Looking forward to reading Jessica’s new book which arrived today. A great impetus to my long overdue return to thinking about Dostoevsky.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Having just seen a fully restored version of this film which I previously had last seen on the big screen at a midnight showing on its release in ’76, I was superficially struck by the prescience of the idea of space travel underwritten by private enterprise. Though Walter and Peter in their forthcoming book, Space Capitalism, take issue with Elon Musk’s accepting of governmental money, the broad principle remains valid. Now I haven’t read the Walter Tevis’ novel but it’s easy to see why the philosophically minded Roeg and Bowie would be to drawn to it. As James Sallis wrote: “The Man Who Fell to Earth, on its surface, is the tale of an alien who comes to earth to save his own civilization and, through adversity, through inaction, through loss of faith (“I want to . . . But not enough”), fails. Just beneath the surface it might be read as a parable of the Fifties and of the Cold War. Beneath that as an evocation of existential loneliness, a Christian fable, a parable of the artist. Above all, perhaps, as the wisest, truest representation of alcoholism ever written”. What is striking about the film is a malevolent not-to-bright streak of the CIA and FBI laid bare in no uncertain terms. It’s interesting to note that the novel was rejected by Harper’s, no doubt a decision taken by a Gottlieb-like editor. Though Bowie is perfectly cast within the narrow confines of the protagonist Thomas Jerome Newton, the acting accolades must surely go to Candy Clark, a performance of a lifetime without a hint of Streep-like imperious luvvieness. According to Sallis’ piece: “Tevis had become a confirmed drinker (“It’s about my becoming an alcoholic. I sobered up to write it,” he said of Man) — which is inversely mirrored in Bowie’s cocaine addled state during the earlier recording of Station to Station though, according to Candy, he was clean and according to Roeg, Bowie had promised he’d lay off for the duration of the shoot. Bowie has since claimed otherwise, his then skeletal frame which Candy carried, giving some credence to this. (The gin-soaked story of TMWFTE has echoes of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano). But it was the dark eroticism that I found most compelling, from a time when thoughtfully transgressive (i.e. not “edgy” or controversial for its own sake) movies could be made without some intersectional harpy or “soy boy” busybody squawking for attention. The eroticism is as dark as Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter so therefore quite possibly some of the darkest sexuality committed to serious film, which was of course Roeg’s forte — see Candy’s recollections here). I had the good fortune on a road trip to skirt the gorgeously mysterious New Mexico locations but never made it into Artesia or to White Sands — hopefully next time. Next week: Roeg (and Donald Cammell’s) masterpiece of erotic psychedelia and personal identity — Performance.
Who Rules in Science?
It’s the IYIs (technically speaking “bureaucrapic fuckwits”) who are deeming what is and what is not bona fide scientific knowledge — the decision handed down is seemingly an instance of an ignoratio elenchi. Some of the toughest-minded criticism of this generalized line of wooly thinking has surprisingly emanated from Canada in the form of James Robert Brown and André Kukla who led the charge in the wake of Sokal some two decades ago. It’s well-worth revisiting Brown’s Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars freely available here along with an earlier companion volume Smoke and Mirrors that is also freely available here. I’d also recommend the hard-headed discussion by Kukla entitled Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science.
Paula Wright: Sexy isn’t Sexist
“Sexy isn’t Sexist” is Paula Wright’s Twitter handle. Very chuffed to have the versatile and independent-minded Paula allow us to use one of her compelling photographs as the next C+T cover. As a classical liberal in the tradition of grandees such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Susan Haack, Paula and a new crop of formidable empirically informed and temperamentally based feminists such as Debra Soh, Claire Lehmann, Diana Fleischman, Tania Reynolds, and others — are showing up that Ponzi-scheme, otherwise known as intersectionality, for the tripe that it really is. As Alice Dreger so pointedly put it: “Truth has a liberal bias, but only if you pursue it” — something conspicuously absent from the POMO sludge that the regressives have uncritically bought into and, gleefully, many are now drowning each other in.
Oakeshott on Education
Here is Anthony’s entry on Oakeshott from The Routledge encyclopaedia of educational thinkers — note, MO’s date of death is incorrectly stated.
Arthur “Mr. Okra” Robinson
Newly Discovered Draft of Descartes’ Meditations
H/T to Stephen Hicks. Write-up in Research Frontiers.
Walker Percy Wednesday 172
Peirce believed that there are two kinds of natural phenomena. First there are those events which involve “dyadic relations,” such as obtain in the “physical forces . . . between pairs of particles.” The other kind of event entails “triadic relations”:
All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects . . . or at any rate is a resultant of such action between pairs. But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.
If A throws B away and B hits C in the eye, this event may be understood in terms of two dyadic relations, one between A and B, the other between B and C. But if A gives B to C, a genuine triadic relation exists. “Every genuine triadic relation involves meaning. “An index sign is part of a dyadic relation. An index refers to the object it denotes by virtue of really being affected by that object. Examples of indexes: a low barometer as an index of rain , the cry of warning of a driver to a pedestrian. A symbol, however, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. “The index is physically connected with its object . . . but the symbol is connected with its object by virtue of . . . the symbol-using mind.”
Dyadic events are, presumably, those energy exchanges conventionally studied by the natural sciences: subatomic particles colliding, chemical reactions, actions of force-fields on bodies, physical and chemical transactions across biological membranes, neuron discharges, etc.
Triadic events, on the other hand, characteristically involve symbols and symbol users. Moreover, a genuine triadic relation cannot be reduced to a series of dyadic relations. Peirce seems to be saying that when a symbol user receives a symbol as “meaning” such and such an object, we may not understand this event as a sequence of dyadic events or energy exchanges even though dyadic events and energy exchanges are involved: sound waves in air, excitation of sensory end-organ, afferent nerve impulse, electro colloidal synaptic event, efferent nerve impulse, muscle contraction, or glandular secretion.
Peirce’s distinction between dyadic and triadic behavior has been noted before, but so pervasive has been the influence of what might be called dyadic behaviorism that Peirce’s “triadic relation” has been recognized only to the degree that it can be set forth as a congeries of dyads. Morris, for example, interprets Peirce’s triad as implying that in addition to response and stimulus there is a third factor, a “reinforcing” state of affairs. This is like saying that Einstein’s special theory will be accepted only to the degree that it can be verified by Newtonian mechanics. Like Newtonian mechanics, dyadic theory can account for perhaps 98 per cent of natural phenomena. Unfortunately the phenomenon of talking-and-listening falls in the remaining 2 per cent.
What would happen if we took Peirce seriously? That is to say, if we retain the posture of behavioral science which interests itself only in the overt behavior of other organisms, what are we to make of observable behavior which cannot be understood as a series of dyadic energy transactions? What has happened in the past is that we have admitted of course that there is such a thing as symbol mongering, as naming things, as uttering sentences which are true or false, as “rules” by which names are assigned and sentences formed. We have admitted that such activity is a natural phenomenon and as such is open to scientific investigation. But what kind of scientific investigation? We have gotten around the difficulty by treating the products of symbol-mongering formally, by what Carnap calls the formal sciences (logic, mathematics, syntax), while assigning the activity itself to a factual science, in this case learning theory, which has not, however, been able to give an account of it. It is no secret that learning theorists will have no truck with symbols and meaning. Most textbooks of psychology do not list the word symbol in their indexes. Indeed, how can learning theory, as we know it, give an account of symbolic activity? If we are to believe Peirce, it cannot. For the empirical laws of learning theory are formulations of dyadic events of the form R = f(O), in which R = response variables and 0 = stimulus variables. *
* Actually the dyads should be segmented in some such order as 0 = f(S), in which 0 = the organic variables and S = the stimulus variables; lb = f(Ia), in which I = the intervening neurophysiological variables within the organism; and R = f(O), in which R = response variables, or measurement of behavior properties.
No Patrimony
Here’s the very excellent Frank Furedi who has this new piece in First Things and who, is of course, a regular contributor to the ecumenical and well-named Spiked. Now what is especially interesting about Frank is that he reminds me a great deal of Paul Hirst and another decent chap, Jerry Cohen. As the Guardian obituary says of Paul, he was “an evangelist of honesty and the enemy of cant”, especially towards that emanating from those ostensibly sharing his ideological outlook, i.e. the “regressive” Left. This is true of Frank as well: long may he continue.
Remembering Carmella
A year ago I was informed of the loss of my friend Carmella: “we spoke of was and when” . . . and then she was gone. Here is the only obituary I could find. For a little glimpse into the wild rock ‘n roll world that Carmella inhabited in the glory days of Boz’ career see some extracts (below) from the recent Jann Wenner bio. Carmella’s last twenty years were (after her profound loss) very much more sedate, highly sensitive to the demands of friendships, her son and grandchildren. We have the fondest memories of us glugging champers on a hot evening on the patio of her glorious Russian Hill house, and then heading down to the bowels of the house, the kitchen, where the food and booze kept on flowing. Carmella’s house was the epitome of good taste with the most imaginably fine attention to detail in domestic decor that I’ve ever seen. And the amazing thing was that it was still very homey and not at all “museumy”. Carmella had an incredibly attuned cultural-artistic bandwidth and could speak authoritatively on classical art as well as the moderns and, of course, popular culture. I loved the way she took to the streets of San Francisco in her Mercedes, driving as if she owned the city, offering up the most scathing of commentary as we past some of the compounds of the political and showbiz denizens of Pacific Heights. She knew them all and had an endless supply of delicious stories especially concerning the heyday of Haight-Ashbury. Through the lens of Carmella’s fine aesthetic sensibility, one could see why she thought that San Francisco and Seattle had gone to seed: indeed she seemed quite angry about it. Carmella loved her food and wine and was a most generous hostess. She took us to some of her favourite SF haunts: when Carmella turned up to a restaurant, the maître d’hôtel ushered us into the standby “VIP” booth/table. Thanks for the trust and friendship dearest Carmella.
manwithoutqualities 