The ‘Sin’ of Omission, History, and Philosophy

I picked up this afternoon, as a summer present to myself, a giant collection of fiction by Jorge Borges, who in the past year has become one of my favourite authors, especially in how I approach my shorter pieces of fiction. Thousands of ideas traversing all disciplines of knowledge animate his work, and his work inspires just as many ideas in his readers. Meditating on his work today has distilled in me the reasons for one of the only concrete, unequivocal stands I take in philosophy and art.

I have occasionally come across a philosopher who believes that the discipline’s goal is to discover ultimate universal truths through argument, and that these truths will be simple, clear, and comprehensive. I’ll omit names of those I’ve met personally, and mention one illustrative example that I’ve only read, Scott Shapiro. It’s an admirable goal, the admission and expectation that one day, philosophy will have completed its task, and in so doing, will be the greatest of all possible sciences. It will have explained all of existence in a short series of simple phrases.

It’s a beautiful dream, but an arrogant, hubristic, and ignorant dream. Consider the nature of expression, not in terms of what is meant or what is said or what is understood, but in terms of what is not said. I say a single word, for example, ‘symbol.’ Most of the time, we concentrate on that spoken word itself, and what it could mean, how we can understand it.

But when I say one word, I choose that one over all the thousands of words that I know in the languages I understand. So much of what is possible is omitted when I act. All the words that I could have said are thrown away and forgotten when I choose that one word. This enormous omission of what could have been, of possibility, of capacity, happens with each utterance of every person.

When I am silent, that is actually when I am closest to articulating those dreamy phrases that encompass all the universe, because I omit the least. In not acting, I certainly don’t omit, but I don’t say anything either. Perhaps that’s what Wittgenstein meant when he ended the Tractatus with “That of which we cannot speak, we must be silent.” There are some possibilities, some capacities, that we should not ignore and discard because of the occasional practical need to say stuff. This, I think Wittgenstein tried to say.

I don’t have Wittgenstein’s mystical leanings, but I think this is important for philosophers to consider when trying to articulate their mission statement. Every word said, every idea developed, requires the omission of all the ideas and words within our capacities apart from that one chosen. Articulating what is requires the omission of what could have been. If philosophy is to take capacity seriously, which I believe it must, then we must consider the radical finitude of all sensible statements. What is said cuts away all that could have been said. Can we really consider all that is said to be a complete picture of reality when so much is invariably omitted?

It Was So Much Easier with George W Bush

Earlier this summer, I was having coffee with an old friend of mine, and the conversation turned to American Presidents. I remember specifically when he asked me to compare George W. Bush and Richard Nixon. A few years ago, at the height of the second Iraq invasion (the ‘successful’ one), I would have put them on about the same level. But now, I’m not so sure.

Through the twisting webs of facebook, I discovered a blog post on Psychology Today written just after the Republican National Convention meeting officially ratifying John McCain and Sarah Palin as their Presidential nominees. Despite a hopelessly provocative title, the post described a high quality study of what psychological traits were most common among conservative thinkers. The study discovered paranoia, fear of death, fear of change, intolerance of ambiguous situations or answers.

It actually made a lot of sense to me. I no longer see a firm disconnect between one’s personality and one’s political beliefs. One’s political attitudes are shaped by personal thoughts about what people are, and how different groups of people interact. So the conservative thought patterns of hostility to foreigners, anti-pluralism, conformity, the retention of the status quo despite inequality, poverty, or counter-productive economics are the political articulations of these personalities.

I’ve been thinking about W lately because American conservatives today are so very different from him. When I compared W to Nixon in that conversation, I realized that W actually wasn’t so bad. He surrounded himself with advisors who brought out the worst in some of his policy positions, like the invasion of Iraq for the sake of ‘democracy.’ But W actually believed in democracy. He believed Islam was a religion of peace, having met people in his alcoholism programs who healed themselves through faith in Allah, while he chose Jesus.

And W understood that the repressive governments of the Middle East provoked the very radicalism they fought so violently. Of course, he completely screwed up any possible success he might have had, because the Iraq invasion was a ham-handed piece of political idiocy operated at almost every level by morons. But he was doing it for democracy, or at least that’s what he always believed.

What Cheney believed was another story altogehter.

W was never anti-immigrant in the racist way a lot of major conservatives are today. In a recent article on The Daily Beast, they quote W from his days as Texas governor speaking about Mexican illegal immigrants in a humanizing way. W understood that Mexican immigrants were sneaking across the border because Mexican workers are egregiously underpaid, and that jobs in the USA would bring much more income back to their families. It’s a far cry from Jan Brewer’s paranoid shrieking about invasions of Mexican coke mules onto every suburban street corner in Phoenix.

What fascinates me about W are the contradictions and paradoxes that inform his personality. He was a political idealist at the centre of a corrupt administration. He saw the good in many people, even though his campaign machine was based around polarizing Americans and provoking conflict among them. His universals were black and white, good and evil. But when you sat down to talk with him as a singular person, he listened and tried to understand.

The real tragedy is that the hateful American conservatisms on the rise are so much more poisonous and poisoned than the poster boy for twenty-first century conservatism. Enjoy your retirement, George.

There Is a Cut Under My Left Eye

Here is a story of how I got the small, but cosmetically noticeable cut under my left eye Friday night.

I was wandering home from The Brain on James North, having gotten a cab with my friend who lives in Dundas out of solidarity, even though I’m pretty sure I probably cost her extra because of Hamilton’s twisty one-way streets. I pay my share of the fare and get out at the convenience store plaza, wandering into the pizzerria because that always feels like a good idea after that much alcohol.

I’m approached by a guy in a beige leather jacket and sunglasses at night, a sign to anyone not this pathetically drunk that he was unstable, or Corey Hart, or an unstable Corey Hart. He barks at me in a mixture of Spanish and broken English. Apparently he thinks I’m someone named José, and that I’ll never get away with leaving his men in the jungle in Peru. He also says something about the Shining Path, which is enough that even I’m pretty sure I’m in trouble.

Next thing I know, we’re out in the parking lot with our left hands tied together and knives in our right hand. It’s like something out of the video for “Bad” by Michael Jackson. In fact, it’s so much like this that I’m feeling sorry for these Maoist terrorists who are still stealing all their tricks from mid-80s Michael Jackson. Some Lady Gaga would really chill these guys out, or at least give them a better fashion sense.

I know I’m no match in a knife fight for a Shining Path terrorist driven by a thirst for revenge against the traitor he thinks I am. So I did the only fair thing I could: cheated. As he lunged at my face with the knife, I jerked him forward while dropping back on my ass. I managed to throw him headfirst into the side of the dumpster, which was enough to knock him out cold. He managed to knick me under the left eye as he was sailing over my head, a shallow cut from above me.

Technically, I had still won the fight, which was enough to quiet his entourage of three other guerillas in cheesy leather jackets long enough for me to untie my hand and get my pizza. I still took the long way around the block back to my apartment. Apparently everybody, guerillas included, were still so drunk that I could get rid of any tail they might have put on me that way. I bought some polysporin Sunday afternoon to make sure it healed well, because the area was still pretty tender over Saturday.

Here’s how I really got that cut under my eye.

I was drunk and immovable sitting in the pizzerria at 2.15 in the morning, waiting for my evening-ending pizza when a fight broke out between three drunk idiots from Hess Village. One of them fell on my head, and the narrow-edged frame of my glasses was pushed down onto my face, giving me a centimetre-long incision. I still picked up that polysporin Sunday morning, though.

A Hilariously Simple Idea About Gilles Deleuze

I was reading some philosophy this evening, as is my wont and my job, when I had one of those moments when several disparate threads of philosphical reading and reflection came together into what I considered a pretty wild revelation. The past two winters, my PhD supervisor has been teaching a graduate level seminar on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, a notoriously difficult French writer of philosophy. One of the concepts that has been most puzzling in that seminar, and in Deleuze’s writing generally, is the virtual.

I’m not going to go into what we speculated about the nature of the virtual, because I don’t have time this evening to write out all that speculation. We talked about Henri Bergson’s metaphysics, the mathematics of differential equations represented in phase space, the nature of possibility. We tried to figure out how something could be real but not actual. I could go on, but I won’t. I have lunch plans in fourteen hours, and I may run out of time. Also, I want to qualify this post with the fact that I’m not yet familiar enough with the French language secondary material on Deleuze to know whether this idea has been articulated there already. But I think I have figured out exactly what this concept is.

The virtual existence of any body is a complete set of all that a body can do. Here’s how I figured it out:

1) A body’s mathematical representation as a phase space is a representation on an n-dimensional map of every possible state of that body. We talked in the seminar about the virtual being ‘something like, but not quite’ phase space.

2) A possible state of a body is something that body can do. I can run, eat, sing (poorly), impersonate the voice of internationally acclaimed film director Werner Herzog. But I am not doing any of that right now. None of these actions are actually being done as I write this, but I can do them.

3) Understand the possible states of a body as contained within the structure of that body itself. This could sound weird, but all you’re doing is considering the capacities of a body to be part of that body. A capacity is a real part of a body, even while that body is not acting with that capacity at the moment.

4) A capacity not enacted right now is a real part of a body, but not actual because it isn’t enacted. A body can do this capacity, but doesn’t all the time, or maybe even ever. I can develop my voice into a deeply rich baritone and embark on an eccentric music career. But I won’t. That’s a real capacity I have, so is really part of the structure of my body. But it will never be actualized.

All that a body can do (keep your eyes open, Spinoza fans, Deleuze was one of you too) is the virtual aspects of that body. That’s Deleuze’s language for discussing a body’s capacities, what a structure is capable of, even if that body never develops that capacity. The capacity is always part of that body, even if it is never actualized. Deleuze calls that virtual.

In Search of the Irrefutable

I’ve come across several philosophers in my experience who consider our discipline as a kind of science of arguments. Philosophers are seeking, according to these folks (none of whom are made of very much straw), the truth through argument. So when a philosopher formulates an argument that cannot be refuted, he (and they have all been he’s) will have discovered a truth upon which philosophy may rest content. But a curious idea occurred to me a few days ago that I realized would make an excellent philosophy article, and stick solidly in the craws of all those truth seekers who would deign to take me seriously.

It started when I read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, about men who synthesize every occult conspiracy theory for the past eight hundred years into a single, perfectly consistent history of the secret and hidden. The aficionados of ancient conspiracies (Masons, Templars, Rosicrucians, et al) then hunt down our heroes, killing them for their evidence, even though their synthetic history was entirely fictional.

Periodically, I’ll have a conversation about the 9/11 Truth conspiracies, the beliefs that some blend of the United States government, conservative establishment, intelligence agencies, and business elite carried out the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, and that al Qaeda had nothing to do with it. Not all the conspiracy theorists are quite this extreme, but all the 9/11 Truth theories have some of these elements mixed and matched together. Even if you can point to an established fact of the case that disproves some aspect of their conspiracy theory, the theorist will not respond to modifying his beliefs. He will instead denounce this fact as an elaborate fakery of the conspirators.

Nothing in the arguments of the 9/11 Truth conspiracy theorist, or indeed any committed conspiracy theorist, can ever be refuted. The very nature of conspiracy thinking maintains the integrity of the theory above all else - even facts. Some conspiracy theories are more consistent than others, and an intelligent theorist will modify their theory when shown some internal inconsistency. But this amounts to a strengthening of the conspiracy theory, not its refutation. Refutation would involve the dismissal of the argument itself, admitting that the USA government did not, in fact, cause 9/11.

This puts the definition of philosophy as seeking truth through articulating an irrefutable argument in quite some bother. The arguments most durable to attack, most invulnerable to critique, most flexible in maintaining their validity, are the most outlandish conspiracy theories. Of course, I’m not troubled, because I don’t think philosophy is about seeking truth at all. But if you’re sympathetic to this idea, I think I have something that could trouble you.

The Patience of Cellular Owners and the Strangeness of Time

I had a curious realization the other day, as my phone rang about twelve times before I managed to answer it. Before cellular phones were as widespread as they are today, most people gave up on a call after five or six rings at the most. Now that people tend to call from and to cellular phones, we actually tend to be a lot more patient than we used to about waiting for an answer on the phone.

It probably has to do with the phone no longer being in a fixed location. On a land line, when the phone rings, you know exactly where to go to answer it. A cellular phone can be anywhere, or underneath, anything within earshot of its ringer. So a caller now anticipates having to wait around for the phone to be found in some absurd location like the pocket of an old pair of pants, underneath a pile of unpaid phone bills, or in the fridge. I find it amusing because the cliché of technology is that it makes us harried and impatient, yet we’re willing to wait for twelve or fifteen rings before concluding that no one is answering the phone.
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I’ve also been planning a future philosophy project about time. Basically, English language philosophy of time remains dominated by the McTaggart argument that time is unreal. In 1908, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart wrote a paper that showed the logical inconsistency, and therefore impossibility, of the concepts of past, present, and future. An event X has to be the same event before it occurs as when it’s occurring and when it has occurred. So all its properties have to be the same, including its properties of pastness, presentness, or futurity.

But these properties all change as the event moves from future to present to past, so it can’t be the same event. But we can still talk about event X no matter when it’s occurring relative to us. So the properties of any event must not include its being past, present or future. Since these properties constitute time, no event can have time properties, therefore time is unreal.

This differs radically from the approach to time of Antonio Negri, an Italian philosopher whose ideas have come to dominate European philosophy of time. In his books and articles throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Negri considers time as it is experienced in life, and all of the social, political, and economic factors that shape our experience and understanding of time. For every mode of production and labouring, there is a kind of experience of time, each conditioning a different way of life and way of understanding existence.

So which is most important? McTaggart’s abstract understanding of time as a set of ordered events? Negri’s understanding of living time shaped by a societal apparatus of production? Those who know me well might assume I’m leaning towards an answer of both. However, I do think Negri’s approach to time is more philosophically productive, because it includes a concept of becoming: production. McTaggart’s doesn’t.

Actually, McTaggart’s argument forcibly prevents a concept of becoming from interacting with the concept of event. All events always exist in a particular order, along which our subjective consciousness moves. But a concept of production requires that events be made by some ongoing activity. So this looks like the one philosophical project where I actually choose sides, argue for one camp against another. Mark this in your calendars; it may never happen again.

He's Still My Hero, Man

Because not every post can be on the epic scale of a major political demonstration shutting down Canada’s largest city, I’ve decided to talk about Doctor Who. It’s been a long time since I’ve done so. Tom Baker once said that fan love is superior to human love. Because Tom's friends and family will tell him that he's gained weight, that it's silly to dye your hair white, and to stop being so strange. But Tom's fans will introduce themselves saying, "You're my hero, man!" Well, Matt Smith can definitely count me as a fan.

First, I want to make clear that I love what new producer Steven Moffatt has done with the show. I’m glad that Russell T Davies revived the show in the first place, and he often made some fine adventures, and wrote some good scripts. “Midnight” is still a brilliant suspence vehicle, and wonderful character piece for the Tenth Doctor. But I always found Russell’s aesthetic a little too pop for me, along with the Tenth Doctor generally.

If there’s any feeling that I get from Moffatt’s production and Matt Smith’s performance as the Eleventh Doctor, it’s nerdiness. The Eleventh Doctor himself is a fantastically strange man. You’re entertained watching him because of the fundamental, unpredictable weirdness of his personality. He’s a man who is always a bit odd everywhere he goes, but far from being alienating, this oddness is charming, ingratiating. He doesn’t fit in, but he fits around others. Russell’s Doctors were very much lost men looking for a home, an anxiety that shaped their personalities. I got the feeling at times that the Tenth Doctor wouldn’t have minded settling down in a stable, if unconventional, home. But Moffatt’s Doctor is at home wherever he goes, because he’s so comfortable with himself. The Eleventh Doctor is a true traveller.

A Moffatt story isn’t afraid to become complicated, never assumes that the audience won’t be able to follow a clear, if complex, story. His season finale, “The Big Bang,” involved a lot of time travel shenanigans that were played for laughs in the moment, but intricately constructed the plot. And ultimately, it became a very personal story about the relation between the Doctor and his main companion Amy.

A couple of the reviews I’ve read of Matt Smith’s first season as a whole, I’ve found miss the point of having a new production team and new Doctor, which is a new articulation of what Doctor Who is. I’ve read that this year’s finale missed the epic dimensions of previous season enders. Even though the universe itself was at risk of being wiped from existence, there were no grand battles or sci-fi vistas, but puzzle in an empty museum for the Doctor to solve. The drama was contained within the four cast members of that story, the Doctor, Amy Pond, Rory Williams, and River Song.

Yet the biggest complaints about Russell’s season finales were that his epic battles became cartoonish, solved with technobabble and deus ex machinas with little attachment to the drama of the characters. But the resolution of this season, the return of the Doctor from oblivion through an anchor in Amy’s time-cracking memories of him, was hinted at throughout the season. Growing up next to a crack in time had altered Amy’s memory, so that she could remember timelines that never existed.

The metaphysics of how the Doctor could return to reality through a memory, and rebuild one timeline with a sample of it in another, was actually seeded in Russell and the Tenth Doctor’s swan song, “The End of Time.” All that’s needed to bring Gallifrey and the whole universe of the Time War back from oblivion was a single Gallifreyan diamond. Likewise, all that’s needed to restore the original universe is a sample within the Pandorica box, and all that’s needed to restore the Doctor to the universe is a sample of his existence in Amy’s brain, her memories of the never-was.

I also don’t understand why consensus seems to be that Rory is dead weight. It’s been a long time since televised Doctor Who had more than two main cast members for an entire season: classic season 21 in 1984. The 2011 season crew of the Doctor, Amy, and Rory will be the first crew. Maybe we’re just not used to stories with enough activity for three people that don’t devolve into the clutters of Russell’s mass reunion episodes.

I think people still consider Rory a white Mickey, the boyfriend overshadowed by Rose’s relationship with the Doctor. But Amy and Rory do onscreen what Rose and Mickey never actually did: make out. Rory fits into the same ‘main companion’s boyfriend’ slot, but the relationships among the three leads (and they are three leads) are completely different in 2010 than in 2005-6.

Mickey started out scared and incompetent, not knowing what to do in an alien invasion in “Rose.” In “The Eleventh Hour,” Rory’s actions and suspicions about his supposedly walking coma patients give the Doctor the information he needs to track down the villain. And he’s just as fast as Amy at evacuating the hospital. By the time he was travelling regularly in the TARDIS, he was on a level with the Doctor setting traps for Silurian warriors. At the end of the season, he was defending Amy from Dalek and Cyberman attacks. Rory was on his feet the fastest of any second-billing companion who wasn’t already a Time Agent.

And I’ll have no disrespect to the mopey nice guy who scored the hot bossy redhead.

The G20 Riots Are a Calculated Political Theatre Piece

Blogging takes a backseat to thesis writing, research, and manuscript editing, so I haven’t followed through on my promise to tell a bunch of funny and insightful stories about my conference trip to Montreal. Taco Tuesdays at NL Girl House, Rue Sherbrooke will have to be immortalized somewhere else for now. There are more pressing issues at hand.

This time last week, I was considering going to Toronto today to join the G20 protests. I’ve talked a fair game about my more radical political views before, and now I had a chance to put some of my philosophy into action, at least in terms of political theatre. Watching events unfold in that city, I’m glad I stayed home, from the perspective of my physical safety. From the perspective of my political beliefs, I’m a little regretful.

Admirable, if smug, leftist activist leaders deride militant protesters as accomplishing nothing but property destruction, violence against people, and the counter-productive public relations that depicts all leftists as thugs, morons, and arsonists. Anti-capitalist groups worthy of praise deem the Ontario and Canadian governments as needlessly provocative, the extent and secrecy of their emergency police powers showing that establishment forces were spoiling for a fight, and are glad to have struck a genuine blow against those struggling for a more fair society in which all people can prosper and live freely.

I can’t disagree with ideas like that, especially when I see video like this.



I examine this situation and perceive a clear narrative. Everyone knew that this G20 meeting would be focussed on global austerity plans for many of the world’s richest nations. These rich nations, Canada included, have long been manipulated by a piratical investment banking establishment into running their governments at massive deficits, funding enormous national debts from which global financial institutions make the most profit. There are even ways in which an investment bank can profit from the complete collapse of a well-off country’s economy: buying insurance against the collapse of a country’s economy. And those economic collapses happened because of over-reliance on financial strategies invented by investment industry chicanery anyway.

Austerity economies in the world’s richest countries would only lead to increased suffering for poor human populations inside and outside those countries. The investment industry also profits from the deregulation of capital investment that comes with austerity economies. So naturally, advoactes for the poor would protest these plans at the most visible moments to communicate their message that there must be other ways of organizing an economy. Such a moment is a G20 summit where these international arrangements are taking shape. However, there is always a militant fringe to the leftist advocacy movement (just as there is for any political movement: observe, for example, the rural militias of the United States). This militant fringe usually causes property destruction, but has lately been overwhelmed in public relations by the sane organizations. I think one of the main reasons few militant anarchists have appeared at recent summits is that these summits have been held at isolated locations, and travelling there is very expensive. Most people who don’t believe money should exist have very little money for travel, so the militant left fringe can only arrive in small numbers.

However, the downtown core of Canada’s largest city is extremely accessible, and it’s cheap to get there. Everyone in Ontario comes to Toronto. Even a hitchhiker would find it easy to get a ride to a city as central to a country’s life as Toronto. Ask a driver if she’s going to Kananaskis and she’ll ask you for directions, and whether that’s the real name of a town. Knowing that huge numbers of people will be able to assemble for protests, the government then creates an enormous security apparatus, effectively shutting down an entire city for a long weekend. Every government spokesperson justifies the expense and enormity through talking points about the ineviably violent nature of leftist protestors.

A climate of mutual provocation is created. A brutalizing government can justify its large-scale security apparatus in an absurdly conspicuous location, while using the spectacle to discredit leftists and their sympathizers as violent criminals. Meanwhile, brutalized leftist protesters can decry the inevitable government crackdown and win sympathizers for their own causes who deplore government and police overkill. Watch the video again, and you can see both narratives unfolding. The police act in a manner that’s inherently threatening, standing in a street with full riot gear. And the protesters are singing the Canadian national anthem, an act of patriotism aimed at the police, who they hope to depict as having betrayed the democratic ideals of Canada. They sing the words to ‘O Canada,’ but what they communicate is, ‘Charge! I dare you!’ And the police gladly oblige. Both government and police, peaceful and militant leftists, have set a trap for each other, and each oblige the other by walking into their enemy’s traps.

My old friend Sheena is a journalist in Toronto who’s been reporting formally and informally on the protests / riots / crackdowns. She tweeted something earlier today that I found quite insightful. She was incredulous at protesters marching down the streets of Toronto chanting ‘These are our streets!’ when most of them had travelled in from other cities around the country. Again, it’s easy to travel to Toronto.

You could hear a statement of solidarity with the people of what they consider a besieged city, as when people around the world declared themselves New Yorkers after September 11, or how sympathizers with the revolutionaries of May 1968 would delcare themselves Parisians. Or one could hear the insincerity of a group of protesters callously manipulating their audience into sympathy by means of a charismatic image.

Yes, Toronto has become a war zone, with hundreds of people imprisoned by a police force with authoritarian levels of special powers. But a leftist today is savvy, knowing that police brutalization will play directly into their larger goals of discrediting a police force and a conservative government. In order to win, sincerity must be embraced and denied. A protester who travelled from other provinces, other countries, must genuinely believe that Toronto is their city, the site of this confrontation that is a defining moment of a political movement. And that protester must provoke the security apparatus that has been built to brutalize them, must manipulate their audience into believing in their cause, that their opposition to capitalism and the police institution is genuine. That’s why a protester sings the national anthem at a line of riot police: they know the cameras are there, and they know what an amazing image that is.

The advocates for global capitalism and heavy industry have long known how to manipulate the undecided masses into believing that advocates for social justice and environmental responsibility are enemies, terrorists, evil. Nixon created the blueprint for that when his administration destroyed the liberatory movements of the United States in the 1960s. They manipulated ordinary people’s fear of change, fear of the end of the old, comfortable order (comfortable because it’s old).

But advocates of social justice and environmental responsibility have learned these techniques of manipulation as well. We manipulate ordinary people’s fear of repression by state power, fear of democracy being hijacked by corporate interests, fear of surveillance, fear of death. I say this not to discredit social justice and environmentalism. The word manipulation carries nasty connotations, but it’s the very tool of politics and society itself. Read this again and substitute persuasion for manipulation.

Tools for achieving a political end are ethically neutral: they can be employed by any advocate of any cause. The ethical worthiness of a movement should be judged on its goals, not its methods. The cause of the protestors of global capitalism is the betterment of life on Earth.