Showing posts with label The Discovery of Experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Discovery of Experience. Show all posts
Monday, May 20, 2024
You will remember that Plato said that only his body still inhabited the City and, in the Phaedo, also explained how right ordinary people are when they say that a philosopher's life is like dying.46 Death, being the separation of body and soul, is welcome to him; he is somehow in love with death, because the body, with all its demands, constantly interrupts the soul's pursuits. 47 In other words, the true philosopher does not accept the conditions under which life has been given to man.
Aaron Swartz, Scott Aaronson, Milo Yiannopoulos, et al.
I think here's something to be said for returning money to the old category of "shit".
Science is optimistic, so anti-material, anti-physical idealism becomes not the monastic self-abnegation of adults who refuse desire, but the preadolescent imagination that's never felt it. I've said this all before, and I'll say it again. Altman is brilliant maybe, and an idiot. His "discovery" of human interaction, as a marketable thing, after a lifetime at the keyboard is almost funny. And his need to see himself as in control, as an agent, to the point of fantasizing panpsychism, which he's apparently never heard of. But panpsychism is as much a product as he is: it exists as an idea for the same reason he exists as a mind.
I've always said Maria Farrell was more interesting than her brother: she describes the world—her world—of experience, but it's not enough.
I was recently in Stansted Airport, queueing in a low-ceilinged, quasi-temporary structure to enter the departure area for a Ryanair flight. There were two queues; the ‘priority queue’ which passengers had paid extra to join, and the ordinary one, but just one airport employee covering both, toggling stressfully between two irritated groups. Each time she switched, she left a line of people to wait. As I neared the front of the ordinary queue, she told a man with a wheelie case that he’d have to pay extra as his bag was too big. He objected and put it into the measuring frame. It fit easily, but the check-in woman refused to accept this, and demanded an extra £40. The man objected again and asked why the rules weren’t being followed, but ultimately paid up as he had no choice. He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired. As he moved into the boarding area, she called after him that she could have him taken off the plane, but it was very full and noisy, and he either ignored this or didn’t hear it and took a seat near the door. Both lines were now even longer, and she was dealing with the 200-odd passengers alone.
While dealing with the next passenger, and then me and the two women behind me, she began to cry. She carried on working but must have pressed a button for help, because a few minutes later, several security guards arrived. Within minutes, five or six security men arrived. The woman pointed to the passenger who had upset her, but there were too many people in between for her to directly identify him. Later still, another employee arrived to relieve her and check the rest of the passengers through. The two women and I who had witnessed the incident all sat on a window sill near the check-through desk the security guards were now clustered at, as we were worried the man would be wrongly denied boarding. When we heard the guards say they would go and find the man, we approached them to say we had seen the incident from the front of the queue and that it may have been different from what they’d been told.
We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops who now outnumbered the passport and ticket-checker by a ratio of five or six to one. The main guard thanked us but didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and we stayed nearby, implicitly ready to intervene. In the noisy disarray of the boarding area, the passenger managed to be one of the first onto the plane. As we boarded, a couple more security guards had joined the initial cluster and moved onto the tarmac, so there were now seven or eight. Walking past, we heard them say the man was already on the plane. They seemed to have decided it wasn’t worth the effort to have him taken off. As I climbed the steps of the plane, it was striking just how many security guards were now milling aimlessly around, compared to the lone and stressed out employee who’d summoned them in the first place.
Schiesser's response, playing her brother's role this time, relating description of experience to a speculative fiction. The world of ideas is utopian by definition.
[I] He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired….
[II] We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops
In both passages, Farrell shows us how much emotional self-regulation we do in public, and also how gendered these norms are. In our contemporary culture we learn to suppress the expression of emotions especially in contexts of escalation of conflict. (Ecotopia is the polar opposite.) I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops (but I am happy to be corrected otherwise), but she clearly knows that being emotionally expressive will reduce her credibility and status in the potentially stressful interaction with them.
As I noted, Callenbach’s Ecotopia is full of vignettes that explore the impact of the absence of such extreme emotional self-regulation of the sort our society requires from its members routinely. That’s compatible with there being very different gendered and racial sanctions for violation of such norms in different local and national contexts (with the use alcohol or drugs being supplementary mechanisms regulating this).
He should read Goffman. He'd find it revelatory . "I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops" She was intimidated. But that intimidation is also a function of desire, especially for the conservative model of femininity in which she's been socialized (see above). Farrell is married to a career soldier. Her description of him and their courtship makes him out to fit the model of the perfect gentleman—who knows how he behaved in Afghanistan. She prays every day for the health of the Pope. She's to the manor born, and lived a sheltered life, even as a technocrat.
I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications. We think of many kinds of people as objects of scientific inquiry. Sometimes to control them, as prostitutes, sometimes to help them, as potential suicides. Sometimes to organise and help, but at the same time keep ourselves safe, as the poor or the homeless. Sometimes to change them for their own good and the good of the public, as the obese. Sometimes just to admire, to understand, to encourage and perhaps even to emulate, as (sometimes) geniuses. We think of these kinds of people as definite classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will be able to control, help, change, or emulate them better. But it’s not quite like that. They are moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. I call this the ‘looping effect’. Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. I call this ‘making up people’.
What sciences? The ones I shall call the human sciences, which, thus understood, include many social sciences, psychology, psychiatry and, speaking loosely, a good deal of clinical medicine. I am only pointing, for not only is my definition vague, but specific sciences should never be defined except for administrative and educational purposes. Living sciences are always crossing borders and borrowing from each other.
Emergence is about the past, yes, but it is subtitled A Philosophical Study. I never called it history. It was the first long piece of writing, in any language, that captured, adapted and applied “the new kind of analysis that Michel Foucault called archaeology. At the time, few readers who came across the book were familiar with his work. Today his achievements are almost too well known, beloved by some, loathed by others. I continue to be a fan, but I have no intention of writing about Foucault. I continue to use him in my own way, with no thought about whether I am faithful to the traditions he began.
From idealism to mannerism (negative idealism) to humane irony. That's how it works. I'm too much of a determinist to be impressed by the obvious. And the thought of Foucault beginning a tradition is annoying.
"...the impersonal in art and technocracy, though the product of the same events are very different things."
"[Weber's] value-free science is as much the product of an age as he was."
Shortly before breaking off for lunch – when, I had been told, I would have to give him as much time as he wanted for his meal and rest – I told him that having listened to him for two and a half hours I thought I had better explain what I really wanted. He could then think about it and let me know after lunch whether he wanted to go on. I said that I knew inside out all the things he had said that morning; all of them had been said before by any number of people. And I didn’t wish to argue the right or wrong of any of this; I felt it was pointless. What I had come for was something quite different: I wanted him really to talk to me; to tell me about himself as a child, a boy, a youth, a man; to tell me about his father, his mother, his friends, his wife and his children; tell me not what he did or did not do but what he loved and what he hated and what he felt about the things in his life which had eventually brought him to where he was sitting now. If he didn’t want to do this, but preferred to go on in the vein of that morning’s recital, then I would listen to him, I said, to the end of that afternoon, go back to England, write a little something about the interview, and that would be the end of it. But if, after thinking about it, he decided to help me delve deeper into the past (his past, because things had happened to and inside him which had happened to hardly anyone else, ever) then perhaps we could find some truth together; some new truth which would contribute to the understanding of things that had never yet been understood. If this could be done I would be prepared to stay in Düsseldorf as long as he liked; days or even weeks. I told him, too, that he had to know from the start that I abhorred everything the Nazis had stood for and done, but that I would promise him to write down exactly what he said, whatever it would be, and that I would try – my own feelings notwithstanding – to understand without prejudice.
When I’d finished he didn’t say anything, only nodded. And when a moment later the guard came to take him back to his cell, he left the room with nothing but a small formal bow. I was not at all sure I’d see him again....
Stangl looked indefinably different when he was brought back to the little room on the second floor at 2 p.m. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, but he still looked spruce – that wasn’t it. He was as well shaved as he had been in the morning – had probably shaved again – yet he no longer looked quite clean-shaven, nor was his skin as taut and young-looking as before....
I’ve thought about what you said,” he told me at once, his voice slightly unsteady. “I hadn’t understood before – I hadn’t understood what you wanted. I think I understand now … I want to do it. I want to try to do it.…”
There were tears in his eyes before we even began to speak of his childhood. “I thought you just wanted – you know – an ‘interview’,” he said, emphasizing that loaded term. I had some English cigarettes and he took one – he was, I soon saw, a chain-smoker. “My childhood,” he began, shaking his head several times, “I’ll tell you.
"Did he perhaps think of you as his friend?"
"No I don't think he would have dared to think of that. He was very respectful. He a provincial Austrian. I was a Hungarian aristocrat."
Jack Balkin's decline and Henry Farrell's... I don't know. It's all sad.
Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade, "The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism"
Algorithms—especially machine learning algorithms—have become major social institutions. To paraphrase anthropologist Mary Douglas, algorithms “do the classifying.”1 They assemble and they sort—people, events, things. They distribute material opportunities and social prestige. But do they, like all artifacts, have a particular politics?2 Technologists defend themselves against the very notion, but a lively literature in philosophy, computer science, and law belies this naive view. Arcane technical debates rage around the translation of concepts such as fairness and democracy into code. For some, it is a matter of legal exposure. For others, it is about designing regulatory rules and verifying compliance. For a third group, it is about crafting hopeful political futures.3
The questions from the social sciences are often different: How do algorithms concretely govern? How do they compare to other modes of governance, like bureaucracy or the market? How does their mediation shape moral intuitions, cultural representations, and political action? In other words, the social sciences worry not only about specific algorithmic outcomes, but also about the broad, society-wide consequences of the deployment of algorithmic regimes—systems of decision-making that rely heavily on computational processes running on large databases. These consequences are not easy to study or apprehend. This is not just because, like bureaucracies, algorithms are simultaneously rule-bound and secretive. Nor is it because, like markets, they are simultaneously empowering and manipulative. It is because they are a bit of both. Algorithms extend both the logic of hierarchy and the logic of competition. They are machines for making categories and applying them, much like traditional bureaucracy. And
Understanding this helps highlight both similarities and differences between the historical regime that political scientist James Scott calls “high modernism” and what we dub high-tech modernism.4 We show that bureaucracy, the typical high modernist institution, and machine learning algorithms, the quintessential high tech modernist one, share common roots as technologies of hierarchical classification and intervention. But whereas bureaucracy reinforces human sameness and tends toward large, monopolistic (and often state-based) organizations, algorithms encourage human competition, in a process spearheaded by large, near monopolistic (and often market-based) organizations. High-tech modernism and high modernism are born from the same impulse to exert control, but are articulated in fundamentally different ways, with quite different consequences for the construction of the social and economic order. The contradictions between these two moral economies, and their supporting institutions, generate many of the key struggles of our times.
Both bureaucracy and computation enable an important form of social pow er: the power to classify.5 Bureaucracy deploys filing cabinets and memorandums to organize the world and make it “legible,” in Scott’s terminology. Legibility is, in the first instance, a matter of classification. Scott explains how “high modernist” bureaucracies crafted categories and standardized processes, turning rich but ambiguous social relationships into thin but tractable information. The bureaucratic capacity to categorize, organize, and exploit this informa tion revolutionized the state’s ability to get things done. It also led the state to reorder society in ways that reflected its categorizations and acted them out. Social, political, and even physical geographies were simplified to make them legible to public officials. Surnames were imposed to tax individuals; the streets of Paris were redesigned to facilitate control.
Yet high modernism was not just about the state. Markets, too, were standardized, as concrete goods like grain, lumber, and meat were converted into abstract qualities to be traded at scale.6 The power to categorize made and shaped markets, allowing grain buyers, for example, to create categories that advantaged them at the expense of the farmers they bought from. Businesses created their own bureaucracies to order the world, deciding who could participate in markets and how goods ought to be categorized.
We use the term high-tech modernism to refer to the body of classifying technologies based on quantitative techniques and digitized information that partly displaces, and partly is layered over, the analog processes used by high modernist organizations. Computational algorithms–especially machine learning algorithms– perform similar functions to the bureaucratic technologies that Scott describes. Both supervised machine learning (which classifies data using a labeled training set) and unsupervised machine learning (which organizes data into self-discovered clusters) make it easier to categorize unstructured data at scale. But unlike their paper-pushing predecessors in bureaucratic institutions, the humans of high-tech modernism disappear behind an algorithmic curtain. The workings of algorithms are much less visible, even though they penetrate deeper into the social fabric than the workings of bureaucracies. The development of smart environments and the Internet of Things has made the collection and processing of information about people too comprehensive, minutely geared, inescapable, and fast-growing for considered consent and resistance.
In a basic sense, machine learning does not strip away nearly as much information as traditional high modernism. It potentially fits people into categories (“classifiers”) that are narrower–even bespoke. The movie streaming platform Netflix will slot you into one of its two thousand–plus “microcommunities” and match you to a subset of its thousands of subgenres. Your movie choices alter your position in this scheme and might in principle even alter the classificatory grid itself, creating a new category of viewer reflecting your idiosyncratic viewing practices.
Many of the crude, broad categories of nineteenth-century bureaucracies have been replaced by new, multidimensional classifications, powered by machine learning, that are often hard for human minds to grasp.7 People can find them selves grouped around particular behaviors or experiences, sometimes ephemer al, such as followers of a particular YouTuber, subprime borrowers, or fans of ac tion movies with strong female characters. Unlike clunky high modernist categories, high-tech modernist ones can be emergent and technically dynamic, adapting to new behaviors and information as they come in. They incorporate tacit information in ways that are sometimes spookily right, and sometimes disturbing and misguided: music-producing algorithms that imitate a particular artist’s style, language models that mimic social context, or empathic AI that supposedly grasps one’s state of mind.8 Generative AI technologies can take a prompt and generate an original picture, video, poem, or essay that seems to casual observers as though it were produced by a human being.
Taken together, these changes foster a new politics. Traditional high modernism did not just rely on standard issue bureaucrats. It empowered a wide variety of experts to make decisions in the area of their particular specialist knowledge and authority. Now, many of these experts are embattled, as their authority is nibbled away by algorithms whose advocates claim are more accurate, more reliable, and less partial than their human predecessors....
At the end of the day, the relationship between high modernism and high-tech modernism is a struggle between two elites: a new elite of coders, who claim to mediate the wisdom of crowds, and an older elite who based their claims to legitimacy on specialized professional, scientific, or bureaucratic knowledge.32 Both elites draw on rhetorical resources to justify their positions; neither is disinterested.they are self-adjusting allocative machines, much like canonical markets.
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1 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 91.
4 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
5 Robyn Caplan and danah boyd, “Isomorphism through Algorithms: Institutional Dependencies in the Case of Facebook,” Big Data & Society 5 (1) (2018): 1–12.
6 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
7 Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market,” Socio-Economic Review 15 (1) (2017): 9–29.
32 William Davies, “Elite Power Under Advanced Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture and Society 34 (5–6) (2017): 227–250; and Jenna Burrell and Marion Fourcade, “The Society of Algorithms,” Annual Review of Sociology 47 (2021): 213–237.
Norman Geras: What is your favourite song? Henry Farrell: My Bloody Valentine, 'Soon'.
Atomization: modernist technocracy—bureaucracy not as necessary as but as utopia—dumbs down both managers and managed. Connoisseurs are replaced by experts—Healy is the author of "Fuck Nuance"—it passed review.
Everything is overlap: scroll down for James C. Scott; connoisseurship, like anarchism, is a hobby for rich tenured technocrats.
What Farrell's still too stupid to see—still too much the academic tempted by libertarianism—is that government bureaucracy is authoritarianism out of the academy, of priests and shepherds, and the bureaucracy of the market is the bureaucracy of wolves. Academic libertarianism like academic radicalism in every form, is an oxymoron: a strict hierarchic elite engaged in collaborative, soi-disant disinterested reason, calling for... something else.
In a basic sense, machine learning does not strip away nearly as much information as traditional high modernism. It potentially fits people into categories (“classifiers”) that are narrower–even bespoke.
Bespoke bread and circuses. Narcissism is bad for democracy, yes? But that was never the goal.
Further down this parenthetical
(The irony is that while high-tech modernist firms are happy to turn the market screw on everyone else, they strive to establish monopoly for themselves).22
I had my first drink in a bar—not my first drink—at 15, in the back room of a bar owned my a man who ran guns for the IRA.
The irony is there, but Farrell doesn't get it.
Thursday, February 16, 2023
1
According to a famous anecdote, Sraffa responded to Wittgenstein’s claim by brushing his chin with his fingertips, which is apparently readily understood as a Neapolitan gesture of skepticism, and then asked, “What is the logical form of this?”
2
Smith was working as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese’s weekly newspaper at a special Mass for lawyers Sunday when a Herald reporter asked the justice how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality as a judge given his public worship.
“The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, ‘To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.
The Italian phrase means “(expletive) you.”
Yesterday, Herald reporter Laurel J. Sweet agreed with Smith’s account, but said she did not hear Scalia utter the obscenity.
In his letter, Scalia denied his gesture was obscene and claimed he explained its meaning to Sweet, a point both she and Smith dispute.
Scalia went on to cite Luigi Barzini’s book, “The Italians,” which describes a seemingly different gesture - “the extended fingers of one hand moving slowly back and forth under the raised chin” - and its meaning - “ ‘I couldn’t care less. It’s no business of mine. Count me out.’ ”
2.1
A freelance photographer has been fired by the Archdiocese of Boston’s newspaper for releasing a picture of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia making a controversial gesture in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Sunday.
Was Sraffa thrilled by the impact that his ideas had on, arguably, the leading philosopher of our times (“the God” whom Keynes met on the 5:15 train)? Also, how did Sraffa arrive at those momentous ideas in the first place? I asked Sraffa those questions more than once in the regular afternoon walks I had the opportunity to share with him between 1958 and 1963. I got somewhat puzzling answers. No, he was not particu- larly thrilled, since the point he was making was “rather obvious.” No, he did not know precisely how he arrived at those argu- ments, since—again—the point he was making was “rather obvious.”
Sraffa was very fond of Wittgenstein and admired him greatly.8 But it was clear that he was not convinced of the fruitfulness of conversing ceaselessly with the genius philosopher. When I arrived in Trinity in the early fifties as a student, shortly after Wittgenstein’s death, I was aware that there had been something of a rift between the two. In response to my questions, Sraffa was most reluctant to go into what actually hap- pened. “I had to stop our regular conversa- tions—I was somewhat bored,” was the closest to an account I ever obtained. The events were described, however, by Ray Monk (1991), in rather greater detail, in his biography of Wittgenstein (p. 487):
In May 1946 Piero Sraffa decided he no longer wished to have conversations with Wittgenstein, saying that he could no longer give his time and attention to the matters Wittgenstein wished to discuss. This came as a great blow to Wittgenstein. He pleaded with Sraffa to continue their weekly conversations, even if it meant staying away from philosophical subjects. “I will talk about anything,” he told him. “Yes,” Sraffa replied, “but in your way.”
There are many puzzling things in the Sraffa-Wittgenstein relations. How could Sraffa, who loved dialogues and arguments, become so reluctant to talk with one of the finest minds of the twentieth century? Even initially, how could the conversations that were clearly so consequential for Wittgenstein, which made him feel “like a tree from which all branches have been cut,” seem “rather obvious” to this economist from Tuscany? I doubt that we shall ever be sure of knowing the answers to these questions.
I think they're "rather obvious". But I feel a little sorry for Wittgenstein: the abandoned lover.
I recently watched a demonstration by the guys from Rockstar Games who did the Western video game Red Dead Redemption. They said that all new technology is essentially run by techies. And then at some point, somebody comes in from another field and makes it universal. And they were hoping that we were getting to that point with video games. We’re not there yet. It’s still in the realm of the techies.
Interview at the NYRB, with Gabriel Winslow-Yost, of the NYRB, published alongside his essay/review of/on the game The Stanley Parable. The NYRB interviews itself: the interviewer, Daniel Drake, is interviewing his boss.
...I’ll sidestep the question, as you do in your essay, of whether or not video games are art to ask instead: What dimension do video games act along that elevates them above other games, or makes them an art? I typically find, after playing a game, even my favorites, that I come away less interested in the world and more interested in the game and the obsessive reward-seeking it fosters.
I didn’t mean to sidestep it so much as take it for granted: they are obviously art! But I also think that making arguments about why they are is kind of a mug’s game—if you believe they are, you’re better off by just demonstrating it, taking games seriously by talking about them the way you would any other artwork.
I do think playing many of them can feel all-consuming, and sometimes that can be pretty gross. Video games have access to compulsion—that kind of deep-seated slot-machine feeling—and the mindless cleaning-up-the-kitchen zone-out in a way that other art forms don’t. But I think that’s also one of the things that makes them especially interesting, when it’s deployed well. A good game can turn compulsion and mindless acquiescence in interesting directions: forcing you to disobey, as something like The Stanley Parable does, or forcing you to go along with something obviously objectionable, as a number of games have done. (Things like Spec Ops: The Line, say, which pretended to be a run-of-the-mill macho military shooter, but then made “your” character commit a war crime and descend into madness.)
"that can be pretty gross." the language of preadolescence. There's no question that games are an art form; it's a question of what sort, and of maturity.
More generally, video games are better than books or movies or whatever at depicting feelings related to your own actions: compulsion, triumph, regret, unease.
The discovery of the other, not in infancy but the cusp of adolescence. I'll take what I can get.
I'm remembering something from years ago. I thought it was Rosalind Krauss, ("Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism") but it isn't. Or maybe I was extrapolating and arguing with the essay? A treatment for narcissism involving the patient sitting in front of a monitor with a video camera above it—now it would be your computer. The image of is no longer a reflection, and the disconnect forces a break.
Winslow-Yost is describing the same process. Again: Robert Wilson, T.S. Eliot etc. The gradual acceptance of the physical body, of the self among others, of time, of death. The discovery of experience. And it all goes back to my essay from 1987. And it's all here.
repeats: Addiction by Design
As recently as the mid-1980s, machine gamblers who wished to continue play when they ran out of money were required to leave their machines, make their way to an automatic teller machine (ATM) on the casino floor to acquire cash, and finally, purchase rolls of coins from cashier cages or change attendants roving the floor with coin carts, before returning to play.
...By 1997 it had become possible for players to directly access their checking accounts from the machines, transferring up to $1,000 per day in the form of play credits. Nevada deferred approval for this technology in 2003, for it came too close to violating a state law that bans the merging of ATM functions into slot machines (on the reasoning that this might facilitate “impulse play” and exacerbate problematic gambling behavior). But given the numerous jurisdictions without this legal obstacle, gambling technology companies have continued to develop systems that allow direct access to finances from machines.
I was in Las Vegas in 2008 working a trade show with some friends. On the last night we went out. I told Natasha years later that on that night I loved Vegas. Around the high rollers and their servants and hangers on, I almost forgot the misery I'd watched for four days. For the first time I felt no pity: I was free. The dealers. the bartenders and the strippers were all top shelf and well-paid. It brought me back to childhood and the Here-You-May-Do-Anything Inn. In Mahagonny the only crime is to be broke.
We started out at at tourist bar on the strip. It was depressing. J's brother asked the bartender where he went to drink. "The biggest room in the house." He drank at home. J spent the time playing blackjack on the built-in screen under his shot glass at the bar. He was glassy-eyed, focusing inward, calculating, "wired in". We knew not to interrupt. After a half hour the bartender payed him and we left.
Click the fucking links.
Drake's first paragraph.
The New York Review of Books expanded its purview beyond books almost immediately, with a pointed review of “non-books” by John Hollander in the very first issue,...
Hollander
The “non-book” has been a successful commodity for a long time. It now appears to have become a genre as well. The class of non-books includes the whole range of coloring books, photographs of infants, animals, or Famous Paintings being forced to say things by means of captions or balloons, the doctored news photographs, etc. Picture prevails over text in the non-book, and yet the result is not a book of pictures. It may have originated in the bound volumes of cartoonists’ work and the “grown-up” comic strip collections (Barnaby, Pogo, Peanuts), but it does not contain cartoons. It is a gimmick in book format. There are often non-books on the best-seller lists, and lately they have been appearing for children as well.
It is a deplorable tradition. And yet,...
"It is a deplorable tradition." The "non book" predates the "book" by years, if not decades. From snobbery to slumming, but slumming is snobbery.
Winslow-Yost has the look of an Aspie who's beginning to outgrow his childishness, but only just. The New York Review of books or movies or whatever...
Drawing and Thinking We learn about a face by drawing it. What can that tell us about how we learn the truth by thinking?
How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel §255
This remark, like many of Wittgenstein’s, seems to arise from self-examination. The answer he gives suggests that he is concerned with learning just by thinking, and indeed with the particular kind of learning just by thinking that happens in philosophy (as opposed to, say, mathematics). He seems to be asking how such learning is even possible. What are we to make of his answer?...
Learning the truth just by thinking, as one does in philosophy, is analogous to learning to see a face better by drawing it, in at least the sense that they require analogous attitudes of humility.
Rationalism and empiricism are opposed. The rationalist defense of empiricism is not empirical.
Truth is theological, metaphysical garbage, or it's poetry: the record of a full moral commitment to a view of the world described in granular specificity. Facts are for arguing and argument is social; the result is a product of that social activity. Truth is asocial and anti-political. Leiter will never accept that his defense of truth is just another form of moralism, and I'm as sick of moralism as he pretends to be.
I've used one quote from John Mortimer for years, as part of my jihad of lawyers and orators, poets and side-show barkers, against pedants and philosophers—poets are all priests of their own sect, and every one's a sincere ironist. But my source was Mortimer's obit in the NY Times, and I've finally gotten around to finding the original. I'll add it to the sourcing in the manuscript. And the timing is perfect.
The trial of Last Exit took place eight years after the acquittal of Lady Chatterley. It was the only obscenity case in which witnesses were produced who said that they had been depraved and corrupted, or in which we were given an opportunity of seeing what a depraved and corrupted person looked like. Sir Basil Blackwell, the Oxford bookseller, said that he had certainly been depraved by the book, but as he was in his eighties at the time the matter didn’t seem to be of great practical significance. The Reverend David Sheppard, who had been Captain of the English Cricket Team, also gave evidence to the effect that he had not, metaphorically speaking, held his bat so straight after reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, but as he went on to become Bishop of Liverpool the damage, whatever it was, doesn’t seem to have been serious. In spite of the industry of a number of literary and clerical witnesses, the book was found to be obscene in its trial at the Old Bailey and the publishers were fined £100. So it came about that John Calder asked me to argue the Last Exit case in the Court of Appeal.
We were lucky in our Court. It was presided over by Cyril Salmon, whose casual way with a gold watch and leisurely stroll up to a cross-examination had led me to envious imitation when I was starting at the bar. I found myself standing up at a point where the two great concerns of my life, writing and the law, met and almost failed to recognize each other. Indeed I was trying to explain to three courteous and distinguished Judges the fundamental difference between writers and lawyers, which produces the basic fallacy of all censorship laws. The writer is bound to explore all areas of human experience. The whole of life must be open to his voyage of discovery, he must sail as far as he can and his only duty is to come back with the truth as he sees it. There can’t be ‘no go’ areas in the world of art, and the writer who cuts short a line of work for fear of shocking some people or ‘giving offence’ is untrue to his calling. But lawyers are trained on ‘no go’ areas. They are accustomed to find truth concealed behind barriers marked ‘inadmissible evidence’. They cannot accept that it’s a writer’s duty to reveal all truths however unpalatable. I tried my best to explain this to the Court of Appeal in the Last Exit case and the Judges listened with great care and attention. The proposition which must be elementary to all students of literature came to their Lordships as an apparent surprise. They looked like three poets who had just been told that you may not call expert evidence on the point the Jury has to decide.
An easier argument in the case was that the descriptions of homosexual prostitution and drug-taking in the book were so revolting that, far from turning anyone on to such practices, they would cause a sharp upswing in the marriage rate and the consumption of unadulterated ‘Old Holborn’ tobacco. The Judges were impressed by this argument which became known as the ‘Aversion Theory’ and withstood the test of a good many obscenity cases. The Court also ruled out the more usual meanings of the word ‘obscene’ which the trial Judge had given them. Publishing a book that was merely disgusting, or immoral, or erotic, or rude was clearly not a crime: it had to be blessed with the mysterious ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’. In the end the Court allowed John Calder’s and Marion Boyars’ appeal and set aside the conviction. Last Exit became a best-seller for a “short while and I was led into a new department of law which I, in my more elevated moments, called arguments about free speech, but most of the friendly hacks in the robing-room call ‘dirty-book cases’.
I became more and more aware of the gulf that is fixed between the law and any sort of literature. One of the most difficult things to explain to Courts is that writers don’t necessarily approve of their characters’ behaviour. Because Shakespeare wrote Othello and Macbeth it doesn’t mean that he approved of wife murder and the stabbing of house guests. The putting-out of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear is a deeply disturbing, shocking and horrific scene; but it tells a terrible truth about man’s inhumanity to man. The purpose of a play, Shakespeare said, is to hold a mirror up to nature: censorship laws would ensure that the mirror is a rose-coloured distortion.
Courts are very unclear about the effect of books on readers. Reading is done in a world of the imagination which has, it would appear, little direct result on the reader’s behaviour. I suppose the worst crime is murder and murder is nowhere written about more freely than in the works of Agatha Christie. If books had the effect claimed for them by the censors, every English country house would have a bloodstained butler in the library, dead with a knife between his shoulder blades. James Bond, licensed to kill, is read about and enjoyed by millions of inoffensive people who catch the train to the office every day and have never killed anyone with a karate chop or slept with a Chinese air hostess. It has been said that it is a strange anomaly of the censoring attitude that murder is against the law, but it is no crime to write about it. Sex is not against the law, but to write about it has often been held a criminal offence.
Doing these cases I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended. The attempts of the law to control the written word seemed to me dangerous and likely to put our Courts of Justice in a somewhat ridiculous light. I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
One of the difficulties of laws which tried to control books and habits of reading was that they assumed that our society was as one, as it no doubt was in 1868 when Lord Cockburn made his resonant pronouncement, and not a loose federation of groups with their own languages, customs, taboos, freedoms, courting habits and senses of morality. In England the moral values of a group of retired army officers and their wives frequenting a golf course in Worthing are not the same as those of a crowd of art students in a Kings Cross squat. What appears permissible in the Surrey commuter belt, among bright young advertising men and their wives, would be looked on with horror by the Puritan Pakistanis of Bradford. Of course all these groups must be subject to a basic strongly enforced criminal law; they must not be allowed to assault or pillage or rape or rob one another. But in such a society, tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another; still less should they be able to use the severe sanctions of the criminal law to do so. The law, it has always seemed to me, is at its best when it is enforcing practical remedies for specific crimes; it is at its worst when it tries to enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for quite sincere and logical reasons, refuse to accept it.
And it is significant that the attempted use of force is all one way. I did not wish to compel any member of the Festival of Light to sit through Oh, Calcutta! or read Gay News, although they do appear, no doubt from the highest motives and in the spirit of martyrdom, quite prepared to submit themselves to such works in the call of duty. No one, in the whole chequered history of censorship, has ever questioned anyone’s right not to read a book, to stay away from a play or not to visit a cinema. No one has ever suggested the compulsory sale of television sets without the button necessary to switch them off if you don’t like the picture.
"We were lucky in our Court. It was presided over by Cyril Salmon, whose casual way with a gold watch and leisurely stroll up to a cross-examination had led me to envious imitation when I was starting at the bar. I found myself standing up at a point where the two great concerns of my life, writing and the law, met and almost failed to recognize each other."
Cyril Barnet Salmon, Baron Salmon
by Walter Bird,
bromide print, 1 December 1964, 8 1/8 in. x 6 1/8 in. (205 mm x 155 mm) image size.
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What Cavell added to this feast of ordinary language philosophy was something he called ‘scepticism’. This begins, crudely put, from the insight that however much we can see from a conventional set of behaviours that someone is experiencing embarrassment or pain or guilt we can’t ever know what those experiences are like from inside. ‘I feel your pain in my finger’ is not something I can say outside the realm of science fiction or philosophical thought experiments, and in this case the norms of verbal usage reveal something about what human beings in general can and cannot do. Cavell regarded this scepticism as internal to Wittgenstein, and it is why he didn’t follow the Roger Scrutons of the world in regarding a ‘form of life’ as a set of codes embedded in a culture which enable human understanding through being both shared and more or less unalterable, and which might therefore justify the conservation of even apparently barbaric cultural practices such as dressing up in scarlet and encouraging dogs to tear foxes apart. Instead Cavell’s Wittgenstein is principally about the big dark things we don’t actually know about ourselves or one another, and which philosophers spend their time seeking.
The next step in Cavell’s scepticism was to argue that although we don’t have ‘knowledge’ of another’s pain we can ‘acknowledge’ or ‘recognise’ it. Making claims to be acknowledged and to have emotions, claims recognised by the other, and in return to acknowledge the claims of the other, is fundamental to living in language, which is a realm (as it is for Austin) of interpersonal ethical demands and needs. The world of art, in particular, is ethically charged: ‘The creation of art, being human conduct which affects others, has the commitments any conduct has.’
2
He liked to quote Erich Auerbach’s assertion that in reading literature we need an ‘empirical confidence in our spontaneous faculty for understanding others on the basis of our own experience’.
All this effort to rediscover the obvious.
History and historians now frequently perform the role to which sociology and sociologists once aspired: to narrate and contextualise the conflicts of the present.
The beginning of the article is a bit absurd. Davies is a bit of an idiot, but I'll take it.
Cavell belongs with Derrida. The same desperation, the need to feel superior, as a philosopher, to those who merely play. Reversing the claims of philosophers that fiction is parasitic, philosophy becomes parasitic in relation to art. I've said it all before.
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Andrew Elrod has been getting a lot of play, building on his dissertation on the history of price controls. The inflation debate: Boston Review, and Equitable Growth. See also, Tooze
Elrod
It was the effort to control supply lurking within the project of price stabilization that produced the late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century taboo against overtly political control of markets.
J.W. Mason
And then at some point it will occur to us that, after all, isn't the interest rate itself a price? In which case, the debate isn't price controls, yes or no, but merely about exactly which prices to control.
Yes x1000 - if the interest rate is simply the ‘price’ of money, how have we not been doing intense price control for over a decade already?
When I read all this I think of all the time wasted on trolley problems. The doctrine of double effect, again, and so soon.
The language in the thing has changed. It was more concise a decade ago, but the link on the right side of the page is still there.
The man who swings the axe is called the "Executioner"; the man who gives the order is called only "Governor". Officers send enlisted men to almost certain death but may not befriend them. Stanley Milgram’s 1963 experiments showed that physical proximity, of authority to subject and subject to “learner”, was the main factor in affecting the level of obedience to the command to cause harm.
A governor has an indirect relation to the execution that he's ordered. Interest rates have an indirect relation to price hikes. A manipulated economy and a command economy are not perceived as the same thing. And the fatalism behind the popular acceptance that power will out no longer holds when power is indecisive.
Democratic government is artificial, and democratic governance is always a bit of a sham. Most people have no interest in the work of self-government but they can still recognize the hypocrisy of self-interested leaders who claim to be selfless. They'll accept simple unfairness as natural but chafe at controls imposed by moralizing hypocrites who can't make up their minds. Putting an economy on a "war footing" succeeds only because it's temporary. And either way if unfairness goes too far people will rebel out of what they sense as self-preservation, still without wanting the full responsibilities of self rule.
Information is decentralized, and the point of government intervention should be to keep it that way. A sham democracy is still better than open rule of an elite, if only because the elite in a democracy is being refreshed from below and outside; experts need to fear amateurs and amateurs need to be watchful. It begins with that fact that you can't predict what will change you, and expands out to the world.
Agreements among stakeholders, including worker representatives. Ordoliberalism?
I don't argue with specialists by pretending to be one. I don't argue with car mechanics about engines. I don't argue with soldiers about the best gun for the job. I don't argue grammar with grammarians. I don't argue technics; I argue application. Even arguing about art I'm a generalist.
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Given the bleak trajectory of American politics, I worry about progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy’s decay.
Because politics is a choice, not a necessity, at its worst a fantasy, a speculative fiction.
"Isaac Asimov’sFoundation series is perhaps the definitive expression of mid-century American liberalism."
"The nerdy classic is quite possibly the definitive statement of 20th Century American liberal thought."
Sci-fi was very much a young man's game, and its tropes -- rockets, extraterrestrials, etc. -- were interpreted by thinking adults as inherently juvenile indulgences. Sci-fi publications marketed themselves almost exclusively to adolescent boys, and the leading practitioners were only slightly more mature than their audience.
Zachary D. Carter, the author of a biography of Keynes, follows Krugman as a TV critic.
"Science Fiction was created by men trying to get away from the alien environment populated by their wives."
The rise of a self-conscious geek culture, the proud celebration of the preadolescent imagination in adulthood, came in earnest ten years after the publication of One-Dimensional Man and the release of Dr. Strangelove, the title character an amalgam of Werner von Braun and the ur-geek von Neumann. “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”
On that note, Henry seems to have dumped Tyler Cowen for Noah Smith.
But Henry is using the same Calvino quote he used 12 years ago, so I'll repeat the comments I made there at the time, repeating arguments I made 30 years before that.
And they're still "struggling to come to terms with the obvious".
Comments on "literary fiction" at Language Log; deleted ones—I always save a copy—here.
If the video dies. Imagining the Future: Science Fiction and Social Science, with Farrell, Ada Palmer, Smith, Jo Walton.
Moderator, Krugman. Introduction, Karen Sander. At the CUNY Gradate Center, on Zoom. 11/10/21
Bookish as a child, Dr. Mills said he regretted spending more time reading the works of J.R.R. Tolkien than Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary Franco-Caribbean philosopher. But he also joked that his love of science fiction had prepared him for a life in philosophy.
“It could just be that I’m a nerdy alienated weirdo, and nerdy alienated weirdos are disproportionately attracted to both fields,” he wrote in a biographical essay in 2002. “Have you been to an A.P.A. meeting recently? I rest my case.”
Like the man says, I rest my case.
If I believed in the primacy of ideas, I'd have a hard time figuring who did more damage to the western and then global intellectual tradition in the post war era: Tolkien, Rawls, or the inventors of Dungeons and Dragons. But in the end of course they'd all follow von Neumann.
Sunday, October 03, 2021
Ryan Cooper
I made a (somewhat slapdash) video about Lord of the Rings and why America has no tradition of dutiful conservatism
In the work of Rawls, Dworkin, Arneson, and Cohen, a central example that clinches the case against equality of welfare as the ethically correct kind of egalitarianism is the required treatment of a person with voluntarily cultivated expensive tastes. Under welfare egalitarianism, such a person must receive a larger-than-normal bundle of scarce resources, which appears to render him a kind of exploiter of others with more frugal tastes. In the model I have presented, a person who has a high rate of time discount (r) or who views education as very costly (low value of s) has expensive tastes, for he will choose a low level of education (ceteris paribus) will consequently have low expected future income, and will have a low expected welfare.
To take a the classic example, consider the person who derives satisfaction from a drink only If it is a pre-phylloxera claret. Such a person requires more money to derive the same satisfaction that a beer lover derives from her brew. Here is how Dworkin, Arneson, and I would differ in the treatment of a person. Dworkin would not compensate the one who could derive satisfaction only front pre-phylloxera claret if she identifies with those tastes. Arneson would not compensate her if it had been prudent for her to learn to like beer: presumably, if she knew that she would not have the income to purchase the ancient claret, and if she had the opportunity to develop frugal tastes, then it would have been prudent for her to do so. I propose that the decision whether to compensate her depends on how the median person of her type behaved. Let us say that her type is "child of impoverished aristocrats." If the "median preferences" of persons of that type are for pre-phylloxera claret, then she is entitled to compensation to increase her level of welfare to what the person of frugal tastes, who exercised a median degree of responsibility in other circumstances can experience with his resources.
If you click through the links they get you back to Rawls, Roemer et al.
And Cooper contracts something he wrote less than a month ago.
At bottom, the argument that socialists need to behave virtuously for political reasons is liberal and individualist – the same fallacy seen from Matt Bors' famous Mr. Gotcha. The whole point of leftist politics is to solve problems through collective coordination, not by convincing individuals to behave differently.
To match this, Leiter has a new paper calling for a return to Hart. Varieties of pseudoscience and anti-politics.
I'll add the Aristocrats tag. I don't have one for virtue ethics. And The Discovery of Experience. It's still Tolkien but at least Cooper is trying. But the video is pretty bad.
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A day later he tries again: "I spent like 60 hours making this video, pls watch"
And that's why the fascist Sophie Lewis calls for abolition. End the family, in the name of freedom,
self-interest, and self-hatred.
And we're back to the previous post: "It might be worth defining fascism as the rebellion of individualism against itself, since fascists are incapable of functioning within a community. "
updated at bit. It's depressing how unsophisticated the sophisticated have become
How an adolescent love affair with "Atlas Shrugged" opened up the world of radical politics.
I don’t suppose that when my parents sent me off to the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop they imagined I’d return, a few weeks later, both gay and an objectivist.
The alt-right is a loser's poor fantasy of what a radical revolution looks like. I should know.
I was nearly expelled from high school my senior year, just before graduation. Only my grades, acceptance to a relatively prestigious college, and privileged position as the son of one of the pillars of the local economy prevented it. I was a weird kid: artsy, fay, obsessed with conspiracies, science fiction, Ayn Rand, and the occult.
Bacharach, 2021
...As for me, I’ve never quite figured where to place myself on a left-right spectrum: a moralist but a moral relativist; a queer atheist with an enduring affection for the most traditional of religions; an anarchist by intellect but a collectivist by sentiment. I do count myself a radical, and even if my later development as a political writer and thinker owed a great deal more to Didion and Vidal and Ishmael Reed and a lot of crackpot early-aughts bloggers, then it would still be no exaggeration to say that my earliest, most formative, and most enduring encounter with a radical politics was the high priestess of The Collective herself, Ayn Rand.
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” Get it, girl!
"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote". Often, they are. It depends. Didion was a Goldwater girl, and she's still not a "liberal". Gore was always a patrician. This idiot is so confused. He still doesn't know what he is, or what he wants to be.
Bacharach, 2016
We were seniors in 1999, the year of the Columbine massacre. For most of the couple of years preceding, we’d been cobbling together a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking—actually, a semi-related skein of filthy, profane sketch gags centered on the peripatetic wanderings of a character (I use the term loosely) named “Headless,” defined chiefly by the fact that he wore, or was, a full-head rubber Tor Johnson mask. We filmed in our backyards and the woods behind them, in parking lots and alleys, in our bedrooms, and, most ill-advisedly, in the hotel where we stayed on our AP Government trip to Washington, D.C. Then one of us left the VHS master copy sitting on a table in the Laurel Highlands Senior High School cafeteria.
The movie inevitably made its way to our principal. There were plenty of bits to get a decent and unimaginative man riled up—rituals cribbed from Anton LeVay, drug use both simulated and actual, violence, and plenty of fake blood. But I have to believe that the worst moment for that poor administrator and for our poor parents was when they watched another friend of ours, a nice girl from a devoutly Christian family—Lord knows how we cajoled her into participating—crawl between my legs to perform simulated fellatio on a TV remote control. I suspect we meant all this as some kind of commentary on the media. The camera panned up to my contorted face. “Oh yeah, baby,” I growled, “Suck it. Heil Hitler, my dick is your Fuhrer.”
I was already out, the only openly gay kid at my school. I was—I am—a Jew.
John Waters is a conservative. Ask anyone who knows him.
In the 2016 piece he name-checks Nick Land, but doesn't get the point. I'm seeing more and more of this...
I'm so fucking bored
"I was a weird kid: artsy, fay, obsessed with conspiracies, science fiction, Ayn Rand, and the occult."
"...he double-majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theater, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes."
Earlier this year, another hipster wannabe communist and Rand, linking to the history.
Jeet Heer retweeting Krugman on Asimov, and writing about comics. Asimov, the intellectual hero to Krugman and Gingrich and Henry Farrell. I liked Asimov at 12 and knew it was intelligent pop crap. Naked Sun, the one that stayed with me, is detective fiction, the only pulp ever to rise above the name. Ray Bradbury and later Philip K. Dick rose above pulp in other ways. I read a page of Rand at 17 and knew it was incompetent. But all of the above, as I've aid a thousand times, documents unsophisticated understanding of art. And change is slow.
More of the same, at a higher level. The brilliance of Steely Dan is inseparable from the limitations. As with the Coen brothers and Nabokov: the poetry of velvet-gloved overdetermination, the late style, not of individual artists but of a form: the Russian novel, American popular song, Hollywood film. Nabokov is better than Borges because not conceptual or in the service of ideas, not openly reactionary, but too knowing. Didion belongs on that list too; I think she'd agree. The fans bother me more than the people they worship, even Borges. I didn't read comics much as a kid, but when I found one by Jack Kirby, from the late 60s, the drawings fascinated me: they combined a rough graphic style with a narrative pull in a way I hadn't seen before. My response was visceral. I recognized that Kirby had succeeded in doing something even if I didn't quite know what it was, so I returned to it. And that's a definition of art.
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I sent note to Bacharach; we had a bit of a back and forth. I told him he should follow Didion's model and be observant and honest to the point of making others and himself uncomfortable, since that's what makes good writing. He disagreed.
I reminded him of Didion's essay on the Central Park jogger. I told him the top image on the top left, above Lulu, is fascist: the identification with victimhood, and the demand for respect as a victim, of the world, and of being therefore too good for this world. Brooks was too smart to make that generalization. Didion didn't go as far as I have, but she makes the conservative case against individualism and the resulting narcissism.
Didion is Bacharach's Judy Garland. He's a fan, writing for an audience of fans."Yes! Didion is so camp!" He can't admit to mocking her. He sees himself as a liberal, as liberals do, full of best intentions.
It might be worth defining fascism as the rebellion of individualism against itself, since fascists are incapable of functioning within a community.
The only way for pedants raised with the assumptions of liberal individualism to escape atomization is a return to religion. I'd originally added "animism" in this case, but he hedges. The thought of formative relations with other people is impossible.
Switch out the pot on the wheel in the first paragraph with another human being on a bed. "Focus, for instance, on the first minutes of action..." Imagine fucking.
Consider a potter throwing a vessel on the wheel. Think of the complex ways brain, body, wheel and clay relate and interact with one another throughout the different stages of this activity and try to imagine some of the resources (physical, mental or biological) needed for the enaction of this creative process. Focus, for instance, on the first minutes of action when the potter attempts to centre the lump of clay on the wheel. The hands are grasping the clay. The fingers, bent slightly following the surface curvature, sense the clay and exchange vital tactile information necessary for a number of crucial decisions that are about to follow in the next few seconds. What is it that guides the dextrous positioning of the potter’s hands and decides upon the precise amount of forward or downward pressure necessary for centring a lump of clay on the wheel? How do the potter’s fingers come to know the precise force of the appropriate grip? What makes these questions even more fascinating is the ease by which the phenomena which they describe are accomplished. Yet underlying the effortless manner in which the potter’s hand reaches for and gradually shapes the wet clay lies a whole set of conceptual challenges to some of our most deeply entrenched assumptions about what it means to be a human agent.
There are two obvious ways to proceed in order to meet these challenges and answer these questions: the first is to turn and ask the potter directly. As a great deal of cross-cultural ethnographic observation will testify, confronted with the ‘how do you do it?’ question, potters would prefer to ‘show you’ rather than simply ‘tell you’ their answer. If, however, the question gets very precise, for instance, ‘how did you decide the force of the grip?’ or ‘how did you decide the appropriate speed of the wheel’ or ‘when and how much water to add on the clay?’, they usually have very little to say. They can do it but they do not know how they do it or they simply lack the means to express or communicate this form of tacit knowledge. No one – not even the potter himself – can have access to this type of information because no one – not even the potter himself – can tell the fingers how hard they can press the clay in and up so that the walls of the vessel will not collapse. When it comes to embodied skill, potters are no exception to the rules of action and material engagement. Potters know more than what they can tell or explain and their hands often have reasons of which their mind is not aware and which the clay may resist or accommodate. Verbal description, however detailed, can hardly capture the phenomenological perturbations of real activity and the reciprocality between the crafted and the crafter. This is also why the affordances of the wheel throwing technique need to be discovered each time, in real time and space, within the totality of the interactive parameters.
Let us now turn to the second way of answering our previous questions, namely to look for some ‘internal’ mental and inaccessible mechanism. From such a perspective, the potter’s fingers do nothing but execute the orders of the potter’s brain and it is there that we should be looking for an answer. The potter’s fingers simply receive information from the clay and transmit it to the appropriate area inside the potter’s brain; they have nothing to do with the central ‘executive’ mechanism responsible for the ‘executive processing’ and decision making. The moment you subscribe to the above popular scenario, you have already com- mitted yourself also to a specific agency judgement. That is, you have already implicitly answered another question, what in this chapter I shall be calling the ‘agency question’, ie, who did it? Who is the author of the act? The paradox is that although the potter may again be totally unaware about how or when his brain is making all these fine small decisions or even about what precisely they consist of, this time, he is, more often than not, going to answer that question, with the ease of a natural-born dualist: ‘I’ did it. The following example from G. Bateson nicely illustrates this anthropocentric ‘I did it-stance’ that I shall be calling in this chapter the ‘agency problem’:
Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, trees-eyes- brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind. . .But this is not how the average Occidental sees the event sequence of tree felling. He says, ‘‘I cut down the tree’’ and he even believes that there is a delimited agent, the ‘‘self’’, which performed a delimited ‘‘purposive’’ action upon a delimited object (Bateson 1973, 318).
But what is this agency problem really about? Subject to the level of analysis (micro-macro), the agency problem can take many different forms. However, what hold those different forms together are two categorical errors that they have in common: The first is an error of apparent mental causation and the second and correlated one is that of agency attribution. According to Wegner, both errors pertain to the fact that people tend to experience conscious will, and thus agency, quite independently of any actual causal connection between their thoughts and actions (Wegner 2004, 654). The following example can take us to the heart of the issue:
Imagine for a moment that by some magical process, you could always know when a particular tree branch would move in the wind. Just before it moved, you knew it was going to move, in which direction, and just how it would do it. Not only would you know this, but let us assume that the same magic would guarantee that you would happen to be thinking about the branch just before each move. You would look over, and then just as you realized it was going to move, it would do it! In this imaginary situation, you could eventually come to think that you were somehow causing the movement. You would seem to be the source of the distant branch’s action, the agent that wills it to move. The feeling that one is moving the tree branch surfaces in the same way that one would get the sense of performing any action at a distance (Wegner 2004, 654).
The above example embodies the crux of Wegner’s famous ‘illusion of conscious will argument’ (Wegner 2003; 2002) which directly relate to the crucial questions about ‘what is the origin of an event we need to explain?’ (see Law, this volume) and about ‘who is the author of an act’? However, I should clarify that despite using Wegner’s example as my starting point to the agency problem, my strategy for tackling this problem and my interpretation of the reasons behind it would be rather different and to a large extent contradictory to Wegner’s account. In particular, following the Material Engagement approach (Malafouris 2004), I will suggest that the agency problem is not so much the product of human illusion or some other attribution error of our left hemisphere ‘interpreter’ (Gazzaniga 1998) but of a certain acquired imbalance between mental and physical causality that destabilises the human cognitive equation.
To redress this imbalance at the root of the agency problem in this chapter I shall be introducing the notion of material agency. The concept itself, that is, material agency, is to some extent a misnomer, yet I believe it serves well my basic hypothesis which can be very simply expressed as follows: If human agency is then material agency is, there is no way that human and material agency can be disentangled. Or else, while agency and intentionality may not be properties of things, they are not properties of humans either: they are the properties of material engagement, that is, of the grey zone where brain, body and culture conflate.
To explore my working hypothesis and develop the argument for material agency, I shall be looking in between, rather than within, persons and things. Specifically, I shall be focusing on the brain-artefact interface (BAI) and using the potter’s wheel as a good illustration of such a bio-interface....
"the brain-artefact interface (BAI)" Always a new concept.
Why not? From the manuscript, p 52, at least for now.
[T.J. Clark] quotes Picasso later in his life saying he preferred The Three Dancers to Guernica because he painted it “sans arrière-pensée”, without ulterior motive. Clark refers to this as cryptic.
Maybe he meant, again with Rimbaud’s dictum in the background, that the work happened essentially without him –him the thinking individual- and all that he could do was look at it as baffled (and admiring) as the rest of us.
Rimbaud’s dictum is not his. Picasso is following Rimbaud only as Rimbaud followed Baudelaire, and as Baudelaire followed Homer: “Goddess, sing me the anger of Peleus' son, Achilles.” A craftsman follows his training and his reflexes. A dancer follows the rules of the dance, and in performing them, hopes for more. A batter at the plate has no time to articulate thought, but in the moments before swinging the bat, he’s thinking. When Soccer players from Catholic countries look up and cross themselves after scoring a goal, it’s not just faith or false humility, it’s an acknowledgement of their own surprise. This is how most decisions are made, for better or worse, and in the arts it’s standard practice. You don’t have to indulge in romance, 19th century or otherwise, to understand how these acts function in relation to philosophy and morality. It’s the history of art, contra pedantry, that I’ve laid out here before.
Humility doesn't require religious belief beyond faith in free will, only the awareness of something bigger than yourself that's nonetheless constitutive of what you are—the relation of a writer to a language and the distinction between writers and reporters. Also as I've said, determinism doesn't mandate individualism. I haven't read Wegner but I hope he's better than Alex Rosenberg, who defends determinism and still thinks "he" "thinks". I hope he has a sense of humor—or that fate granted him one.
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Another example of the same argument, the product of the same drift, without the scholastic's need to separate philosophy from literature, pretend theory precedes practice. In both the religiosity is just under the surface, but rationalism is always the religion of mandates, looking down, and the metaphysics of empiricism looks out and up: iconic/hieratic vs narrative/demotic.
