A couple of artists I admire died recently: Tuli Kipferberg, musician & raconteur, & John Callahan, cartoonist.
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Intermezzi
I continue my desert studies at William Vollmann University, but I took some time away from the VU campus to read a couple of short books, each of which deals with one’s relation to the Other (though in very different ways), which is also Vollmann’s great theme. Last week, I finished reading my first Slavoj Zizek book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, having avoided Zizek up to now because he seemed both too prolific and too trendy. Right after finishing the Zizek, I read Susan Sontag’s long essay, Regarding the Pain of Others. In approaching Sontag over the years, I have often found myself repelled by the coldness of her style & her tendency to argue by assertion. Despite my doubts, both these short books accomplished for me what theory / criticism ought to do — that is, both essays helped me sharpen my own thinking and sense of the world.
The first half of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce presents a flyover of post-9/11 politics & culture in the West — it is what I think would have been called a work of political economy before that term went out of fashion with the rise of economics as a science. Zizek is a fluent, even sprightly, writer who can explain difficult concepts clearly and whose point of view can thus come to feel completely natural to the reader, who, if I am at all typical, adopts the author’s assumptions as if they were his own. This is a very effective rhetoric, if that’s what it is — style as rhetoric — but the reader must be on guard so as to not be swept away on a current of enthusiasm, which, admittedly, can be a pleasant experience, especially with a maestro as charismatic as Zizek.
Two big concepts emerge from Zizek’s essay, which is conveniently divided into two parts: 1. An analysis of the ways in which neo-liberalism & late capitalism effectively subvert & incorporate insurgent political movements. Zizek is particularly interested in the way that movements on the political left suffer this fate, but it would be interesting to see how he’d think about the so-called Tea Party movements on the American right, which will almost certainly be absorbed by the neo-liberal Republican Party. The genius of neo-liberalism is its ability to absorb insurgencies & naturalize them, making them safe for domestic consumption, as it were. 2. A thesis about Human Nature in which the capital letters are appropriate. Zizek sets himself up as a champion of “communism” as a mode of life that depends on the assumption that there is a core set of human values that unites all people across any supposed cultural divides. In this, he directly opposes the position of Theory in all its manifestations over the last thirty years, which has held that human nature is a variable construct. In my view, Zizek’s second thesis consists of a great deal of wishful thinking, but perhaps that is because I have been ensnared by theory. In any case, I have a student who, along with a bunch of Dickens and Tolstoy, has just read The Fountainhead this summer: I have recommended Zizek’s book as an antidote.
Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others came along at just the right moment for me. I have been reading William Vollmann’s big book Imperial, about the California county where my mother was born & where I spent a lot of time growing up & looking, too, at the separate volume Vollmann published, under the same title, of his photographs of people and places in Imperial County. Sontag’s book is an attempt to understand the usefulness of images — photographic images in particular. In this late essay, Sontag revises and even reverses her earlier (more aesthetic?) view of photography as a technology of distancing & comes to an understanding of the photograph – particularly the war photograph — as a necessary, if never sufficient, moral document. The second half of this book strikes me as the epitome of what an intellectual discourse looks like: full of passion & doubt.
Imperial by William Vollmann (2)
I’ve finished Part I of Vollmann’s desert epic & stand in awe of the flexibility and courage of his imagination. The flexibility, I think, is born of desperation & obsession: Vollmann is driven to look at everything about Imperial County (and the geographically and imaginatively much larger entity he calls Imperial), especially his own motives for writing about it and the way writing about it creates an imaginary Imperial; he then worries that the imaginary Imperial cannot do justice to the actuality of the place. All great art calls itself into question, suggests the grounds for its own negation. It is this sort of desperate knowledge of both the power and inadequacy of the imagination that forces Vollmann to bring himself directly into the text in chapters he calls “subdelineations” in order to distinguish them from the more documentary delineations of the other chapters. The courage is both aesthetic & physical. Vollmann dares just about anything in pursuit of the actual, on the page & on the ground. The structure of the book, I think, will be determined — delineated — by the subdelineations, then, where Vollmann brings himself into Imperial & Imperial into himself.
Later: In his second Subdelineation, which comes near the end of Part I, Vollmann presents a long meditation on the difference between fiction and non-fiction & the ability of each to tell the truth. Non-fiction comes out ahead, but not because it is capable in any direct way of presenting the truth, or even, perhaps, a truth. In turning over these ideas, Vollmann actually writes a bit of the novel he might have written had he chosen fiction, then he writes a bit of the novel another character — an INS agent — might have written about the same incident. All this against the background of a sentimental novel from the beginning of the 20th century, set in Imperial, with a heroine named Barbara Worth. For all his hardcore reportorial mojo, Vollmann is throughly pomo.
Wild Lives: Notes for an Essay
1. It is gratifying that whaling regulations have not been eased at the recent meeting of the international commission that oversees the “harvest” of marine mammals, but beyond that news & its egregious metaphor, I was fascinated by some of the information about cetaceans in this NY Times article; specifically, I was struck by the way the scientists quoted were defining personhood, if that’s the right term. Dolphins (& presumably whales) are interested in seeing themselves in a mirror, checking out parts of their bodies they can’t ordinarily see. The mirror test is presumed to to demonstrate self-consciousness, fair enough. My terriers will look at themselves in a mirror, but it’s hard to tell whether they see themselves or an image of another dog. They don’t behave as if they are seeing another dog, so perhaps they recognize themselves. Birds will peck at their own image in a mirror & the behavior seems pretty complex. How about fish? I don’t know, but I know some fish are territorial & might react as if another fish were horning in on their territory. I’m not trying to find fault with the mirror test, just noting that it is the human observer who views the animal’s interaction with a mirror & makes a determination. We know what consciousness looks like, or personhood. This is more interesting to me than whether this or that animal reacts to a mirror in a certain way, as interesting as that is.
2. The vocalizations of cetaceans is often compared to music, or song, and somewhat less often (& less directly), to speech. They have tribal dialects, apparently, which suggests language & since they can both learn & teach what they have learned, it appears that it might be something we would recognize as a real language, not just a highly elaborate system of communication. And here we get back to the issue of self-recognition. Language, too, is a mirror. I’m far from expert, but in addition to their vocal communications, don’t at least some species of cetaceans produce & repeat long “symphonic” vocalizations and then work changes on them? If so, this would suggest a sense of the aesthetic in whales & dolphins, though perhaps it is only an elaborate kind of birdsong. [Need further information.]
3. Living in the country, Carole & I take delight in seeing & naming: birds (many species, including jays, woodpeckers, nuthatches, hawks, vultures, ducks, geese, several kinds of finches, bluebirds, thrushes. . .), turtles (painted, snapping), frogs & toads, beavers, skunks, porcupines, deer, and occasionally coyotes & bears. What is the source of our delight? Merely a privilege of the bourgeois, or something deeper?
4. Portrayals of damaged humans, usually children, in fact & fiction: Kasper Hauser, Victor (the Wild Child from 18 c. France; various accounts by Truffaut, T.C. Boyle, etc.), Malcolm (from Marisa Silver’s novel The God of War), Christopher (from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime). By looking at what these damaged humans possess, as well as what they lack, we highlight the cluster of qualities that allow a person to create & recognize a self. And connected to these accounts, there is the much more abstract set of arguments in Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind that seem to suggest a special place in the universe for human consciousness. Not sure if I can accept the “fine tuning” of physical laws Robinson suggests (but does not assert), but that is not necessary to appreciate her devastating response to “parascientists” like Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and the other reductionists who believe that, because the brain is a physical organ, mind & consciousness are epiphenomena, easily dismissed as ontologically inferior the the various tissues and juices of the brain.
5. Mind as extension in the Cartesian sense. Richard P. Bentall’s Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature argues persuasively that “madness” is not one thing and is not separated by a bright line from other “normal” states of mind; in this vein, he sees mental complaints rather than a discrete set of mental illnesses that can be assigned a particular diagnosis. He also brings forward an impressive amount of evidence that strongly suggests mental illness is a bio-social phenomenon.
Further thoughts a couple of days later: 1. Yesterday evening I was watching Jett, our seven year old Jack Russell as he stood on the deck looking down the road toward the river. There were some kids swimming down there & the other two dogs had been barking in that direction, but Jett was focused, his mouth a little open, his nose moving to sense the air almost as a human would feel a piece of fabric to get the sense of it. The other two dogs were excited, but he was calm, completely self-possessed. I’ve watched all the dogs over the years of course & each has his/her ways of focusing on the world & at the same time being themselves. In fact those two things go together — focusing intently on the world and being an animal self. This goes beyond Santayana’s notion of “animal faith,” which is a kind of confidence that the world will be, perhaps roughly, supportive of our being. For the philosopher, “animal faith” is a common ground for animals & humans, something we humans share with animals but also then surpass in all the usually enumerated ways: reason, language, technology & so on.
2.Over the years I’ve had many encounters with animals that have gone beyond mere observation into something more profound and, I believe, reciprocal, though I don’t want to sentimentalize the notion of reciprocity– I understand that the heron I saw 25 years ago on an estuary near the Pacific “understood” our encounter in the same way I understood it, but the bird did look back at me and allowed me to come quite close & was clearly conscious of me. Wild animals are one thing & domesticated animals another. I freely admit to sentimentalizing our dogs, but I also spend a good deal of time just watching them, trying to understand something about the way they understand the world. Their sensory organs filter the world for them in a way different from mine, of course, but there is enough overlap — we’re all mammals – that we can make sense of each others’ sensory worlds. Also, we share a social world of complex personal interactions that allow us to communicate our sense of the world. And of course we observe each other in action and draw conclusions, seeing the world, in imaginative reconstruction, “through each others’ eyes.”
3.So what kind of cross-species identification does it take to get on a jet ski in the Antarctic Ocean to attack a Japanese whaling vessel & through acid at its crew?