Searching Technorati to see whether Arts & Letters Daily's recent link to Morris Dickstein's contribution to the Theory's Empire Event had sparked conversation, I stumbled upon Joseph Duemer's account of a recent workshop he chaired on "blogging basics." (Among the ten blogs he recommends his students tour are The Valve, Bemisha Swing and Cliopatria.) Around the same time, I received an email from Mark Kaplan in which he asked me whether the name of this humble blog came from the cultic société secrète organized by Georges Bataille called Acéphale. While I would cherish the cultural capital naming a blog after a Surrealist splinter group would net, I confessed that Bataille had nothing to do with the christening of this blog. (Nor did I harbor monstrous intentions or know anything about vampyroteuthis infernalis.) As I composed my reply to Mark I kept thinking about Duemer's workship, the end of which involved the participants "going to Blogger and creating an account and weblog of their own."
The question "What would these workshoppers name their blogs?" circled through my head as I explained the origins of Acephalous to Mark. Would they unintentionally infringe on Adam Kotsko's trademarked dry wit? Would they unwittingly imitate John Holbo and Belle Waring's dead-pan mastery of the obvious? Would they venture down the respectable trails blazed by Amardeep Singh and Michael Berube? Or would they engage in gentle self-mockery like Miriam Burstein or vicious self-deprecation like Yours Truly?
Vicious self-deprecation. That is what I said.
As I explained to Mark, there are levels to my self-deprecation. The first marches alongside Acephalous up there at the top of the page, informing potential readers of the possibility that I'm one of the "Acephalous people" some "modern travellers still pretend to find in America." That quotation from Emphraim Chambers' Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences should have satisfied even the most ardent self-deprecators. But I wanted more. So I installed a double-super-secret self-deprecatory mechanism deep in the bowels of my dissertation. On page 38 the bold can discover the following account of how Herbert Spencer nuanced Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's account of cephalopod evolution:
Adaptation allows the animal to survive long enough for the force of progress to work on it, and adaptation depends on what Lamarck called sentiment intérieur, the ability to adapt, reflexively if not consciously, to environmental vagaries. In a revision of his last major work, The Principles of Ethics (1897), Spencer nuanced Lamarck’s statements on the subkingdom Mollusca. Lamarck, it will be remembered, considers the entire subkingdom to belong to the animaux sensibles or “sensitive animals.”
[snip]
[Spencer] divides Mollusca into the “cephalopods,” the higher mollusks, and what Lamarck had called “acephala,” the “head-less” or lower mollusks. I have chosen to focus on the subkingdom Mollusca because the division between its orders is so stark: some have heads and are non-adaptive, others have heads and are adaptive. To be a headless mollusk is to remain beholden to the whims of the force of progress. For Lamarck, Chambers, and Spencer, the headless mollusks will acquire heads at a moment preordained by force of progress. To be a headed mollusk, on the other hand, is to possess the ability to form habits, and as I discussed above, the formation of habits is the first link in the causal chain of Lamarckian evolution—altered environment to changed habits to modified forms. But the headed-headless distinction indicates why his adamant belief in a progressive, evolutionary, and absolute force would be tempered by the adaptive prong of Lamarckian evolution: heads mattered. So did what was in them.
So you see, dear reader, I am 1) without head and 2) dependent on a non-existant force of progress if I'm ever to improve my station. Since I place no more faith in non-existent progressive forces than the non-existent divinities compelling them, I'm doubly doomed to this acephalic life. Luckily I've come to like it.
[Tomorrow will witness the conclusion of two long-awaited (if not anticipated) posts: one on Literary Interest and another on The Literary Wittgenstein. Excite will ensue!]
As a matter of fact, the participants chose names about the way the rest of us do: Fictionalities, Laura's Blog, Beautiful Letdowns . . . When I started blogging I figured I'd be as descriptive as possible so used Reading & Writing. A couple of years later I wanted to get cute so I changed to Sharp Sand, but now I have changed back to the flat, descriptive, elementary school description.
Posted by: joseph duemer | Sunday, 21 August 2005 at 08:07 AM
I was trying to find out more about "Acephalous" (both the title of your blog and your understanding of the term) and came across this post. (I linked to your page for your MLA meme project from my blog, which is how I'm coming to read this.)
So I guess ignore this contribution if you already know it, but the British anthropologist Meyer Fortes used the term "acephalous" to describe Talensis and other West African societies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acephalous_Society
Might be important, given your interest in social-biological intersections.
Posted by: John Schaefer | Sunday, 24 December 2006 at 04:55 AM