Friday, July 24, 2015
Follow me!
Just a reminder y'all that if you like this work at the blog follow me over on Twitter! And if you have any questions or comments just DM me and I'd be happy to reply.
Monday, January 19, 2015
Writing about writing
Here again just to update you all on the existence of a newish blog, on my main website mike-duffy.com: a little blog called "Writing about writing," where I'm posting something about once a week on writing and criticism and whatever I'm critiquing at the moment. Next up from me expect a couple reviews on some Latin American literature, particularly Horacio Castellanos Moya and Alan Pauls. Also coming soon: I'm tentatively starting work on a little lit magazine here in Portland, I'll open it up to Kickstarter once I have a couple issues going.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Conformity and higher-ed
We complained a lot in grad school about what William Deresiewicz apparently takes aim at here in his new book: namely that the kids we teach are horribly conformist. But I'm wondering if we just refused to respect these kids' peculiar kind of resourcefulness. As a critique of the system and how it encourages conformity, Deresiewicz's sense that they aren't weird enough seems apt. But in thinking about alternatives, what could have been and could be, maybe we have in mind a standard of weirdness these kids just find horribly uninteresting. Perhaps it's us who are too focused on being weird, and not on getting stuff done. Deresiewicz seems to think that being better questioners, better rebels and truth-seekers will solve problems, but what if that's exactly wrong? What if we're holding these kids to an unfair standard? Efficiency is these kids' best quality--maybe they're on to something about actually shutting up for once and producing things. Maybe they are makers, not thinkers. Wondering if that could be a good thing.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Nomadology and sports
I promised some Barthes on sports. Also, get ready for some Deleuze. Just letting you know, it's in the works.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Some thoughts on watching sports and sportswriting
From over at my sports blog, Rip City Reviews:
Just spent some time watching 120 Sports, if "watching" is the right word for it. The MLB's Mark Newman had a nice little piece/advertisement describing what it is like to see it and just how it signals the arrival of a different world of sports viewing:
Picture a world of two-minute segments (hence the name) and ever-changing topical data cards, a world integrated with social media and a constant conversation that powers through everything in sports that fans are talking about everywhere. Imagine a fast-paced look at LeBron James' future and Mike Trout highlights and World Cup analysis and NHL mock drafts and Wimbledon previews and Bob Stoops' contract at Oklahoma and Tiger Woods back in action and NASCAR's Kentucky Speedway and college basketball recruiting and ...
There is no end, there is never an end. The videocentric show goes on, and 120 Sports will learn what you want the more you watch it. You are about to have access to unauthenticated video programming through a new platform built to intuitively integrate video and data in ways you haven't experienced.
There were some good things about it, some bad things too. Overall, it probably represents progress in sports viewing, simply because of the hurdles it overcame trying to license so much stuff from various leagues, and the sheer disruption that produces for the model of distribution whereby the leagues each have their own special devoted cable channel. In other words, it is remarkable for the amount of "content" that it has made available out of mere "broadcasting."
The result though, isn't as entirely surprising as this makes it sound. The end result is something like a Facebook news feed that is nicely selected for you. Meaning, really--because the newsfeed isn't really anything new in itself either--that it's just channel changing done for you. The British cultural critic Raymond Williams coined a nice name for the resulting effect in the 1970s: 120 Sports produces a constant content "flow."
As such, it may be the future, or simply the retrofitting of an outmoded gesture/haptics that now (like the Facebook news feed) restores a little bit more control to the provider side of things and siphons it slightly away from the consumer, by shifting the consumer-producer relationship to one centralized media hub or output point. Basically, its the internet's version of a cable sports package.
Together with other types of writing that pop up around media-integration like this, it is productive of content that centers around the fundamentally great fact about sports writing as a whole: namely, that there's no need to craft a full narrative, not only because the narrative is ongoing continually, but because the words may have an effect, and at any time--like a cheer of support or of derision--affect the nature of the game it comments upon. Any time there is a sign of narrative closure, events rupture it--I've never seen a field of storytelling that spends so much time pushing anti-narrative as sportswriters. Contact with the immediate event, shaping that event and giving it significance or linking it to various networks, and then letting the thing go before anything more than a network of association, facts, statistics, what have you crystallize into anything too definite... that is sports writing, and it is glorious, and there is no other form of writing that comes close to it.
Just spent some time watching 120 Sports, if "watching" is the right word for it. The MLB's Mark Newman had a nice little piece/advertisement describing what it is like to see it and just how it signals the arrival of a different world of sports viewing:
Picture a world of two-minute segments (hence the name) and ever-changing topical data cards, a world integrated with social media and a constant conversation that powers through everything in sports that fans are talking about everywhere. Imagine a fast-paced look at LeBron James' future and Mike Trout highlights and World Cup analysis and NHL mock drafts and Wimbledon previews and Bob Stoops' contract at Oklahoma and Tiger Woods back in action and NASCAR's Kentucky Speedway and college basketball recruiting and ...
There is no end, there is never an end. The videocentric show goes on, and 120 Sports will learn what you want the more you watch it. You are about to have access to unauthenticated video programming through a new platform built to intuitively integrate video and data in ways you haven't experienced.
There were some good things about it, some bad things too. Overall, it probably represents progress in sports viewing, simply because of the hurdles it overcame trying to license so much stuff from various leagues, and the sheer disruption that produces for the model of distribution whereby the leagues each have their own special devoted cable channel. In other words, it is remarkable for the amount of "content" that it has made available out of mere "broadcasting."
The result though, isn't as entirely surprising as this makes it sound. The end result is something like a Facebook news feed that is nicely selected for you. Meaning, really--because the newsfeed isn't really anything new in itself either--that it's just channel changing done for you. The British cultural critic Raymond Williams coined a nice name for the resulting effect in the 1970s: 120 Sports produces a constant content "flow."
As such, it may be the future, or simply the retrofitting of an outmoded gesture/haptics that now (like the Facebook news feed) restores a little bit more control to the provider side of things and siphons it slightly away from the consumer, by shifting the consumer-producer relationship to one centralized media hub or output point. Basically, its the internet's version of a cable sports package.
The one thing that may be the wave of the future involves the way the channel changing (as it were) changes for you: it does so according to the development of stories along social media. After live-tweeting some basketball games like the press guys do at the games, I can tell you, it's REALLY fun, and much more fun than following stories as they are ultimately processed by sports highlight shows. The more that it is raw twittering that determines narratives, the less those narratives get processed, and the more interesting are the possible ways that the story develops.
This is just like enlarging the stadium so that people who don't sit next to each other can sit next to each other. The strange result, in other words, is that we no longer become spectators interested in a representation but participants in a media event.
Pessimists thought this most likely would produce worse writing, but the exact opposite has happened. It makes for a whole new mini-genre of writing: the sports zinger genre. This is something that has purchase at the moment and will have it later when its outmodedness (anticipated and in a way built in to the form) is taken into account, but never quite fully captures the instant, never quite fully commentates upon it authoritatively, just shapes and solidifies and concretizes and memorializes.
But for that, all you need is a Twitter app and a TV, really, not a whole sports platform, as it were. And that means that Twitter's auto-emojiing of the hashtags for the World Cup may be actually, in the end, a bit more relevant than 120 Sports. In a way, while it moves towards mediatizing sports, it still conceives of its audience as a set of consumers still watching something like a channel and a flow. And consumers have become users, fellow producers or mediators. The ultimate irony for 120 Sports in general may be that, in the end, after working so hard to bring a good product to an audience, that audience depends not on the quality of their product, but just how much and in what ways it gets used.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Barthes, self-awareness, and irony
As I'm revisiting Mythologies lately I keep thinking back fondly on Writing Degree Zero, and just how brilliant and important a book that is.
It's also an interesting book from the perspective of our current, post-ironic moment of post-post-modernism or the New Sincerity or whatever you want to call it.
Barthes uses the analogy of the "degree zero"--I do indeed believe he used it as an analogy merely, as he would with various linguistic terms, not stretching them to apply literally scientifically but almost by metaphor extending their range and applicability instead--to talk about the type of writing that he is concerned with. But I do think there was a tendency to interpret this, in the coming years, in certain, other ways.
The degree zero of writing I think for Barthes meant something more like writing that behaved as if it was aware of its status as writing. As such, it was more like writing that was the parody of writing. If it were to manifest itself at its purest, there was something campy about the writing that was writing degree zero. It's like how spaghetti westerns are the purest type of westerns by also being some of the least original, the least authentic. Or the Batman series, which is goofy but more perfect than any other kind of comic book adaptation. All the elements are there, and there is a satisfaction, a YES that you utter privately to yourself when you read some writing of the type Barthes is talking about.
The Pleasure of the Text, despite being a great book, I think may have made this pleasure out to be a more serious thing than it was. Because the pleasure you take in something campy isn't jouissance. Barthes' use of that word was misleading and strange. Only when he later got around to talking about writing and death did he seem to give us an accurate picture of the other face of the satisfaction he was originally talking about: it is something like nostalgia, something like mourning. It isn't what he says it is in this work, which is that sort of bizarre ecstasy that so fascinated Lacan.
But it was an influential interpretation of the kind of reaction to the writing he was originally talked about. And it was of a piece with the times. Self-awareness moving into parody around the time of that text seemed to become a much more serious, but also a much more superficial thing: the enjoyment wasn't in the nearness-to-parody anymore, but in something like the transformation of of the state of discourse, the change in the conversation, that that sort of writing--writing that was understood to be writing--produced.
In short, pleasure in self-awareness seemed to morph into a pleasure in irony, in the way that writing understood as such changed entirely the plane on which we as humans conversed and communicated. No longer was any meaning to be taken literally. Writing as writing was supposed to be the death of literalism.
We all know how well that turned out. Literalism came back with a vengence, and the New Sincerity is in many ways a product of it. But there is, I think, too, an acknowledgment that what most distinguishes irony as a vehicle is that it is safe: for all the crowing about how reckless and dangerous a figure it is, irony is most remarkable for the way that it seals off a domain of discourse from the rest of communicated speech, creates a group of people in the know, and forces others to be included in that group if they want to know the deeper meaning, the other meaning, both simultaneously behind and on the face of the text.
It can't be stressed enough how much this was an attempt, originally, to kill off literalism: in all the bashing of postmodernism that we do now, we forget just how bad literalism is, how bad the master-narratives that evolve out of it genuinely are, and how noble was the effort to try and do away with all that.
But it also can't be stressed enough how interpreting the degree zero of writing not just as a kind of self-awareness, but as a kind of special zone of meaning, makes writing into a very, very safe thing. The pleasure in it that people had, I think, was a kind of pleasure in the sheer fact of its non-literalism. In many ways, it was a reactionary, even a resentful pleasure.
I have recently myself been at war with myself on this issue, as I try and figure out whether my writing is a little too self-aware, and whether it should become more self-aware to the level of being ironic. Revisiting Writing Degree Zero, I found it quite liberating to see just how unironic was the sort of behavior of the text that Barthes was talking about. Irony isn't bad, but self-awareness shouldn't be frowned upon just because it is associated with irony. In many ways, the upshot was for me, was that writing that is self-aware in a way resists being taken ironically, and becomes more purely just a product, just writing. Maybe, then, writing that moves beyond irony isn't a mere reaction against the excesses of postmodernism. Nor does it thereby have to be sincere.
It may simply be really a return to an appreciation of writing as writing, in the sort of innocent pleasure in the corrupted text that knows it is what it is--writing--and that it can't do anything more about that.
It's also an interesting book from the perspective of our current, post-ironic moment of post-post-modernism or the New Sincerity or whatever you want to call it.
Barthes uses the analogy of the "degree zero"--I do indeed believe he used it as an analogy merely, as he would with various linguistic terms, not stretching them to apply literally scientifically but almost by metaphor extending their range and applicability instead--to talk about the type of writing that he is concerned with. But I do think there was a tendency to interpret this, in the coming years, in certain, other ways.
The degree zero of writing I think for Barthes meant something more like writing that behaved as if it was aware of its status as writing. As such, it was more like writing that was the parody of writing. If it were to manifest itself at its purest, there was something campy about the writing that was writing degree zero. It's like how spaghetti westerns are the purest type of westerns by also being some of the least original, the least authentic. Or the Batman series, which is goofy but more perfect than any other kind of comic book adaptation. All the elements are there, and there is a satisfaction, a YES that you utter privately to yourself when you read some writing of the type Barthes is talking about.
The Pleasure of the Text, despite being a great book, I think may have made this pleasure out to be a more serious thing than it was. Because the pleasure you take in something campy isn't jouissance. Barthes' use of that word was misleading and strange. Only when he later got around to talking about writing and death did he seem to give us an accurate picture of the other face of the satisfaction he was originally talking about: it is something like nostalgia, something like mourning. It isn't what he says it is in this work, which is that sort of bizarre ecstasy that so fascinated Lacan.
But it was an influential interpretation of the kind of reaction to the writing he was originally talked about. And it was of a piece with the times. Self-awareness moving into parody around the time of that text seemed to become a much more serious, but also a much more superficial thing: the enjoyment wasn't in the nearness-to-parody anymore, but in something like the transformation of of the state of discourse, the change in the conversation, that that sort of writing--writing that was understood to be writing--produced.
In short, pleasure in self-awareness seemed to morph into a pleasure in irony, in the way that writing understood as such changed entirely the plane on which we as humans conversed and communicated. No longer was any meaning to be taken literally. Writing as writing was supposed to be the death of literalism.
We all know how well that turned out. Literalism came back with a vengence, and the New Sincerity is in many ways a product of it. But there is, I think, too, an acknowledgment that what most distinguishes irony as a vehicle is that it is safe: for all the crowing about how reckless and dangerous a figure it is, irony is most remarkable for the way that it seals off a domain of discourse from the rest of communicated speech, creates a group of people in the know, and forces others to be included in that group if they want to know the deeper meaning, the other meaning, both simultaneously behind and on the face of the text.
It can't be stressed enough how much this was an attempt, originally, to kill off literalism: in all the bashing of postmodernism that we do now, we forget just how bad literalism is, how bad the master-narratives that evolve out of it genuinely are, and how noble was the effort to try and do away with all that.
But it also can't be stressed enough how interpreting the degree zero of writing not just as a kind of self-awareness, but as a kind of special zone of meaning, makes writing into a very, very safe thing. The pleasure in it that people had, I think, was a kind of pleasure in the sheer fact of its non-literalism. In many ways, it was a reactionary, even a resentful pleasure.
I have recently myself been at war with myself on this issue, as I try and figure out whether my writing is a little too self-aware, and whether it should become more self-aware to the level of being ironic. Revisiting Writing Degree Zero, I found it quite liberating to see just how unironic was the sort of behavior of the text that Barthes was talking about. Irony isn't bad, but self-awareness shouldn't be frowned upon just because it is associated with irony. In many ways, the upshot was for me, was that writing that is self-aware in a way resists being taken ironically, and becomes more purely just a product, just writing. Maybe, then, writing that moves beyond irony isn't a mere reaction against the excesses of postmodernism. Nor does it thereby have to be sincere.
It may simply be really a return to an appreciation of writing as writing, in the sort of innocent pleasure in the corrupted text that knows it is what it is--writing--and that it can't do anything more about that.
Friday, June 13, 2014
Barthes on Sport
I've been writing on sports lately, mainly basketball and some baseball--though you can probably bet on some World Cup writing as well to come, too! I've also been reading a lot. Expect some comments on Barthes' writings on sports here and at my other (sports) site, Rip City Reviews.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Rip City Reviews
I've been trying to move into sports writing lately (guess I'm pulling a reverse Graham Harman), so I just wanted to share here a new site where I'll post my pieces: http://ripcityreviews.blogspot.com. I'll mostly be covering the NBA and the Portland Trailblazers, but I'll also be writing on baseball and some other things. I'm starting with recaps of each of the playoff games from the Semifinals on. Come check out what I've posted!
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Some words on poetry analysis
Like I said in the last post, I had to explain recently the purpose of citations, reading response papers, things like that. Here is my explanation of the basic reasons for analyzing poetry:
The analysis of poetry isn't something you learn in order to replace reading, or even to become a better reader. You don't need analysis to read a poem and enjoy it. But analysis is a tool that opens up a shortcut to the insights you typically get after you've read a poem a trillion times. When you know it by heart. When you've memorized it. And in that sense, it's extremely useful to know, and is almost required as a skill if you want to make any truly scholarly remarks about a piece of writing like a poem, because it is only based on that intimate knowledge that anything of that critical complexity can be genuinely thought valid. But it also heightens your appreciation of a poem in general, just like reading something over and over and knowing it inside and out does. So it provides the foundation for everything involved in talking in a sophisticated manner about poems, at the same time as it capitalizes on the strengths you already have as someone who is literate and knows how to read. It is a device that can turn literacy into critical thinking.
The analysis of poetry isn't something you learn in order to replace reading, or even to become a better reader. You don't need analysis to read a poem and enjoy it. But analysis is a tool that opens up a shortcut to the insights you typically get after you've read a poem a trillion times. When you know it by heart. When you've memorized it. And in that sense, it's extremely useful to know, and is almost required as a skill if you want to make any truly scholarly remarks about a piece of writing like a poem, because it is only based on that intimate knowledge that anything of that critical complexity can be genuinely thought valid. But it also heightens your appreciation of a poem in general, just like reading something over and over and knowing it inside and out does. So it provides the foundation for everything involved in talking in a sophisticated manner about poems, at the same time as it capitalizes on the strengths you already have as someone who is literate and knows how to read. It is a device that can turn literacy into critical thinking.
Some words on thesis statements, response papers, and citations
I was recently asked to define and explain a few basic elements of paper writing, and I liked what I had to say. I thought it might be productive if I put it up here. Expect some further tips and tricks in the future:
On thesis statements:
These are like the initial punch of a one-two combo: you need the thesis statement to open up things decisively to get to what you really want to get at, and the better you are at writing one, the better the eventual thing you want to write about will be. Their nature, of course, depends on what you're writing about, but they do several things generally. There are a trillion formulas for this, and everyone says they know the real way to do it. The point is to do what works for you and what will give you the result people can understand clearly. For me, the best definition of a thesis statement is just that it is the argument seen as the answer to a question, one that is brief and provocative. The thesis asks, What is the question I'm asking in what I want to say, and what is the answer I give? If you can show how what you want to say is opening up a problem, something openended, but also definite and precise and provocative, and then give some sense that there is an answer to this question, suddenly what you are going to write becomes clearer in like fifty different ways. You give some sense of the scope of your argument, the stakes, and its possible resonance. And you get right to the center of what you're trying to say and why you're saying it.
On (literary) response papers:
Like mindfulness for reading, response papers do two things: they organize your reactions to a text and showing how they can inform the text for other people, and they connect your own reactions to the larger issues surrounding the text itself. You gather yourself together, and you link yourself to the general discussion. You do this by bringing the work itself into connection with your thinking, taking a passage that was a particularly poignant node in the text for you and actually looking at its linguistic makeup. You employ, during this, a certain simple attentiveness to language, and an attentiveness to your own feelings, and an articulateness about both. This can be extremely fun, and is also extremely useful: your response paper can usually serve as the raw material for an essay that you can write up later in the semester.
On citations:
Citations are often a pain, but they are also important. This isn't just because they "show evidence that you didn't plagiarize." It's because it puts your work into dialogue with other work. Becoming good at citing and knowing how to cite adds a whole different dimension to your paper: suddenly you're not all out on your own, just saying what comes into your head, but you're actually joining a conversation, showing how what you have in mind actually is the product of reading a lot and trying to figure out what the consensus is on an issue, and whether that consensus is good or whether the discussion needs to be changed. So it's not just that you need to show you got information from a source. It shows you got SPECIFIC information from a SPECIFIC source, and that your conclusions build on what is being said THERE, or challenge what is being said THERE. Learning how to cite well is learning how to discuss and argue well--and if you know this, it makes the fundamentals (all that formatting) really interesting and crucial. Good citations are really appreciated by your readers--you appreciate them, don't you? when you read a book?--and change the nature of your argument depending on how you do them. So doing them right is a worthwhile task.
On thesis statements:
These are like the initial punch of a one-two combo: you need the thesis statement to open up things decisively to get to what you really want to get at, and the better you are at writing one, the better the eventual thing you want to write about will be. Their nature, of course, depends on what you're writing about, but they do several things generally. There are a trillion formulas for this, and everyone says they know the real way to do it. The point is to do what works for you and what will give you the result people can understand clearly. For me, the best definition of a thesis statement is just that it is the argument seen as the answer to a question, one that is brief and provocative. The thesis asks, What is the question I'm asking in what I want to say, and what is the answer I give? If you can show how what you want to say is opening up a problem, something openended, but also definite and precise and provocative, and then give some sense that there is an answer to this question, suddenly what you are going to write becomes clearer in like fifty different ways. You give some sense of the scope of your argument, the stakes, and its possible resonance. And you get right to the center of what you're trying to say and why you're saying it.
On (literary) response papers:
Like mindfulness for reading, response papers do two things: they organize your reactions to a text and showing how they can inform the text for other people, and they connect your own reactions to the larger issues surrounding the text itself. You gather yourself together, and you link yourself to the general discussion. You do this by bringing the work itself into connection with your thinking, taking a passage that was a particularly poignant node in the text for you and actually looking at its linguistic makeup. You employ, during this, a certain simple attentiveness to language, and an attentiveness to your own feelings, and an articulateness about both. This can be extremely fun, and is also extremely useful: your response paper can usually serve as the raw material for an essay that you can write up later in the semester.
On citations:
Citations are often a pain, but they are also important. This isn't just because they "show evidence that you didn't plagiarize." It's because it puts your work into dialogue with other work. Becoming good at citing and knowing how to cite adds a whole different dimension to your paper: suddenly you're not all out on your own, just saying what comes into your head, but you're actually joining a conversation, showing how what you have in mind actually is the product of reading a lot and trying to figure out what the consensus is on an issue, and whether that consensus is good or whether the discussion needs to be changed. So it's not just that you need to show you got information from a source. It shows you got SPECIFIC information from a SPECIFIC source, and that your conclusions build on what is being said THERE, or challenge what is being said THERE. Learning how to cite well is learning how to discuss and argue well--and if you know this, it makes the fundamentals (all that formatting) really interesting and crucial. Good citations are really appreciated by your readers--you appreciate them, don't you? when you read a book?--and change the nature of your argument depending on how you do them. So doing them right is a worthwhile task.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Peirce and pragmatism
I'm going to try and write a few posts on William James in the next few weeks, since I've been reading him. I've been a bit busy so there's not been much going on here, sorry about that. But, like I say, that'll change. In the meantime, I'm thinking through Charles Peirce's classic "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," and will have a few things to say about it, maybe also a little bit about Timothy Williamson too. For now, here's a link to a good online version.
Friday, November 8, 2013
Recent reviews
Not much up here lately, but a lot in the background going on. I give some links to recent reviews at my main site, mike-duffy.com, and I'll reproduce them here:
A review of Professor Borges for the Los Angeles Review of Books,
A review of J.M. Coetzee's strange new novel The Childhood of Jesus, for The Millions,
and a review of Jay Neugeboren's novel for Moment Magazine.
I also have a take on Julian Barnes' new work Levels of Life (or, rather, a take on the takes), at my site.
There are more reviews in the works -- a short little solid one on Kafka's "Metamorphosis" being the next. You can keep up to date with my work by checking out my twitter feed or page.
Here, I plan on getting into some Wittgenstein, perhaps, as I'm making my way through the Logical Investigations lately (more like, finally -- I should have gotten around to it long ago), among other things (perhaps Sense and Sensibilia by J.L. Austin, too).
As usual, nothing too new probably to say on this front--certainly nothing as new as other blogs will have to say. But I console myself by reflecting that philosophy is only new anyway when you dip back into it, ask the old questions and try to bring some life into them. That is, when you do something, when you get going and put it into action. If the results are obvious, the process of going about attaining them will--if you've done it right--not have been. And, if you're lucky, never have been.
A review of Professor Borges for the Los Angeles Review of Books,
A review of J.M. Coetzee's strange new novel The Childhood of Jesus, for The Millions,
and a review of Jay Neugeboren's novel for Moment Magazine.
I also have a take on Julian Barnes' new work Levels of Life (or, rather, a take on the takes), at my site.
There are more reviews in the works -- a short little solid one on Kafka's "Metamorphosis" being the next. You can keep up to date with my work by checking out my twitter feed or page.
Here, I plan on getting into some Wittgenstein, perhaps, as I'm making my way through the Logical Investigations lately (more like, finally -- I should have gotten around to it long ago), among other things (perhaps Sense and Sensibilia by J.L. Austin, too).
As usual, nothing too new probably to say on this front--certainly nothing as new as other blogs will have to say. But I console myself by reflecting that philosophy is only new anyway when you dip back into it, ask the old questions and try to bring some life into them. That is, when you do something, when you get going and put it into action. If the results are obvious, the process of going about attaining them will--if you've done it right--not have been. And, if you're lucky, never have been.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Appreciating Lévi-Strauss
I am reading Octavio Paz's brilliant introduction to Claude Lévi-Strauss (Claude Lévi Strauss: An Introduction), in the process of revisiting a bit of the latter's thought. I've been doing this on and off over the last year or so. I'll stub my toe on Structural Anthropology, that big thick brick of a book, and pick it up. I've been looking around for The Savage Mind, and milling it over, though I can't quite find it in my house. I've run into the two brand new translations of his lectures, in handsome volumes from Harvard University Press, reviewed online (like here at the LARB) and at the bookstore, and had a good long look at them. I've been contemplating getting the slew of new (and very much needed and very much welcomed) biographies of him and introductions to his work. And whenever I've had some alone time, and I can sit and read and think by myself, I've been rereading Tristes Tropiques.
So I will be writing a bit more about this amazing and still--in the American intellectual world at least, and despite the recent heroic efforts of many to combat this--under-appreciated thinker, trying to make things a bit more accessible, clearer, useful. This usually in my book means outlining something less than the actual workings of the ideas themselves, and something more than a mere outline of the steps of argumentation, which just dissects the parts of the thing, and turns the thoughts to functions in some idea-machine (something Paz himself in his explication frowns upon). I aim, that is, to get at the general tendencies in the works, that area in which the movement of thought is reflected in its style.
This is a correspondence that cannot and should not (even if it could) be captured in any clear formal mirroring of the thought in the mode of its expression. And it lacks any clear demonstrability than what is necessary to urge the reciprocal sympathies of yet another thinking heart on the other side of the words I write here. One can't point to any of these things exactly. Elucidations aren't readings, but feelings. You know they're right in the way that you know what someone's personality is, after you've lived with them for a while or met them for coffee a few times.
I go on at length here about this just as a reintroduction to what I think I've done in my little notes on this blog--I see it as a consistent sort of approach I have, and one which finds a sort of blood-brother in that of Paz, who emphasizes the personal manner of his introduction. It's appreciative criticism, really. And while it doesn't quite have scientific pretensions (Paz is quick to admit this), it often, as art itself does (since art could be said to be a way of appreciating the world), indeed achieves something like real, philosophic knowledge or wisdom. Not that the achievement is easy. Something is risked in this way of coming to know a thinker and setting that thought forth in personal paragraphs. If you get it wrong, it isn't any different than getting someone's personality wrong--something that has not just bad effects for you, but for other people too in your life (you may have recommended the person to your friends, say, or brought them into contact with the thinker in question). There are works who reward you, just like developing a lasting friendship with someone is rewarding; there are works who manipulate you, often just like people manipulate you.
On top of just reintroducing what I try to do in notes here, all this is not beside the point because of Lévi-Strauss himself. For Lévi-Strauss is fundamentally someone who believed that all the style of thought can be exchanged, communicated. Not only words and ideas themselves, but something of their essence, their truly individual character, is able to be translated and transferred from one environment into another. The passion, the feeling, the deep commitment with which any of these languages is used and built up--this is translated too. Real scientific insight, knowledge itself, is actually the process of--not extracting this knowledge, but facilitating the transfer, of playing around with what is possible there, of respecting this possibility and generating something out of it.
You wouldn't quite get this from what you hear about Lévi-Strauss. There has grown up around his work, especially in theory-savvy circles in the US, a tendency to talk about this with great suspicion, and as if it left something crucial out of human life. Lévi-Strauss appears bloodless, cold. He appears too complicated, or too crazy. The type of thing he is getting at--this generous, holistic procedure for acquiring anthropological knowledge--gets talked about as if it is merely the isolation of certain hard and clear and coherent networks of thought. As if structuralism were the same thing as identifying or classifying certain groups of things.
But this is only true in the sense that all deep work, all deep and philosophic thought, every metaphysics and especially every ontology, every account of the way it really is and what it is--every kind of profound grasp on reality like this eventually deals with the categories, as Aristotle called them. Philosophers appreciate this point, but don't stress it enough. Thought about what there is and the way it is ultimately has to turn on what kinds of things you're going to admit exist, or don't exist. Thought that even tries to resist this sort of work, like historical narratives of things that never subsist, or transcendental critique that only looks at the conditions of possibility of such things, similarly has to employ conceptions of these sorts of things, make use of them. You can't write a sentence without nouns, without stuff, and without clear sorts of relations that involve the stuff, without objects to direct verbs at, . This is what categories do, this is the deep truth about what thinking wisely in any sort of way is: thinking about what's really the case, what's really real, about what reality means and involves and is. The first philosophic thought, it is said, was a remark by Thales to the effect that "everything is water." This is why that is a philosophic, wise belief--and not just him being bonkers. Structuralism, it turns out, is one of the most sophisticated versions of this sort of thought since Aristotle--and it is Lévi-Strauss who first realizes this deeply, which is why the movement or the way of thinking is so associated with him.
But we don't even need to get that far now. We'll get to the full implications of this in an upcoming post. For now, all that needs to be said is that, except in this deeper way of talking about it (and even there too, as I've tried to hint a little), what Lévi-Struass is dealing with is hardly the erection of rigid sorts of boundaries between certain things, of assigning identities, of reducing what's real and what matters to some consistent sort of framework, giving it borders and making its outlines clearer. No. Structuralism is not structural in this kind of hard, unyielding way.
The word you hear all the time is "logic." What Lévi-Strauss uncovered in a certain culture was its underlying "logic." What he found in a certain story is the Oedipal myth's "logic." And while this does acknowledge that what Lévi-Strauss did find in certain cultures that made information translatable between them was indeed called by him a "logic," this was a human logic--this is why such deep "logic" can come from anthropology, of all places--or a logic whose first and foremost feature is that it is lived, and meaningful, and felt. If the real sense of this isn't obvious from Tristes Tropiques alone, it is from many passages all over Lévi-Strauss' writing. For example, in a certain crucial passage in "The Strucutural Study of Myth"--that seminal essay. Lévi-Strauss here speaks of a myth's "logic," but uses it as a synonym for "feeling." That's how deep this "logic" runs. This is the sense in which "logic" is being used. He says, speaking about the way structural analysis deals with myth, the following:
"Our method [he says] thus eliminates a problem which has, so far, been one of the main obstacles to the progress of mythological studies. Namely, the quest for the true version, or the earlier one. On the contrary, we define the myth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such." (Structural Anthropology, p. 216-217)
This is magnificently simple, and it is easy to overlook that last point. But that's the crucial bit. The full implications of those last two sentences I'll elaborate throughout the upcoming posts here in which I deal with Lévi-Strauss. Namely, of the way this manner of thinking about myth obviates quests for the primitive, original versions of a myth, and the way it also obviates considerations of the true version of a myth--reflections that have huge implications for how we understand the worth of cultures and cultural productions generally. But all that needs to be noted now is just that what Lévi-Strauss is dealing with is as much a set of deep feelings, sentiments, emotions, currents of opinion, all the hard-to-grasp, messy qualities of life that make it living and real and human--as it is a "definition," some delineation of what counts as and what does not count as a myth. The object of his investigation is first and foremost human impulses of life, the things that make it what it is. It is, simply, how we feel, and persist in feeling, believing, perceiving something. That is, how real life is to us.
Paz has a great image (one of many, as Michael Wood recently reminds us in the LRB) to characterize how Lévi-Strauss thinks and what it is like to witness him really seeing the world in the way he sees it. He speaks of the last chapter of Tristes Tropiques:
"The thought achieves in those few pages a density and transparency which might make us think of the forms of rock crystal takes if it were not for the fact that it is animated by a pulsation which does not recall so much mineral immobility as the vibration of light waves. A geometry of brilliance which takes the fascinating shape of the spiral. It is the conch shell, symbol of wind and word, a sign of movement among the ancient Mexicans: each step is simultaneously a return to the starting point and an advance towards the unknown." (Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, 135-6)
Wind and word: this is the precise description of logos, the word, the breath, the life--all that stuff (sorry to wax mystical). That is, the real sort of experience of "logic."
In this he also gets at something more which makes Lévi-Strauss particularly relevant today, I think. This is image of iterated simple structures in a shell making up complex patterns--the formula at the heart of one kind of complexity that is now at the heart of the study of social phenomena and natural phenomena of all sorts (clouds, flocks, preferences, relationships). The way Lévi-Strauss sees simple rules in nature and develops out of them patterns of arrangement, networks, of vast and often semi-chaotic... what to call them... structures. This Lévi-Strauss, in other words, offers an excellent way of introducing the concerns at the heart of the study of complexity into fields that may have at one time or another theoretically rejected his invitations to adopt a more structural way of thinking about the world.
So I will be writing a bit more about this amazing and still--in the American intellectual world at least, and despite the recent heroic efforts of many to combat this--under-appreciated thinker, trying to make things a bit more accessible, clearer, useful. This usually in my book means outlining something less than the actual workings of the ideas themselves, and something more than a mere outline of the steps of argumentation, which just dissects the parts of the thing, and turns the thoughts to functions in some idea-machine (something Paz himself in his explication frowns upon). I aim, that is, to get at the general tendencies in the works, that area in which the movement of thought is reflected in its style.
This is a correspondence that cannot and should not (even if it could) be captured in any clear formal mirroring of the thought in the mode of its expression. And it lacks any clear demonstrability than what is necessary to urge the reciprocal sympathies of yet another thinking heart on the other side of the words I write here. One can't point to any of these things exactly. Elucidations aren't readings, but feelings. You know they're right in the way that you know what someone's personality is, after you've lived with them for a while or met them for coffee a few times.
I go on at length here about this just as a reintroduction to what I think I've done in my little notes on this blog--I see it as a consistent sort of approach I have, and one which finds a sort of blood-brother in that of Paz, who emphasizes the personal manner of his introduction. It's appreciative criticism, really. And while it doesn't quite have scientific pretensions (Paz is quick to admit this), it often, as art itself does (since art could be said to be a way of appreciating the world), indeed achieves something like real, philosophic knowledge or wisdom. Not that the achievement is easy. Something is risked in this way of coming to know a thinker and setting that thought forth in personal paragraphs. If you get it wrong, it isn't any different than getting someone's personality wrong--something that has not just bad effects for you, but for other people too in your life (you may have recommended the person to your friends, say, or brought them into contact with the thinker in question). There are works who reward you, just like developing a lasting friendship with someone is rewarding; there are works who manipulate you, often just like people manipulate you.
On top of just reintroducing what I try to do in notes here, all this is not beside the point because of Lévi-Strauss himself. For Lévi-Strauss is fundamentally someone who believed that all the style of thought can be exchanged, communicated. Not only words and ideas themselves, but something of their essence, their truly individual character, is able to be translated and transferred from one environment into another. The passion, the feeling, the deep commitment with which any of these languages is used and built up--this is translated too. Real scientific insight, knowledge itself, is actually the process of--not extracting this knowledge, but facilitating the transfer, of playing around with what is possible there, of respecting this possibility and generating something out of it.
You wouldn't quite get this from what you hear about Lévi-Strauss. There has grown up around his work, especially in theory-savvy circles in the US, a tendency to talk about this with great suspicion, and as if it left something crucial out of human life. Lévi-Strauss appears bloodless, cold. He appears too complicated, or too crazy. The type of thing he is getting at--this generous, holistic procedure for acquiring anthropological knowledge--gets talked about as if it is merely the isolation of certain hard and clear and coherent networks of thought. As if structuralism were the same thing as identifying or classifying certain groups of things.
But this is only true in the sense that all deep work, all deep and philosophic thought, every metaphysics and especially every ontology, every account of the way it really is and what it is--every kind of profound grasp on reality like this eventually deals with the categories, as Aristotle called them. Philosophers appreciate this point, but don't stress it enough. Thought about what there is and the way it is ultimately has to turn on what kinds of things you're going to admit exist, or don't exist. Thought that even tries to resist this sort of work, like historical narratives of things that never subsist, or transcendental critique that only looks at the conditions of possibility of such things, similarly has to employ conceptions of these sorts of things, make use of them. You can't write a sentence without nouns, without stuff, and without clear sorts of relations that involve the stuff, without objects to direct verbs at, . This is what categories do, this is the deep truth about what thinking wisely in any sort of way is: thinking about what's really the case, what's really real, about what reality means and involves and is. The first philosophic thought, it is said, was a remark by Thales to the effect that "everything is water." This is why that is a philosophic, wise belief--and not just him being bonkers. Structuralism, it turns out, is one of the most sophisticated versions of this sort of thought since Aristotle--and it is Lévi-Strauss who first realizes this deeply, which is why the movement or the way of thinking is so associated with him.
But we don't even need to get that far now. We'll get to the full implications of this in an upcoming post. For now, all that needs to be said is that, except in this deeper way of talking about it (and even there too, as I've tried to hint a little), what Lévi-Struass is dealing with is hardly the erection of rigid sorts of boundaries between certain things, of assigning identities, of reducing what's real and what matters to some consistent sort of framework, giving it borders and making its outlines clearer. No. Structuralism is not structural in this kind of hard, unyielding way.
The word you hear all the time is "logic." What Lévi-Strauss uncovered in a certain culture was its underlying "logic." What he found in a certain story is the Oedipal myth's "logic." And while this does acknowledge that what Lévi-Strauss did find in certain cultures that made information translatable between them was indeed called by him a "logic," this was a human logic--this is why such deep "logic" can come from anthropology, of all places--or a logic whose first and foremost feature is that it is lived, and meaningful, and felt. If the real sense of this isn't obvious from Tristes Tropiques alone, it is from many passages all over Lévi-Strauss' writing. For example, in a certain crucial passage in "The Strucutural Study of Myth"--that seminal essay. Lévi-Strauss here speaks of a myth's "logic," but uses it as a synonym for "feeling." That's how deep this "logic" runs. This is the sense in which "logic" is being used. He says, speaking about the way structural analysis deals with myth, the following:
"Our method [he says] thus eliminates a problem which has, so far, been one of the main obstacles to the progress of mythological studies. Namely, the quest for the true version, or the earlier one. On the contrary, we define the myth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such." (Structural Anthropology, p. 216-217)
This is magnificently simple, and it is easy to overlook that last point. But that's the crucial bit. The full implications of those last two sentences I'll elaborate throughout the upcoming posts here in which I deal with Lévi-Strauss. Namely, of the way this manner of thinking about myth obviates quests for the primitive, original versions of a myth, and the way it also obviates considerations of the true version of a myth--reflections that have huge implications for how we understand the worth of cultures and cultural productions generally. But all that needs to be noted now is just that what Lévi-Strauss is dealing with is as much a set of deep feelings, sentiments, emotions, currents of opinion, all the hard-to-grasp, messy qualities of life that make it living and real and human--as it is a "definition," some delineation of what counts as and what does not count as a myth. The object of his investigation is first and foremost human impulses of life, the things that make it what it is. It is, simply, how we feel, and persist in feeling, believing, perceiving something. That is, how real life is to us.
Paz has a great image (one of many, as Michael Wood recently reminds us in the LRB) to characterize how Lévi-Strauss thinks and what it is like to witness him really seeing the world in the way he sees it. He speaks of the last chapter of Tristes Tropiques:
"The thought achieves in those few pages a density and transparency which might make us think of the forms of rock crystal takes if it were not for the fact that it is animated by a pulsation which does not recall so much mineral immobility as the vibration of light waves. A geometry of brilliance which takes the fascinating shape of the spiral. It is the conch shell, symbol of wind and word, a sign of movement among the ancient Mexicans: each step is simultaneously a return to the starting point and an advance towards the unknown." (Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, 135-6)
Wind and word: this is the precise description of logos, the word, the breath, the life--all that stuff (sorry to wax mystical). That is, the real sort of experience of "logic."
In this he also gets at something more which makes Lévi-Strauss particularly relevant today, I think. This is image of iterated simple structures in a shell making up complex patterns--the formula at the heart of one kind of complexity that is now at the heart of the study of social phenomena and natural phenomena of all sorts (clouds, flocks, preferences, relationships). The way Lévi-Strauss sees simple rules in nature and develops out of them patterns of arrangement, networks, of vast and often semi-chaotic... what to call them... structures. This Lévi-Strauss, in other words, offers an excellent way of introducing the concerns at the heart of the study of complexity into fields that may have at one time or another theoretically rejected his invitations to adopt a more structural way of thinking about the world.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Return of Working notes
So, I've been thinking, and I still have all these thoughts about things that people keep coming to this blog for. So why not write them down? I've been wanting to create something of a miniature literary review lately, but that is way more work than I can quite handle, and so I've just been posting my own literary reviews over at http://reviewreviewreview.org/, and links to ones I've done. (Speaking of which, I just finished a review for Moment Magazine on Jay Neugeboren's great new novel: http://www.momentmag.com/book-review-the-american-sun-wind-moving-picture-company/.) But there are still lingering theoretical thoughts, and I've been returning recently to some interesting philosophical figures - why not write those down here too, like I always have?
So, expect some posts on Jean-Paul Sartre, Isaiah Berlin, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida (specifically: the new collection of Derrida's writings from Chicago), Timothy Williamson, and all sorts of crazy wonderful thinkers, plus links to other, less casual pieces on my personal work website and elsewhere.
So, expect some posts on Jean-Paul Sartre, Isaiah Berlin, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida (specifically: the new collection of Derrida's writings from Chicago), Timothy Williamson, and all sorts of crazy wonderful thinkers, plus links to other, less casual pieces on my personal work website and elsewhere.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
New NEW Site!
Readers! You can reach the new Review Review site at: http://reviewreviewreview.org/
Apologies for the false start with this! The new site works smoothly though. There you will find more of the work that I have done here, a portfolio of my work, and new material! Please visit, comment, send me emails, and read! New updates weekly!
Apologies for the false start with this! The new site works smoothly though. There you will find more of the work that I have done here, a portfolio of my work, and new material! Please visit, comment, send me emails, and read! New updates weekly!
Friday, May 10, 2013
New site: The Review Review, Review
It's here. My new project. http://www.thereviewreviewreview.org (I can't tell you how happy I am that the domain name still existed.) I'm still working out kinks, but I'm on the way to writing a weekly column about literary reviews, reviewing them. Many of the questions I've pursued here will also be pursued there.
And in a couple weeks, it'll look more professional--and most likely be more professional. In the meantime though, there is plenty to read, and I have a couple other reviews I'll be posting in the next few days.
If you are interested in current literary culture, take a look! Or, if you are simply interested in your taste and judgment, I'll be constantly probing the issues that surround them here. And, as always, thank you so much for your support!
And in a couple weeks, it'll look more professional--and most likely be more professional. In the meantime though, there is plenty to read, and I have a couple other reviews I'll be posting in the next few days.
If you are interested in current literary culture, take a look! Or, if you are simply interested in your taste and judgment, I'll be constantly probing the issues that surround them here. And, as always, thank you so much for your support!
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Announcing: The Review Review, Review
Dear readers,
Again I'm sorry for having to stop doing much writing here in order to get work done. I promised I'll be starting up something new soon, and, well, soon is nowish! I'm going to be doing a little sort of review blog, where I'll be reviewing... literary reviews. I know, it's odd, but I've been doing it for a while now and it is actually pretty fun and leads to some interesting little insights, all while condensing and aggregating what's good in the most recent--primarily literary--publications, like the LRB, the NYRB, TLS, the LARB, Granta, poetry magazines, the book review pages of the NY Times and other newspapers, etc. etc. Basically what I can get my hands on and digest.
There will also be contributions from other knowledgeable critics I know. And the occasional dip back into the archives to look at past publications and see what critical conversations in the past were like--and whether they were any different. And some original reviews by myself and others. It can't be as comprehensive as other sites, or as big as other reviews, but it will be selective and interesting, and try to revive the venerable and exciting tradition of the "review of review" format and the impetus behind some of the more radical "literary intelligencers" of the 19th century, which are really just so perfect for the modern media situation.
I'm just putting together the final details, and getting a few reviews done to hit the ground running, but expect a link to the new site in early April.
All best,
Mike
Again I'm sorry for having to stop doing much writing here in order to get work done. I promised I'll be starting up something new soon, and, well, soon is nowish! I'm going to be doing a little sort of review blog, where I'll be reviewing... literary reviews. I know, it's odd, but I've been doing it for a while now and it is actually pretty fun and leads to some interesting little insights, all while condensing and aggregating what's good in the most recent--primarily literary--publications, like the LRB, the NYRB, TLS, the LARB, Granta, poetry magazines, the book review pages of the NY Times and other newspapers, etc. etc. Basically what I can get my hands on and digest.
There will also be contributions from other knowledgeable critics I know. And the occasional dip back into the archives to look at past publications and see what critical conversations in the past were like--and whether they were any different. And some original reviews by myself and others. It can't be as comprehensive as other sites, or as big as other reviews, but it will be selective and interesting, and try to revive the venerable and exciting tradition of the "review of review" format and the impetus behind some of the more radical "literary intelligencers" of the 19th century, which are really just so perfect for the modern media situation.
I'm just putting together the final details, and getting a few reviews done to hit the ground running, but expect a link to the new site in early April.
All best,
Mike
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
New site
Working on a little new website that will either review things I'm reading at the moment, just for fun, or, write about key-words that I find significant, like Raymond Williams did. Or maybe it will do both. Stay tuned.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Faults of taste, and upcoming projects
Hello all, just a quick update for anyone who finds this blog. Enough people have found these rather desultory speculations useful enough to convince me to keep the posts all up, ashamed as I sometimes am of them or of certain of the thoughts expressed in them. Looking back on his criticism of Wordsworth, Francis Jeffrey once wrote that with respect to the treatment of the faults he found, he sometimes forgot "that, even on my own view of them, they were but faults of taste," and "sometimes visited them, I fear, with an asperity which should be reserved for objects of Moral reprobation." Something similar happens with faults in ideas that we find, especially when young, and you feel that you sacrifices nothing in throwing all one's energy into the proper thinking-through of a problem--if only because, in the beginning stages of committing oneself to the life of the mind, it seems as if sacrificing everything is almost what is required to think it through.
This is not a false assumption either, both because you are committing yourself to something, and you have to muster up the energy for it, and because, with the sorry state in which the pursuit of ideas is indeed held in this society, at this time, there seems so little recompense in going about it ...I hesitate to say purely, because I mean only impractically, with no foreseeable practical outcome or effectivity, yet even this is made out to be some sort of sham-recompense, which we find in dreams (I use the word with the tone of those who speak of "dream-houses," "dream-cars," "dream-retirement," and especially "dream-job," somehow the hyphen slinking itself in there, as if to insinuate that the substantiality of the thing to which it attaches itself was in some sense never really undreamlike, real, to begin with) of the cozy academic life, which allows you to settle down comfortably and think a lot and write and work whenever you want in pajamas and meet people for coffee and have influence over students but get to talk of popular cultural topics... a dream in which you have everything, and whatever sacrifice you make is not really a sacrifice, just another happy example of initiative, leadership, innovation, or any one of the horrible words we use now to degrade and devalue hard and often unrewarding work. That is (to come back to my point), you treat other people's ideas often too harshly, because you are involved in a process of self-definition, as well as a process of finding the proper degree of honesty and candor with which--not just to present, but to think through your own.
That's about as honest as I can be about the process, though I think it has the potential to sound a bit too harsh on the self there defining itself. I don't mean that what you do is find out how honest you should present yourself as--that'd be a flat out contradiction. What I mean is that you are in a process of finding out how seriously to treat your own ideas--and this is often what makes you attack others unjustly. For people of my generation, who grew up in the hugely dishonest environment of the culture-wars and are caught now in the middle of an age where all expressions of intelligence are treated as competing with the rest of those within the rest of the "discourse" considered, and very often the uber-discourse of "the media," as if an idea were only true if it could manage to fight it out against enough "bad" ideas, and as if everyone who wrote within "the media" (which, as you can gather from the TV news several times an hour, means, you horrible people who say what you mean on the internet, you actual people saying things, without any corporate backing or group-political angle) were a nut--for people who had to confront this way of regarding things, this way of talking about things, this way of conversing with each other, it is so hard to regard others as genuinely speaking as if they mean what they say, so that you come to doubt even if you mean or indeed could ever really mean what you say. And if you don't want to fall back into the position of self-parody, treating nothing that you think or say as serious, or as only temporarily serious (that is, merely useful, merely as a means to some end), then this puts you in a real bind. Moreover, it makes you incredibly sensitive to moments where you have seemed to extend your trust and it seems let down--that is, when you suddenly find out someone else treating an idea less seriously than you thought they might be treating it. And indeed, too often moments of genuine bewilderment in an author can be confused, in such an environment, with a lack of seriousness. But on the rare occasion in which it happens that someone you think is doing their best, and you find out in reality is just spouting bullshit, with a sort of ironic self-referential catchall which is supposed to get them out of the fact that they don't say what they mean--when this happens it can be really a hard thing to bear. If it doesn't poison your expectation of others, it can poison your expectations of yourself and how you treat what you think. This is complicated all the more by the fact that they genuinely are confused; they just also want to say that in a way we all are about the issue in question, and so that gives them to speak authoritatively as if they knew what they were talking about better than you. We are supposed to take the beginning of opening up the limit of a problem, as if it were the actual frontier of that problem. We are supposed to take the fact that all knowledge is gained gradually and the fact that at any particular moment one never knows enough about what they are pursuing, as a reason not to speak of it, not to pursue it further. Or some hope is held out that because we are more conscious of this process, we can fold it back into our own thinking, incorporate it systematically in our answer itself, in our knowledge itself--when this is best developed as an ethic apart from one's thinking, which hangs on a precarious, but only because fundamentally human and sympathetic, society of intellectual characters, neither hostile nor like-minded... and certainly not hostile merely because not like-minded.
But as you develop some surer sense of your own honesty, this situation goes away. And it seems better, on the whole, to treat others ideas that you disagree with, not unlike the faults of taste Jeffrey speaks about. Not that they are the less important for that. It is just that they are not at first, moral problems. You can still look back a little embarrassed at the whole ordeal you went through, though, in order to get to such a place. I've tried to sum up a little how I feel about them all, and what I think went into the parts I now find (as I disagree even with myself) distasteful, but I do also want to give some indication of what the struggle is in those moments which bursts out beneath the surface. We live in an age of such intellectual rage and hate, partly because everything is a matter of the intellect and nothing a matter of ideas--and therefore of feeling, real feeling, too. Belief in oneself and what one says, is not an easy thing to come by, or come to, especially if we understand what we are saying to be merely an indicator of what we do not, cannot quite know yet in full--that is, when one also has doubts. So while I do want to apologize for the harsh tones of some of the entries here--to come round to what I meant to say in this little note--I also can come to bear something of their harshness, looking back on it, as part of the struggle which others still find some use in.
Looking back on it too has also made me convinced it is good to write such occasional thoughts, and if not yet professionally (I hope one day to do some reviewing, alongside my academic work), then somewhere like this. I'm setting up a little blog where I will comment on some keywords I think are pretty interesting and come across while reading, which I'll put a link to here, when I have a couple entries written. I'm also setting up a venue for my fellow graduate students to write reviews of new books at our colloquium website, which should prove interesting for anyone in the field. So keep posted for those things, if you like.
This is not a false assumption either, both because you are committing yourself to something, and you have to muster up the energy for it, and because, with the sorry state in which the pursuit of ideas is indeed held in this society, at this time, there seems so little recompense in going about it ...I hesitate to say purely, because I mean only impractically, with no foreseeable practical outcome or effectivity, yet even this is made out to be some sort of sham-recompense, which we find in dreams (I use the word with the tone of those who speak of "dream-houses," "dream-cars," "dream-retirement," and especially "dream-job," somehow the hyphen slinking itself in there, as if to insinuate that the substantiality of the thing to which it attaches itself was in some sense never really undreamlike, real, to begin with) of the cozy academic life, which allows you to settle down comfortably and think a lot and write and work whenever you want in pajamas and meet people for coffee and have influence over students but get to talk of popular cultural topics... a dream in which you have everything, and whatever sacrifice you make is not really a sacrifice, just another happy example of initiative, leadership, innovation, or any one of the horrible words we use now to degrade and devalue hard and often unrewarding work. That is (to come back to my point), you treat other people's ideas often too harshly, because you are involved in a process of self-definition, as well as a process of finding the proper degree of honesty and candor with which--not just to present, but to think through your own.
That's about as honest as I can be about the process, though I think it has the potential to sound a bit too harsh on the self there defining itself. I don't mean that what you do is find out how honest you should present yourself as--that'd be a flat out contradiction. What I mean is that you are in a process of finding out how seriously to treat your own ideas--and this is often what makes you attack others unjustly. For people of my generation, who grew up in the hugely dishonest environment of the culture-wars and are caught now in the middle of an age where all expressions of intelligence are treated as competing with the rest of those within the rest of the "discourse" considered, and very often the uber-discourse of "the media," as if an idea were only true if it could manage to fight it out against enough "bad" ideas, and as if everyone who wrote within "the media" (which, as you can gather from the TV news several times an hour, means, you horrible people who say what you mean on the internet, you actual people saying things, without any corporate backing or group-political angle) were a nut--for people who had to confront this way of regarding things, this way of talking about things, this way of conversing with each other, it is so hard to regard others as genuinely speaking as if they mean what they say, so that you come to doubt even if you mean or indeed could ever really mean what you say. And if you don't want to fall back into the position of self-parody, treating nothing that you think or say as serious, or as only temporarily serious (that is, merely useful, merely as a means to some end), then this puts you in a real bind. Moreover, it makes you incredibly sensitive to moments where you have seemed to extend your trust and it seems let down--that is, when you suddenly find out someone else treating an idea less seriously than you thought they might be treating it. And indeed, too often moments of genuine bewilderment in an author can be confused, in such an environment, with a lack of seriousness. But on the rare occasion in which it happens that someone you think is doing their best, and you find out in reality is just spouting bullshit, with a sort of ironic self-referential catchall which is supposed to get them out of the fact that they don't say what they mean--when this happens it can be really a hard thing to bear. If it doesn't poison your expectation of others, it can poison your expectations of yourself and how you treat what you think. This is complicated all the more by the fact that they genuinely are confused; they just also want to say that in a way we all are about the issue in question, and so that gives them to speak authoritatively as if they knew what they were talking about better than you. We are supposed to take the beginning of opening up the limit of a problem, as if it were the actual frontier of that problem. We are supposed to take the fact that all knowledge is gained gradually and the fact that at any particular moment one never knows enough about what they are pursuing, as a reason not to speak of it, not to pursue it further. Or some hope is held out that because we are more conscious of this process, we can fold it back into our own thinking, incorporate it systematically in our answer itself, in our knowledge itself--when this is best developed as an ethic apart from one's thinking, which hangs on a precarious, but only because fundamentally human and sympathetic, society of intellectual characters, neither hostile nor like-minded... and certainly not hostile merely because not like-minded.
But as you develop some surer sense of your own honesty, this situation goes away. And it seems better, on the whole, to treat others ideas that you disagree with, not unlike the faults of taste Jeffrey speaks about. Not that they are the less important for that. It is just that they are not at first, moral problems. You can still look back a little embarrassed at the whole ordeal you went through, though, in order to get to such a place. I've tried to sum up a little how I feel about them all, and what I think went into the parts I now find (as I disagree even with myself) distasteful, but I do also want to give some indication of what the struggle is in those moments which bursts out beneath the surface. We live in an age of such intellectual rage and hate, partly because everything is a matter of the intellect and nothing a matter of ideas--and therefore of feeling, real feeling, too. Belief in oneself and what one says, is not an easy thing to come by, or come to, especially if we understand what we are saying to be merely an indicator of what we do not, cannot quite know yet in full--that is, when one also has doubts. So while I do want to apologize for the harsh tones of some of the entries here--to come round to what I meant to say in this little note--I also can come to bear something of their harshness, looking back on it, as part of the struggle which others still find some use in.
Looking back on it too has also made me convinced it is good to write such occasional thoughts, and if not yet professionally (I hope one day to do some reviewing, alongside my academic work), then somewhere like this. I'm setting up a little blog where I will comment on some keywords I think are pretty interesting and come across while reading, which I'll put a link to here, when I have a couple entries written. I'm also setting up a venue for my fellow graduate students to write reviews of new books at our colloquium website, which should prove interesting for anyone in the field. So keep posted for those things, if you like.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
It's time...
It's time to wrap up this blog, everyone. I'll be maybe sticking a couple nice quotes up here over the next few months, but there won't be much more new content. Mostly, this is because there are more important things to do, but also because I think I've learned what I can from this experience--that is, just jotting down things in a more public form, with an eye trained towards an audience of thoughtful readers.
I know blogs can be a lot more than this, of course, so it's not like the medium is failing me in any major way. It's just that I went in with the aim to write a bit better and think a bit more clearly, and, well, I think I've seen it through. Insofar as the blog remains something you can keep continuing even without such a goal, indeed, there it might have failed me: its informality, or unformedness, too easily moving in the space between a diary and an essay or project (the horrible vagueness of "log" hits at this), like everything electronic now can quickly become a crutch, a way of keeping you from beginning something definite and finishing it definitively.
I know that this is also part of the new (or is it old? 17th century cavalier poets did something similar too) practice of creating a public image, or a virtual identity, which you can manipulate and alter as you see fit--probably some way of giving ourselves some sort of narrative for ourselves in such a fragmented society. I think too often this ends in us merely giving ourselves excuses or justifications rather than narratives or passing off the former for the latter: I believe this or this, I take this position and so that was the reason I acted that way, I was consistent, never a hypocrite (one of the topics I gave my students for their essays this semester was the following: "Characters in fictions can be ambiguous where someone, realistically, might be called a hypocrite. Show how a narrative we have read tells a hypocrite’s story as a tale of two desires (without necessarily justifying them), rather than of self-contradicting (or even conflicting) beliefs or biases."). However, the project, insofar as it tends towards making sense of things, is a good one. It's just that I've never really been interested in that, or if I have been, I'm not quite interested any more. And in the end, all of this doesn't quite matter much anyway. Media are not responsible for what is said through them, and first and foremost blame for whatever is at fault here lies certainly with my various incapacities: inexperience; lack of skill; an over-systemic way of thinking; a tendency, drastically lessening as soon as I got into grad school, to read for critique rather than with sympathy and with the aim of understanding; a lack of inventiveness, drollery, incoherence--to name a few things that my readers have had to slog through on occasion.
The human factor broached, I feel on this level there is also an even more basic reason for bringing things to a close: I feel the blog is a good place for people who don't have anything more concrete to do on the intellectual level to just do something, put things to work. That's pretty basic, but I think it's true, and, far from being a testament to the laziness, etc. of such people--I don't mean to say this at all--it testifies to the the absolutely incredible inability of our current society to make something of people's intelligence, skill, time, and desire to be useful: we have to ask ourselves what is going on when our society has to create a massive virtual repository for less professionally oriented intellectual work, give it none of the material benefits of the actual world of letters or make it subject to the same restraints or regulations, and then even have the gall to call it "self-publishing." Of course it's not all bad: people should be able to just have an area to talk to others casually in a weird world where it is hard to do this sometimes, and people do things with blogs that are of course much more than a waste. Again, I don't mean to indict the medium or anything: I just mean to recognize the fact that I don't know if I'd find myself fulfilled writing these things if they weren't notes merely to other work (most of which, in fact the majority of which, has nothing to do with what I write here: I write on 18th century literature), and that has to be weighed into the whole scheme of things when you are at the point of deciding whether you should quit the thing or not. I also just want to recognize, on more of a human level, how lucky I feel that I'm one of the really, really fortunate ones out there now who has more concrete things to do intellectually.
To do this another way, I might again turn the lens not on the notes here but on myself, and just say that as you get older, the desire to engage in such open-ended things as this just fades. You've been around enough to see what results from actions; you have a good measure of your force in the world, and what type of force it is. The blog at its best extends all this and deepens it, and at its worst makes you think you can extend it much farther and go much deeper than you can: in that respect, it seems more appropriate for the young, or the young at heart, who are also more willing to get into fiery all-night-long debates about and critiques of things. I'm past that moment, I think, perhaps earlier than some of my friends (though later than a few I can think of, certainly). That doesn't at all imply I'm more mature, too cool for school--far from it. It's just that, at a certain point, you crave doing something much more actual--by which I mean, more appropriate to your measure. Some people precisely have made blogging their thing: that's great. But for me, it's in scholarly work and teaching, and the fun I have with this just can't compare to the fun and fulfillment I have with that.
Obviously, there's a nice middle way in here somewhere, and I probably will try and gesture towards it in quoting some nice bit every now and then. Of course I won't delete the blog, a few of you good souls out there have pleaded with me not to do that. But as for new things, new thoughts, you won't really be getting many from me. My point here is just to say that maybe this is for the best for you too, reader, in some small way: it encourages you not to read these little notes looking for thoughts, but to go out and think and jot down some yourself.
I know blogs can be a lot more than this, of course, so it's not like the medium is failing me in any major way. It's just that I went in with the aim to write a bit better and think a bit more clearly, and, well, I think I've seen it through. Insofar as the blog remains something you can keep continuing even without such a goal, indeed, there it might have failed me: its informality, or unformedness, too easily moving in the space between a diary and an essay or project (the horrible vagueness of "log" hits at this), like everything electronic now can quickly become a crutch, a way of keeping you from beginning something definite and finishing it definitively.
I know that this is also part of the new (or is it old? 17th century cavalier poets did something similar too) practice of creating a public image, or a virtual identity, which you can manipulate and alter as you see fit--probably some way of giving ourselves some sort of narrative for ourselves in such a fragmented society. I think too often this ends in us merely giving ourselves excuses or justifications rather than narratives or passing off the former for the latter: I believe this or this, I take this position and so that was the reason I acted that way, I was consistent, never a hypocrite (one of the topics I gave my students for their essays this semester was the following: "Characters in fictions can be ambiguous where someone, realistically, might be called a hypocrite. Show how a narrative we have read tells a hypocrite’s story as a tale of two desires (without necessarily justifying them), rather than of self-contradicting (or even conflicting) beliefs or biases."). However, the project, insofar as it tends towards making sense of things, is a good one. It's just that I've never really been interested in that, or if I have been, I'm not quite interested any more. And in the end, all of this doesn't quite matter much anyway. Media are not responsible for what is said through them, and first and foremost blame for whatever is at fault here lies certainly with my various incapacities: inexperience; lack of skill; an over-systemic way of thinking; a tendency, drastically lessening as soon as I got into grad school, to read for critique rather than with sympathy and with the aim of understanding; a lack of inventiveness, drollery, incoherence--to name a few things that my readers have had to slog through on occasion.
The human factor broached, I feel on this level there is also an even more basic reason for bringing things to a close: I feel the blog is a good place for people who don't have anything more concrete to do on the intellectual level to just do something, put things to work. That's pretty basic, but I think it's true, and, far from being a testament to the laziness, etc. of such people--I don't mean to say this at all--it testifies to the the absolutely incredible inability of our current society to make something of people's intelligence, skill, time, and desire to be useful: we have to ask ourselves what is going on when our society has to create a massive virtual repository for less professionally oriented intellectual work, give it none of the material benefits of the actual world of letters or make it subject to the same restraints or regulations, and then even have the gall to call it "self-publishing." Of course it's not all bad: people should be able to just have an area to talk to others casually in a weird world where it is hard to do this sometimes, and people do things with blogs that are of course much more than a waste. Again, I don't mean to indict the medium or anything: I just mean to recognize the fact that I don't know if I'd find myself fulfilled writing these things if they weren't notes merely to other work (most of which, in fact the majority of which, has nothing to do with what I write here: I write on 18th century literature), and that has to be weighed into the whole scheme of things when you are at the point of deciding whether you should quit the thing or not. I also just want to recognize, on more of a human level, how lucky I feel that I'm one of the really, really fortunate ones out there now who has more concrete things to do intellectually.
To do this another way, I might again turn the lens not on the notes here but on myself, and just say that as you get older, the desire to engage in such open-ended things as this just fades. You've been around enough to see what results from actions; you have a good measure of your force in the world, and what type of force it is. The blog at its best extends all this and deepens it, and at its worst makes you think you can extend it much farther and go much deeper than you can: in that respect, it seems more appropriate for the young, or the young at heart, who are also more willing to get into fiery all-night-long debates about and critiques of things. I'm past that moment, I think, perhaps earlier than some of my friends (though later than a few I can think of, certainly). That doesn't at all imply I'm more mature, too cool for school--far from it. It's just that, at a certain point, you crave doing something much more actual--by which I mean, more appropriate to your measure. Some people precisely have made blogging their thing: that's great. But for me, it's in scholarly work and teaching, and the fun I have with this just can't compare to the fun and fulfillment I have with that.
Obviously, there's a nice middle way in here somewhere, and I probably will try and gesture towards it in quoting some nice bit every now and then. Of course I won't delete the blog, a few of you good souls out there have pleaded with me not to do that. But as for new things, new thoughts, you won't really be getting many from me. My point here is just to say that maybe this is for the best for you too, reader, in some small way: it encourages you not to read these little notes looking for thoughts, but to go out and think and jot down some yourself.
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