The Human Limits of History, Research Time, 17/09/2015

If you want to write a universal history of humanity – and I mean a history that’s genuinely universal – it has to include a good chunk of the evolutionary history of Earth. From the bacterial biosphere to the modern era of animals with ideas above our station. Humanity alone isn’t all that matters.

How we conceive of history is a big part of Francis Fukuyama’s analysis of democracy as utopia. He adopts a conception of history that’s explicitly eschatological. The flow of human history, the narrative of our species and global civilization, has a natural endpoint.

When the world ends, it's an event, like any other. Like
the Doctor said, it's so easy to miss.

More than just an end, though. Everything comes to an end. Ecological thinking wonders about the end of humanity all the time. But that environmentalist frame of mind conceives of the end of humanity as our stumbling toward destruction. 

The pollution and ecological effects of our industry eventually makes our own planet uninhabitable for us, and we’ve neglected the space race for so long that we don’t have the resources to try to get it right on another planet. The end of humanity, in the context of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, is a contingent matter. The fatal mistake of our accidental mass suicide.

I’m very much an environmentalist thinker. I wrote a book on the subject, after all. So it’s a refreshing strangeness to walk into such a humanist world-view as Fukuyama’s. For him, it isn’t just that history at one point will end, but that the human story has a plot, and most importantly, a culmination.

Because the idea that history as a culmination is strange to me. It not that I’ve never encountered it before. I’ve read Georg Hegel, after all, and taken university courses on his work. Fukuyama’s read Hegel, and explicitly positions himself as a follower of Hegel. More on that tomorrow.

I find it strange because I find it ridiculous. Egotistical, even. To those who Hegel has influenced, history is a peculiarly human thing. History is only possible with self-consciousness, the ability to reflect on what’s happened and understand it somehow. 

In other words, the only creatures that can have history are those who can think about the meaning of their pasts. Creatures who are capable of philosophy, basically.

But I’ve spent the last few years getting out of this mode of thinking about history, to the extent that I’ve ever been in it at all. Even if you stick to human self-consciousness, we’ve had self-consciousness for millions of years, long before anything like civilization or the recording of history came along. 

One day, I hope we'll all recognize the special peer-hood
that exists between humanity and elephants. We'll have
a lot to answer for, I think, if we make it to a more
ecologically enlightened future.

The recent discovery of another ancestor species of humanity, homo naledi, was most likely of a graveyard of the species. A species that lived two million years ago. For that long, even before there were hominid species, our biological ancestors were able to understand themselves spiritually, a mind-set that we normally associate with great cognitive advancement.

I see no reason to drop that premise, so I conclude that for at least the last two million years of humanity’s evolutionary history, we’ve been advanced enough to think of the world in spiritual terms. Elephants are another type of creature that has graveyards and ritualistic burial behaviour, indicating spiritual thinking. 

It’s a fairly common, and sensible, idea to consider that whales may have comparable intelligence to humans. Cetacean and ape sign language abilities are at a level of sophistication that I feel more uncomfortable with their suffering than many other species of animal. I’ve even seen demonstrations of octopus intelligence – maze running, puzzle solving – that make me especially queasy of eating them.

If intelligence is so prevalent in our world, it’s a sign that we shouldn’t be so humanist about the nature of history. Even if you do associate history with self-consciousness.

Yet because intelligence seems so frequent in the world, I see more continuity between the human and non-human world. This was a key idea in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. The world is made of many interconnecting processes, a single, continuous flux. Everything that happens is a part of history because everything is continuous.

Don’t think that I’m saying that continuity means the universe as a whole is intelligent. I’m not going that far into pantheism. 

What I mean is, coming up with a conception of history that restricts it to humanity alone isn’t actually legitimate. It makes a categorical distinction that isn’t real: between humanity which has history, and nature to which stuff happens. Accept the continuity, and at least give material causality the dignity of the term “history.”

The whole world is just as real as we are.

America the Dream, Research Time, 16/09/2015

When I sit down to write the parts of the Utopias manuscript that critique modern American conservatism, the ideas will come from what I like to call the Big Four.

Friedrich Hayek: In economics, he developed the key concepts understanding wage controls, progressive taxation, and government safety nets as holding us back from prosperity. His wider political influence lies in The Road to Serfdom’s argument that all leftists favoured a large role for government in daily life and the economy, and that this role is the foundation of totalitarianism.

Ayn Rand: Rampant individualism fuelled by rage, justifying rapacious selfishness as the most ethical human lifestyle.

Dick Cheney is still the closest I feel I've ever been in
my life to experiencing a real supervillain in charge of
a major world power. He was genuinely frightening.

Robert Nozick: Developed a moral philosophy that literally justified being an asshole, because he developed a notion that all social and moral obligations are violent forces suppressing your individual freedom. He reconciled this idea with the core tenets of liberal democratic political philosophy.

Francis Fukuyama: Conceived of capitalist liberal democratic politics as the natural state of humanity, the kind of society people will naturally build in our current era once authoritarian politics collapses. The core concept of Cheney & Wolfowitz’s style of neoconservatism.

What I find really interesting is that Fukuyama has completely repudiated, rejected, and renounced all the most influential concepts of his work as they exist today. Contrast Rand or Hayek. Rand ran her entire life according to these principles, without even a hint of basic polite hypocrisy. 

Hayek founded a hub for an international network of think tanks to advocate for his ideas. This network includes places like Canada’s Fraser Institute, and I consider that network the most successful political organization of the last hundred years. 

Yet as scary as Dick Cheney was to me,
I know that he's nothing compared to
Josef Stalin.

Fukuyama, after seeing the impact of an American government prepared to act on his ideas with full military force, rightly rejected those ideas. The invasion of Iraq was a pretty clear conclusion. The premise was false. The experiment was a failure.

I’m interested in Fukuyama’s ideas because I want to work out why the premise was so seductive, so alluring. His thinking is pretty appropriate for a book idea called Utopias. He writes as if he'd discovered a whole new world of utopia. It was real life. 

He lived in a world where communist totalitarianism had fallen overnight, and the conflict that had brought the world to the brink of literal annihilation for 45 years ended in a univocal victory for the West. The conflict of the USA and the USSR had dominated the world since the fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

If the United States has any one story from this era, it’s a fall from grace. Having defeated totalitarian Germany, and standing in 1950 against Stalin’s equally horrifying Soviet Union, the most brilliant intellectuals of free Europe thought of America as the genuine land of freedom, defending democracy and human decency. I’m thinking especially of how Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt wrote about America during this period.

But the next fifty years saw the downfall of America in many ways. For all the prosperity of the post-war economy, America remained racially divided and oppressive. Jim Crow was everyday reality in the South, the carceral state was already taking shape in the North, and McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts were destroying any form of critical dissent in the country. 

Until the CIA helped the coup that
overthrew him in 1955, Iran was a
secular democracy whose President
was Mohammed Mossadegh. He
wanted to create a state oil company.
This qualified him in American eyes as
a stooge of the Soviet Union.

The CIA was also becoming an agent of oppression. It was no trouble for CIA activities to help reactionary, repressive dictatorships overthrow democratically elected governments if they showed any hints of state socialism or a possible alignment with the USSR in global relations. 

While the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, a repressive campaign began against black activists almost immediately afterward. And the US leadership’s reaction to the economic crises of the 1970s was doubling down on supply-side economics that further suppressed wages and pushed the poor into degeneracy. Those policies have now stopped even the middle class from being able to stand. 

Yet the fall of the Soviet Union, for a brief time in popular culture, washed this history away. This exultant mood produced Fukuyama’s End of History. However terrible American police, espionage, and army activities were, they didn’t approach the mass terror and gulag states of the USSR. 

The fall of the USSR was supposedly the triumph of democratic values, as its former republics (at least the European ones and Russia) embraced democracy. In the drama of the Cold War’s sudden end, people saw utopia. And it was America.

Didn’t Democracy Conquer the World in 1991? Research Time, 15/09/2015

As you can probably tell from a lot of my other posts, some of what I discuss on social media, and the fact that I’m a member of the NDP and I volunteer with my district’s candidate this election, I’m generally a left-leaning person. 

And I think it’s important for every left-leaning person to read influential and interesting works of political philosophy from the right-wing, from conservative points of view. Much of this is about getting outside the bubble of social agreement that too many of us insulate ourselves with. 

One of my favourite sets of horrifyingly offensive
comments from the Conservative Party of Canada's
Facebook page.

A hilarious Twitter account that’s sprung up this election is called Conservatives of Facebook, which tweets screenshots of actual member comments from the Facebook page of the Conservative Party of Canada. It’s a wonderful display of ignorance and insularity. 

A lot of this comes down to social insularity. People who only listen to voices that agree with them, that share their own perspective, will never learn to understand why people think differently. They’ll only think different people are evil or stupid. 

The most hilarious and terrifying examples (my favourites are the ones that are both at once) are from the right wing of politics. People who can’t understand why anyone thinks we should help the homeless, refugees, or allow Muslims into the country. 

People who think it’s perfectly common sense and an entirely popular opinion that the homeless are dirty drug addicts who don’t want to work, that all refugees are just lazy bums who want to coast on our generous social services (like the family of seven my current boss knows who survive on a $1600/month stipend in Toronto), and that all Muslims are dangerous radicals who want to enslave and constantly rape all women.

There are people who believe that anyone who thinks differently than this is either stupid or a fascist. 

The same insularity of ideas happens on the left. I know plenty of people who can’t understand why anyone would support Stephen Harper. But that kind of attitude doesn’t actually equal political success, because you don’t know how to deal with opponents as people worthy of respect, and you aren’t able to convince those opponents to change their views. Doing that requires understanding why other people believe as they do.

So I read right-wing, conservative political philosophy. It’s important for my Utopias manuscript too, because part of what that book will engage is the failure of the liberal democratic ideal over the last 25 years. 

This is why I started reading The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It’s a famous book, a popular success that massively and comprehensively influenced Western (esp. American) political culture, and whose effects are still reverberating today. It’s up with Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia as one of the books that define modern conservative philosophy.

For people of Fukuyama's generation, the long tenures
of Soviet leaders like Leonid Brezhnev (1964-82) was
an expected part of international politics. The Cold
War confrontation of democratic and communist
powers was, best case scenario, supposed to last for
centuries. Instead, the entire Soviet Union fell
within a decade of Brezhnev's death.

Its starting idea is that, as we examine the recently fallen corpse of the Soviet Union, we’ve proven that liberal capitalist democracy is univocally the best possible form of human government and the universal desire of all people. This actually was a vibrant, original, and compelling idea in the early 1990s.

Part of the Utopias manuscript will involve getting inside the perspective of generations very alien to my own, because the conclusions that make perfect sense to someone who came of age during the Bush Administration and sees the Eternal War of the Middle East as he matures, weren’t even conceivable to someone who came of age and matured during the Cold War.

Fukuyama describes this clearly. The popular attitude in the West about the Communist world was that totalitarian government had successfully changed the morality, ethics, and character of their entire population, at least in the Soviet Union. Any desire for freedom had been squashed by the all-pervasive state.

It was taken for granted in the West that no one inside the Soviet Union wanted it to fall, aside from the occasional dissident and defector. Then 1991 happened, and a popular movement overthrew the Communist government and broke up the entire Soviet system. Boris Yeltsin seemed to be leading Russia into democracy.

To someone who grew up under the constant spectre of nuclear annihilation in a war with a Soviet enemy that felt more like a population of Dr Dooms than a human society, this literally was a new era of history. God granted us relief from the nuclear death of Earth.

So Fukuyama’s notion that the world had begun a new, immeasurably fast, unstoppable progress toward democracy and freedom made a lot of sense, given how quickly and radically the world really did change in those two years from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the dissolution of the USSR.

Then look what happened.

Darling Companions: Talking Doctor Who, Jamming, 14/09/2015

So Doctor Who comes back on television this Saturday, and I’m planning to write a post about each episode, just as I did last year. Because people really liked those posts, and thought they were interesting. 

In a Twitter conversation I had with a few of my friends in the international Who fandom community this weekend, we got to discussing how amazing the character of Vicki was. She was a companion during the 2nd and 3rd seasons of the classic series, with William Hartnell. It got me thinking about what kind of characters make Doctor Who companions, and I realized that there are really only four templates.

Most of the characters, especially today, mix ideas from all four. But each of them still dominate each character one at a time.

Probably the most remarkable companion template on Doctor Who is the Revolutionary, and these characters are always women. They have a manic energy and love to fight the authoritarian villains of Doctor Who. 

Vicki was the first Revolutionary companion, and probably the purest expression of the idea. Her best story The Space Museum saw her literally lead a revolution against a staid, authoritarian regime. As the Shabogan Banksy said the other night, Vicki literally taught the Doctor how to be a Revolutionary himself. Their relationship was a central step in the development of the Doctor’s own character.

The next Revolutionary was Patrick Troughton’s last female companion, Zoe. One of my favourite scenes of hers is in The Invasion when she giddily laughs as she overloads and destroys a computerized security guard.

Did you also know that Ace made her own explosives?

Jo, when she was written properly as a manic, slightly meta-fictional action hero, fit this model too. The second Romana, played by Lalla Ward, was a Revolutionary, as was Tegan. Ace, the 80s punk chick who grew up in suburban London, once beat a Dalek’s eyestalk off with an amped up baseball bat. Ace also makes the class dynamic of the Revolutionary explicit, because of her origins, accent, and manners.

Rose picked up from Ace in the new series, a rabid anti-authoritarian from London council housing. Even though Martha was a doctor, her aggressive attitude gives her the energy. And her positionality as a black woman makes her challenge cultural conservatism directly. 

Think of her confrontation with Joan in Human Nature: Doctor Who rarely confronted the real historical legacy of racism, but Martha shows an otherwise villainous trait in the story’s guest protagonist. Just as Vicki did by encouraging the Doctor's revolutionary spirit in the first place, Martha as a character is pushing the show forward.

In the Moffat era, Amy and River had these anti-authoritarian traits. River’s more dominant relationship with the Doctor makes her fit another type, but chaos was always the core of her personality.

Then there’s the sadly retrograde version of this character that I uncharitably call the Bimbo. They’re the unfortunate stereotype of a Doctor Who companion from the 20th century, the character whose only purpose is to get captured/rescued, stumble around getting into danger, and scream at scary shit. They’re infantilized when not sexualized.

It’s not to say that these characters don’t have redeeming aspects. If not in the show, then at least the ancillary media have explored these characters enough to make them interesting. 

Susan was the first. She was the Doctor’s granddaughter, encouraging a paternalism and impulse to protect and shield from harm. It seems odd to watch stories from Hartnell’s 1st year and see the Doctor this way. It shows how transformative Vicki’s character was.

One reason the Bimbo character could come back to
Doctor Who is that they actually can work when
they're men instead of women.

Susan was best when she was a star child, behaving as a sci-fi mystic. This happened very rarely. Vicki was supposed to replace Susan's child-Bimbo role, but the male companion, Steven, took it instead. Steven was supposed to follow Ian’s role in the 3rd season. But while he could throw a punch when needed, he ended up a stumbler and a bit of an idiot without the Doctor to boss him around.

When Dodo was written into the show to replace Vicki, Doctor Who had its purest infantilized Bimbo. But many 3rd season stories suffered from having two Bimbo characters, Steven and Dodo, with the Doctor. Hartnell’s health problems meant he wasn’t on screen enough that year to keep their stupidity from annoying a viewer.

Another male companion, Ben, filled this role in the 4th season, Troughton’s first. But he combined stumbling ass-backwards into danger with a manly swagger that ended up hilarious. After Ben left, Victoria filled the role very easily, and her Victorian beauty was the first movement of this companion type’s sexualization.

Sexualization hit high gear with Jo, when the writers only thought of her as a pair of legs in a short skirt. Jo’s an interesting character because in her best stories, she embodies anti-authoritarian spirit. But in her worst stories, the writers see only her looks, sexy wardrobe, and girlish voice.

Tom Baker’s Doctor almost completely avoided Bimbo companions, thanks to two sets of producers dominating his tenure (1974-7: Philip Hinchcliffe & Robert Holmes; 1977-80: Graham Williams & Douglas Adams) who hated those kinds of characters. Then John Nathan-Turner took over, beginning a nostalgia-driven era that over-emphasized the importance of the Bimbo companion to Doctor Who.

Peri works in most of her
audio plays (1999-present)
because her character is
written with an edge more
like a Revolutionary who
tends to stumble into
danger.

Adric was the first Bimbo companion of the JNT era, constantly stumbling into trouble and then complaining about it. But the show made the terrible mistake of putting him in a heroic story role. The squirming awkwardness of the show validating such an irritating fool made Adric universally hated among Doctor Who fandom.

Turlough was originally designed with an innovative edge, probably JNT’s most radical creative step. He was the companion you couldn’t trust, literally a sleeper cell sent to gain the Doctor’s trust and kill him. But after this arc was resolved, Turlough settled into an irritating Bimbo role. Like Adric’s older brother who smoked pot, but was still clearly related to Adric.

Peri was the last of this template, when it finally proved itself completely unworkable. She was hypersexualized from her first appearance, threatened with real or metaphorical sexual violence in almost each of her stories, and utterly incompetent to get herself out of the trouble she let herself get caught in.

Her television portrayal heightened everything that went wrong with this type of companion. Its problems were now impossible to ignore. No one could write a Doctor Who character like this again.

The type of character usually associated with male companions I call the Loyal Soldier, who does everything it says on the tin. They’re the Doctor’s muscle, the bodyguards, and sometimes the attack dogs. The arc of the 1st season was about Ian and Barbara on one side and the Doctor and Susan on the other, each side learning to trust each other. But Ian functioned essentially this way.

Stephen was supposed to be a Loyal Soldier, but his character was too dim. He stumbled into trouble when the Loyal Soldier is supposed to be a rescuer, so ended up having to rescue himself. Or else Vicki would do it, because Revolutionaries do that.

Instead, we wouldn’t have a Loyal Soldier until Troughton had Jamie. The Brigadier was Jon Pertwee’s Loyal Soldier, though his later appearances saw his heritage push him to a more equal level to the Doctor. Harry was an explicitly comic version of this role for Tom Baker. But Leela filled this role with him best. 

After Leela, this kind of companion disappeared from the show until Captain Jack Harkness, I think because it’s mostly associated with men, and male companions slipped from prominence from 1975 onward. Jack was, I should add, only in this role when he was on Doctor Who itself. Torchwood required a version of Jack as a struggling anti-hero.

Wilf says goodbye.

Wilf and Rory were the other official companions in the new series of this kind. Even though he was never an official companion, I do count Danny Pink in this role, since his character arc examined the trope in so much detail.

The Revolutionary is the companion that embodies the anti-authoritarian essential ethics of Doctor Who. The Loyal Soldier is the show’s inspirational action hero. The Bimbo was a mistake, the sexist mutation of a character that held the show back from its potential when it first appeared. There’s one other type of companion that’s closest to the usual meaning of the word. The Doctor’s partner, the closest he has to a spouse. The Matriarch.

Doctor Who has had Matriarchs from the beginning, though these mature characters don’t often appear. Barbara was the first, because their relationship was literally about Barbara teaching the Doctor to be a more ethical person. The Doctor learned how to fight authoritarianism with Vicki, but he learned why to fight authoritarian ideas in the world and himself from Barbara.

After Barbara, the Matriarch’s relationship with the Doctor is no longer about teaching, but being a partner for the Doctor. Essentially, the Matriarch is the Doctor, but played by a woman. This is why it won’t be a big deal when Peter Capaldi eventually leaves Doctor Who and is replaced by a female actor.

Women have played versions of the Doctor since the start of the show: Jacqueline Hill, Anneke Wills, Caroline John, Elisabeth Sladen, Mary Tamm, Sarah Sutton, Bonnie Langford, Catherine Tate, and Jenna Coleman.

Troughton’s companion Polly was essentially a Matriarch, though she was often crowded out of the 4th season’s complex stories and given Bimbo duties in the straight shoot-em-ups because she was a woman. Listen to how Polly and Troughton speak in Power of the Daleks and you hear a brother and sister.

Jacqueline Hill's performance on Doctor Who gets
even better when you imagine how she'd play the
Doctor herself.

Liz had the makings of a Matriarch, because her position in the show as a scientist put her on equal level to the Doctor** and she was mature enough to challenge Pertwee’s sometimes childish dickishness. She could have worked if she’d developed as a stern mother figure, which Pertwee’s Doctor could have used. 

** She was UNIT’s Scientific Advisor on alien life before the Doctor out-qualified her by being an actual nomadic alien.

But Terrance Dicks didn’t know how to write a Matriarch, so he replaced her with Jo, the planned Bimbo who turned out to be a Revolutionary.

Sarah Jane was another mistake of Terrance Dicks made better. Dicks conceived of her as a Revolutionary, but in her year with Pertwee, she expressed this only through the ham-fisted dialogue of how a culturally conservative English man would think a feminist activist of the 1970s sounded. 

Once she was in her proper element with Tom Baker and Robert Holmes, she became a proper Matriarch. She and the Doctor were like two adventurous college students in a madcap romance. 

Mary Tamm’s first Romana also worked best when she was written as a Matriarch. They shared a dynamic like a sitcom couple: the rambling man who doesn’t want to settle down and the domme who can rope him in because he kind of likes it when she ties him up, even though he'd never say so.

Nyssa was a perfect Matriarch for Peter Davison’s Doctor, a quietly confident fellow scientist with a deep sadness in her heart alongside compassion. The problem of this era was, as with Adric, that no one on the writing staff understood the Matriarch concept. Not knowing what to do with Nyssa, they just wrote her out of most action.

We can all agree that Jenna Coleman has been playing
the Doctor already since the start of the Capaldi era?
How about Doctor Who hires her back to play the
Doctor for real in the mid-2030s when she's 50?

I firmly believe that, if we could have had a full season of Mel and Colin Baker’s Doctor on television, she should have been played as a Matriarch. They were another sitcom couple, this one from a broad comedy tradition. He’s the bitter, cranky prick, and she’s the bubbly, sarcastically sincere wife who takes his pretensions down a peg.

But all we got was the carrot juice sketch. 

Donna is the first Matriarch of the new series, which is why I think she’s David Tennant’s best companion. Tennant’s Doctor had an impulsive, over-dramatic immaturity that Donna’s worldliness and empathy complemented and refined. Think of the “Can’t you save just a few?” speech from The Fires of Pompeii or her hug at the end of Midnight. They’re best friends for all the best reasons. 

Clara is a Matriarch. Her deep friendship and empathy with the Doctor helps each other grow, and the show positions her as a parallel Doctor on multiple occasions. 

There’s so much more to grow from with all these types. Even some aspects of the Bimbo character can be fruitful if it’s handled with enough knowledge and nuance. Really, I'm just looking forward to what new developments will happen in the new season next week. As well as the next 51.

So Painfully Fragile, A History Boy, 13/09/2015

After writing my week-long series of posts about two of the most esoteric and difficult writers in the last century of European philosophy, I realized that I actually missed something I said I’d talk about in the beginning. Why I stopped reading D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace to pick up Spectres of Marx instead.

1. Simply put, it was getting dull. This is the clearest reason why I lost interest in Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.* Wallace’s own writing is much more interesting than his life was. And it didn’t take much to be more interesting than Wallace’s life.

* Curious that I’d drop a book whose title purposely evoked ghosts in favour of a book that explored in detail the human experience of ghosts and spectral memory. 

Wallace poured his own life into Infinite Jest, which,
along with literary tropes, was really all he had.

2. Wallace’s young adult life was spent going back and forth between graduate school programs (whether as a student or a teacher) and mental health programs and facilities. The chapters I read in Max’s biography described how several harsher critics of Wallace’s early fiction found it disconnected from the gritty details of life.

Frankly, that’s because Wallace himself was disconnected from how most people actually lived their lives. Max is a sympathetic biographer, and Wallace is nothing if not a person deserving of sympathy (except when he isn’t). So he concentrates these early chapters on what Wallace was trying to do formally with fiction. 

Wallace got his MFA in a program dominated by the minimalist realism of the Iowa school of writing. But simplicity was not his cup of tea. Wallace spent the early part of his career pushing meta-fictional techniques and post-modern aesthetics to their breaking point, and combining these playful methods with an emotional heart that’s absent from a lot of what had come before.

That’s an admirable mission for art. Wallace succeeded, powerfully, and we should be grateful for that. But despite Max’s charity and sympathy for Wallace, simply describing the events of his youth paint a picture of a malignant person who was at best a wreck and at worst a tumour. 

3. I think what disturbed me most was his “relationship” with Mary Karr. I remember reading accounts of this period of Wallace’s life written shortly after he died, which described their relationship as genuinely romantic, but volatile and tense. Max’s biography reveals what these other articles, published in the immediate aftermath of Wallace’s suicide, didn’t have the guts to say.

Wallace never dated Mary Karr. He stalked her obsessively, pressuring her to divorce her husband and abandon her child to be with him. He created a fantasy life of meaning in their limited correspondence, and when he confronted her with his delusions, she rightly reacted with fear.

Some of the biggest regrets in my personal life come from the way I’ve treated some women in my life. I sometimes displayed such awkward, awful behaviour that I now know appeared horribly creepy. And at the time, I’d spin narratives of my own motivations and emotions that validated my disrespectful, off-putting behaviour. 

To see Wallace, a person I generally admired, engage in an even more offensive, manic, obsessive form of this behaviour, blasted to a ridiculous intensity by his bipolar disorder, leaves a disgusting taste in my mouth.

4. The last reason why I put down Max’s biography – and why I may never go back to Wallace’s own writing – is because of how strangely his own mental illness feeds back into his writing. Max, at one point, mentions how Wallace accepted an op/ed journalism job with a 1000 word limit that ballooned into an enormous project.

And I realized that was at the heart of Wallace’s maximalism. It wasn’t a conscious style choice. It was all he could do to bring some kind of order and purpose to his manic tidal waves of expression. 

Yes, he happened to be a genius, and that made his manic bipolar word vomit conceptually interesting and beautifully crafted. But that can’t disguise what it really was.

So that’s why I can’t go back to Wallace now that I know more about his writing, his life, and his personality. I see enough similarity between myself and Wallace (middle-class writers from an intellectual family who’ve struggled to different intensities with depression) that he no longer inspires me.

He makes me feel sick.

A Real Spectre IV: Justice That Isn’t Revenge But Utopia, Research Time, 11/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . So after all this preamble and pre-ambling,* it’s time I finally said something about the idea of justice in Jacques Derrida’s late-period work, and why I find it so interesting for the Utopias manuscript, and in general. 

* Hyphenated word Derrida joke.

What fascinates Derrida throughout his career – and the main concept that the people who he’s influenced in cultural studies – is the slippage between our ideas and reality.** Most of the time, this slippage destabilizes a common-sense presumption, leaves us adrift. This supplies the punk, aggressive energy of Derrida’s 1960s-70s period.

We can still achieve justice for those who live. Part of
this comes through simply doing what we physically
can. It includes running a festival of Syria-related film
and contributing to refugee charities.

** Notice that I didn’t say différance. This is a technical term that you’ll understand if you read his stuff from the 1960s and 70s attentively. But if you read those books explicitly trying to figure out what différance means, it’ll only confuse you, because you’ll miss the forest examining a single tree. 

But by the 1980s, Derrida focussed on the same slippage between concept and reality in ethics and justice. We relate to other people all the time in daily life. We try to do right by them, and fairly serve our moral and social obligations. 

That’s the intuitive conception of justice – do right by people, and give them what they deserve. If someone does something good, return the favour. If someone does evil, wrong, or harm, then punish them. This is retributive justice. 

I’ve written before about why I think retributive justice is inadequate to a lot of political problems. Any fundamentally systematic injustice, really. Because members of an oppressor / privileged group can be implicated in a systematic injustice without intentionally doing any single wrong action. 

Having not done an intentional wrong action as an individual, it’s perverse to punish someone. So if you think the only kind of justice is retributive, you’ll fear that you’ll be punished for a systematic harm that you didn’t personally do. 

I think this lies behind a lot of the white fear of Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and similar groups. White people who personally have nothing to do with police violence or systematic oppression will believe that the minority movement wants to harm them in return. So you need a restorative or reparative approach to systematic justice.

He was always a man who liked to challenge people.

Derrida goes beyond even this, saying that true justice is impossible. Not impossible in the sense that we should give up on it, but in the sense that justice will always call to us. I haven’t come close to finishing the book yet, but essentially, this is about the ghost, the spectre.

The image that Spectres of Marx refers to, again and again, is from literature. Hamlet sees the ghost of his murdered father, and that encounter is a call for him to repair his society and family, returning a broken system to a more just path. And, whether he does or not, he can.

We can too. We can see, for example, the millions of refugees fleeing the Syrian war and welcome them to our countries, setting them up as citizens to begin new lives here. Their social energy will energize our own societies and economies, becoming a new force of labour, business, and people power. 

Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Egyptian, and Libyan refugees in Europe, America, and Canada can lead a new wave of work and dedication that will make our countries great. My grandparents’ generation did the same when they fled the wars and mass poverty of Europe for North America.

But there will always be a break, a slippage, a schiz between our idea of justice and what reality can accomplish. The Kurdi family, and countless others, are still dead on the beaches and bottom of the Mediterranean. Countless more died in the war itself, blown apart by rockets and barrel bombs. Countless more will die in slavery. 

For Derrida himself, the French-Algerian Jew, there were the countless ashen dead throughout Poland, Russia, and Romania. No matter what systematic repair has been made to the relationship of European Gentile and Jew, ghosts still scream from the railways.

The idea – the ideal – of justice is that all these are saved. The reality is that our powers are limited. The ones that are impossible to save are the ghosts that always make true justice impossible. 

From the gap between the ideal and the real comes a howl.

A Real Spectre III: Find the Truth or Tear It Down, Composing, 10/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . Well, I say Jacques Derrida was a major developer of the technique of meditative writing. But the one who really gave birth to the style was his philosophical forefather, Martin Heidegger. But they used the same technique for two very different purposes, so ended up creating very different works.

Heidegger was probably the most profoundly conservative thinker in the West's entire philosophical tradition. Three different points, summarizing very simply a lot of his very complex ideas, will let me use this label.

1) In the sense of his politics, Heidegger was a cultural conservative and anti-development. He was a well-to-do man who grew up in a small, socially insular, very traditional Catholic town in Germany, Messkirch in southern Bavaria, very close to the Swiss border. He considered this rural religious lifestyle the best for German people.

When I really want to make fun of Heidegger's vision of
true philosophy being mystic prophesy of being, I think
of Terry Jones' character Simon the Holy Man. Really,
the concept is much more disturbing, as Heidegger's
Black Notebooks show: he conceived of philosophy as
an authoritarian practice.

He was, correspondingly, very opposed to technological development and urbanization. These views have been picked up superficially to inspire the environmentalist movement, a terrible philosophical mistake precisely because nothing in Heidegger's thinking is superficial. He simply thought too hard for that.

2) He also thought that the philosophical tradition had been chasing the wrong goal when it started to pursue rationality and argumentation itself for a method. So with Plato, basically. This is another way Heidegger was taken up in environmentalist thinking, which rightly understands the messy, chaotic patterns of spontaneous natural development as a superior path for life than the clean, simple rationality of human grids.

Heidegger pursued this largely in philosophy, which meant that he wanted to return the tradition to its prophetic character. Philosophy, Heidegger says, should be the revelations of a prophet (like Anaximander, Parmenides, or Heraclitus) about the eternal nature of existence itself.

3) Heidegger saw himself as such an existential prophet, revealing these truths for the masses to accept. His meditative style of writing was meant to be a philosophical poetry for the 20th century and beyond, picking up the prophetic character of the pre-Socratics again.

This mission for philosophy was a dead end after Heidegger. I think he would have wanted it this way, as he often meditated on the end of philosophy. But the meditative style of writing could be much more than this dusty authoritarianism.

That's where Derrida was a departure. He picked up the same method of meditative writing, but applied it to progressive thinking. Derrida had a fundamentally different personal character than Heidegger, and that pushed his own writing in different directions.

Contrast their biographies alone. Derrida was a dark-skinned French-Algerian Jew, a minority many times over. Society stably conforming to centuries-old patterns makes someone like him homeless, an outcast, or worse.

Derrida's a tough writer who dealt with many different
problems in his books throughout his career. And I
think a good way to approach his work is to understand
his lifelong position as a person. Even though we're
often introduced to Derrida's writings in university
classes as if he were an authority, throughout his life,
he was a minority, a member of different groups, all
of which faced oppression.

Derrida was a Jew born in 1930, though his wartime home in Vichy-controlled Algeria meant only that he was expelled from the state-run school system. Being in Algeria, Derrida and his family were never targeted by the Holocaust's trains, but he watched the horror from the southern coast.

He was never all that concerned with finding stability, truth, or any kind of eternal ground. So while Heidegger influenced Derrida in his meditative writing style, the younger man had his own priorities. Deconstruction has plenty of problems, but it's an excellent philosophical nuclear bomb, Agent Orange, Death Star. And it's target is always authority, the established consensus, conformity to what's acceptable.

It's a way of interpreting a text that makes internal contradictions bubble up from whatever you apply it to. All of Derrida's most famous works in the late 1960s and early 1970s applied this technique to destabilize a lot of presumptions about the possibility of meaning and the powers of language. But when you blow everything up, you find yourself stuck with a lot of rubble.

So Derrida spent the later decades of his career, from about the 1980s onward, figuring out how to salvage something from the rubble. Ethics in particular. Spectres of Marx is one of these conceptual salvage operations, trying to find a politics of justice. Yet it accepts as a premise that genuine justice is impossible to achieve in the world.

How in hell does that work? To be continued . . .