There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream.
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“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Saturday, November 11, 2017
the geography of subjective experience
Thursday, November 09, 2017
the battle between the list and the dialogue
There are two stories about Protagoras. In the hostile
account of his life written by Diogenes Laertius, it is said that he was a
porter, a relatively humble position, and that he invented a porter’s pad for
carrying things. But in Philostratas’s Lives of the Sophists he is given a much
grander birth, being the son of a wealthy citizen of Abdera who “amassed wealth
beyond most men in Thrace”, and who entertained King Xerxes in his house. Philostratus
claims that this Persian connection effected Protagoras’s thinking, since he
became versed, to an extent, in the doctrines of the Persian magi. Whereas
Diogenes Laertius (writing with all the snobbery of the ancient world at his
back) attributes Protagorus’s education to Democritus, who was impressed by
Protagoras’s invention of the porter’s pad. Somehow, this story rings with the
implication of slander – it gives Protagoras’s cunning all too menial a cast.
And yet Diogenes also casually attributes the invention of philosophy by
dialogue, or the Socratic method, to Protagoras – a rather big invention, the
invention of a form, which Diogenes, in his usual way, mentions and goes on.
The biographies of the Philosophers tumble
and jumble off the page like some inventory landslide, leaving us frustrated,
howling outside of the sacked walls for more.
One thing that is agreed between Philostratus and Diogenes
is that Protagorus, like Socrates, was accused in Athens of disbelief in the
Gods. In Philostratus, his person was condemned, and he fled from place to
place like a philosophical Flying Dutchman, seeking refuge, until he drowned in
a shipwreck. Diogenes L, however, maintains merely that his book, On the Gods,
was burned in Athens. He read this book, supposedly, at Euripides house. The
scandalous import of the book comes out in Diogenes quotation: “As to the Gods,
I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist.
For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the
question and the shortness of human life.”
This quotation, of course, doesn’t tell us much about the
argument that Protagoras develops about the gods; for after all, the argument
might show that most probably, they exist, and that their existence is bound up
in our not knowing. Or otherwise. Protagoras’s life – which is a bit
undecidable itself – might have provided a good context in which to ponder undecidablity
and the shortness of human life. Surely some echo of Protagoras’s phrase is
contained in the story, in Acts, that Paul discovered an altar in Athens
inscribed, to the unknown God.
I have always found Protagoras a sympathetic figure, whether
or not he came from the working class. He has been demonized for millenia as
the “founder” of relativism. One of Protagoras’s book, lost like all of them,
has the nice, Nietzschian title of “Truth, or The Overthrower” - (Kataballontes
Logoi). What we have from Protagoras (as though proving the shortness of man’s
life has an imminent effect on what he can know) is fragments, the most famous
of which, pondered wonderfully in the Theaetetus, is: ‘Of all things, the
measure is man, of things which are, that they are, of things which are not,
that they are not.’ What this means is elusive, of course. It is not that man
is the inventor of all things – nor does it say that things do not exist
outside of man. These are, of course, possible interpretations. But it puts man
in the position of “measurer”, and in one sense that goes well with the
Pythagorian viewpoint according to which number is at the ontological base of
things. Yet in another sense, it displaces number with the measurer – begging the
question of whether measure itself “depends” on man.
Myself, I think the measure fragment links up to what DL
claims about Protagoras’s invention of the socratic dialogue for doing
philosophy. DL writes that Protagoras was the first to say “that on everything
(pragmatos) there are two accounts (logous) opposed each other.” This would
seem to make “man” the measurer a more suspect unity; for if
pragmatos is the kind of thing that is subject to exponential account making,
it might be more reasonably said that of all things, the measureless is man.
Plato of course saw this, but he nevertheless decided that “man” meant an
aggregate of individuals, each person, instead of something like Dasein, or the
collectivity of the human, divided within itself. If we are seeking the geneology
of what Bakhtin calls “broadness” – the way many views, acts, desires and
beliefs can be attributed to persons, without there being a core coherence –
then we would have to start, I think, with Protagoras.
There is a story about Protagoras that is recounted in
Plutarch’s life of Pericles that exemplifies this theme. Pericles bratty son
published a “Daddy Dearest” book trying to mock Pericles for, among other
things, hanging with the sophists. “For instance, a certain athlete had hit
Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him, and
Pericles, Xanthippus said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras
whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of
the contests, that "in the strictest sense" ought to be held
responsible for the disaster.” This was an entire waste of time for the son,
Xanthippus; but it is a moment of radical recognition that stands out in legal
history, with the sense that liability can be mediate as well as immediate. But
what we see, in this discussion with Pericles, is an effect of there being two
sides to each question, and two sides after that – two sides, indeed, to
whether the right question is being asked.
The interesting question to ask of those who oppose
relativism relates to this issue of measure and measurelessness, and it is the
question of the disposability of form, whether it can be discarded once we get
to substance, or whether it is, indeed, so tied to substance that our
abstraction of one from the other is a distortion. To put it another way, by
rejecting Protagoras, which happens in the Theaetetus, is Plato actually
rejecting the socratic method? Is he rejecting Socrates? For if Socrates is
taking up Protagoras’s technique, it would seem, from Plato’s non-relativist
view, that Socrates made a mistake, gave too much to the enemy. For Protagoras’s
invention would seem designed never to get us closer to what we want - the list
of imperatives in the realms of knowledge, ontology, ethics and aesthetics that
can tell us what is true and what is false, what is knowledge and what isn’t,
what exists and what doesn’t, what is right and what isn’t, what is beautiful
and what isn’t.
With Protagoras, don’t we begin, in earnest, the battle
between the dialogue and the list?
Sunday, November 05, 2017
shower tourism
Who among us is not aware of shower tourism? By this, I do
not simply mean the always tentative exploration of hotel bathrooms, with their
varying accommodation for the traveler, their little tubes of cheap shampoo and
body gel, which one nevertheless pockets, their towels of varying thicknesses,
and their surprisingly common problem with retaining water in the shower or
shower/tub area – the latter being home to a curious penchant among hoteliers for
what is called, in the industry, the “flexible curtain track”, which allows
ample space to pull the curtain shut – but which always produces a sizeable
puddle at the end of the lustration process. That puddle into which the
showerer plunges his feet, with a light grimace, when removing himself from the
shower – how well we know it. Unlike our bathroom, however, the puddle is a
matter for someone else to clean up. Yes, the hotel bathroom deserves a whole
chapter to itself, but at the moment, I am talking of another facet of this
micro-world, which consists of using the showers of others – of friends or
family with whom one is staying, or who are staying with one. Both aspects are
noteworthy – tourism is, in this sense, a transitive property, since if you
have guests staying with you, your quarters are, for the length of the stay,
going to be somewhat alien to you. In other words, the tourist is a catalytic
creature at whose touch the familiar becomes a tourist site. It is this
logico-magical property that makes for the tragedy of tourism, as the tourist
searches for an authenticity which his very presence destroys.
Myself, I have stayed with many a host. I have entered naked
into many a tiled domain in apartment and house, and, testing the water from the shower head or
wand, surveyed the various unguents stored there. Sometimes, of course, I have
entered carrying my own; sometimes, I confess, I have “borrowed” alien creams,
soaps, shampoos and the like. This, you will say, is pretty un-guestly. It is a
sort of vice. But it is also part of our everyday novel-writing – since we all
engage in living through, or parasiting, other characters now and then. The
grocery clerk surveys the line and sees Mrs. X and Mr. Y and that girl who
always comes in and buys one item and the old woman who makes you go through
endless rolls of curly edged coupons, the auto saleman guesses at the libido of
the 20 year old guy, etc., etc. The self comes and goes, it doesn’t preceed
self-interest so much as it follows it, becoming at worst a ghostly selfishness,
and at best a moral worry.
So it is with conditioners. As we know from Kracauer and
Benjamin, the houses and apartments we live in are potentially only
repositories of clues for the classic detective. The doilies in the living room
may be bought for decorative reasons, but ultimately they serve to soak up the
blood from the murder victim, along with
the velvety pillow. The shower contains – like the computer and its files – a veritable
history of the owner of the shower for those with the eyes to see. Are the hair
products bought from the low end? Are they cheap and general? Or are they
bought from the high end, and are they expensive and specialized? Is the
language on them, by any chance, French? Or English? Do the shower gels refer
to milk? To almonds? To glowing skin?
The shower process itself nourishes speculation. We stand under the fierce beating down of warm drops and we think. We ponder the day, the tasks. We make up verses. We make up grocery lists. There are,
of course, people who simply shower to get clean. But as every tv ad for
shampoo or soap makes clear, cleaning is secondary to the ecstasy of soaping
and rinsing, to swinging, fresh hair, to sparkling eyes, to the smell that film
is just on the edge of throwing at you if it could – the whole transcends its
tawdry utilitarian purpose as much as advertisement’s speedy expensive car
transcends that mere metal carapace stuck in traffic jams and hustled into
parking lots. Advertisement has a way of changing the purposes of the acts of
everyday life. In the case of the shower, it has cinematized our experience.
There is a reason that some sing in the shower.
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