Change in George Gissing's New Grub Street
Proceeding from the research of the good Franco Moretti, who has applied quantitative analysis to the potboilers of the 19th century, we present a bold new initiative in the analysis of literature that solves some of the problems pointed out in the above review: start with a simpler picture. We see here a model that is fit for not one but two change processes in George Gissing’s New Grub Street. The adaptable writer Jasper Milvain secures an editorial spot at an up-and-coming periodical while Edwin Reardon, somewhat less keen on the contemporary literary trends, gets lost in The Neutral Zone when he attempts to write a “commercial” novel without believing in it. While Milvain boldly leads the way, Reardon below him struggles to shift into higher gear and see his own change through. Who knows? If Milvain had provided more leadership to Reardon, Reardon might have pushed through to a New Beginning and might not have met his fate by catching a deadly cold in rotten housing that he moved to out of necessity.
Reardon is tied up in yet another change, when his wife Amy refuses to live with him after he takes a low-paying menial job out of desperation. As the “manager” of the family, Amy chooses the path for the sake of their child and for her own dignity, but Reardon cannot immediately see the win. Reardon pleads with her; she responds forcefully but respectfully. He insists on sending her part of his slight wages; she tries to explain that his thinking is part of the old way. He cannot even enter The Neutral Zone. Unfortunately, he dies before he can see through the change that Amy led, and Amy must proceed on her own.
Reardon may seem like someone ill-suited to change, and he is, but his inefficacy is a reminder that it is the process of change that models the success and failure of characters in novels.
Vizka la Spat! On Basic English and Loglan
Chris Crawford (you may know him from such games as “Balance of Power” and “Trust and Betrayal”) gives an overview of some of the artificial languages created over the years in “Little Languages”. The one that interests him the most is Solresol, which changes syntax expression drastically by having only seven “letters.” I’m more intrigued by the ones that have implications more on the semantic side: Loglan, which condenses words down to a bare minimum size and overloads grammatical data into every aspect of word construction, and C.K. Ogden’s Basic English, which shrinks English down to 850 words and ostensibly gives you a true generative grammar. Neither seem workable to me, but they’re good testing grounds for a few hypotheses.
Basic English, as Crawford points out, runs into trouble when it has to construct new (i.e., idiomatic) meanings for combinations of words to express ideas that simply won’t fit into constructs of the basic set of 850 concepts. It’s fair to say that you can get “red” (not a Basic English word) out of “blue,” “green,” and the other colors that it does provide, but getting “internet” and “metempsychosis” are slightly trickier, and so on and so forth.
But consider the source of the parsimony:
The greater part of the things we generally seem to be talking about are what may be named fictions: and for these again there are other words in common use which get nearer to fact.The emphasis is mine. Aside from assuming a brute-force representational theory of language, which is an argument I don’t want to touch, Ogden is quite a utopian, believing that he can extract a language of pure representation out of English and remove prejudice and emotion. He takes the dream of a common language, implicitly sees a problem in the emotional biases built into a good chunk of the vocabulary, and seeks to fix that as well. I.e., he would probably see a need for “Basic Esperanto” as well.The greater part of the statements we make about things and persons are unnecessarily colored by some form of feeling: They do, no doubt, say something about things and persons, but most common words are colored by our feelings — or the feeling by which the thought of our hearers is to be consciously or unconsciously guided; and it is frequently possible to keep thought and feeling separate.
The most important group of ‘shorthand’ words in European languages is made up of what are named ‘verbs’ — words like ‘accelerate’ and ‘ascertain’; ‘liberty’ and ‘blindness’ are examples of fictions; ‘credulous’ and ‘courteous’ say something about our feelings in addition to their straightforward sense.
Basic English is mechanistic in its approach to minimal, objective representation; Loglan is mechanistic in its word construction (if it’s pronounceable, use it), and its context-free grammar. Loglan was designed to help knowledge representation, though there is not an explanation of why a grammatical language is needed instead of a clearer set of logical axioms, the approach that’s been used by the CYC project and other massive modelling projects. The deeper agenda seems utopian again:
Many loglanists believe, too, that their adopted language is ideally suited to become a lingua franca for the world. Its clarity and lack of cultural bias are just what is needed to cement international cooperation. That leaves each of us with a Mother Tongue that we would use for jokes, poetry, and making love. A further bonus is that our Mother Tongues could be much more locally based: not merely English but Liverpool Scouse, not just German but Hamburger Platt, not just French but Occitan. To maintain the linguistic and cultural diversity that minority and regional languages enshrine could be just as important in the long run as maintaining the diversity of life.Basic English was designed as a supplemental, agnostic second language to be used for people who didn’t have the time to live inside full English. The mission of Loglan seems to be to create a neutral language to allow ever more diverging local languages. I don’t know how this is accomplished either, but it seems to be a step backwards from the all-encompassing aims of Volapuk and Esperanto: instead of the Tower of Babel, it’s a hut.
This can get silly, but I don’t know that it’s so much worse than what the universal grammarians claim about D-structure: roughly speaking, what Loglan (not quite Basic English) set out to do should be accomplishable. Loglan makes you think twice about the project. English particularly has engendered so many dialects across drastically different cultures and countries that the study of gesture, affect, and inflection is becoming increasingly prominent.
(As a follow-up, the only context-free, ambiguous languages I know of are mathematical and computational ones, which have some theoretically crazy ideas of their own (like Tcl’s use of whitespace as an disambiguating mechanism). Question to argue over: are they representational?)
The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch
I once said that The Death of Virgil exists on its own plane of reality, and that is what makes the book worth reading. As a novel of ideas it is behind most of Thomas Mann’s work, and doesn’t even approach Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As a historical excursion into the classics, it’s detailed and panoramic, but that is hardly Broch’s main concern here. He uses Virgil and the Aeneid to give weight to his subjects. He views imperial Rome as a better testing ground for his thoughts than contemporary Europe, which Broch increasingly loathed and saw as decaying and diseased. But he mostly needs solitary territory, and in The Death of Virgil he finds it.
The most striking portrait of Broch was given by Elias Canetti in his memoirs, where he describes Broch as fiercely moral but unguarded and emotionally transparent. The contradiction plays itself out nobly in The Death of Virgil, as conservative political statements clash with modernist techniques on a huge swath of territory that is Broch’s alone.
The book is divided into four sections named after the four elements. In the short first section, the sick and dying Virgil arrives in Rome and is brought to rest. The blind Virgil is preternaturally aware of his surroundings and the section is oriented around pure sensory language as he slowly progresses from the ship to the palace. Rome is vibrant but immoral, and Virgil, in his sensory immersion, achieves a sort of inhuman alienation from the people and society around him, connected but only partly conscious.
It’s scant preparation for the second section, one hundred and fifty pages of tumbling, disorienting language dealing with half-formed abstractions and conjunctions of art, life, love, feeling, infinity, and more. What’s most remarkable is how Broch keeps it from coalescing. Any approaching “payoff” of a unified vision is discarded before it’s reached for a new set of jumbled conceptual atoms. A sample:
the poem though well able to duplicate the creation in words was never able to fuse the duplication into a unity, unable to do so because the seeming-reversion, the divination, the beauty, because all these things which determined, which became poetry, took place solely in the duplicated world; the world of speech and the world of matter remained apart, twofold the home of the word, twofold the home of the human being, twofold the abyss of the creaturely,but twofold also the purity of being, thus duplicated to unchastity which, like a resurrection without birth, penetrated all divination as well as all beauty, and carried the seed of world-destruction in itself, the basic unchastity of existence which came to be feared by the mother; unchaste the mantle of poetry, and nevermore would poetry come to be fundamental…What impresses are not the ideas, which derive from Friedrich Schiller as well as Plato, but the writing that is constantly at war with them. This is the sort of stuff that you write when you must write, or even more, when you are driven to fill up the page out of agoraphobia or a fear of silence. Somewhere in the middle of it, Virgil decides to burn the Aeneid, lost as he is inside a transient but autonomous language that provides effect without impact, divorced from “the world” and focused on metaphysical existence. It is as pure as Rilke, and just as difficult.
The third section is just as much a shock: Virgil returns to reality, as it were, and there follows lengthy passages of dialogue between him and his friends Plotius and Lucius, and then then with Augustus, who all attempt to convince him not to burn the Aeneid. Augustus paints the poet’s relation to the state; Virgil tries to negate it. Augustus flatters Virgil; Virgil will have none of it. Torn between his unattainable obligations and aspirations, Virgil’s positions appear pompous next to Augustus’s rhetoric: they are having a dialogue, but it binds the section to the sort of discourse found in The Sleepwalkers and The Unknown Quantity, in which Broch attempts to raise the state of humanity first through Burkean criticism, then by sheer force of intellectual will.
I’ve never found either tactic wholly successful. Broch’s strength, at its peak in the other sections of The Death of Virgil, was the sort of comprehensive, complex emotional state of being of an artist; when he tries to rationalize its place in the world, either in Vienna in the 1930’s or in Augustan Rome, he can be callow and even petty. After the autonomy of the first two sections, his attempt at worldly engagement and debate in the third doesn’t—really, can’t—justify itself. Thomas Mann’s philosophical debates in The Magic Mountain may be caricatures (of people like Johann Nestroy), but they reflect a certain compromise with the terms of the world that Broch is not really capable of. In The Sleepwalkers there was a conservative nostalgia for the supposedly moral uprightness of past ages; in The Death of Virgil, Broch abandons even that.
This is if anything emphasized in the last, short section. Having divested himself of his possessions and freed his slaves, Virgil surrenders to the inhuman abyss and is thrown into the realm of the essential, a conflation of the cosmos, creation, and language. The placement of language there is a forthright statement of where Broch aims to be and what he sees as Virgil’s proper place.
I don’t know. The high-minded but pedestrian third section helps illustrate how extreme Broch’s position is. It is obviously very impractical, a book that nearly negates its own existence in the world. (Even if Broch does not side with Virgil in the third section, the rest of the book makes it clear that Broch is not hosting a debate.) But the same single-mindedness makes it the closest fictional analogue to Rilke I’ve read, and sui generis. The Death of Virgil is not something to engage and certainly not to argue with, but it has its effects, and they are unique.
"The End of the World", Richard Huelsenbeck
wood s lot wishes happy birthday to dada-ist Richard Huelsenbeck, and so do I. The passages he quotes give a good sense of the anger underneath the nonsense and free association, but my favorite poem of his is the moving “The End of the World”. Here’s the whole thing:
The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess The cockatoo under the skirts of the Spanish dancer Sings as sadly as a headquaters bugler and the cannon lament all day That is the lavender landscape Herr Mayer was talking about when he lost his eye Only the fire department can drive the nightmare from the drawing- room but all the hoses are broken Ah yes Sonya they all take the celluloid doll for a changeling and shout: God save the King The whole Monist Club is gathered on the steamship Meyerbeer But only the pilot has any conception of high C I pull the anatomical atlas out of my toe a serious study begins Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the opera in cutaways for the last two days and nights…? Ah ah ye great devils – ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know what our Father Homer wrote I hold peace and war in my toga but I’ll take a cherry flip Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow They beat time with a coffin lid If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers out of the trolley car it’s a great age The professors of zoology gather in the meadows With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead Again thou hauntest castle and grounds The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds (And this is how the world is this is all that’s ahead of us).It’s very different from Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, closer to Mayakovsky, but less dogmatic. It was given an appropriately earnest reading by Peter Blegvad, who has taken one or to things from Huelsenbeckas well, on the impossibly rare Dr. Huelsenbeck’s Mentale Heilmethode.
American Writers of the 1950's
Eudaemonist goes after Randell Jarrell’s Portraits from an Institution:
I now understand why people go ga-ga for Kerouac: general American fiction of the 1950s was rotten…When seen against the backdrop of such insipid, feeble prose as Jarrell’s, where flashes of wit last no longer than a firefly’s flickering (and provide, if I may say so, rather less illumination), Kerouac’s writing, for all that it is petulant, adolescent, and puerile, at least has some spark.(Jarrell was not the only poet to try his hand at a campus novel. Weldon Kees’s Fall Quarter is quite dull and loses its way early on, torn between social criticism and an unwillingness to indict as viciously as Kees did in his essays.)
Speaking as an avowed detractor from the beats, seeing them as an anti-intellectual offshoot of more self-conscious European surrealist/dadaist movements, I always saw the 50’s as a time of post-war retrenchment. Popular genres (mystery, sf) had been established and were being elaborated on and toughened. William S. Burroughs, not quite a beat, was still writing sordid books like Junky and Queer (not published until later, but still…) that derived from Nelson Algren’s work of the 1940’s. Authors like Hubert Selby and John Rechy would follow this arc in the 60’s, but it is not typical in any way of the 50’s. Likewise with John Barth’s first two novels, which would not have stood out had he not drastically shifted tacks afterwards.
On the more socially conscious front, Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis’s complaints did not yet seem appropriate again (and their writing was far too clunky to stand on its own aesthetically), and Faulkner’s Southern chronicles became rote and nearly pastoral. Faulkner still won the Pulitzer—twice—seemingly by default, once for the failed stretch of A Fable, which reads like an intentional shifting of weight to “larger” (not really) issues.
But there are several 50’s authors that had and continue to have a huge impact on writing style and people’s expectations of the demarcated beast that is “American fiction.” J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Richard Yates all got their start in the 50’s, and none ever really made an impact beyond what they accomplished in that decade. Even Bellow, who held some of himself back for later, spawned upstarts Philip Roth and Joseph Heller before he could wrangle back any significant influence, and settled for becoming an elder statesman who would write books about Allan Bloom. All of them outlined areas that became de facto concerns in what could get published.
Cheever and Yates both specialized in malaise. Cheever’s version had darker, more perverse undercurrents to it (submerged homosexuality quite large among them), while Yates stuck to the surface of things and painted anomie devoid of content. Cheever may have had the richer vision, but Yates was more precise, he knew exactly what wall he was hitting, time and time again, while Cheever wandered.
Bellow was dabbling in a self-mythology based around the already-forming detritus of Jewish intellectual circles of past decades, which were fast being reduced to the parochialism of The New York Review of Books (as well as Irving Kristol’s neoconservative movement, but that’s not literary). But hardly less than Cheever and Yates, he was working on a blank slate of American culture based around a middle-class that hadn’t dominated when Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis had been writing. The context of all of their writing was post-Freudian psychology, the self-defeating self-reflection that produces neurosis. With much less of the weight of history than corresponding European novels of the same time, they drew from the sociology of the moment, and constructed a view of middle-class intellectual and non-intellectual life that produced its own problems. It revolves around the psychology of the little gesture, the meager possession, the sentimental attachment, and the bland statement. These took on specific associations, so that every fictional character looking at a gray building or working in a garden or cooking dinner or walking down a sidewalk came to signify certain things about American life.
Many, many American fiction writers have been dealing with this landscape since, from John Updike to Raymond Carver to Grace Paley. Salinger introduced an element of religious or quasi-religious purity in his work, which was later developed by Walker Percy, among others, but as I get older I see Salinger more as a peculiar variation on the other three, glorifying a narcissistic but extremely personal and effective view of family as a non-historical response to Yates and Cheever’s monotonic views. It is a less robust response than Bellow’s, which has made it harder to imitate. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, though.
These are far from the only movements, but in terms of disproportionate impact, I think the figures above stand out. Many literary magazines today print stories that almost exclusively conform to the boundaries set out: ahistoric, neurotic, drawing from quotidian symbols. And I don’t believe there has been a group since that has had anywhere near as much impact. (For a while, I thought Don DeLillo was doing pretty well in reorienting the field towards a more reductionistic, impersonal psychology, but scions like Steve Erickson and Stephen Wright seem to have faded fast.)
In comparison, there are the roads not taken, those of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and even Nabokov, whose Pnin is a less claustrophobic statement on the social life of the academy. There is Flannery O’Connor, whose pacing and plotting were appropriated, but not her modern gothic sensibility. And there’s William Gaddis, whose The Recognitions I never finished, but who was clearly working towards a more epic, contextual tableau, even if he seemed to get mired in the details.
In sum, then, the 50’s still seem a flagship decade for one of the most dominant breeds of American fiction, as well as its height. There is little that Christopher Tilghman writes about that could not be gleaned (albeit indirectly) from Richard Yates, thirty years earlier. Lorrie Moore adds a touch of Bellow’s eloquent mythologizing to very similar material. Which is to say, there are clearly identifiable “American writers of the 50’s,” in a way that there aren’t of subsequent decades. It’s as though time has stood still.
Entertainment Through Stomach-aches: Suicide, Keith Rowe, Masayuki Takayanagi
Out of Nick Hornby’s 31 significant pop songs, there are four that I’d claim reasonable familiarity with, and two that I actually like. And the only one of those that I was curious to hear his thoughts on is Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” which didn’t make it on to the cd that comes with the book, even though there was plenty of room left and I can’t imagine the licensing would have been too expensive. (I couldn’t have resisted, anyway.) Of course there’s a reason, which is that Hornby feels differently about “Frankie” than about the other tunes:
I need no convincing that life is scary. I’m forty-four, and it has got quite scary enough already—I don’t need anyone trying to jolt me out of my complacency. Friends have started to die of incurable diseases, leaving loved ones, in some cases young children, behind. My son has been diagnosed with a severe disability [autism], and I don’t know what the future holds for him. And, of course, at any moment there is the possibility that some lunatic will fly a plane into my house, or a nuclear power plant….So let me find complacency and safety where I can, and please forgive me if I don’t want to hear “Frankie Teardrop” right now.I’m going to ignore the pathos (some would say bathos) here, other than to note that I’m not a fan, and just say that this is a pretty strong reaction to a shock-horror story complete with screaming about a Vietnam veteran shooting his wife, kids, and self over a minimal synthesizer pulse. It’s not pleasant, but even the first time I heard it I thought it was dull—listen to “Cheree” and “Rocket USA” off the album for better results.
What I don’t get is that the “song” works on the level of an exploitation flick (if you can believe it, Bruce Springsteen is supposedly a fan), so a more understandable response would be distaste, not repulsion or fear. I can see that Hornby might not want to hear it for the same reason I don’t want to watch Michael Haneke or Takashi Miike movies, but the thing shouldn’t pose the sort of moral threat he attributes to it. It’s possible there’s some past association or memory, or simply a visceral fear implanted by Alan Vega’s loud screeching, but this is a secondary effect; primarily, it’s like wanting to avoid the sound of jackhammers. I don’t want to listen to Suicide when I have a headache or when I’m stressed, but even less do I want to listen to DJ Scud.
Since it’s difficult to make music representational, the associations one has with it tend to be on the level of pure physiological or conditioned effect: major chords equal happy, sine waves equal pain, Yamaha DX-7’s equal 1980’s, etc., etc. This is why Throbbing Gristle‘s music never reached the disturbing heights it had pretenses towards: gross-out lyrics over thin synthesizers only at most have the association of mild nausea. If you want raw, elegaic emotion, Shayne Carter and Peter Jefferies’ “Randolph’s Going Home” has it in rare doses, but the sadness isn’t painful. Neither is “Frankie,” which is less effective emotionally as well.
Consequently, as you reach towards representation in less idiomatic areas, as clicheed associations become less accessible, physiology becomes paramount. Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” doesn’t make it onto the stereo too often because it induces acute nausea in me and others (those damn frequencies), but the work is effectively symbolic rather than representational; you could call it “Threnody for Your Long-Suffering Stomach” and its effect on me wouldn’t differ. The association with the historical event is secondary, and requires conscious effort to appreciate, an effort which would be easier to make if my innards didn’t feel so attenuated.
Keith Rowe has spent decades in the free-improv ensemble AMM, who always maintained that there was a strong political side to their work. Drummer Eddie Prevost has been the most vocal about it, but there’s one quote of Rowe’s on his solo album Harsh that addresses these particular issues:
I wanted the CD to become more of a statement about “harshness”, rather than merely a “recording” of a performance. A music that reflects something about the harshness of the lives of the majority of the world’s people, economic harshness, political harshness, cultural harshness. A music that presents questions about taste, the nature of performance, technique, an arena of problems rather than solutions. Where we find long sections of unrelenting, constant, enduring, unforgiving sound, the grinding functionality of unformulated techniques, often unpleasant.This is actually fairly complicated. The album is pretty damn harsh (the three pieces are called “Quite”, “Very”, and “Extremely”), but those who are going to find it unpleasant are (a) going to be those least familiar with this sort of music and therefore least likely to pick the album up, and (b) are those least likely to make the representational connection with other sorts of “harshness” in the first place, since Rowe’s harshness will be so unpleasant for them. As for me, I like the disc (when I don’t have a headache), but the problems it presents to me are concertedly aesthetic.
In contrast, there is another solo guitar album that has a very different effect on me: Masayuki Takayanagi’s Inanimate Nature. From what I gather (I don’t speak Japanese), Takayanagi had prickly, outspoken political and aesthetic views not dissimilar to Rowe’s, but the “emotional noise projection” of Inanimate Nature is something else entirely. It doesn’t make me physically ill, but the album gives off such an ineffable bad vibe (without any noticeable abuse of volume or frequencies) that I’m usually in a noticeably worse mood after I finish listening to it. It presumably goes under the physiological rubric, but the impact is so primarily mental that for non-eliminativists it could easily move into the realm of the metaphysical. It’s a rare effect that deserves investigation and I think it’s a great album anyway, but please forgive me if I don’t want to hear Inanimate Nature right now.
Playtime
Let us consider this [weblogger]. His [writing] is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the [reader] a little too quick. He [posts] a little too eagerly; his [words], his [responses] express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the [reader]. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his [writing] the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while [revising] his [site] with the recklessness of a tightrope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a slight movement of the [topic at hand]. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his [posts] as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a [weblogger].The source is Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Lucretius on Apprehension
From De Rerum Natura (Rolfe Humphries translation):
Or is this More probable?—that in a single time, No longer than it takes an eye to blink Or mouth to utter half a syllable, Below this instant, this split-second, lie Times almost infinite, which reason knows As presences, and in each presence dwells Its own peculiar image, all of them So tenuous no mind is sharp enough To see them all, must focus, concentrate On only one, so all the rest are lost Except the one mind has determined on. Mind does prepare itself, and hopes to see, Anticipates the next successive image, And therefore finds it, as it must.Lucretius seems to have had something of a short-attention span; a page after this he’s offering a preview of Darwin and tearing apart Aristotle’s causes. Most of De Rerum Natura is more metaphysically oriented, but I noticed this little passage, which seems to be very much tied to apprehension.
Lucretius draws on the Presocratics a fair amount; his atomism and materialism draws on Empedocles, and here there’s a bit of Zeno. The question of the mind imposing structures on empirical data wasn’t new, but the emphasis is on paying attention not to aspects of a moment, but to one moment out of many, and from first principles inferring the causality of the next moment (and all those in between).
The continuity of time, then, is assembled from fenceposts taken by the attention of the mind, which, like attention, are not arbitrarily chosen. The sequence of anticipation to a necessary finding of the anticipated moment seems to imply that the flow of time was not as fundamental as Lucretius’s eternal atoms; rather, it’s something that the mind participates in.
Ursonate, Kurt Schwitters
When I first heard Ursonate, I thought it was the tedious ramblings of a mental patient. The dadaist Schwitters is better known for his paintings, but his sound poetry has had a more esoteric influence. Ursonate in particular was one of the earliest works to treat pure spoken syllables as musical form. Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara were playing in similar areas, but Schwitters’ work has more of a pleasing, formally poetic structure. So said Schwitters:
You yourself will certainly feel the rhythm, slack or strong, high or low, taut or loose.I heard it years later with more open ears, and felt the rhythm, but also felt the boredom. Over the course of about forty-five minutes, Schwitters’ stiff recitation of the score couldn’t sustain interest:
Fümms bö wä tää zää Uu, pögiff, kwiiee.And that was that, until I recently heard Eberhard Blum’s version. Blum is mostly known as a flautist who worked with Morton Feldman and recorded some of his longer endurance tests. But his version of Ursonate is revelatory. There are three other versions here: Schwitters’ original, and links to Jaap Blonk’s rather bombastic recital (I prefer him on his own work, which is more pyrotechnical and more playful) and Christian Bok’s rather overexcited version, about which he says:
Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo, tillll, Jüü-Kaa?
Rinnzekete bee bee nnz krr müüüü, ziiuu ennze ziiuu rinnzkrrmüüüü,
Rakete bee bee.
[My] “Ursonate” is what I imagine the poem by Kurt Schwitters might sound like if performed at high speed by F.T. Marinetti.Blonk and Bok’s versions benefit from being delivered at roughly twice the speed of the original, but I didn’t make it through either of them in one sitting.
Blum’s version is different, though it’s also just as fast. His voice is far more sonorous, and he works very hard to bring in traditional musical qualities to the text; he comes closer to singing it than any of the others, and there are discernable notes and even melodies that get associated with specific phrases. This makes it all easier to take, but it also vindicates Schwitters’ original text: given enough of a dynamic vocalizing, sections stick in the memory more easily and Schwitters’ structure becomes more apparent. The irony is that Blum has to bring so much traditional musical baggage in to draw out these qualities.
Unfortunately, the Blum version is out of print, a casualty of the Hat label, but I can offer an excerpt from the third movement: Scherzo (2 mb). Reissue!
Invisible Adjunct on Grad School
I have to put in a plug for Invisible Adjunct’s incredibly moving entry on grad school and “unalienated labor.” After years of sniping, resentful articles in the New York Observer and endless reports of backbiting from inside the academy, she comes much closer to distilling the conflicts between embodying a life of critical thought and achieving subsistence and harmony in the world. IA also isolates the sort of legitimacy conferred on studies by the academy. It’s not just being printed up by a university press and the establishment of norms and rankings for work; it’s the validation of a life and lifestyle based around that work. Even if it’s only people giving each other’s existence legitimacy a la Quine, it can be invaluable in the ideal situation. As Ray Davis points out, the ideal situation is rather uncommon.
I was speaking to someone yesterday about grad school. He happily reported that he had just been accepted to a graduate program and proceeded to tell me how highly the program was ranked, how the school was one of the top ten for this sort of work, how 80% of their graduates got tenure, how respected the professors were in their fields, his sizeable stipend, how much they wanted him to come. I’m happy for him, of course, but I’d be happier if the first thing he’d mentioned was what he wanted to study. I’d be happier (and less worried) if he’d even brought it up.
William Gass on Writing
William Gass on his profession:
The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward. This is not a boast or a complaint. It is a fact. Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. The condition I describe is not extraordinary. Certain scientists, philosophers, historians, and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can. One must be satisfied with that.Yes, but cause? I didn’t know that there was one. Neurologists can spend years analyzing dopamine receptors in the faint hopes of a distant total understanding of the mind-body problem and associated fringe benefits, but even philosophy has more of a directional mechanism through peer acclamation, regardless of how arbitrary it can be. (Also note the purposeful exclusion of art and music, which are presumably more “rewarding”.)
Literature throws off far more chaff—in the sense of directionless, ephemeral entertainments—than almost any other liberal arts discipline because it is less regimented; it is emphatically empirical, even at its most abstract. Attempts to proceed from theory are often disastrous (see Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti, but also Chernyshevsky’s What is To Be Done?, etc.). If you wade through the fiction section at a bookstore, it’s amazing how little older work is present as a percentage of the total books, and how transitory the appeal and designs of most of what’s being written are. I have to go to the university library to find a copy of Gotthelf’s influential and significant “The Black Spider.” There is no plan for the future of literature, nor can there be one under the definition of literature as it is understood. “Movements” are ephemeral and dwarfed by exceptions and detractors. Surrealism in my mind is much more of a piece in art than in literature; situationism (and its bastard child actionism) made itself felt more strongly in any discipline but literature. At its most absurd, Wyndham Lewis’s paintings stand in his one-man Vorticism movement a lot more comfortably than his novels.
Gass’s implicit message, as opposed to the explicit one of private despair and resilience, is that writers, at least recently, place themselves in their artistic stream less as trendsetters and waypoints than as individuals. This has its bad aspects: rampant individualism leads to lack of direction and accusations of being a crank. And it’s frustrating to crawl through the onslaught to find pearls of novelty and meaning. But for me, it’s still a greater discipline in conception, though rarely in practice.
—-As a tangent/afterthought, it’s helpful (as always) to look at the world of science-fiction, which has been more chummy and insular than the world of “regular” fiction. It also possesses less of a critical/academic infrastructure for delivering accolades to the most worthy work, despite the best efforts of people like John Clute. One writer/critic in the field once said that discerning science-fiction critics had to be willing to read an awful lot of terrible and mediocre genre books—and thus, unless you’re a peculiar sort of masochist who enjoys boredom, enjoy them—just to be able to find the good/great ones. I don’t see any reason why this can’t apply to all fiction.
John Coleman on Fires on the Plain
Circa 1962, this was an English film critic’s comment on Fires on the Plain:
Fires on the Plain is showing to an audience of turnip-headed morons…screams of laughter welcoming such acts as the impaling of a mad dog on a bayonet (the spray of blood that hit the ground really rolled them in the aisles), titters as the Japanese hero declines the invitation to cannibalism, bellows of fun as machine guns stuttered and gaunt men ran away.
The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Geegaw points me to Giornale Nuovo‘s review of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, and since the book seems somewhat relevant to the day’s events, I offer my commentary.
The book is nominally about a circus that comes to a small, anonymous, Hungarian town. The circus has two main features: first, a really huge cadaver of a whale (yes, that would be a Leviathan); and second, the Prince, a homunculus-like figure who sows nihilism and violence, and eventually stirs the town’s people into a frenzy of rioting and killing, which is responded to in kind by the police.
Through this pass two sympathetic figures, the naive man-child Valuska, who does performances of the heavenly bodies in motion for bar patrons, and his mentor Mr. Eszter, who is obsessed with a project of retuning a piano to “natural” harmonies and abandoning the well/equal-temperment that was used as the basis for what Krasznahorkai evidently considers to be the peak of aesthetic achievement, “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Krasznahorkai’s explanations are not especially clear, which is unfortunate, since it’s clearly the major metaphor of the book.
For reference, this explanation seems good, and for those of you with time on your hands, this essay on “Pythagorean Tuning and Medieval Polyphony” seems awfully interesting. The Chicago Reader offers a somewhat-helpful summary, and while this may not be helpful, it’s pretty amusing. The first piece concludes with a great passage:
There are four main reasons why modern scholars have lost interest in the question of what is the best tuning system. First, in the 1930s, Carl Seashore measured the pitch accuracy of real performers and showed that singers and violinists are remarkably inaccurate. For non-fixed-pitch instruments, the pitch accuracy is on the order of 25 cents. Yet Western listeners (and musicians) are not noticeable disturbed by the pitch intonation of professional performers. Secondly, on average, professional piano tuners fail to tune notes more accurately than about 8 cents. This means that even if performers could perform very accurately, they would find it difficult to find suitable instruments. Thirdly, listeners seemingly adapt to whatever system they have been exposed to. Most Western listeners find just intonation “weird” sounding rather than “better”. Moreover, professional musicians appear to prefer equally tempered intervals to their just counterparts. See the results of Vos 1986. Finally, pitch perception has been shown to be categorical in nature. In vision, many shades of red will be perceived as “red”. Similarly, listeners tend to mentally “re-code” mis-tuned pitches so they are experienced as falling in the correct category. Mis-tuning must be remarkably large (>50 cents) before they draw much attention. This insensitivity is especially marked for short duration sounds — which tend to dominant music-making.But no matter, since Eszter’s obsession is with finding the harmony of the spheres and returning to mathematically pure intervals; all those nasty intervals are to him the indicators of “an indifferent power which offered disappointment at every turn.” But he doesn’t have much luck; in his purer tunings, Bach sounds awful.
After the riots, order is re-estabished by Eszter’s estranged wife, Mrs. Eszter, who cheerfully and aggressively implements new martial law in light of the need to exert control over the town. She is the sort who was born to fill a power vacuum, and she stands in opposition to both Eszter and Valuska, representing the human capacity towards control, organization, and power; she’s effective, functional, but brutal and arbitrary. Just like the imposition of equal temperament on music (it is all but said).
And when Mr. Eszter retunes his piano back to equal temperament at the end of the book so he can again hear the glory of Bach without his ears bleeding…you can guess what that means. Krasznahorkai’s moral position is ambivalent, but his ideological layout seems to still be derived from Hobbes (and to some extent, Burke): we are given limited natural tools out of which we construct edifices that can reach heights of beauty as well as oppress and dullen. But they remain arbitrary, able to be torn down and built back up. Eszter’s appreciation of equal temperament is as good as it’s going to get.
(I don’t agree with this; I actually think there are significant problems with this metaphor, but the book offers enough to chew on that I’m willing to take it on its own terms.)
Krasznahorkai manages to end the book with a masterstroke, though, with a stunning, sustained description of the body’s biology, which he reveals as a more precise metaphor than temperament. The drama offsets the nagging feeling that Krasznahorkai has left a few loose ends hanging. For the record, Eszter ends up fine, and Valuska is beaten but alive.
So I think about this book while watching television and seeing the statue go down for the Nth time, and the looting and the anarchy and the celebrations and the violence, and I think the book may be too nihilistic, not for its painting of inherent natural imperfection or the implication of destruction in every creative act, but for its lack of differentiation: to use the metaphor, for being unwilling to distinguish one tuning from another. The resignation, or lack of attention, makes the book dark for the wrong reason. In pursuing an ornate Faberge egg of a metaphor, Krasznahorkai loses sight of a complex anthropological standpoint and ends up as a reductionist. The book sets lofty philosophical goals and makes immense progress towards them, but I do not find it fully-formed.
As a footnote, the movie adaptation, The Werckmeister Harmonies nearly obscures the main thrust of the book and goes for a more tepid, sensory approach, turning the complexities of the book into a parable.
The Guinea Pigs, Ludvik Vaculik
Ludvik Vaculik has very little in common with Milan Kundera, or Ivan Klima, or Josef Skvorecky. Those are three of the biggest names in modern Czech writing, and they all combine a historical awareness with a willingness towards heavy allegory. All deal with political subjects explicitly, but the material isn’t polemical, especially with Kundera.
The Guinea Pigs is different. It shuns any specific realism and has a surrealistic streak that has more in common with the samizdat literature of Czechoslovakia, like that of Lukas Tomin, but it is handled with such steely calm that it doesn’t predominate. Very little predominates over anything else; Vaculik adapts Kafka’s style of ambiguous symbolism to totalitarian allegory with huge success. Next to the more explicit and/or fanciful allegories of Koestler, Makine, Pelevin, and others, Vaculik’s book is more intimate, less graspable, and far more striking. Kafka wrongly gets posited as a political or humanitarian allegorist, when his stories are rather personal series of images and processes that cannot be conclusively unlocked.
Vasek, the narrator, works as a bank clerk in Prague, where people regularly steal money to make their living. He buys some guinea pigs for his children, but becomes obsessed with them himself: specifically, with their responsiveness (or lack thereof), their tolerance for adverse situations, and their seeming absence of personality short of gut reactions (like biting). Halfway through the book, he is torturing them. The tortures aren’t beastly; what makes them acutely discomfiting to read is the narrator’s sickly mental state:
As the water rose, the guinea pig rose too, although it ordinarily doesn’t stand around on its hind legs, but rather squats like a hare or a rabbit. Now it stood on its hind legs, though, and raised its body above the water level. “Well, how are things?” I said gently. “Not so hot,” it replied, and rocked slightly in the waves. But it was still standing on its feet. It raised its head, up, in my direction.Vaculik walks a very fine line between a symbolism that is too schematic and intrinsically arbitrary, on the one hand, and an overdramatization of the Vasek’s treatment of the guinea pigs, on the other. Sometimes he loses control and takes the easy way out, as when Vasek tells his wife that he’s turning into a guinea pig. But much of the time he carefully piles on the ambiguities and mysteries. Vasek’s strange relationship with his workplace and his superiors, including the venerable Mr. Maelstrom, whose name signifies the slow degradation of the surrounding environs, as money disappears after it is confiscated from the workers who stole it, as the guinea pigs meet random fates in the face of Vasek’s disinterested curiosity, and as Vasek meets his fate as he loses all his emotional capacities.I turned off the water. The silence was a relief. Only the sewer gurgled. I became aware of a pressure in my skull, a drunken excitement that I had never known before, a tremor of the nerves. I reached into the pit. With my miraculous power, I lifted Ruprecht into the air, he grabbed my hand with all his claws, he hung on. I picked him up to my cheek and I could hear his tight, thin, wheezing breathing. I also whispered to myself, “We’re saved.”
The end of the book is an explicit reference to the end of The Trial, and there are other segments that resemble it, like Maelstrom’s discourse on circulation, which could be a first cousin to the speeches of the lawyer and the priest of The Trial. The flow and process of the book is not as effortless as in Kafka, but Vaculik manages a stricter version of a process Kafka never fully embraced, that of removal. It’s not there in his novels, and the two short stories in which the process of removal predominates—“The Metamorphosis” and “A Hunger Artist”—are actually atypical. By placing the senseless guinea pigs front and center, Vaculik sets his aim quite early, and follows the arc without error. What remains at the end is not language, as with Beckett, but a physical void.
Books like these that strive for an almost noetic effect can have an initial impact that is not lasting, but guardedly, I will say that it ranks far beyond any of the other Czech writers mentioned, and alongside Kleist and Gogol.
The Incredulous Stare on Transhumanism
UFO Breakfast gives Nick Bostrom and Transhumanism the old incredulous stare:
It appears that Yale’s philosophy department is hiring “transhumanists,” a philosophical school which until now I’d thought was limited to Dungeons & Dragons afterparties and the editorial war room of Wired Magazine circa 1996.I grant that Bostrom’s visions are extreme, but there already exist quite a few professors who believe in the singularity and the ascension of humanity into a transhumanistic mind. Roger Penrose is even scared of it. Most of them are not in philosophy departments, however, and most of them have noted scientific accomplishments to rest on. Likewise, Barrow and Tipler’s anthropic principle originated with certified physicists. (The Bostrom article UFO Breakfast points to is fun, but look to Bostrom’s dissertation on the anthropic principle for the real oh-my-god moments.)To be fair, though, transhumanists do participate in a lineage of vapid American optimism…
(There also is some superficial similarity with eugenicism in terms of an exhortatory jargon for human self-improvement, but I wouldn’t press this point.)
But this isn’t some new low for philosophy. Bostrom et al. may be Panglossian in their study of what’s got to be fairly close to the best of all possible worlds, but how about those possible worlds? The well-regarded David Lewis studied them, and a couple of his formulations are here:
1. Possible worlds exist — they are just as real as our world; 2. Possible worlds are the same sort of things as our world — they differ in content, not in kind; 3. Possible worlds cannot be reduced to something more basic — they are irreducible entities in their own right.The usual response, unless you’re an Everett many-worlds fan, is the incredulous stare:
The Incredulous Stare is simply the view that modal realism is intuitively grotesque.Maybe it’s a cheap shot, but is transhumanism any more grotesque? The main difference seem to be its cyber-cool trappings, and who am I to begrudge Bostrom that?
(I should add that I find Lewis’s use of supervenience to salvage his brand of materialism almost equally hard to swallow. This paper is the best I could find on short notice and only coarsely trashes his theories, but I still think there are deeper, internal problems beyond the ones the paper goes after. I won’t discuss them because I don’t believe anyone really cares.)
My point? Only that Bostrom is not a new step down in quality, but a step up in accessibility, and like neoconservativism and cultural studies, that can only mean good news (money and prestige) for philosophy.
Only Dissent: Thoughtless Kind Again
Invisible Adjunct more pithily addresses what I was trying to get at when I quoted Erving Goffman on media. She notes the sheer increase in noise that comes with the instant audiences of the web:
But our desire to “only connect,” combined with our ability to read and comment at the speed of light, argues against the humility that the distance and the vastness should recommend.I would add that even more connect, it’s the desire to be heard speaking in a societally acceptable context, any one other than just speaking to one’s self in an empty room.
Goffman’s work, most handily summarized in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, mostly concerns itself with the often deceptive practices embodied in order to obtain a willing audience for one’s actions and words. Yet the presence and immediacy of the situation grants a consistency that paradoxically prevents the discourse from falling into several independent solipsistic streams. In the case of mass media, the listener plays catch-up with one dominant stream, attempting to find an acceptable position to receive it.
What half-detached, half-immediate forms of discourse like blogs and message boards offer is a way to obtain a responsive audience with so much less commonality between the parties. (To take an extreme case: what is the “real-life” equivalent of a troll?) “Connection” need only be restricted to like-minded thinkers, because others can be ignored. Each speaker can easily shift context to whatever is most favorable to them.
This need not be bad, but it goes a fair ways towards culturally legitimizing speech which in past times would have been kept private in the speaker’s own head. Consequently, there is a purgative nature to some of it that can be rather ugly, aesthetically speaking.
Foundations and Empire
You can say all you want about push polls, badly phrased questions, the sort of dullards who have the time to waste on phone polls, wartime jingoism, etc., etc., but still, this ain’t good:
More than three-fourths of Americans—including two-thirds of liberals and 70% of Democrats —now say they support the decision to go to war. And more than four-fifths of these war supporters say they still will back the military action even if allied forces don’t find evidence of weapons of mass destruction.“Support” is a loaded word and it appears that the 4/5 figure is closer to 3/5, but you can check out the pdf for more stunners, like the result that only 12% of the pollees said that the Iraqi people are not “welcoming the presence of U.S. troops in their country…because they oppose the U.S. invading their land.” Maybe that’s because 69% of them get their news from “Cable news shows.” I’m still not so jaded that this all doesn’t give me a sock in the gut.
Anyway, enough sensationalism about polls. The Pessoan Wealth Bondage briefly sheds his Paglian personae to discuss the difficulty in combatting what See the Forest describes as the Alinskyan moving of the goalposts:
The Republicans are now just an extension of the Scaife/Coors/Bradley, etc.The WB responds with a pessimistic, expert analysis of the imbalance of forces, with a few long-term prescriptions for change:funded web of ideological think tanks and advocacy organizations-Heritage, Horowitz, Federalist Society, etc.—that call themselves “movement conservatives.” They have this magnificent “message amplification infrastructure” in place – the “Wurlitzer”—that is able to move the public more and more to the right, and their politicians just rest on top of that.
Commweal is trying to be a populist counterpoise to Heritage and Cato, but has not got the bucks. When you go to a man who runs a billion dollar family business in a regulated industry, it is easy to explain to him why it might make sense to make a tax deductible gift of the interest on the interest on his money to Cato, to repeal the regulations that vex him. It is much tougher to make an equally cogent case for the common good.But all the money in the world can’t turn this mess around in any short amount of time. The Right had a thirty year project that succeeded wildly, but it took time to reach the level of single-mindedness that See the Forest describes. Even after you read Mark Hertzgaard’s On Bended Knee, which describes the pandering of the press and the excuses they made for Reagan, it’s noticeable that due to Democratic control of Congress, some remaining press independence, or other factors, Iran-Contra still “happened.” The positions of the goalposts would not allow it on the radar now.
So even for them, these things took time. But I’m not in the mood to wait around for the supposed Emerging Democratic Majority to emerge. The crisis point seems too close. And it’s harder to foment a majority than to break one, as Ray Davis suggests:
Introduce enough irresolvable conflicts, and the “right” coalition would splinter into factions almost as nicely as the “left”: it has in the past, and it can again. (Bearing in mind, of course, that, no matter what loose coalitions might be in play, the most powerful single faction in American politics will continue to be, as it’s been since the Civil War, that represented by corporate lobbyists.)It has to be a bad sign when that last, parenthetical sentence reads as a statement of optimism rather than despair. But that’s where I am right now. Temporarily, the preservation of a neo-liberal market with ludicrous income inequity and a lack of checks on corporatism is looking better than all other feasible alternatives (isolationist protectionism, aggressive warmongering imperialism, total multipolar chaos) in the short-term. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part, or a lack of empathy for the victims of its tremendous defects, but what is going on right now is not in the interests of a majority of corporate lobbyists, even in this country. You don’t see articles like the Financial Times calling Bush’s economic policy “lunacy” unless at least the beginning of a rift similar to what Ray describes is forming. The best thing to do is help it along.
My response to the Tutor of WB, then, is that not all right-wing foundations pose equally frightening agendas, nor are they all marching in lockstep as much as current events suggest. The neocons and fundamentalists at Heritage and AEI are not the same as the welfare-bashing libertarians at Cato. It would not be the end of the world for progressives to welcome Cato into the fold temporarily, since they too have expressed reservations (see their Why the United States Should Not Attack Iraq”) about the current direction of the U.S. policy. In the face of patent financial mismanagement, there is room for a schism.
Of course, maybe the free-marketers don’t need us and can just fight it out amongst themselves. But in the face of the left-wing impotence that all the people I’ve quoted bemoan, one potential short-term approach is a strategic alliance—I don’t know what form it would take—between the progressive sorts and those who want a tax cut, easy living, and a reduction of inculcated fear. Sanity precedes social justice.
Analytic Philosophy: Doctor Fact is Knocking at the Door!
Gary Sauer-Thompson delivers a missive on the evolution of analytic philosophy:
Many toiled in the analytic vineyard in the noonday sun to show that we were only looking at a picture not absolute truth. Dewey, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Putnam, Charles Taylor come to mind. Their labors succeeded in breaking the stranglehold of a science-centered expert culture in the liberal university; a culture obsessed with its theory of everything written in a few equations, a hostility to the common life and a big contempt for a literary culture.I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but analytic philosophy, and its particular pretenses and failings, deserves closer examination.
Analytic philosophy started off at the extreme. Proto-analytics like Frege and Russell lay the groundwork for a verificationist model of the world. The confusion that arose post-Wittgenstein came from the Viennese Circle’s appropriation of what they thought was a dismissal of metaphysical statements as nonsense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. What the analytics broke early on was the hold of metaphysics. Carl Hempel’s early papers are dismissive of anything that can’t be assigned a definitive truth value. Rudolph Carnap, one of the most extreme of the logical positivists, shows a great esteem for science, but disapproves of the culture surrounding it; science is too metaphysical for him.
But over time, analytics made the move back towards some notion of metaphysics. They did so using the most mathematical and scientific language possible, leading into endless discussions of material constitution, possible worlds, and debates between essentialism and non-essentialism.
The more esoteric blends of analytic philosophy maintained pretenses of scientific rigor. Willard Quine and Wilfred Sellars approached metaphysics as Frege had approached math and dug themselves into logically consistent but terribly obscure holes. Quine refined and rewrote Wittgenstein’s logical atomism into a network of interdependent atoms, none independent, even while tearing down traditional concepts of metaphysics.
Yet it was the more constructivist approaches, like those that came from Kripke, that caught on. By positing essential “things” with essential and non-essential properties, entirely new problems could be generated that led to statements with definite truth values, statements claiming basic metaphysical principles. Consider normative ethics, with its calculi of moral standing and well-being. It is the study of the mathematical manipulation of what psychologists can’t quantify.
The irony here, I always thought, was that it was the reintroduction of debatable metaphysics that gave analytic philosophy its power. The early verificationist approaches hit a dead end so quickly that there was almost no place to go but to metaphysics, and to establish a set of dogma as a tradition to work within, rather than as assumptions to be questioned. The debate between nominalists (those believing in particulars) and realists (those believing in universals) would have been anathema to Carl Hempel and the positivists in the 30’s, but not to their scions (and even some of them themselves—I know Hempel mellowed considerably) thirty to forty years later. Bernard Williams and David Armstrong had at least as much influence as Quine, because their approaches were more conducive towards productive work, and the manufacturing of problems to be debated and solved. An outstanding thinker like Donald Davidson sometimes seems shackled by assumptions, like the bugbear of the mental/physical divide, that his papers have to work within.
But I’d argue that it’s these restrictions and these signposts that allowed When Rorty attempted, with only partial success, to tear the house down by bringing in relativism (cultural and otherwise) and pragmatism, the metaphysics held it up. The edifice was too strong and too full of shared assumptions to fall victim to an attack that went in the wrong direction, tearing down rather than building up.
(I’d also say that Rorty’s approach is not especially compatible with continental thinkers for the same reason: his version of pragmatism is too destructive towards cultural theory, and possibly even towards pure deconstruction. But that’s a different subject….)
Erving Goffman on the Thoughtless Kind
Finally, consider that whatever else an announcer does, he must talk to listeners who are not there in the flesh. Because talk is learned, developed, and ordinarily practiced in connection with the visual and audible response of immediately present recipients, a radio announcer must inevitably talk as if responsive others were before his eyes and ears. (Television announcers are even more deeply committed to this condition than are radio announcers.) In brief, announcers must conjure up in their mind’s eye the notion of listeners, and act as though these phantoms were physically present to be addressed through gaze, body orientation, voice calibrated for distance, and the like. In a fundamental sense, then, broadcasting involves self-constructed talk projected under the demands, gaze, and responsiveness of listeners who aren’t there.The other half is that listeners, confronted with the one-sided conversation, will tend to imagine themselves in the dialogue and attribute to themselves responses which the broadcaster is assuming them to have had. When someone gets involved who doesn’t play by the rules, there is less offense than there is dissonance, since the script is broken:So announcers must not only watch the birdie; they must talk to it. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that they will often slip into a simulation of talking with it. Thus, after a suitable pause, an announcer can verbally respond to what he can assume is the response his prior statement evoked, his prior statement itself having been selected as one to which a particular response was only to be expected. Or, by switching voices, he himself can reply to his own statement and then respond to the reply, thereby shifting from monologue to the enactment of dialogue.
Erving Goffman, “Radio Talk”
This is how I talk when I’m hitting someone up for something and I’m not sure if I’m going to get it. This is how a greenhorn activist speaks when they solicit donations. I wouldn’t mind hearing it more often.
BROWN: Well I hope that soldiers in the field aren’t looking at CNN but I think, it strikes me, Dr. Ellsberg, that we veered a little there. Let me try and re-frame the question. If the Iraqi political strategy is to use the anti-war movement to put pressure on the coalition to cease fire, don’t – whether that’s the case or not –
(Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in the days when they would print something like that. I wasn’t around then—was it better? Was it worse?)
My question is, what would Goffman’s model say about weblogs and the discourse on such? There’s plenty that’s been said about the absence of vocal and visual cues; that’s not as interesting as the extent to which the momentary (minutes/hours/days) absence of response allows the sort of construction Goffman discusses.
One theory: the vicious and petty squabbles (often in disguised form) that run rampant on newsgroups, blogs, chatrooms, comments boards—whatever—are partly an attempt to repossess and re-envisage the other person while they’re not present. I post a comment to you, you one-up me by shifting context, I try to pull back even further to the big picture, you accuse me of missing the point. The time dilation allows for a lot of little appropriations of authority without ever seating power firmly in one place.
Another theory: this authority granted to bloggers and even those who comment on their boards has generated such a diaspora of promulgated self- and other-images that they (a) blur together, or (b) cancel each other out. The average volume and heatedness of the discourse grows in an attempt to compensate for consequent insecurity.