Wittgensteinian Wednesday

281. ...It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.

282. "But in a fairy tale the pot too can see and hear!" (Certainly; but it can also talk.)

"But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."—It is not as simple as that. Is it false or nonsensical to say that a pot talks? Have we a clear picture of the circumstances in which we should say of a pot that it talked? (Even a nonsense-poem is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child.)

We do indeed say of an inanimate thing that it is in pain: when playing with dolls for example.

But this use of the concept of pain is a secondary one. Imagine a case in which people ascribed pain only to inanimate things; pitied only dolls. ...

283. What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?

Is it that my education has led me to it by drawing my attention to feelings in myself, and now I transfer the idea to objects outside myself? That I recognize that there is something there (in me) which I can call "pain" without getting into conflict with the way other people use this word?—I do not transfer my idea to stones, plants, etc.

Couldn't I imagine having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted? Well, how do I know, if I shut my eyes, whether I have not turned into a stone? And if that has happened, in what sense will the stone have the pains? In what sense will they be ascribable to the stone? And why need the pain have a bearer at all here?!

And can one say of the stone that it has a soul and that is what has the pain? What has a soul, or pain, to do with a stone?

Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains.

For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like of a soul which some body has. And how can a body have a soul?

284. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!—And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. ...

297. Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture pot? ...

300. It is—we would like to say—not merely the picture of the behaviour that plays a part in the language-game with the words "he is in pain", but also the picture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behaviour, but also that of the pain. ...

301. An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it. ...

309. What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Tough Times Tuesday

Now I'm depressed. This article, "Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel" by Jofie Ferrari-Adler, tells us that new male fiction writers stand virtually no chance of getting an agent and getting published unless they either a) have a platform, or b) write thrillers.

What if I wrote a thriller while sitting on a platform, say up on a flagpole? Think that might work?

A Monday Melange

Looking for an excuse to read a really good book? Look no further: The New York Times Reading Room blog is reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Pounce! (Tip of the Hat to Maud for putting us onto it.)

Uh, oh! Lookout! Those bad bad French theorists are coming back. (Don't you just hiss when you say that word?) It began with a Stanley Fish blog at nytimes.com when I was on Spring Break. Now, there's a part deux. The Reading Experience got in on the act early. And Scott McLemee did too. As did, apparently, over 600 commenters at Fish's blog. DFH's all. [I jest]. Our take is that Deconstruction is merely another flavor of analysis, not too distant from what Wittgenstein was up to in Philosophical Investigations or, even Kurt Godel. Yet, because it was too European, it threatened too many in the Anglo-American analytical philosophy camp. Still, one issue I might raise with Ghoti: Isn't taking a relativist position necessarily a political move? Fact is, Sartre and the existentialists declared that every act is a political act. Isn't Deconstruction, on Fish's appreciation, then, merely the antithesis of this move rather than a challenge to the 'truth' police?

There's never a bad time to check out The Valve or 3Quarks.

I'll end this post with a quote from my favorite crank, William Gass:

What the public wants, as the Pulitzer sees it...is an exciting story with a timely theme, although it may have a historical setting. The material should be handled simply and delivered in terms of sharp contrasts in order that the problems the novel raises can be decisively resolved. Ideally, it should be written in a style that is as invisible as Ralph Ellison's invisible man, so that the reader can let go of the words and grasp the situation the way one might the wheel of the family car. And since most of the consumers of fiction are women (or they were until women went in for the professions and other public works and now return home as tired and weary and in need of the screen's passive amusement as men), it won't hurt to fulfill a few of their longings, to grant, now and then, unconsciously an unconscious wish. Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-opened eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry of artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it—lean cuisine, if that's the thing—and the Pulitzer is ready with its rewards.
No, this prize for fiction is not disgraced by its banal and hokey choices. It is the critics and customers who have chosen and acclaimed them, who have bought the books and thought about them and called them literature and tried to stick them like gum on the pillars of our culture. It is they who have earned the opprobrium of this honor. Wm. H. Gass, "Pulitzer: The People's Prize," in Finding a Form, pp. 12-13.

OUCH!!

Turn Some Pages...

More years ago than I care to acknowledge, I was walking through midtown Manhattan on a lunch break from my law job. I edged my way through the crush of the Hasidic diamond row and popped down the two concrete steps into the old Gotham Book Mart ("Wise Men Fish Here"—[alas, no more!]). As was my wont, I browsed through the fiction section where a small silver paperback seemed to leap off the shelf at me. It was Richard Powers's first novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. I can't say quite what made me pick it up (and I might be misremembering its silver color, that edition's long been lent and not returned—you know who you are!), but I did. I'd never heard of Powers, but was intrigued with the first few pages I read standing amid the dusty, crowded stacks. No one there (not even Skip) knew anything about Powers. I spent the entire, non-billable afternoon reading the book behind closed doors at the firm and continued on late into the night. When I emerged a few days later from the text (one simply does not read Powers fast), I knew I had encountered a profound mind. Powers went on to serious acclaim and is now rightly regarded as one of our greatest novelists. I maintained a sort of proprietary feeling over my 'discovery', much the way Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger used to argue over who first discovered the Beatles down in The Cave. This was a mind of the first rate who was doing fiction—there really wasn't a lot of that about.

This week, at a much different point in my life, I got the opportunity to encounter the physical being that houses that remarkable intellect. Mr. Powers gave a reading at Emory University on Wednesday evening and, on Thursday afternoon, offered a colloquium on aspects of "seeing" as a way into the creative (writing) process [more on that in subsequent posts].

He is taller than one expects, lanky, nimble-fingered. Seems to prefer comfort as a prime value in clothing choice as opposed to, say, style or fashion. Wears his ample hair much the way, I suspect, he did in the Seventies—though it may not be as dark now. His voice resounds like that of a trained baritone, though he seems to recognize this and modulates it to fit the room and the conversation. He has the mien of any number of physics grad students I've known. Think a 6'4" or 6'5" Russell Johnson (the Professor on Gilligan's Island). He is engaging and personable and, I emphasize this, listens very intently, even sympathetically. One is impressed also by the impression of emotional depth such a mind generously exudes.

If you've ever read one of his novels (and I highly recommend you read them all—make it a life project) you get a sense of systematicity. They are like schematics of closed circuits: you know that if a problem is posed, it will be solved. He calls this "top down" writing and says that in his later works he's been learning to write as well from the "bottom up", to let the characters introduce surprising movements into the architecture of the work. Something we've alluded to in a previous post as 'improvising'.

Let's try another metaphor: Powers's novels are symphonies. Multiple, complex themes are stated, revisited, analyzed, interwoven, and, eventually, resolved. Big. Wednesday's reading was more like chamber music—and so much to my liking. Mr. Powers read an unpublished short story called "Modulation". He did not read from a work-in-progress because he wanted to give us something with a beginning, middle, and end. Something satisfying. And it was!

One might compare hearing Powers read aloud to hearing Caruso sing "Mi par" live when before you'd only heard it on an old 78: it's all there, just clearer, cleaner, brighter, more riveting. (Or, given the story, listening to Caruso in sound-check perform solfege for 45 minutes—itself a refined pleasure for those in the know.)

Briefly, "Modulation" takes four characters (SATB) who never meet—a freelance Japanese hacker tracker on the hunt for illegal file-sharing sites for the RIAA, a Brazilian journalist in Iraq, Germany and Sao Paulo, a retired Alan Lomax-like professor of ethnomusicology in an I-state, and an urban "chiptune" performance DJ en route to an international conference in Australia—and pinions them at a specific moment in time (though on four continents), tying their lives together around a catastrophic, viral "musical" event. Death and ineffable beauty ensue. As with his novels, the thematic structure of the story is intricate: each of the twelve sections is titled with the solfege syllables of the chromatic scale: do, di, re, ri, mi, fa, fi, sol, si, la, li, ti. The character episodes rotate sequentially (do, mi, and si involve character one (S), etc.) until the end (li, ti) when Powers inverts T and B for a surprising esthetic effect.

The story is densely allusive—everything from obscure world musics to proliferating house genres, from the mythic power musics of Orpheus, et al. to John Cage, from Mozart's "bootleg" transcription of Allegri's Miserere to the U.S. military's non-stop blaring of Van Halen to smoke out Panama's Noriega and its development to a usual Abu Ghraib and Gitmo technique of "enhanced interrogation". The story presumes an up-to-date understanding of technology (tho' one fears with respect to this aspect "Modulation" might have a short shelf-life—but, of course, that's a major theme and problem in all of Powers's work). New, emergent art forms are imagined as are the many forms of degradation of the traditional forms. There are tunes you can't get out of your head ("earworms") and tunes that help you forget earworms ("eraser tunes"). Each character arrives at his/her emotional epiphany/resolution/climax via the arc of music.

The only problem I had with the story has to do with the "ineffable" aspect of the beauty in the resolution. Powers has set himself a Sisyphean task here and he alludes to this issue earlier in the piece when he talks about the inherent difficulties of describing music and sound in language. It is mere description—in Forster's terms, telling not showing. As he was reading, I kept trying to imagine the sounds, the lost chord, the elusive tune that explodes like a deus ex machina across the electronic earth in that climactic moment of the story, and could not. Maybe it was me. Maybe that's what it means to be human—i.e., unable to imagine ineffable beauty. I'll read the story when it comes out in the new Conjunctions and see if it comes through any better. You should, too.

As Promised: Oscar Wao

As everyone knows by now, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Congratulations to author Junot Díaz. So much acclaim has followed this book, so many reviews written, one wonders what there is to add.

Wao is a simple book, really, about the Dominican-American experience: Trujillo was a really bad hombre and every Dominican, native or diasporic—with the possible exception of Oscar—has a little Trujillo in him. And, of course, the original source of this evil was Cristóbal Colón (he who must not be named).

Like the hero of another, funnier, Pulitzer winner—A Confederacy of Dunces—Oscar is fat and slovenly. A sci-fi nerd in a Jersey barrio. For the most part, his story is narrated, Gatsby-style, by one Yunior, a weight-lifting lothario. Yunior was Oscar's college roommate and friend and his sister's erstwhile boyfriend. And this is the source of the problem: the book feels third-hand; Yunior does not witness most of what he narrates, but gets the story second-hand, presumably from Oscar's notebooks and interviews with Lola, Oscar's sister, and, one surmises, others of the principals. Oscar, the anti-Trujillo, never comes into clean focus. As the lawyers say, it's all hearsay and double hearsay—inadmissible as evidence.

Wao is an entertaining narrative. One could conjure words like sweeping, multi-generational, saga, epic—it certainly aspires to them (and that's no doubt what moved the Pulitzer committee). The reader learns a great deal about the tortured history of the Dominican Republic, often in clever DFW-style footnotes. Corruption, desire, sex, violence, death, supernatural curses, hidden secrets, deep disappointment, and buried sorrow pepper the tale. Complex characters don't. In Gatsby-type stories, the Nick Carraways are tasked not only to shed light on their enigmatic eponyms but, often unwittingly or unbeknownst to themselves, on themselves. Yunior, the teller here, just sort of slinks off at the end with an "I'll-never-forget-that-crazy-fat-guy-with-his-wacky-comic-books-and-his-mixed-up-mom-and-I'd-still-like-to-tap-his-hot-sister's-culo" sentiment.

The other aspiration of Wao is what I will call the War and Peace motive: it attempts to show the fate of an individual or group intertwined with significant history. Again, Wao comes up short. The individual, Oscar, is insufficiently illumined and the de Leons are scant Rostovs. It also leads to pacing problems: the entire third section dealing with Oscar's mother's sojourn in the DR with the gangster feels overlong, though necessary for the War and Peace effect, and takes the reader right out of whatever immediacy the narrative had already won.

Stylistically, Wao succeeds supremely. The narrative employs the Dominican Spanglish of the barrio. The voices of its characters are equally adept in English and Spanish and mix the two ad lib. This lends an air of authenticity to the text. One suspects Díaz knows this lingo intimately. Faulkner, of course, was a pioneer of this technique and, among Southerners, 'redneck-ese' has become cliched from overuse. In Díaz, however, the narrative voice still seems as fresh as the Dominican immigrant experience.

Where Wao falters is in its failure to found the emotional lives of its characters on their sensuous experience. The narrative (and the book is almost entirely narrative, as opposed to dialogue and action) is chilly and the characters distant. The reader does not perceive the world through their eyes (or ears or noses or fingertips or tongues, for that matter). Rather, reading the book is a mere mental/intellectual exercise when it could, and should, be so much more. We simply do not sympathize with the characters—and by this I do not mean we have to like them. We are not drawn viscerally into their emotional experience. We are told of their great sorrow or reticence or desire, we aren't shown it from within. The closest we get, and this particular passage jumped out at me when I read it, is in a passage beginning on p. 221:

At one of the interminable presidential events El Jefe had shaken Abelard's hand, but instead of moving on, he paused—a nightmare come true—held on to his fingers, and said in his shrill voice: You are Dr. Abelard Cabral? Abelard bowed. At your service, You Excellency. In less than a nanosecond Abelard was drenched in sweat; he knew what was coming next; the Failed Cattle Thief had never spoken more than three words to him his whole life, what else could it be? He dared not glance away from Trujillo's heavily powdered face, but out the corner of his eyes he caught glimpses of the lambesacos, hovering, beginning to realize that an exchange was in the making.

No other passage in the book approaches this power—not even the sugar cane field beating scenes. Trujillo the tinpot dictator, because of the sensuousness of the presentation, seems larger than life: the tinny fear-inducing voice, the cowing power grip that twists and traps clammy fingers together, the powdered face(!!). Clearly, Díaz can write in close. One only wishes he had done so and to such profound effect oftener throughout. If, for no other reason, for Oscar's sake.

Pres.* Bush Greets His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI at Andrews AF Base

Or, to put it another way:: Unindicted torturer and war criminal George W. Bush meets a former member of Hitler youth and contemporary pedophile protector at the airport and escorts him onto American shores.

What is the symbolism of this photo-op? Does Bush meet him at the airport because the Pope won't have dinner at the White House? The Pope flies into a U.S. military base: does that mean he tacitly approves Bush's Iraq adventure? Or, possibly, the next adventure into Iran? Is this, indeed, turning into a Crusade? And what sort of salute is that anyway, Herr Ratzinger? And to whom is it extended? We, the American people? Your closeted right-wing constituencies here? Who is Mr. Bush smiling at? And exactly who is he saluting with his downward-pointing left hand? Could it be S-A-T-A-N? Yeah, I guess that's funny in a frat-boy sort of way.

Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, love the red shoes!

Busy Rendering...Back Later

"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Matt. 22:21.

But what does one get for one's denarius these days? Well, on the God side you get, among other things, bibliolatry, hucksterism, mass delusion, priestly pedophilia, cover-ups, vast corruption, and the perpetuation of royalism and elitism and right-wing ideology. And from Caesar's side? Demagogy, corruption, paranoia, hucksterism, fear-mongering, war-mongering, gulags, renditions, and torture. Among other things.

Am I bitter? Take a guess. One suspects that Jesus was being ironic (or at least fatalistic) if he did indeed make the statement above attributed to him. After all, the guy got crucified by secular Roman authorities for disrupting a Jewish religious festival where people had to pay money to be able to worship in their church. No, this statement sounds like the work of a later editor who was concerned with keeping the early church's coffers full.

[15 April is Tax Day here in the U.S.]

Spring Break

Thanks to all who stop in to read this little blog of mine. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but so is my mind. So there.

I'm going to be away from my desktop and my broadband next week, on an island down on the Third Coast, the Redneck Riviera, the Gulf. Not sure whether I'll be able to post. We'll see.

When I get back I will weigh in on Rooster winner The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I've just started. I've read most of the books on the list, but haven't really reviewed them. Maybe they can be the subject of future posts. I will say this: I did feel that McCarthy's Remainder had that enduring feel to it—classic, unique, re-readable, overwhelmingly moving ending (despite its pedestrian start).

If you're relatively new to WoW, you can scroll through in my absence and maybe pick up some of the repeating themes and ideas and arguments, not to mention all the cool Monty Python scenes. Oh, and give the Glenn Gould a listen. If I do post this next week, it'll be sporadic.

Best,
Jim H.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

"You cannot step into the same river twice." Heraclitus

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

"Lawd help me I can't change. Lord I can't change." Lynard Skynard
--------------------------------------

This post is a first pass on what is perhaps the central theme of Western literature, and because it touches so many different fields it is my favorite kind of topic. The topic is: Change. Transformation, transfiguration, metamorphosis, evolution, correction, development, differentiation, integration, becoming, etc.

It is an article of faith in serious literature that change is possible and indeed desirable in characters. It is what we look for when we read. But is that mere fiction? Can people really change?

Let's look at some "real world" beliefs:

Freudian psychoanalysis believes change is possible only if one confronts and recognizes the role childhood (primarily sexual) traumas played in forging one's psyche.

Marxian analysis believes change is possible only if the social conditions that determine one's identity are first rectified.
Maoism believed "re-education" was the route to change in the people. Stalinism saw very little room for change and opted for strategies of eradication.

Darwinian analysis is more deterministic: we are who we are by virtue of our genetic make-up and change in human nature only occurs incrementally over the long haul of generations.

Christianity holds that human nature is fallen and can only be changed if our fallen soul is somehow driven out and replaced by the Christ-soul—some hold this conversion or "second birth" is an instantaneous result of professing faith, others that it occurs through a lifetime of good works. Yet, for the most part, Christianity does not believe in the perfectibility of humanity. Salvation is a supernatural thing and is determinative of one's status in the afterlife, not in reality.

Humanism believes human nature is essentially good and merely needs proper nourishment to self-actualize. I'm not sure that is precisely change.

As on most things, philosophers are split. The majority, classical position believes human beings are unchanging substantive entities (Being, essence, Monad, etc.) with a changing list of contingent properties. The minority position believes that existence preceeds essence: that becoming trumps being, and change is the primary feature of human identity.

Sociologically, as a matter of principle, caste- or class-based societies do not believe in change—in fact, they are formed precisely in opposition to it and can be violently resistant to ideas of progress or change.

Politically and juridically: The U.S. has a prison population of over two million, nearly one in one hundred adults—one of the, if not the, highest rates and greatest numbers of prisoners of any country in the world. Are Americans worse as a people or is our legal system simply meaner? A society's belief in the possibility of change is reflected in its theory of criminal jurisprudence: punishment/retribution, isolation, deterrence, rehabilitation. For example, a society which holds humans are capable of change will sport a theory closer in nature to rehabilitation and deterrence. A society that believes humans are incapable of changing will adhere more to a punishment/retribution, isolation theory of criminal justice and will, as a result, have a higher population imprisoned.

Philosophy 101

Old Wizard presents us with a list of the Top Ten Philosophers of All Time. Now, we like lists as much as the next blog, but we've got some serious problems with this list:

10. Rousseau
9. Hume
8. Hegel
7. Heidegger
6. Kierkegaard
5. Kant
4. Descartes
3. Nietzsche
2. Husserl
1. Socrates/Plato

What about Wittgenstein? Where's Aristotle? Hobbes? Mill? Locke? Leibniz (for goodness' sake!) Frege? Did philosophy stop in mid-20th Century? What about Rawls? Derrida? Rorty? or someone like Dummett, Quine, Davidson, Putnam, etc.

Let's ask the Pythons:

The Philosopher's Song (Monty Python)
by Eric Idle

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya'
'Bout the raising of the wrist.

SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am"

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!