. . . in relation to the unknown

My dad once said to me that philosophy is "highly destructive of certainty." Thus prompted, I want to enumerate some (possibly novel) observations about certainty which come from outside philosophy's academic silo. In doing so, I affirm the above remark as a serviceable mandate for philosophy proper, on top of whatever more parochial application it may find day-to-day; but I suggest, also, that the "destructive" bent is not philosophy's alone, and that, in fact, this oft-hidden "philosophical" potential of so many other intellectual and cultural practices is precisely what redeems them beyond their parochial circumstances of origin. In fact we may be "doing philosophy" while we're doing something else, whether we realize it or not; but this can be the case only if certain peculiar conditions are met therein.

---

Christopher Lasch's chapter "The Soul of Man under Secularism," which is the final chapter of his The Revolt of the Elites, contains the following passage:

In the commentary on the modern spiritual predicament, religion is consistently treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security, not as a challenge to complacency and pride. Its ethical teachings are misconstrued as a body of simple commandments leaving no room for ambiguity or doubt. Recall Jung's description of medieval Christians as "children of God [who] knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves." . . .

What has to be questioned here is the assumption that religion ever provided a set of comprehensive and unambiguous answers to ethical questions, answers completely resistant to skepticism, or that it forestalled speculation about the meaning and purpose of life, or that religious people in the past were unacquainted with existential despair. The famous collection of songs written by medieval students preparing for the priesthood Carmina Burana would be enough in itself to dispel this notion; . . .

Or consider the varieties of religious experience analyzed by William James in his book of that name, . . . Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation—which have their origin not in perceptions exclusively modern but in the bitterness always felt toward a God who allows evil and suffering to flourish—often become the prelude to conversion.

(pp. 242-243)

For Lasch here, "religion" may be "a challenge to complacency and pride." Is it also destructive of certainty? He says only that certainty is not something that religion necessarily provides. Above all, he sees suggestions to the contrary as a kind of motivated slander issuing from the apostles of "secularism"; in other words, from his book's eponymous "elites." That is more so what is at issue in the above passage.

I happen to think he has a fair point here, despite being a deeply "secular" person myself. Still, it is curious to return to his previous book, The True and Only Heaven, and find the following:

The scientific worldview, [William James] argued, seemingly so "healthy" and "robustious," so "rugged and manly" in its respect for facts, actually concealed a childish desire for certainty. . . . Science . . . had inherited the attitude of those who longed to live in a risk-free world. . . . Verification, that much-vaunted principle of modern science, was a technique merely for avoiding error, not for wresting truth from chaos. . . . It was a position that could never serve as a guide to the conduct of life.

(p. 289)

Now, if what today's mandarin technocrats "long" for is "to live in a risk-free world," perhaps they are not doing a very good job; perhaps they have become irreverrent of "verification" in precisely such matters as verification ought apply to most rigorously; perhaps they have found the sheer scale and scope of their scientific problems unamenable to control, and so simply given up on "verification" wherever insistence upon it threatens to slow their advance. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for one, has powerfully argued this about forecasting and forecasters; and this, anyway, is what so often appears to have happened most any time a new technology is released into the world without its behavior being fully predictable or its effects fully foreseeable. (And how could they be?)

This latter book of Lasch's is subtitled "Progress and its Critics"; but the legitimate critique of scientific progress seems to me to issue from within science's own walls: the whole problem is an irreverence for "verification," not an over-reverrence for it.

But of course science cannot really be about "certainty" either, because true certainty doesn't exist. How often have all of us non-scientists (and non-doctors and non-economists) been scolded to that effect in recent decades? And, how selective and unidirectional this scolding has been!

The reality is that some houses of worship are full of bullheaded hypocrites, just as some institutions of higher learning give safe harbor to sloppy methodologists and bad-faith polemcists. As my undergraduate Music History prof, David Grayson, aptly put it, "It is the destiny of great music to be played badly."

It would be overstating the case to say that "science" or "religion" (or "philosophy" or "music") are necessarily "destructive of certainty," but all can have this effect, depending on how they are practiced. It is the element of practice, as conspicuously absent from Lasch's remarks as from those of his retrospective adversaries, which is ultimately determinative of such outcomes as he is concerned to examine. The Jamesian notion of "quality of belief" can never get us quite all the way to practice. That quality and that belief have to be realized somehow, realized in earthly deed and not just in thought or word. I think that "conduct of life" is not quite the same thing as what I mean to denote here by "realized."

The historical baggage of (and inherent tensions between) religion and science, so-called, make it nearly impossible to parse the issue of practice without adopting a certain degree of methodological philistinism. Again, a high "quality of belief" is of no help here; it more easily blinds us to some otherwise obvious conclusions if we do not take pains to circumvent it. But if we can manage at least this much, then we need not abandon any particular beliefs of our own in order to see, more broadly, that "quality of belief," when it is "realized" in "practice," can (and probably will) lead to the destruction of myriad easy certainties that had taken root prior to the "conversion"; we can see, in other words, that "philosophy" in its certainty-destroying capacity can be practiced through almost any cultural medium, but that not just any quality of belief or of practice will get us all the way there; in yet other words, a high quality of belief realized in exemplary practice can transfigure a seemingly benign earthly pursuit into a fully "philosophical" one; and of course, a low quality of belief or merely perfunctory practical activity makes this exalted outcome impossible, even when the "music" being "played" this way is widely conceded to be "great."

By "methodological philistinism" I mean merely to suggest a way of getting past the obvious fact, inconvenient for both sides of any fraught cultural conflict, that the belief and practice of most exponents, most of the time, is very low. The fallacy of incomplete evidence is always available to those wishing to show that their adversaries have sought mere "intellectual and emotional security" rather than the "challenge to complacency and pride" that comes from commitment and struggle. It would be notable if an author of Lasch's persuasion could show in more detail that this or that commitment to this or that lifeway really did coax a higher "quality" out of its exponents. Failing that, I have only my own haphazard experiences and anecdotes to fall back on, whereby all signs point unequivocally to Jung's purported caricature of Christians being, actually, quite a servicable portrait of every form of ostensible commitment I have run across face-to-face. It is very rare for anything else to be the case. I am suggesting, though, that there are certain commonalities among the committed exceptions, even though they may belong to incommensurable cultural forms, even to the most infamously incommensurable forms, "science" and "religion."

The aim here is not to deny the incommensurability but merely to notice what is wrong with Lasch's remarks, in spite of all that is right with them. James-as-rendered-by-Lasch has badly mistaken the scientific "respect for facts" for heedless worship of them. But to really "respect" facts is something else entirely. This is neither the exclusive burden nor the exclusive privilege of science. Respect per se is precisely the precondition for adeptness at any cultural practice.

Of course in a culturally pluralistic environment one had better be quite careful about paying such respect, about daring even to speak of such minimum "facts" as are necessary to establish preliminarily. How to handle this? There have been entire libraries filled with that kind of advice, and with chronicles of its refinement through practical application. There is nothing "childish" about this literature! Quite the opposite.

---

The thing about rationalism that leads the same word to denote a properly philosophical school or lineage, a Silicon Valley subculture, and a potentially deal-breaking trait on dating apps, is precisely that it is destructive of certainty. It may be possible for certain entrepreneurial types to outwit others by reasoning their way to near-certainties which remain opaque to normie-brained competitors, but I'm not sure that this practical application, with its positivistic orientation and narrow scope, serves as a good proxy for everything that a good-faith social actor is confronted with in today's world-at-large. Lack of certainty is one thing, surfeit of illusion is quite another. Human beings are illusion-generating machines. Illusion is constantly being created anew, faster and in greater quantities than any proper "science" or "philosophy" can address it. Only the most pressing or salient matters can be addressed, or (eventually) address themselves; the rest of it skates.

Lasch's chapter of course begins in his dissent from those "1960s revolutionary" slogans which were "much closer in spirit to Wilde than to Marx"; in dissent from "the modernist ideal of individuals emancipated from convention, . . . leading their own lives (as Oscar Wilde would have said) as if life itself were a work of art" (p. 234); from Wilde's notion that Christ was himself the "most supreme of individualists" (p. 232); and so on.

Lasch holds that "this kind of message" merely "confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd." "In place of self-denial and self-control, it offered the seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familiar, or religious obligations." (p. 233) "The unexamined premise that history can be compared with the individual's growth from childhood to maturity . . . made it possible to condemn any form of cultural conservatism, any respect for tradition." (p. 237)

Wilde's particular rhetoric may well be worthy of the criticism, and so too may be most of the "artists" who have attempted to make good on it, but it seems, also, that this same criticism cannot apply equally or in the same form to any-and-all ways of being an "artist." Already in the suggestion that life-as-art might be "unconstrained" by any "obligations," something is very wrong. (Recall once again Dr. Grayson's quip.) Much great art of the past seems, at least in hindsight, to have been hatched under severe "constraints," a point which "cultural conservatives" and antimodernist critics never miss an opportunity to reiterate. If Lasch did intend to cast his lot with this tendency, he has buried that intent beneath myriad contrary innuendos.

The Danish radical artist Asger Jorn made a distinction between "art" and "critique" which is very relevant here. Jorn called art "primary action in relation to the unknown," whereas "critique" is "a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists." Of course another way of saying that something "already exists" is to say that its existence is certain. All certainty is precious! The mere "existence" of an artwork is unlikely to be an outright illusion, Warhol and Duchamp notwithstanding; but artworks bring along with them into existence all manner of illusions about the intent, meaning, and value of the work. Intent, meaning, and value are most of what matter about art to most people, but they are often inscrutable, even if the mere existence of the work and certain observations about its formal properties are beyond question. Hence disputes over intent, meaning and value account for most of what goes under the heading, Philosophy of Art.

I think it is because of this inscrutability and not in spite it that these aspects, far more so than the mere artifacts or formal properties themselves, are the customary bases of critique, even long after academic art criticism has contrived an identity for itself as "objective." A mere homage or counterfactual to the form-and-content of an existing artwork is hardly a critique at all unless it bleeds into questions of intent, meaning, or value. That is precisely what is "secondary" about a "secondary reaction," and what is "primary" about "primary action": the bases of critique are epistemically very tenuous, but they are taken as given "facts" about the artwork and about the artist. Conversely, the object of "primary action" is "the unknown," the un-certain; art as primary action pleads uncertainty about the intent, meaning, and value of its antecedents, even as it also is, as all contemporary art must be, a "reaction" to some already-existing forms and artifacts.

What would it mean for someone to underdraw the boundaries of their own certainty based on an illusion? It's not clear that this has any ramifications for Jorn's formulation. If an artist is truly uncertain in the moment of creation, and if that uncertainty is truly their object, then there is the possibility of "primary action." (Of course if a critic interviews them about their state of mind, or tries to read the resulting work for psychological tells, expect the illusions to come at you fast.)

What would it mean to overdraw the boundaries of one's certainty? This is more familiar, and it does, plainly, come to bear on "critique."

What is wrong with Lasch's chapter, then, is that he has merely presented the reverse caricature of the one he is writing against. He has committed the same fallacy of incomplete evidence. The fallacy is the same because certain contours of the problem are the same in religion, science, philosophy, and art: it is easy enough for outsiders to form a certain uncharitable view based on the lowest common denominator of practitioners; at this, the adepts are bound to cry foul, but there is little they can do to compel a higher quality of belief in their cohort.

It's a bit of a stretch (but only a bit) to rephrase Lasch in Jorn's terms: Wilde claimed to be extolling life lived as a work of art, but what he (or at least his postmodern pseudo-followers) ended up extolling, instead, was life lived as a critique of all the lives which had come before, a critique of the "common herd" toward which they now felt a "sense of superiority."

In yet other words,

disillusionment, we might say, is the characteristic form of modern pride, and this pride is no less evident in the nostalgic myth of the past than in the more aggressively triumphal version of cultural progress that dismisses the past without regrets.

(pp 241-242)

Now, what is so wrong with a little bit of well-justified "disillusionment?" One problem, at least, with this "modern" form, besides its pridefulness, is that it is too knowing; it can only amount to "critique," to "secondary" rather than "primary" action. What does the knee-jerk Pollyanna rejoinder to "disillusionment" come down to but the suggestion that perhaps the pessimist does not fully know the good side of everything at issue? I tend to be pessimistic, that is, to think precisely the opposite; but I also tend to think that we do not actually manage to dig up very much of everything that is down there, good or bad, no matter how hard we try; hence the irreducible "unknown," what Donald Rumsfeld infamously called "known unknowns," in relation to which we "act" . . . if in fact that is how we understand ourselves to be acting . . . not even if but especially if we are "artists."

Conventionally the reversion to critique is parsed as a postmodern inevitability, the curse of life after-the-fact: too much has been done, too much is known too well; not enough is uncertain. But again, this can refer only to the mere existence of artifacts and formal properties. That is all that we really know about. We do not really know much about intent, meaning, or value. Most of what we know is that those things do not remain stable over time. We know that we ourselves may feel or react differently each time we confront the same inanimate physical stimulus, but we do not know exactly why. Instrumental musicians come to know this especially intimately through our peculiar kind of "practice." Yet when we encounter people who themselves do not have that kind of intimacy with the artworks or with the instruments, we constantly find them driven to desperately deny any uncertainty about intent, meaning, and value, because it is precisely (and perhaps paradoxically) these epiphenomena of artworks that people care most about. Here of all places is where audiences demand certainty, precisely where it is least forthcoming. Understandably, people are not too keen to simply abandon their most cherished intuitions to the undertow of passing time and the ever-accelerating churn of cultural relativity. But it is precisely this denial which imprisons us in critique. It is nothing about how much we really know, nothing about the instability of popular taste or about the arbitrariness of signification. Rather, it is our desire to know all, and to think that we already do. It is the old "childish desire" again. And so Lasch, though he overcorrects, also provides an indispenable piece of advice for artists and audiences, even for those of us who will never believe in God. Of course we cannot (must not) simply forget what we know; but given what precious little certainty is available to us, there really is no shortage of "unknown" arenas for "artists" to "act" in "relation" to. In fact there is an abundance of "unknowns," the more so the more exemplary our "practice" can be made. What is not abundant? The courage and intellect required to face up to it all; the same in art as in religion, philosophy, and science.

As usual, Ernest Becker has a passage which ties all of these disparate ideas together beautifully:

In the West the belief in a dual universe lasted right up until the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and then gradually faded away, . . .   If you ask someone "where" babies come from he will tell you that they come from the union of the sperm and the egg: so sure is he that everything takes place on tangible physio-chemical levels that he thinks that one causal link in a process of unknown origin explains that process. Do we know where babies come from? Do they not indeed mysteriously spring from an invisible void? . . .   We enter rooms, houses, theatres, stadiums, full of faces that were invisible eighty years ago—and yet most of us claim we "know" where they come from.

. . . there are signs that the scientific view itself may be bending. I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers.   . . . the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it.   . . .   There seems to be empirically an invisible inside of nature from which powers erupt into the visible world from an unknown source. And since our bodies are all composed of elements which break down into atoms which break down into energy, it truly appears that we are constantly generated out of a void, that our physical form emanates from an unknown dimension which sustains it.

(The Birth and Death of Meaning, pp. 120-121)

Scientific materialism, in other words, furnishes an ever lengthier and more detailed chain of proximate causes without ever quite landing on an ultimate cause. There is no danger here of going wanting either for "facts" or for "uncertainty," or for "existential despair" if that's more your bag. It's all in the mix. Blanket ascriptions of "childishness," then, just like blanket ascriptions of adept enlightenment or religious profundity, cannot really be made, at least not to entire academic fields or cultural institutions. These ascriptions can be made only to individuals. There is no social theory of art that can modulate the epistemics of that question. The "great music" of science can be played "badly" or it can be played well; a hobbyist group can give a jagged but rousing rendition, or a celebrity professional group can give a soullessly "perfect" one. Choose your own adventure.

William James cannot serve as proxy for the sum total of modern religious practice, because there have not been very many William Jameses (perhaps there has been exactly one) in the "modern" era. There was, however, at least one, just as there have been a few model rationalists, and indeed also a few (only a few) modern artists who have insisted, always, on acting in relation to the unknown, in Jorn's sense; or perhaps what these artists have done is merely understood, as good rationalists also do, when this is actually what they are doing, and when it actually is not.

Becker —Birth (v)

Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)

---

[112]

Chapter Ten

CULTURE: THE RELATIVITY
OF HERO-SYSTEMS

"If the end of all is to be that we must take our sensations as simply
given or as preserved by natural selection for us, and interpret this
rich and delicate overgrowth of ideas, moral, artistic, religious and
social as a mere mask, a tissue spun in happy hours . . . how
long is it going to be well for us not to 'let on' all we know
to the public?"
William James

...

[113]

...: in things social, man is the only discreditor of man. ...

One of the main reasons that cultures can be so directly undermining to one another is that, despite their many varieties, they all ask and answer the same basic questions. So that when two different ways of life come into contact they clash on the same vital points. There are only a handful of such vital points or "common human problems" (cf. Kluckhohn, 1950);... One of the great advantages of being able to boil the human situation down to the same questions the world over is that it partly lifts the screen that divides us from other peoples and ways of life. ...there is what anthropologists have long recognized as "the psychic unity of mankind":... ...even if you can never actually feel and see as another, you can understand strange premises and see sympathetically why people do not act as we do. ...

[114]

...

Critical Commonplaces

The Commonplace Raised to a Higher Power
Arthur Danto
interviewed by Hans Maes
(excerpt)

---

This so-called 'method of indiscernibles'...arises, according to Danto, not only in the field of aesthetics but in all other areas of philosophy. Philosophy is supposed to address its subject matter...by seeking the conditions that make the things under scrutiny the kinds of things they are. The appropriate way of seeking these conditions, Danto suggests, is to examine how the thing...differs from an object or event that is ostensibly indiscernible from it.

---

Ugh.

Could you forgive some of us, just maybe, for seeing in this merely an exercise?

Neil Postman—Amusing Ourselves To Death

Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves To Death
(1984)

---

[9] In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations.

Speech, of course, is the primal and indispensable medium. It made us human, keeps us human, and in fact defines what human means. This is not to say that if there were no other means of communication all humans would find it equally convenient to speak about the same things in the same way. We know enough about language to understand that variations in the

[10]

structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language. We dare not suppose therefore that all human minds are unanimous in understanding how the world is put together. But how much more divergence there is in world view among different cultures can be imagined when we consider the great number and variety of tools for conversation that go beyond speech. For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message. His aphorism , however, is in need of amendment because, as it stands, it may lead one to confuse a message with a metaphor . A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world . But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality . Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like. As Ernst Cassirer remarked:

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

[11]

What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times, Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "'moment to moment." He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing at all. "The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

Framed

from "The Frame Problem," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

To many philosophers, the AI researchers' frame problem is suggestive of a wider epistemological issue, namely whether it is possible, in principle, to limit the scope of the reasoning required to derive the consequences of an action.
...
Using mathematical logic, how is it possible to write formulae that describe the effects of actions without having to write a large number of accompanying formulae that describe the mundane, obvious non-effects of those actions?
...
What we need, it seems, is some way of declaring the general rule-of-thumb that an action can be assumed not to change a given property of a situation unless there is evidence to the contrary. This default assumption is known as the common sense law of inertia. The (technical) frame problem can be viewed as the task of formalising this law.
...
The puzzle, according to Dennett, is how “a cognitive creature … with many beliefs about the world” can update those beliefs when it performs an act so that they remain “roughly faithful to the world”?
...
the question of how to compute the consequences of an action without the computation having to range over the action's non-effects. ...the “sleeping dog” strategy... not every part of the data structure representing an ongoing situation needs to be examined when it is updated to reflect a change in the world. ...

...the epistemological question is not so much how the computational challenge can be met, but rather how the robot could ever be sure it had sufficiently thought through the consequences of its actions to know that it hadn't missed anything important.

Fodor suggestively likens this to “Hamlet's problem: when to stop thinking” (Fodor 1987, p.140). The frame problem, he claims, is “Hamlet's problem viewed from an engineer's perspective”. But to warrant the award of depth, an epistemological problem must at least resist the most obvious attempts to resolve it. In the case of Hamlet's problem, the obvious appeal is to the notion of relevance. Only certain properties of a situation are relevant in the context of any given action, and consideration of the action's consequences can be conveniently confined to those.

... Fodor's claim is that when it comes to circumscribing the consequences of an action, just as in the business of theory confirmation in science, anything could be relevant (Fodor 1983, p.105). There are no a priori limits to the properties of the ongoing situation that might come into play. Accordingly, in his modularity thesis, Fodor uses the frame problem to bolster the view that the mind's central processes — those that are involved in fixing belief — are “informationally unencapsulated”, meaning that they can draw on information from any source (Fodor 1983; Fodor 2000).
...
solutions to the logical frame problem developed by AI researchers typically appeal to some version of the common sense law of inertia, according to which properties of a situation are assumed by default not to change as the result of an action.
...
According to Fodor, this metaphysical justification is unwarranted. To begin with, some actions change many, many things. ... But a deeper difficulty presents itself when we ask what is meant by “most properties”. What predicates should be included in our ontology for any of these claims about “most properties” to fall out?
...
These questions and the argument leading to them are very reminiscent of Goodman's treatment of induction... Goodman showed that inductive inference only works in the context of the right set of predicates, and Fodor demonstrates much the same point for the common sense law of inertia.
...
An intimate relationship of a different kind between the frame problem and the problem of induction is proposed by Fetzer (1991), who writes that “The problem of induction [is] one of justifying some inferences about the future as opposed to others. The frame problem, likewise, is one of justifying some inferences about the future as opposed to others. The second problem is an instance of the first.” This view of the frame problem is highly controversial, however (Hayes 1991).

---

From Susan Sontag, "Godard," in Styles of Radical Will:

[164]
The most obvious way Godard segments the forward-moving sequence of narration into tableaux is by explicitly theatricalizing some of his material, once more laying to rest the lively prejudice that there is an essential incompatibility between the means of theatre and those of film. The conventions of the Hollywood musical, with songs and stage performances interrupting the story, supply one precedent for Godard—inspiring the general conception of A Woman Is a Woman, the dance trio in the café in Band of Outsiders, the song sequences and Vietnam protest skit performed outdoors in Pierrot le Fou, the singing telephone call in Weekend. His other model is, of course, the non-realistic and didactic theatre expounded by Brecht. An aspect of Godard Brechtianizing is his distinctive style of constructing political micro-entertainments: in La Chinoise, the home political theatre-piece acting out the American aggression in Vietnam; or the Feiffer dialogue of the two ham radio operators that opens Deux ou Trois Choses.

---

A lively prejudice ? Or a mere statement of the obvious? Who's to say?

At the risk of obscuring rather than clarifying the situation, I would suggest that us arty types pay closer (any) attention to our ontological predicates ; at which point there is little left to say about the import and export of means between art forms but quite a lot yet to be said about ends.

In other words:
if it works, it works;
but
it cannot possibly work the same way in cinema
as it does in theater
because
there remain
(despite spirited efforts to the contrary)
irreducible material differences
("ontological predicates," if you insist)
between the two mediums
.

In other words,

some actions change many, many things .

In other words,
means be damned;
the ends can have no precedent .

an actual blog post, fresh as they come

Linda Nochlin—The Paterson Strike Pageant

Linda Nochlin
"The Paterson Strike Pageant"
(orig. 1974)

in

Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now
ed. Aruna D'Souza
(2022)
pp. 368-376

[372] A combination of visual spectacle and dramatic performance, the pageant can weld together two seemingly disparate forces, the subject and object of the dramatic metaphor. In reenactments like the Paterson Strike Pageant, the "actors" remain themselves yet at the same time play their roles as symbols of broader issues. In the same way, the farm laborers in Hitler's Nuremburg Rally of 1934 played—and were—themselves but at the same time stood for the masses of agricultural workers throughout the country. In like manner, the vast crowds that reenacted in Moscow in 1919 the storming of the Winter Palace were revolutionaries themselves yet also played the role of vaster revolutionary Russian forces.

For leaders of revolutionary movements, as well as for ideologues consciously or unconsciously intent on maintaining the status quo, the pageant was a potent weapon in forging a sense of communal identity for the hitherto inarticulate and unselfconscious lower classes. A pageant could function in the realm of participatory dramatic action rather in the way Diego Rivera's Mexican murals did in the realm of public visual art: to
[373]
forge a sense of contemporary purpose, self-identity and social cohesion out of a vivid recapitulation of historical fact heightened by symbolism.

But the pageant was also a unique political instrument in another way: the effects it had on the performers were as important as those it had on the audience. This can be said of no other performance art form.

I know not which esoteric usages are appealed to by effects, important, and performance art form, but this appears on its surface to be an absurd statement. Some effect is all but assured by most any performance. The question is not one of evidence or absence of effect; rather it is a question of control, of what in admin-speak has come to be known as Measurable Outcomes, without which not even another Paterson Pageant could get the attention of either the institutional art world or the "radicals" who ostensibly aim to countervail its power.

In the case of the Paterson Strike Pageant, the choice of significant incidents—...and the dramatic simplification and compression of events which may have been unclear when experienced in actuality—all made the striking workers conscious of the meaning of what they had lived through.

Later, Golin would emphasize this point even more forcefully. But he insists with equal vehemence that events were hardly unclear to the workers as these events were experienced in actuality.

At such a distance, now, from these events, and thus relying on "secondary" sources to form a yet more tenuous "tertiary" account, the distinction between general morale boosting and making people conscious of the meaning of what they had lived through could be meaningless. It may be lost to history. That much being granted, Intellectual history is both more amenable to continual revision and closer to my own concerns here anyway. And so as a matter of nothing more or less than Intellectual History, this drift from morale-boosting to consciousness-raising does seem worth noting.

This is above all an epistemological concern: often we realize only too late what we should have said or done; but also, we distort memories beyond any semblance of truth pretty much from the moment they are formed. Literary thought elevates the clarifying potential of hindsight to the status of an unquestioned and unquestionable virtue, of an assured result (think control again); but it fails to reckon (quite willfully, I think) with the distortive streak. It is often unclear, at least to me, just what it is that distinguishes the quotidian distortion of memory (surely a "motivated" distortion) from the production of "literature," aside from the packaging.

This is how activist litterateurs make their own beds and then become reluctant to lie in them. It is less literature itself than the activist imperative overlaid on it, here and elsewhere, which forces the epistemological issue; this because the concrete purpose of the activist demands concrete methods rather than experimental ones. And it is the dissonance between the thesis that workers were the strike leaders, on one hand, and the thesis that events may have been unclear to workers as they were unfolding in real time, on the other, which indicates, in fact, a substantial difference in interpretation even where the later author has exalted the earlier author and turned to her for support.

The fact that Nochlin is utterly unafraid of inviting comparison with Nazi and Soviet productions is at least a welcome preemption of the most tenuous, puritanical, animistic objections that might be raised against certain performing arts. But it also railroads us into judging these "participatory" artworks by our agreement or disagreement with their political orientation, and by little else. This is indeed a new kind of art, though there has been political art before. And it is only now, I think, with the long-awaited penetration of the mainstream entertainment industry by an activist ethic that is self-conscious, totalizing, and surface-oriented, with a supersession of unspoken ideology by loudly proclaimed ideological stances, it is only now that we can have an informed rather than merely speculative conversation, beyond the thick walls of academia or the paper-thin ones of industry, as to whether this is something that we really need or want; of whether we are better or worse off (or perhaps merely the same!) this way. I expect that "epistemology" will continue to play no role whatsoever in these discussions, and that this will be the reason why they continue to go nowhere helpful. But epistemology is the question here, and unlike history's lost secrets it will not disappear simply for not being spoken of.

Lasch—Confession and Anticonfession

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[Subheading:]
Confession and Anticonfession  The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism that runs all
[17]
through American culture; but the best work in this vein attempts, precisely through self-disclosure, to achieve a critical distance from the self and to gain insight into the historical forces, reproduced in psychological form, that have made the very concept of selfhood increasingly problematic. The mere act of writing already presupposes a certain detachment from the self; and the objectification of one's own experience, as psychiatric studies of narcissism have shown, makes it possible for "the deep sources of grandiosity and exhibitionism—after being appropriately aim-inhibited, tamed, and neutralized—[to] find access" to reality. [Kohut, The Analysis of the Self] Yet the increasing interpenetration of fiction, journalism, and autobiography undeniably indicated that many writers find it more and more difficult to achieve the detachment indispensible to art.

Well, indispensible might be a bit strong even for my tastes, but the point stands that a detached and...attached (?) standpoint have vastly different implications for artist and audience alike. We would do well to try to understand those implications as best we can.

One reason to beat this particular horse as relentlessly as I now do is that, among said implications, there are many properly epistemological ones which don't get the attention or treatment I would like for them. Also important is that these sorts of implications are not, I don't think, usually having anything at all to do with what motivates or, more sentimentally speaking, what inspires either artists or audiences.

Instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it, they have taken to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations. Instead of working through their memories, many writers now rely on mere self-disclosure to keep the reader interested, appealing not to his understanding but to his salacious curiosity about the private lives of famous people. In Mailer's works and those of his many imitators, what begins as a critical reflection on the writer's own ambition, frankly acknowledged as a bid for literary immortality, often ends in a garrulous monologue, with the writer trading on his own celebrity and filling page after page with material having no other claim to attention than its association with a famous name. Once having brought himself to public attention, the writer enjoys a ready-made market for true confessions. Thus Erica Jong, after winning an audience by writing about sex with as little feeling as a man, immediately produced another novel about a young woman who becomes a literary celebrity.

...

[19] The confessional form allows an honest writer like Exley or Zweig to provide a harrowing account of the spiritual desolation of our times, but it also allows lazy writers to indulge in "the kind of immodest self-revelation which ultimately hides more than it admits." The narcissist's pseudo-insight into his own condition, usually expressed in psychiatric clichés, serves as a means of deflecting criticism and disclaiming responsibility for his actions.

...

[20] When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes to The Waste Land, he became one of the first poets to call attention to his own imaginative transformation of reality, but he did so in order to expand the reader's awareness of allusions and to create a deeper imaginative resonance—not, as in these more recent instances, to demolish the reader's confidence in the author.

When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes...
...he was...a century behind Berlioz, who was at least that far ahead of the aforementioned "confessional" writers. Let's not excuse the early adopters just because they have since become classics.

...to expand the reader's awareness of allusions...

...but it doesn't work that way. Just as he who laughs last doesn't get the joke, so he who must read about the allusions in the reference notes has irrecoverably missed the boat. What confidence can one reasonably have in an author who elevates spoiling the punchline from incidental to conventional?

[20, cont.] The unreliable, partially blinded narrator is another literary device of long standing. In the past, however, novelists often used it in order to achieve an ironic juxtaposition of the narrator's flawed perception of events with the author's own more accurate view. Today, the convention of a fictionalized narrator has been abandoned in most experimental writing. The author now speaks in his own voice but warns the reader that his version of the truth is not to be trusted. ... Having called attention to himself as a performer, the writer undermines the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. By fogging over the distinction between truth and illusion, he asks the reader to believe his story not because it rings true or even because he claims it is true, but simply because he claims it conceivably might be true—at least in part—if the reader chose to believe him. The writer waives the right to be taken seriously, at the same time escaping the responsibilities that go with being taken seriously. He asks the reader not for understanding but for indulgence. In accepting the writer's confession that he lied, the reader in turn waives the right to hold the writer accountable for the truth of his report. The writer thus attempts to charm the reader instead of trying to convince him, counting on the titillation provided by pseudo-revelation to hold the reader's interest.

Undertaken in the evasive mood, confessional writing degenerates into anticonfession. The record of the inner life becomes an unintentional parody of inner life. A literary genre that appears to affirm inwardness actually tells us that inner life is precisely what can no longer be taken seriously. This explains why [Woody] Allen, [Donald] Barthelme, and other satirists so often parody, as a deliberate literary strategy, the confessional style of an earlier time, when the artist
[21]
bared his inner struggles in the belief that they represented a microcosm of the larger world. ... The writer no longer sees life reflected in his own mind. Just the opposite: he sees the world, even in its emptiness, as a mirror of himself. In recording his "inner" experiences, he seeks not to provide an objective account of a representative piece of reality but to seduce others into giving him their attention, acclaim, or sympathy and thus to shore up his faltering sense of self.

It occurs here that Lasch is on solider ground in telling us what such work does than where it came from. e.g. Here, whether this is actually a matter of shoring up seems tough to say for sure, although there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence to that effect.

The Radical Restriction of Perspective?

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

Philip Roth once observed, before this kind of observation became a cliché, that the writer's imagination falters in the face of contemporary "actuality," which "is continually outdoing our talents." ... Our culture "tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.". ... In their bafflement and disgust, many writers turn away from the "grander social and political phenomena of our times"...and "take the self as their subject": the "sheer fact of self, the vision of the self as inviolate, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment.
(p. 130)


When social reality becomes imaginatively unmanageable, the imagination takes refuge, as we have seen, in self-defensive survival strategies: exactly the kind of strategies also adopted by the contemporary writer and artist, according to Roth, in their attempt to keep the artistic enterprise alive in an age of extremity. Overwhelmed by the cruelty, disorder, and sheer complexity of modern history, the artist retreats into a solipsistic mode of discourse that represents "not so much an attempt to understand the self," in Roth's words, as an attempt "to assert it." He conducts his own struggle for survival as an artist, under conditions that have made it more and more difficult to transcribe any shared experience or common perceptions of the world, undermined the conventions of artistic realism, and given rise to a type of art that no longer seems to refer to anything outside itself.
(p. 131)

Lasch—Shame

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

The therapeutic discovery of shame finds its political expression in remedial programs administered by caretakers professing to speak on behalf of the downtrodden but concerned, above all, to expand their professional jurisdiction. Steinem's "revolution from within" does not signal a flight from politics, only a continuation of politics by other means.

Her therapeutic assault on shame requires political action for its completion. As a salutary example, she recommends California's Statewide Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. ... Self-contempt, the task force discovered, was a "primary causal factor" in "crime and violence, alcohol abuse, [etc., etc.]..."—the "very problems," Steinem adds, that "Americans fear most."

She does not bother to explain how the California task force arrived at this finding—that is, by ignoring the reservations that were advanced by the experts on whose testimony its report was based. ...[the chairman] dismissed these reservations on the grounds that they came from "those who live only in their heads, in the intellectual." The importance of self-esteem, he said, was confirmed by our "intuitive knowledge."
(p. 209)

Curious not only for the anti-positivist appeal to intuitive knowledge but also, for me, on a personal level being one who grew up as part of this forcibly self-esteeming generation.

The professionalization of compassion has not made us a kinder, gentler nation. Instead it institutionalizes inequality, under the pretense that everyone is "special" in his own way. Since the pretense is transparent, the attempt to make people feel good about themselves only makes them cynical instead. "Caring" is no substitute for candor.
(p. 210)

This is pretty devastating and hard to argue with. It evinces less a conservative or realist appeal to ruggedness than an assertion that liberal ends have not been well served by the means with which liberals have mostly pursued them.

The difficulty, for me at least, with Lasch's assault on the "helping professions" is that I personally can't blame anyone for finding fault in the more rugged styles of child-rearing and self-help. I wonder, here as elsewhere, if the issues of centralization and "professionalization" have not become conflated.

Lasch—Education and Politics

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

The great weakness in [Horace] Mann's educational philosophy was the assumption that education takes place only in schools. Perhaps it is unfair to say that Mann bequeathed this fatal assumption to subsequent generations of educators... An inability to see beyond the school after all—a tendency to speak as if schooling and education were synonymous terms—should probably be regarded as an occupational hazard of professional educators, a form of blindness that is built into the job. Still, Mann was one of the first to give it official sanction.
(pp. 151-152)

one begins to see that Mann wanted to keep politics out of the school not only because he was afraid that his system would be torn apart by those who wished to use it for partisan purposes but because he distrusted political activity as such. It produced an "inflammation of the passions." It generated controversy—a necessary part of education, it might be argued, but in Mann's eyes, a waste of time and energy. It divided men instead of bringing them together. For these reasons Mann sought not only to insulate the school from political pressures but to keep political history out of the curriculum.
(p. 153)

History has given way to an infantilized version of sociology, in obedience to the misconceived principle that the quickest way to engage children's attention is to dwell on what is closest to home: their families, their neighborhoods; the local industries; the technologies on which they depend. A more sensible assumption would be that children need to learn about faraway places and olden times before they can make sense of their immediate surroundings.

I feel very much this way as an adult. Unfortunately the issue of engag[ing] children's attention is not so easily dispensed with. Not for lack of trying nor for lack of opportunities to experiment, I certainly have not yet figured out how to do it; and I have not forgotten (I cannot forget) how difficult-to-engage I was as a child.

There is something of the ancient conflict between rationalism and empiricism here, but considered through the lens of development rather than epistemology itself...which is pretty interesting.

Since most children have no opportunity for extended travel, and since travel in our world is not very broadening anyway, the school can provide a substitute—but not if it clings to the notion that the only way to "motivate" them is to expose them to nothing not already familiar, nothing not immediately applicable to themselves.
(p. 159)

Lasch—Meritocracy

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

Meritocracy is a parody of democracy. It offers opportunities for advancement, in theory at least, to anyone with the talent to seize them, but "opportunities to rise," as R.H. Tawney points out in Equality, "are no substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization," of the "dignity and culture" that are needed by all "whether they rise or not." Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites; if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead. Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping from the common lot—the very definition of meritocratic success.
(p. 41)

The educational reforms of the twentieth century "enabled the clever child to leave the lower class . . . and to enter into a higher class into which he was fitted to climb." Those who were left behind, knowing that "they have had every chance," cannot legitimately complain about their lot. "For the first time in human history, the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard."

(quotes from Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033)

If memory serves, Richard Sennett has said something very similar.

It should not surprise us, then, that meritocracy also generates an obsessive concern with "self-esteem." The new therapies...seek to counter the oppressive sense of failure..while leaving the existing structure of elite recruitment...intact. ... As Young observes, people on the left (like their opponents on the right) are happiest when attacking hereditary privilege. They ignore the real objection to meritocracy—that it drains talent away from the lower classes and thus deprives them of effective leadership—and content themselves with dubious arguments to the effect that education does not live up to its promise of fostering social mobility. If it did, they seem to imply, no one would presumably have any reason to complain.
(pp. 43-44)

[For James Bryant Conant,] Democracy did not require a "uniform distribution of the world's goods," a "radical equalization of wealth." What it required was a "continuous process by which power and privilege may be automatically redistributed at the end of each generation.

...

The only way of "restoring social mobility" was to make the school system a substitute for the frontier.

...

It would be hard to find a better example than Conant's essay ["Education for a Classless Society: The Jeffersonian Tradition"] of the paltry view of democracy that has come to prevail in our time. In the name of the "Jeffersonian tradition," which envisioned a community of intelligent, resourceful, responsible, and self-governing citizens, Conant proposed merely to ensure the circulation of elites. ... His program...contained the additional irony that although it presupposed a rigorous separation of manual and mental labor and a hierarchy of social status in which those who worked with their hands ranked at the bottom, it was conceived as a way of achieving a classless society. ...

Historically the concept of social mobility was clearly articulated only when people could no longer deny the existence of a degraded class of wage earners tied to that condition for life—only when the possibility of a classless society, in other words, was decisevely abandoned. The notion that egalitarian purposes could be served by the "restoration" of upward mobility betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. High rates of mobility are by no means inconsistent with a system of stratification that concentrates power and privilege in a ruling elite. Indeed, the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as a function of merit rather than birth.

The truth is that our society is at once "highly stratified and highly mobile," in the words of Wendell Berry. There is little evidence that rates of vertical mobility have declined. On the contrary, a vast body of social research points fairly consistently to the conclusion that rates of mobility have remained more or less constant ever since the Civil War. ...
(pp. 75-77)

Berry's interrogation of [Justin Smith] Morrill defines the most important choice a democratic society has to make: whether to raise the general level of competence, energy, and devotion...or merely to promote a broader recruitment of elites. Our society has clearly chosen the second course. It has identified opportunity with upward mobility and made upward mobility the overriding goal of social policy. The debate about affirmative action shows how deeply this pathetically restricted notion of opportunity has entered public discourse. A policy designed to recruit minorities into the professional and managerial class is opposed not on the grounds that it strengthens the dominant position of this class but that it weakens the principle of meritocracy. Both sides argue on the same grounds. Both see careers open to talent as the be-all and end-all of democracy

Earth to Hanna Rosin...

when in fact, careerism tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience,

Word...

devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience,

...but be careful here, anti-positivists, because no one's "experience" is comprehensive. Of course it would be great to have BOTH both book- and street-smarts, in whatever proportion depending on the field. What's stopping us?

Anyway, earth to both the positivists and the anti-positivists.

and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all. The reign of specialized expertise—the logical result [of all this]...—is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the "last, best hope on earth."
(pp. 78-79)



Racial integration might have been conceived as a policy designed to give everyone equal access to a common civic culture. Instead it has come to be conceived largely as a strategy for assuring educational mobility. ... The misplaced emphasis on professional careers, as opposed to jobs and participation in a common culture, helps to explain the curious coexistence, in the postsixties politics of race, of a virulent form of cultural particularism with strategies having the practical effect of undermining particularism in its concrete expression in neighborhoods.
(p. 135)

[sc]airquotes (vii)—The Challenge and Pretense of Conceptual Art

"It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement. A.N. Whitehead, on the other hand, explained how the great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Namely, the technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the desired object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other." (62)

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

"If you have the right models...you can predict with great precision how the ice cube will melt—this is a specific engineering problem devoid of complexity... However, from the pool of water you can build infinite possible ice cubes, if there was in fact an ice cube there at all. The first direction, from the ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction, the backward process, is much, much more complicated. The forward process is generally used in physics and engineering; the backward process in nonrepeatable, nonexperimental historical approaches.

"In a way, the limitations that prevent us from unfrying an egg also prevent us from reverse engineering history." (196)

N.N. Taleb
The Black Swan (orig. 2007)
2nd Ed. (2010)

Incidentally, Taleb also takes aim at Russell and the suspension of judgment:

"We cannot teach people to withhold judgment; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects. ... It is not possible without great, paralyzing effort to strip these small values we attach to matters. Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias. ...

"Philosophers since Aristotle have taught us that we are deep-thinking animals, and that we can learn by reasoning. It took a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions. The minute we forgot about this point, the "Enlightenment" came to drill it into our heads for a second time. (Taleb, 202)

Time for another Enlightenment, I guess. Or maybe the Plague will suffice.

"The lesson for the small [matters] is: be human! Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs."

So, re: the peculiar arrogance of believing that any work of art can have just that effect and no other on all of the people who might encounter it...is this a small matter?

"Do not try to always withhold judgment—opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting—yes, after all this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places." (Taleb, 203)

Is artmaking the right place to be a fool? In most ways, yes, emphatically, it is perhaps the best such place. But is this also true re: prediction about the audience? How about re: epistemic arrogance about the audience? If so, what hellish effect or concept does that betoken?

"Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause."
(ibid)

Artworks which themselves do harm to the audience are rare and exceptional. Many of these are indeed "conceptual" works in the sense used here, but that is beside the point. What's the harm in a little old fashioned bohemian pretense? In isolation from all the rest of it, nothing at all. But we are the opposite of isolated these days, and so I do wonder about the system-level impact of all this free-floating dissimulation. I wonder if each of our little white lies about ourselves and our art, and most especially about its effect on audiences, if all of this is not precisely the kind of signal distortion which ultimately ramifies into toxic identity politicking and alt-right conspiracy mongering; into a Global Village not in the reductionist sloganeering sense but in the pejorative, racialist sense of "village" that a 19th Century British anthropologist might have uttered with a hiss. Take credit for enough that is not real and eventually you will have theorists of the Cultural Marxist conspiracy giving you credit for all manner of unreal things beyond your wildest dreams. i.e. Be careful what you wish for. Perhaps the frustrations of the actual Marxists could teach us artists something about the folly of starting with the effect.

A more fitting credo:

"What an artwork represents is quite insignificant. What the artist believes it represents is also insignificant. The effect the artist wanted to achieve is itself without interest. What the observer believes he sees in the artwork is in itself insignificant. The only thing that means something is the objective and real effect the art has exercised on the observer. That is the artistic reality."
(Asger Jorn, quoted in Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 201). 

Collins and Bilge—Disciplinary Segregation

Intersectionality (2016)
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

p. 100—"Overall, the non-intersectional approach of each area limited its ability to consider the ways which other areas might shape its distinctive concerns."

My gut reaction to this paragraph was that it is too sweeping/total in its dissent. Upon a second reading, the word "limited" seems a satisfactory qualification. It is even so hard to believe that disciplinary "segregation" was ever fatal; more likely, I would think, the cross pollination, being of that inevitable/ineluctable type that we all love to invoke in situations like this, was, variously: unintentional, inexplicit, fluid, chaotic, ebbing/flowing, etc. If so, the contribution of Intersectional thinking vis-a-vis advancing said work to a more powerful, relevant, effectual place, would be selective and incremental rather than total and sweeping; and that matter bears as heavily on internal academic politics/legitimation/turf wars/etc. as it does on the Cause. Just saying.

[from a post-it, late 2017]

Collins and Bilge—Experience≠Evidence≠Theory

Intersectionality (2016)
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

p. 46—"...foregrounds the ways in which activism or experience shape knowledge, an insight that is often lost when theoretical approaches are institutionalized in the academy."

This is something of a false dichotomy, or at least a diversionary one. What both "experience" and "theory" suffer from, statistically speaking, is insufficient sample size. Hence the more technocratic, mainstream methodologies of Sociology proper typically involve a certain gathering of evidence before any conclusions are (or can be) drawn. It is true that this has historically been the site of myriad biases, usually toward Power and whatever groups hold it; but if that is so scary, just look at what an eerily similar conception of knowledge construction via "experience" currently prevails among the alt-right and the ways which it is called into service by them (e.g. D'Souza's "rational discrimination"). Can we really trust informal consortiums of like-minded activists to pool their experience and look for patterns with any meaningful degree of detachment? Probably no more than we can trust ivory tower theoreticians with no "experience" at all to create it in their proverbial laboratories. Scientific empiricism is hardly perfect, but IMHO it beats the pants off the other options, and I do find it conspicuous by its absence here.

[from a post-it, late 2017]

Détournement as Resistance to Ownership of the Commons

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

pp.40-41—Détournement as resistance to ownership of the commons

The only problem I have with this is that it deprives the person making the reclamation of the transformative struggle which comes with striving for a unique, original accomplishment. Perhaps wholesale appropriations are crucial for their potential to remind collective society of its collective aspects; but the perpetrator has, as I take Debord to have said repeatedly, not accomplished much for themselves. They have Never Worked in one important sense, and again, while someone's gotta do it, a whole mess of such someone's isn't socially sustainable.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[The passage:]

Michel Foucault (1926-84) undermines the romantic theory of authorship by speaking of discourse as a distribution of author functions. For Foucault, a statement is authorized by a particular form of discourse, a regime of truth, a procedure for assigning truth-value to statements. It's not hard to see why this captivated the minds of academics. It made the procedures in which academics are obsessively drilled the very form of power itself. As if that by which academics are made, the molding of their bodies to desks and texts, that about which they know the most, even more than they know their allotted fields, were the very index of power. Reading Foucault is like taking a masterclass on how the game of academic scholarship is to be played, and with the reliable alibi that this knowledge of power, of knowledge as power, is to be used in the interests of resistance to something or other. Détournement, on the other hand, turns the tables, upends the game.

The device of détournement restores all the subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths. Détournement makes for a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any earlier or supra-critical reference point. On the contrary, its internal coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what validate the symbolic remnants that it restores. Détournement founds its cause on nothing but its own practice as a critique at work in the present. Détournement creates anti-statements. For the Situationists, the very act of unauthorized appropriation is the truth content of détournement. (40-41)

Haraway—Situated Knowledges

Donna Haraway
"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Persepctive"
Feminist Studies 14/3 (1988)

on the "strong" social constructionist theory of scientific (non-)objectivity:

So much for those of us who would still like to talk about reality with more confidence than we allow the Christian right when they discuss the Second Coming... We would like to think our appeals to real worlds are more than a desperate lurch away from cynicism and an act of faith like any other cult's..." (577)

This itself is just rhetoric, but it's refreshing anyway. The more recent Intersectional emphasis on Local Knowledge Claims seems to me, seeing as it is yet more Local than what DH is discussing here, to be a yet more volatile maneuver: some of the most pervasive/insidious prejudices (especially racial ones) are propagated through Local Knowledge Producers, and it remains unclear to me what the epistemological distinction is between these racists and the antiracist Intersectionalists.

the further I get in describing the radicial social constructionist program...the more nervous I get. The imagery of force fields, of moves in a fully textualized and coded world...is, just for starters, an imagery of high-tech military fields, of automated academic battlefields... Technoscience and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality—war. It shouldn't take decades of feminist theory to sense the enemy here. (577-578)

This is a brilliant insight, as well as, I would add, a sort of left-becomes-right moment. From "the strong social constructionist perspective," "all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as power moves, not moves toward truth." (576) DH can see that this orientation treats the world as irremediably hostile, confrontational, and subject to (at least potentially) the rule of might-makes-right; and she ever so delicately implies (I am reading between the lines here) that the apparent absence of any genuine reluctance among such theorists could itself suggest motivations/agendas, i.e. a desire to see the world this way whether it is accurate or not.

Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. ... Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well... In traditional philosophical categories, the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology. (579)

Indeed, ethics/politics and epistemology are quite mutually interdependent and dynamically linked, but ultimately it is ethical behavior out-in-the-world which is the goal, the question on which the success or failure of all other epistemological endeavors hinges. Feminists have too often blanched when science turns up knowledge we'd rather not know (B. Thorne and L. Eliot's books on boys/girls spring immediately to mind); but DH leads us out of the dark here, I think, with the insight that bedrock ethical principles enable us to pursue knowledge without any fear of how it might be used.

We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. Self-identity is a bad visual system. Fusion is a bad strategy of positioning. The boys in the human sciences have called this doubt about self-presence "the death of the subject" defined as a single ordering point of will and consciousness. That judgment seems bizarre to me. I prefer to call this doubt the opening of nonisomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject. (585-586)

So, the subject has not died; it lives, but it is no longer "isomorphic," which is to say that it no longer resembles its (same)self in all times and places; which is to say that in time and space the subject is not of a fixed/constant nature but rather undergoes changes. I'm inclined to embrace this part (perhaps because I can actually understand it). There are ways in which this is (for the most part unfortunately) revolutionary in its simplicity. Just ask politicians who claim to have learned and evolved since their younger days only to thereby invite epithets like Wishy-Washy or Flip-Flopper. ... On the other hand, it only seems to solve the problem raised by bell hooks of individual subjectivity being questioned just as the subjugated have arrived to claim it. Indeed, "we are not immediately present to ourselves," and "self-identity is a bad visual system." Hence the "subjugated" subject who arrogates to speak as such in fact commits the same commutative/associative fallacy as does the ignorant outsider who asks "What do YOUR people think?"

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]

COVID Confessional—On Maintaining Just the Right Amount of Skepticism

Among the many challenges of the past thirteen months has been the everyday-epistemological challenge of staying grounded and vigilant in an environment of ever-polarizing opinion. Recent conversations with two valued friends reveal the danger of the post-COVID world bifurcating absolutely into sheep and denialists. I hasten to insist that these are not the only two options.

I am someone who will not even take a pain killer except in the most extreme of circumstances. I am willing to accept science while reserving the right to limit my exposure to scientific error. Science has given me a few new sets of front teeth over the years, no small matter in my case, and yet I shudder to think what toxins I may have ingested this way (and may yet ingest again). I am an enthusiastic but late adopter of technology in something like Mumford's mode, seeking to enhance life through machine use and to avoid outsourcing life to machines. I don't like to change, but in a pinch I am often surprised at just how adaptable I can be. I think this is a fine way to live. The pandemic is, nevertheless, something of a challenge to this outlook. Like a really bad headache or a baseball to the chops, the pandemic forces the issue. It also forces us to consider how our decisions affect others in a way that literal aches and pains, being perhaps the exceptional "individual" problems, do not.

Somewhere between an "abundance of caution" and "throwing caution to the wind," I would posit a workable middle-ground location, something like a "minimum of caution," meaning: take all the precautions that don't cost you anything; prioritize the basics. I speak now somewhat in the language of N.N. Taleb, who, with a much greater technical and practical arsenal at his disposal, handles these sorts of epistemological questions brilliantly and in precisely the way I, albeit supremely lacking in such technical and practical equipage, have often tended to think about them, especially in the realms of ingestion and vaccination. I confess that my inner "negative empiricist" tends to rather selectively conjure himself in matters of ingestion and vaccination. I am also guilty of focusing too exclusively on downsides and of underrating upsides, as Kahneman and colleagues have shown is endemic to our "fast" brain. (I accept this science!) And I know much, much less than any committed consumer of news likely does about the granular details of vaccine ingredients and reactions. Taleb, Kahneman, and others have curated for lay consumption the quite troublesome phenomenon of more information leading to worse decision-making. I don't know that the vaccination question truly falls into this category, but I am very comfortable applying the "minimum of caution" heuristic to it, because that is the heuristic I apply most everywhere else. So, given my membership in the new untouchable subcaste of "workers who can't work from home," I decided to get vaccinated without thinking too hard (okay, without thinking at all) about ingredients, reactions, science, or politics.

There is a third branch of the barbell which Taleb, bless him, promises to take up but never really does (or not to my satisfaction), this being ethics and morals. With COVID we have a perfect irritant for this epistemological wound: the various corrective measures, from the least to the most intrusive, are really more about protecting others than about protecting ourselves. My "minimum of caution" works well for decisions which affect only me, but it is not such a simple proposition here.

Masking and distancing seem to me like archetypal barbell propositions: most of the benefit can be had this way without costing us much. The more onerous, top-down measures further limiting what masked, distanced people are allowed to do are, on the other hand, very costly, and more importantly, they are differently and inequitably costly. Some curious rhetoric has come out of this sagging barbell. Late last summer I heard a scientist-commentator claim, in response to the proposal that restictions be eased for low-risk groups on grounds of limiting economic damage, that the science on risk factors was not conclusive enough to permit such a policy. Perhaps so, but then much policy had already been made based on this fairly crude science. During the period where grocery stores blocked off the early morning for high-risk groups to shop, I never heard anyone waiting in line at Whole Foods invoke the ultimate uncertainty of science so that they could get in faster; and yet this tack was enthusiastically taken by a well-established scientist in order to avoid litigating a bedrock ethical/worldview conflict. This I find frustrating.

I draw a very different conclusion from uncertainty: if all science is to some degree uncertain, then moral urgency is always already part of how we use science, and this is where the real action is. In the moral framework I am calling a "minimum of caution," we do not treat science as certain until we are forced by circumstances to do so. When we are forced to confront a life-threatening injury or to bring a serial rape suspect to trial, we behave as if we are certain of the science even if in reality we know we cannot be; and then, implicitly at least, we consent to live with the possibility of being wrong. The notion of degrees of certainty, of whether we are 50%, 90%, or 99.99% confident in a given piece of science, is, I want to argue, quite easily and quite often rendered irrelevant by extenuating circumstances, and this more often than we would like to think. Put another way, for each of these percentages there is a countervailing degree of moral urgency which can dictate quick and dirty adjustments, adjustments which are quite unscientific but not at all irrational. If this were not the case, all science would continually be moving halfway toward usability without ever arriving. Colloquially speaking, in the end we are either "in" on some given piece of science or we are "out" on it. In deed if not in word, the percentages are always either zero or one hundred. Because of ultimate uncertainty, it is safer for the ego to be "out" on it all! Especially if, like Taleb, your personal success heuristic ("not being a sucker") is sensitive to the small-minded judgments of others¹. But it is not possible to get out of the game entirely. The pandemic has enabled us to be certain at least of that.

For the aforementioned scientist-commentator, then, I am left to think that the moral urgency of long lines at Whole Foods was low, while that of general containment of the virus was extremely high. The preliminary and crude understanding of risk factors was good enough for one and not for the other. She was not going to be certain of her results unless forced to (or, more to the point, allowed to) by circumstance. I accept this reasoning. But this is not the reasoning that came out of her mouth. It is not the reasoning that laypeople like me, who already were ignoring the news even before we read Taleb's diatribes against following the news too closely, were accosted with that day upon daring to come up for epistemological air. Only sheep and dinosaurs can survive on such meager rations.

There are a few reasons why I have become fixated on this single instance. One is that, admittedly, skepticism comes easily when you've been cut off at the knees. Another is that I previously associated the uncertainty card only with the rightest of climate deniers and the leftest of social constructivists. In those cases too, litigation of the science is more interesting intellectually than it is morally necessary for laypeople. Pollution and waste were already killing us a thousand other ways (even my old roommate the climate denier did not deny this); similarly, perfect knowledge of the genetic-social nexus is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to how we interact with others. Even where the science itself is pursued with perfect disinterest, it might as well still be called ideological science. The wider world makes it so.

One area where we need science most is when the consequences of our actions are otherwise hidden from us. Some such things are perfectly transparent though, and others can be made transparent rather easily, without formal scientific intervention. I suspect it is the things we have learned this way that have always shaped how we use science more so than anyone's notion of scientific certainty. If we can stay open, honest, and yes, just slightly skeptical, this is precisely as it should be.

1. Taleb is best read for general thrust and not for small details. He himself has noticed as much, and he's right. That said, I think the construction of the "sucker" heuristic has a transparent epistemological flaw which is pragmatically significant, even in Los Angeles. The "sucker" heuristic may work brilliantly in the realm of global trading, but it does not work well at all in, say, a 5-on-5 basketball game. The defender who tries the hardest and looks the worst is often the best defender on one team, who is customarily tasked with guarding the best scorer on the other team. On the professional level, the try-hards more often get "posterized" by spectacular dunkers while the deadbeats simply get out of the way and start jogging up court. The advent of Analytics has somewhat exonerated the "suckers" here, at least in the eyes of their employers; fans of course are another matter, and fans ultimately are very important to revenue. At the recreational level, since I am often the tallest, I have been the try-hard "sucker" many times. I also have observed and participated in many games amongst young men for whom "not being a sucker" was almost as important as winning, and a few where it was transparently much more important than winning. This is how I learned what it feels like to "win" while also being a "sucker." It is not a good feeling! Different from losing, but just as bad. There is nothing absolutely wrong with any of this vis-a-vis mere recreation, but needless to say it is a rather extreme departure from the archetype "basketball." It is also, I would contend, a strong indication of trauma given the near-universality of competitive play among men and the lengths to which men typically go to win even in the recreational realm.

I am reasoning by induction here, which a true negative empiricist wouldn't allow. Perhaps I should reformulate: basketball is a single counterexample which disproves any conceit that "not being a sucker" has universal applicability to zero-sum games. (At least if you like to win. Even in Minneapolis.)