A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History

1. A history of concept-making practices — Checking the historian’s predicament; 2. Backward-looking history — Forward-looking imagination; 3. Imagination and hypothesis — How do we curb the vision of mechanism?

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1.      In The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin evinces what Robert Brandom has called “fundamental pragmatism,” “the idea that one should understand knowing that as a kind of knowing how.” [1] For philosophers, this has been a very difficult idea to assimilate ever since Plato distinguished the knowing of philosophers from the doing of artisans, thus making ideas—idea, eidos—unchanging elements to be contemplated, epitomized in Plato’s Realm of the Forms. Fundamental pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic scale of methodology is associated in the analytic tradition with the later Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, now sometimes called social-practice theorists of language, and who would applaud Shapin’s attempt to write “a history of concept-making practices” (4). [2]

One feature of practices is that they do not come into being randomly or without reason—practices are created for something, to do something. Shapin’s book is shaped to show how the efforts of the past were geared into the concerns of their present. [3] This is, itself, a historiographical lesson. History-writing has been the site of extraordinary theoretical pressures in the last 50 years. One effect has been the greater awareness of the dangers of writing Whiggish histories of progress. Such histories require that one posit in the past the seeds of a phenomena one wishes to praise in the present. This gives a lopsided view of how the past is, however, how it was in its wasness, as things unassociated with the contemporary telos you wish to explain the origins of are pushed from view, things that were possibly quite important to the actual historical actors. Such pessimism about stories of progress give way, however, to a more pervasive doubt about one’s ability to even select the phenomena you, the historian, wish to write about without corrupting the data with your contemporary concerns.

Shapin, in effect, shows how to diffuse this worry, what he calls “the historian’s predicament” (10). His explicit answer is a brusque “it is foolish to think there is some method … that can extricate us from this predicament” (10), before talking about such theoretical shibboleths as “respect [for] the vast body of factual knowledge we now have about the past” (10) and “the desire to make endless qualification to any generalization” (11). These are beside the point to the predicament Shapin has scared up, particularly as any revisionist historian—as Shapin, in the end, does aim to be—bloody well better not respect “the vast body of factual knowledge” we have, at least not if they truly want to change what we think that knowledge is. What Shapin runs up against here is what the earlier philosopher of science Norwood Hanson called the “theory-laden” nature of facts. If a historical fact is only constituted as such within some historical story, then “respect for the facts” can’t play a role when the problem is competing stories. [4] The theory-laden nature of facts simply restates the historian’s predicament. Shapin’s implicit answer is that it won’t do us any good to pose our anxiety at the level of epistemology—at the level in which we attempt to understand our concepts of concept-making. And so Shapin’s implicit answer to the worry about contemporary interests running rampant over the selective process used to tell the story is to take seriously the interests of the historical actors themselves. This is the check on the historian—not “the vast body of factual knowledge,” but sensitive treatment of the historical actor as having concerns of their own, of doing things for reasons that might not be our reasons for developing and employing a practice. Shapin’s selection of the “Scientific Revolution,” indeed as it is commonly understood and talked about, is a mark of his own contemporary interests—“how we got from there to here” (7)—but it is his third chapter that checks the encroachment of too much here into there.

2.      What is interesting about the story that Shapin tells is how it parallels the lesson I’ve just pulled out of Shapin’s practice as a historian, thus making Shapin’s story an adjunct to a larger story of cultural development. [5] Shapin gestures toward this larger story at the very opening of his third chapter, whose presence is intended to largely account for the book’s “originality.” Shapin says,

Seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers attempted to discipline, if not in all cases to eliminate, teleological accounts of the natural world. Yet as ordinary actors they accepted the propriety of a teleological framework for interpreting human cultural action, and with some exceptions so do modern historians and social scientists: the very identity of human action—as action rather than behavior—embodies some notion of its point, purpose, or intention. (119)

The unspoken implication of this passage, which is simply a segue into Shapin’s check against his selection process, is that what he’s selected is somehow antithetical to contemporary wisdom about the selection process. I believe there is no contradiction here, not even for one who thinks that the mechanistic model of nature has been and still is a boon to scientific study, but it does invite the telling of another story.

The shape of the conceptual story is this: Shapin’s third chapter is the specifically backward-looking moment in his story. It doesn’t matter if we care about theological problems or not—they do, and that’s all that matters for getting the history right. [6] However, Shapin’s juxtaposition of Descartes and Boyle in that chapter gives us a picture of how to be forward-looking. Here is the crucial passage that sharpens the distinction:

On the one hand, Descartes proceeded by imagining a hypothetical natural world that God might have created, a world wholly amenable to mechanical explanation: this was the world the natural philosopher was to explain. On the other hand, such writers as Robert Boyle and John Ray were concerned to trace the evidence of God’s purpose and design in the world he did create. That is why they were comfortable with the philosophical propriety of giving explanations in terms of purpose when, as they reckoned, the evidence of nature unambiguously supported such conclusions. (156)

Shapin’s account of Descartes here displays, whether Descartes intended to or not, how to be a visionary, looking forward to a time not fully comprehended: “by imagining a hypothetical natural world.” The irony of this situation is that the English are known for being philosophical empiricists as opposed to those on the Continent being rationalists in this time period, [7] and it is empiricism that is so often thought synonymous with science and scientific method. However, in this juxtaposition we see Descartes the visionary pursuing the outer limits of this new metaphor’s effects on human understanding, whereas it is the English who stop at the limits of common sense, which is whatever is denoted as “obvious” or “unambiguous.”

What is at work to create this irony is what philosophers like Wittgenstein and Sellars have now told us about how language works. Underlying the empiricist framework is what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given”—that sense-perception gives us a conceptual content that is unaffected by our interpretive apparatus, e.g. words or theories. [8] If we follow Sellars in thinking that this is a philosophical myth, and that our facts are always already theory-laden, then the “evidence of nature” that Boyle and Ray think obvious and unambiguous is a function of loyalty to the past. For if social-practice theorists of language are right, then facts are a function of the language we’ve been taught to state them in and the force of facts is a function of the authoritative hold we still accord them.

3.      The convenience of Shapin’s language in the above passage on Descartes is that it bridges the gap between imagination and reason. Still to this day in philosophical stories, the two are opposed. The distance, however, is not as great as we might imagine. The notion of the “hypothetical” has a history, but the short way to my point is to first point out that in Kant’s time, he still referred to the logical connective we call the conditional (the “if, then”) as “hypothetical judgment.” The conceptual shape of what Descartes was suggesting was the fantasy of supposing X to be true, and then working out its consequences (“if X, then Y”) without regard for whether X was actually true. The axe comes down on the distinction between imagination and reason when we note, with Sellars and Brandom, that the conditional is the basic unit of inference, of reasoning. [9]

What Shapin’s story suggests is why Boyle and Ray followed what we might call an “intellectually conservative” strategy toward mechanism. It is not that they cared more for preserving God’s province, though that is a plausible candidate and a viable motive in respecting the authority of past reasoning. [10] I take it that Shapin’s comment on Newton displays it: “it was not philosophical, but its opposite, to ‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses, even and especially mechanical causal hypotheses, when the senses and the intellect could not securely discover them” (157). The enemy here, the foe to be curbed, is the Poet of Book 10 of Plato’s Republic. With the conceptual understanding I’ve unfolded in hand, one sees that neither “the senses” nor “the intellect” securely discover anything by themselves. For so gerrymandered in Shapin’s gloss on Newton, all the senses tell you are what you’ve already been programmed to say in response to perceptual stimuli and all the intellect tells you is what you’ve already been programmed to concede as consequences once you’ve disallowed new possible premises in reasoning—which is what is ruled out by “‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses.”

To put it in an idiom I can only suggest, the conservative intellectual impulse is here created by a fear of romanticism, a kind of generic romanticism we can trace back to the ancient Greeks. To try and pull together some of these threads, we can see Shapin’s stance toward science—as a sociological phenomena, which is an outcome of what I called his fundamental pragmatism—as the outcome of an ongoing search for how to curb the vision of mechanism: not by how they in Chapter Three did it (God knows), but by how he views effective historical explanation. Effective explanation of action requires us to use a concept of purpose, telos. [11] And since the shape of the story of the Scientific Revolution Shapin tells is in broad terms designed to show the unresolved conflict between mechanical explanation and teleological explanation (which takes its final form in the beginning of modern philosophy, Descartes’ dualism between res extensa and res cogitans), there is a larger story to be told about just what we should do with the metaphor of mechanism. This larger story, I can only suggest, is that romanticism takes the place of religion in a conflict with scientific empiricism, and that romanticism’s successor on the plane of philosophy is first pragmatism and then social-practice theories of language. This makes Shapin’s theoretical views about how to write history the heir of Descartes’ rationalism, which is what saved him from the Boyle-Ray empiricist attempt to curb the visionary expanse of a new metaphor. [12]

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Endnotes

[1] Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism, 9

[2] Social-practice theories of language also distinguish the kind of Hegelianism pragmatists like Brandom and Richard Rorty are willing to countenance. “Postmodern theory” has made a bad name for itself by promulgating such slogans as “all we have is discourse.” I think it’s important to distinguish what Shapin, Brandom, and Rorty are saying from this. This slogan has led to too many pratfalls by theorists (e.g., deconstructionists who want to say that meaning is impossible) and too many openings for hostile critics (e.g., “There is no thing other than a text? Really?”). The problem with both is poor communication, where whatever good point was meant to be made gets bogged down (e.g., the foolish idea that Derrida was some Berkeleyan idealist).

The good point of the slogan “all we have is discourse” is that meaning only occurs within language, so if you have “thing,” you have a “discourse.” However, people like Shapin, especially, want to go one step further. They want to say that not only are “things” embedded in “discourses,” but “discourses” are embedded in practices. The reason why this is an important move to make, philosophically, is because it closes the loop between you, your community, and the world. Stopping at “discourse” makes one look like an idealist, which makes some people fear we’ve lost the world for the sake of philosophical laziness (for it is hard to make a realist theory of truth-as-correspondence work—i.e., no one’s done it satisfactorily). “Practices” puts us back in touch with the world in a very obvious sense. It also helps move us closer to why material emblems like clocks weird us out when we wonder whether the clock is a symbol for time or is time itself. Like chasing the horizon, such gestalt hiccups merely punch up how entwined meaning is with practice, semantics with pragmatics.

[3] Shapin says that “if there is any originality” in his book it “flows from its basic organization” (12).

[4] I take it that Shapin himself isn’t nearly this naïve, and this theoretical lacuna is a result of his writing a book suitable for non-professionals.

[5] Though, admittedly, size is relative to perspective.

[6] I use the literary present tense, “they do,” partly because I think it is helpful to think of the “other in the past” as a conversation partner, much like we do a contemporaneous other we wish to talk to and understand, such as an Australian aborigine, French political operative, or Arizona Diamondbacks fan. I suspect that this has been common sense for historians for some time.

[7] It might suffice for this old doxographical chestnut to point out that the Three Great Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, are all from the British Isles and that the Three Great Rationalists are Descartes (French), Spinoza (Dutch), and Leibniz (German).

[8] Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given is from his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” which one can find in his collection Science, Perception, and Reality or as a standalone book from Harvard UP with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Brandom.

[9] Technically the conditional is the basic unit of self-conscious reasoning, but that is part of a much different story.

[10] I think this is true in Descartes’ case—I take it that, even from just the evidence Shapin displays, that Descartes was a true believer and wanting to display loyalty to God as much as Boyle. However, in terms of possible motivations, concern about one’s relationship to established Church practices and patterns of thought is certainly a distinct possibility in a way that, for example, it wasn’t in Athens in the first century or most intellectual centers in the United States in this century.

[11] For an articulation of the difference between action and behavior in the context of a discussion of what intentionality is, see Section 4 of “Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization.”

[12] This larger story isn’t as kooky as it seems when it’s just kind of thrown out there. It is roughly coordinate with the kind of story M. H. Abrams tells about romanticism in Natural Supernaturalism, Leo Marx tells about American romanticism in The Machine in the Garden, Rorty tells about pragmatism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and Brandom tells about social-practice theories of language in Tales of the Mighty Dead and Reason in Philosophy. The interesting conclusion of Brandom is that some of the roots of the pragmatist philosophy that Rorty espoused went back to not only Kant, but Leibniz and Spinoza. For a discussion of Brandom's reinsertion of rationalism into pragmatism and his relationship to romanticism, see “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”

Order in Stevens

Poets who are better philosophers than philosophers are my favorite poets. It's a sad state of affairs, but everything I read gets fit into the stories of intellectual power that are constantly playing in my head. One of the curious effects of reading Bloom and Rorty, however, is that the aesthetic and the cognitive tend to dovetail, and so fitting everyone from Plato to Blake to Heidegger to Charles Brockden Brown into a sweeping story of how the West was won, or rather became itself (two ways of saying the same thing after Emerson), is a perfectly acceptable practice, if not any easier to do.

I probably like Stevens more than any other poet of the last 100 years because it always seems like he's wrestling with Plato. At least, that's all my ear picks up. That's pretty much the sum of the reading below, the final paper in a "Close Reading" seminar. There's not a lot to it, just a gerrymandered reading of three poems of Stevens I happen to like, barring "Of Mere Being," my favorite, because I'd already written on it.

You can find the three poems online here:
Anecdote of the Jar
The Idea of Order at Key West
The Poems of Our Climate (scroll down)

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To motivate my close reading, I’d like to remark at the outset that Stevens seems obsessed with the poet’s capacity to create order with words. Every poem, by being a poem, would seem to create its own implicit order, but what this means for order to be created by words is a theme Stevens often takes up in the poem. In Anecdote of the Jar, the problematic is set in the ambiguity that ensues as the jar attempts to order the landscape. In The Idea of Order at Key West, the poet’s relationship to her power in ordering is focused and takes on a sad, lonely tinge. Finally, The Poems of Our Climate takes the other side of the relationship, and shows a perfect order to not even be desirable.

The landscape of Anecdote is dominated by a hill, a jar, the wilderness, and—in a more subtle way—the “I.” The spare set-up of the anecdote begins: “I placed a jar in Tennessee,/And round it was, upon a hill.” (1-2) The “I” almost appears to look out onto the poem, never really moving from its position before placing the jar and disappearing. Like the singer’s voice in Idea of Order, the placing of the jar has a similar power of causation. The “I” creates a proxy in the “jar,” transferring its power as a finger pushes over the first domino. The effect of the jar being placed on the hill is felt immediately: “It made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill.” (3-4) Specificity is drawn out in “a hill” and again in “that hill,” a repetition of the anecdotal thematic. The truly curious thing about that jar on that hill, of course, is that it made the wilderness surround the hill.

The difficulty in the jar’s relationship to the hill appears more boldly when we add the next two lines: “The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild.” (5-6) This is the moment of ordering, but the ambiguities implied are twofold: 1) the verbs of “surround” and “rose” are ambiguous between a literal movement on the part of the wilderness, as if the jar caused the wilderness to march up to the hill, and a change in perspective caused by the jar being placed in the landscape, the juxtaposition of the newly placed jar making the wilderness appear differently than it did before. And 2) “slovenly” and “sprawled” give a very untidy appearance to the wilderness, but the effect of the jar on the wilderness is to make it “no longer wild.” To remove the “wild” from “wilderness” would be to disembowel, one would think, its very essence. Yet the “making” began in line 3, when it was first introduced as “slovenly” (let alone as “wilderness”), and even if we imagine its slovenly appearance to be in the midst of a makeover, the second action taken by it (“rising”) is accompanied by its sprawling and its no longer being wild. These two ambiguities create a sense of failed change, failed ordering. The actions of surrounding and rising are the appearance of action, simply a created effect—the jar suddenly appears on the hill and so the wilderness appears to surround and rise up to it. The wilderness is announced as no longer wild, yet it still sprawls. Just as the jar is taking “dominion everywhere” (9), the wilderness appears like a child who was ordered by its mother to clean up, but does so in name only.

The ambiguity of order is continued between lines 7 and 8: “The jar was round upon the ground/And tall and of a port in air.” Line 7 has a kind of ordering with the internal rhyming of “round” and “ground,” but the squatness of “round” when it is on the ground is juxtaposed in line 8 with its tallness when it is in the air. Further, the jar’s two different appearances are not vigorously separated by a “but,” but rather softly distinguished by the “and.” And whereas on the ground the jar is squat, in the air it has a certain “port,” or carriage. This shift in outward appearance, or carriage, is matched by a shift in diction, “port” being an archaic usage, age carrying with it a raised dignity. The movement we should notice is that while on the one hand, as the jar goes into the air, the diction rises and the jar appears more regal, on the other hand, all of the jar’s power occurs in its movement towards the ground. Just as the powers of order occur low to the ground, so does Stevens lower the poetic diction in shifting from the traditional “ode” (like to, say, a Grecian urn) to the “anecdote” (five appearing in Harmonium). Whereas the ode now gives the semblance of being over-composed, “anecdote” is from the Greek for “things unpublished.” If the ode gives us the sense of an embarrassedly raised diction, something too well-ordered, then Stevens’ anecdote gives us its proper opposite. In Anecdote of the Jar, we are treated to a jar that orders, but within the loose assemblage of the “anecdote.” In a similar way, Stevens achieves this contrast of dictions in the title of The Idea of Order at Key West. On the one hand there is “the idea of order,” with its high, Platonic-like diction, and on the other there is “Key West,” an American resort town.

The powers of ordering in Anecdote are transferred from the jar to the “she”-singer of Idea of Order:

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard. (8-14)

We were introduced to the sea as a “body wholly body” (3) that makes “mimic motion” (4). Lines 8-14 further differentiate the sea from the singer’s song. As we are introduced to the song, like in Anecdote, the verse itself takes on “melodic” attributes to mimic the order being created. The above is in blank verse, in perfect pentameter with near perfect iambs. Most of the poem is in something near blank verse, with a random dispersion of 10 to 12 syllable lines, and indeed takes on the form of something like a Homeric hymn, with its long stanzas of description, and particularly with the split five feet between lines 33 and 34 (“Of sky and sea./It was her voice that made”). Somehow the single rhyming sound at the end of lines 10, 11, 12, and 14 don’t seem overbearing or repetitive, possibly upset by “word by word,” with the first “word” sonically disturbing the perfect rhyme and so setting up the next between 11 and 12. Further melodic ordering includes the mirroring of “grinding water” and “gasping wind” and the beautiful closing internal rhyme before the final “heard” in line 14.

The singer is a poet. “For she was the maker of the song she sang.” (15) Homeric poets were rhapsodes, and their poetry was actually sung, thus beginning poetry’s long romance with metaphors of song. “Poet” comes from the Greek poiētēs, which meant “maker.” But there seems to be a tension in “The maker’s rage to order words of the sea” (53). “Making” seems to imply an act of creation, whereas “ordering” seems to imply an arrangement of things already there. The poem seems to be granting that creatio ex nihilo is an impossibility, but goes further still in honing a tension between the singer’s attempt to create something new as opposed to simply arranging things that were already there. Most of the poem spends its time consolidating the singer’s power in contradistinction to the sea. The simply stated “The song and water were not medleyed sound” (9) creates the impression that the “fluttering” (3) of the sea’s “empty sleeves” (4) are a mere epiphenomena to the song, yet the “It may be that in all her phrases stirred/The grinding water and the gasping wind” (12-13) compromises this sense. Even as lines 8-14 begin the consolidation of the singer’s power, the lines seem sad. This sadness begins to set in with “yet its mimic motion/Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry” (4-5). In the odd epanorthosis which corrects the sea crying to simply causing a cry, it is difficult to tell which is the more disturbing, though in the end the correction merely appears as a repetition for emphasis as “we understood” (6) the cry to be “of the veritable ocean.” (7) After the singer begins her ordering of lines 8-14, the tone of melancholy reaches its denouement for the sea when we find that the “tragic-gestured sea/Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.” (16-17)

I sense a transference beginning, however, when the next line begins “Whose spirit is this? we said” (18). The audience, of which our hidden narrator is but one (never fully making an appearance until he begins talking to Ramon Fernandez), makes a distinction between the “spirit” and something else. At first we might simply take it to be the sea, that “body wholly body” (3). But as the auditor continues to listen, the answer seems to change. Lines 21 to 28 contain a long conditional that begins “If it was only the dark voice of the sea” (21) and finally ends “it would have been … sound alone” (25, 28). The sea is “sound alone”—no spirit. But then: “But it was more than that,/More even than her voice, and ours, among/The meaningless plunging of water and the wind” (28-30). This is an effusive “more,” more than sound alone, more than the singer’s voice, more than the audience’s voice (the implication that the audience makes sounds similar to the singer’s). Yet this effusive “more” seems to obscure the spirit-body distinction that we would’ve identified with the song-sea distinction. It is this same effusive “more” that is cut off by the split pentameter of lines 33 and 34. Almost asking to begin again, 34 restores the singer’s voice to power: “It was her voice that made/The sky acutest at its vanishing.” (34-35) But as the singer accumulates more and more power (“when she sang, the sea,/Whatever self it had, became the self/That was her song,” 38-40) she becomes more solitary: “Then we,/as we beheld her striding there alone,/Knew that there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.” (40-43) This near solipsistic moment achieves the singer’s own melancholic denouement. We find that the sad cry of the sea is a mirror for the sad, solitary cry of the singer, obscured before, but now mimicked by the parity between her measuring of the sky’s “solitude” in line 36 and striding “alone” by the sea in line 41.

The narrative of Idea of Order is the auditor’s coming to terms with the song and the sea, between ordering and making. On the one hand, the “words of the sea” simply do what the singer tells them to do, the more power taken, the more alone she is. On the other hand, the audience espies a spirit behind both the sea and her voice, something more. As a mere ordering (as in lines 8-14) turns into a stronger making, the singer becomes solipsistic—and yet even then, something escapes. This something “more” arises again in The Poems of Our Climate. We are presented with “Clear water in a brilliant bowl,/Pink and white carnations.” (1-2) The syntax in which the carnations are pictured in the bowl gives a kind of simple, lyric quality to the lines. And yet:

Pink and white carnations—one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there. (6-10)

The “brilliant bowl” of “clear water” achieve some of the jar’s causal power as the day seems to be simplified by the bowl itself. Compare the bowl’s “complete simplicity” (11), how it is “low and round” (9), with the jar being “round upon the ground” (Anecdote, 7) and “gray and bare” (10).

Certainly with the jar one would want more, and as the jar neuters the wilderness, so does the bowl strip down the surrounding world:

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white snowy scents. (Poems, 11-17)

The “complete simplicity” of the bowl is opposed to complexity, to the “evilly compounded, vital I,” yet as light and airy as the “newly-fallen snow” appears in the first stanza, the bowl itself seems the sinister element, the pink and white carnations a mere façade. The “evilly” in the second stanza seems imposed by the order of the bowl, not fitting with the I’s vitality. In fact, I take the “vital I” to be the same “I” that places the jar on the hill, the only real, unambiguous action in that poem. In Poems, the sense is that as nice as the carnations and clear water seem, there is something missing that one wants, and the “vital I” seems the key.

The “more” seems even more incessant than in Idea of Order, and whereas the “more” of Idea of Order was of something more that escaped the sea and the voice, the “more” of Poems turns into a desire to escape:

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. (18-24)

The ambiguity of order in Anecdote, where it isn’t clear if the jar succeeds in neutering the still sprawling, un-wild wilderness, compares well with the ambiguity of both success of an ordering-turn-making (with the spirit still escaping) and our desire for the resultant solipsism in Idea of Order. The latter’s “blessed rage for order” (Idea of Order, 52) should be compared to the juxtaposing of delight and bitterness and paradise and imperfection in Poems. Indeed, the “however clear” (25) that the sea was in Idea of Order finds its way into “clear water” of the bowl. And while our imperfection is “hot” (Poems, 23), the bowl is “Cold, a cold porcelain” (9). The tensions in Anecdote and Idea of Order become explicitly manifest in Poems, becoming the exact source of not only our sadness, as in Idea of Order, but also our happiness.

Stevens’ sense of order is an imperfect arranging. In Anecdote, the order that appears only does so by its contradistinction to the wilderness which surrounds it, that even as it takes “dominion everywhere,” the wilderness is only ambiguously tamed. In Idea of Order, the singer’s “rage to order words of the sea” masters the mimicking sea, but the spirit still escapes. In Poems, order takes its appearance as an unsatisfactory, “complete simplicity.” In each poem, something escapes the order, and Stevens seems to be suggesting that we should delight in this imperfection of our imposed order. The jar’s perfect ambiguity is expanded into the singer’s solipsistic rage and focused in the bowl as our imperfect paradise.

Cavell and Romanticism

Stanley Cavell is a unique figure in philosophy and literary criticism, not quite having a home in either but tending to demand attention nonetheless. I'm not sure how Cavell's fortunes are faring in Philosophy Departments, though I suspect he'll go the way of Santayana, but if you're working the streets of Romanticism these days, particularly Emerson or Thoreau, Cavell shows up on the litcrit radar. As well he should, for despite Rorty's strictures against taking philosophical skepticism seriously, if one were to, Cavell is one of the few to show how. The route through is to deflate its philosophical character, which following Rorty we should say is its "Philosophical" character. And by returning to what Cavell calls "the Ordinary," we can better see what live issues there are surrounding the hubbub Descartes created (or Pyrrho for that matter), though perhaps not why we should call it "the Ordinary" and make such a big deal "O" of it. On the other hand, the way I read Cavell is as I read Rorty's talk about metaphors as the engine of cultural change, which is an important point to make.

I stumbled into philosophy by accident, a random obsession with Pirsig which, stumbling into a book at a bookstore one fateful Christmas-break day, blossomed eventually into a random obsession with Rorty. There are perhaps two philosophers with which I wonder what I would think should I have become obsessed with their writing rather than Rorty's, two writers who hold a candle in my imagination. But I doubt Bernard Williams would have captivated by attention in just the same way. Cavell would have.

References are to Cavell's In Quest of the Ordinary.

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One of the unique things about Cavell is the payment one receives by close reading him. I take the following passage, describing his relationship with Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, to encapsulate Cavell’s understanding of the Romantic project:

But I had never been able to stay with it for longer than a chapter, and maybe half of the next, before closing the book with fear and frustration—both at the hopelessness in its ambitions for reconstituting the history of thought, by means, for example, of its elated obscurities as it translates Schelling on the task of something called uniting subject and object; and at its oscillation of astounding intelligence and generosity together with its dull and withholding treatment of Wordsworth’s sense in claiming for poetry the language of the rustic and the low. (Cavell 41)

If we aren’t careful, I think it might be easy to read the “hopelessness” as driving his fear (ambitions too tall) and the “oscillation” as driving his frustration (“why can’t Coleridge give Wordsworth a break?”). I think, however, that Cavell feels both fear and frustration at both the “hopelessness” and “oscillation.” Romanticism has lofty goals and ambitions and this loft produces “elated obscurities.” The trouble, and where the conflict and oscillation comes, is that the overall ambition of Romanticism, as Cavell understands it, is the reconstitution of what he otherwise calls “the Ordinary.”

To restate Cavell’s thought: philosophy began as a flight from the everyday, and began building its floating thought-castles to replace, in some fashion, the bleakness of the ground it wished to flee. The Romantic perceives this flight as misguided and wishes to replace, in some fashion, Philosophy. However, doing so means fighting them on their own ground, which is to say, in the air. And there is a sense, no less, that the impetus to philosophy—skepticism at pieces of the everyday—wasn’t wrong, and should be reconstituted in the replacement Romanticism. This resketching of Cavell, I think, catches his point about “romanticism,” with its lowercase “r,” being not just an historical entity, but a current of thought that runs everclear. But while this is the case—which makes lowercase philosophy a deathless force—the historical entities known as Romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc.) and Philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Schelling, etc.) must still be contested on their own terms. The question of what the “terms” are is, again no less, what is in part at issue and causing of the loft of ambition needed to engage.

Cavell is frustrated at having not just to contend with these obscurities, but produce them himself in trying to reconstitute the history of thought. This frustration then also fuels his fear that these ambitions might be too great, that the philosophical acts required might be all for naught. Is there something special in this for romanticism, though? Why would this frustration and fear loop not just be the regular fears and frustrations of the ambitious? Why is Cavell, as I think he is, especially confronted with this double problem by Coleridge’s text? So far I’ve been concentrating most on the hopelessness-of-ambition part of Cavell’s two-part fear and frustration. In glossing the “history of thought” bit, I’ve attempted to hint at how the hopelessness of philosophical ambition (and the attendant annoyingness of philosophic diction) is entwined with Cavell’s problem with Coleridge’s oscillation. Attending to what Cavell confronts in Coleridge’s confrontation with Wordsworth, I think, will give us the problem that is specific to romanticism.

Cavell’s frustration with Coleridge’s “elated obscurities” is counterpointed by his frustration with Coleridge’s attitude towards Wordsworth’s “claiming for poetry the language of the rustic and the low.” The fact that poetry should have to lay claim to “the low” articulates poetry’s natural, tall position in the equation. The oscillation that Cavell feels is between Coleridge “getting” Wordsworth and then not, between “praising his power and promise” and then “cursing him” for “failing his power and breaking his promise” (41). “Getting the hang” of Wordsworth, I think, is an appropriate idiom to import, and Cavell’s word is “generosity”—Coleridge gives something to Wordsworth when he understands him properly, the sense in which he claims the low for poetry. Cavell unpacks this oscillation as Coleridge’s projection of “the achievements back into promises” (41). That is the key, hiding as it is in Wordsworth’s use of what Coleridge said to him in the 1815 supplementary essay to the Lyrical Ballads: the great poet creates “the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” What Coleridge acts out unconsciously in his critical glance at Wordsworth and what Cavell senses in the promise and problem of romanticism is that the poetic, visionary, prophetic achievement opens the view in which the achievement can be seen at all, but it is always a partial failure for it cannot itself step through the opening. The achievement creates the terms by which it should be judged, and predictably enough the letter is found wanting by an evolved and retrospectively glancing spirit—an ungrateful spirit created by the letter. In other words, the oscillation is a necessary trait of romanticism, for the more Coleridge gives to Wordsworth’s achievement, the more he changes into his vision, and the more he sees is wanting because of the more he sees.

To help better understand this swing from praising the vista to damning the groundbreaking limitations, we might add Cavell’s brilliant summary of his The Claim of Reason: the “mark of the natural in natural language is its capacity to repudiate itself, to find arbitrary, or merely conventional, the lines laid down for its words by our agreement in criteria, our attunement with one another…” (48). If we go the other way at this suggestion, it brings to light philosophy’s relationship with poetry—the “artificial” in language is that which is stipulated, that which by definition does not need agreement for it asks for none, that which asks for no generosity. The process of agreeing to stipulations is the passing of poetry into “natural language”—the “getting the hang” of an idiom. A vision opens a future in which its taste can be enjoyed, but it only becomes the present as people generously pass through the opening. This is the hidden flipside to the Fall story that “seems a romantic’s birthright”—poetry passing into theology, in Blake’s terms, is the fate of any vision to be enjoyed, and yet its enjoyment is its fall from grace, from pure poetry into something understandable, agreed upon, attuned to. By claiming the language of the low for poetry, Wordsworth was internalizing the dialectic of life and death lived by the poet’s metaphors.

Blake and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

This is a fairly uninteresting piece, gerrymandered together out of reading Blake, Horkheimer and Adorno (H/A), and a Romanticist named Mark Lussier (for a class reflection in ecocriticism). In my understanding, H/A formulated one of the most thorough articulations of the post-Rousseauian longing for total revolution, a phrase borrowed from Bernard Yack. I think this longing is one of the most important conceptual pieces to understanding much about modern thought. Once one identifies society as the problem and pervasive, you begin to wish it would all go away--somehow. English Romanticism contains this longing, but like Rorty, I see something else going on, too. I think American Romanticism--Emerson--does much to overcome the problem of this longing, and I take it to be the tension between what Emerson termed "solitude and society" and the identification of that tension as power.

There isn't any of that here, but what Harold Bloom calls Emerson's "dialectics of power" has echoes in this discussion of people "across the pond" (as we stuffy litcrits apparently like to say), and what I identify below as Blake's sly humbling through metonymy is Emerson's mode in Nature. So while below I suggest that Blake's Platonism can't break through H/A's formulation of the dialectic, the real problem isn't Blake's Platonism (which I take to be ironic like Emerson's), but the formulation--the longing--itself. In Blake, the dialectics of power that shirks this longing shows up as the dialectic between Poets and Priests found in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, also not discussed here. To understand this dialectic, between self-alone and self-among-others, it helps to translate Blake's categories into Bloom's: poetry and belief. Santayana helps beautifully with this, too: "Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry" (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion v). Working out the involution of that sentence will move one far towards understanding what Rorty means by metaphors as the catalyst of cultural change and his public/private distinction.

What I have left to work out in these stories is the relationship between mathematics (an enemy common to H/A in the Dialectic of Englightenment and Heidegger in, e.g., "The Age of the World Picture") and the ironic Platonism I find in Romantics from Blake and Emerson to Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. I suspect that I find their Platonism ironic precisely because Platonism took the path of method identified with mathematics, and that this path ironically transformed into materialism in the New Science (an irony charted by Blumenberg)--hence, the needed irony of a return to Plato and Greek idealism.

References are to an article by Lussier, "Blake's Deep Ecology," in Studies in Romanticism Fall 1996 (my pagination is not coordinate to the hardcopy). The H/A translation of the Dialectic of Englightenment used throughout, except one place noted, is to the new Jephcott translation.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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The story Horkheimer and Adorno tell about the history of thought is compressed and dense, but one of its central components is that “in thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered” (Horkheimer and Adorno 31). What Horkheimer and Adorno fear is the instrumentalization of thought, the turning of thought into merely a tool: “blindly pragmatized thought loses its transcending quality and, its relation to truth.”[fn.1] The disturbing thing in Horkheimer and Adorno’s picture is that once the dialectical path is stepped upon, there is no getting off until the bottom. Like Marx’s sense that once the division of labor is made, the rest of history is but an extension of that first moment, it is difficult to find in Horkheimer and Adorno where the wrong but civilization-creating turn was. What they term “enlightenment” is out to destory myth, but it is a hopeless battle: “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology” (8). So the question is: can we turn back the clock? Can we break the dialectic of enlightenment?

Mark S. Lussier has suggested that Blake has, indeed, formulated a way through. By driving straight at Blake’s dualism between humanity and nature, and suggesting that they are deeply symbiotic, Lussier hopes to capitalize on Blake’s formulation of the fall from innocence that marks the birth of modernity Blake stands astride. And much like Horkheimer and Adorno, Lussier highlights Blake’s fingering of Bacon for complicity in the act. Horkheimer and Adorno say that “Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically…” (18). Mathematics bring the “self-satisfaction of knowing in advance” (18) which is ironically coupled with the “apotheosis of advancing thought” (18). Galileo is associated with the former and is the treatment of “nature as self-repetition” (12). But in its repetitious nature, there is the endless scribbling to reinstate math’s preplanned plan—experimentation, of which Bacon is the father. Scientific thought advances in empirical experimentation, just as math makes the experiments less and less interesting.

Lussier references one of Blake’s handy lists of mathematizing, empirical culprits, “Bacon, Locke & Newton” in Milton, but I’d like to refocus on that same list in Jerusalem: “I am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!” (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, v. 16-17) This line tells us something important about the spirit of Bacon and enlightenment—they teach humility before nature. Rather than treating nature as a god to be fought with, as the myths show us, we must acknowledge nature’s power. We must bow respectfully before it and simply trace its contours. But through humility, we gain power. Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Odysseus help unlock this process: “The formula for Odysseus’s cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her” (Horkheimer and Adorno 45). By reducing ourselves, we reduce nature—much along the lines of Lussier’s reversal of Blake’s formula: “just as ‘nature is barren’ in the absence of man, so too, by necessity of the proverb’s own symmetries, man is barren in the absence of nature” (Lussier 5). This reduction of nature’s power by draining ourselves of our own functions along the lines of Harold Bloom’s figure of kenosis, and Bloom assigns the trope of metonymy to this poetic maneuver—the trope Blake is constantly using, as in his use of “Bacon.” By this logic, the enlightenment stands humbled before nature, promising to experiment and test nature slowly, in order to circumscribe nature with mathematics. And Blake humbles himself before “Bacon & Newton & Locke” in order to circumscribe them with his poetry.

The difficulty in breaking the dialectic Horkheimer and Adorno map out still lies before us, though: “Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion” (Horkheimer and Adorno 9). Even a humbling is a succumbing to the dialectic. It isn’t clear how Blake’s Platonism can save him, for it still posits a dichotomy between humanity and nature, and even if they are symbiotic, the trouble is that humanity would rather debase themselves by instrumentalizing their thought than suffer nature’s tyranny. “Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature or its subjugation to the self” (25). In such a dark formulation of the problem of enlightenment, it’s difficult to see how a regression to Platonism, the earlier metaphysics which was the first step past myths (which inexorably produced it), is the way through. And as Lussier, quoting a deep ecology mission statement, agrees, “nothing short of a total revolution in consciousness will be of lasting use” (Lussier 5). The trouble that even stunted Horkheimer and Adorno was in how to conceive of it.

To ferret out this problem in Blake’s Platonism, I would reread a selection of the Book of Thel that Lussier glosses:

Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud.
Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water.
Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face.
Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the air; (I, v. 8-11)

Lussier says that, “in an interesting reversal,” “it is consciousness, and not nature, that ‘mirrors’” (4). This strikes me as just wrong, and it signficantly elides the dialectical danger of Platonic dualism. Lussier wants the reversal so he can say, “See—nature and man need each other so that neither is barren.” But the reversal is not strongly tuned in Lussier’s direction. Noting Bloom’s comment that “Thel” is Greek for “will,” Lussier, I think correctly, identifies Thel with consciousness. But whereas Lussier is focused on Thel’s transformations through the repeated and varied simile, I think one needs to slow down and look at what exactly Thel is like, particularly “a reflection in a glass” and “shadows in the water.” Thel, consciousness, is “like a reflection in a glass”—consciousness is paired with “reflection,” which means nature, as earlier in the Vision of the Last Judgment, is the mirroring glass. “Shadows in the water” is even more Platonically disturbing for consciousness—the water, nature, again reflects back consciousness, and what it reflects are transitory shadows, like those in the Plato’s Cave.

It isn’t clear to me that Blake proposes a total revolution, nor is it clear that he even wants to escape Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he says “Without Contraries is no progression.” (Plate 3) An other-worldly, Platonic-like answer would be to shunt progression, then, to avoid the dialectical devolution portrayed by Horkheimer and Adorno entirely. But Blake says these contraries are “necessary to Human existence.” (Plate 3) The escape of an Edenic Heaven is always paired with the energy and vitality of Hell and Milton’s Satan. For Blake says, “this history has been adopted by both parties” (Plate 5).

Endnotes

[1]This is the old translation by John Cumming, which I greatly prefer to Edmund Jephcott’s translation: “thought in its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and therefore its relation to truth” (xvi).

Austin Gets Rhemed

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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J. L. Austin occupies a curious place in the philosophical canon. On the one hand, he began practicing what came to be known as "ordinary-language philosophy," which a professor of mine said John Searle picked up and beat to death and made ugly. And this is why Rorty can be found saying that, as with Derrida and deconstruction, ordinary-language philosophy isn't a program, but whatever it is that Austin was doing. Yet, on the other hand, as the close of Rorty's wonderful introduction to his anthology, The Linguistic Turn, intimates--Austin did seem to want to be programmatic.

I'd like to focus on a section in Austin's How to Do Things With Words in order to bring out why one shouldn't (like Searle) push Austin for programmatic purposes.

At the start of Lecture 8, Austin reminds us of his distinction between phonetic, phatic, and rhetic acts (95). The phonetic is the "act of uttering certain noises," the phatic "noises of certain types," i.e. linguistic noises, and rhetic is defined as "using those vocables with a certain more-or-less definite sense and reference."

The first thing to notice is that it is difficult to maintain the distinction between phatic and rhetic. Both phatic and rhetic are, roughly, intelligible noises, noises we recognize as linguistic, and therefore functioning in a linguistic manner (which is to say, having sense and reference). Austin quickly allays our fears of collapse by giving a simple example of what he means:

Thus 'He said "The cat is on the mat"', reports a phatic act, whereas 'He said that the cat was on the mat' reports a rhetic act. (95)

Oh, that seems simple--take off the quotes, and add "that." The trouble arises again, though, when we we try and think about how intelligible a foreign language is to us:

'He said "gibba gobba gooba"' reports a phatic act, whereas 'He said that gibba gobba gooba' reports a rhetic act.

It's gibberish. If we don't already understand prior to hearing certain noises, in a fairly definite way, what the sense and reference are of certain noises--if we don't already recognize it as a language--then all we'll hear are phonemes.

Austin doesn't quite say this, but the set-up seems to suggest that we can distinguish a pheme prior to being able to distinguish a rheme, that we can hear it's a pheme without it necessarily making any rhetic sense. Austin says later, "it is clear that we can perform a phatic act which is not a rhetic act, though not conversely." Can we? "Thus we may repeat someone else's remark or mumble over some sentence, or we may read a Latin sentence without knowing the meaning of the words" (97). So, just knowing that a set of noises is supposed to be linguistic is enough for the noises to be phatic? "If a monkey makes a noise indistinguishable from 'go' it is still not a phatic act" (96). Because the monkey didn't realize he said "go"? What if he did? What if it was a gorilla and the language ASL? What if the gorilla made a gesture, and we just sat there stupidly while the gorilla's thinking, "Hey, idiot, I just told you to get out of my seat"? We didn't recognize it as language, and so no phatic or rhetic act, despite that it was intended as such.

"The pheme is a unit of language: its typical fault is to be nonsense--meaningless. But the rheme is a unit of speech; its typical fault is to be vague or void or obscure, etc." (98) But isn't part of Austin's point (or rather, shouldn't it be) that there is no static "language" outside of the act of it's performance, outside of, e.g., speech? (It is apropos to recall Donald Davidson's remark that "there's no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed."[1])

I bring this up is because of what these set of three--phonetic, phatic, rhetic--have in relationship to the more famous and important set of three--locution, illocution, perlocution.

Locution : "Look out!"
Illocution : warning
Perloction : he was warned

The locutionary act are the words being emitted, the illocutionary act is the intended effect of the words, and the perlocutionary act is the actual effect of the illocutionary act. These seem on the surface much more likely not to collapse, I will agree. What seems to be the case in the way Austin uses the first set and the second set is that he intends a locution to be a full phonetic-phatic-rhetic combo act--a fully intelligible linguistic act. From there, and this is what prompts his distinctions, we still get fuzziness in isolating meaning (which was the quest of his predecessors, something like the linguistic version of Descartes' "clear and distinct ideas"), and so he distinguishes the linguistic noise from the noises intended effect, let alone what it causes in a hearer.

Or is that right? What if the locution is simply a phonetic-phatic act, linguistic, but bereft of "more-or-less determined sense and reference," which is the rhetic? This would make sense, for to determine the sense and reference of "Look out!" we would determine that it was a warning. This would make the illocutionary effect a rhetic act, which brings us back to some trouble.

Some literary critics have turned the notion of "speech acts," and specifically the illocutionary act, towards practical duties in reading. For instance, in reading poetry (and this could really go for any piece of language) one might distinguish between the speech act of a line from its tone. To take an example:

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.

These are the first six lines of William Carlos Williams' "The Widow's Lament in Springtime." When treating a selection, the first thing you'd need to do is parcel out speech acts. A period followed by a capital letter, particularly in a poem, need not be the typographic cue for a new speech act (notice, too, the fluid nature of demarcation in speech, and follow that through in written language). The speech act of a poem would be the intended effect of the poetic speaker in "uttering" the particular words and phrases. In this case, we have a widow: "sorrow is my own yard." Noticing the elevated diction created by the odd syntax (let alone the metaphor), we might say that the widow in the first line is insisting to herself the state of her mind--speech act: to insist. We might hold from calling the tone of this speech act, however, insistent. The diction makes it dignified.

I do not doubt the efficacy in using Austin to help climb into a poem--but what I wonder is how the collapse of the phatic/rhetic, locution/illocution might effect the further plunge into a poem. For instance, wouldn't tone be part of an illocutionary act? To take "look out," wouldn't the tone in which I said it create, to a large extent, the intended effect of a warning? And if tone is part of the illocutionary act, the rhetic act, then are we really talking about the same speech act--the same poem--if we get the tone wrong? In other words, if we get the tone wrong, might we be getting the speech act wrong, and if the speech act, then the poem? Might this be why we can still talk about better and worse readings of a poem?

There are a lot of interesting theoretical conundrums lying around this area, and though the distinction between tone and speech act might seem a little artificial, it can be quite useful. The above considerations are probably more like an explanation of why any one of us may have trouble climbing into poems--poems are what they are because of their active attempt to flout their very composition as language, i.e. as having definite sense and reference. It might be important to remember Davidson on metaphors here. Davidson said that metaphors aren't the kind of things that have two meanings, one literal and another metaphorical, but are rather simply noises. Until you beat these surprising noises or marks on a page that have no initial meaning down (by giving them sense from repeated use), they are just unintelligible noises or marks. But when you do, you eventually get dead metaphors we don't even bat an eyelash (i.e. don't even recognize as metaphors, but just as having one literal sense)--like rivers having mouths or mountains feet.

Endnotes

[1] From "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," collected in Truth, Language, and History, 107.

American Lit Notebook: Whitman I

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to the individual lines of each poem.

I should also note that Bloom is hiding behind my reading of Whitman (particularly the vocabulary deployed).

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Whitman: “Song of Myself,” I

The poet of Emersonianism, Whitman quickly states his subject-matter with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” (v. 1) It is not that Whitman is himself singing, it is that he’s singing a song called “Myself.” The first thing Whitman must set to move out of the way is the past, a recurrent theme during the Romantic period. “Creeds and schools in abeyance,/Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.” (10-11) What Whitman seeks is “original energy.” (13)

In the second section Whitman sets out on his leisurely, light voyage, sniffing “shelves crowed with perfumes.” (14) Books stand in for the past and by likening books with odors, he imbues them with an optional ephemerality, a wafting buoyancy that the past rarely displays. Whitman will not let the past intoxicate him, but instead wishes to find Nature and “become undisguised and naked,” seeking “for it to be in contact with me.” (19-20) It is interesting and significant that Whitman should be naked, for in the long Platonic tradition of standing reality apart from her appearances, it is most often reality that we wish to see naked. Whitman has already internalized the Kantian Copernican shift that Emerson saw clearly—reality is always naked and it is us who need to shed our encumbrances.

This shedding maneuver climaxes with the section’s last stanza:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

If with the first line Whitman states his premise, “what I assume you shall assume,” (2) the conclusion of the second section states his “intricate purpose.” (382) Persons, and indeed the whole cosmos (“earth and sun”), are likened to poems and that is the originary power we are seeking. We are ever-elongating texts, songs whose melodies may repeat motifs and accumulate harmonies, but whose true power lies in the note not yet sung, a repetition of what the first note was also—new. Whitman’s design is Emersonian. He realizes that the only way for us to follow him, as in Emerson, is to be non-didactic, even anti-didactic (“not look through my eyes”), though of necessity something is taught, something imparted, something passed from Whitman to the reader. Whitman and Emerson can be seen to be teaching forms, while leaving content to their newly self-reliant auditors, but Whitman is so strong a poetic power, so keen to protect its originality and newness, that he recognizes that any repetition will diminish him, take from him, like a metaphor dying. And so Whitman wishes also to block us from that (“nor take things from me”). Whitman’s method (which, given his poetic paranoia, we should wonder if it is his actual method, or simply the one he’s putting on the screen) is to take in all around and then filter what you find from yourself. An echo of Emerson’s dark anxiety, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty,” (Emerson 139) Whitman finds the path to the origin of all poems as an emptying gesture, taking in the past so as to ebb it all away, leaving us with only what is uniquely us.

Whitman: “Song of Myself,” II

Stanza 24 sees a continuance of Whitman’s Emersonianism. It begins grandly, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos….” (v. 497) “Kosmos” is the transliteration of the Greek word, which otherwise in English is “cosmos.” Whitman’s use of the Greek, rather than English, may be just fancy, but it is notable that in Greek kosmos is the noun form of a parent verb that means something like “to set in order, or arrange,” with aesthetic and moral overtones (whereas the English “cosmos” has no verb counterpart and so hangs more statically). Leaving aside the Greek roots, “cosmos” has come down to us as more or less coextensive with “universe.” What is significant is the article, “a kosmos,” not “the kosmos” as would be expected if we were talking about the only one of something, like the universe.

This is a tone of paradoxicality that Whitman breeds and thrives on throughout the poem—Whitman, “me myself,” is both universe and multiverse, one voiced and several, individual and society, everything and nothing and something. Whitman gives “the sign of democracy,” which is that he “will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” (v. 506-7) This should strike us as a tremendous move of equality, similar to Gloria Allred’s current legal argument about the recently passed Prop. 8 in California banning gay marriage—under California’s equal protection clause, if some class is forbidden marriage, all shall be forbidden marriage (and so the reductio ad absurdum).

However, notice the fourth line of the stanza: “…no stander above men and women or apart from them.” (v. 499) This is, again, a democratic move, eliminating the hierarchical nature of other modes of government and being. It also strikes a tone of solidarity, “or apart from them.” This figure, neither above nor apart, tends to meld in Whitman into a homogenizing relativism. Whitman will be the voice of “many long dumb voices,” (v. 508) but these are the voices of not only the inhumanly silenced, like slaves, but also the wicked, like thieves. By eliminating hierarchy, Whitman also seems to be eliminating value judgments. Whitman calls these voices “forbidden,” (v. 516) which suggests that these voices are silenced by an external authority, and that “by me” they are “clarified and transfigur’d.” (v. 518) What they are is him, the kosmos, nobody apart from anybody, all the same—him.

Whitman: “Song of Myself,” III

As I meditated on previously, Whitman is the poet of a paradoxical democracy and we can see one of his techniques in his gargantuan lists, lines that begin similiarly, and in most cases exactly, to each other, but are filled in differently. In stanzas 31 and 33 we encounter two more substantial lists. On the one hand Whitman’s lists have the effect of lighting areas that were commonly neglected by the so-called “higher arts” and so can be seen to be a kind of “poetry for the people.” By taking “low” subject-matter, particularly bodily and sexual (for example, v. 520’s “bowels” and 819’s “thighs and lips”), he is able to extend the purview of art and discourse to areas previously “forbidden.” (v. 516)

The problem with Whitman’s lists is that while they call attention to a vast array of items, “the buzzard,” “the snake,” “the elk,” (v. 679-81) “the native,” “the foreign,” “the homely woman,” “the handsome,” (v. 774-5), they are also pallid images with no life outside of their brief mentions in a litany that is expressly built to blend, and therefore homogenize. Metaphors and similes work to break down contrastive effects, they take two different things and bring them together through the verb “to be” or the preposition “like,” but while both poetic figures require two different things to create the effect, if overused they die and the items lose contrast, becoming not metaphoric but literal. As with Whitman’s lists, they are homogenizing tropes, blending all together to make equal and the same.

Whitman, however, seems to see us coming. Whitman is dancing in this poem, enacting a sequence of poetic defense, shifting his posture in time to the music of our protests. If we might protest that his poetry reduces us, Whitman will reply: “If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment, reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run” (v.1191). Whitman’s true goal, he will remind us, is to get all of us to become ourselves. He meditates quite frequently on himself, and “any thing is but a part,” (v. 1195) no doubt of himself, that kosmos, but Whitman is “the teacher of athletes” (v. 1234) and we are all, to ourselves, a kosmos.

American Lit Notebook: Emerson

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to the Portable Emerson, edited by Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley.

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Emerson: “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address”

I wasn’t exactly shocked to hear that Emerson holds a recessed position in our contemporary minds, but it was odd, having read a handful of his essays previously, to hear that people have a hard time figuring how so many found their voice in him (like people in the 60s in Dylan). All I hear in myself, since reading him, is my own voice, and in others besides. Perhaps I’m overdetermined by Harold Bloom, on Emerson no less than most of what I read.

The former Unitarian minister wreaks fantastic revenge on the profession in “The Divinity School Address” (DSA). In a stance that should be called an aggressive anti-clericalism, Emerson takes the form of the Protestant Revolution radicalized. Luther and Calvin wished to replace one orthodoxy with another, but the centuries-long transplantment of religious minorities in America produced a cultural space that was consistently at odds with orthodoxy in general. Railing against all priest classes, he says that religion in American “suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest….” (DSA, 77) Prophesizing our contemporary desire to say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” Emerson says, “The idioms of [Jesus’] language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.” (78)

This last is a dark saying, particularly for the writer. Emerson struggled with this impetus, that we are all, at last, only with ourselves, his long life and this produced his strong (and easily appropriated) sense of individuality. The moral, religious sentiment, for Emerson, “is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation….” (76) Emerson’s style, consequently, is one of exhortation, and not argument. Emerson wishes to provoke us into an “original relation to the universe,” one that through “revelation to us” will help us produce “our own works and laws and worship.” (“Nature,” 7, italics mine) Without mediation by tradition we shall make ourselves by ourselves.

What Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence” produces in Emerson one of the strongest, most provocative versions of reading. What Emerson preaches is a refashioning, the taking of contingent materials in order (only in order?) to make something authentically “you,” where this at the same time means “new.” “It came into him life; it went out from him truth.” (“American Scholar,” 55) Emerson essentially shucks off concern with “authorial intention,” something an ordinary literary critic cannot do without. But for Emerson, the first pragmatist, “the sacredness which attaches to the act of creation … is transferred to the record,” and this is a “grave mischief.” (ibid.) “Genius,” for Emerson, “is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence.” (57) The suggestion is that “One must be an inventor to read well,” that the only good reading is a selective, “creative reading,” a misreading in Bloom’s terms—“the discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle;—all the rest he rejects….” (58)

Emerson: “Circles,” “The Poet,” “Experience”

Harold Bloom once remarked that, despite his preternatural verbal memory, he had a tough time recalling the placement of prominent passages in Emerson, thinking it in one essay and instead finding it in another. The experience must be a common one, and I’ve already encountered it many times. It no doubt has much to do with Emerson’s solid foot in oral tradition, with its reliance on interchangeable formula, but also with his obsession with the transumption of the past, which he often identified with power and the promise of America.

Emerson is America’s theorist of self-creation and this comes out well in “Circles.” The trope of the circle contains the core of Emerson’s vision of an agonistic relation to the past. We are born into life and find ourselves amongst circles already drawn, but Emerson’s Law of Compensation says that “every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn….” (“Circles,” 228) Emerson analogizes thinking and acting to the activity of drawing circles, as summing up a situation as this or that. As always, though, Emerson wants us to focus on the activity of drawing as the important bit, not the circle itself: “a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built.” (229)

Emerson’s conception of the poet goes back to its Greek roots: poiesis, or “making.” The poet is the self-maker, involved in “the transcendency of their own nature….” (“The Poet,” 255) Emerson twice calls poets “liberating gods” (257, 258) and one has to think that, in America’s lionization of freedom, that Emerson has Shelley’s maxim at heart when he says, “They [poets] are free, and they make free.” (258) This comes to a head (a little later on then our reading) when Emerson laments that he looks “in vain for the poet whom I describe.” (261) Emerson slyly bids to be that poet for America, but in the wide sense in which the Greeks first used it before the coming domination of prose in Plato’s Athenian 5th century. Presaging Whitman, America’s poet in the narrower sense, Emerson declares that “America is a poem in our eyes….” (262)

Emerson takes a much darker form in “Experience.” Waxing to the philosophical milieu current in the Old World, Emerson echoes to the gulf between the subject (person) and object. For Emerson, though, this isn’t simply a distinction between us and rocks, but between us and our desires, us and other people. This creates a great pathos, one summed up by the cliché “The grass is always greener…,” but in Emerson, “Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.” (267) Emerson grieves for the time we once had originary participation with the world, called Eden, which we were fated to be ejected with “the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.” (284) Emerson’s darkest passage, however, is the knowledge that all we hold dear is held together simply “by love on one part and by forbearance to press objection on the other part….” (285) All life is a continual negotiation, fragile and always open for option.

Longing for the Apocalypse

This is another short paper written for a class that looked at how the concept of time worked in literature and theory. Every paper in the series takes up whoever we were reading and pairs them together. They aren't exactly haphazard pairings, but ya' know. It is an open question as to how forced brevity effected the efforts--good exercise; still not used to it. This one was the last one written, and since it was the last, it exploded into a cavalcade of diverse thoughts that I wanted to say, this being my last opportunity. It begins with some unknown German guy summarizing literature about the image of "apocalypse" in theory and slides into my first attempt to pull together a number of threads I've been thinking about lately--primitivism, intellectual influence, and literacy.

You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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In the most revealing passage in Klaus Scherpe’s serviceable summary of Continental intellectual trends relating to the notion of “apocalypse,” Scherpe says

In Kafka’s stories the exception begins and remains the rule; an idea’s reversal is always implicit in its being thought. Kafka’s literary modernity is a state of emergency, which means that the revolutionary impulse implicit in the notions of “interruption” and the “breakthrough” propagated by Benjamin’s theory of modernity can never occur; the catastrophe can never set any energy free nor provide the stimulus for change. (Scherpe 113)

Benjamin has swallowed the notion that modernity soaks us to the core, that the “‘age of information,’ when norms are purged of meaning and time is characterized by its ‘empty’ homogeneity” (106) requires the notion of a radical break to even conceive of change. After taking both notions on board, postmodernity becomes the last shock available as, for instance, Baudrillard “proclaims a condition of the absolute absence of events.” (100) The question would seem to be: why is such an absurd conclusion taken seriously by smart people? By using Don DeLillo’s White Noise, I would like to trace a path to re-engineer the position so-called postmodern intellectuals have found themselves.

The two positions Scherpe traces have Baudrillard on one side and his “German prophet,” Gerd Bergfleth, on the other. Baudrillard, in effect, pushes the self-directed ironic masks worn by the Romantics to achieve autonomy to its outermost reaches, what he calls “objective irony.” Baudrillard sees quite rightly that a truly all-pervasive irony, when taken out of its normal state of (subjective) context-dependence and amped up into a (objective) reality-rule, becomes an indifference that ultimately denies change: “Everything has already happened.”[fn.1] (100-1) This de-dramatizes reality because by denying change/events, we’ve effectively relieved ourselves of waiting around for something to happen (so-called “drama”). Scherpe says perceptively that the German side of the equation is missing the irony of Baudrillard’s position—whereas from Baudrillard’s position we might as well drop the nukes, from Bergleth’s vantage (a “typically German version of the postmodern condition,” (123) Scherpe says humorously), we need it. Bergleth has an “intense desire for some sort of deadly seriousness” (126) in the midst of French playfulness, a “longing for death” (127) as the last place to find meaning, the true flipside of Camus’ insistence that the only pertinent philosophical question was whether to commit suicide.[fn.2] Bergfleth must re-dramatize the notion of apocalypse to regain Benjamin’s hope for change and (for what ends up resting on the ability to see differences) meaning.

If we turn to White Noise, I believe we can trace the interesting patterns that accrue to the fascination with catastrophe and apocalypse. In Chapter 14, DeLillo shows us Jack and his kids watching television, “floods, earthquakes, mudslides,” “totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death.” (DeLillo 64) The significance, and ultimately the disturbing fascination Jack sees, is that “Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.” (ibid.) The next day Jack asks Alfonse why “people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe”? (65) He replies, not only that “it’s natural, it’s normal,” (ibid.) but that “We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.” (ibid.)

I would like to unpack this section in several different ways. First, DeLillo and the postmoderns all take very seriously the effect of technology on our culture and consciousness. This point should not be underestimated, as all other points fall from there. Modern society is not only bombarded with information, but it better stores and recalls that information. If info is blandly defined as our sensory input, then it is flatly false that we get more info now than before—it is everywhere and always the same saturated state. However, the creation of technology, Prometheus bringing the Gods’ fire to us, has expanded exponentially our ability to store and retrieve information and has altered our consciousness accordingly.[fn.3]

One consequence of our ability to retrieve the past more quickly and accurately has been the increasing sense that the past is a burden. This can be seen quite clearly in the evolution of poetry. In Homeric times, oral poetry was the only form of paideia. As this transferred into prose form, written poetry shuttled into a stage of theological instruction (Dante being the great exemplar). Petrarch marked a great change in all this, as the poet turned inwards, towards his own problems, personal and otherwise. By the time of the Romantics, that shift had been solidified—poets had become so self-conscious of the past that the insular search for something new to say began in true earnest.[fn.4] Irony was instrumental in their search for new ways to shrug off the past—as a stance, it put one in a skeptical relation to the past, and as a figure, one could repeat the past while meaning something else.

The last idea to put into play is that of primitivism—the notion that the past was a glorious time, if only we could restore it. This might seem entirely counterintuitive, but as anxiety over contemporary decadence increases, such that things as time goes on are getting worse, it seems natural to suppose that things were better earlier, before they got worse. Primitivism, in a simple sense, is a typical conservative reaction—too much change is bad for the system—and is as old as recorded time.[fn.5] Primitivism takes on a new cast during the Enlightenment, suffused in the form of Rousseau. Rousseau wished to reach back to the past, as a simpler time. But Rousseau realized the almost insurmountability of this problem because the problem was society itself.[fn.6]

Thus enters the fascination with apocalypse. Bernard Yack suggests that Rousseau transmitted to the European intellectual tradition a “longing for total revolution.”[fn.7] By locating the pernicious evil in the very civilizing, socializing process, Rousseau put out of practical reach our ability to change: “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains,” he says famously in the Social Contract. As technological rates increase, the burden of the past chains us tighter and tighter to where we have been, and the more we dream of being released. For the poet, from the great masters of the past. For the political revolutionary or spiritual purist (who, in true Rousseauian spirit, end up being one and the same), from modern society. We become fascinated with catastrophe as our sense of “we’ve seen this all before” increases, and as time goes by, greater and greater catastrophes of greater magnitude are demanded to breach our attention. And as the Mountains of Time begin to blot out the Sun, we begin to pray for the Great Leveler. The turn in DeLillo, in post-apocalypse, is the same turn in Rousseau—a sudden, renewed sense of community as the TVs die away.

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Works Cited

Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, 1991.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 1997.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, 1985, 1999.

Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. New York: Universal Library, 1963, 1967.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. and George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934, 1997.

Nehamas, Alexander. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections From Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Rice, Eugene F, Jr., with Anthony Grafton. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970, 1994.

Scherpe, Fredric. “Dramatization and De-dramatization of ‘the End’: The Apocalyptic Consciousness of Modernity and Post-Modernity.” Cultural Critique. No. 5 (Winter 1986-7), p. 95-129.

Yack, Bernard. The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 1992.

Endnotes

[1] Baudrillard is right about irony because the classic notion of irony is a directed notion, from speaker to audience, author to reader. What irony does is hide the meaning of a statement. Though often thought of as a simplistic “means the contrary of what it says,” Romantic irony has more to do with the irony of Socrates, as when Alexander Nehamas argues, against the traditional “contrary” version that Gregory Vlastos stands at the far end of in Socratic studies, that irony is a “concealment”: “Irony seems to create a mask. It does not show what, if anything, is masked. It suggests depth. It does not guarantee it.” (Nehamas 67) When Baudrillard expands the ultimately faceless mask of irony to a world-condition, he seems to understandably draw the conclusion that, since 1) all depths are created by a concealing mask, 2) everything is a concealing mask, and 3) every mask pulled off finds us with another concealing mask, the very notion of a “reality” to be taken seriously and differentiatedly is suspicious and should be treated indifferently because it can/could/should/has been revealed to be a different, faceless mask (hence his concept of the simulacrum, a representation with no represented—like a signifier with no signified—which means every representation represents the same thing: nothing).

[2] While L’étranger offers a wonderful portrait of a life seemingly devoid of internally generated meaning (and hence careening towards the only thing that would stand out: death), Camus investigates in prose the question of suicide in Le mythe de sisyphe.

[3] Here I would refer to the work of Walter J. Ong and Eric A. Havelock on orality, literacy and the beginnings of Greek (Western) thought. In our Homeric, oral state the only way to store info was in memorable pieces (because they had to be personally remembered) by the instrumental use of hexametric verse, rhyme, formulas, the use of heroic figures. As Ong says,

The new way to store knowledge was not in mnemonic formulas but in the written text. This freed the mind for more original, more abstract thought. Havelock [in Preface to Plato] shows that Plato excluded poets from his ideal republic essentially (if not quite consciously) because he found himself in a new chirographically styled noetic world in which the formula or cliché, beloved of all traditional poets, was outmoded and counterproductive. (Ong 24)

This marked the true birth of what we now think of as poetry—broadly, the attempt to write in an original way. Poetry had previously been involved in reproduction of noetic resources, but writing provided an external way to save these.
Our sense of accuracy has also increased as our technological capacities have. Writing allowed us to record thoughts. It also allowed us to record history, to record events in a more individuated way than ever before (the detailed History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides rather than the amorphously mythic Works and Days of Hesiod). The printing press registers as another significant event in the history of our consciousness. The reproduction of classic texts for the length of the Middle Ages were largely left to the hands of monastic scribes, most of whom were illiterate and were simply trying to copy as closely as possible the marks. The invention of moveable type changed everything:

Manuscripts, totally dependent on the skill, learning, and care of the scribe, had always been inaccurate and unreliable. Furthermore, this inaccuracy and unreliability were becoming increasingly great as successive generations of scribes copied the errors of their predecessors and added their own. The fundamental contribution of printing to learning was that it halted this progressive corruption and made possible the long and continuing effort to restore the great texts of the past to something approaching their original integrity. Printing gave scholars all over Europe identical texts to work on. (Rice 7)

The weight of the past has increased exponentially since that time as more and more is reproduced and preserved, not only the great and vast, but the boring and trivial. We have it all at our finger-tips.

[4] In this Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet is instrumental, as is Harold Bloom’s transformation of Bate’s more historical thesis into a theory of poetry in The Anxiety of Influence.

[5] On this see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas’ Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. One of the many benefits is their distinguishing between various senses of “primitivism.” The sense I shall use it is as a “cultural primitivism.” Lovejoy says, “The cultural primitivist has almost invariably believed that the simpler life of which he has dreamed has been somewhere, at some time, actually lived by human beings.” (Lovejoy 8)

[6] As Lovejoy says of Rousseau’s First Discourse, “The study of the arts and sciences does not contribute à épurer les moeurs [to the purification of mores], and there it is of minimal value, and often actually harmful.” (Lovejoy 274)

[6] Yack says that the “subjective awareness of the inability to produce a desired object distinguishes a longing from a desire….”

In both longing and desire we feel the uneasiness created by the lack of a desire object. But while in desire our uneasiness focuses on the desired object, thus promoting attempts at its acquisition, in longing the awareness of our present incapacity to acquire the object diffuses our uneasiness. The energy produced by that uneasiness has no obvious outlet—thus the vague, generalized feeling of uneasiness which most of us associate with longing. … When we discover the obstacle to our satisfaction we generate a new object of desire: a world without that obstacle to our satisfaction. And if we find ourselves incapable of removing this obstacle, our desire becomes a longing which, in turn, generates the definition of new objects of desire. (Yack 5-6, italics mine)

Compare this to Scherpe’s nice little slap at Baudrillard: “the curious manner in which this form of theorizing constantly creates new objects in order to make them disappear….” (Scherpe 99) On my reading, this is exactly what is to be expected at the long, self-conscious end of Platonic theory. Nietzsche saw Hegel grasp previous generations and drain them of their power for his own, thought it a neat trick and went directly at the main offender—Plato. Heidegger saw Nietzsche invert Plato, and saw the next step as an inversion of Nietzsche. Derrida sees Heidegger and ups the inverting ante, but by now the jig is up and the game of inverting back and forth infinitely becomes increasingly boring.