Sunrise in Vermont

Is Harman a Platonist? More on his recommendations for literary criticism

Terence Blake has variously suggested that Harman is a transcendentalist, that those objects of never-ending withdrawal are, for all practical purposes, transcendental objects – see, for example, Paul Ennis’s Non-Laruellian Response to Levi Bryant (4), point 2. That criticism has seemed to me variously uncharitable or unnecessary. But I’m reconsidering.

When Harman’s talking about objects in general, or banging away on Heidegger’s hammer, that’s OK. Those oxen have been grazing the conceptual commons for eons and are general property. But when he talks about literary texts, well, I have a long-standing and fairly specific interest in that particular ox. It is not, of course, my ox exclusively. Not at all. But my years of study have given me a sense of ownership.

That’s MY ox that Harman is goring and I don’t like it.

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The goring that’s put me over the threshold takes place in Harman’s response to Dan Green’s critique of Harman’s New Literary History piece (which I critiqued here). Harman is responding to Green’s critique of Harman’s “counter-factual literary criticism” (Harman’s phrase):

...I think the literary text is something deeper than its current holistic configuration in the form of how the author chose to publish it, or the best available scholarly version of a text available at any given moment, or whatever is usually taken to be the real text. ...

In other words, I think I’m giving an even stronger critique of authorial intention than is usually the case. Not only do authors fail to master the infinite dissemination of their texts, they probably don’t even put the text in the right shape in the first place. Most of them should have written better texts. Just as social surroundings fail to exhaust a literary work, the exact written form of a literary work fails to exhaust the deeper spirit of that work. My article proposed the rudiments of some methods to get at that deeper spirit.

What is this unwritten text of which Harman speaks, the one that authors fail to shape properly? What is this deeper spirit he seeks? How does it differ from those Ideal Forms that Plato posited? Out there, in the Great Transcendental Beyond we have the Ideal Forms of the texts: Iliad, Pride and Prejudice, The Valley of the Dolls, they’re all there. And here, in the corporeal world, we have the impoverished husks that the authors and editors have managed to cobble together.

The Emperor’s New Virus

What causes something to go viral on the web?

I assume that lots of folks have lots to say about this matter, but I’ve not read their ideas. And I have no trouble believing that there are various factors involved. But I’m interested in one factor and have one suggestion to make about it.

I make my suggestion by way of the Hans Cristian Anderson tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Here’s how the Wikipedia tells the tale:

A vain Emperor who cares for nothing hires two swindlers that promise him the finest, best suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or "hopelessly stupid". The Emperor cannot see the cloth himself, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his position; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they mime dressing him and the Emperor marches in procession before his subjects, who play along with the pretense, until a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretense, blurts out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor cringes, suspecting the assertion is true, but continues the procession.

In this tale what goes viral is the knowledge that the emperor is naked. Of course, as soon as he starts on his march everyone knows that he is naked. But, so my point goes, that knowledge has not yet “gone viral.”

Sage

Celebrating the Future Independence of Vermont, at the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier: Toward a Politics of Jubilee

I spent Friday, 14 September, in and around the Vermont Statehouse. Sometime back in the mists of time past some good Vermont citizens decided that, in the face of the cancerous growth of the American state, that Vermont folks of conscience and caring had to organize and urge their fellow Vermonters to secede from the Union. And so the Vermont Independence Party (VIP) was born.

Friday was their third state-wide convention, with visitors from several other states as well. This convention was organized toward the reading of The Montpelier Manifesto, listing 29 grievances against the Federal Government of the United States of America and urging secession. The conference was held in the House Chamber of the Vermont Statehouse, for it seems that, by law, Vermont citizens have the right to occupy use the statehouse when it is not otherwise in use.

I was there with the Northeast Irregulars, a contingent of the New York Path to Peace, organized by Charlie Keil. We brought musicians from Jersey City, New York City, Connecticut, and Vermont. At least.

Here's some photographs of that glorious day. I apologize to all those who were there but not in these photos.

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That's Charlie Keil on the right and Jack Lazarowski on the left. Jack and his wife Linda put Charlie and I up for the night. Thanks, Jack and Linda!

The Living Cosmos

As I understand it the modern conception asserts that the cosmos is fundamentally inanimate. Dead.

And then, somehow, life evolved. Miraculously. Except that we moderns don’t believe in miracles. So life isn’t a miracle.

It’s merely a puzzle. One we have yet to solve. That non-miracle puzzle remains a mystery.

Like consciousness.

I have a suggestion: Let’s declare the cosmos to be fundamentally animate. Or at least fecund. Brimming with abundance. But not dead.

No.

Not dead.

In urging such a declaration I do not intend, thereby, to dissolve the mystery, solve the puzzle, explain the miracle. As if by magic.

Word magic.

Spells. Incantation. Enchantment.

Voodoo.

Who do the voodoo that you do so well?

Not at all.

I just want to reframe the question, you know, the question that Chas. Ives was always asking. The unanswered one.

It’s not an idle suggestion, nor unmotivated, nor even unreasonable. After all, that big bang, or whatever it was/is, was/is enormously productive. Wasn’t it? Well then, what sense does it make to say that it was/is dead?

No. It’s alive. Animate. Fecund. Abundant.

Which means that our story is no longer one of heroic struggle against and defiance of a dead universe. It is not a story of us against them. Of fragile conquest, belligerently maintained in the face of a hostile universe.

Brrrrr!

It is simply a story of us.

All of us.

bosons quarks Sappho cathedrals atoms Sam Clemens molecules V2s RNA Buddha DNA cells slime molds yurts c. elegans mushrooms Murasaki Shikibu peacocks jelly fish Tezuka Osamu ants adding machines worms manga soup wheat Richard Pryor rabbits submarines Florence Nightingale buffalo fetishes ice bergs streams braids cocktail napkins Mt. Everest Joan of Arc Sun Yat-sen

and so forth

etc.

usw.

غیره

等等

osv.

stb.

'וכו

dll.

기타

n.k.

.

.

.

∞

Seeds

If, six months ago, you’d told me I’d spend half an hour arranging fresh sunflower seeds on a slab of slate and then photographing them I would not have believed you.

Though, come to think of it . . .

Perhaps I would have. Given that I’ve taken a lot of photographs in the last few years and that, in a handful of cases, I’ve arranged this or that so I could photograph it, well, it’s at least possible that I’d take an interest in trumpets (I own half a dozen), CD jewel cases, buttons, or sunflower seeds at some time. So, I suppose, the idea of me photographing sunflower seeds at some future date wouldn’t’ seem THAT outrageous.

Not any more.

But it certainly wasn’t on my agenda. Where, after all, would I get the sunflower seeds?

If, back then, you’d told me, Why, from the community garden where you volunteer, well then: Get outa’ here! I’d helped my mother weed her flower gardens when I was a kid, but that was a long time ago. And just last year I’d spent time photographing flowers in a garden created by the Hoboken Garden Club (don’t know if that’s the group’s exact name, no matter, it identifies them well enough). But it’s one thing to photograph flowers that others plant and maintain. It’s quite something else to volunteer in a garden yourself.

Disney's Dumbo: A Myth of Modernity

It was back in the early Spring of 2007 that I sent Mike Barrier a longish email on Dumbo. I sent it as ordinary correspondence and did expect him to publish it. But he did. Which was fine by me.

But I had no intention to do any more work on Dumbo.

Then, for whatever reason, I posted Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed in the Fall of 2010. Again, I had no particular reason in mind and certainly had no intention of doing extensive work on the film. That post become the second most popular one on New Savanna, and still is.

Tripping the Elephants Electric was my third major piece on Dumbo. I posted it on June 29 of this year, 2012, and fully intended to do some more work on the film. But not as much as I ended up doing.

And I will do more work on it. Just how much more, and when, I don’t know. For now, though, it is best to lay things to rest, more or less. I need to let things settle down before I read through the whole slew of posts and try to make sense of it all.

For that WILL be required. I like what I’ve done. I don’t feel that I’m on top of things just yet. It’s more like I’m just getting around to figuring out what questions need to be asked. I need to think more about animals and about this “myth logic” that I keep invoking. And I probably need to gin up some more sophisticated intellectual equipment, more than can be conveniently deployed on New Savanna, even in a series of long-form posts.

As an example of the sort of thing I’ll be pondering, consider the bath scene. Vladimir Tytla, the lead animator for Dumbo, based his work in that scene on observations of his own infant son interacting with his mother as she bathed him. We SEE an elephant on the screen, but we see the gestures and motions of a human infant and mother at play. Similarly, in the middle of The Nutcracker Suite in Fantasia we see goldfish dancing languorously and sensuously. Don Lusk based those movements on footage that director Sam Armstrong shot of Princess Omar, who is supposed to have danced before crowned heads.

We see animals on the screen, but we feel their movements as human movements—or do we? Not quite, not exactly, I think. We abstract or extract the motions from the image and match the movements we see with our own inner movements. Somehow in this process the movements themselves float free of us and them and become just movements and gestures, pure expression. Essences even.

That’s what I want to understand. One of the things anyhow.

It’s a simple thing, really. But we don’t have the language we need to understand that simplicity. That’s what I’m after. That language.

This marvelous film has brought me closer to it.

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You can download a PDF of the Dumbo posts here (SSRN) or here (Academia.edu). I have revised them slightly in the process of gathering them together, but I haven't made any substantive changes.

Malick in the Garden

From Objects to Pluralism

This is a somewhat revised version of the essay which I originally posted on July 18, 2012. I have revised it to take account of Levi Bryant's recent work on onto-cartography and to incorporate Graham Harman's notion of vicarious or indirect causality. To do this I expanded the section, Patterns of Relations Among Objects, and added a new section, Indirect Cause and Realms of Being. The rest of the essay remains the same.

* * * * *

. . . 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 . . .  

–Plato, Phaedrus (265e-266a)

Having hazarded that pluralism is the Next Big Thing I now feel some obligation to clarify what I mean by pluralism. As it’s object-oriented philosophy that brought me to this dance, I’ll use it as a vehicle for so doing.

First, using a passage from a Graham Harman interview, I raise the question of the relationship between philosophy and the more specialized disciplines. I then continue with Harman in a section where, in effect, I ask: What can we build with objects and relations alone? By way of illustration I bring up the case of knowledge representation in the cognitive sciences, where complex conceptual systems are constructed from just that, objects and relations.

Then I take an excursion into the work of Levi Bryant, whose concept of regimes of attraction indicates the existence of relatively stable patterns of relationships over large collections of objects. I then go into full tap dance mode, suggesting that we can construct Realms of Being from that notion plus Harman's conception of indirect causation. Realms of Being, that the world consists of many different ever evolving Realms, THAT’s what I mean by pluralism. Given that, the task of metaphysics is to figure out what those Realms are and how they’re interlinked.

I conclude with some more general remarks.

A General Theory of Objects?

As a way of setting the stage, consider the following passage from Graham Harman’s interview at ASK/TELL:

. . . the reason to focus on objects rather than on “language, social change, sexuality or animals” is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. “Language is the root of everything.” Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and belief-systems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth.

All these other disciplines focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space.

My immediate and quite spontaneous reaction to that was a less than charitable: And just what can philosophy tell me about cartoon characters? I asked that question in my capacity as someone who has a specialized interest in cartoons and so has spent hours upon hours going through cartoons scene by scene, shot by shot, and even frame by frame, trying to figure out how these things work. It would be too much to expect a philosopher to look at cartoons in such detail.

But just what WOULD I expect of a philosopher? I don’t need a philosopher to tell me that Popeye is, in some sense, real. I know that already, that’s why I care about them and study them. Nor do I need a philosopher to tell me about the difference between the real object on paper or in celluloid and the image in someone’s mind. That’s been around for a long time. I don’t see that philosophy has anything new and interesting to say about that.

But then, just what does philosophy have to offer the other specialized disciplines? Do they have need of Harman’s “general theory of objects”? I have my doubts. Does ANYONE, other than philosophers, have need of a general theory of objects? If the answer to that question is “no” does that mean that such a theory has no use?

Sunset on a Sunflower

Dance Together

This is a companion piece to Kids in Search of the Dance. That post was about young kids at an outdoor concert wanting to dance to the music but not quite knowing how to do it. They had room to dance, the music was suitable, and everyone would have loved them to see them dance, but they just didn’t have the moves available.

This post is about integrating kids and adults into the same dance. Let’s return to that same concert, by the Gordys in Hoboken. After they’d played for half-an-hour to 45 minutes the band started playing some klezmer music. Almost immediately adults got up and started dancing some version of the Hora, or, more likely, the Horah, a traditional dance originating in the Balkans and adopted throughout the Jewish diaspora.

It is a round dance. People form a circle, join hands and more around to the right. As danced at this Gordys concert the circle often broke and you just had a line of people holding hands and running around the plaza in time to the music.

Here’s some photos I took:

Kids These Days

Taken at a local block party.

Benzon’s Law of the Driver’s Seat

It’s simple, really:

If you want to know what it’s like to drive a car, you’ve got to sit in the driver’s seat and drive it.

That’s particularly true if you drive s stick-shift—remember them? To watch it, there’s nothing to depressing the clutch pedal and using the gear shift. But to actually do it, that’s another thing. The gear shift is easy, but getting a feel for the clutch pedal, that takes a little time, and attention. And putting the car in gear when you’re starting on an upgrade, yowsa! When I first started on the stick shift I thought it was impossible. Now, nothing to it.

You can’t learn that from the back seat or the passenger’s seat and you can’t learn it from reading a book. You have to sit in the seat and work the clutch while coordinating with the gear shift.

It’s all like that, all the skills of driving a car. You have to do them to, well, be able to do them. Vicarious experience doesn’t cut it.

* * * * *

And everything’s like that, everything.

The Pod People are Just Around the Corner