Philosophy

The Metaphysics of Baseball

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

America’s greatest contribution to human civilization?  According to David B. Hart:  baseball.

I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings.

Read the rest of Hart’s Platonic reflections in “A Perfect Game” at First Things.

Labor, Ennui, and Bourbon

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

I’m not sure yet whether to think of the weblog as a genre unto itself, or whether it is more helpful to conceive of the weblog as a writing space in which a variety of genres manifest themselves.  In any case, one of the uses to which I find a blog post particularly suited is the juxtaposition of two or more passages that seem to benefit from being placed in conversation with one another.  It may be that I’m not entirely sure how best  to articulate the relationship, but an intuition leads me to set ideas side by side to see what may emerge.  Or, it could be that I have already some sense of how the ideas relate.  It could also be that the intuition ends up being a blind alley and it is not until I write through it that the dead end emerges.  So with this in mind let me lay two passages side by side for your consideration and mine.

The first from the prologue to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.  She is addressing “the advent of automation, which in a few decades [she is writing in the late 1950’s] probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of labouring and the bondage to necessity.”  This development, however, will not yield what it seems to promise.  Arendt continues:

The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society.  The fulfillment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating.  It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaninfgul activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.  Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor’s way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew . . . What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them.  Surely, nothing could be worse.

Alongside that observation consider an excerpt from an essay by Walker Percy that I recently came across thanks to Alan Jacobs at Text Patterns.  The essay is titled simply “Bourbon, Neat” and you should read it on its own terms, but here’s the part to consider in light of Arendt’s analysis:

Not only should connoisseurs of bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth—all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of bourbon drinking, that is, the use of bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cure the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?”

Connection?

Marilynne Robinson on The Daily Show, Mark Twain on Interviews

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Marilynne Robinson is one of those authors whose name I keep running into and each time I do I make one of those mental notes that never quite materializes to read one of her books.  Mostly I’m interested in reading her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead: A Novel, and her most recent work, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.  The latter collects Robinson’s Dwight H. Terry Lectures at Yale University on the topic of religion, science, and consciousness.  No lack of ambition there.

Robinson recently appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.  Typical Stewart, a little bit serious, a little bit funny.  You can watch the five minute clip here.

Update:  Let me take an opportunity to embellish this post a little bit with another item I just came across.  Let’s begin by recognizing that this is not the most enthralling interview.  Robinson was not exactly inspiring and Stewart’s fan base, which seems for the most part to be a bit hostile to religion, is apoplectic (see the comments below the video clip).  There are probably a number of reasons why this interview doesn’t quite soar when on paper it probably looked like a good idea, but would anyone consider that the format itself is to blame?  In other words, are interviews inherently flawed?

The Mark Twain Foundation has just released for the first time in print a 10-page hand written essay on the subject of interviews written by Twain in 1889 or 1890.  You can see the whole essay at the Newhour’s web site including scans of the handwritten pages.  Here is an excerpt (sections of which brilliantly match form to content) that expresses Twain’s dissatisfaction with the interview:

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn’t done it, though really you don’t know which it is you wish you hadn’t done, and moreover you don’t care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn’t done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn’t anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.

Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must have something “characteristic;” so he invents the humorisms himself, and interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant, often too wordy, and generally framed in “dialect”–a non-existent and impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn’t intend to do it.

There are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had secured before. He doesn’t think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand that. He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.

Jack Kerouac (possibly drunk)

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

That is how The New Republic titled one of the many fascinating archival video clips it has assembled on its website.  When you watch that particular clip you realize that inserting “possibly” into the parenthetical statement was an act of inspired generosity.

Along with the Kerouac clip you will find videos of J. R. R. Tolkien, Isaiah Berlin, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Leon Trotsky, Aldous Huxley, Michel Foucault, Jean Paul Sartre, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, and several more.  Most of the clips are quite short, many are a bit grainy, and a few are not in English (such as Camus at a soccer match).

Just in case you needed something to help you waste away some time.  Although it’s not quite a waste, I don’t think.

Theory and Electronic Literature

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

What is theory?  It is, at least in part, an effort to make explicit what is implicit and to expose what is assumed but unspoken. To paraphrase Niklas Luhmann, theory seeks to perceive the reality which one does not perceive when one perceives it.  If so, then Katherine Hayles is offering us a theory of electronic literature that renders electronic literature an embodiment of theory.  Not, however, in the sense early theorists of hypertext imagined, but in a way that is more consonant with the anti-speculative perspective advocated by Jerome McGann in Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web.

Early hypertext theorists such as George Landow enthusiastically read electronic literature as an embodiment of poststructuralist theory.  It appeared that electronic literature manifested on the surface everything Roland Barthes painstakingly sought to reveal about traditional literature and the author.  This reading of electronic literature, however, appears now to have been stillborn because of its identification of the hyperlink as electronic literature’s “distinguishing characteristic,” a move which Hayles shows was beset by serious problems.  (Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, 31)  Likewise, McGann seems intent on moving past this mode of theorizing.  As I read him, it is not so much theory itself which McGann repudiates, but a certain way of constructing and applying theory.  As I’ve noted in response to radiant textuality, theory for Mcgann is best aligned with the kinds of knowledge that arise from performance/deformance because Mcgann envisions theory as poiesis rather than gnosis. The kind of embodied knowledge or theory that arises from acts of making or performance “makes possible the imagination of what you don’t know” because it elicits knowledge from failure and also from serendipity. (radiant textuality, 83)

McGann’s notion of imagining what you don’t know recalls Hayles’ clever appropriation of Rumsfeld’s Zen-like categorizations of knowledge.  As she puts it, “I propose that (some of) the purposes of literature are to reveal what we know but don’t know that we know, and to transform what we know we know into what we don’t yet know.”  Further resonating with McGann, she sees literature achieving this knowledge by “activating a recursive feedback loop between knowledge realized in the body through gesture, ritual, performance, posture, and enactment, and knowledge realized in the neocortex as conscious and explicit articulations” in much the same way that McGann sees theory arising through “the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations.”  (Electronic Literature, 132; RT, 106)  In one sense I would argue that as Hayles describes the effects of electronic literature it functions in a way reminiscent of McGann’s practices of deformance.

For both Hayles and McGann, theory is bound up with the body, with the material, and with action.  For McGann, deformance is a practice which leads the reader to tap through performance the kind of embodied knowledge that helps them reckon with the materiality of the text.  For Hayles, electronic literature already requires or is intended to force the kinds of interactions that deformance is attempting to artificially elicit in the context of print.  Put otherwise, the productive disruptions code introduces into narrative awaken us, according to Hayles, to the reality of the human life-world’s integration with intelligent machines in much same way that the disruptions of deformance awaken us to the material realities of the text according to McGann.

Electronic literature as Hayles’ theorizes it draws into the open features of human existence that previously lay below the level of awareness.  At its best then electronic literature, like good theory, reveals what is not always perceived, but always present.  And this, according to Hayles, it accomplishes by “creating recursive feedback loops between explicit articulation, conscious thought, and embodied sensorimotor knowledge.”  (Electronic Literature, 135)  Or, as McGann might put it, through poiesis and not merely gnosis.