in its language are more easily correlated to our flitting intuitions into metaphysical truth.

-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Gifford Lectures, 1927-1928), eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 13.

One of the more deeply seeded methodological biases is the belief that substances, qua persisting entities that can remain numerically and/or qualitatively identical over time and change, are not theoretical constructs. Because natural languages rely on substance-talk to facilitate our pragmatic intentional projects, it may seem as if substances are (naturally) given in everyday experience. Consequently, one might be led to believe that according primacy to the formal-ontological category, [Substance], neither requires significant argumentation nor entails any contentious metaphysical commitment. Hence the increased circulation and popularity of fashionable, ostensibly neutral positional terms, such as 'naïve realism'.

We must clearly distinguish, however, between the ready-made ontology presupposed in ordinary contexts and ontology per se, stricto sensu. Although I disagree with her analysis of so-called tensed of time and temporal reality, and that analysis' bearing on the view that temporal reality is heterogeneous, I find myself in tentative agreement with Heather Dyke that

facts about temporal language can allow us to opt out of following the ordinary-language guide to ontology. But I believe that they cannot force us to opt into it. [...] Facts about language can prevent us from adopting the ontological inventory supplied by ordinary language, but they cannot force us to adopt it.

-Heather Dyke, "Temporal Language and Temporal Reality," The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 212 (July 2003): 391.

Substance-metaphysical frameworks have undeniable advantages over other frameworks. A particularly efficacious advantage of such frameworks is that they readily cohere with our everyday pragmatic concerns and intentional projects, which involve substance-talk.

We owe to Hume, however, a particularly perspicacious formulation of the general (and non-abstruse) metaphysical insight that what strikes us as natural or commonsensical has little purchase on what is actual, accurate, and adequate, metaphysically speaking. Hume masterfully underscores the way in which our natural (metaphysical) assumptions--in his idiolect, our ideas of external objects, time, the mind, the self, and personal identity--entrain contentious, unwarranted metaphysical suppositions about the nature of reality per se.

The point I wish to emphasize here is that in this and all similar cases, there is a decision to be made about what metaphysical framework affords the most accurate and adequate conception of the phenomena under analysis.

(And finally, lest we forget (disavow) an irrevocably uncanny instance of one of "the aspects of things that are most important for us," I cannot help but specify--but thereby, to misrecognize--the manifold formations of the unconscious. In reading Wittgenstein's remark that "we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful," I cannot help but recall Lacan's reading of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter," and his enigmatic maxim, that a letter always arrives at its destination.)

Breath

2011-01-31T19:45:00.000-08:00

When you see them
tell them I am still here,
that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams,
that this is the only way,

that the lies I tell them are different
from the lies I tell myself,
that by being both here and beyond
I am becoming a horizon,

that as the sun rises and sets I know my place,
that breath is what saves me
that even the forced syllables of decline are breath,
that if the body is a coffin it is also a closet of breath,

that breath is a mirror clouded by words,
that breath is all that survives the cry for help
as it enters the stranger's ear
and stays long after the word is gone,

that breath is the beginning again, that from it
all resistance falls away, as meaning falls
away from life, or darkness falls from light,
that breath is what I give them when I send my love.

-Mark Strand, "Breath," in New Selected Poems [originally published in Darker] (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 57.

Tomorrow

2011-01-30T10:56:00.000-08:00

Your best friend is gone,
your other friend, too.
Now the dream that used to turn in your sleep
sails into the year's coldest night.

What did you say?
Or was it something you did?
It makes no difference--the house of breath collapsing
around your voice, your voice burning, are nothing to worry about.

Tomorrow your friends will come back;
your moist open mouth will bloom in the glass of storefronts.
Yes. Yes. Tomorrow they will come back and you
will invent an ending that comes out right.

-Mark Strand, "Tomorrow," in New Selected Poems [originally published in Darker] (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 50.

Synthesis

2011-01-27T09:37:00.000-08:00

If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing--a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process--an integral function of the universe.

-R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be A Verb: Environment and Man's Future (1970).

'A question is not the problem', in ethics, is true. Some would also have you, by proxy for themselves, believe that 'a question is not the problem', in metaphysics, is false. That claim, however, is false. 'A question is not the problem', in metaphysics, is true. I would even hazard to claim that, in general, 'a question is not the problem', in philosophy, is true.

Silence is the question that drives us.

Remember where we are located. Analysis, yes. But there is also synthesis. We cannot but be synthetically-processually constituted. And metaphysics cannot but be constructed from such foundations, apropos of any actual entity's formal-ontological constitution.

[Thank you to M. for pointing me to Fuller's masterful statement.]

Personal Identity

2011-01-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

Personal identity, as it pertains to the material-ontological region, CULTURE; from a radical feminist perspective:

"I entered" "a cave" "in which I instantly" "divided into three"
"separate" "figures," "chained together" "in single file"
"I was most the one" "in the middle" "A man stood watching us,"
"professorial," "in glasses, bearded," "dressed in suit & tie"

"'Why are there three of me" "in here?' I--we--asked him," "our voices
separate," "out of sync" "'You are your" "Past, Present," "& Future,'
he said" "'You divide into" "those components" "in this room'"
"'But I do not have" "components!'" "our three voices said," "'My

secret name--" "Time's secret name--" "is Oneness," "is One Thing'"
"As I--the one" "in the middle--spoke," "the one of us in front--"
"who was the Past--" "had already" "finished speaking" "& was awaiting"
"his reply" "He said," "'Don't we seem" "to experience" "things

somewhat this way?" There is past, present" "& future'" "The Future
then cried out," "'Where is my life?" "Where is my life?" "You have
stolen" "my life!'" "There was a silence" The man" "reached out &"
"pressed a button" "on the cave wall--" "we three united" "into

one again" "while he wrote words on" "a clipboard" "Then he looked up
& said," "'Going forward? "Going on?" "Death lies ahead, you know'"
"'Any woman" "may already" "be dead,'" "I said" "'What do you mean?'
he asked" "I opened" "my lips, but" "someone else seemed" "to speak,"

"'No remembrance" "No remembrance" "No remembrance" "of our mother"
"No remembrance" "of who we really are" "Thus a woman" "may be"
"already dead" "born dead'"

-Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 60.

Meta-Blogic

2010-12-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

Graduate student philosophy blogs constitute sites of resistance to the overly dominant publish-or-perish paradigm of excessively professionalized, specialized philosophical inquiry. They fill in, as it were, the interstices inherent to the totalizing tendencies of that encompassing regime; which includes, but is not limited to that regime's exploitation of T.A. wage labor. As such, the institution of professionalized philosophy facilitates the commodification, devaluement, and alienation of philosophical production; and moreover, feelings of under-appreciation, lack of recognition, and inadequacy in its students. This, in my estimation, is the principal reason why some of us feel compelled to publish our thoughts, especially our more radical thoughts, on sites such as this.

Graduate student philosophy blogs represent, in other words, symptoms; and more specifically, compromise formations. By that, I mean that the modality of their (be-)coming-into-being involves the uncanny arbitration of conflicting, predominantly unconscious intentions: of wish fulfillment, on the one hand; and super-ego censorship, on the other. (I do not take the notion of unconscious intentions to be incoherent.)

There is, in this sense, a counter-intentional aspect inextricably interwoven with the productions that are characteristic of graduate student philosophy blogs. By 'counter-intentional aspect', I mean to underscore the inexorably conflicting nature of the kinds of intentions delineated in the previous paragraph: that of wish fulfillment, qua uncompromised expression of one's philosophical beliefs; and that of super-ego censorship, qua uncompromised capitulation to the authoritarian tendencies of professionalized philosophical inquiry. The philosophy-graduate-student psyche forces, as it were, a compromise between uncompromising counter-intentions. This forcing makes possible the achievement of their simultaneous expression in formations of the unconscious; and thereby, their partial, transient satisfaction--as, for instance (be), at the present site (here), in the present moment (now).

Graduate student philosophy blogs are symptomatic expressions of our more general, inexorable desire for recognition and affirmation. They are, accordingly, fantasmatic recognition enhancers. We witness similar expressions in children: "Mom! Mom! Look at me!" Transposed into our paradigm: "World! World! I have ideas!"

The symptomatic structure characteristic of graduate student philosophy blogs does not, however, undermine their materially and ideologically valuable status as sites of resistance in relation to the dominant regime of professionalized philosophical inquiry. Indeed, they may, and sometimes do facilitate genuinely sublimative philosophical activity.

The possibility and encouragement of such activity constitutes the principal (use-)value of sites such as this. That is why I continue to pursue more radical lines of thought here--even and especially in spite of their potential lack, qua Gedankenversuchen. There is, after all, no alternative to the real structure of lack.

The existential modality of being here now--as already-having-been instantiated, at the present site, in the present moment--consists in the valued determination of manifold modes and modalities of processual becoming. Correlatively, the logic and metaphysics of being here now, insofar as that phrase means something to us, concerns processes of establishment and maintenance, not a state of being that one achieves. 'Being here now' denotes a problematics instituted by real lack; and thereby, an essential ethical task.

Philosophical Burial

2010-12-20T15:11:00.000-08:00

The further and more deeply I pursue a philosophical issue, the more I realize how little I know.

In concert with encouraging humbleness, intensive focus on a particular philosophical issue enables me to recognize and appreciate the profundity of the work that other scholars have produced.

Often, however, such work remains buried. The burial and neglect of such work, in my estimation, generally concerns, first and foremost, its relative radicality and ideological divergence from what happens to be fashionable in one's contemporary philosophical milieu. The burial and neglect of such work may also, to be fair, derive from writers' laborious presentation of relevant issues or the excessive technicality of their exposition.

The qualifier, 'excessive', is important, and invites a tangential consideration. A successful blogger expressed to me recently, if I may paraphrase her words, that the writing I publish on this blog does not always adequately "welcome in," as it were, a non-philosophical audience; that I sometimes expect too much of my reader; and that consequently, the technical quality of my writing has likely negatively affected the number of "hits" I may have otherwise procured.

These remarks prompt two specific comments and one general comment, before we return to the problem of philosophical burial. First, I have no interest in increasing this site's number of hits. I would, no doubt, appreciate increased readership; but maximizing readership is not the essential function that this site was designed to serve. This brings me to my second specific comment. I take this site to fulfill a particular function: namely, providing a safe site of resistance for me to express my thoughts about particular pedagogical, philosophical, and meta-philosophical issues in a more-than-less uncompromising manner. Accordingly, the "Inextricable Preface" that appears on every page clearly states that the formulations published here may be provisional, nascent, and not even necessarily represent "the considered, citable view of the author." Hence the blog title, Gedankenversuchen: thought experiments. Those of us working within the confines of professional academic philosophy already concede too much regarding what we study and how we are made to formulate arguments in support of our philosophical beliefs. This dominant structure has undeniable advantages, but its disadvantages can be philosophically stifling. Correlatively, this site, like many other graduate student blogs, functions as a small point of resistance to the disadvantageous tendencies of that overly dominant structure.

The more general comment raised by my friend's remarks concerns the technicality of expression that I take to be requisite of philosophical discourse. In response to what he thought was undue criticism by P. F. Strawson, Bertrand Russell published a polemical article in which he formulated the following, characteristically lucid meta-philosophical claim, with which I find myself in full agreement (my fundamental disagreements with Russell's later thought notwithstanding):

This brings me to a fundamental divergence between myself and many philosophers with whom Mr. Strawson appears to be in general agreement. They are persuaded that common speech is good enough not only for daily life, but also for philosophy. I, on the contrary, am persuaded that common speech is full of vagueness and inaccuracy, and that any attempt to be precise and accurate requires modification of common speech both as regards vocabulary and as regards syntax. Everybody admits that physics and chemistry and medicine each require a language which is not that of everyday life. I fail to see why philosophy, alone, should be forbidden to make a similar approach towards precision and accuracy. [...] For technical purposes, technical languages differing from those of daily life are indispensable.

[Bertrand Russell, "Mr. Strawson on Referring," The Philosophy of Language, ed. A. P. Martinich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 [fifth edition]), 263.]

I make no claim to the precision and accuracy that is characteristic of Russell's later writings. I write 'later', because many of Russell's earlier writings, especially "On Denoting" (1905), are expositional nightmares. I can only express, to those of you who have struggled at the still imprecise hand of my ongoing pursuit of clarity and precision, ideals in relation to which I continually fall short: thank you for continuing to return to this site.

Returning to the issue of philosophical burial: one of the benefits of online journal indexing is that it enables us to discover those scholars whose work need not, and should not remain buried. Philosophers stricto sensu, qua lovers and pursuers of wisdom, have, I believe, a duty to consider and incorporate the work of such scholars, even and especially given its relative radicality or unpopularity vis-a-vis the contemporary philosophical milieu.

The publish or perish paradigm, structured as it is by the excessively professionalized, specialized, capitalist desire for tenure-secured, life-long wage-labor, does not readily accommodate unfashionable names and claims. But that fact gives us all the more reason to insist on considering, analyzing, criticizing, and incorporating high-quality scholarship, regardless of its source.

Let us resurrect relatively radical philosophical theories from eternal damnation. Let us raise the dead.

"Title post, apropos."

2010-11-23T01:47:00.000-08:00

[Soundtrack]

"The psychotic lives in the terror of breakdown (against which the various psychoses are merely defenses). But 'the clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown which has already been experienced (primitive agony)... and there are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, fear of which is wrecking his life, has already occurred.' Similarly, it seems, for the lover's anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first 'ravished.' Someone would have to be able to tell me: 'Don't be anxious any more--you've already lost him/her.'"

"To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing."

"I live under the regime of too much or not enough; greedy for coincidence as I am, everything which is not total seems parsimonious; what I want is to occupy a site from which quantities are no longer perceived, and from which all accounts are banished."

-Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 30, 100, 186-87.

* * *

Malapropos, you both (think you) know and do not know who you (think you) are.

Academic Dishonesty

2010-11-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

In (the dismal) light of a profoundly disturbing article that appeared recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in concert with several instances of ghost-writing and plagiarism that T.A.'s in my department (including me) have identified this quarter, I thought I would invite discussion as to which resources are most useful in identifying academic dishonesty in its various forms--with the proviso that ghost-writing, in particular, is extremely difficult to identify as such.

Turn-it-in seems to be the most common and obvious choice for identifying instances of plagiarism; but it also appears, on a cursory glance, to cost some money. [Update: I have been informed (thanks to M.B.) that both T.A.'s and students at the University of California, Irvine, may use Turn-it-in for free.]

What (preferably free) resources have more seasoned T.A.'s employed to minimize cheating and dishonesty? I would appreciate any advice you have to offer.

Naturalism (Redux)

2010-11-15T00:16:00.000-08:00

In light of my recent letter to several faculty members at the University of California, Irvine, the following quotation from Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality seemed apt.

I noted in a previous post the way in which Whitehead distinguishes the primary method of mathematics and formal logic--namely, deduction--from the properly philosophical method of descriptive generalization, which purportedly conciliates both the empiricist and rationalist aims of philosophical activity stricto sensu.

Apropos of this method of descriptive generalization, which Whitehead also terms "philosophic method" or "philosophic generalization," he writes, with characteristically composed vigor:

"In its use of this method [of descriptive generalization] natural science has shown a curious mixture of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dogmatic denial that there are any factors in the the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such a denial is the self-denial of thought."

-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Gifford Lectures, 1927-1928), eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 5-6.

Similar warnings against excessive naturalism, especially what we today refer to as reductivist, physicalist, or eliminativist naturalism, were presciently sounded by Edmund Husserl in 1935:

"...the Galilean idea" of mathematized nature, that the world as such might be fully described by mathematically grounded natural sciences, "is a hypothesis, and a very remarkable one at that; and the actual natural science throughout the centuries of its verification is a correspondingly remarkable sort of verification. It is remarkable because the hypothesis, in spite of the verification, continues to be and is always a hypothesis; its verification (the only kind conceivable for it) is an endless source of verifications. It is the peculiar essence of natural science, it is a priori its way of being, to be unendingly hypothetical and unendingly verified."

"In his view of the world form the perspective of geometry, the perspective of what appears to the senses and is mathematizable, Galileo abstracts from the subjects as persons leading a personal life; he abstracts from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties which are attached to things in human praxis. The result of this abstraction is the things purely as bodies; but these are taken as concrete real objects, the totality of which makes up a world which becomes the subject matter of research. [...] Thus the world and, correlatively, philosophy, take on a completely new appearance."

"What corresponds to [sense-data] in the [perceived] bodies themselves is then ordinarily replaced by their mathematical-physical [properties]--when it is precisely the origin of the meaning [of these properties] that we are engaged in investigating."

-Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970; original publication, 1935), 41-2, 61, 30fn.6 (respectively).

Michael Friedman parses Husserl's claim in the following, crystalline manner:

"When Galileo and modern mathematical science then turn around and declare that only mathematically described nature is objectively real, and the 'subjective-relative' domain of our actual experience or perception is a misleading appearance of this absolute and objective realm, they forget that our new mathematical description of nature only has sense and meaning on the basis of its necessary origin in the ordinary world of perception and experience--otherwise it is a mere empty formalism."

Michael Friedman, "Science, History, and Transcendental Subjectivity in Husserl's Crisis," in Science ad the Life-World: Essays on Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences, eds. David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 103.

Malibu Creek State Park

2010-11-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

Every path will lead me to death.

I want to take the better paths; in part, so I might be there now, then, when it ends.

But every path entails exclusions. In other words, the exponentially increasing limitation of possibility renders value only insofar as it rends. And even when I feel I know the better path, I cannot know what choosing it entails, and excludes.

That there is no exit from this condition is, I confess (as before), irrevocably trite. But that does not make these decisions easier, even and especially where and when I know what path I must take--at the exclusion of knowing exactly what that choice may, might, must, and will entail, on my way to death.

I will devote the day to my own insignificance.

If I Did It; or, The Maximus Poem

2010-11-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

If knowing meant a little something here,
you'd know to shiver or burn
without me. Whatever. Live forever
and you'll kill. Once around wind, its very
antonym, a brain will chase or hide.
And so I run from and hunt for me,
asleep above myself, below clouds
the size of birds and bundles of whips
and the operative leaves. I don't love you
like I love you; I don't drag out the too-
late light like I love you: cold contour
after contour in a full, dark room; the calm
hauling of the gravity of not-unconscious lists.

I'm just homesick with similarity, overfamiliar
having been here endlessly already.
Next day, I'm sore from comfort. The sky
is thick as a tool. I'm best at the last thing
we need, believe me--I'll hold you until I'm alone.
I've forgotten who taught me how to swim
but I remember how to swim and I'm an American.
And I forget about my blood, about
how blood's not trace enough. About
the required machines and mirages, these keys
in my fist. No pictures of this exist.
But if one turns up, you'll come get me, okay?
And then I'll break it like you own a hundred more.

-Graham Foust, A Mouth in California (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2009), 53-54.

Jacques Lacan Speaks

2010-10-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

If you have a free hour or even thirty minutes this weekend, I'd recommend watching the fascinating (you'll see why) first section of Jacques Lacan Parle (Jacques Lacan Speaks), which you can view in high quality here. Thanks to Farhang Erfani over at Continental Philosophy for providing the link.

Here's a lower quality version, for immediate gratification:

Physics and Metaphysics

2010-10-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

In response to the recent, interdepartmental conversation that ensued subsequently to a presentation given by Bradley Monton, an insightful philosopher of physics and time working at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I sent the following letter to several self-described "naturalist" philosophers of science in the Department of Logic and the Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine.

Two of those naturalist philosophers--whose perspectives I respect, even and especially where we disagree--pressed Monton to provide an argument for the legitimacy of purportedly direct, immediate, intuitive evidence, such as (Monton claimed) the objective flow of time. What irked me was neither the request nor the pressure, but rather the particular way in which they framed the request: as if (naive?) reductive, eliminativist naturalism were the way, the truth, and the life; that it, unlike Monton's position, required no argument ("Just look what science has given us!"), and thus that the issue had already been decided; and consequently that no one should come to the truth except through it.

Couple that implicitly pedantic and dogmatic form of framing with some tacitly condescending remarks and conspicuously raised eyebrows (neither of those from the aforementioned naturalists), and the context proved sufficiently motivating for what follows. My modest aim was to adumbrate a line of thought that one might employ in opposition to eliminativist naturalism, and thereby establish not only the possibility, but philosophical legitimacy of alternate conceptions.

* * *

Dear [All],

The conversation at Friday’s excellent [Logic and Philosophy of Science] colloquium left me with several questions and concerns. In particular, I’ve been concerned with how one might provide a consistent and coherent argument for the legitimacy of the kind of (apodictic) evidence given in “direct, unmediated intuition”; and how that evidence might reveal something essential about the constitution of the universe. The sense I gleaned from the conversation was that naturalists stricto sensu (reductive naturalists?) should reject unmediated, intuitive “evidence” as such: the only evidence that counts is the empirical data treated in (e.g.) physics. I’ll try to be brief in adumbrating what a response to this claim might look like.

First, one could—and at least one faculty member at UCI has sought to—wedge a formal-ontological (as distinct from a material-ontological) distinction between reduction and supervenience; or, in other words, between reductive, causal supervenience relations and non-reductive supervenience relations. Wedging such a distinction would seem to enable one to speak coherently about supervenience relations—and, more generally, ontological dependence relations—between phenomena, e.g., physical and mental phenomena, without entailing the reduction of one to the other. What’s at stake here is, in part, the status and meaning of naturalism: say, between a reductive, physicalist, materialist, or perhaps eliminativist naturalist framework (by whatever name), on the one hand, and a “unionist,” phenomenological, or more robustly metaphysical naturalist framework (by whatever name), on the other.

In light of such a distinction between reductive and non-reductive supervenience relations, one could maintain that although (e.g.) consciousness supervenes on the physical, and thus ontologically depends on the physical, it doesn’t thereby reduce to the physical. The intentional-phenomenological features of consciousness and the physical relationships on which they depend belong to different material-ontological categories. Formal-ontological categories of dependence, part/whole, etc., would apply to and govern these material-ontological categories. It would remain open for entities of all kinds to “simultaneously,” as it were, instantiate distinct yet interrelated material-ontological categories. The formal-ontological category of dependence, on this picture, would not reduce to physical-causal relations. Causal relations between phenomena in distinct yet interdependent material domains would be just one kind of ontological dependence that inheres between entities stricto sensu, as distinct from the physicalistic “objects” analyzed, and one might even say posited, in physics.

I would anticipate the following objection: analyzing the empirical data treated in physics is the only way we can obtain evidence about the constitution of the universe. Purportedly apodictic evidence such as cogito ergo sum has no bearing on physics’ effort to provide a coherent, consistent, and complete theory about the constitution of the universe. Metaphysics must remain in service to the conclusions drawn from physics’ analyses of empirical data. There is thus no need to over-inflate our ontology with the category of intentionality, etc.; and the mental, in light of the conclusions of cognitive science, effectively and completely reduces to the physical… etc.

At this point I think one could go Whiteheadian, if you’ll pardon the locution, to cash out the purchase of the previously introduced, quasi-Husserlian distinction between material-ontological categories and formal-ontological categories. Specifically, one might argue, following Whitehead, that physics always already abstracts from actual entities, or actual occasions, stricto sensu: that the material “objects” (robustly construed) treated in physics are not the most concrete and metaphysically primary entities, but derivative, materialistic representations of metaphysical entities. It falls within the purview of metaphysics, not physics, to analyze actual entities: the most fundamental elements that literally (and, moreover, processually) constitute the universe. Whitehead, for his part, took his philosophy of organism to harmonize the demands put on metaphysics by general relativity (viz. that each actual occasion enjoys its own “actual world,” while still instantiating a certain set of eternal objects that give form to the universe as a systematic whole) and quantum mechanics (viz. the demand for the discontinuous existence, as from actual occasion to actual occasion). Much more would have to be said to render Whitehead’s account more relevant and feasible. But for the purposes of this [letter], I hope to have sketched the possibility and potential legitimacy of laying claim to the kind of evidence that [Bradley Monton] did in his talk.

To that end, a final point: there would seem to be radically different kinds of evidence that human beings may access. It would also seem to not necessarily be the case that all evidence reduces to the kind of data analyzed in physics. (Here I have in mind the distinctions between kinds of evidence developed in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, §6.) That I (exist) think(ing), in line with Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (and my Kantian rendering of it), for example, derives from the kind of apodictic evidence that amounts not just to certainty about certain a certain state of affairs, but also the absolute inconceivability of the universe being otherwise than to include (e.g.) my existence, at that (present? objective?) moment. The relatively small number of truths obtained via apodictic evidence would not, on this picture, be accountable to the physical theories that emerge from consideration of empirical data—data that would ostensibly include self-conscious sensory experiences. Qua apodictic, such truths would hold whatever our best physical theories happen to be—or, for that matter, will become. Physics, on this account, entertains a categorially distinct kind of evidence than that treated in (e.g.) phenomenology and metaphysics; and neither reduces to the other. Brad, if I understood him correctly, wants to qualify as apodictic the evidence that there exists an objective flow of time. To justify this qualification, he relied on the notion that we can have direct, immediate intuition of a certain kind of evidence. That evidence, given its kind, can and (if I understood him) should play a role in shaping future empirical research. One’s direct, immediate, intuitive experience of time as objectively flowing is, I gather, part of what the relevant physics must explain and accommodate, albeit in its own way.

In sum, distinguishing between: (i) reductive and non-reductive supervenience; (ii) material-ontological and formal-ontological categories; (iii) the data analyzed by physics and metaphysics, respectively; and (iv) kinds of evidence, would seem to make possible a consistent and coherent response about why the notion of direct, immediate intuition has some purchase vis-à-vis our best physical and metaphysical theories regarding the constitution of the universe. If I understood him correctly, Brad wants to emphasize the likelihood that certain (phenomenological?) intuitions capture something essential not just about our experience of, in, or as structured by the universe, but rather about the universe per se. Of course, to do that, neither he nor anyone else would need to take the line of thought I've hastily sketched here.

Thank you so much for your time. I would be happy to discuss these issues further, in whatever way works best for you (all).

All best,

D.R.S.

Philosophy contra professionalism

2010-10-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

"But now we ourselves, we philosophers of the present--what can and must reflections of the sort we just carried out mean for us? Did we just want to hear an academic oration? Can we simply return again to the interrupted vocational work on our 'philosophical problems,' that is, each to the further construction of his own philosophy? Can we seriously do that when it seems certain that our philosophy, like that of all our fellow philosophers, past and present, will have its fleeting day of existence only among the flora of ever growing and ever dying philosophies?

"Precisely herein lies our own plight--the plight of all of us who are not philosophical literati but who, educated by the genuine philosophers of the great past, live for truth, who only in this way are and seek to be in our own truth. But as philosophers of the present we have fallen into a painful existential contradiction. The faith in the possibility of philosophy as a task, that is, in the possibility of universal knowledge, is something we cannot let go. We know that we are called to this task as serious philosophers. And yet, how do we hold onto this belief, which has meaning only in relation to the single goal which is common to us all, that is, philosophy as such? [...]

"We cannot seriously continue our previous philosophizing; it lets us hope only for philosophies, never for philosophy."

-Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970; original publication, 1935), 16-17.

* * *

Prescient words--from a "master," no less. Words that should give us pause to consider our present situation; and therewith, ourselves.

Aspiring philosophers struggle for survival amongst professionals and specialists--sophists and dilettantes, in essence--who will willingly, for instance, avoid certain dissertation topics because they are "too difficult" or "not marketable." Quoth the super-capitalist over-determined super-ego: "Publish or perish, publish or perish..."

Please pardon the vitriol. It is a tone I prefer not to take. And yet, such perspectives, and such choices, to me, signal something singularly noxious about the excessively specialized and professional form that contemporary philosophy has taken--so much so, that it appears we have no other choice. "Sink or swim..."

We all have the right to starve. Philosophers stricto sensu, however, do not, by the very purview and telos of their (existential-metaphysical-ethical) "occupation," have the right to forsake the pursuit of universal truth under the aegis, attainable or not, of First Philosophy. That is a lesson that goes back to, and certainly beyond (pace Husserl and the canonical Western philosophical tradition), the seminal figure of Western philosophy: Socrates.

It is a lesson we must continually relearn, a truth to which we must eternally return; even and especially as sophistical professional pressure impends and threatens to rend, precisely when and where it pretends to provide.

Substitution suggestion

2010-10-07T01:27:00.000-07:00

The unconscious is a motherfucking bitch that works in mysterious ways.

I mean the vulgarism to connote not only the too-well-known Christian formulation, but more importantly the properly second-wave feminist declaration given in Jo Freeman's "Bitch Manifesto": "A Bitch takes shit from no one. You may not like her, but you cannot ignore her..."

Similarly, the unconscious--and in particular, the superego--takes shit from no one. No one likes it (who would like or love such a vicious motherfucker?); but no one can ignore it. Accordingly, I mean 'motherfucking' and 'motherfucker' in a more-than-less technical sense.

We neurotics are all invariably subject to, hence subjectivated by, the various symptoms and manifold formations of the unconscious: dreams; slips of the tongue and pen; jokes; parapraxes such as failure of memory and mistakes; and so on. All for your (surplus) (over-)enjoyment; to whatever--and thus unto the final--end.

What a proposition means

2010-09-28T01:48:00.000-07:00

Alfred North Whitehead has claimed that any proposition presupposes a more or less developed, adequate, and applicable background metaphysical system in virtue of which that proposition has sense, or means (what it does). In his words from the Lowell Lectures of 1925, "every proposition refers to a universe exhibiting some general systematic metaphysical character. Apart from this background, the separate entities which go to form the proposition, and the proposition as a whole, are without determinate character" (11). Confluent with this thesis--which I endorse, with qualification--is the corollary that a proposition cannot (or, it is impossible that a proposition) be torn "from its systematic context in the actual world" (ibid.). This thesis, too, I endorse. But I will aim, in future work, to do so primarily on phenomenological grounds. [Apropos, I have been developing another, more succinct Gedankenversuch regarding the mutual dependence of ontology and phenomenology.]

I will not attempt to explicate the precise technical meaning of Whitehead's novel theory of propositions, one of the more difficult aspects of his philosophy of organism: its explication will not be necessary for our present purpose. What I propose, instead, is to introduce one proposition whose precise meaning, and thus proper understanding, depends on--insofar as it emerges from and thus instantiates--a Whiteheadian, process-ontological metaphysical system.

The proposition itself, too, is Whiteheadian. But (again) what I will aim to emphasize in future work is the logical, and not merely chronological significance of its phenomenological emergence. The phenomenological emergence of such propositions constitutes a necessary (logical) condition for extrapolating their ontological import. My claim will be that one may extrapolate such propositions' ontological implications only through a properly phenomenological analysis of the intentional structures that mediate one's (in this case, the present author's) experience. I will also argue that intentionality, rather than providing merely a privileged mode of access to such ontological considerations, is itself a metaphysical category that constitutively belongs to any adequate and applicable metaphysical system. Accordingly, although the statement of the proposition I will propose is, in a sense, thoroughly Whiteheadian, or process-ontological, it is also essentially phenomenological, given its basis in an analysis of the essential intentional structures of a conscious subject's experience in and of the life-world.

Whitehead did not read the work of Husserl. Nor did he consider intentional structures as such. He did, however, recognize the crucial importance of the inextricably interwoven interrelation between relatively high grades of (conscious) experience, or "feeling," and the universe. It follows that one must allow that Whitehead's novel theory of propositions may point in the right, which is to say phenomenological, direction, even and especially if he never thematized intentional experience as such.

The statement that reflects the proposition I have in mind reads as follows. How a subject structures its time and space reflects its value(s).

I mean all of these terms in their most abstract--and yet, as Whitehead would insist, also their most concrete--and thus a highly technical, sense. In what follows I will attempt to adumbrate the background metaphysical system that gives this statement (of a proposition) its precise meaning. It will quickly become clear, however, that what follows requires further explication, elaboration, and illustration.

'How' does not mean the conscious, subconscious, or unconscious determinations of a "vital" or conscious subject, human or otherwise. It means, rather, the patterned, organized constitution of any actual entity. The constitution of any actual entity consists of a process of synthesis of other relevant actual entities, on the one hand, and "eternal objects" (such as shape, relations, forms of dependence, and so on) on the other. 'How' means the determinate, rule-governed manner in which one particular actual entity (or subject) becomes actual through the "physical" objectification and synthesis of the aspects of other relevant actual entities. This process of becoming-actual occurs instantiates a certain set of eternal objects (and more precisely, one complex eternal object) that thereby, via its instantiation, "ingresses" into actuality in the character of determining the actual entity in question as this or that kind of entity. In this sense, the aspects of other relevant actual entities and one complex eternal object function or "work together" to literally constitute (ontologically) and cause (ontologically) the given actual entity in question.

'Subject' does not mean (just) the human subject, but actual entities as such; or, more simply, any entity whatsoever. Any actual entity or subject is the novel result of a metaphysically fundamental process of constitution, also termed actualization, concresence, or ontological becoming. This metaphysical process gives sense to the terms 'process philosophy' and 'process ontology', which stand in radical opposition to the tradition of substance metaphysics that derives principally from Aristotle. Correlatively, one may say that the ontological category of substance, in the process-ontological metaphysical system here delineated, belongs to the system; but it belongs only in a derivative manner. The category of substance presupposes and (ontologically) depends on the fundamental process of actualization (or concresence, etc.). Those aspects of other, relevant actual entities which constitute the actual entity in question are, on this conception, said to be felt or prehended by that actual entity. Similarly, the actual entity in question feels or prehends "its" complex eternal object. A given actual entity prehends those relevant aspects and eternal objects that coordinately, through the fundamental metaphysical process of ontological synthesis, constitute it as that novel actual entity that it is.

Fittingly, 'structure' does not mean the forms according to which a substance inheres in actuality, or appears to a conscious subject. 'Structure' means the complex pattern of those prehensions--also termed "non-cognitive apprehensions"--which feel the relevant aspects of other actual entities in concert with the complex eternal object that gives that actual entity its form and "shape." An actual entity's structure or pattern essentially constitutes that subject as the distinct, novel actual entity that it is. A subject that structures its time and space in accordance with a particular value need not do so consciously. A subject need not be a conscious subject; but it must be an actual entity stricto sensu. (This is one statement of Whitehead's "ontological principle.") The conception of a subject's structure or pattern introduced here pertains to all actual entities, not just conscious, intentional entities that enjoy a relatively high grade of experience.

The conceptions of time and space meant in the italicized statement (above) demand a more rigorous and thorough explication than that which I can provide. Suffice to say, 'time' and 'space' refer neither to an objective-extensive-quantitative conception of time, nor to an objective-extensive-quantitative conception of space. 'Time' means the epochal duration of a specific process of concresence or actualization. 'Space', on the other hand, means the spatialized pattern of prehensions that determine the essence of the actual entity in question. For elaboration of this extremely difficult point, I am content to refer (and defer) to three of Whitehead's formulations introduced in the Lowell Lectures in 1925 (op. cit.). My interpretive notations occur in brackets.

"The pattern [of an event or actual entity] is spatialised in a whole duration for the benefit of the event into whose essence the pattern enters. The event is part of the duration; i.e., is part of what is exhibited in the aspects inherent in itself; and conversely the duration is the whole of nature simultaneous with the event, in that sense of simultaneity. Thus an event in realising itself displays a pattern, and this pattern requires a definite duration determined by a definite meaning of simultaneity" (124).

"Time is sheer succession of epochal durations. But the entities which succeed each other in this account are durations. The duration is that which is required for the realisation [that is, spatialization] of a pattern in the given event" (125).

"Realisation is the becoming of time in the field of extension. Extension is the complex of events, qua their potentialities [as superjects for the potential constitution of other actual entities]. In realisation the potentiality becomes actuality. But the potential pattern requires a duration; and the duration must be exhibited as an epochal whole, by the realisation of the pattern. Thus time is the succession of elements in themselves divisible and contiguous. A duration, in becoming temporal, thereby incurs realisation in respect to some enduring object. Temporalisation is realisation. Temporalisation is not another continual process. It is an atomic succession. Thus time is atomic (i.e. epochal), though what is temporalized is divisible" (126).

Returning to the italicized statement above, 'reflect' means evident of or evincing the determinate pattern that constitutes the essence of the relevant aspects and complex eternal object which "work together" to constitute the actual entity in question. Actual entities which evince an essentially similar pattern across manifold epochal durations may constitute the "objects" we usually experience in so-called sense-perception. Whitehead terms such objects corpuscular societies of enduring (as distinct from eternal) objects; where what endures across several durations is, precisely, the enduring objects' patterns of prehensions. A simple enduring object is, as Whitehead puts it in 1927, "simpler than anything which we ordinarily perceive or think about. It is the simplest type of society..." (198). What we (conscious subjects) usually experience in predominantly visual experiences are corpuscular societies formed from such enduring objects. A tree, for example, is a corpuscular society of manifold enduring objects such as molecules, etc. Such enduring objects are themselves constituted by actual entities of various levels of complexity; all of which "bottom out," so to speak, in the lowest, most simple grade of actual entities (which physics, after abstracting from the ultimate concreteness of actual entities to their (derivative) physical-materiality, terms strings, quarks, or otherwise).

This brings us, finally, to an actual entity's value(s). 'Value' does not mean moral values, or the kind of higher-grade values specific to actual entities which enjoy a relatively high grade of (conscious or self-conscious) experience. Rather, 'value' means those principles which guide the fundamental process of ontological constitution of those actual entities which collectively, as an organized whole, constitute the enduring objects and corpuscular societies we may encounter in conscious experience. It should be apparent that an actual entity or subject's value stands in an essential relation to how it is constituted; which is to say, realized, actualized, temporalized, and spatialized in accordance with that complex eternal object which it makes the novel actual entity that it is.

Again, all of what has been written here requires further elaboration, explication, and illustration. My hope has been to give a more robust sense of the way in which any proposition, and thus any statement of a proposition, presupposes a more-or-less adequate and applicable background metaphysical system in virtue of which that proposition has sense, or means what it does. I have also attempted to adumbrate one such adequate and applicable metaphysical system: the process-ontological "philosophy of organism" developed by Alfred North Whitehead.

In the future I will aim to underscore the importance of intentionality for the further development of such process-ontological systems. If I remain prudent, that is how the subject that I am will structure its time and space, thereby reflecting the value that gives a special meaning to the novel actual entity that I am, and will become.

To that end, I am grateful for and indebted to both the work and person of David Woodruff Smith.

Exchange value

2010-09-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

The following exchange just occurred between me and an older, aspiring philosopher. As I sat cross-legged in the setting sun reading closely through the dense conclusion to the "Relativity" lecture from Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (Lowell Lectures, 1925), I heard:

M.: Be very careful.
Me: (*Looks up, realizes M. hasn't seen what he's reading*)
Are you warning me about process ontology?
M.: Ah! You're surrounded by danger! (*Smiles, continues walking*)
Me: You'd have to substantiate that.

Proposition 19

2010-09-17T17:15:00.000-07:00

From a timely, concise article by Michael Tracey (at The Nation):

"Interestingly, praise for Prop 19 is not limited to what might be the expected left-leaning constituencies. Yes, there's strong student support for the initiative at UC - Berkeley and UC - Santa Cruz, but there's also Jordan Marks, Executive Director of the Young Americans Foundation – the nation’s largest conservative youth activist organization – who sits on the board of the Just Say Now campaign alongside prominent liberal bloggers Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition – a group comprised of former police officers, prosecutors, and judges who oppose current drug policy – have taken to the talk show circuit, assuaging the concerns of those who might assume that only shaggy-haired hippies care strongly about marijuana legalization. Even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, famously fond of the occasional toke during his youth, has cautiously left the door open to backing the measure."

You can peruse the entire article here.

Faith in Reason

2010-08-27T18:25:00.000-07:00

"Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of nature which has made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper faith. This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation. It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate present experience. There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievement: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues."

-Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1967), 18.

* * *

The profundity of Whitehead's statement was, for me, amplified by its resonance with the philosophical system developed David Woodruff Smith; the details of which I have, as of late, been working through, in tandem with my continued study of Whitehead's process philosophy (of organism).

I have and (hence) will have much more to say on such matters. For the time being, however, I must take my leave. Into the desert.

From A Mouth In California

2010-08-23T19:14:00.000-07:00

Shorts and a t-shirt. Not even
nothing's bitten into you.
And to think they call this lack
of shrapnel "fall."
Last night was all corners; this morning
sports a fumbled-up glow.

With your marrowy kilter, you've
believed into this weather, grown
to hate some certain turns and times
of day, but you're mostly okay:
a more plausible me, a less
unthinkable pile of holes.

Watch the world and it'll crack.
You'll see star dirt, sure, but let the sun
not be a lesson. There's a bruise at the end
of the light still hurts from way back.
There's this disease runs from "quit-
to-keep-staying" to "pressed-
for-safekeeping" and yes,
you can recycle it.
The people bells are different from
the God bells, but how?
The hell's a ghost before it gets to us?
You are only not thinking out loud now.

-Graham Foust, A Mouth in California (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2009), 16-17.

* * *

Irvine is a monstrous place.

The Subject of Fight Club

2010-08-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

Dear God (or Master),

My ideal ego may constitute the core of our collective projection, hence the imaginary locus of the ego-ideal's identification; but my eyes are wide open.

How's that for fetishistic disavowal?

Yours,
The Subject

P.S. Who is 'my'?

Poem to Realism

2010-08-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

That you're real enough's
the trouble. That's
the chore here, the chore
of enchantment.

Real enough erupts from too little, too much.
The wall's yours. You make
the subject stay the same.

-Graham Foust, "Poem to Realism," in A Mouth in California (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2009), 18.

The Theory of Feelings

2010-07-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

"A distinction must here be made. Each task of creation is a social effort, employing the whole universe. Each novel actuality is a new partner adding a new condition. Every new condition can be absorbed into additional fullness of attainment. On the other hand, each condition is exclusive, intolerant of diversities; except so far as it finds itself in a web of conditions which convert its exclusions into contrasts. A new actuality may appear in the wrong society, amid which its claims to efficacy act mainly as inhibitions. Then a weary task is set for creative function, by an epoch of new creates to remove the inhibition. Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil. In other words, the novel fact may throw back, inhibit, and delay. But the advance, when it does arrive, will be richer in content, more fully conditioned, and more stable. For in its objective efficacy an actual entity can only inhibit by reason of its alternative positive contribution.

"A chain of facts is like a barrier reef. On one side there is wreckage, and beyond it harbourage and safety. The categories governing the determination of things [i.e. actual entities] are the reasons why there should be evil; and are also the reasons why, in the advance of the world, particular evil facts are finally transcended."

-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1985), 223.

The Crossing

2010-07-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

"He woke all night with the cold. He'd rise and mend back the fire and she [the wolf] was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, in The Border Trilogy (New York, NY: Everyman's Library, 1999), 73-74.

Nothing New

2010-07-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

I will say nothing new and I will say nothing.

It is what a smile betrays. Feel (it) (for) yourself. That somber ontic hollow cannot but be betrayed.

As I said: nothing. How irrevocably trite.

We feel; predicate lives on its systematic misrecognition; desperately produce its all-too-pervasive and pleasant denial, disavowal, and foreclosure in the manifold psychopathologies of everyday life.

What it discloses, pace (Deleuze and) Guattari, is not desire's relative lack of polyvocality vis-à-vis arborescent structuration and stratification of unconscious production, but rather the lack inextricably interwoven into the fabric of the being of human being. And that lack is not, as Lacan thought, a real interstice instituted by the symbolic order between the imaginary individual of the enunciated and the unconscious subject of enunciation. It inheres even in the absence of symbolic relation; as, for instance, in psychosis.

It is the lack of immortality.

But let us be positive: mortality bears lack as the indelible mark of despair.

Despair is indeed the sickness unto death. But that despair is not borne of apostasy from God as that which grounds the self-relation's relating to itself that is, for Anti-Climacus (with respect to Kierkegaard), the self. God is dead. What remains is the inevitability of death; that is, our lack (of immortality).

But let us be positive. Let us play off ambiguities in and of meaning and 'meaning'. Let us torture language. We have no other choice. "Liberty or death." To live is to lack. Live and lack; die. Let me repeat: how irrevocably trite.

Eternally return in bad conscience and faith to the figment of a future beyond. Figure that figment in fear and trembling to prefigure your not giving way on not giving way on your desire. Become nauseated; become a subject. You will see what I mean.

You will never see what I mean.

Whitehead/Doyle

2010-06-20T19:10:00.000-07:00

Last night, I dreamt that I spontaneously elected to introduce Alfred North Whitehead at a lecture being held in his honor. I slipped during the introduction, however, and introduced him as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The audience laughed as if it were a joke (as if I were joking, or as if I were a joke). As Whitehead turned (disapprovingly, at least potentially) in my direction, I told the audience that it was a joke (I was kidding, perhaps, or "just a kid"), and that the man (not kid) before them was in fact (not kidding) the great Alfred North Whitehead. Then, in a flash of dream-time, Whitehead distributed an impressive manuscript to the audience. As the audience filed out of the lecture hall, I felt its weight, its promise, its call (need?) for elaboration--for good detective work, perhaps. Hence the figure of Doyle's imagination.

I apologize for the recent paucity of posts. It's been an intense quarter; in part, because of my first serious and sustained engagement with Whitehead's process philosophy. I hope you, like the audience fantasmatically produced in my dream, will "forgive" me. Expressing that dream in such a public place has, perhaps, made me into the joke I meant to tell. At least, that's my fantasy: $ <> a.

Regardless, thank you for returning insistently, interminably, like the repressed that you are (not). It means a lot to me. So much that I cannot help but disappoint.

Philosophical method

2010-05-08T20:57:00.000-07:00

"Philosophy has been haunted by the unfortunate notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought in general.

"But the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion and not its origin. Philosophy has been misled by the example of mathematics; and even in mathematics the statement of the ultimate logical principle is beset with difficulties, as yet insuperable. [...] But in the absence of a well-defined categoreal scheme of entities, issuing in a satisfactory metaphysical system, every premise in a philosophical argument is under suspicion.

"Philosophy will not regard its proper status until the gradual elaboration of categoreal schemes, definitively stated at each stage of progress, is recognized as its proper objective. There may be rival schemes, inconsistent among themselves; each with its own merits and its own failures. It will then be the purpose of research to conciliate the differences. Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities.

"If we consider any scheme of philosophic categories as one complex assertion, and apply to it the logician's alternative, true or false, the answer must be that the scheme is false. [...]

"The primary method of mathematics is deduction; the primary method of philosophy is descriptive generalization."

-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Gifford Lectures, 1927-1928), eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 8-10.

On what one is condemned to reproduce

2010-05-06T22:40:00.000-07:00

"Here we rediscover what I've already pointed out to you, namely that the unconscious is the discourse of the other. This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. It is the discourse of my father for instance, in so far as my father made mistakes which I am absolutely condemned to reproduce--that's what we call the super-ego. I am condemned to reproduce them because I am obliged to pick up again the discourse he bequeathed to me, not simply because I am his son, but because one can't stop the chain of discourse, and it is precisely my duty to transmit it in its aberrant form to someone else. I have to put to someone else the problem of a situation of life or death in which the chances are that it is just as likely that he will falter, in such a way that this discourse produces a small circuit in which an entire family, an entire coterie, an entire camp, an entire nation or half of the world will be caught. The circular form of a speech which is just at the limit between sense and non-sense, which is problematic.

"That's what the need for repetition is, as we see it emerge beyond the pleasure principle. It vacillates beyond all the biological mechanisms of equilibration, of harmonisation and of agreement. It is only introduced by the register of language, by the function of the symbol, by the problematic of the question within the human order. [...]

"The human being himself is in part outside life, he partakes of the death instinct. Only from there can he engage in the register of life."

-Jacques Lacan, "The Circuit" [January 19, 1995], The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 89-90.

(Process) Ontology

2010-04-21T02:42:00.001-07:00

Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, also known as process ontology or "philosophy of organism," offers a radical solution to the mind/body "problem," the pitfalls of the subject/predicate relation, and the (analytic) philosophy-of-language fantasy that one may separate propositions from feelings, not to mention other "perennial" philosophical "problems." These solutions result if and only if one is willing to bite the bullet, so to speak; willing to assert the flux of it all, the inexorable dependence of all (actual) entities or occurrences--they would, on the theory, be equivalent--on one fundamental, formal process of constitution: ontological becoming, a process which subverts even temporal becoming. More simply: there are, as always, decisions to be made.

First, one must measure one's mereology. Parts and wholes may be dependent parts, independent parts, and exist more or less, according to the relevant theory. Whitehead's mereotopology, for instance, definitively distances his conception from the later Russell--I mean the Russell of 1914 and onward. Husserl has unintentionally taught us that one's mereology, qua ontological or metaphysical ground of any (phenomenological) analysis, has decisive consequences for one's philosophical "perspective," which we could further classify into phenomenological, epistemological, ethical, political, and metaphysical, etc. domains. Quine, too, observed (as David Woodruff Smith observes, with a twist) that our ontology consists of what we posit in our preferred theories. (Smith's twist: "--what we posit, I note, in our intentional activities of theorizing.") The point: much needs to be said about one's mereology if one is to have a coherent, adequate, and consistent "theory," which is (really) to say: one's ontology.

Second, one must delicately place consciousness and intentionality within that "system." The "hard problem of consciousness," as Chalmers put it, may be resolved by an ontological system such as Whitehead's, but at a cost. The exact cost, I do not yet know exactly enough. But this, let me recall, is a place for exploration. Hence the speculation.

I am willing to speculate that process is ultimate. I will, for the moment, see how far that takes me, to whatever end.

Psychoanalysis as science

2010-04-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

"I must emphasize the fact that Freud progressed on a course of research which is not characterized by the same style as other scientific research. Its domain is that of the truth of the subject. The quest for truth is not entirely reducible to the objective, and objectifying, quest of ordinary scientific method. What is at stake is the realization of the truth of the subject, like a dimension peculiar to it which must be detached in its distinctiveness in relation to the very notion of reality--I have emphasized this in all of this year's lectures.

[...]

"To be sure, analysis as a science is always a science of the particular. The coming to fruition of an analysis is always a unique case, even if these unique cases lend themselves all the same to some generality, since there is more than one analyst... Analysis is an experience of the particular."

-Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I (1953-1954): Freud's Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 20.

Food for thought

2010-03-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

This is a useful chart that compares federal subsidies for food production between the years 1995 and 2005 versus federal nutrition recommendations. I wish the data were more current, but the comparison is instructive nonetheless.

What the chart does not capture is the fact that it takes approximately eight times the amount of energy to raise and slaughter cows as it does to produce the same amount of protein in a healthier and more environmentally sustainable crop: soybeans. Cheese, moreover, requires more energy to produce than corn, milk, eggs, and chicken, though less than pork and beef. The vast majority of fruits and vegetables, in contrast, require little energy to produce; nor do fruits and vegetables exude excessive amounts of methane during their respective "production processes."

These statistics may be well-known to some readers, but some things are worth reiterating; which is to say: some consensuses are worth establishing, or reasserting.

UPDATE: Here's a related article.

Possible worlds

2010-03-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

With the proviso that possible worlds are part of a model-theoretic semantics for logic in general, and not just modal logic, we can distinguish between two coherent, well-represented conceptions of possible worlds vis-à-vis modal logic. I will refer to the first basic conception as the combinatorial view, and the second as the constructivist view. Common to both views is the model-theoretic notion of a domain: the set of objects or individuals existing in a possible world. The two basic conceptions radically diverge, or emerge, however, as soon as one says what it means to be an object, and a fortiori the same object across different possible worlds. Correlatively, the combinatorial and constructivist views disagree about the conceptual dependence between language and ontology. Ontological dependence per se, on the contrary, remains the same.

The combinatorial view is so-called because it conceives of possible worlds as different combinations of objects that belong to what is essentially the same domain. That is, the combinatorial view holds that possible worlds consist in varying relations between, or rearrangements of, the same set or subsets of objects. The combinatorial view thus builds a demonstrative notion into the very idea of what it means to be an object in a possible world: this object in this world exists in every other possible world. What differ are the relations inhering between these objects in this (general) domain. Consequently, because the domain remains the same for different possible worlds, and no “new objects” (whatever that might mean for the present view) may be introduced, the combinatorial view enjoys a solid ontological foundation. Correlatively, proponents of this view generally maintain that it is in virtue of a logical law or even the way in which natural language works that the universe of individuals remains the same in all possible worlds. A slightly more liberal combinatorial view such as Kripke’s 1963 account introduces the possibility of conceiving of possible worlds as subsets of a common super-domain. Kripke effectively liberalizes the combinatorial view by blocking the Barcan and converse Barcan formulae; and he accomplishes this by attacking the non-modal principle of universal instantiation used in the proofs of those formulae. Leaving the details aside, the important point is that a possible world may exclude some objects of the super-domain, but never include “objects” that somehow fall outside of that super-domain.

The combinatorial view is, in this sense, confluent and consistent with the logic of transcendental realism, which conceives of the direction of fit between language and ontology as right-left (object-to-language). Transcendental realism assumes or posits that objects have already been given, and that it is on this basis that we can use language to articulate meaningful sentences about knowledge, language, etc. A transcendental realist cannot, however, say much about the sheer existence of objects, since the existence of objects serves as a presupposition of any assertion whatsoever. Transcendental realism begins with objects and only then moves on to investigate the properties and relations they have. The wager is that one can derive every other concept of philosophical significance from this solid ontological foundation. That the starting point of formal semantics is a domain of objects, for instance, illustrates its basis in the framework of transcendental realism.

Fittingly, the primacy of ontology in transcendental realism makes the question of cross-world identification seem unimportant, or obvious. The combinatorial view posits as a logical law, as it were by fiat, that the objects belonging to the (super-)domain already exist; and thus that this object in this world will still be this object in that world (that is, if it exists in that world). Nixon is Nixon even if Nixon’s relations change. That said, certain properties can still be necessary for certain objects, e.g. that 'the positive root of 25' is necessarily true in all worlds in which it exists; and on a more liberal combinatorial view, possible worlds can even exclude rigidly (but not strongly rigidly) designated objects. The important point, however, is that the combinatorial or transcendental realist view answers or precludes the question of cross-world identification at the outset.

The constructivist view, on the other hand, is so-called because it conceives of possible worlds, and more specifically identifications of objects across possible worlds, as constructions. Constructivists start with language (or experience) and construct possible worlds from similarly constructed objects. It is in this sense that possible worlds, on the constructivist view, amount to describable situations: the act of description is a form of construction. Accordingly, the direction of fit between language and ontology, on this view, is left-right (language-to-objects). A relatively extreme, Leibnizian instantiation of the constructivist view (pace Carnap!), for example, maintains that even the minutest alteration of an object’s property implies the existence of a distinct object that belongs to another, correspondingly distinct possible world; for no two worlds ever contain one and the same individual. What is relevant to quantifying over objects, on this view, is not identity, because there is no identity per se; but rather a counterpart (to employ Lewis’s term): some kind of two-place relation that may hold between objects in different worlds.

As such, the problem of trans-world identification stricto sensu arises here, on the constructivist side of the divide. Indeed, there is a lexical suggestion in the very notion of trans-world identification: that of making something identical, of constructing something to be regarded as identical, rather than discovering objects to be identical. The constructivist provides criteria according to which objects may be regarded as identical across different possible worlds; and these criteria constitute what it is for objects to be identical. Constructing a possible world is therefore a kind of creation that, as such, presupposes a contribution from a transcendental subject; and it is precisely in this sense that the constructivist view is confluent and consistent with the framework of transcendental idealism. Transcendental idealism with respect to possible worlds maintains that it is a task to construct identities and work towards, rather than stipulate, what it means to be an object, and thus what it means to be a possible world.

Quine and Kaplan on "quantifying in"

2010-03-15T01:17:00.000-07:00

Quine analyzes propositional attitudes and criticizes the referential opacity of propositional-attitude contexts by demonstrating the failure of substitutivity of identicals when quantifying into such propositional-attitude contexts. Stated in Kaplan’s terms, Quine aims to assimilate intermediate contexts--contexts which, prima facie, are neither purely referential, as in vulgar occurrences such as 'five' in 'Nine is greater than five', nor merely accidental, as in orthographic accidents like 'cat' in 'cattle'--to accidental contexts. Apropos of this eventual assimilation, Quine employs exportation to distinguish what he calls relational [1] and notional [2] senses of belief, as in the following examples:

[1] (∃x) (Ralph believes that x is a spy);

[2] Ralph believes that (∃x) (x is a spy).

For most people, [1] is false, since not many people know a spy, while [2] is true: most of us believe that at least one spy exists. Quine argues that when we quantify into relational belief-contexts from outside, as in [1], 'believes that' becomes referentially opaque. The substitutivity of identicals fails when, for example, one substitutes the description, 'the man on the beach', which attributes to Ralph a belief that he does not hold to be true, for the description, 'the man in the brown hat', which attributes to Ralph a belief that he does hold to be true. When, on the contrary, we quantify within notional 'believes that' contexts as in [2], the substitutivity of identicals seems to hold.

If both of the aforementioned descriptions denote the same man, however, it seems as if the legitimacy of the substitutivity of identicals depends on how (intensionally) we denote that man, call him 'Orcutt'. But this invalidates the substitutivity of identicals. Quine concludes that the although relational sense of belief seems to be "indispensable" for attributions of propositional attitudes in natural language, belief contexts are referentially opaque; and thus one can quantify into such contexts only if one is willing to pay the price of accepting near-contraries, such as:

[3] 'Ralph believes z (z is a spy) of Orcutt';

[4] 'Ralph believes z (z is not a spy) of Orcutt'.

Although one cannot legitimately infer from [3] and [4] that Ralph holds contradictory beliefs, Quine thinks that making sense of such near-contraries by virtue of a logical form that relies on the intensional notion of an attribute requires an undesirable metaphysical burden: intensions, "creatures of darkness" whose principle of individuation remains obscure, since there exist no clear criteria of identification for them.

In response to Quine, Kaplan advances a modified Fregean view that what lies behind referential opacity is an ambiguity. Initially, the notion of a standard name is central to Kaplan's modified Fregean view. The notion of a standard name captures the important relationship that inheres between intensional entities and the entities they denote: namely, the way in which a name (e.g. a numeral) may be so intimately connected with what it names (its corresponding number) that it could not but name it. That is, a relation holds between a standard name and its denotation, contra Quine, independently of any particular way of specifying the denotation. Accordingly, Kaplan argues that standard names such as '9' can go proxy for their denotations in assertions of identity, particularly in propositional-attitude contexts. With this conception of a standard name in place, Kaplan ironically makes use of the meta-linguistic notion of Quine-corners and argues, against Quine, that quantifying into propositional-attitude contexts need not imply referential ambiguity. Quine-corners mention symbols more selectively than quotes: they mention all the words inside of them, but not other symbols (meta-variables). If we understand quantifying-in in this way, we retain referential clarity in quantified propositional-attitude contexts without being riddled with ambiguity.

Although the notion of a standard name affords Kaplan some traction in resisting Quine's inference, he also recognizes the limitation of resorting to standard names. Unlike rigid designators, only abstract objects can have standard names; and thus the problem of trans-world identification remains for the denotations of proper names, definite descriptions, and the like. This insight leads Kaplan to introduce the paradoxical notion of a vivid name--paradoxical, because it does not function like a name, but rather a gauge as to whether specific agents have experiences of objects that are structured and robust enough to cross a “vividness threshold.” When the vividness threshold is crossed, it's no longer the case than agent merely uses an expression; rather, we can legitimately say that there is someone or something about which that agent has a belief. Kaplan admits that what counts as vivid depends on internal, "special interests": an expression may be a vivid name for Ralph, but not for me. Nevertheless, Kaplan argues that any increase in relative detail will always correspond to an increase in vividness; and ultimately, it is a "name's" vividness that licenses unambiguous ascriptions of propositional attitudes to specific agents.

The philosophical significance of the notion of a vivid name, which goes unnoticed by Kaplan, is that it enables one to recover some of the crucial intuitions of what it means to construct an object in a transcendental idealist framework, even though Kaplan approaches the issue from the perspective of transcendental realism. What Kaplan's notion of a vivid name introduces is the idea that the relevant direction of fit between experience and ontology as it regards propositional-attitude contexts is left-right (experience-to-objects). Thus 'vivid' means structured, organized, and connected--concepts that are seemingly in tension with transcendental realism’s notion that a name baptizes an object, or tags an object through an attributive use of an expression. Consequently, if Quine's view enjoys ontological security, Kaplan's alternative, revolutionary view affords us ontological insight about the direction of fit between experience (or language) and ontology, an insight at odds with the premises of transcendental realism. Kaplan's analysis simultaneously respects Quine's realist intuitions while capturing the inadequacy of his regimentation of language, which sets an impossibly high standard for vividness, and thus for exportation in propositional-attitude contexts.

Quantity and quality

2010-02-22T11:33:00.000-08:00

It takes so few people to beyond a situation (for the best).

'The best' is a relative story; but we know well enough where and when the devil lies.

The state of the situation, however, is another story.

Invisible Cities 1

2010-01-25T11:44:00.000-08:00

Cities & Eyes 5
When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repretory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be seperated nor look at each other.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harvest Books, 1978), 105.

I'm with Coco

2010-01-22T13:36:00.001-08:00

Some things are best left unsaid. Others, not.

As if there were not, at this time, more to be said.

Update
This is what he chose to say: "And all I ask is one thing, and this is... I'm asking this particularly of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it's my least favorite quality. It doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. I'm telling you. Amazing things will happen. I'm telling you. It's just true."

Ethics

2010-01-21T02:33:00.000-08:00

I invite you to consider--as I consider, once again--an adumbrated but powerful interlocution from Michel Foucault's April 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus:

Q: So what kind of ethics can we build now, when we know that between ethics and other structures there are only historical coagulations and not a necessary relation?

M. F.: What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? [...]

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. [...]

You see that this idea that one must know one oneself [Foucault has in mind the science of sexuality's appropriation of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi's famous instruction to Socrates, "Know thyself"(gnōthi seauton)]--that is, gain ontological knowledge of the soul's mode of being--is independent of what one could call an exercise of the self upon the self.

-Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress," Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume I), ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 261-62, 276.

Causation

2010-01-18T01:33:00.000-08:00

The problem of causation (Hume) results from time-determination. Time-determination is a contribution, an irreducible given (Kant); and therewith, perhaps, an irreducibly intentional, if unconscious, given (Husserl).

Do not just consider and over-determine. Rather, experience a fire, its smoke; the question.

Proposition 8

2010-01-11T18:27:00.000-08:00

The institution of marriage, as Nancy Cott, professor in the Department of History at Harvard University, has deftly and amply illustrated, plays a crucial ideological role in neoliberalism's hegemonic ordering of gender roles, economic and social currency--including modes of access systematically predicated on "non-deviant" forms of sexual relation--and thus the self-relation of those subjects variously but invariably determined by that super-structure: us. In her words,

"Molding individuals' self-understanding, opportunities, and constraints, marriage uniquely and powerfully influences the way differences between the sexes are conveyed and symbolized. So far as it is a public institution, it is the vehicle through which the apparatus of state can shape the gender order" (op. cit., pg. 3).

Taking Cott's criticism to heart, I have never plumbed for the institution of marriage--if by 'marriage', one means the state of being afforded by the public institution, versus a more nebulous, radical conception of marriage, or companionship, grounded in diverse modes of becoming. At times I have vehemently detested the very idea of marriage, even as I was nominated to give a speech at a good friend's wedding (a tricky political situation, to say the least).

Nonetheless, I cannot help but unequivocally support the gay couple who earlier today began arguing in federal court for the unconstitutionality of California's Proposition 8; for their right, that is, to marry. Far from exacting a revolutionary gesture, repealing Proposition 8 would undoubtedly be a step in the right--which is to say, left--direction. It would afford a significant subset of U.S. citizens their unassailable right to the economic and social privileges that the "non-deviants" take for granted.

Next: Proposition 13.

Shadows

2010-01-06T21:05:00.000-08:00

"It is certain, that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have the preference above the accurate and abstruse; and by many will be recommended, not only as more agreeable, but more useful than the other. It enters more into common life; moulds the heart and affections; and, by touching those principles which actuate men, reforms their conduct, and brings them nearer to that model of perfection which it describes. On the contrary, the abstruse philosophy, being founded on a turn of mind, which cannot enter into business and action, vanishes when the philosopher leaves the shade, and comes into open day; nor can its principles easily retain any influence over our conduct and behaviour. The feelings of our heart, the agitation of our passions, the vehemence of our affections, dissipate all its conclusions, and reduce the profound philosopher to a mere plebeian.

This also must be confessed, that the most durable, as well as justest fame, has been acquired by the easy philosophy, and that abstract reasoners seem hitherto to have enjoyed only a momentary reputation, from the caprice or ignorance of their own age, but have not been able to support their renown with more equitable posterity. It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtile reasonings; and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on his consequences, and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion, by its unusual appearance, or its contradiction to popular opinion. But a philosopher, who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colours, if by accident he falls into error, goes no farther; but renewing his appeal to common sense, and the natural sentiments of the mind, returns into the right path, and secures himself from any dangerous illusions...

The mere philosopher is a character, which is commonly but little acceptable in the world, as being supposed to contribute nothing either to the advantage or pleasure of society; while he lives remote from communication with mankind, and is wrapped up in principles and notions equally remote from their comprehension. On the other hand, the mere ignorant is still more despised; nor is any thing deemed a surer sign of an illiberal genius in an age and nation where the sciences flourish, than to be entirely destitute of all relish for those noble entertainments. The most perfect character is supposed to lie between those extremes; retaining an equal ability and taste for books, company, and business; preserving in conversation that discernment and delicacy which arise from polite letters; and in business, that probity and accuracy which are the natural result of a just philosophy. In order to diffuse and cultivate so accomplished a character, nothing can be more useful than compositions of the easy style and manner, which draw not too much from life, require no deep application or retreat to be comprehended, and send back the student among mankind full of noble sentiments and wise precepts, applicable to every exigence of human life. By means of such compositions, virtue becomes amiable, science agreeable, company instructive, and retirement entertaining.

Man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment: But so narrow are the bounds of human understanding, that little satisfaction can be hoped for in this particular, either from the extent of security or his acquisitions. Man is a sociable, no less than a reasonable being: but neither can he always enjoy company agreeable and amusing, or preserve the proper relish for them. Man is also an active being; and from that disposition, as well as from the various necessities of human life, must submit to business and occupation: but the mind requires some relaxation, and cannot always support its bent to care and industry. It seems, then, that nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man."

-David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), §1.

"Marx after Marxism"

2010-01-03T13:05:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of The Platypus Affiliated Society, and apropos of the new year, I recommend the following interview, "Marx after Marxism: An interview with Moishe Postone," Professor of History at the University of Chicago. A particularly provocative excerpt:

"The present moment can be defined as a post-Cold War moment, and this allows the Left to remove an albatross that had been hanging around its neck for a long time [viz. the terror of Stalin]. This does not mean that the road to the future is very clear, I think it’s extremely murky right now. I don’t think we are anywhere near a pre-revolutionary, even a pre-pre-revolutionary situation. I think it becomes incumbent on people to think about new forms of internationalism, and to try to tie together, intrinsically, things that were collections of particular interests."

I cannot agree more with Postone--and this position runs against the opinions of many leftists I know--that we do not yet inhabit, or have not yet created, a situation sufficient for successful, radical systemic change, imagined as a proverbial "beyond" of capitalism. The situation is, indeed, extremely murky; and, moreover, decisively non-pre-revolutionary. This does not give us reason, however, to acquiesce or complacently hope for messianic change, the political equivalent to despair, as the neoliberal "left"--in fact, an ideology antithetical to any genuinely radical tendencies--would have it.

Against the identity politics that facilitates the ostensibly smooth functioning of an inherently unstable, unsustainable capitalist machine, I second Postone's conviction that a genuinely successful, radical systemic change can result only from a global movement that ties together, through proletarian solidarity, what we erroneously perceive to be particular, relatively isolated struggles. In the absence of such a movement, and the marred history of leftist revolutions in the twentieth century should give us ample evidence for this, we risk further gorging the vampire of capitalism (recall Marx's contention that "capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor"), thereby facilitating capital's intrinsically appropriative, vampiric, and "self-revolutionizing" tendencies, as Žižek might put it.

Accordingly, while the present situation is extremely murky, and we must admit that it is not yet time for a global proletarian revolution, we do know, minimally, an essential aspect of what that revolution will require: a global movement grounded in a proletarian refusal of abstract labor as an adequate form of inter- and self-relation. Of course, it need not appear to the proletariat as such, hence my emphasis on proletarian refusal (and here, one feels the temptation of vanguardism). But this practical refusal, to be properly praxical, must instantiate the rejection of the commodity form analyzed to death in the vast majority of leftist literature.

A vampire remains immortal only if one fails to drive a stake into its heart. But how to do this non-violently, in a way that preserves the principles which previous leftist revolutions presupposed but ultimately perverted: this is a decisive question of our time.

Forget the cross.

Lest We Forget

2009-12-29T00:44:00.000-08:00

Brian Leiter has already pointed us to the eloquent diagnoses leveled against neoliberalism and neoconservativism in Juan Cole's succinct article, "Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade." Cole's analyses and descriptions are too timely and lucid, if excruciating, for me not to reference here. An excerpt:

"It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided."

A Husserlian Thesis (Contra Kant)

2009-12-25T00:10:00.000-08:00

Stated succinctly, the irreducible intentionality of the time-determination of absolute consciousness belongs inseparably to a pure subject that, qua zero-point or center of all intentionality, grounds a priori all my representations as discrete, individual cogitations, regardless of whether those representations pertain to immanent-phenomenological or transcendent-objective time.

Explanation

2009-12-07T01:53:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the relative lapse, but it's that time of the quarter.

In the meantime, here's a good read on the so-called "God Equation"; and here's "Afro Blue" from The John Coltrane Quartet's performance on Jazz Casual (1963). Stick around for the God Equa--I mean crescendo, at 5:00.

And why not, here's Coltrane's solo from "Impressions":

Under further consideration

2009-12-02T02:10:00.000-08:00

"Since analytic unity makes possible the analysis that in turn makes a concept possible, the analytic unity of apperception is the numerical unity of the fundamental act of consciousness itself that lies at the basis of conceptual representation in general, the act whose self-consciousness is expressed through the word 'I'.

[...]

We must therefore suppose that the synthetic unity of self-consciousness originally unites all the representations that can belong to the single act of consciousness whose self-awareness is expressed through the 'I'--where this unification is not a combination effected through any particular act of synthesis but rather an original interrelatedness that itself constitutes the common possibility of any and every such particular combining act."

-Stephen Engstrom, "Unity of Apperception" [unpublished]

Under consideration

2009-11-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

"The I think must be able to accompany all my representations…" –Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (B131 [Guyer and Wood trans.])

"The pure Ego must be able to accompany all my representations." –Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (115 [Rojcewicz and Schuwer trans.])

Terri Lyne Carrington

2009-11-23T00:58:00.000-08:00

It's a shame that Terri Lyne Carrington's music falls prey to the trappings of smooth-jazz, because her playing here--with Herbie Hancock's band, in 1999--smokes.

(Thanks to Drummerworld.com for the video. I suggest watching it in full-screen here.)

Veganism in the N.Y. Times: "Animal, Vegetable, Miserable"

2009-11-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Gary Steiner, a professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, has composed a lucid, thoroughly non-pedantic op-ed about "ethical veganism," which you can read here. (Thanks to Nick for the link.) An excerpt:

"These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection, servitude and--in the case of killing animals for human consumption and other purposes--outright murder.

People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies and can’t perform syllogistic logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value."

Steiner's (abbreviated) position, as I understand it, seems to square nicely with Cora Diamond's paradigm-changing writings about vegetarianism. I find Diamond's position to be best articulated in her extraordinary essay, "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy," the keynote article to Philosophy and Animal Life, a compact volume which features contributions from philosophical heavy-weights Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, and Cary Wolfe.

I cannot overemphasize the importance that Diamond's essay had in framing my approach to--well, life, but more specifically the field of "animal ethics" and, more importantly, my everyday practices. If you have trouble accessing her article through the above means, please feel free to contact me directly to borrow a copy.

Protest U.C. Fee Increases

2009-11-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

This Tuesday, November 24 at 12 p.m., students from the University of California, Irvine will protest the U.C. Regents' recent vote to increase student fees by a staggering 32%. My understanding is that the rally will begin in Aldrich Park and move to the Administration Building. The demonstration is intended and expected to be non-violent and peaceful. Faculty members--whose salaries were cut by 7-10% earlier this year--will also participate in a gesture of solidarity with U.C.I.'s student body.

"Party Line Continentalism"

2009-11-16T00:20:00.000-08:00

Brian Leiter recently published an excellent opinion piece on the so-called continental/analytic divide. Crucial to Leiter's analysis is his distinction between intellectual developments associated with continental Europe, commonly referred to as "continental philosophy," and a sociological-cum-political phenomenon which Leiter baptizes as "Party Line Continentalism." An excerpt:

"So what's really going on here when people, like the anonymous commenter [whom Leiter has been criticizing] (but many others, of course), speak of 'Continental' or 'Continentalists'? For sake of clarity and accuracy, we should really call this sociological phenomenon 'Party Line Continentalism' since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him). Since phenomenology, as it began with Husserl, has much in common with the origins of mid-20th-century analytic philosophy in Frege, there is, shall we say, a certain irony in demarcating the philosophical terrain this way, but it is especially ludicrous to denominate phenomenology-plus-poststructuralism 'Continental' given that it effectively excludes the Frankfurt School, Marxism, German Idealism, and Nietzsche from the Continentalist camp. (Of course, that is not how the Party Line Continentalists understand what's going on here, but this is at least partly because their command of the history of European philosophy after Kant is often quite weak and idiosyncratic.)"

Having previously, in an earlier stage of my philosophical development, espoused opinions roughly in line with Party Line Continentalism, I should briefly express my provisional reservation with Leiter's claim about Party Line Continentalism's deriving (unwittingly) from "a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger," even if "that is not how the Party Line Continentalists understand what's going on here."

More respectable Party Line Continentalists--which is to say, more worthy opponents than the anonymous commentator whom Leiter criticizes--would resist this reductionist conception of the "movement's" historical basis (or bias), not to mention its political bent and philosophical aims and predilections. (Perhaps Leiter would counter that such Continentalists would effectively abnegate the ostensible Party Line...)

Moreover, there are more legitimate, even if ultimately insufficient, reasons for which Continentalists stake their claims. Leiter judiciously excepts Gilles Deleuze from his criticism of "Heidegger and (most) of the post-structuralists...[who] were not...very good scholars or philosophical expositors." What percentage of the departments ranked in Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet Report, however, encourage serious engagement with the thought of Deleuze or, for that matter, Foucault, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, or other such "minority" philosophers and post-structuralists? The systemic, more-or-less unconscious disavowal of such figures has evidently resulted from the previous dominance of Party Line Analyticism, a fact that Leiter does not consider in his piece. (Who, for example, could forget Carnap's paradigmatic criticism of Heidegger?) The residue of that movement's dominance inheres in the contemporary scene by way of systematically disincentivizing aspiring philosophers from engaging seriously with figures such as Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, the post-structuralists and post-modernists, philosophical and phenomenological psychoanalysts, the Frankfurt School, etc. (Indeed, I think one should include Nietzsche in this neglected camp.) As such, it is not surprising that such a sociological-cum-political movement as Party Line Continentalism would have arisen in opposition to the hegemonic residue sedimented by Party Line Analyticisms' previous dominance of the "philosophical terrain."

But whatever (perhaps residual) reservations I have about Leiter's characterization--he does, after all, specify by way of qualification that Party Line Continentalism is only "largely fixed" (emphasis mine) by Heideggerian phenomenology and predominantly French reactions to it--I think his analysis adroitly captures the state of the institutional philosophy in the English-speaking world and the pitfalls of the insistently undead continental/analytic divide. And yet, Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet Report still makes use and thus implicitly (re)asserts the legitimacy of this distinction, thereby preserving the divide.

The Analytic and Continental traditions are dead. Long live the traditions.

January 16, 2009

2009-11-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

While refamiliarizing myself with Lacan's conception of drive in preparation for Robert Stolorow's presentation to the California Phenomenology Circle, I found the following note, which I had written in my copy of Lorenzo Chiesa's Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. (N.B.: "The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.")

* * *

(i) There is no "center" qua state of being; there is (es gibt) only becoming-centered. No state of being centered; rather, there is centering: processes, efforts, acts of will, of becoming-centered.

(ii) Conversely, there is (es gibt) always an object (petit a). (That is, for the vast majority who have moved beyond psychosis.) There is always an object (cause of desire). There is always desire (for an object).

"Authority and Authorship..."

2009-11-11T00:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a direct link to an article titled, "Authority and Authorship in a 21st-Century Encyclopaedia and a ‘Very Mysterious Foundation'." It was written by Kathryn Tabb, a friend of mine and doctoral student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ahleuchatistas: Live in Paris, October 2009

2009-11-10T01:57:00.000-08:00

This live performance of material culled from Of the Body Prone will, I hope, afford the reader a more robust perspective on both the Ahleuchatistas' newly forged aesthetic and my previously posted analysis of that aesthetic.

If you have the means, I highly recommend changing 'SD' to 'HQ' to obtain the best available quality. The full-screen option can be enabled by clicking the partially obscured 'Menu' icon located in the bottom right-hand corner of the video window.

Ahleuchatistas - "Live"
by Parhel

Gravity and Grace

2009-11-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

My first encounter with Simone Weil's harrowing masterpiece, Gravity and Grace, came under the tutelage of Arnold I. Davidson during my tenure as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. My hope is that the following formulations, ordered in this way, with chapter titles in brackets, will convey a miniscule sense of the profundity of that work, its mood, the force of its thought; and, more poignantly, the rivenness of the utterly afflicted, self-extinguished life that was Weil's.

* * *

What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity.
["Gravity and Grace"]

We have to be nothing in order to be in our right place in the whole.
["Decreation"]

To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural. Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counter-balance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere. Yet first there must be a tearing out, something desperate has to take place, the void must be created. Void: the dark night.
["To accept the void"]

Two ways of killing ourselves: suicide or detachment.
["Detachment"]

Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation--no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.
["Detachment"]

Love is no consolation, it is light.
["Detachment"]

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.
["Love"]

To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.
["To accept the void"]

We have to pass through death. We have to be killed--to endure the weight of the world.
["The mysticism of work"]

Ahleuchatistas: Of the Body Prone [Album Review]

2009-10-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Ahleuchatistas, Of the Body Prone
Review by Daniel Robert Siakel, copyright 2009

§1
There is something singularly symbolic signified stridently yet sonorously in the newest offering from Asheville, North Carolina's band of free radicals, the Ahleuchatistas: music that immanently indicates the limit of its own horizon by deterritorializing the form that makes such deterritorializations possible, thereby transcendently indicating a beyond of the initial territory qua refrain: a new, wider—and in this case, better—horizon. The music incarnated here exacts its own sublation, in the contradictory yet inextricably synthetic sense of simultaneously guaranteeing its preservation through its own radical self-subversion.

§2
One would and should expect much of any group recording under the auspices of John Zorn's venerable avant-garde “New Music” label, Tzadik. One should expect even more from a collective whose name was forged, as Eugene Chadbourne explains, “out of a combination of ‘Ah-Leu-Cha,’ a vintage bebop tune featuring fascinating counterpoint between Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and the Mexican revolutionary movement known as ‘Zapatistas.’” A collective, moreover, whose album titles explicitly connote the contentious conceptual articulations of Theodor Adorno (On The Culture Industry)—who will figure prominently in this review—and Emmanuel Levinas (The Same and The Other). Add to these expectations the Ahleuchatistas’ reputation as a tour de force both at home and abroad and one can, I think, get a sense of the pressure put on them to produce an artifact of adequate proportion—call it performance anxiety—in the face of the “performance principle,” as Marcuse would put it.

Listen after listen, Of the Body Prone unequivocally delivers on that—which is to say, its—promise.

§3
Of the Body Prone wisely and respectfully deviates from the formula expertly exacted earlier in On The Culture Industry (2003), The Same and the Other (2004), What You Will (2005), and Even In the Midst (2007). That formula, put (too) simply, expressly aimed to capture “the most intense…compositional rock complexity ever recorded.” Many consider the Ahleuchatistas to have achieved that aim.

There is a risk inherent to expert exactitude, execution, and virtuosity in musical production: namely, the fetishization and perversion of music in the true sense of the term. One finds this kind of fetishization and perversion exemplified by the more-beats-per-minute, odd-meter-driven, post-rock-jazz-star trash that all-too-frequently passes for and pretends to the advanced aesthetic and conceptual articulations of avant-garde, high-concept music. (Exemplars of this latter, respectful category are, on my reading, Roscoe Mitchell, sunn 0))), Nadja, ZS, and the like.) Music qua musicking—a term coined by musicologist Christopher Small to emphasize the agency at the heart of musical production versus music’s mere phenomenality qua spatio-temporal-aesthetic event—facilitates rhizomatic lines-of-flight borne of determinate circumstances that trace the outlines of further, unknown, and (crucially) incommensurable circumstances. Put differently, music in its essential movement instantiates an anarchic flow of becoming-other, deviations and deterritorializations from the arborescent refrains constitutive of that process. (Rhizomatic flows presuppose arborescent, stratifying structures.) What we call “music” rarely partakes of, or contributes positively or progressively to, this fundamental process.

This predominantly Deleuzian description should not, however, obscure the Adornian sense of fetishization and perversion that I mean to emphasize here—in part, because I want to ascribe a special status to the thought of the individual who inspired the title of the Ahleuchatistas’ On The Culture Industry; but also and more importantly because I believe that Adorno’s analysis of the fetishization of music will enable me to articulate precisely what I find to be so revolutionary about Of the Body Prone.

§4
In “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno describes in characteristic, vitriolic detail the structure underlying the enjoyment of virtuosic instrumental execution: viz., the commodity form. (We should understand the process of fetishization delineated here in a Marxist and not a psychoanalytic sense.) Adorno argues that the form of consumption inherent to the commodity form precludes contemporary listeners both from experiencing the quality or function of moments of sensual pleasure vis-à-vis the whole of a musical artifact, and from recognizing the fetish character of musical commodities as such. The fetishistic essence of the commodity form functions in such a way that the commodity’s fetish character remains concealed from the listener and producer alike. I trust that the reverence accorded to such contemporary “performers” as Dream Theater, Yngwie Malmsteen, et al. will aptly illustrate the pervasiveness of this kind of fetishization, one particularly prominent in so-called progressive or New Rock. Furthermore, I believe the prevalence of this kind of musicking gives us prima facie evidence of the plausibility of Adorno’s account, anachronistic and inappropriate as its invocation may seem here.

The principal feature of the “deconcentrated listener” is that s/he no longer produces any resistance to that which is offered up for his/her consumption. Fetishized listening encourages consumers to lose themselves in ecstasy that is not actually such, to lie to themselves about the completeness of their subordination to the rule of the reified mechanism of surplus value and the commodity form. (Consider, for example, the insatiable, miserly, obsessive tendencies of music consumption that came to prominence in the late 1990’s.) As such, deconcentrated listening, which Adorno takes to define regressive listeners’ relationship to their musical commodities, transforms potentially critical listeners into acquiescent purchasers, into subjects whose docility completes the domination inherent to commodity form. Consumption per se, not the actual sale, is what is at issue here.

Accordingly, by “fetishization” Adorno means the reduction of the synthetic musical whole of a work of art to individual, consumable moments, moments that encourage pleasure at the expense of critical reflection. The kind of synthesis one might experience while listening to the music of Bach (Adorno’s example), Schoenberg (Adorno’s example), or (if I may) sunn 0))) would reveal to the listener an image of the social condition in which the historical truth of his/her situation might become manifest, even undeniably so. The kind of critical reflection afforded by such a piece of musical art qua synthetic whole would potentiate the revolutionary capacity latent in the listener, precisely that revolutionary capacity which is devitalized by regressive consumption. Fetishized listening reduces this synthetic whole to specific sensual moments that regressive listeners consume in isolation, as commodities. (Think of the widespread attention accorded to Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo, “Eruption,” for instance, which showcased little more than his rapid-fire finger-tapping technique.) Only in the proper, non-regressive mode of listening, in which the synthetic whole of a musical piece of art is allowed to function as such, may an image of resistance emerge as an immanent, transcendental, dialectically real possibility—as the possibility of new possibility.

In “Bach Defended Against His Devotees,” Adorno maligns so-called devotees of Bach’s music for fetishizing the technical flourishes contained within—which is to say, as irreducible moments of—the whole of each of his musical works. This fetishization of moments thereby perverts and subjugates the revolutionary potential that consideration of the whole, in its robust sense, might afford. One could, I think, level a similar kind of criticism against the vast majority of contemporary progressive rock; except that now—and here I allow Adorno’s pessimism to speak through me— musical production has been fetishized to an even further degree. It is this impasse that determines the situation of what Tzadik has aptly termed “The New Rock Complexity.” Thus, it is both within and to this situation that Of the Body Prone must speak.

§5
This abbreviated Adornian exposition tacitly registers a potential concern with the Ahleuchatistas’ earlier output; the worry being that the uncompromisingly difficult, technical compositions exacted therein might fall prey to structurally similar criticisms which are wholly applicable to progressive rock a la Dream Theater. The uncompromisingly political dimension of the Ahleuchatistas’ musickings, however, coupled with their commitment to texture and expression over and above mere technicality-for-technicality’s-sake, do, I think, save them from such a characterization. But fetishization is still at issue here; for it is precisely this fetishization that defines their field of determination and play, their aesthetic and conceptual horizon: the field of The New Rock Complexity.

These conditions give us all the more reason to laud the new expressed in Of the Body Prone.
The musickings of the album suggest a self-revolutionary dialectical critique—which, following Adorno, contains both immanent and transcendental aspects as dependent parts—leveled against the very form that grounds its multifarious articulations. (Here one might also invoke the tired Derridian term, “self-deconstruction,” but I think this may obscure rather than clarify the (political) point.) For the first time in their corpus, the meticulously composed sections of the Ahleuchatistas’ “songs” seamlessly fall apart and give way to improvisations that occur, as it were, in the cracks of what seem to be almost self-consciously over-determined compositions. The track titled, “Why can’t we be in Jamaica?” for instance, has no detectable trace of reggae or other Jamaican musical forms; yet it allows for intricate play both within and beyond the complex compositional structure that serves as its root.

Add pressure to a closed system and that system will tend towards its own destruction. Closed, consistent systems necessarily contain within themselves evidence of their own lack. (Think of metaphorical applications of Gödel sentences.) This is precisely what the Ahleuchatistas do consistently throughout the album: in-consist.

§6
A convenient way to mark this difference vis-à-vis their earlier material is with the arrival of master drummer Ryan Oslance, whom Sean Westergaard at AllMusic has compared to Tatsuya Yoshida, though “perhaps with another set of arms.” Oslance’s contributions to the energy and aesthetic of the album exemplify the radical conceptual shift described above; and yet that shift, appropriately enough, is irreducible to his uncanny arrival. Nor is it reducible to guitarist Shane Perlowin’s incorporation of effects and loop pedals, or bassist Derek Poteat’s increased attention to texture. Each of these elements is a dependent part of the whole; but we should, I believe, resist fetishizing these moments at the expense of considering that image which emerges from consideration of the synthetic musical whole. For it is that and that alone that conveys the revolutionary accomplishment here.

I agree with the Tzadik propaganda that this is, indeed, The New Rock Complexity “at its very best.” I also want to attempt to articulate why it is the best. Of the Body Prone signals the end of a certain path that The New Rock Complexity has taken thus far. It uncooperatively proclaims where its music—and thus musical production itself—ought to go. This characterization, I hope, appropriately, accurately, and adequately registers its achievement.

That achievement will become revolutionary, however, only through non-regressive—which is to say, critical—listening. I trust that there are those open-minded and vulnerable enough to tread the path newly trodden here, if only to uncooperatively deviate and deterritorialize along the way. This is music in its truest sense, music that ought to be but perhaps will not be heard.

[On that note, one can purchase the album here, here, or through more familiar means.]

Drone music

2009-10-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

Bret Schneider has authored a well-written but controversial article on drone music, which you can read in its entirety here. (Thanks to Kendra for the link.)

Further thoughts to be posted soon...

Method

2009-10-09T18:47:00.001-07:00

Systematize; but carefully, slowly. It will not result from the product of one vision, but a series; of immense focus and effort.

 And that is why "it" must (because it will never) be an it. "It" is nothing; "it" is the result. You'll have more than enough with it and the Thing.   

"If only there were no object of desire, [fantasy]." But one can never fill the fissure, plug the hole. Consider, for example, bar culture.   

* * *  

 "It is too bad that it is first possible for us to glimpse the idea in a clearer light and to outline a whole architectonically, in accordance with the ends of reason, only after we have long collected relevant cognitions haphazardly like building materials and worked through them technically with only a hint from an idea lying hidden within us."

-Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Guyer and Wood trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 692 [A835/B863].

Formal Business Casual

2009-10-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

Boss,

Spin.

Reluctantly,
Schizophrenic

P.S. Halo effect?

"Hope..." -Deceased

Aspects and Distinctions

2009-10-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

Allow me to intimate a sense, that is, communicate a meaning; or I could say, roll the dice. In this iteration the sense came before the springboard.

Within the domain of politics and, I would wager, ontology--specifically, his criticisms of "poetic phenomenologies" in Being and Event--the mathematicity and scope of Alain Badiou's definitions, his terms and thus the terms of engagement, disallow for thorough analyses of determinate situations in which the situation's demand for complexity (as confluent with clarity) is, as it were, at its highest pitch.

Take Badiou's recent analysis of the Obama non-event. In general, the definitions Badiou provides remain too abstract and generic in their scope--a result of their (prior) set-theoretical determination--to adequately characterize the system he describes. 'Capitalism', 'socialism', and even 'communism', for instance, are not radically distinct but mutually dependent functions that operate in tandem to organize economic-socio-political domains. Rather than speak of capitalism as such (e.g., as the current socio-economic system of the United States), socialism as such (as the antithesis to capitalist states), communism as such (as either a threat or antidote to such capitalist states), etc., we would do better to refer to a given system's capitalist aspects or tendencies versus its socialist, communist, and other pertinent aspects or tendencies. These aspects, I contend, occur always and only together--in conflict, to be sure, but also in relations of mutual dependence. Qua aspect, each moment (in the Husserlian sense) constitutes a dependent part of an interdependent whole, a whole I referred to above, to avoid Badiou's terminology, as the economic-socio-political system of a determinate domain.

Pragmatically, this way of thinking and speaking would enable the progressively minded to effectively discount descriptions such as "fascism," "state-sponsored socialism," "Obama-care," and the like. Socialist and capitalist tendencies always occur simultaneously; one supplements even as it limits the other. The current health-care debate in the United States has nothing to do with Capitalism versus Socialism, but rather with radically different conceptions about establishing an appropriate balance between (laissez-faire "capitalist") anarchic free-market tendencies and ("socialist") regulation. It is a testament to his intelligence--but this is not to say his policies--that Obama himself recognizes this. Even notions common in leftist political theory, such as "advanced capitalism," often obscure the complexity of conflicting dynamics at play within economic-socio-political systems, systems irreducible to mere capitalism, socialism, or communism. One could level similar criticisms against Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

I mean to indicate, of course, the perennial need for further distinctions; but I also mean to emphasize, in the same breath, attentiveness to and care for contour, structure, and dynamics.

Despite my misgivings about Moore's film and Badiou's analyses, I must confess that I genuinely appreciate the spirit of their thought. We do, after all, share certain essential affinities; and they are on the right--by which I mean the left or progressive, as distinct from merely liberal--side.

Let us distinguish our enemies from those with whom we merely disagree.

All the Pretty Horses

2009-09-22T00:26:00.005-07:00

"He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in spanish [sic] and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead."

-Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, in The Border Trilogy (New York: Everyman's Library, 199), 301.

Child of God

2009-09-15T10:27:00.010-07:00

"A light sputtered off in the field and a bluetailed rocket went skittering toward Canis Major. High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of lit glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like a huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky. In the bloom of light too you could see two men out in the field crouched over their crate of fireworks like assassins or bridgeblowers. And you could see among the faces a young girl with candyapple on her lips and her eyes wide. Her pale hair smelled of soap, womanchild from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitchlight of some medieval fun fair. A lean skylong candle skewered the black pools in her eyes. Her fingers clutched. In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly."

-Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (New York: Vintage International, 1993 [originally published in 1973]), 65.

"You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing, which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think that at the core of it, there's this, this image that you have, this interior image, of something that is absolutely perfect, and that is your signpost, your guide. You'll never get there, but without it, you won't get anywhere... It [viz. the image] is not so much a conscious thing.

"Some people say, 'Do you plot everything out?' And I said, no, no, that would be death. You can't plot things out. You just have to trust in, you know, wherever it comes from.

"The sense of the subconscious and its role in your life is just something you can't ignore... That raises the question as to why, you know, if your subconscious has solved this problem [e.g. Kekulé's benzene ring] and is ready to tell you, why wouldn't it just say, 'Hey Kekulé, it's a ring!' [...] It may have to do with, you know, the subconscious being older than language, and maybe it's more comfortable creating little dramas and telling you little things. But it has to understand language... it understands language because it understands the problems that you're working on and then when you're sleeping it will work on them for you. And sometimes it will be quite specific."

-Cormac McCarthy, interview with Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Harpo Productions (June 5, 2007).

At the moment, I have little to say.

That said, I should register my enthusiastic if lamentable agreement with a number of interpreters as to the glaringly trite, perfunctory nature of the questions posed to Cormac McCarthy in his first and only televised interview. It is to McCarthy's credit that the opportunity was not entirely laid to waste by his interlocutor, despite her good intentions--though at times, McCarthy, too, fell prey to idle chatter.

And yet, "we" "all" "fall prey." "He" "is," after "all," "just" "one" of "us." And to "be" "fair" to "his" "interlocutor," "all" of "us" "have" "bad" "days..." (I trust that by now the problems introduced here should be more or less clear.)

Distillation: McCarthy intuits a causal and not merely correlative relationship between, on the one hand, a positive conception of the unconscious, metaphorically delineated as a committee that works on problems and expresses solutions to the conscious mind via little dramas or dreams; and, on the other, a provisionally asserted (and wisely so) premise that the mind is older than language. The content of his assertions intimates that McCarthy takes the former to follow from the latter.

This could not be further from what Lacan meant when he spoke of the mind as distinct from the subject of the unconscious.

Auf Wiedersehen

2009-09-02T11:08:00.018-07:00

How better to mark the presence of an absence than with a moniker of eternal return; a trace of the disavowal of death, no doubt, but simultaneously that which registers the vestige of a presence of an absence that exists beyond death, which is to say: beyond (the metaphysics of) presence, beyond what "anyone" has said or done?

I cannot say. But I will say, beyond this, auf Wiedersehen: until we meet again.

Words

2009-08-23T11:22:00.001-07:00

I thought I would say the following:

'I am tethered to the world in such a way...'

--but how many mistakes have I already made? How many rules (Rules?) have I broken, simply by following others?

To be; which is to say, to be tethered; which is to say, to be tethered as an I; which is to say, to be tethered as an I to the world: each concept presupposes another within a constitutively incomplete scheme. Moreover, the scheme may exact more violence than if I had let the phenomenon speak, as it were, for itself.

We owe to post-structuralism and non-mathematical extensions of Kurt Gödel's first incompleteness theorem the knowledge that any consistent conceptual scheme, not only despite of, but by virtue of its consistency remains incomplete. (A metaphorical application of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem would underscore the way in which any theory's statement of its own consistency presupposes that theory's inconsistency.) In the simple conceptual scheme which belongs to the proposition mentioned and delineated above, each concept remains suspect even if the conceptual scheme itself remains entirely consistent.

This is especially true of the seemingly fundamental--in the sense that it appears to be (still in the wake of Descartes' famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am") inescapable and thus irrefutable--concept of 'the I'. And I mean the I: the abstract generalization, or universal particular, resulting from "one's" experience of its own presence, the presence of its presence, its experiencing itself as a being for which thinking and thus being appear to be unassailable.

A multitude of prominent figures in 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, particularly those thinkers (m)aligned with the so-called "continental" philosophical tradition--the predominantly negative term of the imprecise binary distinction between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy, a distinction which must be, and in the best philosophical work always is, overcome--have sought to emphasize the way in which linguistically determined, embodied minds retroactively ascribe transcendence to relations which precede what we refer to as the I. Indeed, for these thinkers the concept of 'the I' represents the inherent reification of the human subject accomplished through language (or thought). Jean-Luc Marion's figure of the gifted, for example; Lacan's conception of the subject (of the unconscious); Deleuze's notion of the rhizomatic schizoid; etc.

I cannot possibly do justice here to the complexity of the positions of and differences between these thinkers. I will just say: I speak, therefore I am not.

(Compare the words uttered by Blanchot's protagonist, Thomas the Obscure: "I think, therefore I am not." Furthermore, recall that the protagonist's moniker invokes Heraclitus of Ephesus, the pre-Socratic philosopher responsible for the baffling proposition that "all things come to be in accordance with this logos," or word. Consider too the words spoken through Samuel Beckett; words which, by way of quotation, subsequently spoke themselves through Foucault: "words speak me.")

If this--which is to say, any--way of speaking presupposes this concept, 'the I', and thus the concepts which attend it within any given theoretical scheme (e.g., 'being', 'the world', 'being in the world', 'being tethered', etc.); if there is a constitutive obscurity instituted by such ways of speaking; and yet, if we have no other way of speaking, or thinking, then the question is: what should we say? And this, precisely, is the radical philosophical and ethical question raised in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Perhaps we should remain silent--but when, and with regard to what? Forget about the right to remain silent. The question posed and arguably answered by Wittgenstein is rather whether it is right to remain silent.

Ironically, and fittingly, like a formation of the unconscious, the very way in which one must pose the question, through language, exemplifies the problem one meant to raise.

And here, a new possibility: does the problem of logical clarity instituted by language necessitate analyses whose telos culminates in formalizations or mathemes (say, Lacan's '$') that we must in some sense, and only after the proper analysis, let speak for themselves? Of course, '$' would not exactly count as a fully analyzed expression in either Russell or Wittgenstein's sense; but the contour of the problem is the same.

What can stand alone? Do phenomena speak for themselves? Do formalizations of phenomena, especially propositions, speak for themselves?

Do we understand the nature of the claim?

The Mind (ii)

2009-08-01T10:18:00.006-07:00

Another thought generated by my continually fruitful exchange with EMG:

I'd like to propose the idea that Lacan's mathemes may, in their own way, accord with what Wittgenstein, according to Diamond--your skepticism of her resolute reading of the Tractatus notwithstanding--seeks to make absolutely clear about thought; such that to throw away the ladder, in this case, would mean to have produced quasi-sensical mathemes through so-called philosophico-logical analyses: e.g., ‘S barred’, ‘A barred’, ‘S1’, ‘S2’, ‘S barred <> objet a’, etc. (It is telling, isn't it, that 'sensical' exists only as an etymological back-formation of 'nonsensical'.)

Such a mathematization would exemplify how one might account for the unconscious in one’s analysis of the mind while simultaneously describing "a way of writing sentences, a way of translating ordinary sentences into a completely perspicuous form"; and after having made that transition, letting "the analyzed sentences... speak for themselves," as Diamond claims they must be, if one is not to "chicken out" in throwing away the ladder to expose the utter nonsense of what is spoken under the pretense of philosophical discourse ("Throwing Away the Ladder," 184).

One would thus analyze Lacan's dictum, 'the subject is the subject of the unconscious', as 'S barred'; or his proclamation, 'It speaks in the Other', as 'S / s [Signifer / subject]'—mathemes which would, so to speak, speak for themselves, and have to. But crucially, Lacan's later thought demands that such a scheme of mathematizations as his system represents, which is to say a potential Language (capital L), must, in proper post-structuralist fashion, always remain incomplete: for as Lacan emphasizes, 'there is no Other of the Other', which we should perhaps render in a more proper, perspicuous form: 'A barred'.

Lorenzo Chiesa has explored similar themes--specifically, about mathematizing the unconscious-- in “Count-as-one, forming-into-one, unary Trait, s1” (Cosmos and History, vol. 1, no. 1-2, 2006, pp. 68-93), though there he makes no mention of Wittgenstein.

In any case, this is an exciting notion, my previous concerns notwithstanding.

The Mind (i)

2009-07-26T18:40:00.004-07:00

A response to a recent post by my friend EMG:

My concern is that it may be impossible to synthesize Lacan's psychoanalytic conception of the mind with the account of the non-psychological mind or self, as Cora Diamond would put it, given by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. For if one agrees with the early Wittgenstein, and for that matter Frege, that what belongs to the mind, properly speaking, is that and only that which would correspond to what Frege designates as thoughts, versus merely psychological ideas or manifestations, then there can be no room in Wittgenstein or Frege's account for the unconscious or the subject--which is, for Lacan, always to say: the subject of the unconscious. The cost of conceiving of the mind or self non-psychologically is, among other losses, the unconscious.

Interestingly, this contention bears on our earlier exchange about nonsense. Here's a relevant quotation from Diamond's first introduction to _The Realistic Spirit_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001):

"It is part of the philosophical view of the mind, in Frege and the Tractatus, that there is no nonsensical thought expressed by a nonsensical sentence... the mind has no fuzzes and no logically confused thoughts; there are, on this view, no translations, strictly speaking, of fuzzy or logically confused mental contents; and so far as philosophy deals with the mind, it will not have, internal to its subject matter, any distinction between the fuzzy and the sharply defined, or between the nonsensical and what makes sense. Such remarks as it contains about vagueness or nonsense can belong only to the setting out of what it is not concerned with" (2).

Freud and especially Lacan's wager is precisely that such a conception of the mind disavows the unconscious' domain over the mind or self, its ideological structuring of so-called everyday conscious life. Like your description of Language (capital L) in your most recent post, the conception of the mind targetted by Lacan has an all-too-tidy, pre-post-structuralist kind of closure about it. Capital letters lurk in the background, principally: M. Whereas the account of the mind given in Lacan's later writings would be more accurately mathematized as M (barred).

Simply put, there's a fundamental disagreement between the so-called philosophers and psychoanalysts--and perhaps here we should employ Lacan's hyperbolic self-description, "anti-philosopher"--as to the essence of the mind, as to what ought to count as the mind. And so I worry that the two perspectives cannot be synthesized in a more than merely metaphorical manner without doing violence to the premises, arguments, and intricacies of each perspective.

The Road to Deep Ecology

2009-07-17T00:42:00.007-07:00

"They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage International, 2006), 181.

* * *

In January of this year, Arne Næss, the eccentric Norwegian philosopher responsible for founding the school, or let us say movement, of deep ecology died days before reaching his ninety-seventh year. The fundamental maxim of Næss' articulation of deep ecology, as I understand it, the truth to which its subjects remain subject, which is to say militantly faithful (even in deep ecology's non-militant, non-violent instantiations) is not only that nature must figure into the way in which human beings conceive of the being of their being, but more radically that nature must constitute the place or ground on which that being is so conceived--which is to say, interminably reconceived, according to (its) nature, which is not its own.

Næss' thought testifies to the fact that nature, as it were, cuts through the being of human being. Like a formation of the unconscious, nature incessantly disrupts our attempts to abstract from and thereby escape or conquer it; it disrupts our fantasy, or what John Seed calls (misleadingly, in my opinion) our "psychological disease" that nature exists as a means to the ends of human being(s). Still more like formations of the unconscious--and this is the crucial philosophical, psychological, and ethical point--nature's uncanny, eternal return constitutes a condition of our capacity to truly conceive of the being of human being. Nature's disruption of the fantasy of our privileged place--and all it takes is thirty breathless seconds for nature's place to impend--opens a conceptual and ethical place in which the being of human being may be rethought. It is precisely this space that Næss sought to inhabit, that his thought intended, that his words meant to preserve.

If, as David Rothenberg notes, the illusion of our separation from nature results from human beings' inherently anthropocentric tendencies--for even so-called savages and primitive peoples regularly conducted rituals that reminded them, even forcefully, of their place in nature--then we can see the attraction of Næss' contention that we need not more sustainable or robust ecological ideas, but again, more radically, a new ecological identity: an identity that stands (and falls) as a constant achievement (or failure), an open identity sustained by incessant (re)iteration, along Emersonian or Thoreauvian perfectionist lines. Here deep ecology's affinities with so-called post-modernism should be obvious; but it is the positivity of Naess' account that sets him apart from the gamut of post-identity politics. Not post-humanism; instead, the human reconceived.

An exemplar of this paradigm: Buckminster Fuller. Dymaxion Deployment Units, 4D Dwelling Machines, the Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map (Fuller's attempt to create a map free of distortion), World Game, Cloud Nine, etc. As he put it himself at the age of eighty-three in an interview on Psychic Phenomena: The World Beyond, "I see ecology as intero-generative." Fuller knew that to remain faithful to the humanity of human beings, humans would need to overcome the competitiveness which, he claimed, originated in natural selection but remains pervasively and positively reinforced by our socio-political and economic environment. The unfortunate result is that competition among members of the same species thoroughly determines our present situation. To truly rethink the human would mean to reinforce patterns that bring us beyond natural selection and competition. It would also mean to refuse to play those games that disavow, in the sense that they are detrimental to, human life on a planet situated within a vast, regenerative universe. The game of capitalism, for example.

Recall Thoreau's proclamation that "Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome." Stanley Cavell illuminatingly interprets this and related passages in Walden as professing that it is our nature that is to be overcome. But the modality of our relationship to nature is not, phenomenologically and fundamentally speaking, one of having. Thus, "Society does not have to be overcome but disobeyed... At the same time, nature is the final teacher powerful enough to show us overcoming"; or as he puts it subsequently, "nature is not my habitat, but my exemplar, my dream of habitation"; and finally, "It is through nature that nature is to be overcome" (The Senses of Walden, 43-4).

Think about The Road; McCarthy's recurrent allusions to an invisible organizing principle (quoted above and in a previous post), for example. Žižek would theorize these allusions as exemplary of the Real Real (versus the Symbolic Real or Imaginary Real), like magnetic fields organizing iron shavings into distinct, detectable structures; but transposed by ideology--the transposition is itself ideology--onto the field of the Symbolic and Imaginary, or the state of the situation, to put it in Badiou's terms.

And within this ideological field, imagine the Boy's status as an uncanny and perhaps inherent exception to the world around him, that is, his post-apocalyptic world, the only world he has known. The Boy is borne of the new world and yet belongs to the old world in the sense that he embodies its principles more than the Man (his father), and even more than the Old Man he and his father meet on the road, men who had that world to lose. Is it the absence of the actual loss of the old world that causes or enables the Boy to act according to the principles of the old world? Or is it precisely the virtuality of his loss of the old world, coupled with the actual loss of his mother, that makes his unique, perhaps even inappropriate ethical position possible?

The ethical principles appropriate to the old world should be thought in direct opposition to the ethic of survivalism demanded by the new world. The Boy's refusal to "steal" from those he believes may still be alive, for example, or his insistence that "the good people," those who carry the fire, would not eat other humans even under the most dire circumstances, etc.

In The Road, suicide marks the unbridgeable gap between the principles of the old world and the ethic of survivalism demanded by the new world, an interstice effected by a literal (but always already figurative) apocalypse. Put differently, suicide qua desire marks the subtraction of need from demand.

The Boy's mother could not bear the difference resulting from that subtraction. She could and did, however, bear the Boy. Her giving way on her desire through suicide marks the Boy's existence as codified by the virtual loss of the old world while being simultaneously and inextricably bound up with the actual loss of his mother('s love). Only the Man, the father, can sustain that torsion of desire and bring it to some sort of (Oedipal) resolution; and even then, only through his (symbolic, literal, and figurative) death. Only in this way may the fire be carried onward, down the road.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Boy joins a nuclear family only after the death of his father, who never gave way on, and promised to never give way on, his desire.

Let me be the first to protest that the multiplicity of McCarthy's masterpiece extends far beyond the Lacanian analysis given here.

Nevertheless--and perhaps this qualification discloses my own fetishistic disavowal, my rapture by a specific truth, which is to say transference--The Road's connection with deep ecology is a straightforward one: the environment, or, in Badiou's terms, the situation, determines the boundaries of the appropriate, and thus the inappropriate. But crucially, this is not evidence for moral relativism. Rather, the coordinates and boundaries of a determinate situation mark the limits that may be transcended by an event, in the proper sense of the term, an event whose truth becomes objective through a subject's refusal to give way on its desire. And it is the structure of this refusal, which is to say fidelity, that Næss, Fuller, Thoreau, the Man in McCarthy's story, and, through him--his death, his promise--the Boy, have in common.

The Road

2009-07-07T20:38:00.005-07:00

"The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in the cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage International, 2006), 15.

Courage

2009-06-21T23:11:00.002-07:00

In his characteristically perspicacious reading of Thoreau's Walden (titled, aptly enough, The Senses of Walden), Stanley Cavell cogently describes a writer in meditation as a human being awaiting expression (59). A writer in meditation stands against, or within, the silence of her situation so that she may be found--indeed, nominated--by the words that she will come to mean as she writes them, that is, only as the words become present, or are given to her as words for meaningful expression. Thoreau, for his part, refers to such considered, prophetically asserted words as one's father tongue. But a writer or speaker's words--which Lacan, in his own way following Saussure, calls signifiers--exist before, after, and through the writer. A human being is a being whose utterances presuppose an Other, language, that enables a subject to make sense, or mean, and to mean what it writes or says. Thoreau somewhat deprecatingly designates this necessary aspect of language as one's mother tongue.

To Cavell's description, I would add that such a meditating human being qua human being stands--consciously or not, it makes no difference (for I am attempting to advance a structural, phenomenological claim)--in an uncanny relation to death, an openness to death as intimated by the silence, or absence, which begets the possibility of a human being's meaningful expression, and thus to death as such, through the meditator's traumatic experience of the inevitability of his or her own death, that is, the ultimately absurd status of her expressions. I've not yet adequately tarried with Hegelian dialectics, but this formulation, as posed, seems to exemplify Hegel's conception of a universal particular.

Philosophers, especially the so-called existentialists--most of whom, with the notable exception of Sartre, rejected that moniker outright--have severally referred to the phenomenon which elicits this despair, or "sickness unto death," as Kierkegaard described it, as the nothing (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre) or, alternatively, the void, even if they signify in different, even radically opposed, senses. Thoreau, for his part, expressly emphasizes the failure and hopelessness which result from (serious consideration of) the American Dream.

Such a human being, a writer in meditation, embodies and exhibits the courage to mark his or her situation in light of a traumatic experience in the face of the silence, or absence, that begets, as if through a trace, the writer's own death, the writer's situation vis-a-vis being-toward-death. (Here I employ 'being-towards-death' in a metaphorical and not a strictly Heideggerian sense.)

This kind of courage, which one might refer to as radical courage--for is it not, after all, more than less akin to Jonathan Lear's notion of radical hope?--is inseparable from our uncanny certainty, and yet fetishistic disavowal of, the traumatic fact begotten by the inevitability of one's death: that, as Cavell puts it, apropos of the American Dream, "we are not free, not whole, and not new, and we know this and are on a downward path of despair because of it."

Later in The Senses of Walden, Cavell argues that "Human forms of feeling, objects of human attraction, our reactions constituted [e.g.] in art, are as universal and necessary, as objective, as revelatory of the world, as the forms of the law of physics."

This, precisely, is the wager or purview of phenomenology: the essence or particular givenness (Marion) of forms of experience--that is, what makes an experience this sort (species) of experience, versus another. A Husserlian phenomenologist, moreover, would not only claim, as Cavell does, that such forms of experience do exist, but more pertinently that they are constituted in and through intentional acts of consciousness, acts which direct consciousness to objects in the world by virtue of ideal contents, that is, abstract entities of the sort referenced in well-formed, true propositions.

Furthermore, according to Husserl, it is the sense and not merely the meaning of propositions that reference ideal contents. If the form of thinking is propositional (if thoughts are propositions) and if the form of communication is sentential (even in so-called non-linguistic communication), then the concept of sense would apply to the domain of thought while the concept of meaning would apply to the related but secondary domain of communication. But how are we to understand meaning as opposed to, and yet through, sense?

Husserl's answer: empathy. Empathy presupposes human separateness, the fact that human beings are not and will never be whole. The fantasy of union, e.g. of the kind desperately reiterated in marriage ceremonies, is just that: a fantasy--and, Lacan would add, the fundamental fantasy structuring the subject's relation to the object cause of desire ($ <> a). Uncannily enough, this desire for union surfaces in (Cavell's reading of) Thoreau's words. For Walden, Cavell attests, its "pins and paradoxes, its fracturing of idiom and twisting of quotation, its drones of fact and flights of impersonation--all are to keep faith at once with the mother and the father, to unite them, and to have the word born in us" (16).

The Lacanian nail to drive home here is that this fantasy of union is precisely the obverse of the fantasy mentioned by Cavell in The Senses of Walden's previous paragraph, namely, "current fantasies according to which human beings in our time have such things to say to one another that they must invent something beyond the words we know in order to convey them" (ibid.).

Let us be more plain: each of us will die, and each of us will die alone. And yet, to write this is already to have fallen subject to disavowal, to the drive. The fantasy of union and the fantasy of a beyond of language go hand in hand, even if the latter is somewhat more honest about or faithful to the absurdity of our condition.

And yet, we reach another fundamental fact when we consider that our absolute phenomenological separation from other human beings conditions our ability to love, to communicate, and to connect with those beings. If we have any consolation, it is this: we have each other as others. We live together as we die alone.

December 11, 2008

2009-06-19T15:49:00.002-07:00

"Tell me the difference between being and existence (please?)."

Being qua being is a more fundamental notion: existence is a category of being. (At least, this is what Badiou argues.) Accordingly, something that is (on the horizon of being) doesn't necessarily exist sensu stricto.

An object, for example, is a being, and we say that it exists. But our imprecise way of speaking obscures the fact that objects, and arguably (according to Heidegger) the world as such--that is, beings-in-the-world--exist for us. Not in the sense that without us, no "objective" world would exist. But 'existence' in this precise sense means to delimit a specifically human kind of being, one riven to and by its existence in the world. Being, on the other hand, is both more fundamental and general: beings-in-the-world are (in the world) just as much as we are (in the world).

Lacan's conception of the unconscious might also prove to be a useful example: it is without existing. For when unconscious formations (symptoms, jokes, slips of the tongue) are known as such--that is, as unconscious--they come to exist in consciousness. So while they never cease being, the formations of the unconscious exist only by virtue of being formations, and precisely as formations of an unconscious that is but does not exist. This account lacks requisite philosophical rigor, but it's a gloss and counts enough for that.