Facing Hitchens

"I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown." (Vladimir Nabokov)

I like Christopher Hitchens's column in Slate this week. I don't agree with it, but I like it because he emphasizes exactly the point at issue. He offers some "minor" objections to the Burka as well, but seems as bored by them as I am. (It may or may not be true that it's unsafe to drive a car wearing various kinds of headdress, but then the law should be against driving under that influence, not the influence itself. We don't ban whisky because it impairs our ability to drive. Nor ought we to ban pot for that reason, as Hitchens would agree.)

No, Hitchens goes straight at it. It begins with a somewhat personal stance:

I would indignantly refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor or teacher who hid his or her face, let alone a tax inspector or customs official. Where would we be without sayings like "What have you got to hide?" or "You dare not show your face"?

But he ends with something much more universal (and what is an intellectual for if not to distill a universal principle from a feeling of personal indignation?):

So it's really quite simple. My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise.

There seems to me to be an obvious objection. Hitchens is claiming his right to see a woman's face over her right to hide it from him. He is offering me the right to see his face in exchange for relinquishing my right to turn mine away from him while I talk to him.

Now, as it happens, the idea of a face to face with Christopher Hitchens appeals to me. But I both understand and respect the impulse to modesty that underlies a woman's (or man's) choice to wear a veil (which is not the same impulse, I want to point out, that underlies the decision of European women to wear sunglasses.) I also understand the desire that underpins a man's hope that his wife will dress modestly in public; and I leave it to husband, wife, and priest (if husband and wife so choose), to decide what's appropriate. I will never grant the state the power to decide what counts as reasonable modesty, no more than I will grant the state the right to decide what counts as too immodest. I would have thought Hitchens was with me on this.

In my country, at least for now, a woman has the right to show as much of her face (and then some) as she chooses. I simply cannot see anything healthy in a law that changes this.

Things and People

Much of what I'm doing here can be found in Heidegger's Being and Time, but I like to think I'm doing it more, if you will, plainly.

Let's begin with a simple phenomenological distinction. There are, immediately, things and people. All of experience is filled with things and people; we are surrounded by things or people or both at all times. That's plain enough, but why bother with it?

Well, in ordinary talk there's a tendency to identify people with their bodies and let everything else be a thing. This ultimately makes the naked body a very strange thing, or nothing at all. When we are dressed, are we really best understood as "people covered in things"? Is your hair a part of your personality or a thing in its own right? What of wigs? Enough.

My view is that we can't divide all the stuff of the world into things and people. Hammer on one side of the distinction, Thomas on the other, a chair is a thing, the body that occupies it, a person, etc. That's not going to work.

A piece of writing in your hand can be as personal as a lover in your bed. A body, even perfectly alive, walking down the street, can be entirely soulless, a mere "extra" in your experience. A thing. To make sense of the difference between people and things we have distinguish them as immediate experiences.

And here Heidegger, drawing on Scheler, gets it entirely right: "A person is ... given as a performer of intentional acts which are bound together by the unity of meaning" (H. 73). Now, I would say simply that people are to acts as things are to facts: implicated in them. A thing, then, is given as the substance of an extended fact that is bound together by the unity of meaning.

We experience things only when faced with facts. The same "thing", however, can be implicated in an act. And then everything changes.

There's a knife on the ground. James and John are standing in the street. Their standing there is an act, performed by two people. But the knife, implicated in the fact of lying on the ground, is a thing. When James steps forward and picks up the knife, however, it ceases to be implicated merely in a fact. There is, in fact, no longer a fact to speak of, not immediately. The knife is now implicated in James's act. To stand there, James only needed his body. But to stab John, he needs the knife.

The thing appears as such in intuition when the fact in which it is implicated is immediately meaningful. The knife on the ground is its own thing because John knows immediately that the knife is on the ground. (The ground, too, derives its thinghood from this immediacy.) If I have a contribution to make to philosophy it is to propose that the person surfaces as such in institution when the act in which he is implicated is immediately meaningful. James wields the knife immediately, he steps into character as the assailant. The knife that once made plain sense to John is now imbued, just as plainly, with a motive. The motive may wholly or partly supplant the sense John made of the knife before James picked it up. It may become an entirely personal experience, all motive.

There is such a "thing" as senseless violence. The limit of institution.

Deep Thought

I am humiliated by how things work.

97 Years on the Case

Robert Reich has an interesting post over at TPM on the Fed's role in the rescue of Bear Stearns.

Thomas Jefferson put a stop to Alexander Hamilton's idea of a powerful central bank out of fear it would be unaccountable to the public. The Fed has just proven Jefferson's point.

And John Adams's. And Ezra Pound's.

Logic

Q: What is the difference between a concept and a mere word?
A: Logic, a certain rigour of usage.

Note on the Crisis of Brute Passion

(See this post for some background.)

Just as reason conditions our understanding so passion conditions our obedience.

Mayhewianism #2

"To really love literature is to love how it rewrites your subjectivity, how it kicks your ass with its transformative power." (Jonathan Mayhew)

I feel the same way about love in general. "Strike, witless bitch," said Irving Layton. "Blind me!"

The Movie Version

My favourite poets are making movies.

Tony Tost's "Elephant & Obelisk 2"

Kate Greenstreet's "The Giant"

A Palinurean Year?

"Pascal and Leonardi dominate because when they died they were the same age as Palinurus (thirty-nine)," says Cyril Connolly in his introduction to The Unquiet Grave. Let's add to this that Borges was thirty-nine when he hit his head and was nearly killed by sepsis. Today, I, too, turn thirty-nine. I have been looking forward to it.

Pangrammar 2.0

"Flarf is to poetry what Wikipedia is to philosophy."

Some implications:

Flarf is to power what Wikipedia is to knowledge.
Flarf is to ethics what Wikipedia is to epistemology.

Remember that Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit."

Homework assignment: Editing is to philosophy what ________ is to poetry.
Extra credit: Anyone is to philosophy what _________ is to poetry.

(Hint: The subject is to poetry what the object is to philosophy.)

What is Poetry?

I've always found the sort of thing that Michael Rosen says in this video about poetry very unsatisfying.

Poetry:
Poetry Basics

What is poetry? Well, it's hard to say. Why do people write poetry? To express themselves. Now, to his credit, he doesn't quite leave it at that. But wouldn't it be refreshing if he simply said, "I don't know what poetry is and I'm the wrong guy to make this video. I just can't give you a straight, informative answer." After all, some of the best videojug contributions are precisely those where the presenter confines himmerherself to what heorshe knows well enough to say simple, declarative sentences about.

What would I say in such a video?

Poetry is the art of writing emotions down. A poem is an emotion that has been (more or less) precisely noted. We can then go on to define "emotion" in contrast to "feeling" without at any point having to say, "That's a difficult question."

Why do people write poetry? In order to make an emotional situation more precise, which just means intensifying it. (Compare a conceptual situation, which you make precise by clarifying it.) We can begin with the simple case of a man in love with a woman. His situation is emotionally imprecise because, while she may have smiled at him or returned a glance, it is unclear how she feels. This makes feeling love for her difficult to handle. In writing a poem, the troubadour is hoping to intensify the positions (him-her) at either end of the emotion. She may then, of course, simply reject his advances, but that is more intense than the ambivalence we began with.

All this also applies to Rosen's "big grand things, important things, political things, aspects of nature, the eternal aspects of the sky, the universe or whatever". One may suffer the emotional imprecision of gender (like, say, Sylvia Plath) or those of race (like Amiri Baraka). One may even (like Ezra Pound) try to deal with our monetary emotions, which may be, as they are to today, in something of a disarray. (I made a quick vaguely flarfy attempt here.)

I don't think (as Rosen does) that a good poem needs to offer something "new" or "surprising". After all, a very old poem, read for the hundredth time, is no worse than when it was first written simply because you, the reader, have become familiar with it. A good poem is just emotionally precise; it does not impart feeling, but it intensifies it. It makes you feel better. It makes you better able to feel. I do dare say that this makes the poem good.

Two Questions

(the not-at-all-difficult-to-discover answers to which might change the way you think about government.)

Why is pot illegal?
Why did we invade Afghanistan?

Two Rackets

This movie about cannabis prohibition is worth watching. It rehearses all the major arguments for legalizing "the safest drug on the planet". Along the way, it brings up the problem of private prisons in the U.S. That's a really good point. If it is possible to make money by running a prison, then there's a natural (in the sense of economically rational) basis for a lobby for criminalizing all sorts of activities and, of course, for tough sentencing of offenders.

There is a of course a similar problem with another human activity: war. A great deal of policy today is being shaped by lobbies who have direct economic interest in crime and war. For some, it is economically rational to start wars and criminalize activities that many people like to engage in. The interest is there regardless of any strategic advantage or disadvantage that a war might bring about or intrinsic harm that the activity in question may or may not cause. There are people who have their own reasons to warmonger and to criminalize.

I'm not making any accusations. I'm just noting, objectively, that those interests exist. The solution is quite simple: put corrections and munitions in the hands of the state. Accept the inefficiency that this might involve in order to avoid constructing this kind of interest.

PS: This argument can also be made in the case of medicine and finance, by the way. And countless other things no doubt. There are certain problems that a society should not let its members profit from solving, because, if they do, members of that society will have an interest in producing the problems themselves.

On Music

"[Music is] the cause of everything that's gone wrong in the world. The dirty music. The young are violent because they have no inner life. And they have no inner life because they have no thoughts. And they have no thoughts because they know no words. And they know no words because they never speak. And they never speak because the music's too loud." (Quentin Crisp)

I remember reading this statement many years ago, excerpted in Harper's Magazine. I think, at some level, it has shaped my views on a great many things. But I do like the music loud sometimes. I'm just not sure it's good for my inner life.

Obscurity and Violence

Many thanks to Thomas Presskorn for solving the puzzle of the last post! Obscurity is to violence as knowledge is to power, as intuition is to institution. Violence is "done to" someone in undoing them. Darkness is "seen as" something in not seeing it. In obscurity, we experience something "as dark"; in violence, we experience someone "to hurt" them.

We may oppose clarity to obscurity, but clarity is already homologous with intensity. That is, clarity is to obscurity as intensity is to violence. Opposites? Is intensity the opposite of violence? Well, clarity is not really the opposite of obscurity. It is light, not sight, against the dark, after all. But there is actually a sense in which the intensity of a boxing match or hockey game can degenerate into violence. It becomes violence when the tension between the subjects is lost.

A fight is not always violence. It is often a contest. Violence eradicates the position of the subject. Darkness conceals the object.

New problem: Light is to dark as ________ is to hurt. Hint: ________ will also be to power as light is to knowledge.

Intuition & Institution

This year I will make an effort to post formal pangrammatical exercises more often.

Keep in mind that "the pangrammaticon" is the general likeness of articulations of knowledge to articulations power. A pangrammatical exercise consists in completing the general formula "_________ is to knowledge as _________ is to power".

Here's one that occurred to me over the Christmas break. First, some background:

The world produces, reproduces, and transforms intuitions. This is a natural process. An intuition is a sensation that is immediately "seen as" something. Without intuition (immediate seeing), no perception (mediated seeing). Intuition constitutes our experience of objects (determined whatnesses).

History produces, reproduces, and transforms institutions. This is a cultural process. An institution is a motion that is immediately "done to" someone. Without institution (immediate doing), no action (mediated doing). Insitution constitutes our experience of subjects (determined whonesses).

Now, it seems to me that there is a kind of doing-to-someone that is necessarily immediate and eminently fundamental: violence. It is by holding back from violence that properly "institutional" experience and subjects in the usual sense can emerge. If all doing were violence, experience would probably not be possible.

So what is the corresponding ("homologous") seeing-as-something? _________ is to intuition as violence is to institution. If violence is a kind of deed that we must refrain from in order to engage, properly speaking, in "action", then what sort of sight must we avert ourselves from in order to have proper "perceptions"? One hint might be that violence is to "the social" as _________ is to "the material". Violence is an immediate experience that affects our mediated experience of who "we" are. We are looking for an immediate experience that likewise affects our mediated experience of what "stuff" is.

Of Pilots

—You have the urge to steer one?
—Yeah, I do. With a giant wheel. I'd just be there. I'd be a little small, compared to the wheel, and I'd be steering it. It'd be great.

Kate Greenstreet

I think what pilots do is wonderful.

Tony Tost

Since the title of one of my favourite pieces in Kate Greenstreet's The Last 4 Things is today's date (it's on page 75 in the section called "56 Days"), I'd like to draw attention to its likeness to Tony Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot", which is the poem that got me interested in contemporary American poetry almost seven years ago.

Both poems are about the (impossible) desire (or lack thereof) to be "at the helm", to steer the ship. More specifically: they bring to presence the emotion of not being in control of the ship. Both, I would therefore argue, indicate an anti-Palinurian mood.

Palinurus was Aeneas' disenchanted pilot. Cyril Connolly used his name as a pseudonym when he wrote The Unquiet Grave; indeed, Palinurus is the theme of that book. Connolly explains in the introduction:

The plot of the book is contained in the title. The Unquiet Grave first suggests the tomb of Palinurus, pilot of Æneas; it is the cenotaph from which he haunts us. 'The ghost of Palinurus must be appeased'. He is the core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within. (xiii)

The quoted sentence about the ghost of Palinurus is from Servius's commentary on the Aeneid, which Connolly quotes also as an epigraph (in Latin) to the book and then again (and again in Latin) nearing the end of part one.

It is just after Christmas, 1942. Palinurus writes as follows in his "journal of 'back thoughts'":

No opinions, no ideas, no true knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore. 'Manes Palinuri esse placandos!' Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating. (24)

That is a direct statement of the Palinurian mood, here owed, perhaps, to what Connolly describes as his "obsession with pleasure at a time when nearly all pleasures were forbidden" (xii). What would he have felt today, we may wonder, in a time when all pleasures are arguably mandatory?

Greenstreet and Tost are not trying to appease Palinurus. They have, perhaps, given up trying. Their would-be pilots are wholly incompetent. Indeed, in these poems, a selfless incompetence replaces Connolly's greedy impotence. Incompetence, of course, is by no means straightforwardly preferable to impotence, but a different sort of poetry seems to emerge from it. Here are the closing lines of Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot":

Repeat after me, 'I am not the pilot,
I will not attempt to fly the ship.'

Folks I am not a pilot and therefore
I am not at the glamorous end of the sword.

I have no feelings for the machine.

I know what pilots look like.

I am not a pilot but I am beginning to understand the pilot's cause:

it's the same one we all have.

Recall that Virgil's Palinurus, bored and disappointed with his leader, jumped ship (so goes Connolly's theory) in the middle of the night and was killed, three days later, on the shore near Velia, for his clothes. Greenstreet seems to invert this theme:

—The ship is white. Mainly white, it has some blue.
—It's at sea?
—Of course. Just water everywhere. At night. With the stars.
—You'd be steering your ship.
—At night would be the main time.
—How about being on the shore when someone else is on the ship?
—I wouldn't. I wouldn't do that again.
—Did it ever happen?
—Oh, it always happens. To everyone. That's life.

Like I say, we cannot say we prefer the anti-Palinurian mood to the Palinurian one. (Invisible Bride, for example, is not a better book than The Unquiet Grave, but it is a distinctly comparable one. I am trying to make that comparison.) Palinurian impotence and anti-Palinurian incompetence are merely the formal conditions of particular species of suffering that must be overcome aesthetically in a given poem.

More Notes on the History of the Individual

A while back I posted these snippets.

1938: "In this domain the individual will remain, individualism will remain, without any theoretical and ideological bulwarks. A man will continue to gain or lose his own soul." (Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 52)

1944: "How do you react to our slogan 'Total Everybody Always'? Have you at last understood that your miserable failure as an individual is proof that you pursue a lost cause?" (Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, p. 100)

1947: "Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué. He lit a cigarette." (Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 5)

I just found another one in, predictably, Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn (p. 122):

1939: As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am leveled down each day to make the fleshless, bloodless city whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream. I am struggling against an oceanic death in which my own death is but a drop of water evaporating.

The theme I'm building here is pretty straightforward. In the first half of the twentieth century, modern literature was exploring the possibility that the individual was being destroyed.

A Critique of Pure Roundness

[Note: play both videos simultaneously.]

The empirical concept of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle. The roundness which is thought in the former can be intuited in the latter. (The Critique of Pure Reason, A137/B176)

The normative motion of the potter's wheel is homogeneous with the pure sculptural emotion of the cylinder. The spinning that can be felt in the former can be instituted in the latter. (The Crisis of Brute Passion)

Anthropopathy

Who is humanity? asks Heidegger. Not, What is humanity? Moreover, he ties the issue both to history and to poetry: "The thinking of Parmenides and Heraclitus is still poetic, and here this means philosophical, not scientific" (IM, 154 [110]). The shift from "what" to "who" is wholly correct: "what" is to the world as "who" is to history. Also, it is no doubt correct (I'm certainly not going to question it) that thinking at the time of Parmenides was more like poetry than science.

Today, by contrast, philosophy is more like science than poetry. And poetry is more like politics than philosophy. In fact, I would question Heidegger only in his approach: what, after all, is he doing in his Introduction to Metaphysics? He seems to be trying to replace metaphysics with some sort of anthropology. It is no wonder he gets himself into trouble on the subject of National Socialism at the end of the course (213 [152]). After all, if the question is "Who is humanity?" then the struggle over the answer is political.

Whatever his aim, he seems to be bound to producing a "logos" of human existence (Dasein). That is, he wants to give us an account of the subject. But perhaps the project of trying to account for, to understand, human existence is doomed from the start. In "the humanities", there is no understanding, only obedience (as Deleuze and Guattari have suggested somewhere, I think).

We don't think we are human; if we do, we feel it. The consequence is a rigorously a-logical approach to human existence. No logos. Pathos. Not anthropology but anthropopathy (an ugly enough word). A story, or better a passion, of humanity, not an account or logic of it. A poem that contains history. An epic.