Archives | Philosophy
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Fear and Trembling and the Incarnation
Adam K. and I have been having a good old-fashioned Zizek brawl in comments. As Adam R. notes:"Ah, just like old times.”
But one of the fun things about Zizek brawls is learning stuff about Kierkegaard. So let’s reflect on Fear and Trembling. Adam K. doubts my claim that Kierkegaard’s concept of faith and the essence of true religion hinges on his understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. The obvious counter-argument: Fear and Trembling is about Abraham, obviously a pre-Christian figure whose story is related in the Old, rather than New, Testament. Adam K writes: “Isn’t it interesting, then, that Fear and Trembling doesn’t deal with the Incarnation at all?” But this is, I think, a misreading, albeit one that is quite understandable. In fact, Fear and Trembling is very centrally, but only implicitly, concerned with the Incarnation, and it is rather hard really to get what it is about until you see this.
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Saturday, November 29, 2008
Icons: Levi-Strauss and Zizek
Claude Lévi-Strauss is 100; France honors him:
On Tuesday there was a day-long colloquium at the Collège de France, where Mr. Lévi-Strauss once taught. Mr. Descola said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” he said in an interview. “His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it’s hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English. But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized.”
Meanwhile, The New Republic goes after Zizek:
Fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but “in a curious inversion,” he characteristically observes, “religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.” And the whole premise of Violence, as of Zizek’s recent work in general, is that resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence. “Everything is to be endorsed here,” he writes in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, “up to and including religious ‘fanaticism.’”
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Monday, November 03, 2008
Critique of Social Construction
Tim Burke has an interesting 4-part critique of the notion of social construction. Here’s his third point:
My third objection follows on the second. The fact that for a long time scholars spent considerable effort to demonstrate that a given identity, institution, etc., simply was a social construction, tells you something about the intent of that argument. It was designed to undercut or demolish practices being described as such. The problem is that many scholars also recognized the “reality” of such constructions–that once constructed, they were social reality, that there wasn’t any ontological, Platonic human “real” being concealed by constructions. If you said something like “modern subjectivities built around liberal individualism, around rights-bearing sovereign selves are a construction”, you also had to say, “But no less real for that”. A lot of Foucauldian work (including by Foucault himself) had this sort of coy double-gesture: madness, sexuality, criminality, etc., were “constructed”, but also “real”–and thus if you said, “Well, so are you against those constructions as we have them?” you would hear “Oh, my no, there isn’t anything but these constructions, there is nothing outside, nothing more ‘real’ beyond them”.
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Friday, October 10, 2008
Manifesto: Literary Reading and Emotion
In mid-July of this year the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts hosted a conference of Literary Reading and Emotion. It was proposed by David S. Miall, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, with the following in attendance: Jan Auracher (Language and Literature) and Willie van Peer (Intercultural Hermeneutics) from the University of Munich, Germany; Sally Banes, Emerita Professor in Theater and Dance, and Ellen Dissanayake (Music) from the University of Washington, USA; Noël Carroll (Philosophy) from Temple University, Philadelphia and CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA; Keith Oatley (Human Development and Applied Psychology) from the University of Toronto, Canada; Reuven Tsur (Hebrew Literature and Literary Theory) from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel; along with Donald and Margaret Freeman (MICA directors) and Evelina Simanonyte (Colby-Sawyer College, New Hampshire, USA).
The group has now issued a brief manifesto (available here, with commments, and here), which includes these two (of six) declarations:
2. We discern a need to shift focus from the interpretative preoccupation of current approaches to the experience of literature and the arts, which includes the need to study their emotional aspects.
3. We propose a new interdisciplinary approach that integrates the social and biological sciences with the humanities. This proposed integration implies the readiness to become actively involved with the methodology of non-humanistic disciplines, including the development of philosophical and empirical research methodologies.
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Wednesday, October 01, 2008
What and Where is the Text?
As David Bordwell has observed in Making Meaning, much of our thinking about literary texts (& movies & graphic novels, etc.) seems to derive from the metaphor of a container. Some things are inside the text while other things are outside of it. Further, some of the things inside the text are not obvious; they’re said to be hidden. One job of the critic is to reveal and explain what’s hidden.
For casual use, this is OK. But it disintegrates if you ask too much of it. We’ve augmented it in various ways, but as far as I know we haven’t arrived at a more satisfactory set of alternatives. My purpose here is simply to lay out a crude sketch of how we’ve worked at augmenting the container notion.
The basic problem, of course, is that “the work of literary art” cannot effectively be reduced to the physical text. The physical text is just a bunch of markings which are meaningless unless taken up by a human mind. How does one work that “taking-up” into a concept of the text?
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Sunday, September 28, 2008
THEORY’s Going Down
Gene Expression has a post presenting empirical evidence on the waning of THEORY. Agnostic searched JSTOR archives for the occurance of certain key words up to 2002: 1) social construction, 2) psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic, 3) postmodern or postmodernism, 4) postcolonialism, 5) orientalist or orientalism, 6) narratolog*, 7) marxist or marxism, 8) hegemony, 9) feminist or feminism, 10) deconstruction*. Each search is graphed, and there are commonts on the exercise as a whole. Eight of the ten graphs shows a rise from left to right, a peak, and then a decline on the right-hand side of the graph. That implies that THEORY’s going down.
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Sciences and the Humanities, Together At Last?
During 2006, 2007, and 2008 the National Humanities Center has be running a program designed to bring hummanists and scientists together in dialogue around questions about the human: Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity. One aspect of this program is a series of conferences in the Fall of each of those years. Video tapes of most of the presentations from 2006 and 2007 are now on the web. I’ve seen one session of 2006 and all but one of the sessions from 2007. I recommend them to you.
In particular, I recommend the Nussbaum & de Wall (on compassion), and de Wall & Bateson (on empathy) sessions from 2007. De Wall presents fascinating information about animal behavior in both sessions. If you’re interested in interrogating the boundary between humans and animals, these sessions are worth watching.
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Monday, August 25, 2008
Censorship Islam Fish Rushdie Language Log
Random House recently decided not to publish a historical novel about the prohpet Muhammad and Aisha, his child bride, for fear of an extreme response by Muslims. Using the word “censorship,” Salmon Rushdie strongly criticized the publisher (his publisher, BTW) for this decision. Stanley Fish argues that Random House’s actions don’t “rise to the level of constitutional or philosophical concern” characteristic of true censorship: “Formulations like that at once inflate a minor business decision and trivialize something too important and complex to be reduced to a high-school civics lesson about the glories of the First Amendment.” Over at Language Log Bill Poser argues that Fish is wrong and that “Rushdie is referring to the threat of Muslim reprisals as censorship, not Random House’s decision to give in to this threat.” Poser also notes that “Fish’s dig at Rushdie reveals a poor understanding not only of the definition of the term ‘censorship’ but of the Enlightenment tradition of freedom of expression.” [Note: Fish has since corrected a quotation error that Poser notes early in his post.]
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Monday, August 18, 2008
Holy Gavagai, Batman! Letterman’s Out of Control
Blockbusters: In the wake of being dissappointed both by Iron Man and The Dark Knight and by the critics who love them, David Bordwell speculates on the rise of super-hero movies. He refuses to blame the zeitgeist - being generally against such explanations - and instead lists eleven contributing factors, including a changing hierarchy of genres, rise of franchises, shock and awe, hambones eclipsing stars, “the mecha look,” and “the dark.” But Hellboy II gives him hope.
Language: Willard van Orman Quine is widely known for an argument that starts with some linguist encountering a native informant who utters “gavagai“ in the presence of a passing rabbit. Quine then adduces a passal of arguments as to why the linguist is not justified in concluding that gavagai means rabbit and why it should be extremely difficult for him or her to make any sense out of what the informant says. Here’s a story about the late Kenneth Pike, a highly skilled and experienced linguist, in a similar situation. “Barely fifteen minutes into the elicitation, he has the rudimentary alphabet, presumably a phonemic script of some sort, figured out; he has vowels, consonants, word initial stress; and due to the strange behavior of the plural suffix k, he begins to guess that this is a vowel-harmony language. Moreover, he has taken steps to discover and to describe the morphology of the language, which—lacking gender and number agreement—seems to be an agglutinating Asian tongue.” What did Pike know that Quine didn’t?
Fiction: Authors may create their characters, but they don’t always control them, a brief note, with citations, by Keith Oatley.
Performcance: Finally, an hour-long video in which Charlie Rose interviews David Letterman in which Letterman talks his career, about doing a show, about Johnny Carson, and about executives. At roughly 29 minutes in Letterman explains how the best things are utterly unplanned and unexpected, how they start out small, and blow up to illuminate the rest of the show.
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Monday, July 07, 2008
Links: Humanities, Mao, Word Order
Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Wilfred McClay chides Stanley Fish for his frivolous defense of the humanities and notes that “This sustained shrug elicited a blast of energetic and mostly negative response from the Times’ online readers. To read through the hundreds of comments is to be reminded that Americans do seem to have a strong and abiding respect for the humanities.” He goes on to offer his own defense in traditional terms:
The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.
Such means are not entirely dissimilar from the careful and disciplined methods of science. In fact, the humanities can benefit greatly from emulating the sciences in their careful formulation of problems and honest weighing of evidence. But the humanities are distinctive, for they begin (and end) with a willingness to ground themselves in the world as we find it and experience it, the world as it appears to us—the thoughts, emotions, imaginings, and memories that make up our picture of reality. The genius of humanistic knowledge—and it is a form of knowledge—is its commensurability, even consanguinity, with the objects it helps us to know. Hence, the knowledge the humanities offer us is like no other, and cannot be replaced by scientific breakthroughs or superseded by advances in material knowledge.
Meanwhile, Jed Perl castigates the cult of Mao in current Chinese art. Here’s the opening paragraph from his review of a show at the Guggenheim:
There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.
From later in the review:
The power of totalitarian regimes to wipe out a visual arts culture generally exceeds their ability to obliterate a literary culture, and it is by no means clear that such traditions can be revived. Recall that in Russia at the start of the twentieth century the visual arts were flourishing as never before, with Kandinsky, Malevich, Chagall, and many others at the beginnings of extraordinary careers. Lenin and Stalin put an end to all that, and it has never come back. This is not to say that there is nothing of value going on in China today: I do not know all there is to know about art in China. What I do know is that the work that is being promoted around the world as the cutting edge of new Chinese art is overblown and meretricious.
Finally, Language Log has two posts (one, two) covering recent research suggesting that Agent, Patient, Action (Subject, Object, Verb) is an innate cognitive schema, but not a syntactic one. The research shows that to be the order people use when acting in charades and is independent of the word ordering typical of their language.
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Saturday, June 14, 2008
Jameson On Hunter: How Not to Criticize the Historicization of Theory
I’m reading a Critical Inquiry critical exchange between Ian Hunter and Frederic Jameson - a response to Hunter’s “History of Theory” piece from CI in 2006. Here’s an old post in which Sean McCann discussed it. I did, too, somewhere or other. And this Long Sunday thread sure got all hot and bothered.
Actually, I haven’t gotten to the Hunter yet. But consider this passage from Jameson’s “How Not To Historicize Theory”:
it is the depth model in general and all manner of hermeneutic practices that are Hunter’s targets here—the reduction, in other words, of facts and historical realities to concepts that have no empirical object, like society, culture, revolution, class, language, history, capitalism, and so on. This particular line of attack is enough to link Hunter to the traditional Anglo-American empiricism that theory set out to demolish in the first place, and indeed the words positive, empirical, and research are here everywhere valorized and emphasized. (566)
It took me three passes before it even occurred to me what Jameson is really saying here: namely, that society, culture, revolution, class, language, history and capitalism are clear examples of subjects that can’t be studied empirically. You can’t do ‘research’ on these subjects. Ergo, Hunter - who is interested in doing empirical research - must not be interested in these things. But obviously these are important things. Therefore, Hunter’s approach is wrong.
What clued me in was a line on the next page: “To such famous nominalistic pronouncements as “there is no such thing as society” and “the Palestinians don’t exist,” we should now presumably add the proposition that capitalism doesn’t exist either.” All this charged to Hunter’s account. But surely it is reasonable to draw a distinction between Tories and nominalists. Jameson is arguing that if you are an empiricist, let alone a positivist, you can’t believe in society. I imagine that would come as a surprise to Auguste Comte, who is generally considered the father of positivism and sociology. (There’s also the difficulty that Hunter isn’t a positivist, but that’s fairly small potatoes.)
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Singularity Watch, where fiction becomes fact
Calling all SF fans, futurists, transhumanists, and techno-utopians!
John Tierney of the NYTimes has a column about The Singularity, that point in the future when machine intelligence will reach or exceed human intelligence. He points to a special issue of the IEEE Spectrum devoted to the singularity, with articles by various folks, including Vernor Vinge, and a guide to thinking machines in pop culture. Tierney’s piece quotes Ray Kurzweil’s reply to the skeptics.
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Thursday, June 05, 2008
Black Swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an economist, philosopher, and one-time trader who’s made his “f**K you” pile and can pursue whatever intellectual projects he wishes, hence he co-directs a laboratory devoted to “The Psychology of Ecological and Nonludic Uncertainty." His home-grown website has links to lots of stuff, including his bestselling books, reviews thereof, articles, etc.
Talib has a very readible article on “The Roots of Unfairness: the Black Swan in Arts and Literature” (PDF) that was published in Literary Research/Recherche Litteraire (Journal of the International Comparative Literature Association) 21.41-42 (2005): 241-254. Great works and great ideas are all black swans, as he calls them, statistical outliers that have tremendous impact. Prospectively improbable and unpredictable, in retrospect these black swans seem inevitable.
Continue reading "Black Swans"To understand successes, the study of traits in failure need to be present. For instance some traits that seem to explain millionaires, like appetite for risk, only appear because one does not study bankruptcies. If one includes bankrupt people in the sample, then risk-taking would not appear to be a valid factor explaining success.
Any form of analysis of art that does not take into account the silent initial population becomes close to pure verbiage.
The line of argument in the remaining segment of the paper is to further weaken the causative explanations by showing the prevalence of extrinsic attributes, as opposed to intrinsic ones, those not embedded in the piece to be analyzed. The role of these extrinsic attributes (say social contagion or informational cascades) implies that the piece was successful for reasons that lie outside its own qualities, and that, accordingly, explanations by the critics are proportionally weaker than face value.
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Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Bordwell on Criticism
Film scholar and critic David Bordwell has a post on the nature of criticism. Following Monroe Beardsley, he divides the critic’s activities into four categories, description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. Reviews, critical essays, and academic articles and books differ in their use of these activites. All are descriptive in some measure, but reviews are long on evaluation and short on analysis and interpretation. Academic articles and book emphasize description, analysis, and interpretation, but tend to be uninterested in evaluation. Critical essays (in e.g. The New Yorker, etc.) tend to be intermediate. Evaluation involves both personal taste and more considered judgment: “The difference between taste and judgment emerges in this way: You can recognize that some films are good even if you don’t like them. You can declare Birth of a Nation or Citizen Kane or Persona an excellent film without finding it to your liking.”
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Friday, May 23, 2008
Links: Trilling, New Blog, Criticism, 1001 books
Cynthia Ozick reviews Lionel Trilling’s second and unfinished novel The Journey Abandoned (and discusses his first, The Middle of the Journey, as well) at The New Republic.
There’s a new blog in town, OnFiction, brought to our attention by Rohan in a comment to her most recent post. It’s a group blog run by a philosopher, Keith Oatley, and two psychologists, Raymond A. Mar and Maja Djikic three psychologists, Keith Oatley, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic. Purpose: “To understand how literary art enables psychological change to occur so that readers are responsible for that change. To put this another way: we don’t aim to understand persuasion, but we do aim to understand how people can use fiction to help transform themselves.”
Salon’s Louis Bayard and Laura Miller on the death of the literary critic. They’re discussing Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic. (Rohan discusses the book here.) Miller:
Which brings to mind McDonald’s complaints about the “democratizing” of criticism, the idea that anyone can and should do it and that no one opinion has more weight than any other. The blogosphere, as he sees it, is only the most visible manifestation of this broader, anti-authoritarian trend. Because academic critics have abandoned evaluation, the popular critics charged with saying whether a book is good or not have gotten “slack,” in McDonald’s eyes—deficient in rigor and scholarship. If anyone can do it, then surely it’s a skill that requires no expertise or cultivation. It’s true that anyone can dispense quickie, depthless, thumb’s-up/down judgments, but that doesn’t really enrich your experience and understanding of literature as a whole. And of course, that might be contributing to the impression that literature doesn’t offer anything special.
The horror, the horror!
The New York Times has an article about another one of those lists, in a book, Peter Boxall, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Universe 2006):
If the “1001 Books” program seems quirky, even perverse, it’s no accident. “I wanted this book to make people furious about the books that were included and the books that weren’t, figuring this would be the best way to generate a fresh debate about canonicity, etc.,” Professor Boxall informed me in an e-mail message. And how.
The tastes of others are always inexplicable, but “1001 Books” embodies some structural irregularities. Arranged chronologically, it begins with the novel’s primordial period — everything up to 1800 — and then marches century by century into the present.
More than half the books were written after World War II. Already I feel my hackles rising. Does not the age of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy dwarf its earnest, fitfully brilliant but ultimately punier successor? And if the 20th century can put up a fight, the real firepower is concentrated in the period of 1900 to 1930. Like many others, I admire Ian McEwan, but does he really merit eight novels on the list, to Balzac’s three?
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