Don’t Expect the Writing to Be As Clean As the Written, Composing, 12/04/2018

In his book about Deleuze’s early development as a thinker, Michael Hardt discusses an insightful comment Gilles makes. It’s a notion that a lot of folks in academic university culture need to remember, especially in the humanities where rhetoric and argument is so much a part of our methods.

There's a distinction between inquiry and presentation. Inquiry is the process of conceiving, researching, and composing a project or some other piece of work. Presentation is the finished product.

Preparing a massive research and writing project is, oddly enough, a
difficult task that isn't perfectly conceived at the beginning. You'd
think that would make sense to people. Maybe it does, but they
don't actually care.

Presentation is a polished, detailed, clear expression of a complex research program and argument. The inferences have been ordered so that each step in the argument flows sensibly from what’s come previously. All the empirical studies supplement and ground the more conceptual parts in an elegant structure.

Inquiry is a great bloody chaotic mess. You redefine the scope, aims, and likely conclusions of the project several times over as you do research. Some angles and sources are thrown out entirely as irrelevant in the light of other discoveries. An argument that you think is going to flow in one direction ends up utterly rearranged. Inquiry is a state of flux.

It sounds so sensible. It sounds so obviously true. It makes perfect sense. So why do so many academics, in my experience and in the experience of many other people, ignore it?

I’m speaking to my experience mostly in philosophy circles, where a bit more emphasis is put on argument than in other disciplines. But I move in pretty interdisciplinary circles today, and what I’m about to describe is pretty common across the humanities and social sciences.

A younger student comes to a more experienced professor, or to a group of her peers, for advice about a project in progress. She lays out the skeleton of an argument, what some of her main sources are so far, what empirical content is coming into play. She asks for advice.

Throwing around thousands of ideas – about research, examples,
empirical evidence, inference, argument structure, order of
presentation, concepts themselves – is part of writing. So why don't
people criticize an ongoing project as if it were actually an ongoing
project? Why do people not see the mess?

But she gets hit with verbal axes. Her messy, still-uncertain project that still has plenty of loose ends get hit with ruthless criticism. None of it is helpful. It’s all phrased to make her project seem inadequate, like a waste of her time. Instead of helping her to understand a difficult landscape, her superiors and colleagues berate and belittle her for not understanding her project.

They’re treating an inquiry as if it was the presentation. A messy project in progress as if it was a polished final product. This even though she introduces her material with countless qualifiers – it’s a work in progress, she’s looking for advice, looking for any blind spots she may have, any research directions that may turn out to be blind alleys for her priorities.

Instead, her colleagues and superiors are more concerned with scoring points. Making themselves look good by making her look bad. Feeling better about themselves by cutting someone else down.

All too often, this is how academicians treat each other. I described it in self-consciously gendered terms because it does – on balance – happen to women much more often than to men. But it happens to men too. It happens to anyone who looks vulnerable in a research community where knowledge is seen as a battleground for prestige.

Do you do it for the letters after your name? For the professional designations to list after your email signature? We should be doing it for the progress of human knowledge. Typical humanity, we so often fall short of what we claim we’re doing because we aren’t really doing what we claim.

When Words Become Actions Become Protocols, Doctor Who: The Pilot, Reviews, 16/04/2017

When Steven Moffat was establishing himself as a television writer and producer, he did so in the world of sitcoms. Moffat by default writes farce stories. We throw the term ‘farce’ around to describe any old horrible, ironically comical mess we stumble into.

Bill and Heather are actually the most important relationship in this
episode. It's the best example in Moffat's entire tenure, I think, of
his genuinely progressive perspective. He always tries to learn
from his fans, even his fiercest critics. And it feels good for young
queer women to see characters like them in their favourite shows,
and for concerns like theirs to be the pivotal points of their stories.

But the term has a precise technical meaning in the science of writing. A farce is a narrative based around a miscommunication – different people who are all interacting in a reasonably simple situation have, somewhere early on, misunderstood each other.

A very ordinary thing, slightly misunderstanding what someone else says. We do it all the time. Normally, we know we’re confused and ask for clarification, but sometimes we proceed thinking we know exactly what to do. In most of our lives, it turns out not to be important and everything goes fine anyway.

But when this happens on a sitcom, what’s misunderstood is some critical piece of information that throws everyone’s plans and lives into a total mess. We laugh because of the embarrassment (or failure to be so when you really, really should) of the characters.

Just think of the most intense (and ridiculous) example I can find at short notice in Moffat’s career. “The Girl With Two Breasts” from his biggest hit sitcom Coupling.

Jeff, the socially awkward Kramer of the group, starts up a great conversation with a beautiful woman who think’s he’s very attractive. But they share no common language. So, while they believe they understand what they’re saying to each other, they totally misinterpret everything the other is saying.

Watching someone else dig their own hole is a classic farce
scenario, but a big part of why we laugh is rooted in how horrible
it would be if such a terrible misunderstanding were to happen to
us in real life.

The most juvenile detail being that Jeff thinks her name is the Hebrew word for ‘breasts.’
• • •
The farce narrative is a default for Moffat, having shaped many of his storylines in Doctor Who around misunderstandings over a faulty communication or a difference in knowledge of the situation. It’s to his brilliance that he understands this one structure of plot well enough to craft from it intricate narratives, heart-wrenching drama, and hilarity.

Sometimes all in the same episode, when he’s at his best.

“The Pilot” isn’t nearly so complex or multilayered. But it’s intriguing for the insight this episode’s particular story gives into the nature of language and communication itself.

Let’s look at this situation in detail, understanding that there are going to be massive

SPOILERS

involved. We have a fairly ordinary situation. Working-class hipster girl meets cute blonde with confidence issues. Implied to be pretty intense depression, judging from the way Heather seems so tired of life.

Maybe this is just because of my own attitude to stories and fiction that
I love, but I'm not that invested as a viewer in the season arc about
the secret vault under the university where the Doctor's been camped
out like Chronotis for who-knows-how-long. I know we'll find out
later on in the season – probably sooner than later if the cracks back
in 2010 are any sign. I want to see what kinds of stories Bill's
character shapes.

When the liquid spaceship drive activated and read Heather’s thoughts, it read was what most dominant – I just want to get away from here, from everything. That impulse to flee from where she was, was the energy of an engine. Merging with the liquid ship, Heather’s drive to leave became the ship’s own pilot function.

In its purest sense, all semantic content is lost in communication from one medium to another. When I say something, I think of it in a particular way, peculiar to my own perspective.

Now, because humans are social creatures, we learn to think through communication and shared action. So our meanings are all similar enough from building them together all the time. Yet miscommunication is still possible. We’re all individual enough to be uniquely different from each other.

In a farce, there’s one such difference that makes all the difference in the process of the whole story. This episode – perhaps I should call it “The Girl With the Star in Her Eye,” whose tragedy is its true centre – is based on a miscommunication across a huge distance.

Humans think in terms of our personalities and interests. We’re subjects for ourselves, understanding our desires as the constituents of our personalities. So when we think and speak, we think in terms of wants and achievements.

Niklas Luhmann is the theorist who first understood how idiosyncratic
our meanings and thoughts really could be. He was a little too
pessimistic though, actually saying that communication as we
understood it is impossible. He thought so abstractly about systems
and environments that they were literally lines on diagrams. We
don't communicate our meanings like computers, by sending
packets across media. We communicate through affects, literally
prodding each other to respond in a way that's reasonably close to
what we want someone to do.

The liquid ship doesn’t think in this way at all. It has no personality – an artificial intelligence, it thinks only in terms of purpose. That purpose is to repair itself and fly. Thoughts that constitute purposes aren’t wants or achievements. They’re protocols, strategies for action.

So when the liquid ship hears Heather’s profound desire to leave her life, it understands a protocol to pilot itself from place to place. The liquid ship absorbs Heather and remakes her – she's no longer entirely human – her desires and egos are now also mechanical protocols for the functioning of a spaceship.

Just before absorption, one other desire at the forefront of her thoughts – her erotic desire to go with Bill. That’s why, when she becomes part of the ship, Heather essentially stalks Bill throughout the universe. Her desire has been turned into a protocol.

That’s why Bill is able to send Heather-ship on her way so easily. All she does is tell her goodbye. A spaceship – unlike far too many humans – is capable of taking no for an answer. Halt function.
• • •
You can even understand Moffat’s own reputation among Doctor Who fandom today as a farce.

Sci-fi fandom today is riddled with poisonous gender politics. Socially awkward men – radicalized into rabid misogyny in their 4Chan families – have lashed out in resentful rage at women who share their interests.

I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks like a stereotypical
4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much Nardole looks
like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a joke about how much
Nardole looks like a stereotypical 4Chan shitbag. I will not make a . . .

Smart or dorky women who like sci-fi are educated in progressive gender politics better now than ever, whether through school or through support communities after dealing with attacks from radical misogynists.

Politically progressive fans mean well. I can’t think of a nicer direction for society than becoming more equal, fair, and free regarding all kinds of gender power imbalances.

I don’t blame anyone for being quick to anger, given what women have to deal with from intentionally aggressive misogynist pricks. But well-meaning people get caught in the crossfire if they’re out of touch with the communities most on the progressive vanguard.

Steven Moffat was one of the people caught in that crossfire, and he came out looking like Sonny Corleone.

In real life, when farcical misunderstandings happen, the results are terrible and rarely funny at all.

When you're a creative producer Doctor Who, you do it best when you bring a singular creative vision to the show. That’s why we remember Verity Lambert, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, Douglas Adams, Andrew Cartmel, Russell T Davies, and Steven Moffat as the most remarkable.

Poor girl really does look like the monster from The Ring, though.
I'm actually surprised Phil Sandifer didn't mention this in his review.

Having a clear aesthetic vision for Doctor Who doesn’t always mean you’re the best-quality producer. Douglas Adams and Graham Williams’ years on the show were marked by consistent mediocrity, as it was yet impossible to find BBC writers able to match Adams’ skill and talent. The Letts-Dicks-Pertwee era produced some amazing train wrecks.

But they all progressed Doctor Who by adding to the cornucopia of what it could be, the styles and personalities it enfolded in its box. Adventure, camp, existential body horror, meta-fictional parody, punk, melodrama, farce.

Better a flawed but vibrant vision than violent nihilism, reactionary racism, shoving fandom’s head up its arse, or simply not caring about the show you work on.

As much as this was a near-perfectly executed piece of television, it’s mostly old hat. Steven Moffat has been doing this for eight years. Not only is he falling back on his old standard plot scaffold, he’s nicking transformed-girl imagery from The Ring.

I love Moffat’s work. I think he’s one of the best writers Doctor Who has ever had, and I think his vision was unique and fertile, opening up so many more spaces for what Doctor Who could do.

But it will have been eight years. Time to regenerate. What’s next?

Gilles in LA IV: We Are Fluid, Research Time, 26/11/2015

Adrian Parr’s essay about what it means to create and employ concepts cuts to the heart of what makes Gilles Deleuze a brilliant inspiration for our era of political, social, and economic tumult.

The basic idea is that when you do philosophy at its most powerful, you're creating concepts. New ways to think, new ways to understand the world. They let you perceive and activate potential in the world and yourself that you never knew existed before.

Sounds pretty utopian, and a little hippie-dippie. But that’s the idea.

She lists a bunch, and I like lists. Not ranked lists, or ordered lists, just random lists that you can find your own order in.

“Deterritorialization and reterritorialization, smooth space and striated space, the molar and the molecular, majoritarian and minoritarian.”

That’s just a few. If there's a common theme, it's becoming. How what was becomes what we are, and how what we are contains the potential to change completely. And all of that potential for flux is in us, and everything, every day. It’s ordinary.

And if there's a more specific theme to most of Deleuze’s concepts,* at least as it relates to politics, it's that everything about human identity and existence has the potential for complete transformation. That potential is in us every day. It's ordinary.

Reading a good book is like speaking
with a ghost. Sometimes, writing a
good book feels like channelling
ghosts too.

* I’m including, of course, the concepts that he created along with his collaborator, Félix Guattari, because when they worked together, they were practically the same person and a huge crowd all at the same time. One of the sweetest gestures Deleuze ever made in his life was giving Guattari a co-author credit on What Is Philosophy?, when he was too sick from heart disease to take part himself. The freaky thing is, What Is Philosophy? still reads in the style of their actual co-authored books.

That's an idea we should think about in our era of campus and student politics today, especially if you're looking at the American situation. There are many ways to think about today’s campus demonstrations, University of Missouri and Yale being the most notable.

Some of their most visible critics think of these protestors as against liberalism, against free speech. Sympathetic analysts have more complex interpretations, like when Jeet Heer described the rise of trigger warnings as a legitimate politicization of the language of trauma. 

Popular discussion of PTSD, through which psychology developed a new understanding of memory, experience, and trauma, gave us a new political language. Where and when the philosophy happened depends on how you want to trace the concept's history. I don’t really have time for that right now.

But a common critique of the campus protest movement is that it’s a resurgence of political correctness and identity politics. Which is wrong, but interesting.

I own a fantastic biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Intersecting Lives. Among its many wonderful stories about the two men, it includes their fascinating and horrifyingly awkward collision with the feminist activists of American universities in the early 1980s.

This is when identity politics was genuinely huge. Deleuze and Guattari held a panel at a conference in Columbia, and many young feminist scholars and activists were in the audience. They reacted with rage to how they presented their concept of becoming-woman. 

A reality TV star becomes an icon of a new definition
of human existence. That's mass media for you.

In modern language, we'd call it mansplaining, with a concept that seemed to deny the validity of the female experience. But Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about how gender can fluctuate beyond a binary seems much more ordinary today.

Because we’ve had three decades of development in trans activism since then, an intellectual field where gender and sexuality fluidity is the norm. Binary talk about gender and sex is now understood to be itself discriminatory, violent language. 

Look at the bile about trans people that spews from Germaine Greer's mouth whenever she gets the opportunity to vomit it out. She denounces, for example, trans women as men trying to appropriate women’s experiences and identities. 

When what's really going on is that the conception of gender as fixed is being thrown out the window. Trans activism and philosophy is teaching us that the material reality of gender has so much more potential than a fixed binary framework can make sense of. 

Like all visionaries, the world has caught up to the strange expressions of Deleuze and Guattari. The next step is to push thought forward again into strange new directions. And our reality will follow.