Digressions&Impressions

On Bullying, Conformism, Self-Censorship, and Clinical Depression: The Religiosity of Fahrenheit 451, revisited

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, and mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!  Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.....
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?--From Ray Bradbury (1953) Fahrenheit 451, pp. 75-6

Judging by the results of a Google search, which shows me links to many essay writing companies, the passage quoted is extremely popular among high school and college students. So, for all I know what follows has been worked out countless times before (and, if not, will -- because it's free -- perhaps become a staple of such essays). The narrator here is Beatty, the fire captain and boss of the main protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag -- his name (man Monday) an allusion to Crusoe's man Friday* -- is part of a book burning brigade (firemen). The speech occurs just as Montag's growing doubts about his work and society are crystallizing.

As it turns out, Beatty's own stance toward his own work and society is also ambivalent, but this is shown more indirectly. Be that as it may, he understands legal censorship as originating in self-censorship which arises out of three elements: a do-no-harm principle, mass democracy, and a heterogeneous population. The embrace of a do no harm principle is not a deeply felt normative stance, but rather dictated by prudence--minorities can organize and create unwanted controversy and hurt sales. In a heterogeneous population it will be difficult to avoid giving offense except by embracing a certain blandness and conformity. The idea being that in a homogeneous society free speech is more natural.

One may read in Beatty's speech a prescient prediction about the origin of what is now known as political correctness (something Bradbury encouraged late in life). But his speech is more subtle. His list of possible would-be-aggrieved minorities omits mention of African Americans and Jews. When the book was published, the great civil rights victories were still in the future, and the persecution of Jews (and the burning of their books) too fresh in living memory.  So, the underlying (neo-Humean) idea is that only when one's resentment can be felt by the majority, will the majority embrace bland conformism toward that minority. 

The previous paragraph may be thought speculative. But Beatty himself goes on to call attention to the two key elements, first not everybody is born equal and, second, he exposes the conformist violence at the core of his consumerist, mass-media society when he describes the school bullying of the boy** that stands out. In an age of McCarthyism, Bradbury need not have done it, but the political significance of bullying is made explicit (with a nod to the Constitution)-- bullying makes us equal. That is, rather than being a bug of a democratic polity, conformist violence is a feature of it.+ While African Americans are effaced, the burning of witches at Salem haunts the whole narrative. It is no surprise, then, that such a society, which disguises its own structural violence by, paradoxically presenting it as spectacle, expresses it abroad with a violent foreign policy. 

To what degree Beatty's origin story fits the facts is an open question. (This is a society in which the printer Benjamin Franklin has become the patron saints of book burners. There is a Swiftian fondness for reversals.) Beatty's diagnosis of the conformism and self-censorship of modern mass culture echoes the meritocratic critique of democracy first developed by Mill (recall here and here). Beatty is an interesting character because he clearly is the nerd in disguise (he is well read despite the prohibition) who  goes on to serve a soul-less and cruel regime.++ The regime is grounded in elections, but no less cruel for it. Its bad laws rooted in public opinion.

This last point deserves more emphasis. The underlying horror of the society depicted is that human life in it is trivialized. Something that Guy Montag becomes increasingly sensitive to. This lack of soul is what creates an undercurrent of clinical despair and dangerous thrill-seeking; where fun is everything. It's a bit surprising that Bradbury is not thought of as the prophet of the clinical depression epidemic of a society addicted to communication by (ahh) screens; this is a society in which all feeling is at the surface and in which our desires for goods are made to outstrip our means, but no connection intimate. For such intimacy is only possible -- the point is made explicit right at the start of the novel [Clarisse does not want anything from him]-- if it is not instrumentalized. 

For, while Bradbury himself facilitated the idea that this was a book about the perils of censorship, the truer theme of the book is the pernicious effects of spiritual deprivation on individual and society. At the start of the book, when talking to Clarisse, Montag understands himself (cf. Plato's Cave), by chance, as somebody watching a puppet show. Clarisse is likened to an angel more than once. She is the prophetic light that points the way out of the cave.*** It's no surprise then in the aftermath of rational-man-made cataclysm -- mutually assured destruction is the fruit of the tree of knowledge --, the novel closes with a quote from Revelation (22:2), which not only prophecies such a destruction, but also the promise of a light that follows. Those that have read the novel will understand my conclusion: there is only redemption if you can hold on to a text.

 

When Enlightenment understands its own Violence

Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact -- the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they've no resistance, then (if they've survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour my mining and logging companies -- for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture -- the one that's turned away, from us at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products. What the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization's perimeter-fence is no more than its effluvia, its toxic fallout. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into mankind's face.--12.10 from Satin Island (2015) by Tom McCarthy (emphasis in original)

One way to understand the revival of the so-called populist, racialized nationalism today is for a keen wish to restore the appearance of "order and harmony of the West" and to keep the noxious by-products of civilization out of sight behind the "perimeter-fence." While the critics of such populism primarily see it as an immoral (because partial) and even violent project, the populist understands himself in moral terms, part of a process of national purification even if (as is sometimes ruefully acknowledged) the agents that facilitate this purification are (rather) imperfect.

Of course, the populist does not allow himself to acknowledge that what it despises and loathes is itself its own filth or the effects of colonial and ongoing political interventions by the West. And often he conflates his own nostalgia with a historical fiction of once steady order and harmony. 

What makes reading Satin Island so interesting is that it allows us to see that populist ideas are, in fact the shadow lives of the purportedly self-critical ideas of the contemporary intelligentsia reflected in a subtly distorted mirror. The novel presents us with a main protagonist, an anthropologist who works for a corporation. The corporation "uses the Future to confer the seal of truth on these scenarios and assertions, making them absolute and objective simply by placing them within this Future: that's how we won contracts." It does so with self-understanding: "Everything, as Peyman [the visionary CEO and networker of the Company] said, may be a fiction--but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all." (8.7) The satirical echoes of Hegel's secularization of Christianity and contemporary theories of reflexivity are undoubtedly intentional here.

What is notable about the quoted passage (12.10), is that it, in turn, reflects a violent delusion of those intellectuals who take themselves to be self-critical heirs of the Enlightenment.+ These intellectuals understand themselves as self-critical, as tracking the all--too-human-costs of civilization, as recognizing that the scientific enterprise itself may be complicit in the very violence of the West; who speak with moral superiority -- because they take pride in frankly acknowledging the violent facts, as if it shows moral fortitude to acknowledge the facts --  and who recognize their own complicity in a system founded on and maintained by violence. In this self-serving fantasy -- but like other fictions it can be made real -- , the modern intelligentsia are the meritocratic elites who understand themselves as cogs in the research and design centers of a hegemonic, world wide civilization characterized by 'complexity.'

Part of the pedantic point of the novel is to show the ever-present desire to perpetrate a gesture of violence against the system by the boys in the Research & Design centers, and simultaneously a kind of obtuseness on their part toward the very real (patriarchal) violence within the hegemonic order against those that merely wish to register their ritualized dissent from the status quo. The obtuseness is not an accident, but a feature.

Above, I suggested that the populist and the self-critical intellectual share an outlook. One commonality is that they both understand the 'West' as 'civilized' and fail to acknowledge the true barbarism within, violence (see 13:12), that makes possible purported 'order and harmony.' They (that is, the populist and the self-critical-intellectual) both treat 'Western' superiority as an unquestionable given. The populist justifies it because she sees the world in zero-sum terms, if 'we' don't project power 'they' will take advantage to us; the would-be self-critical intellectual, takes it as a regrettable given that, while requiring an originary acts of violence,  makes a win-win future possible. What the intellectual does not do is question the very idea of a West. 

Satin Island makes us feel the barbarism within without offering either a scenario or a new language for overcoming it. One may say, then, it disowns the very possibility of researching and designing a better product. This very disowning may be a necessary step on the path of a truer liberation or it may be a quietist gesture characteristic of the reactionary mind unwilling to forego the inherited comforts.

On Eugenics, Armed Robots, and Sparta; (Asimov's Libertarian Utopia)

Now Sparta in its hey day consisted of a relatively small number of Spartiates, the only full citizens, plus a somewhat larger number of second class individuals, the Perioeci, and a really large number of outright slaves, the Helots. The Helots outnumbered the Spartiates a matter of twenty to one, and the Helots were men with human feelings and human failings. In order to make certain that a Helot rebellion could never be successful despite their overwhelming numbers, the Spartans became military specialists. Each lived the life of a military machine, and the society achieved its purpose. There was never a successful Helot revolt.

Now we human beings on Solaria are equivalent, in a way, to the Spartiates. We have our Helots, but our Helots aren’t men but machines. They cannot revolt and need not be feared even though they outnumber us a thousand times as badly as the Spartans’ human Helots outnumbered them. So we have the advantage of Spartiate exclusiveness without any need to sacrifice ourselves to rigid mastery. We can, instead, model ourselves on the artistic and cultural way of life of the Athenians, who were contemporaries of the Spartans...

“Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex. For instance, even the most poorly off humans on Aurora are better off than Earth’s aristocrats, but they are dispossessed with respect to Aurora’s aristocrats, and it is with the masters of their own world that they compare themselves.

“So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

“Now here on Solaria, for the first time, the apex of the pyramid stands alone. In the place of the dispossessed are the robots. We have the first new society, the first really new one, the first great social invention since the farmers of Sumeria and Egypt invented cities.”--Isaac Asimov (1957) The Naked Sun

The passage is quoted from a speech Quemot, a sociologist sought by the main protagonist, Elijah Bailey, a detective from (future, post-Nuclear apocalypse) Earth invited to investigate a murder on Solaria.* Solaria is a very wealthy society in which robots vastly outnumber humans and in which eugenics has been perfected.

In an interesting and potentially far-seeing twist, in this society people avoid nearly all direct (they call it seeing) contact with each other, and if they must interact at all, they do so entirely through remote devices (viewing). [This is also true for married couples, which meet at scheduled moments to do the deed if they have clearance to have children.] In fact, from a young age kids are socialized not just to experience the world through viewing, but to feel intense disgust being around each other in person (there is no such disgust when viewing such that they completely lack a taboo on nudity).  

As an aside, there is an unintentional irony in noticing that a novel set in the future treats sociology as the queen of the human sciences. Bailey seeks out Quemot because on his home planet, the sociologists are the leading experts to government -- no surprise because it must keep a huge human population, which is literally holed up underground quiet --, and he thinks it useful to get some useful background to Solarian society. On Bailey's Earth, sociology is a sophisticated mathematical science, but in his militarily and economically advanced society, Quemot shows little interest in it.

Solaria approaches the character of a community of wise people because there is very little in the way of organized government, yet it flourishes. (I say approaches because philosophy is clearly absent.) There is no need for government due to the lack of 'friction.' I call it a 'libertarian utopia' (somewhat jokingly) because initially uninhabited, Solaria was founded without original sin violence by very wealthy individuals who appropriated the land and turned this planet of holiday villas into a self-supporting, exclusive gated community. There is no exploitation on Solaria because the robots do nearly all the work. (From the perspective of a robot-ethicist the previous sentence may require considerable modification.)

One may correctly quibble in calling Solaria 'libertarian' because of the existence of three important constraints: (i) estates are not allowed to be divided or sold; (ii) estates are not inherited (and on the whole parents do not know who their kids are); (iii) the population of Solaria is held constant (at relatively small number of 20,000). Once an estate-holder dies (after many centuries), one of society's genetically optimized kids, who are reared communally at a planetary wide center, takes possession. So, while there is some inequality among the estates, this is wholly due to luck. One may suspect that these three constraints are a limitation on people's choices. But the narrative strongly implies that the constraints are fully consensual, agreed upon at the original founding and not disputed by any of the Solarians. Of course, a libertarian may well object to the collective brainwashing of kids even if their parents and society decide to do so.

The reason why these constraints are not disputed is because Solarians lack (what we may call) drive; they do not desire accumulation nor desire each other. They also lack competitive emulation. However, they do have pride in their genetic make-up (see here; and here), which is notable given that they possess this without any personal merit. 

It is notable that in a society full of robots, the Spartans are seen as machine-like. The implication is that each Spartan fulfilled a singular functional--that is, military hegemony over the more fully rounded human-Helots through self-mastery. Quemot does not stop to consider that his own people are machine-like in their singular devotion to disease-free, longevity without signs of aging.** 

Asimov's robots obey the three laws of robotics. These are meant to prevent the foreseeable, inductive risk of robots being deployed to harm humans. The Naked Sun relies on the distinction between reason and logic, and this distinction is exemplified by illustrations of how in virtue of robots's reliance on logic, they can be tricked into unknowingly harming humans. In a society in which humans are vastly outnumbered by robots the most dangerous taboo centers on weaponizing robots that can be knowingly and without effort be used to harm other humans without the robots realizing they do so. With the development of fully autonomous weapons systems, we can say that humans are crossing a disastrous threshold.

 

On the Natural Limits of Epistemocracy, Le Guin's Earthsea, III

When a storm begins, it is only a little cloud on the horizon.--Ursula Le Guin, in The Farthest Shore, Earthsea, III.

Regular readers know (recall) that I am an admirer of Ursula K. Le Guin. (I have blogged about Earthsea, here and here.) The Farthest Shore is, in addition to a thrilling adventure and buddy story, a meditation on the natural limits of epistemocracy (the rule by the knowledgeable) and the embrace of inductive risk ("Having choice, we must not act without responsibility"). For in Earthsea, there is (despite local kingdoms) no central authority in the continental archipelago, but -- not unlike New Atlantis -- behind the scenes the Masters of Roke maintain balance in the world. They use their carefully calibrated powers (recall the metaphysics), especially, to facilitate agriculture, navigation, and medicine. I speak of powers (and not technology), because the paradoxical effect of their knowledge is to retard the growth of technology. (I speculate is due to the fact that Le Guin recognizes that a paternalist, well-intention-ed caste creates a kind of tutelage.)+

A whole book could be written on the internal organization of the meritocratic Masters of Roke;++ they are ruled by a kind of politburo or, if that sounds too negative, a deliberative council, with a primes inter pares, the Archmage. This council operates, I think, by cooptation and consensus. The council represents the very best of all the specializations to be found among the Masters--true masters of knowledge are teachers; the Archmage is both the most powerful and the one true generalist (and the one permitted to deviate from the too-status-quo-friendly-consensus). The series is successful in casting doubt on, without fully undermining, the Archmage's practical wisdom. The Masters are hierarchically organized, and lesser wizards are found all over the archipelago generally (but not always) facilitating order and harmony locally.

The Masters do not meddle much with politics (but some of their local disciples do). And absent a central political power, the merchant classes run things on broadly republican grounds in the political center. They have done so successfully for many centuries, but the present Book III suggests that a commercial republic is fundamentally unbalanced. The reason for this is that in a commercial republic, the general interest is not properly cultivated and attended to. It falls on the The Masters of Roke to look after, somewhat imperfectly, the general interest. 

One may wonder why the Masters do not become (benevolent) tyrants. In part this is due to the fact that there is an external threat (represented by dragons confined to the edge of Earthsea).* The significance of external threats is emphasized by the fact that the delicate political balance of Earthsea is undermined by the present Archmage (in Book II), when he had helped destroyed the symbols of power of Earthsea's sole militaristic society (the Kargs on the other edge of Earthsea),which has a sacred kingship and a clerical religion. (Le Guin is no friend of clerical religion; but she recognizes that emancipation can have costs.) 

But the more significant fact is that the Masters are governed by an esprit de corps and religiosity which emphasizes moderation, prudence, and balance indoctrinated by a long apprenticeship.** Not all the great Masters think this sufficient; one of the greatest, Ogion has withdrawn himself to an insignificant corner committed to extremer forms of moderation and self-mastery. But even Ogion is willing to teach his arts to the elect.

Books III-IV, chronicle the necessary undoing of the equilibrium maintained by this epistemocracy. These are produced by two natural defects common, in principle, to all epistemic orders: first, hubris (prompted by competitive emulation among them), or expert overconfidence, and, second, desire for immortality. The first is a natural, even an inevitable response to a history of continued success; while the second is itself the new desire generated by knowledge of natural powers. On this point Le Guin (echoes Bacon and) disagrees with Plato, who clearly thinks that it is uncontrollable sexual desire among the elite which undermines kallipolis (Republic 546b).*** By contrast Le Guin thinks sexual desire is controllable if the alternative rewards (in power, status, etc.) are sufficient and if (and, perhaps, only if), women are not deemed part of this elite. In Book IV, it is suggested, in fact, that power over nature is made possible by sexual abstinence--something foreshadowed in Book III, by the Archmage's claim that he desires "nothing beyond" his "art." 

The disagreement between the Le Guin of Earthsea and Plato's Socrates is not about underlying natural ability of women. Le Guin shows us the existence of women with the powers of would be Mages. But these are kept away from the Masters who, on the whole, believe their own ideology. Ogion is shown to be the (cautious) exception. That is, Platonic feminism, which (recall) rejects natural equality of all, but asserts that the best women are just as capable of ruling as the best men if they are properly educated/cultivated, is always a possibility on Earthsea, but it only comes into being in the closing page(s) of Book IV.

 

On Eating Illusions & True Fools (Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, II)

When you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.--From, The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin, chapter 11.

Last week (recall), I noted that in Ursule Le Guin's purportedly happy cite, Omelas, there is -- like in Plato's True City -- a religion without priests; earlier in the year (recall), I noted the absence of religion altogether in Book 1 of her Earthsea. As Matt Lister noted in his comments religion is central in Book 2 of Earthsea, "The Tombs  of Atuan." The Tombs  is both an unsubtle polemic against priest/priestess-craft and a subtle treatment of the reality of an invisible world full of dangerous and only partially controllable powers. Le Guin echoes the great Enlightenment thinkers in polemically showing how priest-craft and indoctrination can lead to endless cruelty against the politically weak, especially when the priests/priestesses themselves serve and deploy worldly even imperial power (and fail to believe in their own gods). But she  also warns against the seductions of relying exclusively on one's knowledge of nature.

In The Tombs, Le Guin daringly shows the transformation of a true believing Priestess, Arha, who ends up recoiling from her own cruelty when she spies on her most potent enemy, who is in her power, and interprets a gesture by him as him understanding his own foolishness. (The nature of true foolishness is an important sub-them in this novel and many other Le Guin stories [recall The Dispossessed]). We learn in the novel that her  enemy -- a man named Ged, who is capable of controlling invisible powers because he has access to the true names, that is generative definitions, of things  -- had, in fact, been a true fool. He had trusted his own powers to win a great prize. (I won't share the relevant details of the story.) He thought of his power and independence as freedom, but this a false freedom.

Through Arha's actions Ged, who represents the natural hubris of all experts, learns that "alone, no one wins freedom." At the end of the novel, Arha, in turn, discovers that even as a collaborative project, "freedom is a heavy load, a great strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one." So we may sum up the moral of the story -- and like all children's stories it's didactic --  that true freedom is a joint and difficult, even risky project which presupposes uncertain choices.  

True freedom, thus, has two contrasts: one is our submission to tradition, priestly power, and worldly greatness in which we fail to think for ourselves; the other, more interesting contrast in the story is, a false understanding of freedom in which we see ourselves as isolated individuals, using our knowledge to control our environment to our particular ends. These ends may be noble or base, but because they fail to incorporate the chosen perspectives of others, they are fundamentally fragile. (This would not be so on an isolated island, of course. But that's to turn freedom into self-imprisonment.) Even the greatest expert requires the collaboration and assistance of others to survive.

In Earthsea, Le Guin insists that our freedom is grounded in our choice to trust others (this is symbolized by the exchange of true names). That's inherently dangerous because it makes us vulnerable to betrayal and other hurts. If one chooses freedom, there is no insurance against some such vulnerability because even if the incentives are properly aligned, all institutions rely on the good will and good faith of others.  Because vulnerability is so scary, it is no surprise that people willingly choose not to make further choices and knowingly live on illusions that can never be gratified. 

On Games and Society: On Iain Banks' The Player of Games, reflexivity and transformative experience.

Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society's games revealed so much about its ethos, it's philosophy, its very soul.--Iain M. Banks (1988) The Player of Games, p. 30. 

The Player of Games is a clever science fiction novel, but here I want to treat it as a contribution to Socratic Political Theory (recall here and here). The action starts in an imperial, utopian somewhat anarchic (there are few laws) society with little scarcity (nor money) and not much death full of semi-clever drones that serve and keep humans alive. This intergalactic human society is surrounded by an, in part, hidden machine-culture in which super smart machines and networks reveal consciousness and intelligence that outstrip anything we are capable of. Jointly these two societies inhabit the Culture, which is extremely powerful in the galaxy. Its ruling ideology (it's called a 'philosophy' by themselves) is 'Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design." (239) This is an ideology of precautionary principles. In this volume of the series, we never learn what keeps the machines from killing the humans they outsmart. Perhaps the humans are thought the useful redundancy of the Culture.

The Culture is committed to a Whorfian thesis about language, and its language has been designed to facilitate the flourishing of the Culture. The Culture itself is governed by the ruling machines in the manner of Government House utilitarians. The humans kind of know this, but they can never be quite sure what the machines are up to. This turns out to be an important, structural element in the novel. The Culture is resistant to creative innovation (at least among the  humans). 

Prior to the start of the narrative of the novel, the Culture encounters another technologically skillful civilization, the Empire of Azad. This is a militant and hierarchical meritocracy.  This society has not solved the problem of scarcity, and so it is based on property (or "ownership" 114); it both needs conquest abroad and material inequality, which has severe consequences for the quality of life of those at the bottom of the hierarchies. (It has abolished formal slavery -- something they are said to be proud of, but there is wage-slavery.) Part of the fun of the novel is that the Empire of Azad seems a lot more familiar than the Culture to us readers, but that the representatives of the Culture finds it disorienting and (despite all the glitter and color) inferior.

The meritocracy of Azad has two important characteristics. A game, conveniently also called 'Azad,' (which means 'machine, or perhaps system' [76]) is the main selection mechanism of status within the hierarchy. The game (Azad) reflects (like a "model" (76)) the social reality of Azad, "whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance." (76) But because the game, Azad, is such an important social institution, it also structures social reality: "such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so," (77; emphasis in original.) It is to Banks's credit that he does not merely characterize such reflexivity, but also shows the ways such reflexivity can be both extremely robust (the game Azad and the Empire so structured have co-evolved for a long time) and quite fragile--if the idea can be undermined in the right way the whole society can collapse rapidly. Interestingly enough, from the point of view of political philosophy, is the observation that in such a (partially hereditary meritocracy), the opinion of the people is still vital to the survival of the hierarchy--propaganda precisely consists in giving the people what they want to hear.  

The second characteristic I just mention, but deserves fuller discussion. The Empire of Azad has three sexes: males (with testes and penis), and two kinds of females: one with a reversible vagina and ovaries and one just with a womb (74). This sexual division of labor facilitates a social hierarchy with the first kind of women on top and the other on the bottom. The novel was first published in 1988, and one can see that Banks has thought through some of the potential implications of surrogacy and genetic engineering which were then becoming common among our wealthy.   

The novel is structured around a subtle distinction between a mere game player and a game player that is a 'true gambler.' (21) The former, presumably, enjoys play and the thrill of winning, and does not concern us here. However, the latter "needs the excitement of potential loss,even ruin, to feel wholly alive." It is not obvious one needs to be a true gambler in order to be a great or greatest game player. In fact, the novel is most interesting on this very point. The main protagonist (Gurgeh), who is the best game player of the culture and also among its leading game-theorists, discovers that he is such a true gambler.* There is a revealing, seemingly unconnected detail that illuminates this point. Gurgeh's sexual and personal identity is remarkably un-fluid given the society he inhabits. (Sex changes and sexual preferences are very fluid.)  He is one of the very few in his society who has not never changed sex, or (being a man) has slept with a man (24). That is, it's clear his identity is tied up with both extreme loss aversion and treating loss as existential. But in the right circumstances the true gambler is willing to risk all. 

As an aside, the narrator of the novel, who turns out to be one of the super-smart drones who are part of of the machine network that runs the Culture, explains at one point that in the ruling ideology, dubbed 'dynamic (mis)behaviorism' (a species of consequentialism) that identity is less important than humans think: "We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count." (231) The logical problems such a view encounters are not confronted. 

But it turns out the fluidity of identity in another sense also accompanies the true gambler (who is both risk averse and eager for existential games). For, as it happens to be a true gambler, and to know it about oneself, involves playing games that one knows may change who one is--a so-called transformative experience: "he would change; he would be a different person at the end of it; he could help but change, take on something of the game itself; that would be inevitable." (82) That is, if a true gambler plays a game in which one can suffer great, existential loss  (and I am leaving that un-defined in this post) then by definition she can know in advance of the game that she can come out transformed without knowing the content of the transformation. The point of playing the game is not to be transformed, it's feeling the thrill of being alive in the right sort of way; but the transformation is a known  by-product if and only if one survives. (Of course, this is compatible with the existence of all kinds of other transformative experiences.) The game of Azad can also generate transformative experiences for those players who don't expect it.

Let me wrap up, Gurgeh has been trained up, we may say, on playing many different kind of games throughout his life. Even so, in his game playing he represents the Culture. As it turns out, however, this is sufficient to beat the very best folk in Azad at their own game. He is more adaptable than they are and this somehow represents a feature of the Culture. However, it turns out, as he gradually becomes aware, that he himself was a pawn -- even a pawn that could be sacrificed -- by the  machine-network that runs the Culture. It is worth reflecting on this momentarily.

In the Culture, something we learn early, the study of game theory and the study of philosophy are sharply distinguished (p.15)  This is significant, as I hope to suggest in (closing in) what follows. Gurgeh is very good at the former. We only get hints of the game theory, but among the humans of The Culture it seems to be a mixture between the craft involved in the study of positions in the matter of say Chess and Go, and the more formal kind of apparatus we find in say our (Earth) game theory used in economics or political science. 

Again, Gurgeh is notable for being good at playing games and theorizing about it. He also recognizes that games and society are intimately linked. But strikingly his contributions to game theory is all about games one can play and not the society in which they are embedded and (can) model.* This lacuna in his theory, perhaps even a consequence of the way the discipline of his culture is structured [recall the Whorfianism], is especially striking in virtue of the fact that his very own game theory involves a metaphysics in which "reality is game" because "physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance." (41) 

So, one of the indirect points of the book is that only the insertion of what I have been calling Socratic Political Theory, a meta-theory in which the games and structures of societies are analyzed in comparative fashion [More and Le Guin (recall) are astoundingly good at this], completes the proper union of philosophy and game theory. (That's an ideal game theory.) We learn that Gurgeh is fascinated by the subject matter (see the quote above), but that he lacks skill in it. Absent such political science one is, for example, slow to recognize, as Gurgeh is, that one can be a pawn in a game played by hidden powers behind the scenes, that is, the invisible ruling powers of the Culture.

 

 

On Being Solitary in the Desert

There came to him that peculiar loneliness which is felt only in the monstrous impersonality of a multitude, that incomparable sensation of pure aloneness never known in another circumstance. The solitary figure upon an unchanging expanse of desert is not so alone as is one list in the infinity if a crowded city. He who is alone on the desert is always aware of his own significance, however small, and his relation to the space that he can see. But one who is solitary in the midst of a teeming swarm loses awareness of himself as an individual. The hundreds of strange bodies which press against him unknowingly, the hundreds of strange eyes which look upon his face blankly without recognition, the voices which speak above, around, but never to him--in these lies true aloneness. Of these things he was dimlyt aware as he tumbled and drifted along.--John Williams (1948) Nothing but the Night

At a book-seller peddling recent remainders, I was surprised to discover, Nothing but the Night, a slim novel "by  the author of Stoner." I had been under the impression that Stoner (1965; recall), Butcher's Crossing (1960; recall),  Augustus  (1972; recall here and here), and a collection of poems exhausted his oeuvre. I admire these three books greatly (while I do not share in the euphoria about Stoner, I think I understand its popularity).

Reading Nothing but the Night comes as a great shock because while it has literary qualities it lacks the astounding control over language of the later books. In fact, the main character is unsympathetic exemplar of what we may call broken masculinity (and so anticipates John  Stoner): a self-loathing Harvard college-drop out, who is homophobic ["he had no sympathy for the sort of person Stafford was. Stafford's particular perversion constantly repelled him,"] prone to violence toward the women who are kind to him, excessively judgmental of the women his self-pitying father (a widower who travels to forget his despair) dates, but unable to defend himself against the violence other men. He has no genuine agency ["some unnameable power pushed him from one place to another, down paths he had no wish to travel, through doors he did not know and had no wish to know" & "some obscure powers controlled....their destinies'] He understands himself  -- there are deliberate echoes of Stoicism here -- as a puppet of the divine. This is a book that could be taught in a course on toxic masculinity (with a nod to a recent war whose existence is only hinted at).

That he is carrying childhood trauma and is haunted by the memory of his dead mother is revealed early and helps explain these behaviors, but does not endear. To pity somebody is not a means toward sympathetic identification or admiration (if anything, as critics of Christianity -- one thinks of La Rochefoucauld and Hume -- noted, it is a means to feel superior.)*

Loneliness is the great theme of Nothing but the Night. The quoted passage expresses an important truth, not the least  the significance of recognition. But it also allows me to explain why I found the books so hard to read; the implied narrator reveals (ahh) his superiority to the protagonist. I find that grating (as well that use of 'incomparable,' 'pure'--later Williams is more taut and more effective).  Even so, there is a more important point lurking here.

By revealing his perspective the narrator reminds the reader, without having to mark it explicitly, that there is another kind of solitariness--that of the reader. Reading is a form of thinking prompted by another's train of words. One is alone in the company of an author, who (to partially quote another line of the work) reveals his/her ideas 'to him sentence by sentence.' When a book succeeds in grabbing one's attention, one's solitariness may well be  forgotten or one is seduced into a silent dialogue with a book's character(s)'s or point of view. But when a book grates, one is like a disappointed lover alone in one's frustration, awkwardly aware of the imperfect desires of a needy self.

 

Ursula Le Guin: Spinozism, Inductive risk and the Shadow of Power.

[A] man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, 199.

When Ursula Le Guin died last month, I felt a moment's regret not having sent her my two previous posts [here on the Dispossessed and here on The Left Hand of the Darkness.] But I had not done so because I was self-conscious of the fact that I had not fully taken the measure of her greatness yet -- more works could appear -- and, more truthfully, I wanted to give myself time to develop my reading of her. I encountered her works relatively recently -- I had been casting around for suggestions for a course on utopian fiction I taught a few years ago -- , and I read her novels relatively slowly wishing to savior each, and grappling with the full implications, before I move on to the next.

It is fair to say that a running theme through Le Guin's works is the sharp distinction between power and good practical judgment. Perhaps, this is really the underlying theme of all excellent science fiction. We tend to forget how astounding the technological change of the last century and a half has been. Thanks to fantastic scientific and technological advances, we can now manipulate and redirect hidden and previously un-imagined natural powers for often previously unimaginable ends. The idea that signals can be sent across vast distances to produce controlled sounds and images may well have occurred to past generations, but the particular occult powers -- electromagnetic waves -- that are used for this were really not guessed at for most of human history. Le Guin's output is exemplary of the post Nuclear consciousness of the expanded range and scope of destruction now in the hands of humanity.

I own the Earthsea novels in a children's imprint (Puffin). And it's true that in these novels her writing avoids lengthy, complex sentences, and that the vocabulary is in some sense simplified. This also gives these works an elegant almost biblical sparseness and clarity, eminently quotable. While wizards, enchantresses, witches, and dragons provide the local color, the story plays out on an extended archipelago [we are meant to see our continents in a new light] with the backdrop of an environmental catastrophe and potential man-induced civilizational collapse:

A mage can control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly....If it were not so, the wickedness of the powerful or the  folly of the wise would long ago have sought to change what cannot be changed, and Equilibrium would fail. The unbalanced sea would overwhelm the islands where we perilously dwell, and in the old silence all voices and all names would be lost. (60)

This quote offers a window in the larger metaphysical assumptions of Earthsea. Most of our words only track and describe -- like the utterances of the prisoners in Plato's cave -- sensible qualities. But the hidden essences of things, their beings, are knowable and they are identical with their true names. For, "magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing." So, the know and to make a thing is the same activity such that to produce and control a thing is to name it 'exactly and wholly.' In Earthsea each true thing becomes a locally closed, coupled system with the agent naming it exactly and wholly. Each such system of known things is in fragile equilibrium, and the whole of the universe is also such a closed system in equilibrium. The sense of fragility is, in turn, nicely captured by the phrase 'the folly of the wise.' (I return to this below.)

The previous paragraph pretends as if individual things have full reality. But that's not quite so. there is a strain of Spinozism in Earthsea. For to be named is to be, and this just is power.*  This is nicely captured by a comment near the end of the novel, "My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring  of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name." (182)

But the limited, albeit real, being of things naturally give rise -- in virtue of their limitations -- to 'entities' without genuine being.  (Their being is unnamed and does "belong in the world" (97).This is the (ahh) shadow existence of, say, holes and shadows (etc.). The great artistic trick of the first volume of Earthsea, is to imagine the destabilizing effects of the use of great power in the service of pride and "wish for glory" (36) as a decoupling of beings from their shadowing-non-beings. (There are shades of Mani and Tao.)

This post so far makes it sound as if Earthsea is about metaphysics. That's somewhat misleading if only because this is a society in which religion is (almost?) completely absent. The true main theme, inductive risk (see here), is made explicit fairly early in the training of the wizard-hero, Ged:

You must not change  one thing, one pebble, one gain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on the act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changingand of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous.

Given that the consequences of any given act are, in principle, infinite, it follows one really ought not use wizardry. And much of the wise wizards are revealed to be extremely restrained with their power. While they reproduce their knowledge in their disciples, they also withhold the most dangerous information until relatively late in the training. Even so, ambition for glory and pride are not eliminable from human nature, and so new adventures are to be  expected at all times, if we can survive.

The action of the novel is the attempt to restore the necessary balance between true things and their shadows--one imagines that George Lucas drank from the same well.  And while much of our hero's quest is solo, the final voyage can only succeed in the company of his friend and his friend's gift, "the proof of unshakeable trust" (82-3) When religion and its steadfast gods are absent, we require some other anchor, and this is steadfast friendship.

Strikingly, while friendship is symbolized by the disclosing of names, and so power, it is not a real being and so escapes the equilibriating beingshadow duality of everything else. This is so because friendship is ultimately founded on nothing solid, but (rather) faith, which we are told is expressive of our need to have story-telling witnesses to our deeds.

 

On a Dissonant detail that got me thinking about love.

My phone rang on the table in front of me. It was my younger's son number. I picket it up and said that I would call him back later.

'I am lost,' he said. 'I don't know where I am.'

Holding the phone to my chest I told that there was a minor emergency and that we would take a short break....I asked my son whether he could see a sign with a road name on it."

'I'll just look,' he said.

I could hear traffic in the background and the sound of his breathing. After a while he gave me the name of the street, and I asked him what on earth he was doing there.

'I am trying to get to school,' he said.

I asked why he wasn't going to school the way I had arranged for him this week, with friend Mark and Mark's mther.

'Mark isn't coming to school today,' he said. 'He's ill.'

I told him to turn around and walk back the way he had come, telling me the name of each street he passed, and when he reached the right one I told him to turn down it and carry straight on. After a few minutes, during which I listened to his puffing breath and the tapping of his feet on the pavement, he said: 'I can see it, I can see the building, it's all right, I can see the building.'--Rachel Cusk (2014) Outline, pp. 150-1.

There is something dissonant about quoting this passage. It does not have a memorable line, in the way, it seems, just about every other page of the book has. It is also not representative, in a certain sense, for the novel's conceit. (I call it a novel, but not much happens. It reminded me a bit of the film, Night on Earth.)

The narrator is an English (or English speaking) writer who is teaching a week-long, creative writing class one hot summer in Athens (Greece). The phone-call interrupts the class. After the quoted paragraph, the next paragraph starts, "in the classroom the group was waiting..." For much of the book, the first-personal narrator is an attentive, almost passive listener. (We follow her around, as she listens to other people's stories.) In fact, shortly after this scene, she claims that she "had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unremarked by self-will as possible." (170) She has an interesting explanation for her passivity; she treats it as a decision, which, itself, is a consequence of frustrated desire and her inability to accept the mismatch between what she wanted and what she could have.* From a similar mismatch, the great systems of morality, political vision, and religion are born as well as the grotesque techniques of personal transformation.  Cusk’s Outline revisits the effects of such mediated mismatches throughout her fascinating novel (recall my post on her Aftermath). It would make a good blog post.

But today I digress. Through the quoted passage we are made to be aware that for all of the narrator’s passivity, she has maternal ties and responsibilities to others that are dependent on her. She is literally always available to them—one can decide to turn off the mobile phone during one’s lectures, after all, even do without such a device altogether. This dependence goes quite far: her young child has a mobile phone, but does not seem to know how to use maps.google; even when her arrangements fail, he can still rely on his absent, yet ever-at-hand, mom.

In reading the passage, I was a bit baffled: kids don't get lost like that anymore. Which is why I interpret it is a symbol of dependence. Now, one may think that the absence of maps.google is a mere oversight. Yet, technology matters greatly to the book: on the back page (where one sometimes finds acknowledgments in novels) we are explained that the photograph cover photo is an "example of solarisation a technique rediscovered by Man Ray and the photographer Lee Miler, who was his assistant, muse and lover." The novel really starts aboard a plane on the tarmac at Heathrow. 

But is notable that the novel is book-marked by two intrusive men: one (who disappears from the novel) is a nameless software billionaire (with ‘liberal credentials’) who, creepily, has access to her itinerary; the second a thrice-divorced Greek by now elderly man, who is not especially attractive or interesting (she could only feel ‘absolute ambivalence’ (184))** about him, but despite this she goes with him on two boat trips. He is a kind of nameless everyman; he is called 'neighbour' throughout the novel. On the second boat trip, he tries to kiss her which she does not want. The novel closes with the information that the narrator has been ignoring his text messages since their second outing. So, oddly, one feature these two men have in common, in addition to not accepting boundaries, is the use of technology to reach (and track) her.

In reflecting on my puzzlement, I noticed that the internet is never mentioned in the book. It's not because the novel is supposed to take place, say, in the 1980s (or early 90s). Its decidedly contemporary: there are smart phones in the book, and we encounter Athens ravaged by the financial crisis. Most of the book reads like an extended diary by an especially astute observer who is attentive to detail. Yet, somehow, along the way, she has effaced facebook, google, snapchat, twitter, youtube, etc. So what we get is a peculiar illusion: an apparently contemporary novel in which talk and the imagination matters so much that we are liable to forget the little screens that draw our attention (and on which you may be reading this post). 

That is to say, the book tries to enact something it calls "the shared world of imagination"--a "shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have said to exist." As readers, each of us is invited to imagine seeing the world as the narrator sees it. And this is a world in which technology does not guide our imagination. And as it happens, this "is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see;" a bit like the son and his narrator-mom.

I could stop there, but I'll add this thought. Of course, good story-telling relies on the reader's individual imagination; while each of us read the same text of (say) the (same) novel, it's very likely we each experience -- through the train of associations and differential attention -- a somewhat different novel. And so, peculiarly, while we may both appreciate the same novel, the love we may feel for it, the shared vision of our individual readership and the text, will be distinct. Unless, perhaps, we talk about the novel.

 

 

 

On Aftermath

The point was this darkness -- call it what you will -- this darkness and disorganisation were not mere negation, mere absence. They were both aftermath and prelude. The etymology of the word 'aftermath' is 'second mowing', a second crop of grass that is sown and reaped after the harvest is in. Civilisation, order, meaning, belief: these were not sunlit peaks to be reached by a steady climb. They were built and then they fell, were built and fell again or were destroyed. The darkness, the disorganisation that succeeded them had their own existence, their own integrity; were betrothed to civilisation, as sleep is betrothed to activity. In the life of compartments lies the possibility of unity, just as unity contains the prospect of atomisation. Better, in Mrs. Lewis's view, to live the compartmentalised, the disorganised life and feel the stark stirrings of creativity, than to dwell in civilised unity, racked by the impulse to destroy. (5)

[Clytemnestra] is seeking equality. Children will not be born from equality, not will it empires be  built or frontiers expanded, for the pure peace of equality begets nothing. It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before. To beget requires the domination of one thing by the other, the domination of female form by male content; then, in order to nurture what has been begotten, the reverse. Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have  to use violence. To reach aftermath, first there has to be the event itself. (54-5)

The world Creon has inherited is a post-authority, post-familial world: it is aftermath, and Creon has the job of governing it. But how do you make people obey you, respect you, believe in you and in the reality you represent? Creon's idea is that you give  commands and then don't turn back on them, no matter what--a strategy the modern parent, presiding over chaos and unrule, occasionally adopts, only to find themselves insisting on a course of action long after its necessity and even its rationality have passed. (103)

Narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. He says, the violence in the Odyssey is a story told afterwards, in a cave. (121)-Z

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk is greedily treated as a 'memoir' by reviewers (see here; here) and puff profiles. While understandable (the publisher's material encourages it), this focus is peculiar because it ignores the guidance of the title (which is akin to an essay or, to be self-referential, a blog post). This focus on it being a memoir is a bit unfortunate not just because it leads to mistakenly conflating Cusk's biography with narrated details. One example is Camilla Long's careless hatchet job ("the book is crammed with mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin creative-writing experiments").

Unfortunately, these reviewers ignore the central narrative and structural puzzle of the novel (which reads as a series of lengthy autobiographical blog posts). This is odd because the narrative itself calls attention to the issue: "form...conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. (55) The first seven chapters read as would-be-memoir of the aftermath of a divorce; while the first-person narrator makes no effort at fairness (and seems to think it is deeply ingrained but false move when applied to marriage), the narrative and narrated chronology seems fairly straightforward (with meditative reflections on Greek tragedy thrown in). It can't be fully straightforward because the first chapter has (fractal-like) the same title as the book. But the eight chapter "XYZ" is a series of very short vignettes involving three unnamed men (XYZ): one a therapist (Y), but the other two (X/Z) are undefined: are they hints of an affair that destroyed the narrator's marriage, are they post-marital flings, or are they mere possibilities? It's hard to say. Long is probably right that X is the divorced husband at a later date (see for some evidence here), but we can't be sure.

However, nearly all the reviews (except Long's) are silent on the final (ninth) chapter, which is told from the perspective of a Belgian (I think)* live-in nanny, who grew up in a (shall-we-say) unstable family environment and who witnesses the break-up of her host family in England. But that family is -- pace Long --  not the narrator's family. The book ends with the live-in nanny moving to another family in London (also not the one narrated in the  first seven chapters). Why do I think the nanny is, in some sense, a different story altogether? For two reasons: (i) the division of labor as seen by her in the home does not fit the division of  labor narrated in the first seven chapters; (ii) the emotional/physical collapse of the mom occurs in the nanny's perspective before the divorce and not after (as the narrator implies). Obviously, the two reasons are not decisive; part of the point of the first-person narrative is that the narrator is unreliable in some sense, unwilling to tell us the causes of the marriage's collapse nor quite capable of explaining her own dissolution. The problem is, if we treat the final chapter as the perspective of an impartial bystander, we're still stuck with imperfect access to the underlying facts; the live-in nanny's comprehension of English is so mediocre (she flunked her language test), that she is not a reliable witness. That is, the novel enacts the slipperiness of establishing the narratable 'facts.' 

I do not mean to suggest that it is not a memoir (I don't care); nor that it is not a meditation on feminism, the novel introduces the theme repeatedly at the start of the novel, and transformative experience;** nor that it is not an extended analysis of divorce from the vantage point of parents and children ("I have two homes...and I have  no home" (64-5)); nor that it does not raise complex questions about the ethics of writing about people known to the author.+ But here I want to close with a reflection on the title. I have to admit that when I first read 'aftermath,' I thought of it as saying, after numbers or after counted order, that is, (a species of) disordered meaninglessness. At times the novel affirms this thought: in reflecting on marriage, the narrator writes, "It is not to dismantle but to conserve it that strength is required, for it will come apart in an instant. It will come apart, that image, and what remains not a new or different image but a pile of pieces that mean nothing at all." (69)

But in the novel we are reminded of the etymology which refers to a seasonal moment after mowing. And the temporal framework is circular. Soon again there will be sowing and another harvest. As the narrator's teacher (Ms. Lewis) insists the aftermath is the unwanted -- by the propertied farmer -- grass after the harvest, which then needs to be mowed too in an eternal return. It is the yearly reminder of the denial that nature does nothing in vain; that from the perspective of man's estate of nature guarded by a benevolent divine there is, in fact, no sufficient reason for this presence and  subsequent activity. It is necessary, but pure waste.

Paradoxically, this perspective, the official story on  aftermath, is introduced by an authority figure (the teacher) who herself seems to advocate for a reversal of values (namely to treat aftermath as the site of freedom and creativity). That is to say, the novel articulates the battle between at least two takes on the nature of marriage, which throughout is treated not just as the ground of traditional political unity (peace by one name, institutionalized violence by the other), but itself also as a site of order, where in one conception one becomes complete in it, whereas in the other, one is annihilated by it. One is tempted into thinking that these are attributes of the same substance.++

Near the end of the book (with a nod to Plato),*** aftermath is equaled with the post-violence survival narrative. It's a backward looking. Reconciliation need not involve  truth. If we listen to its etymology, narrative reconciliation is a renewal (we tell again in order to give birth to something new that represents the old). It is tempting to see in aftermath a form of therapy (and throughout the novel we're invited to do so), but even so, I am more inclined to see it as a means to exert control. Why? Not just because the narrator tells us on the first page, in commenting on one of her daughter's love  of jigsaws and the other's building of silent card houses, that she sees these activities as 'attempts to exert control.' Aftermath is a way to control the narrative, not just about the failed marriage (and perhaps the causes of failure), but also to keep a sense of order while the narrator is presenting us with evidence of her engulfing  dissolution (anorexia, depression, numbness, alienation, etc.)--she seems close to being destroyed by a species of post traumatic stress.  From that perspective the whole narrative is an act of self-definition required by a state of emergency. This last thought is a bit fanciful, I admit, but on the opening page we are told that An argument is only an emergency of self-definition.

That is, we philosophers tend to tell ourselves that arguments are means to compel agreement; I am not the first to note the role of argument as a means of forcing the other into submission or silence. The novelist replies that argument is a means, an exceptional one, to self-definition. And, indeed, arguments never succeed at silencing others; but if we own arguments (as Socrates urged), they make explicit who we (ahh) come to be. To the novel's credit we are left unsure if that's a viable route.