Bricolage 7
2. “Thus in Time Are We All Devoured” (Retcon story #7) comes out Saturday
The antepenultimate story of the first part of Retcon comes out two days hence, on Saturday. It will be called “Thus in Time Are We All Devoured”, and here is the cover:
The story is, naturally, available for pre-order, both at the normal large commercial operations (Amazon • Amazon UK • Apple • Barnes and Noble • Kobo • Smashwords) and also at my personal web site, where you can also order a subscription to the series as a whole (you’ll get the first six stories immediately (more, if you’re not reading this the day it came out or the day after that)), and the rest as they are published.
About the tale itself, what I will say is that it is an epistolary story. Ever since I introduced tmail in the first Retcon story, I knew I would have to take this to its logical conclusion and have an epistolary story (a form which I have long thought fabulous), and here it is. Please preorder it, give it a try, and let me know what you think!
1. “But Wait!”, the Faithful Reader Cries—
“What is this? You promised us, last time,1 a non-bricolage post, in fact you promised ‘a real essay’—an on week, not an off week, and certainly not a mere bricolage! Why so unfaithful to we, your faithful readers? And why did you start with part 2, anyway?”
Well, I began with part 2 because it was the promotional part, and needed to go on the top; and I knew you would interrupt with this question, and that that could be part 1.
“All right, by why no real essay?”
Alas, it is for the reason that you, Faithful Reader, have already guessed: I did not manage to complete one to my satisfaction. I am juggling a story series, an essay series, sick relatives, a family, and all the other business of life, and I simply, despite my most honest intentions, did not manage one. I apologize.
“Will you manage one by next week at least?”
I had meant to manage one by today, Reader; I shall not be so rash as to promise again. All I can say is that I hope to.
And in the meantime, enjoy the following bricolage, hastily brought up a week in the schedule to keep there from being a gap in the promised material (for all that the gap in the promised type of material is unfilled).
3. The Shoggoth Saga
Red Plenty is an utterly superb novel by Francis Spufford which I commend as highly as I can. I will say only this about it: he said he chose the most boring possible subject (post-Stalinist Soviet economics) as a challenge to see if he could make it interesting; and it was the first book I ever read as an ebook, because I read the kindle “look inside” sample on Saturday night and could not wait until the bookstores opened Sunday morning to keep going. (I write more about it here.)
That is the context in which I say that this review/essay by Cosma Shalizi about the novel is (particularly in its second half) playing at the novel’s level as far as insight and beautiful language goes.
My favorite part of the Shalizi essay is this (it may lose a bit of its punch out of context):
There is a fundamental level at which Marx's nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and lose ourselves in the dance. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming.
But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends.
All of this is a prologue to the fact that Shalizi, with is sometime collaborator Henry Farrell, extended this insight in an essay for The Economist about AI, under the title “Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster”. (That link ought to go to an un-pawalled version of the essay. Then each of them followed up with further thoughts:
And, in response to Brad J. DeLong’s response, a further comment from Farrell
I will admit that these later essays didn’t knock me out the way Shalizi’s original essay did—but I think partly that was because I had read the argument already. Still, it is a noteworthy chain of discussion, and I commend it to your attention.
4. What and Where is Philosophy?
I recently noticed the work of one Becca Rothfeld, who is ABD in Philosophy at Harvard and earlier this year became an editor and regular book reviewer for The Washington Post. I say recently noticed, not recently discovered, because I am fairly sure I have read one or two of her essays before, but (due to my lamentably poor memory for names) not clocked that they were the same byline. What brought her to my attention was the overlap between her areas of interest in mine (I am a sucker for anyone who writes about technical philosophy and literature, particularly if the technical philosophy in question is aesthetics).
But the passage that pushed me from “huh, I wonder who this interesting-sounding human is” to “okay she rocks”2 is this one from her substack:
When I was watching Olympic figure skating last year, I noticed that each performance is awarded two scores: a technical score, and an artistic score. Nathan Chen, the winner of the men’s gold medal, can do enormously complex and athletically demanding moves, so he habitually receives high technical scores. No doubt, he deserves them: he is the first man to ever land four quads—jumps with four rotations, I think?—in a routine. He’s also no fun to watch, in my untutored opinion. There is nothing humane or graceful about him. He is a very gifted technician.
In my view, much (certainly not all) of academic philosophy—much of the academic humanities more generally, if I may overstep my bounds—is taking too many cues from Nathan Chen. Many of its practitioners have completely neglected their artistic scores. What I mean by this is not that much philosophy is not beautiful or balletic, although of course much of it isn’t, but that vast swaths of it are not responsive to actual problems or questions that would resonate with anyone outside the field. In my last post about Agnes Callard and why I love her work, I noted that a lot of academic work addresses “pseudo-problems”—problems that have been generated by academic disputes, not by reality or our experience of reality. It just so happens that a lot of more literary philosophy—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bernard Williams (who is, by my lights, a very beautiful writer)—does address actual problems and questions. But a lot of literary philosophy—I won’t name names, because it is my policy to insult someone or something only when I have time and inclination to really justify my disapprobation—is also absolute bullshit. And by the same token, there is a lot of philosophy that does address real problems in dryer tones but that is unfairly dismissed, either because so many people reflexively loathe the sheer aesthetics of analytic philosophy, or because they fail to grasp why certain idealizations simultaneously falsify the situation on the ground and shed light on it. (The original position thought experiment is an example of a idealization that is much maligned for making false assumptions, when in fact it is the business of an idealization to make false but illuminating assumptions.) Still, a great deal of contemporary philosophy is technically flawless, full of neat arguments and cleanly articulated premises, and completely pointless.
She goes on to make the it-ought-to-be-obvious-but-given-how-many-people-don’t-notice-it-I-guess-it-isn’t point that the dearth of people studying and majoring in the humanities, and philosophy in particular, isn’t about any cultural disinclination for them but because of how we have structured society to render the thinking about those questions economically valueless.3 I think this is an important point, even if I am not sure if it is the whole truth (I think there is possibly also some devaluing going on): but it’s clearly the first aspect that a society that make sensible social policy4 would tackle since it’s simple. In other words, if you want people to major in the humanities, make college free and/or institute a universal basic income.
I have digressed. Aside from that issue, the passage above strikes me as totally right and extremely important. It reminds me of two other things. First, it reminds me of the observation of a philosopher friend of mine5 who was once talking with me about the differences between (academic) history and (academic) philosophy. I pointed out that one of the best things about academic history is that it maintained strong links to public history: took seriously the books of non-academic historians, and aspired to write for a popular audience. The Pulitzer Prize, for instance, is one of the major awards in the field, along with other, more academically-focused awards. My philosopher friend piped up: “Whereas if there were a Pulitzer Prize in philosophy, winning it would ruin your career.”
The second thing the Rothfeld passage reminds me of is this quote from Stanley Cavell (long one of my favorites6) from his essay “Austin at Criticism” in his first essay collection, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969):
And anything would be pleasanter than the continuing rehearsals—performable on cue by any graduate student in good standing—of how Descartes was mistaken about dreams, or Locke about truth, or Berkeley about God, or Kant about things-in-themselves or about moral worth, or Hegel about “logic,” or Mill about “desirable,” and so forth; or about how Berkeley mistook Locke, or Kant Hume, or Mill Kant, or everybody Mill, and so forth. Such “explanations” are no doubt essential, and they may account for everything we need to know, except why any man of intelligence and vision has ever been attracted to the subject of philosophy. (p. 103)
To paraphrase something Cavell said in a class I had with him, we might rewrite "for our ears" the final phrase to read "...why any person...", a rewriting I assume he would have done himself had this essay been written twenty years later.
I am still exploring Rothfeld’s work, but I thought I’d note a few other pieces I’ve noticed. First, and most directly relevant to the above topic, is this essay she wrote for The Hedgehog Review called “The Art of Not Concluding: Can philosophy be worth doing?” which, among other things, shows that she’s read Cavell. A few other pieces of possible interest to some readers:
This essay on gender (and this follow-up) express a position that I am attracted to and believe more than 50%, but less than 100%, of the time. I am tempted to ask her how she reconciles her position with transgender people and their experiences, but honestly that’s not a minefield I want to wander into.
I appreciated her defense of Lolita on aesthetic grounds (one much made, but one, sadly, much in need of remaking).
This is an example (maybe the only one?) of her academic work, although it’s behind a paywall.
An essay about the change in vampires over time.
I like the way she interweaves thoughts on Henry James and Martha Nussbaum here, but I need to read more James and then reread this
A review of recent feminist books about sex in contemporary society
I may add more links here as I read more of her work.
5. A Bricolage’s Bricolage
Other links:
A terrific essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Man?” by Phil Christman (via a link from Becca Rothfeld (q.v.)).
16 Utterly Interesting Prime Numbers Most People Don’t Know. My favorites on this list are 23456789 and 11111….111 (a total of 1,000 ones).
This story by Lincoln Michel feels like one of the more plausible futures I can recall seeing in SF.
A good essay by Jeffrey Quackenbush reviewing Patrick Deenen’s most recent book, under the title “This is What Happens When You Find a Stranger in the Alps!”, which pays off nicely at the end. (In case you don’t know the source of that title, this explains it.)
David Simon (creator of The Wire) writes a letter asking for leniency for the person who gave his friend Michael K Williams (who played Omar on The Wire) the drugs that killed him.
You might say that that wasn’t the last time, this was the last time, but you’d be wrong, at least in the shining ideal that I have in my head: the post in August was a mere commercial, not an actual posting on Attempts; the bricolage at July’s end was the last (real) post, the last one I count.
Although her casual mention of being in a Kant reading group had me almost all the way there already.
Ok, not entirely: training in philosophy, and the humanities, hone skills needed in all sorts of actually-remunerative jobs. But the point holds to some degree (and, of course, can become self-reinforcing).
i.e. not ours.
I would love to credit her for this sentence, but since it was an off-hand remark she may not want to be associated with in even the quasi-permanent way of web writing, I’m wary of doing so without her express consent.
Readers who notice this is ambiguous between whether I mean Cavell is one of my favorite philsoophers or this quote is one of my favorite Cavell quotes should rest easy that both interpretations are equally sound.