Primrose Road

"Social constructivism easily leads to a cultural solipsism analogous to subjectivist interpretations of quantum mechanics." -- Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.

According to Wired (which incidentally this month also declared THE END OF THEORY!!!111!!5!!#1!!), there's a game/SIM called Zero Hour: America's Medic which is being used to train paramedics in disaster response. Basically, paramedics get immersed in one of three situations: an unusual flu breaks out at an apartment building, a possibly radioactive bomb explodes at a baseball stadium, and finally (here I'll quote the item) "a freight train has derailed at a downtown station during rush hour, spewing lethal chemicals into the air." Other people realize what's kind of funny about that last one, right? Meanwhile, I do like the idea of computers that can think better than humans do, because they can serve to remind us humanpeople that thinking isn't supernatural or preternatural.

Some of the ScienceBloggers have picked up on a story about a teacher who threatened, via email, to sue her (freshman comp!) students for harassment. It's quite obvious that the woman was simply litigious -- she also tried to sue her superiors because they "ignored" the harassment -- and couldn't handle her students' challenging her. (I wish more students would disagree with and challenge me in class.) Unfortunately, this one case of a teacher's thin-skinned childishness is being used in the science blogosphere to attack postmodernism in general, which I think is unfortunate and reflects a continued misunderstanding of the term and philosophies it encompasses. Sure, some postmodernists will argue that science is just one "way of knowing," but their aim is to question beliefs that we accept as "natural" because of religious and social norms, not to present a drippy New Age form of relativism. The scientific method is in my view the most effective and safest "way of knowing" in the medical field; people who sell magic water make me angry too. But the ways in which many scientists and proponents of the "new" atheism on the blogosphere praise Enlightenment seems to me philosophically problematic: while the "scientifically study the natural, reject the supernatural" aspect of it makes sense, the (implied) "only (certain privileged) humans can shed light on what's been kept in the dark" aspect can be somewhat unsettling. Historically, there's a little bit of colonialism buried in Enlightenment, a factor that should be acknowledged. Basically, just because there are perhaps more than a handful of New-Agey relativists out there who call themselves postmodernists doesn't mean that postmodernism runs counter to science.

I picked Betraying Spinoza up after hearing author Rebecca Goldstein talk at last week's Nextbook: Jews and Power conference. Goldstein briefly discussed the challenges inherent in writing a "Jewish" Spinoza biography and focused mainly on her personal narrative of encountering Spinoza as a high school student at an Orthodox Jewish Bais Yaakov school. Despite my distrust of personal narrative, I decided that the book was worth a read. What Goldstein offers is far more than a personal narrative of her experience as a young Orthodox woman hearing the story of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community due to his insistence on reason over superstition, being told that Jews should avoid Spinoza, who asked questions that he shouldn't have asked. She presents a captivating speculative biography (though, in my view, she doesn't do enough to announce that the bio is speculative) of the philosopher, deriving her narrative of Spinoza's life from historical documents describing seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Spinoza's own work. Perhaps most interesting are the moments when Goldstein subtly analogizes the Dutch Jewish community headed up by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira to the post-Holocaust religious Jewish community in the 20th and 21st century: severe unthinkable trauma, she suggests, led to three possibilities for people in the community: "fierce religiosity, messianic and mystical," "disappointment, disillusion, attempts to argue with the rabbis about what true Judaism ought to be," and "ultimate rejection and a return to Christianity," to which many had converted when the Inquisition came to Portugal a generation earlier (120-121). Interestingly, Goldstein argues against her high school teacher's assertion that Spinoza was an atheist simply because he believed in reason over superstition and because he claims in his Ethics that one is naturally inclined to preserve oneself before anyone else. (No wonder this work led, via Locke, to some of the ideas on which America was founded ...) Reading Spinoza's ethics of love, Goldstein seems to find a frustrating God in his work: "He who loves God cannot endeavor that God will love him in return" (237). The mistake made by "superstitious" religions is that they carry on as though God were a tyrant, requiring believers to act in certain ways in order to earn his love. Another important strength of the book was Goldstein's ability to explain relatively complicated philosophical ideas to a general audience, especially in relation to what she labels the "if-is" gap (a gap that, she notes, Spinoza closes up). This book could conceivably be used, therefore, as a "way in" to Spinoza for students. In sum, read it.

From my dissertation prospectus: "A significant portion of the theory on which this project is based derives from Deleuzian (and neo-Deleuzian) concepts of affect." Is it okay to have a "portion of theory"?

At yesterday's Nextbook Festival of Ideas: Jews and Power, Stephen Greenblatt shared a Shakespeare-authorship anecdote during a talk entitled "Culture, Taste, and Power." It involved one of the Earl of Oxford's descendants making his audience a bit uncomfortable when he labeled William Shakespeare of Stratford a "shyster." The talk should be posted on the Nextbook site within two weeks; I encourage all both of my readers to check it out. I am already fifty pages into novelist / philosopher / academic Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, in which she holds Spinoza's life and work up against the account presented to her by a history teacher at a Bais Yaakov high school in the late 1960s. Yesterday, Goldstein and Shalom Auslander spoke about power relations within the Jewish community, how oppression today can happen from within, not just from outside, the community. In-community Jewish intellectualism is definitely a breath of fresh air when Jewish-American culture among those in their 20s and 30s often seems (at least to me) dominated by twin philosophies of "any comment critical of / realistic evaluation of Israel means that you're an anti-Semite" and "Jews must necessarily believe in God, and this was always historically so" as well as justalittefascist ultra-Orthodox outreach organizations like Aish who serve up some ultra-right-wingnuttery with their Torah. A favorite excerpt from Goldstein's book thus far, written in the voice of her Orthodox girls' school history teacher:

"It would be a Jew who would make philosophy into one long argument against the existence of God and against the difference between right and wrong, so that philosophy, girls, has been, ever since modernity, the most dangerous subject that you can possibly study."

Recently, Stanley Fish offered up a nice essay on French theory/deconstruction and those who fear it's a huge leap away from rationalism. Fish explains the critique of Enlightenment-style thinking and so-called "liberal" humanism better than I ever could, so, please, read away.

Was thinking today about how contemporary Jewish atheists call themselves humanists, as do many of the (nonetheless brilliant) people involved in the "new" atheism and skeptical movements. Humanism's too much of a throwback to Enlightenment for me. Not the "scientifically study the natural, reject the supernatural" Enlightenment, but the "only (certain privileged) humans can shed light on what's been kept in the dark" humanism.

"This breaks with the whole philosophical tradition which placed light on the side of spirit and made consciousness a beam of light which drew things out of their native darkness. Phenomenology was still squarely within this ancient tradition; but, instead of making light an internal light, it simply opened it on to the exterior, rather as if the intentionality of consciousness was the ray of an electric lamp ... Things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them: all consciousness is something, it is indistinguishable from the thing, that is from the image of light." -- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1

"Artworks participate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them." -- Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

If I flip a coin fifty times, that coin could land heads-up fifty times in a row. The Law of Truly Large Numbers reminds us that events we perceive as unusual/impossible/miraculous are actually more commonplace, and more possible, than we might think. It would thus be rather narcissistic for me to ask why a coin has landed heads-up fifty times in a row, or to ask whether that series of events was a sign designed personally for me or anyone else. Last night, I attended a Limmud salon (a Jewish learning event) that explored the ways in which we could "interpret" everyday life using the same methods that Torah scholars use to interpret the Torah. I go to these events even though I don't believe in anything supernatural; they're interesting cultural experiences and they allow me to play fun ideology-critiquing games in the grad student brain that I'm pretty sure I wear outside my head nowadays. The teacher leading the session identified two views of uncanny repetitions in everyday life: (1) the Biblical, which says that the spiritual is in everything from food to writing to toothpaste to coin-tosses, and that everything happens for a reason; (2) the academic, which says "shit happens." Here is what I did not say: "Those views both sound awfully complacent." I also did not say that I don't know of many academic types who would shrug their shoulders, say "shit happens," and walk away. Instead, many might examine how and why we tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason as a way of keeping ourselves complacent. And if we seek to identify repetitions in life experiences for the purpose of interpreting those repetitions as though they were repeated words in a verse from the Torah, perhaps it's because we narcissistically dream of a personal god and a world that exists for us, a life that is meant to be read, interpreted, annotated like the Bible or a closet drama. Let's talk Hamlet for a moment now (since, after all, all life experience and knowledge is contained in that play ... or not): After witnessing Ophelia's burial, which I suspect crushes him, our favorite Nice Danish Boy tells Horatio that he's sleepless, torn apart over what's happened. But then, he once again proves himself entirely self-absorbed: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," he (famously) says, "Rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-11). Hamlet turns to God, Providence and destiny in order to absolve himself of the specific, fatal failures that lead to Polonius' and Ophelia's deaths. If there is a fatal flaw in the character of Hamlet, it is his willingness to attribute his failures to fate, suppressing what he knows in favor what what can all-too-easily be believed.

Of the many articles and posts that rightly criticize The Secret and Oprah's irresponsible promotion of the idiotic phenomenon, I have yet to see one that points out one of the #1 problems with The Secret book and DVD: it's, uh, kind of Nazi philosophy. Adorno would agree, don'tcha think?

"The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorum-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment-industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness." -- Theodor Adorno.