Eileen Gunn is a writers’ writer; highly esteemed in the science fiction community, but not as well-known as she ought to be outside it. Hopefully the publication of her first-ever book, a collection of her short stories, Stable Strategies and Others will change that.
Gunn’s stories are witty, oblique, subtly uncanny, and surprising in the ways that they continually shift perspectives and perceptions. Aside from that it’s difficult to characterize them, as they are all quite different from one another.
As a longtime Nixonologist, my favorite story here is “Fellow Americans.” This story slyly imagines an alternative history in which Richard Nixon quits politics after his losses for the Presidency in 1960, and for Governor of California in 1962, and instead finds inner peace and fulfillment in the New Hollywood as a TV game show host. The image of the “greening” of Nixon is hilarious — he even takes LSD! — but behind this the story says a lot about the 1960s, and the hidden links between America’s official culture, its so-called counterculture, and the way the media embrace everything: so that we are not so much a “society of the spectacle” as one in which spectacle is tamed and cut down to size: events are captured, homogenized, and shrunk down to fit the small screen.
Every American fiction writer ought to write about Nixon: his story is as basic for our culture as the Oedipus myth and the Trojan War were for the culture of ancient Greece. But thus far, not enough writers have done so. Gunn joins a small select group whose members also include Philip Roth (Our Gang) , Robert Coover (The Public Burning) and Mark Maxwell (Nixoncarver).
Elsewhere in the volume, “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” is a radical postmodern reworking of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” When the narrator is bioengineered into an insect, she doesn’t spend all her time in bed, filled with impotent self-loathing, like Gregor Samsa; rather, she thinks positive and seizes the opportunity — as business gurus like Tom Peters are always exhorting us to do — using her new bodily endowment to work her way up the corporate ladder.
“Nirvana High” (co-written with Leslie What) takes an opposite, but strangely complementary tack, as it imagines how the “loser” culture of Seattle grunge is equally a constituent part of America’s strangely self-deluding image of itself. In a world where Microsoft owns everything, Cobain High is a special high school for paranormals, juvenile delinquents, and other deviant teen sensibilities. Even youthful disaffection and dysfunction has its proper place in the entertainment complex.
My favorite passage in the entire book comes from “Nirvana High”; it’s a gloss on the phrase “Entertain us” (originally from “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” of course):
It meant one thing to the teachers, another to the students. To the teachers it meant “pay attention.” To the students it meant “stop whatever you’re doing that’s interesting and do what we want you to do.” To Kurt Cobain, of course, it had meant “stick a shotgun in your mouth.”
All the stories in Stable Strategies and Others are rewarding. Besides the ones I’ve already mentioned, their subjects range from alien contact (an old SF staple, dealt with movingly in “Contact”, and with hilarious sleaziness in “What Are Friends For?”) to self-reflexive revisionism (as in the collectively authored “Green Fire,” where a young Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein find themselves drawn into a real-life Golden Age SF adventure).
Like all the best SF, Gunn’s stories don’t so much predict the future as they make visible the otherwise hidden deep currents of our present.
Eileen Gunn is a writers’ writer; highly esteemed in the science fiction community, but not as well-known as she ought to be outside it. Hopefully the publication of her first-ever book, a collection of her short stories, Stable Strategies and Others will change that.
Gunn’s stories are witty, oblique, subtly uncanny, and surprising in the ways that they continually shift perspectives and perceptions. Aside from that it’s difficult to characterize them, as they are all quite different from one another.
As a longtime Nixonologist, my favorite story here is “Fellow Americans.” This story slyly imagines an alternative history in which Richard Nixon quits politics after his losses for the Presidency in 1960, and for Governor of California in 1962, and instead finds inner peace and fulfillment in the New Hollywood as a TV game show host. The image of the “greening” of Nixon is hilarious — he even takes LSD! — but behind this the story says a lot about the 1960s, and the hidden links between America’s official culture, its so-called counterculture, and the way the media embrace everything: so that we are not so much a “society of the spectacle” as one in which spectacle is tamed and cut down to size: events are captured, homogenized, and shrunk down to fit the small screen.
Every American fiction writer ought to write about Nixon: his story is as basic for our culture as the Oedipus myth and the Trojan War were for the culture of ancient Greece. But thus far, not enough writers have done so. Gunn joins a small select group whose members also include Philip Roth (Our Gang) , Robert Coover (The Public Burning) and Mark Maxwell (Nixoncarver).
Elsewhere in the volume, “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” is a radical postmodern reworking of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” When the narrator is bioengineered into an insect, she doesn’t spend all her time in bed, filled with impotent self-loathing, like Gregor Samsa; rather, she thinks positive and seizes the opportunity — as business gurus like Tom Peters are always exhorting us to do — using her new bodily endowment to work her way up the corporate ladder.
“Nirvana High” (co-written with Leslie What) takes an opposite, but strangely complementary tack, as it imagines how the “loser” culture of Seattle grunge is equally a constituent part of America’s strangely self-deluding image of itself. In a world where Microsoft owns everything, Cobain High is a special high school for paranormals, juvenile delinquents, and other deviant teen sensibilities. Even youthful disaffection and dysfunction has its proper place in the entertainment complex.
My favorite passage in the entire book comes from “Nirvana High”; it’s a gloss on the phrase “Entertain us” (originally from “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” of course):
It meant one thing to the teachers, another to the students. To the teachers it meant “pay attention.” To the students it meant “stop whatever you’re doing that’s interesting and do what we want you to do.” To Kurt Cobain, of course, it had meant “stick a shotgun in your mouth.”
All the stories in Stable Strategies and Others are rewarding. Besides the ones I’ve already mentioned, their subjects range from alien contact (an old SF staple, dealt with movingly in “Contact”, and with hilarious sleaziness in “What Are Friends For?”) to self-reflexive revisionism (as in the collectively authored “Green Fire,” where a young Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein find themselves drawn into a real-life Golden Age SF adventure).
Like all the best SF, Gunn’s stories don’t so much predict the future as they make visible the otherwise hidden deep currents of our present.
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, the new book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is their sequel to their justly famous Empire.
Hardt and Negri are important thinkers — as I’ve said before, more than once — because they are thinking seriously and profoundly about how to renew marxism and the left in our current age of post-Cold War globalization.
Multitude isn’t quite as rich and surprising a book as Empire: but that was inevitable, both because it consolidates and restates what we already learned from Empire, and because it endeavors to be more immediate, more pragmatic than the earlier book.
Empire argued that globalization, and the end of the Cold War, had led to a new form of capitalist domination, one that differed in substantial ways from those of industrialization, colonialism, and imperialism. While transnational corporations, electronic communications and computing technologies, and a world market whose expansion is no longer checked or resisted by so-called “socialism”, have not ameliorated conditions for the enormous number of people around the world who live in poverty, they have certainly changed the rules of the game, the way power is exercised, the way economic and political structures are organized, and therefore the ways it might be possible to resist, and to change things. Hardt and Negri take for granted that we live in a “network society,” in which nation-states no longer exercise sovereign power to the extent they once did, and in which the fluidity of capital has eroded the welfare state and the status of the traditional working class. Their endeavor was to rethink marxist theory in such circumstances; they rejected both the orthodoxy that would cling to traditional marxist categories (like the proletariat and the vanguard party) regardless of changed circumstances, and the “post-marxists” who would throw out the baby along with the bathwater, arguing for a tepid reformism on the grounds that recent developments had made radical change henceforth impossible. Hardt and Negri instead argued, optimisitically, that in dissolving traditional categories of nationality, in “informatizing” everything, and in uniting points and processes around the world, globalized capitalism had in fact created new conditions for its own overthrow. Instead of opposing “globalization” for basically conservative and nationalistic reasons, they advocated a sort of hyper-globalization,one that actually fulfills the promises falsely offered to the people of the world by the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank.
In Multitude, Hardt and Negri flesh out this picture, by expanding on the possibilities for resistance and change, and by more explicitly linking their own philosophical project with recent radical activism (from the Seattle and Genoa protests to the Zapatistas). They define the “multitude” (which is their replacement for such defunct groupings as “the people” and the “proletariat”) as a collection of “singularities” who discover what they have in common, but without fusing into some sort of sovereign unity, the way “the people” and the “proletariat” were once supposed to do. This idea of the “common,” as that which brings together groups that remain different and disparate, is the link between Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomatic” logic of singularities and connections, on the one hand, and the actual practices of coalitions and affinity groups in the worldwide “anti-globalization” movement today, on the other. Hardt and Negri argue that the informatization and networking of everything leads to a greater production of the common than ever before: precisely because all social and economic production today is networked, leading to the “common nature of creative social activity” (132), and because of the increasing importance of “immaterial labor,” meaning work that produces “ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, and other such products,” on the one hand, and emotions and relationships on the other (108). It is not that industrial work in factories is disappearing, but that such work itself is increasingly permeated by “immaterial labor” and “affective labor.”
What this means, ultimately, is that all of social reality — and not just some economic “base” — is being produced collaboratively, and in common. Traditional notions of private property are evidently nonsensical when applied to immaterial (and digitally reproducible) goods, like pop songs and software and the genomes of crops (which is why the attempts by media companies to enforce their copyright increasingly appear absurd and surreal). But even more conventionally physical goods, like automobiles and food, are now as much the products of collective knowledge (information technologies) as they are of the manipulation of raw materials; and they tend to be marketed at least as much for their affective qualities as for their pragmatic uses. There is no longer an economic sphere (what marxists traditionally called the “base”) separate from the spheres of culture, leisure, etc (the old marxist “superstructure”); rather, everything is cast into the same web and network.
More conventional Marxists see this situation (the loss of superstructural “autonomy”) as a dystopian nightmare. For Hardt and Negri, however, the increasing production of the common means that there is a more powerful basis for radical democracy and equality today than ever before in human history. Capitalism works by expropriating what human labor produces; in globalized “late capitalism” this means that capitalism expropriates everything, not just economic goods but cultural and affective life as well. But for Hardt and Negri, this means that the revolutionary reappropriation, by the multitude, of what it creates, can be equally all-embracing.
This basic thesis is backed up by a wealth of detail: not by those dubiously valid social science statistics, of course, but by considerations both philosophical and practical. Hardt and Negri write at great length about the structure (and lack of accountability) of supernational organizations like the IMF, as well as NGOs (non-governmental organizations), about the sorts of demands that global protest movements have been making, and about the problems involved in “scaling up” from democracy on a national scale (as in the United States, not as it actually does work, but as it is supposed to work according to the Constitution) to a global scale. They don’t claim to give a blueprint of “what is to be done,” but they try to work out the philosophical basis upon which a global truer democracy could function.
Basically, Hardt and Negri call for a massive act of imagination and reinvention — something that cannot be done by theorists, but that has to be thrashed out in the course of actual social and political practices of escape and transformation — and suggest the ways that concrete movements of reform can themselves help lead to these more radical outcomes (in rejection of the old marxist opposition between “reform” and “revolution”). They say that such radical reinvention is possible and thinkable, because its basis is already present in the world today, in our networks and information technologies, and in the extraordinary creativity of the poor, the disenfranchised, and migrants and immigrants, worldwide.
I find myself half persuaded by Hardt and Negri’s arguments. Their vision of multiple singularities, and of the production of a “common” which is yet not a fusion or a unity, is the best way I have come across for thinking about what is often regarded negatively as postmodern “fragmentation”, or as the death of “grand narratives” (Lyotard). This seems to me to be crucial understanding of the world we live in today: there’s nothing worse than when people on the left, as well as the right, call for some return to the “good old days” that never existed in the first place, and regard the present only as a case of woeful decline.
On the other hand, I think that Hardt and Negri’s willful optimism causes them to underestimate the difficulties of the endeavor they are calling for. Especially in the context of our post-9/11 state of eternal war (which they discuss in the first third of the book), I think that Bush and Osama, between them, would destroy the world before they would allow any flourishing of the multitude to take place.
There’s a wonderful passage in Multitude (190ff) where Hardt and Negri write of the way that political philosophy has traditionally seen the nation or the society as a body: Hobbes’ Leviathan is only the most famous use of this more-than-metaphor. The multitude, they say, can in this context only be seen as something monstrous, a disorganized agglomeration of flesh, since it rejects the sovereignty of the head over the other organs that is the central concern of Hobbes’ model (and that of all too many later political thinkers as well). Capital works, in the terms Hardt and Negri implicitly borrow from Deleuze, by separating the body politic from what it can do. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the multitude is a body without organs; it expresses its potentialities to the fullest by rejecting the restrictions imposed by the hierarchical organization of the organs.
While I find this image compelling, I can’t help being haunted by its inversion. In my picture, capital itself is the monstrous flesh, the body without organs, that we the multitude are forced to inhabit. This flesh is “really” ours, ultimately ours. But in our pragmatic, day-to-day experience, we don’t own it, or hold it in common. Rather we scurry about, in its folds and convolutions, like lice or fleas; or at best, we reprogram its code here and there, just a little bit, like viruses. It oppresses us, but we are stuck; we hate it, but we can’t live without it. Can we transform this parasitic, shadowy state of being into a form of resistance?
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, the new book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is their sequel to their justly famous Empire.
Hardt and Negri are important thinkers — as I’ve said before, more than once — because they are thinking seriously and profoundly about how to renew marxism and the left in our current age of post-Cold War globalization.
Multitude isn’t quite as rich and surprising a book as Empire: but that was inevitable, both because it consolidates and restates what we already learned from Empire, and because it endeavors to be more immediate, more pragmatic than the earlier book.
Empire argued that globalization, and the end of the Cold War, had led to a new form of capitalist domination, one that differed in substantial ways from those of industrialization, colonialism, and imperialism. While transnational corporations, electronic communications and computing technologies, and a world market whose expansion is no longer checked or resisted by so-called “socialism”, have not ameliorated conditions for the enormous number of people around the world who live in poverty, they have certainly changed the rules of the game, the way power is exercised, the way economic and political structures are organized, and therefore the ways it might be possible to resist, and to change things. Hardt and Negri take for granted that we live in a “network society,” in which nation-states no longer exercise sovereign power to the extent they once did, and in which the fluidity of capital has eroded the welfare state and the status of the traditional working class. Their endeavor was to rethink marxist theory in such circumstances; they rejected both the orthodoxy that would cling to traditional marxist categories (like the proletariat and the vanguard party) regardless of changed circumstances, and the “post-marxists” who would throw out the baby along with the bathwater, arguing for a tepid reformism on the grounds that recent developments had made radical change henceforth impossible. Hardt and Negri instead argued, optimisitically, that in dissolving traditional categories of nationality, in “informatizing” everything, and in uniting points and processes around the world, globalized capitalism had in fact created new conditions for its own overthrow. Instead of opposing “globalization” for basically conservative and nationalistic reasons, they advocated a sort of hyper-globalization,one that actually fulfills the promises falsely offered to the people of the world by the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank.
In Multitude, Hardt and Negri flesh out this picture, by expanding on the possibilities for resistance and change, and by more explicitly linking their own philosophical project with recent radical activism (from the Seattle and Genoa protests to the Zapatistas). They define the “multitude” (which is their replacement for such defunct groupings as “the people” and the “proletariat”) as a collection of “singularities” who discover what they have in common, but without fusing into some sort of sovereign unity, the way “the people” and the “proletariat” were once supposed to do. This idea of the “common,” as that which brings together groups that remain different and disparate, is the link between Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomatic” logic of singularities and connections, on the one hand, and the actual practices of coalitions and affinity groups in the worldwide “anti-globalization” movement today, on the other. Hardt and Negri argue that the informatization and networking of everything leads to a greater production of the common than ever before: precisely because all social and economic production today is networked, leading to the “common nature of creative social activity” (132), and because of the increasing importance of “immaterial labor,” meaning work that produces “ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, and other such products,” on the one hand, and emotions and relationships on the other (108). It is not that industrial work in factories is disappearing, but that such work itself is increasingly permeated by “immaterial labor” and “affective labor.”
What this means, ultimately, is that all of social reality — and not just some economic “base” — is being produced collaboratively, and in common. Traditional notions of private property are evidently nonsensical when applied to immaterial (and digitally reproducible) goods, like pop songs and software and the genomes of crops (which is why the attempts by media companies to enforce their copyright increasingly appear absurd and surreal). But even more conventionally physical goods, like automobiles and food, are now as much the products of collective knowledge (information technologies) as they are of the manipulation of raw materials; and they tend to be marketed at least as much for their affective qualities as for their pragmatic uses. There is no longer an economic sphere (what marxists traditionally called the “base”) separate from the spheres of culture, leisure, etc (the old marxist “superstructure”); rather, everything is cast into the same web and network.
More conventional Marxists see this situation (the loss of superstructural “autonomy”) as a dystopian nightmare. For Hardt and Negri, however, the increasing production of the common means that there is a more powerful basis for radical democracy and equality today than ever before in human history. Capitalism works by expropriating what human labor produces; in globalized “late capitalism” this means that capitalism expropriates everything, not just economic goods but cultural and affective life as well. But for Hardt and Negri, this means that the revolutionary reappropriation, by the multitude, of what it creates, can be equally all-embracing.
This basic thesis is backed up by a wealth of detail: not by those dubiously valid social science statistics, of course, but by considerations both philosophical and practical. Hardt and Negri write at great length about the structure (and lack of accountability) of supernational organizations like the IMF, as well as NGOs (non-governmental organizations), about the sorts of demands that global protest movements have been making, and about the problems involved in “scaling up” from democracy on a national scale (as in the United States, not as it actually does work, but as it is supposed to work according to the Constitution) to a global scale. They don’t claim to give a blueprint of “what is to be done,” but they try to work out the philosophical basis upon which a global truer democracy could function.
Basically, Hardt and Negri call for a massive act of imagination and reinvention — something that cannot be done by theorists, but that has to be thrashed out in the course of actual social and political practices of escape and transformation — and suggest the ways that concrete movements of reform can themselves help lead to these more radical outcomes (in rejection of the old marxist opposition between “reform” and “revolution”). They say that such radical reinvention is possible and thinkable, because its basis is already present in the world today, in our networks and information technologies, and in the extraordinary creativity of the poor, the disenfranchised, and migrants and immigrants, worldwide.
I find myself half persuaded by Hardt and Negri’s arguments. Their vision of multiple singularities, and of the production of a “common” which is yet not a fusion or a unity, is the best way I have come across for thinking about what is often regarded negatively as postmodern “fragmentation”, or as the death of “grand narratives” (Lyotard). This seems to me to be crucial understanding of the world we live in today: there’s nothing worse than when people on the left, as well as the right, call for some return to the “good old days” that never existed in the first place, and regard the present only as a case of woeful decline.
On the other hand, I think that Hardt and Negri’s willful optimism causes them to underestimate the difficulties of the endeavor they are calling for. Especially in the context of our post-9/11 state of eternal war (which they discuss in the first third of the book), I think that Bush and Osama, between them, would destroy the world before they would allow any flourishing of the multitude to take place.
There’s a wonderful passage in Multitude (190ff) where Hardt and Negri write of the way that political philosophy has traditionally seen the nation or the society as a body: Hobbes’ Leviathan is only the most famous use of this more-than-metaphor. The multitude, they say, can in this context only be seen as something monstrous, a disorganized agglomeration of flesh, since it rejects the sovereignty of the head over the other organs that is the central concern of Hobbes’ model (and that of all too many later political thinkers as well). Capital works, in the terms Hardt and Negri implicitly borrow from Deleuze, by separating the body politic from what it can do. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the multitude is a body without organs; it expresses its potentialities to the fullest by rejecting the restrictions imposed by the hierarchical organization of the organs.
While I find this image compelling, I can’t help being haunted by its inversion. In my picture, capital itself is the monstrous flesh, the body without organs, that we the multitude are forced to inhabit. This flesh is “really” ours, ultimately ours. But in our pragmatic, day-to-day experience, we don’t own it, or hold it in common. Rather we scurry about, in its folds and convolutions, like lice or fleas; or at best, we reprogram its code here and there, just a little bit, like viruses. It oppresses us, but we are stuck; we hate it, but we can’t live without it. Can we transform this parasitic, shadowy state of being into a form of resistance?
The characters and plot of Neal Asher’s SF novel The Skinner didn’t do much for me; but the setting was amazing.
The Skinner takes place on the world of Spatterjay, which has an utterly ferocious ecology. Spatterjay is mostly sea; on the very first page we are introduced to “vicious plankton — which would make the experience of swimming for a human akin to bathing in ground glass”; and things go on from there. Asher takes great delight in imagining surpassingly feral and vicious forms of invertebrate life: mostly arthropods, molluscs, and annelids. As these creatures prey upon one another, Darwinian “survival of the fittest” goes into absurd hyperdrive. The result is a nightmarish cycle of devourers devoured in their own turn, without end.
At the top of the food chain are leeches (both in the sea, and on the sparse islands where people live) that grow to the size of sharks or whales, taking big bites of flesh out of their victims, or even swallowing them whole. But there’s more: if the leeches don’t kill their victims outright, they infect them with a virus that, in effect, renders those victims immortal: or at least the prey become so resilient, and able to repair injury, that they generally live on, providing yet more food for the leeches over the course of their extended lifetimes. This gives an exceedingly nasty twist to Nietzsche’s maxim that “whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger.”
The virus is also mutagenic; under circumstances of extended stress, it reprograms the DNA of the infected organism, making it more leechlike. This happens to human victims, as well as to other organisms. Viral proliferation, pointing towards a future in which the leech genome monopolizes the entire biosphere… It’s a nightmare beyond anything William Burroughs imagined…
Unfortunately, nothing else in the book matches this astonishing ecology. Even the human villains, sadistic nazis that they are, are dwarfed by the fantastic flashes of the novel’s background.
The characters and plot of Neal Asher’s SF novel The Skinner didn’t do much for me; but the setting was amazing.
The Skinner takes place on the world of Spatterjay, which has an utterly ferocious ecology. Spatterjay is mostly sea; on the very first page we are introduced to “vicious plankton — which would make the experience of swimming for a human akin to bathing in ground glass”; and things go on from there. Asher takes great delight in imagining surpassingly feral and vicious forms of invertebrate life: mostly arthropods, molluscs, and annelids. As these creatures prey upon one another, Darwinian “survival of the fittest” goes into absurd hyperdrive. The result is a nightmarish cycle of devourers devoured in their own turn, without end.
At the top of the food chain are leeches (both in the sea, and on the sparse islands where people live) that grow to the size of sharks or whales, taking big bites of flesh out of their victims, or even swallowing them whole. But there’s more: if the leeches don’t kill their victims outright, they infect them with a virus that, in effect, renders those victims immortal: or at least the prey become so resilient, and able to repair injury, that they generally live on, providing yet more food for the leeches over the course of their extended lifetimes. This gives an exceedingly nasty twist to Nietzsche’s maxim that “whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger.”
The virus is also mutagenic; under circumstances of extended stress, it reprograms the DNA of the infected organism, making it more leechlike. This happens to human victims, as well as to other organisms. Viral proliferation, pointing towards a future in which the leech genome monopolizes the entire biosphere… It’s a nightmare beyond anything William Burroughs imagined…
Unfortunately, nothing else in the book matches this astonishing ecology. Even the human villains, sadistic nazis that they are, are dwarfed by the fantastic flashes of the novel’s background.
Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf is a powerful film, and a thought-provoking one. Haneke’s films have always been about imagining the worst — or close to it — and savagely dissecting the pretensions and hypocrisies of bourgeois life. But Time of the Wolfmoves in something of a different register than Benny’s Video or Funny Games or The Piano Teacher. The view is more detached and contemplative, though this certainly doesn’t mean it is more optimistic or hopeful.
Some sort of (unspecified) catastrophe has emptied the cities, poisoned the water and food supply, and left people to wander nomadically about the countryside, or to gather wherever shelter can be found. Many wait by the railroad tracks, hoping for redemption or rescue in the form of a train that never comes.
Haneke’s brilliance comes in the film’s everydayness. Time of the Wolf doesn’t depict the descent into utter savagery that you might expect. Yes, people are murdered for no reason, and some ugly squabbles develop; but on the whole, the film is as far from the extremes of dystopia as it is from the idyllic. People form groups, and these groups have hierarchies and power relations, and bigotry and sexism rear their heads; but for the most part, everyone gets by and has enough to eat, and there are instances of compassion as well as greed, and quarrels are usually resolved without violence. Conditions are unpleasant, but they are still, largely, livable.
By frustrating our melodramatic, dystopian expectations, and instead instilling in us a sense of the routinization of misery, the everydayness of discomfort and deprivation, Haneke makes a film that in retrospect is far more disturbing than a facile Lord of the Flies expose of human beings’ innate savagery would ever be. Civilization hasn’t collapsed in Time of the Wolf ; what we get instead is a social order without the comforts that privileged people have in our own, but with much the same blend of obedience, complicity, half-assed conformity, half-assed rebellion, smugness, and despair.
Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf is a powerful film, and a thought-provoking one. Haneke’s films have always been about imagining the worst — or close to it — and savagely dissecting the pretensions and hypocrisies of bourgeois life. But Time of the Wolfmoves in something of a different register than Benny’s Video or Funny Games or The Piano Teacher. The view is more detached and contemplative, though this certainly doesn’t mean it is more optimistic or hopeful.
Some sort of (unspecified) catastrophe has emptied the cities, poisoned the water and food supply, and left people to wander nomadically about the countryside, or to gather wherever shelter can be found. Many wait by the railroad tracks, hoping for redemption or rescue in the form of a train that never comes.
Haneke’s brilliance comes in the film’s everydayness. Time of the Wolf doesn’t depict the descent into utter savagery that you might expect. Yes, people are murdered for no reason, and some ugly squabbles develop; but on the whole, the film is as far from the extremes of dystopia as it is from the idyllic. People form groups, and these groups have hierarchies and power relations, and bigotry and sexism rear their heads; but for the most part, everyone gets by and has enough to eat, and there are instances of compassion as well as greed, and quarrels are usually resolved without violence. Conditions are unpleasant, but they are still, largely, livable.
By frustrating our melodramatic, dystopian expectations, and instead instilling in us a sense of the routinization of misery, the everydayness of discomfort and deprivation, Haneke makes a film that in retrospect is far more disturbing than a facile Lord of the Flies expose of human beings’ innate savagery would ever be. Civilization hasn’t collapsed in Time of the Wolf ; what we get instead is a social order without the comforts that privileged people have in our own, but with much the same blend of obedience, complicity, half-assed conformity, half-assed rebellion, smugness, and despair.
Nausea prevents me from watching more than small snippets of the Republican convention.
But tonight I watched Arnold’s speech. Arnold is the white Republican answer to Barack Obama.
Note too that Arnold credited Richard Nixon for his political awakening.
The Bush twins make Paris Hilton look like Simone de Beauvoir in comparison.
Nausea prevents me from watching more than small snippets of the Republican convention.
But tonight I watched Arnold’s speech. Arnold is the white Republican answer to Barack Obama.
Note too that Arnold credited Richard Nixon for his political awakening.
The Bush twins make Paris Hilton look like Simone de Beauvoir in comparison.
Iron Council is China Mieville‘s fourth novel, and the third set in the fantasy world of Bas-Lag (after Perdido Street Station and The Scar).
I’ve written about Mieville here before, so I will just go over briefly how he’s a brilliant writer of “speculative fiction” — or of what Mieville himself prefers to call (with a not to Lovecraft and the old pulps) “weird fiction” — basically fantasy, though tinged with elements of both alternative-Victorian science fiction and of Lovecraftian horror; how he’s created as rich and strange an alternative world as any writer has ever done; how he might be thought of as the anti-Tolkien, since his major effort is to rescue fantasy literature from Tolkien’s Medievalizing, moral simplemindedness, reactionary-nostalgic politics, and vision of literature as “consolation”; and how, beyond this, Mieville is actively engaged in rethinking every aspect of fantasy literature, in critiquing and revising its myths, as well as in renewing its links with many aspects of both high culture and low, particularly with surrealism and with pulp writing.
In all these ways, Iron Council is of a piece with Mieville’s earlier books. The urban density and sheer materiality of the immense (and politically repressive) city of New Crobuzon, the strange physics, the monsters, the magical technologies — all of them are here.
What’s new and startling in this novel is how, instead of being about an individual quest, as Perdido Street Station and The Scar both arguably were, Iron Council is about a collective quest, and a political one at that. Mieville has tried for nothing less than to write a myth (if that’s the right word, which I am not sure it is, for something that is both magical and material, but has none of the pompous and reactionary Jungian connotations that invocations of ‘myth’ usually have) of political Revolution.
Iron Council contains echoes both of the Paris Commune of 1871, and of labor struggles in the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is split between three characters, and between two major plotlines (which of course converge by the end). One plotline involves striking railway workers who literally steal the train and the tracks they are working on, and construct a “line of flight” away from their oppressors: it is only by disappearing from public view and official knowledge that they have the leisure to reinvent society along non-coercive lines. The other plotline, back in New Crobuzon, focuses on a disgruntled militant, who becomes increasingly involved with a fringe group of “infantile leftists” (as Lenin called them), while around him, and almost unbeknownst to him, events are fast approaching a point of revolutionary effervescence.
But wait. What I wrote in the last paragraph, if taken by itself, might well be the description of a “social realist” or “proletarian” novel of the 1920s or 1930s. What is it doing in a fantasy novel, filled with occult happenings and monstrosities worthy of Lovecraft (who, of course, also wrote his major works in the 1920s and 1930s)? Can the same novel possibly dramatize both the evolution of class consciousness, and the visceral, nightmarish experience of fighting with monstrous “inchmen,” who have human heads and arms, mouths with shark-sharp teeth, and the torsos and bodies of enormous, yards-long caterpillars?
Mieville’s accomplishment in Iron Council is to make such a fusion work: to carry it off so seamlessly that when reading the book the thought of a possible contradiction doesn’t even enter one’s mind. It’s only in retrospect that one even wonders about it. The politics of Bas-Lag, with heavy state repression, continual war, and feuding leftist factions, and the presence within this world of the Cacotopic Stain, a mysterious region that causes bizarre, cancerous mutations in whomever or whatever approaches it too closely, both seem equally concrete.
Not to mention the presence of the Remade, who are among the most haunting figures in all three of Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels. The technology of New Crobuzon seems especially oriented towards torturing criminals, convicts, and political dissidents by surgically altering their bodies in grotesque ways, combining the organic with the mechanical, or the human with the animal. A man will have been transformed into a centaur or a satyr, or will have a coal stove on wheels replacing his torso, belly, and legs. A woman will have animate babies’ arms attached to her head, in punishment for the poverty that led to the death of her child.
When the human imagination can reach extremes of hypermoralistic cruelty like these, Mieville seems to be saying, the dream of a relatively egalitarian and uncoercive society is really rather a modest one.
Iron Council is China Mieville‘s fourth novel, and the third set in the fantasy world of Bas-Lag (after Perdido Street Station and The Scar).
I’ve written about Mieville here before, so I will just go over briefly how he’s a brilliant writer of “speculative fiction” — or of what Mieville himself prefers to call (with a not to Lovecraft and the old pulps) “weird fiction” — basically fantasy, though tinged with elements of both alternative-Victorian science fiction and of Lovecraftian horror; how he’s created as rich and strange an alternative world as any writer has ever done; how he might be thought of as the anti-Tolkien, since his major effort is to rescue fantasy literature from Tolkien’s Medievalizing, moral simplemindedness, reactionary-nostalgic politics, and vision of literature as “consolation”; and how, beyond this, Mieville is actively engaged in rethinking every aspect of fantasy literature, in critiquing and revising its myths, as well as in renewing its links with many aspects of both high culture and low, particularly with surrealism and with pulp writing.
In all these ways, Iron Council is of a piece with Mieville’s earlier books. The urban density and sheer materiality of the immense (and politically repressive) city of New Crobuzon, the strange physics, the monsters, the magical technologies — all of them are here. Also the intoxicating prose, sometimes down-to-earth, more often lush and luxurious. Mieville is a writer so full of ideas that even in a long book — and Iron Council, at 564 pages, is the shortest of the three Bas-Lag novels — seems not long enough to contain them all.
What’s new and startling in this novel is how, instead of being about an individual quest, as Perdido Street Station and The Scar both arguably were, Iron Council is about a collective quest, and a political one at that. Mieville has tried for nothing less than to write a myth (if that’s the right word, which I am not sure it is, for something that is both magical and material, but has none of the pompous and reactionary Jungian connotations that invocations of ‘myth’ usually have) of political Revolution.
Iron Council contains echoes both of the Paris Commune of 1871, and of labor struggles in the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is split between three characters, and between two major plotlines (which of course converge by the end). One plotline involves striking railway workers who literally steal the train and the tracks they are working on, and construct a “line of flight” away from their oppressors: it is only by disappearing from public view and official knowledge that they have the leisure to reinvent society along non-coercive lines. The other plotline, back in New Crobuzon, focuses on a disgruntled militant, who becomes increasingly involved with a fringe group of “infantile leftists” (as Lenin called them), while around him, and almost unbeknownst to him, events are fast approaching a point of revolutionary effervescence.
But wait. What I wrote in the last paragraph, if taken by itself, might well be the description of a “social realist” or “proletarian” novel of the 1920s or 1930s. What is it doing in a fantasy novel, filled with occult happenings and monstrosities worthy of Lovecraft (who, of course, also wrote his major works in the 1920s and 1930s)? Can the same novel possibly dramatize both the evolution of class consciousness, and the visceral, nightmarish experience of fighting with monstrous “inchmen,” who have human heads and arms, mouths with shark-sharp teeth, and the torsos and bodies of enormous, yards-long caterpillars?
Mieville’s accomplishment in Iron Council is to make such a fusion work: to carry it off so seamlessly that when reading the book the thought of a possible contradiction doesn’t even enter one’s mind. It’s only in retrospect that one even wonders about it. The politics of Bas-Lag, with heavy state repression, continual war, and feuding leftist factions, and the presence within this world of the Cacotopic Stain, a mysterious region that causes bizarre, cancerous mutations in whomever or whatever approaches it too closely, both seem equally concrete.
Not to mention the presence of the Remade, who are among the most haunting figures in all three of Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels. The technology of New Crobuzon seems especially oriented towards torturing criminals, convicts, and political dissidents by surgically altering their bodies in grotesque ways, combining the organic with the mechanical, or the human with the animal. A man will have been transformed into a centaur or a satyr, or will have a coal stove on wheels replacing his torso, belly, and legs. A woman will have animate babies’ arms attached to her head, in punishment for the poverty that led to the death of her child.
When the human imagination can reach extremes of hypermoralistic cruelty like these, Mieville seems to be saying, the dream of a relatively egalitarian and uncoercive society is really rather a modest one.
Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 is a film of sonic and visual textures. It’s science fiction, depicting a world in which genetic screening is the key to everything, including what jobs you can get, where and when you are permitted to travel, and — most important? — who you can have (reproductive) sex with. There are also wall-sized video screens, and everything is protected by personal (spoken) passwords and fingerprint scanners.
But the world of the film is largely recognizable, despite the high technology. Locations alternate between dense urban landscapes, with skyscrapers, anonymously bureaucratic offices and medical facilities, crowds, subways, and security checkpoints (these parts of the film were shot in Shanghai), and seemingly endless deserts (shot in Dubai). Like Godard’s Alphaville and Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, there’s no fancy F/X, but rather a sense of how the future is already immanent, and imminent, in the present of when the film was shot and first seen.
Winterbottom’s images are flat, with ambient lighting; the camera is often handheld, though less skittery than handheld camerawork often is. Everything in this world is polygot: the people are ethnically and racially mixed (though white privilege has clearly not been altogether effaced), whether the locale is supposed to be Shanghai, Seattle, or the Arabian peninsula, and they speak an English mixed with scraps of other languages (mostly Spanish and French, though Arabic and Mandarin are suggested as well). The music, usually warm techno, creates a dreamy ambiance, one of longing and semi-detachment: sadness filtered, softened, and distanced through a calming antidepressant haze, perhaps.
This is the same sense of floating displacement, the same wavering affect (partly calm and partly vaguely nostalgic, neither sincere nor ironic, but giving a sense that indifference has become a sort of engagement), that we get in other pomo/internationalist films, like Lost in Translation or Last Life in the Universe, or any number of films by the likes of Johnnie To and Wong Kar Wai and Shunji Iwai. Films like these are exploring, and articulating, the sensory feel, and the unfamiliar affects — at once frenzied and cool — of the new post-televisual, transnational multimediascape that we are starting to find ourselves living in.
Nomadic displacement is a positive condition in all these films — it is primary, rather than being seen as the negation of some supposed sense of place, or of rootedness.
What distinguishes Code 46 from these other films is that it shows how the “society of control” is inextricably interwoven with the sense of possibility that comes from decentered flows. For instance: access to everything is regulated by a series of personalizing markers (password, fingerprint, various sorts of permissions that can alter from one moment to the next –you are free to travel for the next 24 hours, but you will be blocked after that). These markers determine whether you can remain “inside” (in the metropolis) or whether you are relegated to the “outside” (which seems to be mostly desert. Inside is much more secure, and materially comfortable, than outside. But both inside and outside are nomadic and decentered, both seem to involve a life of slipping and sliding between alternatives, with nothing that is definitive. There’s a rigid binary, which is a real distinction, but the conditions on both sides of the binary are structurally homologous — both are exemplary instances of postmodern drift.
Genetics is the key to all this: it is the way people are coded. Travel restrictions have to do, for instance, with genetic susceptibility to various diseases that are dangers in various parts of the world. And most important, people with similar DNA are prohibited from having sex (the film is unclear when it comes to nonreproductive sex, whether this be because of contraception or because of same-sex encounters). The drama of Code 46 comes from the fact that the two protagonists (played by Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton), are genetic siblings even though they have never met before — their mothers were clones of each other.
It all works quite oddly in the film. Their life circumstances are so dissimilar, that it would seem their mutual attraction is due to the genetic similarity of which they are both unaware. Yet the film also implies that, due to this dissimilarity of backgrounds and characters, there is nothing psychologically incestuous about their relationship. Indeed, Code 46 seems absolutely devoid of any Freudian overtones (or undertones), even thought it is ultimately about incest. Which in itself is a remarkable accomplishment, suggesting how fully & successfully the film has thought itself into its “postmodern” sensibility.
Of course, this has to do not only with the look and feel of the film, but also with the characters of the protagonists. I adore Samantha Morton, and this film is no exception. The camera dwells on her face in closeup, but her face is too alien for this to work in the traditional “feminine mystique” kind of way. She seems alien, abstracted, withdrawn, as if all her attention were turned inwards, except that this “inwards” is nothing that I could possibly recognize by analogy with my own sense of interiority. She isn’t “mysterious” at all, but just sort of not there… elsewhere? or not anywhere? If anybody embodies a “posthuman” affect, simultaneously cool and intense, it is she. Watching her is like being somehow induced to empathize with something that is entirely beyond my (emotional or intellectual) comprehension. There is nothing blank about her; the blankness I feel watching her on screen is entirely mine.
Robbins, on the other hand, I usually do not like, and again Code 46 is no exception. Unlike Morton, he is all too comprehensible. He seems fussy and a bit condescending, and I’m not convinced that this is all because of the character he is trying to play. It’s as if he doesn’t really fit into this film, or into the world of this film. But perhaps this is the point. There’s absolutely no chemistry between him and Morton, despite the fact that we are supposed to see them as a doomed, tragic romantic couple. But this mismatching is not to the detriment of the film; it seems precisely right, for an emotional connection that isn’t “plausible,” and that isn’t explicable in terms of depth psychology, nor even in terms of unconscious kinship/similarity (nothing in the film makes them seem like siblings, any more than like amour fou lovers).
Not everything in Code 46 works; there are problems in terms of the plot, as well as in terms of certain aspects of the film’s world that are left overly vague. But the film does have an opacity, a kind of affectively charged resistance to the usual sorts of categorization, that I found powerful.
Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 is a film of sonic and visual textures. It’s science fiction, depicting a world in which genetic screening is the key to everything, including what jobs you can get, where and when you are permitted to travel, and — most important? — who you can have (reproductive) sex with. There are also wall-sized video screens, and everything is protected by personal (spoken) passwords and fingerprint scanners.
But the world of the film is largely recognizable, despite the high technology. Locations alternate between dense urban landscapes, with skyscrapers, anonymously bureaucratic offices and medical facilities, crowds, subways, and security checkpoints (these parts of the film were shot in Shanghai), and seemingly endless deserts (shot in Dubai). Like Godard’s Alphaville and Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, there’s no fancy F/X, but rather a sense of how the future is already immanent, and imminent, in the present of when the film was shot and first seen.
Winterbottom’s images are flat, with ambient lighting; the camera is often handheld, though less skittery than handheld camerawork often is. Everything in this world is polygot: the people are ethnically and racially mixed (though white privilege has clearly not been altogether effaced), whether the locale is supposed to be Shanghai, Seattle, or the Arabian peninsula, and they speak an English mixed with scraps of other languages (mostly Spanish and French, though Arabic and Mandarin are suggested as well). The music, usually warm techno, creates a dreamy ambiance, one of longing and semi-detachment: sadness filtered, softened, and distanced through a calming antidepressant haze, perhaps.
This is the same sense of floating displacement, the same wavering affect (partly calm and partly vaguely nostalgic, neither sincere nor ironic, but giving a sense that indifference has become a sort of engagement), that we get in other pomo/internationalist films, like Lost in Translation or Last Life in the Universe, or any number of films by the likes of Johnnie To and Wong Kar Wai and Shunji Iwai. Films like these are exploring, and articulating, the sensory feel, and the unfamiliar affects — at once frenzied and cool — of the new post-televisual, transnational multimediascape that we are starting to find ourselves living in.
Nomadic displacement is a positive condition in all these films — it is primary, rather than being seen as the negation of some supposed sense of place, or of rootedness.
What distinguishes Code 46 from these other films is that it shows how the “society of control” is inextricably interwoven with the sense of possibility that comes from decentered flows. For instance: access to everything is regulated by a series of personalizing markers (password, fingerprint, various sorts of permissions that can alter from one moment to the next –you are free to travel for the next 24 hours, but you will be blocked after that). These markers determine whether you can remain “inside” (in the metropolis) or whether you are relegated to the “outside” (which seems to be mostly desert. Inside is much more secure, and materially comfortable, than outside. But both inside and outside are nomadic and decentered, both seem to involve a life of slipping and sliding between alternatives, with nothing that is definitive. There’s a rigid binary, which is a real distinction, but the conditions on both sides of the binary are structurally homologous — both are exemplary instances of postmodern drift.
Genetics is the key to all this: it is the way people are coded. Travel restrictions have to do, for instance, with genetic susceptibility to various diseases that are dangers in various parts of the world. And most important, people with similar DNA are prohibited from having sex (the film is unclear when it comes to nonreproductive sex, whether this be because of contraception or because of same-sex encounters). The drama of Code 46 comes from the fact that the two protagonists (played by Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton), are genetic siblings even though they have never met before — their mothers were clones of each other.
It all works quite oddly in the film. Their life circumstances are so dissimilar, that it would seem their mutual attraction is due to the genetic similarity of which they are both unaware. Yet the film also implies that, due to this dissimilarity of backgrounds and characters, there is nothing psychologically incestuous about their relationship. Indeed, Code 46 seems absolutely devoid of any Freudian overtones (or undertones), even thought it is ultimately about incest. Which in itself is a remarkable accomplishment, suggesting how fully & successfully the film has thought itself into its “postmodern” sensibility.
Of course, this has to do not only with the look and feel of the film, but also with the characters of the protagonists. I adore Samantha Morton, and this film is no exception. The camera dwells on her face in closeup, but her face is too alien for this to work in the traditional “feminine mystique” kind of way. She seems alien, abstracted, withdrawn, as if all her attention were turned inwards, except that this “inwards” is nothing that I could possibly recognize by analogy with my own sense of interiority. She isn’t “mysterious” at all, but just sort of not there… elsewhere? or not anywhere? If anybody embodies a “posthuman” affect, simultaneously cool and intense, it is she. Watching her is like being somehow induced to empathize with something that is entirely beyond my (emotional or intellectual) comprehension. There is nothing blank about her; the blankness I feel watching her on screen is entirely mine.
Robbins, on the other hand, I usually do not like, and again Code 46 is no exception. Unlike Morton, he is all too comprehensible. He seems fussy and a bit condescending, and I’m not convinced that this is all because of the character he is trying to play. It’s as if he doesn’t really fit into this film, or into the world of this film. But perhaps this is the point. There’s absolutely no chemistry between him and Morton, despite the fact that we are supposed to see them as a doomed, tragic romantic couple. But this mismatching is not to the detriment of the film; it seems precisely right, for an emotional connection that isn’t “plausible,” and that isn’t explicable in terms of depth psychology, nor even in terms of unconscious kinship/similarity (nothing in the film makes them seem like siblings, any more than like amour fou lovers).
Not everything in Code 46 works; there are problems in terms of the plot, as well as in terms of certain aspects of the film’s world that are left overly vague. But the film does have an opacity, a kind of affectively charged resistance to the usual sorts of categorization, that I found powerful.
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was first published in 1927. Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality was first published in 1929. Two enormous philosophy books, almost exact contemporaries. Both responding to the situation (I’d rather not say crisis) of modernity, to the immensity of scientific and technological change, to the dissolution of old certainties, to the fast pace of life, to the massive reorganizations that followed the horrors of World War I. Both taking for granted the inexistence of foundations, not even yearning for them, or fixating on them as absent, but simply going on without concern over their absence. Both anti-essentialist, both anti-positivist, both working out new ways to think, to do philosophy, to exercise the faculty of wonder.
Yet how different these books are in concepts, in affect, in spirit (if I may use that word).
(I admit it: I am setting up an overdrawn, melodramatic confrontation, inspired no doubt by the recently released film Alien Vs. Predator, which I haven’t seen, as well as by the first episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy Vs. Dracula,” which I just watched on DVD).
I’ve long detested Heidegger, for a number of reasons. (Did I ever mention the academic conference where a militant Heideggerian, regarding me with the same scorn and disgust he would have shown if he had accidentally stepped into a pile of dog shit, told me with lofty condescension that my problem was that I was unwilling or unable to “patiently hearken to the voice of Being”?). Heidegger embodies for me, more than any other thinker in the Western tradition, what Nietzsche called the “spirit of gravity.” He’s heavy and morbid, without an ounce of humor or irony or even sense that we human beings are/have bodies. He picks up on the worst part of Nietzsche, the heavy-handed, pompous, self-obsessed, doom-laden, apocalyptic, romantic rhetoric — so stereotypically “Germanic” — of Zarathustra, but completely misses Nietzsche’s gaiety, sarcasm, “French” scepticism, and general sense of dancing over the abyss. I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger is worse: the existential part, all about authenticity and resoluteness and the earth and the dwelling and being-towards-death (i.e. the Nazi side), or the ontological part, with its endless dissection of concepts by returning to their etymological roots, its walking on forest paths, its idiotic hatred of technology, its mythology of (capital-L) Language, its waiting and hearkening, its twisting of its own formulations into an endless process of self-confirmation through self-undoing (i.e. the deconstructionist side).
Whitehead is different. His language is dry, gray, and highly abstract. (Occasionally a joke shimmers through, but rarely; you have to work hard in order to make it to the jokes; and as soon as you’ve gotten one, it is on to something else). But in this degree-zero, “academic,” fussy and almost pedantic prose, Whitehead is continually saying the most astonishing things. His “coldness” (in a Deleuzian sense) or “coolness” (in a McLuhaneque sense) or “neutrality” (in a Blanchotian sense) is in fact the enabling condition of his discourse: it is what permits him the freedom to analyze, to construct, to reorient, to switch direction, to re-ignite the philosophic sense of “wonder” at every step. Whitehead’s style is a kind of strategic counter-investment: it allows him to step away from his own particular passions and interests, without thereby falling into the pretense of a universal, above-it-all, higher knowledge. It’s a kind of detachment that continues to insist upon that from which we have become detached: particulars, singularities, perspectives that are always incomplete and partial (in both senses of this word: partial as opposed to whole, but also partial in the sense of partiality or bias). There is no universal, transcendent point in Whitehead’s cosmos; there are only partialities. But each of these partialities “transcends” all the others.
The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement. Whitehead’s neutral style is precisely a way of pointing out how everything is relative, without turning this observation (or really, a potentially infinite series of observations) into a universal.
Whitehead’s philosophy is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty. There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.
Whitehead doesn’t ask (as Heidegger does) “why is there something rather than nothing?” (which in itself, is the ultimately nihilistic question: since it is demanding a reason for existence itself, when it is only within existence, and from an existing standpoint, that questions of value and purpose make any sense), but rather: “how is it that there is always something new, rather than just the same old same-old?”. He doesn’t “hearken” to (genuflect before) Language, as Heidegger and his deconstructionist heirs are always doing, but rather notes language’s inadequacies alongside its unavoidability. He doesn’t yearn for a return before, or a leap beyond, metaphysics, but (much more subversively) just does metaphysics, inventing his own categories and working through his own problems, in order to make metaphysics speak what it has usually denied and rejected (the body, inconstancy and change, the relativeness of all perspectives and of all formulations). And he doesn’t “critique” the history of philosophy, but rather twists it in wonderfully ungainly ways, finding, for instance, arguments in Descartes that are themselves already the best response to Cartesian dualism, or anti-idealist moves in Plato.
Leibniz is the classical philosopher with whom Whitehead is most commonly compared. (Deleuze’s only extended discussion of Whitehead, for instance, takes place in a chapter of The Fold, his book on Leibniz); but there are ways in which Whitehead is actually more similar to Spinoza. More of this in a future posting.
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was first published in 1927. Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality was first published in 1929. Two enormous philosophy books, almost exact contemporaries. Both responding to the situation (I’d rather not say crisis) of modernity, to the immensity of scientific and technological change, to the dissolution of old certainties, to the fast pace of life, to the massive reorganizations that followed the horrors of World War I. Both taking for granted the inexistence of foundations, not even yearning for them, or fixating on them as absent, but simply going on without concern over their absence. Both anti-essentialist, both anti-positivist, both working out new ways to think, to do philosophy, to exercise the faculty of wonder.
Yet how different these books are in concepts, in affect, in spirit (if I may use that word).
(I admit it: I am setting up an overdrawn, melodramatic confrontation, inspired no doubt by the recently released film Alien Vs. Predator, which I haven’t seen, as well as by the first episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy Vs. Dracula,” which I just watched on DVD).
I’ve long detested Heidegger, for a number of reasons. (Did I ever mention the academic conference where a militant Heideggerian, regarding me with the same scorn and disgust he would have shown if he had accidentally stepped into a pile of dog shit, told me with lofty condescension that my problem was that I was unwilling or unable to “patiently hearken to the voice of Being”?). Heidegger embodies for me, more than any other thinker in the Western tradition, what Nietzsche called the “spirit of gravity.” He’s heavy and morbid, without an ounce of humor or irony or even sense that we human beings are/have bodies. He picks up on the worst part of Nietzsche, the heavy-handed, pompous, self-obsessed, doom-laden, apocalyptic, romantic rhetoric — so stereotypically “Germanic” — of Zarathustra, but completely misses Nietzsche’s gaiety, sarcasm, “French” scepticism, and general sense of dancing over the abyss. I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger is worse: the existential part, all about authenticity and resoluteness and the earth and the dwelling and being-towards-death (i.e. the Nazi side), or the ontological part, with its endless dissection of concepts by returning to their etymological roots, its walking on forest paths, its idiotic hatred of technology, its mythology of (capital-L) Language, its waiting and hearkening, its twisting of its own formulations into an endless process of self-confirmation through self-undoing (i.e. the deconstructionist side).
Whitehead is different. His language is dry, gray, and highly abstract. (Occasionally a joke shimmers through, but rarely; you have to work hard in order to make it to the jokes; and as soon as you’ve gotten one, it is on to something else). But in this degree-zero, “academic,” fussy and almost pedantic prose, Whitehead is continually saying the most astonishing things. His “coldness” (in a Deleuzian sense) or “coolness” (in a McLuhaneque sense) or “neutrality” (in a Blanchotian sense) is in fact the enabling condition of his discourse: it is what permits him the freedom to analyze, to construct, to reorient, to switch direction, to re-ignite the philosophic sense of “wonder” at every step. Whitehead’s style is a kind of strategic counter-investment: it allows him to step away from his own particular passions and interests, without thereby falling into the pretense of a universal, above-it-all, higher knowledge. It’s a kind of detachment that continues to insist upon that from which we have become detached: particulars, singularities, perspectives that are always incomplete and partial (in both senses of this word: partial as opposed to whole, but also partial in the sense of partiality or bias). There is no universal, transcendent point in Whitehead’s cosmos; there are only partialities. But each of these partialities “transcends” all the others.
The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement. Whitehead’s neutral style is precisely a way of pointing out how everything is relative, without turning this observation (or really, a potentially infinite series of observations) into a universal.
Whitehead’s philosophy is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty. There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.
Whitehead doesn’t ask (as Heidegger does) “why is there something rather than nothing?” (which in itself, is the ultimately nihilistic question: since it is demanding a reason for existence itself, when it is only within existence, and from an existing standpoint, that questions of value and purpose make any sense), but rather: “how is it that there is always something new, rather than just the same old same-old?”. He doesn’t “hearken” to (genuflect before) Language, as Heidegger and his deconstructionist heirs are always doing, but rather notes language’s inadequacies alongside its unavoidability. He doesn’t yearn for a return before, or a leap beyond, metaphysics, but (much more subversively) just does metaphysics, inventing his own categories and working through his own problems, in order to make metaphysics speak what it has usually denied and rejected (the body, inconstancy and change, the relativeness of all perspectives and of all formulations). And he doesn’t “critique” the history of philosophy, but rather twists it in wonderfully ungainly ways, finding, for instance, arguments in Descartes that are themselves already the best response to Cartesian dualism, or anti-idealist moves in Plato.
Leibniz is the classical philosopher with whom Whitehead is most commonly compared. (Deleuze’s only extended discussion of Whitehead, for instance, takes place in a chapter of The Fold, his book on Leibniz); but there are ways in which Whitehead is actually more similar to Spinoza. More of this in a future posting.
Paul Feyerabend‘s Against Method (originally published in 1975) is another one of those books I have been meaning to read for years, but never got around to before now. Feyerabend (1924-1994) was a philosopher of science, famous (or notorious) for his “epistemological anarchism,” his insistence that “the only principle” that can be justified for scientific research is that “anything goes.” I’ve turned to him no, partly out of my interest in science studies, and partly because I’m supposed to give a talk in a few months at a symposium on “foundations and methods in the humanities,” a task I am finding difficult because I have no belief in foundations, and little use for methodologies.
Feyerabend critiques and rejects the attempt — by philosophers of science, primarily, but also by popular apologists for science, and sometimes by scientists themselves — to establish norms and criteria to govern the way science works, and to establish what practices and results are valid for scientific research. Feyerabend’s particular target is Karl Popper’s doctrine of “falsification,” but more generally he opposes any a priori attempt to legislate what can and cannot be done in science.
Feyerabend’s argument is partly “deconstructive” (by which I mean he showed how rationalist arguments were necessarily internally inconsistent and incoherent — though he does not seem to have much use for Derridean deconstruction as a philosophy), and partly historical and sociological. He argues that actual scientific practice did not, does not, and indeed cannot, make use of the rationalist norms that philosophers of science, and ideologists of science, have proclaimed. He analyzes Galileo’s defense of heliocentrism at great length, and shows that Galileo’s arguments were riddled with non sequiturs, loose analogies, ad hoc assumptions, self-contradictory and easily falsifiable assertions, rhetorical grandstanding, and so on. The point is not to undermine Galileo, or to assert that there are no grounds for choosing between seeing the earth and the sun as the center. Rather, Feyerabend wants to show that such (disreputable) strategies were strictly necessary; without them, Copernicus and Galileo never could have overthrown the earth-centered view, which had both the theoretical knowledge and the “common sense” of their time, as well as the authority of the Church, on their side. It was not a matter of a “more accurate” theory displacing a less accurate one; but rather, a radical shift of paradigms, one which could only be accomplished by violently disrupting both accepted truths and accepted procedures. It is only in the hundreds of years after Galileo convinced the world of the heliocentric theory, that the empirical evidence backing up the theory was generated and catalogued.
Feyerabend is drawing, of course, on Thomas Kuhn’s work on “paradigm shifts,” but he is pushing it in a much more radical direction than Kuhn would accept. Kuhn distinguishes between “normal science,” when generally accepted research programs and paradigms are in place, and rationalistic criteria do in fact function, and times of crisis, when paradigms break down under the weight of accumulating anomalies, thus forcing scientists to cast about for a new paradigm. For Feyerabend, however, there is no “normal science.” There was no crisis, or weight of anomalies, that forced Copernicus and then Galileo to cast about for a new astronomical paradigm; it would be more to the point to say that Galileo deliberately and artificially created a crisis, in order to undermine a paradigm that was generally accepted and that worked well, and put in its place a new paradigm that he supported more out of passion and intuition than out of anything like solid empirical evidence. Because “facts” are never independent of social contexts and theoretical assumptions, Galileo could not have provoked a shift in the theoretical assumptions of his time merely by appealing to what were understood then as the “facts.”
Such an argument was quite shocking in 1975. It has become much less so in the years since, as rhetorical theorists, sociologists, and others in “science studies” have studied in great depth the way science actually works, and have contested many other instances of (capital-S) Science and (capital-R) Reason on historical and sociological grounds.
There remains a subtle but important difference, however, between Feyerabend and more recent science studies historians and thinkers like Bruno Latour, Stephen Shapin, Steve Fuller, and many others. Feyerabend justifies his “epistemological anarchism” on the ground that it is necessary for the actual, successful practice of science, and indeed for the “progress” of science — though he explicitly refuses (page 18) to define what he means by “progress.” What this means is that Feyerabend opposes methodological norms and fixed principles of validation largely on pragmatic grounds : which I do not think is quite true of Latour et al. Where Latour sees a long process of negotiation, and a “settlement,” between Pasteur and the bacilli he was studying, Feyerabend doesn’t see Galileo (or Einstein, for that matter) in engaging in any such process vis-a-vis the earth, or the sun, or the universe. Instead, he sees them as blithely ignoring rules of evidence and of verification or falsification, in order to impose radically new perspectives (less upon the world than upon their own cultures). Galileo’s and Einstein’s justification is that their proposals indeed worked, and were accepted; this is what separates them from crackpots, though no criteria existed that could have assured these successes in advance.
What I don’t see enough of in contemporary science studies — though one finds it in Deleuze and Guattari, in Isabelle Stengers, and in the work of my friend Richard Doyle — is Feyerabend’s sense of the kinship between scientific and aesthetic creativity, in that both are engaged in creating the very criteria according to which they will be judged.
More generally, Feyerabend, like Latour and other more recent science studies thinkers, is deeply concerned with democracy, and with the way that the imperialism of Big Science threatens democracy by trying to decree that its Way is the Only Way. Indeed, one probably sees more of this threat today — in the “science wars” that reached a flash point in the mid 1990s, but that are still smouldering, in the popularization of science, and in the pronouncements of biologists like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists like Steven Weinberg and Alan Sokal — than one did when Feyerabend was writing Against Method. But Feyerabend wisely refuses to get lost (as I fear Latour does at times) in the attempt to propose an alternative “settlement” or “constitution” to the one that Big Science has proclaimed for itself. Feyerabend’s genial anarchism, pluralism, and “relativism” (a term he accepts, but only in certain carefully outlined contexts) simply precludes the need for any single alternative account, such as the one Latour struggles to provide. Finally, for Feyerabend, there is no such thing as Science; we should rather speak of the sciences, as a multitude of often conflicting and contradictory practices, none of which can pretend to ultimate authority, and all of which have to be judged and dealt with according to a range of needs, interests, and contexts.
Pluralism is often derided as wishy-washy, wimpy, “soft,” unwilling to take a stand. None of this is true of Feyerabend’s pluralism, though I am not sure how much of his exemption from such charges is due to the rigor of his arguments, and how much to the charm of his rhetorical style — he’s an engaging, inviting, and unaffected writer, able to be clear and focused without becoming simplistic, and able to argue complexly without becoming abstruse. Of course, the attempt to separate logical rigor from stylistic effects is precisely the sort of pseudo-rational distinction that Feyerabend is continually warning us against.
Paul Feyerabend‘s Against Method (originally published in 1975) is another one of those books I have been meaning to read for years, but never got around to before now. Feyerabend (1924-1994) was a philosopher of science, famous (or notorious) for his “epistemological anarchism,” his insistence that “the only principle” that can be justified for scientific research is that “anything goes.” I’ve turned to him now, partly out of my interest in science studies, and partly because I’m supposed to give a talk in a few months at a symposium on “foundations and methods in the humanities,” a task I am finding difficult because I have no belief in foundations, and little use for methodologies.
Feyerabend critiques and rejects the attempt — by philosophers of science, primarily, but also by popular apologists for science, and sometimes by scientists themselves — to establish norms and criteria to govern the way science works, and to establish what practices and results are valid for scientific research. Feyerabend’s particular target is Karl Popper’s doctrine of “falsification,” but more generally he opposes any a priori attempt to legislate what can and cannot be done in science.
Feyerabend’s argument is partly “deconstructive” (by which I mean he showed how rationalist arguments were necessarily internally inconsistent and incoherent — though he does not seem to have much use for Derridean deconstruction as a philosophy), and partly historical and sociological. He argues that actual scientific practice did not, does not, and indeed cannot, make use of the rationalist norms that philosophers of science, and ideologists of science, have proclaimed. He analyzes Galileo’s defense of heliocentrism at great length, and shows that Galileo’s arguments were riddled with non sequiturs, loose analogies, ad hoc assumptions, self-contradictory and easily falsifiable assertions, rhetorical grandstanding, and so on. The point is not to undermine Galileo, or to assert that there are no grounds for choosing between seeing the earth and the sun as the center. Rather, Feyerabend wants to show that such (disreputable) strategies were strictly necessary; without them, Copernicus and Galileo never could have overthrown the earth-centered view, which had both the theoretical knowledge and the “common sense” of their time, as well as the authority of the Church, on their side. It was not a matter of a “more accurate” theory displacing a less accurate one; but rather, a radical shift of paradigms, one which could only be accomplished by violently disrupting both accepted truths and accepted procedures. It is only in the hundreds of years after Galileo convinced the world of the heliocentric theory, that the empirical evidence backing up the theory was generated and catalogued.
Feyerabend is drawing, of course, on Thomas Kuhn’s work on “paradigm shifts,” but he is pushing it in a much more radical direction than Kuhn would accept. Kuhn distinguishes between “normal science,” when generally accepted research programs and paradigms are in place, and rationalistic criteria do in fact function, and times of crisis, when paradigms break down under the weight of accumulating anomalies, thus forcing scientists to cast about for a new paradigm. For Feyerabend, however, there is no “normal science.” There was no crisis, or weight of anomalies, that forced Copernicus and then Galileo to cast about for a new astronomical paradigm; it would be more to the point to say that Galileo deliberately and artificially created a crisis, in order to undermine a paradigm that was generally accepted and that worked well, and put in its place a new paradigm that he supported more out of passion and intuition than out of anything like solid empirical evidence. Because “facts” are never independent of social contexts and theoretical assumptions, Galileo could not have provoked a shift in the theoretical assumptions of his time merely by appealing to what were understood then as the “facts.”
Such an argument was quite shocking in 1975. It has become much less so in the years since, as rhetorical theorists, sociologists, and others in “science studies” have studied in great depth the way science actually works, and have contested many other instances of (capital-S) Science and (capital-R) Reason on historical and sociological grounds.
There remains a subtle but important difference, however, between Feyerabend and more recent science studies historians and thinkers like Bruno Latour, Stephen Shapin, Steve Fuller, and many others. Feyerabend justifies his “epistemological anarchism” on the ground that it is necessary for the actual, successful practice of science, and indeed for the “progress” of science — though he explicitly refuses (page 18) to define what he means by “progress.” What this means is that Feyerabend opposes methodological norms and fixed principles of validation largely on pragmatic grounds : which I do not think is quite true of Latour et al. Where Latour sees a long process of negotiation, and a “settlement,” between Pasteur and the bacilli he was studying, Feyerabend doesn’t see Galileo (or Einstein, for that matter) in engaging in any such process vis-a-vis the earth, or the sun, or the universe. Instead, he sees them as blithely ignoring rules of evidence and of verification or falsification, in order to impose radically new perspectives (less upon the world than upon their own cultures). Galileo’s and Einstein’s justification is that their proposals indeed worked, and were accepted; this is what separates them from crackpots, though no criteria existed that could have assured these successes in advance.
What I don’t see enough of in contemporary science studies — though one finds it in Deleuze and Guattari, in Isabelle Stengers, and in the work of my friend Richard Doyle — is Feyerabend’s sense of the kinship between scientific and aesthetic creativity, in that both are engaged in creating the very criteria according to which they will be judged.
More generally, Feyerabend, like Latour and other more recent science studies thinkers, is deeply concerned with democracy, and with the way that the imperialism of Big Science threatens democracy by trying to decree that its Way is the Only Way. Indeed, one probably sees more of this threat today — in the “science wars” that reached a flash point in the mid 1990s, but that are still smouldering, in the popularization of science, and in the pronouncements of biologists like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists like Steven Weinberg and Alan Sokal — than one did when Feyerabend was writing Against Method. But Feyerabend wisely refuses to get lost (as I fear Latour does at times) in the attempt to propose an alternative “settlement” or “constitution” to the one that Big Science has proclaimed for itself. Feyerabend’s genial anarchism, pluralism, and “relativism” (a term he accepts, but only in certain carefully outlined contexts) simply precludes the need for any single alternative account, such as the one Latour struggles to provide. Finally, for Feyerabend, there is no such thing as Science; we should rather speak of the sciences, as a multitude of often conflicting and contradictory practices, none of which can pretend to ultimate authority, and all of which have to be judged and dealt with according to a range of needs, interests, and contexts.
Pluralism is often derided as wishy-washy, wimpy, “soft,” unwilling to take a stand. None of this is true of Feyerabend’s pluralism, though I am not sure how much of his exemption from such charges is due to the rigor of his arguments, and how much to the charm of his rhetorical style — he’s an engaging, inviting, and unaffected writer, able to be clear and focused without becoming simplistic, and able to argue complexly without becoming abstruse. Of course, the attempt to separate logical rigor from stylistic effects is precisely the sort of pseudo-rational distinction that Feyerabend is continually warning us against.
Jim Carrey doesn’t really cover any new ground in Bruce Almighty (2003), but the film reaffirms the comedic genius that was his in the first place. The film marks Carrey’s return to the bread-and-butter that originally made him famous, in contrast to his more “serious” efforts to extend his acting range (which efforts have varied from the dismal —The Majestic — to the utterly sublime — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Given divine powers, Carrey’s character Bruce (a disgruntled TV news reporter) goes off on a power binge whose utter narcissism is only matched by its infantile pettiness and lack of imagination. Unable to conceive the divine decadence of a Nero, Caligula, or Heliogabalus, Bruce contents himself with driving a new sports car, parting the Red Sea (a la Cecil B. DeMille) in a plate of tomato soup, and getting revenge by pulling a monkey out of a bully’s ass and causing his newsroom rival to babble as if he had breathed in a tankful of helium. Never has self-indulgence been so lacking in grandiosity. Bruce doesn’t have the manic energy of Ace Ventura; but like Ace and so many other Carrey characters, he is driven by an unconscious whose sole contents seem to be fifty years of television. No wonder the urges that roil in his raging id are nothing more than cheap special effects and lame one-liners. Above all, Bruce is characterized — like so many other Carrey personae — by a cringe-worthy need to ingratiate himself with everyone, and especially with his stereotypically whiny and long-suffering girlfriend (a role played, appropriately enough, by the sitcom queen herself, Jennifer Aniston).
I suppose my remarks are sufficiently snide that they could be read, in Adornoesque fashion, as a critique of the terminal mediocrity of American popular culture (a culture that is basically televisual, even when it is being enacted in the movies). But I don’t mean it that way at all. There is nothing mediocre about Jim Carrey. If you ignore the sappy moralizing and self-congratulatory complacency in which Bruce Almighty is wrapped, and focus just on Carrey’s physical and verbal performance, you will find it (as always, when he does comedy) utterly astonishing. It’s a miracle of embodiment. Every grimace, every twitch, every inflection, every pause conveys the predicament of the character — his narcissism without a self to be narcissistic about, his desire for recognition by others without any sense of otherness to pin that desire onto, the utter saturation of his inner experience by bland, public generalities: in short, the predicament of the quintessential postmodern “man without qualities” — every grimace, twitch, inflection, and pause of Carrey’s incarnates this predicament with energy, grace, intensity, and precision: so that nothing could be more profound and singular than the utter absence of depth and singularity that Carrey is depicting.
“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise” (Blake).
Jim Carrey doesn’t really cover any new ground in Bruce Almighty (2003), but the film reaffirms the comedic genius that was his in the first place. The film marks Carrey’s return to the bread-and-butter that originally made him famous, in contrast to his more “serious” efforts to extend his acting range (which efforts have varied from the dismal —The Majestic — to the utterly sublime — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Given divine powers, Carrey’s character Bruce (a disgruntled TV news reporter) goes off on a power binge whose utter narcissism is only matched by its infantile pettiness and lack of imagination. Unable to conceive the divine decadence of a Nero, Caligula, or Heliogabalus, Bruce contents himself with driving a new sports car, parting the Red Sea (a la Cecil B. DeMille) in a plate of tomato soup, and getting revenge by pulling a monkey out of a bully’s ass and causing his newsroom rival to babble as if he had breathed in a tankful of helium. Never has self-indulgence been so lacking in grandiosity. Bruce doesn’t have the manic energy of Ace Ventura; but like Ace and so many other Carrey characters, he is driven by an unconscious whose sole contents seem to be fifty years of television. No wonder the urges that roil in his raging id are nothing more than cheap special effects and lame one-liners. Above all, Bruce is characterized — like so many other Carrey personae — by a cringe-worthy need to ingratiate himself with everyone, and especially with his stereotypically whiny and long-suffering girlfriend (a role played, appropriately enough, by the sitcom queen herself, Jennifer Aniston).
I suppose my remarks are sufficiently snide that they could be read, in Adornoesque fashion, as a critique of the terminal mediocrity of American popular culture (a culture that is basically televisual, even when it is being enacted in the movies). But I don’t mean it that way at all. There is nothing mediocre about Jim Carrey. If you ignore the sappy moralizing and self-congratulatory complacency in which Bruce Almighty is wrapped, and focus just on Carrey’s physical and verbal performance, you will find it (as always, when he does comedy) utterly astonishing. It’s a miracle of embodiment. Every grimace, every twitch, every inflection, every pause conveys the predicament of the character — his narcissism without a self to be narcissistic about, his desire for recognition by others without any sense of otherness to pin that desire onto, the utter saturation of his inner experience by bland, public generalities: in short, the predicament of the quintessential postmodern “man without qualities” — every grimace, twitch, inflection, and pause of Carrey’s incarnates this predicament with energy, grace, intensity, and precision: so that nothing could be more profound and singular than the utter absence of depth and singularity that Carrey is depicting.
“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise” (Blake).