“In this limit experience,…an experience of language in which we are exposed to the limits of our ability to say what we mean,…language proves not to be identical with being.” Donatella Ester di Cesare (described by Theodor George)
Combine that with Lacan: “The being of language is the nonbeing of objects.”
It would be good to provide an anticipatory reading of the uneven geographical diffusion of “exponential thinking”.
I’m amazed at how inexplicable even simple misunderstandings in social situations can be. You know the kind: tiny emotional explosions occur on someone’s countenance in response to an ambiguous utterance. It seems easy enough to explain: person A interpreted a sentence structure to mean something that person B did not intend to convey, and person B feels as misunderstood as person A feels wounded. But it’s always more than that, and it always will be. James C Scott famously writes that large scale social events will always exceed in complexity any schema we devise to explain them. But it’s even the case for small social events. We are small things on the surface of the earth.
I simply must write, at least to document some books worth reading, to offer quotations and short digressions.
Science Fiction: Charles Stross, Singularity Sky.
What a strange book! From a “hard sci-fi” angle I applaud Stross for his literary treatment of warp drive. As a technology of civilization, warp drive is a cornucopia for the authorial imagination, freeing writers to imagine any place and time, in any combination, at any scale, in any style. Basically, the concept of warp drive is that Einstein’s Special theory of Relativity — which presupposes a solid-state universe — allows a fleet of military starships to travel into the future and past, relative to their own reference point, with “relative” ease. Stross uses this technology, which relies on tightly controlled black holes in the ship’s core to bend and shape spacetime, to tell a story about the inadequacy of traditional organizational paradigms for dealing with the disruptive impacts of emerging technologies.
In Stross’ future there are “cornucopia machines,” i.e. nanoassemblers that can make anything, including new nanoassemblers. The Eschaton (superintelligent A.I.) is traveling throughout the universe making sure that nobody uses Einstein’s theory to intervene in the historical events that led up to the development of the Eschaton, which could jeopardize its continued existence. The idea that artificial intelligence might be embroiled in its own existential crisis at an intergalactic scale is a nice twist on the typical AI narrative.
There are lots of great things about Stross’ novel.
1.) Future tech allows the author to expose the inadequacy of revolutionary socialist ideology in a world of accelerating technological change. Burya Rubenstein, the exiled revolutionary character, is a delight to observe: at first, his dreams are about to be realized (an intergalactic intelligence is about to give him a cornucopia machine); then, he’s organizing a democratic soviet (complete with military trials and executions); and finally, he’s a hybrid cyborg oddity settling in to the realization that complete transcendence through ownership of the means of production is not so easy for the masses to activate.
2.) Dramatic demonstrations of the unintended consequences of future technologies.
Et cetera.
I’ve also been reading John Fowles’ The Magus, a novel I should have read years ago when a chap I conversed with at university recommended it in 2004. Fowles started writing the book at age 25 and spent 15 years working at it, his first novel. The protagonist is 25 years old and travels to the Greek island of Phraxos, where he meets a remarkable gentleman. Luckily, I’ve been reading The Magus alongside a limited edition volume Fowles wrote about the novel, how it came to be, his opinion of how it turned out, etc. One observation Fowles makes has stuck with me. He says that the Greek islands give the impression of such abundance to the observer that, in this land, “one does not create; one enjoys.” I find that sentiment so lucid; as if the act of enjoying went beyond the urge to create art. Of course, the statement comes from a novelist, which should indicate that enjoying cannot last, and will not satisfy the restless envy of poets.
According to Fowles, The Magus never quite captures what the author wanted it to portray, despite 15 years of complete servitude to writing the novel. How horrible!
I’ve also been reading Emile Zola’s first novel Therese Raquin, written when he was 27. The beginning of the novel is tremendous, but the plot drags on like you wouldn’t believe. The author hovers over the emotions of his characters like a cumbersome ghost, unwittingly torturing his readers through endless repititions. Zola believed he was producing a scientific analysis of human emotional automata, as evidenced by the frequently explicit statement from the narrator that his descriptions are scientific descriptions of actual emotional phenomena. The limitation of Zola’s early work is precisely this: his science is ill-formed shit.
What is the nature of the shit science in Zola’s novel?
Take this example: “Therese’s dry, nervous character had reacted in an odd way with the stolid, sanguine character of Laurent. Previously, in the days of their passion, this contrast in temperament had made this man and woman into a powerfully linked couple by establishing a sort of balance between them and, so to speak, complementing their organisms. The lover contributed his blood and the mistress her nerves, and so they lived in one another, each needing the other’s kisses to regulate the mechanism of their being. But the equilibrium had been disturbed and Therese’s over-excited nerves had taken control. Suddenly, Laurent himself plunged into a state of nervous erethism; under the influence of her fervent nature, his own temperament had gradually become that of a girl suffering from an acute neurosis. It would be interesting to study the changes that are sometimes produced in certain organisms as a result of particular circumstances. These changes, which derive from the flesh, are rapidly communicated to the brain and to the entire being.”
Now, this passage is remarkable from a literary history perspective, but not from a perspective of analyzing “the religion of the heart” with scientific rigor in our own day. From a literary history perspective, Zola’s novel should be considered an icon of 19th century portrayals of the nervous system. George S. Rousseau’s book Nervous Acts gets into the details of the literary diffusion of ideas about the nervous system, brain, imagination and memory, from ancient Greece through modern neuroscience. Zola seems to operate with a Galenic, Paracelsian view, where “dry nerves” and “sanguine characters” are technical descriptive terms. Laudably, Zola seems to know that his best descriptive terms are inadequate, which is why he adds the final line: “It would be nice to study this,” i.e. from a more Newtonian, scientific perspective, identifying physical pathways of communication between the nerves and blood of two distinct organisms.
Today, of course, authors have their own ideas about how to describe such emotional interactions in precise literary detail. My question becomes, “Who are today’s great Naturalist writers?” I’m not sure about this, either because I don’t read very much, or because knowledge of nervous system function is so common that these things go without saying.
I’m reading Zola because I had a dream in which someone asked me to read him.
After settling in to the new house, meeting the new roommates, and the cat, I inquired as to the contents of a shabby tupperware container full of used books. Happily, I was offered the chance to slide said container across the wooden floor into my new room, whereupon I set about examining its contents. At once I happened upon Aharon Agus’ The Binding of Isaac & Messiah: Law, Martyrdom, and Deliverance in Early Rabbinic Religiosity, published in the 90s by SUNY press.
The author makes a compelling case for exactly why bodily resurrction was such an important aspect of religious being in early Rabiinic time. In fact, Agus’ argument is that bodily resurretion exists for the religious person in the very intensity of their suffering. His premise and demonstration of this view comes from the story of Hannah and Her Seven Sons from the second book of Maccabbees. The story validates the suffering personality whose reasons for rejecting the command of a king to eat swine and defy the Law are understandable. Basically, the defiant gesture goes like this: “You may take my body and my life, but my Creator will return these things to my possession due to my obedience.”
This story from Agus’ book argues that bodily resurrection exists and has meaning through the historical contingency and metaphysical impact of martyrdom. This is a relational or functional view of the existence of bodily resurrection. No matter when or how the situation of martyrdom comes about, the impact of that exposure to evil produces the justified belief in the resurrection of the body. This is quite a different method for justifying belief than the positivist or materialist variety, which asks whether the material conditions for bodily resurrection could ever obtain in any possible world. The latter method offers a window to bodily resurrection only in a possible future where sufficiently advanced technology reproduces bodily consciousness, either in a new substrate or through biological reproductive means, i.e. cloning. The former method retains the nuance of religious history and the context in which belief in bodily resurrection arises.
In the religious context, there is no demand on the Creator to resurrect the body at a particular time in history; the end suffices. Rather, the only demand is the demand to obey the Law in the present, i.e. by not eating swine. Defying the king is thus the operational command. The context of the materialist method of inquiring about bodily resurrection places the operational command on the future:, i.e. show me the situation in which bodily resurrection obtains. The materialist conception focuses on the object of the resurrected body; the religious conception focuses on the object of the living command of dietary purity.
Strange, that bodily resurrection could be more or less real for the martyr focusing on the Law, compared to the materialist who either believes or disbelieves in the likelihood of bodily resurrection.
In this vein, I’m also thinking about Heidegger and John Dewey and Gilbert Ryle, whose works are featured in a fine 2005 book by W. Teed Rockwell called Neither Brain nor Ghost. Rockwell argues that consciousness or mind cannot be isolated in the brain, or the nervous system, or bounded by the skin. Mind arises from interaction with environment to produce a world of experience. Beyond the world of experience lay a real world of immense adaptive complexity, composed of so many umwelts and objects and systems. What determines meaning, and in some important sense existence, are the purposes and goals of the subjects in question, and those of the inquirer also.
Does bodily resurrection then exist, and if so, what is the manner of its existence? For whom? Under what conditions?
An ontology framed by cultural historians or historians of ideas might isolate particular situations in which bodily resurrection functioned as a real object or process. The object might be viewed through an agnostic lens if a paleoanthropologist asked the historian of ideas whether bodily resurrection exists, i.e. how does one answer this question whether the phenomena exists “in the end”? It might or it might not. Depends what kind of universe this is.
The criteria used by paleoanthropoligists to determine the existence of bodily resurrection in such case places different demands on the object of study. Likewise, a theoretical physicist might analyze bodily resurrection in terms of a 13-dimensional typoloogy, or a framework of parallel universes. The question whether bodily resurrection is metaphysically or logically or actually possible might intrigue the theoretical physicist, the paleoanthropologist, and the historian of ideas all,
What Agus himself claims is that “Its proclamation here, therefore, is an essential part of the being in the world of the mother and her sons.” In other words, bodily resurrection somehow fits in the world as an important feature of the situation of martyrdom.
It is no wonder, then, that belief in bodily resurrection is called into question when the situation of martyrdom abates in world history. The thought of bodily resurrection loses some of its “cash value” as William James would say.
For an anthropologist, the question arises whether belief in bodily resurrection universally accompanies situations analogous to martyrdom. How could such a question be asked, and what might count as data relevant to the question?
It seems obvious, then, that bodily resurrection is an immensely rich hyperobject. It is only the hierarchy of knowledge that pooh-poohs bodily resurrection as an element of historical time, a superstition relegated to particular historical conditions. But then, if theoretical physics is at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge, perhaps bodily resurrection has a future? The ontologies of Tippler and others offer case studies, not of bodily resurrection itself, but of theoretical physicists arguing for its actual possibility “in the end.”
agilekeys 