QOTD -- Philology and the Pascalian wager

by KARL STEEL

In a fit of self-satisfied annoyance yesterday, I tweeted the following:

Anticipatory annoyance, as it turned out. That evening, I cringed at Examined Life when Martha Nussbaum invoked "the background of feudalism, when all opportunities were distributed unequally to people according to their class, their inherited wealth, and their status." Okay, I guess, with some editing. If we drop the word "feudalism," if we think with, say, Kathleen Davis's Periodization and Sovereignty, to identify this "feudalism" as being a 17th-century development accompanying the development of modern models of absolutist kingship, if we think of the long history of class warfare via, say, Corey Robin, if we think "so it was mostly ever, whatever the name we give to it," then maybe we're getting somewhere. But--despite the considerable value of Nussbaum's arguments--"feudal" isn't going to help unless we want to feel smug about our modernity.¹

For more on wagering on knowing the past, and the value of the humanities more generally, reread Jeffrey on The Swerve, and reread Alexa Huang below, and see this engagement with the theory-blaming, canon-defending "austerity pedagogy" of Mark Bauerlein, and read, if you didn't get it 4 years ago, Sheldon Pollock's "Future Philology: The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World" (PDF; Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 931-961). Thanks to Julie Orlemanski for turning me on to this essay. Here's an excerpt, which is today's QUOTE OF THE DAY, today:

what is uncertain in today’s world, and what has contributed to philology’s fall, is whether the past has any meaning at all that still matters. And here a sort of hermeneutical circularity confronts us: only once we have acquired the means, through the cultivation of philology, to access the textuality of the past can we proceed to dispute the value of knowing it. But we would never bother to acquire the means unless we were already convinced that such knowledge has intrinsic value. There is no simple way out of this circle; arguments about the value of remembering can easily be offset by arguments about the ethics of forgetting. The only exit available is offered by those who have made a kind of Pascalian wager, who provide clear demonstrations of the value of knowing the past by showing that you can eventually win something big (950)

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1 I'm also reminded of my tweet here about a review article on the Turkish protests, which speaks of the "mostly failed strategies used by regional dictators." Busting an anti-neoliberal occupy-style defense of public space? To a New Yorker, sounds less like distant "regional dictators" than it does my own mayor^↩

Quote of the Day: Alva Noë

by Karl Steel

From an interview with Alva Noë, author of Our of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, comes a paragraph that--barring its unfortunate use of the word "identity"--intersects very nicely with conversations we've had here over the past few years:

[Smallwood]So we're not just brains in vats.

[Noë] Exactly. I argue that our commitment to the minds of others isn't, strictly speaking, a theoretical one; it's more like a moral or existential one. It's a condition of the kinds of relationships we enjoy with them. I couldn't love you if I thought of you as a hypothetical explanation of the sensory experiences I have when I look at you. What that seems to mean as a consequence is that it isn't possible to recognize mind in the universe from a purely disengaged, detached, objective, theoretical standpoint. And that seems to have the consequence that we can't really have a science of the mind, because science requires that you take a detached, objective attitude toward things. We don't have to accept that consequence, but we need to realize that there is a kind of natural scientific perspective on mind that is not detached, and I call that the biological perspective. Exactly the same things can be said about life. When I recognize a little bacterium as living, I'm thinking of it as not merely a locus of chemical processes; I'm thinking of it as doing things, having interests, seeking food, preserving its unity in the fluid that it's floating around in and not just dissolving. I'm singling it out as having a story, as having an identity. And you can't do that unless in some sense you already take life in a kind of primitive way for granted. We need to enrich our conception of what our so-called scientific study of these phenomena is if we really want to understand them.

[Green June Beetle photo from here under a Creative Commons license]

QOTD: Chrulew on Derrida in Eden

Speaking of Science Fiction writers, last week, Matthew Chrulew (who, so far as I can determine, is a doctoral student at Monash University) did me the honor of letting me read his excellent article "Feline Divinanimality: Derrida and the Discourse of Species in Genesis," published in what looks to be a fascinating journal, The Bible and Critical Theory. I very much enjoyed it, and what's more, I experienced a not wholly unwelcome feeling of uncanniness: Chrulew's conclusion and my dissertation's epilogue have much in common:

Interestingly, Derrida does not name his cat, but, in denying with his appeals to its reality all of the appropriations that necessarily accompany its appearance in his essay, he seeks to retain only the untranslatable pro-noun that marks its individuality: ‘It is a matter … of rendering oneself to the truth of the name, to the thing itself such as it must be named by the name, that is, beyond the name. The thing, save the name’ (Derrida 1995b: 68; see also 58, 89; see also Derrida 1995a: 67). What ultimately guides these (un)namings is the ‘paradisaic bestiary’ (Derrida 2002: 405/287) that haunts Derrida’s philosophy, the vision of an unfallen language more paradisaic even than both the Priestly and Yahwistic creation accounts, which naturalised from the first the cultural distinction between wild animals and livestock (Gen 1:24-25, 2:20). In seeking, chimerically and impossibly, naked words in Eden, he evokes a spectral naming to haunt our relationships with animals: a truly Adamic naming in which man would not differentiate himself (through his shame) from ‘the Animal’ as such, but rather be (unashamedly) in relation to all of the animot in their multiplicity, according to their differences: as species, perhaps, but also as unsubstitutable singularities with their own point(s) of view, every singular existent called by his/her/its proper name. Through this prophetic and profoundly anti-anthropocentric vision, we might approach an unconditional hospitality open to the absolute exemplarity of the unsubstitutable other, in which tout autre est tout autre. Such a naming-to-come would erase the name in search of ‘the proper name in its pure possibility (it’s to you, yourself, that I say “come,” “enter,” “whoever you are and whatever your name, your language, your sex, your species may be, be you human, animal, or divine…”)’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 137–139). It would be in this sense, mythic and nude, that we should inhabit Eden, where ‘whatever the man call[s] each living creature, that [is] its name’ (Gen 2:19).

What's next for all this? At my defense, Samuel Moyn suggested: "nominalism." Strikes me as a good idea.