Digressions&Impressions

On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity

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I once met John Perry for a few minutes in line at a hotel Starbucks at an Eastern APA when those were still the job-market. We didn't know each other, and we never met again (so far). But I knew his name because I owned his A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality; our chat was brief, but it was kind not the least because his eyes didn't wander to scan the room while we talked. I forgot what we talked about, but, as the kids say, sometimes the vibe is more important than the words and it was one of the few sweet moments during that otherwise dismal APA.

So, I'll forgive him that in his (2007) Amherst Lecture which offers a reading of “Borges and I,” Perry opts for "the more straightforward interpretation" in supposing that the implied author of "Borges and I" is Borges the (famous) actual author of the piece, and not some fictional counterpart or doppelgänger of the actual author. After all, we're dealing with Borges, the author of Pierre Menard!

"Borges and I' is, in fact, about the estranged relationship between the implied author of "Borges and I" and the famous author, Borges. So, it's not impossible that the implied author of "Borges and I" is the fictional counterpart.

Perry actually acknowledges this possibility on some level later in his argument when he concedes that "in following the writer’s thoughts, we must to a certain extent pretend that the writer is not Borges." But Perry thinks we can't sustain this perspective because "the interest of the story is the thoughts that the writer has about himself" (emphasis added) and not the implied fictional counterpart.

As an aside, the less straightforward interpretation that Perry rejects is that "Borges could have written a story like this about some other author." But that's compatible with the implied author being (not just a counterpart/doppelgänger of Borges, but) also (say) Eric Schliesser. And it's quite clear that the latter option is not really implied by the story. So, while I agree with Perry that this is less likely and should be rejected, I don't think, as I hinted in the previous two paragraphs, Perry has canvassed all the relevant options when he opts for what he takes to be the more straightforward interpretation.

Perry's interpretation of "Borges and I" actually goes off the rails, I think, shortly thereafter when he writes that "It would not only be odd, but quite impossible, for Borges to survive the writer. Even if all that is meant by “survival” is living on as a literary figure, if Borges lives on in that way, so will the writer."  This is not right if we reject the more straightforward interpretation.

But even on the straightforward interpretation there is a wrinkle that Perry does not confront. (I say this with some trepidation not just because I remember his kindness so fondly, but also because between the two of us, he is actually the expert on identity.) Before I get to that, for Perry, "Borges and I" is fundamentally about the expression of "a certain alienation [the actual Borges] feels about certain aspects of himself and certain achievements of his." The alienation thesis is quite plausible. But the reason for Perry's confidence here is that he is working with a theory of identity (let's call it a 'classical' one) in which "the relation that A and B have when there is just one thing that is both A and B. It is the relation that Tully has to Cicero, the evening star has to the morning star, Mark Twain has to Samuel Clemens, Bill Blythe has to Bill Clinton, and so on. Identity is the relation that each thing has to itself and no other." This is familiar enough for philosophical readers.

In order to hold on to this classical theory of identity and to handle the ways in which A and B (Borges and I or I and Borges) may seem to come apart in "Borges and I," Perry introduces the idea of "motivating cognitive complex." If you are interested in finding out what that is read Perry’s lecture. I'll stipulate here that it can do the job Perry wants it to do.

To be sure, I don't mean to deny that Perry may be playing an elaborate, Borgesian game with us, too. After all, along the way, while discussing a thought experiment of Hector-Neri Castañeda, Perry notes that "then I see on the web that the date when John Perry published his Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality was 1978, that information goes into the same mental file where information about what is in front of me, whether I am hungry or not, and the like, is kept. I get the information “John Perry published the dialogue in 1978” and this leads to the thought, “I published the dialogue in 1978.”" One may well wonder who this I really is supposed to be. 

Be that as it may, I don't think that Borges (in the straightforward interpretation) or the implied author, Borges's counterpart (in my preferred interpretation) is relying on the classical theory of identity in "Borges and I." And my reason for thinking that is two-fold: first, the story ends with an epistemic claim: "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." On Perry's reading this ought to be deeply puzzling. For, by stipulation (the straightforward interpretation), the persona who is writing the piece is Borges the famous author. So this doubt really can’t arise on Perry’s straightforward reading.

Second, Perry completely, and somewhat oddly (he is a professional philosopher, after all), skips the explicit invocation of Spinoza in "Borges and I" (which in the translations I am familiar with is shorter than a double-spaced page). 

It's pretty clear that Spinoza rejects the classical theory of identity. This is obvious in Spinoza's doctrine of eternality in which the X that becomes eternal loses all the particularity one naturally  (and also on the classical theory of identity) associates with X and becomes, in fact, in a certain sense co-extensive with the true or the truths (Y). But it’s not so that from the perspective of eternity, X=Y. (See here for an attempt to describe this.) In fact, Spinoza also rejects what Tarski calls the 'classical' conception of truth (and defends what one might call a metaphysical identity theory of truth (recall here)). Rather, like the Muslim philosophers' views of God’s knowledge (as Al-Ghazali infers, they deny that God knows individuals), from the perspective of eternity, Spinoza's individuals and individuality are ephemera (and so unknowable). My point here is not to defend Spinoza.

Now, it's possible, of course, that the implied author of "Borges and I" has a different interpretation of Spinoza than the one hinted at in the previous paragraph. Fair enough. In the story, the following is claimed: "Spinoza understood that all things want to be preserved in their being." This is an evocation of a feature of the so-called general 'Conatus doctrine' (EIIIp6). In fact, it echoes Ethics IIIp9 (and a whole series of propositions developed in parts IV/V of the Ethics): "The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas and also insofar as it has confused ideas, strives to persevere in being." In "Borges and I" the doctrine gets glossed as follows (in the translation of Ilan Stavans): 

the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others and in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried freeing myself from him and went from the mythologies of the arrabal to the games with time and the infinite, but those games are Borges’ now and I shall come up with other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other.

Again, at first one may think it's pretty clear Perry is onto something when he suggests that this expresses alienation. Perhaps an alienation so extreme, that the conatus doctrine ends up in a kind of inversion: rather than tending toward eternity, it tends in the implied author toward oblivion or near-total loss of identity.

Before I close this digression, I should admit that I ended up returning to Borges' story because my friend Petra had bait-and-switched me into buying Amina Cain's fascinating essay, A Horse at Night. This essay mentions two of Borges' stories (including "Borges and I”.) I write ‘bait-and-switch,’ because Petra had sent me a picture of a paragraph from Cain, which I only later realized (while reading Cain's essay) was an excerpt from Annie Ernaux's The Possession.

A major theme of A Horse at Night, is how in "writing and life" two things can be imaginatively projected on top of each other without eclipsing each other and, thereby, generating something new. That is, Cain explores the complex nature of identity. To put this as a serious joke: I find Cain's implied author in A Horse at Night nearly insufferable and banal when she is engaged in autobiography and mesmerizingly evocative and interesting when discussing other artist’s works of art. For the record: Cain treats the implied author of "Borges and I" as sad.

Neither Perry nor Cain discusses Spinoza or the skeptical conclusion of "Borges and I:" "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." It's not obvious on Perry's reading why this occurs. It's a rather extreme form of skepticism; it denies knowledge of the self-identifying features of the Cartesian ego in the very act of affirming its existence. It is especially notable — alerted by Cain — that this occurs in the writer’s life that one forgets or losses oneself in a certain sense. (Cain touches on this from the perspective of the Soto Zen tradition, not Spinozism.)

If we glance at Spinoza's theory of identity the puzzle disappears if we imagine, as we are allowed in fiction, that the sentence, "I don’t know which of the two writes this page," is written from the perspective of eternity/oblivion. For from that perspective such individualizing marks are not known/knowable. Of course, the joke is knowing that one is Borges, or the implied author, or his very vain counterpart, wouldn't matter from that perspective either, or at least it shouldn't.

• This first appeared at: <On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity - by nescio13 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On Analytic and Continental Clarity (Collingwood and McGuiggan.)

We have, then, two sorts of project, the scientific and the poetic, and two corresponding norms of clarity. Scientists, whose concepts are additions to our experience or (in other words) discrete from other concepts, properly use strictly defined, technical terms to refer to these wholly new and discrete things. This use of language is appropriate to its subject matter and so is content-directedly clear. Poets, whose concepts expand or develop our experience, appropriately do not use technical terms, which would inhibit clarity for them. What is content-directedly clear in poetry is language that is stretched and grown.

What has this all got to do with philosophy? Well, Analytic philosophers often think that philosophy is engaged in the same sort of project as science. Not (normally) exactly the same project, but a project similar enough to it that similar methodologies, and so similar norms of communication, should obtain. In particular, Analytic philosophers characteristically make a virtue of using technical terms(,) as scientists do. Philosophy that fails to adhere to the norms of communication appropriate to this project—such as Continental philosophy or the more theoretical branches of literary criticism, which often ignore or even flout them—is then branded unclear, with the accusation that this is needless naturally consequent. What I have argued in this paper so far should give us reason to think that this dismissal is too quick, and so let us now take seriously Collingwood’s suggestion that “the philosopher must go to school with the poets” (EPM, 214).---James Camien McGuiggan (2022) Scientific, Poetic, and Philosophical Clarity Metaphilosophy 53:5.

McGuiggan tagged me in a twitter thread (here) introducing the paper I have quoted above. I noticed with pleasure and vanity that some of my blog posts are cited rather prominently in the paper, although (mysteriously to me) not the posts I have written on clarity in analytic philosophy (recall here on Carnap and Quine; here on Ernest Nagel). Despite this modest disappointment, I read the paper, and I am very glad I did so. It's a lovely work with lots of clever illustrations from poetry, has useful distinctions, and you get a nice introduction to Collingwood's ideas from an independently minded, but true believer. (And I found the argument an invitation go back and re-read some Collingwood in the future.)

A key distinction is the one between content-directed clarity and audience-directed clarity. Content-directed clarity involves (presentational) form that is appropriate to the content. Whereas audience-directed clarity involves the aptness/fit of the norms of communication that we adopt given our intended audience. This distinction is part of a wider taxonomy (including presentational clarity, clarity of thought, etc.), so don't complain (yet) it's not exhaustive.

Now, content directed clarity and audience directed clarity need not be opposed to or even fully independent of each other. After all, what counts as the proper presentational form apt for particular content, may well be governed, in part, by the norms our communication falls under given our intended audience. (This seems fully compatible with what McGuiggan writes, but if you think it's silly attribute the view to me.) We may, for example, think rightly that a sonnet would be best for a certain content, but decide that a carefully constructed note in Analysis would be more likely to reach most professional philosophers, and advance our careers. On a less dramatic scale such trade-offs are routine in our professional lives (due to word-count restrictions, citational practices, refereeing practices, etc.), and we make them -- sometimes not without anguish -- almost constantly in our publication practices as well as our lectures/colloquia.

If I understand McGuiggan correctly (see the second paragraph quoted above), on his view analytic philosophers criticize or disparage continental philosophy for violating the norms of audience directed clarity that analytic philosophers adhere to. And the reason analytic philosophers do so is that we (pretend my defense of synthetic philosophy is just a thought experiment) falsely assume that continental philosophers are engaged in the same underlying project, and so miss that continental philosophers are shaped by different content-directed standards. Let's call this McGuiggan's Diagnosis or if you prefer, 'McGuiggan's Diagnosis.'

What's neat about McGuiggan's Diagnosis -- and this also lends it some evidence -- is that it helps explain why some analytic philosophers think it's an okay project to translate continental works into the vernacular of analytic philosophy (say for students and for professional advancement) without thinking something really important is lost. This is a thriving genre, so pick your favorite example. (I am not being too sarcastic here because arguably my present Foucault project falls under this genre.)

As an aside, what's odd about McGuiggan's Diagnosis is that if it's true even the most fair-minded least polemical analytic philosophers somehow never grasp what continental philosophy is up to, or, more insidiously, keep quiet about it when we do and our peers attack it unfairly. So, I was a bit sad he did not engage with (say) Kolodny's work on Foucault's cryptonormativity or some of the analytics that turn Heidegger into a fellow pragmatist (and possibly share his theological aims). 

Be that as it may, since it's not uncommon to insist that continental philosophy is poetry adjacent and analytic science adjacent, I won't complain about this move. (If only because it strengthens my prediction back in 2014 (recall) that Wittgenstein will end up treated as a continental.) One problem with McGuiggan's diagnosis is that he essentializes analytic and continental philosophy. (This is notoriously a dubious move.) In particular, he claims that continental philosophy tries to expand our (possible) experience whereas analytic philosophy tries to account for additions to our experiences. Let me stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this indeed fits, say, Heidegger (an example he repeatedly uses) and your favorite philosopher of logic quite well.

So, I have two reservations (that spring from this essentialization). First, some continental philosophers and some analytic philosophers are manifestly engaged in overlapping enterprises. This is most evident in the revival of post-Kantian metaphysics among continentals and among analytics. When I disagree, say, with Meillassoux's 'speculative realism' or the object oriented ontology of Graham, the disagreements are not primarily about the worth/aims or the presentation of the project(s), it's about the contents of the position. When I disagree with, say, Badiou, I do disagree with the Marxist or revolutionary aims of the project, but I have trouble taking it seriously because of the weight and uses he places on set theory.

To be sure, there are circumstances where there is no overlap in the first order aims. Recently, using Deleuzian tools, Jeff Bell has convinced me that in the 1970s Foucault is trying to state the features that are presupposed such that a stable (what we analytics call) semantics and pragmatics (in Carnap's sense) are or appears to be possible. I don't think analytic philosophers are, at present, really engaged in that project despite our search for grounds or for the conditions of a final language, even if the metaphysical position Foucault arrives at (a pragmatism about pragmatics welded to a kind of realist semantics) is not far removed from ones I am familiar with (say, as Jeff suggests, Putnam at some time.)* That's to say we could get involved in this project. I mention this example because if it is right about Foucault it looks to me as if Foucault's special vocabulary then is primarily due to the need to account for additions to our 'experience.' (I use scare quotes there because we can't really experience directly the conditions that make semantics or even pragmatics possible; perhaps in the latter we can sense their absence when a practice breaks down or has moved on.) I don't mean to deny that, perhaps, Foucault is also interested in creating new additions -- to be a philosophical legislator --, but that's beside the point here.

Second, it's not entirely clear to me that that the contrast between accounting for an addition to experience and for expanding or developing our experience is really all that robust where it matters. By this I don't just mean that there are philosophical poets (Lucretius paradigmatically), but rather that it seems to echo a kind of context of discovery vs context of justification distinction. And the problem with that distinction, for present purposes, is that discovery is never wholly discrete from previously justified or to be justified work. That is, within science (and analytic philosophy) there are going to be moments where new terms are introduced and defined in order to make new experience possible, or to begin to classify/measure (etc.) it (with an eye toward new justification).

For related reasons, I also don't think McGuiggan's approach does full justice to the aims of conceptual engineering or ameliorative analysis in ethics and political philosophy. When 'epistemic injustice' gets complemented by 'epistemic violence' and 'epistemic pollution' these new concepts are introduced to make new diagnoses and new forms of intelligibility of one's experiences possible, but also with an aim to change the conditions that make these experiences possible (even though the term was not around). The point here is not to challenge the coherence of McGuiggan's distinctions, but to suggest that the diagnosis seems to presuppose conditions that are not always present.

 

Canon formation within Analytic Philosophy

One of the perennial complaints of philosophy teachers has concerned the dearth of readily accessible and worthwhile reading material in modern philosophical analysis. As a first step toward improving this situation we have prepared the present volume of selections. Our idea was this: In the tremendous bulk of the periodical literature of recent decades, there is a small percentage of articles definitely worthy of reproduction in an anthology. This material required only proper grouping to provide a usable text for intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.
The project in preliminary form was presented by circular letter to about ninety teachers of philosophy in this country and in England. We asked for responses to our proposed selections, that is, endorsements or rejections of titles contained in a list of about 130 items. We also asked for recommendations of valuable material that we might have overlooked. We are pleased to acknowledge with sincere gratitude the enthusiastic and most helpful reactions received from an impressive majority of our correspondents. Because of the limitations of space we had to exclude, with a heavy heart, several excellent articles by authors from whom we had already obtained permission for reprinting.
With the exception of a very few cases in which it seemed clear from the beginning that an article belonged in our collection, we have pondered our choices seriously and long. In many instances it was extremely difficult for us to make up our minds. The exclusion of any article which was either on our original list or had been recommended by our friends was painful; and here, as everywhere, to choose is to exclude. Recognizing in the end that it would be impossible to make our choices coincide with the valuations of all prospective users of this book, we can only plead that within the given aims and limitations we have selected what, after countless considerations, comparisons and consultations seemed the most suitable body of material available for reprinting.
We have been guided in our selections on the whole by the reactions and suggestions of our correspondents. Since some of our own articles met with a very favorable reaction, we felt it would not appear presumptuous to include them. Generally our tendency was not to concentrate exclusively on the work of the great and the famous thinkers, but rather to select on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices.
The conception of philosophical analysis underlying our selections springs from two major traditions in recent thought, the Cambridge movement deriving from Moore and Russell, and the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, Schlick, Carnap) together with the Scientific Empiricism of the Berlin group (led by Reichenbach). These, together with related developments in America stemming from Realism and Pragmatism, and the relatively independent contributions of the Polish logicians have increasingly merged to create an approach to philosophical problems which we frankly consider a decisive turn in the history of philosophy.
Although it is realized that there are no sharp lines of demarcation between this and other contemporary schools, we could not possibly have attempted to represent them all. Since the clearest and most helpful formulation of an idea is not always the first in order of time, or historically the most representative, we have paid relatively little attention to originality as a condition for inclusion. It was rather the penetration, the finesse, and the challenge of the work which counted most. In some instances we succeeded in grouping together divergent and mutually incompatible contributions around controversial subjects. We have tried to avoid definitely obsolete material. Certainly up-to-date-ness in any significant sense is not a mere function of date of publication. Frege, one of whose contributions we included, and Peirce, whose work is not represented because it is so amply available, have more to say to us than many who are writing today....
Courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language, etc., should find ample material for reading and discussion in this anthology. Although some basic articles in Philosophy of Science, Modern Logic, and Theoretical Ethics have been included, we can conceive of additional volumes of selections, very much needed, in these special fields. We express the hope that others will consider work on anthologies along those lines. May we assure them that such work, while arduous, is at least intrinsically rewarding.--"Preface" by Feigl, H., and W. Sellars. in Readings in Analytic Philosophy." New York (1949), pp. v-vi. [HT Alan Richardson]

An informal social media exchange with Jason Stanley got me thinking about canon formation within analytic philosophy. In particular, I started to reflect on the (temporary, but not trivial) dominance of philosophy of language within analytic philosophy such that many analytic programs organized proseminars for entry level PhD students around familiarity with certain classics of that field (which also includes semantics and some bits of philosophical logic). 

While I don't want to claim that the dominance of such philosophy of language was a contingent fact, it's worth noting that as this dominance developed others who were recognizably influential at the time within analytic philosophy, were pushing for, say, philosophy of science as first philosophy (e.g. Ernest Nagel), and one can easily imagine some others to have pushed epistemology in a foundational role (and certainly in some a background empiricism or sense-data theory does play a non-trivial authoritative role). The reason I deny it is wholly contingent is that, for example, axiology or aesthetics cannot have been, then, the dominant core.

Alan Richardson suggested that it would make sense to look at the textbooks of the 1948-53 period as formative. In particular, it is worth noting that, as Alan reminded [Leonard was one of my teachers] me, Leonard Linsky's (1953) Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, A Collection of Readings, clearly anticipates much of the early canon of the philosophy (of language centered) proseminar. Linsky's book is not the definitive canon -- it lacks "On Denoting" (and has no Frege at all) --, but I hope to discuss it some other time. 

But first I want to focus on the Feigl and Sellars text-book, which explicitly sets the agenda for the other textbooks, and simultaneously helps consolidate, roughly, what counts as analytic philosophy (or in modern philosophical analysis) and not. And, pertinent for my present purposes, they do so by using a kind of partial, snowball sampling method to create a canon of texts worthy of inclusion.+ 

To be sure, their grouping of who is included in the "decisive turn" -- (i) the Cambridge movement, (ii) the Vienna Circle, (iii) the Berlin group, (iv) American Realism and Pragmatism, and (v) the Polish logicians -- is not original. We find this nearly exact combination already in 1936 in Ernest Nagel's two-part essay on "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe."* And certainly there is some contingency in what gets passed on. They themselves note that Peirce would naturally fit their agenda, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see that as time passes on the opportunity costs to find a way to include Peirce into the fold grows so great that effectively -- with the exception of some of his informal essays in the philosophy of science -- he ends up terra incognita for analytic philosophers. 

The influential textbooks of the period are nearly all American. Presumably they were created there not just because it was at the time the wealthiest place around, but also because of the sudden demand due to expansion of Higher Education there. Feigl and Sellars are clearly anticipating fine-grained "courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language" etc.! (And note these are not intended as introductory courses, but "intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.")

One interesting claim that Feigl and Sellars make is that they selected "on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices." This is a rare admission that the canon of analytic texts does not reflect originality, or historical priority, but didactic or pedagogic suitability. To be sure, I am not claiming this remains the case in analytic canon formation once analytic philosophy is suitably securely dominant (relative to "other contemporary schools"), but it is prominent at the start. 

And it is worth remarking that several of the features they explicitly mention are de facto rhetorical in character (e.g., "incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge.") That is to say, these are the texts that will persuade students of many different grades of competence of the pertinence of analysis. Of course, it's left vague what counts as pertinence (or clarity, which by no means (recall) means the same in, say, Quine, Carnap, Nagel, or Stebbing). 

One may suspect that the previous paragraph is written in the spirit of unmasking. But that's not the case. It is essential to our self-understanding that we recognize that many of the standard intellectual virtues we associate with analytic philosophy almost as our second nature are originally pedagogical in character. And that is, of course, to be expected of an intellectual school. To what degree their origin in pedagogical (and recruitment) needs generates intellectual problems today, if any, is something I shall consider an other time.

 

On Starship Troopers (and Peckinpah)

Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls has gone through the complete cycle. It was initially received as a notorious turkey, then it became a cult hit that college students watched while playing Showgirls-themed drinking games, and before long it gained a reputation among highbrow commentators including legendary New Wave director Jacques Rivette) as one of the greatest American films of the era.

Good-bad films culture is a space where transgressive movies that are rejected by initial audiences can begin the process of reappraisal and rehabilitation...there is a high degree of overlap between good-bad movie fans and art cinema fans. Film maudit culture emerges from this overlap. I don't mean to say that a legendary film maudit such as Heaven's Gate or Showgirls should be seen as good-bad. Rather, I mean that film maudit sits at the nexus where the concepts of cinematic merit and artistic seriousness are problematized and reshaped.--Matthew Strohl (2022)Why It's Ok to Love Bad Movies, p. 19.

I have been living with Strohl's book for a few weeks now. I avidly search, often without luck, the streaming networks for the movies he discusses and I watch (or re-watch) them in light of his sophisticated and amusing analysis. I quietly mourn the days when my laptop had a DVD player and I could go to the university library or rent from Netflix's once enormous supply. 

The passage quoted above got me thinking of Verhoeven, and especially about (1997) Starship Troopers which has always troubled me. The film has stilted dialogues, an insipid story, but a lot of amazing visual imagery. On Twitter I asked Why think Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is satire? And that went viral with everyone assuring me that it is best understood as a parody/satire of fascism. I am not so sure.

Verhoeven's first major cinematic work was a documentary, Mussert (1968)--Anton Mussert was the leader of the Dutch national-socialists and executed for treason after WWII. I have been unable to find it in order to re-watch it on short notice. But I recall it as an engaging character portrait of Mussert, who is humanized in virtue of the kind of ordinariness of the perceptions of people that knew him. It's important for what follows that I do not mean to say that Verhoeven is interested in defending Mussert's ideology or choices. What is important is that Verhoeven has a documented interest in fascism (no surprise given his biography). 

Soldaat van Oranje (1977) is part of Verhoeven's period of great success in the Netherlands. It's based on a true story. What's distinctive about it (other than the nudity which made all his movies appealing later to my teenage self) is that it starts as a kind of group portrait of students and the choice to collaborate or to resist seems largely arbitrary and driven by ambiguous motives. It's a movie that repays multiple viewings because it's also unusually reflexive about the power of images and the way mutual surveillance is internalized. But I wouldn't call it an antiwar movie because it also treats war as an adventure. (Feel free to challenge this; it's been a while.)

This all by way of prologue. In what follows I want to argue that Verhoeven's Starship Troopers actually expresses a fascist viewpoint. At a high level of abstraction this actually echoes the initial unease about and reception of the film that by now is widely thought inadequate. Since the film also clearly and repeatedly parodies and satirizes a world government that deploys an explicitly fascist aesthetic and propaganda methods most people I know disagree with me.

Moreover, if I am right it also goes against how Verhoeven's claims about the film are usually interpreted (2014). Verhoeven is quoted as follows:

"I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring," says Verhoeven of his attempts to read Heinlein's opus. "It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?'" Empire. By Adam Smith, Owen Williams

Interestingly enough, Neumeier is on record (see here) of being a huge fan of the novel.

In what follows, I take for granted that Verhoeven's intentions are anti-militarist. Even so, there are two weird things worth noticing about Verhoeven's claims. First, the main points of the first chapter of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, are the fear and adrenaline in the confusion of battle. The first sentence of the narrator is "I always get the shakes before a drop" despite being full of drugs! I am not suggesting Heinlein's Starship Troopers isn't fascist -- that's a different debate --, but it is quite striking that Verhoeven claims he could tell after the first two chapters. (The second chapter is a flashback to the narrator's decision to join the service which is how the movie starts.) So, I want to suggest that this passage is worth being cautious about.

Second, Verhoeven himself explicitly qualifies the success of his own effort, he claims he only "partially succeeded." Verhoeven is not known for modesty, and I suggest that he must have discerned something of the argument I intend to offer.

Now, in the quoted passage fascism and ultra-militarism are equated. And such militarism and fascism are indeed on display in the first visual of the movie with the logo of the federal network (and the soundtrack playing a marching tune). The first scene of the movie is a slick recruitment video for the mobile infantry. Strikingly, this is a racially and gender integrated force. (The US Armed forces did not allow women in combat roles until much more recently.) We also learn that the world is imperiled ("help save the world") and something of the ideology of the federation: "service guarantees citizenship." (I return to this below.)

The second scene is shot as if embedded with the infantry in the process of invading Klendathu (the planet of the bugs), "which "must be eliminated." This invasion turns out to be disastrous not the least for the reporter and camera man embedded with the troops which are destroyed by the local bugs. This scene is not slick at all. 

That Klendathu "must be eliminated" is an echo of Cato's famous genocidal claim about Rome's arch-rival, Carthage (censeo Carthaginem esse delendam). This is important to my argument. For, the political ideology of the federation, as presented (and mocked and satirized) in the film, is a militaristic form of civic republicanism. This is, in fact, explicitly articulated in the third scene.

The third scene is a flashback (partially analogous to the second chapter of the book). And we find ourselves in a high school classroom where we are introduced to the hero -- or (if he you disagree with me) main character -- of the film, Rico, a conventionally attractive young man, who is drawing a picture of a boy and a girl and not paying attention to the teacher (Rasczak) who we learn is veteran missing part of an arm (and later turns out to be lieutenant commandeering an elite infantry unit that Rico joins after his initial unit is largely wiped out).*

In the flashback, Rasczak immediately summarizes the main point of the year: "the failure of democracy and the social sciences who brought the world to the bring of chaos."+ We learn that humanity is united in a federation akin to the United Nations (and Star Trek's federation). This federation has been transformed by a coup d'état of veterans who have created a system characterized by social stability for generations.

As we hear the teacher intone, Rico returns to drawing and we see the girl (Carmen Ibanez), who is his model. And as she smiles to him (into the camera), we clearly see her and a portrait of Spinoza. (I return to this below.) Raszcak switches to a Socratic method, and asks another student why are only citizens allowed to vote? And so the audience gets a civics lesson of the ruling ideology, which has a number of distinct elements:

• A distinction between citizens and civilians. The distinction is political and moral.  
• Citizenship is gained through service, primarily (perhaps exclusively) military service.
• The political distinction is that the voting franchise is limited to citizens.
• The moral distinction is that citizenship is freely chosen, and accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic. (Later, by focusing on Rico's parents, we learn that the life of a civilian is basically hedonist enjoyment without responsibility.) This moral distinction is characterized in terms of civic virtue. 
• Importantly, while the students view citizenship as a means toward social benefits (including college entry), as reward for services rendered, the teacher rejects this. Gifts are never of value.**
• Voting is treated as an expression of political authority, which rests on force, especially violence.
• Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. (This is much quoted.)

A student (Dizzy Flores, who is interested in Rico) objects that her mother claims violence does not solve anything. We then get another look at Spinoza, when Raszcak asks Carmen Ibanez (the student who is being portrayed by Rico), what the "city fathers of Hiroshima would say about that," (to which the astute and chilling response is, nothing because they are dead). Near the end of the scene we see a drawing of Hannah Arendt and a bust of Marcus Aurelius. It's not silly to have images of Spinoza, Arendt, and Marcus Aurelius in the classroom if one's ideology is a kind of realist, civic republicanism. 

At the end of the scene -- it's only 90 seconds long -- the question is asked (of Rico) if he believes the ruling ideology and Rico honestly says, he doesn't know. And Raszcak responds that he doubts any of them would 'recognize civic virtue if it bit them in the ass.'

I have spent some time on this because the federation's self-understanding and its structure is formally not fascist. (I don't deny, by the way, that there are important connections between, say, the roman republic and fascism.) We also learn quickly that the federation's military is a meritocracy. And there is some freedom of speech in the federation because there is no suggestion that there will be dangerous consequences for Dizzy Flores' mother doubting of official ideology (and Rico's own lack of conviction). 

Now, the film goes on to show that much of this is sham. The aesthetics of the federation are openly fascist (we see Neil Patrick Harris --  of Doogie Howser, MD fame -- visually transform into a Gestapo officer), it seems committed to open-ended wars of aggression, its claims about citizenship largely a sham because soldiers are treated as expendable; many of the scenes provide us a window into the propaganda that the federation directs at its own citizens. In addition, the federation clearly presents itself as superior to bugs (whose intelligence it constantly underestimates). And it is this fact, this exposure of the militaristic hollowness of the federation, alongside the sheer craziness of its way of life, that is taken as representing the viewpoint of the film and this, in turn, is treated as its anti-fascist message. 

The problem is, however, that exposing that civic republicanism and the duties of citizenship are a sham is itself a feature (not a bug [sorry]) of fascism, or at least what we now call the alt right. In addition, Rico's journey in the film is treated sympathetically. And his species of masculinity is also familiar from contemporary alt right. 

That is to say, while some viewers may end up thinking that Rico is a kind of idiot, I don't think that's the perspective of the movie itself. Initially, his decision to join the service is a rash rebellion against his parents and motivated by his desire to stay near Carmen Ibanez. (This plan fails because Carmen, who is much smarter, is sent to space-force to become a pilot.) He has a change of heart once he is responsible for the death of a fellow trainee (and Carmen far away), but he rescinds his decision to leave the military after his parents (and the city of Buenos Aires) are destroyed by the bugs. After this, this decision is existential. and he devotes his life to killing bugs. 

Rico never questions his decision. And whatever limited growth he shows, it's primarily in the art of killing and military tactics. Rico shows himself to be brave and a good, loyal platoon leader, who rises through the ranks because infantry has a high mortality rate. Importantly, while the smart kids who become officers are uniformly shown to be awful and true believers, in the infantry we see mutual care and comradery of beautiful young people willing to sacrifice for each other and the greater good. 

Now, for some people it's obvious that in virtue of serving an awful regime, which is parodied in the film, Rico and his friends are also so satirized. On social media Liam Kofi Bright suggested, with a knowing nod to Stanley Fish, that it represents a kind of surprised by sin structure. I actually think that's right. For Kofi Bright the lesson is, for the viewer, 'you too can be made to empathise with and root for the villains.' This may be Verhoeven's intention, although it is worth noting that we never root for the senior officers or the federation while watching Starship Troopers. 

My response is that to be surprised by sin just is the human condition. And it does not follow that in virtue of serving an awful regime -- in Kofi Bright's words "objectively what they're doing is aiding a fascist war of conquest...[a]ll their virtues and vices play out against that unquestioned background" -- Rico and his friends are also satirized or parodied. It's not even obvious that Raszcak is satirized in the film. (He turns out to be rather brave and caring of his troops.) In fact, we see Rico taking on the virtues that Raszcak extolls (and exemplifies). 

My position is illustrated by Sam Peckinpah's (1977) Cross of Iron, which appeared the same year as Verhoeven's Soldaat van Oranje. Cross of Iron, which explores the comradery and conflicts of a German platoon on the Eastern front, was a flop Stateside and was panned by critics. (Interestingly enough it did very well in West Germany.) Now, Cross of Iron is very violent, but there is no reason to think that in virtue of coming to sympathize with Corporal Rolf Steiner (James Coburn), whose home is on the front, and who is shown to be courageous and have quite a bit of humanity toward the enemy, we end up admiring the Wehrmacht or Nazi Germany.++ It's pretty obviously an antiwar movie, even though we are shown that for some men war is preferred over domestic life (a good part of the movie explores a romance between Steiner and his nurse Eva, who he ends up rejecting). 

Of course, Cross of Iron is not satire, so structurally it is not identical to Starship Troopers. And whatever aesthetic surrounds Coburn's Steiner, it is by no means fascist. But the aesthetic surrounding Rico and his friends is fascist. The ones that survive keep their beauty. And at the end of the movie Rico even 'gets' Carmen, while the morally superior Dizzy Flores dies. And so while insipid militarism is clearly criticized, Rico's military service is not. 

Now, one might object that Rico's inability to see through the lies and his dedicated service to a corrupt regime make him flawed. Obviously, I am not interested in convincing you otherwise. But I don't think the movie manages to convey this; unlike the smart elites of the federation, he is not obviously "crazy." In fact, he remains likeable and heroic to the end; he is a fascist poster boy. 

If  am right then this episode also illustrates something else: that so many people defend the movie as merely satire also shows something of how difficult it is to distance ourselves from fascism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Rammstein, MRIs and Being Real (long covid Diaries)

A month ago we went on a family holiday on a deserted island in the Indian ocean with a very tiny, quiet resort on it with huts overlooking the ocean. It was very quiet, and my family spent their time sailing and snorkeling. While I love swimming, I didn't feel ready to try my luck with an ocean. So, twice a day I went to the hut with a treadmill and started to do a gentle interval training. It was painful, but I enjoyed it. The rest of the day I would read and live-tweet some of my chapter summaries of books. Only at dinner would I notice any symptoms of covid with the minor buzz of other guests in the background and dinner conversation exhausting me. I would fall asleep early not bothered by the heat, and sleep long restful hours.

I was reminded of a book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by my graduate school dog-park buddy (and basketball competitor), Matthew Crawford  (whose Shopcraft as Soulcraft was a genuine bestseller and briefly a cultural icon), in which he points out that in our age the very rich pay for quiet (as can be noticed in their airport lounges). Most of the few other guests at the resort were very bourgeois Suisse couples (bankers, insurance, etc.), sporty and pleased with the lack of noise while they enjoyed the ocean (and presumably each other). It was truly restful, and it was also delightful to be around my spouse and son while both were mellow. 

When I returned from the holiday, I went back to lap-swimming in the pool down the hill. And I quietly started to muse that if it weren't for my fatigue  after social interactions I had turned the corner on covid. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here;  here;  here;  here; here;  here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). Two weeks ago I went to Amsterdam for a MRI and a visit to my occupational therapist. The occupational therapist insisted that I try to to discipline myself and avoid social interactions for more than 25-30 minutes (including with my family). Of course, I had to experiment occasionally with longer interactions, but I should really try (now using her words) not to deplete energy. She recognized that returning to teaching in February would mean I would violate her instructions, but since I claimed I 'gain energy' from my undergraduates, and these were fairly unidirectional lecture courses (I promised her to make few jokes and leave less room for questions from the lecture hall), she resigned herself to it.

Now I know many academics really dislike social interactions, and I am myself known to be irritable, impatient, and unpleasant on occasion. And there is no doubt that I can be incredibly happy writing hours on end. But in general I love the social aspect of doing philosophy together, and hanging in cafe's and talking. And I love spending time with the undergraduates discussing the material and learning from their insights. And I love gossip. And after a few years of pandemic I really just want to watch crowds enjoying life. 

I was musing about this when I arrived early at my MRI. Much to my amazement I was allowed to go thirty minutes ahead of schedule. After the MRI I had a minor panic attack that the nurse who administered it never asked me for my name (just my weight) and whether my wedding band was made of pure gold. I haven't heard the results yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if my results were mixed up with those of the lovely old man who was scanned after me.

The brain scan was pure horror. I have done them before, and I have never been too bothered by the claustrophobic set-up or the noise. (I had a MRI done of my lungs when I was first diagnosed with covid.) The claustrophobia still didn't bother me--I just closed my eyes. But even with ear-plugs and noise-canceling headphones, a brain scan is the way to kill off all the long haulers. Imagine your head exploding, and then adding TNT, while listening to Rammstein. It only lasted thirty minutes or so. But the variety and intensity of the noise stayed with me for a whole week. I was bedridden, insomniac, and with a weird nausea/headache. And while I am much better this week (more about that below), the optimism of a few weeks ago  eliminated. The bitter irony is that I had arm-twisted my neurologist to put me in the scan. (I am back to swimming my laps daily.)

On Monday I had an important telephone meeting with an occupational health agency expert. According to the law, after one year this expert evaluates my dossier in light of a formal report of my occupational physician, documentation sent by me, and an employer's report. While I have another year on disability funded by my employer, this is the first moment a process that can lead to termination or a new career can be initiated. So, it's not just a routine conversation. I don't think I reveal any state secrets when I disclose that my Chair had not submitted her report. This told me that my department wasn't yet at the point where they would use my partial disability to get rid of my position and salary.

As an aside, but not irrelevant, luckily, the evals of my Fall course were stellar: students felt they had to work hard and were challenged, but they adored the course. (I did say I love my undergraduates, and it is returned.)* The only sign in the evals that my students noticed anything of my covid is that one complained that my jokes were real downers (usually people praise my jokes).

The conversation with the occupational expert got off on the wrong foot when I misunderstood her intention in her trying to get me to understand that based on my CV I was probably overstretched before I got covid. I thought she was insinuating that my covid was mostly a burn-out. My reaction was not wholly surprising because too many Dutch medical types have tried to push this line on me this past year. And I reminded her that while everyone in Dutch academy was overworked (because of structural lack of funding), I was in no mood for another physician trying to convince me that my situation would just heal itself if I took a step back. But we quickly clarified that what she was trying to say was that I should not expect to return to my former level of activity in my job. I assured her that there was no risk of that. I don't expect to get any research done while teaching, and for the moment I am withdrawing from all speaking engagements. 

The rest of the meeting was anticlimactic. She said she trusted my occupational physician that I was likely to have a full recovery. And that as long as my department and I stayed within the guidelines of the occupational physician we should aim to keep me in my position. We would re-evaluate in four months. Later that day I received a lovely email from the Chair of my department that echoed these sentiments.

As I turned to preparing my syllabus for my enormous required, survey course -- 637 registered students -- I initiated a whirlwind of emails to settle logistics. Leaving aside pandemic uncertainty and the fact that we still have to do online testing, courses this size really and this prominent in the curriculum involve half a dozen stake-holders who all have their vision on what it should be. As the emails went back and forth, I mentally realized and accepted I would not get much scholarship done. It would be a prep week. 

Two nights ago I awoke in the middle of the night from a complex nightmare. As I laid in bed restless, I wondered whether my irritability over the burn-out trope was perhaps blinding me to the truth; maybe I couldn't handle the workflow at work? But as my mind drifted into anxiety and I reflected more on the dream, I was terrified over my future: what if each class lecture would incapacitate me for two days (like my Fall seminars)? What if I really could never have a real, long conversation with my kid again? What if I could never attend a workshop again? What if my wife becomes miserable because she has lost her partner in crime? And so on, and so on. 

I mentioned in some of posts at the end of last year that I understand myself as partially cognitively disabled. This limits my life, but it also puts enormous strains on others. My immediate colleagues have had to pick up some of the slack, and my family's life-style is hugely impacted. A lot of the changes can be folded into 'the pandemic', but some of the adjustments pertaining to me qua individual may well be structural for me, and my environment. If my class does incapacitate me I will have to think about a career switch. Not because my department will nudge me out, but because i shouldn't be in a job that makes be bedridden out of sight. And that is terrifying.

As regular readers know I have been influenced by (recall here; here; and here) Elizabeth Barnes' The Minority Body. And one lesson I took from it is that being alive just is living with constraints. The real political and psychological problem is that when you are disabled or impaired, our social environment is shaped for different bodies and agents.  The adjustment to the absence of once familiar affordances which have become out of reach is painful and tiring. Yesterday, Matt Strohl called my attention to a beautiful essay by Francey Russell in The Boston Review. In it, she quotes Sidney Poitier that “acting isn’t a game of ‘pretend.’ It’s an exercise in being real.” This made me see that each new role would be exhausting for actors. For me, being cognitively impaired is taking on a new role, and, if you allow me the inference, so an exercise in being real.  

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 3.: Utopia without Satire (on Le Guin and Borges)

Bedap’s eyes had got very small, like steel beads. “Brother,” he said, “you are self-righteous. You always were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can trust you, damn you! Who else can I talk to? Do I want to end up like Tirin?”

“Like Tirin?” Shevek was startled into raising his voice. Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the wall. “What’s wrong with Tirin? Where is he?”

“In the Asylum on Segvina Island.”

“In the Asylum?”

Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

“Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing.” Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. “It could seem anti-Odonian, if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss. He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for himself. It was bad. Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one. To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went.”

“Tir never worked outdoors the whole time I knew him,” Shevek interrupted. “Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair.”

Bedap paid no attention. “I don’t really know what happened down there. He wrote to me several times, and each time he’d been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn’t come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Files, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just, ‘Therapy. Segvina Island.’ Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody? Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?”

“You don’t get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it.”

“Don’t feed me that crap,” Bedap said with sudden rage. “He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It’s Tirin I’m talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?”

“I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is—a prison? It’s a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it’s because they asked to go there, where they’re not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”

“If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don’t think I have anything else to say to you,” Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair. There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek’s righteous wrath was stopped short.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, Chapter 6, pp. 141-143 (in the British edition). 

This post is the third in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.). Annares is an anarchist society without public laws, property, nor guilt. Relatively minor violations of local norms and practices are generally sanctioned by social criticism and ostracism. The exchange between Bedap and Shevek, the initially foolish hero of the story, reveals that some major violations of norms are medicalized; one is viewed as psychologically diseased if one murders, rapes, or systematically refuses to contribute work to society (a society -- it should be noted, in fairness -- that teeters on the edge of subsistence and otherwise is quite generous). Presumably the Asylum aims at rehabilitation. (In chapter 10, we hear the Asylum understands itself as a "refuge.") Bedap's suggestion is that those who show too much independence of  thought are also nudged to the Asylum.

What makes Tirin's situation so interesting is that his free-thinking is expressed in terms of a satire. And it becomes clear through the narrative that Annares is unfamiliar with such comedy. In this respect Annares, a community devoted to sympathetic mutual aid, is not unalike to how Socrates legislates Kallipolis and, perhaps more pertinent, how J.L. Borges imagines (recall) Ibn Rushd's Muslim Spain (which also lacks satirical comedy). That Le Guin was very familiar with Borges' thought, and took it rather seriously, is suggested by her (1988) introduction to Borges' co-edited volume The Book of Fantasy, which focuses exclusively on Borges (without paying much attention to the two other editors) and the "honours" she thinks he is due, and scattered remarks in her non-fiction writing. Among the noteworthy claims of that introduction is that she treats fantasy and science fiction as a joint genre, each (to convey her thought rather reductively) devoted to making visible the moral questions of our age.

The arts are key to social life to the relatively isolated communities of Annares. And, in particular, the theatre is very important, "the Art." (Chapter 6; p. 131) But the syndics who put up art-works also have rather restrictive interpretations of what art should be shown. So, comedies do exist on Annares, but are not as central: ‘They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. … Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance.’ (p. 131) So, satire is unknown.

My students and I had some initial difficulty in understanding why Tirin's play created such trouble for him in Annares. It looks rather innocent. Here is a brief, post-facto summary by an eye-witness (in chapter 10):

“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!’ Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

“He played the Urrasti?”

“Yes. He was marvelous.--chapter 10, p. 269

At first sight, Tirin is merely making fun of the money-obsessed Urrasti, drawing on the shared prejudices or ideology of the anarchists of Annares. These views are taught on Annares from a young age. In addition, Urrasti are not allowed to visit Annares. (Annares and Urras are each other's moons.) This is, in fact, part of the founding "Settlement" that governs the isolationist anarchist society (which is developed out of the refugees of the members of a failed revolution on Urrasti). They keep outside influences and people, which are seen as dangerously corrupting, out of Annares. This is achieved by limiting planetary entry to a few commodities that are exchanges with mining commodities that are useful to the much wealthier Urrasti societies. 

So, Tirin's play is a fantasy about the troubles an Urrasti might find in adjusting to life on or trying to subvert life on Annares. And since the Urrasti is not presented in attractive fashion and is, in fact, held up to ridicule, it is at first odd that Tirin is sanctioned so badly for staging the play (and his life haunted by it), and that Shevek eventually decides he has to publish it independently despite social disapproval. 

Now, eventually, we are informed that Shevek learns to understand Tirin as an "inventor-destroyer, the kind who's got turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage." (Chapter 10, p. 270.) This goes very much against the purpose of drama on Annares, which really frowns on (i) individuality in all the arts and tends to praise works that (ii) promote (without being shallow) uplifting harmony. (This is also seen in the treatment of choral music on Annares.) 

So, let's take stock: in virtue of (i) and (ii) and (iii) representing immorality in satirical fashion Tirin's play is called "immoral" by some (270). Even in the narrative of The Dispossessed, it is recognized that calling an author immoral in virtue of (i-iii) is not an especially sophisticated response to the play.  But despite the Urrasti being the but of the joke, there is an important feature of the play that is highly critical of Annares. While the satire seems to be primarily directed against the traditional capitalist or properterian enemy it also expresses a criticism of the isolation of Annares. As Shevek puts it, this satire also teaches, "what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners." Annaeres is simultaneously a great social project, and a prison.

Now, for us as readers with only partial and second hand access to the play, it's not entirely clear how this interpretation follows from what we have been shown. But it is not entirely unclear either: the local Annares women does not get satisfaction, and the interaction between the man and women is governed by mutual misunderstanding. And all of this is due to the fact that the Settlement has built a theoretical and empirical wall around Annares. To keep capitalism out, the locals also deliberately keep themselves uninformed and to avoid nearly all mutual exchange.* The outside world is a source of contamination--and needs to be quarantined out. (This point is actually made on the very first page of the book.) 

And taken like this, Tirin's satire is not misunderstood at all by those who criticized and socially ostracized him. And while they may seem initially outlandishly vindictive and dangerously totalitarian to us, Tirin's audience accurately perceives that his ridiculous satire is taking aim at the foundational commitments of their society of mutual aid.+ (Notice that in the play, the Annares basically leave the Urrasti to his own devices.)

To close: one of the main questions that The Dispossessed makes us ask -- this is played out in a number of set-piece debates in chapter 12  -- is whether a society founded on the noble ideals of mutual aid and solidarity, can tolerate individual, intellectual commerce with the rest of the world (especially if that commerce is not governed by social utility) without risking its own survival by it. The question is, of course, not limited to such admirable societies. Le Guin's book offers no platitudes of reassurance or an answer to the question; each of us have to think it for ourselves with our communities.**

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 2.: Inductive risk in State Capitalist plutocratic-oligarchic society

"I did it in ten decads. Well enough to read To’s Introduction. Oh, hell, you need a text to work on. Might as well be that. Here. Wait.” He hunted through an overflowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-looking book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the cover. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed to say Poilea Afio-ite, which didn’t make any sense, and the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Shevek stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. He was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien artifact, the message from another world.

He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the book of numbers.

“Come back when you can read that,” Sabul growled.

Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.”

The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t let anybody else read them!”

Shevek made no response.

Sabul got up again and came close to him. “Listen. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?”

“I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in logic.

“If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’ them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. Now do you follow me?”

“Yes.”

“All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed (chapter 4; p. 89 in the (1999) Millennium edition).

As regular readers know, ever since Joshua Miller introduced me to The Dispossessed, I have become an Ursula Le Guin fan-boi. I wrote about the book enthusiastically six years ago almost to the day (recall here--that counts as pt 1 of the present series). And I intended to return to it regularly. However, when I taught it the next time around, a class discussion about the sexual assault scene in chapter 7 made me realize I didn't understand the book. Normally, I use these digressions to think my way through to some clarity or higher order confusion, but, despite writing joyously about many of Le Guin's other works since, I was blocked on The Dispossessed, which I think of not just as a work of science fiction, but a major contribution to Socratic political theory (recall also here; this one on Thomas More; and here on Kant and Spinoza) in utopian and anarchist thought. (This post will illustrate that.) So now, I'd like to try again with a series of posts, including, eventually, a revisit the significance of that scene.

Okay, in the quoted passage above, our main protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is introduced to a feature of what philosophers call 'inductive risk' (a now flourishing topic again thanks to Heather Douglas' revival of it). As I noted back in 2015 Shevek is politically very naïve, "a fool," this includes the politics of the science. And part of the action of the book is us viewing his education in politics (as well as the politics of science). And while I would never claim you should primarily read the book in virtue of its many insights into the nature of the socially embedded intellectual mind, but it is a good reason to read the book. (Yes, I am a fan.)

As an aside, I am usually not one for insisting biography matters, but while Le Guin never completed her doctorate, she was the daughter of the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, the sister of the literature professor Karl Kroeber, and the spouse of the historian Charles Le Guin. And she used her keen powers of observation and analysis in  her (gentle) satire and advocacy of the intellectual life (including the labor of spouses to make it possible).

What makes the passage notable is that Sabul, the director of the Sciences Institute, uses the inductive risk argument in the service of secrecy. That's not surprising; inductive risk does not entail secrecy, but it's always a live option in light of it. Yet, we realize rather quickly that in many ways it's a bogus argument because the interests that are being served are primarily his own careerist ones. For despite the absence of profit as a motive -- Annares is anarchist society without (private) property and commerce -- the Sciences Institute itself has become hierarchical in structure and a source of social benefits not the least prestige. And through his office and political maneuvering, Sabul controls gate-keeping rather severely (e.g., publication locally and access to information from and with international networks). 

And the reason why the inductive risk argument works so well with Shevek is that the social responsibilities of science (and other practices) are very important in Annares, which teeters constantly on the edge of famine, and where all the social mores are organized around mutual aid and local control by local syndics. Part of Le Guin's wizardry in the book is that she simultaneously makes the potential oppressiveness of such little platoons local syndics highly visible and felt, while not destroying the ideal behind it. Like all important ideas that can be communicated to others, inductive risk can be abused. Of course, in this case it is a reflexive problem (it's the inductive risk of inductive risk). And it is striking that it can be abused so badly in a society where social consequences are taken so seriously. In lots of other contexts, the scientists themselves might well resist the idea that their work should be evaluated in light of social consequences--that's other people's responsibility and problem.

Interestingly enough, despite rejecting property, and embracing mutual aid, the scientists of Annares, the idealistic Shevek not excepted, crave credit/recognition for their scientific work. When Shevek is arm-twisted into sharing credit with his boss (Sabul), we see him experiencing misery. And he looks for ways to receive the credit he thinks he deserves. Sabul and Shevek end up bargaining (through barter and withholding labor/benefits) over credit. And it is one of his motives to challenge (and eventually leave) the Physics syndic. On first principles, one would have expected anonymous or collective publication -- so, either put all the names of the syndic on it or just the name of the syndic -- to be the norm in Annares. But Le Guin discerns, not implausible, that even when profit motive is eliminated by society, status and recognition are important pulls.

To be clear, when Le Guin turns to science's functioning in A-Io (on the planet Urras),--an excessively patriarchal-state-capitalist society [a critic calls it "plutocratic-oligarchic" at one point], which appears as a kind of a mirror-hybrid between the UK and US of the 1970s, but still highly familiar--profit and bureaucratic advancement are also not the only motive in science. When Atro, the doyen of science in Urras, and a champion of Shevek's theories, explains his motives he says:

“I hope you feel the same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate—which is after all the best thing civilization teaches. I don’t want those damned aliens getting at you through your notions about brotherhood and mutualism and all that. They’ll spout you whole rivers of ‘common humanity’ and ‘leagues of all the worlds’ and so on, and I’d hate to see you swallow it. The law of existence is struggle—competition—elimination of the weak—a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You and I: Urras and Anarres. We’re ahead of them now, all those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call themselves, and we’ve got to stay ahead of them. They brought us the interstellar drive, but we’re making better interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to release your Theory, I earnestly hope you’ll think of your duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty means, and to whom it’s due.” The easy tears of old age had sprung into Atro’s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his hand on the old man’s arm, reassuring, but he said nothing.

“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect; and that’s what you can win us. Transilience—if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands—that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?” (119-120)

It's important that in the self-conception of Atro, science is in its social aspect fundamentally about prestige and recognition. In this respect he is not so different from the attitudes of Shevek.

But for Atro, it is a means to winning in a competition. In an important (1987) paper, Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception, the feminist philsopher, María Lugones, noticed, correctly, that modern advocates of play (she names Johan Huizinga and Hans-Georg Gadamer) tend to think of play in terms of agonistic competition, that is winning, and in which competence (under uncertainty over the come) reigns supreme. And she, quite rightly, connects these ideas to imperialist outlook. Atro fits this agonistic schema very nicely.* (I actually think the alternative, loving play, also has a platonic origin in Plato's Laws, but about that some other time.)

In fact, Atro (a scion of an old noble family) rejects the profit motive (which is otherwise very important in his society). But prestige can also be used for ends that are quite political: international standing, and international competitive advantage. And while there are plenty of hints that others in Atro's society intend to make great profits from technological advantage, even derive military advantage, Atro is keen on gifting ideas to others recognizing, a norm once ubiquitous in the academy, that in gift-economy bearing great gifts is a source of great prestige (and power).

There is one more scene that bears on this. It occurs just after the assault scene (and Shevek's response to it) that is so troubling. And after it, Shevek's character changes course in significant. It's an introspective meditation by Shevek:

To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

On his first night in this room he had asked them, challenging and curious, “What are you going to do with me?” He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. (Chapter 9, p. 225)

It's important to recognize (and this is explicit in the book), that in this respect, there is little difference between a communist state [which Chifoilisk serves], where "one [centralized] power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures [and with a] money economy.” (p. 114) And wages are determined by this power structure. And a society (A-Io, akin to ours today) in which profit is pursued, but in which the state and interlocking companies and foundations fund research. The modern state is mercantile in character, and even in the absence of actual violence, it is always lurking in the background to those who refuse or resist its coinage. (This is, in fact, the point of chapter 9.)

Here foreseeable, inductive risk really means either that science is corrupted by letting the state's coinage rule it (that is, that science's intrinsic reward scheme is displaced by extrinsic ones), or that it serves to entrench state power (by becoming "an investment or a weapon" (p. 288)) at the expense of those in the margins of society or other societies. That is, the book very clearly (and rightly!) rejects the idea that the state's and its functionaries' interests coincide with the wider proper interests. And the hard-hitting message of The Dispossessed is that all of us in the academy are, in this respect, state functionaries with more or less greater self-awareness about this.

At the end of the book, Shevek decides that the best solution is free, universal open access; a true communism of knowledge (familiar, say, from the Stoics). But it's not wholly clear whether Le Guin endorses it; because she shows that for Shevek this for all his idealism, too, is partially transactional. He receives credit and a chance at return home (or freedom). And a moment's reflection suggests that international open access may strengthen the states and oligarchs, if they can control, and they have the means to do so, their state functionaries. 

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed (recall) again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle. "Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs. 

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him. So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to his public service. 

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and the characters are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."). 

Having said that, the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows, for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend. And in her story Le Guin, who is not naïve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction) [recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" it is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the "courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition. Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer dies at exactly the same time in your body. “That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry.  It is entirely compatible with his view that one can find one's enemies moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to, individual terms. 

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable. 

 

 

 

Cosmic Balance and Civic Flourishing in Omelas.

    They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
    This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

    The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.--- Ursula Le Guin "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Omelas has an unusual coming of age ritual: the would be adults are initiated into a horrible truth that is simultaneously the foundation of civic happiness. And they may not alter this state of affairs on pain of losing their prosperity (and other good things). In addition, their subsequent free speech is limited in a crucial way, they may not comfort or express compassion to the child that is sacrificed for their flourishing. This would violate "the terms" of a kind of (social) contract (recall here; and here) that is either the actual root of this commercial republic, or a kind of civic religion that structures its social reality. 

A skeptical reader may well deny that such "terms" could ever express a truth since it is so manifestly unjust. But as I have noted before, if the terms actually constitute (political) justice in the city, then this move is external to the civic consciousness of Omelas. (Of course, a defender of natural right might take that as evidence that forms of legal positivism are pathways to evil.) And moreover sometimes the truth indicates the abominable misery of the status quo.

But my present interest is to note that the ritual expresses the significance of social and political knowledge in Omelas. Because this ritual is initiated in order to convey a key knowledge about social life of Omelas when the would-be-adults are capable of "understanding" the "explanations" of it. The reactions of those exposed to it, suggests that those not yet ready for understanding are carefully guarded from the truth. So, the miserable child is a social taboo from which the young are guarded carefully. That is to say, the not young maintain a culture of silence among those who are not yet initiated.  This suggests that in so far as it is a civic religion it is carefully expressed. It is by no means obvious that the many visitors to Omelas that the proud city receives would know about it since these might well tell the children of Omelas or be tempted to protest the state of affairs. (This suggests that freedom of speech is curtailed even more widely in Omelas.)

I have noted before that despite the fact that the actual religion of Omelas lacks clergy, the miserable and innocent child is a kind of piacular scapegoat. To me this suggests that the state and its civic religion has claimed for itself that which properly belongs to revealed or clerical religion.

One of my students, Robin Kan, pointed out to me that the sacrifice of the innocent child functions like a cosmic balance principle in their civic religion. For, at any given time of the polity's existence, the child's immense suffering balances out the flourishing of the polity ("that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.") Structurally, such a cosmic balance principle is very similar to Christ's redemptive suffering for the sins of humanity (which is sometimes discussed in terms of such a cosmic balance), except that Christ voluntarily takes on this task and the child is forced into it without ever being allowed any understanding of its role. It is not even offered an ideological explanation for its suffering, and thanks to Omelas' social taboo on it, it has literally no chance of anticipating it. Of course, Omelas' balance principle is not cosmic, but local, bounded by the the territory of Omelas; the child does not redeem all of humanity.

It is natural to teach Omelas as a means to discuss the limitations of utilitarianism in an introductory context. This year my own students saw in it a parable of colonial/imperial conquest or capitalist exploitation, and the way the media makes that available to viewers at the center and simultaneously makes us it feel impossible to change. In a future post I want to discuss one such interpretation because it centers on the purported absence of war in Omelas.

But it is worth noting that if one reads the story on its own terms, it depicts the horrors of state power devoted to the "happiness" of its people. And in the story this is a power that rests on the well informed understanding and tacit consent of its adult citizens, and it is presented as the best kind of polity that accepts the legitimacy of state power. That is to say, the implied point of view of the narration is the question whether it is worth paying the price of the benefits of state power.  

Of course, my present interpretation is informed by my recent (recall) reading of Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution." This story invites us to see in one of those who walk away from Omelas the revolutionary founders of a form of anarchism (which rejects state power).* That is, if we take Omelas as a best case scenario for statism, then it invites us both to reflect on the price we're willing to pay to accept our complicity in its horrors, and to what degree we're willing to contemplate (and to pursue) serious alternatives.

One final thought: the line of interpretation that I have offered here is not an alternative to, or a refutation of, treating Omelas as a means toward discussing the limitations of utilitarianism. For, as Foucault emphasizes, utilitarianism is not merely an ethical system, it is also a technology of governance. And so it does ask us what price we're willing to pay in pursuing such technologies and if we're willing to contemplate doing without them.

On Comedians that Punch Down (Srinivasan/Cowen, and yes Chappelle)

One of the great jokes of the political circumstances of our age is that comedians are the great political commentators of the age. And while it would be silly to claim that David Letterman is solely responsible for the political ascendancy of Donald Trump, it's also true that he helped turn Trump from a New York city character into a national celebrity by repeatedly giving him space for -- I say this with the benefit of hindsight -- test-running his campaign massages. Belatedly, around 2010 Letterman himself grew uneasy about this, calling Trump a racist and sharply demarcating the "circus" (in which Letterman and Trump were both starring (ahh) freaks) from the political arena. The point of the contrast in Letterman's shtick then is to proclaim Trump unfit for office. (The interview with Dr. Phil is still worth re-watching; Jason Zinoman's 2017 New York Times article gives useful background, although does not mention Trump's role in the Central Park five.)

Letterman's underlying instinct that there is a contrast between comedy and politics is an important one. It's no less important than the difference between work-place harassment and comedy. What's  funny and worth having in one context, is oppressive in another.

I am thinking of these matters not just because Plato implies that Aristophanes is responsible for the accusation (and so eventual execution) of Socrates, or the predictable controversy about Dave Chappelle's latest special, and (recall) my struggle with the implications of my admiration for Norm Macdonald, but also because the topic frames the relatively recent, fascinating discussion (or interview) between Tyler Cowen and Amia Srinivasan. 

So, let's first look at how that exchange commences:

COWEN: You’ve described yourself as a utopian feminist. In your vision of utopian feminism, how much room is there for what I would call compartmentalization? Just to give a simple example, if you look at, say, stand-up comedy, a lot of it is sexist or racist, or even if it’s not, it’s perceived as such. What happens to that in the utopia? Do we just compartmentalize and let it continue? Or how do you treat it?

SRINIVASAN: I’m not sure about room for compartmentalization. I do think there’s a lot of room for context. For example, when you’re thinking about the violence in rap lyrics, an obsession that began in the conservative pearl-clutching in the ’80s, you’ve got to think about what those invocations of violence are doing performatively in a piece of art, that is, rap music. It’s not the same thing as someone standing up in the middle of the town square, trying to deliberately incite violence against people.

Not even speaking about the utopia, just speaking about how we should think about performative utterances right now, I think we need to address them with a great deal of contextual sensitivity and think about, in general, what is happening in these particular cases. What seems to be problematic might not be. But then, let’s be honest, if you’ve spent any time in a comedy club — and I recently did that when I was last in LA — there is just a lot of quite naked sexism there.

It’s pretty shocking — despite the fact of this feminist revolution in comedy — just how much stand-up comedy is really quite comedically boring and sexist. Now, there’s this question about — I take it that one of the thoughts you have is something like humor —

COWEN: Right, which has a brutal element to it. How humor fits into utopia is a long-standing puzzle because humor is often brutal, right?

SRINIVASAN: Yes. Look, I don’t think the utopia or the post-revolutionary world is a place without any form of brutality, and it’s certainly not a place without humor. It’s going to have disappointment and heartache and tragedy and tragicomedy. Human foibles will still exist. Heartbreak will exist. With all of those things, you have humor.

What is very limited is the thought — and I’m not suggesting that you’re advocating for this thought — but the thought that you basically need structures of organized political oppression like racism to have humor. The Greeks had humor without having racism. They had other systems of domination, but they had a great and advanced sense of humor, often directed at intellectuals and philosophers, who, I think, are often very much a worthy target.

I think there can be this view on which ending forms of domination and oppression somehow drains life of all that is special and textured about it: humor, love, intimacy, friendship. I just don’t think that’s true. I think, in fact, what the end of domination would do is release us more fully into the specific things that make human life worth living, including humor.

Now, it's quite possible that Cowen surprised Srinivasan with this line of questioning. I recently read (and discussed) Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, and, while she does self-describe as a 'utopian feminist,' and mentions Louis C.K's misdeeds, I don't recall comedy being especially important to her arguments. Having said that Cowen did his homework and seems to have been aware of the fact (as I was not) that Srinivasan has a serious background in theater (as she affirms later in the interview). I hope to return to the meat of the interview some other time.

I was, however, taken aback by Srinivasan's comments that I have just quoted. For, if a post-revolutionary world, feminist or not, cannot do without "brutality," then it is not obviously worth having. Of course, she leaves unclear what 'form of brutality' she foresees, and without further specification there is not much more to say here.*

Second, she thinks that "intellectuals and philosophers" are worthy targets of comedy. Since she is talking about ancient Greece, and is one of our leading philosophers, one might say she forfeits Plato's/Socrates' "ancient quarrel" (Republic, 607b) against Aristophanes on behalf of the rest of us. She does not explain why, but given her comments in context, I assume this is so because the "intellectuals and philosophers" are not at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy and, one might argue, can wield the pen (or feather/keyboard) as sharply as the comedian. I suspect, then, she thinks it's kind of a fair fight that old quarrel between philosophy and the comic poets.

Fair enough. Although it's worth noting -- as the fate of Socrates suggests --, it's not wholly a fair fight because the comedian can attract a much wider audience than the philosopher, and may well be much better at political and social rhetoric (this is one of the sub-themes of the Symposium, after all.) And the consequential afterlife of such public rhetoric can be quite unpredictable. Aristophanes' Clouds may well have been thought harmless to Socrates when it first was performed, but after a plague, disastrous imperial overreach, a civil war and murderous dictatorship, context shifted dramatically. I mention these historical facts because what Letterman himself clearly thought initially was harmless entertainment, became politically potent after a great financial meltdown and a bailout of the rich and connected.

So, lurking in Srinivasan's comments, which, as I suggested, may well be entirely improvised, is the idea that humor, even brutal humor, is fine as long as it does not reinforce a structural hierarchy of some sorts. In addition (I take this from what she says about rap), comedy should not incite violence. 

Now, one natural way to read Srinivasan is that while comedy may not be art (like some rap is), comedy is, in fact, self-justifying. It's just one of those things that make a good life good. And because I agree with her about this (that comedy is self-justifying), and her suggestion that even in a very well ordered (albeit brutal) society there would be comedy, I do not want to exaggerate our differences.

But it does not follow from this that in addition to being good in its own right, comedy serves no social purpose in a disordered, hierarchical society like ours. For, comedy also offers society a mirror, even if it is a crooked or distorted mirror. And, not unlike great utopian fiction, it reflects back to us -- in exaggerated fashion, perhaps, -- the way laws, norms, and mores operate and the effect of them on all of us or some of us. In fact, Aristophanes Lysistrata has an important role to play in combining comedy with the birth pangs of feminist utopianism (if I don't have enough street cred for you to say this, this is the place in which I invoke the authority of De Beauvoir). Much of the old Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central (now available on Netflix) was about offering society a mirror on racial relations that with the benefit of hindsight looks prescient in light of black lives matter. 

Of course, Chappelle's recent special on Netflix, taped in Detroit, has gotten a lot of attention for its explicitly pro-TERF stance and its many transphobic jokes (also a theme in his earlier 2019 special). But if you watch his shows, there is a broader more complicated position. I want to introduce my defense of that claim by first mentioning another theme unrelated to transgender issues. A set of Chappelle's jokes (this is in his earlier 2019 show) is about Michael Jackson's child victims. And some of the jokes clearly minimize the harm done to the children (and others suggest Chappelle does not believe all the allegations). But the set is itself explicitly framed by Chappelle mentioning the fact that 50% of the audience members have probably experienced sexual harassment or worse. And while each of his punchlines can be construed as a belittling of the problem, the overall point is that there is a horrid epidemic of sexual harassment (and it should not just focus on celebrities). 

I think something analogous happens with Chappelle's orientation toward transgender issues. This is an issue he has gotten flack for in the past, and some of that criticism is part of the narrative. (I don't mean to suggest he is fair to his critics or actually responds well to them.) So, for example, there is a series of jokes about how on a road-trip a car, which includes a transgender person (a 'T'), can't make bathroom stops in four states. What's interesting about these jokes is that Chappelle is clearly not at all oblivious to the fact that many states make it inordinately difficult to be transgender; and his sympathies are clearly with the transgender against the states that wish to police bathroom behavior. 

After watching Chappelle's special and his (2019) Sticks & Stones, it seems pretty obvious to me that his underlying political outlook is live and let live (as long as Chappelle can make fun of you). I don't know whether Srinivasan thinks Chappelle is one of the "boring" comedians, but plenty of his jokes are not just transphobic, but also sexist.** (He recycles and repackages Norm Macdonald's sexist jokes about the WNBA. He also repurchases MacDonald's Jacques de Gatineau joke which is not sexist at all.) It would be disingenuous to say that he is merely representing or providing a window on sexism in society. He is also reenacting it.

But I don't think Chappelle is reenacting his transphobia merely for the purpose of putting his finger in the eyes of his critics. For the recent special culminates in a narrative about his relationship to Daphne Dorman a transgender (part-time) comedian, who ended up committing suicide. What's interesting about the narrative is not that Dorman (and later her family) defended Chappelle or that Chappelle set up a trust fund for Dorman's daughter, or that he has had a transgender friend and offered her professional opportunities, or even that Chappelle thinks white transgenders use their racial privilege in ways he rejects. But rather that Chappelle hoped to speak with Dorfman's daughter someday and that he wants to say to her (and now I quote from memory) that he "knew her father. And he was a hell of a woman.” (See here for slightly different rendition.) And whatever else Chappelle is implying with this joke, he is telling his audience that if even a transphobe -- and if you listen to his set he does not present himself as a moral exemplar at all -- like him can recognize and see Daphne Dorman's gender, anyone can. The implicature of the special is, thus, that the transphobes who act on their transphobia politically and economically are the real problem, and that if one recognizes one's own imperfections one can rise above them.

For Chappelle, we are all flawed none of us is really without sin. And his best jokes (and impersonations) have or exhibit, and now I echo Norm Macdonald's considered views about all good comedy, compassion for their targets.

The underlying point is that by being the object of a joke one can also, simultaneously, be humanized. Of course, this is not always true. But even jokes that are experienced as offensive and entrenching subordination also bring the outcasts into the community and into a larger conversation. (This is Chappelle's own defense in the special.) Not all purported jokes or the sets they are part of do this, of course. And my judgment here is fallible. And I also don't think Chappelle's humor is always that funny. (I never found Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central especially funny, but I also recognize that this may be colored by the realization that people like me were its target! Yet, some of the sketches are etched in my memory.)

But let's say I am wrong about all of this. Maybe his transphobic stance (funny or not to some) is simply beyond the pale, and maybe there are no positive consequences from punching down at all in comedy.  I would still argue that when performing, comedians should have an artistic license to mock and insult on par with the academic freedom of academics in academic life. 

For, it's healthy for society to have a place where none of us is above the joke. I don't just think this because it creates a privileged space for politicized or social commentary and for presenting the effects of our follies and foibles. Because of workplace rules and polarization, there are, in fact, few places where controversial and potentially obnoxious views can be aired at all in relatively heterogeneous company (outside echo chambers). And it is not like comedians can say anything. They, too, are regulated by public opinion and the views of their audience. So, the social utility of comedy is not just that it offers us a window into (the effects of) a lot of our social norms and practices, but also that they do so -- despite audience fragmentation and filtering -- in a way that is accessible to a relatively heterogeneous (and potentially large) public. This is, after all, one of the reasons why despite their lack of authority, they are important politically. 

I have gone on longer than is typical in such a Digression. And this reflects my awareness that perhaps I am all wrong here. So, I should stop here. But I wanted to add two more thoughts.

First, at one point, in an interview I think with Larry King, Norman Macdonald says in self-effacing manner, that stand-up comedy is no art. And this may suggest that Srinivasan is right in her implied contrast between rap (an art) and comedy (not an art) in her response to Cowen quoted above. For, Macdonald says, art is capable of multiple interpretations, whereas the job of a stand-up comedian is to make a room or a TV audience have the same reaction at the same time. What's funny about the comment, of course, is that Macdonald was quite capable of generating multiple reactions to his jokes over time (in the same audience). So, comedy is art, after all, but can only show (not say) it. Many of Chappelle's stories and jokes, too, also have multiple layers to them. He is not just creating laughs, but he is also inviting multiple interpretations. (This also suggests I should not be too confident in my own!)

Second, my partial defense of the fruitfulness of even potentially offensive comedy presupposes that comedy knows its proper place and stays in its lane. But as Letterman discovered that assumption is naïve. When a clown is seen as a trickster or noble truth-teller, they can become quite powerful politically in times of instability even potential civil war. (For the contrast between a clown and trickers see this fine essay on Boris Johnson by Alan Finlayson.)  

My idea that comedy is an important social safety valve and sometimes an epistemically useful window in a democracy also entails that it may be socially dangerous (as dictators everywhere recognize). My cop-out response here is that thankfully Chappelle's critics have access to influential outlets so that their concerns are also heard. Unlike the popular representation of Mill (which, inspired by Jill Gordon, I don't think captures Mill's views), I doubt the truth prevails over time in the 'marketplace of ideas.' Rather, liberal democracy is also a project in forbearance in which we ought to try to minimize mutual inconvenience and harms. Comedy can produce genuine harms, but it also plays an indispensable social role in helping see a way beyond them.