Bricolage 2
Second in a series of links, asides, quick hits, quips, and the like
1.
I want to start by reminding everyone that “Zero Second”, the first story of the first movement of my mosaic narrative Retcon, is now available! Please check it out if you haven’t yet done so. You can get the ebook:
If you are willing to commit to the whole series (and/or are interested in supporting the series, and this substack in the bargain), you can pre-order the entire series in advance, and I will send them to you as they are released (including “Zero Second” right away”). Do note that this offer is exclusive to my web site.
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2.
There was a profile of philosopher Agnes Callard in The New Yorker, focusing on her romantic life: Callard fell in love, divorced her husband, and now lives with both men raising three children: she dragged her ex to participate in a public conversation on the philosophy of divorce. A fascinating profile.
This led me to look around at some of her (popular) philosophy articles, which some fan has helpfully collected links to here. Here are a few quotes that struck me.
From The End is Coming:
[H]ere is something we know for sure: there will not always be future generations. This is a fact. If the virus doesn’t do us in, if we do not do one another in, if we manage to make everything as sustainable as possible, nevertheless, that big global warmer in the sky is coming for us. We can tell ourselves soothing stories, such as the one about escaping to another planet, but we are embodied creatures, which is to say, we are the sorts of things that, on a geological time scale, simply do not last. Death looms for the species just as surely as it looms for each and every one of us.
I doubt that anyone who grew up in the cold war failed to think about the end of the human race; for a lot of the current generation, the most terrifying outcomes of climate change (which are, thankfully, increasingly unlikely, although the “minimal harm” scenarios are also increasingly unlikely) plays a similar role. So of course I have thought about the inevitable end of the human. But there is still something bracing in having it thrust in one’s mind. I have written about what there is to be scared of in our own death; but getting one mind around the end of humanity is something else again.
But here’s another quote from the same article:
Courage means that things can still matter to you—a lot—even when you know you are going to die. Courage means seeing the value of your life as being about more than survival—living ethically, not merely biologically.
I, at least, need to sit with that for a while.
But is it only ethics that matter? Well, here’s another bit from Callard, a larger chunk this time, from the unsavorily titled1 essay Do You Want My Garbage?:
We tend to think of aesthetic disputes as reflecting the least substantive differences between people—you like vanilla, I like chocolate, there’s no arguing over taste, let’s move on. But that point of view may be infected by the wishful thinking of backwards argumentation: given that there is no arguing over taste, those differences had better be unimportant. What if some of them are not?… In the Euthyphro, Socrates notes that the disagreements between people that lead to anger and hostility are specifically those that have as their subject matter “the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad.” People don’t fight over how much something weighs, even when they disagree about it, but they do fight over whether it is just or whether it is beautiful. It is striking that Socrates lumps together ethics and aesthetics as the two sources of strife.
The history of ethical thought is a record of the attempt to insert a wedge between those last two kinds of judgments. In both cases, we’ve worked to turn down the heat, but in the aesthetic case it’s by agreeing to disagree, whereas in the moral one it’s by way of the conceit that some kind of unified moral theory—be it Kantianism or Consequentialism—can serve as backdrop for adjudicating all disputes. We can just “weigh” the reasons and see who is “objectively” right and who is “objectively” wrong. In aesthetics we don’t need objectivity and in morality we can have it: strife solved.
I believe there is no scale that resolves all moral disagreements, and that it is not always possible to agree to disagree about the beautiful and the ugly. These claims are not unrelated to one another, or to the fact that the aesthetic and the moral are not as separate as we would like to believe.
And finally, a quote from “Who Wants to Play the Status Game”, which is interesting to pair with another quote by another writer. First Callard:
There is a philosophical conundrum at the root of all this: morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane—but we also need an aspirational target at the top, so as to inspire us to excellence, creativity and accomplishment. In other words, we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable. And no philosopher—not Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has yet figured out how to construct a moral theory that allows us to say both of those things.
And now a bit of one of my favorite poems, by W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”:
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
Collard seems fascinating, and there’s a lot of other essays by her in that collection that I hope to look at in the future.
3.
This essay by Ted Gioia is relevant to what I was saying recently about mosaic narratives. It even recounts one of the same bits of history that I did, about the final ending of The Fugitive.
I do think, however, Gioia elides a few distinctions worth making:
There is a difference between a serialized narrative which is intended to have an arc and conclude but which is canceled due to market forces, and a serialized narrative which is either designed not to conclude or forced by corporate owners not to conclude in order to make money. And an endless series of stories set in the same universe is yet another phenomenon. Yes, all those stories fall into Gioia’s category of “stories that never end”—but stories that have an ending but are canceled, stories that make an endless serial with no ending intended, stories which are supposed to have an ending but are turned into an unending serial because there’s money to be made, prequels/sequels, and extended universes are all very different things, even if the phenomena overlap and even if things can be pushed from one to another.
This is admittedly self-interested—I don’t want to see mosaic stories get shoved into a bin as collateral damage of serial fatigue and/or frustration with premature cancellations, especially with me writing one and all. But it’s not just that. These are different phenomena, both commercially and aesthetically, and the fact that they are complexly intertwined does not mean that it’s not worth distinguishing them.
One comment that frequently recurs to me—on a different topic, but with obvious application here—is J. L. Austin (in his essay “Performantive Utterances”, collected in his Philosophical Papers—chiding philosophers (and I think by extension the humanities in general) for lacking the patience and thoroughness of science:
…we should not despair too easily and talk, as people are apt to do, about the infinite uses of language. Philosophers will do this when they have listed as many, let us say, as seventeen; but even if there were something like ten thousand uses of language, surely we could list them all in time. This, after all, is no larger than the number of species of beetle that entomologists have taken the pains to list. (p. 234)
Just as we should not throw up our hands and say that there are infinite uses of language when in fact there are only thousands (or millions or billions) of them, we should not throw all “stories that never end” in a single pot and give up, without teasing apart the various ways they don’t end, fail to end, are prevented from ending, etc, as well as the many ways they are composed of other stories, have stories that continue, or reflect on, or interrelate with, etc, each other.
(I will perhaps be accused of having done the same thing with my big post I am labelling “mosaic stories”. I would have two responses: first, that that was an attempt to make one basic distinction too often overlooked, which was (ideally) then to lead to further distinctions; and that drawing connections is as useful as drawing distinctions are. Which ultimately, I suppose, simply means that I think the category of “mosaic stories” is useful, while the category of “stories that never end” is muddling.)
Finally, let me assure audiences that Retcon A) has an intended ending, B) has a structure that won’t let me prolong it indefinitely,2 and C) is an independent production, so is not subject to cancellation by studio bean-counters; baring any Edwin Drood-style situation, if you start reading now, you’ll get an ending.
4.
Other links of possible interest:
David Auerbach cleverly likens chatbots (in particular Bing) to Clever Hans.
I found The End of the English Major quite depressing (and the green shoots sprinkled here and there at the end felt forced); nor was anything in it really news. But I’m glad I read it.
An interesting review of two recent books about the depths of the connections of Heidegger’s philosophy to Nazism.
This was the best of the 20th-aniversary of the Iraq war pieces (of which there have been a predictable flurry) that I have seen.
If you’ve never heard of Rod Dreher, don’t bother with this one. But if you have, you might find this interesting: it’s about how he lost his (incredibly sweet!) blog gig. (And to tie two bits of this bricolage together: one of Dreher’s last posts at the American Conservative was an attack on Agnes Collard, brought on by the New Yorker article linked above.) (I should perhaps note that the main players in the drama deny it, for what that’s worth.)
I’m reasonably sure that this video presenting a 911 call is a parody or deliberate comedy and not a real incident, but it (particularly the first half) is still one of the funniest things I’ve heard all year.3 The language in it is very NSFW.
5.
Hey, did I mention “Zero Second” is out?
Oh, I did?
Well, if you’re bored of being told to go read it, let me pivot to asking you to please review it—anywhere, although if you review it elsewhere then a cross-posting to Amazon would be extremely helpful since, like it or not, it’s the major ebook distributor—and, perhaps, finding a friend who might enjoy it and directing them to it. I would be very grateful. Thanks in advance.
Ironically, given the topic of the article.
If I am planting this flag, I should probably preregister the following caveat: there is a sidequel to the story that I have toyed with writing after the series is done. Just one; and I don’t know if I’ll do it or not; and if so, it will be independent of the main story, not undoing its ending or anything like that (although naturally there may be a few incidental retcons). I am saying this now so that if this happens—and I would say it’s probably unlikely, even if Retcon really takes off. But that would be a one-off story that the above-mentioned structure doesn’t let me work in; it doesn’t, I think, alter the story of Retcon itself at all. And, as I said, it would be a one-time thing, and probably won’t happen. Unlike the telling of the whole 27-story series which will, baring acts of God.
In a David Wallacean touch, listening to it made me laugh so hard that I felt like I was entering the state described in the opening. A video that made someone into what it depicted might be a good story hook…