Monday, April 21, 2008

Sample cards from a great deck I just discovered

Card Images from the Oracle of the Radiant Sun

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Pragmatism, performance, truthful speakers

Re: crowleycrow's comment on my 3/28 post: I'm not an expert, by any means, on the relationship between pragmatism and deconstruction. There are for sure people who connect them, and say that they are something like both. Rorty, for example. Maybe Stanley Fish? This is just from my little political theory/philosophy corner, though. I think of them, pragmatism and deconstruction/p-structuralism, as sharing many assumptions, and so having considerable over-lap, but also as being answers to different questions. And certainly arising in different intellectual contexts. But the upshot? I would say that, in different ways, proponents of both deny that there is any there, there. Be it in relation to the meaning of texts or text-analogues, or in relation to other kinds of entities.

I agree with crowleycrow's observation that "performance" is intelligible as an idea only against the back-drop of what it isn't, namely: "non-performance." And I don't think it's just a matter of how these words, like all words, depend on what they are not, in order to be what they are (that's the post-structuralist irony part). "Performance" (as in, the enacting of an appearance that is to one extent or another at odds with an underlying reality), is an actual modality, or way of being, and like lying, and fiction more generally, it is a modality that can't work unless there are already in place ways of being the objective of which is to create an appearance that is consistent with, rather than false to, an underlying reality. We could say (I do say, I think -- am herewith saying) that performance (real performance, no pun intended) is ontologically contingent upon transparent expression. Though this is not to deny Anselmo's point, that all expression is expression.

I always think of crowleycrow's own "truthful speakers," from Engine Summer, when I think of what a non-performative stance is like. They of course have to *learn* how to be truthful speakers ... but that gets us back to Anselmo's point.





Friday, March 28, 2008

Performing sincerity

I have a friend with whom I argue about the same thing in all manner of guise. A recent version centered on rhetoric, in the context of writing non-fiction. I was arguing that there is some way in which writing that is transparent, i.e., made up out of sentences in which what one means is in some significant (and stylistically unique) sense equivalent to what one says -- that such writing is, in a way that matters, less rhetorically inflected than other forms. My friend disagrees with this, holds that all writing is performance all the way down. To think - I take him to be saying - that "transparent" writing is somehow any less of a show, is analogous to thinking that there is such a thing as "value-free" social science.

He may be right about this. But the thing that it gets to, and that I don't think he's right about - and maybe he doesn't even think it - is the idea that everything period is performance. It seems to me that the problem with this view, that is to say with pragmatism, is that there are certain things that presuppose that it is not so, presuppose that there is indeed a difference between performance and not-performance. Sincerity, for example. It is in the nature of the case that if one is talking about a "performance of sincerity," then one is not actually talking about sincerity. Or at a minimum one is not using the word in a way that is consistent with its accepted definition. It strikes me that this is a good reason to think that pragmatism is flawed, philosophically, viz., that it renders sincerity unintelligible.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Math and art

Anselmo-b raised all kinds of interesting issues in his comments in response to my "Aesthetic Realism" post (March 11). Since we can't see the threads well in this blog, I'll make a new post. He said that with math, the proof might be analogous to a work of art, but the theorem itself is truly impersonal -- not in the way that I was talking about with other works of art, which way amounts, I think to the work being a perfect version of itself, as my friend Howard would say, but instead literally: the theorem, he says, would be exactly the same no matter who thought of it, or how they went about showing that it has to be so.

I don't know enough about math to be able to comment, but it's interesting and I wish I did. A question that it raises for me is: are we sure that theorem and proof are as separable in practice as they are analytically? I mean, how would we want to characterize the activity of working on a problem? Is it like doing aesthetic work in some other medium? It seems to me that it might be. But I don't know.

Anselmo, can you say more about the evil art question? I spent some time recently wondering about art that is ugly (viz., wondering if there is such a thing, and if so what makes it be art still), a question that I'd got to by wondering why raunchy writing about sex is so often bad writing, and if it's in the nature of the case that it would have to be. I decided no, that you could have ugly art, be it writing or visual. But are you asking something different? Say more. Others too.

The thesaurus, continued

This is a continuation of my response to jc's comments, under the entry "Books."

As I guess everybody knows, the standard Roget's has words listed in the back, with numbers next to them. You look up the word, find its number, then look up the number in the front. The thing that is so great about it is that the numbers mark off conceptual categories, into which the words fall. It's good because you can see how nuances of meaning between words are given by the differing general concepts that govern their definitions. I love that. Though admittedly I love conceptual categories in general. As it were.

Anyway, it gets better. My understanding is that Roget was a realist about the categories, which means that he thought that meaning is organized in the way that it is because reality is organized that way. Reality with a capital r, that is. Now, that's probably wrong deep down - or, maybe it's only right deep down - but it's still kind of neat (a word that I recognize can be said but not written) that the thesaurus is so unabashedly ontological. You have to admire an attempted mapping of what philosophers call real (in contrast to "nominal") kinds. Don't we think?

But why do they always have to be dicks? (See jc's report of article about how Roget was an unpleasant weirdo.)

Portals



There is a place near where I live that is sort of other-worldly. I have a friend who set a book there, for that reason I assume. Many of the trees there are in love with each other, and have no inhibitions about showing it. Some of the others are kind of like guardians. Safe to be around, though -- not like those creepy piggie-trees in Speaker for the Dead. It feels like a border-land. I was up there this morning, with my favorite German Shepherd. I think that he would like it if there were sheep there. Sometimes there are cows, though not often. Today there was a beautiful white-tailed deer. Unfortunately for her, he chased her. She was faster than him though.




Friday, March 14, 2008

A few minutes later, they became engaged

The morning after as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.

"I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous, passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild, dark-plumed name -- a name which had in her mind the steel blue gleam of rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things besides, which will be described shortly.

"Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, "Orlando," he explained.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Photos



Patricia wanted photographs.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Aesthetic realism and the self, cont.

In the Republic, a case is made for the desirability of a harmonious soul, or self. The soul is described as being comprised, in broad strokes, of three different kinds of drives: a love of immediate pleasures of various kinds - this is called "appetite" - a love of honor, or righteousness, which is called "spiritedness" or "courage," and a love of the True, the Beautiful and, ultimately, the Good, which is called "reason" or "wisdom." The claim that the character of Socrates makes is that it is the part of the soul that is responsive to the Good that is capable of maintaining harmony within the person. The name that is given to the virtue of being willing to be directed by that part, rather than by either of the others, is "moderation."

Now, anyone who has ever had to battle it out with themselves over anything will understand that it all hinges on this, on whether one can find a way to be willing to be governed by the requirements of the sweet spot (see post #2, March 10, 08). Most of the time the battle with oneself is a drag. Always one wants what one wants. But - and this is the point - one thing about doing any kind of art, even badly, that is so deeply satisfying is that it is a moment of reprieve in this regard. When you do art, moderation is effortless. The self is entirely subject, in the aesthetic context, to what I'll call the laws of truth and beauty (or to the object, we could say) -- yet somehow it's fine. In most other settings, one can only beg for this to be so. But somehow with art one is granted moderation as a freebie.

But maybe there are people who experience aesthetic activity as a kind of voluntaristic assertion of self, not involving this kind of deference at all. Are there?

Books

I'm curious about the books that people love. The ones that, for whatever reason, resonate in some way that others don't, or don't as much. Here are some of mine, in no particular order:

How to Survive in Your Native Land, James Herndon
Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil
Days With Frog and Toad, Arnold Lobel
many dialogues by Plato, but especially the Republic
Orlando, of course; Virginia Woolf
Little, Big (even better, is the truth of it); John Crowley
anything involving Bernie Wooster
Paradise Lost
Roget's Thesaurus, Original Edition

Quilts-R-Us









Rachel said I should post things about quilting. The main thing that I have to say is that color may well be an argument for god. I don't actually have a thing for purple.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Doo-wopping Animated Donkeys - Excellent

http://svt.se/hogafflahage/hogafflaHage_site/Kor/hestekor.swf

Guaranteed to please. Click on a donkey and the vocal kicks in. Click again and it stops. You can get all four going.

And another thing

Recently I had the experience of centering clay on a potter's wheel for the first time. It was remarkable: the clay feels all wobbly going around, and then all of a sudden it doesn't. Bam, it's still. Now, we know from M. C. Richards that this is a metaphor for everything. Fine. But the point is, it's not just a metaphor. I told a friend about it and I commented on how nice it is that with everything that involves grace, there's a sweet spot. But it's not just with movement that this is so. It's the same with writing, too. And humor. The thing that is interesting about the regular sweet spot, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's a physical instance of the way in which things that are good, aesthetically, don't have the fingerprints of self all over them. They may well bear the mark of the author or creator's style, but within those characteristic parameters, the person's self doesn't intrude. When it does, it's like a note played or sung off key. What is it that makes it be that that's the way things are? That the world as we experience it seems to be structured on all fronts by this aesthetic requirement that the capacities of self be applied in such a way that they dissolves into, and/or are subject to the form of, the activity or object toward which they are directed? I think that this is what Aristotle and Plato both think the divine is: something like the laws of beauty. I don't mean prettiness. I don't know if I agree, but I'm pretty sure that I think that there's something to the felt objectivity of the requirement.

Gesture, form and the soul

Okay, here's a thing: what you can see when you draw is the way that people's bodies hold, in the details of their lines and shapes, something like the essence of the whole form. This whatever-it-is is partly about the person themselves, it seems to me, such that in relation to a given model it holds across the various positions that he or she may assume, but it's also particular, in the sense that you have to look for it a-new in each pose. You find it in a line here, a curve there, this shape, that bit of weight. The question is: what is that? Plus, why is it that while it is possible to create genuine, compelling portraits of inanimate objects, what such images capture is not the same thing? Finally, as a side note, don't we think that a thing that is great about Anna Karenina is that Tolstoy there does something with gesture that is similar to the thing that I'm talking about in relation to life-drawing, in the details of his characterizations?