I'm Not Who You Make Me Out to Be

Reading about misogynist extremist Elliot Rodger's killing spree, I found a lot of people who wanted to attribute his violence to assorted things: wide-spread misogyny, sexual frustration, insanity, poor home life, etc. Some people, of course, blamed women in general because women in general would not sleep with him--and of course what they really mean is women-Elliot-Rodger-found-attractive in general; in response to this deranged attribution, others have rightly critiqued the construction of masculinity which requires men to have sex with women in order to become/remain men. While I think there were a number of factors, this last one strikes me as highly relevant to this particular case but also to a whole plethora of misogynistic violence.

For instance, Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic writes, "To [Rodger], women aren't people; they're markers of who is and who is not a man." The choice women make between men defines which men succeed at musculinity and which fail. Berlatsky argues that this construction of masculinity "creates a version of male identity that is bifurcated, or split in two. There is the man you should be, and then there is the failed, non-man thing you are." So the rejection of the latter, the non-man thing, is central to masculine identity, and at its apotheosis this rejection involves the violence against women, gay people, and "failed" men.

Now, I have no interest in supporting any construction of masculinity whatsoever, but insofar as there is masculinity, this sort of masculinity which is dependent on the attraction of women is always going to be toxic. If men are dependent on women in order to gain the identity they desire, then there is a high incentive to manipulate women's choices. After all, it is certainly possible that women will not make the choice you desire; in order to prevent this threat to identity, some men will try to avoid giving women any choice after all. This might come in the form of manipulative pick-up artist tactics or it might com in the form of rape. Finally, it will involve the sort of violence that Elliot Rodger committed.

I have been using very determinist language. Of course many men will succeed because enough women will make the decisions which give them the identity they want; these men probably won't see any problem with the system as it is. And many others will simply be miserable and conflicted, caught between respecting women's agency and not getting the identity they want from those women. But for those who do not succeed at the masculinity to contest, the incentives are very high to disregard women's agency altogether, and so it is almost inevitable that some men--probably many men--will do so. Those men are certainly culpable for their actions, but the entire system which incentivizes those actions is also culpable.

So there seems to be, for the individual man, three choices: the first is to reject the entire construction of masculinity; the second is to remain trapped in it; and the third is to attempt to override women's agency. Of course I advocate for the first, but I at least suggest we support men who choose the second, even as we try to tear down the whole thing.

Three parting notes:

First, I haven't mentioned other issues which do bear on Rodger's killings and on misogyny in general. For instance, entitlement seems to play a large role in Rodger's video and manifesto: he not only needs women to choose him, but he deserves women to choose to him. It is easy to flip the whole dynamic along gender lines: women, too, need men to choose them in order to really be women, but they do not generally have the same sense of entitlement, which might be one of the reasons women are far less likely to use violence against men. And there are certainly other reasons women are less likely to be violent, too, and I'm sure all of those reasons are due to some cultural construction or another; not one of those reasons is biological or is intrinsic to their biological sex. And I'm sure there are particular psychological factors involved, too; after all, only some men follow through on the incentives I've been talking about. All that is worth talking about, too.

Second, I think this issue might be generalizable in certain ways: any identity which depends on the choice of other people (or another person) will be in constant peril. As a consequence, anyone who constructs their identity in this way will either live with the risk that they might lose or fail to achieve their identity, or must find some means by which to coerce the choice of those other people. If they take the first route and succeed, then they will probably not see that anything is wrong with this way of constructing identity, but if they take the first and fail, they will probably have a destructively low sense of self-worth. If they take the second route and succeed, they will violate another person's agency, possibly with violence. If they take the second route and fail, they will not only violate another person's agency, but they will even more radically jeopardize their whole endeavour. Depending on the context failure or success is probably random, not merited, so this cannot possibly be construed as a fair system, but even if it were fair, it would still incentivize the second route and obscure that fact to those who succeed at the first. Here are some examples I can think of: a parent who depends on their children for their identity as a parent, an employee who depends on their bosses for promotion, a blogger who relies on public acclaim for their sense of self-worth.

Third, this is not a call for independence. Of course we are, and must be, dependent on other people. I am arguing not for isolation but simply for a construction of identity which is not dependent on others. I am not denying the very real sense in which we are emotionally, politically, and materially dependent on other people.

An Apology to Authenticity

I have perhaps been unfair to what I've been calling the Polonius virtue. While, when I started out writing about it, I said that I thought you could likely build an argumentative robust version of it, I haven't been doing the best job of keeping that in mind. Instead, I've generally been thinking of people who adhere to the Polonius virtue as being pretty seriously mistaken. Of course even thinking that they're mistaken might be kind of strange, since I first came up with this idea in the context of Moral Foundations Theory, and there are real questions about whether moral foundations (or values) are even opinions anyway, at least in the sense that we think of them; we don't seem to choose which foundations matter to us. But I still want to make a case for valuing authenticity to oneself, in some shape or another.

To recap, I suspect that authenticity is value that a statistically significant proportion of humans care about. One version of this is the Polonius virtue, so called because of this line from Hamlet, spoken by Polonius: "This above all: to thine ownself be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man." To whit, it is a moral good to be true to yourself, a proclamation taken to mean many things. I think the problem, in fact, is that it's taken to mean so many things, and so many of those things are silly that I forget that some of them may not be so silly. For instance, I won't apologize for thinking that acting "true" to your every impulse is a good thing; hardly anyone can believe that if they keep in mind how many times people have conflicting impulses. But I think there might be one possible reading which isn't so silly: you shouldn't lie about yourself to yourself.

If you want to navigate the world with much hope of success, it will be much better if you are honest about yourself. This isn't a claim that there is some deep, immutable self to which you might be honest, nor is it even a claim that there is a temporary but nonetheless coherent self-of-the-moment about which you might be honest. I can fully recognize that I'm conflicted, that I'm partially opaque to myself, etc. and so forth, and still say that I tend to feel certain ways about certain things (so, for instance, I am afraid of heights, I have depression) and that I tend to do certain things (so, for instance, I usually articulate inchoate emotional content in logical, procedural ways). If I'm going to make it, I ought to know all of this about myself.

Another take on it: I need to recongize when people around me are making demands of me which don't honour the ways in which I differ from their ideas about what humans are. I typically see drives for authenticity as being a little anti-conventional, and I think this insight--that people do make demands of you which just don't mesh well with your personality, your needs, your cognitive style, etc.--is where that anti-conventional attitude might come from. Sometimes the dominant narrative just won't work for us; we aren't all or always so easily caught up in our culture's folkways. Being honest about this does seem rather important, at least as a condition of other goods.

And, for goodness sake, this is precisely the sort of thing I've been hoping other people would start adopting (particularly ones I think of as being uber-logical, disembodied rational types, like the Less Wrong people--and that may be unfair caricature, as well). I guess I've been an advocate for particular version of the authenticity ethic and I didn't even know it. Which is ironic in the technical sense. I'm a perfect example of what can go wrong if you aren't aware of yourself: I spent most of my life with dysthymia and I didn't even know it. Had I known it, things might have gone much better for me. And I'm also a decent example of what can go well if you are aware of yourself: I knew in advance that I was going to have a depressive breakdown, and I got a medical leave in time to weather that storm without damaging my academic career. So this specific kind of authenticity ethic is one I'm deliberately cultivating.

I think there are a few ways the Polonius virtue can go wrong, however. The first is when knowing yourself becomes an excuse to remain static. The second is when people start generalizing about what people are like; this can be a case of thinking other people are more like you than they are, or in can be a case of reasoning out from beliefs you have about human behaviour, even when it does not correspond well with the evidence/other people's experiences. The third is using an authenticity ethic to support selfish behaviour. The fourth (perhaps a superset which contains the third) is privileging authenticity over other goods. I'd explicitly disagree with what Polonius actually says: you can be true to yourself (whatever you take that to mean) and still be false with other people. (The most obvious example is that you could lie, and know you're lying.) And I think a lot of the metaphysics or anthropology that people build around the authenticity is unfounded .As an example, you could say that Freudian psychoanalysis is a huge and erroneous mythology built out of the valuable recognition that we are opaque to ourselves and spend a lot of time trying to repress/suppress our desires so that they correspond with societal norms.

Another way it can go wrong, too, is that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we know ourselves when we don't. Smart people prone to introspection are, apparently, really bad for this: smart people are terribly good at rationalization, and trick themselves into thinking they know their own mind. I'm inclinded to think that a fairly good knowledge of psychology--maybe not formal education but at least some commitment to following academic psychology, rather than folk psychology--would help people in this, but maybe not. That might just improve the plausiblity of their rationalizations, not improve the accuracy of their rationalizations. Really, awareness of the limitations of self-awareness is a kind of honesty to oneself, isn't it?

So in future I will try to be fairer to this ethic, and recognize that it probably has a place, when articulated in a certain way and when it is not burdened with baseless metaphysics. In retrospect, it seems appallingly obvious that, at minimum, being honest with oneself about oneself is pretty important to proper functioning. We've just got to pair that with the twin insights that 1) we can never really know ourselves entirely and 2) we are constantly in flux.

And I'm sorry if I offended anyone with my callous dismissal of authenticity as a moral good.

Kinds of Abandon in The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker.

Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni is a lovely novel, even if it does read a little like the first novel it is (there's too much coincidence). As the back of the book explains, it is about Chava, a golem, and Ahmad, a jinni, arriving in New York City in 1899. Chava's master-husband wakes her for the first time minutes before his unsuspected death; when Chava arrives in New York, she is masterless. Ahmad has been trapped in a flask for centuries, and when he is released by a Syrian tinsmith in Manhattan he is still trapped in the human form given to him by the same Bedouin wizard who put him in the bottle. Assorted plotlines unfurl and characters develop, including members of both the Syrian and Jewish immigrant communities and including Yehudah Schaalman, a deadly Kabbalist sorcerer. In a sense it is a book about immigrants in America (Wecker says so explicitly), as the Golem and the Jinni are immigrants in immigrant communities, but the eponymous protagonists are also immigrants to a parody humanity, both trying to act human despite the ways in which their natures rebel against human constraints.

Chava and Ahmad become friends of a sort (though their first meeting is late in the novel, more than a third of the way through), bound by the fact that each of them is a mythical creature pretending to be human for fear that the humans around them, compared to whom both Chava and Ahmad are incredibly powerful, would quickly destroy them in fear and distrust. But they make poor, quarrelsome friends most of the time, because as much as both of their natures resist the humanity they are forced to take on, they resist in very different ways. Chava is a golem, a creature made to serve; without a master, she is aimless, and a quirk of the magic which bound her to her master now allows her (compels her) to feel the desires of everyone she encounters, and when she feels those desires she has an impulse to serve them. (With one exception: she was made to be sexually faithful to her husband.) Chava also fears running amok; whenever a golem gets a taste for violence, it is said, that golem will never stop. Ahmad, on the other hand, is a powerful jinni, a fire spirit once able to enter dreams, fly, and change his shape at will. He roamed the deserts and acted on his whims and desires without thought to consequence. While he retains some of his power, he is bound to human form and certain human vulnerabilities (and worse). And so while both struggle with being human, their desires are radically different: Chava hates the freedom of being human, while Ahmad hates the constraints of being human. Let me excerpt a passage for you (I admit it's a little long):

She shook her head. "You misunderstand me. Each golem is built to serve a master. When I woke, I was already bound to mine. To his will. I heard every thing, and I obeyed with no hesitation."
"That's terrible," the Jinni said.
"To you, perhaps. To me it felt like the way things were meant to be. And when he died--when that connection left me--I no longer had a clear purpose. Now I'm bound to everyone, if only a little. I have to fight against it, I can't be solving everyone's wishes. But sometimes, at the bakery where I work, I'll give someone a loaf of bread--and it answers a need. For a moment, that person is my master. And in that moment, I'm content. If I were as independent as you wish you were, I'd feel I had no purpose at all"
He frowned. "Were you so happy, to be ruled by another."
"Happy is not the word," she said. "It felt right."
"All right, then let me ask you this. If by some chance or magic you could have your master back again, would you wish it?"
It was an obvious question, but one that she had never quite asked herself. But then, couldn't she guess? What sort of man would take a golem for a wife, the way a delivery man might purchase a new cart?
But oh, to be returned to that certainty! The memory of it rose up, sharp and beguiling. And she wouldn't feel as though she was being used. One choice, one decision--and then, nothing.
"I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe I would. Though in a way, I think it would be like dying. But perhaps it would be for the best. I make so many mistakes, on my own."
...
She'd half decided to turn back toward Broadway; but then he said, "Do you remember what I told you before? That I was captured, but have no memory of it?"
"Yes, of course I remember."
"I have no idea," he said, "how long I was that man's servant. His slave. I don't know what he made me do. I might have killed my own kind." There was a tight edge in his voice, painful to hear. "But even worse would be if I did it all gladly. If he robbed me of my will, and turned me against myself. Given a choice, I'd sooner extinguish myself in the ocean."
"But if all those terrible things did happen, then it was the wizard's fault, not yours," she said.
Again, that not-quite laugh. "Do you have colleagues at this bakery where you work?"
"Of course," she said. "Moe and Thea Radzin, and Anna Blumberg."
He said, "Imagine that your precious master returns to you, and you give yourself to him, as you said you perhaps would. Because you make so many mistakes. And he says, 'Please, my dear golem, kill those good people at the bakery, the Radzins and Anna Blumberg. Rip them limb from limb."
"But why--"
"Oh, for whatever reason! They insult him, or make threats against him, or he simply develops a whim. Imagine it. And then tell me what comfort it gives to think it wasn't your own fault."
This was a possibility she'd never considered. And now she couldn't help but picture it: grabbing Moe Radzin by the wrist and pulling until his arm came free. She had the strength. She could do it. And all the while, that peace and certainty.

To be honest, I am more sympathetic to Chava's plight than to Ahmad's. Ahmad's desire is freedom, and his growth as a character is to move from moral nihilism to greater responsibility; his attendant fear is simply that he will lose his freedom. Chava's desire is to be servant to a master which will grant her certainty in her decisions, but her fear is more than just that she'll remain aimless; her fear becomes the dark parody of what she desires, that she will be servant to someone who would cause her to hurt others. And, indeed, this is precisely what the threat of running amok is to her: she would be servant to her own darkest impulse, the golem's buried but ever-present taste for violence. It's not just that I recognize both Chava's fears and her desires more than I recognize Ahmad's; I find the fact that what she fears is the logical extension of what she desires to be more interesting than Ahmad's simplicity.

But what interests me most is how both of them desire a kind of abandonment. Ahmad wants to abandon himself to his own desires, be they good or bad; he wants to abandon himself to freedom. Chava wants to abandon herself to her master's desires; she wants to abandon herself to service. If each of them got what they wished, they would lose themselves. Chava explicitly acknowledges this--"I think it would be like dying"--but even Ahmad would dissolve into a sort of formlessness, being a shape-shifter and perpetual wanderer. He would not be recongizable. (To an extent this is a writer's trick; he would probably have a continued sense of identity, but his jinni name is kept from us because it's supposedly inarticulable by humans, and in the flashbacks to his time as a free jinni he did not appear, at least to me, to be quite as fully developed a character as when he was human; at any rate, it wasn't until he starts following humans and investigating them that he starts to differentiate from other jinn. I think this was deliberate on Wecker's part.) As much as Chava's nature and Ahmad's nature rebel against their current human condition, it is exactly that condition--not free of conscience or consequence, but free to make decisions nonetheless--which makes them characters. They gain identity by their humanity.

While The Golem and the Jinni is no allegory, the point is pretty plain. Chava and Ahmad are different in origin and different in ability than humans, but otherwise they are hardly different at all. This sense that being human is horribly uncomfortable, either because we rebel against the limitations our humanity gives us or because we rebel against the freedom our humanity gives us. Some people prefer one rebellion to another, but each fails. From what I can tell Wecker is not particularly religious, but I think that between Chava and Ahmad (but more Chava) some of the particular struggles and griefs of religious life are well represented. I saw much of my own fears and concerns in Chava, and while I do not feel that The Golem and the Jinni provided much way forward as far as those struggles go, I nonetheless found it an enormously satisfying read, not least because character-driven fantasy novels are so hard to come by.

Who Can Afford Sanctification?

or, Can We Get There From Here?

In my last post, in which I wrote about Terry Eaglton's Why Marx Was Right, I shared Marx's claim that we cannot really engage in praxis (that is, activity that we do for its own sake and not as a means to our economic ends) and cannot really actualize our potentials (I'm not always sure what the means, but bear with me) if we are unable to meet our material needs, or even uncertain in our ability to do so. This leads to a pretty simple conclusion: the bourgeios are able to self-actualize and the proletariat are not. Further, the bourgeios are often able to self-actualize through their work and the proletariat cannot; while a CEO could very well work as hard as the person bussing tables at three different jobs, the CEO is working on themselves and not just at their job, which can't be said so easily for the serving staff.

Abraham Maslow has made a similar observation in his hierarchy of needs: meeting basic needs like food and physical security are preconditions for self-actualization. Pure Land Buddhism also contains a similar idea: true enlightenment is not available in this world, but there is another world in which a meritous practitioner can be reincarnated called the Pure Land in which our material needs are all met, allowing us to focus on attaining enlightenment without the distractions which weigh us down here. There are traditions, then, both psychological-sociological and Vedic, that ask what precisely the material conditions of enlightenment are.

All this stands in stark contrast to my experience and understanding of Christianity. The Beatitudes, which are generally considered to be part of the heart of Christianity, bless the poor rather than the rich, and Jesus tells us that it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Indeed, there is a tendency in Christianity (or, anyway, progressive Christianity) to conflate Christ with the poor, likely because Jesus tells us that we are treating him as we treat the hungry, thirsty, naked, and imprisoned. I'm fully aware that there are other trends in Christianity, which conflate wealth 'n health with divine favour, but the sort of Christianity with which I am familiar suggests that Christ-likeness might look a lot like homelessness (cf the Franciscan and Benedictine monks). I do not mean to deny the close ties between Christ and the poor, or the serious challenges wealth can present for spiritual well-being, but I do want to suggest that Marx's insight--that pursuing activities for their own sake rather than for your stomach's sake (and this probably includes a lot of religious transformation) is a whole lot easier when you aren't starving--is one that it might help us to remember.

I think that I can pretty uncontroversially identify "becoming Christ-like" with praxis and self-actualization. Given that, I have a few ideas, but I don't know how or if these ideas work together.

On the one hand, we Christians can maybe celebrate the fact that we have strategies for acheiving praxis without having all of our material needs secure. Indeed, it's perhaps easier for progressive Christians to imagine sanctification among the poor than among the rich. I'm also reminded of Hinduism's provision for the labouring class, in which they can shed karma through their work (the yoga of labour). At least for the moment, it would be incredibly prudent for us to consciously develop what it means to become Christ-like when we have urgent material needs calling us in other directions. Even in the most successful communist society imaginable, we would still have material needs and we would still be vulnerable to illness and injury, so these strategies for praxis-in-privation will still come in handy. I should say that lots of folks are already working on exactly this project, but I think we would benefit from recalling Marx's insight more explicitly.

On the other hand, we Christians are called to feed the poor--that is to say, help them meet those material needs. Now, Jesus didn't say to what ends we should help them meet those needs; it certainly doesn't say we should feed the poor because it's easier for rich people to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for poor people to do so. The trouble is that when I was reminded of the yoga of labour, I was also reminded of how the yoga of labour was used as justification for serious economic and social inequalities in the caste system's later incarnations. So, sure, on the one hand it's probably a good idea to find ways for poor people to work out their salvation which don't rely on the luxuries of wealth, but that work can often be a distraction from the other work we should be doing to help the poor not be poor. I'm not saying it's inevitable that one leads to the other, but it's awful tempting.

The way forward might be the one I expect you're thinking of already: one of the things we do to become Christ-like is feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, etc. My becoming-Christ-like, my self-actualization, consists at least in part of helping out poor people. Hopefully, if we're taking sanctification/praxis/self-actualization seriously enough to tackle the self-actualization-for-the-poor thing, we will automatically be working on the helping-the-poor-not-be-poor thing. (But maybe that's excessively optimistic.) It might be disconcerting to think that we have one kind of praxis for the rich and another for the poor, since by definiton the poor cannot help themselves not be poor and call it praxis, and bending down from our privileged pedastals to dictate a strategy for praxis-in-privation could become paternalistic and patronizing really quickly, but it's probably squeamishness that's freaking me out on this inequality rather than actual concern for justice. The poor have to roll differently because their lives really are different. So I still think there's a link here, where helping other people pursue Christ-likeness or praxis is, itself, the pursuit of Christ-likeness or praxis. At any rate, I promise to think more about it.

Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts: My Top 25 Borges Stories

Jorge Luis Borges (Source: Wikipedia.)

Partly in response to a request for Borges recommendations, and partly because it woud make it easier when I recommend Borges in other people's comboxes (which I do with what I'm sure is annoying regularity), I have decided to compile a list of what I feel are Jorge Luis Borges's twenty-five best short stories, "best" here being the totally objective measure of how much I liked remembering them when reading Wikipedia's list of Borges's work. Before I begin, I think it is best to place Borges: you'll likely get a sense of his style just from these selections, but each of his stories appreciates the better you know his style and the different things he writes. For this reason, I suggest you read the Wikipedia page, or a similar source, before diving into his work. (I would have liked to recommend the introductions to some of his collections, but I do not have my copy of Collected Fictions on hand, so I cannot identify which collection has an introduction I would like to recommend. This is a shame, as in one of them he writes some very thoughtful things about translation. And as far as non-fiction goes, I would also like to recommend his The Book of Imaginary Beings, which is a bestiary of imaginary creatures.)

These are ordered roughly as you'd find them in a chronological collection of his work; at any rate, they are ranked as you would find them ordered within his short story collections, and the collections themselves chronologically by publication. In order to make your reading decisions easier, however, I've arranged them again below according to themes.

My summaries are deliberately incomplete because many of them are spoilable and I would never want to diminish a person's experience with Borges. Of course I won't mark which ones are the most incomplete because I don't want you starting the story expecting their to be a twist or something.

1. "The Widow Ching--Pirate" is part of The Book of Iniquities, which is famously half-plagairized. It follows the career of the eponymous women, a real historical figure whose depiction here is as much hagiography as it is biography. At the beginning of his career Borges was writing stories about ne'er-do-wells, outlaws, and thoroughly amoral people, but his interest in such characters remained throughout his life.
2. "On Exactitude in Science" is Borges's take on the map/territory problem. It is about a group of cartographers who make a map that exactly fits the empire. Baudrillard later addressed the story in Simulacra and Simulation. It looks like it is a citation, but Borges actually wrote it himself.
3. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is a review of a fictional novel of the same name. I consider it a deeply touching story; it involves a young man trying to find an ever-receding spiritual leader. I understand that it meant something different to Borges than it does to me; to be honest, I haven't read enough of Borges's essays on personality to be quite sure what it meant to Borges (or, anyway, to be as sure as one can be).
4. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is also a review of a fictional novel; this time, the novel is Don Quixote, except written by Pierre Menard rather than Cervantes. It is about how to read texts in light of their authors, among other things. Recall that, in the Spanish literary tradition, Cervantes holds much the same role as Shakespeare holds in the English literary tradition, and that Borges loved classical literature.
5. "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" is maybe the least interesting of the reviews of fictional works that I've included, but it is still interesting. As with the others, Borges suggests books that are interesting in conception but might be tedious to read in full, and I am grateful to Borges that I can think about these books without feeling bad about not having read them, since they don't exist.
6. "The Library of Babel" is one of Borges's fantasies. It is about an enormous and self-contained (ie. microcosmic) library that contains all possible books of 410-page books (of a certain format), and the philosophical consequences of this situation. It is one of Borges's many meditations on infinity. (If you like philosophy, I suggest you read the Wikipedia page on this story once you've read the original, as Wikipedia summarizes what philosophers have said about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel.)
7. "Death and the Compass" is a short detective story, one of Borges's oft-referenced genres. It is not like most mystery stories. It was the first Borges story that I read in full; it was assigned to a class in which I was the TA, and I had to teach it. Expect considerations of mirrors, a labyrinth, and one of the names of God.
8. "Three Versions of Judas" is about a fictional theologian who considers, in three different and increasingly heretical works, what the Incarnation meant and what role Judas played in it.
9. "The Dead Man" is one of Borges's gaucho stories. I have not included many of them and wanted to be sure I had a few. This one is pretty classically Borges.
10. "The Theologians" is about a rivalry between two theologians. It is also about heresy and orthodoxy. It, more than "Pierre Menard," is about how all people are one/the same, or whatever it is that I don't quite grasp about Borges.*
11. "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" is, in way, about conversions, and about finding things worth sacrificing oneself for, though I don't know if Borges would summarize it in the same way. It is not about damsels in distress at all. Like much of Borges work, it is both neo-classical and concerned with South American history and politics.
12. "The House of Asterion" is about Asterion, who is a shut-in. Don't be put off by the beginning; by the end of the story I felt much more sympathy for the narrator, not because he becomes less oblivious but because his obliviousness becomes more, well, sympathetic.
13. "The Zahir" is another fantasy or magic realist piece. It is about a fictional object, the zahir, which makes anyone who sees it become obsessed with it. Someone somewhere says it is about unrequited love, which I think is a horribly diminishing interpretation. It is in many ways the partner and opposite of "The Aleph," which I actually liked less than "The Zahir" and did not include in this list.
14. "The Maker" is about memory and poetry and what kind of life (and psychology) is necessary for art; to this end, it follows a man whose life at least begins in a way that does not predispose him to poetry. I think it is easily one of Borges's most beautiful stories.
15. "Dreamtigers" is quite short (as is "The Maker," but even that isn't so short as "Dreamtigers"). It deals entirely with Borges's obsession with tigers. It also deals with the limits of art. Borges considered it his most personal piece. Some people consider it a poem.
16. "Argumentum Ornithologicum" is a tongue-in-cheek apologetics for the existence of God based on counting birds. At least, I think it's tongue-in-cheek. It's cute and very very short, but it nearly didn't make this list.
17. "Everything and Nothing" is about identity, and Shakespeare, and art, and maybe God.
18. "Borges and I", maybe one of Borges's most well-read pieces (that's wild speculation, you should likely ignore it), is about what it's like to be an author...or, anyway, an author who strongly believes that personality doesn't exist and that identity isn't as coherent or discrete as well mostly pretend. It is not magic realist at all, by the way; it's strictly realist.
19. "The Intruder" is about a love triangle. If you've read Eve Sedgwick's Between Men, you'll realize how badly this can go. It is most interesting to read in light of Between Men, especially once you know that Borges based it on a true story, but changed two of the characters from friends to brothers specifically to prevent any homoerotic undertones. It is also one of Borges's gaucho stories.
20. "The Duel" is about a rivalry between two society ladies who take up painting. I maybe include it because I share Borges's obsession with rivalries. It's unusual for Borges in that all of the primary characters are women.
21. "The Gospel According to Mark" is a sort of surrealist take on the Gospel of Mark. A man stays with a family of illiterate labourers isolated in the pampas and introduces them to the Bible. Events take an unexpected (but in retrospect unsurprising) turn.
22. "Guayaquil" has Borges, or a near-Borges, as a protagonist. It is about some letters of Bolivar; it is also about Spanish American history, and who writes about it.
23. "There Are More Things" probably would not make this list if it was about merit, but since this list is really about which I like the best, it is here. Borges wrote it as an homage to H. P. Lovecraft, and I think in reading it I learned that Borges would likely have made a better Lovecraft than Lovecraft did. (That's maybe unfair. He'd have made a more eloquent and more patient Lovecraft, but maybe not a better Lovecraft. Unless being a less racist Lovecraft is enough to make him better, in which case...)
24. "The Book of Sand" probably would not make this list if it was about which ones I liked best, but since I am kind of pretending this list is at least sometimes about merit, it is here. Like "The Library of Babel," "The Zahir," "The Aleph," and some others, it is about infinity. It is also magic realist/fantasy.
25. "Blue Tigers" could have exactly the same description as "The Book of Sand." Please note that it is not about tigers at all, actually, but having read "Dreamtigers" is probably a prerequisite to really appreciating this story and why Borges named it "Blue Tigers."

Ones I almost included but did not: "The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell," "The Man on Pink Corner," "The South," and "A Yellow Rose."

Below I have organized the stories thematically. Feel free to ignore all of the headings you find boring.

Magic Realism and Fantasy Stories:
"The Library of Babel," "The Zahir," "There Are More Things," "The Book of Sand," "Blue Tigers."

Iniquity Stories (including guacho stories):
"The Widow Ching--Pirate," "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Dead Man," "The Intruder."

South and Latin America Stories (including gaucho stories):
"The Dead Man," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "The Intruder," "The Duel," "Guayaquil."

More Personal Stories:
"The Maker," "Dreamtigers," "Borges and I," "Guayaquil."

Stories with Overtly Religious Themes:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'Tasim," "Death and the Compass," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Theologians," "Argumentum Ornithologicum," "The Gospel According to Mark," "The Book of Sand."

Stories with Infinity as a Theme:
"A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," "The Library of Babel," "The Zahir," "The Book of Sand," "Blue Tigers."

Stories about Literature:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," "Death and the Compass," "The House of Asterion" (perhaps), "The Maker," "The Dreamtigers," "Everything and Nothing," "Borges and I," "There Are More Things," "The Book of Sand." (Huh. I wonder what particular theme interest me the most...)

Stories about Art:
All of those in "Stories about Literature," and "The Duel."

Stories with Mathematics or Science as a Theme:
"On Exactitude in Science," "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" (maybe), "Argumentum Ornithologicum," "Blue Tigers."

Stories with Identity as a Theme:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Theologians," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "Everything and Nothing," "Borges and I."

Stories that are Quests, especially for Knowledge, kind of but not really:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Death and the Compass," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "There Are More Things," "Blue Tigers."

Stories in which Female Characters Play an Important Role:
"The Widow Ching--Pirate," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "The Intruder," "The Duel." (This is maybe one of Borges's weaknesses; he writes mainly about men. Thank goodness they are not all white, able-bodied men.)

Stories which have a Plot, as Traditionally Conceived, or anyway as Traditionally as Borges will Write:
"The Widow Ching--Pirate," "Death and the Compass," "The Dead Man," "The Theologians," "The Zahir," "The Intruder," "The Gospel According to Mark," "There Are More Things," "The Book of Sand," "Blue Tigers."

Stories which might not even be Stories but Some Unnamed Genre, maybe "Fictional Essay"**:
"On Exactitude in Science," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," "Argumentum Ornithologicum," "Borges and I."

Stories, of this list, that are easily my favourites:
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," "The Maker," "Dreamtigers."

*The trouble is more that I don't know how to articulate what Borges is getting at than that I don't have any idea. It is much less willowy-sounding than I've made it out to be, though perhaps still less intellectually rigourous than some might care for.
**If you notice that not all of the stories are included in one of "has a traditional plot" and "might not even be a story," be assured that it's because a lot of what Borges writes is on the border between the two. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" contains a story, for instance, but also contains a fictional review of that story. Others have events but not in some sort of linear plot way.

The Polonius Virtue

or, Are These All the Foundations They Could Think of?
A Moral Foundations Post

When I took the test and got my results, I was a little surprised because I thought two concepts were missing: freedom and authenticity.

Freedom's absence was conspicuous because I had expected to have a fairly high ranking in freedom (or whatever concept they had to oppose oppression). Further, freedom--whether articulated as liberation, choice, agency, or anarchy--is a pretty common trope for political speeches and actions, everything from liberation theology to pro-choice advocacy to justifications of foreign and domestic military violence (which is grossly ironic). As it turns out (according to Wikipedia, anyway), liberty/oppression is actually a concept in Moral Foundations Theory, but it hasn't migrated over to any of the tests I have done. Does anyone know why this might be?

What I really want to talk about is a moral foundation that I suspect does exist but is missing from Moral Foundations Theory: authenticity.

Authenticity's absence was also fairly conspicuous to me, but for a different reason: I was expecting to have a low score in this measure. I tend to think of authenticity as the Polonius virtue: "This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man." Of course calling it the Polonius virtue isn't really a compliment: I think we have changable and contextually-informed identities and that we have no complete internal identity to which we owe some kind of allegiance. In other words, I think authenticity, naively imagined, is generally meaningless. (As we'll see, I think some people have made it more robust, at which point I become much more sympathetic.) However, I know that a lot of people do have certain sentiments that could be organized under this concept and aren't especially clearly organized under concepts that already exist in the Moral Foundations quiz I took. For this reason, I suspect that a good study would find people operating on this assumption. Let's ennumerate some.

1. Some people--a lot of people--value truth very highly. Including the desire for truth here may well be a sort of equivocation; the dogged pursuit of the truth of the world might not be especially similar to the dogged pursuit of the truth of oneself. Similarly, semantic honesty--never make false claims about the world--is not the same as emotional self-disclosure. Of the examples I'm going to list, truth-seeking and -telling seems least connected to authenticity. But I'm not sure truth fits well under the other concepts, either.

2. Existentialism values authenticity very highly. In fact, this is likely its highest (or only) value, though it would understand the term much more like #1's articulation than Polonius's. Is this a moral sentiment of existentialism's own, though, or an extension of #1's, or a philosophical system entirely disjointed from moral foundations?

3. Somewhat more brutally than existentialism, there are some who seem to think that genetics are destiny. You should act in certain ways (for instance, men should sexually pursue multiple women; women should seek to raise children) because these behaviours are genetically encoded. This might fit here? It seems a recycled version of straw Freudian psychoanalysis, which also seems to value a kind of authenticity.

4. Taoism also values authenticity in much the way Polonius does, but with a metaphysics to support it. In my understanding, Taoism does tend to pair authenticity with freedom, but it's worth pointing out that the Taoist sort of freedom and the Taoist sort of authenticity don't look quite so undisciplined or spontaneous as we might imagine. According to Stephen Prothero, Taoists would say that we've been severed from our true natures; Taoist practises require discipline and, well, practise, but eventually the practitioner would become authentic. (If there's a version of authenticity that I find plausible, it would be this one. Of course, I would be using a different metaphysics.)

5. Taoism might appeal very much to those who Walter Truett Anderson calls neo-romantics (see this post for a definition), though the practices of New Agers and radical environmentalists might not be recognizable to a traditional Taoist. (Though maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it would be recognizable.) There's a certain stereotype of people who talk about being yourself and getting back to nature, an idea that human action should be grounded in a certain human nature. I'd like to see if this stereotype would bear out empirically; are there many people who take such a line seriously? (I'm not being judgemental; I just want to be sure that I'm characterizing this position correctly.) I suspect this bears some relation to the common contemporary exhortation to honest self-expression, to letting people (or friends, anyway) know what you're really feeling. Although this concept bears a striking structural similarity to genetic determinism (truth to an intrinsic nature), I think it's far more innocuous. (I suspect the structural similarity comes from the fact that they share pop psychoanalysis as a common ancestor.)

Could these five (or six, I guess, since I put psychoanalysis in with genetic determinism) groupings constitute an empirically supportable concept, in the way of personality test indicators? My suspicion is that it does represent an existing moral sentiment, but I would like to see the evidence. I would like to hear your opinions on it.

I also notice that the there's a bit of equivocation in the concept of nature under authenticity (especially in #4 and #5): according to the stereotype, environmentalism might sometimes correlate with authenticity (but, again, I'd like empirical studies on this). One must be true to oneself, to maintain ones true self, in much the same way that we wish to keep nature (the environment) true to its nature. And this made me think more about the moral sentiments behind environmentalism. I think there's a lot of harm/care behind environmentalism, at least for me, but on a gut level a lot of people, when they're talking about the environment's authenticity (is this really the wild?) seem to being talking about the environment's purity. And purity is already one of the moral foundations.

I'll save purity for another post and I'll end with the reminder that I'm speculating and that what I really want is empirical evidence for all of this, but I'm also wondering aloud whether authenticity, while paired with freedom sometimes (ie. spontaneity and self-expression) and honesty at other times, might also bear some relation to purity.

Index

This Exploitation Might Not Be the Kind You're Thinking of

National Identity and a Pageantry of Stereotypes

When discussing his motivation for making the movie Desperado (2010), director Robert Rodriguez said he was interested in giving people a similar experience to one he had watching John Woo's The Killer:

Rodriguez says that when he got to Hollywood to make Desperado he wasn't trying to make a Latin film but a film that was entertaining just like when he saw John Woo's, The Killer and he thought, "Damn I want to be Chinese." With Desperado he liked the idea of people watching it, who would say, "Wow I want to be Mexican." [sic] (source)

Recently I've been thinking about the relationship between identity/community and the sort of quilt of stereotypes that define exploitation flicks like Rodriguez's later Mexploitation flick Machete (2010), as Rodriguez's quote exemplifies.

(I'm drawing my knowledge of exploitation flicks from these sources: Wikipedia's page on the genre; TVTropes's page on the genre; my own viewings of Coffy (1973), Undercover Brother (2002) (which is really am affectionate parody of Blaxploitation rather than an example of it, despite the fact that Blaxploitation was self-parodying from the outset), Kill Bill I & II (2003, 2004), the Grindhouse movies Planet Terror and Deathproof (2007), and Machete; and conversations with friends on these and other exploitation flicks. Take my interpretations with the grain of salt designed for opinions based on insufficient evidence.)

Exploitation flicks are often described as containing some kind of exploitation (a gimmick to draw in audiences) rather than high-quality plot, acting, or cinematography, but since things like action sequences, romance, horror, and comedy count as exploitation, this definition reduces the term to something as vague and unhelpful as "genre movie." Sometimes definitions insist that two particular exploitations--graphic violence and nudity--must be present, which does narrow the definition considerably but still includes everything shown on HBO (Game of Thrones, I'm looking at you). To narrow the definition so that it actually approaches common use, I would say that an exploitation flick must 1. use at least one of graphic violence and nudity/explicit sex to draw audiences; 2. promise some other material that will play on specific conventions and/or stereotypes and violates a contemporary taboo, such as religion/sacrilege, racism/racial identity, Nazism, or cannibalism; and 3. be notably or seemingly low-budget (though not necessarily poor quality). Often the element in the second qualification places the film in a particular subgenre: among the subgenres, Blaxploitation (which draws heavily on stereotypes of and societal problems for black Americans), nunsploitation (which often shows nuns exhibiting sexual behaviour we don't expect of nuns), and kung-fu movies are perhaps the most well known.

Exploitation flicks tend to incorporate as many stereotypes and associations connected with their chosen theme as they possibly can. For instance, Machete, which I will use as my example throughout, is mainly about illegally-immigrated Mexican Americans ("We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us!") and it has redneck border patrols, cockroaches, taco stands, semi-mythical revolutionaries, high Catholicism, street fighting rings, chop-shops and pimped-out cars, corrupt Federales, bandannas, and people brandishing rickshaws, hoes, and shovels. Plot devices include Mexican immigrants using publicly subsidized health care, Mexican characters getting construction work, Mexican characters infiltrating houses by doing yard work ("You ever notice how you let a Mexican into your house just because he's got gardening tools?"), and American-raised Mexican-Americans struggling to balance American and Mexican identities. It is almost as though the script writers made a list of all possible stereotypes that Americans have of Mexicans, strung them into some kind of order, and wrote a plot around that. Most of these stereotypes are presented as blatantly as possible. Subtlety is not highly valued.

Given the genre's focus, exploitation flicks usually privilege a pageantry of associations over the linear logic of tight plot. There is something carnivalesque and anti-systematic about them (though, of course, it is not necessarily the case that they don't have some kind of deep order). Part of this might come from the fact that the exploitation flick's very name implies an emphasis on immediate experience--pleasure, outrage, shock, tittilation, excitement--over a more considered or analytic engagement. It assumes that an exuberant display of taboo topics will be pleasurable to its intended audience, perhaps in part because of the imagined or documented outrage of a putatively unintended audience of social censors (but of course this unintended audience is really intended if their outrage is a real source of pleasure). However, there's something more to this than just the pageantry and the pleasure of taboo. These films use the play of stereotype and the overabundance of flavour to explore, if not always articulate, a certain kind of collective identity. In my flagship example, Machete, this is especially obvious; Rodriguez has said that he wanted to make his national/ethnic identity attractive, so Machete must display something that is recognizably Mexican, even if Mexican-ness is not clearly articulated in the film. (Of course it couldn't be; it, like any national identity, is imaginary.)

This leaves me with five directions for further questioning.

1. There must be a considerable difference between an emic (insider's perspective) and an etic (outsider's perspective) exploitation flick. Were Machete an etic film rather than an emic film, we would be quite right to consider it an act of appropriation at best, derogatory patronizing at worst. As much as I'm tempted to subscribe to the death of the author, it is clear that an author-figure (or author function) of some kind is still hugely important to an interpretation of a text. If an exploitation flick plays with the identity of a community, how much changes depending on whose community it is?

2. Exploitation flicks play on a confusion of identity or affiliation as well as an exuberant expression of one. I am not Mexican; it is unclear what affiliation I am supposed to have with this film (or it would be if Rodriguez hadn't helpfully told us that we're supposed to want to be Mexican). In etic exploitation films, we're often encouraged not to affiliate with the thematic group; from what I can tell, hixploitation films do not want you to want to be a hick. But more often than not it's unclear: what does Coffy think of race in America? The associative rather than linear focus makes it hard to pin down.

3. Identity must be somehow related to association. I might want to say that my identity as an academic, for instance, is based on a set of values or a set of practices, but if you were to make a gradsploitation flick the salient features would be much less logically coherent ones: all-nighters, useless erudition, endless arguments, grading papers, probably some seductive co-eds (which have nothing to do with my life as a grad student but would be conventional in such a film), etc. Is this a good way of imagining identity, "good" meaning either "accurate" or "admirable"? What does this tell us about how to strengthen our communities? Or does it say something very bad about the communities in question? Is it just a clumsy genre? Of course we should remember that in the case of things like Blaxploitation and Mexploitation, which focus on minority communities, there's a jocular reclaiming element to the stereotyping. The pleasure may come from claiming certain identifiers that were thrust upon them. These films might be excellent examples of the post-modern sense of irony, in that they balance self-conscious parody with sincerity.

4. If an exploitation film is the vehicle for making Mexican identity desirable, this might suggest that violence and nudity make identities desirable, which I find disconcerting. There's a lot in our culture to suggest this is true, but it's worth thinking about why. There are some obvious answers: violence implies that the protagonists are strong and capable while sexuality implies that the protagonists are desired by those who are desirable and desire those who are desirable (and thus have ideal normative sexualities). I'm sure this has something to do with masculinity et al., which makes me suspicious. But I'm also suspicious of those who would ban exploitation flicks as a prudish reaction to violence and nudity/sex; I suspect that filmmakers can use both exploitations to make intelligent and valuable commentaries, even if they have not ordinarily done so.

5. This is probably a coincidence, but to what extent does the term exploitation, which as an industry term does not refer to oppressive practices, relate to exploitation in the sense of oppressive practices? Exploitation in the latter sense has played a role in the history of black Americans, Mexican Americans, etc.; it might be argued that the nudity in these films is an exploitation of women; the violence in these films might reflect the violence needed to enforce the exploitation of oppressed populations. It is probably a coincidence, but it does seem a terrible irony that the method by which filmmakers "exploit" an audience entails or reflects the presumed audience's own exploitative practices. (It also gives a certain linguistic legitimacy to the Marxploitation flick, a genre I made up.)

Other People's Epics

If you're here regarding Leah's Turing Test, you almost certainly want to take a look at this post about choosing the best genre for your beliefs as well as this one. It's the one she gets her question from. Don't worry: it's much shorter.

One of my recurrent pastimes is to imagine what another person's epic might look like.

As far as genres go, the epic is one of my favourites to think about. No individual epic counts among my favourite books (though, you know, Paradise Lost is pretty great). The reason I like thinking about them is that, at least in the English tradition, they have become a kind of formal game, thanks to the humanists of early modern England. (Note to readers: "early modern" is the new PC term for "Renaissance;" in England the early modern period spans the 1500s and 1600s, but it got started earlier in Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, etc.). Let's dive into a bit of history, shall we?

In early modern Europe, there was this group of artists and scholars called the humanists (who are different from the existing group of people who call themselves humanists). They believed in lots of things which were revolutionary for the time, like the idea that people's talents were formed through education rather than inheritance, and that the arts were crucial to intellectual and moral education. They were also pretty keen on the Classics, especially the newly-rediscovered Aristotle. (Or, at least, newly rediscovered in Europe; in Baghdad Aristotle was well-known.) Emulation (mimesis) and variation-on-a-theme/pattern were central to their pedagogy. Thus they emulated the ancient Greek and Roman writers.* One of the genres they embraced was the epic. In the Greco-Roman tradition, famous examples are Homer's Odyssey and Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses, though many humanists (most notably Edmund Spenser) patterned their careers on Virgil's. Dante was the first early modern poet to write a successful epic--The Divine Comedy--and Spenser introduced the form to the English language much later in The Faerie Queene.

The humanists liked classifying and defining poetic genres, and we have them to thank for a lot of the very rigid forms, like sonnets. So when they wrote epics, they codified conventions that their Classical predecessors included somewhat more haphazardly. For instance, early modern epics are usually divided into twelve books, because that's what Virgil did. Some of these conventions have become part of a formal definition for epics as you'd read in a dictionary of literary terms: they must include a katabasis (a descent to the underworld); they must include divine intervention of some kind; they are broad in scope, covering the known world, both geographically and intellectually (they almost always include references to recent scientific discoveries and inventions, reference to historical events, literary allusion, and so on); the protagonist must be aristocratic and must embody the virtues held in high esteem by the audience/author; it must begin in media res; it must describe an event that is of great historical or mythological importance to the community in which the epic was written. However, other traits became just as conventional, and just as necessary, in early modern Europe (or England, anyway). A professor I once had said that any poet who wanted to be somebody had to include in their epic a description of the dawn which beat out Homer's rosy-fingered dawn (or at least beat out their contemporaries' descriptions). Other necessities were a half-snake half-woman creature, a talking tree, catalogues of objects, and ekphrasis (a description of a work of art); all of these were drawn from Homer, Virgil, or Ovid. EDIT 24 July 2013: Another crucial convention is the digression. Epics almost always have long asides--sometimes these are flashbacks (pairing with the convention of in media res), sometimes these are history lessons, sometimes these are even premonitions of what is to come (oracles and prophecies are also epic conventions), but often the digressions are bits of plot that wander off from the main goal. Characters might get lost, or separated from their companions, or get kidnapped or imprisoned. They may have dalliances with seductresses or get distracted by red herrings. The coarse of a true epic never does run smooth. /EDIT

Early modern epics were almost always in verse, usually in heroic couplets. (A common way of organizing them was twelve Books divided into cantos, which were themselves divided into stanzas, which were themselves in couplets...but not all epics were like this.) In fact, strict definitions often insist that epics are written in verse, but many people allow for prose epics, and I'd argue that prose epics are still being written. Paradise Lost was the last great verse epic, as Milton himself declared; after this, most verse epics were mock epics. The Dunciad is perhaps the most famous of the mock epics, but I did once know someone who was working on a mock epic detailing the colonization of Trinidad.

(History lesson over)

Looking over the list of requirements, it should be clear that epics of this kind** are especially well suited to expressing their author's ideology. Of course all texts contain ideology, but epics do so very explicitly. The topic must be formative to the community and the protagonist must be exemplary of the community's values. The presence of the Underworld and the gods means that the religious and mythic sensibilities of the group are involved. The scope means that the epic gives a shape of the physical and intellectual world of the community. Epics are often nationalist. Thus Spencer was deliberately writing an English epic. Sometimes, however, epics are more religious than nationalist; Milton, who thought that England's climate made English culture tepid and generally worthless, avoided the national epic and instead wrote a Christian epic. But whatever group they represent, they do it explicitly and obviously. This makes them very good places to examine a particular worldview. Bakhtin (who I've mentioned before) says that epics have a single viewpoint; they are monoglossic, one-voiced. And as much as I've been talking about early modern epics, I think more contemporary epics exist: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and lots of other fantasy obviously fit most of the criteria (Tolkien was writing a saga, not an epic, but the two are similar and it seems clear that he was incorporating early modern epic conventions, too; while the Narniad did not start as an epic for Lewis, it seems clear to me that, by The Magician's Nephew, or maybe even The Silver Chair, he knew that he was writing one). But I also think that Wade Davis' nonfictional/historical/semi-autobiographical One River is an ethnobotanical epic. I don't think for a second that Davis intended to make it an epic, but it actually fulfills every single requirement, right down to the snake-lady and the description of the dawn. (Also, The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are film epics if you let Will's father-become-part-of-the-ship count as a talking tree--Ovid's and Spenser's talking trees were usually people turned into trees. I don't know what worldview the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are showcasing, though. That's something to puzzle out.)

What makes the epic so amusing to me, then, is that as a genre the epic is almost like a fill-in-the-blanks for ideology. You have all these empty fields which you fill in with content; once you've filled in the fields, you have an epic. What's interesting, of course, is to see how the different features change based on what worldview is slotted in. For instance, in Paradise Lost, the katabasis is Satan's flight into Hell after losing the War in Heaven. In The Faerie Queene, the talking tree is a man who was seduced by a witch (who signified the Catholic Church) and was turned into a tree when he discovered who she was, but in The Lord of the Rings, written by an environmentalist, the talking trees were Ents, early eco-warriors. In The Faerie Queene the hero is a gentleman-knight; in Lord of the Rings he is a hobbit, an analogue for the simple rural men-at-arms in WWI's trenches; in One River the hero is a revolutionary ethnobotanist who has what Davis calls a taxonomic eye, the innate ability to identify taxonomy at a glance. Good epics of course are not really just highly stylized Mad Libs; a skilled epic poet or writer will make creative use of the genre's constraints rather than be a slave to them. So what I like to do is imagine what different kinds of epics would look like. What would an environmentalist epic look like? (Probably a lot like The Lord of the Rings.) What would a Canadian epic look like? What would an Anglican, or Catholic, or Mormon, or Muslim epic look like? What would a librarian's epic hero's virtues be, or an engineer's, or a home-maker's? What would be the Underworld in a Dutch-Canadian epic, an Asian-Canadian epic, an Inuit epic?

I also think about the sorts of world-views that make me uncomfortable. What would an Islamaphobic epic look like? A homophobic epic? A white supremist epic? An anti-feminist epic? This is less fun, but it might be a helpful exercise.

Ultimately, though, I realize that The Faerie Queene is not just an English epic; Spenser wrote it as a handbook on courtly behaviour. It is an English Anglican aristocratic humanist epic. Milton wanted to write a definitive Christian epic, but Paradise Lost is in fact an Arminian Copernican materialist Christian epic. Or, even more accurately, The Faerie Queene is Spenser's epic; Paradise Lost is Milton's. So as fun as it is to figure out what a feminist's epic would be, I really need to be thinking what a specific person's epic would be. What is my epic? What is, say, Stephen Harper's epic or David Suzuki's epic? What is your epic?

I wish people still wrote epics, because while imagining other people's epics is fun, being surprised to find out how another person used the snake-lady is even more fun. We must watch how we imagine other people's stories, because when we do so we run a terrible risk of reducing them. For this reason I would prefer to read them rather than imagine them, but since most people don't write epics, all I've got is the imagining.

---

*If all of this stuff about humanism sounds vaguely familiar and not especially noteworthy, it's because much of our culture is descended from humanism. It was radical at the time: the neo-Platonic monastic tradition was the real force in education and art prior to humanism's advent, along with a sense (among aristocrats) that high culture was exclusively aristocratic. To our eyes, the monastics come off as seeming rather silly (for instance, they believed that the names of objects were intrinsic to the object, while humanists believed that names were socially assigned to objects), but it's important to remember that in most circles the monastic tradition was taken as obviously true until the humanists showed up.
If you're thinking that it looks more familiar than just a vague permeation of our culture and instead sounds a lot like the ideas of the Inklings, or of W. H. Auden, or of T. S. Eliot, then you'd be correct; these writers are known as Christian humanists because of their affinity with Shakespeare, Sydney, Spenser, Wyatt, Marlowe, et al. Christian humanism is a lot bigger than neo-classicism, of course.

**I say "epics of this kind" because in a more anthropological or comparative-literature sense, the Greco-Roman and early modern European traditions of epics weren't the only ones. Lots of people count sagas and  puranas as epics; there's a whole system of designation between oral or primary epics and literate or secondary epics which includes lots of things that don't fit here. However, I'm focusing on the tradition I'm familiar with, that one epitomized by Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene.

The Freedom of Labels

A Note on Depression

For the most part I am used to hearing people discuss labels as limiting devices. For instance, when discussing sexuality, labels are boxes in which we put people; this limits the kinds of behaviours that we expect from them. However, I have also heard people discuss how labels can be liberating rather than limiting. Elizabeth Esther, on her eponymous blog, frequently identifies as ENFP, and has explained how personality typing has legitimized her behaviour. When Richard Beck criticized the Myers-Briggs personality test on empirical grounds (and, incidentally, I support his criticism), he received a lot of backlash from people who found that personality typing to be hugely helpful (however, I cannot find that post again because I think the criticism was buried in comments somewhere; sorry). What's going on?

Among other things, personality types help legitimize certain cognition and behaviour. I have found that identifying as an introvert has been incredibly helpful in understanding my own emotional responses and explaining them to others. In many cases, explanation has the force of justification: what was previous seen as an overreaction, a sign of poor mental discipline, is now a facet of my personality. The labels that personality tests provide, even if empirically unreliable, can be a way of insisting on cognitive diversity. When my interlocutors assume that everyone should be like them, I can use personality labels to insist that I am not like them and do not need to be like them. (When I assume that everyone should be like me, my interlocutors can use personality labels to insists that they are not like me and so on.)

But ultimately I find that even personality labels come with limitations that outweigh their freedoms. One of the most insidious aspects of dysthymia is that those who have it often do not know they have it. Rather than knowing that they have a mood disorder, they think that they are simply melancholy individuals or that they are subject to varied but constant bad luck (see my history with dysthymia). When I had dysthymia, I believed both that I had assorted personal flaws and that I was repeatedly in unhealthy situations. It was only in discovering the term dysthymia that I was able to understand my problem not in terms of personal flaws or external forces but in terms of a specific and treatable mood disorder. Or, even if it is not treatable, to claim the term "mental illness" can be liberating in other ways. I felt the stigma of mental illness, certainly, but psychiatric (and pseudo-psychiatric) labels were helpful in understanding my behaviour and giving it an etiology outside the realms of blame and persecution (cf this post). In this way, I consider the labels of mental illness even more freeing than the labels of personality.

Of course, my experience is not generalizable. I might be in a minority. The label "mentally ill" has been used to disenfranchise people since the inception of that term (cf Foucault). I assume labels are liberatory in proportion to how much control the labeled have over them.

Being Unable to Value

A Note on Depression

Having depression is strange. It is likely the case that any mental illness will produce a breach in a person's sense of self, at least if they are self-aware enough to notice. What makes depression strange is that I find myself unable to value things. Or, more specifically, I am unable to trust my ability to value things. Because I am depressed I do not feel that many activities or goals are worth pursing. Activities that I may once have found satisfying no longer satisfy me. I suppose my seratonin levels are down. (I don't actually know that; I'm basing this on my rudimentary knowledge of psychology.) I am aware that my current feelings about certain things--for instance, my academic discipline, artistic endeavour, social encounters--are not the same as they would have been a year ago or will be a year from now. This puts me in a strange epistemological position; while I can trust my regular sensory and rational abilities (I'm not hallucinating or delusional), I cannot be sure my value judgements are accurate.

Because I cannot be sure what I will value in the future, I do not want to make many/any long-term decisions right now. In a lot of ways I have been stalling, waiting for treatment to start working before I look beyond my immediate treatment. However, I am reaching a place where I need to think about what my goals are. This period I am in is an opportunity to make changes in my life that will help me be a healthy, effective, and productive member of society. It seems I am in a bind: I find it difficult to make the value judgements that will be necessary for me to become mentally healthy again, which is a (perceived) requirement for making those value judgements.

In the last few years I have increasingly learned more about myself, a process which has made my own opacity to myself increasingly apparent. That is, by learning about myself, I realized that if I had anything to learn it must mean that I am ignorant about myself. Perhaps what is new is my realization that what I have to learn about myself is chronological as well as, say, unconscious. Being depressed has made very clear to me the fact that I am not who I was nor who I will be, and my decisions now will impact my life in the future. Normally I would see no problem in making those decisions according to my values in the present: I do not usually have a reason to suspect that my future values will be drastically different from my present values.  (I should clarify that I do not mean "values" in a moral sense but rather in the sense of gaining satisfaction from activities.) Right now, however, I do know that my future values will differ from my current ones. Further, those future values are inscrutable. Perhaps this bind is true at all times for all people, but it has only become apparent to me in these extraordinary circumstances.

"Those to Whom it Matters Most"

One more article before I get to work.

In "Gay rights and religion are not opposed to one another," Petra Davis begins by talking about the false binary that much of the same-sex marriage debate has formed:

Lesbian, gay, bi and trans people are as diverse, culturally, as any other group, with many from faith communities among the throng. Gay columnists are quick to deploy generalisations about religious abuse, with little regard for those with complex cultural, sexual and gender identities. If the debate were led by those to whom it matters most - LGBT people of faith - it might well look significantly different.

She moves quickly from this topic to the other issues around which LGBT people might want to organize: say, mental illness or homelessness in the LGBT community. These seem to be more pressing issues that equal marriage rights. Why are they not being addressed? By the end of the article she becomes a bit alarmist--I'm not sure I would want to use the phrase "a new queer fascism"--but barring the final paragraph, it's a good read.

A few disconnected thoughts: the LGBT people of faith may not be leading the conversation because, by now, their voices are thoroughly overwhelmed. I do not imagine that they can speak easily in their religious communities (though that's changing); I don't know enough about LGBT circles, but I imagine there might be silencing there, as well. So asking why the conversation is not being led by them strikes me as a little naive: they have good reason of fearing being outed (as queer or as religious) to either community. But we should also try to avoid the "silent victims" trope, which can re-enforce their victimhood and cast us (whoever we are) as necessary saviours for them. (Avatar, Dances with Wolves, The Blind Side, The Help, etc. etc.)

And perhaps the focus is on marriage rights because those are easier to fix than homelessness, mentall illness, and so forth. It has clear victory conditions. Focusing on the Marriage Front allows one to identify enemies (those who oppose legislation) and easily select tools (lobbying, legal-drafting, etc.) to win that campaign. The other arenas are more serious, but finding out who is blocking you and selecting the best means to acheive your goals are a lot harder when you're combatting increased incidents of mental illness in LGBT people. That daunting (and less clearly adversarial) campaign makes it difficult to draw media attention, financial backers, and public support. It also involves other categories of oppression (ie. mental illness, neurotypicality), which makes delineating your "sides" a lot harder.

The Canadian Epic

Since tomorrow is Canada Day, I'm going to muse a little about what sort of narrative art would best represent this country. I do this because I have a sense that there is no form of art which could thoroughly tackle the problem of Canada.

Last year, I wrote how I gave some thought to what a Canadian epic would look like, and that I hadn't gotten very far. You can see that in Take 5. I thought about the kinds of things one would want to include, somehow: maple leaves, maple syrup, fields of corn, mountains and other quintessential Canadian landscapes, beavers, moose, Tim Horton's coffee, hockey, polar bears... (I say this with my tongue partly in my cheek.) Since then I have learned a bit more about Canada and a bit more about epics and I see that there is a problem. There cannot be a Canadian epic.

A national epic, properly understood, has a unified sense of nation. That is, The Aenead offers a sense of Rome as a nation; The Faerie Queene offers what it means to be English. Not all epics are national; Paradise Lost is a Christian epic, giving a unified and complete sense of Milton's idea of Christendom. I suggest elsewhere that One River (Wade Davis) could be considered to be an ethnobotanical epic. Regardless, whatever it represents, an epic is supposed to embody and represent the ethic and sensibility of that group. It generates or at least displays a coherent identity. If that group has disparate parts, it unifies them. It ties them all in together. It exudes Englishness, Romanness, Christianness, ethnobotanistness. (There is more to an epic than this. Wikipedia gives an OK account of it. If you're interested, it's a very cool form. I'm sure there are articles you can get from an academic library which would discuss it in greater depth.)

Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian language theorist working in the 1920s, goes further. An epic (or anything written with an epic sensibility) has a single language. In his formulation, a language embodies the social position and worldview of that speaker. He doesn't hear mean the distinction between French, Russian, English, Latin, etc. "Language," rather, refers to smaller groupings. Think, for instance, of the language used by politicians in speeches as a language, or the language of legal documents, or the language of Catholic sermons, or of Evangelical sermons, or of atheist bloggers, or of daycare workers when speaking to children, or of "storytelling voice", or of flirtation, or of plumbers talking about their trade, or of nineteen-year-olds texting one another. Each of these has its own patterns; in each of these, the same word may have different meanings (think, for instance, of what "reasonable" might mean in each of these languages, or whether that word could even be said in all of them). Each also, therefore, represents a different set of relationships between words and ideas and people. That is, each represents a different wordview. The epic is written in a single language. If other languages appear, they appear as objects that the author is presenting, not positions the author is adopting.

Canada is too diverse for an epic to work. More than this, we are self-consciously diverse. The political vision of a unified Canada might suggest that we could rally under multiculturalism--in fact, that often is the political vision of Canada--but unfortunately we cannot easily do this. If we were to honestly and fairly incorporate different people into the Canadian epic, we'd have a problem. Many of the First Nations, Inuit, Asian immigrated, Eastern European immigrated, and African immigrated people would have a problem with the sort of Canadian narrative offered. They (rightly) have problems with the existing narrative offered. It would be all but impossible to find a story which could incorporate all of their voices. A story that could would lose it's unity; it would lose any sense that there is one way to be Canadian. That there is such a thing as Canadianness.

Further, Canadian regionalism gets in the way. How does one reconcile Vancouver, for instance, with Ontario? Many people in Vancouver rebel against the idea that Ottawa speaks for Canada; at least, if Ottawa speaks for Canada, it certainly doesn't speak for Vancouver. In many ways, Vancouver feels more aligned with Seattle and Hong Kong than with the rest of Canada. And what of Quebec? What of Newfoundland? What of Nunavut? Each has its own reason for feeling alienated from a sense of unified Canadian identity, either because they stick so fiercely to their own culture (Quebec), or because they feel that the federal government's policies are deliberately harmful to their economy (Newfoundland), or because their government, ethnic constitution, and basic living conditions are so fundamentally different from the rest of the country's (Nunavut). Each province and territory has a unique political climate, physical and vegetative landscape, occupational environment, music scene, colonial history, and (often) accent and vocabulary.

And, unlike the United States, we haven't mythologized the founding of our country. We don't speak of principles on which our Constitution is based, or of the intentions of Founding Fathers, or of some vague sense of democratic ethics synonymous with our country's name. We don't take ourselves to be representative of freedom or democracy or human rights (though we have as good a claim to be so as the United States does).

Maybe this is why things like maple syrup, polar bears, beavers, moose, the "Canadian landscape," and hockey are Canadian symbols: they're blank, they're less charged (though hockey is becoming a problem), they're unrelated to the actual things Canadians live with and face. But for the same reason, they can't represent us in any meaningful way. And, anyway, not even something like winter can be taken as universal. A friend from Vancouver has said to me that he's never experienced a so-called "Canadian" winter and he's lived here most of his life. And it's not as though Canada's the only place to get winter. Alaska has a winter, as do Russia and the Scandinavian countries.

So Bakhtin's sense of a novel might work better. The novel is structured around heteroglossia, the juxtaposition of voices. Good examples of heteroglossia in English are Sterne, Dickens, and Austen. Even the authoral language is seen from the viewpoint of secondary languages; language which is parodied nonetheless resists parody, exists in its own right and must be taken as a self-contained language. (Not all things we call novels today fit in this definition. Most are much more unitary, more like epics.) Perhaps, then, there can be a Canadian novel, but it would nonetheless not have the sense of unified identity. Rather, it would at best suggest multiple, contradicting ways of being Canadian. The Great Canadian Novel cannot really be Greatly Canadian because it can never be finished. That, in fact, would be the only essentially Canadian thing about it; the disagreeing voices would multiply beyond the possibility of representation.

And so over the course of the last year I have come to recognize that writing the Canadian would not be hard but rather impossible. Of course all groups have much internal dissent, and one wonders how many sixteenth century English readers rebelled against Spenser's sense of the English, or how many seventeenth century readers rebelled against Milton's sense of the Christian. (I'd say "a lot" for the latter.) But there was at least a sense that the authors could fool themselves into thinking they'd done it. Such self-delusion would be much more difficult for Canada at this time. Perhaps it would be possible in Ottawa or in an Ontario public school, where a sense of Canadian identity is much more fierce. But if, like me, you've travelled a bit more of the country, spoken to more of the people in it, studied more of its history, you'll start to see that it can't be done.

No. If I want to write an epic, it can't be a nationalist one. But I can still write a Canadian [genre], I suppose, so long as its incompleteness is highlighted.

(And maybe I can still write an epic, but one for a different kind of category. A literary analytical epic, for instance? A bookworm epic? An Anglican universalist epic?)

The Problem of the Augmented Body

or, What is our body? part 3

I return to this series somewhat more hesitant about it than when I began. Much of the reason there has been such a gap between instalments is that I realized I had little to say. Or, alternately, that what I had to say was not very well considered. In my discipline, literary analysis, there is a lot of discussion of bodies; how we relate to them, how they are represented, how they interact, and what they are. So when I say that I know nothing much about them, I do so in a field in which theorizing about bodies is taken very seriously and is done a great deal. Perhaps this in part explains my trepidation to proceed.

But proceed I will, because I still feel as though I can say something that will be new at least to some people, maybe even ones that will read my blog (especially if Leah continues giving it publicity). What I can perhaps offer is a sense of how the more postmodern, English department-style of thinking about things can impact such a question. I think I’d just like to bracket this post off as somewhat provisional, subject to revision. Or, even better, maybe we should think of it as a starting point for further inquiry.

And don’t worry. I will have a lot more to say, with more confidence, later in the post, once we move away from this issue of raw bodies.

Let’s catch up on the ground we’ve covered here. In my first post I considered a very biological, organic, cellular, genetic sense of body: bodies are made of continuous living tissue, distinct from one another based on disconnect. I used a number of case studies to indicate how this conception must fail. Continuous living tissue is not sufficient to any definition of a body, and I mean this in more than one sense: that which defines one body from another is not continuous living tissue. But I have not ruled out that it might be necessary. That is, it might be one component of a more complex picture.

In my second post I considered an instrumental sense of body: my body is that which I have motor control over. I used a number of case studies to indicate that this cannot be a necessary definition of body. There are things I do not have motor control over (my teeth, my heart) which are my body. I want to clarify, though, that I do not mean to say that instrumentality is not sufficient to being part of my body: perhaps motor control over something is enough to make it my body.

It cannot be the case that continuous living tissue is necessary but not sufficient and motor control is sufficient but not necessary because there is at least one instance in which people have motor control over an object but do not have a continuous living tissue connection. That instance is possession of a prosthetic limb. (Which is the issue that sparked the whole controversy over at Unequally Yoked.)

So let’s get some examples. We have limbs which replace typical human appendages and have some motor function determined by synapses. This is a fairly commonplace example and is fairly easily conceived. While you might from the outset disagree, I think most of us could at least understand why a person with a prosthetic might consider it part of his or her body: it replaces a part of the body which is formerly there. If you replace a computer component with a new one, that new one is now part of the computer. If you replace a body component with another one, we could analogously consider it part of the body. This breaks down somewhat when you realize that prosthetics are not necessarily replacements: they are sometimes function where a person did not already have a limb or they sometimes offer functions which the “original” limb did not have. However, I think it’s a good place to start thinking about prosthetics. We could also say that the addition of a new periphery becomes part of the computer when added even if it does not replace anything that formerly existed there. If you would consider a transplanted heart as now part of the new owner’s body, I think I can expect the onus to be on you to explain how a non-organic heart would be any different. (If you wouldn’t consider the transplanted heart to be part of the new owner’s body, I would like to hear you explain why. The idea is alien to me.)

Let’s move in another direction for a moment. Let’s consider the Emotiv EPOC, a console device which allows you to play the video game simply with your mind. You wear a device on your head and, after a calibration process, it lets you move characters around on the screen with your thoughts. It does this by reading your brain waves. I must admit that I am personally less comfortable taking the characters on the screen to be part of my body. I must also admit that I would be less comfortable taking distant objects also moved only by synapse/circuitry to be part of my own body. To suggest that a remote control car is “me” because I can move it with my mind seems deeply problematic. That such a situation isn’t unimaginable given the EPOC indicates that we must take it seriously.
(And to forestall any complaints that this is not the same as a prosthetic, I’ll point out that some prosthetics operate on this technology and not through nerve-circuit interface.)

The point I see being appropriate here is that the Emotiv is not part of my body because I do not identify with it. That is, I specifically disagree with the claim that identification is not relevant to the conversation. Certainly it is not sufficient: no matter how badly I may identify with your body, that does not mean it is part of my body. But I think it is a component of what is going on. The physical attachment of a prosthetic encourages the owner to define it as part of her body; even when removed, in fact, it may still be considered part of her body due to her identification with it over time. Motor control also plays a role in this, of course; sensory feedback would play even more, and is perhaps part of why the EPOC, lacking as it does in tactile response, does not have the same identification.

But I am merely asserting that identification is relevant. I cannot, actually, back that up, but for two points which might be suggestive. The first is that many people with prosthetics say that those prosthetics are part of their body. While this doesn’t prove anything, I want to point out that we as a society have done a pretty bad job of listening seriously to minority groups. Once we do start listening, we often learn a surprising number of things from them. So maybe listening would be a good idea in this case; to simply say that they are wrong because they go against our own predetermined ideas is not a good idea politically, rhetorically, or epistemologically. The second point is also the destination of this post:

My opinion, as it stands and for whatever it’s worth, is that there is no way of determining, definitively, what a body is or who it belongs to. What we have instead are a number of competing ideas that almost work but that always, somewhere, break down. In the previous instalment I said that if we want a universal definition, it must apply to all bodies. Since I do not think we can find a definition that does apply to all bodies, then we cannot have a universal definition. I want to suggest, in fact, that we not only have no way of writing such a definition, but that the category of a discrete body might not exist outside of our idea of it anyway. There are not discrete bodies.

However, it is important that we act as if there are. (Imagine what rape would look like in a society which did not recognize discrete bodies.) But this doesn’t mean that we pick a definition of body and stick to it regardless of the consequences. Instead I suggest we ride definitions as far as they go until they break down. When they break down, we look around, see what the issue is, and draft a new definition that we can use until it stops working. What becomes crucial, then, is to listen very closely to what the people with those exceptional bodies are saying, because they’re the ones who have the best insight into what a body is in that situation. (And so I circle back to my first suggestion.)

So, to be clear: I would say that if people with prosthetics define body such that that prosthetic is part of their body, then it is part of their body. However, how we define bodies is not so simple because it must take into account the society we live in. I will address this a forthcoming section. In the meantime, I will spend a few instalments dealing with the opposite half of the dualist equation: the mind.

Series Index