Posted 4:35 PM by Heinrich Faust
GRAND DELEUZION:       As readers of this albeit rather intermittent blog can attest, I hate "theory." I hate it fundamentally for its hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of American Post Modernism is the hypocrisy of people who started out railing for social justice, and wound up realizing that there was something to be said for stock portfolios, nice fat pay checks, and SUVs after all. There's nothing wrong with liking those things, perhaps, but liking them must be uncomfortable for a certain type of person, namely one who wishes to achieve tenure, status, and advancement in the very same institution he was throwing Molotov cocktails at a few years earlier. And it must certainly be uncomfortable for the person railing against the system who realizes that the system confers certain privileges of which she would like to partake. The poor, the disenfranchised, and oppressed really do exist, and their problems are complex, multifaceted, seemingly intractable and, probably, require solutions bound to be uncomfortable to those committed to the idea of having as much as they want of everything. And more than that such solutions require a long, hard uphill climb, sure to be met not with accolades but with flying tomatoes or bullets, as the case may be. How much more comfortable, not to mention safe, to be famous, loved, a powerful academic celebrity, ensconced in an Ivy League institution. I for one would much rather sip champagne, than man the barricades. The question becomes what to do? Do you hang your selling out sign from your office door? Nope. Because if you did, you would have to give up the idea that you are a radical subversive, fighting for a better society and the liberation of the oppressed. And you would also be forced to accept the fact that your institution's 30,000 dollar a year tuition is prohibitive to all but a few members of those disenfranchised groups-those lucky enough to receive full-scholarships-, and that the degree your institution will confer on those students who can pay the tuition will enable them to enter into and perpetuate the very class and power structure you are so adamantly against. This is not an appealing prospect. Thankfully, however, there's France, or rather a group of nihilistic French intellectuals who looked at the modern world and said, "Gag," and who present the perfect solution to your dilemma. The recipe for the transformation of the "reactionary sell out" into the "Radical, Subversive, Liberator of the Oppressed" is by now time tested, and virtually guaranteed. It goes as followed:

Take one poorly translated French text, and mix liberally with other poorly translated French texts - preferably a lot of them.

Search dictionary for obscure words and import liberally.

Find scientific terms and sift together with obscure words to form sentences reminiscent of a poorly translated French texts.

Half bake in left-wing ideology, and serve to guests dedicated to 1). the idea that you have just produced the most radically left-wing concoction ever half-baked, and 2). that anyone who says otherwise is a conservative reactionary, and an oppressor of the "oppressed."

Serve liberally and to as many people as possible.

Fortunately, however, those who tolerated Post-modernism because they thought not doing so would make them "conservatives" by default, are starting to wake up and exit the kitchen. Case in point: this article in Dissent.

Posted 1:25 AM by Heinrich Faust
I'M A PARENT:     Of an 8 week old kitten, whose temporary alias is "kitty," until I can think up a real name. So far she and the dog are getting along really well, but I do feel like the person who's just brought home the new baby to the four year old toddler. And it's a strain to make sure that everything is equal, no one feels jealous, and everyone feels loved. Should I ever decide to involve myself in the insanity that is marriage, I shall make sure never to have more than one child. Thankfully, however, "kitty" will be grown in ten months. We'll see if I survive to see it.

Posted 2:06 AM by Heinrich Faust
GOOD BLOG, BAD BLOG:     This is going to sound presumptuous to those of you who have no idea who I am, which, incidentally, is most of you. However, I've always liked the things you learn in your elementary logic class and then never apply in real life, like, for instance, the idea that who the speaker is has no relevant connection to the validity of the idea expressed. But really whether you think it's presumptuous of me or not, I'm still going to wade in on this. Blogs have become trendy in recent months. You can find articles about them in newspapers and magazines large and small, and one of the definitions that gets bandied about is that weblogs are a type of online journal. To me, however, such a definition is balderdash in its purest form, and it is one which leads to a lot of bad, regrettable writing.

Yes, I know that some people really do use blogs as journals, recording the most intimate details of their lives for public consumption. Go over to Livejournal.com sometime and you'll see what I mean. Traditionally, however, journals have been private affairs, equipped with locks. You took out your pen and said what you thought and did so secure in the knowledge that they'd only read it when you were dead. In other words, you might write your journal with an audience in mind, but it would be a posthumous one, unable to hold you personally accountable for what you had said. Journals might be poorly written or eloquent, but readers of journals expect the journal to represent the authors' writing at its most unmediated. This is not to say that journal writers don't engage in hide and seek games with posterity, and, more importantly, with themselves. It is to say, however, that people are much more likely to pop off in a locked journal, than they are in a published column.

And this is why thinking about blogs as journals is bad. Think of your blog as your journal, and you are casting an illusion of privacy over something which is in fact available to people all over the world. It may be just you, your computer, and your cat sitting on top of it, but not the moment you hit publish and the guy on Bangladesh Google hits search. And if you write your blog like you would write your journal, quickly and in large, sweeping strokes, you are likely to end up like Eric Alterman:

"I think I better apologize for the words “tough luck” at the end of yesterday’s entry. They are inappropriate in a situation where so many innocents, including children, were killed. When I wrote them, I was as yet unaware of the extent of the civilian damage caused by the Israeli missile attack."

Blogging presents the temptation of not checking facts. Whether you agree with Alterman's original position or not, it is clear that he would not have said what he said, had he known all the facts. I'm not saying that Alterman is alone in this. I posted something on Martin Walser in which I said that his book had not been published, when in fact it had. This was sloppy and it was embarrassing to read the comment on my post, and then find out the commentor was right. I wasn't that embarrassed, however, and that because I think of blogs, this one, and the others I've done, as being informal, and unmediated. I wrote my Martin Walser piece in fifteen minutes, and although I did a bit of research, I certainly didn't do that much. I would say that Alterman slapped his "offensive" statement up in five minutes flat. And maybe you can say, so what? Alterman got his hate mail; I got my comment, and the wheel grinds on.

Making errors and saying regrettable things is painful, however, especially when the whole world is around to see you do it. And to the extent that people listen to each other, form their ideas on the basis of what they read, and base their actions on their ideas, then just simply spouting off in a world wide forum could have some nasty consequences. I'm not saying that blogs are bad, just that we've been thinking about them in the wrong way. Blogs have much more in common with broadsides than with journals. Like the eighteenth century broadside, they're political, usually polemical, cheaply produced, and mostly succinct expressions of their author's views. And like blogs, most broadsides were written in the hopes of gaining a large audience, and persuading it. Whether you agree with that definition or not, the fact remains that blogs are a political and public form of writing. They are most certainly not journals.

Posted 1:24 AM by Heinrich Faust
CONVERSATIONS WITH MY CLONE:             This sounds to me like a cross between a cheesy 50s sci-fi novel, and a sappy self help book, but L'Express apparently thinks it's: "Intelligent et drôle." [in French for those not put off by ephemeral words and accent marks].

Posted 1:23 AM by Heinrich Faust
MORE MARTIN WALSER:            Everything you probably didn't want to know about Martin Walser, and the scandal over his anti-Semitic !... ? book.  For those of you who don't read German, the brouhaha can be summarized as follows: some critics/ newspapers think the book is anti-Semitic, some don't. If you're more resourceful than I am, you can find a pirated copy of the novel on the web. When the scandal erupted, Surkamp sent email copies of the novel to journalists, who in turn sent them to the friends, and well you get the picture. According to Germany's ALDailey equivalent - perlentaucher.de -, German bloggers got a hold of the novel and posted it. Of course, you can't be sure that the blogged novel you're reading is the one Walser wrote, since Surkamp did nothing to protect the text against alteration - not that there's much you can do anyway, but things like pdf are effective against people who refuse to cut and paste.

Posted 4:21 AM by Heinrich Faust
OH STANLEY CON’T: As a perceptive reader of last week’s installment noted in the comments, one of the problems with Stanley’s article - though not, incidentally, of my essay (huff, huff) - is that it rolls things which can be decided by objective criteria in with things which can’t be. This is evidence of two things. The first is that it’s an indication that for Stanley the system is important, and the world is secondary, if not non-existent. This is bad in itself, as we’ll see when we get to the second part of Stanley’s article. However, it is also the garden path to the door into the maelstrom. Stanley & co. throw this door open, and say, “Hey, great, wow, look at that: chaos. Subversive and awesome.” In doing so, however, post-modernists have turned humanity’s most fundamental and most intractable problem into a virtue. And yet, it is not a virtue, or if it is, it is a virtue redefined, for on the other side of that door lie genocide, murder, and every other evil of which human beings are collectively and individually capable. Let me be clear about this. I think Stanley is dangerous, but I also think you dear reader are dangerous, and I think I am dangerous, and everyone else. I think we are all dangerous, and for reasons which Stanley in his muzzy, bumbling way manages to stumble into all the same.

“Historians,” says Stanley with all the certainty of one proving a point absolutely, “draw conclusions about the meaning of events, astronomers present models of planetary movements, psychologists offer accounts of the reading process, consumers make decisions about which product is best, parents choose schools for their children – all of these things and many more are done with varying degrees of confidence, and in no case is the confidence rooted in a conviction that the actor is in possession of some independent standard of objectivity.” If the world were at all important to Stanley, he would have excepted the astronomer from that statement; for the astronomer is the only one of Stanley’s examples who is - in Stanley’s revealingly redundant terminology – “in possession of some independent standard of objectivity.” The astronomer uses a system to build her model of planetary movement, but she does so, from the conviction that there is an actual planet actually moving in a measurable way, and that both the planet and its movement are available to her. When she presents her model, she may do so with varying degrees of confidence as to its accuracy, but she also does so in the belief that the model will be judged against an objective standard: namely the actual movement of the planet.

When we say that a standard is objective, all we really mean is that it fulfills three criteria. The first and foremost is that the standard exist independently of the person using it. So if the planet and its movement have their own existence, and if this existence is in no way contingent upon the existence of the astronomer and her model, then she can claim the planet and its movement as an objective standard against which her model will be judged. Or rather she can claim the planet, so long as it meets two further criteria, the first being that she have reliable access to the planet, maybe not perfect access, but reliable access all the same. In other words, there is a difference in building a model of planetary movement and a model of a wormhole. The astronomer could not be certain that the wormhole even existed, and would have no reliable way of measuring it, even if it did. So long as the wormhole remained theoretical, so would any claim to using it as an objective standard. It would be likewise impossible to claim as an objective standard a thing which one knew to exist, but could only experience in a way fundamentally out of accord with its actual existence. The thing could theoretically serve as an objective standard, but an actual standard based upon it could not claim objectivity, since the standard itself would in this instance be subjective, a product not of the thing itself, but rather of one’s own highly flawed measurements and perceptions of it. And this leads us to the final criterion of an objective standard, namely that the thing not alter itself according to the observer. This might seem like a rehash of the first criterion, but isn’t, for it is entirely possible for something to behave in one way under the eyes of one observer, and in a completely different way under the eyes of another. My dog for instance is friendly and loving to me, but has never met a stranger he didn’t hate. This doesn’t mean, however, that he does not exist independently of me. And if the planet moved in an ellipse for the astronomer, but in a triangle for me, then the astronomer could not use it as an objective standard, or rather she could, but only as it related specifically to her and her model. An objective standard is in other words: independent, accessible, and universal.

To believe that the astronomer has no claim to an objective standard regarding planetary movement, one would have, therefore, to believe one or a combination of three things: that the planet does not exist independently of the astronomer, that the astronomer’s access to it is either non-existent or so deeply flawed as to be irrelevant, or that the planet exists for the astronomer in a way it does not exist for you or me. Stanley makes no exception for the astronomer when he says, “Rather the actor, you or I or anyone, begins in some context of practice, with its received authorities, sacred texts, exemplary achievements, and generally accepted benchmarks, and from within the perspective of that context – thick interpersonal, densely elaborated – judges something to be true or inaccurate, reasonable or irrational, and so on.” Although it is true that the astronomer probably does begin within some sort of context, the problem is that Stanley neglects to mention the existence of something outside that context, something with the power to destroy or revise it, namely the planet. For Stanley it would seem that the context is controlling the astronomer’s access to the planet, that the astronomer sees the planet in a way commiserate with the context from which she begins, rather than with the existence of the planet itself. Maybe the context and the planet correspond, but Stanley makes no provision for what happens should they not. There is no mention of the planet asserting itself over the context and smashing it to bits, and therefore if the context is flawed in regard to the planet, it would seem that the astronomer is stuck with it all the same. Presumably the planet does not have the power to transcend the context from which the astronomer approaches it, and that because it is the context, not the planet, which is determinative. The astronomer cannot claim objectivity, because her access to the planet can only be subjective, dependent on a context and a system, both of which are revisable, but not on the basis of a reliable access to what goes on independently of them in the empirical world.

In the lab across the quad from Stanley’s ivory tower, of course, cherished beliefs are routinely overthrown, and contexts and methodologies revised. Even in the city beyond Stanley’s tower a group of highly context-oriented individuals did once upon a time accept something called the heliocentric model of the solar system, although the model could not have been more inimical to the context in which they operated. People start from within contexts, but that doesn’t mean they stay locked within them, even if those contexts are ones in which the person has a deep personal or professional investment. And that would seem to indicate that there is something compelling about the world, something beyond what we individually and collectively think.

A post-modernist – though not Stanley in Harpers - would probably say, “Damn right there is. Culture.” Culture is the “super context” into which all “sub-contexts” are subsumed. The astronomer thus operates within two contexts, the subsidiary one related to being an astronomer, and the dominant one of the culture she inhabits. The “cultural context” informs and controls the “astronomer context,” so that what the astronomer thinks about the planet is to a large extent culturally dependent. What she has to say about the planet is, thus, reflective of and to a greater or lesser degree determined by a current in the larger culture. The heliocentric model of the solar system did not change Western culture, but rather was brought about because Western culture changed.

All of this might seem so much philosophical ephemera, a shop clerk’s weekend version of the Glasperlenspiel, and yet ask yourself this: If the heliocentric model of the solar system is determined by context rather than the actual movement of planet Earth, then why should you believe in it? Who’s to say the Earth isn’t standing stock-still and the sun moving around it? It isn’t as if the heliocentric model is based on a reliable understanding of the way things actually are in the empirical world. And if this is the case then why should you be precluded, for instance, from teaching that God placed the earth at the center of everything, and that everything correspondingly travels around it. Aren’t the people saying, “No, no, no, you can’t do that” just trying to impose their beliefs, their context, their culture upon you? Objectivity is a nice thing, because “that’s the way things are” is a wonderful answer to the question “why should I believe it?” And it is wonderful because it is or should be compelling to people regardless of who they are. Don’t believe the earth goes around the sun? You’re stupid, ignorant, insane, or willfully irrational, because the earth really does go around the sun and will continue to do so, whether you believe it or not. And that's also why people would like to claim objectivity for things which are not subject to it, including ethics.

But we'll get into that latter because this – sorry but it’s 4 am - is where this part of the essay ends. I have the day off tomorrow, but probably won’t get around to writing anything more about Stanley until next week. On the off chance you consider that bad news, just think: I’ll be quitting Dillards in two weeks. That means I’ll have lots more time and even more inclination to write and blog

Posted 5:01 AM by Heinrich Faust
THE DEATH OF MARTIN WALSER?:        Proof that Dillards rots your brain or at the very least distracts your attention. Until I saw the link on Instapundit's site, I didn't even know that the German novelist Martin Walser was accused of having written an anti-Semitic novel. Apparently, however, the novel was enough to make Frank Schirrmacher, the publisher of the FAZ, madder than Hell. Having not read the book, I'm withholding judgment, mainly because I see two possible interpretations.

The first is that Walser is doing something similar to what the playwright George Tabori does. Tabori was a much more controversial figure when he was living in the United States, and probably for good reason. However, his "German" plays like his American ones, often times play with
the roles of victimizer and victim, and deny any sort of easy distinction between the two. Tabori gets away with this, because he himself is Jewish and lost a good many of his family members, including his father, to the Holocaust. Were he not Jewish, you could see, however, that a play in which concentration camp inmates must chose whether or not to cannibalize one of their own would, perhaps, provoke people to yell "anti-Semitism." And yet, to characterize the Cannibals that way would be to grossly misunderstand
what is to me, in any event, one of the great plays of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the greatest written about the Holocaust. And it certainly isn't one which takes any prisoners in terms of what the Holocaust means for those who would live comfortably in the present. Some of the things Frank Schirrmacher said in his absolutely boiling "open letter to Martin Walser" made me think that he had misunderstood the novel, and read it too simplistically, when Walser was up to something similar to what Tabori is up to in the Cannibals. The other possibility, however, is that Walser is up to the exact opposite of what Tabori is up to, namely that Walser's novel is a denial of the Holocaust in which the murder of the Jews is portrayed as a hoax. If this is the case, then the novel is frighteningly anti-Semitic in and of itself. That it was written by one of the dominant figures of contemporary German literature makes the situation even worse.

However, it seems to me unfair to condemn Walser simply on the basis of what Schirrmacher said about a novel which hasn't even been published yet. The Times writer Instapundit links ends his article by saying, "So this is a rich and many-layered debate which will doubtless enliven German life for weeks to come. It would be nice to think that we could have one too." And yet, I would say, and this in the very best English fashion, that it would be
even nicer, jolly good, in fact,  if we could actually read the book we were debating about, and then have some certainty as to whether the book we were condemning as anti-Semitic actually was.

Posted 2:49 AM by Heinrich Faust
THANK-YOU:        Many thanks to Instapundit, Rich Hailey, and South Knox Bubba for linking to us. Knoxville bloggers rule!

Posted 2:45 AM by Heinrich Faust
COMING NEXT WED:      The second installment of Oh, Stanley. Ok, so thinking I was going to come home at 12 a.m. after lugging dresses to the dressing room all day, and saw into Stanley Fish with complete lucidity and gusto was, perhaps, a bit overly ambitious. I wrote the first part of this thing on my day off, and I think I’m going to save the next installment for Tuesday of next week, when I again have the day off and can sit down with a nice cup of coffee, and vivisect poor Stanley in peace. Come back on Wednesday, and I’ll have it posted (not to mention written).

Posted 2:29 AM by Heinrich Faust
UM, NEIN:       Mickey Kaus seems to think Gerhard Schroeder is gloating over the great Enron/ World Com accounting swindle. I haven't been able to find Schroeder's comments in the German press, but I haven't done all that comprehensive a search either. If he did say those things, however, I don't think he said them because he was doing the equivalent of jumping up and down in the playground and shouting, "N'yah, n'yah." Germany's economy isn't exactly booming. The latest economic indicators are still bad, and unemployment is still high. Schroeder has tried to blame all this on globalization, and the situation in East Germany, but the continuing lack of economic improvement is increasing the pressure on Schroeder to do something, especially since there's an election coming up. What he seems to have in mind - among other things - are some pretty massive cuts in Germany's extremely generous unemployment insurance. This has not, needless to say, made the unions terribly happy, and since Schroeder's party is supposedly on the left, the unions form an important constituency. Thus, Schroeder is caught between the German people who are demanding reform, and the Unions who are demanding that things like unemployment insurance not be touched. And, thus, if he said all those things about the big, bad US economy, he did it with the intention of A): trying to pass off some of the blame for Germany's economic situation into the US, or at the very least trying to make Germany look good by comparison, and B): reassuring the Unions before really sticking it to them. Personally, I think American-style capitalism is nasty, brutish, dehumanizing, and exploitative, and working at the mall this summer really hasn't helped to mitigate that opinion. I don't, however, think that Schroeder shares my view, or if he does share it, he shares it to the extent it suits his own political agenda and survival. [via Instapundit]