Two things to start - one, I have a parallel blog now... the same sort of thing but with friends from the French department. I couldn't decide how to go about doing both - it is the personal being addressed to you aspect of this blog that makes it interesting to me, the desire to respond to you and have you respond to me. It seems a lot less dry and a lot more fruitful than simply writing notes for myself, and though I feel I don't challenge things you say about your own reading and projects often enough (because I don't find stuff to object to), you do call me out, and I find that helpful. Still, writing about the same reading twice, and describing more or less the same reactions would be a bit tedious, even if when writing to you I'm more likely to connect my thoughts to things you've said or I feel you might said, and I do want to also have the other blog, because, of course, people in the French department having read more of the stuff on Pascal, Baudelaire, Bataille, etc, will be more likely to disagree with my readings and having something to contest. So, I think the more or less straight reading notes will more often than not go into both blogs and often be separate from the entries I write specifically to you or in response to what you're writing... there's already been a kind of division between reaction entries and reading entries anyway. What follows is the first shared entry - though this is one that is actually much more likely to get a useful response from you than from my French lit. brethren, since it is on Austin, and that's a subject that you would be more familiar with than they. I kind of hope that you can shed light on a few things - though like I mention later on, I do also expect to read Derrida's text on him next week - which I also hope that you and I can discuss...
It is hard for me to determine which of the past two days I have more thoroughly wasted. Friday I spent a good 8 hours just watching documentaries on Monty Python (compulsively - the way an alcoholic drinks after swearing to himself he wouldn't, constantly telling himself "well, just one more won't make a difference). Yesterday read Austin's "How to do things with words", which I suppose will be the main topic of this post. I have to say that reading Austin was a similar experience to reading Benveniste or certain texts by Jakobson. I had a pervasive sense of "so what?" reading it. With all the categories and classifications he came up with (less numerous or complicated in Austin than in the others I've mentioned, and certainly easier to follow than Benveniste, but not necessarily any more interesting for that), in talking about performative vs. constative speech acts didn't give me any sense whatsoever of telling me anything I wasn't already fully conscious of or providing me with tools I could use to take me own thought further. It would seem that discussions in Descartes and Locke about whether space and/ or matter are infinite should be much less relevant to my thinking than an analysis of how speech is used, since boundaries of space and time are far outside anything that I have experienced or ever could experience and since they are purely speculative, but reading those discussions actually does excite my imagination and gets me trying to conceive models of the universe in my head (as well as thinking about how ideas are form and to what extent ideas like infinity that seem so straightforward that every schoolchild understands them are lacking any positive content - the absence of boundaries puts in our mind a sort of vanishing beyond our mental horizon, but we can't really imagine anything more specific than motion across vast empty space, we can't actually contain infinite space in our minds, not can we answer a question like - if there were no beginning of time and there was a 'forever' behind us as well as ahead of us, since infinity can not be traversed, how would the present moment ever have arrived? God knows why there should be any interest in trying to imagine the unimaginable like that, but personally I get a weird sense of satisfaction... and oddly keep coming up with images of circularity and feel closer to the eternal return, though I realize I'm mixing familiar and comprehensible images [the discovery that there isn't an end of the world that you can fall off of] with a distorted version of an unrelated theory [I'm fairly certain that Nietzsche didn't mean to say that time loops in on itself, that it is shaped like Finnegans Wake] to create a simple and not entirely convincing model which alternates in my mind with other equally unlikely and speculative pictures of the universe - more science fiction than philosophy). I clearly miss something essential in texts like Austin's - whether or not I understand what he is saying, I certainly don't get the implications or the consequences, since I can't imagine what in it inspired others or how this could be developed into something else. There's an Alice in Wonderland citation in the book (there always is when language is discussed): In order to say that Alice thinks a previous statement isn't right she starts a sentence with "I don't think...", at which point she is broken off by the Cheshire cat who says, "then you shouldn't speak". I feel like a large part of his book is making the extremely obvious point that the Cheshire cat's response wasn't appropriate. Who isn't aware that we select words from a preexistent vocabulary to convey a certain meaning (and why do we need the words 'phatic' and 'rhetic' to separate the choosing a word and conveying a meaning?), and yes it is obvious that there is a difference between what an utterance accomplishes by convention and intention (Illocutionary - promising, pleading, arguing) and what the eventual consequences of an utterance might be whether intended or not (perlocutionary -convincing, offending, etc). Furthermore, it is very clear that the circumstances of an utterance should generally be taken into account, and that while the truth-value of some statements can and should be considered apart from the context in which they appear, quite apart from the judgment of true or false with most statements, or rather utterances we consider what the utterance is meant to accomplish... and in this last statement, I even feel I'm going beyond what Austin says, since he never explicitly questions why a statement is made. Though he clearly says that very few utterances really are purely constative, he generally avoids statements and sticks with classifying his various sorts of performatives - verdictives, expositives, etc. There is something vaguely interesting that to say "I promise" is to promise, that certain words enact themselves, but beyond this what does Austin tell us? I ask in all seriousness, because I sincerely hope that someone can explain to me what the relevance or importance of the text is. I ordered Derrida's Limited Inc. and am expecting it to come later this week, and I'm looking forward to reading what he has to say about it - hopefully this might give rise to more discussion.
I will bring up one thing that did interest me in the text. I'll preface this by saying that, though the topic itself is interesting to me, sometimes the content of what a person says is less interesting than the importance the person places on it - the fact that a certain idea becomes an object of fascination, is perhaps even fetishized, suddenly changes the idea itself, whether you suddenly start looking for what it is in the idea that can illicit that level of fascination or what it is in the writer or text that draws it to that idea that leads it to find the idea so important. This is not something that Austin can be said to fetishize, but he does mention a number of times at a certain distance (though only in the first half of the book), the fact that there is not a performative "I insult you", which admittedly is an interesting idea. I suppose insults would fall into three main categories: 1) The most effective insults in terms of the effect they have on other people are those that call attention to something true or partially true, or that is at least a source of insecurity for the person being insulted. This would probably include most breaking of taboos, since something like a racial slur only works if the person being insulted really does have a self-conscious sense that people do judge him because of his race, religion, orientation, gender or what have you. 2) Inventive insults, at least in my experience, rarely come from people who are beside themselves with rage, and are rarely truly hurtful, they're usually competitive or exhibitionist and used to show off. These are the most fun. 3) Purely conventional insults can work as ready made words that can be invested with as much anger, indignation or what have you as required when the more hurtful truths and sore spots don't present themselves. These usually serve largely as a valve, a way of letting out anger - the words themselves don't have much effect since they don't really mean anything though people might respond to the emotion behind them. But since 'fuck you' basically doesn't mean anything more than "I want you to be insulted", it s worth asking, well, why can't we just say, "I insult you". There is once again a sort of taboo with curse words, though it isn't so much in effect in a lot of circles. A normal response to someone saying, in effect, "I want you to be offended" would be a calm, "well I refuse to be offended", and I think that attitude often can really piss a would-be offender off. If the purely conventional 'fuck you' gets a reaction very often, it is kind of worth asking why. I believe there is still a certain code of honor involved in terms of calling a person out, where not responding to a challenge implied in 'fuck you' (or a mother insult if it's taken seriously, or whatever else) is taken as somehow backing down or admitting defeat. That being the case, if neither side genuinely wants to come to blows and neither side manages to bring the insults to the level of a creative insult competition, there's an obligation to just sort of repeat your insults while walking away or making an excuse not to shift over into some more serious form of confrontation - which brings us back to the fact "I hereby insult you" would work just as well if convention accepted it. In a footnote, Austin mentions an old German practice in which 'Beleidigung' actually was used this was.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Machine Animals
For such a straightforward, lucid philosopher, Locke can be really bizarre sometimes. I'm making incredibly slow progress reading him. Sections are tedious, with him stating the obvious at length and getting hung up on ideas like infinity that he finds important enough to necessitate repeating his key argument over and over again. I ought to be reading specifically for passages that will be picked up by Condillac and that can be useful for thinking about the relationship between thought and language, and about language acquisition, but, of course, the passages that catch my attention are often the ones that have nothing to do with my current project.
Animals come up again, this time with the Cartesians mentioned and attacked explicitly. As far as I can tell, the famous Cartesian body/ soul duality - and I don't know where it is spelled out in Descartes, nor can I remember who later referred to his conception of man as 'the ghost in the machine' - but this duality of an immaterial soul inside the body controlling it and giving it orders, leads to animals being purely mechanical, since they don't have souls. ANimals are thus, nothing but pure reaction to stimuli. I believe that part of this distinction is tied to free will: When an animal is confronted with a certain set of stimuli, originating from within or without, it is only possible for them to react on way - responding to the strongest stimulus. Locke, taking a counter position, has a strong case to make (which will lead him into a number of strange side roads), and all the necessary arguments to make it with, but he keeps going too far, or conceding things he doesn't need to and creating these strange passages. First, Locke initially seems to deny the existence of free will. He says that the will is what makes us prefer one thing over another, and freedom is the freedom to act on our will. We can't be free to will or not to will or to choose what our will is going to be, because absent a will, what could possibly give us a preference one way or the other? He even has a nice section where he seems ready to deny that our actions tend toward any good other than what our desires dictate, or that our desires would necessarily change if we had a better understanding of what the Good is - taking the example of the drunk who is very well aware that it is in his best interest to stop drinking, and declares his intention to do so, but is unable to resist when the thirst and uneasiness at not being with friends in the pub lead him to break his vows and knowingly act against his own interest. He then backtracks in order to preserve a Christian world order, where there is justice in the dispensation of reward and punishment for mens actions after death, deciding that we are actually able to decide between acting precipitously for a present good or holding off to consider what actually is for our eventual greatest good - virtue and vice is all about holding off and thinking things through. This seems that much less convincing considering his odd attempt to describe actions as being controlled not by 'desire' but by 'uneasiness' over and absent good. I don't really see a difference between the too, except that, as he spoke at length about pain being more powerful than pleasure and a greater incentive, highlighting the negative emotion of 'uneasiness' does seem to be adding to a sense of compulsion - of a forceable problem that needs to be addressed. Not that this can't be contained in the word 'desire' just as well, but in context the word 'uneasiness' seemed contaminated by talk of pain, sickness and necessity, and I couldn't conceive of any other excuse for insisting on it.
Locke also denies that a person is his soul exactly... sort of. He makes clear that we have no idea what substances are, that we only know things through the accidents attached to them that we are capable of perceiving. We are familiar with our own thoughts, but we can't say what it is that thinks exactly. He doesn't want to give an opinion on whether it is material or immaterial, or whether matter is capable of thought, but he does define persons and self in such a way that animals are not necessarily denied selfhood. He points out that if you take a sapling and then years later take the full grown oak it has turned into, it will still be the same tree, though most of the particles will be different and perhaps none of the same particles remain, and he talks about this as being because of a unity of life. For a person it is not unity of life, but unity of consciousness that determines the self, and the self owns all those actions it can remember, but no others - and whatever substances, material or immaterial, body or soul, that the consciousness is attached to count as the same person and can be held accountable. Should different souls pass through, this would make no difference, just as, should the soul pass out of the body and be reborn without memories of its past life, it could no longer be counted as the same self. Much of the weirdness in this part of the book comes through things like his story of a parrot who was able not only to say human words, but to have a conversation and give witty answers to questions put to it... basically trying to state that it was outward form and not inner experience that makes us a call a man a man or an animal an animal. Presence or absence of cognitive abilities does not change the species a creature belongs to. He also talks about things like - first off, if limbs get cut off and a person is mutilated, he is still the same person, which leads him to a theoretical discussion of consciousness remaining in a cut-off finger and a new consciousness taking hold in the rest of the body (in which case the person could no longer be held accountable for what the other person born into his body did). While refusing to claim knowledge of what thinks and pointing out that the Cartesians have no better proof than their assertions for the soul as seat of self and origin of self, Locke does show a strong preference for an immaterial source of thought, which I suppose is neither here nor there, except that, as with free will, it felt like Locke's entire reason for challenging the Cartesians was partly undone, since an immaterial source could be called a soul, and if it doesn't rely on the body, than why shouldn't memory and consciousness adhere to it? The main difference, I suppose, would be that the thinking substance would be in animals as well (substance once again being according to Locke a meaningless word which simply marks the fact that we don't know what it is that is capable of thinking).
Some of the nicest parts of the texts are those that Locke dedicates to showing the limits of knowledge and his wonder at all the things he is sure he'll never know. When talking about whether thinking necessarily arises out of matter and explaining that it is a mystery either way, he spends some time saying we don't really know how matter holds together at all, and when you look at it under a powerful enough microscope, it always consists of countless disparate particles, and who knows why they don't just fall apart? He talks about the possibility of having senses other than the five we have that could provide just as much information, but which we have no way of even imagining, and he takes a second to imagine what it would be like if our eyes naturally saw things magnified hundreds of thousands of times (praising God for not giving us such impractical vision, which wouldn't help us much in getting around or going about our business, but also showing a kind of excited wistfulness in evoking all that would be revealed and the wonder of things blown up to reveal more secrets).
Anyway, that's still the main thing I'm reading. I read the first 30 pages of a book called "the decadence of the French Nietzsche", which is the sort of dubious book that you can probably get something out of if you read it with a grain of salt, but which I almost certainly won't finish. It's claiming that philosophy is built on the sacrifice of thinking for truth, taking its cue from a quote in which Nietzsche says something like "we seekers after truth" share a faith with plato and with the Christians, that faith being the belief that Truth is an absolute good. Of course the guy writing this book doesn't seem to realize that it is weird for him to take truth as meaning basically any concrete assertion. He seems to think that whenever you state something is true, you are making a decision not to question that assertion any longer, and the decision "this is where I will halt my train of thought and this is the conclusion I will draw" is what he refers to as the sacrifice of thinking - and I guess he wants to show that Nietzsche and Deleuze make their most bombastic statements provisionally and proceed to contradict themselves, thus refusing to fully sacrifice thinking. The whole thing seemed dubious to me - as I said, implicitly defining 'Truth' as being any assertion whatsoever and imagining that most philosophers DON'T revise and question their own previous assertions seems silly, particularly considering the fact that the guy didn't seem to realize there could be any issue there. Still, the quotes would have been good for something, and I mean, it is a guy who read a lot of Nietzsche and Deleuze, and following his reading couldn't have been utterly useless, but I've got better things to read, and most of it is mandatory.
What were the questions you asked that I wanted to address? You asked what and where I published - it was a revised version of the Louis Wolfson article I showed you a year ago, it just took about a year for the publication to come out (Cabinet magazine)... I don't know whether the interview was already part of it when I showed it to you way back when. It was HUme I was thinking about with not being able to actually live according to what he was writing - and then, you asked, would Anna Karenina be better without the theorizing, which isn't what the point was in the discussion of theory debasing literature - or perhaps it is. I suspect that Proust probably would have included that in the whole, "like an article that still has the price tag on", though he was at least as guilty of it as Tolstoy - the difference perhaps being that rather than the narrator confidently telling how it is, the character is often struggling through theories that aren't necessarily true. At any rate, the main point as far as the Bersani-related discussion is more that writing theory and writing literature are two separate activities, and merely putting theory into application would create something lifeless and hollow. Whatever theory a writer might subscribe to and write before or after his fiction, or even include in his fiction, he needs to disregard and even go against it when composing the fiction, he needs to pay attention to the dictates of his prose, which is something no theory can really encompass or even fully account for. Whether this is true or not, and whether this was Proust's understanding, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was what Bersani had in mind.
Animals come up again, this time with the Cartesians mentioned and attacked explicitly. As far as I can tell, the famous Cartesian body/ soul duality - and I don't know where it is spelled out in Descartes, nor can I remember who later referred to his conception of man as 'the ghost in the machine' - but this duality of an immaterial soul inside the body controlling it and giving it orders, leads to animals being purely mechanical, since they don't have souls. ANimals are thus, nothing but pure reaction to stimuli. I believe that part of this distinction is tied to free will: When an animal is confronted with a certain set of stimuli, originating from within or without, it is only possible for them to react on way - responding to the strongest stimulus. Locke, taking a counter position, has a strong case to make (which will lead him into a number of strange side roads), and all the necessary arguments to make it with, but he keeps going too far, or conceding things he doesn't need to and creating these strange passages. First, Locke initially seems to deny the existence of free will. He says that the will is what makes us prefer one thing over another, and freedom is the freedom to act on our will. We can't be free to will or not to will or to choose what our will is going to be, because absent a will, what could possibly give us a preference one way or the other? He even has a nice section where he seems ready to deny that our actions tend toward any good other than what our desires dictate, or that our desires would necessarily change if we had a better understanding of what the Good is - taking the example of the drunk who is very well aware that it is in his best interest to stop drinking, and declares his intention to do so, but is unable to resist when the thirst and uneasiness at not being with friends in the pub lead him to break his vows and knowingly act against his own interest. He then backtracks in order to preserve a Christian world order, where there is justice in the dispensation of reward and punishment for mens actions after death, deciding that we are actually able to decide between acting precipitously for a present good or holding off to consider what actually is for our eventual greatest good - virtue and vice is all about holding off and thinking things through. This seems that much less convincing considering his odd attempt to describe actions as being controlled not by 'desire' but by 'uneasiness' over and absent good. I don't really see a difference between the too, except that, as he spoke at length about pain being more powerful than pleasure and a greater incentive, highlighting the negative emotion of 'uneasiness' does seem to be adding to a sense of compulsion - of a forceable problem that needs to be addressed. Not that this can't be contained in the word 'desire' just as well, but in context the word 'uneasiness' seemed contaminated by talk of pain, sickness and necessity, and I couldn't conceive of any other excuse for insisting on it.
Locke also denies that a person is his soul exactly... sort of. He makes clear that we have no idea what substances are, that we only know things through the accidents attached to them that we are capable of perceiving. We are familiar with our own thoughts, but we can't say what it is that thinks exactly. He doesn't want to give an opinion on whether it is material or immaterial, or whether matter is capable of thought, but he does define persons and self in such a way that animals are not necessarily denied selfhood. He points out that if you take a sapling and then years later take the full grown oak it has turned into, it will still be the same tree, though most of the particles will be different and perhaps none of the same particles remain, and he talks about this as being because of a unity of life. For a person it is not unity of life, but unity of consciousness that determines the self, and the self owns all those actions it can remember, but no others - and whatever substances, material or immaterial, body or soul, that the consciousness is attached to count as the same person and can be held accountable. Should different souls pass through, this would make no difference, just as, should the soul pass out of the body and be reborn without memories of its past life, it could no longer be counted as the same self. Much of the weirdness in this part of the book comes through things like his story of a parrot who was able not only to say human words, but to have a conversation and give witty answers to questions put to it... basically trying to state that it was outward form and not inner experience that makes us a call a man a man or an animal an animal. Presence or absence of cognitive abilities does not change the species a creature belongs to. He also talks about things like - first off, if limbs get cut off and a person is mutilated, he is still the same person, which leads him to a theoretical discussion of consciousness remaining in a cut-off finger and a new consciousness taking hold in the rest of the body (in which case the person could no longer be held accountable for what the other person born into his body did). While refusing to claim knowledge of what thinks and pointing out that the Cartesians have no better proof than their assertions for the soul as seat of self and origin of self, Locke does show a strong preference for an immaterial source of thought, which I suppose is neither here nor there, except that, as with free will, it felt like Locke's entire reason for challenging the Cartesians was partly undone, since an immaterial source could be called a soul, and if it doesn't rely on the body, than why shouldn't memory and consciousness adhere to it? The main difference, I suppose, would be that the thinking substance would be in animals as well (substance once again being according to Locke a meaningless word which simply marks the fact that we don't know what it is that is capable of thinking).
Some of the nicest parts of the texts are those that Locke dedicates to showing the limits of knowledge and his wonder at all the things he is sure he'll never know. When talking about whether thinking necessarily arises out of matter and explaining that it is a mystery either way, he spends some time saying we don't really know how matter holds together at all, and when you look at it under a powerful enough microscope, it always consists of countless disparate particles, and who knows why they don't just fall apart? He talks about the possibility of having senses other than the five we have that could provide just as much information, but which we have no way of even imagining, and he takes a second to imagine what it would be like if our eyes naturally saw things magnified hundreds of thousands of times (praising God for not giving us such impractical vision, which wouldn't help us much in getting around or going about our business, but also showing a kind of excited wistfulness in evoking all that would be revealed and the wonder of things blown up to reveal more secrets).
Anyway, that's still the main thing I'm reading. I read the first 30 pages of a book called "the decadence of the French Nietzsche", which is the sort of dubious book that you can probably get something out of if you read it with a grain of salt, but which I almost certainly won't finish. It's claiming that philosophy is built on the sacrifice of thinking for truth, taking its cue from a quote in which Nietzsche says something like "we seekers after truth" share a faith with plato and with the Christians, that faith being the belief that Truth is an absolute good. Of course the guy writing this book doesn't seem to realize that it is weird for him to take truth as meaning basically any concrete assertion. He seems to think that whenever you state something is true, you are making a decision not to question that assertion any longer, and the decision "this is where I will halt my train of thought and this is the conclusion I will draw" is what he refers to as the sacrifice of thinking - and I guess he wants to show that Nietzsche and Deleuze make their most bombastic statements provisionally and proceed to contradict themselves, thus refusing to fully sacrifice thinking. The whole thing seemed dubious to me - as I said, implicitly defining 'Truth' as being any assertion whatsoever and imagining that most philosophers DON'T revise and question their own previous assertions seems silly, particularly considering the fact that the guy didn't seem to realize there could be any issue there. Still, the quotes would have been good for something, and I mean, it is a guy who read a lot of Nietzsche and Deleuze, and following his reading couldn't have been utterly useless, but I've got better things to read, and most of it is mandatory.
What were the questions you asked that I wanted to address? You asked what and where I published - it was a revised version of the Louis Wolfson article I showed you a year ago, it just took about a year for the publication to come out (Cabinet magazine)... I don't know whether the interview was already part of it when I showed it to you way back when. It was HUme I was thinking about with not being able to actually live according to what he was writing - and then, you asked, would Anna Karenina be better without the theorizing, which isn't what the point was in the discussion of theory debasing literature - or perhaps it is. I suspect that Proust probably would have included that in the whole, "like an article that still has the price tag on", though he was at least as guilty of it as Tolstoy - the difference perhaps being that rather than the narrator confidently telling how it is, the character is often struggling through theories that aren't necessarily true. At any rate, the main point as far as the Bersani-related discussion is more that writing theory and writing literature are two separate activities, and merely putting theory into application would create something lifeless and hollow. Whatever theory a writer might subscribe to and write before or after his fiction, or even include in his fiction, he needs to disregard and even go against it when composing the fiction, he needs to pay attention to the dictates of his prose, which is something no theory can really encompass or even fully account for. Whether this is true or not, and whether this was Proust's understanding, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was what Bersani had in mind.
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