Dreaming the Future Closer

This is from a notebook I used to carry around with me to write about what I was thinking about. The entry is dated November 30, 2004. There are good ideas here, ideas I would still endorse in some form or another. But it’s been a while since I really cared so much about these sorts of things as I do in this entry, and that makes me a little sad. I have left the inconsistencies of the original (typos and all) since they, too, seem part and parcel of that enthusiasm. Here it is:

A Brief Note on Sense & Reference: Too many put too much weight on the divergence of the two. At base, sense guarantees reference—a sensible phrase always has a referent, even if that referent is a fictional being (“fictional” opposing “real” only in common parlance, not in the metaphysical/ontological sense established in the “sense/reference paradox”). “The present king of France is bald” makes perfect sense and refers to an ontologically real entity (i.e. the fictional character “the present King of France”).

Consider Jed, “a poor mountaineer who could barely keep his family fed.” The story about Jed both makes sense and refers!

This goes some way to laying the framework for a public philosophy of exemplarity.

Notes toward teaching—Make clear the technical & general uses of a term so that students are prepped for vocabulary pluralism.

Emphasize the distinction between “brilliance” (rapid deployment of intellectual schema) and “wisdom” (slow, comparative work that ferrets out “deep” similarities without collapsing the compared into a single category)—especially in a 101-style course, grade according to the student’s effort toward engaging in such comparisons, even if it results in less clearly “brilliant” pieces.

Back to Sense & Reference: where reference becomes less clear, so does sense & vice versa. Sense “secures” the space for referred entities, so that the weakening of their clarity cannot but entail a corresponding loss of sense, just as a blurring of “sensible” categories makes reference more difficult. Sometimes, this blur grows into a full extension of sense, sometimes it collapses into babble, sometimes it remains unstable. (Todorov’s fantastic read back into discourse as a whole—consider “alternative logics” as attempts to claim (stretch) sense).

This is not new—it distills much of what I consider best in Deleuze—The Logic of Sense & What is Philosophy? with Guattari. The introduction of fictional entities opens the door to deeper appreciation of related (but not identical cases) to aesthetic entities, theoretical entities…and philosophic entities. But, unlike D&G, the concept need not be the primary vehicle—ethical vignettes, thought experiments, etc. are not necessarily “concepts” but nonetheless are philosophical entities. If anything, the traditional division of art, science, and philosophy may be too big, still too analogical and not comparative enough. We must move lower to appreciate the entities like Jed, Present King of France, Quarks, Superstrings, thought experiments, casuistry-crafted analogues, etc.

In this lies a criticism of so-called “interdisciplinary” work—the notion of inter-disciplinary does not go quite where we need to be—it sustains the disciplines when it should generate a space where disciplinary boundaries blur. These occur mostly at “sub-disciplinary” levels, where the topic should not “x object” from several perspectives but ”x entity” as of families of entities whose similarities and (more importantly) differences form a field that exists in no discipline but enriches many. These entities may frequently demarcate disciplines, the differences between related entities an important factor in a particular disciplinary boundary. Such entities may also, though, move between disciplines, be shared by them. In such cases, a study of their different uses may be an important aspect of cataloguing them.

Such a study should be loath to quickly categorize certain things as lacking sense and reference. Musico-poetic uses of words as well as instrumental music do not have the sorts of s&r we readers are used to, but this does not have to equate to an absence. A piece of music deploys sense (chords, notes, etc) that establish and condition reference, just as certain kinds of experimental music stretch and distort those establishes patterns of s&r.

Sense and reference here become a certain kind of entity, a conceptual relative of Jed and present king of France, that makes such sub-disciplinary fields possible—establishing conditions that make comparative endeavors possible.

It may be possible to talk about “properly” philosophical applications of terms like these, of claiming philosophical privilege to these sub-disciplinary spaces. But this misses the point: philosophy has no special access qua discipline, although it might have an accidental local privilege based on historical circumstance. Philosophy may enter into such sub-disciplinary spaces & return to its “proper” bounds with new entities or a deepened sense of its own entities (“philosophy” too vague—not philosophy as some vaguely defined aggregate, but philosophy & historical points of interacting).

This model borrows some material from philosophic talk about “conditions of possibility,” but is clearly more historical and materialistic: not absolute conditions of possibility but very local examinations of family relations that illuminate regions of thought they make possible. They give weight to what Foucault wanted his genealogies & archaeologies to be (his claim you can do many archaeologies on the “same” material)—not final descriptions (ascriptions/inscriptions) of how things are, but discussions about the sorts of things we are interested in and how they enable us to talk to each other without simply asserting discursive primacy of our bailywick (hence why questions of what “our” archive is are nonsensical (pardon the pun)—an “archive” is simply a local, practical means of facilitating a discussion, not a “real” thing we unearth).

Note the way this makes standard exegesis of my “favorite” figures problematic—I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with them in any easy manner, but using their work as inspiration, as partial steps toward my project. The “towards” is complicated, because I give their work an aim it may or may not have internally and use that to drive a series of conclusions, that are only partially theirs. I use the concepts of public philosophy, communication, and sense/reference issues to develop inconsistencies from their work, these inconsistencies providing the basis for an alternative formulation (mine) that solves them.

This is “unfair” in terms of adhering to their work, but essential for making use of a thinker. And it is only in use that we begin to really talk.

The work of “use” highlights the problems with any historical discourse that assigns figures to movements and schools. Those movements and schools can too easily elide the diversity of its members, of the uses to which they are put. They become dead litanies of dogma instead of occasions for communication & use.

Dated 2/24/2006 

What bothers me is the loss of a distinction between what you have the right to do (a legal term) and what you ought to do (a moral-ethical term).  There should be many things which you have the right to do and say that you nonetheless should apologize when you do or say them.  I have the right to mock someone mercilessly for their political choices (beyond what is ‘good’ or functional criticism), but that does not mean that I should, or that if I do, I have no need to apologize because I was ‘within my rights.’  I can’t be legally punished for activity that is within my right, but I should be held, and hold myself to, ethical standards that are not demarcated by rights-speak.

Dated 11/28/2005 (Edited to clean up a few typos) 

Rereading Adorno and Benjamin has brought to mind several important things.  First and foremost, that a philosophical account must not rest entirely upon an account of the subject, of the subject’s relationship to the world.  It must encompass the objective and not merely as the shadow of the subject’s actions. Second, that so much modern philosophy does just this, dwelling upon the ceaseless permutations of the Other rather than taking the steps required to place the self and other in the broader field of objects.  This lack of placement gives the Other and Self no content, makes of them empty forms that can sustain both too much (i.e. support multiple contradictory alternatives) and too little (provide no means for selection between competitors).  It strikes me that Deleuze, too, has some savviness in this regard, a concern for the object that is not reduced to the subject, although pursued quite differently.

It would be meaningful, I think, to revisit some of the ’sexy’ elements of Deleuze’s thought—the mistake many make with them may be the manner in which they eagerly seek a human, subjective face for them, entirely ignoring the way in which the model reaches out to highlight the ‘reality’ of the object—masochism not just as the relation of self and other, servant and mistress (as early Deleuze) but as an effort by the masochist to situate himself or herself among the world of objects, to speak to them in their own tongue, if you will.

Dated 5/12/2006 

Learning tends to work upon two different movements—one, the process in which the learner finds themselves in the middle of a domain that they do not understand and with which they must struggle to acquire footholds; two, the process where, once chunks have been acquired, they
learn to move within that field, manipulating portions of it.

Might education do better to discourage competition, most especially at the first movement?  During that time, all learners feel more or less clumsy and a heavy, grade based system leads them to judge themselves more harshly, to discourage action rather than foster it.  It would seem
better to have two sorts of classes—Pass / Fail courses in which the students are immersed, allowed to struggle, taught the lineaments of construction, and fully graded courses where they then begin to construct more properly.

Encourage the two courses to occur throughout a student’s career, so that they are re-immersed regularly in the most dramatic aspect of learning and are taught that their confusion can be the entry to comprehension, not its antithesis.

Dated 8/3/2005  (Edited to break up blocks of text into more digestible chunks)

Ethics is not free of issues of scale.  It is the problem embodied in the question about the justice or righteousness of any legal system, the problem that appears in war.

Ethics begins with the intimate encounters, with our behavior towards those in our immediate environment, it is no simple calculus but requires us to make determinations of principle.  When faced with a knife-wielding assailant, the question of harming them is not negated by their violent attitude, but only raised to its most poignant expression.  The same follows in abusive relationships, where the question of love and endurance appear most starkly.

What happens when we must move beyond that personal sphere, to deal with questions of right and wrong in which we have no direct access.  In a democratic society this should be a essential question—we may not send soldiers abroad (to kill and be killed, to face that moral challenge again and again), but we play a role in determining those who will make those decisions.  The intimacy frequently fades and is replaced by all manner of calculus (the rule of double effect), means for establishing quantitative or nearly quantitative terms for very qualitative questions. 

This is not accidental—we cannot imagine the complexities of such an ethical decision, we are not suited to imagining a thousand or a hundred thousand ethical encounters at once. 

And consider the stress upon those who must then make their peace with the two scales at once, who must be able to accept the justice of the global scale, but live its effects on the local?  What sort of distortions occur here (and this is not a special case—we almost all do it in our encounter with the law)?

How are we to navigate this?  How can we live with (necessary) determinations in the global scale when our intimate encounters on the local scale are so textured, so complicated?

Dated 8/3/2005 (edited to clean up some ugly typos, otherwise the clunkiness of the original is retained)

There is an occasional argument that the humanization of the world (making it the recipient of human endeavors) makes the world more human, more amenable to choice and freedom.  Yet there is a hidden demon in this little notion—the ‘humanized’ world possesses its own complexity, its own laws, that are independent of the human agents that generated them.  These laws possess an inhumanity that rivals and in some cases may even outdo the ‘tyranny’ of the natural world.  Outdo because the scale of the humanized world, being ’set’ to humans, also more easily influences them, more easily makes of them a cog in its machinery whereas the natural world is more indifferent to humanity, less able to directly influence it.

I’m in a sorting mood, going through my Gmail account and looking through some of the many, many emails I sent myself as little reminders.  The fact that I have only recently been going through these probably speaks to how efficacious that is.  Still, the mere act of writing it out serves a purpose, helps focus me.

Anyway, I am going to pull out a few of those emails that I still like in one way or another and repost them here.  I am not necessarily endorsing them as ‘this I believe,’ just putting them up for consideration (primarily my own), as snapshots of my intellectual trajectory.  They will all have the tag ‘Old Thoughts.’