The Varieties of Descriptive Experience

Bump:  Description is (extraordinarily) important and the passage by Mark Twain is (freakin') gorgeous. (Post originally from Nov. 2011.)

Or, literary hermeneutics as blind butchery

First, I note that I’ve blogged a number of posts dealing with description, either as a main or a subsidiary topic. In particular, there’s this post where. among other things, I note that a grammar is a description of language, specifically, that the Chomsky revolution in linguistics was about a certain way of describing a grammar. And there’s this post where I talk of abstract pictures (as descriptions), using the Watson/Crick double-helix model of DNA as my prime example. And then there’s this post, about the distribution of paragraph lengths in Heart of Darkness, again, description.

Those are very different kinds of description. Back in my days teaching technical writing I had students describe a mechanism in one assignment and a process in a different one. There we have two more kinds of description. In one case you’re describing something that’s static and in the other you’re describing something that unfolds in time.

Here’s a descriptive passage that’s of still a different kind. Technically, I suppose, it’s a description of an object. But the description is fundamentally expressive in nature, the concluding sentences from Mark Twain’s “Speech on the Weather”:

Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to do honor to the New England weather--no language could do it justice. But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would not like to part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries—the ice-storm:

when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top—ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence.

One cannot make the words too strong.

I suppose we could go on and on cataloging various kinds of description. And perhaps someone has done so.

The description that most interests me these days, of course, is the description of literary texts. And not just any old description, but a certain kind of description. Just what kind that is, that’s a bit tough to specify. There IS this longish essay in which I say that a text has a computational form.

That’s what I want to describe. But I can’t say just what that is a priori. At least I can’t do that very well. That is, in part, because the nature of computation is itself rather obscure, as this article on Computation in Physical Systems lays it out.

It is my belief that such descriptions are necessary if we are to construct objective knowledge of literature of a new kind. That’s what I’m after, objective knowledge. What must those descriptions be like in order to be the foundation of objective knowledge? The Watson/Crick description of DNA became one of the foundations of objective knowledge about the molecular genetics of biology. Thousands upon thousands of morphological descriptions prepared over three or four centuries provided Darwin and others with the foundation on which to develop the idea of biological evolution.

THOSE are the kinds of descriptions I’m after. But not of biological objects. Of literary texts. I want descriptions that carve nature at the joints, to use a figure that dates back to Plato, Phaedrus (265e-266a):

. . . we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher, but to take example from our two recent speeches. The single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings. Wherefore the first speech divided off a part on the left, and continued to make divisions . . .

And so forth. You get the idea.

It’s clear to me that, as long as the explication of textual meanings is the primary tool of literary criticism, we’re just hacking away like blind butchers. If we want to carve our texts at the joints, we’ve got to open our eyes, and describe what we see. Slowly, patiently, accurately.

It’s not easy, it’s not self-evident. It’s worthy of our best efforts. In fact, believe it or not, it requires invention. We need to create tools and tactics for doing the descriptions. Why? Because they’re not there ready and waiting for us. Biologists had to figure out how to describe organisms and molecules. We’ve to do the same, and the things we’re describing, they’re not so tangible.

Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 2, How to Construct a Spirit

Culture has produced some strange things. Supernatural spirits is one of them. I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue just to get it on my mind, as I need to think about these things a bit more while I contemplate writing a book on cultural evolution.

* * * * *

Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter.
—Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”

In lieu of an environment that surrounds culture . . . picture an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

About two weeks ago I posted some remarks on how one thinks about and plays very simple percussion instruments, claves and bells, and told a story about some mysterious tones that sometimes arise in bell choirs. I also promised a post in which I “attempt to construe those sounds as spirit voices.” This is that post.

The Magic of the Bell, Recap

The phenomenon that interests me is that of certain high frequency (around 2000 Herz and above) ‘twitters’ that arose during a certain rehearse I attended some years ago. As I explained in that post, there were four of us, each playing a different bell. Three of us play set patterns, time and again, while the fourth improvised freely over those patterns.

At a certain point, when energy was high and the music was rocking, we all heard these high twittering sounds. None of us was playing them. That is, they didn’t coincide with the patterns any of us were playing. Rather, they somehow arose through the interaction of the patterns the four of us played. We’d played together many times before, and many times since, but that was the only time we heard those sounds.

What were they? The purpose of this post is to explore what’s involved in asserting that they were some kind of ‘spirit.’

What phenomenon are we trying to name and explain?

This is a matter of drawing a boundary. Perhaps the easiest play to draw the boundary, dare I say it? the natural place, is around the sound itself. If we had had a recorder playing during that session, bounding the phenomenon in this way would be very easy. What we’re interested in would be what’s on the recording; nothing more, nothing less.

Then we could examine the recording to determine just what those pitches were like, their dominant frequency, just when they happened, and so forth. That is to say, we would be treating those sounds as nothing but mechanical vibrations, which we are examining in the standard ways. This is, of course, an entirely legitimate thing to do. It’s done all the time.

But THAT’s not the phenomenon that interests me. That’s not where I want to draw the boundary. That’s only one aspect of the phenomenon that interests me. It’s the aspect that tells me that THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE GOING ON.

Remember my description? I said that this happened when the energy was high and the music rocked. That doesn’t always happen. It’s not rare, but it’s not automatic, and for some purposes it’s neither necessary nor desired. So high rocking energy, that’s within the boundary of the phenomenon I’m talking about.

But drawn that way, the boundary isn’t tight enough, it’s not precise enough. For those twitterings didn’t always happen when the music rocked. They happened only that one time, though, as I indicated in the earlier post, Ade (the leader) recognized the phenomenon. He’d experienced it before, but the others of us had not. Ade was (and is) a very experienced percussionist. He’d toured and performed professionally in his youth and has a wide circle of musician friends, including drummers expatriated from West Africa. He knew those sounds, and simply called them “the magic of the bell.”

Other than the sounds themselves, what’s the difference between rocking music and magic music? Whatever that difference it, I’m going to call it spirit.

So, what do I think REALLY happened? Well, I don’t think some ghostly beings from another dimension entered our bodies and guided our playing. But I don’t have a positive account to offer. I think the place to look is in the micro-timings of our movements and in the neural activity in subcortical regions of our brains, perhaps even in the core of the core of the brain, the reticular activity system and, certainly, in the cerebellum. That’s where I think the action is, but that’s no more than an educated guess.

So in saying that those twitterings are manifestations of spirit, I am, in effect, projecting some subtle group-level neuro-muscular activity onto those sounds that serve as a diagnostic indicator of the phenomenon. To say that those twitterings are spirits, or voices of spirits, is to speak figuratively, where the figure is synecdoche, using the part (the twitter sounds) to stand for the whole (group locked in very intense musical activity).

This is pretty much what I’m doing when, in another context I talk of graffiti as manifestations of the spirit, or kami (in Japanese) of the site. When I do that, I’m NOT asserting that some being from another dimension comes through the wall, enters the graffiti writer, and directs his activity. Rather I’m saying that we cannot understand how and why graffiti ends up in this or that particular place without taking into account, not only the nature of the surface itself, but lines of sight and access, general location and neighborhood traffic, legal status (e.g. is it posted as no trespassing) and past history. All of that is important to the sight and I want to treat all of it as an indivisible gestalt. The easiest way to do this is to talk of the spirit of the site.

There are, of course, differences. The spirit of the graffiti site is, by definition, resident at the site. The twitter spirits don’t seem to have any residence at all. They just come and go. But there’s an overall similarity in the mode of construction, both are assemblages of heterogenous components: walls, paints, footpaths, laws, writers and viewers in one case; bells, strikers, and musicians in the other.

Scienceandtechnology, or, Engineers Rule!

I'm thinking about method these days, and whatever method I've got is more like engineering than science, so I'm bumping this to the top of the queue.

There was a time when I thought of one entity: scienceandtechnology. This entity was all mathy and computery, and that differentiated it from, say, the humanities, which were not and are not at all mathy and computery.

In fact, I’m sure many people believe in this scienceandtechnology thingy.

So it came as something of a shock to realize that, no, scienceandtechnology is not one thing. It is two, science on the one hand, and technology on the other. Yes, they’re both mathy and computery, but they’re otherwise quite different.

And the difference is important, not simply for engineers and scientists, but for those of us in the human sciences who are trying to advance our knowledge of the human mind, human society, and human culture. Perhaps as a crude start, engineering is to rhetoric as science is to interpretation.

Science is about analyzing and describing to arrive at theories and models of how things work. The end result of a course of scientific work is an account of how some phenomenon can be explained within a given framework of laws and models. Such frameworks are likely to be elegant and compact. Newton, for example, had three laws of motion, not 57.

Engineering is quite different. Engineers use laws and models to analyze situations so that they can design a device to perform a certain task. The output of a course of engineering work is the description of that device and plans for its construction. To have any value those plans must specify something that can be constructed with known materials using known methods.

Thus when I was on the faculty at the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute I learned that the engineering curriculum had a design stem, a series of courses required of all engineers devoted specifically to design. That is, it was not assumed that engineering graduates would somehow magically figure out how to design buildable stuff once they’d graduated and taken jobs in the “real” world. They were taught, given practice in, designing and building things.

Science isn’t like that. Scientists may design experiments, but that’s mostly a matter of logic, not of constructing something piece by piece by piece, and so forth, for 10s, 100s, or 1000s or more pieces. And yes, scientists may construct apparatus. To the extent they are doing that, they are acting as engineers. For that matter, engineers will make observations and conduct tests as part of their design work. And so they will, on occasion, act as scientists. But the overall objectives and methods, the envelope, if you will, of a scientific enterprise is different from that of an engineering enterprise.

Why does this matter to the human sciences? Because we deal with complex heterogeneous systems of many parts, systems where design and function are crucial. Thinking about such systems requires a mentality that, if anything, partakes more of engineering than of science. Perhaps that’s why Bruno Latour talks of compositionism, for composition implies design and construction. The FAQ at his website notes that he’s taught engineers for twenty years.

If we in the human sciences are going to ape our techno-savvy colleagues—not necessarily a good thing, but not necessarily bad either—perhaps we should pay more attention to engineers than scientists. Their problems are more like the problems of writers, musicians, artists, or even politicians and bureaucrats. They have more to teach us than do scientists. We don't need humanists who secretly wish they were scientists. We need humanists who openly aspire to engineering.

ADDENDUM: See this recent column by Mark Changizi.

Rita Felski Calls for Latourian Humanities

She points out (Doing the Humanities with Bruno Latour) that critique is over-rated:

Helen Small writes: “the work of the humanities is frequently descriptive, or appreciative, or imaginative, or provocative, or speculative, more than it is critical.” This seems exactly right. That intellectuals in the humanities so often invoke “critique” as a guiding ethos and principle may speak to the stubborn persistence of an either/or mindset: the fear that if one is not negating the status quo, one is therefore being co-opted by it. The practices of academic life may turn out to be more messy, more ambiguous, and more interesting. And it is here that I found Bruno Latour’s work very helpful in working through a different set of ideas on why the humanities matter.

Can we develop a defense of the humanities that is not anchored exclusively in the value of “critical thinking”? Are there other attitudes, actions, orientations in play? To what extent are humanists engaged in practices of making as well as unmaking, composing as well as questioning, creating as well as subverting? And can we talk about the social ties of the humanities in ways that avoid the dichotomy of heroic opposition or craven cooption? Perhaps we need a multi-dimensional defense of the humanities; one that accumulates rationales rather than limiting them or narrowing them down. Today I offer four terms: curating, conveying, criticizing; composing—hoping that the lure of alliteration will not overly compromise the force of my argument! (I make no attempt to be comprehensive and welcome other suggestions about what the humanities do and how we do the humanities).

FWIW, Felski edits New Literary History, which is where Latour published "Steps Toward the Writing of a Compositionist Manifesto" in 2010.

I've written a bit about compositionism here at New Savanna, and called for compositionist literary studies a couple of years ago.

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2

As the title indicates, this post is a follow-up to my previous post, Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism. This post has been prompted both by my own after thoughts and by remarks by Terence Blake.

Caveat: This is quick and dirty. I’m more interested in sketching out a quick scheme than in working out details.

Let’s start with a simple diagram depicting relationships between three Realms of Being:

The Common Sense Realm is the world of consensus reality; we hold it more or less in common with all (adult) inhabitants of our society. The Literary Realm is the world of literary texts of all kinds, high, low, and mid-cult, adults, children, young adults, whatever. The Realm of Literary Criticism is that of formal written commentary on those texts. An arrow between two realms indicates some relationship between the two. The Realm at the head end of the arrow has access to the Realm at the tail end.

Thus LCR (Literary Criticism Realm) has access to both CSR (Common Sense Realm or Common Sense) and LR (Literary Realm). Note that the arrow between CSR and LR is double-headed, indicating that each has access to the other. The texts in LCR are largely about objects (informally understood), persons, and events in CSR while the texts in LR physically circulate in CSR and people comment informally on those texts in CSR.

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism

When I set out to investigate Object-Oriented Ontology a year and a half ago I had several things vaguely in mind: 1) the possibility that Continental philosophy was waking up from its dogmatic dreams of dalliance and devastation, 2) some help in conceptualizing graffiti as a manifestation of the spirit of the place, and 3) some help in framing some questions about literature and literary criticism. Let’s set the first two aside and take up the third.

I take the following three propositions to be true:

1) The meaning of literary texts is indeterminate.

2) There is, however, something quite precise about texts; I take that to be form.

3) The form of texts can be effectively described in that, presupposing agreement on method, different can come to agreement about formal attributes of a text.

As a practical matter, literary criticism has taken the first as a truism. Every critic gets to “roll their own” meaning for a text; all that one has to do is provide a reasonable justification within some accepted interpretive scheme. Beyond this tacit and informal practice, some critics have explicitly argued for indeterminate meaning while others have argued for determinate meaning, often making the author the source of that meaning.

OOO as Interpretive Scheme

Object-oriented ontology can easily serve as an interpretive scheme, providing of course, that it can justify itself as a philosophical regime. That is, primary justification comes in basic philosophical terms, not in the application to literature. From my point of view, this is neither here nor there. The addition of one more interpretive engine to the critic’s tool kit is of relatively little consequence if, like me, you want to do something other than, beyond, reading texts.

Harman, however, has made some remarks that point toward the possibility of non-reductive readings, readings that don’t bypass the “surface” of the text in haste to find the “hidden” meanings, which I’ve discussed in Explicating Literature in Light of Object-Oriented Ontology. But those remarks are only pointers. It’s not clear to me how they might open up into full-blown explications. And, in any event, an explication is, in the end, an explication is a reading, and I’m chasing different unicorns.

Nor, it seems to me, does OOO have anything special to say about textual indeterminacy. Levi Bryant, to be sure, has declared that texts are factories, in a usage from Deleuze and Guattari. As far as I can tell, Bryant has nothing particularly interesting to say about how it is that texts do this, just that they obviously do so. All Bryant has to offer is old wine in new bottles or, as Terrence Blake puts is, tautological reformulation.

Pastoral 6: All Together Now: Nietzsche, Lorenz, Jakobson

Toward a Compositionist Aesthetics in which Nothing is Hidden, All is Revealed

In the past several decades the standard modes of literary and film criticism have sought to find hidden meanings. The work was thus conceived as a device to smuggling various meanings though lines of conscious defense. When the critic had found those hidden meanings, his or her work was done.

Under such a critical regime the psychological patterns I’ve found in earlier posts—sexual in the first and third, oral in the fourth—are such hidden meanings. In that regime everything else I’ve looked—the treatment of sound and color, ring form, cuteness—all that’s just deceptive camouflage. Now that the critic—that’s me, but you as well—has penetrated it, it can be discarded in favor of the REAL meaning, that ‘hidden’ sexual stuff.

The major problem with such readings is that they, in effect, discard the artistry, treating the text or film as an odd species of argument that makes its point almost completely by indirection. Well, if that’s what’s REALLY going on, then why not make the argument directly and dispense with all the artistic window dressing?

It’s not a very convincing style of criticism, though it’s been the norm for half a century. I was trained in such criticism, among other things, and have come to believe we need something more. Just what isn’t entirely clear. But what I’ve been doing with the Pastoral episode—indeed, with all of Fantasia—is to explore other ways of looking at, in this case, film. In this regime, the one I’m making up, that psychological material is still there, but I don’t regard it as particularly hidden nor do I think that pointing it out is the ultimate goal of criticism.

That psychological material is just stuff, raw material, out of which the artist, or artists in this case, construct a work of art. Those other things, color, sound, form, cuteness, they too are stuff. The purpose of this post is to begin thinking about how all this stuff works together to create a work of cinematic art. As for what that work means, I don’t know and I don’t care. Not here and now. What matters is how it works.

Reading Latour 0: Ontology, Methodology, Compositionism

(Revised 12 Oct 2011)

Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.

An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”, New Literary History, 2010, 41: 471-490.

Though it’s not so long ago that I decided to read Latour, I don’t recall the exact route that led me to his work. It might go like this: I was intrigued by the notion of Latour litanies, read a post by Graham Harman where he referred to one he’d quoted in his study of Latour, Prince of Networks, and so downloaded that book, as it was available as a free download. Once I got the book I looked up the specific passage Harman had mentioned, a quotation from Richard Rhodes on p. 103, and then looked around in Harman’s book, finally deciding I needed to read Latour himself.

I suppose I choose Reassembling the Social both because it is relatively recent (2005) and for the systematic exposition promised by its subtitle, An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. What I read struck me as a fascinating and brilliant, if slightly odd, treatise on method:

To describe the social world, this is what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.

The many examples Latour gave were interesting but, given what he was saying, individually a bit thin (I assume he has thicker descriptive work in other books), as were the specific how-to-do-it suggestions. There was some talk of notebooks in one chapter, but that was as much a thought experiment as a practical suggestion. It’s as though the methodological flavor served as an elaborate metaphor for something else, indicated in the whys. And that something else is philosophy, more specifically, ontology.

Compositionist Literary Studies

Back in the day—and I do mean back—I thought of myself as doing cognitive science and literary criticism. So crazy was I, way back even before when in 1985 Hillis Miller lamented the death of deconstruction before the MLA, that I even thought others would be itching to jump aboard the cognitive bus.

Wrong.

Along come the mid 90s and lo and behold! others had declared themselves to be cognitivists, even as evolutionary psychology was looking good to still others. Things were moving, at last.

But alas, these literary cognitivists knew little of my work—after all, how could any literary scholar possibly have committed to cognitive science in the 1970s?—and their work was quite different in style from my own. If you came to my work after having read this newer stuff, you wouldn’t recognize it as the same. And it isn’t. Same with evolutionary psychology. Though I began incorporating primate ethology into my work in the 70s, the literary Darwinians were barking up a different tree.

In THIS newer context, how was I to brand myself—and make no mistake, it is about branding in the Madison Avenue sense. One’s got to sell oneself in the marketplace of ideas. “Ideas” is, of course, a term of courtesy. Ideas are secondary to this marketplace. What matters is whether your book is on a front shelf, cover out. Product placement.

After thinking things through, I produced a quasi-manifesto for naturalist criticism. Here’s a paragraph:

Yes, I know that “the natural” is somewhat problematic, but you’ll just have to get past that. No label is perfect and I’m not about to coin a new term. Assuming you can struggle past the word, what does naturalism suggest to you? To me the term conjures up a slightly eccentric investigator wandering about the world examining flora and fauna, writing up notes, taking photos, making drawing, and perhaps even collecting specimens. That feels right to me, except that I’m nosing about poems, plays, novels, films, and other miscellaneous things. Beyond that I’d like the term to suggest some sense of literature as thoroughly in and a part of the world. There’s only one world and literature exists in it.

Now I find that “natural” is not so good a term, though not quite for the reasons I was imagining in that paragraph.

What to do?

What I’m considering is adopting Latour’s term, “compositionism”, from his recent manifesto (downloadable PDF, video). To be sure, it appears to be a new coinage and I tend to be suspicious of new coinages. But, if so, it’s not MY new coinage, so I’m off the hook. Latour glosses the term as follows:

Even though the word “composition” is a bit too long and windy, what is nice is that it underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity. Also, it is connected with composure; it has a clear root in art, painting, music, theater, dance, and thus is associated with choreography and scenography; it is not too far from “compromise” and “compromising” retaining with it a certain diplomatic and prudential flavor. . . . Above all, a composition can fail and thus retain what is most important in the notion of constructivism (a label which I could have used as well, had it not been already taken by art history). It thus draws attention away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly

composed.

That is all quite congenial, for it’s all about how things are constructed, and that’s what most interests me as a literary critic: how these things, these works of literary art, how they are constructed.

Preview: The Key to the Treasure IS the Treasure, A Program for Literary Studies in the Current Era

Here is a brief description of a program for literary studies that has been forming in my mind over, say, the last year or so. This conceptualization is very much a work in progress.

I surmise that, in the future, literary studies will be organized around four foci: 1) description, 2) the newer psychologies, 3) object-oriented ontology, and 4) digital humanities. Do I KNOW this will happen? Of course not. I surmise that it is possible. I also think it would be a good thing, indeed.

1) Description: We need to develop richer descriptions of the texts we study. I’ve blogged about this hear and there, and I note that some folks at Arcade seem to be thinking about these lines. But mostly what I’ve been doing is working at honing my descriptive skills, with texts and with films. I’m working on an explicit justification of description. For now, see my postscript about a handbook for Heart of Darkness.

The primary texts constitute the treasure we study. Full and accurate descriptions of those texts are the key to that treasure. Everything else is built on those descriptions.

2) Newer Psychologies: By which I mean cognitive science, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology. I take this to be background knowledge, knowledge about the human mind. The first half of Brian Boyd’s On the Evolution of Stories is exemplary in this regard. Supplement it with material on the computational aspect of cognition and you have a synoptic précis of early 21st Century psychology.

3) Object-Oriented Ontology: Provides a philosophical framework in which aesthetic and ethical issues may be addressed. It’s only in the past two or three months that I’ve been pursuing this line of thought, and so I’ve relatively little to say about it. I note that OOO is grounded in the Continental philosophical tradition, which is where my own roots are. But I’m certainly not averse to contributions from the Anglo-American analytical tradition. But I know even less about that than I do about OOO.

4) Digital Humanities: The digital humanities can provide: 1) New tools for the description of literary phenomena, whether, e.g. through statistical studies of individual texts, or though ‘distant reading’ (in Franco Moretti’s phrase) of large numbers of texts over large periods of time and geographical extent. 2) Tools for richly presenting and annotating primary texts, organizing handbook material, and integrating them with the larger literature around those texts (again, see my postscript to the Heart of Darkness posts). 3) Ultimately the digital humanities may provide explanatory models, simulations, of how the mind encounters texts.* In this function the digital humanities would converge with the newer psychologies.

I do not see robust simulation of literary processes as something that is likely to happen soon. Nor do I have any idea when it is likely to happen. Thirty-five years ago I thought that it would take, perhaps, twenty years to reach that point. I was wrong.