Quando un bambino si ammala, somiglia ad un adulto. Perde la voglia di giocare, di ridere, di prenderti in giro con il suo sguardo pieno di innocente malizia. Ti dice sì, o ti risponde no, con la massima serietà e compostezza; come se crescere fosse, in buona sostanza, ammalarsi.

Ho passato tutto il pomeriggio disteso nel mio letto. Ogni tanto chiudevo gli occhi – forse, ho anche dormito un po’. Quando ero sveglio, o quando mi pareva di esserlo, guardavo fuori dalla finestra: stagliato su cielo bianco (proprio #FFFFFF, non un grigio londinese), c’era l’unico albero di Padova che quest’anno ha perso le sue foglie – ne sono rimaste una, due, tre…. dodici, appese ai rami come fantasmi, come denti sul sorriso di un vecchio. Forse c’era vento, perché ogni tanto una di loro dondolava, e poi, senza nessun rumore, undici: uno straccetto marrone si è staccato e navigando su quel fluido freddo che è l’aria trasparente, con mestizia è caduto giù, come le foglie dell’albero dei Monty Python.

L’influenza ha una bellissima struttura narrativa: un prologo in sordina – quei brividi dentro ai quali non vuoi dare ascolto – l’acuirsi del malessere, che diventa vero e proprio dolore – il dramma; la notte, durante la quale il tempo non passa mai; e infine la mattina, che porta il sole e la sensazione bellissima di avercela, in qualche modo, fatta. Ha da passà ‘a nuttata, diceva Eduardo, in Napoli Milionaria, quando la piccola Amalia aspetta di essere salvata dall’introvabile medicina – e, come nella commedia di Eduardo, il senso di questa frase travalica la contingenza dell’episodio.

Quando sono ammalato, quando ho la febbre, la cosa più strana è la forma che assumono i miei pensieri non appena chiudo gli occhi: come se la mia testa volesse reclamizzare le idee che Hofstadter ha esposto nel suo libro “Concetti fluidi e analogie creative”, ecco che percepisco tre o quattro processi mentali che girano dentro di me (non solo nella testa: vagano tra lo stomaco e i polmoni), in modo del tutto indipendente l’uno dall’altro; e tutto il mio sforzo di malatino, immobile e dolorante, disteso nel letto, consiste nel cercare di fornire un modello, una sorta di unità organizzativa, a questa anarchia mentale. C’è il desiderio di dare una descrizione sistematica di quello che mi sta succedendo dentro; e c’è anche la percezione netta, e non molto piacevole, che questo fluttuare rumoroso e disordinato dei pensieri sia, in realtà, una caratteristica sempre presente, ma che di solito (mi viene da dire per fortuna) viene tenuta nascosta, ridotta al silenzio, come certi cani rognosi che si chiudono in uno stanzino quando ci sono ospiti. La differenza è che, con la febbre, anche questo livello superiore di pensiero, questo metapensiero sopra i pensieri, questo processore vs. programmi, è condizionato, è corrotto dai due miseri gradi centigradi in più che chiamiamo influenza; il coordinatore, in altre parole, non è messo tanto meglio dei coordinati. Ieri, il modello che tentavo, inutilmente, di applicare ai miei pensieri, somigliava, in modo inquietante, ad una delle soluzioni software che sto progettando per un mio cliente: un orchestratore di processi di business su più livelli. Ogni tanto tentavo di oppormi a questa follia; riaprivo gli occhi, guardavo l’albero con le sue dieci foglie moribonde, e il cielo bianco che andava scurendosi, senza mai cambiar colore; ma richiudevo gli occhi e di nuovo i pensieri ognuno per conto suo…

Se un adulto si ammala, sembra sia morto: sarà così anche dopo? Una volta che sarò defunto, i pensieri riprenderanno a mulinare ognuno per conto proprio? E io (be’, ma quale io, in simili circostanze?) cercherò inutilmente di organizzarli? L’idea che il mondo sia davvero quello che vediamo, che percepiamo attraverso i nostri sensi, e che riorganizziamo secondo le caratteristiche del nostro cervello, è molto presuntuosa. Che concezione avremmo, del mondo, se la nostra condizione abituale fosse proprio questa? Che teorie sul pensiero, sul tempo, sullo spazio, avremmo tirato fuori? L’io, il super-io, l’inconscio. Persino l’anima: una mente con la febbre, che razza di religioni avrebbe partorito? Quale Dio può immaginare un’accozzaglia di pensieri tutti indipendenti tra di loro? Impossibile negarlo, tutto il mondo cambia, quando il termometro segna 39: non solo il nostro corpo, o la nostra mente. Il tempo si dilata. Oppure spariscono intere mezze ore, inghiottite in un buio molliccio e doloroso. Erano le 15.05: come possono essere le 15 e 33, se non è passato nemmeno un secondo? Niente da fare. Mondo intermittente. Chiudo gli occhi. Cerco di tenere a bada un pensiero che sembra girare attorno a qualcosa, ma appena lo blocco ne viene fuori un altro. Mi rassegno. Riapro gli occhi sull’albero ormai calvo. Poi mi giro e passa un’altra ora, senza che succeda nulla. Così per un giorno intero. Ha da passà a nuttata.

Op-ed by Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman, New York Times

New York Times/Paul Krugman—Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

More @

Yesterday, I finished reading I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. I would not call it a philosophy book per se – instead of being a “pure philosopher,” Hofstadter is very much a public intellectual along the same lines as Ray Kurzweil, Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, or even Dan Dennett. His writing is thus geared to the “lay reader,” exists outside any meaningful “tradition,” and lacks the “serious” tone of voice which characterizes most philosophy books. Nonetheless, he strikes on a few very potent themes in philosophy, which I find provocative.

The “thesis” of the book is that what we call the “self” does not properly exist. It is an example of a “strange loop:” a feedback pattern which develops in self-referential systems. Essentially, our immense ability to categorize perceived information causes us to create categories related to ourselves (e.g. “I am hungry,”  “I am a Giants fan,” “I am interested in Kierkegaard’s essay on Don Giovanni“), which, as the categories grow larger in number and more complex, results in the illusory perception of something called a “self” – something which is consistently present and is the “essence” of one’s personality. As an analogy, Hofstadter describes a box of envelopes which all contain a tiny ball of glue at the tip. When taken individually, each envelope seems quite flat to the touch. However, if one puts his or her hand it the box without looking, it seems quite obvious that there is a marble located somewhere between the envelopes. This “marble” is created by the cumulative effect of all the glue dots piling up on each other. It does not have any real existence of its own (at least, not in the way that a tree, a rock, a water bottle, or a dog could claim to), but it does have a very real perceptual existence. So it stands with the “self” – it does not actually exist in any meaningful physical or metaphysical sense, but it seems very obvious to most humans that we are in possession of a “self” or something like it. This is a necessary illusion. Without the “self,” we would have a very hard time communicating with others, performing key tasks in human civilization, or learning and retaining verbal information. However, it is still an illusion.

At this point, I should probably state that I completely agree with this interpretation, since it is backed up by hard science and, more importantly, Ockham’s Razor. According to current research, one can affect a subject’s conception of his or her “self” in a controlled laboratory setting by physically altering the brain, either via electric stimulation of certain areas or by the subject’s ingestion of certain chemicals – it really doesn’t matter, so long as it is a physical process that alters a subjective experience. Now, if one really wanted to, it might be possible to construct an elaborate system which would explain this in relation to a metaphysical “self,” as Descartes does in his description of the pineal gland as the link between “mind” and “body.”  However, it is really much more simple to conclude from the existence of such experiments that whatever generates our conception of “self” is fundamentally physical in nature. This is, quite simply, the best explanation for commonly known phenomena such as Alzheimer’s Disease, brain damage, and psychedelic experiences caused by ingestion of certain chemicals.

What, then, truly exists in us, other than a large collection of molecules, cells, neural networks, and other physical matter? Well, to be honest… nothing, really. This is not a very new insight. David Hume reached it 280 years ago in his Treatise on Human Nature:

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic’d reflexion thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

In short, for Hume, the act of existing as a res cogitans takes the form of perceiving something. Cogito ergo sum no longer means “the fact that I am thinking proves that I exist” but, rather, the more pessimistic, “if I were not thinking or perceiving or doing something, I would not exist.” There is no real res cogitans doing the perceiving, however. Instead, there is simply a bundle of perceptions, which, due to its quantity and quality, and the capacity to remember previous perceptions, fancies that it is something which exists the same way a physical object could be said to exist. Thus, pure being (i.e. the res cogitans, the Subject, or whatever one would call the “essence” of a person) is nothing – it does not properly exist, although it likes to think it does.

The last phrase is, of course, a paraphrase of Heidegger, who himself takes that statement from Hegel. But wait – how did I get from David Hume (who, in many ways, is the forefather of what came to be known as Analytic philosophy) to Martin Heidegger (who is widely hailed as the greatest Continental philosopher of the past century)? Furthermore, how did I arrive at this issue from what started out as a description of a book I read by Douglas Hofstadter, who references neither of them and, from my understanding (which might, of course, be flawed), is not terribly well-schooled in the history of philosophy to begin with? These are three radically different thinkers, with radically different cultural backgrounds, terminology, and opinions on some of the most fundamental questions. However, it is my understanding that they are all talking about the same thing: the lack of any metaphysically real “self” or res cogitans and its implication.

Je viens de m’avaler deux saisons en deux jour….Je pense que l’on peut commencer a se poser  des question sur mon enfance pour trouver des choses qui aurait pu mener à cette addiction.

Globalement, pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas : c’est l’histoire de geeks qui se confrontent un peu à des gens plus ou moins normaux.

Pour les connaisseurs, mes personnages préférés sont Sheldon et Penny.

-Analysons mon addiction à Sheldon : Il à un QI de 187. Rien que ça, ça me fait bien rire . Il n’a pas la notion des sentiments.  Il a une tête toute ronde ! (Oui c’est important dans mon analyse ). Enfin bref il est completement cinglé ^-^ et j’adore ça. Ca le rendrait presque mignon à côté des autres personnages.

-Penny : Elle est blonde ! (comme moi), elle est un peu crétine (comme moi), elle a un Dell inspiron rose (comme moi). Enfin bref rien que ça, ça la rend intéressante …

PS pour Sonny : JE SUIS PAS GEEK =D

How did I ever miss attending this (Strange Loop) conference ?

There is even “Strange Loop” swag available.

Maybe next year.

October 27, 2009

Dear readers,

I was going to go into detail about the perfect day, but it hurt my brain to try coming up with a perfect day. For now it remains elusive. Something about sunlight and waffles. And gypsy caravans and unicorn tap-dance troupes.

I say this a lot, but I’m excited. Stuff is happening again. Stuff is always happening. I hate not going into more detail, but I’m very cautious about what I write here. Unfortunately I don’t write in a private journal or anything, so what is omitted here is omitted for all of time.

If you’re stressing out about the future, try thinking even more long term than you already are. Think in terms of your entire lifetime, or in terms of eternity. Suddenly the important becomes unimportant, and the hidden items of importance make themselves evident. I was worried to death about college, but eventually I took a step back and reminded myself that college is not life and death. Remember that cliched saying? “All roads lead to Rome.”

All these cliches are popping up in my life. Like that saying about doing things with all your heart or not at all. It’s never been as true as it is now. I think the biggest visible difference is in violining.

Sometimes I like listening to music that I used to like, or music that everyone else my age likes, and just feeling really teenage-y. But after some time I always go back to MIKA or whatever else I’m listening to. He’s pretty mainstream in Europe, but find me someone who loves MIKA around here and I will give you candy.

Goodness my lips are chapped.

Recurring PBS Kids reference of the day: “Caillou”, the bald four-year-old boy with the cat, Gilbert, and T-Rex, Rexy.

In physics I started talking about Caillou with Minaal and Rebekah. I have no idea how this happened, but it’s not too unusual. Then in French we were doing some AP exercises, and I learned (again) that caillou means little rock. Which explains a lot, especially about his head. Very creative, Caillou’s racially ambiguous parents. Very creative.

I can’t wait for “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” and “Toy Story 3″. The anticipation before a movie is much more exciting than after it’s been released. If you wait long enough you can always suppress the urges. Like “500 Days of Summer” and “Where the Wild Things Are”. Now that they’ve been released and the hype is over, I’m not in a big rush to see them.

Goodnight. I must sleep before 12. And was that noise a string popping from my violin!?

Love,
Katherine

P.S. Leonard from “The Big Bang Theory” is Leonard Hofstadter?! Horror of HORRORS. Bane of my life:

P.P.S. If I could Roxercise my fat away, I would work out every day.

Who knows the future? A clunky yellow taxi bumped past today with that piece of wisdom painted on the driver’s door.

Now, I wouldn’t generally take a taxi whose driver espoused that particular view.

Maybe I’ll get you to your destination. Or maybe we’ll crash. Maybe I’ll double the rate upon arrival. Qui sait l’avenir.

But it was a timely reminder of why I came to Calavi: to learn, to explore, to live, to assimilate, to discuss, to absorb, to share, to be — because qui sait l’avenir? Who knows when or if another chance like this will come along?

That’s not all, though. More importantly, qui sait l’avenir embodies a subtle kind of patience, a contentment, a sangfroid, that, in general, Americans are not known for, and that I in particular have eschewed.

Patience

Late last Thursday afternoon, I finally scrambled out of the Cotonou airport, full of ungrammatical apologies for the Rotarians because my flight was more than (two days and) three hours late. But I never got the chance to wow everyone with my repertoire of regrets. There wasn’t even the barest hint that anyone had been bothered. Qui sait l’avenir.

A few days later, Rotaract member Angelo kindly loaded me onto the back of his motorcycle, took me to downtown Cotonou, and helped me buy a cell phone. On the way back, I inquired about buying minutes for the phone. He was obliging, but seemed surprised that I would want to do it the same day. My days of multipage to-do list seem both geographically and stylistically very far away.

I could regale you, chers lecteurs, with more examples of Beninese serenity, but I’m not sure that would reinforce the point. It’s more the attitude that allows one to stand on a porch for hours and watch curtains of rain turn to rivulets in the dirt roads; to sit on a curb at noon with the woman selling limes and wait for the sun to sink a little in the sky; to be truly hospitable without keeping score; to listen conscientiously while every person has a chance to speak at a meeting (which makes for four-hour meetings) but also to quibble about the cost of a taxi ride ad nauseum while one’s motorcycle eats up liters of gas.

Connections

I brought just one English-language book with me. As I knew I would have limited space in my carryon luggage, I wanted to choose a book to last me a while. I picked Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I hesitate to characterize it; in the prologue to the new edition, Hofstadter chastises his reviewers for consistently misstating the book’s theme. But it’s a Pulitzer-Prize-winning nonfiction book that, like me, strives to show that there are overarching themes that connect academic disciplines we generally think of as distinct.

It’s sort of like this: Say I want to explain what qom is. I have two choices: I can explain it independently by listing some of its features (cream-colored, sticky, edible, bland, made of corn) or interdependently by analogizing it to something you’re familiar with (like an uncooked hush puppy or a ball of cornbread dough). (Qom is really good dipped in a spicy, tomato-based fish sauce.)

Generally, experts are preoccupied with the tiniest details of their field, which they must describe with scrupulous precision; therefore they choose to describe things independently. That’s why each academic discipline has jargon the rest of us don’t recognize (voir dire, ETOH, isomorphism, etc.). But Hofstadter took the other route, describing logic in terms of music, art in terms of geometry, linguistics in terms of computer programming. There are other authors who have done this, of course, but Hofstadter stands apart because he delves into details, and still shows that the processes of understanding and appreciating language, music, art, literature and mathematics are largely the same. It seems that his ultimate goal is to get to what intelligence means. (I’ve still read less than half.)

Hofstadter concludes — as have many others — that intelligence is, in part, the process of changing how one learns. That’s why no computer has yet to pass the Türing test: computers are programmable. They can complete unthinkably complex tasks, but their abilities end there. They can learn only insofar as we program them to do so.

Now, what does this have to do with Benin?

Intelligence in Calavi

I don’t want to be an automaton here.

In order to be an intelligent being in Calavi, I have to reprogram myself to learn things I thought I already knew. For example, I have to recognize that I no longer know how to cross the street. Crossing the street is sort of like the video game Frogger, if it had bumpy clay roads, no lanes, and you threw in — for good measure — a few dump trucks, a veritable fleet of motorcycle taxis, some goats, and throngs of unflappable women with towering pyramids of pineapples on their heads (or carrots, limes, coconuts, sunglasses, pens, blankets, bottles of water, radios, suitcases, bundles of sticks, loaves of bread, oranges, pots of stew, jars of gasoline, or clothing racks). I have learned to hold someone’s hand when I cross the street, especially at night, when the electricity s’est coupée and some vehicles have no headlights.

I also have to make my own connections, ferreting out the bits and pieces I have in common with people here: Jehovah’s Witnesses, gesticulating men on Bluetooths driving black-and-silver H2s, Guinness billboards, Obama campaign posters, and the muffin joke. (Ahh, the stuff of true universality.)

Hofstadter compares locating the gene(s) that shaped his nose to pinpointing the note(s) that contain the emotion of a piece of music. I imagine finding a way to adopt Beninese patience is a similar pursuit. Right now, not only do I not know how to live like this, I don’t even know how one might try. As I am not a deterministic computer, I still might learn wrong, or not at all. But that’s the whole point, I think: Qui sait l’avenir?

P.S. There is one thing, chers lecteurs, that I do know about the future: I will get more bug bites. I count 49 on my legs and feet alone. I sleep under a mosquito net; I practically bathe in bug spray; I keep the fans on, to no avail. Bugs love me.

Related to my previous post, Douglas Hofstadter discusses (on page 380 of Godel, Escher, Bach) translating a Russian novel into English. He wonders:

[B]ut if you translate every idiomatic phrase word by word, then the English will sound alien. Perhaps this is desirable, since the Russian culture is an alien one to speakers of English. But a speaker of English who reads such a translation will constantly be experiencing, thanks to the unusual turns of phrase, a sense — an artificual sense — of strangeness, which was not intended by the author, and which is not experienced by readers of the Russian original.

Four bases, A, G, T, C, the genetic building blocks of all life, arranged in the double helix of DNA to create from the most infinitesimal one-celled protozoa to the most complex of animals: humans.  How is it that these four bases can account for all of life on Earth?  How can four bases, arranged in various groups of three, code for a blade of grass, a wing, a flipper, a brain?  Or more impressively:

Behavior: the retreat of a sensitive plant from touch, phototaxis of plankton, nyctinasty in the morning glory, the butting of rams’ horns, neo-Palladian mud-and-twig palaces, the engineering monuments of colonial insects, the clicks and whistles of distress, the motor rhythm of walrus sonar (irresistibly sexy to their opposites), speech, for God’s sake?  Are these enormous structures somehow in the invisible code?  Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?

How do these four letters translate to love, lust, instinct, humanity?  This is the mystery that the characters in Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations seek to decode.

Powers’ story is centered around—actually, one would more accurately say spirals, double-helix style—two sets of couples: there are Dr. Ressler, a molecular biologist, and another woman from his lab, Jeanette Koss; and twenty-five years later, Frank Todd, a man who now works with Ressler not in genetics, but a computer data firm, and a research librarian named Jan O’Deigh, whom Todd befriends in order to find out what Ressler is hiding about his past life as a scientist.  These couples echo the pairing of nucleic acid bases A with T and C with G, one of the many variations on the theme of codes in the novel.  The story moves between the past, a slow unveiling of Ressler’s brief love affair with the married Koss and their efforts to crack the genetic code, and the present, in which Todd and O’Deigh attempt to decipher Ressler’s past and O’Deigh herself becomes obsessed with the genetic code.

The Gold Bug Variations title references both the Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Gold Bug” as well as Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard piece, The Goldberg Variations, most famously recorded by Glenn Gould, the Canadian prodigy who died of a stroke and who is alluded to throughout the text.  As for the Bach piece, the Goldberg Variations consists of 30 variations on a theme, or Aria, all of which sound incredibly different, chiefly because it is not the melody that contributes to the variations, but the bass.  Powers’ novel takes its structure from the Goldberg Variations: it begins with an Aria, announcing the themes in a four-part poem, each part consisting of four verses comprised of four lines.  Then follow 30 chapters that are variations on the themes outlined in the Aria, including “cannon” subheadings in the same positions as the cannons in the Variations, and ends with the Aria, da Capo e Fine, or once more, with feeling.

It is not only the structure that echoes Bach, but the content as well.  The Goldberg Variations consists of translations and transcriptions of the original Aria’s base, just as all life is translation and transcription and variation on the four nucleic acid bases, AGCT.  The similarities between the genetic code and the Variations can be drawn out even further:

The sequence is symmetrical to an extreme: two paired, complementary halves of sixteen notes each.  Each half comprises four similar-shaped paired phrases—tension, release, tension, release—four notes long.  Each pair of four-note phrases creates an eight-note harmonic section, four in all, tracing the fundamental journey from tonic to dominant to relative and back to tonic.  Sixteen twos, eight fours, four eights, and two sixteens: with repeats, the trip from home and back takes sixty-four notes.

Dr. Ressler—already fighting gnostic tendencies—must have loved discovering in Bach two paired strands, four phrase-building blocks, a sixty-four-codon catalog.  Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the number-game nature imbeds in its own.

But it is not the code itself that is important, but the big picture beyond the code.  Jan asks herself, “What is there in the Jupiter but allegro, andante, minuet, plus allegro?  At bottom, only notes,” just as at bottom all life is only AGCT, but without the pattern, without the variation, those notes, those letters mean nothing.  No matter how you decipher it, a code cannot tell us anything about what it is like to be human, just as the explanation of the Goldberg Variations cannot make us hear the music, however impressed we are at its ingenuity.  Deconstruction is one way to understand something, but it can also obscure as much as it elucidates.

Knowledge can be overwhelming, and with so much information available to us it becomes even more so.  As Ressler’s friend Blake says just before he quits the genetics field, “[W]e’re racing to the day when even indices won’t help . . . We’re committed to nothing less than a point-for-point transcript of everything there is.  Only one problem: the concordance is harder to use than the book . . . Here we are, digging in the dirt, turning up shards, millions of shards, more than anyone expected to find.  But nobody knows what the shattered vase they all came from looks like . . . What we need is not more shards.  We need to accumulate something else altogether.  Something much wider.”

One of the interesting things about the Goldberg Variations, and this is something that Powers also mentions in the text, is that they conceivably could go on forever, or at least for much longer than just thirty: but they don’t.  They would become meaningless if they did.  Cataloging everything may give us more information, but it doesn’t necessarily enlighten us.  To know what it is to be human means to live, to love, and to experience. That is why Blake leaves the genetics team before they’ve cracked the code, and that is why Ressler eventually leaves as well, becoming the recluse that Todd and Jan befriend in the computer lab.  Even Jan gives up on genetics after her year-long foray, perhaps to try living life again, once more, with feeling.

Powers’ characters, especially Jan, are intelligent, thoughtful, and excruciatingly human, His prose is at its best elegant and poetic, and most of the time a true pleasure to read, though some sections are beleaguered by unnecessary ornamentation and come off as overwrought and sentimental.  His talent is most obvious when he is discussing science, of which there is a great deal in these 600+ pages.  He is lucid and interesting enough to keep laymen interested in his elementary lessons on Mendel’s genetic experiments as well as his more advanced ponderings on the genetic code, and if his descriptions of various classical pieces throughout the text don’t make you at least a little curious to hear for yourself what all Ressler’s fuss is about, I would be very surprised.

The Gold Bug Variations takes on many of the same ideas as another of my favorite books, Gödel, Escher, Bach, a nonfiction work by Douglas Hofstadter that tackles the theory of the brain as an evolved computer.  Hofstadter is also partial to Bach and draws many of the same parallels between genetics and Bach’s compositions as Powers does.  If you are interested in the science and philosophical ideas in The Gold Bug Variations, I highly recommend attempting Gödel, Escher, Bach (and I say “attempting” because it is quite a daunting task, as you’ll see as soon as you take a moment to flip through its 700 or so pages).  If you can slog through to the end, it’s quite a beautiful and thought-provoking book, and it may change the way you think about the human mind and the concept of “self.”

Sarah Palin exemplifies all the worst traits of paranoid politics within America today.

Forty-five years ago this November, political historian Richard Hofstadter published a provocative essay in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which he argued that our nation “has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.”

Hofstadter, a widely celebrated professor at Columbia University who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” was then confronting both the ghosts of McCarthyism and the more immediate significance of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for president of the United States. Hofstadter was particularly concerned about assessing “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”

“I call it the paranoid style,” Hofstadter wrote, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

In many ways, Hofstadter’s prescient essay anticipated the entree of Sarah Palin into contemporary American politics, that last month marked the one-year anniversary of her failed candidacy as the Republican vice presidential nominee. During the past year, the former governor of Alaska has tapped into a narrow, albeit tenacious, strain in the national polity that stretches back to the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.

Indeed, the paranoid style often rears its ugly head during transformative moments in American history – from the advent of Jeffersonian democracy and the onset of the Civil War, on through to the New Deal presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and, a generation later, the election of John F. Kennedy. Come now the transformative election of Barack Obama, and the paranoid style has once more found fertile soil in America’s political landscape.

Several writers, most notably those on the conservative right, have claimed that Palin is the new Ronald Reagan. As much as I detested the policies of our 40th president, that comparison is decidedly unfair to the Gipper. It’s also politically misleading.

Reagan understood the “big tent” concept of the Republican Party and reached out to moderates and disaffected Democrats. For better or worse, he forged a majority coalition that defined American politics for a quarter century. Even Obama paid homage to it in “The Audacity of Hope,” in which he acknowledged Reagan’s appeal to “the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith.”

Palin is all about small ball. While she has big personal ambitions, her political vision is both narrow and attenuated. She knows nothing about reaching out, and everything about cutting off. Expand the GOP as Reagan did? Hell no. She’s all about shrinking it. During her campaign for vice president, she actually refused to appear with Republican leaders who were either pro-choice or differed with her position on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The paranoid style is constrictive.

“Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe,” Hofstadter declared, “is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric.” Recall Palin’s recent Facebook delusions of “death panels” and her characterization of Obama’s proposed health care reforms as “downright evil.”

While right-wing radio hosts and cable news commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh give voice to the new millennium’s paranoid impulse, Palin not only personifies the style, she has franchised it. She is the only political figure in the conservative movement with electoral gravitas. The likes of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee are mere wannabes. They have neither Palin’s mojo nor her charisma.

Since her emergence on the national political stage, Palin has forged a formidable presence in the American political arena fueled by fear and anger, as when she accused Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists” and not being “a man who sees America like you and I see America.” That there is a racist undertone to the paranoid style quite nearly goes without saying.

In his essay, Hofstadter was careful to distinguish clinical paranoia in an individual from “paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people.” In the case of Palin, this distinction becomes blurred. Ever since her political debut 17 years ago in Wasilla, Alaska, she has embraced the paranoid style as not only a form of communication but, even more importantly, as a means to power. The style has both shaped and defined her entire political career.

The paranoid tendency, Hofstadter contended, is “aroused by a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.” Palin is an absolutist. Hers is a win-lose world of political Manichaeism. Everything is black and white, good and evil.

Palin’s inability to negotiate political compromise was definitively confirmed last month in Anchorage when the Alaska Legislature – a body largely composed of Republicans – overrode Palin’s veto of an energy component included in the federal stimulus package. It provided a perfect coda to Palin’s failed and abandoned governorship. In true paranoid style, she blamed the outcome on everyone else but herself.

Santa Cruz writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn is currently at work on a book about Sarah Palin and American politics, to be published next year by Macmillan/St. Martin’s.

Geoffrey Dunn
San Francisco Chronicle

Der Kognitionswissenschaftler und Informatiker Douglas Hofstadter beschäftigt sich mit der Frage des menschlichen Ichs, des Bewusstseins und was eine Seele ist. Die Schwierigkeit des Themas liegt in der Natur der Sache. Es ist ein verständlich geschriebenes Buch, das für Viele zu einem besseren Verständnis des Bewusstseins führen wird und auch die Konsequenzen für unsere Ethik behandelt.

Douglas Hofstadter ist Professor für Kognitionswissenschaften und Informatik an der Indiana University in Bloomington und ist dort Leiter des „Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition”. Sein 1973 erschienenes Buch „Gödel, Escher, Bach” ist ein Weltbestseller und wurde 1980 mit dem Pulitzer-Preis ausgezeichnet. Sein neues Buch mit dem Titel „Ich bin eine seltsame Schleife” hat im Prinzip die gleiche alte philosophische Frage zum Thema: „Was ist der Mensch?” oder etwas genauer, was ist ein Ich, was ist Bewusstsein oder was ist eine Seele? In seinem neuen Buch versucht er die Dinge noch allgemeinverständlicher darzustellen. Er vermeidet daher auch mathematische Formeln und verzichtet weitgehend auf Fachausdrücke. Dennoch dürfte die Verbindung zwischen Gödels Unvollständigkeitssatz der Mathematik und dem Selbstbewusstsein für die meisten Leser nur schwer nachvollziehbar sein. Dies liegt aber weniger an Hofstadters Darstellung, sondern mehr in der Natur der Sache.

Die philosophische Grundposition von Hofstadter berücksichtigt die neuesten Erkenntnisse der Psychologie und der Hirnforschung und ist dem nichtreduktionistischen Physikalismus zuzuordnen, der eine moderne Variante des materialistischen Monismus darstellt. Er erteilt damit jedweder Mystik eine Absage. Alles was im Gehirn passiert, geht mit rechten Dingen, d.h. im Rahmen der Naturgesetze zu (daher Physikalismus), aber man kann diese Dinge nicht restlos mit dem Schalten einzelner Nervenzellen erklären. Was hier mit ins Spiel kommt, ist das, was in der Regel als Emergenz bezeichnet wird. Das heißt, das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile. Damit hält er reduktionistische Ansätze bis hin zum Mikroreduktionismus für unbrauchbar, um die abstrakten Vorgänge im Gehirn zu erklären. So schreibt er z.B. (Seite 60):

Das Gehirn muss als ein System angesehen werden, das viele Ebenen besitzt; ohne diesen Ansatz ist es unmöglich, schwer fassbare mentale Phänomene wie Wahrnehmung, Vorstellungen, Denken, Bewusstsein, „Ich”, den freien Willen und so weiter zu analysieren. Eine Vorstellung oder eine Empfindung oder eine Erinnerung (oder ähnliches) auf ein einziges Neuron zu reduzieren ist unsinnig.

Hofstadter versucht die Problematik sehr überzeugend anhand von Gedankenexperimenten, Fallbeispielen und eigenen Geschichten schrittweise zu erklären. Für Fachleute, d.h. Kognitionswissenschaftler, Hirnforscher und Psychologen wird das Buch keine allzu großen neuen Erkenntnisse bringen. Aber für Geisteswissenschaftler und interessierte Laien ist es ein gut verständliches, hervorragend geschriebenes Buch, das für Viele zu einem besseren Verständnis des Bewusstseins führen wird.

Auf der Suche nach einer Antwort auf die Frage „Was ist der Mensch?” stellt dieses Buch einen großen Fortschritt dar. Der Autor zeigt, dass viele Dinge, die wir für selbstverständlich und unumstößlich halten, wie die unauflösbare Verbindung eines Ichs mit einem bestimmten Körper, der freie Wille und die Seele letztlich Illusionen unseres Geistes sind. Seine Erkenntnisse sind nicht nur rein theoretischer Natur, sondern haben auch praktische Auswirkungen auf unsere Ethik. So zeigt er, dass Bewusstsein viele Stufen haben kann. Je nach Komplexität des Gehirns müssen wir daher den Tieren ein gewisses Maß an Bewusstsein zugestehen. Ein Grund, weshalb der Autor überzeugter Vegetarier ist. Auf der anderen Seite verfügen Neugeborene noch über kein Bewusstsein und ihnen kann daher auch keine Seele zugesprochen werden. Bewusstsein entwickelt sich nach der Geburt erst langsam, über mehrere Jahre hinweg durch die Interaktion mit der Umwelt. Stammzellenforschung, Präimplantationsdiagnostik und Schwangerschaftsabbruch sind aus diesen Gründen ethisch vertretbar. Wer diese Dinge dagegen als „Mord am Erbgut” bezeichnet, ist auf die Propaganda von religiösen Eiferern hereingefallen, deren Menschenbild im Mittelalter stehen geblieben ist. Zu den Vertretern des Dualismus schreibt er (Seite 270):

Zwischen Geist und Materie sehen sie einen unüberwindlichen Abgrund, und davon fühlen sie sich so vor den Kopf gestoßen, dass sie all ihre Anstrengungen einstellen, herauszubekommen, wie Bewusstsein und Selbst aus physikalischen Prozessen hervorgehen können; stattdessen werfen sie das Handtuch und werden Dualisten.

Eine weitere Schlussfolgerung aus Hofstadters Ich-Theorie ist, dass es in der Zukunft prinzipiell möglich sein wird, Maschinen mit Bewusstsein, d.h. mit „Ichs” auszustatten. Für Freunde der Science Fiction versucht er noch das Problem des Zwillingsparadoxons beim „Beamen” zu lösen. Wenn man eine Person „scannt” und diese Information an zwei verschiedene Empfangsorte schickt und dort daraus jeweils wieder die Person rekonstruiert, sind das dann zwei verschiedene Ichs oder nur ein Ich, das gleichzeitig an zwei verschiedenen Orten existiert? Seine Antwort darauf ist, dass es sich um ein Ich handelt, das gleichzeitig an zwei verschiedenen Orten existiert, auch wenn man sich das nicht so recht vorstellen kann.

Fazit: Wenn es irgendwann einmal eine allgemein anerkannte Theorie des Ichs geben sollte, so wird dieses Buch ein wesentlicher Grundstein dazu sein. Wer nach der Lektüre des Buches immer noch Anhänger des Leib-Seele-Dualismus ist, wird die Welt und den Menschen nie begreifen.
Bernd Vowinkel

Il libro fondamentale dello storico americano Richard Hofstadter citato nell’articolo dell’Economist del quale si dà conto nel post precedente. E’ un testo del 1964 scritto all’alba della nascita del nuovo conservatorismo – isterico e populista – che all’epoca venne rappresentato da Barry Goldwater. Il libro illustra quale ruolo le teorie della cospirazione – e in particolare quelle formulate dalla destra americana – abbiano avuto nella storia del paese. Un evergreen.

I posted my own review of this little gem of a book a little while back, and The Globe and Mail ran their review on their Books site earlier this week. The best line:

[Hofstadter's] translation of La Chamade is brilliant, highly readable, thoroughly engrossing and very nearly everything Françoise Sagan could have hoped for in an English version of her novel.

Read the entire review here.

Published by Basic Books

Note: You will notice the speed and quantity of posts will, and has, drastically decreased over the last 2-3 months. It’ll probably be like this for awhile, but none-the-less I’ll continue to post stuff when I have the time and something strikes me.

Around the time when I got back to Bloomington I noticed a friend of mine had a copy of Last Year at Marienbad (torrent) lying around and I happened to notice it. During the class I took, the section involving Alain Resnais (the director/auteur of Marienbad) was in the “ambiguity” section. Ambiguity is something that I’ve always been fascinated by, and that’s the subject of this avant-garde film post.

I tend to use the word ambiguity poorly, and too often, particularly in situations where I’m really trying to communicate that something vague. So to try and avoid that, I’ve looked up the definition (on Wikipedia, no less):

Ambiguity is different from vagueness, which arises when the boundaries of meaning are indistinct. Ambiguity is context-dependent: the same linguistic item (be it a word, phrase, or sentence) may be ambiguous in one context and unambiguous in another context. A sentence may be ambiguous due to different ways of parsing the same sequence of words.

[and later...]

Pictures or photographs may also be ambiguous at the semantic level: the visual image is unambiguous, but the meaning and narrative may be ambiguous: is a certain facial expression one of excitement or fear, for instance?

So, it’s not the lack of meaning in material presented, it’s at least two apparent but indeterminate and in-distinguished meanings. A lot of things can be made ambiguous, but some things are more truly ambiguous than others. Marienbad is one of those especially ambiguous films that gets special note for its achievements as such–that, and the film is also incredibly beautiful and meticulously shot. Check out a sample here:

As I mentioned in my first avant-garde post, my instructor Jinhee Choi authored an article analyzing the cognitive value of these films. I wondered what one might gain from watching a particularly ambiguous film like Marienbad, and what other ones might apply to the category of cognitive benefit. Well, I find it fascinating the way the film manages to keep you engaged, testing your ability to keep track of the meaning of any particular scene for reference later when attempting to understand the film as a whole. The difference with these films, maybe, is that they don’t offer a resolve–where as Hollywood films that have capitalized on maintaining elements of ambiguity (like maybe Memento, Identity, the Sixth Sense, or otherwise) have a big reveal. The experience I gain from these is sort of a debugging for the analytical part of my brain that re-organizes information to try and make sense of it as a whole.

In parallel, I’ve been trying to read a book by Douglas Hofstadter: Godel, Escher, Bach, which is really dense, and it’ll take me a long time to get through, no doubt. But, it looks at a pattern that tend to find it’s way into all kinds of things, and therefore is an easy book to reference on many occasions (probably why it got a Pulitzer prize in the 80’s when it was published). The book looks at how “self-reference and formal rules allow systems to create meaning from meaningless elements”. I mention this because it seems to me like the value of this movie comes from its ability to encourage audiences to do just that–create meaning from meaningless elements.

Interestingly (recursively) one film scholar’s take on the film is  based on a science fiction story from the 40’s. In it a person ship-wreaked on an island finds anachronistically dressed people acting lively, but strangely. He finds out that they are copies of friends made by an inventor (hence the name of the story “The Invention of Morel”) designed to act in their likeness, and whom are on constant repeat. The film can be seen in this guise. The characters take on the simulacrum of whomever the original people were.

Perhaps you can see why I tied in the recursive ideas explored in G.E.B. Regardless, I hope this has been an insightful and useful start to looking at ambiguous avant-garde film. Unfortunately, this isn’t quite like the previous post, where I can post just a few ambiguous film makers–because it spans a great deal of cinema history, and many different types of films are ambiguous. In the class I took, we were able to choose this topic as a topic for our paper, and three films were associated with it. So I’ll note the other two films and filmmakers:

• Week End (1967) by Jean-Luc-Godard (torrent)
  
  This film features lots of inter-titles, strange dialoges and mis-matched audio among other things that help to create an ambiguous reality within which the story of the film takes place. It’s a black comedy, so you might get a laugh or two in there if you’re not too washed away in the confusing plotline.
• Fireworks (1947) by Kenneth Anger (torrent)
  
  Part of a uniquely weird early American underground, Kenneth Anger explores sexual identity in this film. He made the film when he was just 17, it’s a short watch, and the payoff if pretty good at the end with a poetic use of a firework.

Enjoy. Oh, one more thing. I saw on Kottke the other daym, a post about Marienbad regarding the game that the characters played in the film (Nim). Check out the post here if you’re interested.

The following is a comment sent by Tim Leonard in reaction to a post by Clement published in early June.

————————

Broadly speaking, social Darwinism refers to the use of Darwinian and other ideas about evolution, notably “survival of the fittest,” to explain or to justify aspects of human society. Were the term neutral, the “social” qualifier would be superfluous, since Darwin himself believed that his theory of evolution by natural selection encompassed the human animal too. But “social Darwinism” has, in fact, rarely been a neutral term. Since its first English-language appearance circa 1877, “social Darwinism” has been a term of abuse used by critics to discredit views they opposed.
Darwinism’s reputation has ebbed and flowed in the 150 years since the publication of the Origin of Species, but social Darwinism remains a slur, used only by critics. I know of no one who has ever described his or her own views as social Darwinist. As historians, this tells us something important. We might wish that “social Darwinism” could be made neutral and refer to ideas that Darwin actually endorsed; but concepts are path-dependent, and, if the past is any guide, “social Darwinism” will survive, and will continue to function an epithet.

2.

While “social Darwinism” has always been used to discredit ideas critics dislike, critics have disliked different things (as Bellomy rightly observed). Thus “social Darwinism” has been applied to phenomena as diverse as plutocracy, racism, eugenics, militarism (especially in the name of national superiority), imperialism, and laissez-faire capitalism. That’s a lot of semantic freight, and the set of intellectuals who endorsed all these things is essentially empty.
Today, “social Darwinism” is most commonly associated with an evolutionary defense of free markets, premised on the critic’s view that economic competition is brutish and amoral, just as competition in nature is “red in tooth and claw.”
The identification of social Darwinism with free markets we owe to Richard Hofstadter’s (1944) Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. It is Hofstadter who gave “social Darwinism” its currency and who made Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner into the arch-social Darwinists. Both Spencer and Sumner defended free markets, and both were, as a result, targets for reform-minded progressives (such as Hofstadter) hostile to individualism and free markets.
(Try this parlor game: ask a scholarly friend to name three social Darwinists. I wager that most (specialists excluded) will not be able to come up with three, but that most will be able to come up with two, and, moreover, that those two will be Spencer and Sumner – a measure of Hofstadter’s success, or, rather the success of a narrow reading of Hofstadter).
Hofstadter’s (or, rather, the narrow reading of Hofstadter’s) mistake was two-fold. First, neither Spencer nor Sumner were especially Darwinian. Spencer was a Lamarckian who preached “bootstraps” self-improvement over natural selection, and who ardently believed in human progress. Sumner’s pro-market arguments were only patchily upholstered with Darwinian sentiments. What is more, Spencer and Sumner were both opponents of imperialism, militarism, plutocracy and other ideas that have been associated with social Darwinism.

Second, Darwin did not see nature as red in tooth and claw. To the contrary, Darwin insisted that the natural competition sometimes called the Struggle for Existence need not involve conflict, much less violence: cooperation could well be the fittest strategy. Darwinian fitness meant far more than mere physical strength, as evidenced by the evolutionary success of a relatively weak species, homo sapiens.
Hofstadter judged the American Gilded-Age economic order a jungle, and therefore judged any defense of it as “Darwinist,” whatever its particulars – “social Darwinism” was simply Hofstadter’s synecdoche for the charge that, as Bannister had it, Spencer and Sumner “wrongly apologized for power and privilege (1979: xvii), where, in the Gilded Age, power and privilege were assumed to reside with the plutocratic captains of industry, and not (yet) with the captains of the ship of state” (Leonard 2009).

3.

None of this is to argue that evolutionary ideas were unimportant to Progressive Era social science. The opposite is true. Ideas drawn from evolutionary science profoundly influenced Progressive Era social science – one could hardly make sense of the eugenic influences upon economics otherwise.
But Darwin was not the only scientific source of evolutionary thought, and laissez-faire economics was not the only corner of social science influenced. This, then, is the [double-sided] myth: that Darwin was the sole source and that Spencer and Sumner (qua paragons of free-market economics) were the sole exegetes.
Progressive Era evolutionary thought was not very Darwinian – indeed, historians of biology refer to the period as the eclipse of Darwinism – natural selection in particular was a minority view until the “Darwinian synthesis” of the 1940s. Progressive Era evolutionary science was protean, fragmented and plural, enabling scholars to enlist evolutionary ideas in support of diverse, even opposed positions in political economy. Many social scientists, including those who cast Spencer and Sumner as bête noirs, were influenced by Darwinian and other evolutionary ideas.
Hofstadter (1944), incidentally, was alert to the latter point – he even had a term for the use of evolutionary ideas by reformers, Darwinist collectivism. (It didn’t catch on). Hofstadter preferred planning to laissez-faire and he preferred cultural to biological explanations in social science. This made for ambivalence with respect to the progressives, who also championed reform, but trafficked heavily in biological explanations.
The burden of Leonard (2009) is two-fold: first, that “there are, in effect, two Hofstadters present in SDAT. The first (call him Hofstadter1) could safely disparage biological justification of laissez-faire, for this was, in his view, doubly wrong . . . .The second Hofstadter (call him Hofstadter2) documented, however incompletely, the [biological] underside of progressive reform: racism, eugenics and imperialism.” Second, in 1944 Hofstadter1’s contempt for free markets was far more developed than Hofstadter2’s still incipient skepticism regarding progressivism, an asymmetry that had consequences for the subsequent fate of ‘social Darwinism’ in social science.
Hofstadter did not make the myth alone – stories are altered in their retelling. But I think it’s fair to say that Hofstadter (as Hoftstadter1) played a leading role in discrediting free-market economics as social Darwinism, and, thereby, wrongly implicating Spencer and Sumner (and sundry plutocrats) as Darwinists and as the social Darwinists. (Geoff Hodgson, incidentally, gives prior credit to Talcott Parsons’ 1930s efforts to purge biology from sociology).
At the same time, however, Hofstadter2 debunked the notion that Darwin influenced only laissez-faire economics. (This is SDAT’s ambiguous legacy). Hofstadter2 showed that some of what looked reactionary to mid-20th century liberal eyes (“collective Darwinism”) had been called progressive forty years earlier. But, perhaps because Hofstadter2’s ideas were undeveloped relative to those of Hofstadter1, it was decades before historians took up the tentative connections Hofstadter2 made between progressivism and eugenics, racism and imperialism.
Debunking the myth of “social Darwinism,” then, does not mean ignoring evolutionary influences on Progressive Era social science. To the contrary, debunking requires documenting evolutionary influences on Progressive Era social science, which were, contrary to myth, plural in origin and diverse in effect.

– Tim Leonard

Qualcuno ha detto che un buon inizio fa metà romanzo. Qualsiasi corso di scrittura, più o meno creativa, dedica almeno una lezione all’incipit. Corrisponde, per certi versi, all’impressione che una persona dà di sé alla prima occhiata: la donna abbronzata seduta davanti a me, i suoi capelli scuri e spettinati ad arte, i denti bianchi e irregolari come gli occhi di Venere, le mani piccole e le spalle minute, porge un invito a continuare a leggere la sua storia in modo molto più intenso di quanto faccia la signora che le è seduta accanto, che ad occhio è la pallida, rugosa, ingiallita, tremolante madre. La quale ha, con buone probabilità, tante più cose da raccontare della piacente figlia – se non altro perché la bruttezza è la principale molla di qualsiasi dramma.

Navigando per la rete, frequentando blog di persone che scrivono, mi sono reso conto di un aspetto che ho ritrovato poi nei discorsi che mia madre, maestra in pensione, scambia con le donne sue coetanee che frequentano lo stesso corso di pittura: cioè che le preoccupazioni, e le considerazioni, e le riflessioni, su quanto si crea sono indipendenti dalla qualità prodotta. Mi spiego meglio: l’incipit è presente sia in un racconto di Kafka, sia in un mio romanzo. Sebbene gli esiti siano diversi, troverò sempre qualcuno (ad esempio me) disposto a discutere della mia scrittura con la stessa serietà, e magari gli stessi aggettivi, che altri applicherebbero a un libro di Thomas Mann. Ho iniziato a pensare, perciò, che l’aspetto interessante della scrittura (e della pittura, e della scultura, e del bricolage, e della danza, e di qualsiasi altro mezzo utilizzato per esprimere la propria visione estetica, o ciò che si muove dentro) non sia il risultato (altrimenti non si spiegherebbe tanto accanimento privo di risultati) ma l’atto creativo in sé. Il quale presenta caratteristiche invarianti rispetto alla qualità finale, alla quale sarà interessato, invece, il fruitore.

Sto progettando un nuovo romanzo. Il primo che ho scritto (nato con il titolo “Post coitum”, poi convertito in un più morbido “C’era una volta l’amore”) è stato letto da tre persone, le quali sono state tutto sommato concordi nel dire che non valeva la pena proporlo ad alcun editore. Il secondo (che attualmente si intitola “Un uomo gentile”: anche per il titolo valgono discorsi analoghi a quelli sull’importanza dell’incipit, ma per il momento non sono riuscito a trovare nulla di più accattivante) sta approdando, con un po’ di pigrizia, ai tavoli di qualche editore: non so che fine farà – cioè se vedrà la luce, o rimarrà sulla mia libreria, accanto al primogenito, e alla mia raccolta di racconti “Ai tempi del nulla”, della quale non ho più alcuna notizia da tempo. Facendo un po’ di conti, ho scritto circa un milione e quattrocentomila caratteri in due anni – senza contare i circa duecento post che ho buttato giù nello stesso periodo, e trascurando le vocali e le consonanti che ho battuto e poi cancellato perché sbagliate, inutili, o poco convincenti. Supponendo di riuscire a digitare cinquemila caratteri all’ora, significa che, nella più ottimistica delle ipotesi, ho dedicato 280 ore del mio tempo a scrivere qualcosa che probabilmente leggeranno in dieci o quindici persone, i due terzi delle quali sono miei parenti. Duecentoottanta ore che ho strappato, con i denti, alla fatica e alla stanchezza – sfruttando gli innumerevoli viaggi in treni che mi spostano da un posto all’altro dell’Italia. Non c’è solo questo: per arrivare a scrivere un romanzo, serve anche un lavoro di preparazione che significa, in concreto, appunti presi su un quadernino che porto sempre con me, letture di libri (anche noiosi), progettazione – e soprattutto una profonda critica di tutti i miei valori: perché sono convinto che la scrittura ha senso solo se mira a distruggere le cose che più si amano.

La parte di progettazione di un romanzo è quella che riserva maggiori soddisfazioni. C’è una piccola idea, un ovulo di storia, che attende di essere fecondato, quindi nutrito, allevato, protetto, educato, irrobustito. Un seme si trasforma in albero – e simili metafore ontologiche. I personaggi emergono dalla loro ombra, acquistano lineamenti, ossessioni, debolezze, atteggiamenti e comportamenti funzionali alla storia, che a sua volta si può piegare per conformarsi ad una caratteristica del personaggio principale alla quale non si può rinunciare. La parte più difficile, almeno per me, è la ricerca della lingua da usare – la voce narrante che, per come sento io la scrittura (e la lettura), non è mero strumento per veicolare significato, ma significato in sé. Avere un libro in cantiere implica l’obbligo di aprire gli occhi sul mondo intorno: il modo con il quale la signora seduta davanti a me si sposta i capelli per coprire un orecchio a sventola, la leggera peluria bionda che un impietoso raggio di sole fa brillare sul mento della donna curatissima che le sta accanto, il riflesso di una ciminiera azzurra su una pozzanghera lasciata dalla pioggia di questa notte (pozzanghera alla quale si stanno abbeverando due cavalli marroni (l’ultima parte delle loro zampe è bianca come un paio di calzini poco eleganti)), sono dettagli che entrano in una grande scatola di attrezzi, alla quale, durante i prossimi mesi, attingerò per costruire il risultato finale.

Il primo romanzo, quello che non vedrà mai la luce, è stato concepito in un tormentato viaggio in aereo da Venezia a Palermo, ed è cresciuto a caso, un capitolo alla volta: c’era una vaga idea di costruire una “non-storia”, la rappresentazione di un’assenza di crescita, di evoluzione. Il risultato, proprio perché coerente con questo impianto un po’ picaresco, e antiborghese, finisce per essere (o sembrare) un’accozzaglia di episodi slegati tra di loro: il limite del libro è che vanificando il desiderio di “storia”, che caratterizza il lettore occidentale, il libro non riesce a proporre un’alternativa altrettanto interessante. L’ovulo del secondo romanzo è stato fecondato in quattro giorni, durante un lunghissimo viaggio da Padova a Sondrio, e da Sondrio a Cortina e infine da Cortina a Trieste – mille chilometri attraverso valli e passi e boschi, sfiorando i luoghi della mia infanzia. Poi, sono stati necessari quattro mesi per costruire, attorno a quell’ossatura minuta, una storia completa di tutti gli accessori – mesi durante i quali non ho buttato giù una sola riga del libro; e cinque mesi di scrittura forsennata per mettere in pratica la mia idea. Del terzo – di quello che sto progettando ora – non voglio dire niente, perché le parole, una volta scritte, cementano idee che rimangono fertili solo fino a che sono lasciate libere di muoversi. Dico soltanto che l’altra sera, mentre fumavo una sigaretta in terrazza, guardando un temporale che si stava avvicinando, è arrivato un incipit che non esiterei a definire “fulminante” – in senso stretto. Il problema è che questo inizio non è coerente con tutte le idee che avevo formulato fino a quel momento.

Piccolo passo indietro. Ho trascorso l’ultimo capodanno a casa dei miei zii, ad Asiago. Abbiamo passato il 31 pomeriggio a giocare a Scarabeo (un gioco sul quale Nabokov costruisce un capitolo di “Ada, o ardore”): con otto lettere in mano, si deve cercare di costruire una parola sensata. Il processo mentale che sta dietro a questo gioco avvincente è stato preso come esempio da Hofstadter (il geniale autore dell’eterna ghirlanda brillante), nel suo libro “Concetti fluidi e analogie creative”, per spiegare come, secondo lui, funziona il cervello. La metafora che usa non è quella di un grosso processore centralizzato che elabora in serie ogni pensiero, ma piuttosto quella di una batteria di piccoli computer, o processi pensanti indipendenti, che lavorano in parallelo e continuano a confrontarsi tra loro, contribuendo al risultato finale. Secondo Hofstadter, quando si gioca a Scarabeo, le lettere iniziano ad aggregarsi attorno a piccoli gruppi sillabici, ciascuno dei quali viene seguito, o elaborato, da un processo mentale indipendente. Se un gruppo di lettere riesce ad arrivare ad una sequenza foneticamente sensata (quanto ci sarebbe da dire, su questo argomento…), il processo mentale corrispondente viene elevato ad un livello superiore, ed inizia a confrontarsi con i risultati di altri processi analoghi. I risultati di questa elaborazione, che è più o meno inconscia, sono tanto migliori quanto maggiore è la libertà con la quale i processi possono passare da un livello ad un altro, sia dal basso verso l’alto (quando un gruppo di lettere dà luogo ad una configurazione fonetica compatibile con la lingua corrente) sia dall’alto verso il basso (cioè quando il risultato parziale di un gruppo di lettere impedisce la formazione di qualsiasi altro gruppo di lettere). In altre parole, il consolidamento prematuro di un processo, o, se vogliamo, di un’idea, rappresenta una sorta di vincolo che rischia di bloccare tutti gli altri.

Ecco, sono convinto che il mio processo di creazione di un romanzo, che è profondamente diverso da quello che sta sotto la scrittura di un post (due o tre idee che si intersecano) o di un racconto (un evento eccezionale che svela la vera natura di un rapporto o di una persona), si basi sul confronto continuo tra idee parallele che, dopo essersi consolidate, vengono accostate ad altre idee dotate dello stesso “livello di consolidamento”. Attorno ad un dettaglio si può costruire un buon personaggio; poi, questo viene confrontato con un altro personaggio costruito con lo stesso procedimento: se le due cose stanno insieme, si forma un nucleo un po’ più grande che contiene due personaggi consolidati; in caso contrario, entrambe le idee vengono retrocesse di un livello, e non diventano vincolanti per il nascere di nuove idee; in questo “stato minore”, potranno continuare ad evolversi, cercando nuove strade, o esauriranno la loro carica vitale, finendo in un cimitero di idee morte (salvo poi risorgere come spunto per un racconto o una poesia). Circa quindici giorni fa ero sul punto di abbandonare tutta l’idea iniziale – un aborto in piena regola – e passare ad altro: attraversando una strada di La Spezia, invece, mi sono reso che sarebbe stato sufficiente togliere un blocco di idee per dare un senso compiuto a tutte le altre.

Tornando all’incipit di ieri sera, sono convinto che si tratti di una buona idea. Il problema è che, sebbene sia coerente con alcune idee di alto livello già consolidate, contrasta fortemente con molte altre che non lo sono ancora. Ad esempio, perché possa mettere in atto la sua efficacia narrativa, andrebbe raccontato in prima persona: ma nonostante non abbia ancora preso alcuna decisione sulla lingua da usare, da diverse settimane sto propendendo per una narrazione in terza persona. Il tono dell’incipit fulminante, poi, denoterebbe un distacco quasi ironico tra il narratore, che a questo punto diventerebbe il personaggio centrale del romanzo, e la propria vita – relazione che invece non ho mai pensato in questi termini. Mi trovo dunque combattuto: anche se, indipendentemente da altre considerazioni, ho già deciso di accogliere una novità introdotta da questo incipit, novità che modifica un aspetto importante sul quale non mi ero mai soffermato abbastanza, so che abbracciando fino in fondo questo nuovo inizio mi troverei con una storia diversa da raccontare. Nei prossimi giorni, ci saranno trattative, accordi, rinunce, o vittorie schiaccianti. Alla fine, la storia complessiva, sarà andata avanti di un altro passo.

Tutto questo ragionamento dimostra il discorso iniziale, o da questo viene giustificato – e cioè che ha senso parlare seriamente di un processo creativo disaccoppiandolo dall’analisi dei risultati. Si può cantare sotto la doccia, e ci si può chiedere, a forza di cantare, come funzioni la scala occidentale, o il sistema delle battute nell’organizzazione di una frase melodica, o l’efficacia degli accordi minori nell’ottenere effetti musicalmente drammatici, senza porsi, nemmeno per un momento, il problema della propria intonazione. Perché – al di là di ogni sciocca retorica – si scrive prima di tutto per se stessi.

And so I endeavor, from the beginning, to examine the book. I hesitate to approach the actual content from a literal angle, but these are avenues I feel ought to be exhausted before the hairier metaphorical and allegorical aspects feel scrutiny. Also, this approach aligns more closely with an academic background in letters, so here I go. I hope to explore the texts cited in Being or Nothingness and those at one level of remove from The Book, if they should appear to me.

The Giant Rat of Sumatra

I’ve isolated the Conan Doyle short story in which is written the phrase from the book. The Cliff’s Notes version is that it’s a classic mystery of mistaken intent. It opens with a wrecked man visiting Holmes. This Ferguson explains the scenario: His friend’s wife, a Peruvian woman, has been caught drinking blood through a wound her infant’s neck. Holmes arrives on the scene, noting the appearance of a crippled dog. The husband has a teenaged son from an earlier marriage, Jacky (also crippled) and a maid. His wife is locked in her rooms, away from the infant. She has also been accused of beating the shit out of the crippled kid. What a lady!

Holmes notices South American weapons on the wall in the child’s room and does his perception magic. Turns out the crippled kid’s been popping the infant with blowgun darts, but not before he tested the juice on the dog. Mom knew the kid was doing it and would spend time sucking the poison out of the infant and couldn’t tell her husband because she knew knowing would crush him. Jacky it prescribed a year at sea for being a homicidal jerk. We resolve cleanly.

What do we know?

• At the core of the narrative circumstance surrounding the Rat’s citing is a visual illusion: a woman appears to be guilty of vampirism.
• Holmes, exasperated, complains early on that he and Watson are leaping into a Grimm’s tale.
• The culprit is a vitriolic teenager, jealous and fearless.

Illusion seems to be, given the content on the first page of BoN, the theme of focal import here; are things as they seem? I’m interested in the nature of misdirection here.

The only Grimm’s Fairy Tale which includes rats, specifically, (that I’ve found) is their Pied Piper story. One day, a single man comes to town dressed in strange clothes and leaves later that day with a horde of rats following him. The town doesn’t thank him, or offer him payment. Angry, he returns dressed as a hunter and plays his flute again, this time attracting the town’s children. They follow him out of town into a mountain cave and aren’t heard from again. Bastard!

So. A man comes to town and pipes. *yawn*

There are twelve short stories in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the parent collection which houses The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire. It is the fifth story of twelve. The end of BoN depicts B discovering the 13th book after suffering an aneuryism (or something near), effectively tying up the narrative beginning on the first two pages.

Other works referencing the Giant Rat can be found within the Wikipedia entry.

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Further, this method echoes Hofstadter’s concept of fugues applied metaphorically to other things. He writes, in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

A fugue is like a canon, in that it is usually based on one theme which gets played in different voices and different keys, and occasionally at different speeds or upside down or backwards. However, the notion of a fugue is much less rigid than that of canon, and consequently it allows for more emotional and artistic expression. The telltale sign of a fugue is the the way it begins: with a single voice singing its theme. When it is done, then a second voice enters, either five scale-notes up, or four down. Meanwhile, the first voice goes on, singing the “countersubject”: a secondary theme, chosen to provide rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic contrasts to the subject. Each of the voices enters in turn, singing the theme, often to the accompaniment of the countersubject in some other voice, with the remaining voices doing whatever fanciful things entered the composer’s mind. When all the voices have “arrived”, then there are no rules. There are, to be sure, standard kinds of things to do – but not so standard that one can merely compose a fugue by formula.

And so let BoN work as the theme, and all of these accompanying texts, let them be the other voices. We’ll rough it, and then trim it down to a manageable number, like six or eight. All of that later. I’ll be reading happily on.

El otro día paseando por la Fnac, me encontré con la edición de bolsillo de este libro y no pude resistir la tentación de comprarlo, pues es un libro que había leído la mitad (en pdf) y tenia ganas de tenerlo. La versión que compre es de bolsillo (si tienes bolsillos grandes) y cuesta 12€.

El Autor es Douglas R. Hofstadter y es un libro ganador del Premio Pulitzer. Aunque en la primera edición en español su titulo fue “Gödel, Escher, Bach: una eterna trenza dorada”, posteriormente fue cambiado por el actual.

El libro toma la forma de una interacción entre varias narrativas. Los capítulos principales se alternan con diálogos entre los personajes imaginarios, inspirados por la narración de Lewis Carroll Lo que le dijo la tortuga a Aquiles, que aparece en el libro. En éste, Aquiles y la tortuga discuten una paradoja relativa a los modus ponens. Hofstadter basa los otros diálogos en éste, presentando al cangrejo y a un genio, entre otros. Estas narrativas se sumergen con frecuencia en la autorreferencia y la metaficción.

Un diálogo particularmente significativo en el libro está ingeniosamente escrito en la forma de un canon en espejo, en el cual cada línea antes del punto medio corresponde a una línea idéntica pasado el punto medio, si bien la conversación da una sensación extraña debido al uso de frases comunes que pueden ser usadas como saludos o despedidas (“buen día”) y la colocación de las líneas que, bajo cercana inspección, dobla como una respuesta a una pregunta en la línea siguiente.

El libro fue considerado un tiempo como intraducible, dado que da gran énfasis en los así llamados “retruécanos estructurales”, como en el diálogo del canon en espejo, que se lee exactamente igual, oración por oración, tanto en forma normal como al revés, exceptuando el voilá del primer fragmento que es sustituido por viola en el segundo.

La traducción resultó una tarea compleja, que ha dado lugar a nuevos materiales e interacción entre los traductores y Hofstadter. Por ejemplo, en el idioma chino, el subtítulo no es una traducción de an Eternal Golden Braid (una Eterna Trenza de Oro), sino una frase aparentemente sin relación (y absurda) Jí Yì Bì (集异璧, literalmente “colección de jade exótico”) que resulta homofónica con GEB. Algún material con respecto a esta interacción puede ser encontrado en el último libro de Hofstadter Le Ton beau de Marot, que trata principalmente sobre la traducción.

En este libro hay muchos campos tratados y es un libro “denso” que requiere varias relecturas y echar mano de la enciclopedia Internet para comprender ciertas partes, algunos de los campos que toca son:
* Metamatemática
* Simetría
* Inteligencia artificial
* Sistema formal, Teoría de la computabilidad
* Paradoja
* Zen
* Genética
* Biología molecular
* Lógica, Teoría de números
* Tipografía y sintaxis
* Cerebro, Mente y Cognición
* Sintaxis vs. Semántica
* Libre albedrío vs. Determinismo
* Holismo vs. reduccionismo
* El lenguaje de programación Lisp
* Isomorfismos y significado
* Capas yuxtapuestas de significado, contrapunto, semiótica, códigos
* Autorreferencia, recursión, Bucles extraños
* Auto-organización, sensación emergente de identidad: consciente (por Ej. “Yo soy una oración verdadera, y lo que declaro es que no puedo ser comprobado dentro de este sistema al que pertenezco” o “Yo soy verdadero, pero mi verdad transciende este universo”)

En fin es un libro muy recomendable y con extractos muy interesantes pero también os advierto que es un libro muy denso.

Escuchando: Yann Tiersen – J’y suis jamais allé (Amelie)

Few recent concepts have as complicated a historiography as “social Darwinism”. To make a long story short:

Geoffrey Hodgson

- Thanks to a beautiful bibliometric study by Geoffrey Hodgson published in the Journal of the History of Sociology, we know for sure that the expression “social Darwinism” was not much in use in Anglo-Saxon academic literature before the 1940s – and why.

Richard Hofstadter

- In 1944, historian Richard Hofstadter’s wrote a study of evolutionary analogies in American social thought during the 1870-1920s, and called it “Social Darwinism in American Thought.” Since then, the term has been ubiquitous. Because of Hofstadter’s book success, most people inferred that “social Darwinism” was indeed widely used in the historical period covered by the book, and that it designated a corresponding intellectual movement, with its representative figures and texts, etc.

- In 1979, Robert Bannister wrote “Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought”. In my opinion, Bannister’s project was ambiguous.

Robert Bannister

One could say that he rightly tried to clear up the misunderstanding that had developed since 1944 and Hofstadter’s book. Social Darwinism was not widely used as an expression in the US of the late 19th century, nor did it represent a coherent body of thought, as a too-quick reading of Hofstadter’s book would have it.

But one could also say that Bannister was defending something stronger than that. He really seemed to imply that social Darwinism was a myth – that in fact, the denomination covered no relevant meaning at all.

- In 1984, Donald Bellomy wrote one of the finest pieces in intellectual history that I came across.  In “Social Darwinism” revisited, Bellomy ponders Bannister’ claims that social Darwinism was really a myth.

Donald Bellomy

The scholarship Bellomy displays is simply *huge*, and his reflection is so very nuanced. Right from the introduction, he clarifies that the “myth question” is simply not the relevant one:

- There is no consensus on what “Social Darwinism” really is? Far from proving that the concept is a myth, it should merely recall us that “confusion over the definition of a term is not itself cause for dispensing with it; virtually any designation of a broad cultural phenomenon can be distressingly malleable, as Arthur O. Lovejoy demonstrated in his dissections of romanticism, primitivism, and pragmatism.”
- No one thought of himself as a “Social Darwinist”? That “needs not trouble us unduly. After all, medieval schoolman, classical republican, and romantic poet were not categories available to individuals at the time but were imposed, with more or less finesse, by later generations.”

After over 100 pages of careful study, Bellomy concludes that “Whether or not “Social Darwinism” was a myth, in the restricted sense by which Bannister interprets myth, every serious thinker had to come to terms with Darwinism and evolution.”

This is were I had left the historiographical debate on social Darwinism. But in 2009, the “myth” interpretation gets a new boost, with a forthcoming article by one of the most prominent members of our profession:

Leonard, T.C., Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought. J. Econ. Behav. Organ. (2009), doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2007.11.004

Tim Leonard

Leonard’s article focuses on the Hofstadter episode of this historiographic saga, and endorses Bannister’s revisionist views on social Darwinism – that it should be considered a myth, essentially built by scholars from the Left who distrusted laisser-faire policies. Surely, calling something a myth is not an invitation to further historical investigation of the cultural phenomena it pretends to denominate. And I think more historical investigation is precisely what is needed here, as Bellomy had emphasized in his conclusion:

“Finally, a determination of Darwinism’s influence will emerge only through immersion in the intellectual artifacts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They must be studied in their own terms, not simply as antecedents of contemporary social and political arguments or fields or research, if our goal is to comprehend either the past or present.”

In many previous articles, Leonard contributed a marvelous analysis of the eugenic views of the economists in the Progressive Era. We need more of the same kind of work on the intellectuals and businessmen labelled as social Darwinists.

Note: it is a pity that the article by Bellomy, of the size of a small book, was published in a journal impossible to find in most European libraries (except for the LSE library, as far as I can tell). The reference is:

Donald C. Bellomy, “Social Darwinism’ revisited,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1984): 1-129.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Richard Hofstadter: Unable to face the challenges of commercialized agriculture, the chicken was engaged in a futile attempt to return to the avian individualist values of the past.

Today I ran across this blog post that references two of my favorite “laws”, namely Gall’s Law and Hofstadter’s Law.

The posting is a commentary of the importance of simplicity and resonates with the idea that “creativity is the elimination of options”.

I guess I should mention that Mr. Hofstadter is the source of inspiration for the name of my blog “(I am) Strangely Looping”.

His insightful 2007 book is a tour-de-force of thought-provoking ideas.