Material Language

I rewrite extensively sometimes. If it's anything topical I don't hide anything. Still working on this one. All notes.

What offended me about the original post at Savage Minds was that those for whom a sophisticated understanding of language is supposedly part of their job -for whom language is a tool- would find it necessary to study a minor decorative art to gain an understanding of craft. From the draft of an article linked in the post [PDF]

Through understanding imagination as a generative force in practice, we can reconsider the role it has been scripted in theories of culture. Practice is not that through which we imagine, the cockfight is not a theatre of expression and display of what the Balinese men might imagine themselves to be, as Clifford Geertz argues. Imagination is an imperative of practice itself. The more deeply you imagine, the more deeply you practice – and, conversely, the deeper the practice, the deeper the imagination. Practical imagination, material imagination, the imaginative substance of practice complete with all in which the practice itself is engaged, embedded, intertwined, as a constituent element of practice itself is constitutive, not expressive, of culture- imagination, the lungs of culture. "

The author's mistake is in forgetting that language is material
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Posted elsewhere but rewritten, and expanded (and expanding)
Art and criticism are joined in a fruitful antagonism, and historians and biographers are in a similar relation to those they study. But while artists may hate critics and biographers may dream secretly of supplanting their subjects in authority, only Theory as presently constituted is seen by its adherents as preceding and superior to practice.

What place do arguments from a "naturalized" epistemology have in artmaking? What place have they had in theories of Modernism and of modernist culture-making?
The foundation of theory is in its analogical relation to the sciences. Intellectual design is intellectual engineering, words replacing numbers. Theory reverses the connoisseur's placement of cause and effect, not in defense of a preferred moral truth but of a proposed logical one, and doing so attempts to undermine the role of historical/retrospective knowledge.

Theory has its origin in the prerogatives of Modern criticism, and in a very specific variant of Modernism. My experience, and here I'm publicly treading private ground, is with what I've come to think of as something post-Talmudic. "In the beginning was the word." If the first man was a believer, the second was a critic. The artist was at worst a maker of graven images, at best no more than secondary. Combined with the Modern telos of progress we get the myth of the critic as "social" scientist and not as describer but prescriber.

If art is defined as a free imagination at play, it is defended because that freedom is assumed to perform an important function in society. Action and exegesis are divided not absolutely but unevenly between artist and critic as between history and historian. Theory argues against this division of labor in both cases: history is secondary and a free imagination is unnecessary (often leading to irrationalism.) Art under theory, as culture under neoliberalism, is illustration, advertising, or indulgence.

I want to write something on Yi Yi as pattern making -invention- and observation. Good art as good empiricism always defeats theory.

As a general comment for those who are having trouble following along:
The best art in the romantic tradition, and I'm using this example only because it would otherwise seem to contradict my point, is the art that best describes romantic desire to those who would otherwise have no interest. The art that has come down to us as the most sincerely romantic has also come down to us as minor, at most secondary. That includes bad Beethoven.
Got me?

The last generation has marked the ascendency of technics in the social sciences. In the past few years I've run into a lot of melancholy if not openly miserable technicians. What am I supposed to say, I told you so?

"I don’t think in the 5 years I’ve been reading this page, I’ve read one description of a logically and emotionally complex situation that didn’t rely on generalizations, boilerplate and cheap sentiment."

Here's one example; and another dug up by accident.

note taking

Brian Leiter, Simon Blackburn, Richard Posner, Colin McGinn, the “New Atheists, ” all share Chomsky’s rationalism and his idealism. All more and more express contempt for democracy and the “illiterate” “irrational” majority. Chomsky is on record for his contempt for empiricism as a methodology, but empiricism, as a journalist, is what’s made him as famous as he is. Put that list of names above alongside the link to Kos above [Kos the hack political operative]. Perhaps Chomsky’s a good reporter because he thinks it’s just banality, so he shrugs and does his Joe Friday act. It’s a better model for the press then we have now: he doesn’t take himself seriously.
But Chomsky is a defender of democracy because of what he assumes about people and their behavior Those assumptions are ridiculously simple-minded, in fact self-serving, but he sticks with them, while those who share his modernist rationalism have replaced that naive hope with arch cynicism. But he seems oblivious.

Intellectually Chomsky is in a time warp; his idealism concerning humanity as such is as dated as his linguistics, but he’s still a hero to the young. Yet when he’s caught being sloppy or indulgent he never admits it. He tries to argue his way out of anything, even if it would he easier to just own up and move on. It’s the same with his philosophical arguments. His brilliant imagination is also thin and brittle. You can contextualize him, as a post war rationalist, and still value his insights. But you’ll always have to pick and choose what to keep and what to throw away. True with anybody actually. But context, history and ambiguity, empiricism, are not things he takes seriously. However good a reporter he is, his intellectual model as a thinker and a philosopher, and his model of the world, is deeply deeply flawed.

This and the previous [two down] taken from discussion here. Another commenter linked to a post by Markos Moulitsas, "Kos." It's a good one. Very basic stuff, in a good way.

Summer repeats:

"It's Adolf Hitler and his faithful West Indian companion!"
---
"I'm just flabbergasted by the antiquity of this shit"
"What?"
---
"I want to talk to you for a minute. I just want to say that D. sent me up here as the site supervisor. D[2] is still here, he's not going anywhere, but that wasn't his job anyway. But I want you to know that I'm the one who's going to be running this job now, and I'm the one to talk to if you have any questions. It's down to the wire, but it's a job and we're all here for the same reason: to get this job done and get our money and get out. And that's what we're going to do. Now if... [this goes on for a bit]
...Any questions?"
" Yes I have one...
"Are you a faggot?"
Everyone's running for the door trying not to fall on their faces. No one can tell if W. is serious or not. His brow is furrowed and he's staring intently at our new foreman, who has become flustered. He was trying put the bridle on the horse and the horse is not so much resisting as responding with incredulity. He calls us back and no one goes, so after beginning "what do you want me to be?" he cops out and proclaims his heterosexuality in no uncertain terms, and continues to do so loudly for the next 5 minutes. After a while I see W. back on the ladder with his assistant, and he's laughing.

2

"Yella!... Yella!"
"You're a spic!"
"Yo! my sister's Jordanian."
---
"I'm from Austria, motherfucker!. I'm from Graz! Arnold Schwarzenegger's hometown!"
"No wonder you sound like a Guinea."
"Yeah! We're right on the fuckin' border"
---
"Edenbaum"
"A good Irish name."
"Nazi"
...
"You're alright for a Jew!"
---
"What's the difference between a nigger and a pizza?"
"There's a black man in the room!"
"I don't care! What's the difference between a nigger and a fucking pizza?
"I don't know."
"A pizza can feed a family of four!"
[The black man looks at the ground shakes his head slowly and laughs]
---
"How many languages do you speak?"
"I can say "pussy" in 12 languages!"
---
Flipping open a cell phone to show a photograph.
"She's hot"
Where's she from?"
"Russia. Buying her first Range Rover next week!"
"Damn"
What's she do?"
"Real estate.
"Money."
"Why d'you think I'm with the bitch!?"
"So why's she with you!?"
...
"How old is she?"
"23" [he's 27]
---
"I saw Maurice- we went to the same Church- and I asked him, which way are you taking us? People are worried. And he says, we are a small country, a poor country; all we have is agriculture, but we need to modernize. We need to build infrastructure and to expand trade. We need education. We can learn from both sides..."
[Maurice is Maurice Bishop.]

I still have nightmares about the Jamaican killer trying to say "tuchus."
"Tukush!"
---

The unsmiling Russian who runs the freight in the afternoons turns back to us as he closes the door.
"Whites out the front, Niggers to the basement."
I'm in the elevator with the electricians: two Puerto Ricans and a Pole.
"So how do you get out?"
The Russian pauses.
"I'm Superman, I leave from the roof"
He shakes hands with us as we walk towards the steps.
---

3

Talking to a kid on the job, a Jamaican from the slums of Kingston -Tivoli Gardens- with eyes that turn in an instant from innocent to icy. Listening to him talk about the adventures of his youth, of guns and gangs and the politics of Jamaica, I make a guess:
"Seaga"
"Yah. I was a Seaga Boy!" He laughs.
Still proud.

4

You're from the north?
How'd ya know?
I'm learning to recognize the accents
Ah, they all sound the same.
Por-ta-DYNE!
---
Have ya seen Paddy?
I'm Paddy.
The guy your working with
W're both Paddy!
---
Fuck! Where's Paddy?
Runnin 'round like an extra cock at a whore's wedding!
---
He went to meet a taper. He's bring'n her back after lunch
A female taper?
She better be pretty.
She better be good.
He says she's real good.
---
Did you get your wish.
Oh yeah. Jayzuz! She's six foot tall!
[She's Jamaican]
---
[The Mexican laborer walking around singing U2]
Hello! Hello!
---
See you tomorrow.
Nope. I'm gone.
Nice to meet you. See you again.
With the help of God, and a couple policemen.

"To Justify Something Is To Diminish It?"
Yes, of course.

Fish's arguments, and their weaknesses, are pretty clear. It's easy to understand if you know the antecedents -and isn't that part of Holbo's job description to know them?- But Holbo is "vexed."
The only example he can come up with to parallel Fish's argument is etiquette. Etiquette comes at the end of the line. It's the argument for manners when they're no longer founded on anything but themselves. Mozart's music is founded on and is considered the high point of a tradition. T.S. Eliot and Kentucky Bluegrass Banjo players are inheritors of tradition. Sonata form, lyric poetry, meter and rhyme scheme, and on and on. It's not that Holbo wants to make an argument against these things and their role in the academy, or even that he's accusing Fish of overreaching, it's that he arguing from an ignorance that they ever had a role. That's just bizarre.
I quoted Eliot:" He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it"
You may not agree with the sentiment but ignorance is no excuse.

As I said in a comment It struck me for the first time how the contemporary culture these people are most attracted to is basically Pre-Raphaelite. Proto-fascist and borderline kitsch. Randian, Life as Art/ Art as Life. Life/Art ordered by Intention.

From Crooked Timber

Viel hat von Morgen an,
Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander,
erfahren der Mensch, bald sind wir aber Gesang

Starting from the morning
when we became a conversation, and hear from each other
much have we experienced but soon we shall be song.

Of course, one could try to remain unimpressed by this, and insist that this is, after all, just poetic hyperbole. The idea that song could replace conversation is a Romantic conceit, not something to be taken too seriously. If one is going to take this tack at the point, though, why start by appealing to poetry in the first place?

Poetic hyperbole? Isn't the implication here that soon we shall be dead, and that song, or story, or history - recorded language- will be all that's left?

"The arts and literature are Burkean by default, as at the same time they are liberal also by default: they negotiate the contradictions between instrumentalism and introspection. Intellectual liberalism as a political and philosophical program does not do this.

Academic Platonism says the instance is the vulgarization of the general, that the idea is truth. This is where right and left rebel against utilitarian liberalism -the generalized idea of the individual- in defense of actual individual experience. [DeLong would argue that] if the experts work as hard as they should to be objective then actual individual experience is irrelevant. BDL's anger is most often at members of the press who fail at that goal."

In comments. Let's see how long he lets it stay up.
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more notetaking;
"The rule of unintended consequences and arguments in literary criticism against the intentional fallacy are both arguments against the rule of experts as such. Arguments for defining the rule of law as the rule of textual interpretation rather than of unaided reason are arguments for the consideration of the most important forms of "expertise" as being those of language, history and contextualized knowledge, rather than merely technical know-how. The vulgar reality of politics as 'a popularity contest" protects us from the rule of condescending geniuses.
The rule of law is not the rule of reason any more than it is the rule of leaders, it is the rule of custom. Compared the rule of technocrats the rule of law is Burkean."

I can understand arguments about Cuba, I can’t even comprehend any more the arguments by people who refuse to understand the ad hoc nature of politics and life in the world, who argue against context and for rules over responsibilities as if there were never a tension between them. Without that tension there are no responsibilities at all.
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The last sentence is the root of the critique of morality as rule following rather than understanding. Most observant people recognize this as where the arts find their purpose, in fictional rule breaking and rearrangement. In religion (foundational fiction) the original order is reinforced, in secular literature often undermined, if only slightly. But anglo-american philosophers deride both the arts and religion, by attacking their supposed truth as falsity and ignoring their function. And since art is never "true" it's a double absurdity, a lie that doesn't claim to be anything but a lie: art is irrationalism.
This sort of attempt to "understand" Nietzsche makes as much sense as attempts to "understand" Shakespeare, which is to say slightly more sense than trying to "understand" Homer or the Bible. The discursive mode has its privileges, but philosophy is still a form of literature.

It is impossible for us to free ourselves entirely from "the tyranny of custom." It's a daily struggle and mostly we fail.

"Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed..." and names them according to preconceptions.
Literature is thinking in slow motion and description without naming. It's less precise but precision for its own sake is unphilosophical.

"I see philosophy not as of groundwork for science, but as continuous with science."
Formal logic can be thought of as continuous with formal mathematics, since the language of formal logic is enclosed and reflexive. But the relation of language to the world is unstable, and philosophy, unlike formal logic, must concern itself not only with itself but with the world and our relation to it. Mathematics and formal logic are never undermined by history. Their applications inevitably are. Precision is not a trope; "Precisionism" is. The tension between the twin categories those words represent is the proper subject of philosophy the arts and humanities.
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Russell "Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom." There is no escape from tyranny of custom. We communicate in customs. Our life is our habits.

Quine was a logician, and formal logic is not philosophy. Philosophy concerns our relation to the world. Every action is an action in the world and a discussion of the world that imagines itself not in it (considers itself as other than an action) is predicated on a delusion or a lie.

Formalism in itself is meaningless, its only significance is if it mirrors something in the world. You could argue that mathematics does that in its use, that mathematical calculations mirror the motion of things in the world. But language doesn't mirror the world in any way other than a house mirrors the world. Both are man made, imperfect, things. The singular importance of language originates in its use, but its use is full of ambiguity. The relation of words to referents is fluid. Language does not mirror it mimics and refers to the world, and not very clearly and not very well. The world in language is the world of the social and political not the hard sciences.

"Precision is not a trope; 'Precisionism' is." It's a habit, a custom, as Platonism as it applied to language. I wrote this for a catalogue essay of a friend's work:

"Abstraction has always been anomalous in art, and pure abstraction even more so. It makes sense if you are an idealist to imagine ideal forms, but such philosophies are as rare as the cultures that encourage them. And even pure abstraction only represents purity; we only know the ideal through the illusion of its presence."

The ideal is antithetical to democracy. Textualism and adversarialism define the process of imperfect justice and imperfect government. Rationalism and formal logic can not.

"Taken in isolation neither conditioned response nor reason are conscious."
The brain is a computer running two contradictory operating systems: a system of conditioned response and one of rational analysis: number crunching. Neither are conscious and both can be described in terms of physicalism. Consciousness is the sense of a unified decision making process but perhaps no more than that: an illusion or chimera, less the author of the act than the side effect of the struggle between mechanisms. At the very least unified consciousness is fictional. No news there for most of us. It amazes me that opponents of behaviorism [should that be of psychology itself, or self-reflection?] refuse to look at history. I suppose they defend their choice by saying the the plural of anecdote is literature. To which I respond: read Hamlet.
I choose to pretend that I have some capacity for free will, but I choose not to pretend that I can guarantee my own rationality. I choose to pretend in other words that I have the free will to make the only ethical and moral choice. And of course that choice, and the resulting development of formal adversarialism, is the basis of our justice system.

Discussions like this one on Rorty and this one on the "laws" of nature annoy me, for the same reason Toulmin does. It is simply not necessary to question Platonist assumptions about the mechanical world when all that matters is whether or not we have access to such clarity in the political one. Chapter 15 in Steven Weinberg's Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries is titled Zionism and Its Adversaries. Its presence in this book is a function of rhetoric not science. It's a bad joke. I won't quibble about Platonism and Mathematics if others will stop bullshitting about Platonism and Politics.

Looking for Zizek and Critchley on google, since Critchley asked an old friend to come to his defense [update Jan. 08: now published] I find this by Idiot Holbo.
Who knew? It's serendipity baby.

Conditioned response vs. computation (figuring the odds).
Taken in isolation neither conditioned response nor reason are conscious.
It's pretty simple. Both are basic functions, both are perfectly materialist (plug and play), and they're in conflict. Are human beings capable of rational calculation? Yes. Are we subject to conditioned response? Yes. Consciousness is the fog that is produced by and that surrounds, obscures and stabilizes that conflict. Consciousness is the ghostly aftereffect of material, programmed, contradictory processes that we experience as contradictory imperatives. A "self" is a manifestation of an illusory unity and order.
Dualism sucks. It's based on a dream and a lie: a "need," though one shared by many. It's illogical. And yes, compared with Zizek, Chalmers' ideas are vulgar:

Imagine that I am out hunting and am attacked by a lion. The lion claws me, leaving a deep gash in my leg. I want to run away, but the pain slows me down: my body tells me not to. If I run I will increase the injury, but of course, if I stay I'll just be killed. The choice is obvious, yet my body continues to experience a division. Endorphins and adrenaline are designed to get us out of such scrapes, but they are autonomic, very rarely if ever does the pain, or the division, go away completely. And of course machines do not feel pain.

...What separates us from computers is not consciousness, which we have had such a bad time trying to define, but the unconscious. Desire and fear, like pain, stay with us even when they're inappropriate. Yet we follow these responses as often as not even if we know that they are. Our desires/instincts/neuroses may also be contradictory, or even self-destructive. But all of them: anxiety and depression, calm or exuberance are sensory before they're intellectual. Consciousness is the state produced by the body/brain's negotiation of the conflict between conditioned response and reason. That is its beauty and why we find it so difficult to understand. We experience consciousness as one thing, but only can define it as the space between two. We experience it a as a thing ‘being’, but can only define it as the place where it exists.

The first moment of indecision is the first act of consciousness. Any creature capable of indecision is conscious.

---
Such a description of consciousness also fits well with Duncan Black's analysis of the behavior of network executives. That is it fits well with what most of the people on the planet take to be aspects of human behavior, aspects to match others exhibited by Hamlet, Alexander Portnoy and Richard Nixon. It never ceases to amaze me how so many supposedly educated and sophisticated people -if still a minority- are willing to dismiss the entire history of literature, if not history itself, to replace it with a fiction worthy of Ayn Rand and the Soviet Writers Union.
I'll add as I always do, that one of the people willing to do that is Noam Chomsky.

Dec. 3rd. I've been rewriting this for most of the week.

Propositions begin as assumptions that we attempt to justify by a mix of reason, elision, logical and false or slippery analogies. This marks the behavior of analytic philosophers and rational action theorists no less than historians and professors of comparative literature (and indeed of opinionated novelists.) The difference between the former and later groups is the authors' relations to their foundational assumptions.

What does it mean that Dennett's Darwinian fundamentalism, Chicago School economics and the philosophy of linguistic analysis can be seen so easily as variations on the same theme? And why is the question, like others of contextualization and history, considered not only unnecessary but even off-putting? The answer has to do with claims of all three sometimes explicitly sometimes only implicitly to the status of formal science. But those claims take the form of an analogy, and whatever the formal rigor of the structures built on top of that analogy the fact of it is still a problem. Chemists have nothing to fear from the history of chemistry. Economists and philosophers aren't so lucky.

What is the model for a philosopher: logician or critic? For American fans of Zizek and other Euros, the question is how should they respond to the European analogical (literary) rationalism. American academic philosophy is analytical, so American fans of European theory simply elide the difference between analogy and analysis creating an academic science of literature and history. The difference of course is that analytic thought hides its biggest literary moves in its original positions not in the body of its arguments. American literary and cultural theory is in no position to claim to be a science. But those who mock its pretensions-based on their own supposedly superior understanding of language- are not much better off.

All writers have opponents, but of those who see themselves as writers first, none oppose critical or historical re-contextualization. European analogical rationalism courts it. Contemporary academicism qua academicism and imagined as science, formal or otherwise, denies the validity of contextualization itself. And in terms of its use in economic theory, the results are literally damaging.

The night I heard him Zizek spoke as a critic, and said many things in his talk and over the dinner table that I agree with. I would even consider them "right." I'll get to the movies later. Among other things, we're both fans of Zhang Yimou

Went dancing with Slavoj The Bear yesterday. JT has been telling me for while that I should meet him, He Invited me to dinner which he usually doesn't do since I'm too much of a wild card, but this wasn't business and he wanted to see what would happen.
The reviews were good.
Zizek said what we're seeing intellectually and what we should be fighting for is a redefinition of public and private with a new focus on the public not as state authority but as public space, as commons. I said the commons includes language.
He defended the value of "appearance." I asked him if he would accept "sense." He referred to Kant's definition of public and private reason, seeing the state and law not as public but private. But by that logic, academic philosophy is private reason and literature is public. I should have asked him that one.

I got him to back up a bit on Chavez. He said he was just trying to piss off Simon Critchley. He criticised Judith Butler along the same lines, and I mentioned Martha Nussbaum, though neither of us remembered her name off the bat.
There's more. He did one thing that really surprised me, in a discussion of the Holocaust and art and one well known novel, I can't remember the name or author, describing how he would construct the last moments of a film based on it. He's got a real awareness of the reciprical relation of poet and critic, and a real literary, moral imagination.
more later.

Dualism bad hairstyles and progressive rock.
Science and speculative fiction, computer games and individualism.

The history of literature until recently was the history of the language of embodiment. All successful rhetoric involves an understanding of the material of language. All craft, even craft in the service of faith -religious oratory- is and always has been empirical and materialist in technique, if not intent. The skill of the orator or author draws you into a relationship that is fundamentally intimate, of having someone else's perceptions as your own. Whether those perceptions are the author's or those of his or her fictitious characters is immaterial. This is learning by seduction.
Science, speculative or cerebral fiction by comparison are fictions of the individual unchallenged; like video and virtual reality games they allow you to relive your life without testing your conceptions of yourself or others. Your virtual self is an augmented self. This is art less as a defense of dualism than a presumption of it, following the definition of consciousness as computation-plus, the nature of plus being unresolved but secondary, secondary because unthreatening, no longer a moral question for each of us but now quite literally academic.
The way to confront the arguments for dualism is to ask if the language and literature of embodiment [embodiment plus-computation] teach us things about the world and our existence in it that we would not otherwise learn. If the answer is yes then the debate, as described in the quote from Ned Block in the previous post, is resolved.

Consciousness is a problem mostly for those who are unwilling to accept a weakening of their own sense of authority. Once you do it becomes simply a question of logic.
See posts Nov. 1st and 6th and this from 2003. It makes no sense to argue against dualism using arguments founded on it.

Saving the last rewrite to my files, I'd forgotten that the original had been rewritten once before, when the editor before rejecting it for any other reason -it was written for an architectural journal- simply said it was too long.


The modern crisis in communication, the struggle between the rhetorics of scientific reason and of poetry, is not a new topic at this point. Science has solved problems and answered questions that we were never able to answer by sense alone. We no longer trust our perceptions to carry meanings about the world, but only about ourselves and our internal lives. It’s enough for many to say that the pleasures of perception are little more than minor habits, indulgences to be categorized by style or taste.

Dalibor Vesely makes the humanist’s argument against the dominance of instrumental reason -the logic of means and ends- in architecture and by extension in anything. He argues that we do not live or learn by impartial reason but through experience; that we rely on perception, and that our sensory awareness of objects and movement binds us to one another and grounds us in the world in ways we lose when we think only in terms of numbers, mechanism, and individual consciousness.

With the argument itself as introduction, Vesely moves on to a discussion of the Renaissance, describing how the technical advances of the quattrocento, the various techniques of perspective that stand as markers of the beginning of the Modern era, were created not as illustrations of scientific principles, and not in isolation from the surrounding culture, but as extensions of the metaphorical and allegorical logic of medieval optics. This moment he describes as the beginning of our divided representation, of the struggle between the worlds of sense and science, first seen in the desire both to describe new things in old language, and to do so in ways appropriate to the new world they make manifest.

The Baroque era in the arts, unlike the sciences, is not so much one of discovery but mastery, where the skills of the Renaissance became commonplace and scientific processes were in full conflict with past descriptions of the world. The result is a poetry not of things but of ideas about them, and Vesely analyzes the sense of space in Baroque architecture, describing the differing notions of infinity in mathematics and in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud (Sacra Sindone) of Guarino Guarini.

From Here the author continues to the age of reason and of industry, the 18th and 19th centuries, and then to modernism itself, where science became the arbiter of truth and ideology it’s political equivalent, with the only alternative to either being little more than a good sense of taste and a better one for self-preservation. The book ends with a plea for an art and architecture of open-ended experience: of communication, neither programmatic nor expressive and eccentric, and not grand but of a human scale.

The book makes a lovely argument, but there are problems in the way the author lays it out. To say that science was once inseparable from art is not a defense of art. That may sound good to the converted, but to skeptics more interested in logic than poetry it means little.

"Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth.”
Timothy Williamson, “Past the Linguistic Turn,” in The Future of Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter (Oxford, 2004).

As this quote illustrates, those who do not take the arts seriously, who see them as little more than entertainment, will be dismissive of attempts to justify their efficacy as a counterforce to science and the logic of technics. For all his knowledge of history, and his references to phenomenology and scientific studies of perception- of the disorienting effects of zero gravity environments and isolation tanks, of the ways in which sense defines intellect, the author returns always in his argument to the terminology of depth, of innate value, that Williamson among many others mocks so offhandedly.

There are other problems as well. Few people in the arts would not envy the ability of architects and artists in the past to create works where ornament and detail were more than the signposts of luxury, where objects acted as metaphors in the context of a narrative that an audience would immediately understand. There’s an advantage to being an artist in the employ of a universal church. It’s not only that science bled meaning from the world, it’s that the tools of communication changed. The end of the period of great buildings coincided with the era of great literature, and perhaps theater and novels are the cathedrals of democracy. Vesely also leads us through a wonderful discussion of the social and communicative space of Renaissance and Baroque architecture. But doesn’t the cinema at it’s best provide for us a similar experience? The objects and spaces in film and photography are imbued with the same meanings and metaphors once available to architects. Perhaps architecture requires too much stability to play that major a role in such an unstable world?

These criticisms are not minor, but they are not made in opposition to the arguments described above. Vesely reminds us that architecture is a mimetic art. Buildings are the places where we’re born, and are where we spend almost all our lives. They are as much our environment as any landscape. With this in mind, Vesely asks important questions: What form of knowledge can respond to science and its bastard children? What form of awareness does a bricklayer have, or a violinist, a knowledge that can be attained only by practice? And what does it mean that the product of this knowledge can be seen not as illustrative of but a manifestation of an idea? And how much of current building is made as a statement of ideology or opinion, as proposition, without accommodating within itself the possibility of a response?

If architecture is a stage on which many people move and act, why should it be thought of or designed to represent the ideas of an individual alone? Vesely’s defense of a sympathetic intelligence may seem quaint, or he may fall back on a language that is easy to criticize, but to ignore his argument is to accept the possibility of a courthouse designed for the prosecution, or the defense, and not the administration of justice, or a theater designed for the character of Hamlet and not the play. Vesely is not a poststructuralist arguing against the science of medicine, he’s arguing against the absurdity of the false science of architecture.

From Sept. 2004. Written under assignment for publication but unpublished. Reworked a bit today. It seemed appropriate.

Dalibor Vesely. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
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"Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth."

Timothy Williamson, "Past the Linguistic Turn." In The Future of Philosophy, edited by Brian Leiter. Oxford, 2004.


The modern crisis in communication, between the rhetoric of scientific reason and of poetry, is not a new topic. Between our commonsensical appreciation of the clarity of science and the desire of many partly out of jealousy to extend that clarity to their own fields and the often colorful opposition of those who defend the world from the onslaught of instrumental reason, this argument has been going on for quite a while.

Dalibor Vesely makes the humanist argument against instrumentalism in architecture and in life; but for all his range, and he's widely read in subjects from ancient to modern, he's still a specialist, trapped by the limitations of his field. For all his references to the complex relationships among the various factors- people, ideologies and technologies- involved in the production of the great buildings of the past, for all his discussion of phenomenology and the necessity for us of experiencing and learning the world as a series of sensations in context- including references to NASA studies of human subjects in zero gravity environments and isolation tanks- Vesely is forced by his argument to return to the terminology of depth, and he does so in a way that if he were writing on another subject would offer his opponents a field day. I doubt any of his opponents are architects, but that doesn't really make a difference. In a more general sense his enemies are his most important audience.

Vesely reminds us, referring to Aristotle, that Architecture is a mimetic art. Buildings are where we're born where we spend much of our lives with much of the rest spent traveling between them, and most often where we die. What architect tries to make buildings without indulging the pleasures of construction? How many buildings are made without considering the landscape that surrounds them, and how many of us would argue they shouldn't be? It is true that there were ideologies in Modernism, and objects and structures made as little more than illustrations. It's also true that the Renaissance and Baroque had access to systems of metaphor that allowed both primary and secondary forms, both structures and details, to carry a literary weight. Buildings told stories in the past in ways they no longer do. But it's also interesting to observe that the communicative space Vesely describes in the Baroque exists now in movies. And what's come down to us as the post WWII ghetto of "design," of the changing fashions of the visual, has never been quite the same problem for literature: faddishness has always existed but rarely dominated. What Vesely does not say outright is that until recently design has never been considered an intellectual act; but now it is the model for all intellectual activity, and faddishness has become the rule. Indeed it's the logical consequence of a forward-looking instrumentalist philosophy.

Vesely asks important questions: What form of knowledge can respond to that of science and its bastard children? What form of knowledge is that of a violinist or a bricklayer, a knowledge that can be attained only by practice? And how much has the architecture of the present forgotten this? How much of current building is made as a statement, without accommodating the possibility of a rebuttal?

The best argument against instrumentalism, the best argument that Vesely's opponents in law economics and philosophy would understand is that if in our scientific age our justice system is based still on a battle of opposed parties, of the opposed instrumentalisms of defender and prosecutor, then argument itself and not science is the intellectual keystone of our society. One way or another we're stuck with the ambiguities of language and conversation. It only makes sense then that buildings should be designed not as simple statements, as one side or another of an argument, but as the place where such arguments are held. At the very least this is practical: if the logic of our government is that we should be divided amongst ourselves then the logic of buildings should reflect this choice. Of course that means that the architects should allow that they are, as human beings, as individuals and as members of society, divided within themselves. Instrumentalism denies this as well it could be said, in opposition to our chosen way of life.

Note taking a comment at CT.

Something else to add, since the two posts following this seminar on individualism at Crooked Timber are one on the perils of atomized culture and yet another celebration of it: Isn’t it great to be a middle-aged man who spends all his free time reading comic books?.

The problem isn’t one of institutions or individuals but of how individuals relate to institutions. Books that concentrate on rules for economic policy are about as useful as books that promise to teach you how to pick up girls.
Rules don’t make societies any more than rules make games. Games exist in the playing, and since there are no umpires in society who are not also players themselves, we have to trust our playing partners to make the honest call more often then not even when it’s in our favor. Ever play tennis?
Crises in society come about not because the rules break down but because rules are all there are left. The gearbox is fine, but there’s no grease. And what’s grease?
That’s the unasked question.

What percentage of the population in any country takes individualism as the model for behavior, up to and including the sort of sociopathological individualism economic science seems to prefer as it model? Both American political and economic liberals think mostly of social and religious conservatives and looney leftists as anti-individualist. And of course there’s the army. But the Scandinavian model is based on it. Social democracy is based on it. Religious conservatives counter the ideal of individual freedom with limits originating in god, social democracy with limits originating not in the state but in the community of which the state is a creature. That’s not a problem if we think of individuals as creatures of community. I speak and write in English, and I try to do so “well.” That means I do so expecting to be judged by others. As an individualist why would I care what others thought? Again the posters at CT celebrate individuation and bemoan atomization by turns. What can I say?

Europeans aren’t nearly as afraid of determinism as historically Americans have been. The question of free will is seen as an amusing conundrum not a problem with an answer. Cartesian philosophy never stopped being literature. But the formal structures of social democracy are beginning to appear now in US. While the academy is discussing libertarianism from above, academically mandated anarchism as the last hope for modernism, everyday post-modern [second modernist?] social-democracy is coming up from below.

So I’ll ask you: What percentage of the optimism now permeating academic thought can not be explained by reference to social determinism, as pathology? My sense of cautious optimism is based on something else entirely, the sense that people are getting used to there being unsolvable problems and are developing the capacity to accept the ad hoc. The academy is drying out, but the world’s getting greasy.

Another comment from this one

try this one.
Logicians aren't philosophers, they're technicians, The law of non-contradiction does not hold in the perceptions of our daily life. If it did there would be no need for literature. All of our linguistic definitions are provisional. Language is not mathematics. Look at the list above of Descartes' rhetorical slips and slides.
Formal ethics. How do we come to terms with downloading as a ubiquitous (but not victimless) crime? We can't. The best response to change the system of distribution: to cut the Gordian knot. Such moments are inevitable in every formal system. Philosophy is concerned with the question of how we recognize and respond to those moments. A philosophy that does not concern itself with crisis is not a philosophy but a technics.

And here's that same quote from Santayana again:

Transcendental logic. the method of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of evolution in nature and history. Transcendental method, so abused, became transcendental myth. A conscientious critique of knowledge was turned into a sham system of nature. We must therefore distinguish sharply the transcendental grammar of the intellect, which is significant and potentially correct, from the various transcendental systems of the universe which are chimeras.
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy

The rationalism of utility and the lowest common denominator brings us to this. Read em and weep. Really.

nothing new:

“Painter” is a descriptive term, like “writer” or “filmmaker.” I’ve always been envious of filmmakers since they don’t get called “artists” until people decide they are good enough to warrant the term. All painters get called artists these days and that’s done no one any good. My father was an “english teacher.” He published a few things, one or two well known, but he did not refer to himself as a “literary critic.” He never had “a project” or let anything other than his students take priority. He was not a genius and did not pretend to have an original mind though it could be argued that in some ways he had one. An unimaginative chemist may do research that has value, a “philosopher” with a mediocre mind should stick to teaching philosophy. But the logic of hypertrophied individualism and the need to compete with the hard sciences has created a culture of literary conceptualism and pseudoscience that in the form of “tenured radicals” gives cafe revolutionaries like me a bad name. “Yummies” Young Upwardly Mobile Marxists as an old family friend named them. I doesn’t matter if it’s literary theory, chicago school economics or linguistic analysis, it’s the same fucking thing: rationalist conceptualism, of by and for the academy and meaningless outside it.

The humanities are a function of the social. They are linked to the world through the study of the history of perception. We are made by language and by culture and are not independent of it. It used to be that there was a reciprocal relation between those who followed their sensibilities and those who came by afterwards to find out what honesty had made that intellect could not. That reciprocal relation still exists, but not in the academy (and not nearly enough in the ghetto of the art world) In the world at large all is if not well still much much better. By and large it’s still assumed by people who are bright enough to think about such things that Eastwood is better than George Lucas -and these days better than Scorsese- Pynchon is better than Tolkien and that Ayn Rand simply sucks. In the academy however all bets are off. Libertarianism is little more than a cult in the outside world, but has a place of importance in academic culture. And rationalism (about everything) reigns. Rationalism predicated on what now? On what? ON WHAT?
These days every idiot with a PhD wants to be an intellectual.
Talk amongst yourselves.
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What does it mean that “nerds” now run humanities departments?
What and why is a literature geek? And how and why did people, so unwilling or unable to situate themselves socially or historically as products of linguistic and cultural community take over departments dedicated to the study of language, culture and community?
Nerds separate intelligence from perception, from the body. Nerds fear history and context. The hate instability. It makes them nervous. Posner is a nerd.
Everything I’ve read here over the last few years; the language the tone, the arguments, are specific to the culture and times that produced them.

“Professor Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects is among “the most backwards disciplines in the academy.”

What’s the difference between and expert and a connoisseur? A connoisseur pays attention to his tastes, his surroundings his responses to them and those of others An expert doesn’t think he has tastes and thinks his surroundings don’t matter. He thinks he’s interested in the outside world. Americans are experts. They neither know nor care how others perceive them. You follow me now?
I’ve spent the last few years arguing with experts trying to explain that expertise is not enough. I’ve failed.

Josh Marshall is a Fucking Genius.

"I'd say we, or rather they, may be about set to have their Reformation. Or they may already be in thick of it."

If this is American liberalism, just shoot me and get it over with.

Yes it's the Islamic reformation. It's the fucking Islamic renaissance. We're witnessing the modernization and secularization of Islam. It's been building for decades, going on for years, and our stupidity is helping in an unnecessarily messy and dangerous way to bring things to a head. This has been obvious for a long time. Al Qaeda was always the end of something, not the beginning.
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Meanwhile at Tapped:

The liberal elite has more in common with educated libertarians than with working people and the liberal political elite is made up more of economists and political 'scientists' than historians and professors of literature. "Analysis" and rationalism are hip, history and culture even as viewed in anthropological rather than esthetic terms, are not. "Progress" is a value even when its meaning remains undefined: is it low infant mortality or the number of plasma TV's?

Rather than making bargains with a libertarian minority, better and more egalitarian to work with the large number of moderate social conservatives on the economic concerns they share with the left and endeavor to educate them, without condescension, on why they have nothing to fear from outsiders.

Libertarians are a self-styled elite who like to pretend that they exist as windowed monads. Someone should explain to me what freedom is when before I am able to communicate I need to learn to speak, and preferably to do so well. Libertarians think it takes more intelligence and shows more moral worth to invent a new musical instrument than learn to play one that already exists. Why bother trying to learn to play the violin when it sounds just fine to me already?
And the [slightly more successful] corollary: Why do I have to grow up when I'm a mathematical genius?

The world outside our perceptions is ruled by numbers, the one we live in is ruled by language. Ayn Rand will not show you the way out, and "freedom" is the domain of sociopaths and gurgling infants rolling around in their own shit.

This debate under false pretenses is deluded and self-serving The stupidity is mind-boggling