Acephalous

How science becomes "fact" in conservative circles

On March 30th, The Economist published “Climate science: A sensitive matter,” in which James Hansen, formerly of NASA, noted that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.” The article then outlines the many ways in which the scientific community is attempting to account for the fact that the mean global temperature is “already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models.” Different models are consulted, other mechanisms suggested, alternate sensitivities proposed, i.e. science happens.

Or, as Rich Lowry wrote at the National Review on April 2nd, “[i]n other words, the scientific ‘consensus’ [has] been proven wrong.” Granted, he actually writes that the consensus “will have been proven wrong” if the mean global temperature remains flat “for a few more years,” but that’s a difference without distinction. First, because he declares himself arbiter of a scientific consensus he doesn’t understand; second, because he chooses the scientifically precise date of “a few more years” before the consensus he doesn’t understand will be invalidated; and third, because he’s drawing the conclusion that “the ‘sensitivity’ of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated” despite the fact that his own article contains a paragraph about factors that might be mitigating warming. He tacitly admits that carbon emissions may still have a warming effect, it’s just that, for example, “new coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the stasis in temperatures.”

Which is only to repeat myself: he’s writing about a science he doesn’t understand; moreover, he’s doing so from a position of ignorance so profound he doesn’t even realize his arguments might be entirely compatible. In the same way that I can be both an athlete and a writer, so too can carbon emissions be pushing temperatures up while aerosols drive them down. Arguing that X doesn’t do Y because A does B isn’t much of an argument.

Unfortunately, he’s sharing his misunderstanding of logic and science in the influential pages of the National Review, which means that despite the fact that he misrepresents processes he doesn’t understand, his conclusion will shortly acquire the status of received wisdom as it’s repeated, in ever more ignorant forms, by other writers in the pages of the National Review. For example, today Victor Davis Hanson wrote “[t]he global warming hysteria—with no measurable planet warming in the last 15 years despite sizable increases in carbon emissions—is abating[.]” His evidence? He doesn’t need to cite evidence.

Lowry already established this new conclusion as a fact.

Which means I can propose my own new theory: based on the evidence above, conservatives require six days to transform science into stupid and stupid into ideology. I less-than-eagerly await the inevitable proof of my error.

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

The fact that Hawaii still exists proves global warming is a hoax.

When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a post with that title, he responded by betting his mother's life that someone had already made that claim and set out in search of that idiot. That was five minutes ago but have no fear his mother can breathe easy. Only now I'm not sure what to do with the rest of the post I'd planned to write. I thought it'd be amusing to demonstrate how the deliberately (and defiantly) uninformed worldview of those who think scientific progress is teleological (for example) creates an environment in which any failed hypothesis represents further proof of gross negligence or professional misconduct. But it isn't amusing: it's depressing.

Because of these pig-ignorant people, any scientific finding that doesn't correspond to the dominant scientific paradigm becomes "another nail in the coffin" for that paradigm. That the tsunami that struck Hawaii didn't manifest as a 300-foot-tall wall of water is, for such luminaries, further proof that scientists simply suck at predicting anything that involves heightened sea-level. They leap from a televisually disappointing tsunami to stock global warming denialism because they believe a single failure undermines an entire enterprise, i.e. they have no understanding of or investment in the scientific method.

Like I said: it's depressing.

The End of Lurker Amnesty Week & a Brief Meditation on Professional Identity in the Public Sphere

From now on, any lurker who leaves a comment will face reprisals both terrible and swift.

Or not.

For the most part, I performed this experiment to figure out who I'm writing for because 1) there are many more of you now, but the increase in readers has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of commenters, and 2) I thought knowing who you were might compensate for the fact that I'm not sure who I am anymore.

You don't need to know what the science means to establish what the words mean to scientists.

Global warming skeptics are attacking climate scientist Phil Jones for encouraging trickery in an email recently stolen off the webmail server at the University of East Anglia in which he wrote:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Over at RealClimate, the skeptical response to the word "trick" is to treat it as a colloquial:

Unfounded Fears & Other Scientific Euphemisms

According to Marion Ellis, an "Extension Apiculture Specialist" at the University of Nebraska, there are some things I shouldn't be afraid of, among them swarming bees.  Yes, but...

The playful screels and screechs of unsupervised children have been replaced by the pained screams of unsupervised children who've decided to play near the swarming bees.  Even with the A/C unit blasting in my face I imagine I  hear the low buzz of tens of thousands of bees describing pointless circles around my apartment.  Were it not for my cowardice I would egress and observe what Mr. Ellis calls "one of the most beautiful and interesting phenomena in nature" in more detail.

Alas!  I am a coward.  When the tableaux of bees and bees and bees presents itself before me, I seek shelter in the nearest building not over-filled with pheromone-happy bees drawn to the scent of their queen.  I close the front door.   All the windows.  The vent above the oven.  I open the closet door.  I take out the duct tape.  I rip strips from it and place them around the doors, windows and vents I've closed.  I hyperventilate.  I breath in a bag.  To no avail. 

I pass out.

I dream of work-a-day lives in futuristic utopian communes.  I watch as workers crowds the suspense-bridges tethered by invisible lines to unseen columns and listen to the gentle hum of their morning mumblings.  I enter the moving throng and jostle elbows with the other workers as the bridges below my feet judders in harmony with the low buzz of their uncaffeinated conversation.  I recall the supple undulations of the earthquake, magnitude 5.3, which rattled shelves and startled cats the previous afternoon.  Subdued beneath the feet of my brethren, the bridge begins to yield.  I race for the rails but so do all my brethren.  The gentle hum of moments previous volumes louder until it crests and then the drones' inverted drones sound a panicked cacophony echoing their moral discord and as they run pell-mell on the faltering bridge--its invisible lines snapped, its unseen columns fallen--I stare into their faces and see though legion only one.  I grab one by the buckle of his drab brown unitard and scream "Who are all you?  Who are all you who must by Our Leader's ordinance die this day?"

He turns to me.  One by one they all turn to me.  In unison they say, "We are Dr. Marion Ellis." 

I awake, shaking.

40 Milliseconds, Featuring Former Leading "Lady" Luke Perry as Dread Pirate Linguist Dr. A. Cephalous

Irrenowned linguist A. Cephalous loves his obsolete adjectives and anarthrous occupational nominal premodifiers.  However, he loves thinking about the blazing speed with which humans produce intelligible language even more.  So how pleased is he to learn that Dutch linguist Peter Hagoort won the 2005 Spinoza prize, a.k.a. the "Dutch Nobels," for his work on neurobiological aspects of human linguistic competence?  Very.  Hagoort demonstrated that "people know the grammatical data about a noun approximately 40 milliseconds earlier than they [utter] the first syllable of a word."  (With 40 milliseconds being such a frickin' long time, it's no coincidence that Hagoort works at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.)  According to Hagoort's 1998 article in Science,

This knowledge includes information about the meaning of words, their syntactic properties (such as word class), and their phonological properties (such as their phonemes and syllable structure). All this information is stored in a component of long-term memory that is usually referred to as the mental lexicon. During speaking, the mental lexicon is accessed automatically at very high speed to select words that express the intended meaning, and to retrieve their syntactic and phonological properties....A central unresolved question concerns the orchestration in real time of the retrieval of the distinct types of linguistic knowledge required to produce fluent speech.

The answer, as I've already mentioned, is about 40 milliseconds.  And that's for speaking.  How quickly is it for writing?  The fellows at the A. Cephalous Center for the Unscientific Study of Scientific Science Stuff decided to find out.  One of the fellows, Sneed, scientifically imbibed 3 gallons of water.  Another, Tommy, scientifically steered Sneed's hand into a gallon of water warmed, scientifically, to room temperature.  Lady lab assistant Marsha measured how long it took before Sneed's sallow face performed the familiar contortions of persons seconds away from mighty micturations. 

At this point the lab director, A. Cephalous himself, asked Sneed to remove his hand from the warm water and compelled him to confess to murdering by snickersnee the beloved office caricature, The Insolent Sailor, and informed him that he must also, scientifically, measure the speed with which he selected the appropriate words and retrieved their syntactic and phonological properties.  The obliging Sneed--held captive by his busting bladder and the snickle A. Cephalous had slipped around his neck whilst removing his warm-watered hand--confessed to his morally dubious dastardly doings and begged to be unsnickled and unsnooled so that he might relieve the painful pressure of his bloated bladder. 

A. Cephalous declined Sneed's request.

Snarling at his snickering former fellows, the snickled Sneed labored a lunge at his former fellows and much to mutual dismay nearly snapped his snickle.   The snickle held but sad snarling Sneed's snooled neck did snap.  His snobbish former fellows, saddened by the snapping of Sneed's snickled neck, quickly tired of disposing his detritus and decided to dedicate the day's remaining light to snuggling and snogging.  Those few fellows without women with whom snuggling and snogging would be constant and consensual were to retire to the snoozing room, wherein snoozing, snoring and snooping on the snuggling and snogging of those with women would commence.  Scientifically, of course.

Aaaaaaaaaand Scene!

The point of this exercise?  An imitation of the alliterative mania of William Gass,* but also an Abishian attempt to write something not entirely nonsensical under artificial restraints.  And damn did it not work.  All this time invested compels me to press publish anyway, and so I will--but not before noting that there's a real correspondence between words which, in English, begin with "sn-" and what they signify.  I've often found arguments about why certain sounds connote similarly but none of them have ever been all that convincing.  I don't buy the brazen explanations gracing the pages of my linguistics books, but I've done little work on recent research, so maybe there's something new.  To the library!

*Sample Gassian prose: "Poker for peanuts or pennies is not the same game as one with limitless stakes, and there are certain driving skills which come into play only at high speeds; so that even if there's a resemblance between walking a fallen log and crossing a piece of structural steel amidst the worries of work, wind, and altitude, the achievements are in no way the same, although, again, exhortations like 'careful to keep your balance' are in both cases appropriate and certainly appreciated."  Gass always teeters between the grossly over-written and pitch perfection.  I always wonder how often the first consonant sound of one word determines which will follow--and what effect that has on the meaning of his essays--as when, for example, he says of people who feel the need for therapeutic "creativity," who want "to pass as poets, to be called 'creative,' to fit themselves into a certain social niche, acquire an identity the way one acquires plants there's no time to tend or goldfish that can't be kept alive..."  In that sentence alone, much less the rest of his corpus, we have "pass as poets," "called 'creative,'" "certain social niche," "way one," "time to tend" and "can't be kept."  And almost every sentence he writes is written thus.  I admire the playfulness of his prose--as above the fold discloses, I love little more than language play--and enjoy emulating it immensely.  But I wonder whether what he's written writes itself to some extent, or whether what he's written first is thought and then is wrought.  I don't know, but you no doubt know why Gass in short doses does please much more than Gass in manly morsels.

Ultra-Freudian Pre-Freudian Thought: Bosoms & The Aesthetic Faculty

[NOT cross-posted to the Valve]

According to the June 6, 1885 edition of Medical News, physicians "believe the love of the beautiful has greatly lessened."  The human race, laments the anonymous author, ignored Oscar Wilde and "moved steadily on, trampling under foot all flowers in its persistent pursuit of the utilities, though a big helianthus was waved before them in passionate remonstrance."  Because of this deplorable situation, "the average man and woman plod on in life, giving more attention to justice and truth...than they do to beauty." 

Such a situation cannot be allowed to continue.  Therefore, our anonymous oracle exhorts, "we must [find] the source of the love of the beautiful, the fountain of the aesthetic, and see whether the evil so greatly mourned does not originate there."  This "fountain," he avers, are "woman's [boobs]."*   If

women had no breasts, there would be no love of the beautiful possible for the human race.  The Amazons, those unhappy creatures who took off one of their breasts, became celebrated as athletes, but not as aesthetes. 

That the female breast is beautiful we might prove by showing that it has the chief characteristics, such as its lines, color, and smoothness, which Plato indicated in Philenus, as essential to beauty.

Our anonymous philosopher knows how to hustle Victorian sensibilities: Plato said boobs are the foundation of aesthetic experience.  Who are  you to refute Plato?  In the unlikely event that his Platonic gropings further inflamed the passions of his readers, our author concedes that his argument need not rely on the supple curves, the milk-white flesh, or the gentle undulations of her delicately dimpled bosom, her profferred fruit heaving under the, uh, need not rely on the Platonic appreciation of breasts:

[W]e prefer at once explaining its connection with the aesthetic faculty, which can be best done by quoting from [Erasmus] Darwin's Zoonomia.  Erasmus Darwin in this work, which in some respects is as remarkable as any of the productions of his illustrious grandson, Charles Darwin, tells us that soon after a babe "is born into this cold world it is applied to its mother's warm bosom...which the infant embraces with its hands, presses with its lip and watches with its eyes, and thus acquires accurate ideas of its form.  Its pleasure at length becomes associated with its form.  And hence in our maturer years when any object is presented to us, which by its waving [?] or spiral [?] lines bears any similitude to this form--whether it be found in a landscape with soft gradations of rising and descending surface, or in the form of some antique vases, or in the works of pencil or chisel--we feel a generous glow of delight."

E. Darwin's reprehensible heteronormativity notwithstanding--Some Gay Guy certainly feels no "generous glow of delight" when encountering lines of Man or Nature resembling pale mounds of swollen flesh--I'm inclined to agree with the conclusion our anonymous author draws from him:

In short, the use of the nursing bottle is the cause of the decline in the appreciation of beauty.  [Here here!]  Those who love the beautiful, and who mourn its decline, must seek the remedy for the latter by encouraging maternal lactation...when there will be hope that the coming race will attain the poetic ideal in this regard.  In an age when so much is accomplished by voluntary organizations, such as for the promotion of charity, the suppression of vice, etc., there might be a society for the promotion of this object.

Wait wait wait.  Is anyone else confused?  More lactation brings about more refined aesthetic appreciation, I understand that, but a public society for the promotion of breasts?  Surely our anonymous author jests:

As women do not nurse because they cannot, their breasts not being sufficiently developed, or because they will not, this society would have its work divided into two great sections--one devoting itself to the culture of the moral sentiment which will compel a mother to nurse her infant, and the other to discovering the best means for cultivating mammary glands.

Then again, maybe he's deadly serious.  He really seems to be advocating the formation of a society dedicated to the cultivation of mammary glands.  I'm not sensing much opposition from the patriarchy.  Even so, surely he only speaks figuratively:

The latter [cultivating] section would be divided into several subsections, each of these giving itself to the special study of these organs.  Thus one subsection would investigate the typical form, another the embryogenic development, a third the blood-supply, a fourth the minute anatomy of the glandular structure, and thus on...

Then again, maybe he's deadly literal.  (Can you imagine the difficulties our anonymous author would face finding volunteers for the first and fourth subsections?)  Lest it slide by unattended, I should note that our friend is suggesting a society dedicated to increasing the aggregate aesthetic appreciation of Western Civilization by studying how breasts form and develop and thus, implicitly, how they might be enlarged.  The larger a mother's bosom, the greater the likelihood her son will develop into the next James Joyce.**  But our friend still has one "final class" to describe, and it's

a very large one probably, [and] would be composed of those who do not see the purpose of this article, and would be occupied with lymphatic investigation.  A society with such various and elaborate breastworks would be invincible.  It, of course, would be international, and could be bisected, trisected, and quadrisected--in fact, divided into so many sections that everyone could occupy an official position.

That's it?  The end of the article?  That can't be the end of the article.  I want to know more about my official position in the international breastwork!  You don't think he's been pulling my leg, do you?***

This Draft Will Be The Death of Me

Or not.  I've taken to saving posts as drafts and then never publishing them, thinking that I'll one day have time to edit them with the attention they deserve.  What I've got in the queue right now are:

• one from the archives about the conspicuous absence of Darwin and evolutionary thought from the polygamy debates in the 1890s (and this isn't a silly "male-male eroticism is absent from the work of anchoresses" article, but a serious and amusing look at the extent to which both sides in the polygamy debate avoided anything that might possibly lead to the mention of Darwin and his magical wonderful theory of evolution)
• a look at the treatment of new historicism in Theory's Empire in which I come to the conclusion that I'm not the new historicist I thought I was, but am one of the other ones, the ones with the white hats and wits about them
• an increasingly long commentary on The Orchid Thief that I'll post after I teach it (lest the ideas get too concretized to allow me the intellectual flexibility I need to run a smooth, productive discussion)
• another installment of A. Cephalous' Refutin' and Rebutin' Walter Benn Michaels Travelin' Extravaganza
• an utterly random post about the way David Simon's Homicide changed the way literary journalists write about group dynamics

Soon as any of 'em done to my satisfaction, you'll see 'em up here bells, whistles and all.  Until then, I take my leave of you, dear readers.

P.S.  I'm also done with John Bruce.  As easy and entertaining as it is to kick the boy, people whose opinions I respect have informed me that not only has he been down, he is down, and he'll remain down for the foreseeable future.  That being the case, kicking him for comedy ain't becoming.  So I'm done.

Saints Augustine and Joan, or No Marching Orders, "Just Nuts"

I expect more of my favorite books.  I expect to hear the voice of a child whisper "tolle, lege, tolle, lege, tolle, lege, tolle, lege, aut pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo."*  I expect I'll consider that a command given to me by God to open the book and read the first chapter I should come upon.**  And I expect that instead of landing on Romans 13 like some African-American Church Fathers,*** I'd land on this passage from Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots:

An aspect of his insistence on congruities, and branchings, was his desire to substantise or substantiate metaphor wherever this could be done.  He needs to establish ways in which language may be authenticated by natural order, so that his own discourse and argumentation may be 'naturalised,' and so moved beyond dispute. (49)

And instead of finding myself in tears over the fair pear once stolen only to steal, as from Thou, the fairest Pear of all, for I had a store of better...so instead of finding myself doing that I'm counting my blessings that I'll never be numbered among these clowns:

Those who teach Judith Butler's work have looked forward to a reader that gathers key parts of her extensive corpus and provides a context in which to understand the major themes and continuities of her eclectic philosophical, psychoanalytic, cultural, and political interventions.

Because if I was, I'd be forced to parse this blather...

Setting aside for the moment how the media act upon the public, whether, indeed, they have charged themselves with the task of structuring public sentiment and fidelity, it seems crucial to note that a critical relation to government has been severely, though not fully, suspended, and that the "criticism" or, indeed, independence of the media has been compromised in some unprecedented ways.

...when I could've been reading this:

We have come in this country to tolerate many such fixed opinions, or national pieties, each with its own baffles of invective and counterinvective, of euphemism and downright misstatement, its own screen that slides into place whenever actual discussion threatens to surface. We have for example allowed American biological research to fall behind that in countries where stem cell programs are not confused with "cloning" and "abortion on demand," countries in other words where rationality is not held hostage to the posturing of the political process. We have allowed all rhetorical stops to be pulled out on non-issues, for example when the federal appeals court's Ninth Circuit ruled the words "under God" an unconstitutional addition to the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge was written in 1892 by a cousin of Edward Bellamy's, Francis Bellamy, a socialist Baptist minister who the year before had been pressured to give up his church because of the socialist thrust of his sermons. The clause "under God" was added in 1954 to distinguish the United States from the atheistic Soviet Union.

"Ridiculous" was the word from the White House about the ruling declaring the clause unconstitutional. "Junk justice," Governor Pataki said. "Just nuts," Senator Daschle said. "Doesn't make good sense to me," Representative Gephardt said. There was on this point a genuinely bipartisan rush to act out the extent of the judicial insult, the affront to all Americans, the outrage to the memory of the heroes of September 11. After the June 2002 ruling, members of the House met on the Capitol steps to recite the Pledge—needless to say the "under God" version—while the Senate interrupted debate on a defense bill to pass, unanimously, a resolution condemning the Ninth Circuit decision.

These were, some of them, the same elected representatives who had been quick to locate certain upside aspects to September 11. The events could offer, it was almost immediately perceived, an entirely new frame in which to present school prayer and the constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. To the latter point, an Iowa congressman running unsuccessfully for the Senate, Greg Ganske, marked Flag Day by posting a reminder on his Web site that his opponent, Senator Tom Harkin, who had spent five years during the Vietnam War as a Navy pilot, had in 1995 opposed the flag-burning amendment. "After the tragic events of September 11," the posting read, "America has a renewed sense of patriotism and a renewed appreciation for our American flag. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees." To the school prayer point, according to The New York Times, a number of politicians were maximizing the moment by challenging restrictions on school prayer established by courts over the past four decades. "Post–September 11," the Times was told by Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, "the secularists are going to have a harder time making their case."

The Pathetic Gropings of a Former Linguistics Major, or Walter Benn Michaels, the Insufficient Refutation, Part II

[Note to Ray: The following may disturb you.]

[Note to Everyone Else: The following may bore you.]

[Note to Sean: I find this frustrating and fascinating.]

In my response Sean's request for more on my problems with Walter Benn Michaels' argument in The Shape of the Signifier, I came to the following fruitless conclusion:

what's at issue in debates of History vs. Memory is really a matter of individual responsibility vs. collective trauma/guilt. Individual responsibility can be historically compartmentalized, whereas collective trauma/guilt necessarily extends to all members of the collective, past, present and future. In political terms, collective trauma/guilt subtends claims for slavery reparations; furthermore, it focuses attention on the sins of the past instead of the inequities of the present (and therefore botches the opportunity to hold contemporary individuals responsible for the actions that've created/perpetuated these inequities). I'm with Michaels there. I can see why the representation of this continuity in literature would also--if we grant culture this sort of formative power--have implications for politics at large, i.e. dispense with the idea of collective guilt on television and in books and movies and people might think differently. But even though I grant culture the ability to shape thought thusly, I'm not sure that sense of collective trauma and collective guilt could be eliminated. Logically, and ideally, it should be; but I'm not sure it's possible. Without saying that the capacity for this collectivist sense is hard-wired, I'd say I strongly believe that it's a necessary by-product of how humans have and will continue to interact. I realize I've backed myself into a corner, because I not only can't explain why I strongly believe that, I'm also well aware that I might only believe it because of the limitations imposed on my horizons by the cultural moment in which they've been shaped. And, of course, short of undertaking a Gadamerian intellectual history of the past 3,957 years, I can't responsibly refute that latter claim. In short, I currently think that that is necessarily true, but I can't substantiate that claim.

A couple hours later, I've devised a satisfactory way to talk about hard-wired models of historical continuity.  I'm going to avoid the claims of evolutionary psychology; that is, I'm not going to try to explain why the collectivist model is a universal human default.  Instead, I'm going to demonstrate, quickly, how language is built from the bottom-up and use that bolster the idea of an innate collectivism.  So...

...Benjamin Whorf came up with the whole notion of cryptotypes, by which he meant pretty much the same thing Chomsky does by deep structure; namely, a level of linguistic categorization that is not directly visible/audible but explains why a language behaves in a particular way.  One commonality of all languages is the dual inclusive/exclusive and plural inclusive/exclusive syntax distinctions.  They look like this:

1st person dual inclusive - "you and I"
1st person dual exclusive - "he/she and I"
1st person plural inclusive - "we two/three/four/etc. and you"
1st person plural exclusive - "we two/three/four/etc. and him/her/them"

Clunky though these formulations are in English, in other languages these distinctions are ingrained into the nominal (and pronomial) morphology; not that that matters, as these would be cryptotypes in English anyhow.  Now consider verbal morphology: the difference between the caustive verb "kill" and the non-causitive verb "die" aren't captured so well in English, but in Samoan, for example, the causitive/non-causitive distinction is captured by a single morpheme; as if, in English "kill-o" meant "kill" and "kill-om" meant "die."  Nominal and verbal morphology interact to frame everything we talk about, what Talmy Givon calls a "hierarchy of topicality."  What he means is that certain combinations of nominal and verbal morphological interaction trigger particular (and statistically verifiable and, well, pre-verified) grammatical responses.  The basic distinctions in his hierachy are:

1) human > non-human
2) definite > indefinite
3) more involved participant > less involved participant
4) 1st person > 2nd person > 3rd person

As Alessandro Duranti explains, languages that "tend to separate human participants who are agents from human participants who are not...group the latter with the object of transitive clauses; hence the woman in the woman ran would be marked the same way as the door in the woman opened the door.  Other types of languages might make other kinds of distinctions" (192).  These basic distinctions lead to preferred argument structures, and I'd wager, though I've yet to do the work to back this claim up, that the majority of languages not only capture family/clan/society distinctions but can be observed to functionally distribute them.  (Some of the linguistics who haunt these parts should chime in.  I'm working on the vague memories of my undergraduate days as a linguistic major, and in an attempt to avoid the slightest trace of evolutionary psychology or linguistic anthropology, I fear I may've veered into some irrational abyss.)

A couple of things I'm not saying:

1) that language determines reality or The Real or what-not

2) that these deep structures make certain thoughts impossible to think; Michaels couldn't make the argument he makes if that were the case

3) that these deep structures make certain thoughts easier or more likely to be thought (though I may land somewhere near that position in the future)

Not that I'm obsessing, but I'm going to think about this more and edit this, that and the other sooner than later, and maybe even start a new series called The Statistical Improbability of Walter Benn Michaels Being Correct or something less inflammatory and more respectful...

"Woe Unto Ye Beetles of South America!"

The title of this entry, exclaimed by Charles Darwin upon receiving his father's permission to sail on the Beagle, points to the way in which Janet Browne--in the magesterial two-volume biography floating somewhere to the right of these words--believes Darwin anthropomorphized everything.  The sly but unsubtle hyperbole of "Woe unto ye beetles of South America!" is typical of the way Darwin interacted with the natural world; namely, as if it could understand him and, more tellingly, as if he assumed it could answer back.  According to Browne, it spoke through the mountains of evidence in which Darwin would, after decades of meticulous research, begin to see the contours of his theory of natural selection.  But what Browne really wants to hammer home is that while, for some people, the idea that "evidence speaks" is little more than inflated modesty, for Darwin it organized his every observation for the majority of his life.  For example, Browne writes

Flowers invited him to bury his head in their petals, guinea-pigs reproached him for finding them tasty.  It was a shame to kill armadillos when they were "so quiet."  Sometimes the rocks themselves were like people, hiding their secrets or teasing him with gnomic clues.  Thereafter, he gave human attributes to almost every species he met, including flatworms and beetles:  a trait that blurred the dividing line between man and beast. (216)

You can see where this claim's headed: blurring "the dividing line between man and beast" allowed him to apply Malthus' arguments on the populations of man to animals or to impute the instinctive behaviors of animals to man.  One that wall fell, the door had opened and in walked the theory of natural selection.  (But not through the door, what with the wall having already fallen there would've been no need.  Or door.  But as the British are liable to be, well, British under any and all circumstances, the theory of natural selection probably walked in approximately where the door had been, so that it might be greeted in the foyer.)  But as compelling and intelligent as Browne's book has been--I'm a little more than two-thirds of the way through the first volume, sounding the waters around the Galapagos Island of Indefatigable, that is, east of Duncan, south of James, and north of Charles, Barrington and Chatham--I'm unsatisfied with this telegraphed epiphanic logic.  I know from Darwin's account that he'll soon be tormenting large iguanas:

I watched one for a long time, till half its body was buried; I then walked up and pulled it by the tail, at this it was greatly astonished, and soon shuffled up to see what was the matter; and then stared me in the face, much as to say, What made you pull my tail?

Browne's claim of anthropomorphism is inadequate.  It's not that Darwin believes the entire world is human, no, he believes the entire world is British.  His treatment of the metaphorical subjects of the Queen is therefore doubly deplorable. Of tormenting another iguana, this one perched near the ocean, Darwin notes

I threw one several times as far as I could, into a deep pool left by the retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood.  It swam near the bottom, with a very graceful and rapid movement, and occasionally aided itself over the uneven ground with its feet.  As soon as it arrived near the edge, but still being under water, it tried to conceal itself in the tufts of sea-weed, or it entered some crevice.  As soon as it thought the danger was past, it crawled out on the dry rocks, and shuffled away as quickly as it could.  I several times caught this same lizard, by driving it down to a point, and though possessed of such perfect powers of diving and swimming, nothing would induce it to enter the water; and as often as I threw it in, it returned in the manner above described.

One can only imagine the comic exasperation this iguana felt:

(Enter Darwin and Iguana #2.  Darwin approaches.  Lunges.)

Iguana #2: Good Heavens!  What are you... (thrown into ocean by Darwin)
Iguana #2: Why I nev... (thrown into ocean by Darwin)
Iguana #2: My Good Man!  Why do you insist on throwing me in the ocean?  How have I offen... (thrown into ocean by Darwin)

Project H.O.A.E., Part VI: Answer the Age Old Question "What Is JSTOR?"

The (obviously) acronym'd after-the-fact Project. How to Open an Academic Essay (H.O.A.E.) continues today with a strange entry from the Journal of Historical Sociology.  "Social Darwinism in Anglophone Academic Journals" by Geoffrey M. Hodgson begins with a description of Diego Rivera's massive 1934 fresco "Man at the Crossroads."*  Rivera arrayed his symbols of liberation on the "colorful right of the picture," but

To the darker left of the mural ar sinister battalions of marching gas-masked soldiers, the ancient statue of a fearsome god, and the seated figure of a bearded Charles Darwin.

BAM!  Hodgson nailed that opening.  Gas masked soliders, fearsome gods, and a feeble old Darwin, leaning forward, undeserving martyr to Communist mythology.  The article continues with a brief outline of the history of the term "Social Darwinism," followed by this:

This essay takes advantage of JSTOR an electronic database of leading academic journals in anthropology, economics, general science, history, literature, philosophy, political science, population studies, sociology and other subjects, which has become available in the 1990s.  These journals are almost entirely in English and several date back to the time of Darwin.  A search was made for the terms "Social Darwinism," "Social Darwinist" or "Social Darwinists" in articles or reviews.

I must admit, I'm overjoyed that someone (who works, according to footnote 4, with "R. Bannister") has done my research for me.  While it's beyond wonderful to have an organized, essentially annotated  list of all the references to social darwinism in the JSTOR database, the thing about it is: I already had one.  Because I had made one.  So too, I suppose, had every scholar working on social darwinism since it became widely available in 1995.  The pressing question for a certain unpublished academic I know is "How did someone else publish my background research as a scholarly article?"  Equally pressing is its corollary, "Why didn't my advisors recommend I submit my background research to an academic journal?"

*Hodgson probably meant "Man, Controller of the Universe," since the almost identical "Man at the Crossroads" had been destroyed in 1933. 

Implied Associations, Not So Implicit Results, or You Might Be An Unconscious Redneck If...

Bitch Ph.D.--and before you say it, that's her name...there's no proof I'm a misogynist yet--sent readers scuttling over to Harvard's Implicit Association Test.  I spent several uncoordinated minutes staring at X after X after X after X only to learn that my incompetence suggested a slight automatic preference for White relative to Black.  The next test I took suggested a strong automatic preference for African American relative to White American. 

The only conclusion I can draw is that I have a slight disinclination to converse with a Black person until I'm 100% certain he or she is an American, at which point the bonds of national identity shove aside whatever minute, unconscious reservations I had had.   Which means I'm not a racist...

Homi Bhabha: Our Very Own Three Mile Island

In one of the strangest reviews I've read in my long career as someone who reads book reviews instead of books, D.L. Sims says of Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents:

Much in this book irritates.  The sociological theory adds nothing to the argument.  The style is infuriating; the long, opening example is tedious and frivolous.  There are many assertions which are not technically sustained, particularly the analysis of marine accidents, which is naïve and alarmist.  Perrow is too reluctant to use quantitative arguments; there is an implied assumption that dread or hopeless means an infinite disbenefit. 

Sims' conclusion?

This book is important.  The principles are sound....With its publication, the science of risk assessment ceases to belong to the shamans. 

If you're wondering how he got from the first quotation to the second--from reading an irritating, tedious, frivolous, naïve, alarmist book that does its readers infinite disbenefit to an important and sound study whose publication steals the science of risk assessment back from the shamans (who probably didn't much want it anyhow)--be prepared to keep wondering, because those are the final two paragraphs (sans some minor technical detail) of Sims' review.  Not that any of this germane to what I want to discuss, which is the thesis of Perrow's Normal Accidents, not its incomprehensible reception. 

Because I'm not the most adept summarizer in the world--what with my innate and inane tendency to mock anything so uncomplicated even I can understand it--I'll let Bill Williams handle it:

Perrow offers the following hypothesis: in technological systems the propensity to accident is built in: the more complex the system the higher the probability--the more tightly coupled the higher the probability.  Complex systems are those with many pathways and links between the parts, the full extent of which we often do not understand.  Tightly coupled systems are those where consquence follows cause rapidly and inexorably, with little time or opportunity for corrective action...the less complex the system, the less likely to occur are the complicated consequences which may be serious, unforeseen or difficult to diagnose.  The less tightly coupled, the more opportunity there is to think, and to try possible corrections.

But the obverse is also true: the more tightly coupled, the less opportunity there is to think and try possible corrections.  And, as you probably already surmised, systems have been becoming increasingly tightly coupled for a couple of decades now.  I ran across the Perrow first in William Langewiesche's article on the downing of ValuJet Flight 592, then again in Jerome Groopman's article on the increasing popularity of patient simulators in medical schools.

There's one part of Perrow's thesis I've neglected to mention: the more tightly coupled a system, the less culpable any one actor in that system is when something horrible happens.  Any accident not caused by gross incompetence must be considered "normal" because no amount of precaution could have prevented it from happening.  I'll let Langewische explain:

The failure of one part--whether material, psychological, or organizational--may coincide with the failure of an entirely different part, and this unforeseeable combination will cause the failure of other parts, and so on.  If the system is large, the possible combinations of failures are practically infinite.  Such unravelings seem to have an intelligence of their own: they expose hidden connections, neutralize redundancies, bypass "fire-walls," and exploit chance circumstances that no engineer could have planned for.

That sounds awful, and it is, esp. when you consider that Langewiesche is talking about flying airplanes and Perrow talks about nuclear power plants.  But it gets worse.  According to Perrow, not only will tightly coupled systems inevitably fail--how's that for naïve alarmism?--without some basic modification to their design, but instead of designing systems that are less tightly coupled, most industries are designing ones that are more.  Perrow again:

Rather than technology determining organizational structure, it would appear that machines and equipment are designed so that they reinforce existing [i.e. craptastic] structures and reproduce these structures in new settings.

He offers some examples:

Fifteen-foot banks of identical switches with small code numbers underneath them in nuclear power plants, sophisticated army weapons that personnel cannot aim or even fire.

But it gets even worse.  As workers become less skilled and more reliant on technology, the probability of "normal accidents" occuring becomes even greater:

For want of a robot, an operator is used.  This perspective, ingrained in students by engineering schools and common in top management, pervades the culture of the design engineer.  It leads to equipment that at best is only to be monitored by an operator, and thus leads to a social structure of incentives, punishments, physical layouts, output measures, etc., that reinforce the perspective of designing out the "man" in the loop. 

For example, increasingly sophisticated navigation and collision-avoidance aids have not reduced marine accidents.  Gaffney (1982) noted that the response of the U.S. marine community has been more automation, with ships' officers doing more monitoring of equipment.  The response of European marine communities, after it became apparent that phrases such as "radar-assisted collisions" and inertial navigation system groundings were real phenomena, not clever jokes, was to look at the organizational context.

The basic lesson being that the more we rely on technology, the more that technology is designed increase our reliance on it, and the more its designed to increase our reliance on it, the more likely we can accomplish fuck all in the event of an emergency. 

Why am I writing about this?  Simple: because I'm a homologist at heart and I spy a homology with the current state of literary studies.  Like technology, theory is our friend.  But as theory becomes more ingrained in our "critical" faculties, its begins to replace supple, responsive thought with empty, shallow couplings of extant critical technologies.  Am I saying that theorists consider the people who read their works the way design engineers think of operators?  Am I saying that Spivak or Bhaba sits around thinking "for want of a robot" and writes accordingly?  I am.  Theorists want us to be robots, and as regular readers of this fine blog already know, robots eat babies.  Therefore...

Beanie Babies and the Beagle

The title says it all.  In my researches--i.e. desperate attempts to complete numerous rewrites of material for grant applications by yesterday--I came across the photo below.  All I can say is: Nothing mocks the dead like bright blue beanie babies mock the dead.

Queering Turner Field?

So there I sat, on the couch, watching the Braves slaughter the hapless Mets with one eye and reading David Dobb's Reef Madness with the other, when I see Jose Reyes foul a ball off into the stands.  For those of you unfamiliar with the conventions of baseball telecasts, after a ball is fouled off the camera sometimes follows the ball into the stands, finds the person that caught it and zooms in him or her.  As often as not, the foul ball's caught by a young man accompanied by a young woman; and often as not, the young man's reward for shagging the ball is an enthusiastic, energetic kiss--both the young man and the young woman hopping at this point--from the young woman whose life he saved with a timely shag. 

Turner Field, the home of the Atlanta Braves, sits outside the city proper.  Braves fans are notoriously rural--famously supporting John Rocker after his diatribe on the purple-haried queers with AIDS who comprise the entirety of the Metropolitan Transit Authority's communter population--so when the camera followed the Jose Reyes foul ball into the stands and captured two men engaged in ritual post-ball-shagging osculation, I could hear the clinking of millions of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans hitting the floor from all the way out here...

...on another, more scholarly note, the following query came across H-Net's American Studies listserv this morning:

Can list members suggest ways to introduce the topic of sexual orientation into a pre-Civil War American literature survey?

Let me translate that for you:

I want to engender a discussion about a historical period but I don't know any works in that historical period that will allow me to introduce the only subject I'd like to address, so could some of you people who know the primary works in the period I've been hired by my university to teach tell me which ones I can queer so I don't have to stop reading Judith Butler to do something unimportant like gain expertise in the field in which I have a Ph.D.?

Sometimes rampant unprofessionalism amuses me; sometimes it disgusts me; sometimes it leaves me numb.  Cross your fingers and wish me the last tonight. 

Pragmapalooza 2005! Part II

Never verified whether Rorty remembered our brief encounter in LSU's dining hall circa 1997, but I did attend the lecture, during which he connected the project of pragmatism to Hegelianism and Romantic self-creation...

...I'll add a "highlight" reel sometime later tonight, but for now, I would like it to be known that I

1. called Rorty's characterization of the relationship between analytic philosophers interested in language and cognitive scientists as "disingenuous" during the Q & A and
2. asked the question I wanted to ask. 

How do I know I asked the question I wanted to ask?  The first two words of his response: "Since Darwin..."  If only the rest of his response had been so substantial.

"Gas Theorist of Colic"

Typepad allows you to see the referring address of people who visit your site, and because I'm documenting in meticulous detail my gradual but inevitable rise from 'Net Nobody to President of the United States of America (POTUS), I check my "Statistics and Referrers" page with unhealthy regularity.  Today I found an odd one.  This is what it said:

www.google.com/custom

I didn't know what that custom meant, so I click on it and landed here.

Hidden beneath the innocuous "custom" was, in fact, someone googling "gas theorist of colic."  I couldn't figure out what that meant--or why my blog popped up on that most strange of searches--so I decided to skim some of the other sites that search brought up.  They included:

A catalog of borderline amusing "Academic Jokes."  My favorite: 

How many college students does it take to change a lightbulb in the South?

At Vanderbilt it takes two. One to change the bulb and one more to explain how they did it every bit as well as any ivy leaguer.

At Georgia it takes three. One to change the bulb, and two to phone a friend at Georgia Tech and get instructions.

At Florida it takes four. One to screw in the bulb and three to figure out how to get high off the old one.

At Alabama it takes five. One to change it, two to talk about how Bear would have done it, and two to throw the old bulb at Auburn students.

At Ole Miss it takes six. One to change it, two to mix the drinks, and three to find the perfect J. Crew outfit to wear for the occasion.

At LSU it takes seven. And each one gets credit for four semester hours for it.

At Kentucky it takes eight. One to screw it in, and seven to discuss how much brighter it shines during basketball season.

At Tennessee it takes ten. Two to figure out how to screw it in, two to buy an orange lampshade, and six to phone a radio call-in show and talk about how Phillip Fulmer is too stupid to do it.

At Mississippi State it takes fifteen. One to screw in the bulb, two to buy the Skoal, and twelve to shout, "GO TO HELL OLE MISS, GO TO HELL!!!"

At Auburn it takes 100. One to change it, 49 to talk about how they do it better than Bama, and 50 who realize it's all a lie.

At South Carolina it takes 80,000. One to screw it in, and 79,999 to    discuss how this will finally be the year they have a good football team.

At Arkansas it takes none. There is no electricity in Arkansas.

I don't doubt that some of those are funny.  But none are as funny as the description for a site I refuse, on principle, to link to.  Principle, I say, but here's Google's summary of it:

"The Sanitary Gangbang Squad probability theorist verify ... with licentious colic artery ... the multistory plural of cottony blow gas."

And, for reasons I'd rather not imagine, the homepage for PEOPLE For Mathematically Perfected Economy also showed up. 

Larry and Jeff...

If I composed a list of the names of people I respect and then placed odds on particular couplings appearing on-stage together, this one would've been around 10,000,000,000 to 1... nevertheless, I've learned that Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig will appear together at the New York Public Library on April 7.  I can't wait to hear Larry's rendition of "Company in My Back."  I'm also pretty damn  sure Tweedy's rendition of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity will rock the socks right off the feet of some unwitting library patrons.