(6:09 PM) | Brad:

Let the True Work Begin

[17:32] Brad: I really cannot stand the smugness of Crooked Timber
[17:33] Brad: & other associated blogs
[17:33] Adam: Yeah.
[17:33] Adam: They don't follow the trends! They have an eye for genuine quality!
[17:34] Brad: IMPORTANT work
[17:34] Brad: And when all else fails, just cry Sokal
[17:34] Adam: I've changed the taglines accordingly.
[17:35] Brad: I mean ... there's this weird feeling amongst so many that even at its height theory threatened the sciences
[17:35] Brad: and that's just absurd
[17:35] Brad: the last I looked the military industry still employed engineers and scientists, and not pomo theorists
[17:35] Brad: lit. theory wonks, etc.
[17:37] Adam: And plus I'm just so fucking sick of science-oriented people basically disallowing any non-scientist from so much as mentioning science because they "get it wrong" in some undefined way.
[17:37] Adam: Always undefined!
[17:37] Brad: and when non-scientists cry foul at the abuse of theory, we're shut down
[17:38] Brad: when we suggest that maybe they don't understand, we're called pretentious
[17:38] Brad: when we suggest that they need to know more, we're told that theory should be super-obvious
[17:41] Adam: Yeah, exactly -- it's an attempt to make sure no conversation happens at all.
[17:42] Adam: Okay, but then the next step is -- we're being obtuse and refusing to deal with the "real issues" if we bring in any of these rhetorical issues or analyze the motives behind statements.
[17:42] Brad: Right ... which leads to the full circle. Because when we try to deal w/ "real issues" i.e., the stuff of their respective fields, we're back where we started
[17:43] Adam: All statements of self-proclaimed "scientists" ad extra are power-plays.
[17:46] Brad: We should just begin blatantly saying, "Well, obviously the scientists are idiots."
[17:46] Brad: "Let's move on to the real work of theory."
[17:46] Brad: embrace the caricacture
[17:47] Adam: Scientists are robots.
[17:47] Adam: They do great work! Three cheers! But they aren't qualified to talk to us about what they're doing.
[17:47] Adam: Or about anything other than what they're doing.
[17:47] Brad: Maybe Heidegger came to hate science because of too many lunch conversations w/ scientists
[17:48] Adam: Scientists do not think -- they simply and immediately know.
[17:48] Brad: one need not think about reality that much if it is, you know, real.
[17:48] Brad: it simply is
[17:48] Brad: accept it
[17:49] Brad: a mixture of common sense & the absence of self-consciousness made this country great, Adam
[17:49] Adam: It's as though thinking that there are questions in principle (rather than questions we haven't yet gotten around to answering) is a sign of a stunted intellectual development.
[17:50] Brad: or, more importantly, a threat
[17:50] Adam: It's kind of a neat trick that "science" just means "knowledge."
[17:50] Adam: It's the only available type of "knowledge."
[17:50] Adam: I kind of wish that we had something like "Wissenschaft" in English.
[17:51] Brad: Yes ... of course. Even theory is parastic on science. Because it knows it needs such "knowledge"
[17:51] Brad: it simply bastardizes it for its own ends
[17:51] Adam: But only scientists have earned the right to talk about science, because only they really know stuff.
[17:51] Brad: Theory must be about something ... but the do not have the tools or ability to be about anything
[17:52] Brad: therefore ... theory is empty-headed nonsense
[17:53] Brad: Actually, you know, I'm more concerned at the unified notion of "theory" than I am anything else.
[17:53] Brad: anything non-scientific, as such, becomes wonkery
[17:53] Adam: It's just the same as what religious people do with scientific "theories."
[17:53] Brad: True
[17:54] Adam: Scientists are fundamentalists.
[17:54] Brad: Yes ... because acknowledging the non-scientific as knowledge would threaten a wholesale reevaluation
[17:54] Brad: and this is untenable -- the groundrules cannot be questioned
[17:54] Brad: or changed
[17:56] Adam: I mean, look at how far we've gotten!
[17:56] Brad: Once you begin to question science, Adam, you end up like the Bush Administration's policy toward science
[17:56] Adam: It's like Descartes said -- walk through the woods in ONE MOTHER FUCKING DIRECTION for all of eternity, and before long you'll have produced the nuclear bomb.
[17:56] Brad: it's a slippery slope, this!
[17:57] Brad: love it or leave it, Motherfucker! accept science, or shut the fuck up ... entirely, or else
[17:57] Brad: scientists are the new redneck
[17:59] Adam: We must post this conversation as a blog post.
[17:59] Brad: there is, at times, a certain poetry to IM conversation

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(10:06 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

Being and Event Reading Group: Open Thread

Old Doug Johnson is going to write the main post for this week, but he won't be able to post it until later tonight or early tomorrow. This open thread is for anyone who wanted to open discussion with questions from this week or last.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(9:28 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Overspecialized Internet Quizzes

This should be required for incoming seminarians. Found via Angela, who apparently no longer visits The Weblog daily, but still quite often.

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451. Chalcedon compliant 100% Nestorianism 58% Pelagianism 50% Monophysitism 33% Monarchianism 25% Apollanarian 8% Arianism 0% Adoptionist 0% Docetism 0% Gnosticism 0% Albigensianism 0% Modalism 0% Socinianism 0% Donatism 0% Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Friday, March 10, 2006

(2:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

A Second Round of Confession: Patheticness

It's pretty pathetic to check the mail less than a half hour after you snatched up the mail within a few minutes of its arrival.

What pathetic thing have you done lately, dear readers?

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(7:30 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: The End of Man

I confess that reading books from before the advent of "inclusive language" has made me nostalgic for the generic use of the word "man." No other word seems to be able to take its place, not exactly. "Humanity" doesn't work because it sounds like an abstract quality ("humannness"), and "humankind" is not much better in that regard. Many of the foreign students whose papers I sometimes edit have used the word "human" where "man" would normally be, but that's obviously not going to work. "Humans," too -- inadequate because plural, and besides, it sounds like one is speaking from the perspective of extraterrestrial visitors: "Surrender, humans!" No, none of those captures either the singularity or the concreteness of the word "man." "Man" implies not some generic quality of "humanness" that happens to have been expressed in some more or less arbitrary way -- no, it indicates this history, the world as it has actually happened. It has echoes for me of Paul's use of "Adam" and "Christ" to describe the two ways of counting humanity as one -- and notice here that I'm still using the terms I implicitly reject.

I confess that the term "man" is not my own, not something that I can use with a straight face. That's why it's nostalgia: "What would it have been like to live in a world when one could refer to 'the history of man' without scare quotes?" I'm sure that in the books I am reading, which come from the 1960s and 1970s, they might not realize it yet, but even they can no longer use the term "man" without scare quotes -- and not just because feminism happened. It probably has something to do with losing empires, with having a whole generation mowed down in the trenches, with seeing the heartland of the intellect overrun by insanity. "Man is dead -- it is we who have killed him." Or else: "For as in Adam all die...."

But still -- how odd, that the intellectual culture of the 1960s and 70s is so nostalgic for me. In part, it's simply a factor of the books in the Davison Public Library. So much optimism that an intellectual culture of some quality could be transmitted to the masses. Some kind of break seems to have occurred since then -- too easy to blame the culture wars, though. I confess that I don't really know. Not really.

I confess that sometimes I feel like I'm running fumes, on these scattered remarks that I've read somewhere, these suggestions gleaned from the tacky prefaces to books I never ended up reading, the kind of thing that a particular reviewer in The New Yorker seems to have.... Wait! That's it! It's the evacuation of the "middle brow"! Like in philosophy -- we have Deepak Chopra or else Gilles Deleuze. Where, I ask you, is our generation's Albert Camus? What will replace existentialism as our philosophy for people who don't really have time for philosophy?

It's probably the exception rather than the rule -- the aftermath of the GI Bill. Now we're getting back to normal, a national culture that has to do with nothing but politics, politics in the most idiotic sense of the term ("Democrat" and "Republican" as the only ontological categories). I'll confess that I'm not helping. All I talk about is "national issues," as opposed to "local" ones. But in terms of intellectual culture -- what would it be like if people took more seriously the idea of keeping up with authors in their region? Chicago alone would provide more material than one could possibly keep up with -- but let's say a city the size of Milwaukee or Baltimore. There you would have a critical mass of people who could actually produce quality work. The problem would be convincing people that a local audience is "worth it." I confess that I wouldn't be willing to work my ass off just so that I could be well-known in Chicago.

I confess that this hasn't been a normal confessional.

I confess that the comment thread to this post is amazing.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Thursday, March 09, 2006

(6:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Knowingness, and how to communicate it

Talking with erstwhile Webloggian Robb Schuneman today, I was compelled to read some old threads, including this one in which I had an argument with F. Winston Codpiece III, ultimately necessitating his excommunication from The Weblog. At that time, erstwhile Weblog reader George W. complained that I didn't do philosophy anymore. It still stung. And so: philosophy.

That is to say: Lacan. There is something about an encounter with Lacan that produces arrogance in the subject. Of course I don't need to tell you this: our experience proves as much every single day. There is something about feeling as though one has decoded one of his enigmatic texts that gives one the impression that one has a direct line to Being itself. Let others sit around and spout off unfounded random opinions: the one who has subjected himself to Lacan knows, and surely gets off on that knowledge. He sits content, smiling at those naive, uninitiated folk -- the only question is how to convey to them, not his knowledge (for that would be impossible, they would never understand), but the fact that he knows, the very knowingness to which he has been exposed and in which he participates. A patronizing "Socratic" question, inquiring whether common sense isn't exactly wrong? Perhaps too risky -- although it happens, perhaps more often than we think, it is undoubtedly a stroke of luck when one hits on a position that is the strict inverse of truth. A direct exposition is not a real option -- the desire to start drawing things on the blackboard may be too strong to resist. In most cases, smugness will do.

That's how you can tell someone who is just taking Zizek's word for it from someone who has seriously studied Lacan at first hand -- the former is insecure, over-eager to spout the dogma in every possible position; the latter can remain silent, simply shake his head and chuckle dismissively. (They say that for the last few years of his seminar, Lacan stood behind the podium in utter silence.)

(For a while, I tried telling women that I had read Lacan in French. Though true, it did not "get me anywhere." I still don't fully understand why that was.)

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(2:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Spreading Death Squads

Via Cliopatria, I come across this article comparing Iraq to Vietnam. What I'd really like to see is an article comparing Iraq to Latin America, viewing Iraq as a more heavy-handed and direct version of what we (we, America) did and sponsored in Latin America. That would have the virtue of allowing us to draw connections -- "Hey, this thing happened in Latin America under Reagan, and now... hey! wait a minute! The exact same person is ordering the exact same thing in Iraq!"

I think there's a pretty simple reason that such things are not done in the mainstream press -- which reported on the "Salvadoran option" without drawing out any of the consequences or displaying any protest whatsoever. That is, it's pretty easy to oppose the bastard son of the containment doctrine, particularly if you can associate the worst excesses with Nixon. All of it is behind us, and "everyone" agrees that Vietnam was bad -- yet somehow it is perceived as an isolated unfortunate incident. It's hard to pull off the same effect vis-à-vis the fucking Monroe Doctrine -- that's been with us since pretty early on. The Carter Doctrine expanded the same basic concept to the Middle East, so we shouldn't be surprised that the same techniques are being used.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

(9:52 AM) | Brad:

Cells & Deception

About a year & a half of my life was spent studying the in's and the out's of conning people. Much of this has to do with the fact that my doctoral dissertation entailed an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of Herman Melville's final novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. In the course of studying the con man's (& Melville's) patterns of misdirection, fluidity of identity, and rhetorical adaptivity, I became very interested in the theory behind complex adaptive systems [CAS] & various models of cellular automata. I was reminded why after watching the documentary Death by Design -- as well as rehashing all the reasons I had grown increasingly disenchanted with CAS and cellular automata as means of describing human activity.

In the documentary, for instance, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi-Montalcini describes the process of thought she used to determine the reality (and eventually the necessity) of cell death. While doing so, she draws a rough analogy with the death surrounding here in Italy at the time, during World War II. Now, this would be a benign metaphor in the context of the documentary, were it not for the repeated (and very artfully done) juxtapositions of scientists talking about cellular activity and images of intersection traffic, stock market transactions, crowd behavior, etc. By the end, a couple of the scientists go so far as to say there is more than a "metaphorical" analogy at play here, and bemoan the fact that their insights are not taken into account on the level of politics.

This is where I kind of recoil. The whole analogy they find between cellular activity and human activity is built around such activity being absolutely naturalized (and thus, de-politicized). Death, for instance, is necessary & constructive; and individual cells/agents only "receive" their agency from their active participation in the whole, the living organism. It's little surprise to me that the leading advocates for these theories outside cellular biology are deeply immersed in market research & organizational structures on a corporate level -- and their bastard children, contemporary church growth gurus. Now, there may be no "invisible hand" guiding things, but the overwhelming naturalism ("why do cells act this way? -- because that's the way they have") doesn't need divine intervention or providence. Rather, the ostensible chaos of vibrant human activity, if looked at closely enough, reveals a pattern of adaptivity. Ultimately, then, we can finally describe this adaptivity and the tenuousness of its ensuing order.

Which is where the con man returns. There is, after all, something duplicitous about the central dialectic of the theories that draw from CAS and cellular automata, namely that of order & chaos (and thus, in a sense, that of sovereignty and freedom). -- Duplicitous insofar as there really is no choice offered. Order is always already there, it can only be observed and described as such; indeed, entire discourses are built around explaining the order that simply is. For in explaining, we are liberated from the tyranny of ignorance by insight. -- Duplicitous insofar as spontaneity is repressed; the contingencies of life tagged and ordered in order to make way for Life. -- Duplicitous insofar as Life is what is, even when we know (and acknowledge) that appearances are most often deceiving.

Which makes me wonder whether we should tread very cautiously w/ regard to thinking the logic of cells as a means of political resistance.

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(Brad has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

(7:59 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tuesday Hatred: The Inoperative Community

I hate it when the tub doesn't drain while I'm taking a shower. I hate it when de-clogging products don't work. I hate the bizarre spelling of the brand names of popular de-clogging products.

I hate that I'm not as "into" this season of 24, mostly because I'm no longer usually watching it in a group setting. It's not quite the same as with Survivor, which it wouldn't even occur to me to watch except as a big social event.

I hate that I was passive-aggressively pushed out of that house in Bourbonnais, even though I sincerely think that I would be on the brink of suicide if I were still living in Bourbonnais (or Bradley, or Kankakee) to this day. That was a nice house, a nice location -- plus a nice, stable job, a decent library right across the street in the last resort. I've been thinking lately -- I was more interested in blogging back then. In some respects, my interest was somewhat lame, as in my attempts at political commentary (that is, an attempt to get noticed by the "big" blogs). But for me at least, my greatest desire to blog was fuelled by loneliness, by this sense that I was part of a very small, beleaguered group. Criticizing Bush, for instance, doesn't seem as urgent now that I'm constantly surrounded by people who equally hate him. Making fun of the religious right doesn't seem to be as much fun now that I'm no longer living next door to a Christian university.

There's always talk somewhere or other about blogging being a "community" -- for instance, in the academic blogging circles, there are always those who are a little too into it, who are trying to put out ideas that they've been storing up for months or years, surrounded by people who (at least presumably) wouldn't understand. "Finally, someone I can relate to!" I don't mean to make fun, because the archives (particularly of my pre-blog articles) will show that I was among them. Perhaps it's necessary for that kind of thing to happen, for people to have an outlet. But "community?" I don't know. Maybe a feverish attempt to cover over the fact that it isn't a community, a refusal to admit that this, too fails to be community.

UPDATE: I hate it when I betray the blogging community by neglecting to post a link to Tuesday Love until after working hours are through. (Hopefully Richard was placated by the e-mail chess game today, which I am dutifully losing because I am an idiot.)

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Monday, March 06, 2006

(6:33 PM) | Brad:

How Long Before It's Mentioned by Zizek?

VULVA Original beguiles the senses with the scent of a real vagina thus opening up completely new vistas for enhancing your sex life. VULVA Original lets you enjoy the scent of a woman anytime you want. It's easy to use; shake the VULVA vial well, and the fluid is also transformed to optically resemble the object of every man's desire. Then apply it to the back of your hand and sniff. Your libido will take care of the rest all by itself. Extensive series of tests prior to the pro-duct launch prove that the flavour is convincing.

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(Brad has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(7:07 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:

Monday Picture Blogging: Enough Cuteness to Heal Any Wound.

I have only one picture to share with you today, but I think you'll agree it is by far the cutest picture ever and may have the ability to cure disease by gazing upon it twice a day.

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(Anthony Paul Smith has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(6:22 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:

Catching up on the Reading Group

After week one's impressive start to the Badiou reading group things have unfortunately fizzled a good bit. I'm for pressing on as it is probably the only way I'll read this book anything like soon, and I think I probably should. I've only recently gotten a hold of B&E and have committed to trying to catch up by this weekend in time to do the short presentation. I've read through Part I (pp. 1-80) thus far and further promised some preliminary remarks.

First, with respect to mathematics - Badiou remarks upon maths' peculiar 'power to both fascinate and horrify' (19). Ever since the end of high school, however, the maths for me have rather been a temptation (a temptation that skews toward fascination rather than horrification). In the same way, ontology, chess (at one point also Go), and general philosophical competency have been temptations. Choices have to be made in life and, as of now, I can't find a way to justify (for myself) indulging any of these temptations. Perhaps down the road ... I'm reading Being and Event almost exclusively on the strength of the minor titular term. I'm engaging the maths only so much as I find necessary to grasp what's going on with respect to the situation, event, etc. As such, I'm going to take Badiou's 'practical' suggestion (19) and only really work with the pair of conceptual and textual meditations and leave the meta-ontological (or more strictly mathematical) meditations aside.

In Part I, I found Meditations Four and Six (on 'The Void' and 'Aristotle') the most stimulating. Med. 2 'Plato' was also of vital interest, but mostly explained in much greater detail what I understood of Badiou prior to picking up B&E. I knew that Badiou was a 'platonist of the multiple' but was not aware that he was also an 'aristotelian of the void.' As someone who once considered myself an Aristotelian highly sympathetic to attempts to read Plato and Aristotle together, I was more than a little impressed and, as an amateur, thoroughly convinced that Badiou is successfully extending the Platonic-Aristotelian project in a dazzling new direction.

Here, I should also comment briefly on a prior discussion I've had with Jared concerning Badiou and theology. I can see now where a denial of the link is to be found in 'the maths.' Still, from what I understand so far, I don't see how a negative theological orientation, especially Rosenzweig's, couldn't be perfectly consonant with what Badiou is doing. I think a militant of Rosenzweig could easily entertain a 'platonism of the multiple' and an 'aristotelianism of the void' and successfully make the charge that 'all cognition of the all begins in death,' and that the constitutive elements of the mulitiple can only be sutured together on the strength of revelation (or 'event'). I'll continue to look for problems in this regard, knowing that Badiou strenously denies death as critical to his thinking.

Finally, some remarks closer to the actual text: Badiou seems to me to take on Foucault by way of sideswipes. Analysis of 'mental illness' is named on p. 1 a 'non-philosophical practice' nevertheless important in the unfolding of '[a] post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject.' And in the section of most interest to me, Badiou writes with respect to 'The Void,' 'The logic of the lacuna, of what the count-as-one would have 'forgotten', of the excluded which may be positively located as a sign or real of pure multiplicity, is an impasse-an illusion-of thought, as it is of practice' (54). Immediately in the same section (54-56) we get Badiou's most rigorous description of the void. I simply don't get how an understanding of the void as something other than non-being, as an uncountable multiple that has to remain hidden below the surface in the artificial count-as-one of the multiple sutured to the structure of a situation, is any different from the 'logic of the lacuna.' To put things in terms of the non-philosophical practice of analyzing madness, what is the Badiouan problem with a suggestion that the situation of 'the spirit of capitalism' can only occur to the extent that those who won't work ( the beggar, the madman, the criminal) are forcefully hidden below the surface, not counted (in a census or sociological analysis or political engagement, etc), and further that proper attention to such a void or lacuna is a useful way to explode an unjust situation or even super structure?

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(Old - Doug Johnson has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Sunday, March 05, 2006

(7:52 PM) | John Emerson:

Amelia: Shameless Kin Promotion

My son's post-Decemberist band, Amelia, is playing in at Barbès in Brooklyn on Monday, March 6th, 9:30 pm. (376 9th Street - corner of 6th Avenue in Park Slope, 718.965.9177, www.barbesbrooklyn.com) .

On Thursday, March 9th at 7 pm they play in NYC at the Living Room (154 Ludlow Street between Stanton and Rivington, 212.533.7235, www.livingroomny.com).

Not like the Decemberists at all. Jazzy, somewhat Latin, adult music (AAA format for radio).

http://www.ameliaband.com

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(John Emerson has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)