Not Usual

What then was the vision of those demigods who aimed only at what is greatest in writing and scorned detailed accuracy? This above all: that Nature has judged man a creature of no mean or ignoble quality, but, as if she were inviting us to some great gathering, she has called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of her games and eager competitors; and she has therefore from the first breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves. Thus the whole universe is not enough to satisfy the speculative intelligence of human thought; our ideas often pass beyond the limits that confine us.

Look at life from all sides and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, and you will soon realize that is what we are born for. So it is by some natural instinct that we admire, not the small streams, clear and useful as they are, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all the Ocean. The little fire we kindle for ourselves keeps clear and steady, yet we do not therefore regard it with more amazement than the fires of Heaven, which are often darkened, or think it more wonderful than the craters of Etna in eruption, hurling up rocks and whole hills from their depths and sometimes shooting forth rivers of that earthborn, spontaneous fire.

But on all such matters I would only say this, that what is useful or necessary is easily obtained by man; it is always the unusual that wins our wonder.

Longinus, On the Sublime 35

The Niggerization of America

I’ve always had a fondness for Cornell West. I’m really interested in his next book if this excerpt is any indication:

Since 9/11 we have experienced the niggerization of America, and as we struggle against the imperialistic arrogance of the us-versus-them, revenge-�driven policies of the Bush administration, we as a blues nation must learn from a blues people how to keep alive our deep democratic energies in dark times rather than resort to the tempting and easier response of militarism and authoritarianism.

No democracy can flourish against the corruptions of plutocratic, imperial forces—or withstand the temptations of militarism in the face of terrorist hate—without a citizenry girded by these three moral pillars of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. The hawks and proselytizers of the Bush administration have professed themselves to be the guardians of Amer�ican democracy, but there is a deep democratic tradition in this country that speaks powerfully against their nihilistic, antidemocratic abuse of power and that can fortify genuine democrats today in the fight against imperialism. That democratic fervor is found in the beacon calls for imaginative self�creation in Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the dark warnings of imminent self�destruction in Herman Melville, in the impassioned odes to democratic possibility in Walt Whitman. It is found most urgently and poignantly in the prophetic and powerful voices of the long black freedom struggle—from the democratic eloquence of Frederick Douglass to the soaring civic sermons of Martin Luther King Jr., in the wrenching artistic honesty of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, and in the expressive force and improvisatory genius of the blues/jazz tradition, all forged in the night side of America and defying the demeaning strictures of white supremacy. The greatest intellectual, moral, political, and spiritual resources in America that may renew the soul and preserve the future of American democracy reside in this multiracial, rich democratic heritage.

I find this a fine use of a multimodal argument. Of course West’s use of “blues” as a unifying metaphor is open to debate. I wonder if Bush’s hardcore constituency of the “haves” and the “have-mores” are qualified to sing the blues? I must confess that one of the most proficient blues guitarists I’ve heard (Alex Shultz) was a rich heir, and it didn’t seem to impede his playing.

Angels as Heuristic

Spent most of the afternoon watching a DVD of Wings of Desire. It had been several years since I’ve seen it and I wanted to have a copy around the house. It arrived months ago; I accidentally stumbled on it while sorting through some audio CDS. I started listening to music again, for the first time in probably a year, several days ago. I’m enjoying this brief moment of “freedom” before I start the next leg of the academic stuff. I’d been wanting to share Wings of Desire with my partner for a long time.

The information provided by the interview “extra” on the disc gave me a lot of food for thought. I didn’t know that they sort of made-up this movie as they went along. It’s sort of a hypertext in the first bit, full of nothing more than moments of beauty gathered through eavesdropping. I remember that I didn’t’ care for the movie that much when I first saw it—the lead-filled Teutonic spiritual pronouncements, particularly as the arc of the film developed, fell flat on me. But I was obsessed by the “archangel of storytelling”— Homer. That bit just resonated, particularly the idea that when we lose our capacity to enjoy storytelling that the childhood of civilization is over. But the central theme of “guardian angels” developed (according to Wenders) primarily as a heuristic device to explore Berlin from a perspective outside of time and space.

It was weird to turn this corner today. I haven’t gotten much pleasure from music in a long time—so in the effort to try to recapture it I turned to Frank Zappa. When I went to Oklahoma earlier in the week, I took several volumes of the You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore series (I’m sure the irony would have archangel Frank laughing pretty loud about now). The later live version of “Oh No’ really stuck in my head:

Oh no I don’t believe it
You say that you think you know the meaning of love
You say love is all we need
You say with your love you can change
All of the fools, all of the hate
I think you’re probably out to lunch

Continue reading “Angels” →

Escher Sentences

I didn’t read the assault on architectural deconstruction on 2 Blowhards in great detail. I wasn’t familiar with the people being discussed, and was quite busy with other things. However, as I read the counterpoint to its criticism I spotted some sentences that really bothered me:

If we consider deconstruction as a linguistic and iconic posture, then this explains why its supporters cannot come up with tangible principles that are worth defending. There is nothing there other than being conditioned to speak, write, and view reality in a certain peculiar manner.

The infinite regress involved here isn’t quite the same as the Escher sentences discussed on Language Log, but it shares an interesting affinity. If deconstruction is merely a “linguistic and iconic posture” then what makes the argument against it anything more than an alternate posture? The mind reels. As Geoff Pullum said:

The issue as I see it is not about whether the example type is ungrammatical, or whether it is merely semantically incoherent, or why. The puzzle is about why people initially don’t notice there is anything wrong with it at all.

Continue reading “Escher Sentences” →

Presumption

I can’t stop thinking about the concept of definitions, and the strategy presumed by Hill and Helmer in my previous post. Scholarly activity, as defined in their view would be an inductive approach. Data is collated, and examined for possible categories (definitions) which are based entirely on the data set. I find this assumption to be deeply flawed—the design of the experiment (or the choice of which texts to study) is deeply implicated in a presumption that these texts merit study. Their study begins with at least a minimally categorical assumption that these texts are related. For example, if we want to study the aspects of women’s writing in the 19th century, we have immediately defined the 19th century as a permissible category, “women” as a distinct category of authorship, etc. Definitions are usually a priori not post hoc. Pure induction is a mythic construct which promotes a notion of impartiality which does not exist.

On the other hand, the application of an existing theoretical framework to a set of predefined texts cannot be productive as a deductive enterprise either. Data is smoothed to point out congruencies or disparities with the framework. Usually, such an enterprise is selectively targeted at supporting the existing framework as an acceptable model. But this implies that the category definitions are neat, that the system is closed, and whatever knowledge obtained in this fashion tends to be rote.

A better way of looking at it, I think, is to think of these theories as guesses. We start from the available frameworks, stretching or modifying them based on experiences with the texts themselves. The guesses are honed and refined, but to presume that we have no initial point of departure for them seems ludicrous. Theories are viable if and only if they more adequately describe the texts in question, with flexible definitions that can be transported outside the experimental frame to be tested and refined within other frameworks. Peirce labeled this form of reasoning as abduction.

But then, I guess it’s tougher to sell the idea that scholarship consists of a highly refined form of guesswork. I suspect we all negotiate the world in this way, by “guessing” what the best thing to do is. Separating the world of scholarship from the real world by implying that it is somehow more “pure” doesn’t seem that productive to me at all. We all start out with notions. It’s best to just lay them on the table, and drop the whole charade that we merely invented them as we went along.

Enthymeme

Jonathon Delacour’s exposition regarding “the answer” left one commentator wondering what the question was. The entry talks about something that I’ve thought a lot about—the propositional content of images, or word/image combinations. Many critics focus on the idea of images as “subjects” which are then complemented by descriptive predicates. Delacour’s example really demonstrates just why this sort of thinking does not address the nature of images as propositional arguments.

What Jonathon really seems to be after is the “missing premise” of this particular argument. Most advertising is constructed by using a strategy of rhetorical argument known as the enthymeme. Needless to say, there is a lot of scholarship about enthymemes. The simple version is that enthymemes are truncated syllogisms: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. The enthymeme follows the same pattern, although it leaves either the major or minor premise unstated.

There is a cultural premise implicit in the images attached to advertising that underwrites the “claim” of the ad. One simple example is found in fashion and cigarette advertising, where a fashionable image is accompanied by a subtle product identification. The major premise is that the people in the advertisement are worth emulating. They use the product. Therefore, the claim is that you should too. All of this is based on the presupposition that some tenuous identification between consumer and consumptive model can be made with the audience. Does buying a product used by a sports figure make the audience more “athletic”? These claims are usually ridiculous at best, and rely on the invisibility of their premises to be effective. Thus, Jonathon’s difficulty in isolating any premise, or in the case of his example, a question which the textual proposition of the sign claims to answer, is understandable.

What I find really interesting about Jonathon’s example is the way that a person can read a variety of polysemous propositions into the “premises” contained within the image—the expanse of sea and sky could be the desolation of human existence, or the infinitude of God. In the first case, it would be a “minor” premise, or perhaps in Toulminan argument, a warrant. In the second case (the reading which Jonathon offers) it would be a form of “backing,” or a major premise overriding all—God is good. The problematic proposition of the girl who seems somewhat aloof in her coupling, Jonathon takes to be the minor premise: “human love is fleeting.” It could also be a major premise—we all want to be loved. The multiple nature of the possible arguments assures a greater “connection”—or buy in—to the implicit premises which are matched with the claim: “Jesus is the answer.”

Advertising works well because we do not examine the premises—we merely connect with them in a nearly unconscious way. It’s reasoning may be weak, but its results are certainly effective. The increasingly “open” nature of advertising messages speaks to a radical increase in visual literacy—the ability to read our cultural aspirations and desires into images—and perhaps a commensurate decrease in our ability to critically understand what we are being sold.

Part of this, I think, is that we are not encouraged to think of pictures as propositions, only as “subjects.”

Agency

A lot of the discussions I listened to/participated in last week had to do with the problem of choosing adequate/appropriate vocabularies to describe phenomena. The problem is particularly intense in the case of the metaphors we choose to use in our descriptive vocabularies. Catching up on reading blogs, My Irony’s entry Info wants to be free (and searchable) is a good example.

The commonplace “Knowledge wants to be free” is not only absurd, but is completely untenable. John Logie pointed out that it attributes an agency to an inanimate object. Even allowing that, it seems that knowledge (as a commodity that drives a substantial portion of our economy) wants to be hoarded, protected, exploited, and used to generate profit. It’s dangerous to adopt such sayings because they are inherently reductive of complex problems. I think it was Lessig that spent a great deal of time arguing that knowledge as a commodity is unique in its inexhaustible nature.

Knowledge doesn’t really get “used up” as other commodities do; it actually increases in power as it spreads. Thus, while “knowledge wants to be free” is an interesting sentiment, it does not describe the phenomena in a remotely meaningful fashion. To get to the heart of the problem, we need a new metaphoric slogan. Much like the concept of “virtue,” open access to information multiplies its power. It needs a new economic model to make such dissemination seem worthwhile. Perhaps it’s viral. A virus has no “intention” beyond survival; it is in that sense alone that knowledge can be said to “want” anything.

I stumbled on a similarly meaningful critique in Jouke Kleerebezem’s piece on social software. How can software be social? Only real agents (the people who use such software) can utilize social software to make connections. The software itself has no agency, no desire, no utility outside the consideration of the people who use it. The attribution of even a metaphoric “agency” to such projects obscures the true complexity of its aims. Software (or knowledge) is neither transparent nor motivated. These things are created by people, for people—the only agents that can really possess intent. However, dominance of metaphors of attributing human agency to inanimate objects is apparent even in Jouke’s piece:

All performance tools are developed to improve and refine the purpose they serve. Tools are functional. They learn from their function and vice versa they inform that function. Only if you look at hammering with dedication, concentration and understanding of the physical co-ordination it demands, you will be well informed to design a hammer.

Tools do not learn from their function. People learn. A sentence which declares agency without an agent is passive. We need active metaphors, not passive ones, to strengthen our descriptive vocabulary. Just what those are, I’m really not sure.

Wide and Deep

I’ve been oddly fascinated by the excerpts from After Theory by Terry Eagleton published in the Guardian. I can see the basis for them, but no matter how many times that I read the conclusion of the excerpted sections, I just don’t see anything resembling an alternative.

Postmodernism is obsessed by the body and terrified of biology. The body is a wildly popular topic in US cultural studies – but this is the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece of matter that sickens and dies. The creature who emerges from postmodern thought is centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive. He sounds more like a Los Angeles media executive than an Indonesian fisherman. Postmodernists oppose universality, and well they might: nothing is more parochial than the kind of human being they admire.

I’m troubled by Eagleton’s use of “parochial” to describe the postmodernist hero. Really? How so? Most of the leading figures saddled with that title are polymaths. They challenge the entire nature of what we call disciplines. The “terror” over biology seems overstated. Reading Butler, for example, the question of biological essence is dealt with in a detailed manner. Her conclusion, as I recall, is that there are no (stable) answers to be found in biology. The real problem is the way that bodies are socially constructed; the solution is a sort of hedonistic performance that subverts those social assumptions. Gender radicalism does not flee in terror from the body, but confronts the socialized terror of the body that has been institutionalized by gender conventions. These conventions permeate all levels of society. Parochial? How so? I suspect my quandary is answered in the next paragraph:

Continue reading “After Theory” →

A Bevy of Binaries

I just wanted to make a quick note of some oppositions flying through my head:

• Milton was universalist and individuated.

• Blake was particular and de-individuated

• Kant was universalist and de-individuated.

• Shelley was universalist and de-individuated.

• Nietzsche was particular and individuated.

• Foucault was particular and de-individuated.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do more with this later— these gross generalizations set up an overview of the arc I’ve been exploring. What all these thinkers (except Foucault) share is an emphasis on spiritual rather than corporeal freedom. For now, I’ve got to get to work on Foucault and Semiotics.

Penitent (n.)

Joseph Duemer has been musing about writing as therapy. One of his students proposed that a writer must have an unspecified, though specific relationship with language in order for writing to be therapeutic. Scientific research suggests otherwise. I encountered some of it while taking a class in “Writing and Healing.” My interest in the class was purely theoretical. Like Duemer, I have a certain hesitation in declaring that writing to sort out trauma is universally productive. However, the research of Joseph Pennebaker which I wrote about during the class is worth bringing up, as is the link contributed by a reader in response to that entry to Pennebaker’s homepage.

The interesting thing about this thread right now for me is that Pennebaker’s work undercuts a lot of Foucault’s argument in History of Sexuality. Pennebaker claims that we have a physiological need to confess. Foucault argues that the apparatus of the confessional is genealogically related to the construction of our concept of identity. Confession, far from being a natural compulsion, is a societal mandate in Western nations. I had some difficulty with that the last time I read the book.

I’m still not sure, but I suspect that the answer isn’t either/or. However, the healing relationship poised by Pennebaker is not contingent on written expression. Therefore, one need not write out their confession, or even share it with another, for it to have a positive effect of releasing tension. The basic idea is that being penitent releases some of the energy that the body expends suppressing thoughts of trauma. Other theory I read at the time goes deeper, suggesting that the temporal ordering of trauma (centered in the amygdala) provided by linguistic transfer (by nature temporal, whether spoken or written) is of great importance in the assimilation of emotion.

The apparatus of the confessional proposed by Foucault does exist. However, this does not mean that we are not by nature penitent as an apparatus of self-healing. The ordering of experience is a fascinating phenomenon. There is no evidence to suggest that the impulse to confess might not come from both directions— both within, and without. And I would disagree with any suggestion that it requires a certain “competence” to be effective. Obviously, if it were a life-skill that could be codified and taught, someone would be teaching it already. I think we all set our own boundaries, and make it up as we go along (excepting Catholics, of course).