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The Love of Argument: A Response to Michael Bérubé

(x-posted to The Valve)

In this essay, I want to offer a response to Bérubé’s new book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts, rather than writing a review. My review is quite simple: if you are an academic, or are concerned about the prominence of left-wing politics in college humanities courses, you should read Bérubé’s book. It is a decisive refutation of David Horowitz’s charges, and (as others have written) a marvelous account of how English professors actually teach their courses.

In my response to Bérubé, I will focus on the fact that Bérubé considers himself to have a vested interest in argument qua argument, and specifically in the continuance of certain political debates that have a long history in the United States. Bérubé’s love of argument is representative of a widespread trend in both academia and the blogosphere. In my opinion, this bodes ill. Argumentation is a regrettable means, not an end; believing otherwise leads one to fetishize intelligence, misinterpret opponents, maintain incompatible ideas, and worse.

I will try to outline, briefly, a different account of what should be liberal about the liberal arts.

* * *

Bérubé opens his book with a story about a volatile student named John, who became increasingly outspoken about his conservative beliefs over the course of a class on postmodern literature.

John’s story begins when Bérubé is explaining the historical context for a reference (in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo) to something resembling the Black Muslim movement. Bérubé lectures on the comparisons that were made between the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Nation of Islam, and John responds by “snorting loudly and derisively” (2). John exclaims, “That’s completely ridiculous!” (2). The class ignores this outburst, but Bérubé initiates a conversation with John after class, correctly intuiting that he is smoldering about the incident.

John tells Bérubé that “membership in the American community requires one to subordinate his or her ethnic or national origin” (2). Bérubé responds,

Your position has a long and distinguished history in debates over immigration and national identity. It’s part of the current critique of multiculturalism, and to a point I have some sympathy with it, because I don’t think that social contracts should be based on cultural homogeneity.

The problem with seeking John out, and re-assuring him in this way, is that Bérubé is unwittingly misunderstanding John. Bérubé sees John as a representative of a “long and distinguished” position in debates over the social contract, which means that he is thinking of John as an unliving piece of discourse. The proof that he has started to think of John this way is his response: “I don’t think that social contracts should be based on cultural homogeneity.” This is not extemporaneous speaking. Bérubé has clearly pondered this issue, and winnowed his thinking down to one dense nugget that already takes John’s views somewhat into account. The problem is that John probably can’t scan this pre-fabricated statement, and moreover he isn’t going to lie there passively like some library copy of Edmund Burke. As far as John is concerned, the time to overthrow identity politics is right now — and not to Bérubé’s well-considered liking, either, but in toto. Thus, all John takes away from their conversation is the idea that he was right to feel aggrieved.

Bérubé says as much:

We parted amicably, and I thought that though he wasn’t about to agree with me on this one, we had, at least, made our arguments intelligible to each other [...] But the dynamic of the class had been changed. From that day forward, John spoke up often, sometimes loudly, sometimes out of turn [...] he occasionally spoke as if he were entitled to reply to every other student’s comment—in a class of seventeen. (5)

Bérubé spends the rest of the term doing damage control. He has to use all sorts of subtle devices, often behind John’s back, in order to make the course valuable to the rest of the students without making John feel oppressed. I admire Bérubé’s resourcefulness as a teacher and his obvious compassion for his students. However, I think the problems John created were an inevitable result of the disconnect between John’s world, in which one argues to win, and Bérubé’s world, in which one argues merely to make one’s arguments intelligible.

Bérubé elaborates on this criterion of mere intelligibility a little later in the book, when he goes into an extended analysis of the discussion of foot massages in Pulp Fiction. Jules and Vincent argue about whether a foot massage is sufficient grounds for “Marsellus to throw Antwan off a building into a glass-mutherfuckin-house, fuckin’ up the way the nigger talks” (from Bérubé’s quotation from the film on 234). Vincent, having just trapped Jules into admitting that he (Jules) wouldn’t give a man a foot massage, goes on to explain the hidden sexuality of foot massages. Jules responds, “That’s an interesting point.”

Bérubé’s take on this is crucial:

I acknowledge that Jules’s is not the most eloquent of demurrals/deferrals [...] Yet in one way it is superior [...] for it leaves open the possibility that Jules himself may be mistaken; he is not convinced by Vincent’s argument, but he has understood it as an argument, and he appears to have taken it under advisement. (235)

Bérubé is doing two things here. First, he is showing us how Vincent uses Jules’s heterosexuality (and possible homophobia) to make Jules admit something about foot massages. That is a perfectly good example of what we might call an “immanent” form of argumentation. Second, he is demonstrating his approval of the scene’s open-ended resolution. Unfortunately, though, we really have no idea whether Jules’s comment means a) that Jules now agrees with Vincent, but is saving face, or b) that he can’t think of how to argue back, but isn’t going to change his mind. Bérubé’s comment on the scene allows (b) total legitimacy, since all Jules is really required to do is understand Vincent’s argument “as an argument.” In that case, the two positions become something like complementary tiles in a mosaic of argument, rooted perhaps in the differing, contingent histories of Vincent and Jules. (Also, Bérubé is so intent on preserving them in direct opposition to one another, that he doesn’t ask whether Jules may be talking about a reasonable standard of punishment in addition to doubting whether a foot massage is sexual. The two characters may be talking right past each other as much as arguing.)

Thus the romanticization of argument leads to an aesthetics of ambivalence. Bérubé models this kind of ambivalence in his own discussion of William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham. Bérubé, after asking his students a series of questions about their sympathies, find that they are

basically echoing Silas Lapham’s ambivalence about society and culture (or, if you like, its contradictions), endorsing both the novel’s portrait of social mobility and its image of simple country people with their simple country culture. Very well, so they find Howells’s account of Silas more compelling than mine. That’s understandable: Silas is Howells’s creation, not mine. (157)

This is just to Bérubé’s taste: he is at odds with his class, the novel is at odds with itself, and Howells too is “rather ambivalent” (157). He concludes, “That’s why I think this is so fascinating a book” (158).

“Interesting” is a more common term in academia than “fascinating,” but the purpose of the two words is the same: to put an end to discussions without resolving them, as though one had a personal stake in seeing both sides of every argument persist.

The political consequences of this position are fairly predictable. Bérubé writes,

I often wish I had more conservative colleagues in literary study. I’m serious about this. I don’t mind in the least having substantial political disagreements with colleagues, just so long as they’re smart colleagues who hit the rhetorical ball back over the net with gusto and topspin. (83)

Bérubé is trying to assert his solidarity with “conservative American economists who believe in honest budgets and honest business practices” and “conservative American environmentalists who respect scientific evidence,” but finds that almost none exist. He doesn’t examine the possibility that (for example) the contradictions between conservative notions of self-determination, and environmentalist warnings about global warming and etc., are becoming too great for these amiable instances of self-limiting conservatism to survive. Similarly, he sees no contradiction between embracing the free market, as conservatives do, and shunning the sort of practices that enriched the executives at Enron.

As with the student John, the problem here is seeing discourses like “conservatism” as static objects with an enlivening role to play in the tennis game of democratic debate. In fact, as globalized markets become more and more competitive, and environmental pressures become increasingly severe, the right wing responds dynamically to protect its core values, and the resurgence of the far right in the United States is part of that response. Thus the shift further right isn’t just an outbreak of lunacy, as Bérubé (quoting Brian Leiter on “bonkers” Republicanism) seems to want to believe.

I have no interest whatsoever in seeing right-wing positions (say, for example, the “flat-rate” income tax, or the privatization of social services) preserved out of respect for their long and distinguished histories. I am only willing, as a private citizen, to continue to participate civilly in debates over taxes, social services, abortion, etc., because it is my hope that these debates will one day be ended, replaced by a steady state of reasonable policy and maximal human welfare.

This desire for an eventual political consensus may strike Bérubé as a textbook Habermasian fantasy. I would counter that the fantasies of his text are much less appealing. Occasionally, the text desires its own defeat, as when Bérubé spends a great deal of time applying Richard Rorty to politics and academia, only to allow a student who finds Rorty incoherent to claim the last word.

Bérubé also seems to countenance some kind of forcible solution to an argumentative impasse: this is a fantasy of cutting the Gordian knot, as Mia Wallace does when she dismisses the debate between Vincent and Jules. Bérubé talks both about Harrison Ford shooting an adversary in Raiders of the Lost Ark, instead of fencing with him, and of potentially excluding Hitler from the roundtable of liberal discussion. I think it is reasonable to claim that the Habermasian fantasy of consensus gives one more patience in looking for the kind of loophole Vincent exploits with Jules, no matter how dogmatic or dangerous the opponent.

I should add that I see definitive limits on the amount of “intelligence” one can muster in defense of right-wing arguments, since they always reason from false premises. I write this with a wincing awareness that it shows some disrespect to conservatives. I apologize for that, because this isn’t the forum for arguing the specifics of the issues. I am just very disturbed by the genteel notions of abstract “smartness” which have replaced other ideas of what literature and criticism can be and do, and which have prevailed because abstractable “intelligence” fits in with the valorization of argument as a permanent condition. The demand for originality can be just as good a goad as the experience of opposition — a better one, even, if the opposition reasons poorly.

* * *

As a teacher of English, I intend neither to protect students like Bérubé’s John, nor to impose upon them a set of contrasting views. My problem with John’s remark (“That’s ridiculous!”) has already been discussed somewhat by Dr. Virago. “That’s ridiculous” isn’t a reading of the text. What Bérubé calls the “capaciousness and uncontainable mimesis” (11) of literary study seems to me to be the standard for objectivity in professors and students alike. Ideally, John’s frustration with identitarian positions would lead him to the fact that “reductive brand[s] of nationalism [are] ultimately undermined in the course of the narrative” (2), and pursuing this thread would ultimately make him a good reader and a more insightful observer of situations beyond the text.

I would have no difficulty teaching a poetry course exclusively on Alexander Pope, T. S. Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, if some rationale for such a course existed. I would trust my students to discover Pope’s critique of the cult of virginity, Eliot’s hatred of the consequences of mechanized war, and Tennyson’s occasional outbursts against the bourgeois. In other words, I would trust that mimetic readings, and the exchange of views in the classroom, would produce the sorts of sympathies that Bérubé advocates in Rortian terms for his son and for all people. If one of my students chose to write about Eliot’s “crisis of faith,” with its potentially conservative implications, I would have no problem accepting her argument. The contexts Eliot provides justify his journey to faith in a manner incommensurate with the Left Behind series. If this throws us back upon the thorny problem of selecting a canon, so be it. I would rather face that problem, than the task of treating the political views of myself and my students as complementary aesthetic objects.

I am not suggesting that something like “Eliot’s hatred of the consequences of mechanized war” is a particularly interesting reading of Eliot. However, my definition of “interesting” involves a closer, more daring exposition of some feature of the text, one that still never loses touch with its most blatant properties. It has nothing to do with creating irresolvable arguments about Eliot. Bérubé wants to leave Howells at the point where the contradictions of Silas Lapham are at their most fascinating, whereas I want to see whether students can move towards interpretations that make sense out of an apparent muddle. If their sympathies are really with Howells’s Silas, and not Bérubé’s, let them prove that the value of his text lies in its ability to reconcile the apparently opposite modes of pastoral rurality and social climbing, in ways that go deeper than the overt marriage plot.

Literature is a site for the expansion of sympathy; as a statement, that is nothing new. As a phenomenon, it is one of the more rewarding things a teacher can observe in her students. Literature is something else as well. The suspension of the self necessary for the best mimetic readings (as well as the best intellectual work period) is, in the case of literature, also a very subtle elucidation of the self. John might have achieved this sort of subtlety studying how <i>Mumbo Jumbo</i> subverts the identitarian nationalisms he despises. Therefore literary studies can be a proving-ground for a more familiar synthesis of selflessness and enlightened self-interest – the realization that I am one among many, but no less than that. That realization has always been the firmest ground of support for policies that promote the common weal.

Promoting academic blogging at the MLA

Scott Kaufman at Acephalous has asked us to keep a series of links to a post (which is exclusively about this experiment) moving through the blogosphere, radiating out from Acephalous.

He’s calling this a “meme.” In my opinion, it’s not so much a meme (which I associate with catch-phrases, faddish ideas, and the like), as one way of proving how far across the web the work of academic bloggers actually goes. The results will be part of a presentation at MLA. That is, I think, worth proving, if you do any blogging on matters like poetry, feminism, liberal politics, or other things that intersect with ye olde academy.

Tag, you’re it! (Also I want to know whether you think storms are “cool or scary,” and what you want for Christmas. I think they’re cool, and I want some new shoes.)

All necessary steps provided below. (The numbered section is actually Scott, not me.)

1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I’m one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)
3. Ping Techorati.

Cheers.

A Conversation with Bill Viola?

(The following is a transcript of a fictional conversation between myself, and an aging video artist by the name of Bill Viola. Any similarity between this character and the actual living artist Bill Viola is purely coincidental, and you should have your imagination examined by professionals if you even think you’ve found one.)

Me: Hi, Bill. Thanks for joining us today at the Kugelmass Episodes.

Bill: Sure thing, Kugelmass. It’s a pleasure not being here. Heck, you probably don’t know if I’m even alive. Which isn’t funny — death, I mean. I had a cousin and that’s what killed him.

Me: Well said, Bill. We do need to start re-considering American val–

Bill: Did you even look me up on Wikipedia?

Me: Bill, would you say that your art is sort of hippie-ish?

Bill: Yes, I would. I’m constantly making four hundred minute movies that show a person, and then show molten steel being smashed into a shape, and then back to the person, except now they’re having open heart surgery. I also have one where the camera zooms in on a woman until we’re inside of her near her heart, looking at some sort of moving light, and that light turns out to be loud rushing water moving down a white-mist cataract — waterfall, I mean. Also I have a movie where naked people suddenly appear in a very green, mossy pool that appears to be where elves swim. Trees surrounding, neutral lighting. Focus in on THE POOL. We see an elf in the corner — or do we? But back to the first movie, the woman is drinking a glass of water. So obviously we are working with something both inner and outer, here — the life-force, if that doesn’t sound too corny.

Me: Bill, that sounds awfully similar to what I saw this weekend in Oakland. I also remember seeing a huge still image of a redwood tree in one of your movies.

Bill: Yes, I think a lot of the pleasure comes from seeing places that you’d like to be, such as deep in the forest, or perched over a beautiful waterfall. But really, what you are desiring there is a re-connection with a primal self.

Me: Do you think children understand your work?

Bill: Not really, because children have trouble seeing something as part of a series. For example, an eight-year old was seeing my movies next to you, in the company of her grandmother. Every time I’d show an oil refinery, she’d burst out with: “What’s that?!” It was new and exciting to her, which was exactly what I didn’t want. I wanted soul-killing repetition.

Me: Is it true that you made a twenty minute film about the numbering, freezing, sawing, and processing of tuna?

Bill: That’s right. I also tried to create a very annoying sound for the film, as though a hundred metal saws were crying for freedom. But mostly you’re looking at these tuna getting sawed in slow motion. As my friend Steven Soderbergh said–

Me: Would you say this exhibit made me want to hit you very slowly, perhaps in slow motion?

Bill: Yes, because I have essentially taken the ideas of a stoner, which is that we are one with nature and thus should spend more time camping, and turned them into something highly symbolic and practically motionless.

Me: What is it about the avant-garde that makes the idea of “nothing happening” appear so attractive?

Bill: The absence of a controlling narrative. What we see in Hollywood flattens every movie experience into the tedious expectation of a resolved plot. When plot dominates, we start waiting for the end and wishing the movie could advance even faster, even though that also means it will be all “used up.” Some of my friends don’t watch anything at regular speed anymore; they’ll watch two movies in the time it takes me to watch half an hour of one film, including breaks to write notes and poems.

Me (voice-over): I walked home that evening. People were rushing by me, bumping me with their holiday shopping bags. For six hours, I stood watching the Empire State Building. I felt incredibly depressed by its silence. I thought about all the times I’d gone rushing up to the top of that building without really seeing it, just in order to throw something from the observation deck. Then I left to go see an Andy Warhol movie, and I thought all about my conversation with Bill Viola.

Ethics and Melodrama 2: The Last Stand

Happy Thanksgiving! I am full of foods which you might already be able to guess (except for the pomegranate seeds), and am seriously considering, partly on the basis of today and partly on the basis of the weekend, starting a blog which would be not so much about cooking food as about the experience of eating it, bad food included. I would have a wonderful literary precedent in the novel Dead Souls, which (I’ll save you the trouble) defaults to descriptions of fine eatin’ whenever Gogol runs out of plot.

However, unlike Nikolai Gogol, we here at the Kugelmass Episodes have plenty to chew on: namely, the responses to my earlier post, entitled “Ethics and Melodrama.” You may wonder, since the very question of ethics amidst modernity has clearly been raised, whether it is worthwhile to begin this post by talking about food. I apologize for having digression on my mind; you see, I’ve just finished watching the soggy movie version of Tristram Shandy, and it’s reminding me that, in addition to the talent for digression which old writers like Sterne possessed, they had a talent for the easy admission that where art is, life is elsewhere; in Sterne, as in Montaigne, we hear a constant refrain that the soberest and most admirable product of inductive reasoning, the ethical absolute, looks wonderful on the page but does little in real life.

Therefore I will try to expose the places where my reasoning is in tension. These tensions — perhaps “attempts at balance” is a more cheerful description — seem like a productive alternative to absolutes.

Miso writes that the anxiety expressed in the epigraph (from My Dinner with Andre) is something that she “happen(s) to find every cute, in that miserable existential way reminiscent of ‘cute’ misanthropes. I don’t know what context it was in though. You have to admit that these sorts of characters are ripe for poking fun at. It’s also a luxury. A damn luxury to fucking worry about whether you’re a sham.”

I disagree with this, although I share miso’s affection for thoughtful misanthropes. Art is indispensable; the questions that haunt an examined life are indispensable. First of all, you cannot find a culture anywhere that exists without the superfluities of culture; it is provably a mistake to believe that poorer people do not have pieces of music and sculpture that seem transcendent to them, or that they never stop to ask themselves questions about the relation of their life to their values.

The reason we gravitate towards this belief — in the luxury of fundamental questions — is our dim, uneasy awareness of life as it is lived by the poor, particularly in third world countries where there is practically no exception to poverty. I have seen a slideshow, courtesy of the New York Times, where I saw people in Haiti making tortillas out of inedible clay, and digging through enormous piles of garbage for food. I have read in various places about the conditions in maquiladoras and in the slave-labor factories in China (where, presumably, most of my clothing is made). I cannot get these things out of my mind.

That is why one must possess the acuity to see that by making of this wretchedness a peculiar sort of injunction to view our own misery as superficial, we are actually giving in to the work ethic, and accepting, in our heart of hearts, making their 14-hour work day our own. In fact, we do need to do this, but not by merely taking on greater labors and luxuriating in sadness from time to time. The effect is inevitably to, first, conclude that luxury is an essential part of life, and then, to feel oneself moving in imperceptible steps away from the real core of the problem (which contains both our doubts and their privation) towards a completely arbitrary “middle ground” between opposites: work and play; public and private; family, versus those others who benefit from one’s labor.

By contrast to the genial, but not serene, bourgeois lives of Montaigne and Sterne, consider Simone Weil, who I have recently been discussing with JuniperJune. Weil believed it was her duty not only to embrace sacrifice on religious grounds, but to recreate in her unjustly privileged person the conditions that others had to undergo (such as those living on meager rations in occupied France). She killed herself this way, and I mean that quite literally: she ruined her health and died early, without causing any serious damage to the capitalist and militarist superstructures that offended her so greatly, except perhaps through the small body of writings she produced and which we have inherited.

I am thinking of this, from the beginning of Middlemarch:

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

The phrases “meanness of opportunity” and “no coherent social faith and order” stand out boldly here. Weil did what she was able, but her opportunities were too often meager, and, in the absence of a common social faith, her sacrifice was not easily interpreted by those few who even heard of it. Therefore the questions we have for ourselves about the meaning of our lives, and the authenticity of our efforts, cannot be extinguished in our obligations to others; rather, we cannot fulfill those obligations without answering those questions.

I am currently reading Michael Berube’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, in which he concludes that even though professors in the humanities have less job security than ever, and are particularly sensitive to the demands of (even unreasonable) students, they have been successfully demonized by David Horowitz and others as agents of leftist indoctrination. So, there is plenty of reason to wonder, at least in the United States, what more than one’s patent duty one can do to avoid being blackballed or just buried by indifference.

Those are the most visible effects of this creeping helplessness to me, but that’s nothing like the full extent of the problem. Two important, recent political films, Clooney’s Syriana and the just-released Fast Food Nation, share the assumption that there is basically nothing one can do to reverse global trends towards exploitation and environmental disaster. (Thanks to the Punk Ass Blog for a fine exposition of Fast Food Nation.) I am not persuaded by this kind of resignation, but I was affected by the stories of single individuals (like the well-meaning executive in Fast Food Nation, or the prince and the intelligence agent in Syriana) struggling with intelligence and passion, but without ingenuity, and getting nowhere.

This is, then, the best response I can give to Matt and to the final part of Miso’s comment. Matt’s comments (see comment thread linked above) eventually seem to make the following argument: heroism and ethics are both at their most real when they emphasize the effort towards attainable goals, according to one’s talents, and through a relinquishing of the self (particularly the egoistic fantasies of the self) in favor of the needs of others. Miso might add that the dramatic presentation of those needs, through rarified ethical exercises, enables us to clarify our beliefs and attitudes.

I owe both of them thanks for making my own thinking clearer, and for expressing so much of worth. I am equally indebted to petitpoussin for her fierce reply, because (to return to where we started) I suspect we will find the answer to the claustrophobic feeling of helplessness in the tension between the self and the other, and not in an absorption in one or the other — nor in a “resolution” between the exceptional circumstances that prove the ethical, and the everyday.

It is an awareness of others, including a political awareness, that preserves us from the insufferable phenomenon of celebrity, and its games of mirrored desire (which is really the kind of “iconicity” I’m critiquing in the posts Matt mentions). But it is the awareness of self that preserves us from lying down and being snowed under like Weil, like Clooney’s renegade agent, like the well-meaning people in Fast Food Nation. It is self that keeps every blog from turning into a re-tread of the same YouTube videos and linked updates in the name of liberal politics.

In short, it is at the intersection of self and other that the problem of tactics truly arises in the consideration of ethics and politics. The motif of the unwilling hero, in Spider-Man and other films, is actually another way of avoiding the problem of sublating the distance between what has already been assimilated (everyday life) and ethics-as-entertainment (melodrama). Peter Parker is simply kidnapped out of one into the other, and then returns to the idiocy of the everyday when heroism turns out to be his inescapable job. I have been so interested recently in “I Blame The Patriarchy” (for which I beg your patience) because Twisty takes impossible, despairing positions, and her readers (in the comments’ section) quickly convert these into the ordinary obligation to fight the good fight every single day.

In vain. Such fights aren’t anywhere near the front lines, which is why one can’t return from the rarified to the ordinary with merely a clearer understanding of one’s own values. Today the ethical task, not for one person but for every person who can, is to create the moment of opportunity, and through nihilating personal doubts about ordinary dutifulness, to begin to re-weave a coherent social faith that will give our actions meaning.

What Happened

Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly, if our lives could be like that
-Bob Dylan

I have received a few requests for descriptions of what happened over the previous weekend; I’ll do my best to describe them in full. The cost is, of course, a great deal of self-indulgence which may prompt you to skip to the next post. In which case, my blessing.

(I want to thank the friends who made the whole eighteen-hour finale possible…and spectacular. Many of them have shown up here, as commenters, and fellow bloggers. Here are merely the ones with web presences: JuniperJune, the good people at Dutch Missionary Records, Tomemos, sadkingjonathan, metamanda, HenHen, Julia Glassman, Stove, Brandon, and Common Smartweed. Simply put, the events of this Saturday proved that the community here at Irvine is caring, classy, and a whole lot of fun. Thanks also to everyone who posted or e-mailed birthday wishes.)

On my actual birthday, I went out for brunch with a friend. We ate at a small, wholesome place (the kind that has organic coffee in more than one flavor), and I was treated to a huge tuna melt on fresh bread, and a huge toffee latté. We drove to the beach close by; it was a typical November day in Orange County, by which I mean that I wanted desperately to get out of the sun, into the water. However, it is not legal to go swimming in Orange County unless you know how to surf. In the afternoon, I attempted to read the entirety of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa. I failed, as I had the night before. It nonetheless made an enormous impression on me, especially in passages like these:

He is notoriously, nay, avowedly, a man of pleasure; yet [she] says that in anything he sets his heart upon, or undertakes, he is the most industrious and persevering mortal under the sun. He rests, it seems, not above six hours in the twenty-four, any more than you. He delights in writing. [...] But supposing it to be true, that all his vacant nightly hours are employed in writing, what can be his subjects? If, like Caesar, his own actions, he must undoubtedly be a very enterprising and very wicked man, since nobody suspects him to have a serious turn, and decent as he is in his conversation with us, his writings are probably not such as will redound either to his own honour or ot the benefit of others, were they to be read.

I hope you will agree with me in saying that nothing can be funnier than the various self-deceptions at play here, and throughout the novel; of the heaped mess we make when we try to consider a person in full; and of the confounding of all propriety which animates and underwrites this immensely proper tragedy.

Friday morning I spent answering letters and calls. By early Friday evening, I was out in Newport, trying not to spill Kikkoman on my copy of The Phenomenology of Perception, which I neither read nor discussed, but which provided an excellent pretext for having a very long series of sushi plates (including unagi, since miso asked), and hot tea and beer. (The computer scientists have gotten ahold of Merleau-Ponty, so you should read that if you want to understand the revolutions to come.) I when home to a game of poker that, unbeknownst to me, foreshadowed no less than two wonderful books on poker as gifts from friends. Poker wrapped up quite early, at six in the morning, and there were plenty of hours (four and a half) to sleep before brunch.

Brunch was champagne, homemade quiches and bread pudding (with rum sauce), plus donuts, bagels, juice, smoked salmon, and a lot more. Everyone in attendance was asked to bring something they’d written no later than high school. The readings included:

• A rhyming ballad about a dwarf in love with an elf: “He came upon the zombies five / He killed them, though they were not alive.”

• An entire world based on the Thundercats and featuring Jon Bon Jovi, Debbie Gibson, and Chinese ghosts in small roles.

• A series of acoustic songs performed live, including a song about the destruction of nature, and a song about monkeys.

• A poem self-consciously reflecting on metaphors for love, with the line “If I could translate my pain into vegetation.”

• A parody of Siddhartha, his adoring friend Govinda, and his dog (also named Govinda).

• A series of astounding odes, one of which used the phrase “warm, fat rain.”

• Journal entries about the death of Jerry Garcia, and the possibility that “no-one will ever understand me.”

• An existentialist gangster story written when The Sopranos was just a gleam in David Chase’s eye: “He had ambition, which was stupid. If he’d been worth anything, his ambitions would have gotten him somewhere by now.”

Needless to say, we’ve spent four days now wondering how to write stuff like this again, in some mature and publishable way.

In the interim, I watched Casino Royale. It is pure, sterling fantasy: calling room service for wine and caviar turns out witty, watching someone cut straw out of a straw chair is terrifying, and two people sitting on a plane have a really good conversation. The whole thing looked sleeker and darker, with none of the idiotic bright colors or impossible toys, and none of Pierce Brosnan doing his insufferable impression of a British Serge Gainsbourg.

Then we all had hamburgers, sped off to Johnny’s (described somewhat in my earlier post), and from there the evening snowballed into singing, and dancing, and making toasts, and playing pool. As dozens of people can tell you, having heard it breathlessly from me, at some point I jumped an enemy 4-ball to sink the 8, thus winning back my family’s ranch in Montana from a one-eyed tattoo artist named Shakey. The place filled up, and we were forced, if we knew the words to “Paradise City,” to shout them.

Apparently, while all of this was happening, another party was happening at my place. It was, admittedly, a dim spot in an otherwise brilliant chain of events, as some folks let themselves in, drank all my Johnny Walker, and annoyed the neighbors enough to warrant a visit from the police. They wrote “Happy Birthday, Joe!” in ketchup and Oreos on my kitchen table (the Oreo was the bottom of the exclamation point). You may not know this, but ketchup dries into something hard and fierce. In the morning, I found the ketchup and the empties, and went to work with a large quantity of paper towels. My leather jacket was gone. I had several voicemails to answer.

Thus resumed the more normal business of living.

So affirmed on this day, November 22, 2006. A pleasant birthday to you, whenever that might be.

Birthday 1, Blog 0

Dear readers:

Yesterday was my birthday, and marked the beginning of a three-day carnival deeply antithetical to the quiet reflection and hip-hop scansion required to post here.

We are talking about kitsch marathons, Irish whiskey, sushi, phenomenology, literary readings, champagne brunches, high stakes card games, juvenilia, Eva Green movies about high stakes card games, hamburgers, dancing to punk, ‘Classy/Trashy 2006: The Birthday Party,’ and even The Museum of Jurassic Technology.  Sometime around Sunday night, the world-shaking should come to a close.

We here at the Kugelmass Episodes have not forgotten about ethics and melodrama, and have been reading your comments with pleasure. We appreciate your patience while we get a bit older in the grand style.

Sincerely,

The Management

Superficiality, Alienation, Rhythm: Snoop, Clueless, Woody Allen, and the English Language

(Editor’s note: had to re-post to fix the numbering.) Because this is a post about language, we have to have a bunch of quotes right up front.

It’s the capital S, oh yes, the fresh N double O P
D O double G Y D O double G ya’ see [...]
Never let me slip, ’cause if I slip, then I’m slippin’
But if I got my Nina, then you know I’m straight trippin’
And I’m a continue to put the rap down, put the mack down
-Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, “Nuthin’ But A G Thang”

So, OK, you’re probably thinking, is this, like, a Noxzema commercial or what? But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl. [...]

Like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, “What about the strain on our resources?”
-Alicia Silverstone as “Cher” in Clueless

You know, we had a saying, uh, that “Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym.” And…uh, h’h, of course, those who couldn’t do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.
-Woody Allen as “Alvy Singer” in Annie Hall

Today’s entry comes courtesy of a reader who, having perused the thread “On Feminism and I Blame The Patriarchy,” sent me the following via e-mail:

I do have a pet peeve: I am completely against misspelling and text abbreviations in any form: computer chat, advertising, etc. Thus, “because” rather than “cuz”; no tty, lol, etc. Companies who use the term “lite” should be closed and their assets confiscated.

Naturally, the target of this comment was the word “cuz,” which, in some cases, I’ve begun substituting for “because.” The writer is completely fair in his dismissal of corporate selling words like “lite” — their only purpose is to under-determine meaning by using a misspelled variant that refers exclusively to a product modified according to your supposed wishes.

That said, I’m going to take my stand right now for the version of the English language that I speak, including where it starts to merge with the English that I write in informal settings such as blogs. It is, I believe, an increasingly hysterical language, an increasingly rhythmic language, and a language increasingly skeptical of the person and situations it claims to express. The point is to show, first, that all the quirks and facts of language have meaning; second, that what may appear to be the idiocies or stutters of modern English are actually crucial to its truth. (Academic note: It is a hilarious coincidence that I am currently reading Michael North’s book on impure English in the Modernist period, The Dialect of Modernism.)

1. Get Rhythm

Want to remember how it used to be? Go back and listen to a Frank Sinatra song like “The Girl Next Door”:

So it’s clear to see there’s no hope for me
Though I live at fifty-one thirty-five Kensington Avenue,
And she lives at fifty-one thirty three.

One reason that Sinatra is so famous for his “phrasing” is that the songwriters routinely handed him material with lyrics that didn’t fit their allotted spaces. In fact, it was considered pleasing to occasionally shake things up with an overcrowded line. Thus Sinatra painfully enunciates his way through “fifty-one thirty five Kensington Avenue” at the jarring speed of a television commercial announcer reporting drug side effects.

Thank God Elvis showed up, with his intuitive understanding of the dynamic possibilities of rhythm. He came bursting onto the scene with “That’s All Right, Mama,” a song whose outstanding lyrics included the following: “Ah da da dee, dee, dee-dee, dee dee dee-dee, dee dee dee-dee.” I was amazed to read, in a newspaper article quoted in Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, that teenagers in Memphis would actually greet each other with this line of nonsense. It wasn’t nonsense, though. It was a rhythmic expression of confident excess, just like Little Richard’s “Womp-bomp-a-loo-bam-a-lomp-bomp-bomp,” which has to be the most influential three seconds of music ever recorded.

The conversational style of Sinatra and his followers was shot right to pieces. There were evolutions of all sorts to follow, hand over fist: James Brown’s half-screamed, half-coughed singing style; the syncopated Bee Gees; the mumbling of the Ramones. When the spoken word finally re-asserted itself in music, it did so through hip-hop, which proved to contain such a huge variety of linguistic tricks that they started entering the language by the dozen.

Think of the way Snoop mocks his audience with his debut rap: he spells out his name, as though to help you remember and repeat it, but he does so in such rapid and agile fashion that it’s almost impossible to imitate without practice and repeated listens. That’s why he’s getting to rap alongside of Dre, and you’re not. It’s an astounding act of doubling: two syllables per beat, two rappers combining forces, and Snoop’s twice the man you are (because he’s a “double G”). Dre’s verse shows him first acting out sheer stuttering anxiety (“slip…slip…slippin’”), and then acting out cycles of tense readiness and confident relaxation: “I’m-a continue to put the rap down” is two and a half times as fast as “put the mack down.” Now that’s what I call phrasing.

This added layer of prosodic density is everywhere in hip-hop; when Eminem guests on Jay-Z’s song “Renegade,” he sings:

But I’m debated disputed hated and viewed in America
as a motherfuckin drug addict – like you didn’t experiment?
Now now, that’s when you start to stare at who’s in the mirror

The word “motherfuckin” here — it’s a complete break with the meter, which is otherwise iambic/anapestic and not trochaic, and creates a disgusted pause before Eminem repeats the accusation against him. In a referential, already-appropriated world of social interactions, words (including bad words) are used for their metrical power to cut against the grain of a sentence spoken unwillingly. Eminem continues this pattern of appropriation when he takes the scolding, parental phrase “Now now” and turns it into a sign of his victory in the doubled (because ideologically divided) present.

Rhythm, swearing included, is not sloppy excess. It is a means of subversion. Marshall Mathers takes his name, cuts it down to the sound of his two initials, and replaces his name with it: “M and M.” It’s him, and it’s not.

2. “I was like” and “He was all”: Valley Girl Talk

This is where we get to Clueless. When Cher starts talking at the beginning of the film, she drops in the word “like” as a pause right before she makes both a commercial reference (to Noxzema) and a gesture towards the skepticism of her audience. The pause is a sign to us that she finds the opening montage of teenage life as foreign and uncanny as we do. Her life is like her life, that’s all. If you don’t understand this, then you’ll get frustrated every time you hear somebody say, “I was like, ‘Wanna do something later?’ and she was like…” Look, modern speakers of English know that their lives are hedged in on all sides by cliché and over-determined language. Even when they are in the middle of supposedly meaningful interactions, they find themselves using the language of mass media. It’s actually much less worrisome to admit, through a common verbal tic, that what we say is an approximation, than to “own” as self-expression what is irreducibly borrowed.

There is, actually, a word for people who do try to perform the magic feat of authentically inhabiting these bits of ideation floating around in English. That word is “all.” Hence Cher’s paraphrase of the tragedy of the commons: “but some people are all, ‘What about the strain on our resources?’” Cher isn’t an idiot — she’s capable of using the English language properly, as she does in her paraphrase. However, the way she puts the matter makes it clear that precise diction is here just another sign of the miserly sensibility that seeks to defend itself with nationalism and a false appeal to the established citizenry (as though, within the United States, our resources were being shared equitably). The verb phrase “is all” is a critique of selfishness, when it tries to hide itself in pretentious language. That’s why the phrase shows up so often in recounts of fights.

But of course, when Cher does experience a triumph of selflessness (accepting the guests who have crashed her father’s birthday party), she’s thrown back upon linguistic poverty. She has nothing but clichés, so the Houdini word like comes roaring back to save her from an absolute identification: “But by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier!”

3. Woody Allen, Our Beloved Hysterical Cassandra

How are we supposed to explain the fact that every joke in the quote from Woody Allen is preceded (in the screenplay, as well as in the film) with a tic? If you’ve watched Annie Hall more than once, then you know that you start laughing as soon as you hear the tic, not the joke.

Some of it is undoubtedly the same as with Clueless and Eminem — Allen wants to alienate himself from what he’s saying. But it’s worse even than that. In Allen all these little pauses end up standing for nothingness and horror: the Ivan Karamazov complex (cf. Love and Death). The whole reason we’re taken to his elementary school classroom, at the beginning of a movie which is basically about one failed relationship, is that Alvy sees his failed love affair with Annie as the more or less destined result of a series of disappointing and inhibiting experiences over which he has no control. He can see it all coming: the failed relationship with Annie, and (just as important) the end of human existence when the universe expands to the breaking point (the film shows him as a little boy, talking about this to his family’s doctor). This sense of predestined awfulness is confirmed when all the students around him look straight into the camera and explain the sordid things that will happen when they reach adulthood.

Thus Allen is doing two things when, for example, he breaks up his summary with the useless phrase “I think.” He is first of all trying to buy time, trying to postpone a narrative that he knows can’t end happily. Second, he is articulating the fear that he is doing nothing — that as an actor in his life, he’s unable to reach any of his goals or change his behavior, and that as an artist he’s unable to teach his audience anything. When he says, “Those who couldn’t do anything, I think, were assigned to our school,” he is student and teacher at once. All he can do is think: he is terrifyingly conscious of what’s going to happen, which is why in Mighty Aphrodite Allen felt compelled add an actual Greek chorus and explicit references to Cassandra.

There are probably a lot of different reasons, historical and discursive, why we now speak and write with such overblown urgency. Is there any better proof the lostness and malaise of academia than the tendency to write “precisely,” and furthermore to use constant italics, in our essay and treatises? We have precisely no idea what we are talking about. In any case, the funniest proponent of this sort of hysteria, and the one whose linguistic genius brings him naturally closest to the urgency of modern slang and music, is Woody Allen.

4. Notes Towards A Dictionary Of The Future

“I mean” — An indicator of exasperation. Having acknowledged that there’s almost no hope of being understood, and extremely dubious about what is meant by “herself,” the subject nonetheless forges ahead and tells you what’s what.

“You know” — We all experience the same things, over and over.

“Fucking” — As in this paragraph from VICE Magazine:

Doesn’t this guy make you think of the Buzzcocks? He’s like the personification of that song, “What Do I Get?” I also imagine him zipping around in fast motion like the chases on Benny Hill. Look at him fucking scoot.

In situations like this, the bad word means that so much uncompromising energy has been poured into a basically meaningless activity, such as (in this case) riding on a Vespa, that it has become transcendant. Note also the predictable use of “like” to create the all-important distancing pause.

5. But what about the letter? What does any of this have to do with “I Blame The Patriarchy”?

You mean, is any of this a justification of the word “cuz”? Right. Sorry. “Cuz” is the more decisive form of “because.” It doesn’t explain, it just cuts to the chase, which is why it shows up in the eminently declarative song “Nuthin’ But A G Thang.”

The following is courtesy of Twisty Faster: “Resist the compulsion, in your haste to convey sarcasm, to begin with the word ‘um’ or ‘er.’ You are not an edgy young character in a sitcom.”

Well, that’s just the trouble. We are. It wasn’t necessarily our choice.

* * *

A good night 2 U.

Ethics and melodrama

Then last night, actually, it was our twentieth wedding anniversary. And I took Chiquita to see the show about Billie Holiday, and I looked at these show-business people, who know nothing about Billie Holiday, nothing, so they’re really kind of in a way intellectual creeps. And I suddenly had this feeling, I mean, you know, I was just sitting there crying through most of the show. And I suddenly had this feeling, I was just as creepy as they were! And that my whole life had been a sham, and I didn’t have the guts to be Billie Holiday either.
-André Gregory, My Dinner With Andre

I’ve been reading Irrelevant Narcissism on Marie Antoinette, and The Oh Zone on some sort of English assignment designed to teach her about making arguments. Apparently, in Marie Antoinette, young Kirsten Dunst suffers through a variety of coming-of-queenly-age ordeals, settles down into a life of bizarre regal scenesterism, and then suffers again at the hands of the Revolution. She is initially pitiable, because history is having its way with her. Then she becomes shallow and boring when she gets her own life to live. Then she goes back to being pitiable when the peasants burn her chambers and, well, cut off her head.

Meanwhile, over at the Oh Zone, miso is asking us about an assignment prompt that involves a woman (Beth) being separated from her lover, then having to prostitute herself to reunite with her lover, then being rejected by her lover for being a prostitute, and then shooting her lover in the head. The story is propped up by details like this: the reason that Beth has to prostitute herself is that she has to cross a river, and there is only one boat, and the boat is owned by a lonely evildoer.

What does all this signify? I risk being Marie Antoinette. I risk waiting to be made sympathetic, for that moment when the circumstances around me reach such operatic proportions that I can, for example, throw myself off a bridge to save 1,000 people. In short, we perhaps have ethical reserves ready to be deployed, and that feeling is only intensified by artworks like Battlestar Galactica, where every character is provided an occasion to rise to when the robots suddenly attack.

But what if we have no occasions? What if, as it does to Marie, the camera keeps its gaze trained on us even when there is no particular injustice being done? The risk is that it will find, in the absence of melodrama, an absence too of purpose, aside from the dull imperatives of getting work accomplished — but perhaps here too this is merely work undertaken without self-consciousness, without knowing whither it leads.

So often the ethical dilemmas presented in things like The Book of Questions involve rarified situations, like Spider-Man being forced to choose between saving a trainload of people, and saving his girlfriend (who is, of course, Marie Antoinette). If anyone asks you whether you would die to save a thousand people, I recommend answering, “Well, nothing is certain in the real world. I’d certainly be willing to risk dying.”

A better ethical question is this one: “You wake up. It’s November 13, 2006. Highs will be in the low seventies with a slight chance of rain. What do you do?”

The full text of the PAMLA conference paper on Hegel

If reading close analyses of Hegel is the sort of thing you dig, I’ve included the full text of my conference paper below (“Another Sphere and Science: Aesthetics and Difference in The Science of Logic“). Otherwise (and it’s probably otherwise) skip and I’ll be posting on other stuff soon (working on this little sucker took most of the weekend). I’ve been debating in my mind whether to post this for half the day…but I do think more serious academic work should be available free online.

Cheers,

JK

***

I’d like to make one introductory remark, to explain why I wrote this paper and how it relates to contemporary literary theory. I have been, as I’m sure many of us have been, excited by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida (among others) on such concepts as heteroglossia, which is the idea of many unreconciled voices within a text, and difference. At the same time, I was concerned that the political and philosophical critique of the “whole” – the whole text, the whole nation, and so on – which is also frequently the major critique of Hegel – misunderstands both Hegel and the necessary conditions for literary criticism and the constitution of the political. This paper is a first step towards a politically and philosophically responsible recuperation of totality, though aesthetics, without a corresponding loss of difference.

At the penultimate moment of Hegel’s Science of Logic, the narrative does not, as one might expect, confine itself to summing up the principles and movements which comprise its progress. Instead, Hegel asserts that “pure truth as the last result becomes also the beginning of another sphere and science” (843)—different, presumably, from the main body of the Logic. Hegel does little more than “indicate this transition” when he writes “the Idea freely releases itself (cf. Nietzsche’s Untergang) in its absolute self-assurance and inner poise” (843). What does it mean for Hegel to speak of another sphere co-existent with his re-evaluation of classical logic, and how does this further extension of the system represent a release of the Idea from itself? The key to this question is the Hegelian notion of “positedness.” Positing is a free act of imaginative determining, in the form of art and even personality, and is the essential content of the absolutely undetermined Notion (sometimes translated Idea). The seemingly anti-Hegelian and anti-philosophical modes of finite, aesthetic thinking are present in the Logic itself, where the text employs concrete metaphors, and when it uses narratives of something happening to explain what always-already is. I hope to demonstrate, in opposition to more deterministic readings of his work, that Hegel’s concept of “positedness” shows his appreciation for difference as a manifestation of freedom.

Positedness first appears not as such, but rather as a contradiction in Hegel’s method. The first chapter, entitled “Being,” declares that because both Being and Nothing in their pure state are without form or differentiation “pure being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same” (82). Hegel takes care to use the same adjectives to describe both: for example, he describes both pure Being and pure Nothing as possessing “emptiness.” He considers the sensuous appropriation of the abstract concepts, in which Being is represented by illumination and Nothing by darkness, and comments “one can readily perceive that in absolute clearness there is seen just as much, and as little, as in absolute darkness” (93). But then he retains these impure sensuous conceptions as a mixture: “it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being” (93). In this way Hegel distinguishes himself from Heraclitus, who pretends to do away with being and nothingness, but actually does the opposite — he retains a “substratum in which the transition takes place; being and nothing are held apart in time” (84). This substratum preserves the notion of a genuine difference between the two concepts. Hegel, by contrast, uses a deliberately false and therefore unstable opposition of Being and Nothing in order to express the world of “darkened light” which is manifest to our senses.

Hegel implies that these illegitimate notions of Being and Nothing as light and darkness, or more generally pure presence and pure absence, are connected to the differentiated world of determinate being. In order to explain the subsistence of these “vanishing” moments he introduces the concept of positedness, appropriately enough at the beginning of the chapter on “Determinate Being.” Positing has several meanings in the Logic. Firstly, it means the attribution by thought of any property to any object; to generalize from this to a multiplicity of properties inhering within a single object, one can say that in Hegel the process of constituting an object is always “positing,” that is, the momentary substitution of the “object” for the real, undetermined totality. Hegel writes: “only that which is posited in a Notion belongs in the dialectical development of that Notion to its content” (110). Returning to the initial example of light and darkness, these sensuous categories are “posited” or projected into the abstract identity of Being and Nothing, and out of this emerges a concrete metaphor for dialectical complementarity. At the same time, Being and Nothing do not disappear into the symbolic example of “light” and “darkness” simply because this example is true to experience. How the construction of the example differs from the truth of Being and Nothing will be considered later, in the discussion of essence. For now, the argument runs thus: in order to generate the internal tension of opposites which produces the dialectic, it is necessary to determine (that is, posit) division and conflict within what is really a contiguous phenomenon, and represent this contradiction in concrete terms through metaphor.

The further significance of positing is that it gives objects and phenomena self-sufficiency. This is a corollary of its status as a process of division. In order for an object (such as “Being”) to come into conflict with another object in any meaningful sense, it must have an independent existence. Hegel usually refers to this independence as “indifference.” The interrelation of two phenomena or objects may be transparent to logical thought, and yet, that interrelation must be expressed as a “sublation” or overcoming of indifferent difference. Otherwise the affirmative movement of sublation would be merely a static unity. Hegel writes, “As determinate beings [objects] are indifferent to each other, but this their affirmation is no longer immediate, each relates itself to itself only by means of the sublation of the otherness which, in the determination, is reflected into the in-itself” (125). Self-sufficiency is the result of a posited difference founded upon a contradiction, or the relation of an object to its other.

Thus, self-sufficiency is necessarily unstable because it is posited. The discrete object is continually threatened with dissolution. Under the heading “Contradiction resolves itself,” Hegel writes, “The result of contradiction is not merely a nullity. The positive and the negative constitute the positedness of the self-subsistence. Their own negation of themselves sublates the positedness of the self-subsistence [...] [Objects] destroy themselves” (433). Here the entire process of division and reunification is succinctly presented. First, the object divides into contradictory parts. This is a fruitful division. On the most abstract level, it is the division of Being and Nothing which produces the entire determinate universe. To take a more concrete instance, it is the exchange of capital leading to “very much multiplied capital” (429). The division is based on opposite pairs of positive and negative, where the positive is the overt quality, and the negative the opposite or implicit “other.” Therefore: “in one of the moments the determinateness is posited and in the other it is only implicit” (200). Immediately afterwards, the implicit other re-emerges as the interrelation of the object and its other, nullifying the formative limit of the object and destroying it from within.

What is remarkable is not, as might be supposed, that these moments of self-sufficiency are superseded: that follows necessarily from the way the object is constructed. An object is the “incomplete” expression of a unity in which its complementary opposite has been temporarily reduced, even repressed, to the status of implicit presence. Rather, what is surprising is that the self-sufficient object should exist at all, since its nature is plainly untruth. Hegel says as much when he introduces “essence:” “Essence is being that has been sublated in and for itself; what confronts it is only illusory being. The illusory being, however, is essence’s own positing” (393). The dialectical complement of the true essence of things is the ephemeral “Appearance” of their posited identities.

What develops from this definition of “positedness” is a critique of the systems of Spinoza and Plato. This critique is not a critique of the parts of the system, because Hegel readily appropriates both the pure Form from Plato and the theory of substance from Spinoza. However, he opposes the conclusions each philosopher draws from his system. Both Spinoza and Plato derive a theory of moral necessity from their discovery of essence: this is Plato’s theory of the pure illumination of the “Good,” metaphorized in the famous allegory of the cave, and Spinoza’s concept of sub specie aeternatis, or action in accordance with the plan of the universe. Hegel has already implicitly rejected the idea of the good as pure illumination, in his discussion of sensuous counterparts to Being and Nothing. He goes on to criticize Spinoza on the grounds that the “unveiling of substance” necessitates a “manifested or posited identity, and thereby the freedom which is the identity of the Notion [...] substances now have essentially the status of an illusory being, of being moments” (581). In other words, when the Form or universal “substance” merges with the concrete, it does so as positedness, as self-contradiction, diversity, and change, rather than as internally consistent necessity. These properties are not corruptions of essence, but rather fundamental expressions of the freedom inherent in the Notion.

This critique of deterministic necessity cannot be subverted in the name of fixed laws. For example, it might be natural to conclude that Hegel’s notion of Becoming applies to falling objects according to the law of gravitational acceleration, with the law itself remaining a constant. Hegel describes the “defect” (504) of the gravitational constant in this way: “The determination of time—that is, time as it is commonly imagined—does not itself imply its relationship to space, and vice versa [...] the one comes only externally into relation with the other, which external relation is motion” (505). That is, it is not possible to assign a pre-existence to a law which is realized in the motion of determinate objects in a process of Becoming, because it would be nonsensical to speak of the law existing outside of the situations it describes. Furthermore, the synthesis which it produces of time and space is an imposed or posited synthesis external to both, and therefore utterly dependent on the troublesome posited object. Hegel prepares this demonstration by noting, “this connection of having no connection alone constitutes the thing” (494). Thus, although law is a “stable image” (503) of the world of Appearance, it is nonetheless “identical with itself in positedness or in the self-dissolving self-subsistence of Existence” (503). Laws are as much a product of perception, and as much of an indispensable reduction of the real, as are objects.

Here is where the subject enters into the exposition of the system. In order for the Notion to express itself as illusory being, as positedness, spirit (which is the only substance that generates itself and acts under its own power) must assume a finite form in the subject and through him in “the untrue being of the objective world” (756). The objective world is posited by subjectivity, as Hegel explains in a discussion of Kant:

All unifying of representations demands a unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently it is this unity of consciousness which alone constitutes the connection of the representations and therewith their objective validity [...] In point of fact, the comprehension of an object consists in nothing else than that the ego makes it its own, pervades it and brings it into its own form, that is, into the universality that is immediately a determinateness. (585)

The potential for determinate being which is native to essence is realized through the action of conscious positing: “When it is comprehended, the being-in-and-for-self which it possesses in intuition and pictorial thought is transformed into a positedness; the I in thinking pervades it” (585). The power that consciousness wields as an “actuality of infinite power” (770) and the drive towards freedom inherent in the Notion combine in the posited or illusory synthesis of creative expression.

Hegel gathers together the whole of posited, determinate being together under the banner of “creative power”: “The isolated subsistence of the finite which earlier was determined as its being-for-self, and also as thinghood, as substance, is, in its truth universality [...] one of its own differences. Herein consists the creative power of the Notion” (605). The universality of the Notion depends upon its free and creative expression in the finite universe, in a manner that represents self-difference (what Hegel calls the “assumed ground of division” [804]) as “personality” (824). Had Hegel not established the relationship between essence and positedness, “personality” might seem a strange climax to an investigation of truth. As prepared by the earlier sections of the Logic, however, personality stands in the same relation to the “soul” (824) as illusion and appearance to essence. It is the visible, determinate form of the inner agency of the Notion. It is exemplified in creative works of art and religious allegories of the absolute Idea.

Nevertheless Hegel’s conception of the Notion remains very far from a Derridean free “play” of representation that contains a merely facetious reference to essence. Subjectivity in finitude is never a constant—personality is not stable, because like objects and laws it is subject to dissolution. The subject experiences this as a painful alienation from herself:

Since each of the essential moments of its unity is realized as a separate totality, the Notion is sundered into an absolute disparity with itself; and since, all the same, it is absolute identity in this disharmony, this living being is for itself this disharmony, and has the feeling of this contradiction, which is pain. (770)

Echoes of this moment can be found in Jacques Lacan’s description of the infantile “mirror stage.” According to Lacan, an infant first “playfully experiences” the relationship between his own body and the persons and things around him (Ecrits 3), then suffers a growing disillusionment that sours into aggressiveness, as the revelation of his body leads to a realization of his limits. Similarly, the Hegelian drive towards personality and the creative power of the spirit are effects of truth predicated on essence, which seeks to express the absolute Idea. Therefore the dialectical movement of untruth in positedness is experienced by the subject as the painful loss of totality and eternity, and as the unveiled inadequacy of her efforts to rest in the truth.

Alienation and pain do not have the last word in The Science of Logic; self-conscious existence begins with pain, and comes through knowledge to assurance, if not to finality or perfect joy. In what subjective spheres, then, does the Notion realize itself as diversity and finitude? Hegel suggests the following; “Nature and spirit are different modes of presenting its existence, art and religion its different modes of apprehending itself and giving itself an adequate existence. Philosophy has the same content and the same end as art and religion; but it is the highest mode of apprehending the absolute Idea [...] the derivation and cognition of those modes is now the further business of the particular philosophical sciences” (825). The Notion attains an adequate existence in the untrue world through the formal developments of art, religion, philosophy, and personality. These, in turn, are sublated by philosophy. Yet Hegel’s own system would suggest that the derivation and cognition of the modes of the absolute Idea is inseparable from the creative activity of artistic and religious consciousness. The work of reintegrating the human “shapes of real and ideal finitude as well as of infinitude and holiness” (825) into the truth of the absolute Idea can never be a finalizing labor, since art and all related positings present essence as multiplicity, the way it truly exists in the realm of appearance. If the task of logical thought is to sublate and enfold these traditions, then the realization of the Hegelian project would be to find in created beauty the rigor of the absolute — and to see, in the contradictions of diversity, a reciprocal freedom.