Dmitry Galkovsky: The Infinite Deadlock
There’s a huge frustration to hearing about a supposedly brilliant author (often, as with this case, in the Times Literary Supplement) and finding that his or her work has not been translated into a language you speak. Offhand, the absence of Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologiae has been irritating me for almost a decade, and yet I just now discovered that Frank Prengel, German scholar and Microsoft developer evangelist, has been translating it! So stop reading this and go read what Prenzel has translated so far of Summa Technologiae.
But Galkovsky is unfortunately more obscure. The only English reference I’ve found on him aside from the TLS’s offhand remark is this tantalizing snippet:
A member of the Antibooker panel of judges, Andrey Vasilevsky, says: “This is a book of extremely complicated structure, a book of annotations to a text that does not exist. Fresh annotations are made to these annotations, which forms an endless chain. Finally all gets so complicated, that the author supplements the book with a special index as to how to use it. However very few people can understand how to use that index.”Anyone up for a translation?
I also note the similarity of this description to that of the imagined book Gigamesh in Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum:
Indeed yes: this novel is a bottomless pit; in whatever place you touch it, roads open up, no end of roads (the pattern of the commas in Chapter VI is an analogue of the map of Rome!), and roads not every which way, for they all, with their innumerable outbranchings, interweave harmoniously to form a single whole (which Hannahan proves employing topological algebra—see the Commentary, the Metamathematical Appendex, p. 811ff.). And thus everything achieves its realization…There are rumors to the effect that Hannahan was assisted in his creation by a battery of computers furnished him by IBM.
Brett Bourbon: Finding a Replacement for the Soul, cont.
(Please see Part 1.)
A third disanalogy between Wittgensteinian and everyday criteria indicates that, and why, although Wittgenstein’s immediate audience was the empiricist tradition of philosophy, his views are going, or ought, to offend an empiricist sensibility at every point — which is only to say that this conflict is an intimate one. Go back to the first element of my lay-out, the one I label “Source of Authority”. There one finds “American officials”, “I”, “Africans”, “Anna Freud”, “Shanley”...Wittgenstein’s source of authority never varies in this way. It is, for him, always we who “establish” the criteria under investigation. The criteria Wittgenstein appeals to—those which are, for him, the data of philosophy—are always “ours”, the “group” which forms his “authority” is always, apparently, the human group as such, the human being generally. When I voice them, I do so, or take myself to do so, as a member of that group, a representative human.Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (18)
This quote illuminates some of the problems that Bourbon faces in separating the human from the non-human (e.g., machines). When Wittgenstein uses “we” to generalize over a metaphysically strict notion of people using language (which seems to me a more precise term than “human”), the criteria used are de facto implied by the usage of the words themselves. A word means by virtue of its use, and authority stems from use rather than, for example, a particular set of sense data.
Bourbon does not quite have that avenue open to him, since he is interested in a criteria of being human. What for Wittgenstein was an effect of usage is here inverted, as language takes on a role in elucidating what it is to be human. If the book is to answer this question, he has to engage in debates such as, “Women, narratives, poems, and the like can be understood (1) as expressive of human beings or (2) as analogically like human beings” (170). To do so he cannot rely on language use alone, but on language’s interaction with certain types of ontology (say, “what it is to be human”). This, I think, is the most radical move made in the book. Not coincidentally, there is a tension between the “we” and the “I” in the book—both are used liberally—that implies a more voluntary notion of humanity than the version that Wittgenstein mandated. But for all that, it sometimes is straightforardly ontological:
Human beings could cease to be human only if the world were not our world. (204)
The challenge is set here: to find a version of humanness that has in its very ontology a relation that is illuminated by our relationship to the non-propositional language in fiction.
To this end, the book alternates between passages in high analytic philosophy style (especially Davidson) and much more freewheeling reveries that owe a little to Heidegger and Levinas, but not that much. Sellars is one philosopher who I’m pretty weak on, but from what I can gather, Bourbon draws on his response to Quine in some of the more technical passages. There could be a little John McDowell in there as well, but I’m really not qualified to tell. While Bourbon is concerned with literature, philosophy and more importantly, philosophical forms of argument, take precedence over literary theory and its forms. Apart from a short passage criticizing Helen Vendler and John Ashbery of “philosophical infelicities” (for taking a facile view of meaning in literature), there is little attempt to engage with literary analysis.
The early part of the book attempts to clear some territory, using analytic-styled arguments to push literature out of the realm of philosophy by claiming that fictional sentences are non-propositional. I.e., they do not contain truth values, and therefore do not actually reflect any correspondence to reality. As such, they are nonsense. Here he dispenses with much literary analysis, saying that poems are “provided with content by conceptual means: unjustified conceptual means” (10). Further:
If it [a poem] is going to be valuable as a means of reflecting upon ourselves, then it cannot be because it offers us theories, or places to test our theories. What kind of test would that be since our interpretations can rig the results? (11)
In other words, since whatever correspondence is mandated by an act of interpretation, the meaning of a fictional text is imposed on it, rather than contained in it. Rather (and the significance of this will be clear later), “their value will come out of nonsense.”
He then dispatches the versions of humanity offered by Keats and Henry Adams. Keats in his view sees humanity as an unnatural (or non-natural) phenomenon, capable of motivation in contrast to the non-intentionality of nature. This, he says, is insufficient; it is a definition by contrast and negation. The gloomier Adams offers an inversion of Keats’s bright view, portraying humanity as a meaningless “dynamo” of fireworks and little else in this wonderful passage from “Vis Nova”, near the end of The Education:
Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There, whether finished or not, education stopped. The formula, once made, could be but verified.The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams.
(Also see Ray Davis’s quotation of Adams for similarly grim times.)
Bourbon rejects this too as ultimately nihilistic and begging the question of the initial axiom, which I will quote a third time:
Human beings could cease to be human only if the world were not our world. (204)
Ergo, humanity is not merely a dynamo. Poised between the pre-modern conception of the soul and the existing deterministic, mechanistic view, Bourbon proceeds to nonsense, as embodied by the non-propositional sentences of fiction. His primary exemplar is Finnegans Wake.
Now, to claim Finnegans Wake as a representative of literature is disingenuous, since it is one of the most marginal and extreme works of fiction ever. But I don’t believe Bourbon is doing that; rather, he identifies FW as portraying the aspects he’s interested in in their rawest form, devoid of the facile interpretations that can be placed on the “plots” and “characters” of most books. Without these misleading interpretive constructs, we can get down to business.
For example, the “characters” in FW are not characters at all, but arrangements of assorted things and people that are designated by sigla and/or initials like HCE and ALP. HCE, standing for “here comes everybody”, “Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,” etc. Such a thing resists one particular sense; “We have to learn to recognize HCE, but we also have to learn what it is we are identifying” (175). But from the argument that fictional sentences lack sense and are non-propositional, this seems an impossible feat. Thus:
FW would seem to exemplify all these ways of falling into confusion, all of the ways words, sentences, and persons slip into obscurity. (175)
It is here, I think, that Bourbon sees the commonality with Wittgenstein, who in his later work explicated “language games” as holistic systems of linguistic practice; i.e., that words themselves lack a definite representative meaning, but rather gain what sense they have through their use between people. But what sort of language game is being played in fiction, where the use is explicitly nonsensical (so Bourbon says), and the activity is taking place not between two people but between a set text and a reader? Wittgenstein (in the view of David Pears, at least) mandated that a language be used between two people before it can properly be called a language; a language invented and used by one person who had never met anyone else would not properly be a language at all. That is not what the Wake deals in, but neither is it quite normal communication either. It is in this space between Wittgenstein’s idea of a language game and a solipsistic non-language that Bourbon fills in his idea of the human.
To be continued…
The Nightingales in New York
Robert Lloyd, singer and lyricist for the Nightingales, always sounded like a middle aged man, so their reunion fifteen years after breakup seemed more tenable than most. Sure enough, Lloyd seemed absolutely apropos moaning his despondent/sarcastic lyrics while half bent over the microphone. It didn’t seem silly that a man of 45 or so would be singing the tract of The Crunch or the slogans of Blood for Dirt.
Lloyd’s voice has actually improved in the intervening years; now it’s less whinnying and deeper.
They opened with ten minutes of “Going Through the Motions,” backed by an off-putting drone that sent the punters running. It’s one of many songs about performers being obliged to perform over and over for audiences (“performance is deformance”), but Lloyd’s visible joy at separating the believers from the detractors (listen to a recent performance of Going Through the Motions)—halfway across the world, no less—turned it from a bored complaint into an idealistic invocation. The implication being that if you last through this and like it, he and his band will give themselves over to you fully and gladly for an hour.
And they did. By the time the inevitable How to Age came around at the end of the show, Lloyd was strutting with the visible satisfaction of the cynic who, with the Bush and Blair administrations and lord knows what personal crises, has been proved utterly right. (Steve remembers the song here.) It was as though he’d grown up into the words that were too large for him.
Copying
Fill the lacunae in your inspiration by tidily copying out what you have already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street”
But this is pretty rare with a computer or a blog; you might as well just move on to the next blog entry instead. In the absence of automatic writing (the surrealist’s tool, made all the more simple by the speed at which most people can type), I don’t know of any people who actually copy out what they type on a computer, though transcribing from handwritten notes might half-count. I do edit with a pen and paper, marking up and crossing out before going back to the terminal and making the edits on the screen, because things that read well on a screen sometimes seem so awkward and angular on a thin page. I treasure these marked-up drafts because they are the only unique items that are created in the writing process, as visual documents as much as revisions of words, like a humble Humument (the thumbnails lead to the full-size pages if you click on the numbers—and you should!).
I have recopied writing on computer on occasion, but even then it was because I was so unsatisfied with the original that I wanted to rewrite every sentence, so “copying” hardly seems like an appropriate term. The act of recopying puts me into the rhythms of writing much more than the rhythms of reading, and the harmony of each word being slowly recreated along with the rattle of the keyboard invokes a very different aesthetic than the silent run of the eyes along the screen.
And, for a contradictory view, here’s Kenneth Goldsmith:
I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity. On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day’s NEW YORK TIMES word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page…When I reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity.Automatic writing indeed.
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England
I read Hrabal many years ago in a small-press English language edition of Total Fears, portraying the wandering mind of an aging writer and what might be most accurately termed his tulpa, a female correspondent that he monologues to and rhapsodizes over. I haven’t been as thrilled with the Czech literature I’ve read as with much of the Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian work that oft en dealt in similar socio-political issues. (One very significant exception is Ludvik Vaculik.) And so I never got around to reading much of Hrabal’s other work, until I was reminded of him by James Wood in one of the articles in The Irresponsible Self. Wood gives a good overview of Hrabal’s spirit, but there are some things in I Served the King of England, specifically in his treatment of the historical material, that Wood doesn’t mention.
First, his verbal style. The book reads fantastically well in English, and I can’t believe it’s all translator Paul Wilson’s doing. Hrabal writes in a breezy, propulsive way, tossing off curious images even as he keeps things going quite quickly. The style supports big events and little ones nearly equally, and the blending of them (very important in this novel) comes off a lot more seamlessly than it does in, for example, a Jonathan Franzen or Don DeLillo novel, where the pressures of larger concerns pull the reader away from the characters.
But the structure helps as well: I Served the King of England is about a very short waiter named Ditie, who holds jobs at a couple hotels before getting involved with a blond Nazi after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, then moving on to start his own hotel (built out of a blacksmith shop in an abandoned quarry) before losing it to Communism and spending time in a minimum-security (absolute minimum) prison for millionaires.
Those are the bare bones of the plot. Like Grass’s The Tin Drum, it portrays the skewed, sometimes myopic perspective of someone who doesn’t feel fully human because of their shortness, but the incidental details are less horrific and surreal than they are comical and short-sighted. Ditie is looking up at those around him, literally and figuratively, and pushed down by a headwaiter who claims expertise because he once “served the king of England.” (Ditie later serves the Emperor of Ethiopia and comes to attribute all his skills to it.) And a very long time is spent in the restaurants before the Nazi invasion. The novel is half over and all that has happened is that Ditie has gotten a series of slightly better waitering jobs, had some farcical encounters with perfectionist waiters and, of course, the Emperor of Ethiopia. The “historical” events are all relegated to the last half of the novel, and there is little indication in the first half that they are coming.
And indeed, when they do come, Ditie only sees them through his perspective, which, unlike Oskar’s in The Tin Drum, is that of a man inside history, not a child outside of it. When Ditie meets the Nazi girl:
She was attractively dressed, and to get on the good side of her and show her how grateful I was that she spoke German with me I said it was awful what the Czechs were doing to those poor German students, that I’d seen with my own eyes on Narodni how they pulled the white socks and brown shirts off two German students. And she told me that I spoke the truth, that Prague was part of the old German Empire and the Germans had an inalienable right to walk about the city dressed according to their own customs.He quickly gets an in with the Germans and soon enough faces his old master headwaiter, now as an important customer, and tells him, “You may have served the King of England but it hasn’t done you any good.” He leaves his wife and child (who end up being the subjects of an experiment to see what sort of Aryan baby could be made with a Czech) after suffering a crisis of conscience over the horrors of the war. Yet Hrabal never pulls back enough to see anything beyond Ditie’s eyes, and the book reads as one of the most immanent stories of life around the war. It is farcical and unrealistic, but the remote backdrop of history, kept carefully in check, quietly undermines the position that the history is known as it has been written. Ditie remains half-unknowing and half-happy, and his experiences are shaped more by the odd fraction of life that he experiences than by any larger world outcomes. Against the backdrop of the war, this is alternately amusing (allowing the reader to condescend to Ditie) and horrific; the vividness of the first half takes on as much narrative weight as the second, which is Hrabal’s achievement.
When, much later, he ends up doing manual labor in a gamekeeper’s lodge in a forest, he has lost everything and feels happier for it. He does not treasure his successful days of past, but nor does he quite regret them, and he makes no excuses nor asks for any forgiveness, remaining too happy to be just a waiter and servant. It is, Hrabal implies, how he can live. Ditie shrugs metaphorically at the end, with relief rather than indifference. The story, with the structure of a tall tale and the scenery of historical horror, does not give a moral or a resolution. It is affirming, but it requires that all the good and bad be affirmed together.
For the Blanchot Fans
The value and dignity of everyday words is to be as close as possible to nothing. Invisible, not letting anything be seen, always beyond themselves, always on this side of things, a pure awareness crosses them, so discreetly that it itself can sometimes be lacking. Everything then is nullity. And yet, understanding does not stop occurring; it even seems that it attains its point of perfection. What could be richer than this extreme destitution?Actually, I took this from the liner text to the Mountain Goats’ Nothing for Juice, because while I have my doubts about the “understanding” that occurs through everyday words, I do hear it in popular (i.e. folk) music, and that, more than any would-be proletarian consciousness, justifies (even mandates) its inclusion in more elite avant contexts. See this Fred Frith interview for more…. (No significant exposition of Frith’s folk influences seems to exist online, alas.)Maurice Blanchot, “The Language of Fiction” (tr. Mandell)
Richard Foreman: The Gods Are Pounding My Head!
Not a lot to say on this piece of surrealist theater, since I’m not versed so much in the influences that inform Foreman’s work, nor in the skills needed to analyze the very open-ended symbolism of the play. But here is Foreman’s note on the play, which, besides providing invaluable pointers on what he’s getting at, stands on its own:
This veryto my mindॾlegiac play does delineate my own philosophical dilemma. I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personalityॺ man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.There are echoes here of “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, as memorably referenced by Sam Jones, so perhaps the dichotomy between a wide-ranging fenceposter and a burrowing hedgehog is not that new. Perhaps it’s been there since Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, about which someone (I can’t remember who) said that it was the last time that someone could lay claim to all the written knowledge in the world. But the problem has certainly gotten worse lately, something you become acutely conscious of while writing a weblog like this one.And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modernism”to cut down , like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land this was the ploy of the avant-garde.
But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritanceॺs we all become “pancake people”spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming soॺnd sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.
But, at the end, hope still springs eternal…
Also see this set of Richard Foreman interviews.
Brett Bourbon: Finding a Replacement for the Soul
This is a strange one. Subtitled Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy, this book comes as neither an inhabitant of a particular established field of study, nor as the cross-disciplinary generalizations of a well-known academic like Richard Rorty or Stanley Cavell. Its topic is how literature has something unique to contribute to metaphysical concerns, specifically something that cannot be obtained from philosophy. It’s very idiosyncratic, and while I’m not sure how anyone could agree with all or most of it, there should be more books like it.
The question considered, stated early on, is:
What does it mean to be a human person with our capacities and our fate? How could we answer such a question? Maybe with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the works of Aristotle, or Bach’s Mass in B Minor...Every answer to “What does it mean to be human?” is a restatement of another riddle. (20)
I take the question of meaning in human life to be metaphysical. There are extreme epistemological concerns that overlap with it, such as how such a meaning is communicated to others, how it is perceived, and our own sense of ourselves as humans to begin with. But where Wittgenstein (whose late work figures prominently in the book) would relegate these questions to a mystical status, Bourbon follows them in a comparatively concrete manner. When he says “meaning,” he constitutes it in a Heideggerian way: what does being human constitute that could not be constituted by a robot or a computer program? Here is how he describes this distinction:
To talk about seeing humans as machines, if by machine we mean as automata and thus as not human in the way that I am, or as machines in the same way that clocks and computers are, is not to see humans under some aspect or description. It is to understand human beings as not human. Human beings could cease to be human only if the world were not our world. (204)
The question of “seeing” is epistemological, but the metaphysics underpinning this passage are quite aggressive. There is some bootstrapping going on in the book, as though to assume that the question of human meaning is paramount to Da-sein, and that the path to an answer can be found through literature, and specifically, through “The various ways sentences and phrases lose sense.” I am sympathetic to this approach, but Bourbon goes after it with such single-mindedness that he will lose many along the way who do not agree with the centrality of his concerns.
One of his final conclusions—
The deformations of our variable relation to and participation in language are the only legitimate things that we can read through literature. (259)
—is less shocking in context simply because it flows so easily from
the strong opinions that have preceded it.
The significance of these topics are as a way of saving/replacing the authoritative voice, and how to preserve a method of meaning (as a human) in the absence of a definitive religion or other authority. This is presented as an ethical question as much as an ontological one. Where oracles once spoke with a particular type of intentionality that provided a foundational basis for truth, we now cannot fall back on such myths:
Our ethical judgments and their particular intentional content and concern lack a foundation that would include an intrinsic relation to their normative form. (46)
In other words, it is necessary to build a foundation for ethics that stands aside from the scientific, objective world—perhaps even the propositional world described by Russell and early Wittgenstein. There is an echo here of Levinas’s project to save morality, as well as Alasdair MacIntyre’s endorsement of Aristotle’s ethics. The difference is that it is far more deductive than even Levinas; from literature and “human meaning” will flow a river that picks up ethics downstream.
To be continued…
Kira Muratova: The Asthenic Syndrome
To begin with a tangent: one of the things that I love about the Times Literary Supplement is how dutiful they are about getting experts to review books in their fields, so that instead of, for example, hearing praise for the wonderfully informative, picturesque prose of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, as happened in countless American publications, you get to hear how badly Menand’s book misrepresented the pragmatic philosophical tradition, as Bruce Wilshire discussed at length, concluding:
Menand’s failure to grasp the purport and consequences of distinctively philosophical ideas becomes damagingly clear. What is the meaning of truth, persons, groups, reality, matter, mind, the meaning of meaning itself, the meaning of “pragmatism” itself? James’s pragmatic theories of meaning and truth depend on his metaphysics of radical empiricism or pure experience, but references to this metaphysics are absent in Menand, and so James’s pragmatism cannot be grasped. Neither can Dewey’s, nor Peirce’s.It would be nice to say that The Metaphysical Club is on balance worth having. Menand provides interesting and valuable historical knowledge often overlooked by “pure” philosophers, touching on important thinkers such as Chauncey Wright, Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, Randolph Bourne, W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Bentley, Edward Ross, Learned Hand and many others. But I cannot say this nice thing. Menand’s valuable information about the circumstances surrounding the emergence of ideas will badly mislead unless one already knows quite a bit about the ideas themselves. It is not safe to assume that even many learned, educated, or inquiring people possess this knowledge and discipline.
Right on, Mr. Wilshire. (Sorry, the article is not publicly available, but it’s in the subscriber archive of the TLS.) More recently, Stephen Greenblatt picked a fight with Alastair Fowler, who had slammed Will in the World, over seventeenth century European population statistics, and Fowler came out the more knowledgeable winner.
The point is that there is often a real difference between presenting one’s experience of a work and critiquing the work itself, and often people present themselves as qualified to do both when they can actually only do the first. So I fess up: I don’t know enough about life in the Soviet Union during perestroika to claim that I truly understand Kira Muratova‘s The Asthenic Syndrome. But then, I’m not sure that Jonathan Rosenbaum does, either. He describes the first forty-five minutes of the film in detail, then throws up his hands, declaring:
Doubtless there are other details referring specifically to aspects of everyday postcommunist Russian life that are too local to register with much clarity to outsiders like me. Truthfully, I found the movie a lot easier to follow when I saw it a second time and knew not to look for too much plot continuity, though I can’t claim there weren’t parts that still baffled me. The movie’s a treasure chest, and if we get to see it more, more will surely become clear.Nevertheless, the fundamental aspects of The Asthenic Syndrome come across loud and clear—and you certainly don’t have to be Russian or postcommunist to recognize them as central philosophical as well as behavioral strains in our public life.
(Now I don’t have to feel so bad about discussing the film.) I disagree with Rosenbaum; the movie has a very specific context and makes allusions within it, and speaking to some Russian friends after the movie, it was clear that they were both essential to the film and presented only by allusion. The film is bereft of political (or even markedly cultural) references, yet unlike Alexander Kluge’s The Blind Director or the work of Bela Tarr, which also deal in elusive allegories, Muratova’s film exists within a very definite time and space, that of Gorbachev-era perestroika in the Soviet Union.
If you don’t know that perestroika is seen as the source of millions of deaths stemming from deregulation, corruption, and crime, the melancholy and despair that fill The Asthentic Syndrome seem disconnected from a particular cause: what is Muratova critiquing, exactly? Rosenbaum sees it as a general critique of politics and systems, but that is to deny its overwhelming sense of specificity. Muratova made a film for Soviets, and to reduce it to a series of abstract statements, as Rosenbaum does, sells it severely short. Without the context, the film is simply an ugly, abstract meditation on nothing in particular, one that can be used in assorted political contexts, but which lacks much innate value. Knowing the context reveals the emotion behind the puzzling surface.
The film proceeds for its first segment as Rosenbaum describes: a washed-out, black and white portrait of a woman, Natasha, grieving after her husband has died. But the actress playing Natasha is so hysterically over-the-top, and so unrealistic and disconnected in her mood swings as to be off-putting. So it comes as a relief forty-five minutes in when, with absolutely no prior indication, the camera pulls back to reveal that the film so far has been a film within a film. Everything is now in color, and an audience is bored with this art-house movie, not bothering to question the actress who played Natasha, who is the special guest. Eventually only one man is left in the theater, our hero Nikolai, who has fallen asleep.
Nikolai, it turns out, has some kind of (highly symbolic) narcolepsy, and spends much of the film asleep. He teaches, but rarely displays any emotion beyond resignation and exhaustion. He is clearly the opposite of Natasha, almost comically so. He wanders in a world filled with unpleasant people throwing decadent parties where the party game of the hour is to pose two nude people to make a scene depicting “love.” Nikolai repositions himself and a woman to, pace Kafka, appear to be lying next to each other in a coffin.
So it proceeds. The visuals are mostly drab and underplayed, and the extras in particular make a point of not intruding with much visible emotion. This is, evidently, a portrait of society in despair, a society which has lost a principle of order, albeit a cruel, totalitarian one, and is lost. Historically speaking, given the popularity of Putin’s return-to-authoritarianism regime, Muratova’s vision seems quite prescient.
Yet the relation of the two parts puzzles me. The film-within-a-film, never named, is so artificial as to even be considered a “bad film,” and thus something being rejected; certainly it seems to have no resonance for any of the “real” characters. But the balance of the opposites—lack of affect vs. hysteria—makes it out to be something more complicated. My tentative conclusion is that the film-within-the-film is intentionally designed to have an alienating effect, to be so extreme as to push the audience into the corner of the narcoleptic who is the film’s true protagonist. The old violent extremes, Muratova seems to say, have vanished and are no longer relevant, but that means that there is no revenge to be had, no purgation of anger for the descendents of the victims of Stalin. Rather, the rug has just been pulled out from under them, and they are left in an unregulated void.
I was intrigued by The Asthenic Syndrome, but often confused, sometimes bored, and rarely moved. (An anomalous, memorable sequence of a unlikable old matron ineptly playing the trumpet is a notable exception.) But this film was not made for me. It is a portrait of a unique situation that I never experienced, and it does not go out of its way to generalize or polemicize, though it has its strong opinions. It is of its time in a way that Tarr’s The Werckmeister Harmonies is not, yet that gives it a strength that allows it to easily best Angelopoulos’s tepid, feeble Ulysses’ Gaze, which is more concerned with making a pompous statement than capturing life.
Correspondence vs. Metaphysics
I.
Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber has a dissection of the latest latest battle between Rorty and the analytics. I’m neither schooled in nor particularly concerned with the vagueness part of things, but I do feel strongly about the Kripke-derived school of essentialism and metaphysics, and Rorty’s original review uses vagueness as more of a arbitrarily chosen example than as a special case. I’m not certain why Rorty chose it, since the study of what is and is not a “heap” isn’t as bewildering to common sense as certain other thought experiments, such as this one:
Consider the following version of the PMC taken from the writings of the Stoic Chrysippus. A man named Dion undergoes the amputation of his left-foot. Assuming that he is identical to his body, we may then ask: what is the relationship between Dion, the amputee, whom we shall call Leon, and Theon, the erstwhile aggregate of all of Dions body parts minus his left foot? Shall we say that it is Dion who is (has become) the amputee Leon, Theon having perished? Or is it Theon to whom Leon is identical, Dion having perished? A third option is that both survive the operation as the amputee. I believe that the third answer is the correct one.Regardless of the greater implications that such study has on realism and philosophy of language, Brian points out that many of his colleagues have no interest in the larger issue. It seems undeniable to me that the issue is one of territory.
Some of the correspondents mention that Kripkean essentialism is a way to recover ground lost when Wittgenstein and then Quine attacked language correspondence, empiricism, and the analytic/synthetic distinction. This also seems undeniable in effect if not in intent. David Armstrong once said that he thought that in comparing early Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell (he had no interest in later Wittgenstein), he thought that Wittgenstein had gone in the wrong direction in emphasizing correspondence; Russell was the one who had it right metaphysically. My own biases prevent me from understanding this position; I stand by Wittgenstein’s critique of Russell’s weak correspondence theory. But it’s clear that Armstrong, and most likely many others, are concerned enough with what happens past correspondence that the issue itself is not especially important to them. Or, as Soames says of vagueness (among other things) in his response:
This enterprise is one of several in which analytic philosophers are forging ahead by replacing Rortys metaphorical question — Are the sentences we use to describe the world maps of an independent reality?
— with more specific, nonmetaphorical questions on which real
progress can be made.
II.
But what is the definition of “real progress”? There’s no question that metaphysics has once again blossomed since Kripke, but aside from outliers like Davidson and Cavell, modern analytic work has had very little disciplinary overlap with other fields. As far as I can tell it has no interaction with its continental bete noir, nor much with literature these days.
One large area of overlap, however, is in the philosophy of mind, as neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists in artificial intelligence, and philosophers engage in long turf wars that often appear as though they’re talking past each other. Baumgartner and Payr’s Speaking Minds incisively portrays the dialogue of the deaf by giving each person their own chapter and letting the differences emerge. I disagree with the review at the above link when Cooper says:
Is it really necessary, for example, to include each interviewee’s description of the Turing test? Surely a singly quote from the original source (which is in any case included in a very useful glossary) would be sufficient.I would argue that indeed it is, since the definitions vary! Daniel Dennett, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Weizenbaum, George Lakoff, Hubert Dreyfus, and John Searle all proceed from such wildly varying starting points that they hear the questions about building/simulating minds differently and respond in kind. The computer scientists and the neurologists have lower-level problems to solve and don’t want to be bothered with the hard stuff. Putnam and Dreyfus have bigger epistemological problems to solve before this piddling stuff. Dennett wants to define most of these problems of mind out of existence. Even where there appears to be overlap, then, it is commonly incidental.
Yet there has been real overlap between philosophy and cognitive science in ontology. Metaphysical ontological work has been very significant in the development of knowledge representation structures used in, for example, the CYC project, which has been building a large, general purpose repository of object relations and the like for over a decade. Brilliant people like John F. Sowa have worked tirelessly on such projects of ontological knowledge representation, and still I admit I’m skeptical that such rigorous semantics will yield as good results even as search engines do today. See Peter Norvig’s speech on this topic.
III.
Yet clearly the ontologies have produced research with practical application; yet Sowa and others seem to owe more to Russell and Peirce than they do to the current batch of researchers. This is not to say that vagueness could not be used in knowledge representation ontologies; I’m saying that much of the progress being made no longer appears to link back clearly to “specific, nonmetaphorical applications”—rather, certain particular philosophical questions (free will, the mind-body problem, identity over time, “grue”-ness) appear to be spawning out further work at a rate that does not seem to allow for the cohesion that Soames believes there to be. That these questions seem to be based on a set of shared assumptions quite particular to their field gives me reason to pause.
There is always, however, room for epistemology; it undercuts other fields in a way that metaphysics can’t. This won’t make a case for people studying it, but the realms that were explored by Peirce and Russell seem to have been picked up as much by Godel (in the area of math and logic) as any modern analytic. But the epistemological questions have remained squarely untouched.
Personal, if I didn’t believe that language-reality correspondence was inherently paradoxical, and that it was the fundamental basis for so many other areas of study—sociology, psychology, literature, law, organizational structure—I don’t know what other problem would take the place of the huge void it would leave in my head.