Geoffrey Hartman on Reading

While I’m working on a long post on reading, theory, and the machinic critic I thought I’d post some passages from Geoffrey Hartman’s 1975 – those were they days, weren’t they? – collection The Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press. In the title essay Hartman is grappling with the fact that, no matter how intensely critics are oriented toward the texts of which they write, that very act of writing requires distance from those texts. One cannot write about the text if and while one is immersed in reading it. Complaining that contemporary theorists—mostly French or under French influence—have come to privilege such writing over reading, Hartman asks (p. 272): “To what can we turn now to restore reading, or that conscious and scrupulous form of it we call literary criticism?”

Hartman then observes: “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing.” I believe that Hartman is correct and that his list of modern “rithmatics” should be extended to include the newer psychologies, and to many of the analytic techniques of the digital humanities.

These methodologies are not going to restore the critic to that intimacy with the text which Hartman so earnestly desires. That is a loss. But the loss is not so much that of textual communion, but of the nostalgic rhetorical stance that such textual communion is the proper and possible end of literary criticism.

Here, without further comment, are some further passages from two of the essays in that book.

“The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis”

Confession. I have a superiority complex vis-à-vis other critics, and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis art. The interpreter, molded on me, is an overgoer with pen-envy strong enough to compel him into the foolishness of print. His self-disgust is merely that of the artist, intensified. "Joe, throw my book away." Sometimes his discontent with the "secondary" act of writing—with living in the reflective or imitative sphere—makes him privilege some primary act at the expense of art or commentary on art. He turns into Mystic or Vitalist. But, more often, he compromises by establishing a special relationship to what transcends him. Having discounted other critics, and reduced art to its greatest exemplars, he feels naked enough to say: "Myself and Art." Like Emerson, who said that ultimately there was "I and the Abyss." (p. 3)

Famous artists in the home: Picasso, O'Keeffe, Chagall

There at the lower left, his signature: Picasso. At the lower right, a pair of light switches; notice the glow on the right hand switch. The picture frame bisects the image just right of center and the protective glass reflects the adjacent room – see the windows and the lamp?

The picture itself, framed in narrow wood strips, runs down the photo's center. In the reflection, notice the bathroom tiles, the mirror along the left edge of the picture, the faucet below. The picture itself is a bit difficult to make out, but it's an O'Keeffe flower. Notice the yellow patch, the flower's center.

Here again the famous artist is all but swamped by scene reflected in the protective glass. It's a Chagall print, with angels swirling in red. The glass protecting the picture reflects another protective glass, a window. Note the origami cranes suspended in front of the window.

If you look carefully you'll see that they're flying out of the home, not into it. That could easily be changed by re-hanging them.

A Hothouse Manifesto: Does Stephen Ramsay Sell Literary Criticism Short?

I think so.

I first learned of Ramsay’s work from a Stanley Fish blog post back in 2012: Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation. Fish bills Ramsay as “perhaps the most sophisticated theorist of the burgeoning field” (digital humanities) and goes on to cite his essay: “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism,” Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2003. pp. 167-174. I downloaded the essay and found it uncongenial.

It’s not just that I disagree with him on various particulars. It’s that he seems to have arrived at his beliefs too easily, that things are too settled in his mind. That’s a subtler business to argue but also, I think, more important.

I propose, first, to present the abstract of his essay without comment and then to repeat the abstract, this time interspersing it with some comments.

Here’s Ramsay’s abstract (p. 167):

The inability of computing humanists to break into the mainstream of literary critical scholarship may be attributed to the prevalence of scientific methodologies and metaphors in humanities computing research – methodologies and metaphors that are wholly foreign not only to the language of literary criticism, but to its entire purpose. Breaking out of this unfortunate misalignment entails reaching for more appropriate paradigms. The 'algorithmic criticism' here proposed rejects the empiricist vision of the computer as a means by which critical interpretations may be verified, and instead seeks to locating computational processes within the rich tradition of interpretive endeavors (usually aligned more with art that criticism) which not to constrain meaning, but to guarantee its multiplicity. Computational processes, which are perhaps more conformable to this latter purpose, may be usefully viewed as ways of proving the necessary conditions for interpretive insight. Algorithmic criticism seeks, therefore, in the narrowing forces of constraint embodied and instantiated in the strictures of algorithmic processing, an analogue to the liberating potentialities of art and the ludic values of humanistic inquiry. It proposes that we reconceive computer-assisted text analysis as an activity best employed not in the service of a heightened critical objectivity, but as one that embraces the possibilities of that deepened subjectivity upon which critical insight depends.

Let me preface my commentary by, of all things, a sentence from the publisher’s blurb of a recent book. The book: Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present, Oxford University Press 2013. Here’s the sentence:

Rens Bod contends that the hallowed opposition between the sciences (mathematical, experimental, dominated by universal laws) and the humanities (allegedly concerned with unique events and hermeneutic methods) is a mistake born of a myopic failure to appreciate the pattern-seeking that lies at the heart of this inquiry.

It seems to me that Ramsay takes that hallowed opposition at face value, that he’s thinking in a world where things could not be otherwise, nor could one even imagine such a world. If I think my way back to my early-career brush with the skeptical turn I wonder whether or not Ramsay has his doubts and so is taking his strong position as a way of enforcing and redoubling that hallowed opposition.

Indirection, Reflection, and Inbetween

When I was a kid I was attracted to those puzzles where you were presented with an odd photo or three and asked to identify it. The photo was generally some familiar object photographed in extreme close-up or perhaps from an odd angle. Some of my photos are a bit like that.

Just what IS this?

Obviously that's a banister cutting through the image on left, but what's the rest of the image? Walls, obviously, but what's the layout?

But here there's no mystery, is there?

That's a man, a book, and a dog. The identity of the man is obscure and that might matter if he were some famous person – guess the identity of this well-known person as photographed from this odd angle. But that's not a famous person; it's a friend whom I have known since college. That explains how I got access, but is that so important? The dog is his pet. Actually, it's his daughter's pet. She's off at college at the moment. The book? If you must know, it's James Michners' The Source.

Then there's this:

Blue Philosophy

It is obvious that these three photographs share the color blue, blue sky in two cases, blue shirt in the third. What is not at all obvious is that these photos were taken on the same day (though you could check the dates at Flickr) and that the spot from which I took the moon shot is within five or 10 yards of where I was standing when I photographed my friend. Both those vantage points are some hundreds of yards from where I shot the buds.

That background information is, I suppose, irrelevant, though true. Whatever the photograph, there is always going to be background information. The relevance of the information depends, of course, on the purpose and use of the photographs. The background I've given you on those photos is irrelevant to the reason I took them and even, in a way, to the reason I here display them. It is however most certainly of the point that these photos all betoken things of the ONE while yet betokening some OTHER ONE.

Hence the philosophy trailing the blue. In one case the far side of the moon. In another case the mind. And then there is the promise of future flourishing. All of the world, the cosmos.

And there is so much more blue.

Of Bundling, Love, and Farmers' Daughters

3 Quarks Daily has just posted my Bundling, Dream Space, Love, and the Farmer’s Daughter, which is revised from something I'd posted a few years ago at New Savanna. For one thing I wanted to include some relevant source material that Charles Cameron had posted; it's about religious practices where clerics live and often sleep with women without, however, having sex. I put one such passage below. You might also want to look at From Ishmael to Joey and Ross: Whither American Manhood? by Gregory Jusdanis, which has this passage:

Ishmael wakes up one morning in a hotel in the whaling town of New Bedford to discover an “affectionate arm” around him. He and the stranger, whose name is Queequeg, are sleeping “socially,” having become “bosom buddies.” As he gradually opens his eyes he realizes that “you had almost thought I had been his wife.” Try as Ishmael might, he can’t unlock Queequeg’s “bridegroom clasp,” hugging him so “tightly.” The following evening Ishmael waits impatiently for Queegueg’s embrace.

Although most American men of the nineteenth century would not have described this occurrence as a marriage, they would have been used to sleeping with other men. Boys became accustomed to sharing beds with their brothers and then with their roommates in college, and with strangers when traveling. So did soldiers. Physical intimacy between men was economically enforced and privacy not available. And before central heating the male body lying next to you was a literal source of warmth. Men, in short, were familiar with the smell and touch of other men.

This Google query on "bundling board" ("bundle" alone is uselessly general) turns up quite a number of hits.

* * * * *

The Science of Godzilla

That’s the title of a post at Darren Nash’s Tetrapods blog (which, as a point of information, has relocated to Scientific American’s blogoverse). Here’s the opening paragraph:

To begin with, let’s get things straight and admit up front that Godzilla is not a real animal, nor was it ever. It’s an unfeasibly big late-surviving dinosaur (belonging to the hypothetical taxon Godzillasaurus, according to some), mutated by radiation, with a radioactive heart. Godzilla is virtually impervious to other gigantic monsters, and also to robots, artillery, laser blasts, lava and fire. Not real. Sorry about that. But by posing questions about fictional entities we can still learn stuff, and you may be surprised to learn that Godzilla has, on occasion, been discussed semi-seriously by various biologists and palaeontologists. Ok, that won’t surprise you if you already know anything about Godzilla, but what the hey.

Godzilla may not be real, but it’s a useful prod to thought.

For example, there is this:

In 2000, a peer-reviewed technical paper on the biology of TriStar’s GINO [Godzilla In Name Only] was published in Mathematical Geology by zoologist Per Christiansen. Per is well known for his work on mathematical scaling in dinosaurs, proboscideans, cats and other tetrapods ... Providing a wealth of speculations and inferences about GINO’s locomotor abilities, biomechanics and physiology, the article mostly critiques the view that the new Godzilla created for TriStar’s 1998 movie is more realistic, from a biological perspective, than the Japanese original (Christiansen 2000). To cut a long story short, Per concluded that TriStar’s GINO violated a number of biomechanical rules; in short, the creature is biologically implausible. Not exactly a surprise. His comment that the real Godzilla “is actually much more plausible from a biological perspective” (p. 239) is mostly based on the real Godzilla’s massive columnar legs and walking (rather than sprinting) gait.

One person's mystical experience in 1959

Barbara Ehrenreich in the NYTimes:

There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of. It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.

Of course I said nothing about this to anyone. Since I recognized no deities, and even the notion of an “altered state of consciousness” was unavailable at the time, I was left with only one explanation: I had had a mental breakdown, ultimately explainable as a matter of chemical imbalances, overloaded circuits or identifiable psychological forces.

She goes on to observe:

It took an inexcusably long time for me to figure out that what had happened to me was part of a widespread category of human experience. Some surveys find that nearly half of Americans report having had a mystical experience.

Still later:

I suspect we would have more reports of uncanny experiences from ordinary, rational people if it were not for the fear of being judged insane or at least unstable.

An alternative to the insanity explanation would be that such experiences do represent some sort of encounter. It was my scientific training, oddly enough, that eventually nudged me to consider this possibility.

Yes.  And furthermore:

We need more data and more subjective accounts. But we also need a neuroscience bold enough to go beyond the observation that we are “wired” for transcendent experience; the real challenge is to figure out what happens when those wires connect.

And again, yes.

Paper Cranes

Have the Oligarchs and Plutocrats Won?

Just watched Alex Gibney's powerful documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (you can stream it on Netflix). Here's the trailer:

It uses the conceit of two Park Avenues to tell the story of the 1%, living on the Park Ave of Manhattan's upper East Side, and the (bottom quartile of) the 99%, living on the portion of Park Ave that extends into the South Bronx. It's one thing to know the story in numbers and graphs, which Gibney presents, but it's another thing entirely to see the story in actions through moving images and spoken words. The combination of the two is potent, and, alas, depressing.

As I think over the film the sections that keep coming back, however, are those featuring a social psychologist at U Cal. Berkeley, Paul Piff, and some students. Piff had pairs of students play Monopoly, the board game born during the Depression. But, they played the game with a crucial difference. One player started with twice the amount of money as the other player and was allowed to roll both dice; the other player could roll only one die. The student players were assigned to these roles randomly.

It's a juggler's world, the arts of performing

From a long-form profile on Anthony Gatto, a master juggler, perhaps TEH master juggler:

The fact that juggling audiences can’t tell the difference between hard tricks and easy tricks means they also can’t make any meaningful judgments about jugglers....And jugglers have always taken advantage of audiences’ ignorance. Instead of performing hard tricks, they perform easy tricks that look hard. They lie to delight.

But then came a guy who wasn’t interested in lying, who wanted to do stuff that was hard because he could. This was his power in the world and he wanted to exert it — the basic impulse of any athlete. Yet he never really found his audience, even though he conquered juggling’s demands like no one before him. Gatto learned how to stand calm and straight-backed beneath sick, dizzying multitudes of spinning, arcing objects and conduct them with model-train precision into his hands. He also learned to charm people, even though it didn’t come naturally to him, as the kiss-the-ball video shows. He gave in. He grew to accept the necessity of kissing the ball and lobbing it gently into the crowd with a grin. He also learned to make hard tricks look hard, to pantomime the exertion and self-doubt of a man working at the edge of his ability even though his ability stretched on and on. He learned to entertain, because for some reason, even though we exist in a physical universe defined by the relative attractive powers of massive objects, the mere demonstration of a lush and lovely control of gravity is not enough. He labored to please an audience that could never appreciate his greatness. Then he got older and watched a new wave of jugglers abandon the stage for the flicker of computer screens, sneering at the bright-light mastery he’d worked so hard to gain.

And so Gatto opened a construction business.

Lamp

Cleaning Coal: An Informal Study of Ecological Design

Slightly revised from My Father Cleaned Coal for a Living, originally published for the Truth and Traditions Party.

My father was trained as a chemical engineer. He spent his entire career with Bethlehem Mines, the mining division of the now defunct Bethlehem Steel Company. He designed coal cleaning plants, at least the system for actually cleaning the coal.

This is a story about the last plant that he designed, one designed to keep the air clean while at the same time reducing the cost of running and maintaining the plant. It was a beautiful and elegant solution to a nasty design problem. A study in systems thinking – though my father probably never used that phrase.

Cleaning Coal

Before coal can be turned into coke (for subsequent use as a fuel in steel-making) it must be cleaned of impurities, mostly sulfur. Most cleaning techniques take advantage of the fact that the rocks containing the impurities are denser than coal. So, you crush the raw coal until all the particles are less than, say, an eighth of an inch along any dimension. Then you float the crushed coal in some medium – generally, but not always, water – and take advantage of the fact that the rock sinks faster than the coal. There are several techniques you can use to do this, as I recall, but whichever technique you use, you end up with wet coal when you’re done.

Wet coal is considerably heavier than dry coal. As railroads charge by the pound, it costs more to ship wet coal than dry. Further, in the winter a hopper car filled with wet coal at the mine – where coal is generally cleaned, there's no point in shipping useless rock to the steel plant – is likely to be filled with frozen coal when you get to the plant. How do you empty that mess from the cars?

So, you need to dry the coal.

The old drying technique – drying ovens – leaves you with a lot of coal dust in the air. A lot. And coal dust is nasty stuff. You don't want it spewing out of chimneys anywhere in your neighborhood. Or near your farm.

One artist's public art project in Sweden

My friend Charles Cameron sent me a link to this page by a Swedish artists, Peter John Tucker. He describes his campaign to beautify ugly signal boxes:

I indulge in my own form of graffiti: Decorating electrical cable boxes in public places. Without obtaining permission from the electrical company. Technically speaking, breaking the law. Theoretically, I should be fined or imprisoned, just as most young practitioners of the art of graffiti are treated today. But no! Every passerby applauds my action. Even the electricity company that owns the box approves, writing to the local newspaper, suggesting they print an article on my work.

What conclusions can one draw from this? Quite simply, that the campaign against illicit graffiti is no more than a campaign against a particular genre of art. The fact that I am left in peace to continue my "desecration of public property" proves that the issue concerns one definition of good taste employing its considerable power to crush another definition of good taste. Is it really any different from Adolf Hitler's campaign against what he called "decadent art"? Now, do we live in a democratic, civilised society or not? Sometimes I wonder.

He goes on to describe a course he taught in the public school:

I worked for ten years as an art teacher in The Stockholm School of the Arts (Kulturskolan Stockholm). The last two years I ran a "graffiti school" for youngsters between the ages of 13 and 16. I wasn't the teacher of course, more the pupil, since they knew far more than I did about the skills involved in handling a spray can (which, I should add, are considerable, and quite as admirable as those involved in mastering the paintbrush). But what I could contribute was the respect of an adult for their art form (something they longed for).

From Crowdsourcing to Machine Learning: And then there were none (human workers)

From the New York Times:

But even more troubling is the fact that crowdsourcing platforms are hurrying along the automation of more and more of these tasks. Erik Brynjolfsson, a co-author of the popular book “Race Against the Machine,” cites image recognition as one obvious place where humans have helped robots replace them. Crowdworkers can collect pennies for identifying adorable cats in photographs, and then companies take that data and improve software that identifies adorable cats with a marginal cost that approaches zero. “We’re at a real inflection point in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Brynjolfsson said. “Things are speeding up.”

Indeed, many Turkers are actively helping to put themselves out of jobs. “Yesterday it was spam moderation,” said Panos Ipeirotis, a professor of business at New York University. “And today it’s transcriptions and translation. Once we help computers solve the problem of today, we move on to more challenging tasks. Maybe in 10 years, it’s something we think of as completely out of the range of computers right now. I see it happening, all the time.”

How far can this process go, and how fast?