Archives | Philosophy
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Q: Why is the Dawkins Meme Idea so Popular?
A: Because it is daft.
I believe there are two answers to that question. For most people it’s convenient. That requires one explanation, which I’ll run through first.
For some people, however, memetics is more than convenient. Some, including Dawkins himself and his philosophical acolyte, Dan Dennett, use it as a way of explaining religion. In that role the meme idea is attractive because it is, or has evolved into, an egregiously bad idea, one almost as irrational as the religious ideas whose popularity it is supposed to explain away. By analogy to an argument Dawkins himself has made about religion, that makes memetics the perfect vehicle for the affirmation of materialist faith.
But I don’t want to go there yet. Let’s work into it.
Ordinary Memetics
When Dawkins first proposed the idea in The Selfish Gene (1976), it wasn’t a bad idea—nor even a new one. Ted Cloak, among others, got there first, but not with the catchy name. Having worked hard to conceptualize the gene as a replicator, Dawkins was looking for another set of examples. and coined the term “meme” as a replicator for culture. The word, and the idea, caught on and soon talk of memes was flying all over the place.
I suspect that the spread of computer technology is partially responsible for the cultural climate in which the meme idea found a home. Computers ‘level’ everything into bits: words, pictures, videos, numbers, computer programs of all kinds, simulations of explosions, traffic flow, moon landings, everything becomes bits: bits, bits, and more bits. The meme concept simply ‘levels’ all of culture—songs, recipes, costumes, paintings, hazing rituals, etc.—into the uniform substance of memes.
What is culture? Memes.
Simple and useful. As long as you don’t try to push it very far.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Harmanian Conjunctions: Meillassoux and the Meno
With a digression through de Man and a pendant to Exodus
Graham Harman’s been reading Meillassoux (just a name to me) on Mallarme (another name, but far more familiar). Of the Meillasoux Harman says:
So far, it’s a brilliant reading of Mallarmé’s famous poem, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard. (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.)
Meillassoux finds a numerical code at work in the text, admitting all the while that many will find secret codes to be “puerile,” but he makes it work nonetheless. He draws on a number of techniques to establish this.
Meillassoux’s right there, but it’s puerility well-authorized by slightly older critical practice, which R. G. Peterson summarized in “Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature” (PMLA vol. 91 no. 3, pp. 367-374), a fascinating article. For instance, Peterson points out that the rhyme scheme for Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue,” a poem of roughly 100 lines, is one giant mother (or is that mutha’ or even mofo?) of a chiasmus. That is, the first word rhymes with the last, the second with the penultimate, the third with the antepenultimate, and so forth. That can’t possibly be an accident, nor even the result of unconscious intent, no? Thomas must have done so deliberately. But who’d even notice such a thing unless one went looking for it?
It was Peterson who first put me on to ring-form composition, which I found in, e.g. Disney’s Fantasia,* and which occupied the late Mary Douglas in the last decade of her career (Leviticus as Literature, In the Wilderness, Thinking in Circles).
So, there IS something there in all this counting and symmetry and structure. But just what, and where, that’s a bit of a mystery. I figure half this stuff is nonsense, half not. And I don’t know how to draw the separating line. Maybe a properly compositionist literary criticism will be able to figure that out in, say, an intellectual generation or three.
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Harman and Wittgenstein, a Quickie
I’ve been reading my way around—pp. 1-40 complete, dippings throughout the rest—in Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object (originally published in French in 2010), a short dense book. Rather like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (original German edition, 1921), perhaps my favorite work of philosophy. They’re similar in page count, c. 150 pp., which means the Wittgenstein is rather shorter as it’s published in German and English on facing pages. So it’s only 75 pages or so.
And in a radically different style. Wittgenstein’s text is written in short, often single sentence, paragraphs, which are individually numbered. As you move to the middle logical notation and truth tables appear. In the end, mysticism:
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Thus it came as something of a mild shock to see all the object language up front (note: I’ve not studied the book in over 30 years and have only skimmed it now):
2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).
2.0123 If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs.
2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
2.01 Objects are simple.
2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite.
2.03 In a state of affairs objects fit into one another like the links of a chain.
I’ve left out much, and there is, of course more later. And all is subject to interpretation (what to make of 2.021?). Still, on the surface, a certain congeniality appears.
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Monday, September 26, 2011
Reading Latour 13: ANT and Politics
Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. Comments on “Conclusion: From Society to Collective—Can the Social Be Reassembled?” pp. 247-262.
I would dearly love to pick up from my post on ANT and Literary Studies and generalize to culture in general, drawing, of course, on my remarks about graffiti and music as well. The idea would be to recast memes as rigid intermediaries constituted as, shall we say, semiotic codes. The individual code items, then, could be combined into various ‘texts’—in the extended meaning of that term—which function as mediators between individuals and the groups of which they are members. But I must leave that generalization as an exercise for the reader. Were I to embark upon it I’m afraid I might never find my way back out and thus would never be able to finish these notes.
Not a useful result.
Laws and Explanations
So, to the final chapter of Reassembling the Social. And we’re going to get there by taking a look at the concluding paragraph of the penultimate chapter (p. 246):
The laws of the social world may exist, but they occupy a very different position from what the tradition had first thought. They are not behind the scene, above our heads and before the action, but after the action, below the participants and smack in the foreground. They don’t cover, nor encompass, nor gather, nor explain; they circulate, they format, they standardize, they coordinate, they have to be explained.
That last sentence came as something of a rude shock after Latour’s earlier proscription of explanation. Here’s a passage (p. 137) I quoted in Reading Latour 10: Description & Graffiti:
Either the networks that make possible a state of affairs are fully deployed—and then adding an explanation will be superfluous—or we ‘add an explanation’ stating that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further. If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.
But I stopped reading too soon. That passage continues with this line (and of course more): “There is an exception, however, if it refers to a fairly stable state of affairs where some actors do indeed play the role of fully determined—and thus of fully ‘explained’ intermediaries—but in this case we are back to simpler pre-relativist cases.”
That is, we’re back at the sociology of the social, which is about stabilized social worlds, not worlds in flux, for which Actor-Network Theory has been devised. It’s those worlds in flux where description must be paramount, for how can there be laws if there is no stability? Well, I think there may be an approach to that question, but I’m going to set it aside.
I take it that Latour’s point about “laws of the social world” is that, when we’re dealing with a stabilized world, that stability itself must be explained. Those are the explanations Latour seeks. The laws stating the regularities of a stabilized world are the products of something—forces, structures—Latour fails to name (as far as I can determine).
But his final chapter is not about those worlds. It’s about the world still in flux.
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Seeing What the Brain Sees
Here’s a chunk out of the press release:
Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.
As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.
“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”
So, think of visual perception as real-time simulation in neural wetware of the external world driven by sensory input. Remember that the brain is actively predicting what’s coming next. It’s expecting certain input. That’s the simulation aspect. It then, in effect, uses sensory input to calibrate and refine its prediction.
So, you’re walking your familiar walk to, say, the subway stop, or your mailbox, whatever. The brain ‘cues up’ an enactment, a simulation, of that walk, based, of course, on all those times you’ve walked that walk. That simulation is ‘running’ in high-dimensional state space of your mind. If I interpret Walter Freeman’s theorizing correctly (from a different Berkeley lab, but not associated with this work), the simulation ‘meets,’ becomes ‘entangled with,’ incoming visual sensations frame by frame—click click click click—more or less like movies. Each frame of visual experience marks an encounter between the simulation and the external world.
The Berkeley researches have found a way to ‘read’ the traces of the wetware simulation and reconstruct the visual scene they were tracing. Generalizing from this, the second paragraph above asserts, they expect one day to be able to visualize those simulations we run that are not met by, entangled with, visual input. Very clever.
This links to a page from Gallant’s lab. There you’ll find a link to the full paper (behind a pay wall), an abstract of the article, and some fascinating film clips. This one is fascinating:
The top row shows the video clip that was presented to each of three subjects. The bottom three rows depict various possible reconstructions of the input video. The leftmost image in the row shows the best reconstruction; the others are possibilities. Note the high agreement between subjects.
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Sunday, September 25, 2011
Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 1, Loosen Up
The “sex appeal” of the inorganic, like life, is another way to give voice to what I think of as a shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter.
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
We all know that B.B. King’s guitar is named Lucille. Why? No, not ‘why “Lucille”’? Why is it named at all?
Perhaps it’s a gesture of affection. The guitar, after all, is very close to him. It’s one of his voices, it is, in some sense, part of him.
It may be more than that. The name may well reflect the subtle intricacy of King’s relationship to his guitar, his instrument. To play an instrument well, one must learn to yield to its physicality, to blend with it. You can’t dominate it. Well, you can try, and you CAN succeed. But you pay a cost. You musicianship suffers.
As I’m not a guitar player, however, I can’t tell you what it means to yield to a guitar. Of sure, I can guess, I can make up stories, and you might find those stories convincing. If you’re not a guitar player. But guitar players, the thoughtful ones at least, will know that I’m faking it.
I suppose I could talk about the trumpet—I’ve been playing for half a century—but that’s just a little complex. And my point really isn’t about complexity. It’s about subtlety.
The Claves
So let’s talk about the claves. The claves are a pair of short sticks that tend to be roughly eight inches long and an inch in diameter. They’re used in Latin music, indeed, they’re central to many genres, to produce a sharp penetrating percussive sound. They’re usually made of hard dense wood. Mine are made of fiberglass:
You hold one clave in your left hand and then strike it with the other one, held in your right hand (if you’re right handed). Simple, no? Well, yes. And no.
It’s more like you cradle the one clave (it doesn’t matter which one) in your left hand. You hold your hand palm-up, lay the clave across it, and grip it only so much as needed to keep it in place. You don’t need to grip it tightly, nor do you even WANT to grip it tightly. If you do that, then your hand will dampen the vibrations and dull the sound. The ‘crack!’ will no longer be sharp and crisp.
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Saturday, September 24, 2011
Seeing God: Morton to Latour to Harman to Bennett to Alexander to Greenfield to Darwin
There are great big worlds out there. If we get outside of the Enlightenment, of the Judeo-Christian system of a single truth, everything else being superstition or wrong, there’s a world that we can learn from, and there’s so much to learn.
—Dr. Sidney Greenfield
So, some months ago I read this Timothy Morton guy at Stanford’s Arcade and he gets me interested in object-oriented ontology, which is something of a shock as it’s in the Continental philosophical tradition, which I abandoned years ago, when I abandoned all philosophy (and literary criticism, too). What AM I doing reading this stuff? Well, as I’ve said here and there, I’m after graffiti, I’m after the ‘other side’ of literary understanding (it’s ‘other’ from my distinctly non-standard POV, but that other descends from the traditional humanistic criticism that I abandoned).
And so off I go traipsing through Latour, having a grand old time, and now I’ve started reading Bennett (Vibrant Matter) and Harman (The Quadruple Object) and, once again, it’s WTF!city. This stuff is, well, it’s Continental, that’s what it is. And as I read it I’m telling myself that’s how perception works, that’s what the brain is going. I’m psychologizing it. But they’re not talking about the mind, they’re talking about the world. And I know THAT. Heck, that’s why I’m reading this stuff. But do I HAVE to? Why? What’s it going to get me?
[Dude, you won’t know THAT until you get there, will you?
I suppose not.]
Ecstasy and Healing
Meanwhile, in over the transom, one Sharon Alexander Dreyfus tells me she’s read my essay-review of Benny Shanon’s Antipodes of the Mind and before you know it I’ve got an eCopy of her dissertation, Oh My God!!!!: Ecstatic ritual as examined through the evocative techniques of gospel choir, which is right up my alley, since music and ecstasy is something that, not only interests me, but that I’ve been through. Are you experienced? sings the hippy heavy blues metal psychedelic rock guitar-god musician.
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Thursday, September 22, 2011
Who Controls the Metaphor Police?
Tim Morton quotes a passage from Graham Harman’s post on strategic vitalism. Here’s the passage:
But it’s almost amusing that the human/inanimate divide is such a sacred thing to many contemporary people that they are angered by its metaphorical transgression as well. Indeed, this divide may be the central religious principle of modernism, as Latour decisively and permanently demonstrated in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that refutes so many things that refuse to die.
Yes.
But, just what are the metaphorical commitments of those who would police the human/inanimate divide, or its proxy, the animate/inanimate divide? One of the largest movements in Western thought over the past half millennium has been the imperative to locate all accounts of observable phenomena on the inanimate side of that divide. The name of this program is reductionism. Everything, ultimately is physics, and physics is about itty bitty and super-itty bitty particles in motion (and waves—whoops!).
The ultimate task of the metaphor police is to ensure that there is nothing essential, nothing vital, on the animate side of that line. One is allowed to talk on the animate side of the line if and only if one can: 1) demonstrate the connections back to the inanimate side of the line, and 2) show that all the real work’s being done on the inanimate side. This is called emergentism and it’s quite popular.
Howdy Doody Metaphysics in the Computer Age
Now, enter the computer. Computers, whether analog (remember those?) or digital, are physical devices, operating by known physical principles (more or less). And they process information, whatever that is—and believe me, just what it is, that’s a tad problematic once you get out of some very narrow conceptual confines. Moreover, you know what, boys and girls? If a computer can process enough information fast enough, it’ll be able to think. Really. Think. And so we’ve now shoved thinking onto the inanimate side of that line.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Three cheers: hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! Outstanding! Awesome! Way cool!
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011
“Vitalism” is in Play
And all’s right with the world
Under ‘pressure’ from Jane “Vibrant Materials” Bennett, Levi Bryant speaks for a strategic vitalism. Tim Morton seconds the thought. And Graham Harmon concurs.
What’s Up?
Change, my friends, change. It’s a new world emerging on the horizon.
Can machines, like, think?
It goes without saying that we are undergoing a culture-wide upheaval that is changing how we think about and, thus how we experience, the world. One obvious source of conceptual pressure is the rise of the digital computer, which has forced us to consider the possibility of an elaborate electro-mechanical contraption that can, somehow, think. Well, if such a thing can think, what does that do to the once-firm distinction between mind and matter? Kind of knocks the feet out from under it, doesn’t it. Does that imply, as well, that the computer is somehow alive?
Yeowhhh!
With those boundaries in peril—between mind and matter, mechanism and living organism—then, who could have been surprised when Jane Bennett brought up the topic of animism at the recent OOO meetings. Her book, after all, is titled Vibrant Matter. In her talk last Tuesday, “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter”, she noted in passing that ontology is written in the grammar of our language; which is to say, it’s written into our basic modes of thought. This is something I’ve blogged about recently:
- Ontology in Perception and Thought
- The Great Chain of Being as Conceptual Structure
- An Ontological Moment in Human Thought
There is this technical paper as well, Ontology in Knowledge Representation.
The world IS the world, independent of our perception and conception. But we cannot know it directly. We know it only through the means currently at our disposal, and those means are, in part, cultural. We can change them, and have done so in the past. We are doing so, once again. And not for the last time.
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Ave Maria: It’s Not About Us
It’s time to return to animation, the medium which has, in many ways, been one of my core arenas over the past few years, that and graffiti. I’ve working on Fantasia for the last several years, starting with an appreciation of the film as a whole, and then writing pieces on specific segments. I’ve got two more to go, Night on Bald Mountain and the Pastoral Symphony, plus the intermission interlude, including the sound-track. I’ve already discussed the Ave Maria sequence with Mike Barrier.
The Ave Maria segment, the last one in Disney’s Fantasia, must be one of the most restrained animation sequences ever produced. There are segments where nothing, or almost nothing, moves for a second or three. And this is not limited animation Hanna-Barbara style or anime style, where motion is minimized to save money, though money was an issue, as always.
There are two sources of movement in films: 1) movement produced by the camera, and 2) movements of objects in front of the camera. This segment runs for almost six minutes, half of which have no moving objects on screen. The IS motion, but it’s produced by the camera, and that is often minimal.
It’s an astonishing conception, especially since it follows Night on Bald Mountain, which is perhaps the most frenetic of the segments. And that, in part is the point. The two were planned to contrast the sacred (Ave Maria) with the secular (Bald Mountain). Disney has mirrored, amplified, and transformed this thematic contrast by an almost whole-scale contrast in formal and technical means.
Maximal Minimalism
This is maximal animation, as maximal as there’s ever been. And the visible restraint, in fact, required extreme technical effort, as John Culhane details in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. A special camera rig had to be built to film the last scene in the segment, a long zoom from deep in the forest to a sunrise. The rig spanned a sound-stage that was 45 feet wide. And that last segment had to be shot three times, each time taking several days. The wrong lens had been in the camera during the first shoot. The second shoot was interrupted by an earthquake which may have misaligned the equipment. The only way to tell would have been to develop the film and see how it looked. If it looked bad, it would have been too late to re-shoot it and make the premier date. So they started over again, from the beginning of the segment.
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Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Fuzzy Matter
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Monday, September 19, 2011
The Latour Locus, An Interlude
One of the things that Latour does in Reassembling the Social is show that ‘the local’ is deeply ambiguous. This is nowhere more obvious that in photography, where, automatically, at least three loci are conjured into being by every photograph: 1) the locus of viewing, 2) the locus of taking-the-photo, and 3) the locus/loci IN the photo.
Consider this photograph:
When I took that photo I was standing at a certain place; at that time the locus of viewing (1) and the locus of taking (2) are/were the same. Now, of course, the locus of viewing has become many, each at the place where a viewer looks at the photo. The locus of the-taking, of course, remains unchanged.
But what about the loci IN the photo itself? The lamps were, say, 10 to 20 yards from me. The tall building to the left is the Goldman Sachs Building in Jersey City. It’s, say, between a half-mile and a mile from where I stood when I took the photo. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building (in the middle) would be, say, five or six miles away on the island of Manhattan. The clouds in the sky, how far away are they? And the sun, it is nowhere visible in this photo, but its existence is implied by the fact that the photo exists. For it supplied the light, the photos, which are the physical basis of the photo. It’s 93 million miles away.
Just where IS this photo? What is the locus?
In asking that question I don’t mean to be mysterious, or philosophically deep, or problematic. None of those things. The loci in question can be traced, at least in principle, in a fairly direct fashion. What’s important, at this juncture in our thinking about the world, is that the apprehension of the Latour Locus, if I may, be immediate and intuitive. One should not have to pull out the threads laboriously one after the other. Rather, one should intuit them immediately and be prepared to spin them out as necessary.
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Sunday, September 18, 2011
Cartoon Metaphysics: OOO and Animation
Two and a half months ago when I blogged about Animation and the Sentient Text I speculated
about object-oriented ontology in the age of animation: Is there a connection? Animated films have been with us since the early 1920s, and animation itself extends back into the 19th Century, with flip books, kinoscopes and such. In its cinematic guise animation has been aware of itself and its tech and has depicted that in many and various of its works. From this it follows that animation is aware of the apparent ontological difference between its materials, static images, and its effects, living beings (and others) on the screen and into the minds of viewers.
Let me continue that speculation.
Early in his career Walt Disney did a series of films known as the Alice films. They were short subjects in which a girl named Alice—who owes little to Lewis Carroll’s Alice that I can see—does this that and the other. Alice, however, is a live action girl, while the world in which she does this that and the other is an animated one. Here’s a frame grab:
That’s Walt Disney standing over her shoulder and, of course, an animated scene in front of her. In this shot we see an animated mouse attempt to annoy a live action cat:
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Speculation as Fundamental Thinking
The word “speculation” came up a few times in last week’s OOOevents, generally cloaked in ambivalence. I don’t know the word’s valence in “Speculative Realism”, so I don’t know just what these folks were being ambivalent about. I DO know that I am unabashedly in favor of speculation.
When you find yourself in the middle of the desert, but you’re map’s run out, what’re you going to do? Go back? Well, you can do that, but wherever you left from won’t be any better when you get back. And for YOU it will likely be worse. Or, you could dig a whole, crawl into it, and die. Once you’ve given those two a whirl, it seems to me you have only one other possibility: Forward ho! Without a map, without landmarks, without assurance that there’s any there there.
[You could, if you’re clever, manage the Indian rope trick and vanish up into the air. That’ll only last a second or three, though it’ll feel like forever while you’re up up and away in your metaphysical balloon.]
Anyhow, I the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil is called “Speculative Engineering”. The engineering is as important as the speculation. Engineers design and construct; they make something out of nothing. Our scientific culture has tended to backseat engineering—too pedestrian, too dirty, too much contact with raw stuff—but computer science has put the lie to that. For computer science is as much, and often more, a matter of engineering than of science.
Here’s how I introduce speculation (p. xii):
Continue reading "Speculation as Fundamental Thinking"While we have indeed learned a great deal, the story I tell is, in fact, as incomplete as it is ambitious. I have used empirical evidence wherever I could, but we don’t have enough evidence to cover the ground. There are gaping holes which I can only fill in with speculation.
It is for that reason that Beethoven’s Anvil looks to the future, not to the past. It is a plan for intellectual journeys we have yet to take, not an account of voyages past.
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Friday, September 16, 2011
Talk to the Wood: Animism is Natural
At a certain point her recent OOOIII talk, “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter”, Jane Bennett broached the topic of animism, albeit with a little embarrassment. I understand, on both matters. As someone who writes about graffiti as being an expression of the spirit of the site, the kami, I feel the necessity of animist talk. As a card-carrying PhD intellectual I understand the embarrassment as well; don’t want people to think I’m nuts.
But, it’s 2011 and we’re slipping rapidly past post-modernity in a world that’s in the early phases of a global eCotastrophy. Perhaps going nuts with deliberation is a prudent move. It’s good for the circulation.
Whatever.
In Beethoven’s Anvil I’ve argued primitive proto-music created a new arena for human sociality. At the beginning of “Chapter IX, Musicking the World”, I suggest that animism is what happens when non-humans are assimilated into this new social space. It is their spirits that anchor them in this new community. Here’s that passage (pp. 195-198).
* * * * *
According to Fannie Berry, an ex-slave, Virginia slaves in the late 1850s would sing the following song as they felled pine trees:
A col’ frosty mo’nin’
De niggers feelin’ good
Take you ax upon yo’ shoulder
Nigger, talk to de wood.
She went on to report that:
Dey be paired up to a tree, an’ dey mark de blows by de song. Fus’ one chop, den his partner, an’ when dey sing TALK dey all chop togedder; an’ purty soon dey git de tree ready for to fall an’ dey yell “Hi” an‘ de slaves all scramble out de way quick.
The song thus helped the men to pace and coordinate their efforts. Beyond that, Bruce Jackson notes of such songs, “the songs change the nature of the work by putting the work into the worker’s framework...By incorporating the work with their song, by in effect, co-opting something they are forced to do anyway, they make it theirs in a way it otherwise is not.” In the act of singing the workers linked their minds and brains into a single dynamical system, a community of sympathy. By bringing their work into that same dynamic field, they incorporate it into that form of society created through synchronization of interacting brains.
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