Immanent Domain

Shatner Up

To adapt oneself to the challenges life throws at you with enthusiasm and aplomb. Often used in the imperative: "Shatner up, my good man, Shatner up!"

What Challenges May Come

I recently saw a fine episode about dreaming on PBS’s Nova. Among other things, I learned that we don’t only dream during REM sleep, but also during another stage. I had already read about dreams helping us to consolidate new learning and memories. But according to the special, dreams may also help us prepare for our daily challenges. 

Based on some dreams I can remember, I am now more prepared to cope with the following scenarios:  

• How to avoid Godzilla (surprisingly often) 
• What to do if Wonder Woman shoots somebody dead and then doesn't want to report it to the police (last night) 
• How to deal with a murderous golem named "Jamais" 
• How to comport myself in the park near my childhood home while discovering underground cities, avoiding demons, marveling at steam trains run by Native Americans and other challenges (I dream about this park almost monthly; I guess it's still a training ground) 
• How to help a writer friend escape from Emily Dickinson’s ghost (it helped that I had wings) 
• How to dress for bondage night at a gay roller disco in Rock Springs Montana (just once, but it was glorious)

The Sacred Month of March

Entertain and astonish your friends and co-workers with these fun facts about March by downloading this flyer I put together: Download March Quotes Flyer 3-09

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Hubris & Hybris

“The common use of hubris in English to suggest pride, over-confidence, or any behaviour which may offend divine powers, rests, it is now generally held, on misunderstanding of ancient texts, and concomitant and over-simplified views of Greek attitudes to the gods have lent support to many doubtful, and often over-Christianizing, interpretations, above all of Greek tragedy.”

  The Oxford Classical Dictionary , Third Edition,  (1996): 732.

When I came across this a few years ago, it prompted the following realizations:

1. I had been teaching the term ”hubris” incorrectly for years.
2. I was in good company. Especially in the humanities, I still hear it used in the first, incorrect sense all the time.
3. That it was unusual that the classical scholarship about the term had not been more widely disseminated across other humanities, correcting the misperceptions summarized above.
4. That the current, incorrect use of the term, must be doing a lot of work. The incorrect sense must be useful in the humanities today.
5. That one of the attractions of using “hubris” at all is that it dignifies current attitudes with a snazzy genealogy (even if, as it turns out, that genealogy is false).
6. That the “over-Christianizing” interpretation of “hubris” reveals a lot about the residual religious roots that undergird much of the inter-presonal culture (though not the spiritual beliefs) in the academic humanities.

I wanted to write about hubris (in the incorrect sense), because it strikes me as the height of arrogance to assume that we as professors are somehow more ethical, or even more ethically circumspect, than our students.  My students face ethical situations I wouldn’t begin to know how to deal with, like the mother who informed me that she couldn’t make it to class “because my son’s been shot.”

But there is an older, more accurate use of hubris (which I, following some scholars’ practice, will refer to as “hybris”) that does apply. To cite the same entry from The Oxford Classical Dictionary: “it primarily denotes gratuitous dishonouring by those who are, or think they are, powerful and superior.” While it can also mean insolence from inferiors who "don't know their place," it more often denotes those who are determined to put or keep a perceived inferior in a subordinate position, "to put them in their place."

Is this not a more accurate description of what disturbs me? I have insight into my course's topic that students may lack. I am older than some of my students, though a pleasure of teaching at SOU is that this is often not the case. I have often thought about a topic in a more sustained and systematic way than many students.  I, to quote Gilles Deleuze on the value of studying philosophy, can call ideas by their proper name. But to assume that any of these make me some kind of ethical model for my students, an exemplar whom they should imitate to somehow become a better and more ethically-informed person, would be the height of, well, hybris. 

It's part of my job to challenge my students' beliefs, but if that's going to be more than some sort of theatrics where I've read the script in advance, I also have to respect that their beliefs have been functional for them. Certainly there are clear-cut exceptions where ideas (such as personal attacks on other students or their backgrounds) don't have a place in an academic setting. But I find those are precisely that, exceptions, and not part of some larger pattern where I am somehow ethically enlightened and students are benighted. The less we're putting things in their accepted places, the more enlightening things are likely to be.

Retarded

This week a student used the term “retarded” to refer to an idea. I wasn’t on top of my game, so I deflected to Sarah Palin’s theatrics, then pulled the discussion back to the idea the student thought was stupid. I didn’t think the idea was stupid, and wanted to flesh out its implications.

Is there a pedagogical equivalent of esprit de l'escalier, “backstair wit”—something you wish you’d said in the moment but only think of later, on your way out?  I’m planning to have a discussion of the term next week, that focuses on the issues in this post.

In retrospect, one reason I hesitated about how to respond was a recent piece I’d seen by Lewis Black on “The Daily Show” about the term “retarded.” Black’s argument was that we no longer use this term to refer to someone with a learning disability, but to refer to someone “normal” who voices a stupid idea or does something stupid.

Since the class is on youth culture, we debate about terms that have situational meanings all the time: nigga, bitch, queer, dyke, and so on. Most often these come up with regard to linguistic reappropriation, when a group takes a term historically used to denigrate them and claims it as their own, but usually only for “insider” use.

But “retarded” doesn’t seem like an example of this. If young people with learning disabilities refer to each other as “retards,” I’m unaware of it. Instead, the question I want to ask is whether the term is changing the way that older terms like “idiot” or “moron” have changed. These were once used to refer to people with mental disabilities. But when Gregory House, MD says to someone “you’re an idiot,” I doubt the show gets many calls from advocates for people with learning disabilities. In fact I’ve been planning to use a sound bite of him saying it as a ring tone.

Then there is the difference between “retarded” and “retard.” I can’t imagine a student saying someone is a “retard.” I’m also old enough and was ignorant enough as a child to use this term to refer to kids in the Special Ed program in my grade school. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood how cruel that was.

So that’s part of the discussion plan for next week. Maybe to watch the Lewis Black segment, and talk about the term.  About who would and who would not find it offensive, and whether it is shifting like the terms idiot, idiotic, moron, and moronic--from offensive labels to inoffensive metaphors.

Lil' Debbie in A Red Giant

As referenced in my previous post. I'm kinda happy about the Red Giant. It's the first time I've tried to make one.

 

Claire Danes Can Still Make Me Cry

I recently dreamt of this image of BF Skinner’s daughter, Debbie, in the special child-rearing box he and his wife used to raise her. It was actually called an “heir conditioner,” and she spent most of her crib and quiet time inside of it. My parents wanted to do the same thing with me, and my Dad (a Civil Engineer) still gets a kind of wistful look if it comes up. Fortunately, their horrified friends talked them out of it. (Thank you horrified friends.)

In my dream, Debbie Skinner was floating inside of a Red Giant star. Antares, to be exact, the heart of the constellation Scorpius. Not coincidentally, it’s also my Zodiac sun sign. I’m not much for astrology, but if like me you were an adolescent in the US during the 1970s, chances are astrology was conveniently at hand as you were forming an identity. It can work for me in ways that inspire both my fear and my fondness. Not so much as template or a structure, but as a kind of rhythm, a set of issues and responses that repeatedly assert themselves.

In the dream that was one angry baby. “They won’t help me survive. / My chest is aching, burns like a furnace/ the burning keeps me alive,” as one of my favorite Talking Heads songs puts it. There are boxes and then there are boxes.

So you have the baby in the box, and box in the angry star, which brings me to Claire Danes and her portrayal of Temple Grandin, a woman who has used her autism to better understand prey animals. When I listened to the audio version of Grandin’s book, Animals in Translation, I had an “aha” moment when she described her self-built “squeeze box” that she used to calm herself.  I felt a kind of cellular relaxation when she talked about that. It reminded me of a time my first year in college when I crawled under my bunk looking for something, felt safe down there, and fell asleep.

 I’m no Temple Grandin, but there’s a part of me, a part of my body, that understands. My body understands in ways that my mind can’t follow. It knows boxes. So when Claire Danes, playing Grandin in the HBO Special, “Temple Grandin,” spoke about the peace a properly-relaxed cow felt just before it was killed, I wept like a school girl. One of the things I found so moving was that she was talking about touching the cow and sensing its calmness. For someone normally so cut off from physical contact, she had bridged a gap, helping minimize the suffering of hundreds of thousands of fellow animals.

 

The Once and Future Me

Eventually I should get around to making an animation of what my arthritis feels like (chainsaws, a cement mixing truck, and bones splintered like fiberglass will all be in play, not to mention a malevolent clown-god.)  More funny than self-indulgent or histrionic, I hope.

In the meantime, I ‘m waiting to be back on Remicade, a highly effective but hideously expensive ($4,500 a pop every eight weeks) medication. The first time I was treated with Remicade, my mind leapt back to a camp stove my friend Tom Kacprowicz had in Junior High. It was an efficient, but ear-shattering little thing, and when Tom would turn it off after cooking the silence was deafening. You don’t realize how much day-to-day pain you’ve been carrying around until it is gone. For me, the sudden lack of pain was similarly deafening.

Still, the last few months while I’ve been off Remicade for economic and insurance reasons have been philosophically interesting.  The experience of being on and off medication changes my relationship to my healthier generational peers. In a few weeks, back on Remicade, I won’t only feel fifteen years younger; in some senses, I will be fifteen years younger. Maybe even thirty or forty years younger.

What I mean is that I am currently dealing with physical challenges, mostly finding it difficult to walk more than a block or two, that I wouldn’t “normally” expect to experience until I was in my seventies or eighties.  Within a few days of the treatment, I will inhabit a body that feels more like it felt when I was in my early twenties, before my arthritis began to drag me down. At the time, I just assumed I was getting older: it wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my mid-thirties.  So again, there was a strange yo-yo effect: feeling like I was in my late fifties, then suddenly younger.

This isn’t the only un- or misdiagnosed obstacle I’ve had to deal with in my life. Until I was about ten I was hypothyroidic: slow, tired, constipated. I took a pill and suddenly I could play again, stay awake again, think more clearly. Same with my migraines: for years and years, I was told they were “sinus headaches.” It was a classical migraine with an aura, a set of symptoms that date back to Galen that any MD should have been able to catch. Same with my hernia. It wasn’t until my high school biology teacher mentioned a hernia that I knew what was wrong with my package: I’d grown up thinking I had three testicles.

And so on. What I want to avoid is turning this into a narrative: poor-Warren-and-his-misdiagnoses. That bores even me.

What’s more interesting to me is the malleability of my body and the temporal displacements the illnesses and their treatments created. Codger one day, sprightly the next. Remicade takes me from near zero to my personal sixty in about a week. All by targeting tumor-necrosis-factor-alpha. Biochemically, the medicine is a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer. A smart bomb that cuts the cascade of inflammation and pain off at the command and control level.

Not sure of all the implications just yet, but will be pondering and posting about this for a while.

Turing Machines All Over the Place

 I have often heard Turing machine this and Turing machine that. It’s only lately that I’ve actually read about the concept and come to understand that one aspect of Turning machine is that it aspires to be universal, capable of simulating other, more specialized machines.

So now I’m seeing them everywhere. My iphone is a Turing machine, the laptop I’m writing this on, the ipad I’m looking forward to buying.  All of these devices are wireless receivers, can record text, etc. Devices today have different strengths: a high end digital SLR can take video and has built-in GPS, but it’s best at taking digital photographs. I can read the New York Times on my iphone, but like it better on my laptop, and will probably like it best of all on an ipad.

Still, it was a breakthrough for me to realize the emerging trend isn’t toward one master device that does everything, but toward many devices that do all sorts of things.

Philosophically, what’s so damn interesting about this is that the machine, the poster child for determinacy in an earlier, clockwork age, now has poster children all over the place for indeterminacy. A Turing machine is, by definition, indeterminate.

If Gilbert Simondon is correct, most machines are similarly indeterminate. Only we restrict their functions (fruitfully) to limited tasks. This is one reason why, predictably enough, Deleuze and Guattari are so enthused about Simondon.  Even non-Turing machines have an underlying diversity or flow that can be rechanneled in unexpected ways. Think, for example of how bicycles have mutated and diversified over the last forty years: road bikes, fixed gear, mountain, BMX, stunt, commuter, cruiser, exercise, rickshaw taxi, power generator. I could go on, but you get the point. The underlying technology is less determinate than I’ve been accustomed to think of it.

Got much more thinking to do about this, but it’s a start.

House Pessimism

Lately I’ve been thinking about Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. “ Not Gramsci’s use, so much as how it functions in some circles as a kind of slogan or shorthand. Specifically, I’ve been asking when does this maxim cease to be a consolation and become an excuse, something which claims to preserve possibilities, to keep hope alive, but in practice forecloses both?

 I think Nietzsche is correct in identifying nihilism as, in part, the despair we can fall into when our hopes, and the worldview which supported them, turn out not to be true. If so, some left academic circles promote a nihilism that is no less bitter for its staid eloquences. 

The failure (and yes I will call it that) is neither one of intellect or of will, but of desire. Pessimism of the Intellect as the House Style of Leftism has always struck me as a strategy to keep desire at arm’s length. If desires are imbricated in larger structures of oppression, so the reasoning might go, best to renounce them entirely, or at least deny they have any hold upon you or your motives, or spend an enormous amount of time reflecting on their imbrications. Delay your gratifications, Bodhisattva -like, until the last injustice is righted and the last soul enlightened. 

Is this the best way to change the world, or simply something that epitomizes the very privilege that it seeks to renounce? The alternative for me, predictably enough, is in a different genealogy: one that runs from Spinoza through Deleuze and Guattari, right on to Hardt and Negri, who begin their book Labor of Dionysius: A Critique of the State Form thus: “This book is aimed toward the proposition of a practice of joy—joy in the sense of the increasing power of an expansive social subject.” 

Hardt and Negri have their debts to Gramsci, but they are light years away from how his quote is most often deployed. If culture is indeed a structure of feeling, shouldn’t we have more to offer than depression and obligation, however heroic we imagine that nasty combination to be?