Donald Philip Verene: Philosophical Rhetoric
In the context of an excellent article on Ernesto Grassi and Henry Johnstone (thanks A):
Narrative is the speech of memory. Philosophies are essentially narratives. All great works of philosophy simply tell the reader what is the nature of things. The arguments we find within such works are meaningful within the structure of the narrative they contain. The narration confers meaning. Questions of meaning always precede questions of truth. Philosophical arguments do not stand on their own. They cannot profitably be removed from the narrative that informs them and evaluated as though they had independent value and truth.Philosophies, like all narratives, act against forgetting. To forget is to leave something out, to omit or overlook a feature of a subject matter or of the world. Philosophical speech is memorial speech because it reminds us of what we have already forgotten or nearly forgotten about experience. The speech of philosophical narrative can never become literal-minded because to act against forgetting is to attempt to hold opposites together. The narrative is always based on a metaphor; a metaphor is always a narrative in brief. The narrative is also the means to overcome controversy, because for the self to overcome an inconsistency of its thoughts it must develop not simply a new argument but a new position, a new narrative in which to contain any new argument.
The self makes itself by speaking to itself, not in the sense of introspection but in the sense of the art of conversation, which is tied to the original meaning of dialectic. On this view, philosophy is not rhetorical simply in its need to resolve controversy, nor is it rhetorical simply in terms of its starting points for rational demonstration. Philosophy is rhetorical in these senses, but it is further rhetorical in its total expression. Any philosophy commands its truth by the way it speaks. Great philosophies speak in a powerful manner that affects both mind and heart. It is common, in the Dialogues, that, after engaging in the elenchos, Socrates says he is unsure whether a claim that seems to be true really is true. His answer is to offer a “likely story.” All philosophies, on my view, are likely stories, which originate in the philosopher’s own autobiography and are attempts to move from this to the autobiography of humanity, to formulate the narrative of human existence in the world and to speak of things human and divine.
"Philosophical Rhetoric" (2007)
Donald Philip Verene: Knowledge of Things Actual And Divine
I would feel a lot better about this book if it lost its subtitle. The full title is Knowledge of Things Actual And Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake, but this book is an exegesis on Vico with some Joycean flavoring. To the best of my knowledge, an extensive investigation into Vico's presence in Finnegans Wake and its parallels with Vico's philosophy has yet to be written. (Atherton's book is the best treatment I know of. Campbell and Robinson give it a go but their analysis is tenuous.) Indeed, Verene complains that Joyce scholars know little of Vico. Since I know little of Vico, I thought I would apply what I learned from the book to the Wake. As for Vico himself, Verene only strengthens my conviction that Vico was an esoteric genius far ahead of his time, and had he been German, he would have stolen a good deal of thunder from Hegel. And I have great respect for the historicist thinkers that followed and paid tribute to him last century: Croce, Cassirer, Collingwood, and so on.
Verene does make some observations on the Wake, but these fall prey to the problems of making any decisive interpretation of Finnegans Wake. Early on he says, "Vico is the protagonist of Finnegans Wake. He is Earwicker." The problem is not so much that this statement is wrong is that it is incomplete. Verene marshals many textual references conflating Vico with male archetype HCE, but Vico is no more the protagonist than Adam, Humpty Dumpty, Dublin, Finn MacCool, or some Irish pub owner. Verene analyzes Vico's life in terms of a series of "falls," and here he is on solid ground in equating Vico's clap of thunder with the thunderwords of the fall that occur periodically in the Wake, but the problem is that the Wake always outsizes any interpretation because there is always such a huge remainder, and so declaring Vico the protagonist is ultimately, I think, wrongheaded. And I take issue with Verene's claim that "Shem, like a forger, moves around a lot, but Shaun, like a post, occupies set positions and talks of past and future." While Shem is a more slippery character than Shaun, it is Shaun who sets out on the quest in the third book of the Wake, and it is he who is the deliverer of ALP's letter which Shem has transcribed. Again, it is not so much that such claims are wrong as much as that they need far more elaboration. So it's best to see the book as using Joyce as a tool to conceptualize Vico's life and work.
And on Vico, there is much of interest to Wake scholars. I'll enumerate a few points that gave me insight into the structure of Joyce's nightmare book. Two cycles are commonly cited as the basis for the Wake's structure: Vico and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. But the three large books of the Wake do not clearly map onto the three ages of Vico's New Science (divine, heroic, and human), though the final, short section does read as a recorso, restarting the book. Without elaborating on these matters, Verene still gives much evidence to contribute to the parallel. In particular, I was fascinated by the elaboration on Vico's three languages, from the mute language of the divine to the verbal language of humanity:
The verb introduces time, and things can no longer be what they are; their meanings can no longer just be mute. What is mute has being. It is not transposed in time. The mute meaning is the denial of time. Like the ritual, it takes us to the origin and stops time. The mute gesture is a ritual in brief. We are back where the gods were.Mapping the ages onto the Wake, this strongly parallels the curiously static character of the first book, which spends more time making lists and describing history than it does having anything actually happen. If the divine is a state of pure mute ritual language, then the non-narrative descriptions of the first book of the Wake fit well with Vico's divine age.
Likewise, there is much to connect the second book with Vico's seventh oration, which discusses education its goal of producing "the heroic mind:"
The ideal of ‘‘heroic mind’’ for Vico involves three things: all branches of knowledge must be studied and put together; the human mind is divine and in its activity of learning reaches God the creator in an attempt to make itself whole; and the acquisition of knowledge, when rightly practiced, leads the individual toward virtue and the good.One crux of the second book of the Wake is the children learning about adult sexuality via the fall of man and forbidden knowledge. Joyce perverts the idea of education significantly, but it is still this education, and this very fall, that enables the maturation of the children and the eventual overthrow of the parents (who could be likened to gods themselves). That, in turn, leads to this passage of Vico's:
Knowledge of the corrupt nature of man invites the study of the entire universe of liberal arts and sciences, and sets forth the correct method by which to learn them (125).Which is to say, the fall is that which engenders knowledge and progress, and following on from that, the flowing of time itself. Joyce is perhaps more fatalistic than Vico in that he sees nothing but the endless battle of son against father and brother against brother, and little to be learned from it, but more significantly, Joyce renders this knowledge wholly physical and bodily, downplaying if not eliminating theology, philosophy, and eschatology. See also the mysterious fight between Berkeley and Patrick in Book IV, which may suggest that Joyce is neither a materialist nor an idealist, but merely a monist (or a this-ist, focused wholly on the world at hand). The exact relation of Joyce's stance to Vico's emphasis on the irreducibility of the real/mythic to abstraction is something I'm still puzzling over.
This is only the barest start. I haven't even touched on how Vico's conceptualization of language might relate to the linguistic apparatus of the Wake, as it's simply too huge a topic to chance saying anything about. Verene's book reminds me that I really do need to read The New Science from cover to cover, so that I can come back and say more insightful things about Verene's book and Vico. And it reminds me how fantastic Finnegans Wake is underneath all the verbal impenetrability, as one of the greatest portrayals of human history in literature.
Philip Guston
Just saw his drawings at the Morgan. I have an affection for him that I don't for most of his generation because Art Spiegelman plugged him in an issue of The Comics Journal that I read at a very impressionable age.
Francis Bacon
Philosophy and the intellectual sciences are, like statues, admired and venerated but not improved. Moreover they are sometimes at their best in their earliest author and then decline. For after men have joined a sect and committed themselves (like obsequious courtiers) to one man’s opinion, they add no distinction to the sciences themselves, but act like servants in courting and adorning their authors. Let no one maintain that the sciences have grown little by little and now have reached a certain condition, and now at last (like runners who have finished the race) have found their final homes in the works of a few authors, and now that nothing better can be discovered, it remains only to adorn and cultivate what has already been discovered. We could wish that it were so. But a more correct and truthful account of the matter is that these appropriations of the sciences are simply a result of the confidence of a few men and the idleness and inertia of the rest. For after the sciences had been perhaps carefully cultivated and developed in some areas, by chance there arose a person, daring in character, who was accepted and followed because he had a summary kind of method; in appearance he gave the art a form, but in reality he corrupted the labours of the older investigators. Yet it is a delight to posterity, because of the handy usefulness of his work and their disgust and impatience with new inquiry. And if anyone is attracted by ancient consensus and the judgement of time (so to speak), he should realise that he is relying on a very deceptive and feeble method. For we are mostly ignorant of what has become known and been published in the sciences and arts in different centuries and other places, and much more ignorant of what has been tried by individuals and discussed in private. So neither the births nor the abortions of time are extant in the public record. Nor should we attach much value to consensus itself and its longevity. There may be many kinds of political state, but there is only one state of the sciences, and it is a popular state and always will be. And among the people the kinds of learning which are most popular are those which are either controversial and combative or attractive and empty, that is, those which ensnare and those which seduce assent. This is surely why the greatest geniuses in every age have suffered violence; while men of uncommon intellect and understanding, simply to preserve their reputation, have submitted themselves to the judgement of time and the multitude. For this reason, if profound thoughts have occasionally flared up, they have soon been blown on by the winds of common opinion and put out. The result is that Time like a river has brought down to us the light things that float on the surface, and has sunk what is weighty and solid. Even those authors who have assumed a kind of dictatorship in the sciences and make pronouncements about things with so much confidence, take to complaining when they recover their senses from time to time about the subtlety of nature, the depths of truth, the obscurity of things, the complexity of causes, and the weakness of human understanding; yet they are no more modest in this, since they prefer to blame the common condition of man and nature rather than admit their own incapacity. In fact their usual habit, when some art fails to deliver something, is to declare the thing impossible on the basis of the same art. An art cannot be condemned when it is itself both the advocate and the judge; and so the issue is to save ignorance from disgrace.Francis Bacon, The New Organon (1620)
Literature Minus One
I'd like to ask you all out there for your participation here: pick a work of literature or philosophy (or poetry, if you can make it work) and a sentence from that work that, if the sentence had been excluded from the work, would have made the greatest difference in the work's interpretation/reception/history in the following years. I'll start with what set me off on this line of thinking in the first place:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them.Who's next?Wittgenstein, TLP 6.54
Don't Forget
Gregor von Rezzori: The Snows of Yesteryear
[The German is Blumen im Schnee, which sounds better to me.]
Cassandra's superstitious awe of the reality of letters, and her ultimate and voluntary rejection of their decipherment, originated in a much more archaic insight. The serried rows of books on the shelves of my father's library were truly demonic for her. That certain things had been recorded between the covers of these books which could be grasped mentally and transformed into speech and knowledge by initiates in the shamanic craft of coding and decoding those runic symbols--this could be understood only as a supernatural phenomenon. It irritated her to see that we had lost the sense of its terrifying uncanniness and that reading was an everyday custom, publicly performed, nay, that it could even become a vice, as exemplified by my sister. With the instinctive certainty of the creature being, she felt that such casual handling of the irrational was bound in turn to generate irrationality.A little bit of anti-Calibanism from Rezzori's well-wrought memoir, written in the late 80s, which portrays a family in the early part of the 20th century but reads as closely contemporary, as though he brought them with him into the end of last century to make them easily comprehensible to the younger generations. There's a nice hesitancy to Rezzori's irony that I enjoyed.She realized that for those who had acquired it, the ability to read conferred power over those to whom the written or printed word remained a sealed mystery. But she also knew that this was a power pertaining to black magic--that it turns against its own practitioners and transforms them into slaves of the abstract. She saw in it a truly devilish power, since its manipulators, who also were its most immediate victims, were not even aware of its nefarious effects.
Krugman's Anti-Cassandra
Following on from before. I like Krugman's comment enough I'll just quote the whole thing:
Reading some of today’s news, it suddenly struck me: we’re living in the age of the anti-Cassandra.
Cassandra had the gift of prophecy — she saw, correctly, what was coming — but was under a curse: nobody would believe her.
Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.
What set me off was the matter of Alan Greenspan; as Dean Baker like to remind us, news analyses of the housing and financial crisis almost always draw exclusively on “experts” who first insisted that there wasn’t a housing bubble, then insisted that the financial consequences of the bubble’s bursting would remain “contained.”
It’s even worse, of course, on the matter of Iraq: just about every one of the panels convened to discuss the lessons of five disastrous years consisted solely of men and women who cheered the idiocy on.
Now, none of this is entirely new. Consider what Keynes said in 1931:
A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.
Still, it seems especially extreme now. And think of the incentive effects. What’s the point of taking the risk of challenging conventional wisdom if, even after you’re proved right, only the guys who were wrong get invited to opine on Charlie Rose?
Cassirer on Gobineau, etc.
In order to grasp the purport of Gobineau's book, too, we must not read into it these later political tendencies. They are quite alien to the meaning of the author. Gobineau did not intend to write a political pamphlet but rather a historical and philosophical treatise. He never thought of applying his principles to a reconstruction or revolution of the political and social order. His was not an active philosophy. His view of history was fatalistic. History follows a definite and inexorable law.I hear the heavy hand of Kant in Cassirer's attack on Gobineau, even before Cassirer cites the individual stupidities that make Gobineau's work garbage. The hubris of purporting to move into the noumenal sphere is enough to doom him already. (Note that this is an inversion of the "Enlightenment thinking" that is usually associated with Kant and used to damn him on the same grounds that Cassirer is attacking Gobineau on here.)History is no science; it is only a conglomerate of subjective thoughts; a wishful thinking rather than a coherent and systematic theory. Gobineau boasted of having made an end to this state of affairs. "It is a question of making history join the family of the natural sciences, of giving it...all the precision of this kind of knowledge, finally of removing it from the biased jurisdiction whose arbitrariness the political factions impose upon it up to this day." Gobineau did not speak as an advocate of a definite political program but as a scientist, and he thought his deductions were infallible. He was convinced that history, after innumerable vain efforts, had at last come to maturity and virility in his work. He looked upon himself as a second Copernicus, the Copernicus of the historical world. Once we have found the true center of this world, everything is changed. We are no longer concerned with mere opinions about things, we live and move in the things themselves; our eyes are able to see, our ears to hear, our hands to touch.
Myth of the State, XVI
I thought of this point when reading Walter Pincus's attack on journalism today (Pincus was the old-timer Washington Post reporter who wrote story after story questioning the administration's Iraq WMD claims in 2002, only to see all of them shunted to the back page.)
Today’s mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines refereeing a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy.Well, we can debate which of so many problems makes the current state of mainstream journalism so wretched, but the obsession with neutrality and apparent lack of bias is certainly one of them, and I wonder if it too is the same mentality at work that Cassirer attacks: that despite there being points of view, there is only one absolute News that presents them all equally, and that's what to strive for.At a time when it is most needed, the media, and particularly newspapers, have dropped the idea of having experienced reporters provide analysis and context and turned instead to retired public figures or so-called experts to provide commentary. It was not always this way.
I do hear that same absolutist arrogance in this little speech too:
"[The government] will not be satisfied for long with the knowledge that it has 52 per cent behind it while terrorising the other 48 per cent but will, by contrast, see its next task as winning over that other 48 per cent for itself...It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime, to move them towards a position of neutrality towards us, we want rather to work on people until they have become addicted to us..."As with Gobineau, that's when purported objectivity turns into propaganda.Goebbels, March 15, 1933 (taken from Evans, 396)
Southland Tales
What an awesome disaster of a movie. Panned at Cannes, left for dead by Sony, eventually raking in $300K on an $18 million budget and forcing a promise from Richard Kelly that he will be more commercial in the future, I now say that it's the major American movie of 2007 that I enjoyed the most, far more than limp critic-fodder There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. It certainly isn't a good movie, though there are plenty of good bits in it, but the movie, at least partly unintentionally, has been constructed in such a way as to make such evaluations meaningless. Southland Tales will never be ridiculed and celebrated the way Showgirls or Valley of the Dolls or Manos: The Hands of Fate or Battlefield: Earth are. It doesn't provide enough reference points. James Wood, in one of his bon mots, said of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, "It invents its own category of badness." Wood was wrong, for The Unconsoled is just a mediocre symbolist text (see Alasdair Gray's Lanark for a far more brilliant effort in the same vein). But Southland Tales comes as close to that description as any film in recent memory, and where it is in its own category, there is no comparable "good" to be had next to the bad. Its idiosyncratic overambition lies alongside O Lucky Man! and its acknowledged antecedent, Kiss Me Deadly. I don't know that it is as seminal as the latter film, which for me is one of the greatest American films of its era, but as with Kiss Me Deadly, it won't be possible to tell until we are further from the present. It's that sort of a zeitgeist movie; maybe it'll look as awful as Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie or Jodorowski's films, but I hope not. I got a real kick out of it.
Let's start with the logo.
Does the oddly-colored shape under the title look familiar? I was pleased with myself for recognizing it. It's a US electoral map from 2004, skewed by congressional district so that each district's size is proportional to its population, and color coded red-to-blue to represent Republican-to-Democratic dominance. It's ugly, oversaturated, politically allusive, and obscure all at the same time, and it's a good synecdoche for the film.
The film fails in making any coherent political statement, because you can't make any sort of political statement in the midst of such chaos. The plot, such as it is, has to do with The Rock playing an amnesiac actor married to the daughter of the Bush-a-like Republican presidential candidate (this film takes place in 2008; the Democratic ticket is Clinton-Lieberman). His name is Boxer Santaros, but he'll come to be known as Jericho Cane, the lead character in a screenplay he has written (or has he???) about the apocalypse. Also collaborating on the screenplay is Sarah Michelle Gellar's Krysta Now, a porn star/talk show host who may or may not have Marxist revolutionary tendencies. (It may be possible to figure out the actual affiliations of many of the characters, but, like most of the plot elements, it is largely irrelevant.) What glimpses we have of this screenplay reveals that it is pretty much the sort of screenplay The Rock would have written: a macho action hero killing people, spouting banal dialogue, and chugging Bud Light. Here's page 1:
(If you don't find that funny, this movie might be extremely painful for you.) Anyway, through a combination of subversive revolutionary action, plain accident, and assorted other Philip K. Dick-ian causes, the screenplay is being acted out in reality by people who don't even know of it, as well as observed by all the other characters and by the actors themselves. Since the script is about the apocalypse, things get very strange in a hurry. Some neo-Marxists attempt to fake a shooting to turn the population of California against the government's draconian anti-terror laws, instituted after two nuclear bombs exploded in Texas. Justin Timberlake plays a mutilated Iraq veteran who spends his days spying on (and occasionally killing) people from offshore through a giant rifle sight. He and several other characters have had megadoses of the mysterious Fluid Karma, a substance that causes telepathy, shared dreams, the mixture of fantasy and reality, and so on and so forth, like Chew-Z in Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It's also a clean fuel that will save the world, according to a bunch of German scientists led by Wallace Shawn. And at ground zero of this mess are a bunch of morons getting sucked into their own screenplay in the middle of Los Angeles, already shot, with the exception of one critical scene, to be apocalyptically unreal. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
As these stars act out their wretched screenplay, it's obvious that at least some of the badness of the acting, dialogue, and plot is intentional. But Kelly makes it impossible to separate the intentional from the unintentional, because the crap script mixes with "reality" to the point that they are inseparable, and none of the "real" characters are any smarter than their in-script standins. This is obvious early on, from the moment Krysta Now says "Apparently, the future is much more futuristic then scientists thought," but also evident from the sheer lack of any empathetic characters. And I haven't even mentioned the Justin Timberlake video embedded in the movie, done up as a tribute to The Big Lebowski. The movie is impressive in its self-referential textuality, as bad actors play bad actors writing bad screenplays with bad characters that they then become the bad stars of. (The Rock does a magnificent job of acting like he has no idea what's going on.) Most of the cast are famous for anything but dramatic acting and can only be recognized as themselves, not as characters within a movie. This movie oozes Verfremdungseffekt.
If nothing else, these factors ensure Southland Tales a place in post-structuralist theory for years to come, a bitterly appropriate result. Still, that's not to deny the disorienting effect the movie has in providing no reference point whatsoever to what would be called "real life." It's spectacle all the way down. But what spectacle! Kelly has given himself over to the pop culture overload and distilled it more densely, and authentically, than anyone since John Oswald. (The opening pastiche of news channel graphics, logos, and crawls is dead-on, the best anyone has done since Chris Morris's Brass Eye.) And to Kelly's credit, he never loses his grip, never sacrifices the miasma to anything that could dare be called "art," which is why Cannes hated him and loved Tarantino. Even if Kelly was trying to elevate (quite literally, at points) his material, he never does.
So let's go back to Kiss Me Deadly, which appears twice in the film and is clearly a major influence on Kelly. Aldrich's film is a joke at everyone's expense, a contemptuous reading of a Mike Hammer novel portraying Hammer as a dull-witted thug incapable of understanding the true stakes of what's around him. Even the entire genre of detective novels is held up for ridicule when the McGuffin at the center of the story turns out to be anything but irrelevant. The acting ranges from lumpen to histrionic and never matches the unstable material. But unlike Southland Tales, it comes together to damn every bit of its source material and America with it. In Southland Tales, things are inverted: the fools understand and we do not, because the fools are generating their own story, and we--and I include director Kelly in that--are getting caught in it.
