A Continuous World of So Many, A History Boy, 13/02/2018

One of the most important insights a person should have in the 21st century if you want to settle yourself, and give yourself come perspective, is this – Accept the continuity between humanity and other species.

Now, I’m not just talking about human-ape proximity. Though I am. All too often we forget how close we are to primates, how similar they are to us. All too often, we know how close we are to primates, and acknowledge it in the worst way. All too typical of us, I should say.

Seeing the continuity of your own life with that of an orangutan
isn't all that hard – they're laughing, silly, joyful, and quietly
experience such an enlightened wisdom of knowing that a loving,
silly, joyful life is the best one for creatures like us.
They're what we aspire to be.

The continuity I’m talking about today has much earlier roots, and much deeper in our bodies. Literally and figuratively.

I spent quite a few years studying philosophy of mind, and one reason I walked away from that as a major research focus was frustration – Frustration that so many researchers ignored the obvious answer to so many of their problems.

So many discussions I had and papers I read about the “hard problem” of consciousness fell to dust to me as I accepted that the human mind is a perceptual field. Our thoughts aren’t just in our heads. Our brains and nervous system develop through environmental interaction. They continue to function through complex feedback loops that we’ve been refining for our entire lives.

Henri Bergson was on to a similar way of thinking. He just expressed it in a totally different way.

The tragedy of Bergson is that he so radically misapplied true and valid philosophical principles of becoming. In the most notorious* example from his work – No Henri, the cause of life getting more complicated isn’t a force of life energy constantly struggling against the inertia of matter’s torpor.

* And simplest to explain.

But yes, large amounts of matter interacting in complex systems that constantly generate energy – say, from giant balls of gas falling in on themselves until they become nuclear fusion furnaces that can be stable for billions of years – tend to become more complex over time.

Here's the life story behind that set of links. At 21, mystified why Chalmers
thought consciousness was a hard problem at all. At 22, puzzled why Putnam
even had to argue that meaning was more than thoughts or neuronal flickers.
At 23, Merleau-Ponty gave me a wonderful vocabulary to let me walk away
from Chalmers’ limited point of view. At 24, learning the biological ground
of that wonderful vocab from Varela. At 25, learning the power and ubiquity
of life and memory to grow, refine, and develop a creature thanks to Allen
and Hofstatder. If you let the problems be your guide, you’ll figure them
out. Don’t specialize too early.

Bergson’s ideas are much more useful today – better applicable to the current state of human science, where we understand that complexity really is everywhere. And his concepts of what consciousness is, and what its roots are, matter today too.

Think about Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness – that a scientific understanding of consciousness will never help us understand the experience of consciousness. An essential premise of that concept is unspoken, but necessary for someone to arrive at that concept at all.

Consciousness is exclusively human, and only humans experience the world as a phenomenal sensory field. Absolutely untrue.

Everything that is capable of action in response to external stimuli – whose reaction to fields of force and affects in its environment – is conscious. That covers every organism. Humans have peculiarly complicated and complex perceptual fields, because we’ve refined our powers of communication and memory with language and technology.

But all those actions are mechanisms. They aren’t deterministic in the most strict sense, because organic responses are based on feedback loops – previous responses condition future responses. The feedback loop is the most rudimentary form of memory.

Even the simplest organisms perceive because their responses are actions – the movement of response itself originates internally and kicks off a feedback loop of the organism with its environment which couples them into a single dynamic field.

Add Bergson to the history I’ve strung together. Even if he might not have realized he’d become a member.

Making New Differences, Composing, 28/11/2017

I’m working on a few different creative projects right now. One of them is a little indie publishing project of essays about the Capaldi years of Doctor Who – Essays Critical and Temporal.

The Lights of David, by Rebecca Bergson,
a depiction of divine illumination, as much as
should be allowed for human safety.

That's a literal description of the book too. They adapt the philosophical reviews I’ve written of each episode of Doctor Who since the 50th anniversary show. But I'm revising them pretty radically to match the retrospective nature of the book.

When I was first writing them, they were off-the-cuff – almost stream-of-consciousness, dredging up ideas from my years of (over-)education and reading, throwing them all at the keyboard. Same way that a lot of Doctor Who stories are absolutely mad ideas thrown at the screen to see if they stuck.

The opening credits, for one. And the Méliès-inspired The Web Planet. The tradition continued up to the present day.

I’m working on the revised essay for Into the Dalek now. It was Capaldi’s second story as the Doctor, and a very strange story. You can check out my old review, which is getting a radical, radical rewrite. Probably more so than a lot of the rest of them.

Into the Dalek was a weird story with a very straightforward idea at its heart. The visuals were absolutely trippy, from the cybernetic antibodies of a Dalek’s body, the reality-bending image of the Doctor’s hand melting, bending, and extending into the watery eye of the Dalek as he was shrunk and went inside.

There’s a moment where Peter Capaldi’s face appears in high resolution, video effects making his image appear deeper, more intense – the lines and crags of his face were so dark that he looks singular and cosmic at once. Like a full-colour hyper-realist sketch of a living god.

As I work on the new Into the Dalek essay, I’m revising some ideas of Henri Bergson about the nature of creativity. See, the episode’s plot is – convoluted fantastic voyage aside – ultimately about shepherding a rebellious Dalek to the realization that his species’ life mission of destroying all trace of difference in the universe is wrong.

In the event that this fantastic voyage should turn to erosion, and we'll
never get old – Remember it's true that dignity is valuable, but our
lives are valuable too.

The Doctor performs a kind of cosmic ethical psychotherapy, demonstrating the value of creation to a creature whose ideology – whose own creation’s original purpose – was the destruction of everything. Reducing all of being to a single, unchanging template.

So the essay will be a sketch of what an ethics where the creation of difference – variety, the new, proliferation, and the conditions that enable and sustain these processes – is good in itself. It’s a notion common to Bergson’s approaches to ethics, as well as much of pragmatist thought, and continues in post-colonial thinking and the traditions influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

I’m still synthesizing all these together in my thinking, though. So it’s going to be a while until my Patreon sponsors see the finished product. Probably only a couple of weeks, really. But I try to be as productive as I can.

As I’m working on this revision and rewrite, I’m imagining a plan to crowdsource illustrations – combing through DeviantArt and other fan art web platforms for sketch donations to include in the ebook. Maybe I’ll even do a small Kickstarter to fund artist commission fees for some key pitches.

We’ll see. Do please keep paying attention.

The Real Vanguard II: The Leading Edge, Composing, 29/03/2016

Continued from last post . . . What really transforms humanity is a much more profound process than just a few orders from a government. No matter what kind of force you might summon to back up those orders. That profound process is what I want to write about when I write Utopias. 

It’s a profound process, even though it’s pretty ordinary: changing people’s minds. It’s ordinary because we typically think of our whole life narratives in terms of how we changed our minds about different topics. “I used to think this way, until I realized that it wasn’t quite the right track” or “I realized that I was making a mistake” or “that I was missing something very important.”

Writing my own existence.

Every now and then, I like to remind readers that they’re actually watching an unfolding storyline on this blog (with some interruptions). That storyline is my research and developing the ideas of my next big nonfiction book, Utopias. 

Utopias literally picks up from the end of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. There, I introduced the idea that the only way to build a mass political movement or a transformative social change is the hard, grunting work of changing people’s minds. One person, one act of outreach, at a time. The process itself is very profound, because when successful, it’s the complete reorientation of someone’s personality. But it’s also really hard work.

The arc of the actual book Utopias will start from the profound and work its way into the gritty meat of everyday reality. The core idea is that because self-conscious humans can understand themselves narratively, we have a special relationship with time itself. 

Everything has a history – the series of events that have happened to bring them into being, knock them around, and eventually destroy them. As fundamentally narrative creatures, each of us not only has such a history, but we make a historical narrative out of our histories. That power to understand ourselves historically (and also act socially) gives us a very special ability to shape our own history and that of other people.

So the first third of Utopias will be about understanding that special human relationship with time. The final third is about the process of political and social change itself – how you change people’s minds genuinely and effectively. The middle part bridges the two investigations in what will probably be its weirdest part.

Right now, I only have a vague idea of what this bridging section will involve. But it starts from a potentially very pretentious conception of humanity.

A philosopher in ink.

In Henri Bergson’s last major book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he writes about the transformative power of humanity – prophecy. The religious mystic, he says, is the vanguard of life’s creative energies, pushing human understanding into new territory and dragging the rest of us after him. 

You can also interpret this idea as implying that genuinely creative philosophers can do the same thing. That’s pretty controversial in Bergson scholarship, to my knowledge at the moment, anyway. But in very basic terms, the creation of new concepts is the leading edge of human progress.

And you can see how that makes sense. If progress is about developing new ways to live, solving the problems we’ve made for ourselves in our current era, then we need new ideas and concepts to do so. Concepts are our guides for self-positioning, self-definition as people and communities, and action. 

But as the Jewish tradition* says, the time of prophecy is over. The work of creating new concepts is less for mysticism and the ecstatic, and more for deep thought and detailed investigation. Work out what we need to do, what are conditions would be to do it, and then work to make those conditions real.

* And possibly also the Muslim tradition, though I’m not nearly as familiar with these kinds of theologies, and they’d certainly put the date later than Judaism too.

Philosophy is the discipline of human knowledge that focusses most intently on the creation and refinement of new ideas, new concepts. At least when it’s firing on all cylinders and not caught up in the unfortunate institutional games it tends to lose itself in, as an academic discipline.

This is why I’ve been following so closely the debate unfolding at the Reply Collective over what philosophy’s political role should be outside the formal academy. No matter what you might think philosophy used to do, the truth is that the university-based discipline is in a crunch.

The casualization of teaching and research labour is eroding job security in the academic sector and driving many of its brighter talents among the younger generation outside it. That’s one of the main topics of my upcoming presentation at the Canadian Philosophical Association – how to keep trained philosophers who’ve left the university system engaged in the creativity of philosophy as a tradition.

Rooting the creativity of philosophical thinking in a wide-ranging political activity – outreach, activism, and social change – can be a more firm ground for the philosophical tradition than the increasingly corrupt university system. 

Utopias will be a framework and a strategy guide for what that unmoored philosophy would look like.

And Write in the New Style, Composing, 05/10/2015

You know, I never really liked Jacques Derrida’s stuff for the longest time. I still have a lot of issues with his presumptions, his starting points, and definitely his writing style. But I think my biggest issue with him was the way people talked about him and his ideas.

Imagine you’re a writer whose job it is to come up with new ideas and explain them relatively sensibly. That's writing philosophy. It’s a style of writing that requires you to push a little bit at the limits of what your language can do. That's why philosophy is sometimes written in such weird, inaccessible ways.

I hope what I do in my books, my philosophy essays, and on this blog is explain some very strange ideas in increasingly accessible ways. I’m not sure that I always succeed. 

But the best part about having a writing blog like this is that you can be experimental, try new things, some folks will enjoy it or not, and there’ll be another set of ideas in a day or two. The lead time on trying out new things is shorter than it's ever been before. 

So as long as you get the proper style of a blog down (casual, if slightly nerdy conversation), you can spin around as many trippy ideas as you want. It ends up making your language more accessible, less needlessly technical, a little more seductive, and more clear. 

I tried to do this in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. And I aim for Utopias to be even better at this style of philosophy. I’d like to write philosophy in a style about as accessible as a nerdy listicle, but with the conceptual rigour of the classics of the tradition.

Sometimes, I think people find
Derrida's writing so difficult to
understand, because they first
approach it presuming that it's
going to be difficult and
confusing. Because I always
have the ego when I'm reading
that, of course, I'll understand
this book decently, I can
overcome difficult parts better.
At least, I think I can.

Sometimes, like this weekend on an inter-city train, I’m reading a book by Derrida. And I think about this eventual goal of mine for writing philosophy. It gets frustrating.

When I was a student, I knew a few professors who studied the books Derrida wrote in his Spectres of Marx period, from the 1980s until his death. One of the ideas he explored was a conception of the messianic – thinking about the world as though it were leading up to a profound transformation into a new framework that would be paradise compared to the way things are now.

The idea’s pretty common. Derrida took the term from the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religions where profound transformations of reality are central to the belief system. The appearances of God to humans in Judaism, the incarnation of God as human in Christianity, and the revelation of God’s final word in Islam. 

And from a secular perspective, you can hear it from transhumanist discussion and any cyberpunkish talk of The Singularity, following Ray Kurzweil. 

Derrida talks about experiencing time in your life as if existence were moving toward a time-to-come. And I heard a lot of people use this phrase without really being able to explain it to me. They’d just say that it wasn’t the future, but a time-to-come. 

I remember being 22 years old and completely turned off Derrida because people would talk about his ideas this way, unable to explain even in a simple sense what was actually going on. 

Now that I’ve started reading some of the books where he uses this term, I can say that I actually found it pretty simple to understand. Maybe I'm deluding myself, thinking that I can easily understand a writer famous for being difficult and obscure out of a bizarre fit of egomania. 

Maybe, because I haven’t had access to university library paywalls in years, I haven’t had my reading confidence broken by contending with a deluge of poorly written academic journal articles on the same subject. But it seems pretty clear to me.

Time to come. It means you don’t really think of a clear distinction between present and future as such. Ironic for a perspective that expects a radical transformation of reality in the future.

But not really. Because you live your life in constant anticipation of the messianic moment when the world is transformed. So the present becomes this rush toward a magic point. Call it a singularity if you want. The real distinction in time isn't between then, now, and later. It’s between the time leading up to the transformation, and after it.

When you live and understand your life in terms of anticipating that transformation, that's time-to-come. I don’t think anyone ever explained this to me, but that's what I read in the book this afternoon.

Why Futurism Matters Today IV: Why Imagine At All? Composing, 31/07/2015

Continued from last post . . . The utopian thinkers – whether they use that term or something like it or generally imagine or work toward a vision of a better society – all have a kind of optimism. Minimally, a utopian believes that human nature can be changed for the better. 

This is why transhumanists are usually thought of as utopians. This is why Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a utopian book. It's why philosophy, when it's carried out as a creative art, is an essentially utopian discipline. It’s an activity that tries to change human nature for the better. 

Modern utopia lies in the visions of networked social
movements, as in this moment from a Black Lives
Matter protest in north Toronto this week.

I’ve sometimes heard rhetorical talk about libertarian utopias, usually as a means of dismissing libertarians as cranks and crazies. Utopian visionaries are often considered kind of crazy in a lot of popular discourse, mostly because the term can all too often evoke images of madmen in a desert or a forest calling their followers to build a new society in the wilderness. 

All too often, these kinds of visionaries are would-be prophets whose megalomania has interfered with their planning faculties. Quite regularly, ordinary office workers quit their unfulfilling jobs to build a self-sufficient community in the wilderness, where they'll commune with nature, a utopia that escapes the evils of technology. However, with no scientific or practical knowledge of farming, plumbing, or any basic survival skills, most of these communities end up collapsing. 

Yet Henri Bergson took seriously the concept of prophesy as a progressive force for humanity and human nature. An engagement with his Two Sources of Morality and Religion will be a centrepiece of the Utopias manuscript. 

The last third of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia describes a utopian community where everyone is free or organize along their own vision of perfection a society of themselves and whoever agrees with that vision. He calls freedom to choose and experiment with different ways of life to see what works and what doesn’t is a large-scale argument for the libertarian way of life. If freedom to choose is paradise, then restricting that freedom is to fall.

This give and take between a movement pushing for social progress and the ethical necessity of freedom is a significant aspect of modern politics. You can see it in the social media discussions that define so much of the politics of our era. On one side, you have the social justice warriors, whose campaigns call attention to dangerous, violent, and vile inequities of class, gender, and race in our society, and push for material change in our institutions and in our cultures and minds to address those inequities in profound ways. 

As with every discussion of politics lately, it comes
back again to Donald Trump.

On the other side,* you have the conservatives who wish to preserve their freedom to think in the racist, sexist, and uncritically capitalistic ways that are simultaneously embodied in the greasy jackassery of both Donald Trump and Travis Kalanick.

* Where I am manifestly not, as you can probably tell by now.

The libertarian critique of modern movement-based progressivism is that they accuse the social justice warrior of wishing to use the state to force their ideas on everyone with or without consent or deliberation. 

This manifestly isn’t true, because the essential framework of social movement activism is about changing minds. You expose people to different lives and experiences, talk with them about the systematic causes of the injustices in those experiences, and build solidarity to change the destructive relationships we’re all caught in. 

Some of those exposures are confrontational, but movement politics ultimately has to understand that every encounter is an opportunity for education, for changing minds.

But progressive politics is always going to be subject to this fear of the libertarians until we can acknowledge that, in figures like Marinetti and Italian Futurism most intensely and purely, the engine of progress is the tyranny of the state crushing all resistance to the new program of a perfect society. That’s what my Utopias project is all about.

Ultimately, I think my conclusion will be that progressive politics can only avoid the hypocrisy of tyranny and violence when it learns what Hayek and his new liberal followers get right: avoid the state and top-down enforcement of ideology as an engine of the social progress we want. 

My libertarian friend G once asked me why I believed that it was possible to improve humanity. “Don’t you believe in human nature?” he asked. I wanted to know what he meant, and he told me that humans were essentially self-interested, egotistical creatures who cared only about themselves and would be inherently violent to each other.

That was the root of our disagreement. I believe that people can change, and change for the better, if they open their minds to the possibility of difference and a systematic view of the world. That’s why I still write philosophy. It’s the tradition of developing new concepts, and those concepts can, conversation by conversation, change the world.

Into the Mystic III: Freedom, Research Time, 16/06/2015

Continued from last post . . . Yes, I know it’s the next day, but honestly, I think I’ll just guarantee an MWF series of posts, and if I have the time, I’ll blast a T or R or weekend post on Twitter. 

Oddly enough, I was at a networking session with the International Association of Business Communicators, and one of the more experienced folks there told me how generally impressive just maintaining a regular blog was. I may even volunteer for IABC’s newsletter and blog over the next while, adapting some of my communications theory ideas to their forum. It’d be good practice in maintaining my tone of an accessible intellectual. I think I keep a good tone balance on this blog, but I could do with the challenge of a bigger, more diverse audience than I get here.

So back to prophecy, my last post in this series. This is another concept that I think I’ll use in the Utopias manuscript, but only as a metaphor. Why has to do with the limits of my own expertise. The philosophy of religion has always been pretty tangential to my own interests – what fascinated me most were ideas in political thought and trippy metaphysics that adapt progressive ideas in science to everyday life (like determinism, chance, time, relation, and selfhood). 

Vox Day and the flaming
sword of devotion to God.

But religion is one of the most important aspects of modern politics, particularly what violence people will do in the name of their devotion. The stereotypical example is Islamic terrorism, becoming a suicide bomber or waging a war across most of Iraq and Syria to live out the dictates of your devotion to your god. And that happens.

But I could just as easily mention blowing an abortion provider’s brains out in the name of Christ. You get the idea.

Ultimately, it rests on the notion that the only genuine expression of faith is following the orders of your divinity without question – faith as submission. It’s weird that a dorky little fundamentalist sci-fi editor like Vox Day could call up such a terrifying spectre behind his discussions about pretentious Naria riff novels. But there you go.

Henri Bergson wrote one of the best books of philosophy about religion that I’ve ever came across, and which I and a few others whose perspectives I trust would say that it’s among the best that’s ever been. Two Sources of Morality and Religion. It examines religion as a phenomenon in the world, particularly its social and political power.

Religion and religious belief has two modes, says Bergson. One is the institutional. This is religion as a worldly authority that uses a common moral and theological belief system to maintain the social stability of a community. We needed this method of social control in the early days of our species, when we were first beginning to speculate about the nature of the world as well as live in it.

This is the religion of Vox Day, John C. Wright, and many others who commit much more violent and horrifying acts of devotion than writing pretentious sci-fi literature and hijacking awards shows. I look at religious extremism around the world and I wish they were all satisfied with Day and Wright’s level of general dickishness.

That conception of religion as social control is a primal aspect of the totalitarian impulse. After all, few other things govern human behaviour as comprehensively as a set of religious duties. Applied in the name of control alone, to the fullest extent of its powers, and you have a totally universal form of social control. A militarized theocracy. A literal sun king who’s worshipped as a god.

Utopias will confront this drive for total, comprehensive control of an entire human personality, life, and mind as its central enemy, along with the authoritarian impulse wherever it appears. 

Another aspect of Utopias will be
exploring the complex and weird
philosophical legacy of Henri
Bergson himself, as well as his
concepts on their own.

Bergson’s second function of religion in human society is the antidote to this authoritarian drive, the mystic. Bergson has a complicated ontology, where there’s a vital force in the universe itself driving complexification and progress toward higher and higher powers of mind, a drive within matter to make itself energy again. At the end of his philosophical career,* Bergson conceived of the human as the highest articulation of this force in the universe so far, and mystic prophecy was this force’s way of progressing humanity.

* That is, near the end of his life.

Not quite where I’m going with it, of course. In my own conception, as this metaphor will play out in the Utopias manuscript, the mystic is the agent of freedom, the one who calls upon a higher power than the richest, most vile and corrupt factions of his society can summon, to end their regime of injustice. It’s the ragged, old woman who calls on a king to cower before her. 

Ezekiel against the theocracy. Jesus against Rome. Luther against Rome. Bonhoeffer against the Leader. King against Wallace. That sort of thing.

It’s interesting (in that existentially unsettling way) to see the Christian tradition Vox Day described in his interview with Phil Sandifer as mysticism that urges you to follow, submit to authority. It’s an aspect of the mystic that I’ll have to think about.

Scars Etched in History Itself II: History Is Real, Research Time, 26/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . I only know the popular psychology version of what trauma is. If I were to use concepts of trauma as an analytic angle of the Utopias project, I'd have a lot of work to do. But I'm using a slightly strange, if enlightening set of ideas from Western philosophy to understand the long-term effects of the First World War.

Men like this lived for four years on land that was
constantly being bombed. You are not normal anymore.

It's weird about the man himself who developed the ideas of time, becoming, and history that will be important to the middle arc of the Utopias manuscript. Henri Bergson himself, even though he lived and worked through the First World War, passed the entire affair by in the Sorbonne.

He was politically idealistic enough after the war to have worked with the League of Nations, as a major figure in the League's organization for intellectual cooperation between France and Germany. But he was politically naïve enough that he didn't understand that all his French co-workers were systematically barring German scientists and researchers from joining. It says Franco-German cooperation on the box label, so that must be what we're all dedicated to.

Bergson the man made a lot of mistakes. Just about everything that's explicitly argued in his book Creative Evolution has been utterly disproven by mainstream biology ever since. Though I do, at some point, want to talk with Steve Fuller about what he'd have to say about Bergson's evolutionary theory as a fruitful critical perspective on evolutionary theory.

But his ideas about time, history, and memory? That's the bomb.

The heart of Bergson's thinking about time is that the past is real. The present is the roiling moment of becoming, the leading edge of a process. But that process is the creation of the past. The intuitive presumption for most of us is that the present is all that's real, and the past isn't any longer. That's why we say it was.

But the past is real, and we literally carry it with us all the time. How we do so is open to interpretation. Bergson doesn't go into much detail about what kind of substance the past is. The closest he comes in Matter and Memory is when he draws a very abstract diagram of a downward-pointed cone. 

This is seriously the most information we
bloody get about this cone. Bergson's weird.

The bottom point of the cone is our current experience of the entire world around us. With every moment, more and more keeps building up in the cone, as it expands, growing taller, wider from the top, and heavier. Of course, this isn't a real cone that we carry with us. But the cone is the reality of each of our pasts. It’s the history of our duration.

Here's where it gets really trippy. And where how we understand personal trauma (at least as far as the popular version goes) returns to the picture. Memory is our mental faculty of perceiving this real past that is a-materially part of us.* Such perception of your past traces a zigzagging path through the cone of your personal duration so far. A moment of the present actually perceives, accurately or hazily, a series of events in your own past duration.

* Bergson seriously never engages in metaphysical speculation as to what kind of substance this past could be composed of, as if it would be any kind of analogy with matter. Why would he? All you need to know is that it’s the real past. Why would you think it had even a fundamental framework anything like matter? Or even its opposite (and maybe negation), spirit? Without even knowing he’s doing it, Bergson finds himself pushing our metaphysical buttons in ways they’ve never been fondled before. Do you see why I enjoy his writing so much? Where was I?

The past is real, and is part of us. We remember by perceiving past events in this collected sack of experience in the present moment. Such perception, and what you perceive, need not be voluntary. And such involuntary memory might perceive something terrifying.

Bergson's psychological reflections were grounded in the cutting edge science of his day. His psychological influences are unique among his scientific studies in that they turned out to be correct, influencing the successful psychological science we’ve developed since then. Aside from the behaviourist ideas, which Bergson never would have let slide. His philosophy worshipped creativity.

But you can see how Bergson's philosophy can help understand the experience of trauma, at least philosophically and ethically. He gives us metaphysical resources to take seriously the notion that the wounds a trauma inflicts on your personality are real, and part of you. Because the experience itself is and always will be part of you. So trauma counselling is learning to control your involuntary memory, so that you no longer perceive so clearly and starkly such horrifying experiences.

The question is whether and how any of this can be articulated on a cultural or civilizational scale. . . . To be Continued

To Live In Dreams, Doctor Who: Last Christmas, 27/12/2014

My girlfriend’s dad died almost three years ago, and she misses him. Even though I never met him, I miss him too, because of all the things she’s told me about him that make me think we really would have gotten along smashingly. Like everyone we miss, she sometimes dreams that he’s still around, and that they meet up for coffee and she tells him about how life is going.

The existence of Santa Claus is completely sensible and
believable, given everything else that can happen in
Doctor Who, and it's why I love this show.

SPOILERS

are necessary, because I thought of her dreams of her father when I saw Danny Pink in Last Christmas, when he makes Clara promise him that she’ll stay alive, even though it means leaving the dream that’s been created for her to live out the rest of her life in happiness with him. “Miss me for five minutes, five solid minutes, every day.”

There are many strange miracles in this year’s Doctor Who Xmas special, the most obvious of which being the constant appearances of Nick Frost as Santa Claus to rescue the characters from their dream-states in which face-hugging aliens* sedate their victims while feeding on their brains. This is a story about dreams, the most overused symbol, image, and concept in the history of Western philosophy. 

* Yes, they make the Alien reference explicitly, and I love how the Doctor calls out the title for how offensive it is to perfectly ordinary extra-terrestrials like him.

Perhaps I say it is overused because to analyze the dream philosophically seems so run-down by now. It’s a common cliché of philosophy, a piece of shoddy rhetoric used to dismiss the discipline more than a genuine engagement with it. “Philosophy, isn’t that the class where you pay thousands in university tuition to wonder whether or not you're dreaming?” 

The design of the alien crab is brilliant, a hand when on
its own, but with a mouth when wrapped around a face.
And yes, it is incredibly suggestive of the same freaky
sexuality of H. R. Giger's facehugger. But Doctor Who
doesn't dwell on it. Just not its style.

And university philosophy often confirms the hostility. One of the best texts to introduce students to philosophical reflection and thinking is Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, and one of the first questions he considers is that, considering how the experience of a dream is indistinguishable from the experience of real life, we are left doubting whether we are in a physical world or dreaming at any given moment.

The less said about the twisting corridors of sexual dysfunctions and obsessiveness in the Freudian canon the better, but if anyone is going to make use of the Freudian canon, you’d best put on a condom.**

** My girlfriend and I also watched a Marx Brothers movie after throwing on Last Christmas, because Netflix is dropping Duck Soup from its listings on the first day of 2015.

But the dream is a place for strange occurrences and parallelisms in Doctor Who. Tegan Jovanka found haunting images of her friends and companions when in the Mara’s dreamspace as it assaulted her mind. The Land of Fiction blended an entire cultural imaginary with the logic of Lewis Carroll and a dream. The trace of Amy’s Choice played through the entire character arc of Amy Pond in her first season. Last Christmas finds the plane of dreaming serving as a strange kind of afterlife. Danny Pink in this episode is no mere construct of a carnivorous crab, no facsimile. He is clearly there, still caring for Clara, urging her to fight the creatures that would kill her. 

Yearning for some kind of life after death is one of the most universal reasons why people turn to religion. Although I’m coming to join a religious tradition myself, my reasons don’t have to do with this assurance. I think I’ll always doubt whether there is any kind of afterlife for a human subjectivity as we experience it. 

Danny's calling Clara's extra time with him a bonus
reminded me of Pete Tyler's happiness over "all these
extra hours" with his wife, baby, and grown daughter
from the future.

Yet Last Christmas suggests a charming and fascinating idea. A pure speculation of course. To call it idle would give it too much credit. 

Science-fiction used to be about Hard Science. Not the disciplines of physics, chemistry, and the like, which are often called the hard sciences. I mean a view of the world that reduces all phenomena to the easily explicable. A world where all myths exist to be explained away. 

I remember this idea underlying the early Asimov, early Clarke, and the Larry Niven books that I used to read as a teenager. It’s the reductive sort of materialism that I find so intolerably pig-headed in its most popular current expression, the rantings of the New Atheists. That stupidity is why I’m always so happy to find a writer or sci-fi approach where the material and mundane become mythic, like Clarice Lispector, or Doctor Who.

Dreams in Last Christmas are a shared psychic space, still linked to the physical body, but where echoes of what and who we've lost exist, not only as images but as agencies. It’s the afterlife as the continuation of a life that’s passed on in memory. 

I have no idea what next season's storyline for Clara will
be, as this past year has given her brilliant work. But she's
right to stay on the show for at least one more year. It's not
just that she's a wonderful actor and companion, and not
just that I didn't want her character to leave on such a sad
note, but because Doctor Who is seriously an artistic
pinnacle for any actor who appears on it. They may never
get such good work regularly as they did on Doctor Who.

Henri Bergson theorized that each person’s past was a part of them, and memory just a sorting tool to select elements of that past which were relevant to a present situation to understand it and act. Because the durations of each individual life and body interacted, they combined to form a kind of universal duration. Existence itself can be considered a single life, and its past is searchable. The presence of the past is memory.

Last Christmas offers an image of the past, and past durations like Danny Pink, that retain their agency even as they only exist as the past of those who knew and interacted with them. Because all of the past is retained in the present, although it is rarely accessible, the agencies of the past are preserved as well. Dreams are here the archaeology of a past that still lives as long as we do. The afterlife is the retention of agency in the echo of a life.

Perhaps in a few years, I'll have tea (and probably still too many cigarettes) with my mother in a dream some nights, just as my girlfriend still meets with her dad. There are worse visions of the afterlife.

Meticulously Understanding Intuitive Theatre, Composing, 09/10/2014

The American cinema of the 1970s is a major influence on
my approach to drama and narrative. I originally planned
You Were My Friend as a pure social realist narrative, like
Hal Ashby's The Last Detail.

Last night was the first time I’ve been able to make it to a rehearsal of You Were My Friend in a couple of weeks. We’ve made great progress on the production. All but the last two sequences have been completely blocked already. Today, I thought I’d talk about an idea that I’ve had about our process of composition and production.

As I write a text like this, a script that’s performed entirely live in front of an audience who’s right in the room with us, I’m intimately concerned with transition and flow. Each moment of emotionally intense drama has to be followed up with a moment of humour. Levity must follow gravity so the audience isn’t dragged down too deeply. As well, each line progresses the narrative just a little bit. Even the most apparently superfluous element like a reactive, “Well, yeah,” contributes to the development of the characters, the story, and their ideas. I conceive of the play, as well as my film script for the Alice project, as one continuous movement.

Getting into the first rehearsals with Mel the director and Samantha and Hannah the cast, a very different process began. Mel breaks down that continuous movement into individual moments, according to the predominant emotional tone. Every tonal shift is a little break in the narrative, as my continuous movement is analyzed into component parts. 

Then once we get to physical rehearsal and the blocking out of scenes, the continuous movement of the play is restored in the performance. Small changes are made to the script, we introduce performance details as we refine and perfect the expression of the narrative on the stage. Most importantly, all the knowledge of that analysis is articulated in the physical movement of the play.

Yet once the script was finished, You Were My Friend had
several fourth-wall breaking and montage elements as well,
shattering its social realist style of expression (though not
its content) as it came to an end. Robert Altman's MASH
was a touchstone here.

This is the closest I’ve come to actually seeing Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition in front of me in my experience. The concept is a strange one, appearing as it does in his books Creative Evolution and Two Sources of Morality and Religion at work in more specific arguments about particular disciplinary areas (biology and evolutionary theory in one, and social/political philosophy in the other). He explains the concept in the abstract in some of his essays in the Creative Mind collection, but precisely what it is remains an object of endless debate* in academic Bergson studies.

* As all debates are endless in academic contexts. The endlessness is a function of the desperation of university academics to keep a debate going past a sensible point, finding more and more distinctions to create research niches in the sub-disciplines of X studies. For an example, see my earlier posts on Daniel Smith's work about Deleuze. Rant over.

After my experience working on You Were My Friend with a director who has such a different method that gels so well with my own, I think I can say, following up on my own suspicions about the concept in Bergson’s work, that this intuition unites the smooth articulation of expert physical movement with the depth of contemplative knowledge that you gain from analysis. It is knowing movement.

“But Why Do You Have to Destroy?” Doctor Who: Into the Dalek, Reviews, 01/09/2014

As someone who has committed several years of my life to the study of philosophy, and who still practices it regularly, I was ecstatic watching this weekend’s new episode of Doctor Who. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Oh, yes, and

SPOILERS

I feel confident saying that Into the Dalek has given Doctor
Who in the 21st century some of its new iconic imagery.

Into the Dalek was the most visually inventive and spectacular episode of Doctor Who I’ve seen, other than the anniversary special, probably since the finales of the Davies era. The much more cerebral, narratively complex, dramatic Doctor Who of the Moffat era usually downplays, de-emphasizes, or purposely undermines its own visual panache. But the opening scenes of the Dalek assault on the small starfighter, the Dalek invasion of the Aristotle, the stunning visuals of the interior of the Dalek itself from the small scales of the shrunken TARDIS crew,* and undoubtedly the utter weirdness of the Doctor’s hand turning to liquid as he steps into the Dalek’s eye make for brand new iconic images of Doctor Who.

* Into the Dalek also has a curious relationship with Doctor Who’s past. It touches on the high points of the show, of course, in how it engages with the Doctor’s relationship with the Daleks. But it’s also concerned with resurrecting a curious idea from one of the deservingly discarded parts of the show’s history: shrinking the cast to enter the body of a character is the same notion from The Invisible Enemy, one of the nadirs of Tom Baker’s era.

This episode aimed a tight focus on the relationship of the Doctor and the Daleks. This wasn’t their diegetic relationship, the history in the show’s own narrative of their interactions. At the forefront of Into the Dalek is the philosophical and moral relationship of the Doctor to the Daleks. The Doctor at one point says to the Dalek that when he first started travelling, Doctor was just a name he called himself, but he only understood what it was to be The Doctor after he met the Daleks. The Daleks are a force of monstrousness, evil, destruction. The Doctor defines himself through his fight against this. What is noble and admirable about him, the answer to his question “Am I a good man?,” is seen through his opposition to this monstrousness.

Peter Capaldi's Doctor and Clara confront the Dalek
invasion . . . Wait, this doesn't seem quite right.

The Doctor’s devotion to goodness and the precise nature of this goodness is central to the story. The Dalek, which the Doctor affectionately calls Rusty, could no longer believe in the Dalek morality of total destruction of all alien life forms after a revelation that occurred in its thinking upon watching the birth of a star. Rusty understood the futility of the Dalek quest to destroy all that was different. Life itself is the proliferation of difference, of novelty, of that which is alien to what has come before. And this proliferation continues despite all the Dalek attempts to shut it down.

Daleks are opposed to a fundamental aspect of existence itself: the creation of the new. This is the beauty that the Dalek saw, and the beauty that the Doctor spent the climax of the story trying to remind Rusty of his experience. The goodness of the universe lies in its beauty. But that beauty is not a matter of mathematical elegance or physical symmetry, as our more common intuitions would have it. The beauty of the universe lies in its creative energy. The evil of the Daleks lies in their desire to destroy that creativity. It’s at this point, I would say, that Doctor Who has taken up an explicitly Bergsonian philosophy.

Henri Bergson's philosophy
understood existence itself as
inherently creative, and later
developed an ethics in which the
best human behaviour was to
channel that creativity into our
daily lives.

This is expressed differently through Dalek activity throughout the story. The action scenes as the Daleks invade the Aristotle are visually breathtaking, some of the most beautiful action sequences Doctor Who has done in a while. But the Daleks themselves are boring. As characters, all a standard Dalek is really capable of doing is destroying things: killing, exterminating, annihilating, all at various speeds depending on physical impediments and their occasional desire for a nice bit of victim torturing first. The presence of Daleks wipes all creativity out of a story, just as, diegetically, they wish to wipe all creativity out of the universe. The only thing you can do in a regular Dalek story is figure out how they’re going to kill everyone, and stop them while avoiding being killed.

This was interesting when they were first introduced (The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth) because such a creature had never really appeared before on television. Terry Nation’s only attempt to do something different with Daleks was an insane failure, making them comedy characters in The Chase. After that, what was most interesting about Dalek stories was what was going on around them.

In The Daleks’ Master Plan and Revelation of the Daleks, it was the plots of all the secondary characters. In The Power of the Daleks, it was how they manipulated the power games at the colony until they could get back to proper massacring. In The Evil of the Daleks, it was the literal alchemy of the story transforming Dalek nature. In Day of the Daleks, it was the narrative of collaboration with evil. Genesis of the Daleks was brilliant because of its depiction of a self-destructive society, and the charisma of the character of Davros. Remembrance of the Daleks was wonderful because it used the Daleks to tell a parable about race, prejudice, and the political and personal consequences of social exclusion.

Stories in the classic series that focussed specifically on the Daleks and their nefarious plans to do what they do every night, Pinky, and try to destroy all other life forms, were generally terrible. Jon Pertwee’s other two Dalek stories, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks, were uninspired retreads of story styles from the 1960s, as was Tom Baker’s second Dalek story, Destiny of the Daleks. The same goes for Peter Davison’s Resurrection of the Daleks, which also suffers from being hopelessly convoluted and written by Eric Saward.

The post-revival series follows the same trend. The more boring Dalek appearances are when they’re behaving just as Daleks do: storming through the narrative destroying everything. Journey’s End was probably the only story to fall completely on this problem. The difference of the post-revival from the classic series is that the Daleks so rarely overpower all the more interesting characters and ideas around them anymore. The Parting of the Ways and Doomsday came close, but avoided collapse because those stories were still ultimately about the relationship of the Doctor and Rose. Victory of the Daleks was in similar trouble, and suffered from the android Bracewell not being prominent enough to carry the episode.

The greatest Dalek stories of the post-revival series have
seen Daleks themselves attempt what the Doctor first tried
to do to them in 1968: change them.

Asylum of the Daleks worked because it was about setting up the multi-diegetic mystery of Clara and repairing the Ponds’ relationship. Evolution of the Daleks, shit-show though it was, was most intriguing when it focussed on Sec’s own transformation and its implications. Rob Sherman’s Dalek was the first attempt in the televised series to have a Dalek itself try to develop.

Only when a Dalek character breaks from this pattern of a totalizing will to destroy can it be truly interesting. But once that happens, the character isn’t really a Dalek anymore. Rusty is unique in this tradition of self-refuting singular Dalek characters because it understands that it isn’t a Dalek anymore once it accepts this new moral perspective. Rusty still has his Dalek heritage, because the only way he knows how to put his morals into action is to destroy things. Now, he simply destroys Daleks.

Yet there is also a very important difference between Into the Dalek and the other stories that focussed on a Dalek transforming itself into something different: Rusty survives.

Sec, the Dalek in Sherman’s episode, and Caan in Journey’s End are all progressive evolutions of the essential Dalek nature. They achieve individually what Patrick Troughton’s Doctor (in David Whitaker’s script, most importantly) tried to do through alchemical intervention in The Evil of the Daleks. But these three Daleks are all failures in this progressive change because they don’t survive their stories. The change does not proliferate.

The Doctor and the Daleks, philosophically entwined,
without escape.

This is why the Doctor was so intrigued to have found a Dalek who had made itself ethical, who had learned to appreciate the goodness of the universe’s relentless creativity. The Doctor first defined who he was in opposition to the Daleks. In the original sense, this was in strictly moral terms; the Dalek drive to destroy was “senseless, evil killing,” and the Doctor opposed this. But this was a negative self-definition; the Doctor defined himself through identifying what he stood against.

Regeneration gave the first positive definition to the Doctor himself, and to Doctor Who as a television show, which has allowed them to run for half a century and, despite sometimes getting worse, still continuing runs of brilliant television. The Doctor was defined by his changeability. Like a star born from the dust of dead stars, he could make himself again and again, as can Doctor Who. Now, we can identify the Daleks negatively, in opposition to the Doctor; he changes, and so they stay the same. With Rusty, the change in the essential morality and personality of the Daleks can continue. The seed of creativity and fluctuation exists in the Daleks now.

My girlfriend said, astonished as we watched Into the Dalek this weekend, how amazed she was that Doctor Who could still produce such good television after so long. I said that it was because the show never let itself get stale by staying the same for too long. It kept changing.

Into the Dalek brought us a Dalek who could change. 

21st Century Kropotkin II: The Continuity of History, Research Time, 08/07/2014

A few years ago, I presented some of my work in environmental philosophy at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, a short version of a paper about the usefulness of John Dewey’s ontological thinking for environmentalist ethics and ecological metaphysics. The paper, in longer form, was eventually published in Environmental Ethics. 

At the conference, I met the ageless Joseph Margolis, who was the keynote speaker. One of the interesting conversations he and I had over the week was about the nature of time, and history in particular. He and I disagreed over what could properly be called history. With his Hegelian influence, Joe understood history as an entirely human affair. With my ecological way of thinking, I understood history as a function of change itself, which means that everything in the universe has a history, and all our histories affect each other. 

An advantage to Kropotkin's view of history is that he
doesn't separate the pre-history of humanity from the era
of civilizations that left detailed records.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid offers a take on history similar to mine, but arrives there for different reasons. The book, as I’ve said in previous posts, is weird. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before, which is a commendation as far as I’m concerned. It understands the political associations of mutual aid and communal life as evolutionary adaptations of self-conscious social beings. He explains how this is so by situating the human race in an unbroken continuity of evolutionary history.

Now, Kropotkin’s evolutionary chronology has distinct disadvantages. It’s extremely brief, covering essentially just under two chapters of a book that does largely concentrate on human history. Since the book was written over the 1890s, Mutual Aid doesn’t have nearly the depth, breadth, and detail that contemporary accounts of the evolution of life on Earth can muster. While our own knowledge does remain incomplete, today we do have a better grasp of what kinds of creatures dominated the past epochs of Earth’s biosphere, and rely less on the notion that contemporary animal and plant species can be extrapolated back in time with little change because of their ‘hierarchically’ ‘lower’ place on the ‘scale’ of evolution.*

* I include these terms in scare quotes because hierarchical concepts don’t even really make sense in contemporary evolutionary theory. Kropotkin uses them because they are the terms contemporary to his own time. 

Henri Bergson was one of the most popular philosophers of
the early 20th century, but he remains a cult figure today.

But despite these failures of the technical aspects of evolutionary knowledge, Kropotkin offers a vision of Earth’s history and biological evolution as a single duration. Writing in the 1890s, he was already articulating in his scientific and political writing what Henri Bergson was doing in his concurrent philosophical work. Time and Free Will developed the basic concept of duration, and his subsequent books put it to work. A duration was a single continuous flow whose internal changes were a unified process, affects affecting affects (if I can make a reference to stoic philosophy, causes causing causes causing causes). Each duration was qualitatively different.

The boundaries between durations were sketchy in Bergson’s philosophy. In some contexts of his writing, a duration was an absolute, but in other analyses, what constituted a duration depended on what a thinker herself chose to examine as such. 

I don’t know how much of Bergson’s work Kropotkin was exposed to, and I don’t know if anyone has ever taken the question seriously. But if Kropotkin could be said to analyze human history in any way, I would understand him as conceiving of human political history as the later stages of a duration that encompassed all that was known of the changes that constitute the history of animal life itself, from his genesis to his own day.

It’s a very novel way to think about human history, and I think we could all benefit from taking this point of view more often.