waste

Sometimes I have a similar reaction to the claim that "we" can conceive of something-or-other. What do you mean, "we"?

Mill, in his essay eulogizing Bentham, writes:

From the same principle in Bentham came the intricate and involved style, which makes his later writings books for the student only, not the general reader. It was from his perpetually aiming at impracticable precision. … in his later years and more advanced studies, he fell into a Latin or German structure of sentence, foreign to the genius of the English language. He could not bear, for the sake of clearness and the reader's ease, to say, as ordinary men are content to do, a little more than the truth in one sentence, and correct it in the next. The whole of the qualifying remarks which he intended to make, he insisted upon embedding as parentheses in the very middle of the sentence itself.

Certainly such a writerly habit does not conduce to readerly pleasure, but it springs, I think, from an admirable source (and I don't call it admirable just because a like reticulation is not always absent from my own productions, when I don't take care to prevent that, and even, at times, when I do; after all, it could simply be for me as it was for Plutarch—"These things coming into my memory as I am writing this story, it would be unnatural for me to omit them")—one doesn't want casually to mislead, or to say something for which the ground has not yet been prepared. It is good to be careful! Often one gets (putative) counterexamples, or worries, tossed off without its being adequately made clear exactly in what respect they are supposed to be counterexamples. This is really only related to Mill's description of Bentham in that going into the details of the instance would have the effect he claims for Bentham's writing; by the time we got through it, we'd be in danger of having lost track of the point in whose service the damn thing was introduced in the first place. But that's a danger worth running, I think; if the alternative is merely being suggestive, that, no doubt, is fine, but being suggestive in criticism can easily shade into spreading FUD, which is not fine.

Here is an example of a case in which it seems that the author surely must be aware that the situation is not nearly as cut and dried as he presents it as being (suggests it to be?). It's from the NDPR review of Rational Causation:

I would add, however, that a more troublesome state-type for him would be ones like "the holding of the French line"—which are not only countable, but exhibit the end-directedness he sees as distinctive of events. While 'X was believing' entails 'X believed' in a way that 'Y was crossing Grand Avenue' does not entail 'Y crossed Grand Avenue' (198), that the French line was holding at noon does not entail that it held.

But surely we might wonder about this on any number of dimensions.

1. Are holdings of the French line countable? I'm just not sure what gets counted here, or how. If the French line holds on June 3rd and June 4th, is that two holdings of the line, or one? Does it matter if there's no fighting at night? (If there's no fighting at night, does that mean we have, not two holdings of the French line, but two holdings of French lines?) What if the French line holds at noon and one on June 3rd?
2. Is the holding of the French line a state at all? Perhaps (one could suggest) there is really here only the activity of the French in holding the line. The suggestion can be resisted with reference to, say, holdings of knots. (There's only the activity of … the string?) But it is really not clear at all, then, that holdings of knots are countable. (Except in the trivial sense in which you could render any stative claim countable through a grammatical transformation. The knot held? Then there was one holding of the knot (and there couldn't be two, since any other holding would involve a different knot. The wall was red? Then there was one being red of the wall.)
3. Is the holding of the French line end-directed? True, what we would express by saying that the French line was holding at noon does not entail what we would express by saying that it held, but that doesn't establish that its holding at a particular time was directed to its holding simpliciter, or even that there is such a thing as its holding simpliciter. Surely—one can conceive a person confidently asserting—to say "the French line held" is to say that it held throughout some period of interest, for instance, that while it was holding at noon, the Belgians penetrated it at four, so it didn't hold all day. "The French line held—but not for long" makes perfect sense to me, and at least suggests that the part of the sentence before the em dash doesn't indicate that it achieved some end.

With regard to the first and the third, we might contrast the holding of the French line with things being in locations in various manners. That the infant was lying in its crib at noon doesn't entail what, in many contexts, would be expressed by "the infant lay in its crib". "What did Little Infant do while we were gone?" is not aptly answered with "LI lay in its crib" if it mostly wasn't doing that, though it would be a fine component of an answer cataloguing the various things that LI did. (Just as it would be perfectly just to say "the French line held" in the course of giving a relatively fine-grained account of the progress of the battle: "the Belgians launched a fierce attack at 11:55, but the French line held. By the early evening, however …".)

The knot case can be extended from the second item to the third. Certainly that the knot held/was holding at noon does not entail what would normally be expressed by "the knot held". But that hardly establishes that the knot's holding is directed at an end. I have an end for the knot, and if I say that it "didn't hold" because halfway through whatever I was doing it came undone, that is too bad for me and the end I was directed at, but that end was no business of the knot's; it isn't going for—what would the end even be? Having held at the end of time? "Holding" strikes me as canonically endless. Even in the case of the apparently metaphorical extension to holding a line: a line is done being held when there is no longer any occasion to hold it, because, say, peace has been negotiated. Holding the line does not itself move toward such an end state (except incidentally—a war of attrition). That is: there is no longer any need for the line, so it's dispersed. But that's something external to the line's holding (couldn't the French line stay there once the Belgians leave the field, after all?), not something toward which it's directed or progresses (in general I think directedness and potential progress move together).

I would not be surprised at all to know that the reviewer has answers to my puzzlement. (I would be surprised if I found the answers satisfactory, but that may simply be a personal problem.) And I will acknowledge that it would probably be out of place to go into all the details about how this problem is supposed actually to be problematic in a relatively brief review. What this suggests to me, though, is that some acknowledgement should be made, either that there seems to be something troublesome in this vicinity, rather than the bald statement actually made, or that the claims that render the example problematic do stand in need of fleshing out, and that that fleshing out is not here done.

What thing is needful?

Here is the text of Gay Science 290 (and here for the Kenner):

One thing is needful.—To 'give style' to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views—it is supposed to beckon towards the remote and immense. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small—whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it's enough that it was one taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures who experience their most exquisite pleasure under such coercion, in being bound by but also perfected under their own law; the passion of their tremendous will becomes less intense in the face of all stylized nature, all conquered and serving nature; even when they have palaces to build and gardens to design, they resist giving nature free rein. Conversely, it is the weak characters with no power over themselves who hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitterly evil compulsion were to be imposed on them, they would have to become commonplace under it—they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such minds—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape or interpret their environment as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising—and they are well advised to do so, because only thus do they please themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself—be it through this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually prepared to avenge himself for this, and we others will be his victims if only by having to endure his sight. For the sight of something ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

Quære: what thing is needful?

If you said "to give style to one's character", you are in excellent company, so far as I can tell, among Nietzsche scholars who comment on the passage (wouldn't illustrative examples be nice here? Yep!); you are also wrong. What is needful is that one should attain satisfaction with himself. Some do that by giving style to their characters, others by giving style to their environments. (It is also common to pass over the parts dealing with weak characters as of little interest.)

I am thinking of—later—putting up a post on the theme Things That I Realized in the Course of Teaching Nietzsche. One is: positions and people whom I formerly thought highly of fell somewhat in my esteem as I devoted more close attention to them than I had previously. Another: many papers on Nietzsche on Topic X don't read as closely, or with as much of an eye to context, as one would perhaps have liked. (Millgram's papers—Millgram not taking that approach—are very refreshing in this regard.) Here I actually do have some examples! But they will be deferred until that post, I think. Instead I will point out the curiosity of Nehamas' failing to mention, when arguing against reading Nietzsche's talk of self-creation as holding "that to become what one is is to actualize all the capacities for which one is inherently suited", not mentioning (even to dismiss it as not Nietzsche's mature/final position) Human, All Too Human 263:

Talent.—In as highly developed a humanity as ours now is everyone acquires from nature access to many talents. Everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, en durance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become what he is: which means to discharge it in works and actions.

I mean, it seems like it might just support that reading!

What's eating Elizabeth Costello?

The previous post's content was recycled from (not merely the actual experience it relates but also) an old IM conversation (my mill recognizes neither bone, nor meat, nor tendon, nor organs—only gristle, only gristle), but was prompted by a re-reading of Cora Diamond's "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy", and several of the other essays included with it in Philosophy and Animal Life. The obvious connection between the two being: the encounter with such old, isolated, inhuman (if it makes sense to call only some trees inhuman) trees seems to have a similar potential for psychic disruption as do the examples she adduces—though they strike me as somewhat heterogeneous.

One of them (the one with which the least time is spent) is just of beauty, with reference, in fact, to trees. But the description given ("the slimness of a column crowned with green"), while certainly evocative, isn't, or wasn't in my case, really sufficient to get across, or stimulate, what, say, the apprehension of a monstrous death-in-life in the photograph Ted Hughes describes in the poem that serves as her first example gets across or stimulates—some kind of apprehension of something that remains recalcitrant, that resists us our efforts to tame, or that we resist even trying to tame. I don't think she should even really speak, as she does, of "instances of beauty"; the issue, I think, isn't that this beautiful thing is here but should not be or is somehow incomprehensible, but that there should be beautiful things at all is. (After all, beauty itself isn't supposed to be off-putting, not evendivinely superfluous beauty; it takes more than a bit of black bile to have the reaction Diamond describes to it.) I think it's easier to assimilate being somewhat disordered, when confronted with a nearly 5,000-year-old living thing, to something like sublimity—except even the sublime is supposed to be precisely something that we can quarantine in thought, while the point of Diamond's interest in the phenomena she singles out is precisely that they can't.

In that respect she might count, in Braver's eyes, as a continental realist; we encounter—occasionally, and not on the same occasions—something which we take to be "resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability" (45–46), or, later and more severely, something "beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one's thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty" (57), so that, faced with its difficulty, we are apt to retreat to our ordinary concepts, transforming the experience into something more tractable (we don't realize how much we are already artists*), rather than staring into the abyss with resolution.*

The heterogeneity of the examples she adduces, and her remonstration with the commentators on Coetzee's novella (and especially with Peter Singer), in which she argues that they have missed its real significance, that its significance precisely is to show us someone who has had such an experience, or a realization, and been unhinged because she does not allow herself to be diverted—whereas they, the commentators, do—almost makes it seem as if the precise content of what so upsets Elizabeth Costello is not only not the real scene of the action in the novella, but interesting only insofar as it's the source of Costello's "wound". (It's actually tendentious to describe Singer as engaged in deflection, because he would have first to have had the relevant experience if he's going to deflect it. But he may not have. Deflection isn't the same as just not seeing something.†) The real action is the view Coetzee gives us of a "profound disturbance of the soul" (56); that's what the novella is "centrally concerned" with (49)—and not with an ethical issue. How we should treat animals is itself not an "ethical issue" (51).

I take it Diamond means to be rejecting (or means to take Costello as rejecting) the issue part of "ethical issue"; for Costello, certainly, it isn't at issue, which is part of what's so horrifyingly disturbing about the smiling faces of the people who offer her bits of corpses to grind between her teeth. But even things that aren't at issue, not really disputed about, can be ethical issues insofar as there is room to say why they are bad (or good). It may be self-evident that, and why, the Holocaust gave us a new categorical imperative, but, as lovers say in a different context, it doesn't hurt to say it. And it's important that in the case of the treatment of animals, it's something that even those who are not vegetarians, or are not vegetarians for Costello's (or Diamond's) reasons (which is not to say reasonings), the question of the treatment of animals is one that we can at least acknowledge as something to be addressed. The thing which wounds Costello is important itself. And, to some extent at least, I think that Diamond does Singer a disservice in her treatment of his response.

Another part of what's so horrifying for Costello is that people don't just offer her corpses as comestibles, and do so apparently seeing nothing wrong with it, but that Costello herself has no certain hold on her own take on the situation; the enormity with which she's confronted alternates between that of everyone else's complicity in an outrageous crime and the possibility that she herself simply stands outside the community for no reason, that she's being hypersensitive. Nothing gives her an answer—and after all everyone seems to be managing just fine. (People emphasize the parallel Costello draws between the Holocaust and the eating of meat. But this is a striking difference: "We look (or used to look) askance at Germans of a certain generation because they are, in a sense, polluted; in the very signs of their normality (their healthy appetites, their hearty laughter) we see proof of how deeply seated pollution is in them" (21; emphasis added), she says toward the beginning of her lecture. But at the end of that lecture: "Every day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean" (35), and at the end of the novella: "I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people … is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? … I look into your eyes, into Norma's, into the children's, and I see only kindness, human-kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can't you?" (69). The point of quoting which is not to emphasize how adrift Costello feels, but that she feels adrift in a way that she presumably wouldn't when confronted with Germans of a certain age—even if they had healthy appetites and hearty laughs, and seemed perfectly normal and kind to each other. It may not be at issue for her, something to be decided by reasons, but it's not settled for her.) But it's important that, even if we don't see things as Costello does, we can at least see how someone might see things that way.

Hacking, in his conclusion to the book, notes that it would be perfectly natural to be unhinged if you and your family were actually being targeted for weird experiments and abductions by sinister alien forces, especially if no one believed you. If that's what were going on, you would, indeed, likely be unhinged by it, but you wouldn't be crazy. But if you believe that's what's going on, you are likely, sadly, to be crazy. And additionally unhinged! Given that you're crazy in this way, we can expect you to be unhinged. But a novella about someone unhinged for that reason, while it could be interesting in itself, would not be like The Lives of Animals, even though it would also show us a profound disturbance of the soul, because we would attribute the disturbance of the soul to a disturbance of the mind. Or—on the Braver tip—we could think that Johannes de Silentio's Abraham is similarly isolated (and isolated, indeed, from the ethical!), but I am uncertain how a novella about him would fare, presented to a largely secular audience. ("Well, of course he was deranged—he was the father of fanatics.") Says Hacking: "it must be reasonable to suppose that the putative reality is what is the case, is the reality" (153). But—well—is it reality? If I don't think it is, can you persuade me that it is? Say I, like Montaigne, "hardly ever [what, never? no: hardly ever] catch a beast alive without restoring it to its fields"—this an example of how cruelly I detest cruelty—and say, with him, that, first, "I do not attach much importance to such cousinship between us an the beasts" (to be fair, in context he appears to be speaking of literal metempsychosis), and, second, that "watching animals playing together and cuddling each other is nobody's sport: everyone's sport is to watch them tearing each other apart and wrenching off their limbs". This is may way of being with animals; it is the sense in which they are my fellows. Or perhaps—as against Diamond's claim in "Eating Meat and Eating People" that we would find someone "batty" who "freed his cows on his deathbed" (477)—I think it was downright sensible when "the Athenians commanded that the he-mules and she-mules which had been used in building the temple named the Hecatompedon should be set free and allowed to graze anywhere without hindrance" (all of this Montaigne being from "On Cruelty"). Here is my life with animals; there is yours. What then? Well, in "Eating Meat", Diamond suggests that we can make appeals on behalf of animals to see it this way, see these creatures thus, as Orwell suddenly saw the fascist holding up his trousers as a fellow-creature, look into the cow's eyes, etc. And—sure. (Think of the power of the descriptions of lobsters clinging to life in "Consider the Lobster".) And she insists that we oughtn't look for reasons that will be a reason for just anyone—to which again I am sympathetic. But there is a great gap between that and just not giving reasons; when Singer (paraphrased) says, "whenever I hear the phrase 'I think with my blood', I reach for my 'Therefores'", the reaction is, I think, just.

The mention of Abraham supra is calculated: if a mark of the ethical is precisely that it is characterized by reasons we offer one another, then Abraham is beyond the ethical, he's isolated from others; no one would accept, would believe, that he had received this instruction from God. And so is Costello, on Diamond's telling, not because she believes something unbelievable, but because she can't get others to occupy the position she occupies by giving them reasons. Though, again, it's important that we can see how someone could occupy that position without simply being a kook. But this seeing can't be: the seeing how someone could see the familiar figure as a duck rather than as a rabbit. Because—and I think this gets at a sense in which the question clearly is an ethical one, even if not whatever it is that Diamond means to denote by "ethical issue"—while we can freely go back and forth between the duck and the rabbit, once we have the knack, if we could actually see things as Costello sees them, we couldn't just flip back and forth between that and our previous point of view. (Something else that comes from Hacking. First, the fact that "the tom [of commercial turkeys] has been bred to be so heavy that, aside from the fact taht he can no longer walk but only totters, he cannot fertilize a female, for if he mounts her he will crush her to death" (147). Could someone who knows that just decide to put it out of his head, come November? If he actually found it disturbing, that is. For he could also, as Hacking notes, consider it to be a marvellously interesting development, a kind of symbiosis between this new breed of turkey and mankind. Could someone flip back and forth between inhabiting that viewpoint, and finding it disturbing? Surely not.)

* hey, I'm teaching Nietzsche this quarter too; you have to expect something will spill over.

† another reason to find the accusation puzzling. Singer may well be insensitive in his reading of the novel, in overlooking the position Costello's in. But what is the position she's in? She thinks that she's surrounded by participants in a horrible crime of extreme proportions, a daily slaughter. But surely Singer, too, thinks something like that? That meat-eating, factory farming, etc., are horrific, immoral enterprises? He doesn't think it the same way. But surely he does think it?

Archaic Forest of Bristlecone Pines

There is, absurdly, a page of reviews of the ancient bristlecone pine forest on Yelp; this strikes me as substantially more bizarre than there being a review of a Burger King, even though one might reasonably note that at least the forest is something significant. There simply seems to be something funny (not exactly presumptuous, but that's in there too) about reviewing a visually somewhat unimpressive but simultaneously mind-boggling stand of squat trees (and then giving it fewer than five out of five stars! Though that is not the important part). "Being in the presence of a tree that was not only alive but had been alive for around two thousand years when Homer was in short pants was amazing, A+++ WOULD BE HUMBLED AGAIN." [1]

Perhaps posting to Yelp is really no stranger, or even no different, from enthusing about the place to one's friends, and certainly I've done that. But it seems—each seems!—a weirdly inadequate response; describing the experience as "peaceful" (though it is) is an inadequate response; describing it as surreal or unsettling (though it is) is an inadequate response.

Part of the effect is doubtless a product not just of the knowledge that these trees are extremely old, but also the environment in which one encounters them: a windy drive up a tall hill (they are, of course, in a pretty isolated area) to an exposed area where the trees, which are surprisingly short, and surprisingly bare, sit in inhospitable earth. Near the area where you park (where we parked, when I was there, something like five years ago now) there's a bunch of sagebrush—it's downhill from the road, the pine trees uphill. There appears to be nothing else in the area with the pines than pines; there are lots of small ones, no more than six inches tall, for instance, which are probably older than my grandparents. It's all very disconcerting and one doesn't know quite how to take it. It seems to call for something.

It gets worse: while on the one hand a clonal organism seems like cheating in the "oldest living creature" competition, the idea of this colony of aspens is distressing in its own way: a going concern for 80,000 years, occupying 43 hectares. 43 hectares of nothing but yourself—and there are apparently colonies in Utah of over 80 hectares—how oppressive! It must, one wants to say, be so boring. And then there's this:

If its postulated age is correct, the climate into which Pando was born was markedly different from that of today, and it may be as many as 10,000 years since Pando's last successful flowering.

One can hardly imagine.

[1] Relating the age of the trees to things like when Homer lived is one of those maneuvers that you need to engage in, which take one away from the thing itself, in order to enable it to have its proper effect. Analogy: Arthur Dent, on learning that the Earth has been destroyed, finds himself unable to react to that knowledge at all until he frames it in terms of the nonexistence of some fast-food chain or other. (I think that's it.)

I do not want to moralize

Robert Pippin (in "How to Overcome Oneself: Nietzsche on Freedom"):

…Nietzsche adds something that is easy to overlook.

How is freedom measured, individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome.

Nietzsche here is most interested in a sort of psychological self-relation as constitutive of freedom … But what is this sort of self-relation? What counts as self-mastery in this sense? (pp 76f)

But nothing so far cited has explicitly referred to self-overcoming or -mastery; the resistance in the quotation is not obviously inner or coming from one's self. Later:

But the agency issues seem to me clearly present. This is so even though neither Nietzsche nor Zarathustra ever simply encourages us to "overcome yourselves." (The issue seems to be the proper acknowledgement and endurance of the self-overcoming character of life, an orientation that itself, as we shall see, has several social and historical conditions for its possibility.) (p 80).

Now Nietzsche, Gay Science 304 and 305:

304. By doing we forgo.—Basically I abhor every morality that says: "Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself [überwinde dich]!" But I am well idsposed toward those moralities that impel me to do something again and again from morning till evening, and to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing else than to do this well, as well as I alone can! …

305. Self-control [Selbstbeherrschung]—Those moralists who command man first and above all to gain control of himself thereby afflict him with a peculiar disease, namely, a constant irritability at all natural stirrings and inclinations and as it were a kind of itch. Whatever may henceforth push, pull, beckon, impel him from within or without will always strike this irritable one as endangering his self-control: no longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wing-beat; instead he stands there rigidly with a defensive posture, armed against himself …

Let it be hastily said that Pippin can and does, of course, adduce plenty of Nietzschean texts in favor of his position and I am pretty sure it can be rendered workable in the light of GS 304 and 305: but it's rather remarkable that they are not mentioned at all in the paper.

Is Infinite Jest experimental?

Two events of about a week ago conspire, at a temporal distance, to produce this post; they are a conversation (or set of conversations) about fiction on a self-conscious quest for something new¹, in the course of which I was reminded of an album by Tatsuya Nakatani, or rather its liner notes (also by Nakatani), and this post of Adam Kotsko's, in which he refers to David Foster Wallace as an author of experimental fiction.

Is he, though? Is Wittgenstein's Mistress, described by Wallace as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country", experimental fiction? (It's certainly a high point of something.) The relevance of Nakatani's liner notes is this: at one point in the text (I can't quote exactly since the CD (Primal Communication) is buried in a box somewhere), he raises the question of what kind of music it is that he plays. It isn't, he says, jazz, and that is surely true, though the kind of thing he does is ultimately derived genealogically from jazz. Nor, he says, is it "free improvisation", and there's truth to that as well; I bought the CD after hearing him perform a solo percussion performance, a single uninterrupted set of about 40-50 minutes), and the CD itself is a solo percussion performance, uninterrupted, about 50 minutes, and recognizably the same general program as the performance I had heard. (You can hear something cut from the same cloth yourself.) IIRC he doesn't directly address the "non-idiomatic improvisation" tag, but that's not really a useful classification anyway in various ways, and arguably it wouldn't fit either. He goes through some other candidates, and mentions along the way that he doesn't consider what he plays to be experimental music either, because he knows what he's doing.

Generally, of course, people call music "experimental" based on how it sounds, not based on the performer's attitude toward it, with the result that the same fate has befalled "experimental music" that tends to befall any stylistic classifier that has a preexisting descriptive content (e.g. "modern"; "noise"—I believe I've mentioned before on this very blog a complaint I encountered long ago, that the classics of noise, things like Metal Machine Music, don't sound noisy anymore, not like today's noise—nothing fails like success); it's the great virtue of tags like "rock" or "jazz" that they don't, or anyway, to the extent that they do, it's pretty tenuous. But I like Nakatani's take on it; anyway, if "experimental" were just a stylistic term, there would be no sense in Adam's (perhaps accurate) contention that experimental fiction is regarded as a resented duty. It might be a duty because important cultural work is being done there, it's the matrix whence new techniques, new concerns, new whatevers emerge; but if it just means (in the musical case) noisy, arrhythmic, aharmonic, amelodic, perhaps painful to hear, then why should anyone be concerned? No one need take an interest in the things that freak the squares, because they freak the squares. And that kind of thing could simply become old hat, after all, once it is no longer experimental in the sense of pushing forward. Similarly, natch, in the literary case; certainly, no one producing texts like "Welcome to the Funhouse" now could plausibly be said to be writing experimental literature. A resented duty because—let's face it—these are experiments that can fail, and certainly can fail to have lasting interest (something that I suspect is true of the Barth), whether failures or success.²

And this idea that one's own sense of trying something out, trying to figure out how a technique does or can be made to work, as a component of the result's being experimental, chimes, I think, with something else I find sympathetic, namely, Josipovici's take on what renders something modernist—a sense that certain prior methods can't simply be used anymore, that there's a problem, in fact, about the enterprise as a whole: so that, again, merely stylistic criteria can get it wrong.

So we would require a certain amount of self-doubt or uncertainty regarding what one is up to, and this, given what we know about him, Wallace probably did have. Though really his writing seems too assured, in general, for me to give that much weight; anyway, I'm not really interested in diagnosing whether or not Infinite Jest is experimental. (For the most part I would say: no, it's just long.) Wittgenstein's Mistress, too, seems so much the product of someone who knows precisely what he's after that it's hard for me to look on it as experimental, though, again, it was the first book in that telegraphic style that Markson published. (Surely, though, he had it down by The Last Novel!) Contrariwise: Nufer's Never Again doubtless is an experiment, an experiment in trying to write a novel in which no word appears more than once, and, though he did do that, and there are lessons to be learned from it and the effects he's led to employ, I think it must be judged a failure, since it is nearly unreadable and mostly unengaging. (It is nevertheless exciting, though.) We would also require, as the remark about someone producing Barth-like stories these days indicates, that it actually be new; techniques formerly experimental have become part of the common vocabulary these days (free indirect discourse: once experimental, now ubiquitous). This is on the one hand a further objection to the purely stylistic (or … auditory?) construal of "experimental", since that construal, I think, can't account for this Barthian fact, whereas the reason that one couldn't experiment along Barthian lines anymore is that (though one personally may be fumbling with that kind of authorial intervention) we now know how it's done. Even if most people still find it off-putting. But the non-stylistic construal is perhaps uncomfortably teleological (not, to repeat myself, that I think that the person experimenting need have the telos of enriching the common stock of techniques). And it too could be seen to encourage something like philistinism: since it wishes to say that the experiments can also be failures, it thereby gives someone who doesn't care about experimental stuff a good excuse for ignoring it: why not wait until they've got their stuff sorted out, anyway?³ And really I think it's a good question why one would be interested in the new (music, literature, etc.), just as such—which is probably why "experimental" so often does slide into a description of a style: the style that was new at the time the person employing it liked it.

Having now run out of steam, I will unceremoniously conclude this post, without any real conclusion.

1. Prompted by the desire for a literary parallel to the sorts of compositions Cavell mentions in "Music Discomposed"; suggestions from others included Caucasian Chalk Circle, the nouveau roman, and the theatre of the absurd; from me myself, "Welcome to the Funhouse", Never Again, and Roussel.

2. Their successes would often result in part in their being taken up more broadly, though it is not necessarily the case that that's what the experiments would be for, as in fact has happened with music in many cases; jazz musicians mining avant-garde European compositions for krazy harmonies, or various kinds of actually pretty out-there pop/hip-hop production in the last decade being prominent examples. (If I knew more about the latter I could produce more, or any, examples offhand; I think, actually, the the Bomb Squad long ago had pretty advanced production techniques, whence Ken Vandermark's dedication of a tune to Hank Shocklee.) Dodecaphony is a staple of movie soundtracks! At one point in one of the conversations mentioned in the first paragraph of the post I thought it would be amusing to consider "Reading Barth after Duck Amuck", but it turns out that—in a reversal of the way these things usually go—Barth's stories really did come after Duck Amuck, by over a decade.

3. Though as long as I'm being irenic, it's not as if I think people should be interested in experimental stuff. I myself prefer things that I think are successes! Even if many of those things would fall under the "stylistically experimental" label.

A technique that was old before it became avant-garde

Here is the description of the procedure in Steve McCaffery's "Dark Ladies" (nb link goes to a PDF download):

The Dark Ladies emerged from the deletion then reconstruction of Shakespeare's sonnets. Only the end-rhymes and their sequence are retained, italicized [except in at least one case] and embedded throughout the freely reconstructed poems. Each poem comprises two versions of each sonnet, [sic] the first, preserves the end-rhymes in reverse order; the second in their proper one. I allowed myself the liberty of removing some archaicisms and replacing them with their current synonyms; hence "thou" becomes "you" and "becomest" becomes "becomes".

One can question the aptness of the word "reconstructions" there, and also, I think, the interest of the reconstructions; after all, it's not too hard to write to a list, even if the items in the list have to appear in order. But the interest is diminished not only because the content of the reconstructions is so hodgepodge and is somewhat incoherent, but also because a very similar idea has been seen before, with niftier results, too.

Richer psychological vocabulary desired

It is very tiresome to have that which an addict has for the thing to which he is addicted, hunger, my desire to have a stove with further-apart and larger ranges, and my desire to peel the beets which I have cooked so that I can eat them (what the final clause is attached to is ambiguous, but really it's accurate in either case) reduced to the same category, whether "desire", "drive", or, in a vague nod to the idea that there might in fact be differences among them, "pro-attitude" (something that still at least makes them all out to be attitudes), subsequent on which it is assumed that they all operate pretty much the same way—a tendency that has made it almost impossible for me to take seriously philosophical arguments about addicts, willing or otherwise, given the ham-handedness with which the phenomena of addiction are treated. Or seem to be, anyway: my experience with substances generally recognized to be addictive, other than alcohol, is pretty much nil, but a similarly-minded friend who has quit smoking several times agreed to the proposition that in addiction the (or a) issue is not that one has particularly strong desires for cigarettes but that as it were one's will is corrupted; one hasn't the ability to deny desires for cigarettes. (In fact this fits well with Nietzsche's definition of weakness of the will as the inability not to act on a stimulus—which doesn't require that the stimulus be very strong, even if we think that someone's will can be weaker with regard to some objects than to others.) Moreover—something that Sarah Buss at least has thankfully pointed out—succumbing to such a desire is still your action; it isn't actually an alien force—doesn't drag you around and move your hand into the pack for you—even if you might wish that you didn't have such desires. that they weren't so insistent, or that smoking hadn't become quasi-needful for you. (I mean, we are talking about a dependency.)

The cost of the absence of subtle descriptions and subtle words can be seen when (for instance) someone describes high-functioning alcoholics as those in whom a drive for consuming alcohol (which is what alcoholics are said to have—a drive, like any other, except very strong, for drinking alcohol) has "mastered" other drives, where such mastery "consists of one drives' beign predominant, but still allowing other drives expression. In other words, drive A masters drives B and C when A becomes stronger than B and C, and modulates the expression of B and C, yet does not weaken or eliminate B and C" (this is Katsafanas, "The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller"). Of course "allowing other drives expression" cannot mean here something agentially flavored, something that might be glossed as "suffering them to be expressed": at best it can be something like: this drive does not prevent or exclude the expression of the others. No gloss has yet been given for one drive's being stronger than another; it would be implausible to think that A being stronger than B meant that one always acted in accordance with the former rather than the latter whenever one could only do one of the two, so I assume it's something on the order of acting in accordance with the stronger drive when there's an issue of which of the two drives will prevail. On the one hand: this allows us the reasonable possibility that a drive might be momentarily satisfied and thus not contest other drives even if action in accordance with it is still possible. On the other: it seems to make fatigue and thirst, to say nothing of the drive associated with (*ahem*) fecal urgency, into drives that (in most of us) have mastered all other drives.

Katsafanas notes that high-functioning alcoholics "maintain stable and successful lives" and says that they "have rich arrays of passions and drives that are subordinated to, but not weakened or extirpated by, their craving for alcohol". But why should we think that this claim of subordination is correct—that the alcoholic will go to his weekly bridge game, but not until he's had a drink, because the desire to play bridge is subordinate to his desire to have a drink? (I've said "desire" in part because talking about a drive to play bridge is a little too too.) Why not think precisely the opposite: his desire to have a drink is subordinated to his desire to play bridge in the way that his desire to drive to the place where the game takes place is subordinated to the desire to play bridge? That he can't do it without having a drink first. That wouldn't mean that the drive to drink is stronger than the drive to sociability, it would mean that drinking has become a necessary step in the pursuit of other ends. (You could try to make it out that this is the drive for drink's "modulation" of the drive for sociability, but I think we should be becoming skeptical of talk of a "drive for drink" at all. Katsafanas also speaks of a "craving for alcohol", which strikes me as something different again. It also seems forced to talk of a modulation here; the expression of the drive to sociability remains the same: playing the weekly bridge game. It's just become that much harder to actually do it. Similarly (or at worst, similarly forced): when the bus routes change, that doesn't modulate the expression of the drive to sociability, it just means he has to figure out afresh how to get to the game.) Katsafanas even quotes Hemingway to apparently this effect: "You wake up in the night and things are unbearable and you take a drink and make them bearable." This doesn't seem to be the expression of a drive to drink; it's an expression (as Katsafanas notes) of a dependency on alcohol to do other things. Alcoholism being what it is, the need to consume alcohol to do anything eventually becomes an inability to do anything because of the alcohol consumed (I am told that heroin isn't like this and that if you can secure a good supply it is, considered in itself, basically free from ill effects, but I have no idea how true that is): which Katsafanas is forced to describe, bafflingly, as the drive "extirpat[ing] or severely weaken[ing] competing drives" (the hallmark of a drive's tyrannizing rather than mastering another). Whereas it seems to be the result of two things: (a) when one is constantly trashed, it is hard to maintain other interests, and even the most iron-livered will eventually reach the limits of their tolerance; (b) when what it takes to meet one drive (theoretically, in order to be able to get on with one's life) keeps increasing, one can do less and less by way of getting on with one's life. What is happening here is that the other drives are dying on the vine, not that the drive to drink is weakening them. (Not all becoming-weaks are being-weakeneds.) If we must persist in identifying what the alcoholic undergoes as a drive on a par with all others.

Enthusiasm for reflexivity

At some point when I wasn't paying attention Velleman's "The Way of the Wanton" was published; rereading it now I'm struck by two (very Vellish) points about reflexive desires that seem completely unjustified. One is offered apparently as an obiter dictum: Velleman identifies the two desires that the famous "willing addict" has as "his addictive urge to take the drug and a desire that he take the drug because of that urge, which is a desire for himself to take the drug and hence a reflexive desire to take it." (p 175 of Practical Identity and Narrative Agency). If the referent of "which" is the "addictive urge to take the drug", then one wishes to say of the reflexive pronoun in the later exposition of its content what Baier said of Chisholm's ever-present agent, namely, that it is somewhat over-advertised, or anyway too much is being made of it; if I have the urge to take a drug, then indeed the urge is for me to take it, not for you to. If that is sufficient to make it a reflexive desire then all desires that aren't targeted at someone else are reflexive. (Whereas it seems more natural to me to call only the desires that involve oneself as another reflexive. One half suspects that here the absence of something like Latin's ipse is felt: I want to take the drugs myself, not, I want myself to take the drugs. (Where the "myself"s would be Latinized respectively as ipse and me.) Velleman's phrasing is more in line with the latter but also more in line with the oneself-as-another reading, and that reading is not at all forced by the example.) If, on the other hand, the "which" refers to the desire that he take the drug because of the addictive urge, it is still unclear where the reflexivity comes in; a desire that I φ because of p is indeed a desire that I φ; why (hence) it should be a reflexive desire to take it is beyond my ken.

Later on the same page Velleman writes:

This explanation necessitates a subtle clarification about the content of second-order volitions. A second-order volition that one be effectively moved by a first-order desire cannot have the content that one be effectively moved by the first-order desire alone. The content of a second-order volition must be that one be effectively moved by the first-order desire as reinforced by this very volition. Otherwise, the volition would tend to be self-frustrating.

It would be self-frustrating because if I desired to be effectively moved by the desire to φ alone, either (a) the first desire would not be effective, or (b) it would be effective in which case I would not have φed owing to the desire to φ alone. This does not at all establish that a second-order volition must be one that runs "φ because effectively moved by the first-order desire to do so as reinforced by this very volition", because I could have a second-order volition that runs "φ because effectively moved by the first-order desire to do so". We can agree that a second-order volition can't have the content "be effectively moved by the first-order desire alone", but it can have the content "be effectively moved by the first-order desire" alone.

(Of course my head swims when the topic of self-referential mental states comes up; how—I wonder—do they get their content at all? One is brought to imagine some kind of mental fixed-point combinator, but even those only work by stages, and what could account for the first stage? Harman has addressed this at various points but nowhere in a way that rids me of my confusion.)

Brief comments on beginning

Here is a thesis that is discussed a bit these days: to intend, or to have formed the intention, to $\^H^Hφ is already to be φing. One sees it in, for instance, "Naïve Action Theory"; Korsgaard endorses it (and her argument for it in Self-Constitution is breezy in a way all too typical of that book), as do, apparently, Moran & Stone, each of K, M and S crediting Luca F/rrero (M & S citing a paper that apparently no longer exists in the form it did when it was cited, and which Luca has been saying he'll show me for over three years—so who knows if he thinks it). It is also occasionally attributed to Wilson.

I have opinions about this! In particular, I think that Thompson's argument is totally unconvincing and that the view's attribution to Wilson is incorrect; Wilson has a related, but different and much less implausible, position. (Actually I think the question of Thompson's commitment to it is less clearly decidable than one might guess, because of his extended analogy to different economic forms, but I'm not sure whether he means the analogy to work that way.) Thompson writes:

The use of temporal designators in "I'm doing A tomorrow (or in a minute, or on Tuesday, or when Hector arrives" is subordinate to the imperfective aspect that is here reckoned as strictly present; it is no different from the use of temporal designators in "I want to do A tomorrow", and any contradiction to which it tends is the 'contradiction' present in "I want to do A, but I don't want to do it now". (p 140 of Life and Action, italics in original)

On the next page he states that "'anticipatory' uses of the progressive are really no different from … uses `in hiatus'". Now I think he is right about uses 'in hiatus', and that, as he has said elsewhere, "it is a mistake to look, at each moment, … for something in which the progress might be supposed to consist" (Wilson, IIRC, uses the spreading of a crack through freeze/thaw cycles as an example here). But it is still reasonable to insist that there be occasional events constituting progress, and if the gap between them is too large one will be inclined to think, not that the same process was ongoing all along, but that one stopped and another picked up where the previous left off. (One might think that in writing this post I am blogging again, not still.) And it is a fair question, one not answered by Thompson's claims about temporal designators, whether having made a decision is such an event, or whether it is a preliminary to such an event, or what.

The claims about temporal designators are anyway quite strange: what sense could it possibly make to say that the aspect of a sentence is present? The dimensions of tense and aspect are orthogonal (something of which one would have thought Thompson was aware); in any case, the present tense of a sentence does not at all indicate that it is concerned with present time. Consider the following present-tense sentences, which discuss past time, present time, no time in particular, and future time:

1. So it's last Tuesday, right, and I'm sitting there minding my own business when all of a sudden Mabel comes in and she's yammering on about god knows what, and now I can't concentrate anymore, so I get up and leave, and I'm just heading out the door when wham! she whacks me over the head with a table leg!
2. I am sitting in a room.
3. Potatoes are healthful.
4. I will sit in that room tomorrow.

Since English has no future tense, it had better be possible to use some other tense it does have to talk about future time. And temporal adverbs are a way of doing that; we distinguish between what I'm doing today and what I'm doing tomorrow as statements about different times using the same tense. A statement about a present desire for a future action is comprehensible, since the desire is had now, and the future action is conceived as something that has not yet been begun but (it is desired) will commence in the future. As Thompson requires it to be understood, "I am doing A tomorrow" involves no such separation (and a statement such as "I'm doing A all day tomorrow, then on Thursday I'm going to the beach" threatens to become nearly incomprehensible—the question also arises what statement about the weather is made when I say "it's going to rain tomorrow").

Wilson does say some things that seem to amount to a Thompson-like position, in particular this:

[T]he thesis I wish to develop is this: if Flannery is intending to φ (i.e., Flannery intends to do φ), then Flannery is in the course of intending to φ. That is to say, Flannery is in the course ofa ctivity that is intended to φ where, finally, this means that Flannery is in the course of activity each step of which is, will, or would be intended to lead to her future φing. (p 224 of The Intentionality of Human Action, italics in original)

Nothing he says here, however, requires that we interpret "intended to lead to her future φing" in such a way that Flannery's activity is already a part of the φing (giving "φing" something akin to a success reading: her having φed). Elsewhere he writes that "planning in connection with my possible future φing is also, as a rule, intended to promote that φing" (p 225) and speaks of the activity associated with intending as "intended to lead to φing" (p 222), which also do not compel a Thompson-like reading. Better, I think, to take Wilson to be suggesting that intending to φ is a process related to, and leading up to, a future φing, but not the same as that φing. (Landman, in his article "The Progressive", reaches a somewhat similar position, saying "I will allow the possibility that [actions] start with what could be called a planning stage, where the process hasn't properly started yet" (p 24).) Part of the idea is that there is no such thing as utterly pure intending, which has no overt manifestations at all; while Wilson will allow (anticipating Thompson's comments about silence in music) that "I may be intending to φ [n.b. not φing] throughout a period p while doing very little" and that "the period p may be almost as thin as one likes with φ-directed activity" (p 225), but it can't be empty. Otherwise one has, at best, an idle wish to φ.

This is controverted: "What about plans for tomorrow that require no preparatory steps, as for instance, to blink at 3:00pm? Isn't some intending utterly pure, as Davidson thought?" But it is far from clear that a plan to blink at 3pm tomorrow requires no preparatory steps. Actually blinking at 3pm tomorrow does not, if it's just a fact that I do then blink; but if I intend to blink at 3pm tomorrow I had better be prepared to answer the question, "how?". Answers could be, for instance: "I set an alarm for 2:59 and wrote 'BLINK' on my hand"; "I'm just going to blink all day"; "I have an excellent memory and an excellent sense of time so I can just do these things". Even in the last case I think we must imagine that I will occasionally compare the time it is now to 3pm: my sense of time is something I will use, not something that will automatically cause me to blink; likewise the excellence of my memory means that I won't have to have written myself a note to keep myself on track. Well: I might indeed mean with the last claim something like "I just will blink then, given that I have formed the intention now"—a situation in which the eventual action, to steal a metaphor from Velleman (in "Deciding How To Decide"), stands to the intention-formation as the explosion of a bomb does to the lighting of its fuse. But we would still have a preparatory step: namely, the lighting of the fuse. Arguably, such lighting is all I intentionally do in this situation: likewise, I don't intentionally wake up when my alarm goes off, though I do intentionally set it so that I will wake up when it goes off. And setting the alarm was a necessary preliminary.