Skippy ponders the eternal verities

Trump, Gibbs & NCIS, and the Queen @3QD

I’ve got another post up at 3 Quarks Daily, Donald Trump is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2017/09/donald-trump-is-no-leroy-jethro-gibbs.html

The title tells it all, I measure Trump against the central character of one of the most popular scripted shows on network television, ever. Trump comes up short.

After establishing a sense of NCIS I focus on the distinction between one’s interests as a private person and one’s interests and duties in an organization. In Trump’s case that organization is, of course, not merely the Federal Government, but the nation. That distinction is real for Gibbs, but doesn’t exist for Trump.

But how do you dramatize that distinction? It’s easy enough to assert it, and one can write about it at considerable length. But making it REAL in a dramatic medium is different. You can’t have characters giving lectures on political and legal theory. Well you can, but it would be very boring.

For the most part NCIS leaves the distinction unstated. It’s there in Gibbs’s actions, and the actions of other characters, but they don’t philosophize about it.

I then give an example from the Netflix series about Queen Elizabeth II, The Crown. The distinction between private interests and public duty is central to that show, and there is considerable talk about it. I present one such example, but without comment. In this post I want to comment on that example. Before that, however, I want to present a speech from Shakespeare.

The Rejection of Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff is one of the most beloved characters in Shakespeare. He’s a down-and-out knight who spends his time drinking with his pals and trading in petty crime. Prince Hal, heir apparent to the throne of England, is one of those pals. When Hal ascends to the throne, becoming Henry V, Falstaff approaches him at the coronation, gleefully anticipating good times to come now that his boon companion, good old Hal, rules the land. He addresses the King as “Hal” and is severely, unexpectedly, and very publically reprimanded (Henry IV, Part II, Act 5, scene 5)

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;

But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;

Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape

For thee thrice wider than for other men.

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:

Presume not that I am the thing I was;

For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

That I have turn'd away my former self;

So will I those that kept me company.

When thou dost hear I am as I have been,

Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,

The tutor and the feeder of my riots:

Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,

As I have done the rest of my misleaders,

Not to come near our person by ten mile.

For competence of life I will allow you,

That lack of means enforce you not to evil:

And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,

We will, according to your strengths and qualities,

Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,

To see perform'd the tenor of our word. Set on.

Notice how Hal explicitly distinguishes his two selves, the private person (“the thing I was”, “my former self”) and his new status as king (“our person”, “we hear you”). As a consequence of this distinction the King must necessarily have a different relationship with Sir John than Hal did.

Such a speech is natural to the occasion, the coronation of the King. For it is in that ceremony that a person leaves one social status (a term of art in the social sciences) and assumes another, that of monarch. This is a type of ceremony that anthropologists call a rite of passage. Christenings, baptisms, bar/bat Mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, and graduations are other examples of rites of passages. In each case a person leaves one station in society and assumes another. Depending on various factors, such ceremonies may be simple, with few present, or complex and staged before a large audience.

A complex ceremony before a large audience is a kind of theater. As such, it is a natural way for a dramatist to explore and present, at some length, the distinction between private and public person. That is what Shakespeare did in Henry IV, Part II.

SK8!

Literary Criticism: A short note on the current state of the art

Just a place-holder, really, I’ve got other things I’ve got to do.

A meaning-centric criticism takes translation as its first principle. A naturalist criticism takes description as its first principle. The existing academic discipline focuses on the first and neglects the second. That’s why the discipline cannot deal coherently with form, though form is one of its central concepts. And that’s why the current interest in description is deeply problematic, for it’s not clear what the targets for description for a meaning-centric literary criticism. Oh sure, there’s versification and such, that’s been around a long time; it can be avoided. But it’s peripheral to the discipline. Putting that aside, how do you describe meaning?

The current discipline uses spatial metaphors (inside, outside, surface, hidden, deep, close, distant) to characterize the text and the relations between the text, the world, the audience, and the critic. A naturalist criticism considers the text a way the social-behavior scientist would – phonetics, graphemics, phonology, morphology, and so forth. Such a characterization is not utterly foreign to the meaning-centric critic, but it has little place in the critic’s practical criticism or even theorizing (such as it is).

The discipline had a brush with a naturalist conception back in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s what structuralism offered, a naturalist poetics. Structuralism was rejected, thus further entrenching meaning-centric criticism. A critic born in 1955 would have been 20 years old when Culler’s Structuralist Poetics was published. That critic might have encountered structuralism as a live possibility. Any critics born after 1960 would only know of structuralism as a thing of the past. My guess is that most critics currently active were born after 1960. These critics would know of the naturalist conception of language and texts, but it’s not something they are likely to have internalized in any degree; it's not something they’ve lived.

Computational criticism, however, is a different. On some level the computational critic has no choice but to approach texts as a naturalist critic would. Why? Because that’s how computers deal with texts. Computers deal with the signifiers (as opposed to the signifieds) that constitute texts. They have no access to semantics, to meaning. However, most (if not all) computational critics will have been trained in the meaning-centric spatial metaphors of conventional criticism. Thus they may well hold the naturalist conception of language, the one embodied in the software they use, at arm’s length. It is an unstable and delicate situation.

More later.

For extra credit: meaning-centric = logocentric (in Derrida's sense)?

Why identity politics? Because the left has given up on everything else.

Writing in the Guardian, Kenan Malik reviews Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. We've got a problem:

Between them, Lilla and his critics sum up well the impasse of contemporary politics on the left. Many of his critics cannot see that the politics of identity, far from defending the marginalised and the powerless, fragments the possibilities of meaningful social change. Lilla cannot see that the self-proclaimed “liberal centrist” politics he espouses has helped create the fragmentation of which he despairs. In Europe, too, debates about immigration and multiculturalism, about nationalism and federalism, expose a similar kind of deadlock. The roots of contemporary identity politics lie in the new social movements that emerged in the 1960s to challenge the failure of the left to take seriously the issues of racism, homophobia and women’s rights. The struggle for black rights in America, in particular, was highly influential in providing a template for many other groups to develop concepts of identity and self-organisation. Squeezed between an intensely racist society, on the one hand, and a left often indifferent to their plight, many black activists ceded from civil rights organisations and set up separate black groups.

The left has lost its vision:

The erosion of the power of labour movement organisations, the demise of radical social movements, the decline of collectivist ideologies, the expansion of the market into almost every nook and cranny of social life, the fading of institutions, from trade unions to the church, have all helped to create a more fragmented society. These are the changes that have snapped social bonds and hollowed-out civic life.

That hollowing out has been exacerbated by the narrowing of the political sphere, by politics that has self-consciously become less ideological, more technocratic. The Democrats in America have discarded much of their old ideological attachments as well as their links to their old social constituencies.

Consequently, identity is all that's left for the left.

What Lilla fails to recognise is that the demand for “mayors not marchers” – for pragmatic politics over social movements – is a change that has already happened; and the consequence has been the kind of identity politics he rightly despises. The problem is not that there are marchers rather than mayors. It is, rather, that both marchers and mayors, both activists and politicians, operate in world in which broader visions of social change have faded. How to restore a sense of solidarity based on broader politics rather than narrow identities – that’s the real challenge we face.

Two observations on wealth

John Waters’ Graduation Speech: Real Wealth is Never Having to Spend Time with Assholes https://t.co/dxdNPfn7xI pic.twitter.com/R1bE5ZjmcO

— Open Culture (@openculture) September 17, 2017

when you get a surprise kiss pic.twitter.com/Or2pwnx3ih

— Emergency Kittens (@EmrgencyKittens) September 17, 2017

The city-state redux

Jamie Bartlett, in Aeon:

Until the mid-19th century, most of the world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities, which travellers crossed without checks or passports. As industrialisation made societies more complex, large centralised bureaucracies grew up to manage them. Those governments best able to unify their regions, store records, and coordinate action (especially war) grew more powerful vis-à-vis their neighbours. Revolutions – especially in the United States (1776) and France (1789) – helped to create the idea of a commonly defined ‘national interest’, while improved communications unified language, culture and identity. Imperialistic expansion spread the nation-state model worldwide, and by the middle of the 20th century it was the only game in town. There are now 193 nation-states ruling the world.

But the nation-state with its borders, centralised governments, common people and sovereign authority is increasingly out of step with the world.

Maybe Trump was right"

On 17 September 2016, the then presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted: ‘A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We WILL Make America Safe Again!’ The outcry obscured the fact that Trump was right (in the first half, anyway). Borders determine who’s in and who’s out, who’s a citizen and who’s not, who puts in and who takes from the common pot. If a nation cannot defend its border, it ceases to exist in any meaningful way, both as a going concern and as the agreed-upon myth that it is.

Trump’s tweet was set against the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s offer, one year earlier, of asylum for Syrians. The subsequent movement of people across Europe – EU member states received 1.2 million first-time asylum applications in 2015 – sparked a political and humanitarian crisis, the ramifications of which are still unfolding. It certainly contributed to the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. But 1.2 million people is a trickle compared to what’s coming. Exact numbers are hard to come by, and notoriously broad, but according to some estimates as many as 200 million people could be climate-change refugees by the middle of the century.

Tough, of course, The Donald doesn't believe in climate change.

Graffiti in winter with chair

Zero dated to 3rd century CE

From Oxford:

Although a number of ancient cultures including the ancient Mayans and Babylonians also used the zero placeholder, the dot’s use in the Bakhshali manuscript is the one that ultimately evolved into the symbol that we use today. India was also the place where the symbolic placeholder developed into a number in its own right, and the concept of the figure zero as it exists today, was born.

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, said: ‘Today we take it for granted that the concept of zero is used across the globe and is a key building block of the digital world. But the creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics.

‘We now know that it was as early as the 3rd century that mathematicians in India planted the seed of the idea that would later become so fundamental to the modern world. The findings show how vibrant mathematics have been in the Indian sub-continent for centuries.’

Lawfare on impeachment in the context of the contemporary presidency

Bob Bauer (former White House Counsel to President Obama) observes:

The presidency in its current form is, in many respects, something of a constitutional absurdity. We entrust the occupant to wisely exercise vast powers, but the barriers to entry into competition for this office have been virtually eliminated. Provided that he or she meets basic constitutional qualifications—for example, age—anyone can run. The aspirants are not required to submit to any formal screening or peer review. The political parties may have once performed a function like that, but now they do not: They host the event but have no control over the invitation list because a candidate wishing to participate can invite himself. Now it is largely up to the press and the operation of fierce political competition to ferret out disqualifying information, and to get this job done in the compressed period after a candidate becomes serious and undergoes the fullest, most sustained scrutiny. We hope for the best.

Even the availability of resources limits the field only so much. Often a little press buzz and a good showing in Iowa, in whatever order that occurs, are enough to launch a relatively low-budget and improbable candidacy well into the later stages of the primary election process—and sometimes all the way to the nomination.

So informal mechanisms for judging worthiness are all there is to go on, and these are only so reliable. It is precisely the candidate with little prior experience in public life and the scrutiny that goes with it who may stand the best chance—as an “outsider”—of advancing well into the process.

They didn't contemplate such things back in the 18th Century, when the Constitution was formulated and adopted as the foundational laws of the land:

While not a step to be taken lightly, or routinely, the “dreadfulness” of removal can be gauged only with reference to the office as it stands, in relation to the processes by which candidates compete for it. If someone not “viable” does slip through the crazy-quilt process, then the impeachment process is a safeguard, the use of which should not stand or fall on whether the new president committed his crimes and misdemeanors before taking the oath of office.

Of course, not all 18th-century assumptions and precedents built on them need be discarded, but there is also no virtue in disregarding the 21st-century realities of institutional and political change. And while impeachment might well remain an extraordinary remedy, it does not follow that it must be viewed as inevitably a constitutionally catastrophic outcome to be avoided if at all possible. In fact, the constitutional catastrophe could well be an entirely outdated understanding of impeachment. This is a useful question to be debated now, and it is an important one without regard to the specific case of Donald Trump.

We have met the enemy and the enemy is us

a human byte (1974) pic.twitter.com/REp34NlSOb

— James Ryan (@xfoml) September 14, 2017

an illustration for Harper's Magazine of a line of computer-generated poetry (1963)—"Sob suddenly, the bongos are moving" by AUTO-BEATNIK pic.twitter.com/7rzd6b26Q8

— James Ryan (@xfoml) September 14, 2017

the ultimate potential of computers (1961) pic.twitter.com/3lykNsWg76

— James Ryan (@xfoml) September 14, 2017

Friday Fotos: Urban pastoral with a painted elephant

Tim Morton’s Maxims

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey had moved through Houston, Tim Morton, who lives there, was interviewed for a Cultures of Energy podcast. During the interview he offered four maxims for living in the Anthropocene:

1. You're not guilty. 2. If you can understand it, you're responsible for it. 3. Try increasing pleasures. 4. We're all roughly the same.

That may seem a bit terse, but, yes, I do rather like them in that form, the way they rub up against one another and intermingle. But he did get some pushback about lack of context:

Read the book of which that sentence is an all too brief summary

— Tim Morton (@the_eco_thought) August 31, 2017

So, read the book (Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People) if you will, Tim’s a good writer, and witty.

But I’d like to think about the maxims in their naked decontextualized form.

What caught my eye, as you might imagine (& my heart), is #3 “Try increasing pleasures” (my toes too). If I were to give it a close close reading I’d note a mild ambiguity: we need more and more pleasure, but also, we need individual pleasures that build and build. Such is language.

It’s just the delicious irony of it, in America, home of earnest Puritan virtue, to hear of pleasure. From the mouth of a hurricane though, since the hurricane was moving away at the time, maybe it was from the other end. I gather Tim is one of Emma Goldman’s dancing r/evolutionaries.

YES!

#1: You’re not guilty. Guilty of what? Everything, life. I sometimes think that guilt is sometimes something we agree to assume in order that we may either do something we shouldn’t, not fail to do something we should. We may feel the guilt after the event, or non-event, but we allow and plan for it in advance. Guilt is a bargain we make so we can be naughty and self-righteous at the same time.

Guilt gets in the way, of pleasure certainly. But also, it clouds understanding & hence responsibility (#2) and is isolating, thus diminishing fellow-feeling (#4).

Changing direction a bit, we were born into this mess (the Anthropocene), we didn’t start it. (Seems very Christian. Adam & Eve.) The Anthropocene was launched during the Industrial Revolution, and they didn’t understand (#2) what they were doing. They couldn’t see. And neither could we until science & satellites & computers allowed us to look at the earth and the climate and see that, YIKES!, it’s getting warmer.

So, guilt gets in the way. They didn’t intend it and we didn’t deserve it – throw off the guilt! – but here it is. And now that we understand...

(#2: If you can understand it, you're responsible for it.)

... we’re responsible. Without guilt, we are FREE to be responsible. We can do something. Yes, we CAN. And by “we” we mean (“we” means Tim and you and me and everybody else) every body, which by OOO logic implies everything.

#4: We're all roughly the same. I suppose “roughly” as in “more or less, approximately”. Yet, as we’re all bodies, it might also be “smoothly”. So we’re smoothly the same, rolling around together here on earth, increasing pleasure.

Born to Groove

Appalachian Soul

From Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life: A History, Norton 2001, p. 156:

In 1933, George Pullen Jackson . . . published a book – White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands – about a remarkable tradition he had encountered among “plain folk” in the region. From the time he settled in Nashville in 1918, Jackson noticed a practice of sacred singing that was being carried on outside the churches. Gathering on weekends, groups of Southerners staged all-day “singings,” and they brought their own books: thick, oblong volumes of psalm and hymn tunes, and anthems set mostly for four-part chorus with the melody in the tenor voice. They seated themselves according to voice part . . . in a rectangle with an open space in the middle. Into that space stepped a succession of singers from the ranks, each leading the group in two or three pieces. . . . The sound of the singing . . . took some getting used to. The singers tended to vocalize full blast at all times, making no attempt to blend.

Crawford then goes on to quote from Jackson’s book where he describes a reception that followed a singing contest for children:

At first the happy children received merely a warm hand-shake and pat on the shoulder from the men and a kiss from the women. But by degrees the wave of emotion rose, swept on by this song and then by another one spliced on, and by the really parental joy in those children who had so beautifully proved that they could carry on their fathers’ and mothers’ beloved art – until the warm congratulatory reception became a veritable and ardent “love feast.” The little ones were smothered with kisses and hugs. Tears streamed down the cheeks of young and old. And one particular fat man, looking on, crying, laughing, seating, and fanning, shouted intermittently.