Jon Cogburn's Blog

Kommunizm (Egor Letov) - Stop The Rolling Stones

My God, but punk rock from the Soviet Union was great.

Fantastic essay HERE by Adam Curtis on music and youth rejection in the Soviet Union.

Curtis is motivated by the thought that the widespread failure of communism to deliver what it promised is currently being repeated by neo-liberal regimes in the west, and that this is going to lead to the kind of collapse of belief that produces such great music in the Soviet Union.

To right is Kommunizm's "Stop the Rollin Stones." It's fantastic, Curtis has a video form Letov's other famous band Grob for the song "Everything is Going According to Plan" and then part of a wonderful punk/folk song by Yanka Dyagileva's that includes the lyric "the television is hanging from the ceiling, and no one knows how f***ing low I'm feeling."

In the current epoch, we are all in danger of becoming exactly like Hamlet, as Curtis says, "someone who can see through the superficiality of the present age, but is unable to have any beliefs or even feelings about anything."

Genuine punk is paradoxical because the manner in which it asserts that we are all Hamlet promises the negatation of the assertion. It probably doesn't really work, but this kind of performative contradiction may be all we have left, the only way to recover some smidgeon of beauty and autonomy in a world without rock.

Fantastic new website for O-zone

The web-site for the new journal O-Zone has undergone a bit of a facelift and it's really cool. It's configured so that there will be links to conference presentations and things like that.

Capsule credo for the journal:

Located within a post-Kantian philosophical outlook, where everything in the world, from the smallest quarks to lynxes to humans to wheat fields to machines and beyond exist on an equal ontological footing, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies invites new work that explores the weird realism, thingliness, and life-worlds of objects. Possible methodological approaches and critical modes might include: actor-networks, unit operations, alien phenomenology, agentic drift, onticology, guerrilla metaphysics, carnal phenomenology, ontography, agential realism, cosmopolitics, panpsychism, insect media, posthumanism, flat ontology, dark vitalism, prosthetics, territorial assemblage, vibrant materialism, dorsality, distributed intelligence, dark ecology, hyperobjects, realist magic, post-continuity, and other paradigms for object-oriented thought still coming into being and yet to be articulated.

Sign me up! Actually I already am signed up. Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out.

more development of Meillassoux's argument in modal logic, plus a possible dialtheist problem

I've had a couple of fantastic discussions with Levi Bryant about Graham Priest's connection to a slew of continental philosophers that Priest doesn't even mention in Beyond the Limits of Thought, and a bunch of weird things are popping out with respect to my current reading of Meillassoux.

The most important connection is that Meillassoux several times makes the kind of argument Priest diagnoses and logically regiments, where it is shown that just articulating a limit (Closure) forces that very limit to be contradicted (Transcendence). Given my teaching rotation, I should be able to teach a class on Meillassoux and Priest two Spring semesters from now, and the course notes for that class might be the genesis of something collaborative with Bryant (Insha'allah).

Weirdly, in Chapter 3 of After Finitude. Meillassoux does have two discussions of the possibility of true contradictions, first in arguing that a contradictory being can't exist, since it would have all properties it would nto be contingent in the way Meillassoux has argued that objects are, and second in admitting that his argument uses ex falso quodlibet, something not valid in paraconsistent logics. It's pretty clear Meillassoux hadn't read Priest at the time he wrote After Finitude, because much of Priest's work can be read as picking up the challenge Meillassoux lays down in his discussion of paraconsistency.

Tonight I initially thought that I could prove that Meillassoux actually may need it to be the case that truths that escape the correlationist circle are all true contradictions, but as I dug deeper into the modalities, I actually came up with even more formal logic derivations of Meillassoux's key arguments. At the end of this post though, I do show how actual dialetheist worries arise, but then raise a couple of issues concernin whether the resulting form of dialetheism may not be a problem for Meillassoux.

In THIS POST I showed that Harman's interpretation of a central Meillassouxian argument was provable in modal logic.

The key lemma is that Verificationism (Strong Correlationism), the position that all truths are knowable (P --> <>KP), entails that if it is impossible to know that something is impossible, then that fact is possible (~<>K~<>R --> <>R). This latter statement forms the core of Harman's reconstruction of Meillassoux's argument to absolutize facticity.

The key point is that the for the correlationist it is not possible to know that truths describing  things outside the correlationist circle are impossible. But then it follows (from Verificationism) that they are in fact possible. This leads to a very wide notion of contingency since so many truths are for the correlationist such that we can neither know that they nor their negations are impossible (so both they and their negations are impossible).

This too is formalizable and valid. For Meillassoux's outside-the-correlate sentences, for correlationists the following is true (~<>K~<>R) and (~<>K~<>~R). By the contrapositive to Verificationism (~<>K~<>R) entails ~~<>R and (~<>K~<>~R) entails ~~<>~R. If we allow ourselves to excluded middle, this is exactly Meillassoux's conclusion that R could be true and could be false <>R and <>~R. So if correlationism really does entail that outside the correlate sentences are such that it is impossible to know whether they are impossible, then it follows as a matter of pure logic that R is contingent!

Now here's a weird logical fact. On pain of contradiction a Verificationist cannot affirm that a sentence and its negation are both impossible to know. If P entails that it is possible to know that P, then it being impossible to know that P entails that P is false. So if I say that some sentence and its negation are impossible to know, I get that that very sentence is both false, and not false, a contradiction.

So while Meillassoux must affirm of anti correlate sentences (~<>K~<>R) and (~<>K~<>~R), he cannot (on pain of dialtheism) affirm of any sentence (~<>K~<>R) and (~<>K<>R). The contrapositive of Verificationism would then entail (~~<>R) and (~<>R). But of course Meillassoux's whole conclusion is that it *is* possible to know that R (and its negation) is possible!

Again, since Meillassoux holds that for all anti-correlate sentences we can't know that they are impossible, to avoid dialetheism, he must hold for all anti-correlate sentences ~~<>K<>R, and by classical logic <>K<>R. But this is again of a piece with his demonstration of contingency everywhere.

---

The possible problem is this. Forgetting about the being able to know the impossiblity or possibility of anti-correlate sentences, Meillassoux's discussion strongly suggests that anti-correlate sentences are such that both they and their negations are impossible to know. We cannot know that we will live for ever and we cannot know that we will die.

But if anti-correlate sentences (such as the one affirming our death) are such that both they and their negations are impossible to know, Meillassoux must affirm by the contrapositive of Verificationism, that anti-correlate sentences are both true and false.

I actually don't think this is a problem, precisely because if you have a stronger form of verificationism (for example all truths are knowable by a non-existent God), then sentences about my death are not anti-correlate sentences. So only a few really odd metaphysical sentences such that neither they nor their negations are knowable by the God we hope to come would end up being such that they are both true and false.

And maybe Priest has made a compelling case that such sentences should be considered to be true contradictions anyhow.

However, there is a bigger problem rising. I worry that this kind of limiting by appeal to a non-existent God's knowledge undermine's Meillassoux's case for radical contingency. If we only apply the argument to the kind of sentences that a non-existent God could not know, then there will not be many sentences that we can be sure are such that they and their negations are false. Moreover, these might be the same class of sentences that we can be sure are both true and false.

There is an immense amount of argument to go through with this in mind (Chapter 3 of After Finitude is one of the most densely argued pieces of good philosophy that I've read), so I'm just flagging it for now so that I can think about it over the next few years.

Would you look at that?

I can't remember where Wittgenstein noted that saying the same phrase over and over again drains it of its meaning.

Not only can't I remember where he wrote that, but I can't remember why he thought it was an interesting thing to say.

In any case, it can be very funny, and I wish I knew why.

Philip Larkin - The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange;
            Why aren't they screaming?

Updated post on Chapter 1 of Meillassoux's After Finitude, with what I take to be the master argument against correlationism

After lecturing on the material today, I realized that I hadn't really clarified how the chapter presents a sustained argument (with some fascinating tangents). So I rewrote the lecture and edited the earlier post that is HERE. There's lots of cool stuff there, including some of Harman's criticisms. The biggest thing is that I take Meillassoux's master argument against correlationism to actually be the following.

1. Let A be the sentence, ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ A seems to undermine the correlationist claim that being and thought cannot be separated, as scientists are thinking of truth-making events existing in the absence of any thinkers.

2. The correlationist can say that the sentence is always false, in the manner of contemporary creationists, but they understandably don’t want to do this.

3. Instead, they typically give an account of such scientific statements being part of a “founded mode” defined over something more originary involving human practices and perceptions. In this manner, they actually double the meaning of the sentence. The error is thinking the sentence is true and originary, but understood as founded it can be true.

4. So according to this strategy, A is true for the scientists, or more broadly for us, but not true from an external, absolute “God’s eye” perspective that does not involve human thinkability. So we must distinguish A^us versus A^absolute. A^us is true, while A^absolute is false or meaningless.

5. The claim that A^us  is true and A^absolute is false or meaningless directly contradicts the scientist's own understanding of the meaning of A! When the correlationist says A^us  is true, the assertion gives rise to a Euthyphro dilemma. (5.1) A^us  asserts the following: “Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans” correlates with a set of verification procedures followed by scientists that lead them to assert A. (5.2) Scientists hold that this is the case for the following reason: The set of verification procedures followed by scientists leads them to assert A because event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.

6. The correlationist could outright deny 5.2, but this would be to lapse into Idealism, holding that scientists’ verification procedures caused reality to be the way it is.

7. Or the correlationist could just refuse to assert 5.2, perhaps because it is meaningless, or perhaps out of some kind of Wittgensteinian quietism, but this again leads to a contradiction of what the scientist means.

8. In any case, the claim that A^absolute is false or meaningless contradicts Finitude. Saying anything about A^absolute requires claiming knowledge about an absolute, which the correlationist claims we cannot have.

Again, full details (in addition to an overview of the other great things in the chapter as well as a discussion of some really nice related points and criticisms by Harman) are HERE.

Yet Another Reason to Learn French [Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines]

In 2006 I actually made some progress towards learning French. For a while I was good enough to read political stories in Newspapers and not to do too horribly with hotel staff and restaurants.

But after my kids were born I had to cut out a number of things (don't regret it for a second!). But now that Thomas is 4 and Audrey is 2 they are a little bit more self-sustaining, and I can actually work on stuff while watching them. So I realized for this year's resolution I could commit to something that would take advantage of the new time.

For the last few weeks I've been unclear what this would be, but today it was immediately clear after I discovered THIS AWESOME WEB SITE, which is organized by a research group at École Normale Supérieure.

It's a weird de ja vu because from what I can get of the publications and presentations, something similar to my own increasing intersection of analytic (check out the papers on David Lewis at the Atelier) and continental philosophy. Not only that, but in addition it is clear that some of the participants see this intersection, like me, as leading of necessity to a serious study of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology. Man I will learn a lot from these people as I get much further up to speed on the language.

I'm completely hyped about this, and I really do think (without sacrificing writing) that within a year and a half I can get my French good enough to read the materials on the web site. Anyhow that's my New Years Resolution.

In any case, if you read French, then Joe Bob says to check it out! If you don't, it's yet another strong argument for learning the language.

[Footnote: This New Years Resolution actually ties to my children too. There's a decent chance that we will get them in to a public French Language immersion school (one of the best reasons to live in Louisiana), which will be an issue for Thomas next year. It will be awesome to do this with them. Since kids learn languages so quickly, it is very much to my and their advantage to get even more of a head start this year.]

Chapter 1 of Meillassoux's After Finitude (with some reflections on Harman's reflections)

Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism is not too complicated, but covers a lot of deep philosophical material. Here I will present the structure of the argument first, and then do some textual exegesis to support that as well as discuss some of Harman’s criticisms of this chapter.

Remember that we earlier defined “correlationism” in this manner:

(1) Verificationism- We cannot coherently think of reality as unthought (from the British empiricists originally, though Berkeley actually argued for it). Note that this arguably entails that if P is true, then it is possible for someone to know that P is true, but that in itself it places no restriction upon who is doing the knowing, it maybe could be "knowable by an infinite mind." Arguments concerning Finitude are typically what force the verificationism to be knowable by something human-like.

(2) Embodiment/Embeddedness-We cannot coherently think of humans without thinking of them as embedded in a reality ( Schopenhauer and then later Heidegger developing Kant's claim that concepts without intuitions are empty, Schopenhauer with respect to the body and Heidegger with respect to a reality experienced as in some sense pre-existing, modal (involving possibilities), and valuative).

(3) Finitude- We cannot coherently think of self-subsistent totalities/absolutes (from Kant’s dialectic, which is often taken to entail that we can therefore only think of finite totalities in relation to us; Graham Priest has a different analysis of these kinds of arguments, one that makes him in the speculative realist who rejects both Finitude and Verificationism, but who like Meillassoux argues from this by radicalizing correlationism).

Here is the first part of Meillassoux’s argument, from (2.2 (pp. 13-15)).

1. Let A be the sentence, ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ A seems to undermine the correlationist claim that being and thought cannot be separated, as scientists are thinking of truth making events existing in the absence of any thinkers.

2. The correlationist can say that the sentence is always false, in the manner of contemporary creationists, but they understandably don’t want to do this.

3. Instead, they typically give an account of such scientific statements being part of a “founded mode” defined over something more originary involving human practices and perceptions. In this manner, they actually double the meaning of the sentence. The error is thinking the sentence is true and originary, but understood as founded it can be true.

(modal logical) Meditations on the Meillassoux versus Harman

Yesterday I provided a preliminary formulation of a key lemma in Meillassoux's argument that correlationism absolutizes. I'd wanted to do this in a full natural deduction form today, but my thinking got both ahead and behind the argument. Let me get behind the argument first.

I. Correlationism, and the contrast between Meillassoux and Harman

From the position of an analytic philosopher (and I pray that this is not too distorting), Meillassoux's correlationism is best presented in terms of the following three positions.

(1) Verificationism- We cannot coherently think of reality as unthought (from the British empiricists originally, though Berkeley actually argued for it). Note that this arguably entails that if P is true, then it is possible for someone to know that P is true, but that in itself it places no restriction upon who is doing the knowing, it could be "knowable by an infinite mind." Only arguments concerning finitude force the verificationism to be knowable by something human-like.

(2) Embodiment/Embeddedness-We cannot coherently think of humans without thinking of them as embedded in a reality ( Schopenhauer and then later Heidegger developing Kant's claim that concepts without intuitions are empty, Schopenhauer with respect to the body and Heidegger with respect to a reality experienced as in some sense pre-existing, modal (involving possibilities), and valuative).

(3) Finitude- We cannot coherently think of self-subsistent totalities/absolutes (from Kant’s dialectic, but Graham Priest has discovered the true nature of this argument).

Before I go any further I must make absolutely clear the contrast between Harman and Meillassoux. Harman rejects (1) the Verificationism and maintains (3) the Finitude (if I could write an aria I'd write one in praise of this insight!) by radically externalizing the manner in which Finitude is expressed by Heidegger. Meillassoux rejects (3) the Finitude while keeping the (1) Verificationism. This is in some sense the titanic strugle at the heart of Speculative Realism.

II. Meilllassoux Needs (some form of) Verificationism

As I briefly (much more is needed exegetically) argued yesterday, the way Meillassoux gets to his rejection of Finitude actually uses Verificationism as a premise.

III. Meillassoux Rejects Verificationism

Here is a big problem. As far as I can make out, Meillassoux's argument that correlationism need not entail Berkeleyan Idealism is inconsistent with the very Verificationism he uses. Meillassoux's worry is that correlationism renders the thing in itself unthinkable/unconceivable, but then we might think that it is impossible, which is the position of Berkeleyan idealism.

So Meillassoux argues, persuasively to me (and this actually has powerful resonances with Lovecraft that are in common to all of the first generation Speculative Realists, and many of the second generation ones such as myself), that unthinkability does not entail impossibility.

But I'm not sure he can argue this. First, notice that Meillassoux is arguing against a strawman. To stop Berkeleyan Idealism, he must argue against the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity. For the Berkeleyan Idealist need only be committed to the claim that it is false that things in themselves exist, not that it is impossible that they do so. But the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity is much harder to argue against than the proposition that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. In fact, it is not a proposition that I think Meillassoux can argue against (though Harman and myself, following him, can).

No Verificationist of the sort we've been considering can argue against the calim that unthinkability entails falsity! For surely unthinkability entails unknowability. But this claim, plus Verificationism, is provably inconsistent with the claim that unthinkability does not entail falsity! Let me explain the formalism before giving the proof.

One of Meillassoux's key arguments is formulizable in modal logic (and valid)

[Note: (1) Meillassoux's argument to contingency is further developed in modal logic HERE, with some dialetheist worries thrown in. (2) A clearer explanation of the difference between Meillassoux and Harman is HERE, including a distinct worry.]

Reading page 26 of Graham Harman's Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, and just put the key argument (of which Harman writes, "This apparently hair splitting point point is actually the key to Meillassoux's entire system, and is worthy of closer attention") in modal logic. If I have not fudged too much by putting things in terms of a knowledge predicate, it definitely works. And in a very weak modal logic to boot, I think classical K but in the next few days I will put it in natural deduction to check. 

Basically there is a simple proof from P --> <>KP (if P, then it is possible to know that P, to which the correlationist is arguably committed) to Meillassoux's conclusion ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible). Contraposing the correlationist claim gives you ~<>KP --> ~P. But then substitute in ~Q for P and you get ~<>K~Q --> ~~Q, which via classical logic entails ~<>K~Q --> Q (if it's not possible to know that something is false, then it is true). Now substitute in <>R for Q, and you get ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible).

That's it. I'll do a proper natural deduction proof (without the substitutions) in the next few days, in part because I want to find out if I had to use classical negation rules above (if I was a better logician I would know this without having to formalize it; but full formalization sometimes yields unexpected interesting things so I don't mind).

The reason this is so mind-blowing is that so much does follow from the incredibly simple point, once you think about it in a way informed by knowledge of German Idealism, as Harman and Meillassoux do. More on that soon. I have to get clearer on how this fits with Meillassoux's other key argument in this context that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. This is how Meillassoux rejects Berkeleyan Idealism while still being a Verificationist (correlationist). But then the Verificationism entails ~<>K~<>R --> <>R, and then some other commitments entail that there are a lot of Rs for which the scheme applies.

It's the fact that for the correlationist the antecedent is maintained for lots of philosophically Rs that entails much of the weird and fascinating aspects of Meillassoux's philosophy (let R equal "humans will survive their death" or "things in themselves exist"), which is why I'm going to get clearer on that next. As far as I'm getting it now, the reason we can't know so many things is from Kantian Dialectic type Finitude arguments (the Verificationism follows from Berkeleyan type arguments).

Interestingly, Meillassoux, like Graham Priest, ends up exploding the Finitude arguments while staying with the Verificationism, and Harman (to some extent like a certain period John McDowell) keeps the Finitude but jettisons the Verificationism. I should note that by saying this I'm not reducing any thinker to any other thinker or just understanding the continental philosophers as shadows of the analytic ones (a horrible, horrible tendency of a lot of analytic "pluralists"). I'm learning all sorts of new things from Meillassoux and Harman, and there are essential respects in which the two differ from the analytic analogues (among other things, Harman is not hobbled by McDowell's quiteism, and this makes a humongous difference).

It's really cool stuff. Any logician readers will have intuited interesting issues involving Fitch's Paradox as well. I have a couple of lines on that (one from Tennant, one from reflection on Moore's Paradox) that I want to try out on Meillassoux this semester.

Kitcher on Parfit in The New Republic

Review HERE.

The highpoint of the criticism is Kitcher's discontent with gedankenexperiments, e.g.

You cannot respond to the imagined predicament without thinking hard, but hard thinking leads through a cloud of questions to a state of confusion. A few conditions are simply declared: the outcomes are known and the options limited. But since that sort of certainty and limitation is exceedingly remote from the circumstances in which we make our practical decisions, our judgmental capacities cannot be put to work in their normal ways. Readers are pitched into a fantasy world, remote from reality, in which our natural reactions are sharply curtailed by authorial fiat. When we are called on to render a verdict, the dominant feeling is a disruption of whatever skills we possess, and a corresponding distrust of anything we might say-often publicly visible when lecturers ask their audiences to respond to some puzzle case: only partisans of some particular theory answer confidently, while the rest sit in uncomfortable silence. The reader may even be left with a deep sense of unease that matters of life and death are to be judged on the basis of such cursory and rigged information.

The low point is the paean to naturalism at the end, as predictable as it is disappointing. I think Kitcher felt he had to do that because it ties to his bread and butter epistemology stuff and because he knows that the criticism from the first part of his article has historically been articulated by Moorean anti-naturalists.

When I finally get around to closely reading Becker's fantastic book on Stoicism I could conceivably come around to something closer to Kitcher's view on this too, minus the predictable Stephen Pinkerish just-so evolutionary story that seems to be the null hypothesis for contemporary naturalists (not to give one inch to Fodor, Chomsky, or Plantinga's ignorant remarks about evolutionary theory; it's rather that evolutionary theory doesn't do any of the meta-ethical work that Kitcher hints at in the article, so with Kitcher type naturalists you end up with just-so stories defending whatever prejudice the teller wants to defend).

Anyhow, Becker defends a quite different form of naturalism, one that actually necessitates sages in a manner inconsistent with Kitcher's dismissal of the same. Maybe I'll do a post on that topic in the next few weeks. I really hope to teach Becker's book (as well as Feldman's book on hedonism) at some point in the next few years, after I complete the Speculative Realism book. I think some of the issues I'm working out there will have some friction in these debates, but it's kind of a roundabout story.

advice to the young concerning timbre

I'm a little bummed I have a record of so little of my own music from before my thirtieth birthday, but for most of that stuff it's for the best. I think all of the bands mentioned in yesterday's post (such as Steel Fury, to right) actually went into studios with professionals to record their work.

I've never done that, but have just messed around with cheap DIY four track recorders and the digitigal equivalent today In high school I actually daisy chained two-two track recorders, weirdly, some of that stuff I have on old cassettes sounds better than what I can get with Sonar and Mixcraft in the rare time Emily and I have to noodle around since graduate school (most of the results of which are in the Devil in my Pocket links to the far right, including the fun youtube videos). You can tell whenever you listen to any of it that the levels and compression and whatnot are messed up. Even people who have loved any of those bands live have found the recordings almost uniformly unpleasant.

From this life's experience, here's my advice to any new bands. Make demos with your DIY stuff, but even if you have Garage Band, Sonar, Pro Tools, or Mixcraft or whatever- still try to scrounge up the money and time to go into an actual studio to record the final versions you want to share with people.

When you listen to your own recorded stuff you can hear the melodies through it, and this ends up being a tremendous hindrance to your ability to get a good timbre (even if you are antecedently gifted in that way). In addition to timbre it's really, really, really hard to get a recording where the levels continue to be proportional through so many different media: e.g. headphones in the studio, in a car stereo, in some audio-phile's system, condensed down to mp3 format on someone's iphone, over the radio, etc. etc. etc.. This is really, really hard stuff. The ability to write good melodies and perform good live does not predict it at all (in fact the hearing loss and tinitus from live performances, as in my case, usually makes it a lot worse).

And the phenomenology is weird. You may like the way it sounds, but other people won't. Even people who will pay to come see your band will have no interest in listening to something incompetently recorded and mastered. This is of course, unless you are a sui generis timbre genius like Jack White or Jimmy Page, probably the only two people who were both great live performers and whose mastery of studio recordings matches Rick Rubin's. Rubin for that matter, is probably alone in both his ability to capture perfect timbre and recognize good melody. Of the records he produces, the best ones (Danzig, Johny Cash, early Red Hot Chili Peppers, that recent Neal Diamond LP) are where he dictatorially makes the band write fifty or so songs and then crafts the album by picking some of them and combining others. His worst ones are where he is too scared of the band (AC/DC),or doesn't care enough about the band (lots of stuff), to put them through that wrenching process.

Bands with which I used to jam: Lusting after Mary, Steel Fury, Three Lesbian Folksingers

At right is a live performance from a great Austin band of my college era, Lusting After Mary. It's their second best song (the Joe of the song is their guitarist, one of the kindest people I've ever known). The keyboard player is philosopher Mike Einhaus, and I used to jam with him and philosophers John Heil and Jim Hankinson (Heil and Einhaus were grad students at U.T. then, I was an undergraduate, and Hankinson was and still is faculty there) and less often other assorted members of Mary.

Einhaus is also an incredible accordian player. Sadly, Mary's best song, Ice Capades, is not on youtube.

There singer wasn't that charismatic, but that's is a little unfair of me to point out. It's actually pretty hard to get up in front of a lot of people and sing. For singers, guitarists, and keyboard players, unless you're gifted with a particular kind of glamour and grace, it's almost impossible to know what to do with your body so that you don't look like an idiot. If I do anything other than just stand there and do my job while playing music, I look so ludicrous that people laugh (this is no exaggeration).

The eponymous Joe (the guitarist at left) actually had enough innate rock charisma/glamour for the rest of the band. He moved gracefully too. You can see him jumping up and down at the beginning here and get a sense of it. Einhaus was also fun to watch in an Olympic athlete way too, because the music was so piano based and the guy focused everything on providing the bottom for everyone else. I mean, watching anybody focused so much on doing their best, and delivering on it is aesthetically pleasing.

But the camaraperson here is focused on the singer dude, which wasn't really the phenomenology of one of their shows. It would be like filming an AC/DC concert and just following Brian Johnson around.

For the record, I should note that Jim Hankinson is actually a hell of a blues singer (and rhytm guitarist, for that matter). He has this song called "Slow Blues" that will make you weep. At the philosophy parties we also regularly played the Beatles' "Why Don't we Do It in the Road," Elvis Costello's "Pump it Up," and whatever the rest of us came up with on the spot.

This is a cool thing about the interwebs, finding old bands you used to jam with. Most haven't survived though, or sometimes someone else got the same name. I know that the current Ducky Boys of Boston have nothing to do with the (much better!) band from Montgomery Alabama with that name. On the other hand, from what I can tell, the Vicious Diplomacy that became a key part of the Carolina hardcore scene probably was a ship of Theseus like descendant of the band I knew (they took the bass player from one of the bands I was in at the time, breaking us up).

Somebody has been putting some of Steel Fury's (not to be confused with the video game of the same name) stuff up on youtube. They were originally from Montgomery and one of my bands shared a warehouse with them. There are lots of stories not safe for the blog from then. . .

Sometimes me and Fury's bassplayer, Tim, would take a break from our respective bands (this when I was playing with Vicious Diplomacys' bass player, who also sang in my band, but then didn't later in Vicious Diplomacy) and I'd play Tim's bass and Tim would play my guitar and sing. It was just a joke, but it rocked out in a weird way. We'd just make stuff up for an hour or so and people would take turns drumming, all the hangers on getting crazier and crazier with the slam-dancing and other forms of delinquency. We actually had a name for our improvisational "band" but I can't remember it, nor can I remember the name of my band that shared the warehouse with Steel Fury (which is sad, because the songs that Dave, of later Vicious Diplomacy bassplaying fame, wrote were actually good).

This is perhaps my one claim to musical fame, or to being a footnote to a footnote of fame (you have to be a pretty big metal geek to still hold a flame for Steel Fury). If I remember right, before Steel Fury moved to Southern California they actually had a singer, and the only time Tim sang was when he was playing my guitar and I was playing his bass. Maybe seeing how well his singing went over with me was part of them ultimately reducing to a three piece and handing the duties over to Tim as in the above video. Also, I think the guitarist's DK (for Dead Kennedy's) sticker might have been influenced by the exact same sticker I had on my guitar. I certainly had the sticker first. Both of these things might be misrememberings though. As noted, I can't even remember the name of the band I was in that shared their upstairs warehouse space (the cover band I was in at the time was called Side Effects; I did a much better job in the punk band).

I also just found a song from the great Austin band, Three Lesbian Folksingers, fronted by Phillip, still up on myspace (unfortunately not their best song, Espanol es la Linua de La Rock and Roll, or their second best, Wee Little Wee, or the other one where at the end Phillip would just scream his head off for a few minutes). My band at the time "Ben Wa Blues" played gigs with them, by his own admission he actually lifted the primal screaming bit from me, which was cool, and makes me a third order footnote at least. The thing is, it was just weird when I did it; it actually worked for them. They were a much better band, and I'm bummed that all I can find is their Jello Lover song.

I'm a much happier person these days, but all that music produced some really good times. I can't wait to teach my kids to play, but they'll probably get in to jazz flute just to rebel against me. That's O.K. though.

feh

So much to do today, phone calls to return, e-mails, a lecture to prepare, but my psyche is in full-on Bartleby mode.

I think Black Flag has a couple of songs about this, but the real Bartleby have preferred not to embed a youtube video.

Great Crispin Glover Interview

From the Onion AV Club HERE.

My reaction to Crispin Glover has always been very much like Morrissey's reaction to Jobriath and The New York Dolls' performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

From high school onwards, I've always experienced him as a normal person in an abnormal world. Perhaps that's conceptually incoherent. . .

Glover is the main actor in my favorite movie, Jane Spencer's "Little Noises," described by wikipedia thusly:

Little Noises is a 1991 drama/comedy film. It follows the life of an awkward and unsuccessful writer (Crispin Glover) who dates a playwright (Tatum O'Neal) and shares a room with an unsuccessful actor (Steven Schub). He steals the poems of a deaf-mute (Matthew Hutton). After claiming them as his own, he shows them to a literary agent (Rik Mayall) who is so impressed that he immediately advances the writer hundreds of dollars.

Jane Spencer, fresh out of UT, directs her first movie, aiming for a comedy. It is in fact billed as "a little comedy in the Big Apple".

(1) It's actually a tragedy. The deaf guy's brother gets killed. Glover's character gets exposed. The poems really are amazing. You just feel sorry for all of humanity by the end.  . . (2) Glover's character is just so believable. When a grunt in the Air Force he won a contest for writing a horrible short story about Eskimos and decided to be a writer based on that. But the problem is, he had no talent.  (3) Like the New York Dolls in their prime, the movie is just beautiful.

I saw the film in the now closed Dobie movie theater, right off the University of Texas at Austin Campus.It probably got shown there because the director was a graduate from the Radio Television Film major at U.T (shuttered while I was there, just as the El Mariachi guy was getting his degree).

While I'm in an elegaic mood from thinking about how Little Noises is is only availabe on VHS from amazon, I should note this further depressing fact. All the great things in the U.T. campus from the pre-grunge (when SST records were alone in carrying the lamp for rock and roll) to early grune eras are now shuttered. You used to have the Dobie, Quakenbushes Cafe, Les Amis, GMs Steakehouse, Europa Books, a head shop whose name I can't remember, and a great independent record store. Shiner Bock Brewery had not been bought out yet, and they provided free beer to poetry readings and art shows every weekend.

All this is closed now! Even the post-grunge Barnes and Noble on Guadelupe has closed now. It's all just stupid clothes and food stores. What happened? With the exception of Hole in the Wall, there's absolutely no funkiness on the drag any more. No creativity.

It's weird how a city can be a victim of its own success.

Anyhow, nice to see that Glover is still carrying the lamp, shouting out in the marketplace.

Tebowie

5 And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

As well as being the funniest thing I've seen all month, this is really quite an extraordinary performance, especially at around 1:06 when Jesus starts to sing.

When Mitt Romney Came To Town

How is this even legal?

A quote from Kranish and Helman's The Real Romney.

In 1996, Bain invested $27 million as part of a deal with other firms to acquire Dade International, a medical diagnostics equipment firm, from its parent company, Baxter International. Bain ultimately made ten times its money, getting back $230 million. But Dade wound up laying off more than 1600 people and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, amid crushing debt and rising interest rates. The company, with Bain in charge, had borrowed heavily to do acquisitions, accumulating $1.6 billion in debt by 2000. The company cut benefits for some workers at the acquired firms and laid off others. When it merged with Behring Diagnostics, a German company, Dade shit down three US plants. At the same time, Dade paid out $421 million to Bain Capital's investors and investing partners.

The companies they did  this to were forced to pay off Bain dividends first while they were collapsing.

It's a shell game. Company Y buys Company X. Company X borrows huge amounts of money and gives it to Company Y. Then Company X goes bankrupt, and Company Y is not responsible for its debts.

And Mitt Romney gets over a quarter of a billion dollars out of this scam as tens of thousands of people working for the companies purchased by Bain are destroyed. From an earlier New York Post article:

Romney's Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in five businesses - Stage Stores, American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), GS Industries, and Details - making a $578 million profit.

And every single one of the companies went bankrupt! More from the same article.

Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts...

* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Anyhow, if you have the time, please watch the embedded video, if you can stomach it.

the most depressing thing about philosophical finitude

is that to make any progress in a philosophical project you have to bracket huge swaths of philosophy: issues, arguments, thinkers, epochs, etc. Say that you are working on inferring causality from mathematical equations in physics. To even address that issue you might have to just assume that Hume's skeptical problems about modality have been solved.

But the stuff one person brackets might be absolutely central to another person.

It would be very nice if we were all humble about this, but that's often not the case. Some weird facet of human psychology makes it the case that people want to be condescendingly dismissive towards the thinkers and issues that they are bracketing so as to get on with their own work.

I don't quite get why this is the case, though it's something I've both had to fight against in my own soul, and been victim to.

One of my best papers is probably the one with Jason Megill on the Lucas/Penrose argument, but it took us five years to get it published (in Minds and Machines, which is great). The paper is clear enough to place in a generalist journals, and we really do present a version of the Lucas/Penrose argument that does not fall prey to any of the extant criticisms. But after weird rejection after weird rejection, it just became clear to me that the phil. mind reviewers for a lot of generalist journals had an overwhelming psychic investment in the debate being closed.

Maybe that's arrogant. . . in any case it's not a big deal because Megill and I have published plenty, and Minds and Machines is a great place to end up in anyhow.

I think it's much harder with respect to how the lack of humility can damage friendships. I don't know how many times I've heard someone who has either not read a thinker I'm excited about (e.g. Robert Brandom, Graham Priest, Graham Harman, Crispin Wright), or who maybe read a little bit in graduate school, say something completely dismissive like, "well X is just deeply confused." In these contexts it's always when the issue is one that the person has to bracket to do their own work.

Which is fine as far as it goes. But still depressing.

I just wish we could be a little more humble about these kinds of judgments. Why can't we just admit that we're finite and we have to make bets about what is going to be most useful for our own work? Can't we do this without denigrating people who make different bets?

No. Humans are just too depraved.

[P.S. This train of thought motivated by an interesting and I think very difficult discussion at Leiter Reports HERE. The discussion caused my thoughts, but I'm not sure that my thoughts are that relevant to it. I don't take the above to be inconsistent with what anyone wrote, so I posted them on my own space.]

first day back at LSU after the break

I went in to school today to do transfer advising. This involves helping students get LSU credit for courses they took elsewhere. The trick is to try to make sure they get as much credit for classes that count towards General Education Credit. For example, the student may have taken a class that is a combination of practical and theoretical philosophy, but our practical philosophy class would only fulfill the "elective" component of their degree audit, whereas our theoretical ethics class fulfills one of their "humanities" GEC parts of the cafeteria tray. So in a case like that you try to get the student the GEC credit.

It sounds tedious, but it's actually really rewarding. You meet all these students who are really psyched to be coming to LSU and if you do your job well and look at their official degree audits you get to help them quite a bit as far as being on track to graduate in their major. It's three to five minutes of your time and you are meeting somebody cool and at their best and also making their day.

It's also the kind of thing that requires practical wisdom of the sort a computer is probably never going to master. There are just so many finely grained distinctions concerning how one class translates into another (this example actually illustrates Lance and Hawthorne's (correct!) take on Quinean indeterminacy really well, but I won't go into that).

This kind of thing changes alot when you have kids of your own. . . When I see these parents and their kids getting tours of the campus I sometimes get a little choked up now in a way I didn't used to. It's quite a fine thing actually, deeply rooted in love.

Tom Waits could play the hell out of this song

Weirdly, until I checked it tonight I had been confusing this song with Tom Waits cover of the Dwarves' Working Song.

I mean I remembered the song from seeing the Bakshi film in high school, but I was remembering it as crazily syncopated in the same way as Swordfishtrombones era Waits.

I think it's probably pretty often that we remember things as better than they were precisely because of this kind of confusion.

Vanity Fair Article on Romney

Pretty devastating takedown HERE.

If I had to predict it would be that Romney gets the nomination and loses the election, and the Republican base responds to this pathologically by nominating someone equally unpleasant (and whom they view as even more "conservative") in 2016.

The reasons I'm betting on Obama are many: (1) Republican legislative attempts to stall the recovery and thus deny Obama a second term seem to be failing, (2) American voters are not kind to people who come across as robotic on television (Gore, Kerry), (3) Romney's business background as a corporate looter is pretty transparently evil and ended up not only being destructive to tens of thousands of lives but also a paradigm example of how we've lost our way since the 1970s,  and (4) Obama's done a pretty good job, everything considered.

Of course I was disastrously wrong about Bush. It was clear to me from the get-go that he was a boiling cauldron of barely surpressed rage and resentment, which he only managed to tamp down in public via  a sub-Eddie Haskell type smarmy insincerity. Everything I read about how incredibly petty and nasty he treated people personally verified that assessment, as did the kind of kiss up, kick down *&#holes he surrounded himself with (Chaney, Bolton, Rumsfeld, etc.).

But the guy did get elected the second time at least. Since his presidency failed in the exact ways you would predict from someone of his temperment, I conclude both that my *&#hole radar is more finely tuned than some non-trivial percentage of the electorate, and (more distressingly) that there are way more people out there who feel better about their own (or their spouse's or father's) masculine *&#holery when they vote for one (and this is the psychic subtext both for the Nixon "Southern Strategy" in general and in particular for much of what drove the torture policy of the Bush administration).

But again, American voters are much less forgiving of any sniff of insincerity from people who come across as robotic on the television.  I don't think the Nixon/Bush appeal to unoriginal, destructive macho energy type pathologies will work for someone like Romney.

I was wrong about Bush though. . .

The Onion on LSU/Alabama Game

Maybe easier to read HERE.

I don't know how complicit I am in this sorry business.

I do teach at LSU, but the only sports I watch are professional wrestling and competitive cooking type reality shows. I can't for the life of me understand why people want to watch other people move little balls back and forth. Ever since I was a kid (surrounded by Alabama fans, coincidentally) I haven't been able to get it one bit.

I know that there is aesthetic pleasure to be had in watching anybody do something well, but that's pretty much vetoed by the other relevant fact, that if something is not worth doing, then it is not worth doing well.

Sorry for being grumpy. Geaux Tigers. . .

salon dot com fails Web Design 1001

Obviously there is no going back to the glory days before these things had to be profitable, when salon dot com had about as much content as the daily beast does now, and (moreover) when they had both Camille Paglia and Greil Marcus writing tremendously entertaining weekly articles.

But the worst thing is that when you go to the articles now, more often than not there is an add with moving images that continue to move the whole time you are there. It's tremendously distracting.

At about the time HTML 4 was invented, and you could do these animated GIF files, all of the books on how to design web sites contained the commandment not to include graphics that continuously move, because they were subconsciously irritating at best. I think this was really good advice.

If salon has an article I want to read I always cut and paste the text into a word document and also try to notice whatever the obnoxious moving add is and remember not to purchase that.

In addition to defending endless apartheid in Israel, The New Republic sins by having the scroll through of their top stories constantly on the move. Again, the Daily Beast is way better, you can pause the damned thing on their site.

One of the hardest things about having pretensions to creativity. . .

is the feeling of constantly throwing a party at which no one shows up.

This is a harsh thing in reality. It happened once to my wife and a friend when they were in college. They put on a party for the University of Minnesota Philosophy Club at my wife's family's lake cottage and no one came.

It sucked!

My first publication was with Roy Cook in Analysis. I remember celebrating with Emily when I got the actual journal. We went to the now closed Baton Rouge Macaroni Grill where one of my smartest students was a bartender, and he kept slipping us these free concoctions he'd made up.

I was really excited, but my excitement was very much like Steve Martin in THIS VIDEO (taking out the sniper part).

In addition to having a philosophy MA, Emily has a masters in Library Science, and her research skills are unearthly. As a result of this, she was able to get statistics on how likely it is your published work is to get cited. The mean (not median!) citation rate for an article is 1.5. So on average (mean) an article will be cited one and a half times. But it gets more complicated. First, 75% of these citations are the author citing the article herself in a later article. And what accounts for the remaining .5 citations are a few articles that are cited hundreds of times (Emily couldn't get median citation rates, which would have been vastly more depressing).

And if you write novels it's even worse. Among fiction writers the common lore is that your first two to three hundred thousand words are practice. And if you get to that point there's no guarantee of anything (Moby Dick was categorized under non-fiction for whales for years). And music is even worse than that.

But there's this whole Wittgensteinian thing where creative works have to be in principle public. And it is a result of this (and the statistics above) that the overwhelmingly majority of creative activity really is like getting one's lake cottage ready for a party that nobody shows up to.

If you have any religious, or just Hegelian for that matter, affectations, then all of this is vastly easier psychically. When you create something beautiful or express something that illustrates a new understanding then you are part of the universe creating and thinking itself. What could be cooler than that? This is perverse in a hyper Brandomian way, but it is exactly how I understand (at least for myself and people like me) the first of Jesus' two commands, the one involving honoring God.

Finally, one of the great things about Role Playing Games such as Dungeons and Dragons is that they provide mechanisms for collaborative story-telling. They give you a way to be creative and social at  the same time.

Feh. As the brothers Meat would say, who needs action when you got words?

Speculative Realism now a category in Phil Papers

Tremendous good news.

Announcement by Harman HERE, and place at PhilPapers HERE.

If you just do a search on "speculative realism" you get a lot of other realism stuff too, but also the option to click on "speculative realism" under "continental philosophy." This then brings you to the place to which I link above.

Cool to know that the book I'm working on this year will have a home at philpapers.

syllabus to class on Graham Harman

My syllabus to PHIL 4952 Topics in Metaphysics for this Spring Semester at LSU is on-line HERE.

This is going to be an absolute blast, and also help substantially with the Speculative Realism book that I'm writing now.

nice IHE essay by Jay and Graff on why Humanities degrees are good for employability

Essay HERE.

Joe Bob Briggs would have appended, "I shouldn't have to say this" to the whole thing, but it is something that we need to be saying over and over again.

 

Critcheley, Lepore, et. al. on Dummett

Moving collection of memorials at the Stone HERE (if the very porous paywall blocks you, then just reset your cookies by hitting "clear history" under your browser tools).

In some sense I'm Dummett's philosophical grandson, having studied under Neil Tennant and dissertated on Dummett and his philosophical sons such as Tennant and Crispin Wright.

Some of my friends thought it was weird that I never attempted to meet or communicate with Dummett, but almost always when I meet people who have such an influence on me (usually musicians, but in philosophy it includes Putnam) it's very much like the Chris Farley interview to right, e.g. "Remember when you wrote The Logical Basis of Metaphysics? That was awesome."

It was and is.

[Update: Brian Leiter (HERE) showcases this lovely remembrance by Jason Stanley:

My first job, in 1995, was as a stipendiary lecturer in Oxford, a position in the Oxford academic hierarchy just a bit lower than assistant janitor. Dummett was nevertheless extremely generous with his time. Some people kiss up and kick down; Dummett was someone who kicked up and kissed down.]

Washington Post Covers the APA

Story HERE. Focus is almost entirely on a session with three Ph.Ds who are successful bloggers. That part is nice. However, the article is actually pretty misleading on the non-academic career possibilities that the BA in philosophy yields.

In our department we (and by "we" I mean James Rocha and Jeff Roland) are putting together a Powerpoint thingy on why philosophy is a good BA that we will show to the students in our intro classes and also make available on the interwebs.

Another thing not covered in the story is just how much more fun it is to watch your four and two year olds' ecstasies over sightings of Mickey Mouse and company than is the Eastern APA smoker.

Though it did suck to, for a second year in a row, miss the author meets critics sections of Lance and Kukla's monumentally excellent Yo! and Lo!: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. Last year the reason involved inclement weather, this year Mickey Mouse. I wonder what it'll be next time.

incommunicado

I will be in international waters for the next week, so expect neither posts nor return e-mails for a bit.