Dreaming the Future Closer

My wife and I were talking about the most recent episode of CSI, featuring a murder that occurs at a rodeo.  We both felt that this episode, moreso than a lot of last season or perhaps last few seasons, captured something that was inimitably about the CSI experience. 

She observed that one of the things people don’t seem to get about murder mystery driven shows like CSI is that they aren’t about a voyeuristic attitude to death, but about a voyeuristic attitude to life.  That’s just brilliant, really, and it exactly captures what I liked about CSI when it started.  The death provides an occasion to examine a life, sometimes a whole microworld of lives.  Like a bat’s sonar, it throws the world into sharp outline.

The detective is an essential part of the process and in this Grissom, at his best, provided an essential structuring role.  His quirkiness, his macabre objectivity, cast a gentle light over the ensuing investigations.  His perpetual out-of-place self provided a remarkably non-judgmental window into some very strange social circles.

At the same time, he wasn’t immoral.  He had a strong sense of right and wrong, they were just unhindered by squeamishness.  He could, at the opening, make an off-color joke about the situation in which a body was recovered and by the end look calmly across the table at the convicted killer and respond to their layers of self-justification with a simple, “but you didn’t deal with these problems, you killed them, you made their resolution impossible.”

Between those two moments, he spun out ideas, explored theories, letting nothing but the evidence he discovered guide his judgments.  Biases were present, but quickly abandoned when unsupported by later information.  Alternative lifestyles were not demeaned, but regarded with a certain affectionate bemusement.

What might have been viewed as gross or deviant, became mere variation, a delightful panoply of human life.  The deviants were not inhuman, just differently human, beautiful in the way a strange new insect could be beautiful, fulfilling a secret and wondrous purpose if we only had the eyes to see into it.  Grissom arrived at the crime by befriending the world in which it occurred.  “Here, let me remove the disease so that you may return to your health.”

Compare this especially to the current portrayal of the lead in CSI: Miami, Horatio.  He is nothing but judgment, and the drama exists only to affirm that.  The evidence inexorably bears out whatever moral qualms he has with a person.  His insight, his judgment, his actions, are all impeccable.  When someone gets in his way or misleads him, the writing makes clear the fault lies in them, not Horatio.

So unerring is his judgment that we are provided with a storyline in which he goes to Brazil to engage in vigilantism, to kill a man who has threatened and hurt those dear to him.  There is no suggestion of moral ambiguity here.  Because Horatio judges him guilty and in need of execution, so are we.  Blood and death serve to illustrate Horatio’s perfection, an inhuman ideal who justifies our prejudices.

Beneath Horatio’s piercing eyes, difference becomes sin, a sign of the corruption that led to murder.  The acquaintances are so many already-fallen suspects.  It’s not a question of who is guilty, but of who is more guilty, who is the most guilty.  All along the way, Horatio uncovers other crimes, as if the whole world might be put behind bars to leave Miami empty but for the well-lit innocents who would remain behind to haunt it.

[Warning: dense, presumes familiarity with Hegel] 

I daresay that most people who have made their way through any sizable portion of Hegel’s opus comes away with a sense of awe for the man’s intellect.  Many, to be sure, qualify that with a sense that there is something almost, well, too brilliant, too pure.  That history may so gracefully be ordered, progressively, by a series of dialectical movements just seems too good or too awful to be true.

And I think that qualification is pretty much spot on.  I think the idea of dialectics is spot on, brilliant even, but that it holds only for a single remove.  Dialectics breaks down, becomes mere abstraction, when its functions are linked together progressively. 

The reason may be put something like this: each dialectical movement is a leap forward of the understanding into confusion and a local resolution of it.  However, the resolution drawn is utterly local, related to the person(s) involved.  The movement can be resolved in a number of different ways, and each of those different (not contradictory) movements are dialectical so long as they are carried to their end.

This is, I suspect, the gist of Adorno’s concern.

I am getting to the point where there is a sort of praxis involved in posting to this blog.  I understand that what is posted here is not the final word on anything I am writing on, but that in the effort to write as if it were, I move one step closer to a more thought out position.

Sometimes, I discover that what seemed clear in the confines of my thoughts reveals itself as tangled and muddy in writing.  Unless it is irredeemably so, I still post it because I have faith in my capacity to keep thinking beyond my posting of it.

I also hope that, in spite of the muddiness, a reader might come along who will see in it something useful, that will spark their own thinking or allow them to push a thought already in motion a little further forward.

I also think its very important to learn that thoughts aren’t born fully formed from the minds of geniuses, ready for the rest of us to gobble up. 

I would hope people come to my posts with a critical eye, not in order to demolish what can be demolished, but it order to extract from it what is good to them. 

But there is something more going on, too.  In applying a critical eye, the critic learns more of themselves, acquires a firmer sense of their own tastes, of their own place. 

I hope that the muddier posts still provide some glimpse of my own critical eye at work.

It’s a bit difficult to talk about polytheism in a serious way without getting into a terminological morass.  When we include some of the African diaspora religions, it only gets more complicated.

A lot of that has to do with the god word.  What is and what isn’t a deity?  The problem has to do, in part, with the theological baggage from Christianity (which tie back to issues Christianity has/had with Jewish conceptions…but that’s another ball of wax)—there can be only one God and everything else has to be arranged in a hierarchy beneath either for or against that.

I’m going to take a page from Kant’s playbook and just shunt the whole matter to the side, bracketing.  We, limited though amazing creatures that we are, simply do not have the faculties required to make sense of the questions underlying that. 

Whether there is one big God and all the others are its creation or expressions of it or whether there all kinds of gods and the G-D is just one among many, I can’t say.

That doesn’t mean I think there is no difference in thinking one or the other thing about monotheism.  As a tenet of belief, as a means of interacting with the divine, it has real effects, some good, some not. 

But it is a tenet of faith, not reason.  It is embedded in the intimate experience you have with the divine and should not be divorced from that too quickly.

In the exact same way, an ardent belief in polytheism is embedded in your intimate experience of the divine, and ought not be quickly divorced from it.

Which is why I will say that I am, in a technical sense, agnostic about monotheism contra polytheism.  I have experienced nothing that convinces me, one way or another, that there is one G-D over all spirits or that one God is just one kind of god among others.

What I am not agnostic about is the existence of sacred beings and the diversity of their personality.  Whether that diversity is only ’skin deep’ and conceals a primary unity, I could only theorize about.

Which gets me to a very important tenet of this whole open theology project, one with roots in the thought of Soren Kierkegaard and Simone Weil:

Do not theologize beyond the scope of your experience.  An honest agnosticism is better than a false assertion of gnosis.

This one is very hard for me.  I want to make that clear—this is as much a warning for a would-be reader as it is for me.  I am prone to hypothesizing well beyond the scope of my experience. 

That can be a virtue but only when thoroughly moderated, when there is a neti, neti, to reach for when I get too high in the clouds.  I hope this post is one reminder of many to myself about that.

[Originally posted over at the Knife Fight, but reposted here in its entirety because I think there is something to this, something important that I want to dig into later.]

 You know when I am most able to love myself?  It’s when I think back to when I was younger, looking at how silly, how stupid I could be.  It’s when I look back at myself, foundering and trying to get somewhere, that I feel love for myself.

Every once in a while, I have a flash of that love for myself, when I think of me as just a person doing what I do, doing my best, as one person among others.  When I can look at myself, full of faults to be sure, but still working on everything.

I think that’s because love is about an other person, really, and so I only really love myself when I have enough distance on myself to see myself as an other person.  More often than not, that comes with a certain dose of forgiveness—the sort of forgiveness that is real and meaningful, full of appreciation for everything that went into the mistakes.

That shift in level, in being able to see myself as one person among others, someone and not me, has much to do with what I would call spirituality.

I can love myself only to the extent that I’m some person, not me.  Strangely enough, being able to do that also makes it easier to love and forgive others.  Being able to see myself as one among others allows me to love and forgive others.  I think that ‘one among others’ perspective is ‘more true’ than any perspective in which it is primarily me among others.

How’s that for nutty?

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.

Perhaps the greatest failure of much latter day modernism, postmodernism, post-what-have-you-ism, is the overwhelmingly monotheism of it.  That sounds silly, given how often these discourses tend toward discussions of diversity, of mobility, of plurality, but so much of that discourse is just an effort to outdo the old monotheism on its own ground.

What do I mean by this?  Nothing fancy, really, just that the very effort to provide a unified picture of plurality, an underlying symphonic rationality, runs aground because it misses what is most essential to a picture of plurality, namely difference. 

And with difference, a sense that each explanation has its limits, that there is a point when it just makes sense to change registers rather than drive yourself batty trying to make it all fit.  Not that there is not something productive about the effort to push the envelope, see if the explanation can be carried just a little further.  But only in that limited sense, as something to push just a little further, not as an effort to reveal the truth behind it all.

Talk less about an image of thought and more about images in the plural, correlating them not according to their ‘resemblance’ to one another, but according to what they illuminate and how they illuminate it. 

This is not new, but here I am reminding myself of it.

When it comes to determining the ‘value’ of a humanities-driven education, we often end up with some platitudes about being well-rounded, of being ‘human,’ of developing critical thinking. 

While I think there are meaningful ways to flesh out these platitudes, they also obscure an important dimension and opportunity of a humanities education: it encourages people to think differently, to stretch their mind around foreign modes of thinking.

A common lament of a student taking these classes is that they have to read all this obscure or irrelevant people with crazy ideas.  The outrageous content of these ideas goes hand in hand with their being seen as irrelevant.  And, unfortunately, armed with the sort of platitudes already mentioned, we don’t get much beyond that attitude.

However, what needs to be remembered, is that crazy ideas can be contained within very innovative and powerful formal structures.  Assuming we aren’t just dealing with craziness pure and simple (which is fairly infrequent), as historians of ideas, philosophers, critical theorists, wehave the opportunity to unearth modes of relating information. 

Those modes of relating information are not entirely content-neutral, but nor are they content-determined.  Teaching students to interact with these ‘crazy’ ideas as forms of rationality is an education in not just critical thinking, but creative thinking.

While I would not want to reduce the mission of the humanities to teaching this ‘creative thinking,’ we do a disservice to it by not elaborating more clearly the benefits of it, by not encouraging it as a virtue among scholars and students alike.