Who Killed Homer?

While I haven’t read any of Victor Davis Hanson’s work, an article in the Boston Globe caught my eye. Maybe it was the reference to where I grew up, the San Joaquin Valley, as a cultural wasteland. Maybe it was the call to a return to Greek values—I’ve been reading Plato’s Euthydemus the last few days.

Hanson is a neo-con who has the ear of G.W. and Cheney, and a history of damning postmodern theory in favor of a return to classical values of citizenship. The eristic values of warlike behavior, that is. The article puts a certain spin on Hanson’s ideas: the values he wishes to promote are those of the yeoman farmer—not just the values of Plato and Aristotle and the Athenian Greeks. Hanson has some commonality with some of the critics of academia in blogging circles, calling universities “rotten institutions.”

I find this stuff really scary. One thing I dearly loved about the romantics is that they shared a rejection of classical values of celebrating war. Blake, in particular, was sure that the adherence to classical values was at the root of the world’s misery. Blake thought we needed new models. What drove me to muse about this was a post by Gary Sauer-Thompson (whose site is down right now, or I’d link it) regarding the role of the humanities in teaching citizenship. I tend to blame a lot of things on Greek values, and I read them using a variation of Blake’s “infernal method.” I side sympathetically with the adversaries of Socrates, and marvel at Plato’s ability to wrangle them using eristic methods, while damning the warlike, eristic nature of sophistic methods.

The schism between vocational education and the humanities was promoted by Plato—I think of the problem that Gary explores as just another piece of fallout from our classical heritage that is still glowing. Socrates states the case plainly:

In reality these persons who partake in both are worse than both for each thing which politics and philosophy are important for, and although they are really third, they try to be thought first. (306 e)

It was Plato that killed Homer, not “modern” life. The values of a well trained citizenry were thought best furthered by a separation between the aesthetic and the practical. Reading the interpretation of people like Hanson, I wonder if Socrates wasn’t right. But then I catch myself, and realize that I do still believe that if the average citizen has a better understanding of aesthetic practice, they will be able to make better decisions. Separating art and politics is always attractive—and yet ultimately dangerous. There was no mythic unity between art and politics in the classical era. It’s the same old battle, just on a new battle ground.

Property

Akma wrote some interesting things regarding privacy and online education today. It’s a big issue, and something that I find myself arguing about constantly with the powers-that-be who work with courseware at our university. They use WebCT, which I am about to be forced to learn. I hate almost everything about it. I’ve only used it once as a student—not as an instructor—and I found its interface to be clunky, confusing, confining and generally chaotic. The first thing I ever posted into a WebCT shell was a rant about how scholarship should be free— there was no reason for a university to hide behind password-protection when it should be promoting community and sociality.

Of course, there are reasons why universities are quick to embrace these crappy commercial pieces of omnibus software. I suspect they think that if they have to pay for software it must be better. Standardizing software also makes it possible to educate instructors on how to operate it. There is a large amount of resistance among long-suffering tenured faculty regarding learning any new technology. Instead of promoting a range of tools, it’s simpler to just promote one. But the major reason, I think, is the idea that someone might steal the work which an instructor invests in developing a course to sell it to someone else. Education is, after all, a business too. It’s a matter of protecting your property.

Secondly, instructors that teach sensitive courses feel that a private environment promotes greater ease for the students who should feel shielded by a sort of covenant between themselves and the institution, and themselves and the instructor. Their work is thought to be more freely expressive (especially in the case of writing courses) when they have the chance to fail privately, rather than publicly. A private environment is thought to be better for people who are not ready to “solo” in the big bad world of discourse.

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The Allusive Butterfly

I was standing on the edge of highway 10 when I saw the sign in front of the shop: The Allusive Butterfly. Not the elusive butterfly, but rather the allusive one. I have no idea what they sell. However, it certainly sounds girly to me. Perhaps its just my dirty mind. But it made me think of the problems of allusion.

Allusion is always local. It is connected to our place in time. It doesn’t translate well, without a lot of work. It’s the same problem faced by humor—if you have to explain a joke, it isn’t as funny anymore. I think a lot of poetry suffers from this problem, and it is unavoidable. I remember the most irritating response of failed literature students who seemed to dominate the rhetoric department when I first started there: “I can’t stand it when teachers explain literature. Isn’t my opinion just as important as all that critical junk?” Like Wordsworth’s famous observation, do we murder to dissect?

I don’t think so. I enjoyed taking things apart to better understand them. When you understand the allusions in a particular poem or novel, it seems to me that it should deepen your understanding of it. The power of those allusions, in the richest of poetry, cannot be reduced to some sort of metadata to help someone understand. Metadata could tell you the apparent subject, but not perhaps the real meaning, or tangible worth of a work of literature.

You have to know the context for the construction of the deep allusive meanings. They can be quite elusive, and not easily trapped. And it is not illusive, residing only in the minds of literary scholars. It is a tangible dimension to literature—its richest dimension, the dimension of relationship to not only the words that appear on the page, but to the words that echo through the memory of a culture.

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Modeling the World

Tom requested further explanation of the modeling of worldview, from the perspective of Thomas Sebeok’s explanation of the relationship between language and semiotics. Rereading him carefully, this is the best I can come up with.

There is the world-as-it-is. This would be a sort of zero-state, inaccessible in its complete form to any organic creature. You could call it world zero (Sebeok doesn’t really address this—this is an extrapolation based on his exploration of the next level).

Then there is the world-as-perceived. A sort of world one. Sebeok cites F. Jacob to explain the world, from the point of view of biology:

As Jacob has explained, ‘every organism is so equipped as to obtain a certain perception of the outside world. Each species thus lives in its own unique sensory world, to which other species may be partially or totally blind . . . What an organism detects in an environment is always but a part of what is around. And this part differs, according to the organism.’ The world-as-perceived depends crucially on each organism’s total sensorium and on the way its brain integrates sensory with motor events. But inclusive behavioral resources of any organism must be reasonably aligned with its model of ‘reality’ (Natur), that is, the system of signs its nervous system is capable of assembling—or it will surely be doomed, by natural selection, to extinction. (emphasis mine).

Hence, the primary model of behavior for any organism is a “system of signs” which is tied to its senses, but not limited to it. This model avoids the problem (in the case of humans) of declaring sensory perception the primary model for our world. It is a more complex matter than that. And this also establishes the certainty that other creatures do indeed have a world view.

In this way, he justifies the idea that language can only be a secondary modeling system. Only humans use verbal language, so for Sebeok this establishes a sort of world two modeled by language in addition to the sub-system of signs. Culture then, is what he considers to be world three, built from language and the subconscious level of signs previously mentioned.

I hope this helps clear up any confusion. I don’t know enough about Heidegger to compare them meaningfully. It seems to me that what we are doing is constructing models of reality in terms of this secondary model of language, and thus we are limited by it. But that does not mean that other layers don’t exist. As Locke suggests, if we could conceive of things in terms of more primary signs, then a new mode of thinking might be revealed.

It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole.

Something has been bothering me. First, Baldur says: “Culture forms language. Language is a symptom, not a cause.” and then he ups the ante:

“The discussion fails to recognize that language is a cultural product.”

“A Weapon.”

One might expect a rhetorician to agree with this without thinking, because skilled rhetors can wield language like a gun. But taken from another point of view, it’s when the language stops that the real shooting starts. It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the bleeding hole. Culture’s primary weapon is not language, but ostracism.

At first, debating this seemed a bit like entering into an argument over the chicken and the egg. It’s rather pointless.

However, it seems that the position of language in the dispute over the formation of culture (and vice versa) is worth talking about, if for no other reason than to avoid another sort of hole— the trite dismissal of our social tool as merely a cultural sneeze over which we have no power to shape or change. It’s easy to think of language as simply a matter for linguistics, when in reality it’s much more than that. As a photographer, I’ve often thought of myself as working with a language that reaches beyond words. Photographs are signs (or bullets) too. I wish they could make us smarter, but I’m not so sure. However, I’m pretty certain that language has a deep impact.

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Hammers and Crowbars

Methinks the Tutor has mistaken a crowbar for a hammer. Deconstruction is not morally constructive. While advertised as a magnifying glass, I will freely admit it becomes more like a funhouse mirror when employed by some. However, by ripping apart a house that was already coming apart at every nail, it opens up the possibility of a more defensible postmodern ethics. That hammer is being carefully swung by people like Zigmunt Baumann. He cautions against considering the topic (postmodernity) as a resource for its own explanation: “to describe a prevalent behavior does not mean making a moral statement: the two procedures are as different in postmodern times as they used to be in pre-postmodern” (Postmodern Ethics 3).

Once the shaky foundation is exposed, only then can we begin to examine the nature of injustice. Baumann suggests, at least as I read him, that a world built upon the ideas of “pure evil” or “pure good” simply cannot be moral. Every moral choice is filled with aporia, not certainty. Accepting this is the first step towards becoming moral. Morality cannot be dictated, or legislated—it must be negotiated. And it must confront the possibility that man is neither inherently good nor evil. Man is inherently ambivalent to moral choice. Unlike the crowbar approach of de Man and the first wave of theorists, Bauman offers a hammer:

The humankind-wide moral unity is thinkable, if at all, not as the end-product of globalizing the domain of political powers with ethical pretensions, but as the utopian horizon of deconstructing the “without us the deluge” claims of nation-states, nations-in-search-of-the-state, traditional communities, and communities-in-search-of-a-tradition, tribes and neo-tribes, as well as their appointed spokesmen and prophets; as the remote (and, so be it, utopian) prospect of the emancipation of the autonomous moral self and vindication of its moral responsibility; as a prospect of the self facing up, without being tempted to escape, to the inherent and incurable ambivalence in which that responsibility casts it and which is already its fate, still waiting to be recast into its destiny. (15)

Some theorists and philosophers have argued that morality is an obsolete concept (both modern and postmodern). Some haven’t. The satiric reduction that places them all as a hammer with no anvil, ignores that though postmodernism is filled with tools of dubious utility, some of these tools may shore up a sagging moral foundation by ripping away the dead wood.

Hardcore Linguistics

I’m too busy to say too much about it, but I was happy to see Tom defend Chomsky. A hardcore advocate of Chomsky taught the first course in linguistics I ever took. While he just was not able to answer most of the questions I had, eventually, I figured out why. It’s because Chomsky’s transformational grammar does not address the question of how we make meaning. It is not linguistic reductionism in the sense that many people think it is. It is purely a syntactic reduction (universal grammar, not universal world view!).

Chomsky’s approach to linguistics is mathematical, precise, and limited. It draws the line at making any conjecture about meaning. It describes the way that ambiguity creeps into language amazingly well, but it offers no real way of dealing with that ambiguity. Chomsky fought to fix linguistics as a science, and sought to separate it completely from hermeneutic analysis. We were specifically instructed not to talk about meaning in this class. It was all about the math. I don’t know much about Pinker, because I am more interested in other things now. One class in transformational grammar was enough.

The linguist I am working with now is primarily focused on discourse pragmatics. This isn’t about the math, it’s about the meaning. According to Chomsky, this isn’t linguistics at all. We’ve never discussed Sapir-Whorf. Instead, we’ve discussed Lev Vygotsky at length. It amounts to a similar thing, approached from a different field—developmental psychology. But it has profound implications for sociolinguistics. Even if the underlying deep structure (grammar) of languages is universal, this does not mean that the value systems of languages are universal. This is not a leap that Chomsky would make. Language is more than grammar, but in Chomsky’s view assigning value (or meaning) cannot be explained scientifically. This area of study belongs to psychology and sociology, which to Chomsky are arts rather than sciences. As far as I can tell, when Sapir-Whorf proposes that language determines culture or Vygotsky proposes that language becomes thought, they are speaking about far more than grammar. They are talking about value systems.

While structure is a big part of creating meaning, Chomsky’s hardcore scientific approach to linguistics does not address that part. That is a matter for linguistic philosophy (not science), and sociology. It is possible to agree both with Chomsky, and Sapir-Whorf. It just depends, as Tom pointed out, on your definitions of language and linguistics— how hardcore your view of the role of science in linguistics is.

co~l~lapse

I’ve had a thing about threes for a while. The curious thing about threes is that three points define a space. Two points can only define a line. Binary oppositions and binary thinking leads to an either/or sorting behavior. If you have three points, you can create a space for something more complex rather than be locked into strictly sorting.

However, sorters always come along and try to collapse that space. But there’s always a remainder, ideas that don’t fit into the either/or distinction. A great example of that is the rhetorical triangle that I tend to write about. This collapse can be sorted out a number of ways—equivalences that seem innocent enough, and yet form an insidious step backward into binary thinking. Depending on the context or speaker, the rhetorical triangle can be expressed in a number of ways.

The fundamental distinction made by Aristotle was a sorting of three appeals—ethos, pathos, and logos. These constitute the core of rhetoric. Ethos can be collapsed as a Hegelian synthesis of logos and pathos. Society is constituted by the logos of cultural norm, and the individual rests firmly rooted in pathos— in a sophistic view. Society is composed of both simultaneously.

Social constructionism tends to discard pathos, and focus on the cultural norm. Individualism tends to discard the norm, and focus on pathos. Another way of looking at it is to say that this trinity represents mind (logos), body (pathos), and soul(ethos). In a sense, there is a move by rationalists to discard emotion (body) in favor of mind. Then the equation becomes reduced to a binary—mind forges society, not emotion. This is easy to argue with. Ethos is irreducible to either mind or body. That’s why there are three points in any discussion of rhetoric. The reduction by equivalence just doesn’t work (for me at least).

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Out of Joint

*I wrote this essay in about two hours this afternoon to demonstrate how a descriptive essay could be built from around ten minutes of Internet research. Nothing fabulous, just an example for my students.

A car passing by woke me up. I heard the sound and opened my eyes to see headlights on the pavement from a worm’s eye view. I looked at my watch and saw it was three a.m. I tried to stand up. It wasn’t right.

Under normal circumstances, the heel bone, called the calcaneous, contacts the ground and flexes against the talus stretching the Achilles tendon. Calcaneous means heel in ancient Greek, and just above it rests the talus, a small bone in the center of the foot that acts like the center of a U-joint in the lowest part of the ankle. But talus is also used to refer to the pile of rocks at the base of a cliff. The second meaning seemed closer to me, as I collapsed again to the ground, unable to support my own weight.

“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” A bad television commercial from years ago came rushing back in my head. If it wasn’t so embarrassing, I might have laughed. I moved my ankle back and forth. It can’t be broken, I thought, I must have sprained it somehow. I couldn’t remember. The last thing I remembered was waking up on the ground. My ankle seemed oddly disconnected from my body. It was clearly the weak link in the process of standing up. I could move it though, so I was sure it wasn’t broken.

The Dutch anatomist Verheyden first named the “Achilles heel” when he dissected his own amputated leg. According to myth, Achilles’ mother tried to make him strong by dipping him in the river Styx. She immersed him completely, except for one of his heels— leaving him vulnerable to attack there. But that’s not the only version of the myth. According to Homer, the great hero was vulnerable because of his excessive pride. My pride welled up after I fell down. The pain seemed secondary to the thought of being found helpless on the pavement of the parking lot.

I contemplated crawling the hundred yards back to my apartment. As I laboriously tested the limits of my limbs, another car passed by. Every time my tibia, the large bone at the center of my leg, the drive shaft that moves the leg forward, contacted the pavement it began to pipe a song of pain. Appropriate, really, because the word tibia is actually taken from a word for flute. Six flutes were found in China, the same year of my collapse, dating from 7,000 to 9,000 years old made from the leg-bones of cranes. Something was wrong, and the song of my leg told me so. I was reduced to crawling like a worm. After managing to travel the scant four-feet to the end of my car, I was in a cold sweat. It could have been shock; I’m not sure. I passed out. When I woke up, I looked at my watch again. It was 3:15.

It was at least thirty feet to the other side of the parking lot. I wondered if I would be squashed like a can on the pavement if I passed out again before reaching the other side. It was a tough decision, but my pride wouldn’t accept any other choice. I had to use my arms because any attempt to touch my leg to the ground created pain so intense I could not stay conscious. But I made it, and passed out on the other side on the comfortable grass.

I repeated the performance several times, finally arriving at my apartment by 4:30 a.m. where I slept in my own bed. When I woke up several hours later, I realized I needed to call for help. At the hospital, I finally found out what was wrong.

The primary ankle joint is composed of three bones: the talus, the tibia, and the fibula. My fibula, the small thin bone that makes up the other side of the primary ankle joint had sprung apart. Both my tibia and fibula were fractured and occupying different zip codes, leaving the talus a useless stone above my heel. It took thirteen screws and a long titanium strip to bring them back together, including a screw an inch and a half long to convince my fibula to stay in place and form an intact ankle joint. The word fibula actually means pin or clasp, and like a sprung safety pin, mine just wasn’t doing the job without help. Because of this experience, I received a crash course in the anatomy of the ankle joint. The doctor, though helpful, refused to say when I could walk again.

Three months later when they took the massive screw out the joint stayed together. Gradually, I was able to walk. My Achilles tendon had shrunken to a hard-knotted mass, and it seemed to take forever to get it stretched back into place. Only after I began to walk did the doctor tell me that it wasn’t a given. Many people do not recover from this sort of injury. I suppose for me, it was a matter of pride.

What it’s not

Aristotle is really clear in delineating the properties which may be used to describe something in Topics. The motive behind Topics is to identify the constituent parts of an argument. Arguments are derived from propositions that have both a subject and a predicate. If the predicate is interchangeable with the subject, then the proposition is a definition, otherwise it is a property. These properties are enumerated as quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, activity, and passivity.

Having a variety of ESL students in both of my classes, I think it will be a good idea to review many of the descriptive words used to list these properties. I hate flowery description, myself, and there are usually more than enough properties for any given subject to provide a good description without resorting to them. That’s my biggest fear about teaching beginning composition— the “writerly” types who want to load up every page with a bunch of fru-fru nonsense. It’s always best to start with the literal, before you try to start building up chops. Literal description begins with simple properties. The first step towards knowledge begins with arriving at propositions such as these. However, in order to evaluate statements, properties must be compared with the subject to test their scope, their similarity, and their differences from the subject.

It occurred to me last night that it is easy to get stumped when trying to describe something— watching my students scratch their heads when I asked them to make a list of things about themselves to share with the rest of the class made me wonder about ways to overcome that mental-block. I decided that the best strategy I could think of to describe something when you run out of things to say regarding what it is— is to start enumerating the things that it is not.

To that end, I’ve decided to use this fragment of writing by Tom Robbins to illustrate one way of overcoming that block. It also serves as a nice bridge between the literal and the metaphoric, the territory I’ll be exploring next week. It’s always a challenge to come up with ideas for texts that aren’t hard— I like things that are hard, a fascination that not many college freshmen share. Hopefully, this won’t be too challenging to start out with.

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