The Value of Life Is Immanent, Jamming, 19/07/2014

When couples who don’t have children hang out with couples who do have children, there are occasionally those awkward moments when the children-havers ask why, and they are rarely satisfied with the answer that we just don’t want any. I anticipate these questions will arise fairly frequently over the course of my life, because my girlfriend and I don’t want kids.

I’m a writer, philosophical journalist, playwright, and whatever other creative endeavours will give me a paycheck of some kind. I don’t need children. My artworks will be my children — unlike children, art can never disappoint its creator.

Because an important element of environmental politics is a goal for an overall reduction in the human population by peaceful means, it’s important to encourage more people to decide not to have children. To do that, people have to live in such a way that they don’t need children to be happy in life. Yet an important concept in the image of reproduction as the validation of one’s present existence is in creating a heritage for the future. 

Well, to answer those concerns in this particular case, as an artist and creative figure, my artworks are that heritage. When my play, You Were My Friend, is produced, its script will be available in a Canadian database of theatre for other performers to produce in the future. My novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, will be available for purchase from Amazon for a long time. And if it ever goes out of print, ebooks will still be available. If Amazon ever discontinues the ebooks, I’ll seed it to piracy sites and sell copies by other means. The same goes for any other works of published art or philosophy I create.

Marry for love. Create for happiness. Or terror; whichever
you prefer.

Yet this question of heritage for the future is not even all that necessary. Back in April, I posted about my engagement with Lee Edelman’s No Future, a landmark work of queer theory that engendered some very strong reactions in me. If I can summarize my take on Edelman’s idea, he describes the queer as the living embodiment of the death drive. His Lacanian philosophical framework guides him to understand the only alternative to an uncritical embrace of heterosexual reproduction to safeguard the future to be an embrace of death. If children and the futurity they represent do not matter to you, says Edelman, then you can only be a walking spectre of annihilation.

Needless to say, I am not a fan. First, it’s a mutually exclusive (and alternative-exclusive) dualism, which I consider poor-quality thinking. Now, I do admire the gumption of Edelman embracing precisely the view of non-hetero sexualities that radical social conservatives share, and which motivates their desire to stamp such people out. But it still adds up to an embrace of death. 

There is a way to value one’s life, not because of the legacy you leave for the future, but for the effect you have in the present. One of the central ontological principles of my Ecophilosophy manuscript is that every process in the universe is ultimately interconnected because of their shared causal histories going back to the beginning of the universe and going forward into the future. Because every event has conditions that brought it about and effects that proliferate forward, every event leaves its imprint on the entire process of the universe’s development.

The effects of every event, in some small way, constitute the specifically singular character of the entire universe, throughout its duration. Each event itself is as only it can be, unique in its innate arrangement, singular in its essential nature. Its legacy is unimportant, both the past that led to it and the future that it conditions. The effects an event has on the world while it exists are most important to its value. 

On a personal perspective, that means what matters most in our lives are the effects we have on our co-workers, friends, families, and the wider world around us. Where we come from and our legacies don’t matter; only what we do counts as to the value of our lives. 

I’d Like to Have an Argument Please, A History Boy, 18/07/2014

Because I’m a really huge nerd, I’ve been reading an argumentation book for fun. When I was an undergraduate in philosophy, I actually had no idea this sub-discipline of argumentation theory existed. It’s one of the unfortunate parts of the fact that very few people can specialize in everything in a discipline anymore.* When I got to McMaster, I did discover argumentation theory, and found it quite fascinating. One of the department’s professors, Dr Hitchcock, was a specialist in argumentation theory, and my colleague Young Breezy in the PhD program was raised on theory of argument and informal logic in his undergraduate years at University of Windsor. 

* If I was still on a career path in academia, I would have liked to become one of those people who had his specializations, but knew a little of the basics of every field, enough to point an inquiring student in the direction of the major works. I still plan on writing and publishing philosophy independently of the university system, so maybe I still can.

When I did discover argumentation theory, I thought it had a lot of potential for explorations in meta-philosophy. If philosophical discourse consisted of arguments, then the study of argument structure would double as the study of philosophical discourse.

"An argument is a connected series of statements intended
to establish a proposition."
"No, it isn't."

So I found it a little sad that most of the argumentation theory that I read tended to be mostly about colloquial arguing. The meta-philosophical angle was rarely addressed except in asides and quips. I did assemble a paper on disagreement theory that eventually found a home in a young journal of argumentation and epistemology called Cogency, that’s published out of Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. It was an implicitly meta-philosophical paper about the idea that reason itself comes in many forms.

And that little paper received quite a lot of negative peer reviews in my initial attempts to publish it, even though, predictably, I was never able to follow their advice because my different peer reviewers (even for the same journal) gave mutually contradictory feedback. One said my paper wasn’t worth publishing because the notion that there are different types and frameworks of reasoning and reason was actually pretty obvious. Another said that my idea was ridiculous and immature, because the fact that people can mutually understand each other at all demonstrates that reason is entirely univocal and any attempt to describe it as plural misunderstood what argument was.

But today, I’m reading, for my fun book, Coalescent Argumentation by Michael Gilbert. It originally dropped in 1997, and Dr Hitchcock recommended it as a strong book in the kind of argumentation theory that I would enjoy. I had often spoken with my colleagues about how displeased I was with the confrontational form of argument that tends to dominate academic philosophical discourse: the notion that critique consists in attack. 

To me, a philosophical idea first exists as a hazy notion, and the purpose of criticism is to let the idea go to work, see what it can do in thought and what its implications are for action. Subjecting a tentative hypothesis or notion to aggressive critical attack, searching for its flaws as if it were a fully-fleshed out concept from the start, only nips creativity before it even has the chance to establish itself. I was interested in finding models of argument that approached the subject with a little more nuance. Dr Hitchcock assured me that Gilbert’s book was the most fruitful for my meta-philosophical discourse about discourse. 

I only started it recently, but I do enjoy one key idea. Gilbert describes the example of two academics. Smith writes a complicated 500 page book. Jones writes a review of the book, summarizing and attacking its ideas in about 2000 words. Smith explains that Jones has completely misunderstood her. Summarizing a large book in a couple of thousand words and expecting your attacks on this summary to stick isn’t solid philosophical analysis or even charitable engagement. 

We don’t need to be precise in what we say (because we so rarely are) to be understood (as we so often are), even though the bulk of argumentation theory tends to believe that precision of necessary for comprehension. I’m only at the beginning of the book, so I’m not sure where Gilbert ultimately takes this. But I consider it a promising start.

Putting Minds on Paper, Composing, 17/07/2014

I had a meeting with Mel today, the director of You Were My Friend, which will be my debut as a playwright this November at The Pearl Company theatre in Hamilton. We’ve made our plans for the revisions to the draft script, and discussed our plans for what actors we would want for the two roles in the play, Vicki and Madison, two mismatched roommates.

No, not these comically mismatched roommates. Mine are
women, so it's a completely different kind of fun.

It’s coming together very well already, though the revisions are interesting. I originally designed the play as a series of alternating monologues and dialogues. My motives for this structure were twofold. On one level, I was being entirely pragmatic. I wanted to book the best actresses possible, and to do that, I gave them a huge amount of juicy material in long format that would feed their egos. On another, less mercenary level, I wanted to build tension between the characters’ public personae — how they interacted with each other — and their private selves — how they interacted with the audience.

This could feel stilted after a while, though, and take time away from the most entertaining part of the story, watching these two spar and laugh together. So I’m recasting most of the material in the monologues to be revealed in longer, more involved dialogue scenes. The play is called You Were My Friend, after all, so we should see more of their actual friendship.

However, I do think the play’s development was improved by casting so much of it as long monologues to start. Sometimes, writing dialogue alone results in ambiguous characterization, ideas that can be too easily misinterpreted, and characters who feel thin, self-contradictory, or wedded more to the plot than any authenticity. But having these monologues to translate into more playful scenes together gives Vicki and Madison a more secure grounding. 

I don’t have to look at the dialogue now, and wonder what thoughts it may express or elide. I already have those thoughts, and I can reveal them cagily or directly, as the situation demands. I may try this with scripts I write in the future, plotting the inner lives of the characters before completely wiping over their direct expression and weaving it through dialogue and story.

You Don’t Have to Endorse Something to Understand It, Research Time, 16/07/2014

When this blog first started about a year ago, I was reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, a book that is firmly rooted in Marxist traditions of political, social, and psychological analyses. At the time, I had conceived the Utopias project as more firmly rooted in Marxist ideas, though that focus has shifted considerably since then, with its positive political direction being more a style of community-centric anarchism.

When you get to be as old as Kolakowski was,
you're thankful you can still smile for the
camera, so you smile well.

One early post included a footnote where I mention that I was planning to pick up my own copy of Leszek Kolakowski’s massive work of philosophical, historical, and political analysis, Main Currents of Marxism. My friends B and P told me that, despite the comprehensive scale of Kolakowski’s 1200-page masterwork and the praise it had accumulated as a work of scholarship, it wasn’t worth going to. Kolakowski had turned against Marxism, and my friends were skeptical of his work for this reason.

I never bought the book, but a copy came into my possession anyway. When my girlfriend and I moved in together, she took from her mother’s house the remnants of her deceased father’s book collection, which included a complete hardcover edition of Kolakowski’s tome. Rudy was the type of guy who would casually buy a 1200-page critical history of Marxist philosophy. It’s a damn shame I never got to talk with this guy.

Even at 1200 pages, the book is incomplete. It never engages explicitly with anarchist theorists — Peter Kropotkin, for example, only merits only a few sentences of discussion scattered around two of its three volumes, despite his seminal place in anarchism as a philosophy and political movement. As well, having been published in 1976, the book only has very indirect lessons for the development of Marxism since then, how the philosophy has adapted to the end of the Cold War and its relegation to the work of university scholars disconnected to working people. Finally, Kolakowski’s focus is entirely on European and American Marxism, and doesn’t touch on how the political theory and movement picked up across the globe. Africa is a sad blank spot, but Asia, particularly Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Indonesian Marxism, is historically significant and passed over.

Nonetheless, I was happy for the coincidence that brought such a book into my life for free. After reading through the book of selections from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, I thought I’d read through Kolakowski’s chapter on the Italian writer to see what he had to say. 

Reading Gramsci makes for a good critique of Badiou's
thought, even if just to show that he isn't that original.

I found the chapter a fine summary of a thinker with a large and complex corpus. Gramsci, in Kolakowski’s words, conceived of a socialist revolution as a more profound transformation of a society than a party simply seizing the reins of state power. Though Kolakowski was unable to say so in this book, Gramsci anticipates some of the ideas of Badiou on revolution, that a Communist Party taking power over the state is no revolution at all, but the failure of the revolutionary party to follow through on its own mission, instead becoming one more clique who contests for control of repressive apparatus, whether through violent or peaceful means. 

I found Kolakowski a little to quick to dismiss Gramsci’s thoughts on the ground of seeming contradictions among points, such as the Italian’s apparent historical relativism about truth being supposedly incompatible with his skepticism about necessitarian laws of social development. Perhaps this is a symptom of simply trying to encompass so much complex theory and history in such a massive and complicated project. Going through the notable theorists and ideologists of European Marxism one person at a time is going to wear on you, and person-to-person arguments in philosophy tend to be a little too quick. The Gramsci chapter is the only one I’ve read so far, but I’m glad Kolakowski is now another of the great writers in my apartment’s library.

Why I Am Such an Excellent Writer, Composing, 15/07/2014

Having done some promotional duties for one of my fellow artists yesterday, I thought it best to promote my own upcoming projects as well. As my difficult hunt continues for such an apparently simple thing as a day job with a reliable income stream, I at least have a writing career that, while it doesn’t yet produce a lot of cash, at least reminds me that I have something valuable to contribute. 

One of my personal favourite under-
employed philosophical writers, the
title of this post is a play on his
ironically egotistical chapter headings
from Ecce Homo.

Not everyone who is underemployed has this kind of fallback for their sense of self-worth. For almost two years, I’ve had the qualifications and the references for a good start to the career that I chose, and that I was continually told that I could make a great life from. Those qualifications were the result of seven years of hard work: one year and change for my MA, eight months of preliminary research, and four years of my doctorate. Realistically, I’ve spent the last two years trying to get that career started and coming up empty in terms of steady employment. Like a lot of academics in my generation, despite my best efforts and the assurances of people who have actually worked with me that what I do is valuable to the discipline, the university sector simply does not want me.

Now, like a lot of former academics, I face the difficult task of convincing employers in the private sector that my years of experience as a writer, researcher, and teacher (and in my case, as a contractual editor, a customer service phone jockey, and having helped run one of Canada’s largest university newspapers for two years) is relevant to their faster-paced working environment. Also, that I am sincerely devoted to my career change, and will not rush back to academia the minute a poverty-waged four-month teaching post opens up. There is the additional problem that I will not know precisely what my new career is until I land my first job. I'm qualified to work as an editor (which I'm doing freelance now, but is not a reliably sustainable income) and as a researcher (which is the bulk of my current applications). 

Even so, the most creative part of my career(s) is beginning to take off. For one thing, my novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, is slated for release later this month. I’m beginning from an independent publisher, but BlankSpace take their work seriously, and they take their ambitions seriously as well. They’ll be pleased to know that, as I’ve discussed Under the Trees, Eaten with members of Toronto’s literary community, they’ve heard of the label, and it’s all good things. If the work I publish with them ultimately opens a pathway to future success with larger labels, I’ll always have BlankSpace to thank.

In fiction, my favourite inspirations are
writers whose ideas I can take in
directions they never would have gone
themselves. Lovecraft writing a female
protagonist and a comprehensible
alien? Never.

Going through the proofs this weekend was the first time that I’ve revisited my own manuscript in a while, and it felt like I was reading it with fresh eyes. I wove enough thematic complexity into the work to please anyone who generally enjoys anything science-fiction. The heritage of H. P. Lovecraft is clear in the basic premise and the nature of the central extraterrestrials in the story. 

At the same time, Under the Trees, Eaten grows beyond its primary inspiration in many ways. For one, I cannot sensibly equate the radically Other with the utterly unknowable as Lovecraft does.* The mysterious creatures of my novella are indeed terrifyingly different than humans, more terrifying and casually violent in ways we would find abhorrent. But they move with a calm rationality, and their reason, though radically different than that of humanity, is still a reason and can still be understood. This is a fundamental aspect of my research in environmental philosophy: that humanity must lose its hubris that its own reason is the only reason that can exist. Lovecraft, in his xenophobia, was all too guilty of this small-mindedness.

* And as many of my least favourite traditions of European philosophy over the last hundred or so years have done as well, but that’s another story.

My theatre work continues as well. You Were My Friend, which will play at the Pearl Company Theatre in Hamilton this November, features many of the same feminist approaches as Under the Trees, Eaten. One of Lovecraft’s greatest weaknesses as a writer, after all, was his inability to craft a woman. My novella’s very spine and backbone is its protagonist, Marilyn. Her story searching for the truth about the death of her mother and the mental breakdown of her father is the central driving force of the story.

You Were My Friend is similarly rooted in the complexity of women’s lives and families. It has a cast of two, both women. The story begins when one of them, Vicki, is cast out of her mother’s home before she even has the chance to finish high school to fend for herself, all because of her relationship with a man in his mid-20s (who disappears from her life at this very moment of crisis). It is the story of a young woman who is thrown, quite literally, to the wolves because her actions don’t conform to a puritanical sexual morality. 

No matter how many job applications I may send out, their fate is ultimately out of my control. This was true when I was looking for university work, and it’s true now that I’m transitioning into research and editing work in the wider private sector. But if there is one place where I’m not adrift, it’s the words that come from my fingers on these keyboards. 

That’s why, no matter how difficult or demoralizing my work in this economy might become, I keep working, in my spare time, on this blog, the philosophical publishing projects that it often tracks, this novella (and the other ideas for fiction works), and this play (and other theatrical ideas as well). It is the one area of my productive life where I can maintain some measure of control. I wish more people adrift in our economy could have a similar anchor.

Yellow Wallpaper: The Undeniable Power of Theatrical Experience, 14/07/2014

Theatre is supposed to be strange. We usually gripe about how a special effect in a movie doesn’t look real enough, but we always know that it isn’t real because it’s an image on a screen. When we experience the strangest images theatre can create, the effect is especially powerful because we are physically in the same room as these phantasms. 

See it at the Player's Guild theatre at
80 Queen Street South in Hamilton,
June 17 – 27.

I met Kristi Boulton a couple of years ago when she was a theatre and media student and I was doing my doctorate at McMaster University. Today, she’s written a play based on “Yellow Wallpaper,” a chilling short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is written in the first person, and the play presents a fictionalized version of Charlotte herself playing the protagonist, a woman confined in an attic for medical observation after an embarrassing mental health episode spoken of only in hushed terms. 

Locked away, she begins to experience visions, hauntings. A featureless female figure in bright yellow emerges from the titular modular wall, stalking her around the room with the voices of the women who have been confined there before. Not only these, but the cries of all the women who have been broken by the violence of men. Not only these, but echoes of Charlotte’s own torture and suffering, as her husband has happily betrayed her to a medical institution that has stripped her of freedom, personhood, agency. 

Boulton told me that her script and production has left it up to the audience to decide whether Charlotte’s experiences are real supernatural events, or if she really has had a mental breakdown and has become delusional. But the weirdness of theatre both complicates and simplifies this impression. It’s a fairly simple form of narrative literacy to think of a performance like this as presenting the audience with a choice between whether Charlotte’s haunting experiences are real or imaginary.

Because a contemporary theatrical (and televisual, and cinematic) literacy is more sophisticated than this. A reasonable viewer of this play knows that they’re watching an artificial experience: actors on stage in an adaptation of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story. The ambiguity of whether her haunting is diegetically real or illusory is part of the play’s own structure. Posing and thinking about the question is itself part of how the audience engages with the play, and a discerning audience will understand that the ambiguous nature of the events on stage is part of the theatrical event. 

Audiences today don’t need to postulate the reality of what they see on screen or on stage to engage with an artwork, as if they were watching a documentary about imaginary people. Theatre is the presentation of a narrative through self-consciously artificial means. The sets are wooden blocks, often intentionally bare or sparsely decorated. Theatre creates an intentionally unsettling space, bringing its audience to an experience where they will see a purposely artificial story, a live barrage of affects whose purpose is to express ideas and emotions, and enfold an audience into that expression.

• • •

Theatre wasn’t always supposed to be strange. Before the invention of cinema, an artistic movement began in the 19th century for theatre to depict social situations realistically. Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen are the most famous voices from this movement today, though Leo Tolstoy and other Russian playwrights affiliated with the Moscow Art Theatre were remarkable figures as well. 

If you watch Brando's The Wild One, you understand just
how strange he makes that movie. The Wild One is an
extremely stupid movie. Its tone is essentially Reefer
Madness, only about motorcycle riders. But Marlon Brando
shows up in this world of cornballs giving a totally realistic
performance as a swaggering young man driven to criminal
life by a lack of opportunity who acts out to cover the deep
wounds of his soul. It's totally incongruous and brilliant.

Probably the most influential inheritance from theatrical realism today comes from Constantin Stanislavski, the progenitor of modern psychological realist acting. The Method, when Marlon Brando brought it so forcefully to the American stage and screen, ushered in an era of realist filmmaking in cinema that lasted for decades. The theatrical flourishes and purposeful artificiality of the silent and studio system generations disappeared from American cinema for decades, only resurfacing in the genre play comedies and action films that developed in the 1990s and 2000s.

But the growth of cinema forced theatre to give up its pretensions to realism. This was not an immediate process, of course. Brando’s own theatrical work, along with the plays of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller were developing viscerally realist theatre while Eugene Ionesco, Dario Fo, Peter Shaffer, and Samuel Beckett were bringing a new weirdness and surreality to the stage. Harold Pinter's works were deliciously vital combinations of realism and artifice. These experimental works created new forms of dramatic, conceptual, and emotional expression by dropping all pretence that the events on stage were real, or even aimed for verisimilitude to the real.

But the strangeness of theatre’s obvious artificiality belies its ability to express vitally important realistic ideas. Consider Boulton’s Yellow Wallpaper. A woman is trapped in a confined space and stalked by the psychic echoes of all other women who have been abused and tortured through a medical system that treated them as living laboratories and a wider patriarchal society that robbed them of physical agency and self-control. 

It’s a perennial struggle, one of the defining struggles of human culture for well over a century. The theatre is a space where an essential dynamism of the forces that constitute the globalized culture of our world can be displayed before us. The performance itself expresses those forces and we participate in them in real time as we experience and engage with the narrative. 

Charlotte is locked in an enclosed space where the narratives of millions of tortured and oppressed women are brought before her through an experience that, in its artificiality is more than real precisely because its nature as a performance allows the direct expression of forces that are normally diffuse and barely noticeable throughout our planet’s societies. She, and we, are the audience to the history and narratives essential to the entire human experience.

This is the power of theatre.

To Develop a Singular Identity, Research Time, 11/07/2014

One of the centrepiece concepts of my broad philosophical work is singularity. In an absolute sense, this is the notion that every body and event in the universe is at least minimally unique from every other. In a relative or practical sense, it is the notion that there is a natural tendency for systems, especially when they interact, to become more complex over time, thereby increasing their degree of uniqueness. They become more singular.

We can see this functioning, for example, in human personalities. One of the most lamentable developments for a person to take is to become nothing more than a stereotype, a cookie-cutter person, a total conformist. The best people are remarkable, interesting, weird. 

This notion of singularity is at the centre of my Ecophilosophy manuscript, and it will be very important to the basis of the political philosophy in the Utopias project. Wonderfully, Peter Kropotkin has given me a foothold to use this idea in relation to the anarchist project. In a late essay, Kropotkin contends that the most important political and social priority is something called individualization, creating a social and economic structure that allows people to do what they are best suited and find most interesting. It would encourage them to develop their personality along entirely unique lines, creating a world of the remarkable. In such a society, we would never be bored, always meeting fascinating and weird people. This is a world of extremely intense human singularities. 

I only discovered the idea in a short article, in fact an encyclopedia article Kropotkin was asked to write about anarchism, so it doesn’t go into much detail. But he considers anarchism the political system best suited for achieving this singularization of the human race. The central argument for it in this essay is that coercion encourages conformity, the stifling of one’s individuality for the sake of survival. This is so whether it’s conformity to the rules of the state in fear of its military violence, or to the dictates of an oligarchical business clan in fear of its ability to trap you in poverty.

One of the nice things about encyclopedia articles written by brilliant theorists and writers is that it allows them to define a complex concept in as straightforward a manner as possible, and a political concept needs a straightforward articulation. Anarchism, says Kropotkin, is a political system of voluntary associations, obligations, and agreements to manage all social and economic functions which currently rest within the state. Instead of the state’s univocal laws that are so difficult to change as to be ossified, we govern ourselves in a complex network of dynamic covenants. We are each a node in the network, and in being so, have the power to help shape that network.

The theory isn’t perfect, after all. We know now that in dynamic, mutually self-constituted networks, not every node is created equal, as Kropotkin would suppose. Spontaneously developing networks are usually scale-free, with some nodes being much more important than average, and some nodes quite marginal and isolated. But the dynamism inherent to a networked relation would make an individual equally dynamic, encouraging their creativity not from fear of harm, but from the desire to connect and evolve.